“Is it booze?” she asked, concerned. “Have you been drinking?”

“Breakfast, I think,” he said. “Listen, Amy, I—”

“At Bowie’s?”

“Yes,” he said, trying to sound strangled with pain and effort. The truth was, he felt strangled. It was all quite a comedy, when you really considered it. “Amy, really, I—”

“God, Mort, she keeps the dirtiest grill in town,” Amy said. “Go. I’ll call back later.” The phone went dead in his ear. He put the receiver into its cradle, stood there a moment, and was amazed and dismayed to discover his fictional complaint was suddenly real: his bowels had drawn themselves into an aching, throbbing knot.

He ran for the bathroom, unclasping his belt as he went.

It was a near thing, but he made it. He sat on the ring in the rich odor of his own wastes, his pants around his ankles, catching his breath ... and the phone began to ring again.

He sprang up like a jack released from its box, cracking one knee smartly on the side of the washstand, and ran for it, holding his pants up with one hand and mincing along like a girl in a tight skirt. He had that miserable, embarrassing I-didn’ t-have-time-to-wipe feeling, and he guessed it happened to everyone, but it suddenly occurred to him he had never read about it in a book—not one single book, ever.

Oh, life was such a comedy.

This time it was Shooter.

“I saw you down there,” Shooter said. His voice was as calm and serene as ever. “Down where I left them, I mean. Looked like you had you a heat-stroke, only it isn’t summer.”

“What do you want?” Mort switched the telephone to his other ear. His pants slid down to his ankles again. He let them go and stood there with the waistband of his Jockey shorts suspended halfway between his knees and his hips. What an author photograph this would make, he thought.

“I almost pinned a note on you,” Shooter said. “I decided not to.” He paused, then added with a kind of absent contempt : “You scare too easy.”

“What do you want?”

“Why, I told you that already, Mr. Rainey. I want a story to make up for the one you stole. Ain’t you ready to admit it yet?”

But he wouldn’t.

All the fury and frustration and horror and confusion suddenly burst out of his mouth in a howl.

“I DIDN’T.! I DIDN‘T! YOU’RE CRAZY, AND I CAN PROVE IT! I HAVE THE MAGAZINE, YOU LOONY! DO YOU HEAR ME? I HAVE THE GODDAM MAGAZINE!”

The response to this was no response. The line was silent and dead, without even the faraway gabble of a phantom voice to break that smooth darkness, like that which crept up to the window-wall each night he had spent here alone.

“Shooter?”

Silence.

“Shooter, are you still there?”

More silence. He was gone.

Mort let the telephone sag away from his ear. He was returning it to the cradle when Shooter’s voice, tinny and distant and almost lost, said: “... now?”

Mort put the phone back to his ear. It seemed to weigh eight hundred pounds. “What?” he asked. “I thought you were gone.”

“You have it? You have this so-called magazine? Now?” He thought Shooter sounded upset for the first time. Upset and unsure.

“No,” Mort said.

“Well, there!” Shooter said, sounding relieved. “I think you might finally be ready to talk turk—”

“It’s coming Federal Express,” Mort interrupted. “It will be at the post office by ten tomorrow.”

“What will be?” Shooter asked. “Some fuzzy old thing that’s supposed to be a copy?”

“No,” Mort said. The feeling that he had rocked the man, that he had actually gotten past his defenses and hit him hard enough to make it hurt, was strong and undeniable. For a moment or two Shooter had sounded almost afraid, and Mort was angrily glad. “The magazine. The actual magazine.”

There was another long pause, but this time Mort kept the telephone screwed tightly against his ear. Shooter was there. And suddenly the story was the central issue again, the story and the accusation of plagiarism; Shooter treating him like he was a goddam college kid was the issue, and maybe the man was on the run at last.

Once, in the same parochial school where Mort had learned the trick of swallowing crooked, he had seen a boy stick a pin in a beetle which had been trundling across his desk. The beetle had been caught—pinned, wriggling, and dying. At the time, Mort had been sad and horrified. Now he understood. Now he only wanted to do the same thing to this man. This crazy man.

“There can’t be any magazine,” Shooter said finally. “Not with that story in it. That story is mine!”

Mort could hear anguish in the man’s voice. Real anguish. It made him glad. The pin was in Shooter. He was wriggling around on it.

“It’ll be here at ten tomorrow,” Mort said, “or as soon after as FedEx drops the Tashmore stuff. I’ll be happy to meet you there. You can take a look. As long a look as you want, you goddamned maniac.”

“Not there,” Shooter said after another pause. “At your house.”

“Forget it. When I show you that issue of Ellery Queen, I want to be someplace where I can yell for help if you go apeshit.”

“You’ll do it my way,” Shooter said. He sounded a little more in control ... but Mort did not believe Shooter had even half the control he’d had previously. “If you don’t, I’ll see you in the Maine State Prison for murder.”

“Don’t make me laugh.” But Mort felt his bowels begin to knot up again.

“I hooked you to those two men in more ways than you know,” Shooter said, “and you have told a right smart of lies. If I just disappear, Mr. Rainey, you are going to find yourself standing with your head in a noose and your feet in Crisco.”

“You don’t scare me.”

“Yeah, I do,” Shooter said. He spoke almost gently. “The only thing is, you’re startin to scare me a little, too. I can’t quite figure you out.”

Mort was silent.

“It’d be funny,” Shooter said in a strange, ruminating tone, “if we had come by the same story in two different places, at two different times.”

“The thought had occurred to me.”

“Did it?”

“I dismissed it,” Mort said. “Too much of a coincidence. If it was just the same plot, that would be one thing. But the same language? The same goddam diction?”

“Uh-huh,” Shooter said. “I thought the same thing, pilgrim. It’s just too much. Coincidence is out. You stole it from me, all right, but I’m goddamned if I can figure out how or when.”

“Oh, quit it!” Mort burst out. “I have the magazine! I have proof! Don’t you understand that? It’s over! Whether it was some nutty game on your part or just a delusion, it is over! I have the magazine!”

After a long silence, Shooter said: “Not yet, you don’t.”

“How true,” Mort said. He felt a sudden and totally unwanted sense of kinship with the man. “So what do we do tonight?”

“Why, nothing,” Shooter said. “Those men will keep. One has a wife and kids visiting family. The other lives alone. You go and get your magazine tomorrow morning. I will come to your place around noon.”

“You’ll kill me,” Mort said. He found that the idea didn’t carry much terror with it—not tonight, anyway. “If I show you the magazine, your delusion will break down and you’ll kill me.”

“No!” Shooter replied, and this time he seemed clearly surprised. “You? No, sir! But those others were going to get in the way of our business. I couldn’t have that... and I saw that I could use them to make you deal with me. To face up to your responsibility.”

“You’re crafty,” Mort said. “I’ll give you that. I believe you’re nuts, but I also believe you’re just about the craftiest son of a bitch I ever ran across in my life.”

“Well, you can believe this,” Shooter said. “If I come tomorrow and find you gone, Mr. Rainey, I will make it my business to destroy every person in the world that you love and care for. I will burn your life like a canefield in a high wind. You will go to jail for killing those two men, but going to jail will be the least of your sorrows. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Mort said. “I understand. Pilgrim.”

“Then you be there.”

“And suppose—just suppose—I show you the magazine, and it has my name on the contents page and my story inside. What then?”

There was a short pause. Then Shooter said, “I go to the authorities and confess to the whole shooting match. But I’d take care of myself long before the trial, Mr. Rainey. Because if things turn out that way, then I suppose I am crazy. And that kind of a crazy man...” There was a sigh. “That kind of crazy man has no excuse or reason to live.”

The words struck Mort with queer force. He’s unsure, .he thought. For the first time, he’s really unsure ... which is more than I’ve ever been.

But he cut that off, and hard. He had never had a reason to be unsure. This was Shooter’s fault. Every bit of it was Shooter’s fault.

He said: “How do I know you won’t claim the magazine is a fake?”

He expected no response to this, except maybe something about how Mort would have to take his word, but Shooter surprised him.

“If it’s real, I’ll know,” he said, “and if it’s fake, we’ll both know. I don’t reckon you could have rigged a whole fake magazine in three days, no matter how many people you have got working for you in New York.”

It was Mort’s turn to think, and he thought for a long, long time. Shooter waited for him.

“I’m going to trust you,” Mort said at last. “I don’t know why, for sure. Maybe because I don’t have a lot to live for myself these days. But I’m not going to trust you whole hog. You come down here. Stand in the driveway where I can see you, and see that you’re unarmed. I’ll come out. Is that satisfactory ?”

“That’ll do her.”

“God help us both.”

“Yessir. I’ll be damned if I’m sure what I’m into anymore ... and that is not a comfortable feeling.”

“Shooter?”

“Right here.”

“I want you to answer one question.”

Silence ... but an inviting silence, Mort thought.

