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that guy getting ready to send himself to jail. I didn’t want that to happen. Or the other guy to be hurt.
    Yet she said that last almost as an afterthought, and Fred for the first time sensed not only her courage but her unflinching Viking’s heart. She was on the side of Young and Heavyset because . . . well, because the other fellow had been afraid.
    Weren’t you worried, though?
he asked her. He had still been so stunned by what he’d seen that it hadn’t crossed his mind—yet—to think he should be a little ashamed; after all, it was his girlfriend who’d stepped in instead of him, and that wasn’t the Gospel According to Hollywood.
Weren’t you afraid that in the heat of the moment the guy with the tire iron would take a swing at you?
    Judy’s eyes had grown puzzled.
It never crossed my mind,
she said.
    Camelot eventually debouches into Chase Street, where there is a pleasant little gleam of the Mississippi on clear days like this one, but Fred doesn’t go that far. He turns at the top of Liberty Heights and starts back the way he came, his shirt now soaked with sweat. Usually the run makes him feel better, but not today, at least not yet. The fearless Judy of that afternoon on the corner of State and Gorham is so unlike the shifty-eyed, sometimes disconnected Judy who now lives in his house—the nap-taking, hand-wringing Judy—that Fred has actually spoken to Pat Skarda about it. Yesterday, this was, when the doc was in Goltz’s, looking at riding lawn mowers.
    Fred had shown him a couple, a Deere and a Honda, inquired after his family, and then asked (casually, he hoped),
Hey, Doc, tell me something—
do you think it’s possible for a person to just go crazy? Without any warning, like?
    Skarda had given him a sharper look than Fred had really liked.
Are we talking about an adult or an adolescent, Fred?
    Well, we’re not talking about
anyone,
actually.
Big, hearty laugh—unconvincing to Fred’s own ears, and judging from Pat Skarda’s look, not very convincing to him, either.
Not anyone
real,
anyway. But as a hypothetical case, let’s say an adult.
    Skarda had thought about it, then shook his head.
There are few absolutes in medicine, even fewer in
psychiatric
medicine. That said, I have to tell you that I think it’s very unlikely for a person to “just go crazy.” It may be a fairly rapid process, but it is a process. We hear people say “So-and-so snapped,” but that’s rarely the case. Mental dysfunction—neurotic or psychotic behavio
r
—takes time to develop, and there are usually signs. How’s your mom these days, Fred?
    Mom? Oh hey, she’s fine. Right in the pink.
    And Judy?
    It had taken him a moment to get a smile started, but once he did, he managed a big one. Big and guileless.
Judy? She’s in the pink, too, Doc. Of course she is. Steady as she goes.
    Sure. Steady as she goes. Just showing a few
signs,
that was all.
    Maybe they’ll pass,
he thinks. Those good old endorphins are finally kicking in, and all at once this seems plausible. Optimism is a more normal state for Fred, who does not believe in
slippage,
and a little smile breaks on his face—the day’s first.
Maybe the signs will pass. Maybe whatever’s wrong with her will blow out as fast as it blew in. Maybe it’s even, you know, a menstrual thing. Like PMS.
    God, if that was all it was, what a
relie
f
! In the meantime, there’s Ty to think about. He has to have a talk with Tyler about the buddy system, because while Fred doesn’t believe what Wendell Green is apparently trying to insinuate, that the ghost of a fabulous turn-of-the-century cannibal and all-around boogerman named Albert Fish has for some reason turned up here in Coulee Country,
someone
is certainly out there, and this someone has murdered two little children and done unspeakable (at least unless you’re Wendell Green, it seems) things to the bodies.
    Thighs, torso, and buttocks bitten,
Fred thinks, and runs faster, although now he’s getting