Lydia was still trying to find a means by which she could reenter the house when to her surprise the lights had gone on and she saw the three Graveses on their inspection tour. It would have been natural for her to go knock at the nearest door to their current position, but before she could do so, she saw a shadowy figure emerge from one corner of the building and steal out through the parking area and onto the gravel lane that led to the public road.

Chuck Burgoyne was making his departure, slinking off like a whipped cur. She found it difficult to abstain from sounding derisive applause, perhaps even a raspberry. He was the type to whom it would be heaven to rub it in, and now that she had evened the score by saving his life, she had no motive for restraint. But what revenge would be appropriate for what he had done to her? All she could think up was something obsolete, like public shaming in the pillory.

But her sense of triumph was soon moderated by the realistic reflection that it would be utterly unlike the Chuck she knew to leave permanently at this point. He had not long before won exclusive possession of the house, having, in a way that might seem magical to him, survived a savage attempt on his life. Why, when things had again turned his way after a short-lived reversal, would he make a surreptitious exit into the night woods?

Lydia saw it as her duty to follow him as far as the road, if such was his destination, but she could not walk on the gravel, for, though at the moment the sound of her footsteps would be obscured by his own, if he stopped without warning she would be audible at a great distance. She therefore took the verge, in this case a terrain in which parts of dead trees, pine cones, and boulders were routine, and scratchy, even stinging bushes not uncommon. Mosquitoes too were at home in places. A hundred yards of this course left many marks upon her, and soon after leaving the car-park she encountered dense darkness as the lane became a corridor through the woods, too narrow to be penetrated by such feeble light as the sky offered. Yet every time she halted she continued to hear Chuck’s regular crunch up ahead. He had no flashlight. If she quit now, he would have proved he was the more competent night navigator. She had long since determined she would never again surrender to him in any area of human enterprise.

The lane may have been as long as a quarter of a mile. Every time Lydia stubbed her toe on an invisible obstacle, or was again slashed by a thornbush or bitten by another insect, she told herself that this would be the last, that she had earned an easy passage from here on, and on each occasion she was immediately proved wrong. Once she fell outright, and her hair caught in a spiky bush. It was only after her hopelessness had been established that relief arrived.

The lights of an oncoming car became visible, silhouetting Chuck’s figure in the lane. Lydia now plunged to the ground on purpose. It was a nasty place for this, and her right hand encountered a soft, damp mess of something with the texture of excrement though fortunately with an odor no worse than that of mildew.

Chuck was waving in the jovial style in which vehicular friends are hailed, and when the car stopped, he went out of sight behind the headlamps and, as the slam of the door would indicate, climbed on board.

The car stayed where it was; the occupants sat there plotting their tactics for the final assault. Now what she had to do was return to the house as quickly as possible and sound the alarm. Secrecy no longer had a point. She took to the middle of the lane and ran full speed through the gravel, expecting to be immediately pursued by the car and in danger of being ruthlessly run down.

But whether or not the men had seen her, her backward glance when halfway home told her they were staying in place.

At the parking area, the end of her run, she checked again, but now the headlights could not be seen at all. This could have a sinister implication; maybe they had launched an invisible, silent advance. She could identify all three members of her adopted family through the kitchen window, could easily have picked them off with a target rifle. They were more vulnerable than she.

Both screen and inner doors were locked. She banged on the frame and loudly identified herself. Bobby answered the summons, after having peered out apprehensively under a horizontal hand. Yet when he let her in, he pretended to have difficulty in recognizing her.

“Don’t bother with how I look,” she said, gasping from her expenditures both physical and emotional. “They’re coming! Get these lights out!”

“More divided loyalties?” he asked skeptically.

His father came forward. “Let’s get this straight,” Doug said. “Has Chuck really decamped? By coming back like this do you mean you’ve broken with him for good?”

“I was never with him!” she shouted. “Will you listen to me? They’re out there, in a car with the lights out. They’re probably all armed to the teeth.”

Doug’s expression changed from dubiety to fear. “Oh, my God,” he muttered, and then, in a louder voice, “By ‘they’ you mean his gang?”

“Tedesco was one name, I believe,” said Audrey, “and then you claim to have spoken with a Mr. Perlmutter.”

“When Lyman left, he threatened to come back with a carload of other relatives who have been drinking all day,” said Lydia, looking for the light switch that ought to have been on the wall near the door. “I haven’t had time to tell you that.”

“And ransack the house?” asked Audrey. “I thought we were getting off too easy.”

Doug nodded. “Those Neanderthals who hang around in the back room of the gas station. They’ve been doing that for years, generation after generation.”

“Goddammit,” Lydia said. “Will you turn the lights off!”

Doug went to more or less the same place where she had been looking in vain, found a switch, and put the kitchen into darkness.

In the dark he said, “We’ve got floodlights out there in the car-park.”

“No,” said Lydia. “Lights will keep them away from where they can be seen. They’ll just keep the car out in the lane, or they’ll shoot out the bulbs. In a minute when our eyes get adjusted, we’ll be able to see as well as they, and they might not know at first that we’re onto them.”

