The question was, how much would he settle for?

“You can tell me everything,” she said. “I’ll be your mother, or your sister, or your whore, or your slave. All you have to do is tell me, Harold.”

How that echoed in his mind! How that intoxicated him!

He opened his mouth, and the voice that emerged was as tuneless as the chiming of a cracked bell. “But for a price. Isn’t that right? For a price. Because nothing is for free. Not even now, when everything is lying around, waiting to be picked up.”

“I want what you want,” she said. “I know what’s in your heart.”

“No one knows that.”

“What’s in your heart is in your ledger. I could read it there—I know where it is—but I don’t need to.”

He started and looked at her with a wild guilt.

“It used to be under that loose stone there,” she said, pointing to the hearth, “but you moved it. Now it’s behind the insulation in the attic.”

“How do you know that? How do you know? ”

“I know because he told me. He… you could say that he wrote me a letter. And what’s more important, he told me about you, Harold. How the cowboy took your woman and then kept you off the Free Zone Committee. He wants us to be together, Harold. And he’s generous. From now until when we leave here, it’s recess for you and me.”

She touched him and smiled.

“From now until then it’s playtime. Do you understand?”

“I—”

“No,” she answered, “you don’t. Not yet. But you will, Harold. You will.”

Insanely, it came to his mind to tell her to call him Hawk.

“And later, Nadine? What does he want later?”

“What you want. And what I want. What you almost did to Redman on the first night you went out hunting for the old woman… but on a much larger scale. And when that’s done, we can go to him, Harold. We can be with him. We can stay with him.” Her eyes slipped half-closed in a kind of rapture. Perhaps paradoxically, the fact that she loved the other but would give herself to him—might actually enjoy it—brought his desire up again, hot and close.

“What if I say no?” His lips felt cold, ashy.

She shrugged, and the movement made her breasts sway prettily. “Life will go on, won’t it, Harold? I’ll try to find some way of doing the thing I have to do. You’ll go on. Sooner or later you’ll find a girl who will do that… one little thing for you. But that one little thing is very tiresome after a while. Very tiresome.”

“How would you know?” he asked, and grinned crookedly at her.

“I know because sex is life in small, and life is tiresome—time spent in a variety of waiting rooms. You might have your little glories here, Harold, but to what end? On the whole it will be a humdrum, slipping-down life, and you’ll always remember me with my shirt off, and you’ll always wonder what I would have looked like with everything off. You’ll wonder what it would have been like to hear me talking dirty to you… or to have me spill honey all over your… body… and then lick it off… and you’ll wonder—”

“Stop it,” he said. He was trembling all over.

But she wouldn’t.

“I think you’ll also wonder what it would have been like on his side of the world,” she said. “That more than anything and everything else, maybe.”

“I—”

“Decide, Harold. Do I put my shirt back on or take everything else off?”

How long did he think? He didn’t know. Later, he wasn’t even sure he had struggled with the question. But when he spoke, the words tasted like death in his mouth: “In the bedroom. Let’s go in the bedroom.”

She smiled at him, such a smile of triumph and sensual promise that he shuddered from it, and his own eager response to it.

She took his hand.

And Harold Lauder succumbed to his destiny.

The Judge’s house overlooked a cemetery.

He and Larry sat on the back porch after dinner, smoking Roi-Tan cigars and watching sunset fade to pale orange around the mountains.

“When I was a boy,” the Judge said, “we lived within walking distance of the finest cemetery in Illinois. Its name was Mount Hope. Every night after supper, my father, who was then in his early sixties, would take a walk. Sometimes I would walk with him. And if the walk took us past this perfectly maintained necropolis, he would say, ‘What do you think, Teddy? Is there any hope?’ And I would answer, ‘There’s Mount Hope,’ and each time he’d roar with laughter as if it had been the first time. I sometimes think we walked past that boneyard just so he could share that joke with me. He was a wealthy man, but it was the funniest joke he seemed to know.”

The Judge smoked, his chin low, his shoulders hunched high.

“He died in 1937, when I was still in my teens,” he said. “I have missed him ever since. A boy does not need a father unless he is a good father, but a good father is indispensable. No hope but Mount Hope. How he enjoyed that! He was seventy-eight years old when he passed on. He died like a king, Larry. He was seated upon the throne in our home’s smallest room, with the newspaper in his lap.”

Larry, not sure how to respond to this rather bizarre bit of nostalgia, said nothing.

The Judge sighed. “This is going to be quite a little operation here before long,” he said. “If you can get the power on again, that is. If you can’t, people are going to get nervous and start heading south before the bad weather can come and hem them in.”

“Ralph and Brad say it’s going to happen. I trust them.”

“Then we’ll hope that your trust is well founded, won’t we? Maybe it is a good thing that the old woman is gone. Perhaps she knew it would be better that way. Maybe people should be free to judge for themselves what the lights in the sky are, and if one tree has a face or if the face was only a trick of the light and shadow. Do you understand me, Larry?”

“No, sir,” Larry said truthfully. “I’m not sure I do.”

“I wonder if we need to reinvent that whole tiresome business of gods and saviors and ever-afters before we reinvent the flushing toilet. That’s what I’m saying. I wonder if this is the right time for gods.”

“Do you think she’s dead?”

“She’s been gone six days now. The Search Committee hasn’t found a trace of her. Yes, I think she’s dead, but even now I am not completely sure. She was an amazing woman, completely outside any rational frame of reference. Perhaps one of the reasons I’m almost glad to have her gone is because I’m such a rational old curmudgeon. I like to creep through my daily round, to water my garden—did you see the way I’ve brought the begonias back? I’m quite proud of that—to read my books, to write my notes for my own book about the plague. I like to do all those things and then have a glass of wine at bedtime and fall asleep with an untroubled mind. Yes. None of us want to see portents and omens, no matter how much we like our ghost stories and the spooky films. None of us want to really see a Star in the East or a pillar of fire by night. We want peace and rationality and routine. If we have to see God in the black face of an old woman, it’s bound to remind us that there’s a devil for every god—and our devil may be closer than we like to think.”

“That’s why I’m here,” Larry said awkwardly. He wished mightily that the Judge hadn’t just mentioned his garden, his books, his notes, and his glass of wine before bedtime. He had had a two-bit bright idea at a meeting of friends and had made a blithe suggestion. Now he wondered if there was any possible way of going on without sounding like a cruel and opportunistic halfwit.

“I know why you’re here. I accept.”

Larry jerked, making the wicker of his chair strain and whisper. “Who told you? This is supposed to be very quiet, Judge. If someone on the committee has been leaking, we’re in a hell of a jam.”