saw what was happening on the floor of the apartment, he sat up. 'Peter did it,' he heard Don say beside him.
The boy was standing six feet away from them, his eyes intent on the body of the woman lying some little way from them. Don was on his knees, rubbing his neck. Ricky met Don's eyes, saw both horror and pain there, and then both of them looked back down at Anna Mostyn.
For a moment she looked as she had when he had first seen her in the reception room at Wheat Row: a young woman with a lovely fox face and dark hair: even now the old man saw the real intelligence and false humanity in her oval face. Her hand clutched the bone handle protruding out just below her breastbone; dark blood already poured from the long wound. The woman thrashed on the floor, contorting her face; her eyes fluttered. Random flakes of snow whirled in through the open window and settled down on each of them.
Anna Mostyn's eyes flew open, and Ricky braced himself, thinking she would say something; but the lovely eyes drifted out of focus, not seeming to recognize any of the men. A wave of blood gushed from her wound; then another boiled out, sheeting across her body and touching the knees of the two men; she half-smiled, and a third wave rushed across her body and pooled on the floor.
For an instant only, as if the corpse of Anna Mostyn were a film, a photographic transparency over another substance, the three of them saw a writhing life through the dead woman's skin-no simple stag or owl, no human or animal body, but a mouth opened beneath Anna Mostyn's mouth and a body constrained within Anna Mostyn's bloody clothing moved with ferocious life: it was as swirling and varied as an oil slick, and it angrily flashed out at them for the moment it was visible; then it blackened and faded, and only the dead woman lay on the floor.
In the next second, the color of her face died to chalky white and her limbs curled inward, forced by a wind the others could not feel. The dead woman drew up like a sheet of paper tossed on a fire, drawing in, her entire body curling inward like her arms and legs. She fluttered and shrank before them, becoming half her size, then a quarter of her size, no longer anything human, merely a piece of tortured flesh curling and shrinking before them, hurtled and buffeted by an unfelt wind.
The tenement room itself seemed to exhale, releasing a surprisingly human sigh through whatever was left of her throat. A green light flashed about them, flaring like a thousand matches: and the remainder of Anna Mostyn's body fluttered once more and disappeared into itself. Ricky, by now leaning forward on his hands and knees, saw how the particles of snow falling where the body had been spun around in a vortex and followed it into oblivion.
Thirteen blocks away, the house across the street from John Jaffrey's on Montgomery Street exploded into itself. Milly Sheehan heard the crack of the explosion, and when she rushed to her front window she was in time to see the facade of Eva Galli's house fold inward like cardboard, and then break up into separate bricks flying inward to the fire already roaring up through the center of the house.
'The lynx,' Ricky breathed. Don took his eyes from the spot on the floor where Anna Mostyn had dwindled into vacant air, and saw a sparrow sitting on the sill of the open window. The little bird cocked its head at the three of them, Don and Ricky already beginning to move across the floor toward it, Peter still gazing at the empty floor, and then the sparrow lifted itself off the sill and flew out through the window.
'That's it, isn't it?' Peter asked. 'It's all over now. We did it all.'
'Yes, Peter,' Ricky said. 'It's all over.'
And for a moment the two men exchanged glances of agreement. Don stood up and walked as if idly to the window and saw only a slackening storm. He turned to the boy and embraced him.
20
'How do you feel?' Don asked.
'He asks how I feel,' Ricky said, supported by pillows on his bed in the Binghamton hospital. 'Pneumonia is no fun. It affects the system adversely. I advise you to refrain from getting it.'
'I'll try,' Don said. 'You almost died. They just got the highway open in time for the ambulance to bring you up here. If you hadn't pulled through, I'd have had to take your wife to France this spring.'
'Don't tell that to Stella. She'll run in here and pull my tubes out.' He smiled wryly. 'She's so eager to get to France she'd even go with a pup like you.'
'How long will you have to stay in here?'
'Two more weeks. Apart from the way I feel, it's not too bad. Stella has managed to terrify all the nurses, so they take excellent care of me. Thank you for the flowers, by the way.'
'I missed you,' Don said. 'Peter misses you too.'
'Yes,' Ricky said simply.
'It's a funny thing about this whole affair. I feel closer to you and Peter-and Sears, I guess I have to say-than anyone since Alma Mobley.'
'Well, you know my thoughts about that. I blurted them all out when that young doctor doped me to the gills. The Chowder Society is dead, long live the Chowder Society. Sears once said to me that he wished he wasn't so old. I was a bit taken aback at the time, but I agree with him now. I wish I could see Peter Barnes grow up-I wish I could help him. You'll have to do that for me. We owe him our lives, you know.'
'I know. Whatever we don't owe to your cold.'
'I was completely befuddled, back in that room.'
'So was I.'
'Well, thank God for Peter. I'm glad you didn't tell him.'
'Agreed. He's been through enough. But there is still a lynx to be shot.'
Don nodded.
'Because,' Ricky continued, 'otherwise she'll just come back again. And keep on coming back until all of us and most of our relatives are dead. I've supported my children for too long to want to see them go that way. And as much as I hate to say it, it looks like it's your job.'
'In every way,' Don said. 'It was really you who destroyed both Gregory and Fenny. And Peter killed their boss. I have to take care of the remaining business.'
'I don't envy you the job. But I do have confidence in you. You have the knife?'
'I picked it up off the floor.'
'Good. I'd hate to think of it being lost. You know, back in that terrible room I think I saw the answer to one of the puzzles Sears and I and the others used to talk about. I think we saw the reason for your uncle's heart attack.'
'I think so too,' Don said. 'Just for a second. I didn't know that you saw it too.'
'Poor Edward. He must have walked into John's spare bedroom, expecting at the worst to find his actress in bed with Freddy Robinson. And instead she- what? Threw off the mask.'
Ricky was now very tired, and Don stood up to go. He put a stack of paperback books and a bag of oranges on the table beside Ricky's bed.
'Don?' Even the old man's voice was grainy with exhaustion.
'Yes?'
'Forget about pampering me. Just shoot me a lynx.'
21
Three weeks later, when Ricky was at last released from the hospital, the storms had wholly vanished, and Milburn, no longer under siege, convalesced and healed as surely as the old lawyer. Supplies reached the grocery stores and supermarkets: Rhoda Flagler saw Bitsy Underwood at the Bay Tree Market, turned red as a radish and rushed over to apologize for pulling out her hair. 'Oh, those were terrible days,' Bitsy said. 'I probably would have clobbered you if you'd got to that damned pumpkin first.'
The schools reopened; businessmen and bankers went back to work, taking down their shutters and facing the mounds of paperwork that had accumulated on their desks; slowly, the joggers and walkers began to appear on Milburn's streets again. Annie and Anni, Humphrey Stalladge's two good-looking barmaids, grieved for Lewis Benedikt and married the men they were living with; they conceived within a week of one another. If they had boys, they'd name them Lewis.
Some businesses never did open up again: a few men had gone bankrupt-you have to pay rent and property taxes on a shop, even if it is buried under a snowdrift. Others closed for more somber reasons. Leota Mulligan thought about running the Rialto by herself, but sold the site to a franchise chain and married Clark's brother six
