He did not trust her. Up in that lost midnight meadow of hay standing with his neck bent back toward the sky and his eyes pinched tight he saw her vivid astride a prone Sloane: the slow wet glide of her with her back arched, her head bent back as his was now so her loosed hair was a down-strewn broken piece of night-river with her face lost in it, her arms and shoulders and collarbone forged twigs, her breasts pulled up by the curve of her back, the nipples greedy, his hands covering them. Sloane in turgid satisfaction, some part of himself watching this young woman work over him, some part of him expecting this, some part deserving, believing he deserved. A shooter of clay pigeons.

He started the Ford and backed around in the meadow and rode through the woods again back to Bethlehem, where a lone horse stood between the shafts of an empty gig, the horse jumping sideways and shaking the gig as the motorcar passed, the broad street otherwise empty. He stopped at the Sinclair but the bar there was closed and empty save for an old man with a bucket and mop scrubbing the sticky floorboards. Drove on then to the after-hours club with bricked-up basement windows in the house of a man, Laird, that Jamie did business with but did not care for, the two of them each puffed and tight with the other, speaking in jokes and barbs indirect and circuitous. Here a couple of motorcars and a couple of buggies were edged up in a clump under the sugar maples behind the house. One of the cars belonged to the one-man police force, a Spanish-American veteran, a captain, a man called Haynes. Jamie sat outside, squatting in the dark near the bole of one of the maples, smoking and watching the black rectangle of shut door. If she wasn’t there he didn’t want to walk in looking for her.

The basement walls were stone and mortar foundation eighteen inches thick and he couldn’t hear anything, music or voices. He might have been the only man in town. The horses at the buggies next to him stood each with one foot cocked up, sleeping. From time to time one of them would briefly rouse and shake the harness or grind teeth on the bit and then go back to sleep. His cigarette smoke drifted and lay about him in the night. After a time the door opened and Scully came out and shut the door behind him and stood without moving, taking fresh air, stoop-shouldered near to a hunchback from the cumulative years bent over the keys. As if his body had become a functionary of the instrument.

Scully looked past him a little when Jamie came up. That was all right. Jamie said, “She’s not here, is she Scully?”

Scully thought about it. “She was tired. Went on to home I think.”