Instead of four steaks Jack bought a dozen and three pounds of ground sirloin as well. I didn’t try to stop him. If he wants to stay three or four days, just keep your mouth shut and put up with it, I thought. It’s not going to kill you. Of course, it never occurred to me that it might eventually kill him.

“Everything looked so good,” he said lamely as we put the bags in the car trunk.

I kissed him lightly on the cheek. “You’ve been mesmerized by Mrs. Reddy.”

Duff had wandered off as we were loading the car. Franny and I went looking for him and found him on the other side of the parking lot talking to three burly motorcyclists.

It was impossible to tell whether they were much older than Duff or not, considering their sunglasses and beards. They were wearing the customary sleeveless denim jackets and no shirts and their arms were tattooed from their wrists to their shoulders.

Duff was conferring earnestly with them. When I called to him, they all turned to stare at me, and then one after another they roared out of the parking lot.

“Who were they?” I asked, trying to keep it casual.

“Some local guys.”

“What were you talking about?”

“Oh, I was just checking on the local scene—where the action is around here.”

I thought he was kidding, although his expression was serious. I would have been willing to bet plenty that he had never before in his life had words with such people. Not that he would have been afraid of them. He would just have considered them to be of subhuman intelligence and wouldn’t have wasted his time.

But then I thought, maybe the boy is just making an effort to come out of his shell, and I said no more about it. I didn’t even ask what advice the bikers had given him. I think now he might have told me. He might not have reached the point of lying to us yet. And what the bikers said to him very likely led to much of what happened later.

Anyway we went back to the farm. Jack drove up to the barn and we carried our bags of groceries into the house. While I prepared dinner, the others did some more exploring and chose their bedrooms.

Duff and Franny decided to take the upstairs bedrooms and Jack and I would sleep in the rooms downstairs. Jack and I had been sleeping separately since his last heart attack. Dr. Raphael had suggested that he go easy on the sex for a while—not that he had been much interested in it for the past year or so anyway—and we decided that he could rest better in a room by himself.