“Did you burn down my house in Derry?”

“No,” Shooter said at once. “I was keeping an eye on you.”

“And Bump,” Mort said bitterly.

“Listen,” Shooter said. “You got my hat?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll want it,” Shooter said, “one way or the other.”

And the line went dead.

Just like that.

Mort put the phone down slowly and carefully and walked back to the bathroom—once again holding his pants up as he went—to finish his business.

She had spoken with Fred Evans herself since her last call, she said, and she was convinced he either knew something or suspected something about the fire he didn’t want to tell them. Mort tried to soothe her, and thought he succeeded to some degree, but he was worried himself. If Shooter hadn’t started the fire—and Mort felt inclined to believe the man had been telling the truth about that—then it must have been raw coincidence ... right?

He didn’t know if it was right or not.

“Mort, I’ve been so worried about you,” she said suddenly.

That snapped him back from his thoughts. “Me? I’m okay.”

“Are you sure? When I saw you yesterday, I thought you looked ... strained.” She paused. “In fact, I thought you looked like you did before you had the ... you know.”

“Amy, I did not have a nervous breakdown.”

“Well, no,” she said quickly. “But you know what I mean. When the movie people were being so awful about The Delacourt Family.”

That had been one of the bitterest experiences of Mort’s life. Paramount had optioned the book for $75,000 on a pick-up price of $750,000-damned big money. And they had been on the verge of exercising their option when someone had turned up an old script in the files, something called The Home Team, which was enough like The Delacourt Family to open up potential legal problems. It was the only time in his career-before this nightmare, anyway—when he had been exposed to the possibility of a plagiarism charge. The execs had ended up letting the option lapse at the eleventh hour. Mort still did not know if they had been really worried about plagiarism or had simply had second thoughts about his novel’s film potential. If they really had been worried, he didn’t know how such a bunch of pansies could make any movies. Herb Creekmore had obtained a copy of the Home Team screenplay, and Mort had seen only the most casual similarity. Amy agreed.

The fuss happened just as he was reaching a dead end on a novel he had wanted desperately to write. There had been a short PR tour for the paperback version of The Delacourt Family at the same time. All of that at once had put him under a great deal of strain.

But he had not had a nervous breakdown.

“I’m okay,” he insisted again, speaking gently. He had discovered an amazing and rather touching thing about Amy some years before: if you spoke to her gently enough, she was apt to believe you about almost anything. He had often thought that, if it had been a species-wide trait, like showing your teeth to indicate rage or amusement, wars would have ceased millennia ago.

“Are you sure, Mort?”

“Yes. Call me if you hear any more from our insurance friend.”

“I will.”

He paused. “Are you at Ted’s?”

“Yes.”

“How do you feel about him, these days?”

She hesitated, then said simply: “I love him.”

“Oh.”

“I didn’t go with other men,” she said suddenly. “I’ve always wanted to tell you that. I didn’t go with other men. But Ted ... he looked past your name and saw me, Mort. He saw me.”

“You mean I didn’t.”

“You did when you were here,” she said. Her voice sounded small and forlorn. “But you were gone so much.”

His eyes widened and he was instantly ready to do battle. Righteous battle. “What? I haven’t been on tour since The Delacourt Family! And that was a short one!”

“I don’t want to argue with you, Mort,” she said softly. “That part should be over. All I’m trying to say is that, even when you were here, you were gone a lot. You had your own lover, you know. Your work was your lover.” Her voice was steady, but he sensed tears buried deep inside it. “How I hated that bitch, Mort. She was prettier than me, smarter than me, more fun than me. How could I compete?”

“Blame it all on me, why not?” he asked her, dismayed to find himself on the edge of tears. “What did you want me to do? Become a goddam plumber? We would have been poor and I would have been unemployed. There was nothing else I could fucking do, don’t you understand that? There was nothing else I could do!” He had hoped the tears were over, at least for awhile, but here they were. Who had rubbed this horrible magic lamp again? Had it been him or her this time?

“I’m not blaming you. There’s blame for me, too. You never would have found us ... the way you did ... if I hadn’t been weak and cowardly. It wasn’t Ted; Ted wanted us to go to you and tell you together. He kept asking. And I kept putting him off. I told him I wasn’t sure. I told myself I still loved you, that things could go back to the way they were ... but things never do, I guess. I’ll-” She caught her breath, and Mort realized she was crying, too. “I’ll never forget the look on your face when you opened the door of that motel room. I’ll carry that to my grave.”

“You knew my love,” he said unsteadily. “I never hid her from you. You knew from the start.”

“But I never knew,” she said, “how deep her embrace could be.”

“Well, cheer up,” Mort said. “She seems to have left me now.”

Amy was weeping. “Mort, Mort—I only want you to live and be happy. Can’t you see that? Can’t you do that?”

What he had seen was one of her bare shoulders touching one of Ted Milner’s bare shoulders. He had seen their eyes, wide and frightened, and Ted’s hair stuck up in an Alfalfa corkscrew. He thought of telling her this—of trying, anyway—and let it go. It was enough. They had hurt each other enough. Another time, perhaps, they could go at it again. He wished she hadn’t said that thing about the nervous breakdown, though. He had not had a nervous breakdown.

“Amy, I think I ought to go.”

“Yes—both of us. Ted’s out showing a house, but he’ll be back soon. I have to put some dinner together.”

“I’m sorry about the argument.”

“Will you call if you need me? I’m still worried.”

“Yes,” he said, and said goodbye, and hung up. He stood there by the telephone for a moment, thinking he would surely burst into tears. But it passed. That was perhaps the real horror.

It passed.

At last he walked over to the couch, adjusted the pillows, and lay back. Next to his cheek, cold rain spickle-spackled against the dark glass.

Only once, he thought. I only did it once. And then he fell deeply asleep.

The walls stretched up for miles. Each desk was a mesa, the gray tiles the endless plain which swept among them. The clock on the wall was a huge cold sun. The door to the hallway was shut, but Morton Rainey could read the words on the pebbled glass:

They spelled it wrong, Mort thought, too many L’s.

But another voice told him this was not so.

Mort was standing on the giant blackboard’s wide chalk gutter, stretching up. He had a piece of chalk the size of a baseball bat in his hand. He wanted to drop his arm, which ached ferociously, but he could not. Not until he had written the same sentence on the blackboard five hundred times: I will not copy from John Kintner. He must have written it four hundred times already, he thought, but four hundred wasn’t enough. Stealing a man’s work when a man’s work was really all he had was unforgivable. So he would have to write and write and write, and never mind the voice in his mind trying to tell him that this was a dream, that his right arm ached for other reasons.

The chalk squeaked monstrously. The dust, acrid and somehow familiar—so familiar—sifted down into his face. At last he could go on no longer. His arm dropped to his side like a bag filled with lead shot. He turned on the chalk gutter, and saw that only one of the desks in the huge classroom was occupied. The occupant was a young man with a country kind of face; a face you expected to see in the north forty behind the ass end of a mule. His pale-brown hair stuck up in spikes from his head. His country-cousin hands, seemingly all knuckles, were folded on the desk before him. He was looking at Mort with pale, absorbed eyes.

I know you, Mort said in the dream.

That’s right, pilgrim, John Kintner said in his bald, drawling Southern accent. You just put me together wrong. Now keep on writing. It’s not five hundred. It’s five thousand.

Mort started to turn, but his foot slipped on the edge of the gutter, and suddenly he was spilling outward, screaming into the dry, chalky air, and John Kintner was laughing, and he—

He was at Tashmore Lake. Not in some weird, cyclopean classroom but at the lake ... and dawn was coming up misty in the east.

But he wasn’t. Because it hadn’t just been a dream. John Kintner had been real. How in God’s name could he have forgotten John Kintner?

Mort had gone to college at Bates, and had majored in creative writing. Later, when he spoke to classes of aspiring writers (a chore he ducked whenever possible), he told them that such a major was probably the worst mistake a man or woman could make, if he or she wanted to write fiction for a living.

“Get a job with the post office,” he’d say. “It worked for Faulkner.” And they would laugh. They liked to listen to him, and he supposed he was fairly good at keeping them entertained. That seemed very important, since he doubted that he or anyone else could teach them how to write creatively. Still, he was always glad to get out at the end of the class or seminar or workshop. The kids made him nervous. He supposed John Kintner was the reason why.

Had Kintner been from Mississippi? Mort couldn’t remember, but he didn’t think so. But he had been from some enclave of the Deep South all the same—Alabama, Louisiana, maybe the toolies of north Florida. He didn’t know for sure. Bates College had been a long time ago, and he hadn’t thought of John Kintner, who had suddenly dropped out one day for reasons known only to himself, in years.

Dreamed about him, you mean, Mort corrected himself quickly, but that hellish little voice inside would not let it go.

