The following morning, a florist’s truck delivered a splendid bouquet of long-stemmed American Beauty roses. Echo O’Brien had telegraphed them from Toledo with this message:

“God bless all the Williamses see you

Saturday noon with love from Echo.”

These flowers were a welcome distraction, but now Annabel carried with her a constant sense of foreboding so strong that it was like an actual knowledge of impending trouble. No matter what else commanded her attention, she was aware of this knowledge that hovered just outside her field of understanding, tormented her like some real and palpable thing, too capricious to show its face. In some curious way, Annabel felt there was something shameful in her anxiety, and she mentioned it to no one at all.

She had also a second secret: her belief that Berry-berry would come back soon, just as Bernice O’Brien had predicted. Perhaps it was natural that she would not fit these two secrets together, and make a piece of them in her mind. Because a mother is not commonly expected to admit, even to herself, that she fears the return of a long-awaited child.

Nevertheless, on that Wednesday evening, while Annabel experienced her fright in the living room, this is what had taken place outside the window:

A blue Ford pickup truck, with its headlights off, had driven up Seminary Street and parked at the curb across the street from the Williams house. On the side of this truck, in gray letters, a sign had been painted:

APPLE MOUNTAIN PLUMBING COMPANY APPLE MOUNTAIN, O.

In the front seat sat Berry-berry Williams. He sat there for a long time, just looking at the house. For the first ten minutes—while he smoked two cigarettes and took several quick pulls from a half-pint bottle of cognac from the glove compartment—the young man still believed that he would actually go up and knock on the door or just walk in. He thought he was just taking his time about it.

But as the minutes passed, he found that he could not do it. However, he did walk barefooted up onto the porch and stand there for a long time looking at Annabel through the window. When she rose to turn off the television, Berry-berry knew that she felt herself being watched. So he crept silently off the porch and, passing between the house and a big white-flowering bush, he stole into the driveway and crouched next to a lighted window in the basement.

From here, he took a good long look at Ralph, who was asleep in his easy chair next to the table. Then the old man woke up with a sudden start: he gripped the arms of his chair and sat forward. Berry-berry felt he could almost see Ralph’s ears cocked for sounds like a smart old hunting dog. He wanted to knock gently on the window and lock eyes with the old man, just to reassure him. But this impulse was no more than a slight tension in his hands. Instead of following it through, he backed away from the window altogether.