ou're gonna talk to me, woman,' his eyes said. 'You're going to tell me everything I want to hear twice, if that's the way I want it.'

And my own eyes were sayin back, 'No I ain't, chummy. You can sit there drillin on me with those diamond-bit baby-blues of yours until hell's a skatin rink and you won't get another word outta me unless you open your mouth n ask for it.'

We went on that way for damned near a full minute, duellin with our eyes, y'might say, and toward the end of it I could feel myself weakenin, wantin to say some thin to him, even if it was only 'Didn't your Ma ever teach you it ain't polite to stare?' Then Garrett spoke up - or rather his stomach did. It let out a long goiiiinnnnggg sound.

McAuliffe looked at him, disgusted as hell, and Garrett got out his pocket-knife and started to clean under his fingernails. McAuliffe pulled a notebook from the inside pocket of his wool coat (wool! in July!), looked at somethin in it, then put it back.

'He tried to climb out,' he says at last, as casual as a man might say 'I've got a lunch appointment.'

It felt like somebody'd jabbed a meatfork into my lower back, where Joe hit me with the stovelength that time, but I tried not to show it. 'Oh, ayuh?' I says.

'Yes,' McAuliffe says. 'The shaft of the well is lined with large stones (only he said 'stanes,' Andy, like they do), and we found bluidy handprints on several of them. It appears that he gained his feet, then slowly began to make his way up, hand over hand. It must have been a Herculean effort, made despite a pain more excruciating than I can imagine.'

'I'm sorry to hear he suffered,' I said. My voice was as calm as ever - at least I think it was - but I could feel the sweat startin to break in my armpits, and I remember being scairt it'd spring out on my brow or in the little hollows of my temples where he could see it. 'Poor old Joe.'

'Yes indaid,' McAuliffe says, his lighthouse eyes borin n flashin away. 'Poor. . . auld. . . Joe. I think he might have actually got out on his own. He probably would have died soon after even if he had, but yes; I think he might have got out. Something prevented him from doing so, however.'

'What was it?' I ast.

'He suffered a fractured skull,' McAuliffe said. His eyes were as bright as ever, but his voice'd become as soft as a purrin cat. 'We found a large rock between his legs. It was covered wi' your husband's bluid, Mrs St George. And in that bluid we found a small number of porcelain fragments. Do you know what I deduce from them?'

One . . . two . . . three.

'Sounds like that rock must have busted his false teeth as well's his head,' I says. 'Too bad - Joe was partial to em, and I don't know how Lucien Mercier's gonna make him look just right for the viewin without em.'

McAuliffe's lips drew back when I said that n I got a good look at his teeth. No dentures there. I s'pose he meant it to look like a smile, but it didn't. Not a bit.

'Yes,' he says, showin me both rows of his neat little teeth all the way to the gumline. 'Yes, that's my conclusion, as well - those porcelain shards are from his lower plate. Now, Mrs St George - do you have any idea of how that rock might have come to strike your husband just as he was on the verge of escaping the well?'

One . . . two . three.

'Nope,' I says. 'Do you?'

'Yes,' he says. 'I rather suspect someone pulled it out of the earth and smashed it cruelly and wi' malice aforethought into his upturned, pleading face.'

Wasn't nobody said anything after that. I wanted to, God knows; I wanted to jump in as quick as ever I could n say, 'It wasn't me. Maybe somebody did it, but it wasn't me.' I couldn't, though, because I was back in the blackberry tangles and this time there was friggin wells everyplace.

Instead of talkin I just sat there lookin at him, but I could feel the sweat tryin to break out on me again and I could feel my clasped hands wantin to lock down on each other. The fingernails'd turn white if they did that. . . and he'd notice. McAuliffe was a man built to notice such things; it'd be another chink to shine his version of the Battiscan Light into. I tried to think of Vera, and how she woulda looked at him - as if he was only a little dab of dogshit on one of her shoes - but with his eyes borin into me like they was just then, it didn't seem to do any good. Before, it'd been like she was almost there in the room with me, but it wasn't like that anymore. Now there was no one there but me n that neat little Scots doctor, who probably fancied himself just like the amateur detectives in the magazine stories (and whose testimony had already sent over a dozen people up n down the coast to jail, I found out later), and I could feel myself gettin closer n closer to openin my mouth n blurtin somethin out. And the hell of it was, Andy, I didn't have the slightest idear what it'd be when it finally came. I could hear the clock on Garrett's desk tickin - it had a big hollow sound.

