The little room with its dark mahogany bed, its marble-top wash stand with bowl and pitcher and a door for the pot, its wallpaper endlessly repeating little roses—little roses—the little room was silent, the sound sucked out of it.

The sheriff was staring at a picture of three cherubim—just heads, curly-haired, limpid-eyed, with wings about the size of pigeons’ wings growing out of where their necks would be. He frowned. “That’s a funny picture for a whorehouse,” he said.

“It was here,” said Kate. Apparently the preliminaries were over now.

The sheriff straightened up, undid his fingers, and held the arms of his chair. Even his buttocks pulled in a little. “You left a couple of babies,” he said. “Little boys. Now you calm down. I’m not going to try to get you to go back. I guess I’d do quite a bit to keep you from going back. I think I know you. I could just run you over the county line and have the next sheriff run you, and that could keep up till you landed splash in the Atlantic Ocean. But I don’t want to do that. I don’t care how you live as long as you don’t give me any trouble. A whore is a whore.”

Kate asked evenly, “What is it you do want?”

“That’s more like it,” the sheriff said. “Here’s what I want. I notice you changed your name. I want you to keep your new name. I guess you made up someplace you came from—well, that’s where you came from. And your reason—that’s when you’re maybe drunk—you keep your reason about two thousand miles away from King City.”

She was smiling a little, and not a forced smile. She was beginning to trust this man and to like him.

“One thing I thought of,” he said. “Did you know many people around King City?”

“No.”

“I heard about the knitting needle,” he said casually. “Well, it could happen that somebody you knew might come in here. That your real hair color?”

“Yes.”

“Dye it black for a while. Lots of people look like somebody else.”

“How about this?” She touched her scar with a slender finger.

“Well, that’s just a—what is that word? What is that goddam word? I had it this morning.”

“Coincidence?”

“That’s it—coincidence.” He seemed to be finished. He got out tobacco and papers and rolled a clumsy, lumpy cigarette. He broke out a sulphur match and struck it on the block and held it away until its acrid blue flame turned yellow. His cigarette burned crookedly up the side.

Kate said, “Isn’t there a threat? I mean, what you’ll do if I—”

“No, there isn’t. I guess I could think up something pretty ornery, though, if it came to that. No, I don’t want you—what you are, what you do, or what you say—to hurt Mr. Trask or his boys. You figure you died and now you’re somebody else and we’ll get along fine.”

He stood up and went to the door, then turned. “I’ve got a boy—he’ll be twenty this year; big, nice-looking fellow with a broken nose. Everybody likes him. I don’t want him in here. I’ll tell Faye too. Let him go to Jenny’s. If he comes in, you tell him to go to Jenny’s.” He closed the door behind him.