Somehow Audrey had foreseen that when Chuck finally appeared in the main house, he would not refer to breakfast.

Instead he looked sternly at her and asked whether there had been a telephone call for him.

She answered guiltily. “In fact, there was.” It was fortunate that Doug remained away on his walk. “On Doug’s private phone. It was just by chance that I—”

“It wasn’t Perlmutter?” Chuck’s bright blue eyes seemed to show an unparticularized resentment.

“Actually, someone named Tedesco. He didn’t leave a number. He said—”

“I can imagine what he said.” Chuck was a man of slightly under medium height, of average-to-slight figure. He had a ruddy face that anyone would have called handsome, below neatly cut, straight, very dark hair. “If he calls again, tell him I’ve left.”

“It’s not likely I’ll be the one to answer if he uses that number. It’s really Doug’s private one. He doesn’t like others to use it. I wonder how Mr. Tedes—” But Audrey stopped here; she would not be rude.

Chuck sat down in the chair that Bobby had earlier vacated in favor of the deck. Parts of the newspaper lay where they had been dropped. Chuck retrieved them, stacked them on his lap, but did not so much as glance at the headlines.

“Tedesco’s not a man to trifle with,” said he. “If anybody is looking for trouble, Tedesco will supply it.”

Why then would he have given the man Doug’s private number? was the question that persisted with Audrey. But she could neither ask it nor mention the subject tabooed by the law of hospitality: namely, were the plans for breakfast now definitely shelved?

“He called you Charley,” she said at last, and when Chuck looked at her as if puzzled, she added, “Mr. Tedesco.”

Chuck, who had seemed to be brooding, now brightened. “It’s a matter of choice. The name you’re called by others is not exactly your own property, is it? Charley, Chuck, Chaz. It’s the name you can do that with. But Audrey is not, I think?” Chuck took the matter seriously. It was this sort of thing that made him so ingratiating.

“Actually, Audrey’s not my first name, as it happens,” said his hostess. “I don’t like it much but it’s preferable to Wilhelmina, which is one of those names one is given to please some relative who might leave money to a younger person of the same name.”

Chuck leaned towards her. He still held the newspapers, which he had stacked, she assumed, merely to serve his sense of order. He wore leather loafers, with socks, and apparently had not brought along a pair of sports shoes of any kind, nor jeans or shorts. He provided quite a contrast with Bobby’s style, and not only in clothing. “You’re a desirable woman, Willie,” he said in a voice of intensity but low volume. Having made that startling speech, he rose and left the room at a smart pace, carrying with him the stack of newspapers.

Audrey had assumed she had forgotten how to blush, so long had it been, perhaps even since the days of the squint. While Doug’s courtship antics had shocked her, she had never been embarrassed by them, but the difference there was that she had been a participant, a collaborator even if involuntarily. At the moment she had been given no role, and sat alone with her blazing face. Whether it was cruel or considerate of Chuck to leave so decisively would have been difficult to say. She was fifty-one and he might be somewhat older than her son but was still under thirty. With another intonation, his words now might well have been interpreted indecently. As it was, they sounded almost businesslike. His departure suggested ruthlessness. With no supporting evidence Audrey might have applied to Chuck what he had said of his friend or perhaps enemy named Tedesco, who should not be trifled with nor frequented unless one was looking for trouble. That certainly had never been true of Audrey. Her style was to avoid conflict, and thus, unlike almost everyone else she knew, she was still on her first marriage.

Lydia too had colored by reason of Chuck Burgoyne, but her flush represented anger. Only a scoundrel would sleep naked with an open bedroom door, even if quartered in the remotest part of the house. The weekday housekeeper, Mrs. Finch, surely went back there routinely as did the team of cleaning women who made regular Monday and Friday visits, not to mention those persons on missions such as that of Lydia only just concluded, or mere wanderers-through-hallways. But what infuriated her most was her inability to decide whether in so establishing the opportunity for self-exhibition Chuck was showing insolent indifference or narcissistic intent. Each would have been offensive, but perhaps the first was the more obnoxious.

