"Harley gets itchy, don"t you, Harley? Look, love, let me go put on the house garments and brush up the dining room a little and then we can talk, because things will be dead as a snake until five past five and all the car doors start chunking shut out there in the lot."

I saw her in a little while, trotting back and forth in the dining room, wearing a crotch-length tennis dress with a sailor collar and a little white yachtsman"s cap. Another waitress had joined her. A couple of construction workers-off at four-came in for beers. Somebody started the juke. I watched Michele. She had absolutely great legs. I felt guilty about the way I was going to try to b.o.o.by-trap my question. Not very guilty. Antic.i.p.atory guilt, the kind that Meyer calls chessboard guilt, when you realize that the weaker player is making a frail response to a standard opening, and you are about to ram your bishops down his throat.

When she beckoned to me, I went into the dining room and followed her over to a service bar where she had coffee waiting. She said, "Coffee? Black? Okay. Look, I have talked myself out on that boat ride. Believe me, it was a long, long time ago. To nle, two months is long. Lots and lots of things happen in two months. I have told about it so much ttiat what I remember now is not the boat ride but all the times I talked about it."

"It can happen. Felicia is just as tired of it, I guess."

"You would never believe how sick we got. Maybe I would have been okay, but as soon as she lost it, I was gone too."

"There was just one thing I wanted to get straight, Michele."

"Such as?"

"Exactly how did John Tuckerman word it when he asked you to come along for the ride and bring a friend?"

"You got it wrong. I asked him if we could go along."

""Licia says that"s what Tuckerman told you to say."

"Why, G.o.d d.a.m.n her! She agreed never to tell anybody-"

And suddenly she stopped all motion. She was a subdued, plain-faced blonde with deeply bitten fingernails, staring at me from way inside herself, like an animal, looking out of the brush.

"You rotten b.a.s.t.a.r.d," she said in a low voice,. "You faked me out, didn"t you?"

"Look at it this way. If Lawless is still alive somewhere, the whole thing was a conspiracy to defraud. He needed bodies to dress up the conspiracy."

"That shows how much you know, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"I know this. You lied under oath. Right? So far, that"s between the two of us. And Felicia: But you keep on with the garbage mouth, I see no reason to keep your little secret."

We stood facing each other, each with an elbow on the service bar. For a few more moments the wary creature stared through her eyes at me, out of the thickets at the back of her mind, and then dropped out of sight, and she was Miss Cheerleader again, all bounce and joy, all twinkle and grin.

With breathy laugh and salacious wink, she said, "What it was, and I"ll trust you, I really will, John Tuckerman has this thing about Felicia. You wouldn"t believe how h.o.r.n.y he is for her, right from the first look he got at her. He said he would give me a nice present if I could get "Licia to come along. What it was, it was a way of getting maybe a good chance to set her up. She didn"t know what was coming down. She"s a funny kid. She"s not much for s.e.x. She lived with some cat for a while but she"ll never talk about it, and I think it was some kind of bad start for her, so now it"s all yeck to her. What happened was we got seasick, and then Harder pa.s.sed out and we had to come back and you know what happened. Right in the beginning John Tuckerman had told me to say it was me asked him if we could come along. Later on he said it was even more important I should say that, because if it got out he asked us, it would look bad. Mr. Lawless wasn"t real turned on by having us come along. He hardly spoke to us at all. The way Felicia found out was, after the testimony and all, I got a little high and I started kidding Felicia about Tuckerman giving me a hundred dollars to talk her into that terrible boat ride. She was really p.i.s.sed off at me. She wouldn"t talk to me for a week but then she began to see how funny it was and she forgave me. She said even if it had been the best boat ride the world ever saw, Tuckerman wasted a hundred dollars. I don"t see why she"s like that. He"s sort of old for her. He"s thirty-eight, he says, but probably forty. I told her he"s not kinky or anything like that, mid very sweet and generous, and he lives on that great beach, but she doesn"t want anything to do with him. It isn"t as if she thinks she"s the world"s best. She has this idea she"s ugly. Somebody told her once that with those teeth she could eat a Big Mac through a venetian blind. She doesn"t see why anybody would want her."

