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 their grandniece had droppedthem off in her car and then forgotten to pick them up. the grandniece could not be reached, babette said, forcomment.

the day before the happy discovery, the police had called in a psychic to help them determine the treadwells'

whereabouts and fate. it was all over the local paper. the psychic was a woman who lived in a mobile home in awooded area outside town. she wished to be known only as adele t. according to the paper, she and the police chief,hollis wright, sat in the mobile home while she looked at photos of the treadwells and smelled articles from theirwardrobe. then she asked the chief to leave her alone for an hour. she did exercises, ate some rice and dahl,proceeded to trance in. during this altered state, the report went on, she attempted to put a data trace on whateverdistant physical systems she wished to locate, in this case old man treadwell and his sister. when chief wrightre-entered the trailer, adele t. told him to forget the river and to concentrate on dry land with a moonscape lookabout it, within a fifteen-mile radius of the treadwell home. the police went at once to a gypsum processingoperation ten miles down river, where they found an airline bag that contained a handgun and two kilos of uncutheroin.

the police had consulted adele t. on a number of occasions and she had led them to two bludgeoned bodies, asyrian in a refrigerator and a cache of marked bills totaling six hundred thousand dollars, although in each instance,the report concluded, the police had been looking for something else.

the american mystery deepens.