He drove the Mustang downtown and was at E-O earlier than usual. He let himself into the back stairwell and went directly to his private cell. He needed to meditate. He wondered if he should call Julia in Old Lyme and describe Phyllis’s new mood. But, no, it would just distress her, and her efforts to combat this new development might do him more harm than good. There were enough energies at work; things had a way of working out, like his finding his glasses that time in the dew-soaked empty lot, or his discovering, as he was devising the algorithms for DigitEyes 2.1, that no matter how many 3D transforms have been nested, one branching from the other, the last coördinate space can be specified in terms of the first, with no more than a displacement vector and three basis vectors—a mere twelve scalars to be crunched. The intermediate steps can be consigned to the void. He was struck less by the possible impediment to the legal proceedings—Phyllis was basically too rational, she would give in, with an improvement in terms that Halloran would wheedle from Davis—than by the passion for him she had belatedly displayed. Or was it a passion merely for her old, carelessly bright and lovely self, of whose memory he had become the curator, now that her parents were no longer alive to bear witness? Not that they, or her kid brother, could have seen what her contemporaries saw—that flashing, loaded impression we make on those with whom we might mate. Her passion had not centered, he felt, on him. Wounded pride, threatened security, fears for the children had activated her. The old question remained unsolved, why do women go along with men? Perhaps it was a simple question of electrical engineering: in a world full of plugs, nature must provide sockets.

His locked door rapped, more loudly than Karen had ever rapped before. Owen called out, “Go away, Karen. It’s over.”

But a male voice said, “It’s Ed, O. You better open. We got trouble.”

Ed looked more than startled, he looked frightened when the sticky gray steel door revealed him in a rumpled business suit, his swollen flesh as colorless as a slug’s. He was breathing as if poisoned. “A phone call came for you at the company number. The cops. Your house didn’t answer and neither did your new digs. I said I doubted you were here but, son of a bitch, here you are. Let’s go. We better go together.”

“Go where, Ed?”

“Upper Falls. Old County Road. She was headed in the Hartford direction.”

“Who’s she?” But he knew.

Ed nodded, pushing ahead through the door leading down the stairs to the street, the secret stairs now thundering with Ed’s heavy feet.