“Dennis?”

“I’m thinking,” I said, “Can’t you smell the wood burning?”

“What do you know?” she asked again

Collision. Critical mass. Chain reaction. Kaboom.

The thing was, I was thinking, if we put our information together, we would have to do something or tell someone. Take some action. We—

I remembered my dream: the car sitting there in LeBay’s garage, the motor revving up and then falling off, revving up again, the headlights coming on, the shriek of tyres.

I took her hands in both of mine. “Okay,” I said. “Listen. Arnie: he bought Christine from a guy who is dead now. A guy named Roland D. LeBay. We saw her on his lawn one day when we were coming home from work, and “You’re doing it too,” she said softly.

“What?”

“Calling it she.”

I nodded, not letting go of her hands. “Yeah. I know. It’s hard to stop. The thing is, Arnie wanted her—or it, or whatever that car is—from the first time he laid eyes on her. And I think now… I didn’t then, but I do now… that LeBay wanted Arnie to have her just as badly, that he would have given her to him if it had come to that. It’s like Arnie saw Christine and knew, and then LeBay saw Arnie and knew the same thing.”

Leigh pulled her hands free of mine and began to rub her elbows restlessly again. “Arnie said he paid—”

“He paid, all right. And he’s still paying. That is, if Arnie’s left at all.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“I’ll show you,” I said, “in a few minutes. First, let me give you the background.”

“All right.”

“LeBay had a wife and daughter. This was back in the fifties. His daughter died beside the road. She choked to death. On a hamburger.”

Leigh’s face grew white, then whiter; for a moment she seemed as milky and translucent as clouded glass.

“Leigh!” I said sharply. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she said with a chilling placidity. Her colour didn’t improve. Her mouth moved in a horrid grimace that was perhaps intended to be a reassuring smile. “I’m fine.” She stood up. “Where is the bathroom, please?”

“There’s one at the end of the hall,” I said. “Leigh, you look awful.”

“I’m going to vomit,” she said in that same placid voice, and walked away. She moved jerkily now, like a puppet, all the dancer’s grace I had seen in her shadow now gone. She walked out of the room slowly, but when she was out of sight the rhythm of her stride picked up; I heard the bathroom door thrown open, and then the sounds. I leaned back against the sofa and put my hands over my eyes.

When she came back she was still pale but had regained a touch of her colour. She had washed her face and there were still a few drops of water on her cheeks.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s all right. It just… startled me.” She smiled wanly. “I guess that’s an understatement.” She caught my eyes with hers. “Just tell me one thing, Dennis. What you said. Is it true? Really true?”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s true. And there’s more. But do you really want to hear any more?”

“No,” she said. “But tell me anyway.”

“We could drop it,” I said, not really believing it.

Her grave, distressed eyes held mine. “It might be… safer… if we didn’t,” she said.

“His wife committed suicide shortly after their daughter died.”

“The car…”

“… was involved.”

“How?”

“Leigh—”

“How?

So I told her—not just about the little girl and her mother, but about LeBay himself, as his brother George had told me, His bottomless reservoir of anger. The kids who had made fun of his clothes and his bowl haircut. His escape into the Army, where everyone’s clothes and haircuts were the same. The motor pool. The constant railing at the shitters, particularly those shitters who brought him their big expensive cars to be fixed at government expense. The Second World War. The brother, Drew, killed in France. The old Chevrolet. The old Hudson Hornet. And through it all, a steady and unchanging backbeat, the anger.

“That word,” Leigh murmured.

“What word?”

“Shitters.” She had to force herself to say it, her nose wrinkling in rueful and almost unconscious distaste. “He uses it. Arnie.”

“I know.”

We looked at each o her, and her hands found mine again.

“You’re cold,” I said. Another bright remark from that fount of wisdom, Dennis Guilder. I got a million of em.

“Yes. I feel like I’ll never be warm again.”

I wanted to put my arms around her and didn’t. I was afraid to. Arnie was still too much mixed up in things. The most awful thing—and it was awful—was how it seemed more and more that he was dead… dead, or under some weird enchantment.

“Did his brother say anything else?”

“Nothing that seems to fit.” But a memory rose like a bubble in still water and popped: He was obsessed and he was angry, but he was not a monster, George LeBay had told me. At least… I don’t think he was. It had seemed that, lost in the past as he had been, he had been about to say something more… and then had realized where he was and that he was talking to a stranger. What had he been about to say?”

All at once I had a really monstrous idea. I pushed it away. It went… but it was hard work, pushing that idea.

Like pushing a piano. And I could still see its outlines in the shadows.

I became aware that Leigh was looking at me very closely, and I wondered how much of what I had been thinking showed on my face.

“Did you take Mr LeBay’s address?” she said.

“No.” I thought for a moment, and then remembered the funeral, which now seemed impossibly far back in time. “But I imagine the Libertyville American Legion Post has it. They buried LeBay and contacted the brother. Why?”

Leigh only shook her head and went to the window, where she stood looking out into the blinding day. Shank of the year, I thought randomly.

She turned back to me, and I was struck by her beauty again, calm and undemanding except for those high, arrogant cheekbones—the sort of cheekbones you might expect to see on a lady probably carrying a knife in her belt.

“You said you’d show me something,” she said. “What was it?”

I nodded. There was no way to stop now. The chain reaction had started. There was no way to shut it down.

“Go upstairs,” I said, “My room’s the second door on the left. Look in the third drawer of my dresser. You’ll have to dig under some of my undies, but they won’t bite.”

She smiled—only a little, but even a little was an improvement”. “And what am I going to find? A Baggie of dope?”

“I gave that up last year,” I said, smiling back. “’Ludes this year. I finance my habit selling heroin down at the junior high.”

“What is it? Really?”

“Arnie’s autograph,” I said, “immortalized on plaster.”

“His autograph?”

I nodded. “In duplicate.”

She found them, and five minutes later we were on the couch again, looking at the two squares of plaster cast. They sat side by side on the glass-topped coffee table, slightly ragged on the sides, a little the worse for wear. Other names danced off into limbo on one of them. I had saved the casts, had even directed the nurse on where to cut them, Later I bad cut out the two squares, one from the right leg, one from the left.

We looked at them silently: on the right; on the left.

Leigh looked at me, questioning and puzzled. “Those are pieces of your—”

“My casts, yeah.”

“Is it… a joke, or something?”

“No joke. I watched him sign both of them.” Now that it was out, there was a queer kind of loosening, or relief. It was good to be able to share this. It had been on my mind for a long time, itching and digging away.

“But they don’t look anything alike.”

“You’re telling me,” I said. “But Arnie isn’t much like he used to be either. And it all goes back to that goddam car.” I poked savagely at the square of plaster on the left. “That isn’t his signature. I’ve known Arnie almost all my life. I’ve seen his homework papers, I’ve seen him send away for things, I’ve watched him endorse his paycheques, and that is not his signature. The one on the left, yes. This one, no. You want to do something for me tomorrow, Leigh?”