What brought me out of this daze was a cry from behind me: “Wait up, Mike! Wait up!”

I turned and saw Kyra running toward me, dodging around the strollers and gamesters and midway gawkers with her pudgy knees pumping. She was wearing a little white sailor dress with red piping and a straw hat with a navy-blue ribbon on it. In one hand she clutched Strickland, and when she got to me she threw herself confidently forward, knowing I would catch her and swing her up. I did, and when her hat started to fall offi caught it and jammed it back on her head.

“I taggled my own quartermack,” she said, and laughed. “Again.”

“That’s right,” I said. “You’re a regular Mean Joe Green.” I was wearing overalls (the tail of a wash-faded blue bandanna stuck out of the bib pocket) and manure-stained workboots. I looked at Kyra’s white socks and saw they were homemade. I would find no discreet little label reading Made in Mexico or Made in China if I took off her straw hat and looked inside, either. This hat had been most likely Made in Motton, by some farmer’s wife with red hands and achy joints.

“Ki, where’s Mattie?”

“Home, I guess. She couldn’t come.”

“How did you get here?”

“Up the stairs. It was a lot of stairs. You should have waited for me.

You could have carrot me, like before. I want to hear the music.”

“Me too. Do you know who that is, Kyra?”

“Yes,” she said, “Kito’s mom. Hurry up, slowpoke!”

I walked toward the stage, thinking we’d have to stand at the back of the crowd, but they parted for us as we came forward, me carrying Kyra in my arms—the lovely sweet weight of her, a little Gibson Girl in her sailor dress and ribbon-accented straw hat. Her arm was curled around my neck and they parted for us like the Red Sea had parted for Moses.

They didn’t turn to look at us, either. They were clapping and stomping and bellowing along with the music, totally involved. They stepped aside unconsciously, as if some kind of magnetism were at work here—ours positive, theirs negative. The few women in the crowd were blushing but clearly enjoying themselves, one of them laughing so hard tears were streaming down her face. She looked no more than twenty-two or — three.

Kyra pointed to her and said matter-of-factly: “You know Mattie’s boss at the liberry? That’s her nana.’

Lindy Briggs’s grandmother, and fresh as a daisy, I thought. Good Christ. The Red-Tops were spread across the stage and under swags of red, white, and blue bunting like some time-travelling rock band. I recognized all of them from the picture in Edward Osteen’s book. The men wore white shirts, arm-garters, dark vests, dark pants. Son Tidwell, at the far end of the stage, was wearing the derby he’d had on in the photo. Sara, though…

“Why is the lady wearing Mattie’s dress?” Kyra asked me, and she began to tremble.

“I don’t know, honey. I can’t say.” Nor could I argue—it was the white sleeveless dress Mattie had been wearing on the common, all right.

On stage, the band was smoking through an instrumental break. Reginald “Son” Tidwell strolled over to Sara, feet ambling, hands a brown blur on the strings and frets of his guitar, and she turned to face him. They put their foreheads together, she laughing and he solemn; they looked into each other’s eyes and tried to play each other down, the crowd cheering and clapping, the rest of the Red-Tops laughing as they played.

Seeing them together like that, I realized that I had been right: they were brother and sister. The resemblance was too strong to be missed or mistaken. But mostly what I looked at was the way her hips and butt switched in that white dress. Kyra and I might be dressed in turn-of-the-century country clothes, but Sara was thoroughly modern Millie. No bloomers for her, no petticoats, no cotton stockings. No one seemed to notice that she was wearing a dress that stopped above her knees—that she was all but naked by the standards of this time. And under Mattie’s dress she’d be wearing garments the like of which these people had never seen: a Lycra bra and hip-hugger nylon panties. If I put my hands on her waist, the dress would slip not against an unwet-coming corset but against soft bare skin. Brown skin, not white.

What do you want, sugar?

Sara backed away from Son, shaking her ungirdled, unbustled fanny and laughing. He strolled back to his spot and she turned to the crowd as the band played the turnaround. She sang the next verse looking directly at me.

“Bejsre you start in fishin you better check your line.

Said bqre you start in fishin, honey, you better check on your line. I’ll pull on yours, darling, and you best tug on mine.”

The crowd roared happily. In my arms, Kyra was shaking harder than ever.

“I’m scared, Mike,” she said. “I don’t like that lady. She’s a scary lady. She stole Mattie’s dress. I want to go home.”

It was as if Sara heard her, even over the rip and ram of the music. Her head cocked back on her neck, her lips peeled open, and she laughed at the sky. Her teeth were big and yellow. They looked like the teeth of a hungry animal, and I decided I agreed with Kyra: she was a scary lady.

“Okay, hon,” I murmured in Ki’s ear. “We’re out of here.”

But before I could move, the sense of the woman—I don’t know how else to say it—fell upon me and held me. Now I understood what had shot past me in the kitchen to knock away the CARLADEAN letters; the chill was the same. It was almost like identifying a person by the sound of their walk.

She led the band to the turnaround once more, then into another verse.

Not one you’d find in any written version of the song, though:

“I ain’t gonna hurt her, honey, not jsr all the treasure in the worl’. Said I wouldn’t hurt your baby, not Jr diamonds or jor pearls. Only one black-hearted bastard dare to touch that little girl.”

The crowd roared as if it were the funniest thing they’d ever heard, but Kyra began to cry. Sara saw this and stuck out her breasts—much bigger breasts than Mattie’s—and shook them at her, laughing her trademark laugh as she did. There was a parodic coldness about this gesture… and an emptiness, too. A sadness. Yet I could feel no compassion for her. It was as if the heart had been burned out of her and the sadness which remained was just another ghost, the memory of love haunting the bones of hate.

And how her laughing teeth leered.

Sara raised her arms over her head and this time shook it all the way down, as if reading my thoughts and mocking them. Just like jelly on a plate, as some other old song of the time has it. Her shadow wavered on the canvas backdrop, which was a painting of Fryeburg, and as I looked at it I realized I had found the Shape from my Manderley dreams. It was Sara. Sara was the Shape and always had been.

No, Mike. That’s close, but it’s not right.

Right or wrong, I’d had enough. I turned, putting my hand on the back of Ki’s head and urging her face down against my chest. Both her arms were around my neck now, clutching with panicky tightness.

I thought I’d have to bull my way back through the crowd—they had let me in easily enough, but they might be a lot less amenable to letting me back out. Don’t fuck with me, boys, I thought. %u don’t want to do that.

And they didn’t. On stage Son Tidwell had taken the band from E to G, someone began to bang a tambourine, and Sara went from “Fishin Blues” to “Dog My Cats” without a single pause. Out here, in front of the stage and below it, the crowd once more drew back from me and my little girl without looking at us or missing a beat as they clapped their work-swollen hands together. One young man with a port-wine stain swimming across the side of his face opened his mouth—at twenty he was already missing half his teeth—and hollered “I3e-HAW!” around a melting glob of tobacco. It was Buddy Jellison from the Village Cafe, I realized… Buddy Jellison magically rolled back in age from sixty-eight to twenty. Then I realized the hair was the wrong shade—light brown instead of black (although he was pushing seventy and looking it in every other way, Bud hadn’t a single white hair in his head). This was Buddy’s grandfather, maybe even his great-grandfather. I didn’t give a shit either way. I only wanted to get out of here.