ou think somebody might have snatched her?" He went right on eating his Popsicle. "No, nothing like that," Andy said. "Did you see the van?" "Gray van? Hey, goodbuddy, you have any idea how many cars go by here in just one hour? Or half an hour? Busy street, man. Carlisle is a very busy street." Andy cocked his thumb over his shoulder. "It came from Blassmore Place. That's not so busy." He got ready to add a little push, but he didn't have to. The young guy's eyes suddenly brightened. He broke his Popsicle in two like a wishbone and sucked all the purple ice off one of the sticks in a single improbable slurp.

"Yeah, okay, right," he said. "I did see it. I'll tell you why I noticed. It cut across our tarmac to beat the light. I don't care myself, but it irritates the shit out of the boss when they do that. Not that it matters today with the rinser on the fritz. He's got something else to be irritated about."

"So the van headed toward the airport."

The guy nodded, flipped one of the Popsicle sticks back over his shoulder, and started on the remaining chunk. "Hope you find your girl, goodbuddy. If you don't mind a little, like, gray-tuitous advice, you ought to call the cops if you're really worried."

"I don't think that would do much good," Andy said. "Under the circumstances."

He got back in the wagon again, crossed the tarmac himself, and turned onto Carlisle Avenue. He was now headed west. The area was cluttered with gas stations, car washes, fast-food franchises, used-car lots. A drive-in advertised a double bill consisting Of THE CORPSE GRINDERS and BLOODY MERCHANTS OF DEATH. He looked at the marquee and heard the ironing board ratcheting out of its closet like a guillotine. His stomach rolled over.

He passed under a sign announcing that you could get on I-80 a mile and a half farther west, if that was your pleasure. Beyond that was a smaller sign with an airplane on it. Okay, he had got this far. Now what?

Suddenly he pulled into the parking lot of a Shakey's Pizza. It was no good stopping and asking along here. As the car-wash guy had said, Carlisle was a busy street. He could push people until his brains were leaking out his ears and only succeed in confusing himself. It was the turnpike or the airport, anyway. He was sure of it. The lady or the tiger.

He had never in his life tried to make one of the hunches come. He simply took them as gifts when they did come, and usually acted on them. Now he slouched farther down in the driver's seat of the wagon, touching his temples lightly with the tips of his fingers, and tried to make something come. The motor was idling, the radio was still on. The Rolling Stones. Dance, little sister, dance.

Charlie, he thought. She had gone off to Terri's with her clothes stuffed in the knapsack she wore just about everywhere. That had probably helped to fool them. The last time he had seen her, she was wearing jeans and a salmon-colored shell top. Her hair was in pigtails, as it almost always was. A nonchalant good-bye, Daddy, and a kiss and holy Jesus, Charlie, where are you now?

Nothing came.

Never mind. Sit a little longer. Listen to the Stones. Shakey's Pizza. You get your choice, thin crust or crunchy. You pays your money and you takes your choice, as Granther McGee used to say. The Stones exhorting little sister to dance, dance, dance. Quincey saying they'd probably put her in a room so two hundred and twenty million Americans could be safe and free. Vicky. He and Vicky had had a hard time with the sex part of it at first. She had been scared to death. Just call me the Ice Maiden, she had said through her tears after that first miserable botched time. No sex, please we're British. But somehow the Lot Six experiment had helped with that-the totality they had shared was, in its own way, like mating. Still it had been difficult. A little at a time. Gentleness. Tears. Vicky beginning to respond, then stiffening, crying out Don't, it'll hurt, don't, Andy, stop it! And somehow it was the Lot Six experiment, that common experience, that had enabled him to go on trying, like a safecracker who knows that there is a way, always a way. And there had come a night when they got through it. Later there came a night when it was all right. Then, suddenly, a night when it was glorious. Dance, little sister, dance. He had been with her when Charlie was born. A quick, easy delivery. Quick to fix, easy to please...

Nothing was coming. The trail was getting colder and he had nothing. The airport or the turnpike? The lady or the tiger?

The Stones finished. The Doobie Brothers came on, wanting to know without love, where would you be right now. Andy didn't know. The sun beat down. The lines in the Shakey's parking lot had been freshly painted. They were very white and firm against the black-top. The lot was more than three quarters full. It was lunchtime. Had Charlie got her lunch? Would they feed her? Maybe

(maybe they'll stop make a service stop you know at one of those Hojos along the pike-after all they can't drive can't drive can't drive)

Where? Can't drive where?

(can't drive all the way to Virginia without making a rest stop can they? I mean a little girl has got to stop and take a tinkle sometime, doesn't she?)

He straightened up, feeling an immense but numb feeling of gratitude. It had come, just like that. Not the airport, which would have been his first guess, if he had only been guessing. Not the airport but the turnpike. He wasn't completely sure the hunch was bona fide, but he was pretty sure. And it was better than not having any idea at all.

He rolled the station wagon over the freshly painted arrow pointing the way out and turned right on Carlisle again. Ten minutes later he was on the turnpike, headed east with a toll ticket tucked into the battered, annotated copy of Paradise Lost on the seat beside him. Ten minutes after that, Harrison, Ohio, was behind him. He had started on the trip east that would bring him to Tashmore, Vermont, fourteen months later.

The calm held. He played the radio loud and that helped. Song followed song and he only recognized the older ones because he had pretty much stopped listening to pop music three or four years ago. No particular reason; it had just happened. They still had the jump on him, but the calm insisted with its own cold logic that it was a very good jump-and that he would be asking for trouble if he just started roaring along the passing lane at seventy.

He pegged the speedometer at just over sixty, reasoning that the men who had taken Charlie would not want to exceed the fifty-five speed limit. They could flash their credentials at any Smokey who pulled them down for speeding, that was true, but they might have a certain amount of difficulty explaining a screaming six-year-old child just the same. It might slow them down, and it would surely get them in dutch with whoever was pulling the strings on this show.

