and sat down at the desk to get out some letters.

I was just signing the last one when I heard tires crunch on the gravel outside. I looked at my watch. It was five minutes to eight, a little early for Otis to be showing up. I shrugged and started pawing through the drawers of the desk for a stamp. Now where was it Barbara used to keep them? Maybe I d had sense enough to leave them in the same place. . . . I stopped and looked up. Somebody had rattled the front door.

It couldn’t be Otis. He had a key. I stepped out into the showroom. An old station wagon was parked in front of the near show window and a tall girl with tawny hair was just turning away from the door. She walked out to the car and started to get in.

I stepped up front and opened the door. “Hello,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

She turned. I didn’t know her. “Are you open?” she asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “But if it’s important . . .?

“I was supposed to pick up some motors,” she said. It was a nice, throaty voice, down in that end of the contralto range actresses sometimes use for a burlesque sexiness, but there was none of that in it. There was nothing in it, in fact, except indifference, faintly tinged with sullenness. She was supposed to pick up some motors, but if she didn’t it was all right with her.

“Sure,” I said. “What were they? Repairs?”

She nodded slightly. “Nunn. George Nunn.”

“Oh. Then you’re Mrs. Nunn?”

“That’s right,” she said with the same indifference. If it turned out I was Mrs. Nunn she wasn’t going to raise a stink about it.

“I think they’re ready to go,” I said. “Come on in.”

I pushed the door back and stood aside. She stepped up on the concrete walk and went past me. She was quite tall. I’m six feet two, so in the scuffed spectator pumps she was wearing she must have been close to five eight. Her legs were bare. The predominantly blue cotton dress she had on was just another number off the rack, well worn and often laundered, and while it was somewhat tight across the chest for a couple of somewhat obvious reasons I noted it only in passing. Now that bust-line architecture has become a basic industry, like steel and heavy construction, all the old pleasant conjectures are a waste of time and you never believe anything until the returns are in from the precincts. The cascade of tawny hair fell to her shoulders, bobbing a little as she walked and framing a dead-white face on which there was no expression at all, unless utter stillness is an expression. The eyes were a smoky gray, fringed with dark lashes that were almost startling against the milk-white skin, and the mouth had been good to begin with but she’d overpainted it into a sullen smear with too much of the wrong shade of lipstick. Well, it was her mouth, wasn’t it?

I indicated an aluminum frame chair in the front of the showroom near the showcases. “Sit down. I’ll get the motors.”

It was dim inside the shop. I clicked on a switch and a bank of fluorescent tubes over the lone work-bench came on and an electric fan began whirring. There were a half-dozen dismantled motors scattered around on the bench in various stages of repair, but I walked on over to the end of the room where the completed jobs were clamped to individual dollies. They were both there, 3-h.p. motors with tags that read “Nunn” on one side and “Tested OK” on the other.

George Nunn ran a fishing camp on Javier Lake, about thirty miles away in another county. It was an enormous, marshy body of water in a wild area, accessible by road most of the year only at his place on the lower end. I’d been over there a few times duck hunting, but it was before he’d taken over the camp. He’d been in the store two or three times, and still owed me around fifty dollars on a motor he’d bought from me. I lifted the repaired ones on to the bench and started wiping them down with a piece of waste. In a moment I heard a clicking of high heels on the concrete floor of the showroom. She came in and stood watching me after an indifferent glance around at the bench