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Police believe that Zulma was involved in the previous evening's killing of John Lief Snow, 30, who had been operating a Stone City antique dealership.

Federal agents investigating possible tax fraud raided Snow's establishment on the North Side yesterday morning only to find that the subject of their investigation had been slain in an altercation of unknown origin.

Local law enforcement officials were quickly instructed to be on the hunt for Snow's automobile, a late-model coupe that was missing from the grisly scene.

“Thanks to the fine police work of Deputies [Sheila] Geer and [Earl] Kellogg, the vehicle sought was located and stopped at 11:20 a.m.,” said Sheriff Edward T. Aiken in a prepared statement.

And what a stop it was, according to Romyla resident Russ W. Roller, 41, who witnessed the spectacular apprehension.

“I was driving a refrigerator over to my grandparents' place in Lunenberg, because they want an extra one to put in the garage, why I don't know, when all of a sudden I hear a siren and see her [Zulma] coming up on [the rear end of my vehicle],” said Roller. “And I thought, ‘Sorry lady, you'll just have to wait, because there's a [large] truck coming the other way.' But she give it a try. So things weren't looking too good for me at that time.”

Police confirmed the essentials of Roller's account, adding that to avoid the oncoming truck Zulma took to the ditch, where her vehicle hit a rise and flipped twice. Freed from the wreckage by a rotary metal saw, Zulma was rushed via ambulance to Mercy Hospital in Stone City, where she is in fair condition.

No charges had been filed at press time, but requesting anonymity a member of the Sheriff's Department said a sword that may have been used in the killing was recovered from the wreckage of the Mustang.

Ironically, Zulma was interviewed last fall for this news­paper's “People in Towns” column. She said she had walked to the United States in a tunnel beneath the ocean. Due to the outlandishness of the claim and other issues, the interview was never published.

“The whole thing is outlandish,” said Mary.

The back door opened. Louise called hello and they could hear her putting groceries in the refrigerator.

“It's getting to be Grand Central Station around here,” said Mary.

Louise came in and sat. She took her hat off and held it in her hands and told them how, before he was killed, Jack Snow had come to the house looking for Dan.

“What'd I tell you about running around all hours?” said Mary.

“I was home washing my hair!”

“His mom was on TV, said him and the girl used to be thick as thieves.”

“Poor word choice on her part,” said Hans.

Mary sat back in her chair and closed her eyes.

“You always had the most beautiful hair,” she told Louise, “but you would never let me brush it. ‘I brush,' you would say. ‘I brush.
'
”

“When was this?” said Hans.

“A couple weeks ago,” said Louise.

On her third day at Mercy Hospital Sandra Zulma moved from the ICU to a room on the top floor, where Sheriff Ed Aiken went to see her in the evening.

He sat down on a chair by the bed and unfolded a piece of paper and read from it, saying that whatever she said would be used against her. She waved her hand.

“You have to say if you understand.”

“I understand.”

“Why did you come to Stone City?”

“To find a rock.”

“That should've been easy.”

She went on to explain the possible history of the rock, adding this time that it might also be the stone of invisibility the maiden gave to Peredur so he could fight the monster of the cave, or the rock slung by Cúchulainn to kill the squirrel on Maeve's shoulder.

“Did you know Jack Snow was here?”

“I heard he might be.”

“From who?”

“People.”

“People in Omaha?”

“I don't know where Omaha is.”

“You thought Snow had the rock? Why did you think that?”

“A feeling.”

“From where?”

“Inside me.”

“What'd you want with it?”

“To take it home.”

“You wanted to take a rock to Minnesota.”

“No.”

“Where then?”

“No place in this world.”

“You see, now there's where you lose me,” said Ed. “Did you kill Jack Snow?”

“Yes.”

“And why did you?”

“We fought. His skills are not what they once were.”

Ed Aiken left the room. Earl Kellogg was sitting arms crossed in a chair by the door.

“How'd that go?” said Earl.

“Pretty well, I think.”

“Can I leave now?”

