"You'd like.... You feel pretty big, don't you, _Miss_ Blake? You feel real big wit' them cigarettes. I t'ought we was just dirt, now everyt'ing's okay, you can bend low 'n' give an old woman a pack of your butts." She held her voice down; Watson was mumbling and crooning to herself, perhaps not listening. "Maybe it wouldn't occur to you, _Miss_ Blake, but that old trot's got pride. She ain't lickin' up no at'eist prisoner's dirty leavings. Me neither. Miss Blake, I wouldn't touch you not by a ten-foot pole." Callista saw thumb and forefinger of the woman's hand pinched in a circle at the shelf of her breasts. Her soft tones had lost distinctness, slipping back into the vaguer argot of a South Winchester childhood. "Ain't comin' in 'ere, not 'less Sheriff or somebody gives me direc' order, you can drop dead. You ain't human, you're a stinkin' t'ing, you can hang yourself I won't go in, leave you for Flannery to find by the morning." Callista put the cigarettes away and sat on her cot gazing at interlaced fingers, trying (as if the time allowed were not short but the need urgent) to grasp the nature of hatred, especially in this new guise. Kowalski had not displayed it before, had seemed only an indifferent mechanism busy with her job. It occurred to Callista that she herself must have been shamefully unobservant. Did others unsuspectedly ache with this kind of loathing for her? T. J. Hunter? Cousin Maud? Jim? _Why?_ "I guess you don't talk, you can't be bod'ered." "No, Mrs. Kowalski, I'd rather not talk." "Oh, you'd rather not. Much too good to talk to a dumb Polack. Let me tell you somet'ing, Miss Blake, what they do after they pull the switch in that little room--what they do, they take out the heart, doing the oddopsy, understand? No matter you got lots of money, 'r' gonna be buried fancy somewheres, they take out the heart. They got a reason. All right, you don't talk." Kowalski stood there a while longer, exercising great courage perhaps, or having faith in the cold iron of the bars. Then Callista sensed that the woman had gone away. _I will think about the night of Saturday, the 15th of August._ Cousin Maud must have been telling the truth about that episode on the front porch. Callista could not remember seeing or hearing Ann then, but Cousin Maud would not have lied. How unmistakably the bedroom was Mother's! Nothing there of Herb, who slept at the far end of the upstairs hall in a room Mother indulgently called "his den," as one might refer to a cat's favorite basket. Well, the entire house merely tolerated Herb Chalmers, who after all did nothing except own it, pay taxes and upkeep, and exist there. _Poor Herb! If only he wasn't so inclined to agree with that estimate himself!_ By contrast, the spook of The Professor, the great Malachi Chalmers so respectably dead, was quite at home. Cousin Maud liked to behave as though all major directives were announced jointly by The Professor and Victoria.