“Did she go to her studio or down to the lake?”

“I don’t know. She was gone another fifteen minutes or so—time enough for me to smoke another butt—and then she came back out the front door. She checked to make sure it was locked, and then she came up to me. She looked a lot better. Relieved. The way people look when they do some dirty job they’ve been putting off, finally get it behind them. She suggested we walk down that path she called The Street to the resort that’s down there—”

“Warrington’s.”

“Right, right. She said she’d buy me a beer and a sandwich. Which she did, out at the end of this long floating dock.” The Sunset Bar, where I had first glimpsed Rogette.

“Then you went to have a look at the softball game.”

“That was Jo’s idea. She had three beers to my one, and she insisted. Said someone was going to hit a longshot homer into the trees, she just knew it.” Now I had a clear picture of the part Mattie had seen and told me about.

Whatever Jo had done, it had left her almost giddy with relief. She had ventured into the house, for one thing. Had dared the spirits in order to do her business and survived. She’d had three beers to celebrate and her discretion had slipped. . not that she had behaved with any great stealth on her previous trips down to the TR. Frank remembered her saying if I found out on my own then it was meant to be-que sera, sera.

It wasn’t the attitude of someone hiding an affair, and I realized now that all her behavior suggested a woman keeping a short-term secret. She would have told me when I finished my stupid book, if she had lived. If.

“You watched the game for awhile, then went back to the house along The Street.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Did either of you go in?”

“No. By the time we got there, her buzz had worn off and I trusted her to drive. She was laughing while we were at the softball game, but she wasn’t laughing by the time we got back to the house. She looked at it and said, “I’m done with her. I’ll never go through that door again, Frank.’”

My skin first chilled, then prickled.

“I asked her what was wrong, what she’d found out. I knew she was writing something, she’d told me that much—”

“She told everyone but me,” I said… but without much bitterness. I knew who the man in the brown sportcoat had been, and any bitterness or anger—anger at Jo, anger at myself—paled before the relief of that. I hadn’t realized how much that fellow had been on my mind until novq.

“She must have had her reasons,” Frank said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“But she didn’t tell you what they were.”

’gkll I know is that it started—whatever it was—with her doing research for an article. It was a lark, Jo playing Nancy Drew. I’m pretty sure that at first not telling you was just to keep it a surprise. She read books but mostly she talked to people—listened to their stories of the old days and teased them into looking for old letters… diaries… she was good at that part of it, I think. Damned good. You don’t know any of this?”

“No,” I said heavily. Jo hadn’t been having an affair, but she could have had one, if she’d wanted. She could have had an. affair with Tom Selleck and been written up in Inside ’ew and I would have gone on tapping away at the keys of my Powerbook, blissfully unaware.

“Whatever she found out,” Frank said, “I think she just stumbled over it.”

“And you never told me. Four years and you never told me any of it.”

“That was the last time I was with her,” Frank said, and now he 35O didn’t sound apologetic or embarrassed at all. “And the last thing she asked of me was that I not tell you we’d been to the lake house. She said she’d tell you everything when she was ready, but then she died.

After that I didn’t think it mattered. Mike, she was my sister. She was my sister and I promised.”

’gkll right. I understand.” And I did—just not enough. What had Jo discovered? That Normal Auster had drowned his infant son under a handpump? That back around the turn of the century an animal trap had been left in a place where a young Negro boy would be apt to come along and step into it? That another boy, perhaps the incestuous child of Son and Sara Tidwell, had been drowned by his mother in the lake, she maybe laughing that smoke-broken, lunatic laugh as she held him down? You gotta wiggle when you wobble, honey, and hold that young ’un way down deep.

“If you need me to apologize, Mike, consider it done.”

“I don’t. Frank, do you remember anything else she might have said that night? Anything at all?”

“She said she knew how you found the house.”

“She said what?”

“She said that when it wanted you, it called you.”

At first I couldn’t reply, because Frank Arlen had completely demolished one of the assumptions I’d made about my married life—one of the biggies, one of those that seem so basic you don’t even think about questioning them. Gravity holds you down. Light allows you to see. The compass needle points north. Stufflike that.

This assumption was that Jo was the one who had wanted to buy Sara Laughs back when we saw the first real money from my writing career, because Jo was the “house person” in our marriage, just as I was the “car person.” Jo was the one who had picked our apartments when apartments were all we could afford, Jo who hung a picture here and asked me to put up a shelf there. Jo was the one who had fallen in love with the Derry house and had finally worn down my resistance to the idea that it was too big, too busy, and too broken to take on. Jo had been the nest-builder.

She said that when it wanted you, it called you.

And it was probably true. No, I could do better than that, if I was willing to set aside the lazy thinking and selective remembering It was certainly true. I was the one who had first broached the idea of a place in western Maine. I was the one who collected stacks of real-estate brochures and hauled them home. I’d started buying regional magazines like Down East and always began at the back, where the real-estate ads were. It was I who had first seen a picture of Sara Laughs in a glossy handout called Maine Retreats, and it was I who had made the call first to the agent named in the ad, and then to Marie Hingerman after badgering Marie’s name out of the Realtor.

Johanna had also been charmed by Sara Laughs—I think anyone would have been charmed by it, seeing it for the first time in autumn sunshine with the trees blazing all around it and drifts of colored leaves blowing up The Street—but it was I who had actively sought the place out.

Except that was more lazy thinking and selective remembering. Wasn’t it?

Sara had sought me out.

Then how could I not have known it until now? And how was I led here in the firstplace, full of unknowing happy ignorance?

The answer to both questions was the same. It was also the answer to the question of how Jo could have discovered something distressing about the house, the lake, maybe the whole TR, and then gotten away with not telling me. I’d been gone, that’s all. I’d been zoning, tranced out, writing one of my stupid little books. I’d been hypnotized by the fantasies going on in my head, and a hypnotized man is easy to lead.

“Mike? Are you still there?”

“I’m here, Frank. But I’ll be goddamned if I know what could have scared her so.”

“She mentioned one other name I remember: Royce Merrill. She said he was the one who remembered the most, because he was so old. And she said, “I don’t want Mike to talk to him. I’m afraid that old man might let the cat out of the bag and tell him more than he should know.” Any idea what she meant?” “Well… it’s been suggested that a splinter from the old family tree wound up here, but my mother’s people are from Memphis. The Noo-nans are from Maine, but not from this part.” Yet I no longer entirely believed this.