They could have drugged her and hidden her, his mind whispered. Then if they got stopped for busting along at seventy, even eighty, they'd only have to show their paper and keep right on going. Is an Ohio state cop going to toss a van that belongs to the Shop?

Andy struggled with that as eastern Ohio flowed by. First, they might be scared to drug Charlie. Sedating a child can be a tricky business unless you're an expert... and they might not be sure what sedation would do to the powers they were supposed to be investigating. Second, a state cop might just go ahead and toss the van anyway, or at least hold them in the breakdown lane while he checked the validity of their ID. Third, why should they be busting their asses? They had no idea anyone was onto them. It was still not one o'clock. Andy was supposed to be at the college until two o'clock. The Shop people would not expect him to arrive back home until two-twenty or so at the earliest and probably felt they could count on anywhere from twenty minutes to two hours after that before the alarm was raised. Why shouldn't they just be loafing along?

Andy went a little faster.

Forty minutes passed, then fifty. It seemed longer. He was beginning to sweat a little; worry was nibbling through the artificial ice of calm and shock. Was the van really someplace up ahead, or had the whole thing been so much wishful thinking?

The traffic patterns formed and re-formed. He saw two gray vans. Neither of them looked like the one he had seen cruising around Lakeland. One was driven by an elderly man with flying white hair. The other was full of freaks smoking dope. The driver saw Andy's close scrutiny and waved a roach clip at him. The girl beside him popped up her middle finger, kissed it gently, and tipped it Andy's way. Then they were behind him.

His head was beginning to ache. The traffic was heavy, the sun was bright. Each car was loaded with chrome, and each piece of chrome had its own arrow of sun to flick into his eyes. He passed a sign that said REST AREA 1 MILE AHEAD.

He had been in the passing lane. Now he signaled right and slipped into the travel lane again. He let his speed drop to forty-five, then to forty. A small sports car passed him and the driver blipped his horn at Andy in irritated fashion as he went by.

REST AREA, the sign announced. It wasn't a service stop, simply a turn-out with slant parking, a water fountain, and bathrooms. There were four or five cars parked in there and one gray van. The gray van. He was almost sure of it. His heart began to slam against the walls of his chest. He turned in with a quick twist of the station wagon's wheel, and the tires made a low wailing sound.

He drove slowly down the entranceway toward the van, looking around, trying to take in everything at once. There were two picnic tables with a family at each one. One group was just clearing up and getting ready to go, the mother putting leftovers into a bright orange carrier bag, the father and the two kids policing up the junk and taking it over to the trash barrel. At the other table a young man and woman were eating sandwiches and potato salad. There was a sleeping baby in a carrier seat between them. The baby was wearing a corduroy jumper with a lot of dancing elephants on it. On the grass, between two big and beautiful old elms, were two girls of about twenty, also having lunch. There was no sign of Charlie or of any men who looked both young enough and tough enough to belong to the Shop.

Andy killed the station wagon's engine. He could feel his heartbeat in his eyeballs now. The van looked empty. He got out.

An old woman using a cane came out of the ladies" comfort station and walked slowly toward an old burgundy Biscayne. A gent of about her age got out from behind the wheel, walked around the hood, opened her door, and handed her in. He went back, started up the Biscayne, a big jet of oily blue smoke coming from the exhaust pipe, and backed out.

The men's-room door opened and Charlie came out. Flanking her on the left and right were men of about thirty in sport coats, open-throated shirts, and dark double-knit pants. Charlie's face looked blank and shocked. She looked from one of the men to the other and then back at the first. Andy's guts began to roll helplessly. She was wearing her pack sack. They were walking toward the van. Charlie said something to one of them and he shook his head. She turned to the other. He shrugged, then said something to his partner over Charlie's head. The other one nodded. They turned around and walked toward the drinking fountain.

Andy's heart was beating faster than ever.

Adrenaline spilled into his body in a sour, jittery flood. He was scared, scared plenty, but something else was pumping up inside him and it was anger, it was total fury. The fury was even better than the calm. It felt almost sweet. Those were the two men out there that had killed his wife and stolen his daughter, and if they weren't right with Jesus, he pitied them.

As they went to the drinking fountain with Charlie; their backs were to him. Andy got out of the wagon and stepped behind the van.

The family of four who had just finished their lunch walked over to a new midsized Ford, got in, and backed out. The mother glanced over at Andy with no curiosity at all, the way people look at each other when they are on long trips, moving slowly through the digestive tract of the U.S. turnpike system. They drove off, showing a Michigan plate. There were now three cars and the gray van and Andy's station wagon parked in the rest area. One of the cars belonged to the girls. Two more people were strolling across the grounds, and there was one man inside the little information booth, looking at the I-80 map, his hands tucked into the back pockets of his jeans.

Andy had no idea of exactly what he was going to do.

Charlie finished her drink. One of the two men bent over and took a sip. Then they started back toward their van. Andy was looking at them from around the van's back-left corner. Charlie looked scared, really scared. She had been crying. Andy tried the back door of the van, not knowing why, but it was no good anyway; it was locked.

Abruptly he stepped out into full view.

They were very quick. Andy saw the recognition come into their eyes immediately, even before the gladness flooded Charlie's face, driving away that look of blank, frightened shock.

"Daddy!" she cried shrilly, causing the young couple with the baby to look around. One of the girls under the elms shaded her eyes to see what was happening.

Charlie tried to run to him and one of the men grabbed her by the shoulder and hauled her back against him, half-twisting her pack sack from her shoulders. An instant later there was a gun in his hand. He had produced it from somewhere under his sport coat like a magician doing an evil trick. He put the barrel against Charlie's temple.

The other man began to stroll unhurriedly away from Charlie and his partner, then began to move in on Andy. His hand was in his coat, but his conjuring was not as good as his partner's had been; he was having a little trouble producing his gun.

"Move away from the van if you don't want anything to happen to your daughter," the one with the gun said. "Daddy!" Charlie cried again.

