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stayed right on in the old Warden place. George sold that this year. Man named Syler bought it. He chopped it up into apartments, I hear.”
    I talked with him for another half hour, but he didn’t have very much to add. He asked me to stop around again. I liked the atmosphere of his bar, but I didn’t like him. He was a little too eager to prove he knew everything, particularly the unsavory details.
    When I got back to the garage a little after three my car was ready. I paid for the work. It ran smoothly on the way back to the motel south of town. Once I was in my room with the door shut I reviewed everything that had happened. Though I had told my lie about writing up Timmy on impulse, I couldn’t see how it could hurt anything. In fact it might make things a good deal easier. I decided that I’d better buy some kind of pocket notebook and write things down so that my story would stand up a little better.
    There was no reason why Timmy and the others like him shouldn’t be written up. I remembered that a magazine had done the same sort of thing with the progressives who refused repatriation. So why not the dead. They would be more interesting than the turncoats, who, almost without exception, fell into two groups. They were either ignorant and very nearly feeble-minded, or they were neurotic, out-of-balance, with a lifelong feeling of having been rejected. The dead were more interesting.
    My one abortive attempt to find Cindy had failed. Using the cover story of writing up Timmy, I should be able to find her. From what Timmy had said, she wasa girl who would know of a special hiding place. And the money was there.
    Unless Eloise had taken it. I was puzzled by Fitz’s insistence that she hadn’t taken it.
    When I went back into town for dinner I bought a notebook in a drugstore. At dinner I filled three pages with notes. I could have filled more. Timmy had talked a lot. There hadn’t been much else to do. I went to a movie, but I couldn’t keep my mind on it. The next person to talk to was Ruth Stamm. I could see her the next morning.
    But back in the motel room I took another look at Ruth Stamm. I took her picture out of the back of my wallet. Tomorrow, Friday, I would see her for the first time in the flesh. I had looked at this picture a thousand times. Timmy had showed it to me in camp. I remembered the day we sat with our backs against a wall in watery sunshine and he took the picture out and showed it to me.
    “That’s the one, Tal. I didn’t have sense enough to stay with her. That’s the good one, Tal. Ruthie Stamm.”
    They had taken my papers away from me, including the shots of Charlotte. I held the picture of Ruthie Stamm, turning it toward the pale sunshine. It was cracked but none of the cracks touched her face. It was in color and the colors had faded and changed. She sat on her heels and scratched the joyous belly of a blond cocker while she laughed up into the camera eye. She wore yellow shorts and a halter top, and her laughter was fresh and good and shared.
    In some crazy way it became our picture—Timmy’s and mine. I took it off his body after he died and it became mine. It represented an alien world of sanity and kindness and strength. I looked at it often.
    Now I took it out again and lay on the motel bed and looked at it in the lamplight. And felt a tingle of anticipation. For the first time I permitted myself to wonder if this pilgrimage to Hillston was in part due to the picture of a girl I had never seen. And to wonder if this picturehad something to do with the death of love for Charlotte.
    I put the picture away. It took a long time to get to sleep. But the sleep that came was deep and good.

•    THREE    •
    O n Friday morning it was not until I opened the bureau drawer to take out a clean shirt that I knew somebody had been in the room. I had stacked the clean shirts neatly in one corner of the big middle drawer. They were scattered all over the drawer as if stirred by a