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Why had she assumed there was only one? Maybe he had let Jake see him just to give that impression. He was coming closer. This was her last chance to look behind her, so she took it. She swirled her head, her eyes searching hungrily for the shape of a man, but there was none.
    "Can I come in?" he asked quietly.
    She hesitated, slipped to the side of the door by the tilted refrigerator as quietly as she could, and turned her head to the side to let her voice come to him from the center of the room. She cocked the hammer and said, "Come in."

4
    Jake Reinert applied the paint in long, even brush-strokes. He was not the sort of man who put too much paint on a brush and hoped that would keep him from having to do a second coat. Foolproof nondrip paint was still in the realm of the perpetual-motion machine and the philosopher’s stone. In fact, paint was one of many things that had actually gotten perceptibly worse in his lifetime. They had taken the lead out so the whole country didn’t get retarded at once, but whatever they had put in there to replace it was as good as money, because it meant you had to buy paint twice as often, and sometimes it seemed as though the whole world had gotten mentally damaged anyway. The only thing to be said for painting was that it helped a man keep his mind off things that worried him and that were none of his business. If Jane Whitefield wanted to tell him something, she knew where to find him.
    Jane Whitefield had taken up a lot of watching time, because he had begun early and kept up with it. He had started worrying about her before she was born. He had felt a little trepidation about it. The old folks had been pretty reasonable about Henry Whitefield’s marrying an American woman, as near as Jake could tell. But he had seen situations before where everybody pretty much minded their own business until the babies started coming. Then there would be a lot of arguments that were deep and nasty about whether the kid was going to be Protestant or Catholic, who it looked like, who it would be named after, and all that. But with the Whitefields it hadn’t been like that. They didn’t seem to notice.
    Her hair was as black and shiny as the lapel of a tuxedo, and it hung so straight it sometimes looked as though it were made of something heavier than hair. But Jake had seen at about six months that the eyes weren’t turning brown, not even darkening a little, and he had mentioned it to Henry.
    Henry had laughed about it. He said the Seneca had captured so many white women over the years that the blue eyes might have come from him. Then he reminded Jake of something he hadn’t thought about since high school: that the last great Iroquois chiefs, Joseph Brant and Complanter, both had had white fathers. He said he had read somewhere that the more mongrelized a person was, the better the chance that he would be healthy and intelligent. Mongrels wasn’t a word Jake would have used, and it had shocked him, but he guessed Henry had a better opinion of dogs than he did.
    Henry lived long enough to see that Jane had turned out all right: nice-looking, smart in school, fine athlete. Jake’s own girls, Amanda and Mary Ellen, who were a few years older, had doted on Jane until they had gone away to college. He had assumed that these were going to be lifelong friendships, but history had fooled him and made lifelong friendships obsolete. By the time all those kids had come back from school, there wasn’t really a whole lot that the town could offer them to do for a living. His had moved on; Jane had stayed.
    There was a natural question in Jake’s mind as to how she was accomplishing that. Her mail was always full of stuff from stock brokers and banks and mutual funds, so she must have a little money from her folks. But that couldn’t be what she lived on. Henry had been shrewd, but he had never concentrated on getting rich. He had worked construction jobs for thirty years. A few years ago, when Jake