“That’s sort of private stuff, Bobbi,” Andy said, sounding uncomfortable. He felt uncomfortable. There were a thousand holes in Charlie’s story. “Don’t you say another word,” Irv said. “I know about trouble in families. It can get pretty bitter at times. And I know about being hard-up. It ain’t no shame.” Andy cleared his throat but said nothing. He could think of nothing to say. They rode in silence for a while. “Say, why don’t you two come home and take lunch with me and the wife?” Irv asked suddenly.

“Oh no, we couldn’t do-”

“We’d be happy to,” Charlie said. “Wouldn’t we, Daddy?”

He knew that Charlie’s intuitions were usually good ones, and he was too mentally and physically worn down to go against her now. She was a self possessed and aggressive little girl, and more than once Andy had wondered to himself just who was running this show.

“If you’re sure there’s enough-“he said.

“Always enough,” Irv Manders said, finally shifting the farm truck into third gear. They were rattling between autumn-bright trees: maples, elms, poplars. “Glad to have you.”

“Thank you very much,” Charlie said.

“My pleasure, button,” Irv said. “Be my wife’s, too, when she gets a look at you.”

Charlie smiled.

Andy rubbed his temples. Beneath the fingers of his left hand was one of those patches of skin where the nerves seemed to have died. He didn’t feel good about this, somehow. That feeling that they were closing in was still very much with him.

The woman who had checked Andy out of the Slumberland Motel not twenty minutes ago was getting nervous. She had forgotten all about Phil Donahue.

“You’re sure this was the man,” Ray Knowles was saying for the third time. She didn’t like this small, trim, somehow tight man. Maybe he worked for the government, but that was no comfort to Lena Cunningham. She didn’t like his narrow face, she didn’t like the lines around his cool blue eyes, and most of all she didn’t like the way he kept shoving that picture under her nose.

“Yes, that was him,” she said again. “But there was no little girl with him. Honest, mister. My husband’ll tell you the same. He works nights. It’s got so we hardly ever see each other, except at supper. He’ll tell-”

The other man came back in, and with ever-mounting alarm, Lena saw that he had a walkie-talkie in one hand and a great big pistol in the other.

“It was them,” John Mayo said. He was almost hysterical with anger and disappointment. “Two people slept in that bed. Blond hairs on one pillow, black on the other. Goddam that flat tire! Goddam it all to hell! Damp towels hanging on the rod in the bathroom! Fucking shower’s still dripping! We missed them by maybe five minutes, Ray!”

He jammed the pistol back into its shoulder holster.

“I’ll get my husband,” Lena said faintly.

“Never mind,” Ray said. He took John’s arm and led him outside. John was still swearing about the flat. “Forget the tire, John. Did you talk to OJ back in town?”

“I talked to him and he talked to Norville. Norville’s on his way from Albany, and he’s got Al Steinowitz with him. He landed not ten minutes ago.”

“Well, that’s good. Listen, think a minute, Johnny. They must have been hitching.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Unless they boosted a car.”

“The guy’s an English instructor. He wouldn’t know how to boost a candy bar out of a concession stand in a home for the blind. They were hitching, all right. They hitched from Albany last night. They hitched this morning. I’d bet you this year’s salary that they were standing there by the side of the road with their thumbs out while I was walking up that hill.”

“If it hadn’t been for that flat-“John’s eyes were miserable behind his wire-framed glasses. He saw a promotion flapping away on slow, lazy wings. “Fuck the flat!” Ray said. “What passed us? After we got the flat, what passed us?” John thought about it as he hooked the walkie-talkie back on his belt. “Farm truck,” he said.

“That’s what I remember, too,” Ray said. He glanced around and saw Lena Cunningham’s large moon face peering out the motel office window at them. She saw him seeing her and the curtain fell back into place.

“Pretty rickety truck,” Ray said. “If they don’t turn off the main road, we ought to be able to catch up to them.”

“Let’s go, then,” John said. “We can keep in touch with A1 and Norville by way of OJ on the walkie-talkie.”

They trotted back to the car and got in. A moment later the tan Ford roared out of the parking lot, spewing white crushed gravel out from beneath its rear tires: Lena Cunningham watched them go with relief. Running a motel was not what it once had been.

She went back to wake up her husband.

As the Ford with Ray Knowles behind the wheel and John Mayo riding shotgun was roaring down Route 40 at better than seventy miles an hour (and as a caravan of ten or eleven similar nondescript late-model cars were heading towards Hastings Glen from the surrounding areas of search), Irv Manders hand-signaled left and turned off the highway onto an unmarked stretch of tar-and-patch that headed roughly northeast. The truck rattled and banged along. At his urging, Charlie had sung most of her nine-song repertoire, including such golden hits as “Happy Birthday to You,” “This Old Man,” “Jesus Loves Me,” and “Camptown Races.” Irv and Andy both sang along with that one.

The road twisted and wound its way over a series of increasingly wooded ridges and then began to descend toward flatter country that had been cultivated and harvested. Once a partridge burst from a cover of goldenrod and old hay at the left side of the road and Irv shouted, “Get im, Bobbi!” and Charlie pointed her finger and chanted “Bam-ba-DAM!'” and then giggled wildly.

A few minutes later Irv turned off on a dirt road, and a mile farther along they came to a battered red, white, and blue mailbox with MANDERS stenciled on the side. Irv turned into a rutted driveway that was nearly half a mile long.

“Must cost you an arm and a leg to keep it plowed in the winter,” Andy said.

“Do it m’self,” Irv said.

They came to a big white frame farmhouse, three stories tall and set off” with mint-green trim. To Andy it looked like the sort of house that might have started off fairly ordinary and then grown eccentric as the years passed. Two sheds were attached to the rear, one of them zigging thisaway, the other zagging thataway. On the south side, a greenhouse wing had been added, and a big screened-in porch stood out from the north side like a stiff skirt.

Behind the house was a red barn that had seen better days, and between the house and the barn was what New Englanders called a dooryard-a flat dirt stretch of ground where a couple of dozen chickens clucked and strutted. When the truck rattled toward them they fled, squawking and fluttering their useless wings, past a chopping block with an ax buried in it.

Irv drove the truck into the barn, which had, a sweet hay smell Andy remembered from his summers in Vermont. When Irv switched the truck off, they all heard a low, musical mooing from somewhere deeper in the barn’s shadowy interior.

“You got a cow,” Charlie said, and something like rapture came over her face. “I can hear it.”

“We’ve got three,” Irv said. “That’s Bossy you hear-a very original name, wouldn’t you say, button? She thinks she’s got to be milked three times a day. You can see her later, if your daddy says you can.”

“Can I, Daddy?”

“I guess so,” Andy said, mentally surrendering. Somehow they had gone out beside the road to thumb a ride and had got shanghaied instead.

“Come on in and meet the wife.”

They strolled across the dooryard, pausing for Charlie to examine as many of the chickens as she could get close to. The back door opened and a woman of about forty five came out onto the back steps. She shaded her eyes and called, “You there, Irv! Who you brought home?” Irv smiled. “Well, the button here is Roberta. This fellow is her daddy. I didn’t catch his name yet, so I dunno if we’re related.” Andy stepped forward and said, “I’m Frank Burton, ma'am. Your husband invited Bobbi and me home for lunch, if that’s all right. We’re pleased to know you.” “Me too,” Charlie said, still more interested in the chickens than in the woman-at least for the moment. “I’m Norma Manders,” she said. “Come in. You’re welcome.” But Andy saw the puzzled look she threw at her husband.