Then we had to bounce away from each other, frightened by the intimacy. Jack swung away to put on his shirt; I sat down to slide my feet into my shoes. I ran my fingers through my hair, took care of a button I'd skipped.

We were silent on the ride to my house, the bitter cold biting into our bones. When we pulled into the driveway I saw one light burning on the dimmest setting, in the living room. Jack leaned over to give me a quick kiss, and I was out of the car in a wink, running across the frosty lawn to the front door.

I locked the door behind me and went to the picture window. Looking out the small triangle unobscured by the Christmas tree, I saw Jack's car back out and start back to the motel. The sheets of his bed would smell like me.

Once in my room, where my mother had left a lamp on, I slowly undressed. It was too late to shower; it might wake my parents, if they weren't in their room lying awake to make sure I was home safe, like they'd done when I was a teenager. There was no counting the sleepless nights I'd given them.

Fleetingly, I thought about Teresa and Simon Macklesby. How many good nights' rest had they managed in the eight years since their daughter had vanished?

The murders of the doctor and his nurse, the strain of the wedding rehearsal, and the shock of all Jack had told me should have kept me awake. But being with Jack had drained the tension from me. Even if we hadn't had sex, I thought with some surprise, I would have felt better. I crawled in my bed, turned on my side, slid my hand under the pillow, and was immediately asleep.

The next day I had showered and dressed before I came out to have some coffee and breakfast. I'd done some sit-ups and leg lifts in my room so I wouldn't feel like a slug the rest of the day. My parents were both at the table, sections of newspaper propped up, when I got a mug from the cabinet.

"Good morning," my mother said with a smile.

My father grunted and nodded.

"How was your date last night?" Mother ventured when I was sitting with them.

"Fine," I said. My toast popped up, and I put it on a plate.

Dad peered over his glasses at me. "Got home late," he observed.

"Yes."

"How long you been dating this man? Your mother says you told her he was a private detective? Isn't that kind of dangerous?"

I answered the safest question. "I've been dating him for a few weeks."

"You think he might be serious?"

"Sometimes."

My father regarded me with some exasperation. "Now, what does that mean?"

"I think it means she doesn't want to answer any more questions, Gerald," Mother said. She rubbed the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger, hiding a little smile.

"A father needs to know about men who are seeing his girl," my father said.

"This girl is almost thirty-two," I reminded him, trying to keep my voice gentle.

He shook his head. "I don't believe it. Why, that would make me old, gosh dog it!"

We all laughed as the little touchy moment passed.

Dad got up to shave, following his nearly invariable morning routine. He stuck his head back in the door just as I bit into my toast. "Can you make any kind of living as a detective?" he asked, then hurried away before I could either laugh or throw my toast at him.

"The paper says," my mother began when I'd finished my coffee, "that Dave LeMay and Binnie Armstrong were killed right before you and Varena found them."

"I thought so," I said after a pause.

"You touched them?"

"Varena did. She's the nurse," I said, reminding my mother that I was not the only one present when awful things happened.

"That's true," my mother said slowly, as one who has received a revelation of which she's half proud, half dismayed. "She has to deal with things like that all the time."

"That bad or worse." Once upon a time, Varena had given me a graphic description of a motorcycle rider who'd stretched out his arm at the wrong moment and come into the hospital without it. A passerby had had the presence of mind to wrap it in the blanket his dog sat on when it rode in the car and bring it into the hospital. I had seen bad things ... maybe just as bad... but I didn't think I could have dealt calmly with that. Varena had been excited - not by the crisis but by her team's effective response.

Evidently she didn't talk about some aspects of being a nurse, at least to our mother.

"I never quite pictured her job that way." Mother looked thoughtful, as if she were seeing her younger daughter in a different light.

I read the comics for a minute or two, Ann Landers, the horoscopes, the scrambled words, the "find the errors" drawing. I never had time to do this at home. Thank God.

"What's on the agenda today?" I asked, without feeling one bit excited. The pleasure of Jack's presence in town had faded, to be replaced by the gnawing anxiety of his suspicions.

"Oh, there's the shower at Grace's in the afternoon, but this morning we have to go to Corbett's to pick up a few things they called us about."

Corbett's was the town's premier gift shop. Every bride with any claim to class went to Corbett's to register her china and silver patterns, and also to indicate a range of acceptable colors that would look good in the bride's future kitchen and bath. Corbett's also carried small appliances, pricey kitchenware, and sheets and table linens. Many brides left an all-encompassing list at Corbett's. Varena and I had always called it the "I want it" list.

Two hours later - two dragging, boring hours later - we were in Varena's car, parallel parking on Bartley's town square. The old post office crumbled on one side, while the courthouse, in the center on a manicured lawn, was festooned with Christmas decorations. Unlike Shakespeare, Bartley was holding on to its manger scene, though I had never found plastic figures in a wooden shed exactly spiritual. Carols blared endlessly from the speakers located around the square, and all the merchants had lined their store windows with twinkling colored lights and artificial snow.

If there was a true religious emotion to be felt about Christmas, I had been too numbed by all this claptrap to feel it for the past three years.

I was glad to see Varena click the "lock" button on her key-ring control, and the car gave its little honk! to show it had received her command. Naturally we all looked at the car as it made the sound, a senseless but natural reaction, and I almost didn't see the running man until too late.

He was coming for us out of nowhere, his hand already outstretched to grab my mother's purse, which she was clutching loosely under her right arm.

With a positive rush of pleasure, I planted my left foot, came up with my right knee, and flicked my foot out to catch him in the jaw. In real life (as opposed to movies) high kicks are risky and energy draining: The knee and the groin are much more reliable targets. But this was my chance to land a high kick, and I took it. Thanks to hours and hours of practice, my instep smacked his jaw correctly, and he staggered. I got him again on the way down, though it was not as effective an impact. It hastened his fall rather than damaging him further.