"Which finger did Nicky Noyes break?"

Her face got red. "She"s got all those big white teeth and she"s got a great big mouth too."

"Here come customers."

"Oh, G.o.d, with four kids yet. We close the kitchen at ten and I"m off by ten thirty."

"If I"m not at the bar there by ten thirty, give up an me."

"But you"ll be around?"

"Sure. For a while."

Eight.

I WENT right from the Cove to 215 South Oak Lane, to the long white house with the three-car garage. I arrived at about quarter to five. There were two cars in the drive, a weatherbeaten old Cadillac convertible, rusting out under the white paint, and a new little gray Honda Accord. The front door was open. Through the screen I heard women laughing-not social laughter, but contagious yelps of delight.

I had to ring the bell a couple of times. A woman came hurrying to the door and looked out at me, brows raised in query. She was small and lean and sun-brown in yellow shorts and a T-shirt. The black-gray bangs of her Prince Valiant hairstyle came almost to her black brows. Her face was sunweathered, hollow-cheeked, with deep squint lines, deep brackets around her mouth. Her eyes were dark blue.

"Mrs. Lawless?" I said.

"Yes, but I don"t want a thing, thanks."

"I represent a group trying to purchase Double L Ranches and Lawless Groves, and I would appreciate a little of your time."

I sorted out the calling card which said on the back "Dear Julia" and was signed "Dev" She opened the door a whole quarter inch to receive the card and then latched it again.

After she read it slowly and carefully, she frowned at me and said, "I can"t sell that land. You certainly know that much."

"If your husband is alive, the problem is more complicated."

"Hub is dead."

"Perhaps you could help us ascertain that fact."

"I"m through talking to people about my husband."

"Because they wouldn"t listen?"

"Something like that."

"I listen pretty good. Not as good as D. Jake Herron used to. But pretty good."

Her face softened slightly. "You knew my father?"

"Just slightly. A friend of mine and I helped D. Jake nail a game warden some years back who was in the alligator-hide business as a sideline. The warden took a couple of shots at us."

"I remember hearing about that!"

"I remember him saying that night that n.o.body ever wasted their time listening."

"Well... come on in. Maybe you"ll buy something."

"I don"t understand."

"We"re tagging stuff for the biggest garage sale ever presented on South Oak Lane. Maybe the only garage sale."

I went through the house with her and out to the area in the rear. There was a big screened cage, a swimming pool, a flagstone terrace beyond the cage, and a barbecue area beyond the terrace. Two women were working with Julia Lawless. There was a beefy cheerful redhead named Doris Jennings and a sallow and mocking blonde named Freddy Ellis. One Lawless daughter was there, introduced as Lynn. She looked familiar, and I suddenly remembered where I had seen her.

"Nice going, tiger," I said to her.

"For what?" she said, looking at me with that apathy they reserve for ancient male strangers. "For whipping Miss Languid in the salmon dress over at the North Bay Resort courts. She wouldn"t shake hands on it, I noticed."

She gave me a quick, warning wink. "Thanks. That was Sandra Ellis. I never beat her before."

Freddy Ellis said, "Hey. You mean my snitty little daughter lost ungraciously?"

"I didn"t mind, honest," Lynn said.

"I mind," Freddy said ominously.

Doris Jennings asked me if I would be willing to look at the prices they had put on Hub"s possessions and see if they were out of line. She said she had gotten advice from the sporting-goods stores which had sold him a lot of the things. They were arranged on display in the nearest stall of the garage.

I moved slowly and carefully past Hubbard Lawless"s golf clubs, golf cart, tennis equipment, bowling ball and bowling shoes, shotguns, rifles, target pistol, fly rods, spinning rods, surf rods, tuna rods, reels and reel cases, boxes of lures, boxes of flies, weights, punching bag, Nikon cameras, lenses, lens cases, strobe lights, tripods, slide boxes, slide projectors, movie cameras, movie projectors, light stands, ten-speed tour bike, binoculars, sheath knives...

