Still, I felt really lonely for the first time since I saw Kyra marching up the white line of Route 68 in her bathing suit and flip-flops. “You funny little man, said Strickland,” I told the empty room. It came out before I knew I was going to say anything, and when it did, the channel on the TV changed. It went from baseball to a rerun of All in the Family and then to Ren 0 Stimpy. I glanced down at the remote control. It was still on the coffee-table where I’d left it. The TV channel changed again, and this time I was looking at Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman. There was an airplane in the background, and I didn’t need to pick up the remote and turn on the sound to know that Humphrey was telling Ingrid that she was getting on that plane. My wife’s all-time favorite movie. She bawled at the end without fail. “Jo?” I asked. “Are you here?” Bunter’s bell rang once. Very faintly. There had been several presences in the house, I was sure of it… but tonight, for the first time, I was positive it was Jo who was with me. “Who was he, hon?” I asked. “The guy at the softball field, who was he?” Bunter’s bell hung still and quiet. She was in the room, though. I sensed her, something like a held breath. I remembered the ugly, gibing little message on the refrigerator after my dinner with Mattie and Ki: blue rose liar ha ha.

“Who was he?” My voice was unsteady, sounding on the verge of tears.

“What were you doing down here with some guy? Were you…” But I couldn’t bring myself to ask if she had been lying to me, cheating on me. I couldn’t ask even though the presence I felt might be, let’s face it, only in my own head. The TV switched away from Casablanca and here was everybody’s favorite lawyer, Perry Mason, on Nick at Nite. Perry’s nemesis, Hamilton Burger, was questioning a distraught-looking woman, and all at once the sound blared on, making me jump. “I am not a liar!”

some long-ago TV actress cried. For a moment she looked right out at me, and I was stunned breathless to see Jo’s eyes in that black-and-white fifties face. “I never lied, Mr. Burger, never!”

“I submit that you did!” Burger responded. He moved in on her, leering like a vampire. “I submit that you—” The TV suddenly went off. Bunter’s bell gave a single brisk shake, and then whatever had been here was gone. But I felt better. I am not a liar… I never lied, never. I could believe that if I chose to. If I chose. I went to bed, and there were no dreams.

I had taken to starting work early, before the heat could really get a hold on the study. I’d drink some juice, gobble some toast, then sit behind the IBM until almost noon, watching the Courier ball dance and twirl as the pages floated through the machine and came out with writing on them.

That old magic, so strange and wonderful. It never really felt like work to me, although I called it that; it felt like some weird kind of mental trampoline I bounced on. Those were springs that took away all the weight of the world for awhile. At noon I’d break, drive down to Buddy Jellison’s greaseatorium for something nasty, then return and work for another hour or so. After that I would swim and take a long dreamless nap in the north bedroom. I had barely poked my head into the master bedroom at the south end of the house, and if Mrs. M. thought this was odd, she kept it to herself. On Friday the seventeenth, I stopped at the Lakeview General on my way back to the house to gas up my Chevrolet.

There are pumps at the All-Purpose Garage, and the go-juice was a penny or two cheaper, but I didn’t like the vibe. Today, as I stood in front of the store with the pump on automatic feed, looking off toward the mountains, Bill Dean’s Dodge Ram pulled in on the other side of the island. He climbed down and gave me a smile. “How’s it going, Mike?”

“Pretty fair.”

“Brenda says you’re writin up a storm.”

“I am,” I said, and it was on the tip of my tongue to ask for an update on the broken second-floor air conditioner. The tip of my tongue was where it stayed.

I was still too nervous about my rediscovered ability to want to change anything about the environment in which I was doing it. Stupid, maybe, but sometimes things work just because you think they work. It’s as good a definition of faith as any. “Well, I’m glad to hear it. Very glad.” I thought he was sincere enough, but he somehow didn’t sound like Bill.

Not the one who had greeted me back, anyway. “I’ve been looking up some old stuff about my side of the lake,” I said. “Sara and the Red-Tops?

You always were sort ofint’rested in them, I remember.”

“Them, yes, but not just them. Lots of history. I was talking to Mrs. M… and she told me about Normal Auster. Kenny’s father.” Bill’s smile stayed on, and he only paused a moment in the act of unscrewing the cap on his gas tank, but I still had a sense, quite clear, that he had frozen inside. “You wouldn’t write about a thing like that, would you, Mike? Because there’s a lot of people around here that’d feel it bad and take it wrong. I told Jo the same thing.”

“Jo?” I felt an urge to step between the two pumps and over the island so I could grab him by the arm. “What’s Jo got to do with this?” He looked at me cautiously and long. “She didn’t tell you?”

“What are you talking about?”

“She thought she might write something about Sara and the Red-Tops for one of the local papers.” Bill was picking his words very slowly. I have a clear memory of that, and of how hot the sun was, beating down on my neck, and the sharpness of our shadows on the asphalt. He began to pump his gas, and the sound of the pump’s motor was also very sharp. “I think she even mentioned Yankee magazine. I c’d be wrong about that, but I don’t think I am.” I was speechless. Why would she have kept quiet about the idea to try her hand at a little local history? Becahse she might have thought she was poaching on my territory? That was ridiculous. She had known me better than that… hadn’t she? “When did you have this conversation, Bill? Do you remember?”

“Coss I do,” he said. “Same day she come down to take delivery of those plastic owls. Only I raised the subject, because folks had told me she was asking around.”

“Prying?”

“I didn’t say that,” he said stiffly, “you did.” True, but I thought prying was what he meant.

“Go on.”

“Nothing to go on about. I told her there were sore toes here and there on the TR, same as there are anyplace, and asr her not to tread on any corns if she could help it. She said she understood. Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t. All I know is she kep’ on asking questions.

Listenin to stories from old fools with more time than sense.”

“When was this?”

“Fall of ’93, winter and spring of ’94. Went all around town, she did even over to Motton and Harlow—with her notebook and little tape-recorder. Anyway, that’s all I know.”

I realized a stunning thing: Bill was lying. If you’d asked me before that day, I’d have laughed and told you Bill Dean didn’t have a lie in him. And he must not have had many, because he did it badly.

I thought of calling him on it, but to what end? I needed to think, and I couldn’t do it here—my mind was roaring. Given time, that roar might subside and I’d see it was really nothing, no big deal, but I needed that time. When you start finding out unexpected things about a loved one who’s been dead awhile, it rocks you. Take it from me, it does.

Bill’s eyes had shifted away from mine, but now they shifted back. He looked both earnest and—I could have sworn it—a little scared.

“She ast about little Kerry Auster, and that’s a good example of what I mean about steppin on sore toes. That’s not the stuff for a newspaper story or a magazine article. Normal just snapped. No one knows why. It was a terrible tragedy, senseless, and there’s still people who could be hurt by it. In little towns things are kind of connected under the surface—”