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bodies jerking up and down like oil rigs. As he watched, one of them broke the pattern to do a somersault.
    Suddenly she laughed. It was a spontaneous, merry laugh that made him smile. “That crazy Willy,” she said. “He never could do a somersault.”
    He smiled, too. She was always laughing back in school when they went together. She was so full of it then, she even laughed at his puns—his English teacher graded him down, the old fart.
    “Great doughnuts,” he said. “Can I have the recipe?”
    She lifted an eyebrow, still smiling.
    “I do the cooking. Dad never learned. Though I admit, food doesn’t mix with formaldehyde.”
    “I’ll write it out for you. Though I don’t use a recipe.” Her smile squeezed a dimple into her cheek. It was nice to see it. He supposed she’d gotten out of the habit with Pete.
    Jeez, how could that guy walk out on this woman!
    * * * *
    They went out to the muddy fields together—he should have worn his rubber boots. She introduced him to the men, then left. She had accounts to do, she said, then she was going to the hospital to see about Belle and Lucien. There was still a little time to make up for neglect, wasn’t there? They could compare notes later?
    Ruth had a way of looking directly at a man, holding his gaze. It was disconcerting, but exciting. He wondered if she’d fight for her husband the way she fought for this boy. Or was she too proud for that?
    “I can do a somersault,” Willy told him. “You wanna see? Tim been teachin’ me how. I can do it. Mostly I can.”
    “I saw you,” Colm said, “out the window.”
    Tim laughed. “He can do bettern’ that if he wants. He don’t always remember to tuck his head under, right, Willy? Right? Now get that pail of trees over here, huh?”
    Tim didn’t stop work. He thrust his shovel in the earth, then Willy dropped a thready tree root in the hole. The shovel slid out and Tim thumped it down with his boot heel.
    “You don’t mind if I ask a few questions,” Colm said. He picked up the pail and moved it for Tim. He felt like a Realtor now, no, a detective. He read stuff at night: Dobyns, Mayer, Gill, that Irish detective. He’d learned one thing: the nicest guys can have secrets, rotten things in the core. The one you least suspected did it. Who could that be in this case?
    Tim said, “Terrible thing. Nice old couple. They don’t deserve that.” He seemed genuinely grieved, but then, what did Colm know? He could only have faith in intuition, his great-gran’s second sight. His mother had told him about that, he used to laugh. Now he wanted to believe in it.
    He went through a list of dumb questions he’d thought up. The replies yielded little that was surprising. Timothy Junkins, born in Long Island of upward-bound parents. College dropout in the early sixties, joined “the cause,” carted off to jail a dozen times for protests. The police would make something of that. The worst was in Chicago, something about a bomb exploding in some lawyer’s garage.
    “The bastard was supporting the corrupt mayor,” Tim explained. “He was establishment with a capital E. I don’t know how many he swindled. I think he was hooked up with the Mafia.”
    Colm nodded. He was a sixties man himself, even had a motorcycle—till he ran it into an oak tree. He’d got into one or two sit-ins, protesting the war. A cousin was taken prisoner by the Vietcong, still hadn’t surfaced, one of the MIA—undoubtedly dead, though his aunt never gave up hope. A reason, he guessed, for his own anger at injustice. He couldn’t sit around and let one human being exploit another.
    He’d settled down, Tim said, only in the last dozen years or so. Doing farm work, respite work, helping the mentally retarded— eight states he’d worked in. Married once, and when she wanted to leave he gave her “the works: house, furniture, dog, fifteen birds, the old Ford. Hell, I didn’t want it. I didn’t need all that. There was another woman,