It had been a routine September night, chilly with a first taste of winter, and the black-and-white portable in the old Barrow P.D. station had been tuned to a baseball game out of Pittsburgh seventy miles away. Sixth inning, bases loaded, two out, batter with a full count, and the phone rang at the front desk.

"You're on duty, Claude," Paul Elder said from his swivel chair.

"Hell." Claude Wilke shambled over to take the call. "This had better be important."

The batter swung and missed, strike three, inning over, and above the disappointed hum of the crowd Wilke spoke up, a funny quaver in his throat.

"Lieutenant. You need to hear this."

That had been Paul Elder's rank then, in 1974, when he was fifty-two. Circumstances, not ambition, would carry him higher. He was content to be a patrol lieutenant in a small rural town.

Elder punched line one, lifted the phone, and heard a woman screaming.

In those days there was no instant trace on an incoming call. Elder had to coax the woman into coherent speech.

"Calm down, ma'am. It's all right. Just calm down." The TV went mute as somebody in the squad room dialed down the volume. "Calm down ..."

She kept on screaming, or nearly screaming, her voice breaking up like a weak radio signal. Through the clutter Elder could make out a single phrase, manically repeated: "It's horrible."

"Just tell me your name, ma'am."

He had to ask three times before she responded: "Mary Beth Squires."

Remotely familiar, but he couldn't place it. "Mary Beth, where are you calling from?"

"Great Hall."

Elder stiffened, and Wilke, listening on the desk phone, raised his head, eyes big.

Mary Beth Squires was calmer now, not screaming anymore, and though her breathing was fast and shallow she was able to form complete sentences.

"I'm the housekeeper here. I work for Lenore Garrison. She's dead. Lenore is dead. And Dr. Wyatt too -- Keith Wyatt -- her fiance. They were supposed to be married next month. They're both dead. Mrs. Garrison and Dr. Wyatt, both of them, dead."

Wilke took over, keeping Mary Beth Squires on the line, while Lieutenant Elder led three patrol officers out the door.

* * *

Nineteen seventy-four was a bad year for Barrow and for the nation. A president had resigned in August, and the country still reeled, disoriented by his graceless fall. The ten-year deadlock in Viet Nam had ended without victory. Many had died, and few could say what they had died for. People spoke of revolution. It was an edgy, harrowed time, dense with portents, Cassandras on street corners auguring the end.

These events had touched Barrow only glancingly. The larger world was mostly held at bay. Still, there was a strangeness lately, even here. It had begun with last year's tragedy, also at Great Hall. And now this.

Elder picked up two patrol units en route to the Garrison estate. By the time he reached the wrought-iron gate, he headed up a convoy.

Most of the mansion's windows were brightly lit. There were no unfamiliar vehicles in the driveway, and Elder found no sign of intrusion at the front door. The door, in fact, was locked, but because the police department did Mrs. Garrison the favor of checking up on her house whenever she was away, Elder had a spare key.

With guns drawn, he and five patrolmen entered the foyer, then paused on the threshold of the living room.

It had happened here, in the cavernous sweep of space that gave the estate its name. A fire blazed in the hearth, driving off the autumn chill. Its glow leaped and danced among the high rafters and the arrayed crystal chandeliers, and it cast a flickering sheen on two wide, ragged pools of blood.

The blood was visible only by its shine. In color it was indistinguishable from the royal purple of the carpet, dark and rich like a deep bruise. Elder spent a moment looking at the blood, bright as lacquer, settling slowly into the carpet's thick pile. Then he widened his focus to take in the two corpses in violent disarray.

They lay together -- Lenore Garrison, chatelaine of Great Hall, and Dr. Wyatt, her fiance. Where there had been elegance and refined conversation and staccato bursts of wit, now there was only a confusion of tangled limbs and blood-glazed hair. Lenore wore a nightgown and one slipper, the other lost like Cinderella's. It would be retrieved hours later, not by a handsome prince but by a bald, bespectacled evidence technician from the sheriff's department, who found it near the doorway to the library, ringed by a vivid spatter pattern of blood.

