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shaded frame houses. It was still early enough for there to be wisps of vapor clinging to the sides of the wooded hills, like gentle night spirits longing to stay in the shelter of the tall, huddled cedars.
    “You still think about the accident, don’t you?” Sarah said.
    Wintone slowed his pace and Sarah slowed beside him, as if they’d begun walking up a grade.
    “Be unnatural not to,” Wintone said.
    “I don’t like to see you blame yourself.”
    “I don’t.”
    “You seem to.”
    Their steps fell out of rhythm on the cracked pavement.
    “I wasn’t even hurt….” Wintone said.
    Sarah was silent for a while, staring down at the ground as she walked. “You can have certain kinds of internal injuries,” she said. “Any doctor can tell you that … any nurse.”
    “Maybe they take awhile to heal. Maybe they never heal.”
    “They’ll heal if you let ’em. You can’t go on an’ on blamin’ yourself, not forever.”
    “Maybe it’ll be my fault forever.”
    “Even if that’s so, it seems eventually you oughta swallow it.”
    “It sticks.”
    They turned the corner toward Doc Amis’s office, into the face of the slowly climbing sun. The sudden warmth seemed to saturate the front of their clothes like heated liquid.
    “Not likely to be any cooler today,” Wintone said. With the sun’s warmth had come the internal heat of his awakening anger. Sarah had no right to talk to him about Etty’s death. It was a private, painful matter. Maybe too private and painful, but that was his business, not Sarah’s.
    Beside him, she seemed to sense his resentment. “Maybe it’ll rain,” she said with baseless optimism, “cool things …”
    “I doubt it.”
    “Learned anything else about the Larsen boy?”
    Wintone shook his head. “There aren’t any solid facts to grab onto.”
    “The family took the body back to Little Rock last evening. I felt really sorry for ’em.”
    “They deserve your pity.” Wintone was telling her that he didn’t deserve it, and she seemed to understand even if she didn’t agree.
    “You think we’ll ever know what happened to him?” Sarah asked.
    “Don’t know that it makes a difference; he’s dead. It was one of those things that happen from time to time in this country an’ nobody ever explains it. Remember the Iron Ridge man was found dead up in the fork of the tree some years back?”
    “Lightnin’, they said.”
    “Coulda been. Lightnin’ does strange things. Probably we’ll never know about that or the Larsen boy.”
    “Folks around here are more scared than they been in awhile,” Sarah said.
    “Time’ll have to pass for ’em to calm down, but they will.”
    “Time heals most everything.”
    “Some things,” Wintone replied, feeling another surge of annoyance. Why did she have to press where she had no business at all?
    They had reached the doctor’s low brick office and were standing in the shade of the huge cottonwood that seemed to be bracing for another day of unreasonable heat.
    “Why don’t you come on in,” Sarah asked. “Have a cup of coffee?”
    “Thanks,” Wintone said, “but there’s things need doin’.”
    He smiled at her as he turned to walk away. She saw that he didn’t mean the smile.
    Back at his office, Wintone settled himself behind his desk and engaged in some routine paper shuffling. The office was quiet and cool, illuminated by soft, slanting sunlight through the blinds. It was easy for Wintone to become engrossed in his work, so that the time passed unnoticeably.
    Near noon the sheriff tossed his pencil onto the desk in a gesture of accomplishment and finality. He rose and poured himself a cup of strong coffee from the dented electric percolator on one of the file cabinets. Then he stood sipping the hot coffee, staring idly out through the blinds at the empty street.
    Now that the morning’s work was over he felt somewhat depressed, and he again felt resentment over Sarah intruding herself into the sanctity of his