Lydia could not abide inconsiderate persons, those who performed as if they were alone in the universe. But until now it could never have been said of Chuck Burgoyne that he operated with indifference to those around him: he was all too aware of others. He was always manipulating the Graveses, inducing them to alter practices that had apparently been lifelong, e.g., it had been their custom to breakfast severally and not collect around the table as a family so early in the day. He was singlehandedly responsible for the canceling of the traditional cocktail party with which the family had celebrated the opening of the season each year for the last seventy-odd, if the count began with Doug’s grandfather, whose enormous house had not been at the shore, which in those days was considered too remote a site for a residence, but rather in the town overlooking the harbor. But it had been Audrey, not Doug, who cared about tradition, and the latter made no vocal objection when she announced that, as Chuck had rightly pointed out, the party when seen unsentimentally was no more than, when the time for planning and preparing was included, many dollars of expense and days of hard work for a few hours of tedium.

On the other hand, if it were Chuck’s intention to exhibit himself, it could have been supposed that he would have done so under conditions more propitious for success. How could he have assumed that anyone would go back that way on a Sunday? And then what if the visitor had been Bobby or Doug? Presumably the sight would not have been so shocking to another man, certainly not to Bobby, who had told her of some of the contests that had gone on in his day as an adolescent in the locker rooms of the club. Males then actually did concern themselves with size, as she noted derisively. Ah, said he, then women are indifferent to measurements of breast and butt and thigh? He professed not to understand the fundamental difference involved.

To Lydia the sight of Chuck’s tumid organ was anything but erotic. It simply represented the ultimate in effrontery.

She had stopped off at her own quarters to collect herself. A bright sitting room faced the sea; the bedroom, behind it on the land side, was always cool and dark and tranquil. The house had been built just as Bobby entered prep school, and his tennis and golf trophies from those years to the present stood on a teak shelving system that had probably been designed for books. Bobby owned few of the latter, being no reader, but with Lydia’s assistance he had when necessary summoned up sufficient intellectual effort to get passing grades in his college courses, though they would probably not have been high enough to get him accepted by a law school not heavily endowed by his great-grandfather. All three of the Graveses known to Lydia considered themselves virtually impoverished because they did not have the grand estate of his forebear, with its scores of servants, a property that today had long been a monastery, with grounds ever dwindling as the monkish order, in need of funds in an impious era, sold more of the acreage for tract houses and a shopping mall.

Lydia stood before the big window and sought to be calmed by the sight of the expanse of water: the ocean was a great flat gray sheet at the moment. It was perhaps incongruous to seek emotional balance by gazing at such a potentially violent medium, but this measure never failed even in a storm. Presumably a hurricane might provide a different story, but anything less, if one were safe behind plate glass, did not fail to bring—well, reassurance might be the name for it: what did not seem petty in view of that liquid magnitude?

Lydia was a superb swimmer, but riding on the surface of the sea was another thing. She was the poorest of sailors on her father’s big cabin cruiser, large enough for ocean-roaming but used by him exclusively on the meagerly proportioned and rather brackish Lake Winkeemaug, if not altogether a manmade body of water, then at least enhanced by dredge. Aboard that vessel the pubescent Lydia was capable of getting the vapors before the anchor was hoisted, and spent much of any voyage in the toilet, whose door, needless to say, was labeled “The Head.”

The two men Lydia loved the most were the same for whom she felt the most contempt: her father and her husband. But perhaps this was normal enough.

Had his daughter-in-law moved closer to the glass she could have seen Doug returning from his walk, ascending the steps from the beach. She would have been in an ideal situation from which to admire the fecundity of his scalp, on which the hair grew as thick as when he had been a boy.

He now had decided that there could be no more waiting for Chuck’s appearance: he was too hungry. And if the houseguest did subsequently, belatedly, arise and prepare breakfast, it would be within one’s capacity to eat twice: the salt air would see to that. Therefore, having entered by one of the doors which in a conventional dwellingplace would have been more obviously assigned to tradesmen, he was in the kitchen.

