Not yet.

She wasn't ready to walk through the front door of the old house and sit down with the hard fact that there was no one home and never would there be.

In some dimension, Markowitz was continuing on, but not in any afterlife. Heaven would not do; it was beyond belief. She could believe in old radio heroes for an hour or more, but there were limits. Yet Markowitz had to be somewhere.

She had never returned to the small cafe down the street from the station house. She avoided walking on that block in the morning hours, when he might be eating breakfast there… continuing on. How could she go back to the old house in Brooklyn and not see him there, if Markowitz was to continue on outside the dark hole in the cemetery lawn.

She also continued on in her own usual way, wondering what she could do to bug his eyes out and give him a new story for the Thursday-night poker game which would always begin: "Let me tell you what my kid did this time."

Samantha Siddon nodded her white head at the doorman and walked slowly up the street to the next block, brandishing a silver-handled cane. She hurried along the sidewalk with a trace of a limp and the fearful memory of a bad fall which had broken one hip. The bone had taken forever to mend, and the onset of arthritis had increased her agony. She would rather be quartered by four swift horses than suffer a second fall. She never went anywhere without the cane which bore a lion's face and lent her a little courage.

She was soon well out of the calm of Gramercy Park and into the surrounding alien atmosphere of Manhattan, taking shallow breaths, mistrusting this air. She hailed a cab, and gave the driver a Midtown address. Samantha was pleased and stunned to have a traditional New York cabby, a native son with a Brooklyn dialect who took risks on every block, defying death to swerve through lane changes and beat each yellow traffic light. When she stepped out of the cab on Madison Avenue, it was well ahead of the appointed hour because she had anticipated a driver who translated addresses to the wrong side of town.

With fifteen minutes to spare, she stood on a busy street corner near a public telephone, and watched the parade of surefooted children of commerce marching on the avenue with the hard slaps and clicks of flat-soled shoes and high heels, eyes fixed with terrible purpose, prepared to trample old women, toddlers, anyone who impeded them on their lunch hour. Though she knew she could buy and sell any one of them with a day's interest on her capital, they terrified her. One careless shove and she might spend the rest of her days in traction or a wheelchair. The days of the walking cane were numbered as it was.

As the minutes passed by, these ideas fell away from her. When the public telephone did ring, she was ready, more than ready.

She whispered into the receiver, though the pedestrian army of that avenue was hurrying by at a heart-attack clip not conducive to eavesdropping. Her words were lost in the noise of a passing bus followed by a police car, its siren opening with a panicky scream and then switching into the nagging mode of "Hey, get out of my way, come on, come on, move it, move it". And at last, she was screaming to be heard above the hustle of the throng which looked through her and moved around her, and never noticed if she had two heads or one.

Her step was quicker as she walked away from the pay phone. This small intrigue had made her young again, though the bank window threw back the crawl-pace reflection of an old woman with a hump on her back and white hair.

Mallory arrived at the campus theater just behind Gaynor. She stood on the top step and casually perused the playbill set in glass to one side of the entrance. Again, she read the words she knew by heart and gave him three minutes through the door before she followed him.

She knew this building well from student days when she had attended Barnard College productions in its small theater. That had been another life, and when she thought back on it, it was almost as though it had happened to someone else. Some other girl had sat alone in the crowd while the babble went on around her in another language belonging to a different species of animals with bubbling mouths and the softer eyes of prey.

She entered the shoe-box lobby as Gaynor was disappearing through the door which led into the theater. A young woman stepped between Mallory and this door. Hands on hips, the woman tossed back her long frizz of brown hair, which might have passed for long waves of rusted steel wool.

"You can't go in there," said the woman, in the attitude of a combative poodle which had no idea how ridiculous it looked.

This woman might be all of twenty years old, and Mallory could not miss that fact that the frizzy brunette was smaller, lighter in the framework, and had no gun. She moved past her.

"One more step and I call campus security."

Incredulous, Mallory paused and faced the poodle down. "So? You and I both know the response time for campus security is forty minutes or never."

A snicker came from the side, and the salvo was meant for the poodle. A baby-faced boy in a denim shirt and dungarees leaned one arm on the ticket counter. He stared at Mallory as he lit a cigarette and dangled it from his lip. He tipped the wide brim of an old felt hat to her, and then lowered the brim to a rakish angle. She approved both hat and boy with a slight inclination of her head.

"We're in dress rehearsal," said the poodle, still glaring up at Mallory. "No one but cast." She sniffed the air and, catching the scent of the smoke, her head whipped around, followed out of sync by her body as she turned on the boy. "Put that cigarette out immediately!" Her eyebrows smashed together. "It's against the law to smoke in this building."

"But, Boo, I don't actually mind breaking the law," said the boy. His smile was charming, a child's smile.

"Put it out, this minute!"

The boy bent down to stub his cigarette out on the worn sole of his shoe, but he continued to hold onto it. The unwillingness to waste the cigarette told Mallory this was a fellow scholarship child, here on merit, and not family money.

"I'm ushering tonight," said Mallory to the poodle who was called Boo.

"Why didn't you say so? Here," she snapped, "you can start folding the programs." She pulled a cardboard box from the ticket counter and thrust it into Mallory's hands. When the younger woman had made her stiff exit through the stage door, Mallory turned to the boy.

"Boo? That's a name?"

"No, we call her that to jerk her chain. Bending Boo out of shape is an art form around here. You weren't half bad yourself." He relit his cigarette and smiled. "So, since when do ushers attend dress rehearsals?"

"I'm the over-zealous type."

"Or crazy for punishment. I wouldn't go through it again if I wasn't in the cast." He sat down on the wooden bench and motioned her to join him. "Is it me, or does it seem a little nuts to use radio scripts in a visual medium? Does this work for you?"

"Well, it won't work for the Shadow script. You can only see the Shadow on the radio." She settled the box on her lap and checked her watch. "Did I see Professor Gaynor go in there?"

"Yeah, a few minutes ago."

"What's he doing here?" She already knew. His name was on the playbill which had been posted on the cork wall in her den.

"Old Boo snagged him for the role of the radio announcer."

Mallory set the box of programs to one side, and stared at the double doors on the opposite wall. This, as she remembered, was the route to the balcony. There should be a staircase beyond those doors. During the daylight hours, she had never lost track of Gaynor for more than ten minutes, and she was bordering on that now. How many exits were there?