Ralph looked at Echo. “Where’d Bernice O’Brien ever get hold of a sample of my handwriting?”

“No, Ralph,” she said, “phrenology is bones. Skulls and noses and all. Remember them snapshots I took a while back? Well, she took one look at you and said, ‘Ralph Williams is a genius!’ “

Ralph’s hand went instinctively to his head. “Is that what she said? I wonder if there’s anything to it?” He felt his skull with his fingertips.

“Oh, a hundred per cent,” Echo said. “Listen, I showed her a picture of Felix Frankfurter, who she’d never laid eyes on before, and what do you suppose she said right off the bat? ‘Why,’ she said, ‘I don’t know what that man does, but what he ought to do is be a judge!’ —I’m tellin’ you, she absolutely floors everybody in Toledo. But the point is that you are a humanitarian of the first water. —Now am I red or black?”

Clinton said, “Did you show her a picture of me?”

“I sure did!” Echo said.

“What she say?”

“Well, she said if you had a haircut, she’d know more. But she swears you got a dandy imagination.”

“What about Berry-berry?” he said.

“What about him?”

“I mean,” Clinton explained, “did she say what kind of bones he’s got?”

“Who, Berry-berry?” Echo said.

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Uh-huh. Well, it was all kind of complicated. Sometimes Mamma gets astrology mixed into it. —Now I’ve got to concentrate. I’m black, right?” She moved one of the checkers. “I had a system for this game once, but it’s gone completely out of my head. Clint, will you reach into my pocketbook and help yourself to a cigarette and light one for me? Lately, if I’m not smokin’, my mind turns to oatmeal.”

“You want a little drink?” Ralph said.

“No thank you, Ralph, it’d put me right to sleep.”

Clinton went to the dressing table and opened Echo’s pocketbook. He had been through it before on a number of occasions, both at Echo’s request and on his own initiative. A person’s intimate belongings had always held for him as much fascination as any private conversation or even a personal letter. Echo’s pocketbook contained the usual female paraphernalia of cosmetics, Kleenex, address book, identification cards, money, a pocket flashlight; and along with these a pair of pliers, a set of small wrenches, a screw driver, an assortment of nuts and bolts and headlight fuses that were as essential to Echo O’Brien as her mascara and lipstick. —Now a new item had been added: a small medicine bottle containing a clear red liquid. Clinton read these typewritten words on its label:

For nerves.

1 tsp. every 4 hrs.

Do not exceed.

Clinton removed one of her gold-tipped cigarettes and lighted it for her. As he handed it to her, he heard a car stopping in front of the house.

“There’s the truck,” he said.

Echo started to rise. “Huh?”

“The truck. I just heard it.”