Here he stood bewildered for a moment before the large brushed-steel refrigerator that the designer had obtained, if memory served, from a firm whose routine clients were commercial restaurants. It was easy to assume that one could just go ahead and feed oneself, but aside from pouring cornflakes from a box, splitting a muffin and buttering it, and applying mustard to layered ham and cheese, Doug had never his life long been personally responsible for the preparing of that which he chewed and swallowed, and thus he found himself on alien terrain at the moment, without a legible map. He had never even tried frying a slice of bacon, and had an idea, based on scenes in comic movies, that it could seldom be performed by a beginner. To prepare his favorite form of egg, poached, divine intervention was probably to be implored, for even those of his women who were adepts at cookery made cloudy, oysterish messes unless they cheated and brought into play those little steaming-cups from which the eggs came looking as if effigies molded in rubber.

But Chuck’s poached eggs were as though formed in God’s hand, translucent, veiled, quivering, scarcely over the threshold of solidity. Dammit, where was the fellow now?

Right there: he came out of the butler’s pantry.

“Chuck!” Doug cried in happy surprise and frank affection.

The houseguest failed to reply in kind. He frowned and scraped his lower lip with chisel-teeth. He carried two slices of white bread, inserted them into the twin slots of the toaster. Apparently this was to constitute his breakfast-making today.

Chuck asked, “Bobby went to the club?”

“I saw him outside a little while ago.”

Chuck made it a statement this time. “He went to the club.”

Doug rubbed his hands together. “Toast looks like a good idea. IVe been up for hours but haven’t yet eaten a bite.” He gave his speech a rising inflection so as to imply that this denial had been his own idea.

With excessive force Chuck pulled one of the chairs away from the kitchen table and dropped into it. “Have a seat,” he said to Doug. “The womenfolk are elsewhere.”

It occurred to Doug that Chuck sometimes used quaint terms, especially with respect to females, had heard him actually say “gentler sex” once.

He took a chair as asked. He could not remember having previously sat in this kitchen; on his brief visits he was wont to lean against a counter.

Chuck put a fist on the tabletop between them. “I don’t know whether you’re aware, Connie’s got to the point at which she’s threatening to make real trouble.”

Doug felt a reaction at the base of his skull, as if he had been seized, with pliers, at the nape. “Connie?”

“Cunningham,” Chuck said impatiently. “I’ve talked with her. Obviously it’s my intention to be discreet—else I wouldn’t be sitting here.”

Connie Cunningham was a divorcee with whom Doug had lately had some six weeks of ardent sexual encounters. She was skinny, almost emaciated, with breasts consisting of little more than nipples, and her behind was flat, but her vulva could only be called inexhaustible. Indeed, the trouble had apparently been that none of her three husbands had been able to maintain the pace she demanded. Only Doug, eight to ten years older than the eldest of these men, had ever been her match. Anyway so she had assured him, and at first this news proved aphrodisiac. Lately it had been anything but, and as the weeks passed, Connie became ever rougher, seizing him painfully at the crotch on his entry into her apartment, in bed nipping at his glans with her horsey front teeth, riding him as if he were a recalcitrant bronco, bruising his ribs.

Connie had not yet accepted the truth that she had been dumped: hence the anguished telephone messages on the tape in his answering machines at island and city addresses. Fortunately she had never learned the name of the firm; nowadays he routinely kept that a secret when he could. In the past he had too often been embarrassed before his relatives, who usually managed to make a spy of his secretary, for after all, they and not he held the effective power in the firm. “For God’s sake, Douglass,” said his uncle Whitson K. T. Graves III, who in addition to being on the boards of universities and hospitals had once been a wartime commanding officer of an elite regiment of the National Guard as well as, for the final eighteen months of one administration, ambassador to a little authoritarian state in Latin America. “Douglass, we all wet our whackers now and again, but we don’t wave them out the window!”

“I had gone back to look for you,” said Chuck. “When the phone rang I answered it. I hadn’t been given any special instructions.” He stared at Doug. “She assumed I was you, and gave me quite a earful.”

