"He's not sick, either," Larry said. "But most of the others are."

"The doorman at my building seems very well," Rita said. "He's still on duty. I tipped him five dollars when I came out this morning. I don't know if I tipped him for being very well or for being on duty. What do you think?"

"I really don't know you well enough to say."

"No, of course you don't." She put her cigarettes back in her bag and he saw that there was a revolver in there. She followed his gaze. "It was my husband's. He was a career executive with a major New York bank. That's just how he put it when anyone asked what he did to keep himself in cocktail onions. I-am-a-career-executive-with-a-major-New-York-bank. He died two years ago. He was at a luncheon with one of those Arabs who always look as if they have rubbed all the visible areas of their skin with Brylcreem. He had a massive stroke. He died with his tie on. Do you think that could be our generation's equivalent of that old saying about dying with your boots on? Harry Blakemoor died with his tie on. I like it, Larry."

A finch landed in front of them and pecked the ground.

"He was insanely afraid of burglars, so he had this gun. Do guns really kick and make a loud noise when they go off, Larry?"

Larry, who had never fired a gun in his life, said, "I don't think one that size would kick much. Is it a .38?"

"I believe it's a .32." She took it out of her bag and he saw there were also a good many small pill-bottles in there. This time she didn't follow his gaze; she was looking at a small chinaberry tree about fifteen paces away. "I believe I'll try it. Do you think I can hit that tree?"

"I don't know," he said apprehensively. "I don't really think-"

She pulled the trigger and the gun went off with a fairly impressive bang. A small hole appeared in the chinaberry tree. "Bull's-eye," she said, and blew smoke from the pistol barrel like a gunfighter.

"Real good," Larry said, and when she put the gun back in her purse, his heart resumed something like its normal rhythm.

"I couldn't shoot a person with it. I'm quite sure of that. And soon there won't be anyone to shoot, will there?"

"Oh, I don't know about that."

"You were looking at my rings. Would you like one?"

"Huh? No!" He began to blush again.

"As a banker, my husband believed in diamonds. He believed in them the way the Baptists believe in Revelations. I have a great many diamonds, and they are all insured. We not only owned a piece of the rock, my Harry and I, I sometimes believed we held a lien on the whole goddam thing. But if someone should want my diamonds, I would hand them over. After all, they're only rocks again, aren't they?"

"I guess that's right."

"Of course," she said, and the tic on the side of her neck jumped again. "And if a stick-up man wanted them, I'd not only hand them over, I would give him the address of Cartier's. Their selection of rocks is much better than my own."

"What are you going to do now?" Larry asked her.

"What would you suggest?"

"I just don't know," Larry said, and sighed.

"My answer exactly."

"You know something? I saw a guy this morning who said he was going out to Yankee Stadium and je ... and masturbate on home plate." He could feel himself blushing again.

"What an awful walk for him," she said. "Why didn't you suggest something closer?" She sighed, and the sigh turned into a shudder. She opened her purse, took out a bottle of pills, and popped a gel capsule into her mouth.

"What's that?" Larry asked.

"Vitamin E," she said with a glittering, false smile. The tic in her neck jumped once or twice and then stopped. She became serene again.

"There's nobody in the bars," Larry said suddenly. "I went into Pat's on Forty-third and it was totally empty. They have that great big mahogany bar and I went behind it and poured myself a water glass full of Johnnie Walker. Then I didn't even want to be there. So I left it sitting on the bar and got out."

They sighed together, like a chorus.

"You're very pleasant to be with," she said. "I like you very much. And it's wonderful that you're not crazy."

"Thank you, Mrs. Blakemoor." He was surprised and pleased.

"Rita. I'm Rita."

"Okay."

"Are you hungry, Larry?"

"As a matter of fact, I am."

"Perhaps you'd take the lady to lunch."

"That would be a pleasure."

She stood up and offered him her arm with a slightly deprecatory smile. As he linked his through it, he caught a whiff of her sachet, a smell that was at once comforting and disquietingly adult in its associations for him, almost old. His mother had worn sachet on their many trips to the movies together.

Then he forgot about it as they walked out of the park and up Fifth Avenue, away from the dead monkey, the monster-shouter, and the dark sweet treat sitting endlessly inside the comfort station on Transverse Number One. She chattered incessantly, and later he could remember no one thing she had chattered about (yes, just one: she had always dreamed, she said, of strolling up Fifth Avenue on the arm of a handsome young man, a man who was young enough to have been her own son but who wasn't), but he recalled the walk often just the same, especially after she began to jitter apart like some indifferently made toy. Her beautiful smile, her light, cynical, casual chatter, the whisper of her slacks.

