“We have a deal. I shut up, the lawyers shut up, he gets out of Mattie and Kyra’s life. If, on the other hand, he continues to—”

“I know, I know, you’ll bore him and stroke him. I wonder how you’ll feel about all this a week from now, you arrogant, stupid creature?”

Before I could reply—it was on the tip of my tongue to tell her that even at her best she still threw like a girl—she was gone.

I stood there with the telephone in my hand for a few seconds, then hung it up. Was it a trick? It felt like a trick, but at the same time it didn’t. John needed to know about this. He hadn’t left his parents’

number on his answering machine, but Mattie had it. If I called her back, though, I’d be obligated to tell her what had just happened. It might be a good idea to put off any further calls until tomorrow. To sleep on it.

I stuck my hand in my pocket and damned near impaled it on the steak knife hiding there. I’d forgotten all about it. I took it out, carried it back into the kitchen, and returned it to the drawer. Next I fished out the aerosol can, turned to put it back on top of the fridge with its elderly brothers, then stopped. Inside the circle of fruit and vegetable magnets was this: d go w 19n Had I done that myself?. Had I been so far into the zone, so tranced out, that I had put a mini-crossword on the refrigerator without remembering it? And if so, what did it mean?

Maybe someone else put it up, I thought. One of my invisible roommates.

“Go down 19n,” I said, reaching out and touching the letters. A compass heading? Or maybe it meant Go 19 Down. That suggested crosswords again.

Sometimes in a puzzle you get a clue which reads simply See 19 Across or See 19 Down. If that was the meaning here, what puzzle was I supposed to check?

“I could use a little help here,” I said, but there was no answer—not from the astral plane, not from inside my own head. I finally got the can of beer I’d been promising myself and took it back to the sofa. I picked up my %ugh Stuff crossword book and looked at the puzzle I was currently working. “Liquor Is Quicker,” it was called, and it was filled with the stupid puns which only crossword addicts find amusing. Tipsy actor? Marion Brandy. Tipsy southern novel? Tequila Mockingbird. Drives the D.A. to drink? Bourbon of proof. And the definition of Down was Oriental nurse, which every cruciverbalist in the universe knows is amah. Nothing in “Liquor Is Quicker” connected to what was going on in my life, at least that I could see.

I thumbed through some of the other puzzles in the book, looking at 19

Downs. Marble worker’s tool (chisel). CNN’s favorite howler, 2 wds (wolfblitzer). Ethanol and dimethyl ether, e.g. (isomers). I tossed the book aside in disgust. Who said it had to be this particular crossword collection, anyway? There were probably fifty others in the house, four or five in the drawer of the very end-table on which my beer can stood.

I leaned back on the sofa and closed my eyes.

I always likeda whore… sometimes theirplace was on my face. This is where good pups and vile dogs may walk side-by-side. There’s no town drunk here, we all take turns. This is where it happened. Ayuh.

I fell asleep and woke up three hours later with a stiff neck and a terrible throb in the back of my head. Thunder was rumbling thickly far off in the White Mountains, and the house seemed very hot. When I got up from the couch, the backs of my thighs more or less peeled away from the fabric. I shuffled down to the north wing like an old, old man, looked at my wet clothes, thought about taking them into the laundry room, and then decided if I bent over that far, my head might explode.

“You ghosts take care of it,” I muttered. “If you can change the pants and the underwear around on the whirligig, you can put my clothes in the hamper.”

I took three Tylenol and went to bed. At some point I woke a second time and heard the phantom child sobbing.

“Stop,” I told it. “Stop it, Ki, no one’s going to take you anywhere.

You’re safe.” Then I went back to sleep again.

Te telephone was ringing. I climbed toward it from a drowning dream where I couldn’t catch my breath, rising into early sunlight, wincing at the pain in the back of my head as I swung my feet out of bed. The phone would quit before I got to it, they almost always do in such situations, and then I’d lie back down and spend a fruitless ten minutes wondering who it had been before getting up for good. Ringgg…

ringgg… ringgg…

Was that ten? A dozen? I’d lost count. Someone was really dedicated. I hoped it wasn’t trouble, but in my experience people don’t try that hard when the news is good. I touched my fingers gingerly to the back of my head. It hurt plenty, but that deep, sick ache seemed to be gone.

And there was no blood on my fingers when I looked at them.

I padded down the hall and picked up the phone. “Hello?”

“Well, you won’t have to worry about testifyin at the kid’s custody hearin anymore, at least.”

“Bill?”

“Ayuh.”

“How did you know…” I leaned around the corner and peered at the:

waggy, annoying cat-clock. Twenty minutes past seven and already sweltering. Hotter’n a bugger, as us TR Martians like to say. “How do you know he decided—”

“I don’t know nothing about his business one way or t’other.” Bill sounded touchy. “He never called to ask my advice, and I never called to give him any.”

“What’s happened? What’s going on?”

“You haven’t had the TV on yet?”

“I don’t even have the coffee on yet.”

No apology from Bill; he was a fellow who believed that people who didn’t get up until after six a.M. deserved whatever they got. I was awake now, though. And had a pretty good idea of what was coming.

“Devore killed himself last night, Mike. Got into a tub of warm water and pulled a plastic bag over his head. Mustn’t have taken long, with his lungs the way they were.”

No, I thought, probably not long. In spite of the humid summer heat that already lay on the house, I shivered. “Who found him? The woman?”

“Ayuh, sure.”

“What time?”

“"Shortly before midnight,’ they said on the Channel 6 news.”

Right around the time I had awakened on the couch and taken myself stiffly off to bed, in other words.

“Is she implicated?”

“Did she play Kevorkian, you mean? The news report I saw didn’t say nothin about that. The gossip-mill down to the Lakeview General will be turnin brisk by now, but I ain’t been down yet for my share of the grain. If she helped him, I don’t think she’ll ever see trouble for it, do you? He was eighty-five and not well.”

“Do you know if he’ll be buried on the TR?”

“California. She said there’d be services in Palm Springs on Tuesday.” A sense of surpassing oddness swept over me as I realized the source of Mattie’s problems might be lying in a chapel filled with flowers at the same time The Friends of Kyra Devore were digesting their lunches and getting ready to start throwing the Frisbee around. It’s going to be a cele bration, I thought wonderingly. I don’t know how they’re going to handle it in The Little Chapel of the Microchips in Palm Springs, but on Irsp Hill Road they’re going to be dancing and throwing their arms in the sky and hollering I3s, Lawd. I’d never been glad to hear of anyone’s death before in my life, but I was glad to hear ofdevore’s. I was sorry to feel that way, but I did. The old bastard had dumped me in the lake.

… but before the night was over, he was the one who had drowned.

Inside a plastic bag he had drowned, sitting in a tub of tepid water.

“Any idea how the TV guys got onto it so fast?” It wasn’t superfast, not with seven hours between the discovery of the body and the seven o’clock news, but TV news people have a tendency to be lazy. “Whitmore called em. Had a press conference right there in Warrin’-ton’s parlor at two o’clock this morning. Took questions settin on that big maroon plush sofa, the one Jo always used to say should be in a saloon oil paintin with a naked woman lyin on it. Remember?”