Having settled herself at last in the car, she looked calculatingly at Annie. “Well, we’ll see what’s to happen. You got rid of that worm? My brother’s found us an apartment a mile from the drive-in, near the beach. I called that stink of a landlady of yours but she wouldn’t go get you. I called three times. The last time I said, ‘Jesus! you old bag! why don’t you lay off the hootch sometime?’ and she hung up. What I wanted to tell you was about the apartment Joe got. Joe’s going to stay awhile. There’s a room downstairs in the garage with a cot in it. He’s got nothing better to do right now. He said he’s going to try for a bartender’s job. They’ve got lots of joints down there. You look awful.”

Annie told her the worm was gone and that she felt a little weak still but the lab said they’d found the head—

“Jesus! Don’t tell me no details!”

—and Sigrid didn’t understand about the landlady, who was always being beaten up by her lover and was not drunk but sick.

“I got no charity to spare,” Sigrid said. She lit a cigarette and settled back against the cracked leather seat.

Sigrid, who had been to Laguna a few times before, gave directions but was silent most of the time. They stopped once for gas, and later she asked Annie to pull over near a stretch of woods so she could answer a “call of nature.” There was no special restraint between them. They didn’t ever have much to say to each other. After work in the Greek’s with Sigrid, Annie knew that her bursts of conversation always had to do with some immediate or imminent event. The nearest thing that could pass for speculation was that occasional guileful look of the Swedish girl’s—as for that, it seemed more mimetic than an indication of thought. But, Annie thought, she was “goodhearted,” which was the most one could expect as a rule. One could put up with a lot if people were goodhearted, even their cruelties.

Max Shore, whose visit had only taken place a few days earlier, was more complicated to think about. Shore’s presence during that terrible day and evening had been of greater magnitude than mere goodheartedness. Alone, Annie told herself, she might have cut her own throat in order to escape the vermin’s emergence. Even as Max had knocked on her door, she had been in a condition of such utter panic, at the furthermost reaches of paralyzed terror, that she had hesitated to open the door for fear that she would fling herself into the street and try, impossibly, to outrun the hours still to be endured.