Roy Owen found the County Line Motel at noon on Monday, the eighth day of August. It was three miles west of the small city of Lakemore, and on the north side of the road. It was an old motel with no more than thirty rooms, a single-story structure in the shape of a U with the open end of the U facing the two-lane highway. It was a block building covered with pink stucco, and had a red tile roof. The pink was faded and cracked, an-d there were many broken tiles. There was a patch of brown grass on one part of the roof. Parking was inside the U, the cars facing the narrow roofed walkway which ran all the way around the interior of the U. There were two vans, a pickup and a step van parked in front of the units.

The office was oven hot. An overhead fan spun and buzzed at high speed. The woman was standing behind the high counter, weight on her forearms, dark hair hanging toward the magazine she was reading. When she heard the twang of the screen-door spring she straightened, tossing the sheaf of hair back, giving him a welcoming smile. She was a lean sun browned woman with a hard shelf of brow, a crinkled and pleasantly simian smile, very dark eyes. Her shoulders gleamed with perspiration. He guessed she was about thirty.

"Can I help you?"

"Have you got a single room?"

She nodded and put the registration card and a ballpoint pen in front of him.

"Twelve dollars plus tax. Just one night?"

"Is number sixteen vacant?"

She tilted her head and looked at him with a puzzled expression.

"It's empty, yes. You can have it if you want it. The wall unit is working okay in that one, at least. The one in here rusted out a month ago and it's been an oven in here ever since.

The postage stamps get all stuck together. The rooms are pretty much all alike. Why do you want that one?"

He couldn't think of any lie that made any sense at all.

"There was a woman who stayed in that room three months ago."

"Oh boy, I thought I'd heard the last of that. After the police and that old boy with the scar, I thought that was the end. The mysterious Miss Olan. What good could it do you staying in that room anyway?"

He spread his hands in a hopeless shrug.

"I don't have any idea at all. Maybe it's only because I know how she thinks, how she reacts to things. I've been married to her nine years this month, and I hired that investigator with the scar. I couldn't get down here sooner."

She turned his card around and looked at the name he had printed.

"Of course. Owen. I remember now they said that was her real name. Mrs. Owen. It makes a person feel strange to have somebody come into your motel and use a false name. She was supposed to be some kind of a journalist or a writer."

"Supposed to be and she was. Trying to get some kind of new angle on the Meadows family for that magazine Out Front."

That's what I found out later."

"She was on assignment. It wasn't any kind of free-lance thing. She used to work for newspapers using her maiden name, Linda Rooney. Everybody called her Lindy."

She tossed her dark hair back, an impatient gesture, and she gave him a strange, flat, challenging look.

"Okay, your wife is missing and that is too bad, but bad things can happen in this world to pretty little women who don't stay where they belong."

"You sound angry. Did you quarrel with her?"

"No. We don't have enough customers I can afford to quarrel with any of them, friend. I found out later she had lied about her name and I guess I do not appreciate people lying to me no matter what the reason. And maybe I've got some kind of old-timey feeling about a woman roaming around the countryside leaving her little kid at home."

He was puzzled.

"She talked about Janie?"

"Not a word. She didn't act as if she had a kid or a husband. I saw in the paper about the little girl. Jeanie, is it?"

"Janie. She's six, staying with Lindy's mother."

"And so everybody thinks she's just fine. Having a ball. That arrangement is okay with you, Mr. Owen?"

He smiled and shook his head.

"I get the feeling we're quarreling about something, but I don't know what."

She seemed to pull herself back from the edge of an inexplicable irritation with him. Her smile was wry. She combed her fingers back through her dark hair and said, "Don't mind me. It gets too hot in this office without the air conditioning. Look, your Lindy was certainly a cute little person. A petite blonde. I think I could get a lot of mileage out of being a little blonde person." She tilted her head, studied him.

"I guess you two must have made a great-looking little couple."

"You keep talking about her in the past tense. Is that because you feel sure something happened to her?"

"Lots of women want to get away from their kids for good."

Before he had a chance to answer in anger, defending Lindy, the step van pulled up by the office door and a man in gray coveralls came in and put a key on the counter.

"Peggy, that damn shower water doesn't hardly go down the drain at all.

You have to stand in it up to your ankles. It's still running out in there."

"Thanks, Lew. I'll get Fred to check it out. Everything else okay?"

"Fine. See you next time around."

"Be looking for you."

As the man was climbing into his truck, she turned quickly to Roy, and said, "I don't know if anything happened to her.

And I think it's a natural way for me to speak about her. She was here. Right. Just as Lew who just left was here. And when she was here she was a neat-looking little blonde person.

Okay. I don't think you should read anything into the way I use the past tense or any other tense, okay?"

"Okay, sure. I'm sorry. I know why I'm jumpy. But I don't know why you are so damn cross. I never had to go looking for anybody before. The man I hired said it was a waste of time to come here. But... I guess I have to do everything I can. I don't know whether I should be with Janie up in Hartford. Maybe that would be best for her right now. But someday she's going to want to know that I did everything possible to find her mother. And I don't know why I have to keep justifying myself to you."

Her faint smile was bleak.

"I'm not asking you to justify anything, Mr. Owen. If you decided to look for your wife, that's your business, isn't it."

His smile was rueful.

"So I should be looking. You could say I'm entitled. But I don't know how. Did you have any particular impressions of her? Please, I need all the help I can get."

"She was a type we don't get here much."