The man liked nice things, and he kept them in good shape. He didn"t buy things and put them away. They showed signs of wear and signs of care.

A splendid custom shotgun caught my eye. It was in a fitted pigskin case, with an extra set of side-byside barrels. Spanish walnut stock. Initials inlaid in gold. H.R.L. Beavertail forearm. Single nonselective trigger. Ventilated rib. English scroll engraving on white steel. It was Orvis Custom, built to Hub Lawless"s physical dimensions, and I knew it had to represent a minimum three-thousand-dollar investment. A dandy toy for a grown-up boy. It was priced to move at five hundred. I a.s.sembled it and tried it. The drop at the comb and the heel was wrong, trigger distance wrong. And the initials were wrong. A man the same size as Hub Lawless could find a great bargain here.

I moved along and then went back to the billfish tackle, and fended off a l.u.s.t to buy some of it. The man had good taste in equipment.

"Well?" Julia asked.

"You got good advice. The prices of the things I know about are in line. Fair for the buyer and the seller."

"He never stinted himself," she said flatly. "Good old Hub. The best was just barely good enough."

"Mother!" Lynn said, defending the beloved daddy.

"Sorry, chick," Julia said, reaching to ruffle the girl"s hair. "Thanks for easing my mind about the prices. They seemed kind of low. I know what he paid for some of those things."

"I know nothing about golf equipment or bicycles."

"Oh, those prices are okay. I didn"t know about the outdoor jock stuff."

The next stall of the garage was filled with standard garage-sale household items, Julia"s and also items brought over by Doris Jennings and Freddy Ellis, for a joint effort. It was a predictable array: Cribs and high chairs. Ornate beer steins and souvenir plates. Bonus books from book clubs. Floor lamps and suitcases. Rotisseries and bulletin boards. Tricycles and feather headdresses. End tables and tablecloths. On being pressed, I said it looked as if they had a lot of good stuff there.

Finally, as a reward for my patience and help, and for having known her father, she took me back into the living room for the obligatory conversation.

She sat curled in a corner of a large couch. I sat across from her, with a gla.s.s coffee table between us.

"It"s so d.a.m.ned depressing," she said. "I"ve still not tackled his dressing room. I"ve got to get rid of all that stuff. Goodwill, I guess. Or the Salvation Army or somebody."

"A lot of people seem to think he"s in Mexico."

"Say the rest of it too, Mr. McGee."

"Such as?"

"He stole the money and ran. He took off with his Norwegian piece of a.s.s to live happily ever after."

"He was having an affair with her. An architect, wasn"t she?"

"Okay. So he was having an affair. His very first. Believe me, it was his first. It started last year. In the summer. She was recommended to him. She was supposed to be some kind of an expert in the design of shopping centers. She did a big one in Atlanta and one in Jacksonville. When everything went to h.e.l.l with the one he was supposed to build here, she should have taken off, right? But she stayed on, drawing pay from the big shot who was going broke. Oh, I am so G.o.dd.a.m.n sick of these little Scandinavian broads with their little breathy accents and no makeup, maybe a trace of lipstick and their pale green eyes and their big b.o.o.bs and no more morals than rabbits. I don"t mind telling you I was really really hurt. I couldn"t believe it at first. Then when we had a nose-to-nose battle, he wouldn"t deny it. Finally he confessed and promised he would break up with her, but he didn"t. He claimed he tried, but he didn"t try hard enough. I asked him if he gave a d.a.m.n about Tracy and Lynn. It marks a child terribly when there is family trouble when they"re in their mid-teens, just sixteen and fourteen. We had more rotten fights and then he started sleeping out at the ranch, in a room back of the ranch office out there. That was in late January. I"ve had a chance to think lately. And I can... almost begin to understand this Kristin business. Hub had a dream. He admired my daddy so much. What he wanted to do was build a base. Money and power. And then one day he was going to run for governor and become somebody in Florida. But last year, when times were hard and things began to go bad, he could see his dream fading. He had been too confident. He"d made a bad judgment of the situation. It was going to spoil his track record to be brought down after forty. And there wouldn"t be enough time to build it all up again. He, was really seriously upset. He always had such great drive and spirit, and he couldn"t find a way out of the spot he was in. Some men would go a little crazy. Some would take to the bottle or go onto Valium. Hub took up with that architect person, proving his manhood, I guess. Maybe she kept telling him he was a great man. Maybe I should have done that so she wouldn"t have to. Maybe I nagged him some. And maybe it was Hub"s way of going a little bit crazy. Am I making any sense?"

