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What most people don't know about prison is that it's a bureaucracy and that you have to treat it that way.

Time passes.

A dozen people said hello to me on the way back to my motel. Half a dozen waved. I'd never seen any of them before but they reminded me that the twin of small-town suspicion was small-town openness. I saw dogs chase butterflies, bees seek honey, and cats loll in sunlight. Walt Disney would have had all of them singing merry little songs. He had the right idea. Even if the universe wasn't a merry little place, what was the harm in pretending it was every once in a while? Of course, my generation didn't believe much in Disney, except for Fantasia, which had just been another giggly excuse to get stoned. No, my generation would have shown the dogs taking a crap on the lawn, the bees stinging innocent babies, and the cats eviscerating doves.

I was two blocks from my motel when I saw the Caddy. My first reaction was, No, you're imagining things. Must be a number of blue Caddies around. Anyway, what would Nora and Vic be doing here?

A block from my motel, I saw the blue Caddy sitting in an alley. The windows had been darkened so that I couldn't see in. But I had the clear impression that I was being watched carefully. I also had the clear impression that it was Nora and Vic in the car. Why were they following me around?

In my motel room, I called a friend of mine at the State Bureau of Investigation in Des Moines. I asked him to run a check on the good minister and on both Kenny Deihl and Mindy Lane. I was not exactly a trusting soul. He said to call him back in a few hours.

Before leaving, I looked around the room. It smelled of disinfectant and was dark enough, on this sunny afternoon, to give the House of Usher a few pointers on gloom. I opened the drapes, cracked the window a quarter-inch, spent a long minute watching a jay perched on the window ledge, and then raised my eyes and looked across the street to the parking lot adjacent to the steak house.

Big blue Caddy just sitting there.

I left the room, found the rear EXIT sign and took it.

If they were going to follow me around, I'd make them work for it.

They were going to be sitting there for a long time waiting for me to walk out the front door.

Lochinvar Antiques was a refurbished Queen Anne Victorian that had enough gingerbreading for at least three such houses. It sat on its own acre lot on the edge of a residential area. The grass was in need of a quick trim.

In the front yard, a slender woman with a blonde ponytail sat next to an aluminum tub where she was bathing a feisty young kitten. I couldn't see her face but something about her blue work shirt and jeans and the heavy Navajo turquoise earrings signaled me that she was going to be young—no more, say, than thirty.

I walked over and watched the kitten shake off water and soapsuds. The woman laughed most pleasantly, then looked up at me.

Her eyes were young, brown and quick and intelligent, but the skin of her face was deeply lined and aged.

A momentary sadness shone in her eyes, as if she was used to people being surprised by how old her face looked when they finally saw it. The odd thing was that she was very pretty, even with the wrinkles and grooves in her face.

The kitten, who was calico and very young—four pounds of kitty at most—was covered with suds and water that made her fur stand straight up like spikes. She made a lot of mad little noises, her eyes chiding me for not taking her away from this murderous woman who imprisoned her.

"She hates it, Ayesha does," she said, wrapping the wriggling kitten in a nubby white towel.

"Ayesha, that's a great name."

"From H. Rider Haggard," she smiled. "I was one of those girls who always liked boys' books better than the ones for girls. Ayesha was the eternal goddess in
She
."

"That's right, I forgot. I used to read Haggard, too."

"Give me a minute—I'm going to run her inside."

While she was gone, I walked to the edge of the small hill the house sat on and looked at the blue river in the yellow sunlight. There was a breeze, one scented up with apple blossoms, and as I watched the river I thought of how white pine had been rafted down these waters to the eager mills. For fifty years, just after the Civil War, the towns in this part of the state had boomed with furniture factories. But then in Burlington, which was the center of all this activity, a fire had destroyed a full five blocks of factories. Business never quite recovered, and the sight of white pine being ridden by lumberjacks down the blue, blue waters was seen no more.