And I was gonna say somethin when the one person I'd forgot - Garrett Thibodeau - spoke up instead. He spoke in a worried, fast voice, and I realized he couldn't stand no more of that silence, either - he musta thought it was gonna go on until somebody had to scream just to relieve the tension.

'Now John,' he says, 'I thought we agreed that, if Joe pulled on that stone just right, it could have come out on its own and -,

'Mon, will ye not shut op!' McAuliffe yelled at him in a high, frustrated sort of voice, and I relaxed. It was all over. I knew it, and I believe that little Scotsman knew it, too. It was like the two us had been in a black room together, and him ticklin my face with what might have been a razor-blade. . . n then clumsy old Constable Thibodeau stubbed his toe, fell against the window, and the shade went up with a bang n a rattle, lettin in the daylight, and I seen it was only a feather he'd been touchin me with, after all.

Garrett muttered somethin about how there was no call for McAuliffe to talk to him that way, but the doc didn't pay him no mind. He turned back to me and said 'Well, Mrs St George?' in a hard way, like he had me in a corner, but by then we both knew better. All he could do was hope I'd make a mistake. . . but I had three kids to think about, and havin kids makes you careful.

'I've told you what I know,' I says. 'He got drunk while we were waitin for the eclipse. I made him a sandwich, thinkin it might sober him up a little, but it didn't. He got yellin, then he choked me n batted me around a little, so I went up to Russian Meadow. When I come back, he was gone. I thought he'd gone off with one of his friends, but he was down the well all the time. I s'pose he was tryin to take a short-cut out to the road. He might even have been lookin for me, wantin to apologize. That's somethin I won't never know . . . n maybe it's just as well.' I give him a good hard look. 'You might try a little of that medicine yourself, Dr McAuliffe.'

'Never mind yer advice, madam,' McAuliffe says, and those spots of color in his cheeks was burnin higher n hotter'n ever. 'Are ye glad he's dead? Tell me that!'

'What in holy tarnal hell has that got to do with what happened to him?' I ast. 'Jesus Christ, what's wrong with you?'

He didn't answer - just picked up his pipe in a hand that was shakin the tiniest little bit and went to work lightin it again. He never ast another question; the last question that was ast of me that day was ast by Garrett Thibodeau. McAuliffe didn't ask it because it didn't matter, at least not to him. It meant somethin to Garrett, though, and it meant even more to me, because nothing was going to end when I walked out of the Town Office Building that day; in some ways, me walkin out was gonna be just the beginning. That last question and the way I answered it mattered plenty, because it's usually the things that wouldn't mean squat in a courtroom that get whispered about the most over back fences while women hang out their warsh or out on the lobster-boats while men are sittin with their backs against the pilothouse n eatin their lunches. Those things may not send you to prison, but they can hang you in the eyes of the town.

'Why in God's name did you buy him a bottle of liquor in the first place?' Garrett kinda bleated. 'What got into you, Dolores?'

'I thought he'd leave me alone if he had somethin to drink,' I said. 'I thought we could sit together in peace n watch the eclipse n he'd leave me alone.'

I didn't cry, not really, but I felt one tear go rollin down my cheek. I sometimes think that's the reason I was able to go on livin on Little Tall for the next thirty years - that one single tear. If not for that, they mighta driven me out with their whisperin and carpin and pointin at me from behind their hands -ayuh, in the end they mighta. I'm tough, but I don't know if anyone's tough enough to stand up to thirty years of gossip n little anonymous notes sayin things like 'You got away with murder.' I did get a few of those - and I got a pretty good idear of who sent em, too, although that ain't neither here nor there at this late date - but they stopped by the time school let back in that fall. And so I guess you could say that I owe all the rest of my life, includin this part here, to that single tear . . . and to Garrett puttin the word out that in the end I hadn't been too stony-hearted to cry for Joe. There wasn't nothing calculated about it, either, and don't you go thinkin there was. I was thinkin about how sorry I was that Joe'd suffered the way the little bandbox Scotsman said he had. In spite of everything he'd done and how I'd come to hate him since I'd first found out what he was tryin to do to Selena, I'd never intended for him to suffer. I thought the fall'd kill him, Andy - I swear on the name of God I thought the fall'd kill him outright.

Poor old Garrett Thibodeau went as red's a stopsign. He fumbled a wad of Kleenex out of the box of em on his desk and kinda groped it out at me without lookin - I imagine he thought that first tear meant I was gonna go a gusher - and apologized for puttin me through 'such a stressful interrogation.' I bet those were just about the biggest words he knew.

