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How do I get there?”
    “Go down Main Street to the bank and turn right. It’s about three or four blocks beyond the edge of town. There are a couple of cross streets, I think, and then a filling station on the left. The next block is big oak trees on both sides of the street, and only two houses. Ours is the two-storey one on the right-hand side.”
    “Check,” I said. “Which car is it?”
    “He said there was a Buick. A coupé.”
    “Yes. It’s still here. I’ll bring it out.”
    “There’s no hurry. Any time after you close up. And thanks a lot.”
    It was around six when we locked up the cars and the shack. I told Gulick where I was taking the coupé, and left my own car on the lot. The place wasn’t hard to find, after I’d threaded my way through the double-parked congestion of Saturday-afternoon Main Street. Beyond the filling station she had spoken of, the road swung a little to the right as it entered the oaks. The house itself was back in the trees and had a big lawn in front and a gravel driveway running back beside a hedge of oleanders. It was a smaller copy of the old-style southern plantation house, with a columned porch running across the front and down one side next to the drive. I stopped by the side porch and got out. It was secluded back in here, partly cut off as it was from the street, with long shadows slanting across the lawn.
    “Hello,” she said.
    I glanced around, but didn’t see her until she opened the screen door and came out on to the porch. She had on a little-girl sort of summer dress with puffed-out short sleeves tied with bows, and was rattling ice cubes in a highball glass. She was bare-legged and wearing wedgies with grass straps, and her toenails were painted a flaming red. I don’t know anything about women’s clothes, but still I was conscious that she jarred somehow. The teenage dress didn’t do anything for that over-ripe figure except to wander on to the track and get run over, and she looked like a burlesque queen in bobby socks.
    “Oh, hello,” I said. “I left the keys in it.”
    “Thanks. It was sweet of you to drive it out for me.”
    “Not at all.”
    “How about a drink before you go?”
    “Yeah. Sure.”
    I followed her inside. The venetian blinds were half closed in the living room and a big electric fan oscillated like a slowly shaking head on the mantel above the fireplace. She stopped and faced me, and again I could feel that faint strain in the air.
    “Bourbon and water?”
    “That’s fine.”
    “Push some of those magazines out of the way and sit down. I’m sorry the place’s in such a mess.” She turned to go, and then stopped and added, as if it was an afterthought, “I gave the girl the week-end off, to visit her folks.”
    She went out. It was hot in the room, even with the fan going, and I was conscious of a deep quiet, unbroken except by the whirring of the fan blades and now and then a tinkle of ice against glass out in the kitchen. I lighted a cigarette and put the match in a tray. It was heaped up and overflowing with butts smeared with lipstick. Movie and confession magazines were scattered over the sofa and lying on the floor, and I could see the rings left by highball glasses on the coffee table. Standing there looking around at the evidence of boredom was like watching a burning fuse.
    She came back in a minute with the drink, and I saw she’d refilled her own. She sat down in the big chair across from me with her legs stretched out and the toes of the wedgies touching each other, and looked at me with her chin propped on her hand.
    “Well, how are you standing the excitement?”
    I shrugged. “Maybe it picks up on Saturday night.”
    “Yes, it really does. They show two westerns at the movie instead of one.”
    “Sounds pretty rugged.”
    “Well, you can always join the Ladies’ Club and collect junk. There’s a hot pastime.”
    “I might have trouble getting past the credentials committee.”
    “I bet you