Andy moved slowly away from the van. The other fellow, who was prematurely bald, had his gun out now. He pointed it at Andy. He was less than five feet away. "I advise you very sincerely not to move," he said in a low voice. "This is a Colt forty-five and it makes a giant hole."

The young guy with his wife and baby at the picnic table got up. He was wearing rimless glasses and he looked severe. "What exactly is going on here?" he asked in the carrying, enunciated tones of a college instructor.

The man with Charlie turned toward him. The muzzle of his gun floated slightly away from her so that the young man could see it. "Government business," he said. "Stay right where you are; everything is fine."

The young man's wife grabbed his arm and pulled him down. Andy looked at the balding agent and said in a low, pleasant voice, "That gun is much too hot to hold."

Baldy looked at him, puzzled. Then, suddenly, he screamed and dropped his revolver. It struck the pavement and went off: One of the girls under the elms let out a puzzled, surprised shout. Baldy was holding his hand and dancing around. Fresh white blisters appeared on his palm, rising like bread dough.

The man with Charlie stared at his partner, and for a moment the gun was totally distracted from her small head. "You're blind," Andy told him, and pushed just as hard as he could. A sickening wrench of pain twisted through his head. The man screamed suddenly. He let go of Charlie and his hands went to his eyes.

"Charlie," Andy said in a low voice, and his daughter ran to him and clutched his legs in a trembling bear hug. The man inside the information booth ran out to see what was going on.

Baldy, still clutching his burned hand, ran toward Andy and Charlie. His face worked horribly.

"Go to sleep," Andy said curtly, and pushed again. Badly dropped sprawling as if poleaxed. His forehead bonked on the pavement. The young wife of the stern young man moaned.

Andy's head hurt badly now, and he was remotely glad that it was summer and that he hadn't used the push, even to prod a student who was letting his grades slip for no good reason, since perhaps May. He was charged up-but charged up or not, God knew he was going to pay for what he was doing this hot summer afternoon.

The blind man was staggering around on the grass, holding his hands up to his face and screaming. He walked into a green barrel with PUT LITTER IN ITS PLACE stenciled on its side and fell down in an overturned jumble of sandwich bags, beer cans, cigarette butts, and empty soda bottles.

"Oh Daddy, jeez I was so scared," Charlie said, and began to cry. "The wagon's right over there. See it?" Andy heard himself say. "Get in and I'll be with you in a minute." "Is Mommy here?" "No. Just get in, Charlie." He couldn't deal with that now. Now, somehow, he had to deal with these witnesses. "What the hell is this?" the man from the information booth asked, bewildered.

"My eyes," the man who had had his gun up to Charlie's head screamed. "My eyes, my eyes. What did you do to my eyes, you son of a bitch?" He got up. There was a sandwich bag sticking to one of his hands. He began to totter off toward the information booth, and the man in the bluejeans darted back inside.

"Go, Charlie."

"Will you come, Daddy?"

"Yes, in just a second. Now go."

Charlie went, blond pigtails bouncing. Her pack sack was still hanging askew.

Andy walked past the sleeping Shop agent, thought about his gun, and decided he didn't want it. He walked over to the young people at the picnic table. Keep it small, he told himself. Easy. Little taps. Don't go starting any echoes. The object is not to hurt these people.

The young woman grabbed her baby from its carrier seat rudely, waking it. It began to. cry. "Don't you come near me, you crazy person!" she said. Andy looked at the man and his wife. "None of this is very important," he said, and pushed. Fresh pain settled over the back of his head like a spider... and sank in.

The young man looked relieved. "Well, thank God."

His wife offered a tentative smile. The push hadn't taken so well with her; her maternity had been aroused.

"Lovely baby you have there," Andy said. "Little boy, isn't it?"

The blind man stepped off the curbing, pitched forward, and struck his head on the doorpost of the red Pinto that probably belonged to the two girls. He howled. Blood flowed from his temple. "I'm blind." he screamed again.

The young woman's tentative smile became radiant. "Yes, a boy," she said. "His name is Michael."

"Hi, Mike," Andy said. He ruffled the baby's mostly bald head.

"I can't think why he's crying," the young woman said. "He was sleeping so well until just now. He must be hungry."

"Sure, that's it," her husband said.

"Excuse me." Andy walked toward the information booth. There was no time to lose now. Someone else could turn into this roadside bedlam at any time. "What is it, man?" the fellow in the bluejeans asked. "Is it a bust?" "Nah, nothing happened," Andy said, and gave another light push. It was starting make him feel sick now. His head thudded and pounded. "Oh," the fellow said. "Well, I was just trying to figure out how to get to Chagrin Falls from here. Excuse me." And he sauntered back inside the information booth.

The two girls had retreated to the security fence that separated the turn-out from the private farmland beyond it. They stared at him with wide eyes. The blind man was now shuffling around on the pavement in a circle with his arms held stiffly out in front of him. He was cursing and weeping.

Andy advanced slowly toward the girls, holding his hands out to show them there was nothing in them. He spoke to them. One of them asked him a question and he spoke again. Shortly they both began to smile relieved smiles and to nod. Andy waved to them and they both waved in return. Then he walked rapidly across the grass toward the station wagon. His forehead was beaded with cold sweat and his stomach was rolling greasily. He could only pray that no one would drive in before he and Charlie got away, because there was nothing left. He was completely tipped over. He slid in behind the wheel and keyed the engine.

"Daddy," Charlie said, and threw herself at him, buried her face against his chest. He hugged her briefly and then backed out of the parking lot. Turning his head was agony.

The black horse. In the aftermath, that was the thought that always came to him. He had let the black horse out of its stall somewhere in the dark barn of his subconscious and now it would again batter its way up and down through his brain. He would have to get them someplace and lay up. Quick. He wasn't going to be capable of driving for long.

"The black horse," he said thickly. It was coming. No... no. It wasn't coming; it was here. Thud... thud... thud. Yes, it was here. It was free.

"Daddy, look out!" Charlie screamed.

