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Show 38 enameled mail boxes with names scotch-taped across them hung next to the front door, which was always open. Charlie and Sharon lived in the L-shaped apartment on the second floor, whose balcony looked out on a little grocery store across the street that had been held up twice since they had lived there. The original owner of the house had had two wives, the story went, of whom the older hated the younger and contrived, during one week while the husband was away dedicating a new wardhouse in Milford, to murder the younger wife and the younger wife's five-year-old daughter and to hide the bodies so thoroughly that they were never found. The basement of course was excavated, but nothing turned up, and the older wife maintained to the end of her very long life-she survived her bewildered husband by thirty years and died in a nursing home shortly after the war-that her hated rival had run off with a miner and was living no farther away than Bingham Canyon, and had taken her daughter with her. The house eventually passed to other hands and grew disreputable and was cut up into apartments, and when an apartment was finally built in the basement each tenant who came and went reported hearing a child giggling when he sat on the toilet or took a shower. Charlie enjoyed telling this story, and Lorin was pleased to have heard it, but he had to admit that even two floors away it gave him the creeps. He had fed Charlie's cats and watered Sharon's house plants and had no further business in their apartment at all, and had felt a little like a trespasser going through their bedroom to get to the balcony, but he suspected it was a duty not to miss any opportunity to jolt the eye by seeing familiar things from a new perspective. The trouble was, he reflected while studying the sketch that had come of the intrusion, that box elders did not look all that different seen from the balcony of an empty apartment, especially when his concentration was aflame with the sight of the four-poster double bed he had walked around and kept looking back at, and the |