I said: 'How about Austin's drawing? Did your old professor remember what any of 
those looked like?'
    'Not really. They were just sketches of hands and joints. Very detailed and accurate, 
but not very memorable.'
    'It's a goddamned shame that report's lost,' I repeated. 'I know,' said Rheta. 'I 
even called the library and had them look back over their records to see who had taken it 
out. Their records don't go back to 1925. They've just had to write it off as pilfered.'
    I finished my drink. 'I guess that's as far as we can go, then, until we get the 
coroner's post-mortem report, and until we see what's down that well. Do you fancy some 
lunch?'
    'Aren't you going to sleep?'
    'Unh-hunh. I keep having bad dreams. And, like I told you, I hate to sleep by myself. 
How about the Iron Kettle at one o' clock? I could use one of their steak brochettes.'
    'All right,' agreed Rheta. 'As long as you don't let me drink
    too much wine.'
    'Of course I won't,' I told her. 'I don't need to make a lady
    drunk to impress her.'
    'I wasn't thinking about that,' Rheta retorted. 'It's just that I find it difficult 
to perform accurate scientific tests when I'm under the influence of alcohol.'
    'Trust me to go for a bluestocking,' I said. 'I'll see you later.'
    The Iron Kettle is a colonial-style restaurant in an elegant white-painted house a 
few miles north of New Milford. It's the kind of place where you can sit at lunch for 
hours, surrounded by elderly Connecticut matrons with elastic support stockings and 
fraying white hair, while plates of tidily-arranged salads and neatly-prepared avocadoes 
are carried to and fro in an atmosphere of quiet gentility. Rheta and I sat at a table by 
the window drinking a plain white wine and looking out over the russet slopes of a fall 
garden.
    Rheta was looking more attractive than ever. In the grey light from the window, her 
hazel eyes took on a translucent look, and her off-blonde hair shone with an appealing 
softness. I said: 'I can't imagine you dating Pigskin Packer.'
    'Are you jealous?'
    'Why not?'
    'Well,' she said, with a gentle smile, 'jealousy is the most destructive of all 
feelings. Jealousy destroys the people who feel it, as well as those for whom it's felt.'
    'I'm not consumingly jealous,' I told her, looking at her over the rim of my glass as 
I drank. 'I'm just ordinary jealous. And surprised, too. I don't know what a big lunk 
like that could possibly give you that I couldn't. Apart from fifty pounds of extraneous 
muscle, of course.'
    She smiled again, and looked away. 'Maybe I'm just responsive to extraneous muscle,' 
she said. 'After all, there are plenty of men who are responsive to extraneous breast 
tissue.'
    'What's extraneous about breast tissue?' I demanded, a little too loudly. An old 
woman in a purple hat turned in her wheelback chair to stare at me through her 
half-glasses. I grinned at her reassuringly, and then hissed at Rheta: 'Packer is such a 
dumb-bell. He has no class at all. His conversation comes right out of Raggedy Ann. An 
exclamation point after every sentence.'
    Rheta shrugged. 'At least he's safe.'
    'Safe? What does that mean?'
    The waitress arrived with my brochette of steak tips and with Rheta's grilled fish. I 
couldn't have eaten fish right then, but I guess scientists are less squeamish than the 
rest of us. I ground some black pepper over my rice, and then took a mouthful of steak 
and tomato. But I was still waiting for Rheta to answer me. 'Well,' said Rheta, reaching 
for another breadstick, 'I guess he's safe as opposed to unsafe.'
    'And I'm unsafe?' I She nodded. 'I think you would be for me.'
    'What's unsafe about me? I'm the safest guy in the universe.' She squeezed lemon on 
her fish, and then started to eat. 'I think you're attractive,' she said, without looking 
up. 'But also think that you're too wound up in your own life. You're too wound up in 
yourself. You could hurt someone like me, hurt them bad, and never even realize you'd 
done it.'
    I didn't answer for a while, as I finished my mouthful of steak. But then I drank 
some more wine, and said quietly: 'I wouldn't hurt you for anything.'
    'You may not want to hurt me, Mason, but you would. I know the kind of man you are. 
It's like the way you can never take anything seriously. That's okay, for a while. Every 
girl likes to laugh. But then the time comes when she needs to know that, even if you 
don't take the world seriously, you take her seriously. You see what I'm getting at?'
    I reached across the table and laid my hand on hers. 'I can take you seriously,' I 
said, simply. 'What sort of proof do you need?'
    'I don't know. What sort of proof are you prepared to give
    me?'
    The old woman in the purple hat was eavesdropping on our conversation with increasing 
interest. I sat up and stared at her coldly, and she bent herself over her plate with 
exaggerated absorption, and applied herself to her breadcrumbed veal. i 'Finish your 
lunch,' I told Rheta. 'Then come back to the house. I've built up the fire, and there's a 
bottle of Chablis in the icebox. The only thing I haven't done is tidy the bed.'
    "She stared at me for a long time. The light brightened a little, as the grey clouds 
broke, and the sun shone down through the flaking leaves of the birch trees. She was 
wearing Gucci perfume, and she was so warm and delicious that I could have leaned across 
the table and kissed her right then.
    She said: 'You're supposed to be meeting Dan at two-thirty.'
    'So? I can still make it. It's only up the road a ways.' She licked her lips with the 
tip of her tongue. 'I have to be back at the laboratory to finish those tests. Dan will 
skin me if I
    don't.'
    'Why don't you let me square it with Dan?' I asked her. 'This thing is bigger than 
testing water.'
    She laid down her fork. 'Aren't you too tired?' she enquired.
    'Are you trying to talk yourself out of it?'
    'No,' she said, 'I don't think I am.'
    'Well, then,' I told her. 'Finish your lunch, and then we'll go.'
    We didn't say very much more as we ate our fish and our steak, and drank our wine. We 
looked into each other's eyes a lot, weighing-up, calculating, checking, prying. Then, 
when the meal was over, and I had paid at the desk and collected a book of matches and a 
mouthful of peppermints, we left the restaurant and walked across to our cars like two 
lovers in a European art movie, testing the wind and the weather and each other's 
feelings with every step.
    Rheta had brought her Volkswagen. It was beige, and very battered. I said: 'Why don't 
you come with me? I'll bring you back here later, and you can drive straight back into 
town.'
    'Okay,' she nodded. I don't think she wanted to break the spell any more than I did. 
We both knew that she was going to have to .go back to the laboratory this afternoon, and