The blind man had staggered directly across their path. Andy braked. The blind man began to pound on the hood of the wagon and scream for help. To their right, the young mother had begun to breast feed her baby. Her husband was reading a paperback. The man from the information booth had gone over to talk to the two girls from the red Pinto-perhaps hoping for some quickie experience kinky enough to write up for the Penthouse Forum. Sprawled out on the pavement, Baldy slept on. The other operative pounded on the hood of the wagon again and again. "Help me!" he screamed. "I'm blind! Dirty bastard did something to my eyes! I'm blinds" "Daddy," Charlie moaned.

For a crazy instant, he almost floored the accelerator. Inside his aching head he could hear the sound the tires would make, could feel the dull thudding of the wheels as they passed over the body. He had kidnapped Charlie and held a gun to her head. Perhaps he had been the one who had stuffed the rag into Vicky's mouth so she wouldn't scream when they pulled out her fingernails. It would be so very good to kill him... except then what would separate him from them?

He laid on the horn instead. It sent another bright spear of agony through his head. The blind man leaped away from the car as if stung. Andy hauled the wheel around and drove past him. The last thing he saw in the rearview mirror as he drove down the reentry lane was the blind man sitting on the pavement, his face twisted in anger and terror... and the young woman placidly raising baby Michael to her shoulder to burp him.

He entered the flow of turnpike traffic without looking. A horn blared; tires squalled. A big Lincoln swerved around the wagon and the driver shook his fist at them. "Daddy, are you okay?" "I will be," he said. His voice seemed to come from far away. "Charlie, look at the toll ticket and see what the next exit is." The traffic blurred in front of his eyes. It doubled, trebled, came back together, then drifted into prismatic fragments again. Sun reflecting off bright chrome everywhere.

"And fasten your seatbelt, Charlie."

The next exit was Hammersmith, twenty miles farther up. Somehow he made it. He thought later that it was only the consciousness of Charlie sitting next to him, depending on him, that kept him on the road. Just as Charlie had got him through all the things that came after-the knowledge of Charlie, needing him. Charlie McGee, whose parents had once needed two hundred dollars.

There was a Best Western at the foot of the Hammersmith ramp, and Andy managed to get them checked in, specifying a room away from the turnpike. He used a bogus name. "They'll be after us, Charlie," he said. "I need to sleep. But only until dark, that's all the time we can take... all we dare to take. Wake me up when it's dark." She said something else, but then he was falling on the bed. The world was blurring down to a gray point, and then even the point was gone and everything was darkness, where the pain couldn't reach. There was no pain and there were no dreams. When Charlie shook him awake again on that hot August evening at quarter past seven, the room was stifling hot and his clothes were soaked with sweat. She had tried to make the air conditioner work but hadn't been able to figure out the controls.

"It's okay," he said. He swung his feet onto the floor and put his hands on his temples, squeezing his head so it wouldn't blow up. "Is it any better, Daddy?" she asked anxiously. "A little," he said. And it was... but only a little. "We'll stop in a little while and get some chow. That'll help some more." "Where are we going?"

He shook his head slowly back and forth. He had only the money he had left the house with that morning-about seventeen dollars. He had his Master Charge and his Visa, but he had paid for their room with the two twenties he always kept in the back of his wallet (my run-out money, he sometimes told Vicky, joking, but how hellishly true that had turned out to be) rather than use either one of them. Using either of those cards would be like painting a sign: THIS WAY TO THE FUGITIVE COLLEGE INSTRUCTOR AND HIS DAUGHTER. The seventeen dollars would buy them some burgers and top off the wagon's gas tank once. Then they would be stone broke.

"'I don't know, Charlie," he said. "Just away."

"When are we going to get Mommy?"

Andy looked up at her and his headache started to get worse again. He thought of the drops of blood on the floor and on the washing-machine porthole. Ire thought of the smell of Pledge.

"Charlie-"he said, and could say no more. There was no need, anyway.

She looked at him with slowly widening eyes. Her hand drifted up to her trembling mouth.

"Oh no, Daddy... please say it's no."

"Charlie-"

She screamed, "Oh please say it's no!"

"Charlie, those people who-"

"Please say she's all right, say she's all right, say she's all right!"

The room, the room was so hot, the air conditioning was off, that was all it was, but it was so hot, his head aching, the sweat rolling down his face, not cold sweat now but hot, like oil, hot-

"No," Charlie was saying, "No, no, no, no, no." She shook her head. Her pigtails flew back and forth, making him think absurdly of the first time he and Vicky had taken her to the amusement park, the carousel-

It wasn't the lack of air conditioning.

"Charlie!" He yelled. "Charlie, the bathtub! The water!"

She screamed. She turned her head toward the open bathroom door and there was a sudden blue flash in there like a lightbulb burning out. The showerhead fell off the wall and clattered into the tub, twisted and black. Several of the blue tiles shattered to fragments.

He barely caught her when she fell, sobbing.

"Daddy, I'm sorry, I'm sorry-"

"It's all right," he said shakily, and enfolded her. From the bathroom, thin smoke drifted out of the fused tub. All the porcelain surfaces had crack-glazed instantly. It was as if the entire bathroom had been run through some powerful but defective firing kiln. The towels were smoldering.

"It's all right," he said, holding her, rocking her. "Charlie, it's all right, it's gonna be all right, somehow it'll come right, I promise." "I want Mommy," she sobbed. He nodded. He wanted her, too. He held Charlie tightly to him and smelled ozone and porcelain and cooked Best Western towels. She had almost flash-fried them both.

"It's gonna be all right," he told her, and rocked her, not really believing it, but it was the litany, it was the Psalter, the voice of the adult calling down the black well of years into the miserable pit of terrorized childhood; it was what you said when things went wrong; it was the nightlight that could not banish the monster from the closet but perhaps only keep it at bay for a little while; it was the voice without power that must speak nevertheless.

"It's gonna be all right," he told her, not really believing it, knowing as every adult knows in his secret heart that nothing is really all right, ever. "It's gonna be all right." He was crying. He couldn't help it now. His tears came in a flood and he held her to his chest as tightly as he could. "Charlie, I swear to you, somehow, it's gonna be all right."