They went into a steak house and Larry cooked, a trifle clumsily, but she applauded each course: the steak, the french fries, the instant coffee, the strawberry-rhubarb pie.

CHAPTER 28.

There was a strawberry pie in the fridge. It was covered with Saran Wrap and after looking at it for a long time with dull and bemused eyes, Frannie took it out. She set it on the counter and cut a wedge. A strawberry fell to the counter with a fat plop as she was transferring the piece of pie to a small plate. She picked the berry up and ate it. She wiped up the small splotch of juice on the counter with a dishrag. She put the Saran Wrap back over the remains of the pie and stuck it back in the refrigerator.

She was turning back to get her pie when she happened to glance at the knife-rack beside the cupboards. Her father had made it. It was two magnetized runners. The knives hung from them, blades down. The early afternoon sun was gleaming on them. She stared at the knives for a long time, the dull, half-curious cast of her eyes never changing, her hands working restlessly in the folds of the apron tied around her waist.

At last, some fifteen minutes later, she remembered that she had been in the middle of something. What? A line of scripture, a paraphrase, occurred to her for no good reason: Before removing the mote in thy neighbor's eye, attend the beam in thine own. Before removing the mote in thy neighbor's eye, attend the beam in thine own. She considered it. Mote? Beam? That particular image had always bothered her. What sort of beam? Moon-beam? Roofbeam? There were also flashlight beams and beaming faces and there had been a New York mayor named Abe Beame, not to mention a song she had learned in Vacation Bible School-"I'll Be a Sunbeam for Him." She considered it. Mote? Beam? That particular image had always bothered her. What sort of beam? Moon-beam? Roofbeam? There were also flashlight beams and beaming faces and there had been a New York mayor named Abe Beame, not to mention a song she had learned in Vacation Bible School-"I'll Be a Sunbeam for Him."

-before removing the mote in thy neighbor's eye- But it wasn't an eye; it was a pie. She turned to it and saw there was a fly crawling on her pie. She waved a hand at it. Bye-bye, Mr. Fly, say so long to Frannie's pie.

She regarded the piece of pie for a long time. Her mother and father were both dead, she knew. Her mother had died in the Sanford Hospital and her father, who had once made a little girl feel welcome in his shop, was lying dead in bed above her head. Why did everything have to keep coming in rhymes? Coming and going in such dreadful cheap jingles and jangles, like the idiot mnemonics that recur in fevers? My dog has fleas, My dog has fleas, they bite his they bite his knees- knees- She came to her senses suddenly, and a kind of terror twisted through her. There was a hot smell in the room. Something was burning.

Frannie jerked her head around, saw a skillet of french fries in oil she had put on the stove and then forgotten. Smoke was billowing up from the pan in a stinking cloud. Grease was flying out of the pan in angry splatters, and the splatters that landed on the burner were flaring alight and then going out, as if an invisible butane lighter was being flicked by an invisible hand. The cooking surface of the pan was black.

She touched the handle of the pan and drew her fingers back with a little gasp. It was now too hot to touch. She grabbed a dish-towel, wrapped it around the handle, and quickly carried the utensil, sizzling like a dragon, out through the back door. She set it down on the top step of the porch. The smell of honeysuckle and the droning of the bees came to her, but she barely noticed. For a moment the thick, dull blanket which had swaddled all her emotional responses for the last four days was pierced, and she was acutely frightened. Frightened? No-in a state of low terror, only a pace away from panic.

She could remember peeling the potatoes and putting them into the Wesson Oil to cook. Now Now she could remember. But for a while there she had just ... whew! She had just forgotten. she could remember. But for a while there she had just ... whew! She had just forgotten.

Standing on the porch, dish-towel still clutched in one hand, she tried to remember exactly what her train of thought had been after she had put the french fries on to cook. It seemed very important.

Well, first she had thought that a meal which consisted of nothing but french fries wasn't very nutritious. Then she'd thought that if the McDonald's down on Route 1 had still been open, she wouldn't have had to cook them herself, and she could have had a burger, too. Just take the car and cruise up to the take-out window. She would get a Quarter Pounder and the large-size fries, the ones that came in the bright red cardboard container. Little grease-spots on the inside. Undoubtedly unhealthy, indubitably comforting. And besides-pregnant women get strange cravings.