He didn’t want to think about this. He wouldn’t think about this. John Kintner was in the past; John Kintner had nothing to do with what was happening now. He got up and walked unsteadily toward the kitchen in the milky, early light to make strong coffee. Lots and lots of strong coffee. Except the hellish little voice wouldn’t let him be. Mort looked at Amy’s set of kitchen knives hanging from their magnetized steel runners and thought that if he could cut that little voice out, he would try the operation immediately.

You were thinking that you rocked the man—that you finally rocked him. You were thinking that the story had become the central issue again, the story and the accusation of plagiarism. Shooter treating you like a goddam college kid was the issue. Like a goddam college kid. Like a—

“Shut up,” Mort said hoarsely. “Just shut the fuck up.”

The voice did, but he found himself unable to stop thinking about John Kintner anyway.

As he measured coffee with a shaking hand, he thought of his constant, strident protestations that he hadn’t plagiarized Shooter’s story, that he had never plagiarized anything.

But he had, of course.

Once.

Just once.

“But that was so long ago,” he whispered. “And it doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

It might be true, but that did not stop his thoughts.

There had been about a dozen students in the class. One of them was John Kintner. Kintner was only a freshman, but he had gotten special permission to take the class. And had deserved it, Mort supposed. Southern-fried cracker or not, that sucker had been good.

The course required each of them to write either six short stories or three longer ones. Each week, Perkins dittoed off the ones he thought would make for the liveliest discussion and handed them out at the end of the class. The students were supposed to come the following week prepared to discuss and criticize. It was the usual way to run such a class. And one week Perkins had given them a story by John Kintner. It had been called ... What had it been called?

Mort had turned on the water to fill the coffeemaker, but now he only stood, looking absently out at the fog beyond the window-wall and listening to the running water.

“But it wasn’t!” he yelled petulantly to the empty house. He thought furiously, determined to shut the hellish little voice up once and for all ... and suddenly it came to him.

“ ‘Crowfoot Mile’!” he shrieked. “The name of the story was ‘Crowfoot Mile,’ and it doesn’t have anything to do with anything!”

Except that was not quite true, either, and he didn’t really need the little voice hunkered down someplace in the middle of his aching head to point out the fact.

Kintner had turned in three or maybe four stories before disappearing to wherever he had disappeared to (if asked to guess, Mort would have guessed Vietnam—it was where most of them had disappeared to at the end of the sixties—the young men, anyhow). “Crowfoot Mile” hadn’t been the best of Kintner’s stories ... but it had been good. Kintner was clearly the best writer in Richard Perkins, Jr.’s class. Perkins treated the boy almost as an equal, and in Mort Rainey’s not-so-humble estimation, Perkins had been right to do so, because he thought Kintner had been quite a bit better than Richard Perkins, Jr. As far as that went, Mort believed he had been better.

But had he been better than Kintner?

“Huh-uh,” he said under his breath as he turned on the coffeemaker. “I was second.”

Yes. He had been second, and he had hated that. He knew that most students taking writing courses were just marking time, pursuing a whim before giving up childish things and settling into a study of whatever it was that would be their real life’s work. The creative writing most of them would do in later life would consist of contributing items to the Community Calendar pages of their local newspapers or writing advertising copy for Bright Blue Breeze dish detergent. Mort had come into Perkins’s class confidently expecting to be the best, because it had never been any other way with him. For that reason, John Kintner had come as an unpleasant shock.

He remembered trying to talk to the boy once ... but Kintner, who contributed in class only when asked, had proved to be almost inarticulate. When he spoke out loud, he mumbled and stumbled like a poor-white sharecropper’s boy whose education had stopped at the fourth-grade level. His writing was the only voice he had, apparently.

“Shut up,” he muttered. “Just shut up.”

Yes. True. And a year later, when he was preparing to graduate, he had been cleaning out the back closet of the sleazy Lewiston apartment he had shared with two other students, and had come upon a pile of offprints from Perkins’s writing course. Only one of Kintner’s stories had been in the stack. It happened to be “Crowfoot Mile.”

He remembered sitting on the seedy, beer-smelling rug of his bedroom, reading the story, and the old jealousy had come over him again.

He threw the other offprints away, but he had taken that one with him ... for reasons he wasn’t sure he wanted to examine closely.

As a sophomore, Mort had submitted a story to a literary magazine called Aspen Quarterly. It came back with a note which said the readers had found it quite good “although the ending seemed rather jejune.” The note, which Mort found both patronizing and tremendously exciting, invited him to submit other material.

Over the next two years, he had submitted four more stories. None were accepted, but a personal note accompanied each of the rejection slips. Mort went through an unpublished writer’s agony of optimism alternating with deep pessimism. He had days when he was sure it was only a matter of time before he cracked Aspen Quarterly. And he had days when he was positive that the entire editorial staff-pencil-necked geeks to a man—was only playing with him, teasing him the way a man might tease a hungry dog by holding a piece of meat up over its head and then jerking the scrap out of reach when it leaps. He sometimes imagined one of them holding up one of his manuscripts, fresh out of its manila envelope, and shouting: “Here’s another one from that putz in Maine! Who wants to write the letter this time?” And all of them cracking up, perhaps even rolling around on the floor under their posters of Joan Baez and Moby Grape at the Fillmore.

Most days, Mort had not indulged in this sort of sad paranoia. He understood that he was good, and that it was only a matter of time. And that summer, working as a waiter in a Rockland restaurant, he thought of the story by John Kintner. He thought it was probably still in his trunk, kicking around at the bottom. He had a sudden idea. He would change the title and submit “Crowfoot Mile” to Aspen Quarterly under his own name! He remembered thinking it would be a fine joke on them, although, looking back now, he could not imagine what the joke would have been.

He did remember that he’d had no intention of publishing the story under his own name... or, if he had had such an intention on some deeper level, he hadn’t been aware of it. In the unlikely event of an acceptance, he would withdraw ithe story, saying he wanted to work on it some more. And if they rejected it, he could at least take some cheer in the thought that John Kintner wasn’t good enough for Aspen Quarterly, either.

So he had sent the story.

And they had accepted it.

And he had let them accept it.

And they sent him a check for twenty-five dollars. “An honorarium,” the accompanying letter had called it.

And then they had published it.

And Morton Rainey, overcome by belated guilt at what he had done, had cashed the check and had stuffed the bills into the poor box of St. Catherine’s in Augusta one day.

But guilt hadn’t been all he’d felt. Oh no.

Mort sat at the kitchen table with his head propped in one hand, waiting for the coffee to perk. His head ached. He didn’t want to be thinking about John Kintner and John Kintner’s story. What he had done with “Crowfoot Mile” had been one of the most shameful events of his life; was it really surprising that he had buried it for so many years? He wished he could bury it again now. This, after all, was going to be a big day—maybe the biggest of his life. Maybe even the last of his life. He should be thinking about going to the post office. He should be thinking about his confrontation with Shooter, but his mind would not let that sad old time alone.

When he’d seen the magazine, the actual magazine with his name in it above John Kintner’s story, he felt like a man waking from a horrible episode of sleepwalking, an unconscious outing in which he has done some irrevocable thing. How had he let it go so far? It was supposed to have been a joke, for Christ’s sake, just a little giggle—

But he had let it go so far. The story had been published, and there were at least a dozen other people in the world who knew it wasn’t his—including Kintner himself. And if one of them happened to pick up Aspen Quarterly—

He himself told no one—of course. He simply waited, sick with terror. He slept and ate very little that late summer and early fall; he lost weight and dark shadows brushed themselves under his eyes. His heart began to triphammer every time the telephone rang. If the call was for him, he would approach the instrument with dragging feet and cold sweat on his brow, sure it would be Kintner, and the first words out of Kintner’s mouth would be, You stole my story, and something has got to be done about it. I think I’ll start by telling everybody what kind of thief you are.

The most incredible thing was this: he had known better. He had known the possible consequences of such an act for a young man who hoped to make a career of writing. It was like playing Russian roulette with a bazooka. Yet still ... still ...

But as that fall slipped uneventfully past, he began to relax a little. The issue of Aspen Quarterly had been replaced by a new issue. The issue was no longer lying out on tables in library periodical rooms all across the country; it had been tucked away into the stacks or transferred to microfiche. It might still cause trouble—he bleakly supposed he would have to live with that possibility for the rest of his life—but in most cases, out of sight meant out of mind.

Then, in November of that year, a letter from Aspen Quarterly came.

Mort held it in his hands, looking at his name on the envelope, and began to shake all over. His eyes filled with some liquid that felt too hot and corrosive to be tears, and the envelope first doubled and then trebled.

He had thought of suicide then—quite calmly and quite rationally. His mother had sleeping pills. He would use those. Somewhat eased by this prospect, he tore the envelope open and pulled out a single sheet of stationery. He held it folded in one hand for a long moment and considered burning it without even looking at it. He wasn’t sure he could stand to see the accusation held baldly up in front of him. He thought it might drive him mad.

