“Your complexion will survive,” he said, and turned to Mr and Mrs Norton. “Thank you again.”

“Anytime,” Bill said. “Come on over with a six-pack tomorrow night, if you want. We’ll make fun of that goddamn Yastrzemski.”

“That would be fun,” Ben said, “but what’ll we do after the second inning?”

His laughter, hearty and full, followed them around the corner of the house.

TWO

“I don’t really want to go to Spencer’s,” she said as they went down the hill. “Let’s go to the park instead.”

“What about muggers, lady?” he asked, doing the Bronx for her.

“In the Lot, all muggers have to be in by seven. It’s a town ordinance. And it is now exactly eight-oh-three.” Darkness had fallen over them as they walked down the hill, and their shadows waxed and waned in the streetlights.

“Agreeable muggers you have,” he said. “No one goes to the park after dark?”

“Sometimes the town kids go there to make out if they can’t afford the drive-in,” she said, and winked at him. “So if you see anyone skulking around in the bushes, look the other way.”

They entered from the west side, which faced the Municipal Building. The park was shadowy and a little dreamlike, the concrete walks curving away under the leafy trees, and the wading pool glimmering quietly in the refracted glow from the streetlights. If anyone was here, Ben didn’t see him.

They walked around the War Memorial with its long lists of names, the oldest from the Revolutionary War, the newest from Vietnam, carved under the War of 1812. There were six hometown names from the most recent conflict, the new cuts in the brass gleaming like fresh wounds. He thought: This town has the wrong name. It ought to be Time. And as if the action was a natural outgrowth of the thought, he looked over his shoulder for the Marsten House, but the bulk of the Municipal Building blocked it out.

She saw his glance and it made her frown. As they spread their jackets on the grass and sat down (they had spurned the park benches without discussion), she said, “Mom said Parkins Gillespie was checking up on you. The new boy in school must have stolen the milk money, or something like that.”

“He’s quite a character,” Ben said.

“Mom had you practically tried and convicted.” It was said lightly, but the lightness faltered and let something serious through.

“Your mother doesn’t care for me much, does she?”

“No,” Susan said, holding his hand. “It was a case of dislike at first sight. I’m very sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m batting five hundred anyway.”

“Daddy?” She smiled. “He just knows class when he sees it.” The smile faded. “Ben, what’s this new book about?”

“That’s hard to say.” He slipped his loafers off and dug his toes into the dewy grass.

“Subject-changer.”

“No, I don’t mind telling you.” And he found, surprisingly, that this was true. He had always thought of a work in progress as a child, a weak child, that had to be protected and cradled. Too much handling would kill it. He had refused to tell Miranda a word about Conway’s Daughteror Air Dance, although she had been wildly curious about both of them. But Susan was different. With Miranda there had always been a directed sort of probing, and her questions were more like interrogations.

“Just let me think how to put it together,” he said.

“Can you kiss me while you think?” she asked, lying back on the grass. He was forcibly aware of how short her skirt was; it had given a lot of ground.

“I think that might interfere with the thought processes,” he said softly. “Let’s see.”

He leaned over and kissed her, placing one hand lightly on her waist. She met his mouth firmly, and her hands closed over his. A moment later he felt her tongue for the first time, and he met it with his own. She shifted to return his kiss more fully, and the soft rustle of her cotton skirt seemed loud, almost maddening.

He slid his hand up and she arched her breast into it, soft and full. For the second time since he had known her he felt sixteen, a head-busting sixteen with everything in front of him six lanes wide and no hard traveling in sight.

“Ben?”

“Yes.”

“Make love to me? Do you want to?”

“Yes,” he said. “I want that.”

“Here on the grass,” she said.

“Yes.”

She was looking up at him, her eyes wide in the dark. She said, “Make it be good.”

“I’ll try.”

“Slow,” she said. “Slow. Slow. Here…”

They became shadows in the dark.

“There,” he said. “Oh, Susan.”

THREE

They were walking, first aimlessly through the park, and then with more purpose toward Brock Street.

“Are you sorry?” he asked.

She looked up at him and smiled without artifice. “No. I’m glad.”

“Good.”

They walked hand in hand without speaking.

“The book?” she asked. “You were going to tell me about that before we were so sweetly interrupted.”

“The book is about the Marsten House,” he said slowly. “Maybe it didn’t start out to be, not wholly. I thought it was going to be about this town. But maybe I’m fooling myself. I researched Hubie Marsten, you know. He was a mobster. The trucking company was just a front.”

She was looking at him in wonder. “How did you find that out?”

“Some from the Boston police, and more from a woman named Minella Corey, Birdie Marsten’s sister. She’s seventy-nine now, and she can’t remember what she had for breakfast, but she’s never forgotten a thing that happened before 1940.”

“And she told you—”

“As much as she knew. She’s in a nursing home in New Hampshire, and I don’t think anyone’s really taken the time to listen to her in years. I asked her if Hubert Marsten had really been a contract killer in the Boston area—the police sure thought he was—and she nodded. ‘How many?’ I asked her. She held her fingers up in front of her eyes and waggled them back and forth and said, ‘How many times can you count these?’”

“My God.”

“The Boston organization began to get very nervous about Hubert Marsten in 1927,” Ben went on. “He was picked up for questioning twice, once by the city police and once by the Malden police. The Boston grab was for a gangland killing, and he was back on the street in two hours. The thing in Malden wasn’t business at all. It was the murder of an eleven-year-old boy. The child had been eviscerated.”

“Ben,” she said, and her voice was sick.

“Marsten’s employers got him off the hook—I imagine he knew where a few bodies were buried—but that was the end of him in Boston. He moved quietly to ’salem’s Lot, just a retired trucking official who got a check once a month. He didn’t go out much. At least, not much that we know of.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ve spent a lot of time in the library looking at old copies of the Ledgerfrom 1928 to 1939. Four children disappeared in that period. Not that unusual, not in a rural area. Kids get lost, and they sometimes die of exposure. Sometimes kids get buried in a gravel-pit slide. Not nice, but it happens.”

“But you don’t think that’s what happened?”

“I don’t know. But I do know that not one of those four was ever found. No hunter turning up a skeleton in 1945 or a contractor digging one up while getting a load of gravel to make cement. Hubert and Birdie lived in that house for eleven years and the kids disappeared, and that’s all anyone knows. But I keep thinking about that kid in Malden. I think about that a lot. Do you know The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson?”

“Yes.”

He quoted softly, “‘And whatever walked there, walked alone.’ You asked what my book was about. Essentially, it’s about the recurrent power of evil.”

She put her hands on his arm. “You don’t think that Ralphie Glick…”

“Was gobbled up by the revengeful spirit of Hubert Marsten, who comes back to life on every third year at the full of the moon?”