Doug raised his chin. “You see, I—”

“Look,” said Chuck, “it’s better it happened this way. I gather you’ve given this person the boot, but she’s resisting.”

“I—”

The houseguest raised his slender hand, making it into a pistol, the muzzle of the index finger pointed at Doug’s chin. “This is something that requires no effort at all on your part. I’ll see it’s taken care of.”

“Oh,” said Doug, “that won’t be—”

“Please,” said Chuck, waving the hand that was still extended. “It’s the least I can do.” A bell sounded at the toaster, followed by a clicking metallic noise. The houseguest went to the counter.

Doug’s embarrassment continued to grow. That he had no clear sense of what Chuck was proposing made it worse. And while Chuck was not as young as Bobby, he had yet to be born when Doug first had carnal knowledge of a female. With all respect to the young man, it did not seem right that he would assume authority in this matter—even though he might well be competent enough.

Chuck returned along a route that included the refrigerator, from which he took a covered butter dish of thick glass.

“She’s making too much of it,” said Doug.

Chuck had reclaimed his seat and, working neatly, knifed shavings of butter off the firm stick and put them to melt on each piece of toast. “You don’t need that sort of thing, Doug: a man in your position.” He smiled. “Let’s drop the subject. It’s been taken care of.”

This was news. Just a moment earlier he had put the statement in the future tense. What had happened since?

“I’m not sure I understand,” said Doug. “You’ve said something to Connie?”

Chuck shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “I just arrange things. I’m an idea man or maybe a diagnostician.” He crunched his teeth into the buttered toast. It was probably not his place to offer the other piece to Doug, for after all it was Doug’s kitchen, Doug who owned all the bread on the premises.

Before another attempt could be made to get to the truth of the matter at hand, Audrey entered the kitchen.

“Here you are,” said she, and it could be taken to refer to either one of them or both. “Golly, the toast smells goood.” She marched to the refrigerator. “How about some scrambled eggs to go with it?”

Doug considered this to be one of the great suggestions of the era, but Chuck said, “A little late in the day for me, Audrey, but you go right ahead.”

That was enough to discourage her even from preparing toast for herself and Doug. She sat down at the table, making a trio that might seem to the onlooker to be positively familial. “Well, what have you fellows been up to?” she asked as if jovially.

Chuck had already devoured the first piece of toast. “Oh,” said he, and took time to lick several fingertips, though with a certain grace that seemed boyish, not coarse, “oh, Doug and I are involved in a conspiracy.” He grinned at his so-called partner. “And it wouldn’t be a conspiracy if we told you.” Perhaps because the emphasis seemed rude in retrospect, he added, after a pause, “Boy-talk.”

But so far as Doug was concerned, that note made it worse. Said he to his wife, “Sports. Baseball. That’s the secret. It’s not as if we’re plotting a murder.”

Chuck raised his eyebrows inscrutably.

“I predict,” Audrey said suddenly, “that this will be a twenty-win year for the Soldier Boy.”

“You might be right,” replied Chuck. “It’s certainly within the range of possibility, if that bone-chip problem can be licked.”

It seemed to Doug as though they had begun to converse in a code for the reason of discomfiting him: he who was still shaken by Chuck’s being privy to the matter of Connie Cunningham.

“Since when,” he indignantly asked Audrey, “have you been interested in baseball?”

“Oh, I don’t know I can name a date. And I still haven’t actually ever seen a game except on television.”

Doug wondered whether he should be offended: this was news to him. He was not the sort of man who liked women who were keen on sports, even if simply as spectators. Of course female athletes, drenched with sweat, were out of the question.

Audrey asked Chuck, “Think the Bulldog will be swinging a big bat again this season?”

“Probably time for an off-year,” he said immediately. “Always happens after the signing of a big new contract.”

What in the world could Chuck have meant when he said Connie had been taken care of? Despite his previous favorable opinion of the young man, Doug found a suggestion of arrogance in the suggestion.

