Lee came in from the kitchen and put a damp towel in his hands, and Adam sponged his eyes and handed it back.

“I didn’t expect that,” Adam said, and his face was ashamed. “What shall I do? I’ll claim her. I’ll bury her.”

“I wouldn’t,” said Horace. “That is, unless you feel you have to. That’s not what I came about.” He took the folded will from his pocket and held it out.

Adam shrank from it. “Is—is that her blood?”

“No, it’s not. It’s not her blood at all. Read it.”

Adam read the two lines and went right on staring at the paper and beyond it. “He doesn’t know—she is his mother.”

“You never told him?”

“No.”

“Jesus Christ!” said the sheriff.

Adam said earnestly, “I’m sure he wouldn’t want anything of hers. Let’s just tear it up and forget it. If he knew, I don’t think Aron would want anything of hers.”

“ ’Fraid you can’t,” Quinn said. “We do quite a few illegal things. She had a safe-deposit box. I don’t have to tell you where I got the will or the key. I went to the bank. Didn’t wait for a court order. Thought it might have a bearing.” He didn’t tell Adam he thought there might be more pictures. “Well, Old Bob let me open the box. We can always deny it. There’s over a hundred thousand dollars in gold certificates. There’s money in there in bales—and there isn’t one goddam thing in there but money.”

“Nothing?”

“One other thing—a marriage certificate.”

Adam leaned back in his chair. The remoteness was coming down again, the soft protective folds between himself and the world. He saw his coffee and took a sip of it. “What do you think I ought to do?” he asked steadily and quietly.

“I can only tell you what I’d do,” Sheriff Quinn said. “You don’t have to take my advice. I’d have the boy in right now. I’d tell him everything—every single thing. I’d even tell him why you didn’t tell him before. He’s—how old?”

“Seventeen.”

“He’s a man. He’s got to take it some time. Better if he gets the whole thing at once.”

“Cal knows,” said Adam. “I wonder why she made the will to Aron?”

“God knows. Well, what do you think?”

“I don’t know, and so I’m going to do what you say. Will you stay with me?”

“Sure I will.”

“Lee,” Adam called, “tell Aron I want him. He has come home, hasn’t he?”

Lee came to the doorway. His heavy lids closed for a moment and then opened. “Not yet. Maybe he went back to school.”

“He would have told me. You know, Horace, we drank a lot of champagne on Thanksgiving. Where’s Cal?”

“In his room,” said Lee.

“Well, call him. Get him in. Cal will know.”

Cal’s face was tired and his shoulders sagged with exhaustion, but his face was pinched and closed and crafty and mean.

Adam asked, “Do you know where your brother is?”

“No, I don’t,” said Cal.

“Weren’t you with him at all?”

“No.”

“He hasn’t been home for two nights. Where is he?”

“How do I know?” said Cal. “Am I supposed to look after him?”

Adam’s head sank down, his body jarred, just a little quiver. In back of his eyes a tiny sharp incredibly bright blue light flashed. He said thickly, “Maybe he did go back to college.” His lips seemed heavy and he murmured like a man talking in his sleep. “Don’t you think he went back to college?”

Sheriff Quinn stood up. “Anything I got to do I can do later. You get a rest, Adam. You’ve had a shock.”

Adam looked up at him. “Shock—oh, yes. Thank you, George. Thank you very much.”

“George?”

“Thank you very much,” said Adam.

When the sheriff had gone, Cal went to his room. Adam leaned back in his chair, and very soon he went to sleep and his mouth dropped open and he snored across his palate.

Lee watched him for a while before he went back to his kitchen. He lifted the breadbox and took out a tiny volume bound in leather, and the gold tooling was almost completely worn away—The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius in English translation.

Lee wiped his steel-rimmed spectacles on a dish towel. He opened the book and leafed through. And he smiled to himself, consciously searching for reassurance.

He read slowly, moving his lips over the words. “Everything is only for a day, both that which remembers and that which is remembered.

“Observe constantly that all things take place by change, and accustom thyself to consider that the nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.”

Lee glanced down the page. “Thou wilt die soon and thou are not yet simple nor free from perturbations, nor without suspicion of being hurt by external things, nor kindly disposed towards all; nor dost thou yet place wisdom only in acting justly.”

Lee looked up from the page, and he answered the book as he would answer one of his ancient relatives. “That is true,” he said. “It’s very hard. I’m sorry. But don’t forget that you also say, ‘Always run the short way and the short way is the natural’—don’t forget that.” He let the pages slip past his fingers to the fly leaf where was written with a broad carpenter’s pencil, “Sam’l Hamilton.”