That brought her to the next link in the chain. Thoughts of strange cravings had led to thoughts of the strawberry pie lurking in the fridge. Suddenly it had seemed to her that she wanted a piece of that strawberry pie more than she wanted anything in the world. So she had gotten it, but somewhere along the line her eye had been caught by the knife-rack her father had made for her mother (Mrs. Edmonton, the doctor's wife, had been so envious of that knife-rack that Peter had made one for her two Christmases ago), and her mind had just ... short-circuited. Motes ... beams ... flies ...

"Oh God," she said to the empty back yard and her father's un-weeded garden. She sat down and put the apron over her face and cried.

When the tears dried up, she seemed to feel a little better ... but she was still frightened. Am I losing my mind? she asked herself. Is this the way it happens, the way it feels, when you have a nervous breakdown or whatever you want to call it?

Since her father had died at half past eight the night before, her ability to focus mentally seemed to have gotten fragmented. She would forget things she had been doing, her mind would go off on some dreamy tangent, or she would simply sit, not thinking of anything at all, no more aware of the world than a head of cabbage.

After her father died she had sat beside his bed for a long time. At last she had gone downstairs and turned on the TV. No particular reason; like the man said, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. The only station broadcasting had been the NBC affiliate in Portland, WCSH, and they seemed to be broadcasting some sort of crazy trial show. A black man, who looked like a Ku Klux Klansman's worst nightmare of headhunting Africans, had been pretending to execute white men with a pistol while other men in the audience applauded. It had to be pretend, of course- they didn't show things like that on TV if they were real-but it hadn't looked looked like pretend. It reminded her crazily of like pretend. It reminded her crazily of Alice in Wonderland, Alice in Wonderland, only it wasn't the Red Queen yelling "Off with their heads!" in this case, but ... what? Who? The Black Prince, she had supposed. Not that the beef in the loincloth had looked much like Prince. only it wasn't the Red Queen yelling "Off with their heads!" in this case, but ... what? Who? The Black Prince, she had supposed. Not that the beef in the loincloth had looked much like Prince.

Later in the program (how much later she could not have said), some other men broke into the studio and there was a fire-fight which was even more realistically staged than the executions had been. She saw men, nearly decapitated by heavy-caliber bullets, thrown backward with blood bursting from their shredded necks in gaudy arterial pumps. She remembered thinking in her disorganized way that they should have put one of those signs on the screen from time to time, the ones that warned parents to put the kiddies to bed or change the channel. She also remembered thinking that WCSH might get their license to broadcast lifted all the same; it really was an awfully awfully bloody program. bloody program.

She switched it off when the camera swung up, showing only the studio-lights hanging down from the ceiling, and lay back on the couch, looking at her own ceiling. She had fallen asleep there, and this morning she was more than half convinced that she had dreamed the entire program. And that was the nub, really: everything everything had come to seem like a nightmare filled with free-floating anxieties. It had begun with the death of her mother; the death of her father had only intensified what had already been there. As in had come to seem like a nightmare filled with free-floating anxieties. It had begun with the death of her mother; the death of her father had only intensified what had already been there. As in Alice, Alice, things just got curiouser and curiouser. things just got curiouser and curiouser.

There had been a special town meeting which her father had attended even though he had been getting sick by then himself. Frannie, feeling drugged and unreal-but physically no different than ever-had gone with him.

The town hall had been crowded, much more crowded than it was for town meetings in late February or early March. There was a lot of sniffling and coughing and ker-chooing. The attendees were frightened and ready to be angry at the least excuse. They spoke in loud, hoarse voices. They stood up. They shook their fingers. They pontificated. Many of them-not just the women, either-had been in tears.

The upshot had been a decision to close off the town entirely. No one would be allowed in. If people wanted to leave, that was fine, as long as they understood that they couldn't come in again. The roads leading in and out of town-most notably US 1-were to be barricaded with cars (after a shouting match that lasted half an hour, that was amended to town-owned Public Works trucks), and volunteers would stand watches at these roadblocks with shotguns. Those trying to use US 1 to go north or south would be directed up north to Wells or down south to York, where they could get on Interstate 95 and thus detour around Ogunquit. Anyone who still tried to get through would be shot. Dead? Someone asked. You bet, several others answered.

