interested in getting the lowdown on Tagliani-Turner, for the moment 1 was more interested in what
had happened to the local landscape.
After a block or two of silence I asked, “What in hell happened to Dunetown?”
He stared over at me with a funny look on his face, then, as if answering his own question, said, “Oh,
yeah, I keep forgetting you lived here once”
“Not here,” 1 said. “Not in this town. Anyway, 1 didn?t live here. I was, oh. . I guess you could say I
was a summer guest.”
“When was that again?”
I was trying to be casual, trying to keep away from personal history. I didn?t know him well enough to
show him any scars.
“Twenty years ago, just for a couple of months. It?s hardly worth mentioning,” I answered in an
offhand way.
“You were just a kid then.”
“Yeah, a senior in college.” While I didn?t want to get too personal, I didn?t want to play games,
either.
“Teddy Findley was my best friend,” I added after a second or two.
“Oh,” he said. “Then you know what?s been going on.”
“No, I got out of touch with the family,” I said.
“You know the Findley kid is dead?”
“You mean Teddy?”
“Yeah.”
“Yes,” I said. “It?s after that I kind of lost track of things.”
“Well, what happened was the racetrack, that?s what. The town got bent. Twenty years ago there was
probably, what, seventy-five, a hundred thousand people?”
“Sounds about right.”
“Probably three hundred thousand now, about half of ?em from the shady side of the tracks. What you
got here, you got a major racetrack, and a beauty. Looks like Saratoga. A classy track, okay? That?s a
gimmee.”
“Where is it?”
“Back behind us, on the other side of the river. It?s dark now, anyway.”
“Okay, so you got a classy track. Then what?”
“I think maybe what the money in town expected was kind of another Ascot. Everybody standing
around sipping tea, wavin? their pinkies in the air. What they got is horseplayers, which come in every
