The Mask

two and chasing them with catlike single-mindedness.
    Grace was on her hands and knees in front of a row of intermingled yellow and crimson and orange flowers, hand-spading the earth with a trowel, when someone said, “You have a magnificent garden.”
    Startled, she looked up and saw a thin, jaundice-skinned man in a rumpled blue suit that hadn’t been in fashion for many years. His shirt and tie were hopelessly out of style, too. He looked as if he had stepped out of a photograph taken in the 1940s. He had thinning hair the color of summer dust, and his eyes were an unusual shade of soft brown, almost beige. His face was composed entirely of narrow features and sharp angles that gave him a look halfway between that of a hawk and that of a parsimonious moneylender in a Charles Dickens novel. He appeared to be in his early or middle fifties.
    Grace glanced at the gate in the white board fence that separated her property from the street. The gate was standing wide open. Evidently, the man had been strolling by, had seen the roses through a gap in the poplar-tree hedge that stood on the outside of the fence, and had decided to come in and have a closer look.
    His smile was warm, and there was kindness in his eyes, and he seemed not to be intruding, even though he was. “You must have two dozen varieties of roses here.”
    “Three dozen,” she said.
    “Truly magnificent,” he said, nodding approval.
    His voice wasn’t thin and sharp like the rest of him. It was deep, mellow, friendly, and would have seemed more fitting if it had issued from a brawny, hearty fellow half again this man’s size. “You take care of the entire garden yourself?”
    Grace sat back on her heels, still holding the trowel in one gloved hand. “Sure. I enjoy it. And somehow… it just wouldn’t be my garden if I hired someone to help me with it.”
    “Exactly!” the stranger said. “Yes, I can understand how you feel.”
    “Are you new in the neighborhood?” Grace asked.
    “No, no. Used to live just a block from here, but that was a long, long time ago.” He took a deep breath and smiled again. “Ah, the wonderful aroma of roses! Nothing else smells half so pretty. Yes, you’ve got a superb garden. Really superb.”
    “Thank you.”
    He snapped his fingers as a thought occurred to him. “I ought to write something about this. It might make a first-rate human-interest piece. This fantasy-land tucked away in an ordinary backyard. Yes, I’m sure it would be just the thing. A nice change of pace for me.”
    “Are you a writer?”
    “Reporter,” he said, still taking deep breaths and savoring the aroma of the blooms.
    “Are you with a local paper?”
    “The Morning News. Name’s Palmer Wainwright”
    “Grace Mitowski.”
    “I hoped you might recognize my byline,” Wainwright said, grinning.
    “Sorry. I don’t read the Morning News. I take the Patriot-News from the delivery boy every morning.”
    “Ah, well,” he said, shrugging, “that’s a good paper, too. But of course, if you don’t read the Morning News, you never saw my story about the Bektermann case.”
    As Grace realized that Wainwright intended to hang around awhile, she got off her haunches, stood up, and flexed her rapidly stiffening legs. “The Bektermann case? That sounds familiar.”
    “All the papers reported it, of course. But I did a five-part series. Good stuff, even if I do say so myself. I got a Pulitzer nomination for it. Did you know that? An honest-to-God Pulitzer nomination.”
    “Really? Why, that’s something,” Grace said, not sure if she should take him seriously but not wanting to offend him. “That is really something. Imagine. A Pulitzer nomination.”
    It seemed to her that the conversation had suddenly taken an odd turn. It wasn’t casual any longer. She sensed that Wainwright had come into the yard not to admire her roses and not to have a friendly chat, but to tell her, a complete stranger, about his Pulitzer nomination.
    “Didn’t win,” Wainwright said. “But the way I look at it, a nomination is almost as good as the prize itself. I mean, out of the tens of thousands of newspaper articles that’re published in a year, only a handful are up for the prize.”
    “Refresh my memory, if you will,” Grace said.
    “What was the Bektermann case about?”
    He laughed good-naturedly and shook his head. “Wasn’t about what I thought it was about. That’s for damned sure. I wrote it up as a tangled, Freudian puzzle. You know—the iron-willed father, with perhaps an unnatural attraction for his