"I think you are."

"You really listen, don"t you?"

"I"m interested."

"You have been sitting there, looking right at me, and nodding and making little sounds in your throat. You are so d.a.m.ned earnest about listening to me, you made me rattle on and on and on."

"You wanted to talk about it. That"s all."

"So I open up to you and I don"t even know you."

"That"s the easiest way of all, when you don"t know the other person."

"Maybe."

"What makes you so sure he"s dead?"

"We were always very close. Very close, until the last eight months of his life. We were in touch with each other on some kind of level most people don"t have. Once I had a feeling of blackness, of terrible fear. He"d gone hunting with John Tuckerman. I wrote down the exact time it happened. I couldn"t get in touch with him. I was beside myself with worry. Finally he phoned me from Waycross, Georgia, and said he"d been bitten on the wrist by a big cottonmouth, but he"d been treated and it was going to be okay and he would be home in two days. When we compared my note with the time he had been bitten, it was correct to the very minute. He knew the time because it had bitten him on the left wrist, near where his wrist.w.a.tch was. Once when the girls were both in school, in the first and third grades, he came charging home in the middle of the afternoon, convinced something was wrong. I"d fallen from the shed roof and wrenched my back so badly I couldn"t stand up. I couldn"t even crawl to the phone or to the neighbors, it hurt so badly. I"d ruptured a disc. I knew that if I waited he"d come. I knew that he knew I was in trouble, and he came. There were lots of little things like that that happened between us. Those are just two of the biggest ones. When they told me that night that Hub was lost off the Julie and believed drowned, I didn"t believe it. I kind of reached into that private world where he and I were always in contact, and I knew he was still there, so he couldn"t be dead."

"I don"t understand."

"It was a distasteful situation-with those two young girls going with two middle-aged men out on that lovely boat named for me-but not some kind of disaster, really. I didn"t know what was going on. I got to sleep quite late. The girls were terribly upset, Tracy and Lynn, and I had to get them settled down. They loved their father so much. They couldn"t understand what was happening to their world. I am very concerned about them, about Tracy particularly, she"s getting so strange and secretive. Anyway, I took a sleeping pill and I didn"t wake up until after ten the next morning, March twenty-third. Everything came rushing back into my mind and I reached out, or over, or down, in some direction I can"t describe, to find the same rea.s.surance I"d felt the night before, and there was nothing. Absolutely nothing. It was a cold, dead, abandoned place in my mind. I knew he was gone. There is no doubt at all in my mind. My husband is dead."

"Forgive me, but that is not exactly the sort of evidence that will mean much to the insurance company."

"I found that out. They want any excuse not to pay, because it is a very big policy. I wouldn"t be at all surprised if they hadn"t started all those rumors about Hub being in Mexico. He loved Mexico, granted. If he were alive, it would be a reasonable place for him to run to, if he wanted to hide."

"Cleaning out those bank accounts makes it look as if he had running and hiding on his mind."

"Maybe he did. I don"t know. We weren"t communicating. I suppose it would have eased his conscience about me and the girls if he could fake his own death and leave that insurance for me."

"What if he tried to fake it, and something went wrong and he died?"

"That would fit the way he acted before he disappeared, and it would fit the way I feel about his being so definitely dead."

"Hypothetical question. Suppose somebody showed you a picture of Hubbard Lawless taken at a sidewalk cafe in Guadalajara on the eighth day of April, sitting and pouring dark beer into a gla.s.s?"

"I would have to say the picture is a fake."

"Who would bother to fake it?"