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since he could hardly avoid thinking of the jeep he’d rescued from a long-abandoned army training camp in the mountains. Because he hadn’t thought to check the wheel nuts, the back left-side wheel detached itself while he was driving down the highway and travelled independently past him on a long downhill slope. Only when the wheel had gone spinning off ahead and veered across the oncoming traffic to leap into the roadside weeds did the back corner of the jeep drop to the pavement and bring the whole business squealing to a halt. Remembering this, he could break out in a sweat even now.
    He tried to keep at bay the doubts that Peterson had raised — the possibility of a breakdown far from home, or interference by police. It was also possible they could get all the way to the city only to find that Myrtle wasn’t at home. Travelling maybe. And of course there was also the possibility that even if she were at home she could turn him away — not wanting a reminder of her father or of the husband who’d worked for her father, or anything at all that reminded her of her childhood.
    She had sat directly in front of him in Grades Six and Seven, her long curls occasionally brushing his desk, and often turned to ask him to explain what the teacher was talking about. She had been Snow White in the school play while he was only a woodcutter — but this meant it was sometimes necessary for her to walk home with him to practise their lines in his mother’s kitchen. She had barely noticed his help with her failed science experiments or with anything else, and he had not found the nerve to tell her how he felt, knowing they were both too young for such nonsense.
    He’d lived long enough in the city to see her reach adolescence sooner than any other girl her age. Even at thirteen she caused men to turn and watch her walk down the street.
    Several years after his family had moved north, he’d learned thatMyrtle had married a middle-aged Hungarian her father had brought to this country to be his assistant. No doubt she’d married him so she would never have to leave her father’s side. Much later still, he’d heard that the husband had been an unsatisfactory assistant and had returned to Hungary, though not until after he’d done a good deal of damage to the business.
    Myrtle had not abandoned her father. He had seen her name several times in the arts-and-society pages of the city paper. Apparently she was either a divorced woman or a widow, and might now be running her father’s business herself or, more likely, living in some sort of luxury, having sold the business to someone else.
    He knew it was unrealistic to imagine a reunion. Yet trying to forget her had led him into nothing but trouble. He had even, once, considered a mail-order sort of bride. He’d known that Johnnie Banner, who for a while had been his assistant in the Company machine shop, was happily married to the widowed school teacher who’d responded to his ad in the Winnipeg Free Press.
    It had taken him three months of writing and throwing away his own advertisement for “meeting a middle-aged woman interested in a visit to the West Coast with other possibilities to follow” but before he had sent his advertisement off, he’d come across a notice in the Vancouver Sun, where a “woman of Finnish background living in the Port Arthur area of Thunder Bay” was looking for a cousin who had disappeared out west. Arvo had recognized the name of a long-ago fellow worker in the logging camps and wrote to tell her of his death. What had been an exchange of brief notes — friendly but not too friendly, he’d thought — had apparently seemed, to her, something like a marriage proposal.
    One afternoon, without warning, she had stepped down off the bus in front of the Store — a large woman, with three grey suitcasesand a teenaged son who had not been mentioned in the letters. Ritva Pekkanen and Toivo. The mother was determined on a trial period “to see if