“What kind of shape are we in at the office?”

“All right,” Mike said. “It’s quiet.”

“You take the next flight back to Manitou and start assembling the material for photographing. We have to have her approval for the expense. When I have it I’ll call you at my apartment. I don’t think we can go beyond that for now.” Mike looked unsatisfied. Leland honestly did not know what more could be done until he had talked to Norma, but his thoughts about Roberts and her made him want to counter criticism that could not even occur to anyone else. “I’d better stay here. Karen and I had tentative plans for the weekend, but I think we can rework them. Would you call her, tell her that I’ll check us into a hotel? The Regent. Tell her to wire the Regent about the flight she and Steffie will take, and so on. If she seems hesitant—well, she won’t. Forget that. And I’ll be here at the airport to meet her.”

“Okay.”

Leland looked for the waitress. While he had been talking he had remembered that he had told Mike that he would be in Manitou on Saturday. He could not be sure that what he had just said about “tentative plans” did not contradict that. And now Leland was thinking that he had been urging Karen to come to Port Smith since Monday. Confusion between Mike and her this afternoon would not simplify unscrambling what had happened over long-distance last night. Leland knew what she would say, how upset she would be, but he was not going to take the opportunity now to use Mike to avert a situation. As much as anything, Leland did not want Mike knowing these things about them. The waitress was coming.

Downstairs, while Mike checked the flight schedule, Leland realized that he could not remember what he had told his mother about Steffie staying over. He simply could not remember. There was a pattern to the disorder he had drawn around him, as if he had made a kind of desperate try at telling every side that he was all right—I’m swell, my old self, recognize me?—when he was toying with cracking his life over his knee. Playing, Norma had called it. He could think about it guiltlessly while he planned to get Karen near him—it was so easy that he was almost afraid to wonder how it was possible. The further he took it, the more frightening it became, but his mind still wandered, and when Mike came back from the counter, Leland had something to tell him.

“Twenty-five minutes,” Mike said.