“I think we might suffer less damage in the long run,” said Audrey, “if we simply surrendered at least some of the items they want. Make a deal of some sort. It has been determined that some of the worst people will often negotiate. Compromise seems to come naturally to human beings.”

“Not to Chuck. I begged him at the pool!” Doug said with emotion, and then turned hard. “If they come for me, they’d better be ready to shed blood—their own as well as mine.”

Bobby’s voice came from near the door. “I agree. For everything they are given, they’ll want something else. This is war.”

“They don’t want your possessions,” Lydia said to the others, whose presences were becoming discernible. “They want me.”

“You?” Bobby asked, in the kind of voice that could be taken to imply the unspoken question: For what reason?

“I’m hardly making it up,” she said testily. “Chuck told me.”

“They want you,” said Bobby, putting it as a statement of dubious authenticity.

“I don’t intend to stand here in the dark repeating it. That’s what I was told.”

“You mean to say …” Audrey began to speak, her voice falling away.

“Look here,” said her father-in-law, in almost a parody of the avuncular tone, “look here, Lydia, we’re certainly not going to expect you to make such a sacrifice for the family. Why should you? You’ve just joined it. Please believe me, you can rely on us to stand back of you one hundred percent on whatever course you choose. That’s what a family’s for.”

Even after the experience of this half a day, she remained shockable. “But you are asking me, aren’t you?”

“He just said he wasn’t.” Bobby was speaking. “What more do you want, Lyd? Why make any more trouble than we’ve got?”

“Will there ever be a way out of this whole thing?” Audrey asked rhetorically. “Short of total ruin? That’s all I’m saying. I just wish I had the answer.”

Lydia asked bitterly, “You really want me to go out there, don’t you?”

Doug said, “I don’t know how I could put it in any other way than I already have. I specifically stated I didn’t expect that of you. If something’s beyond someone’s capacities, it’s unfair to criticize them: that’s always been my policy.”

“Now you can’t say that’s not fair,” said Bobby.

Lydia tested them. “Okay, I’m going.”

“Uh-huh,” murmured Bobby.

“No,” said Doug.

“Excuse me?”

“I said I wouldn’t ask it of you, and I’m not.”

“Is that your response?”

“You’re really being a pain, Lyd,” said Bobby. “Just let me ask you: Do you really want to go? Because that’s what it seems like when you keep asking the same question.”

“Do you know what a shit you are being?”

“Sure,” Bobby said, “you can abuse me. That’s always one way of avoiding the issue.”

Audrey came to her side in the darkness. “Don’t let them bully you, dear. They can’t take away your dignity.”

Lydia suddenly understood she was speaking of the gang in the car, not her son and husband. “You’re a traitor to your own sex.”

“Sex has nothing to do with this,” said Audrey, in apparent, perhaps even genuine innocence. “Survival is what’s at stake.”

“Your survival.”

Audrey sighed. “I could hardly speak with authority on anyone else’s.”

“What gets me,” said Lydia, “is that earlier you kept suspecting me of being in collusion with Chuck. Now you are urging it upon me.”

“Lydia,” Doug said, coming nearer, “the situation’s always changing. You’ll learn that when you get a few years older. Nations soon go to war with their former allies. After acquiring power, revolutionaries invariably begin to execute their old comrades, and starving persons cannibalize their nearby friends. This is beyond right and wrong: it is simple reality.”

“No it isn’t,” Lydia said with more conviction that she felt. Indeed she suspected he might well be correct, but it would have been unconscionable for her spinelessly to acquiesce, and anyway, just because something is true is not sufficient justification for it to be stated in so many words, thus discouraging those souls who live on hope. “Oh, maybe it is for you,” she went on, “and for them out there. But I’m better than you. I’m better than them.” Having said which, she realized she would now have to make her claim good, else be disqualified forever.

She breathed deeply and left the house. She was halfway to the parking area before the men in the darkened vehicle were aware of her approach and turned on not only the headlamps but also a row of spotlights mounted on the roof of the jeep. It would have shown a weakness if she had covered her eyes, but she could not help wincing.

To show disrespect for Chuck, she went to the driver’s side and spoke presumably to Lyman. She would continue to be blind for a few moments.

“Chief,” said she, “I want to file formal charges against someone for criminal trespass, malicious injuries, possession of a concealed weapon, sodomy, and mala in se.” She impulsively threw in the last, so to speak a catchall, because the penultimate charge was more than a bit doubtful, Chuck’s not having performed unnaturally in bed, and in fact the previous one had slim support, for she had never seen his gun if indeed he had one.

The window was rolled squeakily down. With it closed, he had probably not heard her statement of charges, and she had now lost the fine edge of energy that had produced it. To make one good attack is within anybody’s power, but consistency is the mark of the champion.

Before the window was fully open she could smell, in the clean air of the shore, the stale booze-fumes emanating from the interior of the vehicle.

