'I am so sorry, missus,' he said.
'Rainey!' a voice cried. 'Stop!'
She tried to look around and could not. She had strained something in her neck. Shooter never even tried. He simply came on toward her.
'Rainey! Stop!'
'There is no Rainey h -' Shooter began, and then a gunshot rapped briskly across the fall air. Shooter stopped where he was, and looked curiously, almost casually, down at his chest. There was a small hole there. No blood issued from it - at least, not at first - but the hole was there. He put his hand to it, then brought it away. His index finger was marked by a small dot of blood. It looked like a bit of punctuation - the kind which ends a sentence. He looked at this thoughtfully. Then he dropped his hands and looked at Amy.
'Babe?' he asked, and then fell full-length beside her on the porch boards.
She rolled over, managed to get up on her elbows, and crawled to where he lay, beginning to sob.
'Mort?' she cried. 'Mort? Please, Mort, try to say something!'
But he was not going to say anything, and after a moment she let this realization fill her up. She would reject the simple fact of his death again and again over the next few weeks and months, and would then weaken, and the realization would fill her up again. He was dead. He was dead. He had gone crazy down here and he was dead.
He, and whoever had been inside him at the end.
She put her head down on his chest and wept, and when someone came up behind her and put a comforting hand on her shoulder, Amy did not look around.
EPILOGUE
Ted and Amy Milner came to see the man who had shot and killed Amy's first husband, the well-known writer Morton Rainey, about three months after the events at Tashmore Lake.
They had seen the man at one other time during the three-month period, at the inquest, but that had been a formal situation, and Amy had not wanted to speak to him personally. Not there. She was grateful that he had saved her life ... but Mort had been her husband, and she had loved him for many years, and in her deepest heart she felt that Fred Evans's finger hadn't been the only one which pulled the trigger.
She would have come in time anyway, she suspected, in order to clarify it as much as possible in her mind. Her time might have been a year, or two, possibly even three. But things had happened in the meanwhile which made her move more quickly. She had hoped Ted would let her come to New York alone, but he was emphatic. Not after the last time he had let her go someplace alone. That time she had almost gotten killed.
Amy pointed out with some asperity that it would have been hard for Ted to 'let her go,' since she had never told him she was going in the first place, but Ted only shrugged. So they went to New York together, rode up to the fifty-third floor of a large skyscraper together, and were together shown to the small cubicle in the offices of the Consolidated Assurance Company which Fred Evans called home during the working day . unless he was in the field, of course.
She sat as far into the corner as she could get, and although the offices were quite warm, she kept her shawl wrapped around her.
Evans's manner was slow and kind - he seemed to her almost like the country doctor who had nursed her through her childhood illnesses - and she liked him. But that's something he'll never know, she thought. I might be able to summon up the strength to tell him, and he would nod, but his nod wouldn't indicate belief. He only knows that to me he will always be the man who shot Mort, and he had to watch me cry on Mort's chest until the ambulance came, and one of the paramedics had to give me a shot before I would let him go. And what he won't know is that I like him just the same.
He buzzed a woman from one of the outer offices and had her bring in three big, steaming mugs of tea. It was January outside now, the wind high, the temperature low. She thought with some brief longing of how it would be in Tashmore, with the lake finally frozen and that killer wind blowing long, ghostly snakes of powdered snow across the ice. Then her mind made some obscure but nasty association, and she saw Mort hitting the floor, saw the package of Pall Malls skidding across the wood like a shuffleboard weight. She shivered, her brief sense of longing totally dispelled.
'Are you okay, Mrs Milner?' Evans asked.
She nodded.
Frowning ponderously and playing with his pipe, Ted said, 'My wife wants to hear everything you know about what happened, Mr Evans. I tried to discourage her at first, but I've come to think that it might be a good thing. She's had bad dreams ever since
'Of course,' Evans said, not exactly ignoring Ted, but speaking directly to Amy. 'I suppose you will for a long time. I've had a few of my own, actually. I never shot a man before.' He paused, then added, 'I missed Vietnam by a year or so.'
Amy offered him a smile. It was wan, but it was a smile.
'She heard it all at the inquest,' Ted went on, 'but she wanted to hear it again, from you, and with the legalese omitted.'
'I understand,' Evans said. He pointed at the pipe. 'You can light that, if you want to.'
Ted looked at it, then dropped it into the pocket of his coat quickly, as if he were slightly ashamed of it. 'I'm trying to give it up, actually.'
Evans looked at Amy. 'What purpose do you think this will serve?' he asked her in the same kind, rather sweet voice. 'Or maybe a better question would be what purpose do you need it to serve?'
'I don't know.' Her voice was low and composed. 'But we were in Tashmore three weeks ago, Ted and I, to clean the place out - we've put it up for sale - and something happened. Two things, actually.' She looked at her husband and offered the wan smile again. 'Ted knows something happened, because that's when I got in touch with you and made this appointment. But he doesn't know what, and I'm afraid he's put out with me. Perhaps he's right to be.'
Ted Milner did not deny that he was put out with Amy. His hand stole into his coat pocket, started to remove the pipe, and then let it drop back again.
'But these two things - they bear on what happened to your lake home in October?'
'I don't know. Mr Evans ... what did happen? How much do you know?'
'Well,' he said, leaning back in his chair and sipping from his mug, 'if you came expecting all the answers, you're going to be sorely disappointed. I can tell you about the fire, but as for why your husband did what he did ... you can probably fill in more of those blanks than I can. What puzzled us most about the fire was where it started - not in the main house but in Mr Rainey's office, which is an addition. That made the act seem directed against him, but he wasn't even there.
'Then we found a large chunk of bottle in the wreckage of the office. It had contained wine - champagne, to be exact - but there wasn't any doubt that the last thing it had contained was gasoline. Part of the label was intact, and we sent a Fax copy to New York. It was identified as Moet et Chandon, nineteen-eightysomething. That wasn't proof indisputable that the bottle used for the Molotov cocktail came from your own wine room, Mrs Milner, but it was very persuasive, since you listed better than a dozen bottles of Moet et Chandon, some from 1983 and some from 1984.