It was Howard, all right. There was no mistaking the long trench coat, the wide-brimmed Stetson Howard affected.

  Where was he going? There was a frantic quality in the swift movements of the figure behind the headlights’ glare. Where was Howard going in the late night, in a heavy rainstorm, frantically?

  And suddenly Ellery remembered Howard’s face as it had been in the study a few hours before: the pinchiness about the mouth, the glaze over the staring eyes, the tom-tom in his temple, as his father related the findings of the Connhaven detective agency. His stumbling from the study, his erratic steps mounting to the studio. Might be witnessing the beginning of an amnesia episode…

  Ellery dashed into the cottage, not stopping to switch on the lights. It took him no more than fifteen seconds to find his topcoat and run out again, struggling into his coat as he ran. But already the motor was roaring, the hood was down, the car was in motion.

  As he splashed across the gardens Ellery opened his mouth to yell. But he didn’t; it was useless; Howard wouldn’t hear him above the motor and the storm and the headlights were already swinging away toward the open drive.

  Ellery flew.

  He could only hope one of the cars in the garage had keys in it.

  The first car…Key in the ignition!

  He blessed Sally as he sent her convertible hurtling out of the garage.

  He was already damp from the run around; within ten seconds at the wheel he was soaked from head to foot. The top was down and he made an attempt to find the switch that controlled it. Not finding it quickly, he gave up; it didn’t matter now, he couldn’t get any wetter; and the condition of the corkscrew driveway called for concentration.

  There was no sign of Howard’s roadster anywhere along the drive. Ellery skidded to a stop just outside the entrance to the estate, on North Hill Drive, prepared to turn either way instantly.

  Nothing was to be seen to the right, toward Hill Drive.

  But to the left, going north, there was a dwindling taillight.

  Ellery swung Sally’s convertible hard left and stepped on the accelerator.

  At first he thought Howard was heading for the Mahoganies, perhaps Quetonokis Lake, which was atonement, or Lake Pharisee, which was original sin. In the grip of amnesia Howard might be moved by some obscure urging to return to the scene of an emotional crisis. All this, of course, if it was Howard’s taillight. If it was not, if Howard had turned south on North Hill Drive and headed for town, he was lost for good.

  Ellery pressed harder.

  At sixty-five he began to gain.

  Serve me right, he thought, if I find out it’s some upstate drunk’s car just as I skid off the road and bring my career as a wet nurse to a messy conclusion.

  The rain spouted off his nose. His shoes were so wet that his right foot kept slipping off the accelerator.

  But he continued to gain, suddenly with great rapidity, and then he saw the brake light of the car he was following and he jammed on his own brake. Why was the car slowing?

  The blinker of an intersection answered him just as the car ahead turned sharply left. But for an instant it was fixed in the convertible’s headlights and Ellery saw that the roadster was Howard’s. Then it disappeared.

  He missed the road sign in the darkness and rain. But left was west, which meant they were flanking Wrightsville. He kept the red light at a constant distance. Howard had decelerated to a mere twenty-five miles an hour, another puzzle; but it enabled Ellery to turn off his brights and become less conspicuous.

  So it wasn’t either of the lakes.

  What was it?

  Or didn’t Howard himself know?

  It occurred to Ellery that for the first time he was justifying his trip to Wrightsville.

  All at once he knew why Howard had slowed down.

  He was looking for something.

  Then the roadster’s taillight disappeared for the second time.

  So he’d found it.

  And Ellery found it a few moments later.

  It was a fork in the road. At the fork there was a small local sign, and the sign said:

  FIDELITY

  2 Miles

  The fork had been a dirt road; now it was deep and affectionate glue. It not only clung to the wheels; it twisted and dipped and soared and doubled back like a fox on the run. Within thirty seconds Ellery had lost Howard.

  Mr. Queen began to curse, bubbling like a whale as he wrestled with the convertible.

  His speedometer sank to 18, then to 14, and finally to 9 miles an hour.

