Spencerville

Annie Baxter was a simple country girl, but not that simple. She knew what he was telling her: If a letter was ever returned to her, he was dead, and someone in Washington would call or write to her regarding the circumstances.

It had been two days since the letter had been returned to her sister's address in the next county, where Keith sent all his letters to Annie.

Since then, Annie Baxter had feared answering her phone and feared seeing her sister's car pull up again with another letter, an official letter from Washington with a line or two beginning with, "We regret to inform you..."

But on second thought, why would they even bother with that? What was she to Keith Landry? A long-ago girlfriend, a sometimes pen pal. She hadn't seen him in over twenty years and had no expectation that she'd ever see him again.

But perhaps he'd instructed his people, whoever they were, to tell her if he died. Probably he wanted to be buried here with the generations of his family. He might, at this moment, she suddenly realized, be lying in Gibbs Funeral Home. She tried to convince herself it didn't matter that much; she was sad, but really how did it affect her? An old lover died, you heard the news, you became nostalgic and dwelled on your own mortality, you thought of younger days, you said a prayer, and you went on with your life. Maybe you went to the funeral service if it was convenient. It struck her then that if Keith Landry was dead, and if he was going to be buried in Spencerville, she could not possibly go to the service, nor, she thought, could she expect to sneak off to his grave someday without being seen by her constant police chaperons.

She petted the dog beside her. This was her dog — the other three were Cliff's. The dog jumped on her lap and snuggled against her as Annie scratched behind its ears. She said, "He's not dead, Denise. I know he's not dead."

Annie Baxter put her head down on the arm of the swing seat and rocked gently. Heat lightning flashed in the western sky and thunder rolled across the open cornfields, into the town, just ahead of the hard rain. She found herself crying again and kept thinking, We promised to meet again.

Chapter Three

Keith Landry walked through the quiet farmhouse. Distant relatives had looked after the place, and it wasn't in bad shape considering it had been empty for five years.

Keith had called ahead to announce his arrival and had spoken to a woman on a nearby farm that he called Aunt Betty, though she wasn't actually his aunt, but was his mother's second cousin, or something like that. He'd just wanted her to know in case she saw a light in the house, or a strange car, and so forth. Keith had insisted that neither she nor any other ladies go through any bother, but of course that had been like a call to arms — or brooms and mops — and the place was spotless and smelled of pine disinfectant.

Bachelors, Keith reflected, got a lot of breaks from the local womenfolk, who took inordinate pity on men without wives. The goal of these good women in caring for bachelors, Keith suspected, was to demonstrate the advantage of having a wife and helpmate. Unfortunately, the free cleaning, cooking, apple pies, and jams often perpetuated what they sought to cure.

Keith went from room to room, finding everything pretty much as he remembered when he'd seen it last about six years before. He had a sense of the familiar, but, at the same time, the objects seemed surreal, as if he were having a dream about his childhood.

His parents had left behind most of their possessions, perhaps in anticipation of not liking Florida, or perhaps because the furniture, rugs, lamps, wall decorations, and such were as much a part of the house as the oak beams.

Some of the things in the house were nearly two centuries old, Keith knew, having been brought to America from England and Germany, where both sides of his family originated. Aside from a few legitimate antiques and some heirlooms, a good deal of the stuff was just old, and Keith reflected on the frugality, the hardscrabble existence, of a farm family over the centuries. He contrasted this with his friends and colleagues in Washington who contributed heavily to the gross national product. Their salaries, like his, were paid from the public coffers, and Keith, who had never successfully accepted the fact that you don't have to produce anything tangible to get paid, often wondered if too many people in Washington were eating too much of the farmers' corn. But he had dwelled on that many times, and if any of his colleagues thought about it at all, they'd kept it to themselves.