“It’ll be fun watching you work.”

I shrugged, and said nothing. I wondered a little irritably if she really wanted that gun back, or if this was just her idea of a lark. After all, if it was lost during duck season it had been lying there for six months now. Maybe she had so much money and was so bored that hiring a diver came under the heading of entertainment, like ordering a clown for a children’s party.

Then I asked myself morosely why I was so intent on picking her to pieces. She hadn’t done anything, and so far as I knew there was no law against looking like a Norse goddess, even a slightly sexy one.

Norse? With a name like Shannon? It was odd, though, because she did look like a Swede.

I asked her to stop at the watchman’s shanty for a moment while I told him I’d be gone the rest of the day in case anybody called. The mill was abandoned now and the pier was seldom used for anything, but the place was still fenced and a bored watchman put in his hours reading in a little shack beside the gate.

As soon as we were out the gate she fumbled in her bag for a cigarette. I lit one for her, and another for myself. She drove well in traffic, but seemed to do an unnecessary amount of winding around to get out on the right highway. She kept checking the rearview mirror, too, but I didn’t pay much attention to that. I did it myself when I was driving. You never knew when some eager type might try to climb over your bumper.

When we were out on the highway at last she settled a little in the seat and unleashed a few more horses. We rolled smoothly along at 60. It was a fine machine, a 1954 hardtop convertible. I looked around the inside of it. She had beautiful legs. I looked back at the road.

“Bill Manning, isn’t it?” she asked. “That wouldn’t be William Stacey Manning, by any chance?”

I glanced quickly around. “How did you know?” Then I remembered. “Oh. You read that wheeze about me in the paper?”

It had appeared a few days ago, one of those interesting-character-around-the-water front sort of things, written by a rather intense girl who oozed her dedication to capital-J journalism all over the pier and was determined to pump me up into a glamorous figure for at least a column if it killed her. It had started over the fact I’d won a couple of races out at the yacht club, handling a friend’s boat for him. I wasn’t even a member; he was. But it had come out I’d deck-handed a couple of times on that run down to Bermuda and was a sailing nut; hence the story. Then she made the fact I’d gone to M.I.T. for three years before the war sound as if I were a South Seas beachcomber with a title. I didn’t get it myself. Maybe she thought divers ate with their feet. It was a good thing I hadn’t said anything about the four or five stories I’d sold. I’d have been Somerset Maugham, with flippers.

Then an odd thought struck me. I hadn’t used my middle name in that interview.