  He clung to the wheel doggedly, not caring whether he caught up with Howard or not. He was seated in a small lake and he squished every time he shifted. He could feel cold rivulets coursing down his naked back. He had long since turned his brights on again, but all he could see was the interminable striped wall of the rain and drenched trees to either side. He passed a few miserable houses, Cowering by the roadside.

  He also passed Howard’s roadster before he realized what it was.

  There had been no town. It was less than two miles from the fork. Why had Howard stopped here, in the very center of nowhere?

  Maybe amnesiacs have their own logic. Ha-ha.

  Howard had not merely stopped; he had turned the roadster around, so that now it was facing south.

  Accordingly, Ellery straddled the narrow road and persuaded the convertible backward and forward until he, too, could face south. He coaxed the sliding car to a position some twenty-five yards from the roadster, turned off his ignition and headlights, and crawled out of the convertible.

  Immediately he sank into mud to the tops of his Oxfords.

  The roadster was unoccupied.

  Ellery sat down on Howard’s running board and wearily rubbed his streaming face with his streaming hand.

  Where in the hell was Howard?

  Not that it mattered. Nothing mattered now except the deliriously unattainable, which was a hot bath and dry clothes afterward. But as a question of simple scientific interest, where had Howard gone?

  Ah, for footprints.

  But this mud would be as trackless as the sea.

  Anyway, he didn’t have a flash.

  Well, thought Ellery, I’ll wait a few minutes. Then if he doesn’t show up, the hell with it. Seeing was impossible. No moon…

  Out of stern habit he got to his feet, although reluctantly, opened the roadster door, and felt around on the dashboard.

  Just as he discovered that Howard had taken the keys, he saw the light.

  It was a coy light, bobbing and curtseying and for brief moments disappearing altogether. But it kept reappearing. It would fix itself for a moment, then it would bob and curtsey again and disappear again and reappear a few feet away.

  The light was performing these antics a good distance off, not up or down the muddy road, but off to the side, beyond the roadster.

  Was it a field over there?

  Sometimes the light was close to the ground. Sometimes it was waist-high to a man.

  Then it steadied for a longer moment and Ellery caught a glimpse of a dark mass surmounted by a broad hat.

  Howard using a flashlight!

  Ellery slogged around the roadster with his hands before him. There was probably a flashlight in the convertible’s glove compartment but to go for it might mean missing something. And there was always the possibility that another light might frighten Howard away.

  Ellery’s hands encountered a wet stone wall beyond the roadster. The wall came up to his waist.

  He swung himself up and over, landing neatly in a thorny bush.

  At this point Mr. Queen included Heaven itself in his imprecations.

  Then, because part of him was pure leech, he wrenched himself from the embrace of the brambles and set a stumbling, groping course toward the light.

  It was the most baffling place. He found himself going up little rises and sliding down on the other side. He encountered cold hard wet objects. Once he fell over one and found that it was lying flat on the weedy ground. And occasionally there was a tree, usually encountered first by his nose.

  It was the most puzzling terrain he had ever tried to cross in the dark, full of traps for the feet. What made it especially difficult was the necessity for keeping the light continuously in view. If only the damned thing would stay in one place! But it kept moving jerkily, in a sort of dance.

  And Ellery made the exasperating discovery that he was not gaining on it.

  It danced in the distance like ignis fatuus, a snare for the unfortunate traveler, never seeming to come nearer.

  The traveler’s toe caught on something and he fell for the second time. But this time, as he fell, something happened to his head. It flew right off his shoulders, exploding in a burst of flame, and surely he died, because everything stopped, the rain and the chill and Howard and the dancing light and everything.

  Perhaps it was the Providence he had cursed, shaming him with Its beneficence, but when Ellery opened his eyes the light was no more than twenty feet from where he was lying. And, sure enough, there was the trench-coated, Stetson-surmounted mass that was Howard, before the light, which was now steady. It gave enough illumination for Ellery to make out what he was lying on, what he had stumbled over, and what had struck him on the side of the head.

