"But what is it?" Wally asked. "Carrying what, John? What aren't I carrying?"

"A gun," Dortmunder explained, to shut him up, and Wally's eyes grew huge and even wetter with this new thrill.

Meanwhile, up front, Tom was saying, "There's a left just up ahead. You'll take it, then the next left, and it'll swing us back to this road just this side of that town we went through. If your Fairlane's still with us then, we'll have to get rid of them." Twisting around, he frowned at Dortmunder and said, "This peaceful impulse of yours, Al, you're letting it take over your life. You don't want to go around all the time without heat."

"As a matter of fact, I do," Dortmunder told him.

Tom grimaced and shook his head and faced front. They made the left, onto a smaller and narrower and curvier road. "The Fairlane made the turn," Kelp said, looking at the rearview mirror.

They drove along quietly then, the four of them in the purring Cadillac. Kelp had, as Dortmunder had known he would, come up with excellent transportation. And an extra pa.s.senger, too, since Kelp on his own had decided it would be a good idea to tell Wally the actual story here (which Tom hadn't liked one bit, but it was already done, so there you are) and bring the little b.u.t.terball along so he could have a look at the actual terrain, to help him and his computer think about the problem better. So here they all were, the Unlikely Quartet, driving around the countryside.

Around and around. A few miles farther along this secondary road, just after a steep downgrade and a one-lane stonewalled bridge, they came to the second left, as Tom pointed out. Kelp took it, and looked in the mirror. "Still with us," he said.

"Heat would solve this problem," Tom commented.

"Heat brings heat," Dortmunder told the back of his head. Tom didn't bother to answer.

"I'll go around again," Kelp suggested, "and when we get to that one-lane bridge from before, I can squeeze them."

"A Caddy can beat a Fairlane," Tom pointed out. "Why not just floor this sucker?"

"I don't break speed limit laws in a borrowed car," Kelp told him.

Tom snorted but made no comments about the superior qualities of rented cars.

Dortmunder looked back, and the Fairlane was still on their tail, far too close for anybody who knew anything about surveillance. Unless somebody wanted them to know they were being followed. But why? And who were those two women? He said, "Tom, why would anybody follow you?"

"Me?" Tom said, looking over his shoulder. "Whadaya mean, me? How come it isn't one of you guys? Maybe they're computer salesmen, want to talk to Wally."

"The rest of us aren't known around here," Dortmunder said.

"Neither am I," Tom said. "Not after twenty-six years."

"I don't like it," Dortmunder said. "Right here in the neighborhood where we're supposed to do the main job, and we've got new players in the game."

"Here's the turn," Kelp said, and took it. Then he looked in the rearview mirror and said, "They kept going!"

Dortmunder looked back, and now there was no one behind them at all. "I don't get it," he said.

Wally, tentative about making suggestions among this crowd, said, "Maybe they were lost."

"No," Dortmunder said.

"Well, wait a second," Kelp said. "That's not entirely crazy, John."

"No?" Dortmunder studied Kelp's right ear. "How much crazy is it?" he asked.

"People get lost," Kelp said, "particularly in the country. Particularly in places like this, where everything's got the same name."

"Dudson," commented Tom.

"That's the name, all right," Kelp agreed. "How many Dudsons are there, anyway?"

"Let's see," Tom said, taking the question seriously. "North, East, Center, and Falls. Four."

"That's a lot of Dudsons," Kelp said.

"There used to be three more," Tom told him. "Dudson Park, Dudson City, and Dudson. They're all under the reservoir."

"Good," Kelp said. "Anyway, John, how about that? You go out for a nice ride in the country, all of a sudden everywhere you look another Dudson, you're lost, you don't know how to get back, you're driving in circles."

"We were the one driving in circles," Dortmunder said.

"I'm coming to that," Kelp promised. "So there you are, driving in circles, and you decide you'll pick another car and follow it until it gets somewhere. Only they picked us. So when we start going in circles, too, they figure we're also lost on account of all the Dudsons, so off they go."

"Sounds good to me," Tom said.

Timidly, Wally said, "It does make sense, John."

"I never seen that to matter much," Dortmunder commented. "But, okay, maybe you're all right. n.o.body around here knows any of us, those two women didn't act like they knew how to tail anybody, and now they're gone."

"So there you are," Kelp said.

"There I am," Dortmunder agreed, frowning.

Tom said, "So now can we go pick up my stash?"

"Yes," Kelp said.

"Just the same," Dortmunder said, mostly to himself, "something tells me we got that Ford in our future."

TWENTY-ONE.

"Mother," Myrtle said, keeping her attention straight out the windshield as they drove together through the twilight back toward Dudson Center, "you just have to tell me the truth."

"I don't see that at all," Edna said. "Keep your eyes on the road."

"My eyes are on the road. Mother, please! I have the right to know about my own father."

