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“Could you please let me out at building 227?” said Amy to the driver. “I don’t know where it is.”

“Don’t know as I know where it is, either,” said the driver. “Don’t get much call for that one.” He took a dog-eared map of the works down from the sun visor.

“You don’t get any call for that one,” said a passenger. “Nothing in 227 but a bunch of lanterns, some barrels of sand, and maybe a potbellied stove. You don’t want 227, Miss.”

“A man called the girl pool for a stenographer to work late,” said Amy. “I thought he said 227.” She looked at the driver’s map, and saw the driver’s finger pointing to a tiny square all by itself in the middle of the railroad yard, building 227. There was a big building fairly near to it, on the edge of the yard, building 224. “He might have said building 224,” said Amy.

“Oh sure!” said the driver happily. “Shipping Department. That’s the one you want.”

All on board sighed with relief, and looked with affectionate pride at the pretty little Southern girl they were taking such good care of.

Amy was now the last passenger on the bus. The bus was crossing the wasteland between the heart of the works and the railroad yard, a tundra of slag heaps and rusting scrap. Out in the wasteland, away from the street, was a constellation of dancing flashlight beams.

“The cops and the dogs,” said the driver to Amy.

“Oh?” said Amy absently.

“Started from the office where he broke in last night,” said the driver. “The way the dogs are talking it up, they must be pretty close to him.”

Amy nodded. My wife-to-be was talking to Miss Hostetter in her imagination. “If you’ve told the police,” she was saying, “you’ve killed him, just as sure as if you’d aimed a gun at him and pulled the trigger. Don’t you understand? Don’t you care? Haven’t you got an ounce of womanhood in you?”

Two minutes later, the driver let Amy off at the Shipping Department.

When the bus was gone, Amy walked out into the night, and stood on the edge of the railroad yard, a sea of cinders sprinkled with twinkling red, green, and yellow signal lights, and streaked with glinting rails.

As Amy’s eyes grew used to the night, her heart beat harder, and from the many hulking forms she chose one, a small, squat building that was almost certainly building 227—where a dying man had said he’d be waiting for a girl with a heart.

The world dropped away, and the night seemed to snatch Amy up and spin her like a top, and she was running across the cinders to the building. The building loomed, and my wife-to-be stopped against its weathered clapboards, panting, and trying to listen above the roaring of blood at her temples.

Someone moved inside, and sighed.

Amy worked her way along the outside wall to the door. The padlock and hasp had been pried from the old wood.

Amy knocked on the door. “Hello,” she whispered, “I brought you something to eat.”

Amy heard an intake of breath, nothing more.

She pushed open the door.

In the wedge of frail gray light let in by the door stood Miss Hostetter.

Each woman seemed to look through the other, to wish her out of existence. Their expressions were blank.

“Where is he?” said Amy at last.

“Dead,” said Miss Hostetter, “dead—behind the barrels.”

Amy began an aimless, shuffling walk about the room, and stopped when she was as far from Miss Hostetter as she could get, her back to the older woman. “Dead?” she murmured.

“As a mackerel,” said Miss Hostetter.

“Don’t talk about him that way!” said my wife-to-be.

“That’s how dead he is,” said Miss Hostetter.

Amy turned to face Miss Hostetter angrily. “You had no business taking my record.”

“It was anybody’s record,” said Miss Hostetter. “Besides, I didn’t think you had the nerve to do anything about it.”

“Well, I did,” said Amy, “and I thought the least I could expect was to be alone. I thought you’d gone to the police.”

“Well, I didn’t,” said Miss Hostetter. “You should have expected me to be here—you of all people.”

“Nothing ever surprised