bountiful as ever, I hope?”

“She likes you too,” I said.

She smiled. “We adore each other. But I do wish she would stop sending people up here to tear my house apart.”

I remembered the slashed cushions. “So that’s who—”

“You didn’t think there was anything original about it, did you? I can assure you that in almost nothing connected with Miss James are you likely to be the first.”

I said nothing. I was busy with a lot of things. She knew the house had been searched before, but still she hadn’t reported it to the police. That meant she couldn’t, and that I was still right. She was in whatever it was right up to her neck. She couldn’t report me either.

Her eyes were slightly mocking. “But I see you admit you had started to search the place. What changed your mind? I was asleep and wouldn’t bother you.”

“It got a little crowded,” I said. “With three of us.”

“Three?”

“The other one was the man who tried to kill you.”

“Oh, we’re going back to that again?”

“Listen,” I said. I told her what had happened.

“You don’t expect me to believe that?” she asked when I had finished.

“When you go back to the house, take a look at what’s left of your records and the player. We rolled on ‘em. The other guy was a heavyweight, too.”

“He was?” she asked. She was thinking about it. Then she shrugged it off. “I don’t believe you.”

“Suit yourself,” I said.

Then I stopped. We had both heard it. It was a car crossing that wooden culvert at the edge of the meadow. It came on, and pulled to a stop right in front of the porch. I could hear the brakes squeak.

I shook my head savagely and motioned for her to stay where she was. She couldn’t be seen through the front window. I stepped out into the other room. The coat, with the gun in it, was on the back of a chair against the other wall. As I started across I could look out the front door and see the car. There was only one person in it, and it was a girl. I could hear the radio, crooning softly.

I went out and walked around the car to the driver’s side. She smiled. She was an ash blonde with an angelic face and a cool pair of eyes, and you knew she could turn on the honey-chile like throwing a switch at Boulder Dam. She turned it on.

“Good moarornin’,” she said. It came out slowly and kept falling on you like honey dripping out of a spoon. “It’s absolutely the silliest thing, but I think I’m lost.”

“Yes?” I said. She was eight miles from a county road and twenty from the highway. And she didn’t look much like a bird watcher. “What are you looking for?”

She poured another jug of it over me. “A farmhouse. It’s a man named Mr. Gillespie. They said to go out this road, and take that road, and turn over here, and go down that way, you know how people tell you to go somewhere, they just get you all mixed up, it’s the silliest thing. Actually. All these roads with no names on them, how do you know which one they mean?”

Maybe I imagined it, but the patter and the eyes didn’t seem to match. And the eyes were looking around.

The radio had quit crooning and was talking. I didn’t pay any attention to it. Not then.

“Did they tell you to go through a gate?” I asked.

“Oh, yes, definitely a gate. Mr. Cramer, he’s the manager of the store, he was the one that found out Mr. Gillespie had forgotten to sign one of the time-payment papers when he bought the cookstove and took it home in his truck. Anyway, he definitely said a gate, and then about a mile after the gate you turn— I know you’re not Mr. Gillespie, are you? You don’t look a bit like him.”

“No,” I said. “My name’s Graves. I’m on a fishing trip.”

“My,” she said admiringly, looking at the white shirt and the tie, “you go fishing all dressed up, don’t you? My brother, when he goes fishing, he’s the messiest thing, actually, you should see him.”

“I just got here,” I said. “A few minutes ago.”

Her story was plausible enough. She might be looking for somebody named Gillespie. God knows, she sounded as if she could get lost. She could get lost in a telephone booth, or a double bed. But still. . .

An