"The right!" Even for Edna, that word was flung out with startling fury. "Did I have the right to know him? I thought I did, but I was wrong. He knew me, G.o.d knows, and here you are."

"You've never said a word about him." Myrtle found herself awed by it, by Edna's years of silence, by her own blithe acceptance of the status quo, never questioning, never wondering. "Can he be that bad?" she asked, believing the answer would simply have to be no.

But the answer was, "He's worse. Take my word for it."

"But how can I?" Myrtle pleaded. "How can I take your word, when you don't give me any words? Mother, I've always tried to be a good daughter, I've always-"

"You have," Edna said, suddenly quieter, less agitated. Myrtle risked a quick sidelong glance, and Edna was now brooding at the dashboard, as though the words mene mene tekel upharsin had suddenly appeared there. Myrtle was surprised and touched to see this softening of her mother's features. Imperfectly seen though her face might be in the light of dusk, some harsh level of reserve or defense was abruptly gone.

And abruptly back: "Watch the road!"

Myrtle's eyes snapped forward. The two-lane blacktop road was now bringing them past the Mexican restaurant at the edge of Dudson Center; they were less than fifteen minutes from home.

Myrtle hadn't at all wanted to give up the pursuit. It was true the people in the backseat of the Cadillac kept turning around to look at her, it was true the Cadillac was driving in circles around the countryside, it was true these things suggested they'd realized they were being followed and therefore had no intention of going on to their original destination until she stopped following them, but what did any of that matter? She didn't care where they were going, she cared only about who they were. Or not even all of them, only the one: her father. To her way of thinking, if she followed them long enough, if she made her presence both obvious and inevitable, sooner or later wouldn't they have to either arrive somewhere, or at least stop somewhere, so that she could get out of her car and go look at them, see them, talk to them? Talk to him?

But Edna had said no. "They're on to us," she snarled out of the side of her mouth, displaying another previously unknown side to her personality. "Forget it, Myrtle. We'll go home."

"But we're so close! If we lose them-"

"We won't lose that son of a b.i.t.c.h," Edna had said grimly. "If he's back-and he's back, all right, d.a.m.n his eyes-one of these black days he'll come around, you see if he doesn't. It's only a matter of time. Myrtle, if they take that G.o.dd.a.m.n left again up there, you don't follow them! You go straight ahead!"

And the Cadillac had taken the g--left, and obedient Myrtle, the good daughter, had gone straight ahead. And now they were almost home, the adventure almost finished, long before it had ever really begun. Myrtle had no faith in her mother's conviction that her father would "come around" one of these days, black or otherwise; after all these years, why should he?

And he'd been so close!

Once Mother gets out of this car, Myrtle thought, I've lost the truth forever. "Please," she said, so faintly she wasn't sure Edna would be able to hear her at all.

The answer was a sigh; another surprising example of softness. In a voice so gentle as to be almost unrecognizable, Edna said, "Don't ask me these things, Myrtle."

Her own voice as soft as her mother's, Myrtle said, "But it hurts not to know."

"It never used to," Edna said with a return of her normal tartness.

"Well, it does now," Myrtle said. "Knowing you just won't talk about it."

"For Christ's sake, Myrtle," Edna cried, "don't you think it hurts me? Don't you think that's why I don't want to talk about the G.o.dd.a.m.n man?"

"You must have loved him very much," Myrtle said, gently and consolingly, the way they do such scenes in the movies. She'd never imagined the day would come when she'd play such a scene herself.

"G.o.d knows," Edna answered bitterly. "I suppose, at the time, I must have thought I..." But then she shook her head, eyes flashing. Sharply she said, "And what did I get out of it?"

"Well, me," Myrtle reminded her, and tried a little smile, saying, "That wasn't so bad, was it?"

"At the time?" Edna's answering smile was twisted and lived only on one side of her face. "It wasn't so wonderful, either, back then. Not in North Dudson."

"I can't even imagine it."

Edna c.o.c.ked an eye at her as Myrtle stopped for a red light on Main Street. Ahead, the windows of the library gleamed yellow in the gloaming. "No, I don't suppose you can imagine it," Edna said. "Did I do that to you? Well, I guess I did."

"Do what to me?"

"The light's green," Edna said.

Myrtle, feeling an impatience and an irritation that were rare in her, looked out at the green light and tromped down on the accelerator. The Ford bucked across the intersection, not quite stalling, but then Myrtle settled down to her normal way of driving.

Musingly, not even having noticed Myrtle's jack rabbit start-which is what she would have called it, with withering disapproval, under normal circ.u.mstances-Edna said, "I brought you up to be careful, cautious, obedient, mild..."

Laughing, but awkward and self-conscious, Myrtle said, "You make me sound like a Girl Scout."

"You are a Girl Scout," her mother told her, without pleasure. "I wasn't brought up that way," she went on. "I was brought up to be independent, make up my own mind, take my own chances. And what did it get me? Tom Jimson. That's why I went the other way with you."

