“Joe, the despair corroded him. Too much had happened. Listen to me. He knew that there weren’t going to be final answers. His marriage with Norma was the best thing he did. It was going to be better. He could see it opening to greater depths of experience, new feelings, aspects of feelings. He loved it, and he loved her more and more as time passed. But for him there was the prospect of a day-after-day struggle for insight and understanding. The good mind continues being mischievous and inventive; he would have had to fight himself to the end of his life. There was nothing to be gained. He had seen himself—he had worked very hard. He was tired. He didn’t have the energy to give to it any more.”

Leland had heard him. He was too far along even to think of turning around. Manitou seemed like a very far place. The snow falling, Thanksgiving in six days, the air clean, and the Christmas lights strung across Senapee Street. If he let himself, he would feel the snow swirling against his face. Roberts was watching him, hands in his lap. Leland had to avert his eyes. The telephone—he could call Karen, talk to her again, but he did not dare. He had had to know: he did not know if it had been that urge that had brought him here or the simpler, simple-minded falling back on his training as a policeman. If he marched it to the end, there would be no calculating the unhappiness.

The widow of the late admitted murderer Colin MacIver gave birth today to a seven-pound, six-ounce son … Mrs. MacIver and the boy, who will be named David, are doing well … something like that. A long item would remind newspaper readers that it had been the investigation sponsored by Mrs. MacIver that had uncovered the tape recordings in which her late husband had confessed to the six-year-old murder of Theodore Leikman. Readers would not have to be reminded of her police record. Herbert Davis and his office would settle that. The way things were done in this country, the newspapers and their Sunday magazines would never let her forget what had happened—or had been decided here. She would learn that she had another, public personality. Perhaps that, too, would be determined by Davis and the members of the conspiracy. There was no question of whom he would go to bat for. It had always been the same, the indignant, hysterical name-calling, the righteous posturing—many had suspected, but Leland was as close as any to knowing. Leland had won the previous battle, but he ached with the thought of bringing Davis down for good.