"Can't open them, I suppose," Wheeler said.
"Y'know I'd say yes if I could, Harry," Poulter answered. "But law's law. You know that. I got t'send them back unopened. That's the law."
"All right." Wheeler took out his pen and copied down the return addresses in his pad. He pushed the letters back. "Thanks."
When he got home at four that afternoon, Cora was in the front room with Paal. There was a look of confused emotion on Paal's face-a desire to please coupled with a frightened need to flee the disconcertion of sound. He sat beside her on the couch looking as if he were about to cry.
"Oh, Paal," she said as Wheeler entered. She put her arms around the trembling boy. "There's nothing to be afraid of, darling."
She saw her husband.
"What did they do to him?" she asked, unhappily.
He shook his head. "Don't know," he said. "He should have been put in school though."
"We can't very well put him in school when he's like this," she said.
"We can't put him anywhere till we see what's what," Wheeler said. "I'll write those people tonight."
In the silence, Paal felt a sudden burst of emotion in the woman and he looked up quickly at her stricken face.
Pain. He felt it pour from her like blood from a mortal wound.
And while they ate supper in an almost silence, Paal kept sensing tragic sadness in the woman. It seemed he heard sobbing in a distant place. As the silence continued he began to get momentary flashes of remembrance in her pain-opened mind. He saw the face of another boy. Only it swirled and faded and there was his face in her thoughts. The two faces, like contesting wraiths, lay and overlay upon each other as if fighting for the dominance of her mind.
All fleeing, locked abruptly behind black doors as she said, "You have to write to them, I suppose."
"You know I do, Cora," Wheeler said.
Silence. Pain again. And when she tucked him into bed, he looked at her with such soft, apparent pity on his face that she turned quickly from the bed and he could feel the waves of sorrow break across his mind until her footsteps could no longer be heard.
And, even then, like the faint fluttering of bird wings in the night, he felt her pitiable despair moving in the house.
What are you writing?" she asked.
Wheeler looked over from his desk as midnight chimed its seventh stroke in the hall. Cora came walking across the room and set the tray down at his elbow. The steamy fragrance of freshly brewed coffee filled his nostrils as he reached for the pot.
"Just telling them the situation," he said, "about the fire, the Nielsens dying. Asking them if they're related to the boy or know any of his relations over there."
"And what if his relations don't do any better than his parents?"
"Now, Cora," he said, pouring cream, "I thought we'd already discussed that. It's not our business."
She pressed pale lips together.
"A frightened child is my business," she said angrily. "Maybe you-"
She broke off as he looked up at her patiently, no argument in his expression.
"Well," she said, turning from him, "it's true."
"It's not our business, Cora." He didn't see the tremor of her lips.
"So he'll just go on not talking, I suppose! Being afraid of shadows!"
She whirled. "It's criminal!" she cried, love and anger bursting from her in a twisted mixture.
"It's got to be done, Cora," he said quietly. "It's our duty."
"Duty." She echoed it with an empty lifelessness in her voice.
She didn't sleep. The liquid flutter of Harry's snoring in her ears, she lay staring at the jump of shadows on the ceiling, a scene enacted in her mind.
A summer's afternoon; the back doorbell ringing. Men standing on the porch, John Carpenter among them, a blanket-covered stillness weighing down his arms, a blank look on his face. In the silence, a drip of water on the sunbaked boards-slowly, unsteadily, like the beats of a dying heart. He was swimming in the lake, Miz Wheeler and-
She shuddered on the bed as she had shuddered then-numbly, mutely. The hands beside her were a crumpled whiteness, twisted by remembered anguish. All these years waiting, waiting for a child to bring life into her house again.
At breakfast she was hollow-eyed and drawn. She moved about the kitchen with a willful tread, sliding eggs and pancakes on her husband's plate, pouring coffee, never speaking once.
Then he had kissed her goodbye and she was standing at the living room window watching him trudge down the path to the car. Long after he'd gone, staring at the three envelopes he'd stuck into the side clip of the mailbox.
When Paal came downstairs he smiled at her. She kissed his cheek, then stood behind him, wordless and watching, while he drank his orange juice. The way he sat, the way he held his glass; it was so like-