“Lady,” said Lyman’s voice, “you think you can come up here and do anything you damn please, shake your little ass around in shorts without any underpants under them, wear shirts with the nipples of your knockers sticking out, you talk worse filth than any of the hardworking men I know, I’ve heard your kind in the village, with your fuck-this and fuck-that and shit-on-it and so forth, and we’re supposed to clean up after you and bow down like you’re royalty or something, but I tell you we get sick of it. We’re gonna teach you a lesson you’ll never forget.” He threw the door open, and had not her vision by now improved sufficiently to see it coming, Lydia might have been struck.

But she stepped back and waited for Lyman to emerge, which he proceeded to do as if he had acquired another hundred pounds of flesh since last seen. It was perhaps unfair of her, considering his current state, in which the chief was obviously incapable of giving more than a symbolic performance, but that was the pleasure of it: she kicked him in the groin with all her force. She was amazed at how effective this blow proved: she had never previously delivered one except against a soft dummy in a two-session female self-defense course at college.

Lyman actually howled in anguish, clutched himself, and sat down heavily in the gravel.

Figures emerged from the jeep, but before they reached her Lydia had claimed the chief’s revolver from his holster. It was much heavier than she had assumed it would be, took both hands to hold and was not so steady even then.

“Lydia,” Chuck said, coming from around the rear of the vehicle, “do you realize what you’ve done to an officer of the law?” He was by far the smallest of the four standing men. The others were submissively holding their hands in the air, as if victims of a stickup.

“Now you guys,” she said, in a voice that started uncertainly but grew more steady as she spoke, “you guys pick up Lyman and put him in the jeep.”

Chuck slowly advanced. “Lydia,” he said, “can’t you see it was just a joke? You’re going to get into trouble if you keep this up.”

She waved the pistol at the largest of the big men. “Get going.”

He made a little bow of acquiescence and bent to take the crumpled chief under one shoulder. Another man took the other side, and the third seized the ankles just above the hightop shoes. The task looked heavy even for three large porters: Lyman hung between them like an overfilled sack.

Chuck said, “So he goes a little far, but he is the duly constituted authority. He can’t be deposed just like that, at your convenience.”

Lydia kept the gun on him. “Why is your name Burgoyne and not Finch?”

“My mother got married.” He stepped closer. “I’m glad to see you’re coming to your senses, Lydia. Now put that gun down.”

Lyman uttered a new groan of pain. His hat had fallen off: perhaps the men had banged his head trying to insert him into the jeep.

“Don’t come closer,” Lydia warned Chuck. “I know how to shoot a revolver. My uncle showed me.”

Chuck said knowingly, “And who would know better than a mobster?”

“He’s a veteran police lieutenant,” :she lied.

“Go on,” said Chuck, but he stopped where he was. “Put the gun down, Lydia. Let’s talk this over.”

“I want you out of here. You’ve become an embarrassment.”

“You can’t mean that. We saved each other’s lives today. That must signify something.”

“One person naturally helps another in an extreme situation: that’s only human. It doesn’t mean anything else.”

“I just wish you could bring yourself to admit it,” Chuck said, in a wheedling tone. “You’re in love with me. God knows, you’ve done everything you can to show that, but you simply can’t say it. Okay, then don’t! But just put the gun down, and we’ll forget this little incident ever happened. Am I right, boys?”

The other men had by now installed Lyman in the back seat of the jeep and were presumably awaiting instructions. They grunted inscrutably in response to Chuck’s question.

Lydia waved the pistol. “You guys get in.”

Chuck pretended to be part of the current directorate and added his own orders as the men were complying with hers. “Go on back to the village. This is it for tonight.”

“You’re going with them,” said Lydia. “Get in.”

“Naw,” he said in a lowered voice. “That wouldn’t work at all. I don’t have anything in common with these guys. I left and made something of myself. I didn’t come back to them. I’ve got an education. I’ve got good taste. I know how to act. I can go anywhere.”

“That’s what you think,” said Lydia, waving the gun at him. “Get in the jeep. We don’t want your kind here.”

Chuck hung his head for a moment. When he brought his eyes up, he said, “You think your fancy in-laws give you the right to take the law into your own hands?”

“Yes.” Despite the complexities of reality, or perhaps because of them, the simplest answers are often the most effective: she was learning that. “I could give lots more in the way of justification, but it would probably come down to that simple fact in the end.”

Chuck stared at her. “You’re my biggest disappointment. I can’t really see you getting, any where in the long run. You’re living in a fool’s paradise. You think you’re clever now, but they’ll eventually destroy you.”

“I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do this,” Lydia said, “because it sounds so phony, but unless you get into the jeep before I have counted to three, I’m simply going to shoot you. One.”

Chuck shrugged, said, “You’re in charge,” turned and took a step towards the vehicle.

Lydia felt ridiculous, but she went ahead and said, “Two.”

At this point, Chuck whirled around and leaped at her. She had no choice but to fire.