There was a small contingent of about twenty which maintained that those already sick should be put out of town at once. They were overwhelmingly voted down because by the evening of the twenty-fourth, when the meeting was held, almost everyone in town who was not sick had close relatives or friends who were. Many of them believed the newscasts, which said that a vaccine would be available soon. How, they argued, would they ever be able to look each other in the face again if it all turned out to be just a scary close call, and they had overreacted to it by putting their own out like pariah dogs?

It was suggested that all the sick summer people be put out, then. people be put out, then.

The summer people, a large contingent of them, pointed out grimly that they had supported the town's schools, roads, indigent, and public beaches for years with the taxes they paid on their cottages. Businesses that couldn't break even from mid-September to mid-June stayed afloat because of their summer dollars. If they were to be treated in such a cavalier fashion, the people of Ogunquit could be sure that they would never come back. They could go back to lobstering and clamming and grubbing quahogs out of the dirt for a living. The motion to escort sick summer people out of town was defeated by a comfortable margin.

By midnight the barriers were set up, and by dawn the next morning, the morning of the twenty-fifth, several people had been shot at the barriers, most just wounded, but three or four killed. Almost all of them were people coming north, streaming out of Boston, stricken with fear, panic-stupid. Some of them went back to York to get on the turnpike willingly enough, but others were too crazy to understand and tried to either ram the barriers or swing around them on the soft shoulders of the road. They were dealt with.

But by that evening, most of the men manning the barricades were sick themselves, glowing bright with fever, constantly propping their shotguns between their feet so they could blow their noses. Some, like Freddy Delancey and Curtis Beauchamp, simply fell down unconscious and were later driven back to the jackleg infirmary that had been set up over the town hall, and there they died.

By yesterday morning Frannie's father, who had opposed the whole idea of the barricades, had taken to his bed and Frannie was staying in to nurse him. He wouldn't allow her to take him to the infirmary. If he was going to die, he told Frannie, he wanted to do it here at home, decently, in private.

By afternoon, the flow of traffic had mostly dried up. Gus Dinsmore, the public beach parking lot attendent, said he guessed that so many cars must be just stopped dead along the road that even those manned (or womaned) by able drivers would be unable to move. It was just as well, because by the afternoon of the twenty-fifth there had been less than three dozen men capable of standing watch. Gus, who felt perfectly fine until yesterday, had come down with a runny nose himself. In fact, the only person in town besides herself who seemed all right was Amy Lauder's sixteen-year-old brother Harold. Amy herself had died just before that first town meeting, her wedding dress still hung in the closet, unworn.

Fran hadn't been out today, hadn't seen anyone since Gus had come by yesterday afternoon to check on her. She had heard engines a few times this morning, and once the close-together double explosions of a shotgun, but that was all. The steady, unbroken silence added to her sense of unreality.

And now there were these questions to consider. Flies ... eyes ... pies. Frannie found herself listening to the refrigerator. It had an automatic ice-maker attachment, and every twenty seconds or so there would be a cold thump somewhere inside as it made another cube.

She sat there for almost an hour, her plate before her, the dull, half-questioning expression on her face. Little by little another thought began to surface in her mind-two thoughts, actually, that seemed at once connected and totally unrelated. Were they maybe interlocking parts of a bigger thought? Keeping an ear open for the sound of dropping icecubes inside the refrigerator's ice-making gadget, she examined them. The first thought was that her father was dead; he had died at home, and he might have liked that.

The second thought had to do with the day. It was a beautiful summer's day, flawless, the kind that the tourists came to the Maine seacoast for. You don't come to swim because the water's never really warm enough for that; you come to be knocked out by the day.

The sun was bright and Frannie could read the thermometer outside the back kitchen window. The mercury stood just under 80. It was a beautiful day and her father was dead. Was there any connection, other than the obvious tear-jerky one?

She frowned over it, her eyes confused and apathetic. Her mind circled the problem, then drifted away to think of other things. But it always drifted back.

It was a beautiful warm warm day and her father was dead. day and her father was dead.

That brought it home to her all at once and her eyes squeezed shut, as if from a blow.

At the same time her hands jerked involuntarily on the tablecloth, yanking her plate off onto the floor. It shattered like a bomb and Frannie screamed, her hands going to her cheeks, digging furrows there. The wandering, apathetic vagueness disappeared from her eyes, which were suddenly sharp and direct. It was as if she had been slapped hard or had an open bottle of ammonia waved under her nose.