He rose from the chair and rubbed his hands together. He now had sufficient justification to announce he was hungry, in which statement there was a definite implication that was critical of Chuck. “I haven’t had anything to eat since dinner last night. Does anybody have any plans for lunch?”

Audrey seemed to quail, but after a moment Chuck threw up his arms and cried genially, “Couldn’t sleep, so I came out early and made a big breakfast. This toast has taken care of me till dinnertime.”

Doug was now provoked to reveal his annoyance. “I really was looking forward to your pancakes.”

Chuck raised one eyebrow. “You don’t remember? We all agreed last night we’d each be on his own this morning?”

Audrey remained serenely silent. She could not be looked to for assistance.

After a moment Doug shook his head and said expressionlessly, “My mistake.” He walked to the casement window over the sink and stared out to the parking area, a graveled place below tall pines. Seeing which car remained, he asked, without purpose, “Bobby went to the club?” He slowly came to the table. “I think I’ll run in to the village and catch a sandwich at the diner.”

“It’s closed,” said Audrey. “All day Sunday.”

Smirking, Chuck strolled to the refrigerator, swung open the door, and while peering into the interior said, “A man’s got a square meal coming under his own roof. I’ll rustle up something.”

All at once Doug had lost his sense of hurt. “Mighty nice of you, Chuck old boy. I wouldn’t mind it at all. You’ve spoiled us with your culinary prowess.” He had intended, on the route to the village, to stop at a roadside phone booth and call Connie Cunningham in the city: it was too risky to try that on his private telephone in the house, what with people wandering through the hallways. But he now had an excuse not to perform this chore, at least not promptly, and that was just as well, for he was sure to be wrong in feeling any apprehension as to her welfare: the result would be only to postpone, for more painful days, the necessary end to their association, for Connie was currently in the mood to see a routine hello as evidence of his revived passion.

Audrey protested hypocritically to Chuck, “It’s really me who should be doing that. You’re our guest!”

“I’d rather be useful than sit around,” said Chuck. “You know that.”

But good as he had previously been at the stove, today he produced fried eggs with hard yolks and brown edges, and burned the bacon, yet he served this fare to his hosts with the same air of confidence he had justifiably displayed with fine meals.

But one should probably not judge him harshly on the basis of a unique off-day.

Audrey was about to sit down to the plate Chuck had prepared for her when she said, “Oh, I guess I’d better tell Lydia we’re eating.”

“No,” said Chuck, “you sit down while it’s hot. I’ll find her.”

When the houseguest had left the kitchen, Doug asked Audrey, “Know anything about Chuck’s family?”

She shrugged. “Not really. I think he hails from out West somewhere. Ask Lydia. I gather she’s the one knew him first, introduced him to Bobby.”

“He’s an awfully agreeable guy,” said Doug, munching some bacon, the char-bittered taste of which was actually stimulating to his palate. “I hope he’s able to stay for some days to come.”

Audrey agreed. “He’s nice to have around the house. You know when Mrs. Finch is here he never comes into the kitchen. He’s that delicate.”

Unlike his wife, Doug had never seen their weekday housekeeper as charmingly quaint. He had been coming to the island all his life and had yet to find a local he either trusted or liked.

“I wonder if Chuck would like to audit her accounts,” he said to Audrey. “I doubt they’d pass muster.” Members of the Finch family owned the nearest grocery, the gas station, the liquor store, and supplied the cleaning women, and the island postmaster was an in-law. In Doug’s experience they were all lazy, surly, and unscrupulous throughout the generations. In appearance most of them shared a potato-face, though now and again a Finch had a foxlike snout: long nose and undershot jaw.

“Oh, Doug,” Audrey chided. “You’re hardly ever here when she is.”

“I will be tomorrow,” said he. “I’m not going back this evening.”

His wife lowered her knife and fork. “Not flying back?”

“Nor driving. Nor going. I’m staying on for a couple of days for a change. Is it that amazing?”

Audrey made a little gesture. “Well, it’s unprecedented.”