McAuliffe gave out a humph! sound at that, said somethin about how he'd be at the inquest to hear my statement taken, and then he left - stalked out, actually, n slammed the door behind him hard enough to rattle the glass. Garrett gave him time to clear out n then walked me to the door, holdin my arm but still not lookin at me (it was actually sorta comical) and mutterin all the time. I ain't sure what he was mutterin about, but I s'pose that, whatever it was, it was really Garrett's way of sayin he was sorry. That man had a tender heart and couldn't stand to see someone unhappy, I'll say that for him . . . and I'll say somethin else for Little Tall: where else could a man like that not only be constable for almost twenty years but get a dinner in his honor complete with a standin ovation at the end of it when lie finally retired? I'll tell you what I think - a place where a tender-hearted man can succeed as an officer of the law ain't such a bad place to spend your life. Not at all. Even so, I was never gladder to hear a door close behind me than I was when Garrett's clicked shut that day.

So that was the bugger, and the inquest the next day wasn't nothing compared to it. McAuliffe ast me many of the same questions, and they were hard questions, but they didn't have no power over me anymore, and we both knew it. My one tear was all very well, but McAuliffe's questions - plus the fact that everyone could see he was pissed like a bear at me - went a long way toward startin the talk which has run on the island ever since. Oh well; there would have been some talk no matter what, ain't that right?

The verdict was death by misadventure. McAuliffe didn't like it, and at the end he read his findins in a dead-level voice, without ever lookin up once, but what he said was official enough: Joe fell down the well while drunk, had prob'ly called for help for quite awhile without gettin an answer, then tried to climb out on his own hook. He got most of the way to the top, then put his weight on the wrong stone. It pulled free, bashed him in the head hard enough to fracture his skull (not to mention his dentures), and knocked him back down to the bottom again, where he died.

Maybe the biggest thing - and I never realized this until later - was they couldn't find no motive to hang on me. Of course, the people in town (and Dr McAuliffe too, I have no doubt) thought that if I had done it, I did it to get shut of him beatin me, but all by itself that didn't carry enough weight. Only Selena and Mr Pease knew how much motive I'd really had, and no one, not even smart old Dr McAuliffe, thought of questionin Mr Pease. He didn't come forward on his own hook, either. If he had've, our little talk in The Chatty Buoy would've come out, and he'd most likely have been in trouble with the bank. I'd talked him into breakin the rules, after all.

As for Selena . . well, I think Selena tried me in her own court. Every now n then I'd see her eyes on me, dark n squally, and in my mind I'd hear her askin, 'Did you do anything to him? Did you, Mamma? Is it my fault? Am I the one who has to pay?'

I think she did pay - that's the worst part. The little island girl who was never out of the state of Maine until she went to Boston for a swim-meet when she was eighteen has become a smart, successful career-woman in New York City there was an article about her in the New York Times two years ago, did you know that? She writes for all those magazines and still finds time to write me once a week. . . but they feel like duty-letters, just like the phone-calls twice a month feel like dutycalls. I think the calls n the chatty little notes are the way she pays her heart to be quiet about how she don't ever come back here, about how she's cut her ties with me. Yes, I think she paid, all right; I think the one who was the most blameless of all paid the most, and that she's payin still.

She's forty-four years old, she's never married, she's too thin (I can see that in the pitchers she sometimes sends), and I think she drinks - I've heard it in her voice more'n once when she calls. I got an idear that might be one of the reasons she don't come home anymore; she doesn't want me to see her drinkin like her father drank. Or maybe because she's afraid of what she might say if she had one too many while I was right handy. What she might ask.

But never mind; it's all water over the dam now. I got away with it, that's the important thing. If there'd been insurance, or if Pease hadn't kep his mouth shut, I'm not sure I woulda. Of the two, a fat insurance policy prob'ly woulda been worse. That last thing in God's round world I needed was some smart insurance investigator hookin up with that smart little Scots doctor who was already mad as hell at the idear of bein beaten by an ignorant island woman. Nope, if there'd been two of em, I think they might've got me.

So what happened? Why, what I imagine always happens in cases like that, when a murder's been done and not found out. Life went on, that's all. Nobody popped up with last-minute information, like in a movie, I didn't try to kill nobody else, n God didn't strike me dead with a lightnin-bolt. Maybe He felt hittin me with lightnin over the likes of Joe St George woulda been a waste of electricity.