5

The one thing they had not been able to hang around his neck-as much as they might have liked to-was the murder of Vicky. Instead, they had elected to simply erase what had happened in the laundry room. Less trouble for them. Sometimes-not often-Andy wondered what their neighbors back in Lakeland might have speculated. Bill collectors? Marital problems? Maybe a drug habit or an incident of child abuse? They hadn't known anyone on Conifer Place well enough for it to have been any more than idle dinnertable chat, a nine days" wonder soon forgotten when the bank that held the mortgage released their house.

Sitting on the deck now and looking out into darkness, Andy thought he might have had more luck that day than he had known (or been able to appreciate). He had arrived too late to save Vicky, but he had left before the Removal People arrived.

There had never been a thing about it in the paper, not even a squib about how-funny thing! an English instructor named Andrew McGee and his family had just up and disappeared. Perhaps the Shop had got that quashed, too. Surely he had been reported missing; one or all of the guys he had been eating lunch with that day would have done that much. But it hadn't made the papers, and of course, bill collectors don't advertise.

"They would have hung it on me if they could," he said, unaware that he had spoken aloud.

But they couldn't have. The medical examiner could have fixed the time of death, and Andy, who had been in plain sight of some disinterested third party (and in the case of Eh-116, Style and the Short Story, from ten to eleven-thirty, twenty-five disinterested third parties) all that day, could not have been set up to take the fall. Even if he'd been unable to provide substantiation for his movements during the critical time, there was no motive.

So the two of them had killed Vicky and then gone haring off after Charlie-but not without notifying what Andy thought of as the Removal People (and in his mind's eye he even saw them that way, smooth-faced young men dressed in white coveralls). And sometime after he had gone haring off after Charlie, maybe as short a time as five minutes, but almost surely no longer than an hour, the Removal People would have rolled up to his door. While Conifer Place dozed the afternoon away, Vicky had been Removed.

They might even have reasoned-correctly-that a missing wife would have been more of a problem for Andy than a provably dead one. No body, no estimated time of death. No estimated time of death, no alibi. He would be watched, cosseted, politely tied down. Of course they would have put Charlie's description out on the wire-Vicky's too, for that matter-but Andy would not have been free to simply go tearing off on his own. So she had been Removed, and now he didn't even know where she was buried. Or maybe she had been cremated. Or-

Oh shit why are you doing this to yourself?

He stood up abruptly and poured the remainder of Granther's mule-kick over the deck railing. It was all in the past; none of it could be changed; it was time to stop thinking about it.

A neat trick if you could do it. He looked up at the dark shapes of the trees and squeezed the glass tightly in his right hand, and the thought crossed his mind again.,

Charlie I swear to you, somehow it's gonna be all right.

6

That winter in Tashmore, so long after his miserable awakening in that Ohio motel, it seemed his desperate prediction had finally come true. It was not an idyllic winter for them. Not long after Christmas, Charlie caught a cold and snuffled and coughed her way through to early April, when it finally cleared up for good. For a while she ran a fever. Andy fed her aspirin halves and told himself that if the fever did not go down in three days" time, he would have to take her to the doctor across the lake in Bradford, no matter what the consequences. But her fever did go down, and for the rest of the winter Charlie's cold was only a constant annoyance to her. Andy managed to get himself a minor case of frostbite on one memorable occasion in March and nearly managed to burn them both up one screaming, subzero night in February by overloading the woodstove. Ironically, it was Charlie who woke up in the middle of the night and discovered the cottage was much too hot.

On December 14 they celebrated his birthday and on March 24 they celebrated Charlie's. She was eight, and sometimes Andy looked at her with a kind of wonder, as if catching sight of her for the first time. She was not a little girl anymore; she stood to past his elbow. Her hair had got long again, and she had taken to braiding it to keep it out of her eyes. She was going to be beautiful. She already was, red nose and all.

They were without a car. Irv Manders's Willys had frozen solid in January, and Andy thought the block was cracked. He had started it every day, more from a sense of responsibility than anything else, because not even four-wheel drive would have pulled them out of Granther's camp after the New Year. The snow, undisturbed except for the tracks of squirrels, chipmunks, a few deer, and a persistent raccoon that came around to sniff" hopefully at the garbage hold, was almost two feet deep by then.

There were old-fashioned cross-country skis in the small shed behind the cottage-three pairs of them, but none that would fit Charlie. It was just as well. Andy kept her indoors as much as possible. They could live with her cold, but he did not want to risk a return of the fever.

He found an old pair of Granther's ski boots, dusty and cracked with age, tucked away in a cardboard toilet-tissue box under the table where the old man had once planed shutters and made doors. Andy oiled them, flexed them, and then found he still could not fill Granther's shoes without stuffing the toes full of newspaper. There was something funny about that, but he also found it a touch ominous. He thought about Granther a lot that long winter and wondered what he would have made of their predicament.

Half a dozen times that winter he hooked up the cross-country skis (no modern snap-bindings here, only a confusing and irritating tangle of straps, buckles, and rings) and worked his way across the wide, frozen expanse of Tashmore Pond to the Bradford Town Landing. From there, a small, winding road led into the village, tucked neatly away in the hills two miles east of the lake.

He always left before first light, with Granther's knapsack on his back, and never arrived back before three in the afternoon. On one occasion he barely beat a howling snowstorm that would have left him blinded and directionless and wandering on the ice. Charlie cried with relief when he came in-and then went into a long, alarming coughing fit.

The trips to Bradford were for supplies and clothes for him and Charlie. He had Granther's struttin money, and later on, he broke into three of the larger camps at the far end of Tashmore Pond and stole money. He was not proud of this, but it seemed to him a matter of survival. The camps he chose might have sold on the real-estate market for eighty thousand dollars apiece, and he supposed the owners could afford to lose their thirty or forty dollars" worth of cookie-jar money-which was exactly where most of them kept it. The only other thing he touched that winter was the large range-oil drum behind the large, modern cottage quaintly named CAMP CONFUSION. From this drum he took about forty gallons of oil.