He unfolded the letter.

Mort had read this letter twice, and then began to peal hoarse bursts of laughter at the house, which was luckily empty. He had heard of side-splitting laughter, and this was surely it—he felt that if he didn’t stop soon, his sides really would split, and send his guts spewing out all over the floor. He had been ready to kill himself with his mother’s sleeping pills, and they wanted to know if he was upset with the way the story had been typeset! He had expected to find that his career was ruined even before it was fairly begun, and they wanted more! More!

He laughed—howled, actually—until his side-splitting laughter turned to hysterical tears. Then he sat on the sofa, reread Charles Palmer’s letter, and cried until he laughed again. At last he had gone into his room and lain down with the pillows arranged behind him just the way he liked, and then he had fallen asleep.

He had gotten away with it. That was the upshot. He had gotten away with it, and he had never done anything even remotely like it again, and it had all happened about a thousand years ago, and so why had it come back to haunt him now?

He didn’t know, but he intended to stop thinking about it.

“And right now, too,” he told the empty room, and walked briskly over to the coffeemaker, trying to ignore his aching head.

“Shut up.” He spoke in a conversational tone which was rather cheery ... but his hands were shaking as he picked up the Silex.

“Shut up, I’m warning you,” he said in his cheery conversational voice.

You might be very ill. In fact, you might be having a nervous br—

“Shut up!” he cried, and threw the Silex as hard as he could. It sailed over the counter, flew across the room, turning over and over as it went, crunched into the window-wall, shattered, and fell dead on the floor. He looked at the window-wall and saw a long, silvery crack zig-zagging up to the top. It started at the place where the Silex had impacted. He felt very much like a man who might have a similar crack running right through the middle of his brain.

But the voice had shut up.

He walked stolidly into the bedroom, got the alarm clock, and walked back into the living room. He set the alarm for ten-thirty as he walked. At ten-thirty he was going to go to the post office, pick up his Federal Express package, and go stolidly about the task of putting this nightmare behind him.

In the meantime, though, he would sleep.

He would sleep on the couch, where he had always slept best.

“I am not having a nervous breakdown,” he whispered to the little voice, but the little voice was having none of the argument. Mort thought that he might have frightened the little voice. He hoped so, because the little voice had certainly frightened him.

His eyes found the silvery crack in the window-wall and traced it dully. He thought of using the chambermaid’s key. How the room had been dim, and it had taken his eyes a moment to adjust. Their naked shoulders. Their frightened eyes. He had been shouting, he couldn’t remember what—and had never dared to ask Amy—but it must have been some scary shit, judging from the look in their eyes.

IfI I was ever going to have a nervous breakdown, he thought, looking at the lightning-bolt senselessness of the crack, it would have been then. Hell, that letter from Aspen Quarterly was nothing compared to opening a motel-room door and seeing your wife with another man, a slick real-estate agent from some shitsplat little town in Tennessee—

Mort closed his eyes, and when he opened them again it was because another voice was clamoring. This one belonged to the alarm clock. The fog had cleared, the sun had come out, and it was time to go to the post office.

He had to force himself out of the car, and the walk from the door of the post office to the window where Juliet Stoker stood sorting mail seemed at least a thousand miles long.

When he got there, he tried to speak and no words came out. His lips moved, but his throat was too dry to make the sounds. Juliet looked up at him, then took a step back. She looked alarmed. Not, however, as alarmed as Amy and Ted had looked when he opened the motel-room door and pointed the gun at them.

“Mr. Rainey? Are you all right?”

He cleared his throat. “Sorry, Juliet. My throat kind of double-clutched on me for a second.”

“You’re very pale,” she said, and he could hear in her voice that tone so many of the Tashmore residents used when they spoke to him—it was a sort of pride, but it held an undertaste of irritation and condescension, as though he was a child prodigy who needed special care and feeding.

“Something I ate last night, I guess,” he said. “Did Federal Express leave anything for me?”

“No, not a thing.”

He gripped the underside of the counter desperately, and for a moment thought he would faint, although he had understood almost immediately that that was not what she had said.

“Pardon me?”

She had already turned away; her sturdy country bum was presented to him as she shuffled through some packages on the floor.

“Just the one thing, I said,” she replied, and then turned around and slid the package across the counter to him. He saw the return address was EQMM in Pennsylvania, and felt relief course through him. It felt like cool water pouring down a dry throat.

“Thank you.”

“Welcome. You know, the post office would have a cow if they knew we handle that Federal Express man’s mail.”

“Well, I certainly appreciate it,” Mort said. Now that he had the magazine, he felt a need to get away, to get back to the house. This need was so strong it was almost elemental. He didn’t know why—it was an hour and a quarter until noon—but it was there. In his distress and confusion, he actually thought of giving Juliet a tip to shut her up ... and that would have caused her soul, Yankee to its roots, to rise up in a clamor.

“You won’t tell them, will you?” she asked archly.

“No way,” he said, managing a grin.

“Good,” Juliet Stoker said, and smiled. “Because I saw what you did.”

He stopped by the door. “Pardon me?”

“I said they’d shoot me if you did,” she said, and looked closely at his face. “You ought to go home and lie down, Mr. Rainey. You really don’t look well at all.”

“Well,” he said, “maybe that’s not such a bad idea. I still feel weak.”

“There’s a virus going around. You probably caught it.”

Then the two women from Camp Wigmore—the ones everybody in town suspected of being lesbians, albeit discreet ones—came in, and Mort made good his escape. He sat in the Buick with the blue package on his lap, not liking the way everybody kept saying he looked sick, liking the way his mind had been working even less.

He started to pull the envelope open, and then the ladies from Camp Wigmore came back out and looked at him. They put their heads together. One of them smiled. The other laughed out loud. And Mort suddenly decided he would wait until he got back home.

No—he was just under strain, he decided.

He heard something—or thought he did—and looked around quickly. Nothing there. Get hold of your nerves, he told himself shakily. That’s really all you have to do—just get hold of your motherfucking nerves.

And then he thought: I did have a gun. That day. But it was unloaded. I told them that, later. Amy believed me. I don’t know about Milner, but Amy did, and—

He thought of the crack in the window—wall again, senseless silver lightning-bolt zig-zagging right up through the middle of things. That’s how it happens, he thought. That’s how it happens in a person’s life.

Then he looked down at the Federal Express package again. This was what he should be thinking about, not Amy and Mr. Ted Kiss-My-Ass from Shooter’s Knob, Tennessee, but this.

The flap was already half open—everyone was careless these days. He pulled it up and shook the magazine out into his lap. Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, the logo said in bright red letters. Beneath that, in much smaller type, June, 1980. And below that, the names of some of the writers featured in the issue. Edward D. Hoch. Ruth Rendell. Ed McBain. Patricia Highsmith. Lawrence Block.

His name wasn’t on the cover.

Well, of course not. He was scarcely known as a writer at all then, and certainly not as a writer of mystery stories; “Sowing Season” had been a oner. His name would have meant nothing to regular readers of the magazine, so the editors would not have put it on. He turned the cover back.

There was no contents page beneath.

The contents page had been cut out.

He thumbed frantically through the magazine, dropping it once and then picking it up with a little cry. He didn’t find the excision the first time, but on the second pass, he realized that pages 83 to 97 were gone.

“You cut it out!” he screamed. He screamed so loudly that his eyeballs bulged from their sockets. He began to bring his fists down on the steering wheel of the Buick, again and again and again. The horn burped and blared. “You cut it out, you son of a bitch! How did you do that? You cut it out! You cut it out! You cut it out!”

He stopped.

Good, Juliet had said. Good, because I saw what you did.

That was it; that explained it. Juliet was in on it. Except—

Except Juliet had been in Tashmore since forever.

Except that hadn’t been what she said. That had only been his mind. A little paranoid flatulence.

“He’s doing it, though,” Mort said. He went into the house and once he was inside the door, he threw the magazine as hard as he could. It flew like a startled bird, pages riffling, and landed on the floor with a slap. “Oh yeah, you bet, you bet your fucking ass, he’s doing it. But I don’t have to wait around for him. I—”

He saw Shooter’s hat. Shooter’s hat was lying on the floor in front of the door to his study.

Mort stood where he was for a moment, heart thundering in his ears, and then walked over to the stove in great cartoon tippy-toe steps. He pulled the poker from the little clutch of tools, wincing when the poker’s tip clanged softly against the ash-shovel. He took the poker and walked carefully back to the closed door again, holding the poker as he had held it before crashing into the bathroom. He had to skirt the magazine he’d thrown on the way.

He reached the door and stood in front of it.

“Shooter?”

There was no answer.

“Shooter, you better come out under your own power! If I have to come in and get you, you’ll never walk out of anyplace under your own power again!”

