“I shall certainly do that.” He held up a few sheets of paper. “I can go over some of Duff’s written responses to the Thematic Apperception test if you like.”

“Stick them.” I went to the door.

“Perhaps you really did see another person, Mrs. Caine.”

“Thanks. If I were you, I’d try some of those tests on my brother.”

I went out to find Duff sitting in the car. He greeted me with a grin, nothing anxious about it either.

“Well?”

“You’re sane.” I started the car and moved out onto the road before saying anything else. “Duff, you promised you’d cooperate with that man.”

“I did, Mother.”

“You lied to him.”

“No, I didn’t, Mother.”

What was the use in arguing? I thought about turning around, taking him back to the motel and making him go over his stories again, but then I thought, what’s the use? He’d only come up with more explanations and Jackson would drag out his tests results again.

And wasn’t it a good thing that the psychiatrist had found no trace of mental illness? Even if Duff had deceived the man, maybe he had also decided to mend his ways. Whatever the explanation for the General, maybe he would never appear again and Duff would become his old self once more. Of course, I was only kidding myself in thinking that things might get better, because they almost instantly got worse.

I had turned onto our road and we were nearing the Weber place, when strangely the car and the world outside seemed to change. The windshield melted away and the steering wheel disappeared under my hands. Instead of a wheel I was holding reins and there was an old gray horse plodding along in front of me. The road that had been macadam when we drove to Cainesville was now hard-­packed earth, high in the middle and with deep ditches on both sides.

The Weber house, a wood-­shingled colonial with a one-­story addition in the back (the meeting room, I realized later), had become a smaller house. The addition was gone and the sides were now clapboarded instead of shingled. Moreover the station wagon that had been earlier parked in the yard was also gone, and in its place was a new-­looking, leather-­topped buggy with a handsome brown horse hitched to it. For some unexplainable reason I felt that the new buggy would soon be mine and that I lived in the house.

I was about to cry out to Duff when I heard a guttural cough and I knew it was no longer Duff who was seated beside me. I was afraid to turn my head and look, but I knew.

It lasted only ten seconds, maybe less. Then I heard Duff shouting, “Watch the road, Mother!”