I’m not a bad swimmer when people aren’t pelting me with rocks, but my first shore-to-float-to-shore lap was tentative and unrhythmic—ugly—because I kept expecting something to reach up from the bottom and grab me. The drowned boy, maybe. The second lap was better, and by the third I was relishing the increased kick of my heart and the silky coolness of the water rushing past me. Halfway through the fourth lap I pulled myself up the float’s ladder and collapsed on the boards, feeling better than I had since my encounter with Devore and Rogette Whit-more on Friday night. I was still in the zone, and on top of that I was experiencing a glorious endorphin rush. In that state, even the dismay I’d felt when Mrs. M. told me she was resigning her position ebbed away. She would come back when this was over; of course she would. In the meantime, it was probably best she stay away.

Something’s mad at me. I could have an accident.

Yes indeed. She might cut herself. She might fall down a flight Of cel lar stairs. She might even have a stroke running across a hot parking lot. I sat up and looked at Sara on her hill, the deck jutting out over the drop, the railroad ties descending. I’d only been out of the water for a few minutes, but already the day’s sticky heat was folding over me, stealing my rush. The water was still as a mirror. I could see the house reflected in it, and in the reflection Sara’s windows became watchful eyes.

I thought that the focus of all the phenomena—the epicenter—was very likely on The Street between the real Sara and its drowned image. This is where it happened, Devore had said. And the old-timers? Most of them probably knew what I knew: that Royce Merrill had been murdered. And wasn’t it possible—wasn’t it likely—that what had killed him might come among them as they sat in their pews or gathered afterward around his grave? That it might steal some of their force—their guilt, their memories, their T/-ness—to help it finish the job?

I was very glad that John was going to be at the trailer tomorrow, and Romeo Bissonette, and George Kennedy, who was so amusing when he got a drink or two in him. Glad it was going to be more than just me with Mattie and Ki when the old folks got together to give Royce Merrill his sen doff. I no longer cared very much about what had happened to Sara and the Red-Tops, or even about what was haunting my house. What I wanted was to get through tomorrow, and for Mattie and Ki to get through tomorrow. We’d eat before the rain started and then let the predicted thunderstorms come. I thought that, if we could ride them out, our lives and futures might clarify with the weather.

“Is that right?” I asked. I expected no answer—talking out loud was a habit I had picked up since returning here—but somewhere in the woods east of the house, an owl hooted. Just once, as if to say it was right, get through tomorrow and things will clarify. The hoot almost brought something else to mind, some association that was ultimately too gauzy to grasp. I tried once or twice, but the only thing I could come up with was the title of a wonderful old novel I Heard the Owl Call Rly Name.

I rolled forward off the float and into the water, grasping my knees against my chest like a kid doing a cannonball. I stayed under as long as I could, until the air in my lungs started to feel like some hot bottled liquid, and then I broke the surface. I trod water about thirty yards out until I had my breath back, then set my sights on the Green Lady and stroked for shore.

I waded out, started up the railroad ties, then stopped and went back to The Street. I stood there for a moment, gathering my courage, then walked to where the birch curved her graceful belly out over the water.

I grasped that white curve as I had on Friday evening and looked into the water. I was sure I’d see the child, his dead eyes looking up at me from his bloating brown face, and that my mouth and throat would once more fill with the taste of the lake: help I’m drown, lemme up, oh sweet Jesus lemme up. But there was nothing. No dead boy, no ribbon-wrapped Boston Post cane, no taste of the lake in my mouth.

I turned and peered at the gray forehead of rock poking out of the mulch. I thought There, right there, but it was only a conscious and unspontaneous thought, the mind voicing a memory. The smell of decay and the certainty that something awful had happened right there was gone.

When I got back up to the house and went for a soda, I discovered the front of the refrigerator was bare and clean. Every magnetic letter, every fruit and vegetable, was gone. I never found them. I might have, probably would have, if there had been more time, but on that Monday morning time was almost up.

I dressed, then called Mattie. We talked about the upcoming party, about how excited Ki was, about how nervous Mattie was about going back to work on Friday—she was afraid that the locals would be mean to her, but in an odd, womanly way she was even more afraid that they would be cold to her, snub her. We talked about the money, and I quickly ascertained that she didn’t believe in the reality of it. “Lance used to say his father was the kind of man who’d show a piece of meat to a starving dog and then eat it himself,” she said. “But as long as I have my job back, I won’t starve and neither will Ki.”

“But if there really are big bucks…?”

“Oh, gimme-gimme-gimme,” she said, laughing. “What do you think I am, crazy?”

“Nah. By the way, what’s going on with Ki’s fridgeafator people? Are they writing any new stuff?.”

“That is the weirdest thing,” she said.

“They’re gone.”

“The fridgeafator people?”

“I don’t know about them, but the magnetic letters you gave her sure are. When I asked Ki what she did with them, she started crying and said Allamagoosalum took them. She said he ate them in the middle of the night, while everyone was sleeping, for a snack.”

“Allama-wh0-salum?’ “Allamagoosalum,” Mattie said, sounding wearily amused. “Another little legacy from her grandfather. It’s a corruption of the Micmac word for ’boogeyman’ or ’demon’—I looked it up at the library. Kyra had a good many nightmares about demons and wendigos and the allama-goosalum late last winter and this spring.”

“What a sweet old grandpa he was,” I said sentimentally.

“Right, a real pip. She was miserable over losing the letters; I barely got her calmed down before her ride to V.B.S. came. Ki wants to know if you’ll come to Final Exercises on Friday afternoon, by the way. She and her friend Billy Turgeon are going to flannelboard the story of baby Moses.”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” I said… but of course I did. We all did.

’gkny idea where her letters might have gone, Mike?”

“No.”

“Yours are still okay?”

“Mine are fine, but of course mine don’t spell anything,” I said, looking at the empty door of my own fridgeafator. There was sweat on my forehead. I could feel it creeping down into my eyebrows like oil.

“Did you… I don’t know… sense anything?”

“You mean did I maybe hear the evil alphabet-thief as he slid through the window?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I suppose so.” A pause “I thought I heard something in the night, okay? About three this morning, actually. I got up and went into the hall. Nothing was there. But… you know how hot it’s been lately?”

“Yes.”

“Well, not in my trailer, not last night. It was cold as ice. I swear I could almost see my breath.” I believed her. After all, I had seen mine.

“Were the letters on the front of the fridge then?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t go up the hall far enough to see into the kitchen. I took one look around and then went back to bed. I almost ran back to bed.

Sometimes bed feels safer, you know?” She laughed nervously. “It’s a kid thing. Covers are boogeyman kryptonite. Only at first, when I got in…