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Into this stepped Hawkin, who put his hand on her shoulder as she was writing.
    "Pardon me, Casey, but when you're finished you might like to join Tyler and me upstairs. All the way to the top of the stairs, third door on your left."
    Kate nodded her agreement and looked up to catch the tail end of an extremely odd expression on the woman's face.
    "What is it?"
    "Nothing, really." She was stifling amusement.
    "Something about upstairs? Was that it?"
    Flower Underwood's lips twitched, and finally she burst out laughing, which caused her son to pull back and stare at her, milky mouth agape.
    "Well, you know," she said helpfully, "the downstairs of this place is pretty public. Everyone on the Road uses it like a living room."
    "And upstairs--the top floor--is not public, you mean? Quite private, in fact?" The woman's eyes were sparkling, those of her son drooping as she caressed his back. "By private invitation only, that sort of thing, yes?"
    "That sort of thing," she agreed.
    "Have you been up there, to the top of the stairs?"
    "Not in quite a while, though I don't imagine it's changed much. Or Tyler either, for that matter." It seemed a good memory, thought Kate, judging from the face across from her.
    "Would you say that many of the women on the Road have 'been upstairs'?"
    "A fair number. Probably most of the single women at one time or another, maybe, oh, a third of the attached ones."
    "I would have thought that would cause a lot of trouble."
    "Not here. In suburbia, perhaps, but not here. And Tyler's very careful not to get too close if there's another man involved who would object. He's a good man, very caring, very generous."
    "With money?"
    "With everything." Again the amused, fond smile crossed her face.
    "He only invites women upstairs?"
    "Oh, no, men too. Not to bed, of course." She giggled at the absurdity of the thought, and Kate was struck dumb by this outcrop of conventionality. "He takes guys up there to play chess, I know, or just to have a drink or a smoke if something's happening down here and he wants some quiet."
    "But you're sure it's no more than that?" Kate persisted.
    That gave her pause, and Kate had her turn to be amused, to see that Flower Underwood was troubled by this idea, whereas Tyler's wholesale hetero relationships had fazed her not at all.
    "No, he invites a lot of people up to his rooms, not just to sleep with them. I've never heard of him sleeping with a man. I'm sure I would have. There's no hiding anything on the Road, not for long. No, I'm sure Tyler's a normal man," she said, firmly rejecting the possibility.
    " 'Normal.' "
    "Well, straight, anyway. At any rate, he is very sweet. In bed, I mean."
    This interview is getting out of hand, thought Kate, and tried to pull it back to earth.
    "Does he have any children?"
    "A couple for sure. He has a wife, or an ex-wife, I guess, who lives in L.A. with their daughter, who's ten or eleven. There's also a little boy here on the Road who's probably his, though it's hard to be sure because he's only three. There's a couple other possibilities, but the mothers aren't sure."
    Kate's eyes involuntarily strayed to the sleeping blond terror, and the mother's eyes followed.
    "No, not this one. You'd only have to see my old man to be sure about that. She looks just like him. Say, if you want to know what the men do--" Her voice faltered as a thought struck her and strengthened again as she pushed it away. "If you want to hear about Tyler's rooms from a man, you could talk to Charlie. Charlie Waters is my old man. He's down here all the time, playing chess with Tyler." Her voice trailed off and her eyes rose to search the room beyond, and Kate thought it a good time to call the session to a halt.
    "Thank you very much for your time, Ms. Underwood. I really appreciate your coming down today," but the woman had already risen with her groggy burden and headed for the hallway.
    Kate scribbled her signature and dropped the papers on the next table--where Bob