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closing it up. I imagined that it was a relief to Nancy to have the house to herself. Mrs. Raymond was an imposing, stone-faced, white-haired woman in her sixties, confined by arthritis to a wheelchair. She had positive opinions, and achieved emphasis through repetition. In her scale of values the fact that I worked for Dodd put me on almost the same social footing as the brawny Irish nurse who lifted her in and out of her wheelchair.
    I parked the car in the drive and went around to the front where I knew they’d be. The shoreline is steep at that place. There is a patio on the lake side, and steep wooden steps that go down to the shallow beach. Dodd had changed to bright yellow shorts, and he had a can of beer in his hand. Mrs. Raymond sat in her wheelchair in the shade of a big beach umbrella. Nancy was stretched out on a padded chaise longue with wheelbarrow handles and wooden wheels. Her smile was what I had come to see.
    “Well, young man,” Mrs. Raymond said, “I suppose they’re all running around in mad circles up at the Pryors’ now that it’s too late.”
    The final two words gave me a jolt. “Too late, Mrs. Raymond?”
    “Of course it’s too late. White slavers.”
    “Please, Mother,” Dodd said. “Can I get you a beer, Clint?” I nodded.
    “White slavers,” Mrs. Raymond said firmly. “You don’t hear much about them. They keep it out of the papers. You wait and see. Even if they didn’t get her this time, they’ll get her next time. You wait and see.”
    Dodd came back out of the kitchen and handed me a cold beer. “Mother has them crouched behind every bush.”
    “You can make it sound ridiculous all you want. You can jeer at me. But did they ever find the Cornwall girl? Did they? Did they ever find the slightest trace of her?No, and they never will. After what they do to them they’re ashamed to come home,” she said darkly.
    “Maybe she just decided to go on a trip or something,” Nancy said.
    “Ha!” said Mrs. Raymond. Nancy’s opinions always got a similar response. I suspected that Mrs. Raymond resented Nancy not only because she had married an only son, but because after some six years of marriage Nancy had yet to come up with a grandchild for her.
    Nancy was wearing a figured grey sunsuit thing, with a sort of skirt effect. She stretched and said, “Gosh, the sun is making me sleepy. Anybody want to walk on the beach?” Her glance swept across me meaningfully and I rose to the hook.
    “I’d just as soon.”
    “You two go ahead,” Dodd said casually. A bit too casually, I thought.
    We went down the steep wooden stairs, Nancy first. She is my favorite candybox blonde. Small perfect delicate features, silky floating hair. She has a thin little-girl voice with overtones of a lisp cured long ago. However, there is a level honesty and intelligence in her blue eyes that keeps her from being insipid. Her figure is flawed, if you can consider it a flaw. I have no doubt that she does, because her clothes, even the sunsuit, are styled to de-emphasize the flaw. She is very long-waisted. Her torso, discernible through any clothing, is long, ripe, muscular, perfectly formed. You see such torsos carved in old marble a lot oftener than you see them on people. Were her legs in proportion Nancy would be six feet tall. But the lovely torso rests on short heavy legs. They are shapely, but they do not fit. Understand, it is not something you see immediately. After you see her a few times you begin to realize that though she is lush indeed, the proportions are subtly off. Then you see why. Her hips are too far from her head, and too close to the ground.
    We walked to a pine log a hundred yards up the beach.
    “He’s pretty upset,” she said.
    “Yes.”
    “Clint, do you have any remote idea what could have happened?”
    “Not the slightest.”
    “It’s damned funny. I … I hope she never comes back.” Nancy said that shyly. We could not talk together of Mary Olan without constraint.