Her arm was slipping off his chest. Alan moved it gently, aware that if he bumped her hand even lightly, he would wake her. Looking at the ceiling, he wondered if Polly had deliberately provoked his grief that day. He rather thought she had, either knowing or intuiting that he needed to express his grief much more than he needed to find answers which were almost certainly not there. anyway.

That had been the beginning between them, even though he felt more like the end had not recognized it as a beginning; it had he had finally musof something. Between then and the day when tered up enough courage to ask Polly to have dinner with him, he had thought often of the look of her blue eyes and the feel of her hand lying on his wrist.

He thought of the gentle relentlessness with which she had forced him toward ideas he had either ignored or overlooked. And during that time he tried to deal with a new set of feelings about Annie’s death; once the roadblock between him and his grief had been removed, these of her feelings had poured out in a flood. Chief and most distressing among them had been a terrible rage at her for concealing a disease that could have been treated and cured… and for having taken their son with her that day. He had talked about some of these feelings with Polly at The Birches on a chilly, rain-swept night last April.

“You’ve stopped thinking about suicide and started thinking you’re angry, Alan.”

about murder,” she’d said. “That’s why you He shook his head and started to speak, but she had leaned over the table and put one of her crooked fingers firmly against his lips for a moment. Shush, you. And the gesture so startled him that he did shush.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m not going to catechize you this time, Alanit’s been a long time since I’ve been out to dinner with a man, and I’m enjoying it too much to play Ms. Chief Prosecutor. But people don’t get angry at other people-not the way you’re angry, at leastfor being in accidents, unless there has been a big piece of carelessness involved. If Annie and Todd had died because the brakes in the Scout failed, you might blame yourself for not having had them checked, or you might sue Sonny jackett for having done a sloppy job the last time you took it in for maintenance, but you wouldn’t blame her. Isn’t that true?”

“I guess it is.”

“I know it is. Maybe there was an accident of some kind, Alan.

You know she might have had a seizure while she was driving, because Dr. Van Allen told you so. But has it ever occurred to you that she might have swerved to avoid a deer@ That it might have been something as simple as that?”

It had. A deer, a bird, even an oncoming car that had wandered into her lane.

“Yes. But her seatbelt-”

“Oh, forget the goddam seatbelt! “she had said with such spirited vehemence that some of the diners close to them looked around briefly. “Maybe she had a headache, and it caused her to forget her seatbelt that one time, but that still doesn’t mean she deliberately crashed the car. And a headache-one of her bad ones-would explain why Todd’s belt was fastened. And it still isn’t the point.”

“What is, then?”

“That there are too many maybes here to support your anger.

And even if the worst things You suspect are true, you’ll never know, will you? “No. “And if you did know She looked at him steadily. There was a candle on the table between them. Her eyes were a darker blue in its flame, and he could see a tiny spark of light in each one.

“Well, a brain tumor is an accident, too. There is no culprit here, I per Alan, no-what do You call them in your line of work?-no petrator.

Until you accept that, there will be no chance.”

“What chance?”

“Our chance,” she said calmly. “I like You very much, Alan, and I’m not too old to take a risk, but I’m old enough to have had some sad experience of where my emotions can lead me when they get Out of control. I won’t let them get anywhere Close to that point until you’re able to put Annie and Todd to rest.”

He looked at her, speechless. She regarded him gravely over her dinner in the old country inn, firelight flickering orange on one of her smooth cheeks and the left side of her brow. Outside, the wind played a long trombone note under the eaves.

“Have I said too much?” Polly asked. “If I have, I’d like you to take me home, Alan. I hate to be embarrassed almost as much as I hate not speaking my mind.”

He reached across the table and touched her hand briefly. “No, You haven’t said too much. I like to listen to you, Polly.”

She had smiled then. It lit up her whole face. “You’ll get your chance, then,” she said.

So it began for them. They had not felt guilty about seeing each other, but they had recognized the need to be careful-not just because it was a small town where he was an elected official and she needed the good will of the community to keep her business afloat, but because both of them recognized the possibility of guilt.

Neither of them was too old to take a risk, it seemed, but they were both a little too old to be reckless. Care needed to be taken.

Then, in May, he had taken her to bed for the first time, and she had told him about all the years between Then and Now… the story he did not completely believe, the one he was convinced she would someday tell him again, without the too-direct eyes and the left hand that tugged too often at the left earlobe. He recognized how difficult it had been for her to tell him as much as she had, and was content to wait for the rest. Had to be content.

Because care had to be taken. It was enough-quite enough-to fall in love with her as the long Maine summer drowsed past them.

Now, looking up at the pressed-tin ceiling of her bedroom in the dimness, he wondered if the time had come to talk about marriage again.

He had tried once, in August, and she had made that gesture with her finger again. Shush, you. He supposed…

But his conscious train of thought began to break up then, and Alan slipped easily into sleep.

In his dream he was shopping in some mammoth store, wandering down an aisle so long it dwindled to a point in the distance. Everything was here, everything he had ever wanted but could not afford-a pressure-sensitive watch, a genuine felt fedora from Abercrombie amp; Fitch, a Bell and Howell eight-millimeter movie camera, hundreds of other items-but someone was behind him, just behind his shoulder where he couldn’t see.

“Down here we call these things fool’s stuffing, old boss,” a voice remarked.

It was one Alan knew. It belonged to that high-toned, Toronadodriving son of a bitch George Stark.

“We call this store Endsville,” the voice said, “because it’s the place where all goods and services terminate.”

Alan saw a large snake-it looked like a python with the head of a rattler come sliding out of a huge selection of Apple computers marked FREE TO THE PUBLIC. He turned to flee, but a hand with no lines on the Palm gripped his arm and stopped him.

“Go on,” the voice said persuasively. “Take what you want, boss.

Take everything you want… and pay for it.”

But every item he picked up turned out to be his son’s charred and melted beltbuckle.