"How so?"

"Well... two-hundred-dollar silk blouse. Italian shoes.

Heavy gold chain. Expensive luggage. Which direction did you come in from? Did you come right down off the Interstate and over here through Lakemore?"

"I came up on the Interstate but I went the other way first, over through the Meadows Center, and then turned around and came back through the town, maybe ten miles from where I turned around."

"What you have to know, to see what I mean, is the history.

When the Meadows Center was real small and little, before they began building the Tabernacle, the Interstate wasn't finished through here, and people came to the Center north or south on U.S. Route and turned off onto the state road that runs right by here. So that made for a lot of business for us. The county and the city encouraged the Meadows Center people.

We didn't realize they were going to turn into what is practically another city. Now all the pilgrims and tourists come down the Interstate and turn east and stay over there in the Meadows Center motels and eat over there and shop over there. This side of town is drying up and blowing away. You and your wife would be the kind of people who'd stay over there at the Center. That driver who just left his key, Lew, he stays here because he saves a few dollars and we keep it clean. Our customers used to be able to eat right across the road over there, but it's been boarded up so long now there's weeds up to your hip pockets. Some people say that bringing all that money and traffic to this area is a real good thing for everybody. I don't know. I really don't. The last two fairly nice restaurants in Lakemore folded last year. A lot of the stores went out of business. And we can't seem to get far enough ahead to replace this rotten broken air conditioner!"

"So your impression was that Lindy didn't belong here."

"I wasn't all that curious about her. She came and went at odd times in that rental car. When Dolly was sick she works maid for us I made up number sixteen a couple of times but your wife didn't leave anything around that gave me a clue. But I didn't feel like prying. Even if I had wondered about her, I couldn't open people's private stuff no matter what. I didn't give a damn what she did."

"Most people like Lindy. It just seems strange to me..."

"Don't let it worry you what I think or didn't think, okay?

You want to ask me questions, I'll answer them as best I can."

"I really appreciate that. The man I hired to look into it, Mr. Hanrahan, in a written report he told me Lindy had been seen in an old red pickup truck with a driver who wore a big black beard. When I asked him about that on the phone he said it turned out to be somebody who gave her a ride for hire over to the Center when her rental car wouldn't start. He said it had no significance at all."

"I guess it didn't. I got her the ride, actually. He's not a dangerous person. People call him Moses. When you head toward town from here, the third place on your left is a yellow house with green trim. That's Mrs. Holroyd's place, and Moses lives out back of her barn in a yellow school bus he fixed up.

Moses is very handy and he's strong as a bull. People who have odd jobs they need done, they get hold of Moses. He does a cash business. He's kind of buggy on religion. I mean he'll quote things to you from the Bible for almost no reason at all.

But there's a lot of that going around lately. When a person wants to get hold of Moses, they phone Mrs. Holroyd and she goes out to the barn and tells him or leaves a message for him.

The police, Sheriff Dockerty himself, he looked into it and, like I told him, it was because I got a ride for... your wife."

"Her car broke down?"

"On a Friday morning, the last Friday she was here. She came into the office very upset. She had an appointment to see somebody over at the Center. They were coming out from Lakemore to fix her car but it would take too long. Could she borrow one? I didn't have one to lend. Fred was out somewhere hunting down some kind of a valve for the plumbing. I asked her if maybe she shouldn't phone and change the appointment and she said it had been too hard getting the one she had. Then I remembered Moses and I told her if she didn't mind somebody pretty strange in a terrible old red pickup, maybe I could arrange something for her. She said she didn't mind at all, but please hurry. Moses was at Mrs. Holroyd's and he came by ten minutes later. I walked her out to the pickup and introduced them and she told him what she wanted. Drive her in, wait for her, bring her back. He nodded and away they went. I guess it was eleven o'clock by then. He dropped her off back here at two o'clock, a little bit after. She came into the office and I gave her the envelope the car repair people had left for her. She told me she had given Moses fifteen dollars and she was worried about whether it was enough. I told her it was enough. She seemed relaxed. She drove out soon after that and came back at about seven o'clock in the evening. She parked outside the door there and came in and asked me if there'd been any calls for her. When I said no, she seemed depressed.

Right after that she made a long-distance call on her credit card."

That was to me. Friday night. What did she do Saturday?"

"She went out early Saturday morning and I don't remember seeing her again until I saw her drive in past the office alone at dusk Saturday night. On Sunday Dolly told me in midmorning that number sixteen was empty. The key was on the bureau.

Her car and luggage were gone, and I didn't think anything of it. She'd paid through Sunday, and there wouldn't be any unpaid phone charges because you can't call long-distance from the rooms except through the switchboard and I place the call."

"Did she make many other long-distance calls?"

"All on a telephone credit card, to New York City. Maybe there were five or six while she was staying here."

"Did she make any on Saturday, her last day here?"

"Well, she tried. Several times, but I don't think she got through. I mean, the calls were so short I thought the other end was probably busy, or nobody home."

"Who did she have the appointment with?"

