'Sure,' she said. 'He'll say good-bye for both of us. And ... Vic?'

'What?' He sounded impatient now, pressed for time.

'I love you,' she said, and then before he could reply, she added:

'Here's Tad.' She gave the phone to Tad quickly, almost conking him on the head with it, and went through the house to the front porch, stumbling over a hassock and sending it spinning, seeing everything through a prism of tears.

She stood on the porch looking out at 117, clutching her elbows, struggling to get herself under control - control, dammit, control -

and it was amazing, wasn't it, how bad you could hurt when there was nothing physically wrong.

Behind her she could hear the soft murmur of Tad's voice, telling Vic they had eaten at Mario's, that Mommy had her favorite Fat Pizza and the Pinto had been okay until they were almost home.

Then he was telling Vic that he loved him. Then there was the soft sound of the phone being hung up. Contact broken.

Control.

At last she felt as if she had some. She went back into the kitchen and began putting away the groceries.

Charity Camber stepped down from the Greyhound bus at quarter past three that afternoon. Brett was right at her heels. She was clutching the strap of her purse spasmodically. She was suddenly, irrationally afraid that she would not recognize Holly. Her sister's face, held in her mind like a photograph all these years (The Younger Sister Who Had Married Well), had gone suddenly and mysteriously out of her mind, leaving only a fogged blank where the picture should have been.

'You see her?' Brett asked as they alighted. He looked around at the Stratford bus depot with bright interest and no more. There was certainly no fear in his face.

'Give me a chance to look around!' Charity said sharply. 'Probably she's in the coffee shop or

'Charity?'

She turned and there was Holly. The picture held in her memory came flooding back, but it was now a transparency overlying the real face of the woman standing by the Space Invaders game.

Charity's first thought was that Holly was wearing glasses - how funny! Her second, shocked, was that Holly had wrinkles - not many, but there could be no question about what they were. Her third thought was not precisely a thought at all. It was an image, as dear, true, and heartbreaking as a sepia-toned photograph: Holly leaping into old man Seltzer's cowpond in her underpants, pigtails standing up against the sky, thumb and forefinger of left hand pinching her nostrils closed for comic effect. No glasses then, Charity thought, and pain came to her then, and it squeezed her heart.

Standing at Holly's sides, looking shyly at her and Brett, were a boy of about five and a girl who was perhaps two and a half. The little girl's bulgy pants spoke of diapers beneath. Her stroller stood off to one side.

'Hi, Holly,' Charity said, and her voice was so thin she could hardly hear it.

The wrinkles were small. They turned upward, the way their mother had always said the good ones did. Her dress was dark blue, moderately expensive. The pendant she wore was either a very good piece of costume jewelry or a very small emerald.

There was a moment then. Some space of time. In it, Charity felt her heart fill with a joy so fierce and complete that she knew there could never be any real question about what this trip had or had not cost her. For now she was free, her son was free. Ibis was her sister and those children were her kin, not pictures but real.

Laughing and crying a little, the two women stepped toward each other, hesitantly at first, then quickly. They embraced. Brett stood where he was. The little girl, maybe scared, went to her mother and wrapped a hand firmly around the hem of her dress, perhaps to keep her mother and this strange lady from flying off together.

The little boy stared at Brett, then advanced. He was wearing Tuffskin jeans and a T-shirt with the words HERE COMES

TROUBLE printed on it.

'You're my cousin Brett,' the kid said.

'Yeah.'

'My name's Jim. just like my dad.'

'Yeah.'

'You're from Maine,' Jim said. Behind him, Charity and Holly were talking rapidly, interrupting each other and laughing at their hurry to tell everything right here in this grimy bus station south of Milford and north of Bridgeport.

'Yeah, I'm from Maine,' Brett said.

'You're ten.'

'Right.'

'I'm five.'

'Oh yeah?'

'Yeah. But I can beat you up, Ka-whud!' He hit Brett in the belly, doubling-him up.

Brett uttered a large and surprised 'Oof P Both women gasped.

'Jimmy!' Holly cried in a kind of resigned horror.

Brett straightened up slowly and saw his mother watching him, her face in a kind of suspension.

'Yeah, you can beat me up anytime,' Brett said, and smiled.

And it was all right. He saw from his mother's face that it was all right, and he was glad.

By three thirty Donna had decided to leave Tad with a baby-sitter and try taking the Pinto up to Camber's. She had tried the number again and there had still been no response, but she had reasoned that even if Camber wasn't in his garage, he would be back soon, maybe even by the time she arrived there ... always assuming she did arrive there. Vic told her last week that Camber would probably have some old junker to loan her if it looked like her Pinto was going to be an overnight job. That had really been the deciding factor. But she thought that taking Tad would he wrong.

If the Pinto seized up on that back road and she had to take a hike, well, okay. But Tad shouldn't have to do it.

Tad, however, had other ideas.

Shortly after talking to his dad, he had gone up to his room and had stretched out on his bed with a stack of Little Golden Books.

Fifteen minutes later he had dozed off, and a dream had come to him, a dream which seemed utterly ordinary but which had a strange, nearly terrifying power. In his dream he saw a big boy

throwing a friction-taped baseball up and trying to hit it. He missed twice, three times, four. On the fifth swing he hit the ball ... and the bat, which had also been taped, shattered at the handle. The boy held the handle for a moment (black tape flapped from it), then bent and picked up the fat of the bat. He looked at it for a moment, shook his head disgustedly, and tossed it into the high grass at the side of the driveway. Then he turned, and Tad saw with a sudden shock that was half dread, half delight, that the boy was himself at ten or eleven. Yes, it was him. He was sure of it.

Then the boy was gone, and there was a grayness. In it he could bear two sounds: creaking swing chains ... and the faint quacking of ducks. With these sounds and the grayness came a sudden scary feeling that he could not breathe, he was suffocating. And a man was walking out of the mist... a man who wore a black shiny raincoat and held a stop sign on a stick in one band. He grinned, and his eyes were shiny silver coins. He raised one band to point at Tad, and he saw with horror it wasn't a hand at all, it was bones, and the face inside the shiny vinyl hood of the raincoat wasn't a face at all. It was a skull. It was He jerked awake, his body bathed in sweat that was only in part due to the room's almost explosive heat. He sat up, propped on his elbows, breathing in harsh gasps.

Snick.

The closet door was swinging open. And as it swung open he saw something inside, only for a second and then he was flying for the door which gave on the hall as fast as he could. He saw it only for a second, long enough to tell it wasn't the man in the shiny black raincoat, Frank Dodd, the man who had killed the ladies. Not him.

Something else. Something with red eyes like bloody sunsets.

But he could not speak of these things to his mother. So he concentrated on Debbie, the sitter, instead.