Excited, Myrtle said, "Tom Jimson? Is that his name?"

"I'm not even sure of that much," Edna said. "It's one of the names he told me. The one he told me most often, so maybe it's his."

"What was he like?" Myrtle asked.

"Satan," Edna said.

"Oh, Mother," Myrtle said, and smiled in condescension. She knew this story. Edna had been madly in love with... Tom Jimson... and he'd abandoned her, pregnant and unwed, and the hurt was still there. Now Edna thought he was Satan. Then she'd loved him. So how bad, really, could he be?

Myrtle made the turn onto Elm Street, and then the turn onto Albany Street. Ahead lay Spring Street, and beyond that Myrtle Street. "Myrtle Jimson," she said softly, testing the sound of it.

"Hah!" Edna snorted. "That was never in it, believe me!"

"I wonder where they were going," Myrtle said.

"Well, not to church," Edna told her. "I can tell you that much."

TWENTY-TWO.

The church was beautiful in the waning light of day. A small white clapboard structure with a graceful steeple, it nestled into its rustic setting like a diamond in a fold of green felt. The hillside behind it was a rich tumble of evergreens mixed with stands of beech and birch and oak, falling away to well-manicured lawn that swept like a thick-piled carpet around the tidy white building with its oval-topped stained-gla.s.s windows well s.p.a.ced along both side walls.

The road outside, Church Lane, curving up into these foothills from State Highway 112, came nowhere but here, to the Elizabeth Grace Dudson Memorial Reformed Congregational Unitarian Church of Putkin Township. (Five different churches, and five separate congregations, had been combined down to this one, absorbing the remnants of churches flooded by the reservoir or emptied by shrinking attendance.) Since Church Lane ended here, the road simply ballooned at its terminus into a large parking area, from which the asphalt path ran straight up the slight incline to the church front door. The white of the church, the rich indigos and maroons and golds and olives of the stained-gla.s.s windows, the varied greens of the surrounding lawn and hillside, the bottomless black of the asphalt, were never more beautiful than now, in the fading light at the end of another perfect day.

And even more beautiful than the church and its setting was the bride, blushing pink in her swaths of organdy white, climbing from the family station wagon with her parents and baby sister. They were the first arrivals, half an hour before the scheduled ceremony, father looking uncomfortable and thick-fingered in his awkwardly fitting dark suit and badly knotted red tie, baby sister an excited bonbon in puffy peach, mother beribboned and bowed in lavender, dabbing at her tear-filled eyes with a lavender hankie and saying, "I told you not to go all the way, you little tramp. Just get him off with your hand, for heaven's sake! Oh, I so wanted a June wedding!"

"Mother!" the bride replied, elaborately ill-tempered. "I'll be showing by then."

"Let's get this thing over with," said father, and led the way heavy-footed up the path and into the church.

Snickering cousins of the bride came next, some to be ushers and flower girls, some just to hang out, and two burly fellows in blocky wool jackets who'd volunteered to be parking lot attendants, to see to it that all of the cars of all of the guests would fit in this s.p.a.ce at the end of Church Lane.

Relatives of the bride continued to predominate for the first ten minutes or so; giggling awkward large-jointed people wearing their "best" clothes, saved for weddings, funerals, Easter, and appearances in court. Soon this group began to be supplemented by members of the groom's family: skinnier, shorter, snake-hipped people with can-opener noses and no a.s.ses, dressed in Naugahyde jackets and polyester shirts and vinyl trousers and plastic shoes, as though they weren't human beings at all but were actually a chain dental service's waiting room. Intermixed with these, in warm-up jackets and pressed designer jeans, were the groom's pals, acne-flaring youths full of sidelong looks and nervous laughter, knowing this was more than likely a foretaste of their own doom: "There but for the grace of the Akron Rubber Company go I." The bride's girlfriends arrived in a too-crowded-car cl.u.s.ter and hovered together like magnetized iron filings, all demonstrating the latest soap opera fashion trends and each of them a sealed bubble of self-consciousness and self-absorption. The groom, a jerky marionette in a rented tux, a wide-eyed pale-faced boy with spiky hair and protuberant ears, appeared with his grim suspicious parents and entered the church with all the false macho a.s.surance of Jimmy Cagney on his way to the electric chair. The church door shut behind him with a hollower boom than it had given anyone else.

As the hour of the service approached, the last few cars, each with its couple snarlingly blaming each other for causing them to be late, came tearing up Church Lane and was slotted into one of the remaining s.p.a.ces by the volunteer attendants. And then it was TIME. The attendants grinned at each other, pleased with their accomplishment, and were about to turn and enter the church themselves when headlights alerted them to one last car load of wedding guests. "They are gonna be late!" one attendant told the other, and both stepped out to the road to wave frantically at the oncoming car to get a move on.