Skip’s tone told Eddie this much: Skip knew Karen hadn’t been treated as a daughter. For all that Skip had some sort of blind spot, unable to see himself, he could always pounce unerringly on the flaws in anyone else. Now he grabbed for Karen suddenly, pulled her over so that she lay across his knees, her shoulders against his chest. He looked at Eddie and said, “I’ll meet you at the car.”

Eddie got up and went quickly down through the trees. He felt an immense relief. There had been a moment when he had thought the girl wasn’t going to co-operate, and he’d been afraid of what Skip might do to her. She was a kind of nice girl. Young and inexperienced. More than that, worse than that—ignorant. The girl was just ignorant enough to think Skip was interested in her instead of the money.

Eddie got into the car and put his head back and shut his eyes. He was half asleep when Skip came back alone. The girl had gone home by herself through the trees.

Skip got into the car, started the motor. He was grinning in the light from the dash, and his air was satisfied. The dog, he told Eddie, was a new arrival. Mrs. Havermann had taken it off the hands of a friend. It was just a pet, Karen said. “I think there’s more to it,” Skip concluded, “even if Karen doesn’t know it. The old woman’s nervous over all that money in the house. Bound to be.”

They turned from the hillside roads into lower and shabbier streets, heading for home.

“It must be like sitting on a bomb,” Skip said all at once, amused. “Yeah. Mrs. Havermann must feel that way.” He drove as if musing over it. Eddie knew then that Skip was thinking of the old woman and her fear and of what sort of reaction she’d have on learning that someone else knew about the money and had come to get it.

CHAPTER THREE

Eddie let himself in quietly at the back door. The smells of the house swept over him, garlic and chili spices and stale coffee and an undefinable aroma of ingrained dirt. He stood still in the kitchen and listened. By now his dad should be asleep, fogged out on wine, but his mother might be up, reading or telling her beads. He had noted a light in the front room as he had come into the yard.

When he heard no sound, he went into the tiny hall and then on into the living room. His mother sat asleep in a chair, a magazine on her lap. She was a short, heavy woman, her neck thickened by a goiter, her gray hair thin and straggling. Her mouth had fallen open, and Eddie could see the gold tooth shining, the tooth put in in Mexico when she had been a girl.