So she didn’t go with him, I thought. “Yes. Madox speaking.”

“This is Mrs. Harshaw. I know you’ll think I’m an awful pest, but I wonder if I could ask another favour?”

“Sure. What is it?”

“Mr. Harshaw has gone fishing, and he promised me a car off the lot while he was gone with ours, but he forgot to bring it home. I wonder if you’d drive it out for me when you close up?”

“Sure. How do I get there?”

“Go down Main Street to the bank and turn right. It’s about three or four blocks beyond the edge of town. There are a couple of cross streets, I think, and then a filling station on the left. The next block is big oak trees on both sides of the street, and only two houses. Ours is the two-storey one on the right-hand side.”

“Check,” I said. “Which car is it?”

“He said there was a Buick. A coupé.”

“Yes. It’s still here. I’ll bring it out.”

“There’s no hurry. Any time after you close up. And thanks a lot.”

It was around six when we locked up the cars and the shack. I told Gulick where I was taking the coupé, and left my own car on the lot. The place wasn’t hard to find, after I’d threaded my way through the double-parked congestion of Saturday-afternoon Main Street. Beyond the filling station she had spoken of, the road swung a little to the right as it entered the oaks. The house itself was back in the trees and had a big lawn in front and a gravel driveway running back beside a hedge of oleanders. It was a smaller copy of the old-style southern plantation house, with a columned porch running across the front and down one side next to the drive. I stopped by the side porch and got out. It was secluded back in here, partly cut off as it was from the street, with long shadows slanting across the lawn.

“Hello,” she said.

I glanced around, but didn’t see her until she opened the screen door and came out on to the porch. She had on a little-girl sort of summer dress with puffed-out short sleeves tied with bows, and was rattling ice cubes in a highball glass. She was bare-legged and wearing wedgies with grass straps, and her toenails were painted a flaming red. I don’t know anything about women’s clothes, but still I was conscious that she jarred somehow. The teenage dress didn’t do anything for that over-ripe figure except to wander on to the track and get run over, and she looked like a burlesque queen in bobby socks.

“Oh, hello,” I said.