Life just went on. I went back to Pinewood n to Vera. Selena took up her old friendships when she went back to school that fall, and sometimes I heard her laughin on the phone. When the news finally sunk in, Little Pete took it hard. . . and so did Joe Junior. Joey took it harder'n I expected, actually. He lost some weight n had some nightmares, but by the next summer he seemed mostly all right again. The only thing that really changed durin the rest of 1963 was that I had Seth Reed come over n put a cement cap on the old well.

Six months after he died, Joe's estate was settled in County Probate. I wa'ant even there. A week or so later I got a paper tellin me that everythin was mine - I could sell it or swap it or drop it in the deep blue sea. When I'd finished goin through what he'd left, I thought the last of those choices looked like the best one. One kinda surprisin thing I discovered, though: if your husband dies sudden, it can come in handy if all his friends were idiots, like Joe's were. I sold the old shortwave radio he'd been tinkerin on for ten years to Norris Pinette for twenty-five dollars, and the three junk trucks settin in the back yard to Tommy Anderson. That fool was more'n glad to have em, and I used the money to buy a '59 Chevy that had wheezy valves but ran good otherwise. I also had Joe's savins passbook made over to me, and re-opened the kids' college accounts.

Oh, and one other thing - in January of 1964, I started goin by my maiden name again. I didn't make no particular fanfare about it, but I was damned if I was gonna drag St George around behind me the rest of my life, like a can tied to a dog's tail. I guess you could say I cut the string holdin the can. . . but I didn't get rid of him as easy as I got rid of his name, I can tell you that.

Not that I expected to; I'm sixty-five, and I've known for at least fifty of those years that most of what bein human's about is makin choices and payin the bills when they come due. Some of the choices are pretty goddam nasty, but that don't give a person leave to just walk away from em - especially not if that person's got others dependin on her to do for em what they can't do for themselves. In a case like that, you just have to make the best choice you can n then pay the price. For me, the price was a lot of nights when I woke up in a cold sweat from bad dreams n even more when I never got to sleep at all; that and the sound the rock made when it hit him in the face, bustin his skull and his dentures -that sound like a china plate on a brick hearth. I've heard it for thirty years. Sometimes it's what wakes me up, and sometimes it's what keeps me outta sleep and sometimes it surprises me in broad daylight. I might be sweepin the porch at home or polishin the silver at Vera's or sittin down to my lunch with the TV turned to the Oprah show and all at once I'll hear it. That sound. Or the thud when he hit bottom. Or his voice, comm up outta the well:

'Duh-lorrrr-issss .

I don't s'pose those sounds I sometimes hear are so different from whatever it was that Vera really saw when she screamed about the wires in the corners or the dust bunnies under the bed. There were times, especially after she really began to fail, when I'd crawl in bed with her n hold her n think of the sound the rock made, n then close my eyes n see a china plate strikin a brick hearth and shatterin all to bits. When I saw that I'd hug her like she was my sister, or like she was myself. We'd lie in that bed, each with her own fright, and finally we'd drowse off together - her with me to keep the dust bunnies away, and me with her to keep away the sound of the china plate - and sometimes before I went to sleep I'd think, 'This is how. This is how you pay off bein a bitch. And it ain't no use saym if you hadn't been a bitch you wouldn't've had to pay, because sometimes the world makes you be a bitch. When it's all doom n dark outside and only you inside to first make a light n then tend it, you have to be a bitch. But oh, the price. The terrible price.'

Andy, do you s'pose I could have one more tiny little nip from that bottle of yours? I'll never tell a soul.

Thank you. And thank you, Nancy Bannister, for puttin up with such a long-winded old broad as me. How your fingers holdin out?

Are they? Good. Don't lose your courage now; I've gone at it widdershins, I know, but I guess I've finally gotten around to the part you really want to hear about, just the same. That's good, because it's late and I'm tired. I've been workin my whole life, but I can't remember ever bein as tired as I am right now.

I was out hangin laundry yest'y mornin - it seems like six years ago, but it was only yest'y - and Vera was havin one of her bright days. That's why it was all so unexpected, and partly why I got so flustered. When she had her bright days she sometimes got bitchy, but that was the first n last time she got crazy.

So I was down below in the side yard and she was up above in her wheelchair, supervisin the operation the way she liked to do. Every now n then she'd holler down, 'Six pins, Dolores! Six pins on every last one of those sheets! Don't you try to get away with just four, because I'm watching!'

'Yeah,' I says, 'I know, and I bet you only wish it was forty degrees colder and a twenty-knot gale blowin.'

'What?' she caws down at me. 'What did you say, Dolores Claiborne?'