“Stay. I or Sheila will come spell you at midnight.”

“At least go get me some magazines. If I sit here with nothing to do I'll go crazy.”

“I know you told the paper about the sword.”

“Prove it.”

Sandra Zulma opened the door and peeked out of the room. The barrel chest of a sleeping lawman rose and fell with his chin resting upon it. He had a gun in a holster with a black strap over the grip. A magazine lay open on the floor. A woman in black lace had put him right out.

“Hey,” she whispered. “You there.”

Sandra stepped out, hearing the soft voices of the nurses at the station, and crept down the lavender hallway. On the walls were pictures of flowers, horses, mothers and children. It was that late-night hospital time when all is quiet and beautiful, and you can almost hear the sound of mending and dying. The hall was empty but for a doctor who stood tapping the chest piece of a stethoscope on the back of his hand.

“I'm walking,” said Sandra.

“Let me listen to you.”

He pressed the stethoscope to her chest.

“What is wrong with this thing?”

“Maybe I don't have a heartbeat.”

The doctor touched her wrist with his fingers and looked at his watch.

“Adagio,” he said. “That means okay.”

At the end of the corridor Sandra took an elevator to the basement. The walls were steel with raised hash marks and she ran her hand over them, soothed by the cool repetition of bumps.

In the basement she found a long room lined with green lockers. There was a mirror on the wall and she looked at the bandages on her arms and face. Down the room she saw a young man wearing scrubs and hanging street clothes in a locker.

She picked up a mop and held it like a spear. “I'll lay you for your clothes,” she said.

He looked at her, said nothing.

“That's all I've got to trade.”

“You're off your ward. I know who you are.”

“Got to have those clothes.”

He glanced at a two-way radio on a wooden bench.

“Please don't do that,” she said. “I don't want to hurt you but I will.”

“Sometimes I don't get the padlock done right. So it looks locked but it isn't.”

“You don't want to get laid,” said Sandra.

“Not the state you're in.”

“Maybe you could just hold me.”

She let the mop fall and they embraced. At first he was afraid, but she held him tightly, courage flowing from her body into his. The man closed his locker, picked up his radio, and left the room.

Sandra dropped her gown and put on the pants and T-shirt and sweatshirt, the socks and boots, the watch cap and gloves of the doctor or orderly or whatever he was.

A door at the end of the hallway opened onto a ramp lined with dumpsters. Sandra stood looking up and down the street. A light soft snow fell, so little you could hardly tell.

A police car glided by with the ray of a fender-mounted light sweeping the sidewalk. She bent behind a dumpster with her arms across her chest and waited.

The Laughing Bandit struck again that night. Tiny sheared the padlock from the loading dock at Shipping Giant in Stone City. He liked using bolt cutters. There was something satisfying in the way the jaws bit and compressed before slicing.

Hard to pin down, the feeling he got using bolt cutters.

He took nine packages of various sizes and carried them out to the trunk of his car a few at a time. One had a yellow note taped on saying:

HOLD FOR AUTHORITIES

PER HERB

Tiny couldn't pass that one by. He left his trademark laugh written in blue marker on an erasable board.

Before setting out for home he smoked a cigarette in the car. He rolled his own lately, the tobacco reminding him in look and smell of pencil shavings he'd once emptied from school sharpeners. He liked making the cigarette rather than just taking it from a box. More of an earned smoke, you might say.

Through a haze of blue he saw the rangy woman walking down the alley, shoulders hunched and hands in pockets. Without a glance at him, she crossed steady from one side of the windshield to the other and kept on going west.

Bright ash fell from the cigarette to his chest and he slapped it out. He flipped the cigarette out the window, eased the car into motion, drove up beside the walking woman.

“Need a ride, miss? Where you going?”

“Minnesota,” she said. “Couple hours from the Canadian border.”

“I could take you that way.”

She looked warily at Tiny, and she looked inside the car.

“Let's go,” she said.

She walked around the front of the car and opened the door and folded her knees up in the passenger seat.