He managed to land on his knees, and I seized his right arm and twisted it sharply behind him. He screamed and hit the pavement, and I kept his arm behind and up at an angle I knew to be extremely painful. I was on his right, out of reach of his left hand if he could manage to lever himself up to grab for my ankle.

"I'll break your arm if you move," I told him sincerely.

He believed me. He lay on the sidewalk, panting for breath - sobbing for breath, really.

I glanced up to see my mother and sister staring not at their assailant but at me, with stunned amazement making their faces foolish.

"Call the police," I prompted them.

Varena kind of jumped and ran into Corbett's. She was doing a lot of police calling these days. The Bard sisters were on a roll.

The man I'd downed was short, stocky, black. He had on a ragged coat, and he smelled. I figured this was probably the same man who'd taken Diane Dykeman's purse a couple of days ago.

"Let me up, bitch," he said now, having gathered enough breath to speak.

"Be polite," I said, my voice harsh. I gave his arm a yank upward, and he screamed.

"Oh, Lily," my mother gasped. "Oh, honey. Do you have to ... ?" Her voice trailed off as I looked up to meet her eyes.

"Yes," I said. "I have to."

A siren went off right behind me. The patrol officer must have been two blocks away when he got the call from the dispatcher, so he put on his siren. It nearly made me lose my grip. The car had "Bartley Police Department" printed in an arc over the Bartley town symbol, some complicated mishmash involving cotton and tractors. Under the symbol, the word "Chief" was centered in large letters.

"What we got here?" called the man in the uniform as he bounded up on the sidewalk. He had brown hair and a neat mustache. He was lean except for a curious potbelly, like a five-month pregnancy. He looked at the man on the sidewalk, at my grip on his arm.

"Hey, Lily," he said, after assessing all this. "What you got here?"

"Chandler?" I said, peering up at his face. "Chandler McAdoo?"

"In the flesh," he drawled. "You caught you a purse snatcher?"

"So it seems."

"Hi, Miz Bard," Chandler said, nodding at my mother, who nodded back automatically. I looked up at her shocked face, thinking as I did so that nothing could make her feel better for a little bit. Being the victim of a random crime was a shocking experience.

Chandler McAdoo had been my lab partner in high school, one memorable semester. We had done the frog thing together. I had been holding the knife - or the scalpel? I couldn't remember - and I had been on the verge of going silly-girl squeamish, when Chandler had looked me straight in the eye and told me I was a weak and useless critter if I couldn't cut one little hole in a dead frog.

He was right, I had figured, and I had cut.

That wasn't the only thing Chandler McAdoo had dared me to do, but it was the only dare I'd taken.

Chandler bent over now with his handcuffs, and with a practiced move, he had my prisoner cuffed before the man knew what was happening. I rose, with a courteous assist from Chief Chandler, and while I was telling him what had happened, he hauled the cuffed man to his feet and propelled the prisoner toward the squad car.

He listened, made a call on his radio.

I stared at every move he made, unable to square this man, this police chief with his severe haircut and cool eyes, with the boy who'd gotten drunk with me on Rebel Yell.

"Where you think he came from?" Chandler asked, as if it weren't too important. My mother had been coaxed inside the store by Varena and the sales clerks.

"Must have been there," I decided, pointing at the alley running between Corbett's and the furniture store. "That's the only place he could've been hiding unseen." It was a narrow alley, and if he'd been just a few feet inside it, he would have been invisible. "Where was Diane Dykeman when her purse was snatched?"

Chandler cocked an eye at me. "She was over by Dill's pharmacy, two blocks away," he said. "The snatcher dodged back in the alley, and we couldn't track him. I don't see how we could have missed this guy, but I guess he could have hidden until we'd checked the alley behind the store. There are more little niches and hidey-holes in this downtown area than you can shake a stick at."

I nodded. Since the downtown area of Bartley was more than a hundred and fifty years old, during which time the Square businesses had flourished and gone broke in cycles, I could well believe it.

"You stay put," Chandler said and strode down the alley. I sighed and stayed put. I glanced at my watch once or twice. He was gone for seven minutes.

"I think he's been sleeping back there," Chandler said when he reemerged onto the sidewalk. Suddenly my high school buddy was galvanized, and there wasn't any languid small-town-cop air about him anymore. "I didn't find Diane's purse, but there're some refrigerator cartons and a nest of rags."

Chandler had that saving-the-punchline air. He bent into his car and used the radio again.

"I just called Brainerd, who answered the call on the murder cases," he told me after he straightened. "Come look."

I followed Chandler down the alley. We arrived at the T junction, where this little alley joined the larger one running behind the buildings on the west of the square. There was a refrigerator carton tucked into a niche behind some bushes that had made their precarious lives in the cracks in the rough pavement. Chandler pointed, and I followed his finger to see a length of rusty pipe close to but not visible from the carton, as I figured it. The pipe had been placed on a broken drain that had formerly run from the top of the flat-roofed furniture store to the gutter, and the placement rendered it all but invisible if it had not been stained at one end. The pipe, more than two feet long and about two inches in diameter, was darker at one end than the other.

"Bloodstains?" Chandler said. "Dave LeMay, I'm thinking."

I stared at the pipe again and understood.

The same man who might have beaten to death the doctor and his nurse had come that close to my mother. For a savage second, I wished I had kicked him harder and longer. I could have broken his arm, or his skull so easily while I had him down on the sidewalk. I stared out of the alley. I could just glimpse the man's profile as he sat in Chandler's car. That face was vacant. Nobody home.

"You go on in the store, Lily," Chandler said, maybe reading my face too easily. "Your mama might need you right now, Varena too. We'll talk later."