They arrived in Toledo during the first moments of twilight. The O’Brien cottage looked familiar to Clinton, even though he had never seen it before. As he drove the car into the driveway, he saw the garage at the end of the yard, its doors flung wide, yawning with emptiness. The sight of it caused him to shudder.

“I guess I better not come in,” Clinton said.

“Well precious,” Annabel said, “to tell you the truth, I don’t know what shape she’ll be in. —Will you do something about food?”

“Yes.”

“And before you start that long drive back. Promise?”

“I promise.”

They kissed each other. “Bless you,” Annabel said, “for being so sweet.”

“‘Bye,” he said.

Clinton backed out of the driveway and started at once on the trip back to Cleveland. He had no intention of eating. The possibility, even when Annabel had mentioned it, did not actually touch him at all. He filled the gas tank at a station near the edge of town, and even before the twilight had ended, he was on the highway again.

He could not remember a time in which his senses had been so keen. His eyes beheld colors and forms with a new clarity that gave to the pavement and the countryside and the sky a fresh kinship with one another, and with himself. The steering wheel did not seem to him any different from his own hands, but an extension of them, of himself; and it possessed no lesser degree of life and reality than his own flesh.

Not only in his senses, but in his mind, too, he experienced this peculiar clarity. He felt that he knew everything, understood everything. He had only to turn his mind to the basement on Seminary Street and, with no further effort at memory, it presented to him a word-for-word re-enactment of the conversation he had overheard there between Berry-berry and Echo. During the drive back to Cleveland, he tested this power over and over again, and not once did it fail him. He could see these people with photographic accuracy, hear their voices, witness over and over again the cruelty, the pain. And with this same facility, his mind could evoke for him the sight of Annabel’s hands, clutching the receiver at noon: Annabel’s hands, assuming the ghastly shapes of disaster, had told the tale more eloquently than either her face or her voice could have done: “Echo,” they said, spread-fingered. “Crash,” they said, twisting into themselves, against the instrument. “Dead,” they said, suddenly still. “I don’t believe it,” they said, massaging the receiver as if to revive it.

And Ralph Williams, bare-legged, clad only in his bathrobe, frowning with anguish, his mouth open: “Ooh. Oh. Oh,” he repeated over and over again. He went out to the front porch and looked up and down the street, searching for the car in which Echo had been killed. Then he had come back into the house and held Annabel in his arms, uttering over and over again the pained monosyllable that expressed his profound reluctance to accept the truth; and he shook his head back and forth more than a hundred times, trying to wish it away from them all.