I don’t know… I thought someone was in there already. Like someone had been hiding on the floor underneath and then… when I went to check the hall…, they got in. Not a nice someone, either.” Give me my dust-catcher, I thought, and shuddered. “What?”

Mattie asked sharply. “What did you say?”

“I asked who did you think it was? What was the first name that came into your mind?”

“Devore,” she said. “Him. But there was no one there.” A pause. “I wish you’d been there.”

“I do, too.”

“I’m glad. Mike, do you have any ideas at all about this? Because it’s very freaky.”

“I think maybe…” For a moment I was on the verge of telling her what had happened to my own letters. But if I started talking, where would it stop? And how much could she be expected to believe?”… maybe Ki took the letters herself. Went walking in her sleep and chucked them under the trailer or something. Do you think that could be?”

“I think I like the idea of Kyra strolling around in her sleep even less than the idea of ghosts with cold breath taking the letters off the fridge,” Mattie said. “Take her to bed with you tonight,” I said, and felt her thought come back like an arrow: I’d rather take you. What she said, after a brief pause, was: “Will you come by today?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. She was noshing on flavored yogurt as we talked, eating it in little nipping bites. “You’ll see me tomorrow, though. At the party.”

“I hope we get to eat before the thunderstorms. They’re supposed to be bad.”

“I’m sure we will.”

“And are you still thinking? I only ask because I dreamed of you when I finally fell asleep again. I dreamed of you kissing me.”

“I’m still thinking,” I said. “Thinking hard.”

But in fact I don’t remember thinking about anything very hard that day.

What I remember is drifting further and further into that zone I’ve explained so badly. Near dusk I went for a long walk in spite of the heat—all the way out to where Lane Forty-two joins the highway. Coming back I stopped on the edge of Tidwell’s Meadow, watching the light fade out of the sky and listening to thunder rumble somewhere over New Hampshire. Once more there was that sense of how thin reality was, not just here but everywhere; how it was stretched like skin over the blood and tissue of a body we can never know clearly in this life. I looked at trees and saw arms; I looked at bushes and saw faces. Ghosts, Mattie had said. Ghosts with cold breath.

Time was also thin, it seemed to me. Kyra and I had really been at the Fryeburg Fair—some version of it, anyway; we had really visited the year 1900. And at the foot of the meadow the Red-Tops were almost there now, as they once had been, in their neat little cabins. I could almost hear the sound of their guitars, the murmur of their voices and laughter; I could almost see the gleam of their lanterns and smell their beef and pork frying. “Say baby, do you remember me?” one of her songs went, “in I ain’t your honey like I used to be.”

Something rattled in the underbrush to my left. I turned that way, expecting to see Sara step out of the woods wearing Mattie’s dress and Mattie’s white sneakers. In this gloom, they would seem almost to float by themselves, until she got close to me…

There was no one there, of course, it had undoubtedly been nothing but Chuck the Woodchuck headed home after a hard day at the office, but I no longer wanted to be out here, watching as the light drained out of the day and the mist came up from the ground. I turned for home.

Instead of going into the house when I got back, I made my way along the path to Jo’s studio, where I hadn’t been since the night I had taken my IBM back in a dream. My way was lit by intermittent flashes of heat lightning.

The studio was hot but not stale. I could smell a peppery aroma that was actually pleasant, and wondered if it might be some of Jo’s herbs. There was an air conditioner out here, and it worked—I turned it on and then just stood in front of it a little while. So much cold air on my overheated body was probably unhealthy, but it felt wonderful.

I didn’t feel very wonderful otherwise, however. I looked around with a growing sense of something too heavy to be mere sadness; it felt like despair. I think it was caused by the contrast between how little of Jo was left in Sara Laughs and how much of her was still out here. I imagined our marriage as a kind of playhouse—and isn’t that what marriage is, in large part? playing house? — where only half the stuff was held down. Held down by little magnets or hidden cables. Something had come along and picked up our playhouse by one corner—easiest thing in the world, and I supposed I should be grateful that the something hadn’t decided to draw back its foot and kick the poor thing all the way over. It just picked up that one corner, you see. My stuff stayed put, but all of Jo’s had slid…

Out of the house and down here.

“Jo?” I asked, and sat down in her chair. There was no answer. No thumps on the wall. No crows or owls calling from the woods. I put my hand on her desk, where the typewriter had been, and slipped my hand across it, picking up a film of dust.

“I miss you, honey,” I said, and began to cry.

When the tears were over—again—I wiped my face with the tail of my tee-shirt like a little kid, then just looked around. There was the picture of Sara Tidwell on her desk and a photo I didn’t remember on the wall—this latter was old, sepia-tinted, and woodsy. Its focal point was a man-high birchwood cross in a little clearing on a slope above the lake. That clearing was gone from the geography now, most likely, long since filled in by trees.

I looked at her jars of herbs and mushroom sections, her filing cabi nets, her sections of afghan. The green rag rug on the floor. The pot of pencils on the desk, pencils she had touched and used. I held one of them poised over a blank sheet of paper for a moment or two, but nothing happened. I had a sense of life in this room, and a sense of being watched… but not a sense of being helped. “I know some of it but not enough,” I said. “Of all the things I don’t know, maybe the one that matters most is who wrote ’help her’ on the fridge. Was it you, Jo?” No answer. I sat awhile longer—hoping against hope, I suppose—then got up, turned off the air conditioning, turned off the lights, and went back to the house, walking in soft bright stutters of unfocused lightning. I sat on the deck for a little while, watching the night. At some point I realized I’d taken the length of blue silk ribbon out of my pocket and was winding it nervously back and forth between my fingers, making half-assed cat’s cradles. Had it really come from the year 19007

The idea seemed perfectly crazy and perfectly sane at the same time. The night hung hot and hushed. I imagined old folks all over the TR—perhaps in Motton and Harlow, too—laying out their funeral clothes for tomorrow. In the doublewide trailer on Wasp Hill Road, Ki was sitting on the floor, watching a videotape of The Jungle Book—Baloo and Mowgli were singing “The Bare Necessities.” Mattie was on the couch with her feet up, reading the new Mary Higgins Clark and singing along. Both were wearing shorty pajamas, Ki’s pink, Mattie’s white. After a little while I lost my sense of them; it faded the way radio signals sometimes do late at night. I went into the north bedroom, undressed, and crawled onto the top sheet of my unmade bed. I fell asleep almost at once. I woke in the middle of the night with someone running a hot finger up and down the middle of my back. I rolled over and when the lightning flashed, I saw there was a woman in bed with me. It was Sara Tid-well.

She was grinning. There were no pupils in her eyes. “Oh sugar, I’m almost back,” she whispered in the dark. I had a sense of her reaching out for me again, but when the next flash of lightning came, that side of the bed was empty.