“I might not be the greatest company,” she said. “I was in an accident. I'm talked out.”

“I don't talk much either, not counting to myself.”

It did Tiny good to drive roads he didn't know with another person. He had a pretty good idea who she was and wondered what she was doing out and about.

He stayed off the interstate for a hundred miles. Sandra dropped the seat back and fell to sleeping with the innocence of Micah.

In Mankato, Tiny stopped at a lonely mart and stood in the cold night, filling the tank. He wondered had she really done what they said, had she killed the man, or were the police bobbling along in their usual guesswork.

Inside the store he bought cherry pies and energy drinks.

“You have yourself a good night,” said the clerk.

The roads were empty and dry in the early morning. Tiny played the radio low. The towns of Minnesota drifted up, islands of light existing for the time it took to drive through and then gone in the dark.

The towns seemed prosperous and orderly, but maybe it was only that he did not know them. The Minnesotans were asleep and dreaming in their beds. “Good morning,” they'd say upon waking. “How are you this fine day?”

Steering with his forearm Tiny popped open another can of carbonated caffeine and drank it down.

Sandra woke when the sun came up. They were on the interstate headed northwest and making good time. Tiny was proud of this landscape, so far from where they'd started, as if he had built it for her. She rubbed her eyes, licked her lips, touched the bandage at her temple. When you awake is when the injuries hurt.

“Were you in the hospital?”

“Where are we?”

“On 94,” said Tiny. “Coming up on Fergus Falls. There's a cherry pie there if you're hungry.”

“Fergus,” she said. “A great hero. He leveled the hills of Meath with his sword and needed seven women to get off.”

“Now, who is this?”

She tore the paper open with her teeth and ate, the glazed crumbs falling to her lap.

“Yes, I was in the hospital.”

“How'd you get out?”

“No hospital can hold me.”

To pass the time, Sandra told Tiny the story of Deirdre, whose beauty had been foreseen along with the jealousy and trouble she would bring upon Ulster. Deirdre dashed herself against a stone post from a speeding charior rather than remain captive to the killers of her lover. Or perhaps, as Lady Gregory had it, Deirdre drove a knife into her side and threw the knife into the sea.

“You don't have to make that choice,” said Tiny.

“I hope I would be strong enough.”

Two miles from the town of Mayall, Sandra asked Tiny to stop, for this is where she would get out. He would be glad to take her into town, but she didn't want to go there. He left her near a snowy path that wound its way into a state forest.

“Oh wait, almost forgot,” he said.

He got out of the car, went to the back, and opened the trunk, where the boxes from Shipping Giant lay mixed up from the drive.

“I got these things.”

“What are they?”

“Don't know. Stuff people sent. Take some.”

She picked up two packages the size of shoe boxes and held one under each arm.

“I know you weren't coming all this way,” she said. “You did this for me.”

“Maybe I just like driving,” said Tiny. “Open them.”

She seemed weak and tired, and he unsealed the boxes on the trunk lid. A semi racketed by, and they stood still, buffeted in the backdraft. One of the boxes held a Boker knife with a hand-sewn sheath and the other a rock in bubble wrap.

Hell, thought Tiny, she would have to pick that fine knife. But she had made a good choice, which he could not begrudge. The rock, on the other hand, didn't seem worth the cost of shipping. Perhaps someone had intended to make a table lamp from it as is sometimes done.

Sandra held the rock in both hands, like something of value. Tall as she was, she seemed to grow and transform on the roadside, daylight coloring her face. She smiled for the first time he had seen.

“Do you know what you have done?” she said.

“Not as a rule,” said Tiny. “That's a hellish good knife, by the way. Slip the sheath on your belt and you'll always know where it is.”

Carrying the rock and the knife, she walked down the ditch to the path that entered the forest. Tiny watched until he couldn't see her in the trees. He wondered where she was going. Maybe a cabin. He put the empty boxes in the trunk. One had been the parcel held for authorities per Herb, whoever Herb was, but Tiny had not noticed if it was the rock or the knife.