The students tend to stick close to campus. There is nothing for them to do in Blacksmith proper, no natural haunt orattraction. They have their own food, movies, music, theater, sports, conversation and sex. This is a town of drycleaning shops and opticians. Photos of looming Victorian homes decorate the windows of real estate firms. Thesepictures have not changed in years. The homes are sold or gone or stand in other towns in other states. This is a townof tag sales and yard sales, the failed possessions arrayed in driveways and tended by kids.

　　Babette called me at my office in Centenary Hall. She said Heinrich had been down at the river, wearing hiscamouflage cap and carrying an Instamatic, to watch them drag for the bodies, and while he was there word camethat the Treadwells had been found alive but shaken in an abandoned cookie shack at the Mid-Village Mall, a vastshopping center out on the interstate. Apparently they'd been wandering through the mall for two days, lost, confusedand frightened, before taking refuge in the littered kiosk. They spent two more days in the kiosk, the weak andfaltering sister venturing out to scavenge food scraps from the cartoon-character disposal baskets with swingingdoors. It was sheer luck that their stay at the mall coincided with a spell of mild weather. No one knew at this pointwhy they didn't ask for help. It was probably just the vastness and strangeness of the place and their own advancedage that made them feel helpless and adrift in a landscape of remote and menacing figures. The Treadwells didn't getout much. In fact no one yet knew how they'd managed to get to the mall. Possibly ............