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the plan, unnecessarily risky. Nevertheless, the key is there, and Peke can’t remember for sure, but he has the nagging sense that he actually Scotch-taped the box number to the key at some point, years ago, so that he wouldn’t forget it. There are only a couple of main banks in town, so it isn’t out of the question that the thief could locate the safe-deposit box.
    Peke sits for the last time on the front steps of his former home. He forces himself to watch that day—moving day—again, carefully, in his mind’s eye. To listen again. To observe again the care, the thoroughness, the precision of the operation. All of which he appreciated as he watched them work. All of which now have a different meaning, now seen in a different light. The calculation. The mechanical coldness of the short, broad man’s smile.
    Yes. The thoroughness, the completeness, seem somehow, for this man, part of the point. Maybe for this man it is a necessary annihilation. Maybe it’s merely the perverse satisfaction of a job well done. He remembers men like that. He remembers that particular character trait, having observed it a long time ago.
    Thoroughness, completeness. Admirable qualities in your employees, your colleagues—except when those qualities stand for something else, hostile and unresolved. Something more than thoroughness and completeness. Some effort to prove something, to combat some inner messiness, to deny some inner sense of incompletion. Yes, Peke could see how a man like this might actually return. Come back to finish the job.
    To be sure, the odds are vastly against it, but just to be safe, change the lock. That is what any cautious, just-victimized, seventy-two-year-old man would do.
    He has brought the stack of catalogs outside with him. He was going to take them back to the inn, to Rose, not knowing what else to do with them, exactly. He had set them down on the flagstone step next to him, while he fiddled with locking the door. Now, sitting on the cool steps of the flagstone landing, he begins to thumb through the stack, until he reaches the electronics catalog once again. He opens it, thumbs through, then begins to squint closely . . .
    His seventy-two-year-old heart ticks a little faster.
    And in counterpoint to his quickened heartbeat, Peke feels a momentary calm. The day seems suddenly supernally quiet, the wind and birds caught in a momentary pause, as he squints at the electronics catalog—its communication and information gadgetry, its security devices, its pages of protective paranoia—in the fading afternoon light . . .

    The Pekes’ safe-deposit box is at a local bank called First County. It’s a small town. Peke knows the bank president from local charity functions. “Earl? Stan Peke.”
    “Yes, Stan, hello.” Then a shift in tone. The formal, appropriate condolence, and within it, an authentic one, too. “So sorry to hear what happened, Stan. Jesus. What a world.”
So the news has made its way around
, thinks Peke.
Well, really, how could it not?
    “Well, thank you. I appreciate that.” His slow, authoritative tones. People always seemed to believe him. To accept his authority. To defer. That was good. A small usefulness of his past in the present. There was good reason to believe him. “Listen, the reason I’m calling. We’ve got a safe-deposit box over there at First County. And the key . . .”
    “You’ve lost your key,” Earl cuts in, hearing the first note of a familiar refrain. “You need a new one . . .” Earl’s spry, neighborly eagerness to be helpful.
    “The key was in my desk,” Peke explains, “and everything in the desk was stolen . . .”
    “Oh, OK, then. You need a new box
and
key. Just to be safe. You never know these days. I’ll waive all the usual ID requirements for you; I’ll see to that, you know, in light of what happened, and not having your documentation, I’m guessing . . .”
    Peke goes a little slower now. Says it pleasantly, but as though