Keith wore absurd polyester slacks and a knitted sweater. His feet were bare. Mary Beth Squires reported later that Keith liked to walk barefoot indoors even in cold weather. Somewhere, perhaps in medical school but more probably in one of the mimeographed counterculture magazines he liked to read, he had picked up the notion that shoes put an unnatural stress on the feet, stress that could lead to lower back pain as the body aged.

Aging, of course, was not a worry for him now.

Before that night, Lieutenant Paul Elder had seen only three homicides in his twenty-six-year tenure at Barrow P.D. One was a bank hold-up gone wrong, which had left a teller with a faceful of shotgun pellets. The other two were domestic quarrels. It was surprising, the things a woman could do with a kitchen knife when she got her back arched.

He sized up this one as a domestic quarrel also, but on a different order. No cutlery had been used here. Elder had done enough deer hunting to know a gunshot wound when he saw one, and so it was no surprise at all when the forensics team, gently disentangling the bodies, found a Colt .38 revolver locked in the death grip of Lenore Garrison's right hand.

By that time Elder had spoken with Mary Beth Squires after finding her in the kitchen, squatting on the floor with the telephone handset in her grip, oblivious to the long coiled cord twisting around her like a maypole ribbon.

Out for the evening, she'd returned at nine o'clock, letting herself in via the side door, which was used as a servant's entrance. The strange silence of the house had worried her. The place was rarely silent these days, she said. They fought all the time -- Keith and Lenore -- him criticizing her for drinking too much, and her telling him to shut up in front of the damn kids....

Then Mary Beth's face changed, and she looked at Elder in new horror and whispered, "Oh, God ... the kids."

"My men are looking for them now," Elder said.

She started crying then, big noisy sobs that shook her large frame, and Elder just held her hand and asked no more questions.

Afterward the rest of her story came out. There wasn't much. Disturbed by the silence, Mary Beth had explored the house and found Lenore and Keith in the main hall. Panic had beaten her back into the kitchen, where she'd dialed Barrow P.D., reading the number off a list of emergency numbers chalked to a blackboard near the phone. The two kids had not crossed her mind at all.

They had been Elder's first concern, and he'd dispatched his men to conduct a search. For much too long a time the cops shouted for the children and got no answer.

Then from the second floor, at the rear of the house, a rookie named Blanchard yelled, "Found 'em!"

Elder mounted the grand staircase two steps at a time -- he could still do that in those years -- and ran down a corridor to a back bedroom, joining the other cops.

In the far corner of a walk-in closet, huddled against hanging wardrobes and stacked cardboard cartons, were the two Garrison children, sister and brother, ages twelve and nine.

Like the pair downstairs they were wrapped tightly together, unmoving, silent. But these two were alive.

"I'll handle it," Elder said. He told Blanchard to go downstairs and wait for the damn ambulance, which still hadn't arrived. "Bring the medics up here fast."

As a very young man Paul Elder had seen action in the Pacific during the last furious months of the big war. He knew what shock looked like. The Garrison children had been badly traumatized, and the effects might be long-lasting, even permanent.

He entered the closet, crouching to make himself smaller and less threatening. The overhead bulb was weak, and the looming wardrobes threw shadows everywhere. He advanced into the gloom.

"It's okay, you two. Nobody's gonna hurt you."

He expected no answer and got none.

The kids were in their p.j.'s. The girl's outfit was light blue, decorated in what looked like a floral pattern -- carnations or something. Her baby brother had on a Superman suit, the stylized S standing out boldly in its dramatic triangular frame.

"Kids? You're all right now. Everything's all right."

The boy wouldn't look at him. His face was buried in his sister's arms. Perspiration soaked through his pajama top and pasted the fabric to his skin.