'I said someone must be spreadin manure in their garden,' I says, 'because I smell a lot more bullshit around here than usual.'

'Are you being smart, Dolores?' she calls back in her cracked, wavery voice.

She sounded about like she did on any day when a few more sunbeams than usual was findin their way into her attic. I knew she might get up to mischief later on, but I didn't much care - right then I was just glad to hear her makin as much sense as she was. To tell you the truth, it seemed like old times. She'd been number'n a pounded thumb for the last three or four months, and it was sorta nice to have her back. . . or as much of the old Vera as was ever gonna come back, if you see what I mean.

'No, Vera,' I called up to her. 'If I'd been smart, I'd've gotten done workin for you a long time ago.'

I expected her to yell somethin else down at me then, but she never. So I went on hangin up her sheets n her diapers n her warshcloths n all the rest. Then, with half the basket still to do, I stopped. I had a bad feeling. I can't say why, or even where it started. All at once it was just there. And for just a moment the strangest thought came to me: 'That girl's in trouble. . . the one I saw on the day of the eclipse, the one who saw me. She's all grown up now, almost Selena's age, but she's in terrible trouble.'

I turned around n looked up, almost expectin to see the grownup version of that little girl in her bright striped dress n pink lipstick, but I didn't see nobody, and that was wrong. It was wrong because Vera should have been there, just about hangin out onto the roof to make sure I used the right number of clothespins. But she was gone, and I didn't understand how that could be, because I'd put her in her chair myself, and then set the brake once I had it by the window the way she liked.

Then I heard her scream.

'Duh-lorrrrr-isss!'

Such a chill ran up my back when I heard that, Andy! It was like Joe had come back. For a moment I was just frozen to the spot. Then she screamed again, and that second time I recognized it was her.

'Duh-lorrr-isss! It's dust bunnies! They're everywhere! Oh-dear God! Oh-dear God! Duh-lorrr-iss, help! Help me!'

I turned to run for the house, tripped over the damned laundry-basket, and went sprawlin over it n into the sheets I'd just hung. I got tangled up in em somehow n had to fight my way out. For just a minute it was like the sheets had grown hands and were tryin to strangle me, or just hold me back. And all the while that was goin on, Vera kep screamin, and I thought of the dream I'd had that one time, the dream of the dust-head with all the long snaggly dust-teeth. Only what I saw in my mind's eye was Joe's face on that head, and the eyes were all dark n blank, like someone had pushed two lumps of coal into a cloud of dust, and there they hung n floated.

'Dolores, oh please come quick! Oh please come quick!

The dust bunnies! THE DUST BUNNIES ARE EVERYWHERE !

Then she just screamed. It was horrible. You'd never in your wildest dreams have thought a fat old bitch like Vera Donovan could scream that loud. It was like fire n flood n the end of the world all rolled up into one.

I fought my way clear of the sheets somehow, and as I got up I felt one of my slip-straps pop, just like on the day of the eclipse, when Joe almost killed me before I managed to get shut of him. And you know that feelin you get when it seems like you've been someplace before, and know all the things people are gonna say before they say em? That feelin came over me so strong it was like there were ghosts all around me, ticklin me with fingers I couldn't quite see.

And you know somethin else? They felt like dusty ghosts.

I ran in the kitchen door n pelted up the dark stairs as fast as my legs'd carry me, and all the time she was screamin, screamin, screamin. My slip started to slide down, and when I got to the back landin I looked around, sure I was gonna see Joe stumblin up right behind me n snatchin at the hem.

Then I looked back the other way, and I seen Vera. She was three-quarters of the way down the hall toward the front staircase, waddlin along with her back to me n screamin as she went. There was a big brown stain on the seat of her nightgown where she'd soiled herself - not out of meanness or bitchiness that last time, but out of plain cold fear.

Her wheelchair was stuck crosswise in her bedroom door. She must've released the brake when she saw whatever it was that had scared her so. Always before when she come down with a case of the horrors, the only thing she could do was sit or lay where she was n bawl for help, and there'll be plenty of people who'll tell you she couldn't move under her own power, but she did yesterday; I swear she did. She released the brake on her chair, turned it, wheeled it across the room, then somehow got out of it when it got stuck in the doorway n went staggerin off down the hall.

I stood there, just frozen to the spot for the first second or two, watchin her lurch along and wonderin what she'd seen that was terrible enough to get her to do what she was doin, to walk after her days of walkin should have been over what that thing was that she could only think to call the dust bunnies.

But I seen where she was headed - right for the front stairs.