There was still no answer.

He stood a moment longer, nerving himself (but not really sure he had the nerve), and then twisted the knob. He hit the door with his shoulder and barrelled in, screaming, waving the poker—

And the room was empty.

But Shooter had been here, all right. Yes. The VDT unit of Mort’s word cruncher lay on the floor, its screen a shattered staring eye. Shooter had killed it. On the desk where the VDT had stood was an old Royal typewriter. The steel surfaces of this dinosaur were dull and dusty. Propped on the keyboard was a manuscript. Shooter’s manuscript, the one he had left under a rock on the porch a million years ago.

It was “Secret Window, Secret Garden.”

Mort dropped the poker on the floor. He walked toward the typewriter as if mesmerized and picked up the manuscript. He shuffled slowly through its pages, and came to understand why Mrs. Gavin had been so sure it was his ... sure enough to rescue it from the trash. Maybe she hadn’t known consciously, but her eye had recognized the irregular typeface. And why not? She had seen manuscripts which looked like “Secret Window, Secret Garden” for years. The Wang word processor and the System Five laser printer were relative new-comers. For most of his writing career he had used this old Royal. The years had almost worn it out, and it was a sad case now—when you typed on it, it produced letters as crooked as an old man’s teeth.

But it had been here all the time, of course—tucked away at the back of the study closet behind piles of old galleys and manuscripts ... what editors called “foul matter.” Shooter must have stolen it, typed his manuscript on it, and then sneaked it back when Mort was out at the post office. Sure. That made sense, didn’t it?

Mort dropped the pages with a great wild cry and they seesawed lazily down around him as all of the truth rushed in on him at once like a jagged bolt of silver lightning.

There never had been.

“No,” Mort said. He was striding back and forth through the big living room again. His headache came and went in waves of pain. “No, I do not accept that. I do not accept that at all. ”

But his acceptance or rejection didn’t make much difference. All the pieces of the puzzle were there, and when he saw the old Royal typewriter, they began to fly together. Now, fifteen minutes later, they were still flying together, and he seemed to have no power to will them apart.

The picture which kept coming back to him was of the gas jockey in Mechanic Falls, using a squeegee to wash his windshield. A sight he had never expected to witness again in his lifetime. Later, he had assumed that the kid had given him a little extra service because he had recognized Mort and liked Mort’s books. Maybe that was so, but the windshield had needed washing. Summer was gone, but plenty of stuff still splatted on your windshield if you drove far enough and fast enough on the back roads. And he must have used the back roads. He must have sped up to Derry and back again in record time, only stopping long enough to burn down his house. He hadn’t even stopped long enough to get gas on the way back. After all, he’d had places to go and cats to kill, hadn’t he? Busy, busy, busy.

He stopped in the middle of the floor and whirled to stare at the window-wall. “If I did all that, why can’t I remember?” he asked the silvery crack in the glass. “Why can’t I remember even now?”

He didn’t know ... but he did know where the name had come from, didn’t he? One half from the Southern man whose story he had stolen in college; one half from the man who had stolen his wife. It was like some bizarre literary in-joke.

“Fuck that. A man who sleeps with another man’s wife is a thief. And the woman is his accomplice.”

He looked defiantly at the crack.

The crack said nothing.

Three years ago, Mort had published a novel called The Delacourt Family. The return address on Shooter’s story had been Dellacourt, Mississippi. It—

He suddenly ran for the encyclopedias in the study, slipping and almost falling in the mess of pages strewn on the floor in his hurry. He pulled out the M volume and at last found the entry for Mississippi. He ran a trembling finger down the list of towns—it took up one entire page—hoping against hope.

It was no good.

There was no Dellacourt or Delacourt, Mississippi.

He thought of looking for Perkinsburg, the town where Shooter had told him he’d picked up a paperback copy of Everybody Drops the Dime before getting on the Greyhound bus, and then simply closed the encyclopedia. Why bother? There might be a Perkinsburg in Mississippi, but it would mean nothing if there was.

The name of the novelist who’d taught the class in which Mort had met John Kintner had been Richard Perkins, Jr. That was where the name had come from.

Oh, Mort, the small voice mourned. You’re very sick. You’re a very sick man.

“I don’t accept that,” he said again, horrified by the wavery weakness of his voice, but what other choice was there? Hadn’t he even thought once that it was almost as if he were doing things, taking irrevocable steps, in his sleep?

Stop, the little voice whispered inside his head, and Mort stopped.

For a moment there was utter silence in both worlds: the one inside his head, and the one outside of it.

And, after an interval, the little voice asked quietly: Why did you do it, Mort? This whole elaborate and homicidal episode ? Shooter kept saying he wanted a story, but there is no Shooter. What do you want, Mort? What did you create John Shooter FOR?

Then, from outside, came the sound of a car rolling down the driveway. Mort looked at his watch and saw that the hands were standing straight up at noon. A blaze of triumph and relief roared through him like flames shooting up the neck of a chimney. That he had the magazine but still no proof did not matter. That Shooter might kill him did not matter. He could die happily, just knowing that there was a John Shooter and that he himself was not responsible for the horrors he had been considering.

“He’s here!” he screamed joyfully, and ran out of the study. He waved his hands wildly above his head, and actually cut a little caper as he rounded the corner and came into the hall.

He stopped, looking out at the driveway past the sloping roof of the garbage cabinet where Bump’s body had been nailed up. His hands dropped slowly to his sides. Dark horror stole over his brain. No, not over it; it came down, as if some merciless hand were pulling a shade. The last piece fell into place. It had occurred to him moments before in the study that he might have created a fantasy assassin because he lacked the courage to commit suicide. Now he realized that Shooter had told the truth when he said he would never kill Mort.

It wasn’t John Shooter’s imaginary station wagon but Amy’s no-nonsense little Subaru which was just now coming to a stop. Amy was behind the wheel. She had stolen his love, and a woman who would steal your love when your love was really all you had to give was not much of a woman.

He loved her, all the same.

It was Shooter who hated her. It was Shooter who meant to kill her and then bury her down by the lake near Bump, where she would before long be a mystery to both of them.

“Go away, Amy,” he whispered in the palsied voice of a very old man. “Go away before it’s too late.”

But Amy was getting out of the car, and as she closed the door behind her, the hand pulled.the shade in Mort’s head all the way down and he was in darkness.

The place was a mess. The trash can was full and had overflowed onto the floor. A few sluggish autumn flies were crawling in and out of an aluminum pot-pie dish that had been kicked into the corner. She could smell stale cooking and musty air. She thought she could even smell spoiled food.

“Mort?”

There was no answer. She walked further into the house, taking small steps, not entirely sure she wanted to look at the rest of the place. Mrs. Gavin had been in only three days ago—how had things gotten so out of hand since then? What had happened?

She had been worried about Mort during the entire last year of their marriage, but she had been even more worried since the divorce. Worried, and, of course, guilty. She held part of the blame for herself, and supposed she always would. But Mort had never been strong ... and his greatest weakness was his stubborn (and sometimes almost hysterical) refusal to recognize the fact. This morning he had sounded like a man on the point of suicide. And the only reason she had heeded his admonition not to bring Ted was because she thought the sight of him might set Mort off if he really was poised on the edge of such an act.

The thought of murder had never crossed her mind, nor did it do so now. Even when he had brandished the gun at them that horrible afternoon at the motel, she had not been afraid. Not of that. Mort was no killer.

“Mort? M—”

She came around the kitchen counter and the word died. She stared at the big living room with wide, stunned eyes. Paper was littered everywhere. It looked as if Mort must at some point have exhumed every copy of every manuscript he had in his desk drawers and in his files and strewn the pages about in here like confetti at some black New Year’s Eve celebration. The table was heaped with dirty dishes. The Silex was lying shattered on the floor by the window-wall, which was cracked.

And everywhere, everywhere, everywhere was one word. The word was SHOOTER.

SHOOTER had been written on the walls in colored chalks he must have taken from her drawer of art supplies. SHOOTER was sprayed on the window twice in what looked like dried whipped cream—and yes, there was the Redi-Whip pressure-can, lying discarded under the stove. SHOOTER was written over and over on the kitchen counters in ink, and on the wooden support posts of the deck on the far side of the house in pencil—a neat column like adding that went down in a straight line and said SHOOTER SHOOTER SHOOTER SHOOTER.

Worst of all, it had been carved into the polished cherrywood surface of the table in great jagged letters three feet high, like a grotesque declaration of love: SHOOTER.

The screwdriver he had used to do this last was lying on a chair nearby. There was red stuff on its steel shaft—stain from the cherrywood, she assumed.

“Mort?” she whispered, looking around.

Now she was frightened that she would find him dead by his own hand. And where? Why, in the study, of course. Where else? He had lived all the most important parts of his life in there; surely he had chosen to die there.