You can't keep a corpse in the house. Not in high summer.

The apathy began to creep back in, blurring the outlines of the thought. The full horror of it began to be obscured, cushioned. She began to listen for the clunk and drop of the icecubes again- She fought it off. She got up, went to the sink, ran the cold water on full, and then splatted cupped handfuls against her cheeks, shocking her lightly perspiring skin.

She could drift away all she wanted, but first this thing had to be solved. It had had to be. She couldn't just let him lie in bed up there as June melted into July. It was too much like that Faulkner story that was in all the college anthologies. "A Rose for Emily." The town fathers hadn't known what that terrible smell was, but after a while it had gone away. It ... it ... to be. She couldn't just let him lie in bed up there as June melted into July. It was too much like that Faulkner story that was in all the college anthologies. "A Rose for Emily." The town fathers hadn't known what that terrible smell was, but after a while it had gone away. It ... it ...

"No!" she cried out loud to the sunny kitchen. She began to pace, thinking about it. Her first thought was the local funeral home. But who would ... would ...

"Stop backing away from it!" she shouted furiously into the empty kitchen. "Who's going to bury bury him?" him?"

And at the sound of her own voice, the answer came. It was perfectly clear. She was, of course. Who else? She was.

It was two-thirty in the afternoon when she heard the car turn into the driveway, its heavy motor purring complacently, low with power. Frannie put the spade down on the edge of the hole-she was digging in the garden, between the tomatoes and the lettuce-and turned around, a little afraid.

The car was a brand-new Cadillac Coupe de Ville, bottle green, and stepping out of it was fat sixteen-year-old Harold Lauder. Frannie felt an instant surge of distaste. She didn't like Harold and didn't know anyone who did, including his late sister Amy. Probably his mother had. But it struck Fran with a tired sort of irony that the only person left in Ogunquit besides herself should be one of the very few people in town she honestly didn't like.

Harold edited the Ogunquit High School literary magazine and wrote strange short stories that were told in the present tense or with the point of view in the second person, or both. You come down the delirious corridor and shoulder your way through the splintered door and look at the racetrack stars You come down the delirious corridor and shoulder your way through the splintered door and look at the racetrack stars-that was Harold's style.

"He whacks off in his pants," Amy had once confided to Fran. "How's that for nasty? Whacks off in his pants and wears the same pair of undershorts until they'll just about stand up by themselves."

Harold's hair was black and greasy. He was fairly tall, about six-one, but he was carrying nearly two hundred and forty pounds. He favored cowboy boots with pointed toes, wide leather garrison belts that he was constantly hitching up because his belly was considerably bigger than his butt, and flowered shirts that billowed on him like staysails. Frannie didn't care how much he whacked off, how much weight he carried, or if he was imitating Wright Morris this week or Hubert Selby, Jr. But looking at him, she always felt uncomfortable and a little disgusted, as if she sensed by low-grade telepathy that almost every thought Harold had was coated lightly with slime. She didn't think, even in a situation like this, that Harold could be dangerous, but he would probably be as unpleasant as always, perhaps more so.

He hadn't seen her. He was looking up at the house. "Anybody home?" he shouted, then reached through the Cadillac's window and honked the horn. The sound jagged on Frannie's nerves. She would have kept silent, except that when Harold turned around to get back into the car, he would see the excavation, and her sitting on the end of it. For a moment she was tempted to crawl deeper into the garden and just lie low among the peas and beans until he got tired and went away.

Stop it, she told herself, just stop it. He's another living human being, anyway.

"Over here, Harold," she called.

Harold jumped, his large buttocks joggling inside his tight pants. Obviously he had just been going through the motions, not really expecting to find anyone. He turned around and Fran walked to the edge of the garden, brushing at her legs, resigned to being stared at in her white gym shorts and halter. Harold's eyes crawled over her with great avidity as he came to meet her.

"Say, Fran," he said happily.

"Hi, Harold."

"I'd heard that you were having some success in resisting the dread disease, so I made this my first stop. I'm canvassing the township." He smiled at her, revealing teeth that had, at best, a nodding acquaintance with his toothbrush.

"I was awfully sorry to hear about Amy, Harold. Are your mother and father-?"

"I'm afraid so," Harold said. He bowed his head for a moment, then jerked it up, making his clotted hair fly. "But life goes on, does it not?"