'Could it have been three?'

'I guess.'

'Five?'

'No, probably not so many.'

'But you don't know, exactly, do you?'

'Because Kyra Devore was upset.'

'Actually she had it together pretty well for a - '

'Did she cry in your presence?'

'Well . . . yes.'

'Did her mother make her cry?'

'That's unfair.'

'As unfair as allowing a three-year-old to go strolling down the middle of a busy highway on a holiday morning, in your opinion, or perhaps not quite as unfair as that?'

'Jeepers, lay off,' Mr. Bissonette said mildly. There was distress on his bloodhound's face.

'I withdraw the question,' Durgin said.

'Which one?' I asked.

He looked at me tiredly, as if to say he had to put up with a.s.sholes like me all the time and he was used to how we behaved. 'How many cars went by from the time you picked the child up and carried her to safety to the time when you and the Devores parted company?'

I hated that 'carried her to safety' bit, but even as I formulated my answer, the old guy was muttering the question into his Stenomask. And it was in fact what I had done. There was no getting around it.

'I told you, I don't know for sure.'

'Well, give me a guesstimate.'

Guesstimate Guesstimate. One of my all-time least favorite words. A Paul Harvey word. 'There might have been three.'

'Including Mary Devore herself?. Driving a - ' He consulted the paper he'd taken from the folder. ' - a 1982 Jeep Scout?'

I thought of Ki saying Mattie go fast and understood where Durgin was heading now. And there was nothing I could do about it.

'Yes, it was her and it was a Scout. I don't know what year.'

'Was she driving below the posted speed limit, at the posted speed limit, or above the posted speed limit when she pa.s.sed the place where you were standing with Kyra in your arms?'

She'd been doing at least fifty, but I told Durgin I couldn't say for sure. He urged me to try - I know you are unfamiliar with the hangman's knot, Mr. Noonan, but I'm sure you can make one if you really work at it I know you are unfamiliar with the hangman's knot, Mr. Noonan, but I'm sure you can make one if you really work at it - and I declined as politely as I could. - and I declined as politely as I could.

He picked up the paper again. 'Mr. Noonan, would it surprise you to know that two witnesses - Richard Brooks, Junior, the owner of d.i.c.k's All-Purpose Garage, and Royce Merrill, a retired carpenter - claim that Mrs. Devore was doing well over thirty-five when she pa.s.sed your location?'

'I don't know,' I said. 'I was concerned with the little girl.'

'Would it surprise you to know that Royce Merrill estimated her speed at sixty sixty miles an hour?' miles an hour?'

'That's ridiculous. When she hit the brakes she would have skidded sideways and landed upside down in the ditch.'

'The skid-marks measured by Deputy Footman indicate a speed of at least fifty miles an hour,' Durgin said. It wasn't a question, but he looked at me almost roguishly, as if inviting me to struggle a little more and sink a little deeper into this nasty pit. I said nothing. Durgin folded his pudgy little hands and leaned over them toward me. The roguish look was gone.

'Mr. Noonan, if you hadn't carried Kyra Devore to the side of the road - if you hadn't rescued her - mightn't her own mother her own mother have run her over?' have run her over?'

Here was the really loaded question, and how should I answer it? Bissonette was certainly not flashing any helpful signals; he seemed to be trying to make meaningful eye-contact with the pretty a.s.sistant. I thought of the book Mattie was reading in tandem with 'Bartleby' - Silent Witness Silent Witness, by Richard North Patterson. Unlike the Grisham brand, Patterson's lawyers almost always seemed to know what they were doing. Objection, Your honor, calls for speculation on the part of the witness. Objection, Your honor, calls for speculation on the part of the witness.

I shrugged. 'Sorry, counsellor, can't say - left my crystal ball home.'

Again I saw the ugly flash in Durgin's eyes. 'Mr. Noonan, I can a.s.sure you that if you don't answer that question here, you are apt to be called back from Malibu or Fire Island or wherever it is you're going to write your next opus to answer it later on.'

I shrugged. 'I've already told you I was concerned with the child. I can't tell you how fast the mother was going, or how good Royce Merrill's vision is, or if Deputy Footman even measured the right set of skid-marks. There's a whole bunch of rubber on that part of the road, I can tell you. Suppose she was going fifty? Even fifty-five, let's say that. She's twenty-one years old, Durgin. At the age of twenty-one, a person's driving skills are at their peak. She probably would have swerved around the child, and easily.'

'I think that's quite enough.'

'Why? Because you're not getting what you wanted?' Bissonette's shoe clipped my ankle again, but I ignored it. 'If you're on Kyra's side, why do you sound as though you're on her grandfather's?'