He didn't like going to Bradford. He didn't like the certain knowledge that the oldsters who sat around the big potbellied stove down by the cash register were talking about the stranger who was staying across the lake in one of the camps. Stories had a way of getting around, and sometimes they got into the wrong ears. It wouldn't take much-only a whisper-for the Shop to make an inevitable connection between Andy, his grandfather, and his grandfather's cottage in Tashmore, Vermont. But he simply didn't know what else to do. They had to eat, and they couldn't spend the entire winter living on canned sardines. He wanted fresh fruit for Charlie, and vitamin pills, and clothes. Charlie had arrived with nothing to her name but a dirty blouse, a pair of red pants, and a single pair of underdrawers. There was no cough medicine that he trusted, there were no fresh vegetables, and, crazily enough, hardly any matches. Every camp he broke into had a fireplace, but he found only a single box of Diamond wooden matches.

He could have gone farther afield-there were other camps and cottages-but many of the other areas were plowed out and patrolled by the Tashmore constabulary. And on many of the roads there were at least one or two year-round residents.

In the Bradford general store he was able to buy all the things he needed, including three pairs of heavy pants and three woolen shirts that were approximately Charlie's size. There was no girls" underwear, and she had to make do with size-eight Jockey shorts. This disgusted and amused Charlie by turns.

Making the six-mile round trip across to Bradford on Granther's skis was both a burden and a pleasure to Andy. He didn't like leaving Charlie alone, not because he didn't trust her but because he always lived with the fear of coming back and finding her gone... or dead. The old boots gave him blisters no matter how many pairs of socks he put on. If he tried to move too fast, he gave himself headaches, and then he would remember the small numb places on his face and envision his brain as an old bald tire, a tire that had been used so long and hard that it was down to the canvas in places. If he had a stroke in the middle of this damned lake and froze to death, what would happen to Charlie then?

But he did his best thinking on these trips. The silence had a way of clearing the head. Tashmore Pond itself was not wide-Andy's path across it from the west bank to the east was less than a mile-but it was very long. With the snow lying four feet deep over the ice by February, he sometimes paused halfway across and looked slowly to his right and left. The lake then appeared to be a long corridor floored with dazzling white tile-clean, unbroken, stretching out of sight in either direction. Sugar-dusted pines bordered it all around. Above was the hard, dazzling, and merciless blue sky of winter, or the low and featureless white of coming snow. There might be the far-off call of a crow, or the low, rippling thud of the ice stretching, but that was all. The exercise toned up his body. He grew a warm singlet of sweat between his skin and his clothes, and it felt good to work up a sweat and then wipe it off your brow. He had somehow forgotten that feeling while teaching Yeats and Williams and correcting bluebooks.

In this silence, and through the exertion of working his body hard, his thoughts came clear and he worked the problem over in his mind. Something had to be done-should have been done long since, but that was in the past. They had come to Granther's place for the winter, but they were still running. The uneasy way he felt about the oldtimers sitting around the stove with their pipes and their inquisitive eyes was enough to ram that fact home. He and Charlie were in a corner, and there had to be some way out of it.

And he was still angry, because it wasn't right. They had no right. His family were American citizens, living in a supposedly open society, and his wife had been murdered, his daughter kidnapped, the two of them hunted like rabbits in a hedgerow.

He thought again that if he could get the story across to someone-or to several someones-the whole thing could be blown out of the water. He hadn't done it before because that odd hypnosis-the same sort of hypnosis that had resulted in Vicky's death-had continued, at least to some degree. He hadn't wanted his daughter growing up like a freak in a sideshow. He hadn't wanted her institutionalized-not for the good of the country and not for her own good. And worst of all, he had continued to lie to himself. Even after he had seen his wife crammed into the ironing closet in the laundry with that rag in her mouth, he had continued to lie to himself and tell himself that sooner or later they would be left alone. Just playing for funzies, they had said as kids. Everybody has to give back the money at the end.

Except they weren't kids, they weren't playing for funzies, and nobody was going to give him and Charlie anything back when the game was over. This game was for keeps.

In silence he began to understand certain hard truths. In a way, Charlie was a freak, not much different from the thalidomide babies of the sixties or those children of mothers who had taken DES; the doctors just hadn't known that those girl children were going to develop vaginal tumors in abnormal numbers fourteen or sixteen years down the road. It was not Charlie's fault, but that did not change the fact. Her strangeness, her freakishness, was simply on the inside. What she had done at the Manders farm had been terrifying, totally terrifying, and since then Andy had found himself wondering just how far her ability reached, how far it could reach. He had read a lot of the literature of parapsychology during their year on the dodge, enough to know that both pyrokinesis and telekinesis were suspected to be tied in with certain poorly understood ductless glands. His reading had also told him that the two talents were closely related, and that most documented cases centered around girls not a whole lot older than Charlie was right now.

She had been able to initiate that destruction at the Manders farm at the age of seven. Now she was nearly eight. What might happen when she turned twelve and entered adolescence? Maybe nothing. Maybe a great deal. She said she wasn't going to use the power anymore, but if she was forced to use it? What if it began to come out spontaneously? What if she began to light fires in her sleep as a part of her own strange puberty, a fiery counterpart of the nocturnal seminal emissions most teenage boys experienced? What if the Shop finally decided to call off its dogs... and Charlie was kidnapped by some foreign power?

Questions, questions.

On his trips across the pond, Andy tried to grapple with them and came reluctantly to believe that Charlie might have to submit to some sort of custody for the rest of her life, if only for her own protection. It might be as necessary for her as the cruel leg braces were for the victims of muscular dystrophy or the strange prosthetics for the thalidomide babies.

And then there was the question of his own future. He remembered the numb places, the bloodshot eye. No man wants to believe that his own death-warrant has been signed and dated, and Andy did not completely believe that, but he was aware that two or three more hard pushes might kill him, and he realized that his normal life expectancy might already have been considerably shortened. Some provision had to be made for Charlie in case that happened.

