Rogette was reading Devore’s statement when my phone rang again. It was Mattie, and she was crying in hard gusts. “The news,” she said, “Mike, did you see… do you know…” At first that was all she could manage that was coherent. I told her I did know, Bill Dean had called me and then I’d caught some of it on the local news. She tried to reply and couldn’t speak. Guilt, relief, horror, even hilarity—I heard all those things in her crying. I asked where Ki was. I could sympathize with how Mattie felt—until turning on the news this morning she’d believed old Max Devore was her bitterest enemy—but I didn’t like the idea of a three-year-old girl watching her mom fall apart. “Out back,” she managed. “She’s had her breakfast. Now she’s having a d-doll p-p-p… doll pi-p-pic—”

“Doll picnic. Yes. Good. Let it go, then. All of it.

Let it out.” She cried for two minutes at least, maybe longer. I stood with the telephone pressed to my ear, sweating in the July heat, trying to be patient. I’m going to give you one chance to save your soul, Devore had told me, but this morning he was dead and his soul was wherever it was. He was dead, Mattie was free, I was writing. Life should have felt wonderful, but it didn’t. At last she began to get her control back. “I’m sorry. I haven’t cried like that—really, really cried—since Lance died.”

“It’s understandable and you’re allowed.”

“Come to lunch,” she said. “Come to lunch please, Mike. Ki’s going to spend the afternoon with a friend she met at Vacation Bible School, and we can talk. I need to talk to someone… God, my head is spinning.

Please say you’ll come.”

“I’d love to, but it’s a bad idea. Especially with Ki gone.” I gave her an edited version of my conversation with Bill Dean. She listened carefully. I thought there might be an angry outburst when I finished, but I’d forgotten one simple fact: Mattie Stanchfield Devore had lived around here all her life. She knew how things worked.

“I understand that things will heal quicker if I keep my eyes down, my mouth shut, and my knees together,” she said, “and I’ll do my best to go along, but diplomacy only stretches so far. That old man was trying to take my daughter away, don’t they realize that down at the goddam general store?”

“I realize it.”

“I know. That’s why I wanted to talk to you.”

“What if we had an early supper on the Castle Rock common? Same place as Friday? Say five-ish?”

“I’d have to bring Ki—”

“Fine,” I said.

“Bring her. Tell her I know “Hansel and Gretel’ by heart and am willing to share. Will you call John in Philly? Give him the details?”

“Yes.

I’ll wait another hour or so. God, I’m so happy. I know that’s wrong, but I’m so happy I could burst!”

“That makes two of us.” There was a pause on the other end. I heard a long, watery intake of breath.

“Mattie? All right?”

“Yes, but how do you tell a three-year-old her grandfather died?” ll her the old fuck slipped and jll headfirst into a Glad Bag, I thought, then pressed the back of my hand against my mouth to stifle a spate of lunatic cackles. “I don’t know, but you’ll have to do it as soon as she comes in.”

“I will? Why?”

“Because she’s going to see you. She’s going to see your face.”

I lasted exactly two hours in the upstairs study, and then the heat drove me out—the thermometer on the stoop read ninety-five degrees at ten o’clock. I guessed it might be five degrees warmer on the second floor.

Hoping I wasn’t making a mistake, I unplugged the IBM and carried it downstairs. I was working without a shirt, and as I crossed the living room, the back of the typewriter slipped in the sweat coating my midriff and I almost dropped the outdated sonofabitch on my toes. That made me think of my ankle, the one I’d hurt when I fell into the lake, and I set the typewriter aside to look at it. It was colorful, black and purple and reddish at the edges, but not terribly inflated. I guessed my immersion in the cool water had helped keep the swelling down. I put the typewriter on the deck table, rummaged out an extension cord, plugged in beneath Bunter’s watchful eye, and sat down facing the hazy blue-gray surface of the lake. I waited for one of my old anxiety attacks to hit—the clenched stomach, the throbbing eyes, and, worst of all, that sensation of invisible steel bands clamped around my chest, making it impossible to breathe. Nothing like that happened. The words flowed as easily down here as they had upstairs, and my naked upper body was loving the little breeze that puffed in off the lake every now and again. I forgot about Max Devore, Mattie Devore, Kyra Devore. I forgot about Jo Noonan and Sara Tidwell. I forgot about myself. For two hours I was back in Florida. John Shackleford’s execution was nearing. Andy Drake was racing the clock. It was the telephone that brought me back, and for once I didn’t resent interruption. If undisturbed, I might have gone on writing until I simply melted into a sweaty pile of goo on the deck. It was my brother. We talked about Mom—in Siddy’s opinion she was now short an entire roof instead of just a few shingles—and her sister, Francine, who had broken her hip in June. Sid wanted to know how I was doing, and I told him I was doing all right, I’d had some problems getting going on a new book but now seemed to be back on track (in my family, the only permissible time to discuss trouble is when it’s over).

And how was the Sidster? Kickin, he said, which I assumed meant just fine—Siddy has a twelve-year-old, and consequently his slang is always up-to-date. The new accounting business was starting to take hold, although he’d been scared for awhile (first I knew of it, of course). He could never thank me enough for the bridge loan I’d made him last November. I replied that it was the least I could do, which was the absolute truth, especially when I considered how much more time—both in person and on the phone—he spent with our mother than I did. “Well, I’ll let you go,” Siddy told me after a few more pleasantries—he never says goodbye or so long when he’s on the phone, it’s always well, I’ll letyou go, as if he’s been holding you hostage. “You want to keep cool up there, Mike—Weather Channel says it’s going to be hotter than hell in New England all weekend.”

“There’s always the lake if things get too bad. Hey Sid?”

“Hey what?” Like I’ll let you go, Hey what went back to childhood. It was sort of comforting; it was also sort of spooky. “Our folks all came from Prout’s Neck, right? I mean on Daddy’s side.” Mom came from another world entirely—one where the men wear Lacoste polo shirts, the women always wear full slips under their dresses, and everyone knows the second verse of “Dixie” by heart. She had met my dad in Portland while competing in a college cheerleading event.

Materfamilias came from Memphis quality, darling, and didn’t let you forget it. “I guess so,” he said. “Yeah. But don’t go asking me a lot of family-tree questions, Mike—I’m still not sure what the difference is between a nephew and a cousin, and I told Jo the same thing.”

“Did you?”

Everything inside me had gone very still… but I can’t say I was surprised. Not by then. “Uh-huh, you bet.”

“What did she want to know?”

“Everything I knew. Which isn’t much. I could have told her all about Ma’s great-great-grandfather, the one who got killed by the Indians, but Jo didn’t seem to care about any of Ma’s folks.”

“When would this have been?”

“Does it matter?”

“It might.”

“Okay, let’s see. I think it was around the time Patrick had his appendectomy. Yeah, I’m sure it was. February of ’94. It might have been March, but I’m pretty sure it was February.” Six months from the Rite Aid parking lot. Jo moving into the shadow of her own death like a woman stepping beneath the shade of an awning. Not pregnant, though, not yet. Jo making day-trips to the TR. Jo asking questions, some of the sort that made people feel bad, according to Bill Dean. . but she’d gone on asking just the same. Yeah. Because once she got onto something, Jo was like a terrier with a rag in its jaws. Had she been asking questions of the man in the brown sport-coat?