"And what did he say about the petticoat?" prompted Mike.

"Heh? Oh, he says, 'Mink, it wasn't that nigger's petticoat at all. I never went nowhere near that nigger. It was Judge Ashley who paid me a silver dollar to hide that petticoat in the nigger's bedroll.' You see, the way Billy'd figured it when he was just a little snot, was that the Judge knew who'd done it, and needed Billy's help to get him, 'cause they just didn't have no evidence an' all. But I guess when Billy got older, after goin' off to college to get smart an' all, he musta figured what the dumbest Polack in town could figure out. . . which is, namely, where in hell did the Judge get that little girl's underclothes?"

Mike leaned closer. "Did you ask him that?"

"Hmmm? No, don't think I did. Or if I did, I don't remember no answer. What I do remember is Billy sayin' somethin' about gettin' out of town before the Judge an' the others knew he wasn't with 'em no more."

"With who?" whispered Mike.

"How the hell do I know, boy?" growled Mink Harper. He leaned closer, squinted, and breathed wine fumes on Mike. "This was more'n forty years ago, y' know. What'ya think I am, a damn memory machine?"

Mike looked over his shoulder at the entrance to the crawl-space under the bandstand, a small rectangle of escape that seemed very far away. The sound of smaller kids playing in the park had long since faded; there was no traffic.

"Can you remember anything else about Old Central or the bell?" asked Mike, not flinching away from Mink's inspection.

Face inches from Mike's, Mink showed his three teeth again. "Never seen or heard the bell again ... not till last month when it woke me up from a deep sleep here in my dry little home . . . but I know one thing ..."

"What's that?" Mike found it very hard not to lean back out of the range of Mink's breath and stare.

"I know that when Old Man Ashley stuck his two-barreled Boss shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger 'bout a year after the war was over ... the First War, I mean . . . that he done us all a favor. Burned down his goddamn house, too. His boy came home from Peoria where the old man's new grandbaby was just born, and he found his pappy . . . the Judge that was . . . lyin' dead with his brains bio wed out. Everybody thinks it was either a accident or the ol' Judge who burned the place . . . wasn't ... I happened to be out in the gardenin' shed with one of the servants when I seen the young Mr. Ashley's carriage comin'-he called himself Ashley-Montague after he married that fancy woman from Venice-yeah, I was in the gardenin' shed when we heard the shot and saw Mr. Ashley-Montague go in, then come out bawlin' and shoutin' at the sky and spreadin' kerosene oil everywhere on the big house. One of the servants tried to stop him . . . there'd been more of 'em at the house but they'd been laid off during that recession after the war . . . but there was no stoppin' him. He threw that oil everywhere an' lit it up and stood back to watch it burn. They never come home after that, him and his bride and the baby. Jes' to show the goddamn Free Show, that's all."

Mike nodded, thanked Mink, and scrambled for the opening, suddenly eager to get back out into the sunlight. At the exit, his body out into the fresh air, Mike asked one more question. "Mink, what did he shout?"

"Whaddya mean, boy?" the old man seemed to have forgotten what they had been talking about.

"The Judge's son. When he burned the place down. What was he shouting?"

Mink's three teeth gleamed yellowly in the dimness. "Oh, he was shoutin' that they wasn't gonna get him . . . no, by God, they wasn't gonna get him."

Mike let out a breath. "I don't suppose he said who 'they' were?"

Mink frowned, pursed his lips in a parody of deep thought, and then grinned again. "Yeah, he did, now that I 'member it. Called the guy by name." "Guy?"

"Yeah . . . Cyrus, only pronounced like that flat cloud . . . cirrus. He kept saying 'No, O'Cyrus, you ain't gonna get me.' The way he said it, I thought maybe it was some Irishman's name. O'Cirrus."

"Thanks, Mink." Mike stood up, feeling his shirt plastered to his body, wiping a bead of perspiration from his nose. His hair was wet and his legs felt shaky for some reason. He found his bike, crossed the Hard Road, noticed how long the shadows were getting, and pedaled slowly up Broad under the canopy of arching branches. He was remembering Duane's notebooks and the slow translation he and Dale had done from the Gregg shorthand. The part where Duane had copied bits from his uncle's diary was especially tough. One word had sent them checking the squiggles and codes over and over again; Dale had recognized it from some book he'd read about Egypt: Osiris.

Dale, Lawrence, Kevin, and Harlen left on their camping trip after lunch the next day, Wednesday the thirteenth of July. Only Harlen's mother had been slow to give permission for the trip, but she relented, as Harlen put it, "when she realized she could go out on a date while I was gone."

They had a ton of stuff to carry and it was difficult piling it on their bikes and tying it down, properly. Once secured, the heaps of sleeping bags, food, gear, and backpacks weighed down their already heavy bicycles so they had to pedal standing up the entire way out to Uncle Henry's, leaning over the handlebars and grunting with exertion on the hard-packed ruts between the loose gravel on Jubilee College Road and County Six.

There were patches of timber-of a sort-along the railroad tracks northwest of town, but those woods were small and too near the dump for real camping. The real woods were a mile and a half away, east of Uncle Henry's farm and north of the Billy Goat Mountains quarry behind the cemetery. Near where Mink Harper had found the bones of Merriweather Whittaker along Gypsy Lane almost fifty years earlier.

The boys had met in Mike's treehouse for almost three hours on Tuesday night, comparing notes from their trips and making plans until the sound of Kev's mother's bellowing-"Ke-VINNN!"-had echoed down Depot Street and effectively adjourned the meeting.

The leatherbound book that Dale had stolen from Mr. Ashley-Montague-an act that not even he fully believed after he had returned to Elm Haven-was a mass of foreign phrases, arcane rituals, complicated explanations of unpronounceable deities or anti-deities, and a mess of cabalistic, numerological double-talk. "Hardly worth getting your ass thrown in jail for" had been Jim Harlen's verdict.

But somewhere in the tight print, Dale was sure, there would be mention of Osiris or the Stele of Revealing that Duane's notebooks had spoken of. Dale brought the book with him on the camping trip; just another bit of weight to lug over the hills.

All four of the boys had been tense on the ride out, looking over their shoulders as every truck approached and every car passed. But the Rendering Truck did not appear, and the most aggressive act aimed at them during the slow ride out to Uncle Henry's was a little kid-possibly a boy, but it was hard to tell through the matted hair and dirty face-sticking his tongue out at them from the backseat of an overloaded '53 DeSoto.

They rested on the shady back patio at Uncle Henry's while Aunt Lena made lemonade for them and sat in the Adirondack chair awhile, discussing the best places to camp. She thought the empty pasture would be good-there was a nice view of the creek and surrounding hills from it, but the boys were insistent about camping in the woods.

"Where is Michael O'Rourke?" she asked.

"Oh, he had work to do in town. Stuff at the church or something," lied Jim Harlen. "He'll come later."

The four boys hiked east out through the barnyard at about three o'clock, leaving their bikes in the safekeeping of Aunt Lena. Their backpacks were makeshift affairs: Lawrence's inexpensive Cub Scout pack made of nylon; Kev's canvas army pack that he borrowed from his dad, the whole thing smelling of mildew; Dale's long, clumsy duffel bag, more suited to a canoe trip than this long hike; and Harlen's bulky bedroll, little more than some blankets wrapped around his junk and secured with what looked to be about a hundred yards of rope and twine. There were many halts for small adjustments and reshiftings of load.