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bananas or Ceylonese or Indian spices. A river of quiet wind had entered the house and left with the priceless stuffs.
    McCoy muttered, scribbling, “That’s enough evidence.”
    “Evidence?”
    “Everyone’s hiding. Everything’s stashed. When I leave—bingo!—the grass gets cut, the icebox drips. How did they know I was coming ? Now, I don’t suppose there’s a Western Union in this no-horse town?” He spied a telephone in the hallway, picked it up, listened. “No dial tone.” He glanced through the screen door. “No postman in sight. I am in a big damn isolation booth.”
    McCoy ambled out to sit on the front porch glider, which squealed as if threatening to fall. McCoy read Cardiff’s face.
    “You look like a do-gooder,” he said. “You run around saving people not worth saving. So what’s so great about this town that’s worth the Cardiff Salvation Army? That can’t be the whole story. There’s got to be a villain somewhere.”
    Cardiff held his breath.
    McCoy pulled out his pad and scowled at it.
    “I think I know the name of the villain,” he muttered. “The Department of—”
    He made Cardiff wait.
    “—Highways?”
    Cardiff exhaled.
    “Bingo,” McCoy whispered. “I see the headlines now: ACE REPORTER DEFENDS PERFECT TOWN FROM DESTRUCTION. Small type: Highway Bureau Insists on Pillage and Ruin. Next week: SUMMERTON SUES AND LOSES . Ace Reporter Drowns in Gin.”
    He shut his pad.
    “Pretty good for an hour’s work, yep?” he said.
    “Pretty,” said Cardiff.

CHAPTER 21

    “This is gonna be great,” said James Edward McCoy. “I can see it now: my byline on stories about how Summerton, Arizona, hit the rocks and sank. Johnstown flood stand aside. San Francisco earthquake, forget it. I’ll expose how the government destroyed the innocents and plowed their front lawns with salt. First the New York Times , then papers in London, Paris, Moscow, even Canada. News junkies love to read about others’ misery—here’s an entire town being strangled to death by government greed. And I’m going to tell the world.”
    “Is that all you can see in this?” said Cardiff.
    “Twenty-twenty vision!”
    “Look around,” said Cardiff. “It’s a town with no people. No people, no story. Nobody cares if a town falls if there are no people in it. Your ‘story’ will run for one day, maybe. No book deal, no TV series, no film for you. Empty town. Empty bank account.”
    A scowl split McCoy’s face.
    “Son of a bitch,” he murmured. “Where in hell is everyone?”
    “They were never here.”
    “No one’s here now, but the houses get painted, the lawns get mowed? They were just here, have to have been. You know that and you’re lying to me. You know what’s going on.”
    “I didn’t till now.”
    “And you’re not telling me? So you’re keeping the headlines to yourself to protect this pathetic little ghost town?”
    Cardiff nodded.
    “Damn fool. Go on, stay poor and righteous. With you or without you I’m going to get to the bottom of this. Gangway!”
    McCoy lunged down the porch steps, onto the street. He rushed up to the adjacent house and pulled open the door, stuck his head in, then entered. He emerged a moment later, slammed the door, and ran on to the next house, yanked open that screen door, jumped in, came out, his blood-red visage quoting dark psalms. Again and again he opened and closed the doors of half a dozen other empty houses.
    Finally, McCoy returned to the front yard of the Egyptian View Arms. He stood there, panting, muttering to himself. As his voice drifted off into silence, a bird flew over and dropped a calling card on James Edward McCoy’s vest.
    Cardiff stared off across the meadow-desert. He imagined the shrieks of the arriving trainloads of hustling reporters. In his mind’s eye he saw a twister of print inhaling the town and whirling it off into nothing.
    “So.” McCoy stood before him. “Where are all the people?”
    “That seems to be a