The next time I looked he was pointing with a gloved hand, not at me but at the side of the road ahead of me. I turned away and looked back and he was still pointing. He was insistent now, no longer grinning, but jabbing his finger as though he wanted me to go in that direction.

I thought he was pointing to the farm lane. I still couldn’t see anything on either side of the road, but I took my foot off the gas pedal and braked, preparing to turn. Immediately the horse and rider shot ahead, led me for a moment, and then, maybe forty yards away, he wheeled the horse to face me. He was still pointing, to his left now, and a bit in front of him.

As I was about to turn the wheel—was, in fact, in the act of turning—I noticed, unexplainably, the aspirin bottle that the girl had given me in the afternoon. I reached over and took the bottle from the dashboard ledge, and then straightened the wheel quickly, heading straight at the man and horse.

I heard the horse scream as he reared. His legs and belly filled the windshield—then there was nothing. I braked to a stop a few yards beyond and sat there trembling uncontrollably for several minutes.

The night had cleared. After a while I looked in the rearview mirror, and although I could see through the rear window now, there was no sign of the horse and its rider. If I had hit them—as it seemed I had to have done, although I had felt no collision—I must have hurled them off the road.

I opened the door and looked back. A few yards behind me—surely where he had wanted me to turn—was a bridge with a rickety iron railing and a twenty-­foot drop to the creek that bordered the Caine farm.

When a car came up behind me, braked and swerved and its driver leaned out and cursed me, I managed to start the Plymouth and drive the remaining couple of hundred yards to the Caine house. I got out and left the car near the front door. I couldn’t bring myself to drive it out to the barn where it was usually parked.

Franny heard me and opened the door while I was fumbling with the key.

“What’s that in your hand, Mother?” she said.

I couldn’t speak for a moment. “The key,” I said finally.

“No, the other hand.”

It was the aspirin bottle. I put it in my coat pocket. “It’s just an old bottle that was in the car,” I said.

“Why are you trembling?”

“Cold.”

“It’s not that cold, is it?”

“Maybe I’m catching something. Where’s Duff?”

“Upstairs. Dad’s in his room writing.”

“Has Duff been in the house all evening?”