But his sister, at least, seemed to meet Elder's gaze. Her eyes were large, too large for her face, and she barely blinked. Yet she had not tuned out of reality altogether. He sensed an awareness, and something more: pain, harsh and raw like an open wound.

"Hey, little miss," Elder said with a lying smile that pained him, "it's okay."

She began to rock her baby brother.

"He shot her," the girl said in the toneless voice of a sleepwalker.

"It's okay. You don't need to talk about it."

"He shot her. Dr. Wyatt. Uncle Keith. He told us we should call him Uncle Keith."

Rocking the boy gently, gently in her arms.

"He shot her with a gun. Shot mommy with a gun. Shot her, and she screamed."

Elder hoped the girl hadn't actually seen it, hoped she'd only heard the shooting from a distance.

The girl fell silent. From outside rose an amplified wail. The ambulance, here at last.

Elder didn't think either child had sustained any physical injury, but he couldn't be sure. Tentatively he reached out to the girl.

"Are you hurt?" he asked, and touched her arm.

She flinched, and the rocking stopped.

Elder felt wetness, warmth.

Blood.

He saw it then -- the red splatter soaked deep into her pajama top -- the pattern he'd mistaken for a floral print.

And on Robert too, the same pattern, hard to see against the dark blue of the Superman suit.

Blood had doused them, gouts of blood. Not their own. Couldn't be. They couldn't have sustained such a blood loss and survived.

They had been in the same room with Lenore and Keith. And when the shooting started, they had been splashed with a hot red rain.

"Oh, kids," Elder whispered. "Oh, you poor damn kids."

"He would've shot us too," the girl whispered. "I know he would. But ..."

Elder, remembering the .38 in Lenore's hand, supplied the rest of the thought. "She got the gun away from him."

A nod, the girl's eyes closing, remaining closed as if in sleep.

"She saved you," Elder said. "She loved you both. Don't forget that. It's something for you to hold on to. Your mother loved you both very, very much."

No response from either of them. Except one thing.

Down the boy's cheek ran a line of clear fluid, a single teardrop, glittering in the uncertain light.

* * *

The ambulance took them away, its siren crying in the night like a lost child, and Elder was left in the big old house with the patrol cops and the forensics crew and the bitter odor of blood.

"What is it with this place?" the crime-scene photographer wanted to know. "That business last year was bad enough. This is worse."

"People say it's the Garrisons," one of the cops said. "Too much money, too much power."

Somebody told him he was talking like a goddamned peacenik.

"I don't mean nothing political," he protested. "I mean it's, like, payback, you know. You got too much good luck, and you're due for some bad. Things gotta balance out."

"Those kids haven't had much luck," the photographer said. "What's balanced about their part of it?"

The cop shrugged, a fatalist. "Didn't say it was fair."

Another cop said he knew what folks in town would say. "They'll call it a curse, that's what."

Hoots greeted this prediction.

"I'm just telling you what folks'll say."

"So what's cursed?" asked a skeptic. "The house? Like, it's haunted? Or the whole Garrison clan?"

"Lenore's not a real Garrison," someone said. "She married into the family."

"Can you marry into a curse?" the photographer wondered, and there was laughter.

The cop who'd spoken of good luck and bad asked Elder for his opinion.

Elder stood at one of the high windows, his head raised to study the horned rim of the moon, its light clear and cold.

"I used to think there was a reason behind things," he said, and some quality of his tone drained the jocularity from the room and left it what it truly was, a place of death. "Used to believe if you could see what God sees, it'd all make sense. Now I don't know. Nothing's sensible these days."

But none of that was important. All this searching for some higher meaning, this philosophic disputation, was plainly irrelevant.

It was the children who counted. The children in their bloodied p.j.'s, with their pale shell-shocked faces.

Watching the moon, Elder wondered what would become of them, what kind of future they could expect. He couldn't guess. But one thing he knew.

Ill fortune, a jinx, blind chance -- however anyone explained what had happened here tonight, those kids were the ones who would have to pay the price.