A baleful little smile touched Durgin's lips. The kind that says Okay, smart guy, you want to play? Okay, smart guy, you want to play? He pulled the tape-recorder a little closer to him. 'Since you have mentioned Kyra's grandfather, Mr. Maxwell Devore of Palm Springs, let's talk about him a little, shall we?' He pulled the tape-recorder a little closer to him. 'Since you have mentioned Kyra's grandfather, Mr. Maxwell Devore of Palm Springs, let's talk about him a little, shall we?'

'It's your show.'

'Have you ever spoken with Maxwell Devore?'

'Yes.'

'In person or on the phone?'

'Phone.' I thought about adding that he had somehow gotten hold of my unlisted number, then remembered that Mattie had, too, and decided to keep my mouth shut on that subject.

'When was this?'

'Last Sat.u.r.day night. The night of the Fourth. He called while I was watching the fireworks.'

'And was the subject of your conversation that morning's little adventure?' As he asked, Durgin reached into his pocket and brought out a ca.s.sette tape. There was an ostentatious quality to this gesture; in that moment he looked like a parlor magician showing you both sides of a silk handkerchief. And he was bluffing. I couldn't be sure of that . . . and yet I was. Devore had taped our conversation, all right - that underhum really had been too loud, and on some level I'd been aware of that fact even while I was talking to him - and I thought it really was on the ca.s.sette Durgin was now slotting into the ca.s.sette player . . . but it was a bluff.

'I don't recall,' I said.

Durgin's hand froze in the act of snapping the ca.s.sette's transparent loading panel shut. He looked at me with frank disbelief . . . and something else. I thought the something else was surprised anger.

'You don't recall? Come now, Mr. Noonan. Surely writers train themselves to recall conversations, and this one was only a week ago. Tell me what you talked about.'

'I really can't say,' I told him in a stolid, colorless voice. For a moment Durgin looked almost panicky. Then his features smoothed. One polished fingernail slipped back and forth over keys marked REW, FF, PLAY, and REC. 'How did Mr. Devore begin the conversation?' he asked.

'He said h.e.l.lo,' I said mildly, and there was a short m.u.f.fled sound from behind the Stenomask. It could have been the old guy clearing his throat; it could have been a suppressed laugh.

Spots of color were blooming in Durgin's cheeks. 'After h.e.l.lo? What then?'

'I don't recall.'

'Did he ask you about that morning?'

'I don't recall.'

'Didn't you tell him that Mary Devore and her daughter were together, Mr. Noonan? That they were together picking flowers? Isn't that what you told this worried grandfather when he inquired about the incident which was the talk of the township that Fourth of July?'

'Oh boy,' Bissonette said. He raised one hand over the table, then touched the palm with the fingers of the other, making a ref's T T. 'Time out.'

Durgin looked at him. The flush in his cheeks was more p.r.o.nounced now, and his lips had pulled back enough to show the tips of small, neatly capped teeth. 'What do you you want?' he almost snarled, as if Bissonette had just dropped by to tell him about the Mormon Way or perhaps the Rosicrucians. want?' he almost snarled, as if Bissonette had just dropped by to tell him about the Mormon Way or perhaps the Rosicrucians.

'I want you to stop leading this guy, and I want that whole thing about picking flowers stricken from the record,' Bissonette said.

'Why?'

Durgin snapped. 'Because you're trying to get stuff on the record that this witness won't say. If you want to break here for awhile so we can make a conference call to Judge Rancourt, get his opinion - '

'I withdraw the question,' Durgin said. He looked at me with a kind of helpless, surly rage. 'Mr. Noonan, do you want to help me do my job?'

'I want to help Kyra Devore if I can,' I said.

'Very well.' He nodded as if no distinction had been made. 'Then please tell me what you and Maxwell Devore talked about.'

'I can't recall.' I caught his eyes and held them. 'Perhaps,' I said, 'you can refresh my recollection.'

There was a moment of silence, like that which sometimes strikes a high-stakes poker game just after the last of the bets have been made and just before the players show their hands. Even the old fighter-pilot was quiet, his eyes unblinking above the mask. Then Durgin pushed the ca.s.sette player aside with the heel of his hand (the set of his mouth said he felt about it just then as I often felt about the telephone) and went back to the morning of July Fourth. He never asked about my dinner with Mattie and Ki on Tuesday night, and never returned to my telephone conversation with Devore - the one where I had said all those awkward and easily disprovable things.

I went on answering questions until eleven-thirty, but the interview really ended when Durgin pushed the tape-player away with the heel of his hand. I knew it, and I'm pretty sure he did, too.

'Mike! Mike, over here!'

