scissors into a basket in the herb garden. Timmy and Dale were in the midst of a game of Scrabble and acted distracted and vaguely annoyed by my interruption.
'When did they leave?' I asked.
'It must have been not long after you did,' Timmy said 'We were all still asleep. What time did you leave for Attica?'
'Six-thirty.'
'I was up at seven,' Dale said, 'and they were out of here by then. They left the note here on the table '
'Would you like some iced tea?' Timmy asked, indicating a perspiring crystal pitcher and a tray of glasses.
Helping myself, I said, 'Where's the note?'
It appeared to be Dale's turn in the Scrabble game, so it was Timmy who glanced around the room in search of Dan's note. 'Here it is.' He turned over the sheet of typing paper their Scrabble scores were written on-Dale was leading, 180 to 167-and on the other side was the scrawled note: 'Don't worry about us-Dan.'
I said, 'Is that Dan's handwriting?'
'I think so,' Dale said, not looking up from her letter holder. 'Janet saw it, and she didn't say it wasn't Dan's handwriting.'
'Did the phone ring, that anybody knows of, before they left? Could they have received a call from someone?'
'I didn't hear it,' Timmy said. 'And there's a phone in our room.'
'Ours too,' Dale said. 'But it's only rung once all day. That was around noon, when Pauline called for Janet.'
'Was Janet here?'
'Yes, she came home for lunch,' Timmy said. Now both Dale and Timmy were furiously rearranging the letter squares on their holders.
'Did Janet say why Pauline called her?'
Dale ignored this, and Timmy shook his head and said, 'Nnn-nnn.'
'Janet didn't say anything about Pauline still being upset after the way she held a gun on me yesterday?'
'Nnn-nnn.'
Leaning against a nearby wicker settee were Timmy's wooden crutches, and my impulse was to pick one of them up and sweep all the letter squares off the Scrabble board and onto the players' laps. Instead, I said, 'Aren't you two curious to hear about my meeting with Craig out at Attica? It was eventful.'
Not looking up, Timmy said, 'Absolutely.'
'Yes, Donald,' Dale said, 'but if you don't mind keeping your dick in your pants until we're through with this game, that'll be just too, too groovy.'
I picked up one of the crutches, played with it, put it back.
'It might look as if we've got our priorities screwed up,' Timmy said, 'but this game is more important than it may seem. Each word that Dale places on the board is meant to offer a clue about what it is I once did that makes me a moral slug in her eyes.'
'And each word that Timothy plays shows his reaction to the word I last played,' Dale said.
I studied the board. Among the words snaking this way and that way, up and down the board, were these: fib, ill, liar, retch, cuffed, ducky,
CURT, UMBRAGE, KNEED, EEL, DORKY, RIPRAP
I said, 'Is 'riprap' a clue or a response?'
'Neither, exactly,' Timmy said. 'But it got me a triple-letter score. That was the response I felt like expressing at the time.'
'Which was not following the agreed-upon rules of the game,' Dale said. 'When he played that word, Timothy was not keeping his word- as usual.'
Timmy frowned deeply as Dale spelled out 'pimp.'
I left them and walked outside across the broad back lawn, aromatic and abuzz with bees, to the herb garden. Ruth Osborne had placed a low flat basket on the ground beside the spot where she was bending over. The basket contained eight perfect sun-ripened tomatoes that must have come from the vegetable garden in the southeast corner of the yard. Mrs. Osborne had snipped off a small bunch of basil sprigs, and their perfume in the heat of the late afternoon was strong and transporting. Scientists who know the geography of the human brain say the olfactory and memory centers are located next to each other, and that's why smells can trigger such powerful memories. Basil set off a welter of memories for me, all of them good. Among them were my grandmother's vegetable garden in Phillipsburg, New Jersey, and beside her herb patch a hidden pathway through the brush down to the banks of the Delaware River. Then it was on to lunches with Timmy at our pensione in Fiesoli, and on and on in a fraction of a second.
'Smells wonderful,' I said.
Mrs. Osborne straightened up slowly and said, 'This is the season I'll miss when I'm dead. It isn't even a season-just a week or two in August when the tomatoes are at their peak and the basil hasn't begun to wilt and the local corn is sweetest. What luck it is for a person to be up and around and conscious in Edensburg in August!'
I said, 'It's one of the times of the year when we remember why we live in this part of the country.'
'Oh, I live in Edensburg because I came back here and married Tom Osborne,' she said, 'instead of marrying one of the boys from Yale who came up to Mount Holyoke on weekends. If I'd married Ogden Winsted of Philadelphia, I'd have gone off with him to darkest Chestnut Hill and never been heard of again. Or if I'd accepted Lew McAl-ister's proposal of marriage, I'd probably still be in the Cameroons shining Christ's light on the heathen. Either locale would have left me a long way from Edensburg.
'There were other offers, too, some of them worth considering. But
I loved Tom Osborne from the time he was a sixth-grade… 'patrol boy' was what the school crossing guards were called back then, and I was a frightened first grader, and Tom held my hand every day when I crossed Third Street on the way to Stuyvesant Grammar.
'I adored Tom and felt safe and secure with him, and although much later, of course, I had to set him straight on a few matters-he could be dumb as a post when it came to what he used to call 'the female of the species'-still, I never in all our fifty-nine years together stopped leaning on Tom or looking up to him. You know, Mr. Donaldson, I was just thinking: Tom had asked that his ashes be scattered in the mountains, and I was too selfish to let the kids do that. Even though Tom is now just bits and pieces of bone and whatnot, I drew comfort from having what's left of him around. But now I've come up with another idea. Why not spread Tom's remains around in the herb garden? That way he'd be out in the weather, which is what he wanted. At the same time, I could visit him-and I do use that term loosely-and I could continue to be reassured by Tom's nearby presence, however irrational that may seem to others. What do you think?'
I said, 'I don't know. Is that legal?'
'Oh, do you suppose it might not be?'
'Just to be on the safe side, maybe you should consult an attorney, Mrs. Osborne. And an agronomist.'
'I suppose I ought to.'
'As a precaution.'
'You don't hear of people,' she said, 'being hauled into court for- what would the charge be? If it's on your own property it wouldn't be littering. And I don't believe there's any hazard to public health-the cremation fire surely would eliminate any risk of bacteriological contamination. What would any legal objection possibly be based on?'
She had me there. I said, 'It won't hurt to ask. You might learn something neither of us knew.'
She looked doubtful and unconvinced. 'It's nothing I need to worry about today,' she said. 'Today we've all got more immediate concerns. How is your investigation progressing, Mr. Donaldson? Have you accumulated