  He had stumbled over a weed-choked little mound of earth of rectangular shape, at the head of which stood a column of marble supporting a stone dove.

  It was the dove which had struck his temple, and while he lay unconscious Howard had made a rough circle and had found, only a few yards from where Ellery was lying, the graves he had been hunting.

  They were in the Fidelity Cemetery.

  Ellery got to his knees. The marble monument stood between him and Howard. Even if he had knelt exposed, there would have been small danger of Howard’s seeing him—his back was to Ellery and he was utterly absorbed in the sight revealed by his flashlight.

  Ellery clung to the unknown’s monument; he could only stare.

  Suddenly Howard lunged. The light made a crazy half circle. Then it focussed again and Ellery saw that Howard had stopped for a handful of mud, mud from one of the graves.

  This mud he now hurled with satanic energy full in the face of the broad headstone.

  He stooped again, again the light pinwheeled, again it focussed, again he hurled mud.

  It seemed to Ellery that this was the strictly logical denouement of the whole nightmare: that a man should drive miles in a pelting downpour in the dead of night to throw mud at a broad headstone. And when the flashlight swooped to the ground and its beam trained itself on the mud-spattered monument and Howard took from one of the pockets of his trench coat a chisel and a mallet and darted forward to strike great blows upon the stone, blows that sent commas, periods, and exclamation points flying through the italic rain into the darkness beyond…this too seemed the proper employment for a sculptor groping toward the final shape of the Unknown.

  Ellery came to himself in the dark cemetery.

  Howard was gone.

  All that was left of him was the light going slowly away in the direction of the dirt road.

  And even as Ellery got to his feet the light vanished.

  A moment later he heard the faint roar of the roadster. Then that too was gone.

  He was surprised to discover that the rain had stopped.

  Ellery leaned against the dove-topped column in the darkness. Too late to follow Howard.

  But even if there had been time, he would not have followed Howard. The ghost of every soul lying beneath his soaked feet could not have dragged him from the burying ground.

  There was something to be done, and to do it he would stand here until dawn, if necessary.

  Maybe the moon would show up.

  Mechanically he unbuttoned his gluey topcoat and fumbled with muddy fingers in his jacket pockets for his cigaret case. It was a silver case and its contents would be dry. He found it and opened it and took out a dry cigaret and stuck it between his lips and returned the case to his pocket and fumbled for his lighter…

  Lighter!

  He had the lighter out and open and a flame cupped between his palms even as he hurdled three mounds to the place where Howard had exorcised his demon.

  Ellery stooped, shielding the little flame.

  It was necessary to stoop. For this was surely the poorest of the poor, pale soft crumbly stone, a pitiful affair no taller than the crowding weeds but wide as two graves, rounded at the top and cleft between, like the twin tablets of Moses. Weather and its own infirmities had pocked it honorably; but the sculptor’s chisel had dealt the final foul blows, and it tottered above the twin graves now, a murdered thing.

  Some of the lettering had fallen victim to the furious chisel; what remained was hard to read. He could make out figures, dates of birth and date of death, but these were all but illegible; and there was a motto, which after patient scrutiny Ellery decided had originally read: WHOM GOD HATH JOINED. But there was no question about the names. Across the top of the gravestone, in crabbed clear capitals, ran the legend:

  AARON AND MATTIE WAYE

  Ellery drove the convertible into the Van Horn garage and parked it beside Howard’s roadster with no surprise. Nevertheless, he was relieved. He decided that Howard could wait, and he hurried around the main house to the cottage.

  He left his mud-stiffened outer garments on the porch, discarded the rest on the way to the bathroom, and scalded his hide under the shower until the chill seeped out of his bones and his muscles unknotted. He rubbed himself down quickly, got into clean dry clothing, paused in the sitting room only long enough to take a flashlight and a pull from the bottle of Scotch, and then he strode over in the lifting darkness to the other house.

