"Didn't you hear me last time, Molly? This has been loads of fun and thank you very much, and I'll never forget you, and so forth, but this little game is over. I told you that."

"Bull! You don't get to say when it's finished."

"I'm saying it."

"You listen to me, Tink. Listen very carefully. I am going down there and you are going down there. Today. And you are going to be affectionate and loving, and you are not going to talk crap to me about this being over. It isn't over. You are going to be there because if you are not, I am going to make you the sorriest preacher in the state and the nation. I'll geld you at the entrance to your stupid Tabernacle, pet. Or I'll hand Rolf the knife. Let me see. How does that work? I cry and cry and cry and finally tell him that you've been making me sleep with you because if I didn't he was going to be fired. Rolf will believe everything I tell him. I am yanking on your leash, Tink.

So heel, goddamn you! See you at three-thirty." She had hung up as he had started to say something, and when the phone rang again moments later, she did not answer it.

And now she was totally miserable in the heat, itching and angry. She looked at her watch and said she would give him until quarter after four and then that was it. And he was going to pay a very heavy price for every single minute of her discomfort. Worst of all, she had awakened this morning wanting him, awakened from a dream about him. There'd been, by her own careful count in erotic reverie, sixteen men, beginning when she was fifteen, but never one who'd been able to satisfy her as completely as Tink.

She started the car and went fishtailing up the muddy track.

When she got to the crest she put the top down so as to cool herself in the rush of air, and blow the bugs out at the same time. She started to slow down as she reached the gate, then clamped her jaw tightly and stepped on the gas. Big splinters of board flew up in the air and fell behind her, and she heard in the impact the thin tinkle of the glass from her broken headlights, and thought for a moment of the various ways it could have happened, and selected the most plausible one to tell Rolf.

A few miles later an air horn blared at her as she moved from the access strip to the traffic lanes on the Interstate and a tanker went by her at a speed that twitched the steering wheel in her hands. She put the pedal to the floor and within a few miles she went by him at better than eighty-five. The wind snapped her hair against her forehead and ears. The speed climbed slowly.

She saw a sheen of water across the two lanes a hundred yards ahead and held the wheel more firmly. She was in the passing lane. Just as she reached the water, the great air horn roared again, and in the rearview mirror she saw that same tanker tailgating her, the cab with two figures in it high above her. So you win, she thought, and twisted the wheel to move over to the right lane. But the water was causing the front wheels, at that speed, to hydroplane, and when there was no effect, she turned the wheel further clockwise. Beyond the water was dry pavement. When the cramped tires snubbed sidelong against the dry concrete, the little car tripped over, throwing her out high and to the left toward the median strip, breaking her legs against the steering wheel as she was catapulted out.

There was the great shock, the jar, and a slow wonderment in her mind. The sky and the road and the green fields were circling around her, and in one glimpse she saw her beloved little yellow car bounding and whirling itself to death, bits flying off it. The grass swarmed close then, and she went down into a green thud, a great flash of white light and nothingness.

The cars began to slow and stop, and the trucks began to call in on Channel 9.

At four o'clock on Sunday afternoon, Carolyn Pennymark waited for her flight in the Pan Am Clipper Club at the city airport an hour from Lakemore. Her flight was delayed in Tampa. Her giant purse which served as carry-on, suitcase, toilet case and camera bag was on the seat beside her. She had changed to a wrinkled white blouse and a sharply creased pair of pale blue polyester trousers too big for her, with the cuffs turned up. The blue denim work hat was squashed down on her springy hair, and her lavender lenses sat slightly askew.

From time to time, as she talked, she dipped quickly to take a salted peanut from the bowl on the low coffee table in front of her, or take a quick sip from her bourbon on the rocks.

While she talked one part of her mind was busy trying to remember the last name of the man she was sitting next to and talking to. The first name was Sam. He was with one of the networks, but not in front of the camera. She hadn't seen him in perhaps three years and there he was, smiling at her and beckoning to her when she turned away from the desk after clearing her business-class ticket and her membership card with the Clipper Club woman.

