23

Ricky sent him postcards from France; Peter continued to visit, and gradually Don saw that the boy was beginning to let the Bate brothers and Anna Mostyn fade into the background of his experience. In warm weather, with a new girlfriend who was also going to Cornell, Peter was beginning to relax.

But it was a false peace, and Don still waited. He never let Peter see his own tension, but it grew every week.

He had watched new arrivals to Milburn, had managed to look at all the tourists who checked into the Archer Hotel, but none of them had given him the thrill of fear Eva Galli had projected across fifty years. Several nights after drinking too much, Don dialed Florence de Peyser's telephone number and said, "This is Don Wanderley. Anna Mostyn is dead." The first time, the person at the other end simply replaced the phone in its cradle; the second time, a female voice said, "Isn't this Mr. Williams at the bank? I think your loan is about to be recalled, Mr. Williams." The third time, an operator's voice told him that the telephone had been switched to an unlisted number.

The other half of his anxiety was that he was running out of money. His bank account had no more than two or three hundred dollars in it-now that he was drinking again, enough for only a couple of months. After that he would have to find a job in Milburn, and any sort of job would keep him from patrolling the streets and shops, searching for the being whose arrival Florence de Peyser had promised.

He spent two or three hours every day, now that the weather was warm, sitting on a bench near the playground in Milburn's only park. You have to remember their time scale, he told himself: you have to remember that Eva Galli gave herself fifty years to catch up with the Chowder Society. A child growing up unobtrusively in Milburn could give Peter Barnes and himself fifteen or twenty years of apparent safety before beginning to play with them. And then it would be someone everybody knew; it would have a place in Milburn; it would not be as visible as a stranger. This time, the nightwatcher would be more careful. The only limit on its time would be that it would want to act before Ricky died of natural causes-so perhaps it had to be ready in ten years.

How old would that make it now? Eight or nine. Ten, perhaps.

If.