Although she had no wish to go in, no wish to be the one to find him, her feet carried her in that direction all the same. As she went, she kicked the issue of EQMM Herb Creekmore had had sent out of her way. She did not look down. She reached the study door and pushed it slowly open.

“Mort?” she asked. Her voice was weak and uncertain.

He made no reply, only stared at her. His eyes were grim and glittering. She had never seen Mort’s eyes look this way, not even on the horrible afternoon at the motel. It was almost as if this was not Mort at all, but some stranger who looked like Mort.

She recognized the hat, though.

“Where did you find that old thing? The attic?” Her heartbeat was in her voice, making it stagger.

He must have found it in the attic. The smell of mothballs on it was strong, even from where she was standing. Mort had gotten the hat years ago, at a gift shop in Pennsylvania. They had been travelling through Amish country. She had kept a little garden at the Derry house, in the angle where the house and the study addition met. It was her garden, but Mort often went out to weed it when he was stuck for an idea. He usually wore the hat when he did this. He called it his thinking cap. She remembered him looking at himself in a mirror once when he was wearing it and joking that he ought to have a bookjacket photo taken in it. “When I put this on,” he’d said, “I look like a man who belongs out in the north forty, walking plow-furrows behind a mule’s ass.”

Then the hat had disappeared. It must have migrated down here and been stored. But—

“It’s my hat,” he said at last in a rusty, bemused voice. “Wasn’t ever anybody else’s.”

“Mort? What’s wrong? What’s—”

“You got you a wrong number, woman. Ain’t no Mort here. Mort’s dead.” The gimlet eyes never wavered. “He did a lot of squirmin around, but in the end he couldn’t lie to himself anymore, let alone to me. I never put a hand on him, Mrs. Rainey. I swear. He took the coward’s way out.”

“Why are you talking that way?” Amy asked.

“This is just the way I talk,” he said with mild surprise. “Everybody down in Miss’ippi talks this way.”

“Mort, stop!”

“Don’t you understand what I said?” he asked. “You ain’t deaf, are you? He’s dead. He killed himself.”

“Stop it, Mort,” she said, beginning to cry. “You’re scaring me, and I don’t like it.”

“Don’t matter,” he said. He took his hands out from behind his back. In one of them he held the scissors from the top drawer of the desk. He raised them. The sun had come out, and it sent a starflash glitter along the blades as he snicked them open and then closed. “You won’t be scared long.” He began walking toward her.

Then she saw the look in his eyes and understood that Mort knew that, too.

But this wasn’t him.

She screamed and wheeled around and lunged for the door.

Shooter came after her, bringing the scissors down in a silver arc. He would have buried them up to the handles between her shoulderblades if his feet had not slid on the papers scattered about the hardwood floor. He fell full-length with a cry of mingled perplexity and anger. The blades stabbed down through page nine of “Secret Window, Secret Garden” and the tips broke off. His mouth struck the floor and sprayed blood. The package of Pall Mails—the brand John Kintner had silently smoked during the breaks halfway through the writing class he and Mort Rainey had shared-shot out of his pocket and slid along the slick wood like the weight in a barroom shuffleboard game. He got up on his knees, his mouth snarling and smiling through the blood which ran over his lips and teeth.

“Won’t do you no help, Mrs. Rainey!” he cried, getting to his feet. He looked at the scissors, snicked them open to study the blunted tips a little better, and then tossed them impatiently aside. “I got a place in the garden for you! I got it all picked out. You mind me, now!”

He ran out the door after her.

Behind her, Shooter ran across to the table and snatched up the screwdriver he had used on the cat.

“Stay right there, and be still,” he said as she turned over on her back and stared at him with wide eyes which looked almost drugged. “If you move around, I’m only goin to hurt you before it’s over. I don’t want to hurt you, missus, but I will if I have to. I’ve got to have something, you see. I have come all this way, and I’ve got to have something for my trouble.”

As he approached, Amy propped herself up on her elbows and shoved herself backward with her feet. Her hair hung in her face. Her skin was coated with sweat; she could smell it pouring out of her, hot and stinking. The face above her was the solemn, judgmental face of insanity.

“No, Mort! Please! Please, Mort—”

He flung himself at her, raising the screwdriver over his head and then bringing it down. Amy shrieked and rolled to the left. Pain burned a line across her hip as the screwdriver blade tore her dress and grooved her flesh. Then she was scrambling to her knees, hearing and feeling the dress shred out a long unwinding strip as she did it.

“No, ma‘am,” Shooter panted. His hand closed upon her ankle. “No, ma’am.” She looked over her shoulder and through the tangles of her hair and saw he was using his other hand to work the screwdriver out of the floor. The round-crowned black hat sat askew on his head.

He yanked the screwdriver free and drove it into her right calf.

The pain was horrid. The pain was the whole world. She screamed and kicked backward, connecting with his nose, breaking it. Shooter grunted and fell on his side, clutching at his face, and Amy got to her feet. She could hear a woman howling. It sounded like a dog howling at the moon. She supposed it wasn’t a dog. She supposed it was her.

Shooter was getting to his feet. His lower face was a mask of blood. The mask split open, showing Mort Rainey’s crooked front teeth. She could remember licking across those teeth with her tongue.

“Feisty one, ain’t you?” he said, grinning. “That’s all right, ma’am. You go right on.”

He lunged for her.

Amy staggered backward. The screwdriver fell out of her calf and rolled across the floor. Shooter glanced at it, then lunged at her again, almost playfully. Amy grabbed one of the living-room chairs and dumped it in front of him. For a moment they only stared at each other over it ... and then he snatched for the front of her dress. Amy recoiled.

“I’m about done fussin with you,” he panted.

Amy turned and bolted for the door.

He was after her at once, flailing at her back, his fingertips skating and skidding down the nape of her neck, trying to close on the top of the dress, catching it, then just missing the hold which would have coiled her back to him for good.

Amy bolted past the kitchen counter and toward the back door. Her right loafer squelched and smooched on her foot. It was full of blood. Shooter was after her, puffing and blowing bubbles of blood from his nostrils, clutching at her.

She struck the screen door with her hands, then tripped and fell full-length on the porch, the breath whooshing out of her. She fell exactly where Shooter had left his manuscript. She rolled over and saw him coming. He only had his bare hands now, but they looked like they would be more than enough. His eyes were stern and unflinching and horribly kind beneath the brim of the black hat.

“I am so sorry, missus,” he said.

“Rainey!” a voice cried. “Stop!”

She tried to look around and could not. She had strained something in her neck. Shooter never even tried. He simply came on toward her.

“There is no Rainey h—” Shooter began, and then a gunshot rapped briskly across the fall air. Shooter stopped where he was, and looked curiously, almost casually, down at his chest. There was a small hole there. No blood issued from it—at least, not at first—but the hole was there. He put his hand to it, then brought it away. His index finger was marked by a small dot of blood. It looked like a bit of punctuation—the period which ends a sentence. He looked at this thoughtfully. Then he dropped his hands and looked at Amy.

“Babe?” he asked, and then fell full-length beside her on the porch boards.

She rolled over, managed to get up on her elbows, and crawled to where he lay, beginning to sob.

“Mort?” she cried. “Mort? Please, Mort, try to say something!”

But he was not going to say anything, and after a moment she let this realization fill her up. She would reject the simple fact of his death again and again over the next few weeks and months, and would then weaken, and the realization would fill her up again. He was dead. He was dead. He had gone crazy down here and he was dead.

He, and whoever had been inside him at the end.

She put her head down on his chest and wept, and when someone came up behind her and put a comforting hand on her shoulder, Amy did not look around.

They had seen the man at one other time during the three-month period, at the inquest, but that had been a formal situation, and Amy had not wanted to speak to him personally. Not there. She was grateful that he had saved her life ... but Mort had been her husband, and she had loved him for many years, and in her deepest heart she felt that Fred Evans’s finger hadn’t been the only one which pulled the trigger.

She would have come in time anyway, she suspected, in order to clarify it as much as possible in her mind. Her time might have been a year, or two, possibly even three. But things had happened in the meanwhile which made her move more quickly. She had hoped Ted would let her come to New York alone, but he was emphatic. Not after the last time he had let her go someplace alone. That time she had almost gotten killed.

Amy pointed out with some asperity that it would have been hard for Ted to “let her go,” since she had never told him she was going in the first place, but Ted only shrugged. So they went to New York together, rode up to the fifty-third floor of a large skyscraper together, and were together shown to the small cubicle in the offices of the Consolidated Assurance Company which Fred Evans called home during the working day ... unless he was in the field, of course.

She sat as far into the corner as she could get, and although the offices were quite warm, she kept her shawl wrapped around her.