“You weren’t expecting guests?” he asked sardonically. “I can keep my room?”

“Then how long will you be staying?”

“I trust I’m welcome?”

“You’ll have more than Mrs. Finch to contend with: the cleaning crew comes again on Monday.”

These women, three or sometimes four of them, were also essentially Finches, at least second cousins or perhaps a near neighbor who probably had some of the same blood, so interbred were the island folk.

“You’ve forgotten. I’ve been coming here since I was a baby. I know how to handle myself with that tribe.”

“Well, I’m just pointing it out. And remember not to leave anything lying around that you want to find afterwards. They put away everything loose, any article of clothing, jewelry, papers, ashtrays, everything movable, so they can dust a room all at once. Trouble is where they put the things: never places I would choose. They’ll shove one shoe into a dresser drawer and throw its mate on a closet shelf.”

“Genetic deficiencies have been passed on from generation to generation,” Doug pointed out. “Necessarily: any breeding done on the island has to be incest. These are essentially the same people that came here three centuries ago. Nobody leaves and no new blood has been added.”

Audrey herself could freely criticize the Finches, but of course when Doug added his observations she came to their defense.

“You exaggerate,” she said now. “They’re probably as good or maybe even better than the usual people found in such a place as this, with a part-time population so different from the human beings who live here all year—to whom the permanent residents are merely servants.”

Lydia had composed herself by now and had only just left her room when she encountered Chuck, of all people, in the hall.

For no apparent reason he was positively ebullient. “Hi!” he cried. “You’re quite the slugabed today.”

If she knew the term at all, it was but distantly, perhaps from some childhood book written in the century past but still read to little girls in her day. It went with “counterpane.” Despite these innocent associations she was having a struggle with herself to keep from making a wisecrack with reference to the state in which she had last seen him.

“I’ve been up and about for hours. You’re the one who overslept today.” And not being burdened with Audrey’s obligations as hostess, she added, “We naturally assumed you’d be up to make breakfast, and waited and waited.”

Chuck did not admit a hint of failure. “Where were you?” he asked aggressively. “I did cook, and everybody else has eaten long since.” His front teeth, now on gleaming display, were perfect. He was not at all her type, but there could be no argument as to his good looks.

He went on. “That’s why I came to fetch you. It’s so late now there won’t be another meal till evening. Better come along and eat some eggs.” He turned and strolled along the hall for a few paces, then stopped and spun around to face her again. At first it seemed odd that he would not have waited till she was at closer range to say such a thing, but in retrospect she understood that it was his game to unsettle prospective prey by the use of special effects. “Just as well you’re up,” said he. “Can’t tell what I might have done if I found you still in bed.”

Had she had time to reflect, Lydia would have seen that the only effective response here would have been none whatever. As it was, inexperienced at this kind of contest, she answered with some asperity.

“Oh. I can take care of myself.”

His grin was triumphant. “I would be counting on that.”

She realized she was now in the uncomfortable and in fact preposterous situation of fearing that he might believe she was afraid of him.

The car conked out not long before Bobby would have emerged from the private lane to join the cross-island road: simply coughed twice and stopped. He obstinately tried for a while to start it, angrily failing to comprehend how an engine that was running well could quit without warning and did not at least “miss” for a mile or two. But finally he climbed out and began to walk the quarter mile back to the house. The lane was one car wide, unpaved, and deeply grooved by wheels that had traveled it in wet weather. This was no place for anything but utilitarian vehicles. Not to mention that the salt air pitted any finish within months. The Graveses kept two cars at hand, a station wagon of some capacity and the rusty compact that had just given out on Bobby. These machines were regularly maintained during the summer by the Finches who operated the local garage and then when autumn came “winterized” by them and stored in one of the barns at the disposal of that family. But it was more than possible that, as his father routinely suspected of anything managed by the Finches, this job was poorly done. If so, Bobby did not want to be the one who told them so, for his childhood bête noire, Dewey Finch, now ran the automotive branch of the Finch enterprises. Once when Bobby was twelve and Dewey fourteen or fifteen and much thicker-set than he, the brutal islander had cornered the rich kid in the gas-station toilet and forced the younger boy to masturbate him, after the performance of which degrading act he predicted that Bobby would be far too humiliated to report it, and of course he was right.