But not the Shop's way.

Not the small room. He would not allow that to happen.

So he thought it over, and at last he came to a painful decision.

7

Andy wrote six letters. They were almost identical. Two were to Ohio's United States senators. One was to the woman who represented the district of which Harrison was a part in the U.S. House of Representatives. One was to the New York Times. One was to the Chicago Tribune. And one was to the Toledo Blade. All six letters told the story of what had happened, beginning with the experiment in Jason Gearneigh Hall and ending with his and Charlie's enforced isolation on Tashmore Pond.

When he had finished, he gave one of the letters to Charlie to read. She went through it slowly and carefully, taking almost an hour. It was the first time she had got the entire story, from beginning to end.

"You're going to mail these?" she asked when she finished.

"Yes," he said. "Tomorrow. I think tomorrow will be the last time I dare go across the pond." It had at last begun to warm up a little. The ice was still solid, but it creaked constantly now, and he didn't know how much longer it would be safe.

"What will happen, Daddy?"

He shook his head. "I don't know for sure. All I can do is hope that once the story is out, those people who have been chasing us will have to give it up."

Charlie nodded soberly. "You should have done it before."

"Yes," he said, knowing that she was thinking of the near cataclysm at the Manders farm last October. "Maybe I should have. But I never had a chance to think much, Charlie. Keeping us going was all I had time to think about. And what thinking you do get a chance to do when you're on the run... well, mostly it's stupid thinking. I kept hoping they'd give up and leave us alone. That was a terrible mistake."

"They won't make me go away, will they?" Charlie asked. "From you, I mean. We can stay together, can't we, Daddy?" "Yes," he said, not wanting to tell her that his conception of what might happen after the letters were mailed and received was probably as vague as hers. It was just "after."

"Then that's all I care about. And I'm not going to make anymore fires."

"All right," he said, and touched her hair. His throat was suddenly thick with a premonitory dread, and something that had happened near here suddenly occurred to him, something that he hadn't thought of for years. He had been out with his father and Granther, and Granther had given Andy his.22, which he called his varmint rifle, when Andy clamored for it. Andy had seen a squirrel and wanted to shoot it. His dad had started to protest, and Granther had hushed him with an odd little smile.

Andy had aimed the way Granther taught him; he squeezed the trigger rather than just jerking back on it (as Granther had also taught him), and he shot the squirrel. It tumbled off its limb like a stuffed toy, and Andy ran excitedly for it after handing the gun back to Granther. Up close, he had been struck dumb by what he saw. Up close, the squirrel was no stuffed toy. It wasn't dead. He had got it in the hindquarters and it lay there dying in its own bright dapples of blood, its black eyes awake and alive and full of a horrible suffering. Its fleas, knowing the truth already, were trundling off the body in three busy little lines.

His throat had closed with a snap, and at the age of nine, Andy tasted for the first time that bright, painty flavor of self-loathing. He stared numbly at his messy kill, aware that leis father and grandfather were standing behind him, their shadows lying over him-three generations of McGees standing over a murdered squirrel in the Vermont woods. And behind him, Granther said softly, Well, you done it, Andy. How do you like it? And the tears had come suddenly, overwhelming him, the hot tears of horror and realization-the realization that once it's done, it's done. He swore suddenly that he would never kill anything with a gun again. He swore it before God.

I'm not going to make anymore fires, Charlie had said, and in his mind Andy heard Granther's reply to him on the day he had shot the squirrel, the day he had sworn to God he would never do anything like that again. Never say that, Andy. God loves to make a man break a vow. It keeps him properly humble about his place in the world and his sense of self-control. About what Irv Manders had said to Charlie.

Charlie had found a complete set of Bomba the Jungle Boy books in the attic and was working her way slowly but surely through them. Now Andy looked at her, sitting in a dusty shaft of sunlight in the old black rocker, sitting just where his grandmother had always sat, usually with a basket of mending between her feet, and he struggled with an urge to tell her to take it back, to take it back while she still could, to tell her that she didn't understand. the terrible temptation: if the gun was left there long enough, sooner or later you would pick it up again.

God loves to make a man break a vow.

8

No one saw Andy mail his letters except Charles Payson, the fellow who had moved into Bradford in November and had since been trying to make a go of the old Bradford Notions "n" Novelties shop. Payson was a small, sad-faced man who had tried to buy Andy a drink on one of his visits to town. In the town itself, the expectation was that if Payson didn't make it work during the coming summer, Notions "n" Novelties would have a FOR SALE OR LEASE sign back in the window by September 15. He was a nice enough fellow, but he was having a hard scrabble. Bradford wasn't the town it used to be.

Andy walked up the street-he had left his skis stuck in the snow at the head of the road leading down to the Bradford Town Landing-and approached the general store. Inside, the oldsters watched him with mild interest. There had been a fair amount of talk about Andy that winter. The consensus about yonder man there was that he was on the run from something-a bankruptcy, maybe, or a divorce settlement. Maybe an angry wife who had been cheated out of custody of the kid: the small clothes Andy had bought hadn't been-lost on them. The consensus was also that he and the kid had maybe broken into one of the camps across the Pond and were spending the winter there. Nobody brought this possibility up to Bradford's constable, a Johnny-come-lately who had lived in town for only twelve years and thought he owned the place. Yonder man came from across the lake, from Tashmore, from Vermont. None of the old-timers who sat around Jake Rowley's stove in the Bradford general store had much liking for Vermont ways, them with their income tax and their snooty bottle law and that fucking Russian laid up in his house like a Czar, writing books no one could understand.

Let Vermonters handle their own problems, was the unanimous, if unstated, view. "He won't be crossin the pond much longer," one of them said. He took another bite from his Milky Way bar and began to gum it. "Not less he's got him a pair of water wings," another answered, and they all chuckled.

