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ago."
    "Is there any chance of talking to Gloria?" Meyer asked.
    "This wouldn't be too good of a time, not right now. She's in the bedroom with a couple of her women friends, and they're in there praying and crying and hugging."
    "Does she blame me?" Meyer asked.
    Bud came out of the house in time to hear Meyer's question. "I don't think she's thought of it that way. I suppose she could get around to it in time," he said. He was the small-boned son, the one who was most like his mother physically, with delicate features and steel-rimmed glasses.
    "Just tell her, when you get a chance, that it appears as if somebody was trying to make it look like a terrorist act," Meyer said. "There would be no reason to go after me. And nobody has ever heard of the organization that claimed credit. It was a cover for something. We think that if they were in close enough touch to make the phone call so soon after the explosion, they must have known I wasn't aboard. They were after somebody else. After one or both of the Lawrences, or after Hack."
    Both boys shook their head, and Dave said, "Nobody would up and kill my daddy. Maybe by accident if it come to a fight, something like that. He was sometimes mean. But not planned ahead. Not that way. Mom said he really liked that couple, liked showing them places along the Waterway, liked putting them into fish. But he kept saying what a terrible boat you had, Meyer, and how much work it needed."
    Bud said, "if they ever find out, I think they'll discover that somebody came over from Texas, following that couple, and killed them, and it didn't matter to them who else they killed in the process. Maybe it was somebody who didn't like the idea of your niece marrying that man. Or maybe it was something to do with the oil business, something she knew that somebody wanted covered up for good. If you get any clue at all, me and Dave and Andy would be most grateful to know who did it. Dave and Andy and me wouldn't like it to be one of those things where it takes three years to come to trial, and finally they call it second-degree, and then there's a bunch of appeals and the guy gets out a couple of years later. We'd surely like the chance to save him the fuss of waiting around all that time for his trial."
    I looked at their eyes. Hack's eyes looking out at me. The same amber brown with golden glints, one pair behind lenses, one pair squeezed by the wrinkled squint of a few thousand hours searching the sun riffles for fish sign. A fierce independence. "What we find out," I said, "You'll get to know." There was a look of satisfaction diluting the intensity, and Bud said, "We'll tell Mom it doesn't look like it was anybody after you, Meyer."
    On the way back to Bahia Mar, Meyer said, "I never really got to know Norma. One summer I stayed out there in Santa Barbara with my sister, Glenna, for a couple of weeks, helping each other remember things, good and bad. I think Norma must have been about fourteen. She was in a school for exceptionally gifted children, and that summer she was going on some sort of series of field trips with a batch of kids. Overnights, with sleeping bags. She had a rock hammer and a closet full of labeled samples. Her eyes danced and shone with the pure excitement of learning things. Her world was four and a half billion years old, and she had a vocabulary newly full of strike-slip faults, cactoliths, andesite, and monzonite, and she made tilting slipping shapes with her hands to show us how the mountains came about. Strange the way how a bright young brain, exposed to a certain kind of knowledge at just the right time, bends in the direction of that knowledge, sops it up, relishes it. Glenna concealed her dismay at having her only child aimed toward a life of bounding from crag to crag with a lot of rough people, carrying a rock hammer, a sample bag, and a chemistry set. I thought I would get a chance to know her better, after Toronto. Did you see much of them?"
    "Not much. They came