I tried to think about John Storrow and how unhappy he was apt to be if he found out there was—to quote Sara Laughs, who got to the line long before John Mellencamp—another mule kicking in Mattie Devore’s stall.

But mostly what I thought about was holding her for the first time, kissing her for the first time. No human instinct is more powerful than the sex-drive when it is fully aroused, and its awakening images are emotional tattoos that never leave us. For me, it was feeling the soft bare skin of her waist just beneath her dress. The slippery feel of the fabric…

I turned abruptly and hurried through the house to the north wing, almost running and shedding clothes as I went. I turned the shower on to full cold and stood under it for five minutes, shivering. When I got out I felt a little more like an actual human being and a little less like a twitching bundle of nerve endings. And as I toweled dry, something else recurred to me. At some point I had thought of Jo’s brother Frank, had thought that if anyone besides myself would be able to feel Jo’s presence in Sara Laughs, it would be him. I hadn’t gotten around to inviting him down yet, and now wasn’t sure I wanted to. I had come to feel oddly possessive, almost jealous, about what was happening here.

And yet if Jo had been writing something on the quiet, Frank might know.

Of course she hadn’t confided in him about the pregnancy, but- I looked at my watch. Quarter past nine. In the trailer near the intersection of Wasp Hill Road and Route 68, Kyra was probably already asleep. . and her mother might already have put her extra key under the pot near the steps. I thought of her in the white dress, the swell of her hips just below my hands and the smell of her perfume, then pushed the images away. I couldn’t spend the whole night taking cold showers.

Quarter past nine was still early enough to call Frank Arlen. He picked up on the second ring, sounding both happy to hear from me and as if he’d gotten three or four cans further into the six-pack than I had so far done. We passed the usual pleasantries back and forth—most of my own almost entirely fictional, I was dismayed to find—and he mentioned that a famous neighbor of mine had kicked the bucket, according to the news. Had I met him? Yes, I said, remembering how Max Devote had run his wheelchair at me. Yes, I’d met him. Frank wanted to know what he was like. That was hard to say, I told him. Poor old guy was stuck in a wheelchair and suffering from emphysema. “Pretty frail, huh?” Frank asked sympathetically. “Yeah,” I said. “Listen, Frank, I called about Jo. I was out in her studio looking around, and I found my typewriter.

Since then I’ve kind of gotten the idea she was writing something. It might have started as a little piece about our house, then widened. The place is named after Sara Tidwell, you know. The blues singer.” A long pause. Then Frank said, “I know.” His voice sounded heavy, grave. “What else do you know, Frank?”

“That she was scared. I think she found out something that scared her. I think that mostly because—” That was when the light finally broke. I probably should have known from Mattie’s description, would have known if I hadn’t been so upset. “You were down here with her, weren’t you? In July of 1994. You went to the softball game, then you went back up The Street to the house.”

“How do you know that?” he almost barked. “Someone saw you. A friend of mine.” I was trying not to sound mad and not succeeding. I was mad, but it was a relieved anger, the kind you feel when your kid comes dragging into the house with a shamefaced grin just as you’re getting ready to call the cops. “I almost told you a day or two before we buried her. We were in that pub, do you remember?” Jack’s Pub, right after Frank had beaten the funeral director down on the price of Jo’s coffin. Sure I remembered. I even remembered the look in his eyes when I’d told him Jo had been pregnant when she died. He must have felt the silence spinning out, because he came back sounding anxious. “Mike, I hope you didn’t get any—”

“What? Wrong ideas? I thought maybe she was having an affair, how’s that for a wrong idea? You can call that ignoble if you want, but I had my reasons. There was a lot she wasn’t telling me. What did she tell you?”

“Next to nothing.”

“Did you know she quit all her boards and committees? Quit and never said a word to me?”

“No.” I didn’t think he was lying. Why would he, at this late date? “Jesus, Mike, if I’d known that—”

“What happened the day you came down here? Tell me.”

“I was at the printshop in Sanford. Jo called me from. . I don’t remember, I think a rest area on the turnpike.”

“Between Derry and the TR?”

“Yeah. She was on her way to Sara Laughs and wanted me to meet her there. She told me to park in the driveway if I got there first, not to go in the house… which I could have; I know where you keep the spare key.” Sure he did, in a Sucrets tin under the deck. I had shown him myself. “Did she say why she didn’t want you to go inside?”

“It’ll sound crazy.”

“No it won’t. Believe me.”

“She said the house was dangerous.” For a moment the words just hung there. Then I asked, “Did you get here first?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And waited outside?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see or sense anything dangerous?” There was a long pause. At last he said, “There were lots of people out on the lake—speedboaters, water-skiers, you know how it is—but all the engine-noise and the laughter seemed to kind of… stop dead when it got near the house. Have you ever noticed that it seems quiet there even when it’s not?” Of course I had; Sara seemed to exist in its own zone of silence. “Did it feel dangerous, though?”

“No,” he said, almost reluctantly. “Not to me, anyway. But it didn’t feel exactly empty, either. I felt… fuck, I felt watched. I sat on one of those railroad-tie steps and waited for my sis. Finally she came. She parked behind my car and hugged me… but she never took her eyes off the house. I asked her what she was up to and she said she couldn’t tell me, and that I couldn’t tell you we’d been there. She said something like, “If he finds out on his own, then it’s meant to be. I’ll have to tell him sooner or later, anyway. But I can’t now, because I need his whole attention. I can’t get that while he’s working.’” I felt a flush crawl across my skin. “She said that, huh?”

“Yeah. Then she said she had to go in the house and do something. She wanted me to wait outside. She said if she called, I should come on the run. Otherwise I should just stay where I was.”

“She wanted someone there in case she got in trouble.”

“Yeah, but it had to be someone who wouldn’t ask a lot of questions she didn’t want to answer. That was me. I guess that was always me.”

“And?”

“She went inside. I sat on the hood of my car, smoking cigarettes. I was still smoking then. And you know, I did start to feel something then that wasn’t right. As if there might be someone in the house who’d been waiting for her, someone who didn’t like her. Maybe someone who wanted to hurt her. Probably I just picked that up from Jo—the way her nerves seemed all strung up, the way she kept looking over my shoulder at the house even while she was hugging me—but it seemed like something else.

Like a… I don’t know…”

“Like a vibe.”

“Yes!” he almost shouted. “A vibration. But not a good vibration, like in the Beach Boys song. A bad vibration.”

“What happened?”

“I sat and waited. I only smoked two cigarettes so I don’t guess it could have been longer than twenty minutes or half an hour, but it seemed longer. I kept noticing how the sounds from the lake seemed to make it most of the way up the hill and then just kind of… quit. And how there didn’t seem to be any birds, except far off in the distance.

“Once she came out. I heard the deck door bang, and then her footsteps on the stairs over on that side. I called to her, asked if she was okay, and she said fine. She said for me to stay where I was. She sounded a little short of breath, as if she was carrying something or had been doing some chore.”