Evans’s manner was slow and kind—he seemed to her almost like the country doctor who had nursed her through her childhood illnesses—and she liked him. But that’s something he’ll never know, she thought. I might be able to summon up the strength to tell him, and he would nod, but his nod wouldn’t indicate belief. He only knows that to me he will always be the man who shot Mort, and he had to watch me cry on Mort’s chest until the ambulance came, and one of the paramedics had to give me a shot before I would let him go. And what he won’t know is that I like him just the same.

He buzzed a woman from one of the outer offices and had her bring in three big, steaming mugs of tea. It was January outside now, the wind high, the temperature low. She thought with some brief longing of how it would be in Tashmore, with the lake finally frozen and that killer wind blowing long, ghostly snakes of powdered snow across the ice. Then her mind made some obscure but nasty association, and she saw Mort hitting the floor, saw the package of Pall Malls skidding across the wood like a shuffleboard weight. She shivered, her brief sense of longing totally dispelled.

“Are you okay, Mrs. Milner?” Evans asked.

She nodded.

Frowning ponderously and playing with his pipe, Ted said, “My wife wants to hear everything you know about what happened, Mr. Evans. I tried to discourage her at first, but I’ve come to think that it might be a good thing. She’s had bad dreams ever since—”

“Of course,” Evans said, not exactly ignoring Ted, but speaking directly to Amy. “I suppose you will for a long time. I’ve had a few of my own, actually. I never shot a man before.” He paused, then added, “I missed Vietnam by a year or so.”

Amy offered him a smile. It was wan, but it was a smile.

“She heard it all at the inquest,” Ted went on, “but she wanted to hear it again, from you, and with the legalese omitted.”

“I understand,” Evans said. He pointed at the pipe. “You can light that, if you want to.”

Ted looked at it, then dropped it into the pocket of his coat quickly, as if he were slightly ashamed of it. “I’m trying to give it up, actually.”

Evans looked at Amy. “What purpose do you think this will serve?” he asked her in the same kind, rather sweet voice. “Or maybe a better question would be what purpose do you need it to serve?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice was low and composed. “But we were in Tashmore three weeks ago, Ted and I, to clean the place out—we’ve put it up for sale—and something happened. Two things, actually.” She looked at her husband and offered the wan smile again. “Ted knows something happened, because that’s when I got in touch with you and made this appointment. But he doesn’t know what, and I’m afraid he’s put out with me. Perhaps he’s right to be.”

Ted Milner did not deny that he was put out with Amy. His hand stole into his coat pocket, started to remove the pipe, and then let it drop back again.

“But these two things—they bear on what happened at your lake home in October?”

“I don’t know. Mr. Evans ... what did happen? How much do you know?”

“Well,” he said, leaning back in his chair and sipping from his mug, “if you came expecting all the answers, you’re going to be sorely disappointed. I can tell you about the fire, but as for why your husband did what he did ... you can probably fill in more of those blanks than I can. What puzzled us most about the fire was where it started—not in the main house but in Mr. Rainey’s office, which is an addition. That made the act seem directed against him, but he wasn’t even there.

“Then we found a large chunk of bottle in the wreckage of the office. It had contained wine—champagne, to be exact—but there wasn’t any doubt that the last thing it had contained was gasoline. Part of the label was intact, and we sent a Fax copy to New York. It was identified as Moët et Chandon, nineteen-eighty-something. That wasn’t proof indisputable that the bottle used for the Molotov cocktail came from your own wine room, Mrs. Milner, but it was very persuasive, since you listed better than a dozen bottles of Moët et Chandon, some from 1983 and some from 1984.

“This led us toward a supposition which seemed clear but not very sensible: that you or your ex-husband might have burned down your own house. Mrs. Milner here said she went off and left the house unlocked—”

“I lost a lot of sleep over that,” Amy said. “I often forgot to lock up when I was only going out for a little while. I grew up in a little town north of Bangor and country habits die hard. Mort used to ...” Her lips trembled and she stopped speaking for a moment, pressing them together so tightly they turned white. When she had herself under control again, she finished her thought in a low voice. “He used to scold me about it.”

Ted took her hand.

“It didn’t matter, of course,” Evans said. “If you had locked the house, Mr. Rainey still could have gained access, because he still had his keys. Correct?”

“Yes,” Ted said.

“It might have sped up the detection end a little if you’d locked the door, but it’s impossible to say for sure. Monday-morning quarterbacking is a vice we try to steer clear of in my business, anyway. There’s a theory that it causes ulcers, and that’s one I subscribe to. The point is this: given Mrs. Rainey‘s—excuse me, Mrs. Milner’s—testimony that the house was left unlocked, we at first believed the arsonist could have been literally anyone. But once we started playing around with the assumption that the bottle used had come from the cellar wine room, it narrowed things down.”

“Because that room was locked,” Ted said.

Evans nodded. “Do you remember me asking who held keys to that room, Mrs. Milner?”

“Call me Amy, won’t you?”

He nodded. “Do you remember, Amy?”

“Yes. We started locking the little wine closet three or four years ago, after some bottles of red table wine disappeared. Mort thought it was the housekeeper. I didn’t like to believe it, because I liked her, but I knew he could be right, and probably was. We started locking it then so nobody else would be tempted.”

Evans looked at Ted Milner.

“Amy had a key to the wine room, and she believed Mr. Rainey still had his. So that limited the possibilities. Of course, if it had been Amy, you would have had to have been in collusion with her, Mr. Milner, since you were each other’s alibis for that evening. Mr. Rainey didn’t have an alibi, but he was at a considerable distance. And the main thing was this: we could see no motive for the crime. His work had left both Amy and himself financially comfortable. Nevertheless, we dusted for fingerprints and came up with two good ones. This was the day after we had our meeting in Derry. Both prints belonged to Mr. Rainey. It still wasn’t proof—”

“It wasn’t?” Ted asked, looking startled.

Evans shook his head. “Lab tests were able to confirm that the prints were made before what remained of the bottle was charred in the fire, but not how long before. The heat had cooked the oils in them, you see. And if our assumption that the bottle came from the wine room was correct, why, someone had to physically pick it up out of the bag or carton it came in and store it in its cradle. That someone would have been either Mr. or Mrs. Rainey, and he could have argued that that was where the prints came from.”

“He was in no shape to argue anything,” Amy said softly. “Not at the end.”

“I guess that’s true, but we didn’t know that. All we knew is that when people carry bottles, they generally pick them up by the neck or the upper barrel. These two prints were near the bottom, and the angle was very odd.”

“As if he had been carrying it sideways or even upside down,” Ted broke in. “Isn’t that what you said at the hearing ^?”

“Yes—and people who know anything about wine don’t do it. With most wines, it disturbs the sediment. And with champagne—”

“It shakes it up,” Ted said.

Evans nodded. “If you shake a bottle of champagne really hard, it will burst from the pressure.”

“But there was no champagne in it, anyway,” Amy said quietly.

“No. Still, it was not proof. I canvassed the area gas stations to see if anyone who looked like Mr. Rainey had bought a small amount of gas that night, but had no luck. I wasn’t too surprised; he could have bought the gasoline in Tashmore or at half a hundred service stations between the two places.

“Then I went to see Patricia Champion, our one witness. I took a picture of a 1986 Buick—the make and model we assumed Mr. Rainey would have been driving. She said it might have been the car, but she still couldn’t be sure. So I was up against it. I went back out to the house to look around, and you came, Amy. It was early morning. I wanted to ask you some questions, but you were clearly upset. I did ask you why you were there, and you said a peculiar thing. You said you were going down to Tashmore Lake to see your husband, but you came by first to look in the garden.”

“On the phone he kept talking about what he called my secret window ... the one that looked down on the garden. He said he’d left something there. But there wasn’t anything. Not that I could see, anyway.”

“I had a feeling about the man when we met,” Evans said slowly. “A feeling that he wasn’t ... quite on track. It wasn’t that he was lying about some things, although I was pretty sure he was. It was something else. A kind of distance.”

“Yes—I felt it in him more and more. That distance.”

“You looked almost sick with worry. I decided I could do worse than follow you down to the other house, Amy, especially when you told me not to tell Mr. Milner here where you’d gone if he came looking for you. I didn’t believe that idea was original with you. I thought I might just find something out. And I also thought He trailed off, looking bemused.

“You thought something might happen to me,” she said. “Thank you, Mr. Evans. He would have killed me, you know. If you hadn’t followed me, he would have killed me.”

“I parked at the head of the driveway and walked down. I heard a terrific rumpus from inside the house and I started to run. That was when you more or less fell out through the screen door, and he came out after you.”

Evans looked at them both earnestly.

“I asked him to stop,” he said. “I asked him twice.”

Amy reached out, squeezed his hand gently for a moment, then let it go.

“And that’s it,” Evans said. “I know a little more, mostly from the newspapers and two chats I had with Mr. Milner—”

“Call me Ted.”