"Anyway," she said, 'where I am now, doing what I do, what chance do I get to have to look at dead bodies? I mean, you take something like Out Front, you don't go yelling for anybody to stop the presses, not that anybody ever did except in old movies. The thing I feel ashamed of is where I put the knock on Lindy Rooney talking to that PR bitch with all the teeth because I guess there was something about her that bent me the wrong way. In all honesty maybe every big lively beautiful blonde bends dark dim ladies like me the wrong way and we resent hell out of it. But who do you blame for genetics? Like I always say, we're lucky to be here at all, right? But it wasn't fair painting that picture of Lindy, because she wasn't all that bad. I mean, she had the makings of a pretty good tiger, but she'd never had the newsroom background to teach her the moves. When we worked together, it was okay, really. And I told that cute little husband of hers with the big mustache that Lindy was okay loyal when she was out of town. What did that cost me? Because she was, but I knew something about her I didn't want to tell him. One night in a motel God knows where Lindy and I got sloshed pretty good on the grape, a- bottle apiece and a third one to split, and it got to be confession time and she said, not right out, but sort of crosswise, that she and the little guy with the mustache didn't make it too good except once in a while because he was, she called it, unresponsive. He didn't ever seem to pick up on the clues she'd give him when she was really ready and willing, and always seemed to want to 2-55 make it at the wrong time. I tell you, Sam, he was just cute enough I was tempted to hang around and give it my best shot, which isn't a whole hell of a lot, but the best I got, but the way it looked to me, the lady owns half the motel with her brother was already pounding in the stakes and stringing the bob wire.

Kind of cute in a monkey-face kind of way, she is. You know the type, and I would say maybe getting a little bit long in the tooth if it wasn't I've got the same problem myself. She moves young, though, you know what I mean? Like quick-slim.

Anyway just about the worst move I made in this whole thing, I went through all my little routines until I finally got a look at a little stack of eight-by-ten glossy black and whites of during the autopsy, and believe me, Sam, you never want to see anybody you have ever known looking like that. It is worse than any kind of picture you can get in your head from reading Steve King. It shook me, pal. That experience was a bitch. You know what I mean. We've seen bodies in worse shape, like when they pull them out of the Potomac after a long winter, but always nobody you knew, you've laughed with, walked with, worked with. I told Marty on the phone that it was my feeling they weren't ever going to make anybody for killing her, and the place was so crawling with media it wasn't worth me hanging around for the magazine. I should have stayed, I guess. I know I could have dug up some stuff, some of it pretty raunchy to be going on in the middle of the Bible lessons, but to tell the truth I was beginning to feel pretty strange about that whole operation. It made me begin to feel like a little kid again, and it made me feel as if doing my digging and prying was kind of like when you were little and they shushed you for making too much noise in church. I got the feeling that if I unmasked some of the kinky ones and we did a big story on sin and corruption in paradise, what I would be doing is hurting the Eternal Church of the Believer, and somehow I didn't want to do that. I'm not hooked on it, but a lot of people are. You see what I mean, Sam? It's the whole world to them, and heaven too, and it keeps them going in hard times, making them feel like this world is just a passing phase and sooner or later, off you go, with golden trumpets and all that. Funny, I've got no scruples about knocking institutions every chance I get. Conglomerates, banks, movie studios, government bureaus, political committees. I know they've got rotten spots and I can dig z56 until I come to one and then open it up to daylight and let the people take a look. You probably read how those right-wing bastards tried to car-bomb me out of Guatemala City, but all they got was the chauffeur and the guard assigned to me. It went off when I was coming down the steps from seeing the minister of something or other, and it knocked me back up the steps on my ass, but I got some shots they used of the car burning and the guard there face down beside it with his uniform burning in back. Maybe what it is about that place, Sam, there has to be things people believe in, good or bad, and Sister Mary Margaret Meadows, she really does believe and she's doing her best while everything seems to be kind of falling down around her lately. That's what we do with what they give us, right? We take our best shot. Sam, how about you go over and get more peanuts in the bowl, and while you're at it, a real weak little bourbon on the rocks, about this high ? Thanks, love."

The Southern Memorial Hospital occupied four blocks on the west side of downtown, twelve miles from the airport. At the time Carrie Pennymark's flight was loading, Rolf Wintergarten waited in a small room down the corridor from Intensive Care for them to give him his once-an-hour installment of five minutes with Molly. Down in the basement, behind a labeled drawer front with a stainless-steel handle, reposed the refrigerated remains of Linda Rooney Owen, awaiting final reports on the laboratory tests of the tissue samples taken by Drs Ludeker and Johnson. If no further tests and samples were recommended, then the body could be released to the immediate family for disposition.

Wintergarten flipped through tattered travel magazines with color photographs of canals in France, villages in Crete, beaches on Pacific islands. He wondered vaguely who had decided that the waiting rooms for Intensive Care should be stocked with travel magazines. Get away from it all. Stop thinking about it all. Sure.

He wondered when his sister would arrive, if she would look for him at the airport, if she could find him on her own. A little old man shared the small waiting room with him. He was bald and cadaverous, in a suit too big for him. He had a thick book on his lap and he was bending over it to read, moving his lips, 2-57 taking a long time between pages. Wintergarten wondered if the book would last the man the rest of his life.