Dewey had obviously not forgotten that episode, for he still smirked today if Bobby was so careless as to gas up one of the cars when his enemy was on duty.

On the walk back he saw a red squirrel that looked no bigger than a good-sized mouse and heard the sounds made by a larger animal he could not see but had set to flight amidst the trees. Many beasts lived in these woods. Deer were not uncommon. A gardener when Bobby was a boy, of course another Finch, scared him with tales of wandering bears, but in later years he determined that there had been no bear-sightings locally since the turn of the century.

As he was approaching the house, Chuck came around the wing nearest the parking area.

“Out for a constitutional?” asked the houseguest. Chuck wore his habitual uniform: khaki trousers, navy knitted shirt, and leather loafers. Apparently he had brought little else. Since it was not likely he was poor, this was perhaps an expression of his austere tastes. But Bobby really couldn’t understand how anyone would want to stay out of shorts in this season.

He groaned now. “Car broke down, just stopped in its tracks. Sunday the garage is closed, so I guess what I’ll have to do is take the wagon out there and pull the car back. Mind steering the car, Chuck?”

“Why don’t you let me walk out and see whether I can get it started?” Chuck asked. “I know a few tricks.” He held out his hand for the ignition keys that Bobby had been swinging on an index finger.

Bobby felt a great sense of relief. He hated to have trouble with cars, for even the simplest matter pertaining to the internal-combustion engine was mysterious to him: he really had no idea of what, say, a distributor did.

“God, I’d be grateful,” said he, surrendering the keys. “I’ll go get the keys to the wagon, just in case.”

“No,” Chuck said evenly. “Let me see first.” He started off up the lane in his, usual brisk, regular, almost military stride. Bobby would have liked to go along with him on this very male mission, but he had the definite sense that Chuck did not require his company. Also, he was hungry and assumed that now Chuck was up, some provision had been made for a meal.

He found a door that was reasonably near the kitchen and entered the house. In the kitchen he found Lydia eating an open-faced grilled-cheese sandwich with knife and fork. She also had a tall glass of what looked like grapefruit juice.

He told her what had happened. She frowned and lowered her fork. “He certainly makes himself indispensable around here,” said she. “I gather Chuck is a longtime friend of the family.”

Bobby shrugged. “I guess so. My parents are probably friends of his.” The molten cheese looked delicious. “Say, Lyd, make me one of those, will you?”

“You mean you don’t know him?”

“Only since he came, last week.”

“You never saw him before?”

“Not that I can remember,” said Bobby. “I don’t think he’s ever stayed here before. Hey, how about it: grill me a cheese?”

Lydia pointed with her fork. “See that gadget on the counter, Bobby? That’s a toaster-oven. You just take the cheese from the fridge and bread from the breadbox. You put the cheese on the bread and the bread in the tray of the toaster, then you press down the lever on the side. You watch through the window, and when it’s done you take it out.”

“I know how to do it,” said he. “I just thought it might be nice and generous and kind of you to fix it for me.”

“You mean,” she asked with an expression that favored one eye, “it’s some kind of test of my regard for you?”

She could be derisive in the kitchen, but when they were in bed, he would be the one who would be expected to perform, whatever the state of his own ardor at the time, and it never quite matched hers.

“I’ll have something else, then,” he said, expecting her to capitulate, but she did not, so he had to go to the refrigerator and root around. As it happened, he never did come across the cheese. Instead he found one of the many packages of frankfurters for the lunch Mrs. Finch prepared every third day: hotdogs, canned baked beans, and the cole slaw sold in plastic containers at her family’s grocery. Unable to breach the tough plastic without a tool, Bobby whined to Lydia, and she gave him the knife she had been eating with.