“Ted, then.” Evans did not seem to take to Ted’s first name as easily as he had to Amy’s. “I know that Mr. Rainey had what was probably a schizophrenic episode in which he was two people, and that neither one of them had any idea they were actually existing in the same body. I know that one of them was named John Shooter. I know from Herbert Creekmore’s deposition that Mr. Rainey imagined this Shooter was hounding him over a story called ‘Sowing Season,’ and that Mr. Creekmore had a copy of the magazine in which that story appeared sent up so Mr. Rainey could prove that he had published first. The magazine arrived shortly before you did, Amy—it was found in the house. The Federal Express envelope it came in was on the seat of your ex-husband’s Buick.”

“But he cut the story out, didn’t he?” Ted asked.

“Not just the story—the contents page as well. He was careful to remove every trace of himself. He carried a Swiss-army knife, and that was probably what he used. The missing pages were in the Buick’s glove compartment.”

“In the end, the existence of that story became a mystery even to him,” Amy said softly.

Evans looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Beg pardon?”

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

“I think I’ve told you everything I can,” Evans said. “Anything else would be pure speculation. I’m an insurance investigator, after all, not a psychiatrist.”

“He was two men,” Amy said. “He was himself ... and he became a character he created. Ted believes that the last name, Shooter, was something Mort picked up and stored in his head when he found out Ted came from a little town called Shooter’s Knob, Tennessee. I’m sure he’s right. Mort was always picking out character names just that way ... like anagrams, almost.

“I don’t know the rest of it—I can only guess. I do know that when a film studio dropped its option on his novel The Delacourt Family, Mort almost had a nervous breakdown. They made it clear—and so did Herb Creekmore—that they were concerned about an accidental similarity, and they understood he never could have seen the screenplay, which was called The Home Team. There was no question of plagiarism ... except in Mort’s head. His reaction was exaggerated, abnormal. It was like stirring a stick around in what looks like a dead campfire and uncovering a live coal.”

“You don’t think he created John Shooter just to punish you, do you?” Evans asked.

“No. Shooter was there to punish Mort. I think ...” She paused and adjusted her shawl, pulling it a little more tightly about her shoulders. Then she picked up her teacup with a hand which wasn’t quite steady. “I think that Mort stole somebody’s work sometime in the past,” she said. “Probably quite far in the past, because everything he wrote from The Organ-Grinder’s Boy on was widely read. It would have come out, I think. I doubt that he even actually published what he stole. But I think that’s what happened, and I think that’s where John Shooter really came from. Not from the film company dropping his novel, or from my ... my time with Ted, and not from the divorce. Maybe all those things contributed, but I think the root goes back to a time before I knew him. Then, when he was alone at the lake house ...”

“Shooter came,” Evans said quietly. “He came and accused him of plagiarism. Whoever Mr. Rainey stole from never did, so in the end he had to punish himself. But I doubt if that was all, Amy. He did try to kill you.”

“No,” she said. “That was Shooter.”

He raised his eyebrows. Ted looked at her carefully, and then drew the pipe out of his pocket again.

“The real Shooter.”

“I don’t understand you.”

She smiled her wan smile. “I don’t understand myself. That’s why I’m here. I don’t think telling this serves any practical purpose—Mort’s dead, and it’s over—but it may help me. It may help me to sleep better.”

“Then tell us, by all means,” Evans said.

“You see, when we went down to clean out the house, we stopped at the little store in town—Bowie’s. Ted filled the gas tank—it’s always been self-service at Bowie’s—and I went in to get some things. There was a man in there, Sonny Trotts, who used to work with Tom Greenleaf. Tom was the older of the two caretakers who were killed. Sonny wanted to tell me how sorry he was about Mort, and he wanted to tell me something else, too, because he saw Mort the day before Mort died, and meant to tell him. So he said. It was about Tom Greenleaf-something Tom told Sonny while they were painting the Methodist Parish Hall together. Sonny saw Mort after that, but didn’t think to tell him right away, he said. Then he remembered that it had something to do with Greg Carstairs- ”

“The other dead man?”

“Yes. So he turned around and called, but Mort didn’t hear him. And the next day, Mort was dead.”

“What did Mr. Greenleaf tell this guy?”

“That he thought he might have seen a ghost,” Amy said calmly.

They looked at her, not speaking.

“Sonny said Tom had been getting forgetful lately, and that Tom was worried about it. Sonny thought it was no more than the ordinary sort of forgetfulness that settles in when a person gets a little older, but Tom had nursed his wife through Alzheimer’s disease five or six years before, and he was terrified of getting it himself and going the same way. According to Sonny, if Tom forgot a paintbrush, he spent half the day obsessing about it. Tom said that was why, when Greg Carstairs asked him if he recognized the man he’d seen Mort Rainey talking to the day before, or if he would recognize him if he saw him again, Tom said he hadn’t seen anyone with Mort—that Mort had been alone.”

There was the snap of a match. Ted Milner had decided to light his pipe after all. Evans ignored him. He was leaning forward in his chair, his gaze fixed intently on Amy Milner.

“Let’s get this straight. According to this Sonny Troots—”

“Trotts.”

“Okay, Trotts. According to him, Tom Greenleaf did see Mort with someone?”

“Not exactly,” Amy said. “Sonny thought if Tom believed that, believed it for sure, he wouldn’t have lied to Greg. What Tom said was that he didn’t know what he’d seen. That he was confused. That it seemed safer to say nothing about it at all. He didn’t want anybody—particularly Greg Carstairs, who was also in the caretaking business—to know how confused he was, and most of all he didn’t want anybody to think that he might be getting sick the way his late wife had gotten sick.”

“I’m not sure I understand this—I’m sorry.”

“According to Sonny,” she said, “Tom came down Lake Drive in his Scout and saw Mort, standing by himself where the lakeside path comes out.”

“Near where the bodies were found?”

“Yes. Very near. Mort waved. Tom waved back. He drove by. Then, according to what Sonny says, Tom looked in his rear-view mirror and saw another man with Mort, and an old station wagon, although neither the man nor the car had been there ten seconds before. The man was wearing a black hat, he said ... but you could see right through him, and the car, too. ”

“Oh, Amy,” Ted said softly. “The man was bullshitting you. Big time.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think Sonny is smart enough to make up such a story. He told me Tom thought he ought to get in touch with Greg and tell him he might have seen such a man after all; that it would be all right if he left out the see-through part. But Sonny said the old man was terrified. He was convinced that it was one of two things: either he was coming down with Alzheimer’s disease, or he’d seen a ghost.”

“Well, it’s certainly creepy,” Evans said, and it was—the skin on his arms and back had crinkled into gooseflesh for a moment or two. “But it’s hearsay ... hearsay from a dead man, in fact.”

“Yes ... but there’s the other thing.” She set her teacup on the desk, picked up her purse, and began to rummage in it. “When I was cleaning out Mort’s office, I found that hat—that awful black hat—behind his desk. It gave me a shock, because I wasn’t expecting it. I thought the police must have taken it away as evidence, or something. I hooked it out from behind there with a stick. It came out upside down, with the stick inside it. I used the stick to carry it outside and dump it in the trash cabinet. Do you understand?”

Ted clearly didn’t; Evans clearly did. “You didn’t want to touch it.”

“That’s right. I didn’t want to touch it. It landed right side up on one of the green trash bags—I’d swear to that. Then, about an hour later, I went out with a bag of old medicines and shampoos and things from the bathroom. When I opened the lid of the garbage cabinet to put it in, the hat was turned over again. And this was tucked into the sweatband.” She pulled a folded sheet of paper from her purse and offered it to Evans with a hand that still trembled minutely. “It wasn’t there when the hat came out from behind the desk. I know that.”

Evans took the folded sheet and just held it for a moment. He didn’t like it. It felt too heavy, and the texture was somehow wrong.

“I think there was a John Shooter,” she said. “I think he was Mort’s greatest creation—a character so vivid that he actually did become real.

“And I think that this is a message from a ghost.”

He took the slip of paper and opened it. Written halfway down was this message:

The signature was a bald scrawl below the neat lines of script.

“Is this your late husband’s signature, Amy?” Evans asked.

“No,” she said. “Nothing like it.”

The three of them sat in the office, looking at one another. Fred Evans tried to think of something to say and could not. After awhile, the silence (and the smell of Ted Milner’s pipe) became more than any of them could stand. So Mr. and Mrs. Milner offered their thanks, said their goodbyes, and left his office to get on with their lives as best they could, and Fred Evans got on with his own as best he could, and sometimes, late at night, both he and the woman who had been married to Morton Rainey woke from dreams in which a man in a round-crowned black hat looked at them from sun-faded eyes caught in nets of wrinkles. He looked at them with no love ... but, they both felt, with an odd kind of stern pity.

It was not a kind expression, and it left no feeling of comfort, but they also both felt, in their different places, that they could find room to live with that look. And to tend their gardens.