"Somebody in the Administration Building. Moses saw her go in there. That's all anybody seems to know. I don't think she would have told Moses. He isn't the sort of person you chat with, you know. I don't think he's retarded, but he isn't really. normal. Kids make fun of him. These days they seem to dump people out of asylums, right out on the street. A friend of mine was in New York last month and she told me about seeing lots of weird people wandering around the sidewalks, making gestures and talking to themselves. Do you want to pay by cash or credit card?"

"Visa?"

"Sure. Just let me know by noon tomorrow if you're going to stay longer. Here's the key, but if you want ice the machine is broken. If you come here to the office, I can let you have some from our refrigerator."

"I'm sorry if there was something I said that upset you."

"Believe me, please, nothing you said upset me."

"Then it was something between you and Lindy."

"Enjoy your stay," she said, and wheeled and went through the doorway into the living quarters beyond the office.

He parked in front of sixteen and carried his suitcase in. The room was stifling. He experimented with the air-conditioner controls until he found a reasonable compromise between noise and cooling. The room contained a chest of drawers, a small desk, a straight chair, an overstuffed wing chair, a double bed, two windows looking out on woodsy scrubland behind the motel. Sixteen was in the base of the U, one of the rooms furthest from the highway. His front window looked out at the grille of his rental car. There was a small closet alcove with hangers permanently affixed to the clothes bar, a small bath with tub and shower, scarred sink and toilet with a cracked lid, and two towels halfway between bath size and hand size. There was a grass rug in the room and bolted to the wall a framed lithograph of big-eyed Spanish-looking children.

He removed his shoes and stretched out on the bed, fingers laced behind his head. The room was beginning to cool off.

The ceiling was made of twelve-inch squares of patterned white fiberboard. Above the foot of the bed was a curious yellow stain on the ceiling the shape of a dog's head, defacing three of the white squares.

She was here, he thought. Right here like this, looking up at the dog's head and wondering how it happened, just as I am wondering.

Once again he had the conviction Lindy was dead. It came at unexpected times, with no warning. As before, it made his eyes sting and his breath catch. He had tried to keep it from happening when he had gone over to Lindy's mother's place to tell Mrs. Rooney and his daughter about his plan to come down here and look around. But it had happened then and they had all clung to each other, weeping. He did not like to cry, or to even think of himself crying. He guessed that it was due to his always being smaller than his classmates. In the roughest games, they had never been able to make him cry.

The night before he had talked long-distance to Margaret Rooney after his interview with Hanrahan. She had sounded very depressed. He had talked to Janie. She said she had a new friend. Her name was Princess Jones and nobody could see her except Janie. She wore a little gold tiara with emeralds on it, lace dresses and shoes with high golden heels. She would introduce him to her when he came home, but he would have to promise to pretend he could see her.

So Lindy was dead and it was a hell of a waste. There was no one to blame for the delay in reporting it. Her editors had not become alarmed until he had phoned them about not hearing from her.

So he knew everything about her and at the same time very little about her. She was nearsighted and wore soft contacts.

She'd had a full scholarship to Vassar and had graduated with honors. She was an only child. She slept in short flannel nightgowns summer and winter. She drank spritzers. Anything stronger made her ill. She made a point of doing things well, regardless of her own likes and dislikes. And so she cooked well and had kept the house clean and her daughter healthy and tidy. When she was a child a lawn chair had collapsed under her and pinched off almost half the little finger of her right hand. She carried that hand half curled into a fist. In her touch-typing she used the stub of that finger for the 'p', the ';' and the' ?". There was a typing callus on the end of that stunted finger. She wrote a sturdy and durable prose, and when moved could write in an effective and luminous style. She was afraid of air travel. She liked large thick white towels. She had a knack of sitting without random motions or nervous habits, and she had a direct, level, challenging stare many found disconcerting. She was shrewd with money, a canny bargainer.

She played to win, and became cross when beaten at games.

She was a skeptic, researching everything she heard that she did not believe. She became huge with Janie, reminding Roy of a penguin in the way she walked, leaning back to balance the load. She could thrive on six hours' sleep a night.

She kept her weight right at or close to a hundred and five pounds.

He guessed he did not really know her because they had never solved their sexual puzzles. When there was a mutual satisfaction, it was more by accident than design. He had tried 8z to talk about it to her but there was a primness in her that made her change the subject as soon as she could. He had always felt that in some deep and secret way she disapproved of him, of his maleness and his hungers. It was a wall between them which they managed to ignore most of the time. When he looked deeply into her eyes, before she looked away he would sometimes think he saw a stranger back in there, someone he did not know and would probably never meet.

He wondered if her repressed sexuality was the reason for her truly impressive energies. He had never seen her felled by exhaustion except after the long ordeal of birthing Janie. He felt certain those energies had not led her into someone else's bed. She would have thought it unpleasant, tacky and dishonest. Untidy at best.

"Lindy is dead!" It was an experiment, to say it aloud for the first time. Tears ran out of the corners of his eyes, blurring the dog-head image on the ceiling. He wondered if the tears were real and true, or if he was crying at the idea of himself losing her. He thumped the bed with his right fist, as hard as he could.