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I took her hands in both of mine. 'Okay,' I said. 'Listen. Arnie: he bought Christine from a guy who is dead now. A guy named Roland D. LeBay. We saw her on his lawn one day when we were coming home from work, and 'You're doing it too,' she said softly.

'What?'

'Calling it she.'

I nodded, not letting go of her hands. 'Yeah. I know. It's hard to stop. The thing is, Arnie wanted her - or it, or whatever that car is - from the first time he laid eyes on her. And I think now I didn't then, but I do now that LeBay wanted Arnie to have her just as badly, that he would have given her to him if it had come to that. It's like Arnie saw Christine and knew, and then LeBay saw Arnie and knew the same thing.'

Leigh pulled her hands free of mine and began to rub her elbows restlessly again. 'Arnie said he paid - '

'He paid, all right. And he's still paying. That is, if Arnie's left at all.'

'I don't understand what you mean.'

'I'll show you,' I said, 'in a few minutes. First, let me give you the background.'

'All right.'

'LeBay had a wife and daughter. This was back in the fifties. His daughter died beside the road. She choked to death. On a hamburger.'

Leigh's face grew white, then whiter; for a moment she seemed as milky and translucent as clouded glass.

'Leigh!' I said sharply. 'Are you all right?'

'Yes,' she said with a chilling placidity. Her colour didn't improve. Her mouth moved in a horrid grimace that was perhaps intended to be a reassuring smile. 'I'm fine.' She stood up. 'Where is the bathroom, please?'

'There's one at the end of the hall,' I said. 'Leigh, you look awful.'

'I'm going to vomit,' she said in that same placid voice, and walked away. She moved jerkily now, like a puppet, all the dancer's grace I had seen in her shadow now gone. She walked out of the room slowly, but when she was out of sight the rhythm of her stride picked up; I heard the bathroom door thrown open, and then the sounds. I leaned back against the sofa and put my hands over my eyes.

When she came back she was still pale but had regained a touch of her colour. She had washed her face and there were still a few drops of water on her cheeks.

'I'm sorry,' I said.

'It's all right. It just startled me.' She smiled wanly. 'I guess that's an understatement.' She caught my eyes with hers. 'Just tell me one thing, Dennis. What you said. Is it true? Really true?'

'Yeah,' I said. 'It's true. And there's more. But do you really want to hear any more?'

'No,' she said. 'But tell me anyway.'

'We could drop it,' I said, not really believing it.

Her grave, distressed eyes held mine. 'It might be safer if we didn't,' she said.

'His wife committed suicide shortly after their daughter died.'

'The car '

' was involved.'

'How?'

'Leigh - '

'How?

So I told her - not just about the little girl and her mother, but about LeBay himself, as his brother George had told me, His bottomless reservoir of anger. The kids who had made fun of his clothes and his bowl haircut. His escape into the Army, where everyone's clothes and haircuts were the same. The motor pool. The constant railing at the shitters, particularly those shitters who brought him their big expensive cars to be fixed at government expense. The Second World War. The brother, Drew, killed in France. The old Chevrolet. The old Hudson Hornet. And through it all, a steady and unchanging backbeat, the anger.

'That word,' Leigh murmured.

'What word?'

'Shitters.' She had to force herself to say it, her nose wrinkling in rueful and almost unconscious distaste. 'He uses it. Arnie.'

'I know.'

We looked at each o her, and her hands found mine again.

'You're cold,' I said. Another bright remark from that fount of wisdom, Dennis Guilder. I got a million of em.

'Yes. I feel like I'll never be warm again.'

I wanted to put my arms around her and didn't. I was afraid to. Arnie was still too much mixed up in things. The most awful thing - and it was awful - was how it seemed more and more that he was dead dead, or under some weird enchantment.