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in the middle of nowhere. And I thought it was all trees and cows and guys who shoot at Bambi up there. Silly me."
    "I'll call you later," I told her. "If anything turns up, you can try the cell phone, but you might not get through up here."
    "I'm surprised you even took it with you."
    "You told me I had to carry one. I always do what you tell me."
    "Uh-huh."
    "Uh-huh. Well, anyway, if you can't get through, try this number." I gave her the number of the phone I was at. "Ask for Tony. Leave a time and a place I can call you. Hey, and Lydia?"
    "Yes?"
    "Tell your mother I'm a nice guy."
    "I never lie to my mother. Talk to you later."
    She hung up. I took out another quarter, dialed Obermeyer's garage—the number was carved into the wood-work—and asked for Jimmy. A voice muffled by food told me he hadn't come in yet. "You got a problem?"
    "Lots," I answered. "If you see him, tell him Bill Smith is looking for him, okay?"
    "Sure." The voice slurped a drink, went on. "If you see him, tell him I'm all backed up here, and where the hell is he?"
    "Sure."
    There were loud crunching sounds. I hung up.
    The vinyl-covered phone book was chained to the shelf under the phone. I flipped it open to the Yellow Pages in the back, found Antique Shops, pages of them. Schoharie was studded with these places. Most of them were no more than someone's front room or disused garage, where chipped china and molding books shared space with broken-legged tables and chairs with torn upholstery. But a few shops were bigger or more choosy about their merchandise. It was still possible to come across the kind of finds up here that had long since vanished from areas closer to the city or more attractive to tourists. The past was one of the few things people up here had to sell.
    Jimmy could have pointed me in the right direction.
    He'd have protested innocence, or maybe with me he wouldn't have bothered; but he'd know where to find a fence for the sort of things Eve Colgate had lost. Without him it was a crapshoot, so I fed quarters into the phone and started from A. With everyone who answered I used the same line. A teapot, I said I needed, describing vaguely a silver teapot Eve Colgate had described to me in great detail. For my wife, I said, for our anniversary. She liked that kind of thing, I didn't know anything about it, myself.
    At the end of half an hour I had four promising places, all within an hour's drive of Eve Colgate's farm.
    I brought my empty glass back to Tony at the bar. The T-shirts were gone; the place was empty.
    "You leavin'?"
    "Yeah. I'll be back tonight. Someone may call me here." I pointed a thumb at the phone.
    "Okay," Tony said. "Only help me out with somethin' before you go."
    "I thought I was supposed to mind my own business."
    "You gonna want ice in your goddamn bourbon later, this is your business. Damn thing's busted again." Tony's antiquated ice machine had more weak points than a sermon.
    "What is it, that valve? Like when I was here in the fall?"
    "Yeah, and twice in the winter when you wasn't. You gotta turn it off downstairs, wait till I tell you to turn it on again. The red one. You know." I knew. "Unless you're in a hurry. It can wait till the O'Brien kid comes in, or Marie."
    "No hurry."
    The door to the cellar was back by the phone. Under my weight the wooden stairs creaked. The light from the head of the stairs didn't reach very far, but dusty gray daylight filtered in through the grimy windows in the back wall. The place smelled of mildew and damp concrete. I shook a spiderweb from the back of my hand.
    Tony's cellar was a shadowed landscape of boxes, crates, abandoned furniture. Lying across the pipes overhead were old fishing rods, skis, a pair of snowshoes whose leather webbing was crumbling to dust. About five miles of greasy rope was heaped in a corner, next to a bureau Tony's father had moved down here before Tony was born.
    Tony knew every object here, and could navigate smoothly through them in the dark. I