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to try to get anything more from her. The silence waged war with Clay's conscience while he sat disconsolately cradling the wheel. When next he spoke, the words told more truth than either of them had expected.
    “Listen, I don't want that kid raised in the same house with your father.”
    You could have heard a leaf drop from the blackened branches that drooped above the road. Then Catherine's voice came quietly into the dark.
    “Well, well, well . . .”
    For answer he started the engine, threw the car into gear and tried to drive away his frustration. Brooding, he drove again one-handed, allowing the car just enough excessive speed, but not too much. She leaned back, silently watching the arch of trees spin backward above the headlights, losing all sense of direction, shutting out thoughts momentarily. The car slowed, turned, nosed along the street where he lived.
    “Do you think your parents might still be here?”
    “I have no idea. A madman like him just might be.”
    “It looks like they've gone,” he said, rolling past, finding no sedan in the driveway.
    “You'll just have to take me home then,” she said, then added while turning her face toward her window, “. . . so sorry to put you out.”
    He came to a halt at a stop sign and sat waiting with feigned patience. When she only continued staring stubbornly out that window he was forced to ask, “Well, which way?”
    Under the blue-white glance of the streetlight she noted the effrontery of his insolent pose: one wrist draped over the wheel, one shoulder slightly slumped toward his door.
    “You really don't remember anything about that night, do you?”
    “I remember what I want to remember. You remember that.”
    “Fair enough,” she agreed, then settled her expression into one of indifference and gave him a street address and brief directions on how to reach it.
    The ride from Edina to North Minneapolis took some twenty minutes—long, increasingly uncomfortable minutes during which their angers diminished at approximately the same rate as the speed of Clay's driving. With verbal combat forsaken, there was only the sound of the car purring its way through the somnolent city with an occasional streetlight intruding its pale, passing glimpse into their moving world. Within the confines of that world an uninvited intimacy settled, like an unwanted guest whose presence forces politeness upon his host and hostess. The silence grew rife with unsaid things—fears, dreads, worries. Each could not be more anxious to part and be rid of this tension between them, yet for both a final separation seemed too abrupt. As Clay turned a last corner onto her street the car was nearly crawling.
    “Whi . . .” His voice cracked and he cleared his throat. “Which house?”
    “The third on the right.”
    The car rolled to a stop at the curb, and Clay shifted into neutral with deliberate slowness, then adjusted some button till only the parking lights remained on. She was free to flee now, but, curiously, remained where she was.
    Clay hunched his shoulders and arms about the wheel in the way with which she was already growing familiar. He turned his eyes to the darkened house, then to her.
    “You gonna be all right?” he asked.
    “Yeah. What about you?”
    “God, I don't know.” He laid back and closed his eyes. Catherine watched the pronounced movement of his Adam's apple rising and falling.
    “Well . . .” She put her hand on the door handle.
    “Won't you even tell me what your plans are?”
    “No. Only that I've made them.”
    “But what about your father?”
    “Soon I'll be gone. I'll tell you that much. I'm his little ace-in-the-hole, and with me gone he'll have nothing to threaten you with.”
    “I wasn't thinking about me when I asked that, I was thinking about you going in there now.”
    “Don't say it . . . please.”
    “But he—”
    “And don't ask any questions, okay?”
    “He forced you to come to the house tonight, didn't he?”