The nurse beckoned to him from the doorway, filling his mind with panic. The hour would not be up for another fifteen minutes. She said Dr. Menirez wanted to speak to him. Menirez waited in the alcove outside the Intensive Care double doors, looking out the window at the glaze of heat over the Sunday city. He was too young, Wintergarten thought. Entirely too young.

"What's wrong? Is something wrong?"

"Let's sit down. I told you this morning that she's got some big problems, but I didn't know how big. We've been keeping a close watch on her, evaluating the damage. When she was brought in, Dr. Hendrin in Emergency diagnosed primary brain stem injury, and I confirmed his diagnosis. We had coma, stertorous breathing, pinpoint pupils, quadrispasticity, all of which could have come from inter cranial bleeding, but there was no raised inter cranial pressure, so no point in going in to find or stop any bleeding. Okay? Are you following me?"

"I think so."

"We know now that she suffered some thoracic damage, damage to the chest, and we've been getting edema, hypoxia, unstable circulation and a fluttery heartbeat. We took a brain wave pattern a few minutes ago. It isn't entirely flat, but it's getting there. I'm sorry, but we have a really lousy prognosis here. She was just too badly damaged. I'm really sorry. I don't think there's anything we could have done or could do to save her."

"She's dying!"

"That's right. She's going whether we keep her hooked up to the equipment or not."

"Oh Jesus. Oh God. Oh Molly honey."

He leaned over and put his forehead against the cold metal of the right-hand arm of the chair. The young doctor put his hand on his shoulder.

"You could come in and hold her hand. It won't be long."

They had drawn the curtains around the bed. Her hand was slack. Half her face was a swollen purple bruise. A tube was fastened to her throat somehow, and it pumped air into and out of her. The eye that wasn't swollen shut was half open and all he could see was the white. There was no particular moment when it happened. He suddenly realized her hand was cooling off. He called the nurse and she came and listened for a heartbeat and told him he should go. He walked out through a blear of tears and when he was halfway down the long corridor toward the elevators, he remembered to keep his head up and square his shoulders and walk briskly. And then he remembered he did not have to do that anymore.

He saw his sister come out of the elevator. He had not seen her since the wedding. It startled him to see how old she looked. He hurried to her and put his arms around her and sobbed once and said, "She's gone, Allie. She's gone."

The sister held him and patted him.

"There there," she said.

"There there. Rolf? The taxi charged me eighteen dollars to come in from the airport! Can you imagine?"

Sixteen.

Finn Efflander was mildly surprised when John Tinker Meadows delayed their usual Sunday discussion until Monday, and then suggested they meet in the old man's office on the fourth floor of the Manse. It was as if he had anticipated the bad news Efflander was bearing, and thought to armor himself with the old man's aura.

When Finn knocked and went in, John Tinker was sitting in the big black leather armchair behind the big slate-top desk, surrounded by all the talismans of the old man's past victories.

He was wearing a pale blue terry bathrobe and old sandals. It was ten in the morning. His hair was uncombed and there was a visible shadow of beard on his cheeks and jaw.

"Sit down, old friend," John Tinker said.

"I have been sitting here for four hours. Not all the time. I've roamed around, but mostly I've been sitting and thinking. Where are we going?

What have we been doing right? And wrong? Making lists, I guess."

The long view?"

"Right. Anything I should know in the routine reports?"

Finn opened his folder on the desk.

"No report from Rolf, of course, but his assistant, Jorgland, reports progress. Occupancy up, rentals up, traffic up. He says Wintergarten wants to discuss additional motel space with Harold Sherman. Ben Harvey reported on Lakemore Construction. The thirty houses in Section F of the Settlements are nearly done and all spoken for, and he has begun foundation work on G and H. Then he reports, wearing his other hat, Chairman of the Board at the bank, that the maintenance people did not keep the big pipes clear that lead through the wall around the flat roof of the bank. So they were blocked and a big tonnage of water accumulated, which broke down one corner of the roof and flooded through all the way down to ground level. He's getting the damage looked at and an estimate of what it will cost to repair structural damage. Charley is researching the insurance coverage.

"Because of our housing shortage here, I asked Walker McGaw to ease up on the radio promotion of the Settlements for a while. The radio coverage is on a twenty-four-hour basis and they have added two more languages to cassette distribution. The television transmissions are seen now in two hundred and thirty-one national markets. Spencer McKay on television production and McGaw on radio are both enthusiastic about the market survey technique Joe Deets worked out, relating specific test programs to response in selected areas. McKay calls it a wonderful device for fine-tuning the program content.

"Security had nothing to report, and neither did Maintenance and Grounds. Our University president, Dr. Hallowell, says that they have accepted a hundred and forty applications for the freshman class. It will include three Vietnamese and two blacks.