“It ain’t that we don’t get along,” McDermott said. “We get along fine. It’s one of them situations, and we make the best of it. At first it wasn’t easy; she wanted to leave me. One time she tried to knock herself off. Then gradually I sold her on the idea we could get adjusted, learn to live with it.”

“Live with what?”

“Her condition.”

“She crippled?”

“In her head,” the detective-sergeant said. “Not all the way. It’s just that one mental block. She’s incapable, that’s all.”

Why is he telling me this? Corey wondered, and heard himself asking, “What happened to her?”

“She was jumped. A bunch of thugs jumped her and took her into an empty house. There were nine of them. They had her there for a little less than forty-eight hours. Some people found her in an alley. She didn’t have no clothes on. There was blood running down her legs and later in the hospital they said it was fifty-fifty, she’d lost an awful lot of blood.”

“She talk?”

“She couldn’t talk. That is, she couldn’t talk at all. For over a year she wouldn’t say a word. She wouldn’t eat, neither. They hadda feed her through a tube. And then when she was able to talk, she wouldn’t say anything about it, and the doctors told me not to ask her. They let me have it straight. They said she was on the borderline and only time would tell. They said I’d hafta be very careful not to bring it up again. Another thing, they sat me down and counseled me. Said I’d better call it off—”

“Call what off?”

“The engagement.”

Corey blinked a few times.

McDermott said, “You thought all this happened recently?”

“Well, I figured—”

“It happened six years before we were married,” McDermott said. “It happened thirty-three years ago.”

Corey blinked again. He grimaced slightly, then sensed that more was coming and braced himself. And for some unaccountable reason, he wasn’t able to look at the detective-sergeant. He just stood there stiffly and stared off to one side and waited.

He heard McDermott saying, “You wanna know where it happened?”

He nodded slowly, not knowing why he was nodding.

“It happened here in the Swamp,” McDermott said.

Corey turned his head slowly. He looked at the detective-sergeant.

“I’ll tell you something else,” McDermott said. He was still relaxed on the bed, leaning back on his elbows. He spoke softly. “I’ll tell you why they did it to her. Not because they were hopped up, or juiced, or anything like that. It was a carefully planned maneuver. They did it to get back at me.”