“For God’s sake, this is dirty,” said he. “Also, it’s blunt.” He gave it back, sighing. “I don’t have any fingernails.” This was true: he trimmed them so short he could not pick up a fallen coin.

Lydia groaned and pointed to the conspicuous hardwood block with slots for many knives, all of them filled. It took him a while to find the littlest one. By the time the hotdogs were available to him, he lacked the energy and patience to cook them, and ate a couple cold, from his fingers, then reached over Lydia’s shoulders and stole her grapefruit juice.

She was finished by now, anyway. She took her plate to the dishwasher, and while there looked out the window that gave onto the parking area.

“Huh, Chuck’s brought the car back. He seems to have had no trouble with it.”

Bobby came to join her. “How about that,” said he. “He was right.”

“Right?”

“He said he knew a few tricks about cars.”

“And not just about cars,” Lydia said sourly. “He’s a pretty tricky guy in general.”

Bobby frowned with his forehead, letting his long jaw hang loose. “He knows how to do everything. Maybe I should take a few lessons from him.”

Lydia seized him around the waist. “No, you shouldn’t,” she said fiercely.

“I really ought to learn something about cars,” said Bobby. He found the hug slightly painful: he had a sensitive rib. “I’ve been driving since I was twelve or thirteen.”

“Speaking of cars,” Lydia said, releasing him, “where’s Chuck’s? How’d he get here?”

But Bobby was distracted, watching Chuck lock the door of the car he had just returned to its place. There was no need for that up here: robbery of any kind was virtually unknown during the season. When the summer people were away, however, their houses were fair game—unless they hired the Finches, at quite a healthy fee, to keep an eye on the property. It was his father’s theory that this constituted a “protection” racket of the kind operated in the cities by mobsters: namely, that the people who could be hired as guards were, unless given such employment, the selfsame who ransacked the houses—though naturally this would have been hard to prove. Even old General Lewis Mickelberg, former supreme commander of the armed services, had a healthy respect for them, as did other summer residents who were people of power in the real world, e.g., Nelson T. Boonforth, chairman of the board of the third largest bank in the country; and celebrated defense attorney Hartman Anthony Johncock, whose eldest son was Bobby’s principal rival on the tennis courts.

Chuck was heading in a direction that would have taken him out of sight had not Bobby leaned across the counter and shouted through the screened casement.

“I’m in the kitchen!”

Chuck halted.

“You got it started?” Bobby asked. “Did it run okay?”

Chuck nodded.

“What the devil was the problem?” asked Bobby.

“Flooded,” Chuck answered laconically. He walked away.

Lydia lifted her upper lip. “Don’t you think that’s rude?”

“I guess it was dumb of me,” Bobby said. “But if you don’t keep trying to get the motor started, how’s it going to start? Yet if you do, you flood it.”

“I notice he’s keeping the keys,” Lydia pointed out.

“Well, we know where to find them.” Bobby yawned, crucifying his arms. “Anyway, the moment has passed for going to the club. I can hardly keep my eyes open.”

“Are there extra sets of car keys?”

“Sure,” said Bobby. “On the hook inside the door of the cabinet in the utility room, next to the washer-dryer. Why? Going someplace?”

Lydia shrugged. “Good to know such things.”

Bobby grinned lazily. “We don’t get tidal waves here. Sometimes there’s the tail end of a hurricane, but you’re safer inside this house than out where you could get hit by falling trees.”

“You didn’t happen to check the tailpipe after the car stopped?”

“Why should I have done that?”

“Oh,” said Lydia, “I was just thinking if something, some foreign object, had been stuck in there, the result would have been just about what happened. The engine would stop if the exhaust was blocked.”

He smiled smugly. “You’re as knowledgeable as Chuck. No, I wouldn’t have thought of that. But Chuck already said it was flooded: that’s something else entirely, though, isn’t it?”

“Looks like you’re headed for a nap,” Lydia observed, changing the subject. “Mind if I join you?”

“No, but I really am drowsy.”

“You mean I should keep my hands to myself?”

He laughed helplessly. It was flattering to him to be always in such demand.