Mattie was waving from one of the tables in the picnic area behind the town common's bandstand. She looked vibrant and happy. I waved back and made my way in that direction, weaving between little kids playing tag, skirting a couple of teenagers making out on the gra.s.s, and ducking a Frisbee which a leaping German shepherd caught smartly.

There was a tall, skinny redhead with her, but I barely got a chance to notice him. Mattie met me while I was still on the gravel path, put her arms around me, hugged me - it was no prudey little a.s.s-poking-out hug, either - and then kissed me on the mouth hard enough to push my lips against my teeth. There was a hearty smack when she disengaged. She pulled back and looked at me with undisguised delight. 'Was it the biggest kiss you've ever had?'

'The biggest in at least four years,' I said. 'Will you settle for that?' And if she didn't step away from me in the next few seconds, she was going to have physical proof of how much I had enjoyed it.

'I guess I'll have to.' She turned to the redheaded guy with a funny kind of defiance. 'Was that all right?'

'Probably not,' he said, 'but at least you're not currently in view of those old boys at the All-Purpose Garage. Mike, I'm John Storrow. Nice to meet you in person.'

I liked him at once, maybe because I'd come upon him dressed in his three-piece New York suit and primly setting out paper plates on a picnic table while his curly red hair blew around his head like kelp. His skin was fair and freckled, the kind which would never tan, only burn and then peel in great eczema-like patches. When we shook, his hand seemed to be all knuckles. He had to be at least thirty, but he looked Mattie's age, and I guessed it would be another five years before he was able to get a drink without showing his driver's license.

'Sit down,' he said. 'We've got a five-course lunch, courtesy of Castle Rock Variety - grinders, which are for some strange reason called 'Italian sandwiches' up here . . . mozzarella sticks . . . garlic fries . . . Twinkies.'

'That's only four,' I said.

'I forgot the soft-drink course,' he said, and pulled three long-neck bottles of S'OK birch beer out of a brown bag. 'Let's eat. Mattie runs the library from two to eight on Fridays and Sat.u.r.days, and this would be a bad time for her to be missing work.'

'How did the readers' circle go last night?' I asked. 'Lindy Briggs didn't eat you alive, I see.'

She laughed, clasped her hands, and shook them over her head. 'I was a hit! An absolute smashola! I didn't dare tell them I got all my best insights from you - '

'Thank G.o.d for small favors,' Storrow said. He was freeing his own sandwich from its string and butcher-paper wrapping, doing it carefully and a little dubiously, using just the tips of his fingers.

' - so I said I looked in a couple of books and found some leads there. It was sort of wonderful. I felt like a college kid.'

'Good.'

'Bissonette?' John Storrow asked. 'Where's he? I never met a guy named Romeo before.'

'Said he had to go right back to Lewiston. Sorry.'

'Actually it's best we stay small, at least to begin with.' He bit into his sandwich - they come tucked into long sub rolls - and looked at me, surprised. 'This isn't bad.'

'Eat more than three and you're hooked for life,' Mattie said, and chomped heartily into her own.

'Tell us about the depo,' John said, and while they ate, I talked. When I finished, I picked up my own sandwich and played a little catch-up. I'd forgotten how good an Italian can be - sweet, sour, and oily all at the same time. Of course nothing that tastes that good can be healthy; that's a given. I suppose one could formulate a similar postulate about full-body hugs from young girls in legal trouble.

'Very interesting,' John said. 'Very interesting indeed.' He took a mozzarella stick from its grease-stained bag, broke it open, and looked with a kind of fascinated horror at the clotted white gunk inside. 'People up here eat this?' he asked.

'People in New York eat fish-bladders,' I said. 'Raw.'

'Touche' He dipped a piece into the plastic container of spaghetti sauce (in this context it is called 'cheese-dip' in western Maine), then ate it.

'Well?' I asked.

'Not bad. They ought to be a lot hotter, though.'

Yes, he was right about that. Eating cold mozzarella sticks is a little like eating cold snot, an observation I thought I would keep to myself on this beautiful midsummer Friday.

'If Durgin had the tape, why wouldn't he play it?' Mattie asked. 'I don't understand.'

John stretched his arms out, cracked his knuckles, and looked at her benignly. 'We'll probably never know for sure,' he said.

He thought Devore was going to drop the suit - it was in every line of his body-language and every inflection of his voice. That was hopeful, but it would be good if Mattie didn't allow herself to become too hopeful. John Storrow wasn't as young as he looked, and probably not as guileless, either (or so I fervently hoped), but he was young. And neither he nor Mattie knew the story of Scooter Larribee's sled. Or had seen Bill Dean's face when he told it.

'Want to hear some possibilities?'

'Sure,' I said.