Koko

morning, and I knew that I couldn’t live with him anymore.”

“Well, what?”

“It’s too black. I don’t know. Charles told me he thought that Harry had a demon inside him.”

“You got divorced because you had this mystical feeling about something that happened about ten years before, and for which Harry had already been put on trial and found innocent?”

“I got divorced because I couldn’t stand the thought that he might touch me again.” She was silent for a moment. “He wasn’t like Michael. Michael feels he has to atone for whatever happened over there, but Harry never felt a second of regret.”

Judy could say nothing to this.

“So I looked at him tying his bow tie and I just finally knew and before I even knew I was going to say it I told him that he had to move out and give me a divorce.”

“What did he do?”

“Finally he saw that I really meant it, and in order to protect his job with Charles, he left without making much of a fuss.” After a second she added, “Of course I felt that I should give him regular alimony payments, and I have. Harry can live at a decent level for the rest of his life without working.”

What was a decent level, Judy wondered. Twenty thousand dollars? Fifty thousand? A hundred thousand?

“I take it that you’re interested in the practicalities of divorce,” Pat eventually said.

“Can’t fool you, can I?”

“Everybody else has, why not you too,” Pat said, laughing a little theatrically. “Has Michael said anything?”

“Enough.” Silence. “No.” Silence. “I don’t know. He’s in a kind of daze because of Tina.”

“So you haven’t talked about it with him.”

“It’s like—he’s just sinking out of sight, and he won’t let me pull him back up on land. My land, with me.”

Pat waited until Judy had stopped crying into the telephone, and then said, “Did you tell him about the man you dated when he was gone?”

“He asked me,” Judy wailed, losing control again. “It’s not that I wanted to hide it, it’s not that—it’s the way he asked me. It was like—did you ever find the car keys? He was a lot more interested in the girl, Stacy Talbot, than he was in me. I know he hates Bob.”

“The nice, stable guy who sails and plays tennis.”

“Right.”

“It’s not important, but I didn’t know they knew each other.”

“They met at a faculty Christmas party once, and Michael thought he was conceited. Maybe Bob is a little conceited. But he’s a very dedicated man—he teaches high school English because he thinks it’s important. He doesn’t have to do it.”

“Sounds like Michael decided he doesn’t ‘have to’ keep his practice.” Or to stay married, Pat silently added.

“Why doesn’t he have to?” Judy asked in a plaintive voice. “Why did he work so hard to get it, if he doesn’t have to keep it?”

That was not the question she was really asking, and Pat did not answer it.

“I feel scared,” Judy said. “It’s so humiliating. I hate it.”

“Do you think you have a future with your friend?”

“Bob Bunce doesn’t have much extra room in his life.” Judy now sounded very dry-eyed. “In spite of seeming to have nothing but room in his life. He has his sports car. He has his sailboat and his tennis. He has his job and his students. He has Henry James. He has his mother. I don’t think he’ll ever make room for a wife.”

“Ah,” Pat said, “but you didn’t start seeing him with the idea of marrying him.”

“Isn’t that a comfort. Wait a minute …” Judy apparently set down the telephone and was gone for several minutes. Pat Caldwell could hear what sounded like ice cubes cracking out of a metal tray. There came the chink of glass against glass. “Mr. Bunce fancies the whiskey that comes in a little blue bag with a drawstring. So I helped myself to some of it. Maybe I should have made him come into a little blue bag with a drawstring.”

Pat heard the ice cubes chinking as Judy raised or lowered her glass.

“Don’t you ever get lonely?” Judy asked.

“Give me a call if you need me,” Pat said. “I’ll come up and keep you company, if you like.”

1

“What do you mean, the police will be there?” Judy asked. “I think that’s completely ridiculous.”

It was ten o’clock the next morning, and the Pooles were driving Harry Beevers and Conor Linklater north to the small town of Milburn, New York, for Tina Pumo’s funeral. They had been driving for two hours and, thanks to Harry’s directions, had managed to lose their way in search of a shortcut. Harry now sat with empty hands in the front passenger seat of Michael’s Audi, fiddling with the digital dial of the radio; Judy sat in back with Conor and the unfolded map.

“You don’t understand the first thing about police work,” Harry said. “Are you always this aggressive about your ignorance?”

Judy opened both her eyes and her mouth, and Harry hurriedly added, “I apologize, I’m sorry, I should not have said that. Pardon, pardon. I take Tina’s death very personally, and I’m also a little touchy. Honest, Judy—I’m sorry.”

“Follow the signs to Binghamton,” Conor said. “We’re about forty-fifty miles away now, the way I figure it. Can you find something besides that noise?”

“This is a murder case,” Harry said, ignoring Conor but changing the station anyhow. “It’s big business. Whoever is in charge of the case will be at the funeral, looking us and everybody else over. This is his chance to meet the cast of characters. And he’s thinking that whoever killed Tina might show up to see him buried. Cops always come to things like this.”

“I wish Pat could have come with us,” Judy said. “And I hate big bands, all that phony nostalgia.”

Harry switched off the radio.

For a time they drove on in silence past a landscape of snowy empty fields and dark stands of trees straight as soldiers in formation. Slashes of grey and black stood out starkly in the snow. Now and then a farmhouse stood like a mirage between the fields and the woods. The map rattled in Conor’s hands, and Judy made a series of little sniffling noises. The past had died, Michael thought, died as part of the present so that now it was really just the past.

When he had arrived back in Westerholm, a nervous Judy had welcomed him with a kiss in which he could taste resentment. Home. She had asked about Singapore, about Bangkok, about traveling with Harry Beevers; she poured out measures of an expensive whiskey that she must have bought for this moment and which, he saw, she had generously sampled in his absence. She followed him upstairs and watched him unpack. She followed him into the bathroom while he ran a tub. She was still sitting in the bathroom, listening to his edited version of the trip, when he asked her if she had enjoyed her meal with Bob Bunce.

She gave a jerky nod.

He had merely remembered to ask, but he felt as though she had shrieked at him, or thrown something at him. She raised her glass and took a swallow of the expensive whiskey.

He asked the question to which he already knew the answer, and she gave him a prompt, flat denial.

“Okay,” he said, but he knew, and she knew that he did. She gulped at her drink and walked out of the bathroom.

“It’s hard to believe that Tina Pumo could have come from a place like this,” Judy said. “He seemed so