It had taken him awhile to work up the courage, but then he went to the phone in the hall and called Duane's number, letting the party-line phone ring twice the way he was supposed to. There was a click and that weird recording machine came on and said in Duane's emotionless voice, "Hi. We can't answer the phone right now, but whatever you say will be taped and we'll get back to you. Please count to three and speak."

Dale counted to three and hung up, face burning. He'd have enough trouble talking to poor Duane right now; expressing his condolences to a tape recorder was beyond him. Dale left Lawrence working on the model, his brother's tongue sticking out and eyes almost crossed with concentration, and rode down the street to Mike's.

"Eeawkee!" Dale let out the shout, hopped off the bike, and let it glide a few yards on its own before crashing onto the grass.

"Keeawee." Mike's answering shout came from the giant maple that overhung the street.

Dale jogged back, climbed the few remaining rungs to the lower treehouse fifteen feet up, and then continued climbing through branches toward the higher, secret platform thirty feet higher. Mike sat with his back to a bole of one of the diverging trunks, his legs dangling over the three-board platform. Dale pulled himself up and sat back against the other trunk. He looked down, but the ground was lost behind leaves and he knew that they were invisible from the ground. "Hey," he said, "I just heard . . .."

"Yeah," said Mike. He was chewing on a long piece of grass. "I heard a little while ago, too. I was going to come over to talk to you after a while. You know Duane better."

Dale nodded. He and Duane had become friends through discovering a common interest in books and rocketry in fourth grade. But Dale had dreamed of rockets; Duane had built them. Dale's reading was precocious-he'd read Treasure Island and the real Robinson Crusoe by fourth grade-but Duane's reading list was beyond belief. Still, the two had stayed friends, spending recesses together, seeing each other a few times over the summer. Dale thought that he might be the only person whom Duane had told about his ambition to become a writer. "There's no answer," said Dale. He made an awkward gesture. "I called."

Mike studied the piece of grass he was chewing and dropped it into the layer of leaves fifteen feet below. "Yeah. My mom called this afternoon too. Got that machine. She's going out there later with a bunch of ladies bringing food. Your mom'll probably go."

Dale nodded again. A death in Elm Haven or the outlying farms meant a battalion of women descending like Valkyries bringing food. Duane told me about Valkyries. Dale couldn't quite remember what Valkyries did, but he remembered that they came down when someone died. He said, "I've only met his uncle a couple of times. He seemed real nice. Smart, but nice. Not touchy like Duane's dad."

"Duane's dad is an alcoholic," said Mike. His voice said that it wasn't a judgment or criticism, merely a statement of fact.

Dale shrugged. "His uncle has . . . had white hair and used to wear a white beard. I talked to him once when I was out at the farm playing and he was . . . funny."

Mike plucked a leaf and began stripping it. "I heard Mrs. Somerset tell my mom that Mrs. Taylor said that he was torn apart when a steering wheel thingie went through him. She said Mr. Taylor said that no way could they have an open coffin. She said that Duane's dad came in and threatened to rip Mr. Taylor a new asshole if he touched his brother's body. Mr. McBride's brother's body, I mean."

Dale found a leaf for himself. He nodded. He'd never heard the phrase "rip him a new asshole" before and he had to fight to keep from smiling. It was a good phrase. Then he remembered what they were talking about and any threat of a smile fled.

"Father Cavanaugh went over to the funeral home," Mike was saying. "Nobody knew what religion Mr. McBride- the uncle Mr. McBride-was, so Father C. gave him Extreme Unction just in case."

"What's extreme . . . whatever?" asked Dale. He finished with the leaf and started on another. Some girls skipped by far below, never guessing that people were talking softly forty feet above them.

"The Last Rites," said Mike.

Dale nodded, although he understood no better than before. Catholics had lots of weird things that they assumed everybody knew about. Dale had watched in fourth grade when Gerry Day singer had made fun of Mike's rosary-Gerry had stuck it around his own neck and danced around with it, accusing Mike of carrying a necklace around. Mike hadn't said anything, he'd merely pounded Daysinger's face in, sat on his chest, and carefully removed the rosary. No one had teased Mike about it since.

"Father C. was there when Duane's dad came in," continued Mike, "but he didn't want to talk or anything. He just told Mr. Taylor to keep his ghoul's hands off his brother and told him where to send the body for cremation."

"Cremation," whispered Dale.

"That's when they burn you instead of bury you."

"I know that, stupid," snapped Dale. "I was just . . . surprised." And relieved, he realized. In the past fifteen minutes part of his mind had been imagining going down to Taylor's to the funeral, having to see the body during the visitation, sitting with Duane. But cremation . . . that meant no funeral, didn't it? "When's it going to be?" he asked. "The cremation?" It was such an adult and final word.

Mike shrugged. "You want to go out and see him?"

"See who?" asked Dale. He knew that Digger Taylor sometimes snuck his friends into the coffin room before the viewing, showing them corpses. Chuck Sperling once bragged that he and Digger had seen Mrs. Duggan when she was laid out naked in the embalming room.

"Who? Duane, of course," said Mike. "Who else do you think we ought to go see, dipstick?"

Dale grunted, crumbled the last of the leaf, and tried to brush sap from his hand. He squinted up at the sky through the thinning canopy above them. "It'll be dark pretty soon." "No, it's not. We've got another couple of hours. The days are longer this week than any time in the whole year, dopehead. It's just cloudy this evening."

Dale thought about the long pedal out to Duane's house. He remembered Duane talking about the time the Rendering Truck had tried to run him down. They'd be on the same road. He thought of having to talk to Mr. McBride and whatever other grown-ups were out there. What could be harder to do than visit someone after a death? "OK," he said. "Let's go."

They climbed down, grabbed their bikes, and headed out of town. The sky in the east was almost black, as if a storm were coming. The air was dead calm. Halfway to County Six, a truck became visible ahead of them as a cloud of dust. Dale and Mike pulled far to the right, almost into the ditch, to let it pass.

It was Duane and his dad going the other way in their pickup. The truck did not stop.

Duane saw his two friends on their bikes and guessed that they were probably headed out to the farm to see him, and he glanced over his shoulder in time to see them stopped and standing, staring after the truck for the few seconds before the cloud of dust enveloped them. The Old Man hadn't even noticed Mike and Dale. Duane said nothing.

It hadn't been easy convincing the Old Man that the book was important enough to go hunting for tonight. Duane had played the tape.

"What the hell is all this about?" the Old Man had asked. He'd been in a murderous depression since he'd returned from Taylor's.

Duane hesitated only a second. He could tell the Old Man everything, just as he'd explained it to Uncle Art. But the time seemed all wrong. The stuff about a Borgia Bell seemed idle nonsense in the face of the reality of loss the Old Man and he were feeling. Duane explained that he and Uncle Art had been researching this bell ... an artifact one of the Ashley-Montagues had brought back from Europe and which seemed to have been forgotten by everyone. Duane made it sound like a lark, one of the uncountable projects he had shared with Uncle Art, like the times they had gone buggo on astronomy and built their own telescopes, or the autumn they had tried to build every device Leonardo da Vinci had designed. That kind of thing.