As they penetrated the foothills the temperature dropped. He rolled down the window and smelled the bite of fall in the air that poured down on them from the plum-colored hills, until Gaby asked him to close the window because she was afraid of catching cold.

Her father’s resort was named Pender’s North Wind. It was a large and rambling country estate which in a gentler era had seen grander days. She turned the car off the driveway between two stone gargoyles and they followed a long and rattling gravel drive to a Victorian mansion that loomed unbelievably, lights burning only in the central portion of the ground floor.

As they got out of the car something nearby, an animal or a bird, shrilled a high, mournful cry, repeated over and over again in a restless, sorrowing litany.

“God,” he said, “what’s that?”

“I don’t know.”

Her father came out to meet them as Adam pulled their bags from the car. He was a tall man, lean and fit-looking, wearing work-pants and a blue sweatshirt. His hair was gray but heavy and waving. He had the kind of clean-profiled good looks which must have been especially impressive when he was much younger, and even now he was a handsome man.

But he was afraid to kiss his daughter, Adam saw. “Well,” he said. “So you made it, with a friend. Glad you brought somebody along this time.”

She introduced them and they shook hands. Mr. Pender’s eyes were bright and hard. “Call me Bruce,” he commanded. “Leave the bags. We’ll see that they get taken care of.” He led them down a side walk, past a putting green with the last of the moths flitting around the overhead light, to pause before a silent gleaming expanse of water. “You never saw this, did you?”

“No,” she said.

“Olympic size. Could swim a goddam army, hold professional races in it. Still, you should have seen them pack it full of flesh this summer on a good hot weekend. Cost me a bundle, but it was worth it.”

“It’s very nice,” she said in a curiously formal voice.

He led them through a side door, down a flight of inside stairs, through a tunnel and soon they were in a basement bar. The room was built for perhaps two hundred people. In front of the large fireplace, in which flames sprang and crackled over the corpses of three logs, a woman and two little girls sat and waited, their identically-slender bare feet extended toward the fire, which gleamed in reflection on thirty nail-polished toes like small blood-red shells.