"She's still mad at me," she said when she got back. She put out an elegant hand that felt of hard honest physical work. "I'm Joanna, by the way."

I told her my name and gave her my pitch.

"I guess that's the trendy phrase for it now, huh? 'Bedroom communities'?"

"I guess so," I said. I nodded to the house. "This is quite a place. Really well kept."

"Interesting history, too."

"Oh?"

"I don't know if you know anything about this part of the state, but back in the 1840s and 1850s people around here hid runaway slaves. A lot of slave hunters—they were pretty much like bounty hunters—combed this area looking for runaways. They came up from the South; you know, hired by the plantation owners. That's why people had trapdoors and sub-basements for slaves to hide in."

Her enthusiasm made me smile. She was a girl again, eager to share a story. I liked her. "One night a couple of slave hunters killed a little slave girl in cold blood. They were trying to impress all the slaves with how merciless they were. But they didn't count on the people of the town here. Six men from New Hope got together and spent all night tracking the slave hunters. They found the hunters in the morning and lynched them on the spot. Left them hanging for five days. The bodies probably looked pretty awful by then."

"So much for the theory that nothing ever happens in nice little Iowa towns. Or used to, anyway." I looked at her and smiled. "But you were telling me about your husband and this being a bedroom community."

"Well," she smiled but it was a smile that bore more pain than pleasure, "he certainly travels a lot." She hesitated, then said, "As women throughout the Midwest can attest."

I didn't know what to say so I immediately went to the inane. "You've really got a great view from here."

"I'm sorry to put all that on you."

I looked at her. "I don't mind. I just wasn't sure what to say."

She shrugged. "We used to be a matched set, my husband and I. Six years ago we were Zelda and Scott, the most beautiful, the most desirable, the most sought after. Then about five years ago, my face— Well, you see what happened. Tried everything. Nothing helped. The dermatologists call it solar elastosis. Did it to myself. Too much sunlight, too many cigarettes."

She walked to the edge of the hill and looked down. A bright red canoe with two blonde girls paddled past.

I walked up next to her.

"He was always unfaithful—he really is quite handsome—but after my face started to go . . . Well, I don't suppose I blame him, really. We were both very vain people when we met. I was a real heartbreaker, very shallow and insincere, just as much as he was. The only difference is that with my face this way—"

She looked at me and smiled. "Well, now I've been forced to look at life the way mere mortals do. You know, walk into a room and have men be courteous but not interested in me in the slightest bit. Or see the pity and the horror in the eyes of beautiful women who worry that this may happen to them someday."

"He's gone now?"

She nodded, staring at the river again, down the brambly hill and past the sandy shore to the sunlight-painted water and the occasional splashing fish.

"He'll be back tonight. You can call him around eight if you want to catch him."

"I'll set up a time for an interview tomorrow."

She eased her arm through mine, led me back toward the beautiful Victorian.

"Are you married, Jim?"

"Not anymore."

"Divorce?"

"She died."

"Lord."

When we reached the sidewalk, she slid her arm out from mine and said, "Maybe I'll use you to make him jealous. You're a nice-looking man."

"Thanks."

"Would you mind?"

I leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. "Not if it'll make you feel better."

"For a little while it would."

"Then go ahead and do it."

"I'll tell him that you took me to lunch and that we spent the afternoon walking in the woods. God, it's been so long since he was jealous." She laughed suddenly, heartily. It was good to hear. "God, you probably think you stepped into a local production of
Sunset Boulevard
, some nutty old broad carrying on this way. Do you know
Sunset Boulevard
?"

"One of my wife's favorites."

"I'll bet you were faithful."

"I was."

"And I'll bet she was faithful, too."

"Far as I know."

This time, she kissed me on the cheek. "I think I'll go inside and lie down and have a fantasy about you, Jim."

I smiled. "That's when I'm at my best. In somebody else's fantasies."

I gave her arm a squeeze and walked back to town.