hat woman didn't act like it was a joke. I'll tell you the truth, Johnny ¨C she sort of scared me.'

John Graham's normally pleasant face grew stern and hard. The expression did not look at home on his face, but neither did it look faked or insincere.

'I know,' he said, picking up their wrappings and napkins and plastic baskets. 'And there's going to be an apology made for that. I find foolishness for the sake of foolishness agreeable enough, but when someone scares my wife ¨C hell, they scared me a little, too ¨C I draw the line. Ready to go back?'

'Can you find it again?'

He grinned, and immediately looked more like himself. 'I left a trail of breadcrumbs.'

'How wise you are, my darling,' she said, and got up. She was smiling again, and John was glad to see it. She drew a deep breath ¨C it did wonders for the front of the blue chambray work-shirt she was wearing ¨C and let it out. 'The humidity seems to have dropped.'

'Yeah.' John deposited their waste into a trash basket with a left-handed hook shot and then winked at her. 'So much for rainy season.'

But by the time they turned onto the Hempstead Road, the humidity had returned, and with a vengeance. John felt as if his own tee-shirt had turned into a clammy mass of cobweb clinging to his chest and back. The sky, now turning a delicate shade of evening primrose, was still clear, but he felt that, if he'd had a straw, he could have drunk directly from the air.

There was only one other house on the road, at the foot of the long hill with the Hempstead Place at the top. As they drove past it, John saw the silhouette of a woman standing motionless at one of the windows and looking out at them.

'Well, there's your friend Milly's great-aunt,' John said. 'She sure was a sport to call the local crazies down at the general store and tell them we were coming. I wonder if they would have dragged out the whoopee cushions and joy-buzzers and chattery teeth if we'd stayed a little longer.'

'That dog had his own built-in joy-buzzer.'

John laughed and nodded.

Five minutes later they were turning into their own driveway. It was badly overgrown with weeds and dwarf bushes, and John intended to take care of that little situation before the summer got much older. The Hempstead Place itself was a rambling country farmhouse, added to by succeeding generations whenever the need ¨C or maybe just the urge ¨C to do some building happened to strike. A barn stood behind it, connected to the house by three rambling, zig-zag sheds. In this flush of early summer, two of the three sheds were almost buried in fragrant drifts of honeysuckle.

It commanded a gorgeous view of the town, especially on a clear night like this one. John wondered briefly just how it could be so clear when the humidity was so high. Elise joined him in front of the car and they stood there for a moment, arms around each other's waists, looking at the hills, which rolled gently off in the direction of Augusta, losing themselves in the shadows of evening.

'It's beautiful,' she murmured.

'And listen,' he said.

There was a marshy area of reeds and high grass fifty yards or so behind the barn, and in it a chorus of frogs sang and thumped and snapped the elastics God had for some reason stretched in their throats.

'Well,' she said, 'the frogs are all present and accounted for, anyway.'

'No toads, though.' He looked up at the clear sky, in which Venus had now opened her coldly burning eye. 'There they are, Elise! Up there! Clouds of toads!'

She giggled.

"Tonight in the small town of Willow,¡± ' he intoned, "a cold front of toads met a warm front of newts, and the result was¡­". She elbowed him. 'You,' she said. 'Let's go in.' They went in. And did not pass Go. And did not collect two hundred dollars.

They went directly to bed.

Elise was startled out of a satisfying drowse an hour or so later by a thump on the roof. She got up on her elbows. 'What was that, Johnny?'

'Huzz,' John said, and turned over on his side.

Toads, she thought, and giggled¡­ but it was a nervous giggle. She got up and went to the window, and before she looked for anything, which might have fallen on the ground, she found herself looking up at the sky.

It was still cloudless, and now shot with a trillion spangled stars. She looked at them, for a moment hypnotized by their simple silent beauty.

Thud.

She jerked back from the window and looked up at the ceiling. Whatever it was, it had hit the roof just overhead.

'John! Johnny! Wake up!'

'Huh? What?' He sat up, his hair all tangled tufts and clock-springs.