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they’re the cat’s pajamas—not the clothes, but themselves. They think we’re all dying to wear the same crap they are and the only reason we don’t is that we can’t afford to. Personally, I’d rather stick pins in my eyeballs.”
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    Things sped up. The trail Lyle Halliday left behind grew faint and fainter, like an ink drawing left out in the rain. No bloodhounds, the Truro and Provincetown police did not have the equipment—technical or cerebral—to follow it and Halliday lost himself somewhere in the great landscape of the United States. The Cape Cod Times twitted the authorities for losing him without a fight, day after day, sometimes in a feature, sometimes an editorial, and most awfully, a cartoon showing cops in the Truro dump, kicking pretzel-shaped beach chairs and broken pottery with clumsy boots: “leaving no stone unturned in the Halliday investigation.” The police’s response to the Halliday vandalism was compared and contrasted ad nauseam to the Tinkham murder, not only still unsolved but yellowing with age. It was really an exercise in self-loathing because, after all, we were one of only three or four remaining nearly crime-free areas in the country. What struck me and my friends—Molly, Raymie, the ladies at the Truro Historical Society where I volunteered once a week, and my irregular lunch group—as far more important than the crime rate was the rate at which the McMonsters were being erected.
    Beth—whose imagination is even livelier than mine—said she believed a bunch of aliens had landed on Earth and, bringing with them their own construction crews, put these big houses strategically over the sweetest terrain on the East Coast, and when it came time, they would swoop down on us, carry us to their domains and make us their slaves. I asked her when she thought that time would be. She didn’t have any idea. “But doesn’t it seem odd to you that five years ago there weren’t any trophy houses and now there are dozens?”
    Not odd at all. Instead of trickling down, money was defying gravity and dripping up into the hands of people who had never had much, if any, before and, I said, “I probably shouldn’t be saying this out loud, but they haven’t the foggiest idea what constitutes good taste.”
    Beth said she didn’t know why that was such an awful thing to say.
    I sat down and began to draw my version of the perfect trophy house. Vaguely but insincerely Italianate in style, with compulsive symmetry, a double-staircase entry, with plant-bearing urns on either side of the entrance. The door was wide enough to drive a Hummer through and the roof sloped not ungracefully. To break the symmetry I added a rectangular tower with a peaked roof. This went up about twenty feet beyond the roof line, more or less like that of the Brenner house. It was very wide and the number of windows suggested that inside were more rooms than even a family of five needed, not to say bathrooms galore. “Would you like me to color it?” I asked.
    She nodded and I colored it tan, with a bit of blush pink. Tan all over. “Here,” I said, handing her the picture, “you can have it.”
    It seemed to me—although it may have been wishful thinking—that Beth was slowly emerging from the fog of her breakup with Andy. I had caught her that morning with her hand on the telephone. She jumped when she saw me and moved away, so I figured she was trying to call the ex-boyfriend but was ashamed to have me know it. She said, “It’s pretty good, Mom, but not awful enough. How do we know how big it is compared to the next house?”
    I asked for it back and lightly sketched in an imaginary Truro beach house. The pairing reminded me of Diane Arbus’ piquant photograph of the circus giant standing next to the circus midget. Beth was pleased with it. “Why don’t you do a book about