  Quietly he went upstairs, past sleeping doors. There were no lights anywhere; he stepped cautiously, feeling his way, not using his flash. On the top floor landing, however, he turned it on. A faint trail of muddy prints on the taupe carpeting led from the stairs to Howard’s bedroom. And the bedroom door was half open.

  Ellery paused in the doorway.

  The mud marks wandered to the bed. On the bed, fully clothed, lay Howard, asleep.

  He had not even bothered to take off his trench coat.

  His soaked hat gaped in a puddle on the pillow.

  Ellery shut the door and bolted it.

  He drew the Venetian blinds.

  Then he switched on the lights.

  “Howard.”

  He prodded the sleeping man.

  “Howard.”

  Howard groaned something unintelligible and turned over, his head thrown back, snoring. He was in a sort of stupor. Ellery stopped prodding him.

  I’d better get him out of these clothes first, Ellery thought, or he’ll come down with pneumonia.

  He unbuttoned the sodden coat. The material was rainproofed and the lining was dry. He tugged until he got one sleeve off, and then he managed to lift Howard’s heavy body sufficiently to pull the coat free and strip it off the other arm. He removed Howard’s shoes and socks, and his trousers, which were caked and wet to the knee, and, using the blanket as a towel, he rubbed Howard’s legs and feet dry; the bed was a mess, anyway.

  Then he went to work on Howard’s head.

  Under the massage, Howard stirred.

  “Howard?”

  He thrashed about as if he were fighting something off. He moaned. But he did not awaken. And when Ellery had him all dry, he lapsed into the same semicomatose sleep.

  Ellery straightened with a frown. Then he saw what he was looking for on the bureau and he went for the whiskey bottle.

  Howard opened his eyes.

  “Ellery.”

  They were bloodshot and stary.

  They took in the bed, himself half undressed, the wet muddy clothing on the floor.

  “Ellery?”

  He was bewildered.

  And then, suddenly, frightened.

  He clutched at Ellery.

  “What happened!” His tongue was thick; he mouthed it.

  “You tell me, Howard.”

  “It happened, didn’t it? Didn’t it!”

  Ellery shrugged. “Well, something happened, Howard. What’s the last thing you remember?”

  “Coming upstairs from the study. Pottering around a while.”

  “Yes, I know. But after that.”

  Howard squeezed his eyelids shut. Then he shook his head. “I don’t remember.”

  “You came upstairs from the study, you pottered around a while—

  “Where?”

  “Where?”

  “Oh, you’re asking the questions.” Howard laughed shakily. “What’s the matter with me? I pottered around in the studio there.”

  “In the studio. And then—nothing?”

  “Not a blamed thing. It’s a blank, Ellery. Just like…” He stopped.

  Ellery nodded. “The other times, eh?”

  Howard swung his naked legs off the bed. He began to shiver and Ellery pulled the underblanket free and tossed it over his thighs.

  “It’s still dark.” Howard’s voice rose. “Or is it another night?”

  “No, it’s the same night. What’s left of it.”

  “Another attack. What did I do?” Ellery studied him. “I went somewhere. Where did I go? Did you see? Did you follow me? But you’re dry!”

  “I followed you, Howard. I’ve changed.”

  “What did I do?”

  “Whoa. Wrap that blanket around your feet and I’ll tell you—you’re sure you don’t remember a thing?”

  “Nothing! What did I do?”

  Ellery told him.

  At the end, Howard shook his head as if to clear it. He scratched his scalp, rubbed the back of his neck, pulled his nose, stared at the muddy clothing on the floor.

  “And you don’t remember any of that?”

  “Nope.”

  Howard looked up at Ellery.

  “It’s hard to believe.” Then he looked away. “Especially that part about where I…”

  Ellery picked up the trench coat, fished in one of the pockets.

  When Howard saw the chisel and mallet he went very pale.

  He got off the bed and began to blunder about the bedroom in his bare feet.