He wanted to do all the things you should do when someone disappears, but he held back. What could he say? "My wife, sir, has disappeared. She is suffering from the delusion that--" And what if she should be found and questioned in her present state of mind, examined by a doctor, before he could get to her? No, this was something for him to handle alone. But if he did not get a line on it soon, he would have no choice. He would have to go to the police, inventing some story to cover the facts. She had written, "Two days." If she believed that she were doomed to die in two days, might not the belief be enough? That was his worst fear. Toward evening he drove back to the house, repressing the chimerical hope that she had returned in his absence. The special delivery carrier was just getting into his car. Norman pulled up alongside. "Anything for Saylor?" "Yes, sir. It's in the box." The message was longer this time, but just as difficult to read. At last its attention is somewhere else. If I control my emotions, it isn't so quick to notice my thoughts. But it was hard for me to post the last letter. Norman, you _must_ do what I tell you. The two days end Sunday midnight. Then the Bay. You _must_ follow all directions. Tie the four white cords into a granny, a reef, a cat's-paw, and a carrick bend. Tie the gut in a bowline. Then add-- He looked at the post mark. The place was two hundred miles east. Not on the railroad lines, as far as he could recall. That should narrow down the possibilities considerably. One word from the letter was repeating itself in his mind, like a musical note struck again and again until it becomes unendurable. Bay. Bay. Bay. Bay. * * * * * The memory came of a hot afternoon fifteen years ago. It was just before they were married. They were sitting on the edge of a ramshackle little pier. He remembered the salt smell, and the faintly fishy, dry-wood smell of the splintery old planks. "Funny," she had said, looking down into the green water, "but I always used to think that I'd end up down there. Not that I'm afraid of it. I've always swum way out. But even when I was a little girl I'd look at the Bay--maybe green, maybe blue, maybe gray, covered with whitecaps, glittering with moon-beams, or shrouded by fog--and I'd think, 'Tansy, the Bay is going to get you, but not for years and years.' Funny, isn't it?" And he laughed and put his arms around her tight, and the green water had gone on lapping at the piles heavy with seaweed. He had been visiting with her family, when her parents were still alive, at their home near Bayport on the southern shore of New York Bay. The narrow corridor suited itself to its victim's most cherished fear. It ended for her in the Bay, tomorrow midnight. She must be heading for the Bay.