"We won't be seein him much longer," Jake said complacently as Andy approached the store. Andy was wearing Granther's old coat and a blue wool band pulled over his ears, and some memory-perhaps a family resemblance going back to Granther himself-danced fleetingly in Jake's mind and then blew away. "When the ice starts to go out, he'll just dry up and blow away. Him and whoever he's keepin over there."

Andy stopped outside, unslung his pack, and took out several letters. Then he came inside. The men forgathered there examined their nails, their watches, the old Pearl Kineo stove itself. One of them took out a gigantic blue railroad bandanna and hawked mightily into it.

Andy glanced around. "Morning, gentlemen."

"Mawnin to you," Jake Rowley said. "Get you anything?"

"You sell stamps, don't you?"

"Oh yes, Gov'ment trust me that far."

"I'd like six fifteens, please."

Jake produced them, tearing them carefully from one of the sheets in his old black postage book. "Something else for you today."

Andy thought, then smiled. It was the tenth of March. Without answering Jake, he went to the card rack beside the coffee grinder and picked out a large, ornate birthday card. TO YOU, DAUGHTER, ON YOUR SPECIAL DAY, it said. He brought it back and paid for it.

"Thanks," Jake said, and rang it up.

"Very welcome," Andy replied, and went out. They watched him adjust his headband, then stamp his letters one by one. The breath smoked out of his nostrils. They watched him go around the building to where the postbox stood, but none of them sitting around the stove could have testified in court as to whether or not he mailed those letters. He came back into view shouldering into his pack.

"Off he goes," one of the old-timers remarked.

"Civil enough fella," Jake said, and that closed the subject. Talk turned to other matters.

Charles Payson stood in the doorway of his store, which hadn't done three hundred dollars" worth of custom all winter long, and watched Andy go. Payson could have testified that the letters had been mailed; he had stood right here and watched him drop them into the slot in a bunch.

When Andy disappeared from sight, Payson went back inside and through the doorway behind the counter where he sold penny candy and Bang caps and bubble gum and into the living quarters behind. His telephone had a scrambler device attached to it. Payson called Virginia for instructions.

9

There was and is no post office in Bradford, New Hampshire (or in Tashmore, Vermont, for that matter); both towns were too small. The nearest post office to Bradford was in Teller, New Hampshire. At one-fifteen P.m. on that March 10, the small postal truck from Teller pulled up in front of the general store and the postman emptied the mail from the standing box around to the side where Jake had pumped jenny gas until 1970. The deposited mail consisted of Andy's six letters and a postcard from Miss Shirley Devine, a fifty-year-old maiden lady, to her sister in Tampa, Florida. Across the lake, Andy McGee was taking a nap and Charlie McGee was building a snowman.

The postman, Robert Everett, put the mail in a bag, swung the bag into the back of his blue and white truck, and then drove on to Williams, another small New Hampshire town in Teller's zip-code area. Then he U-turned in the middle of what the Williams residents laughingly called Main Street and started back to Teller, where all the mail would be sorted and sent on at about three o'clock that afternoon. Five miles outside of town, a beige Chevrolet Caprice was parked across the road, blocking both of the narrow lanes.

Everett parked by the snowbank and got out of his truck to see if he could help.

Two men approached him from the car. They showed him their credentials and explained what they wanted.

"No!" Everett said. He tried on a laugh and it came out sounding incredulous, as if someone had just told him they were going to open Tashmore Beach for swimming this very afternoon.

"If you doubt we are who we say we are-"one of them began. This was Orville Jamieson, sometimes known as OJ, sometimes known as The Juice. He didn't mind dealing with this hick postman; he didn't mind anything as long as his orders didn't take him any closer than three miles to that hellish little girl.

"No, it ain't that; it ain't that at all," Robert Everett said. He was scared, as scared as any man is when suddenly confronted with the force of the government, when gray enforcement bureaucracy suddenly takes on a real face, like something grim and solid swimming up out of a crystal ball. He was determined nonetheless. "But what I got here is the mail. The U.S. mail. You guys must understand that."

"This is a matter of national security," OJ said. After the fiasco in Hastings Glen, a protective corden had been thrown around the Manders place. The grounds and the remains of the house had got the fine-tooth-comb treatment. As a result, OJ had recovered The Windsucker, which now rested comfortably against the left side of his chest.

"You say so, but that ain't good enough," Everett said.

OJ unbuttoned his Carroll Reed parka so that Robert Everett could see The Windsucker. Everett's eyes widened, and OJ smiled a little. "'Now, you don't want me to pull this, do you?"

Everett couldn't believe this was happening. He tried one last time. "Do you guys know the penalty for robbing the U.S. mail? They put you in Leavenworth, Kansas, for that."

"You can clear it with your postmaster when you get back to Teller," the other man said, speaking for the first time. "Now let's quit this fucking around, okay? Give us the bag of out-of-town mail."

Everett gave him the small sack of mail from Bradford and Williams. They opened it right there on the road and sorted through it impersonally. Robert Everett felt anger and a kind of sick shame. What they were doing wasn't right, not even if it was the secrets of the nuclear bomb in there. Opening the U.S. mail by the side of the road wasn't right. Ludicrously, he found himself feeling about the same way he would have felt if a strange man had come barging into his house and pulled off his wife's clothes.

"You guys are going to hear about this," he said in a choked, scared voice. "You'll see."

"Here they are," the other fellow said to OJ. He handed him six letters, all addressed in the same careful hand. Robert Everett recognized them well enough. They had come from the box at the Bradford general store. OJ put the letters in his pocket and the two of them walked back to their Caprice, leaving the opened bag of mail on the road. "You guys are going to hear about this!" Everett cried in a shaking voice.

Without looking back, OJ said, "Speak to your postmaster before you speak to anyone else. If you want to keep your Postal Service pension, that is." They drove away. Everett watched them go, raging, scared, sick to his stomach. At last he picked up the mailbag and tossed it back into the truck. "Robbed," he said, surprised to find he was near tears. "Robbed, I been robbed, oh goddammit, I been robbed."