The Progress of Love

happened?”
    “We never noticed anything at all.”
    Robert pictured the Weebles getting into and out of their car in the driveway. That was where he had most often seen them. Herecalled their Boxing Day visit. Her gray legs made him think of a nun. Her mention of virginity had embarrassed Peg and the boys. She reminded Robert a little of the kind of women he used to know. Her husband was less talkative, though not shy. They talked about Mexican food, which it seemed the husband had not liked. He did not like eating in restaurants.
    Peg had said, “Oh, men never do!”
    That surprised Robert, who asked her afterward did that mean she wanted to eat out more often?
    “I just said that to take her side. I thought he was glaring at her a bit.”
    Was he glaring? Robert had not noticed. The man seemed too self-controlled to glare at his wife in public. Too well disposed, on the whole, perhaps in some way too indolent, to glare at anybody anywhere.
    But it wasn’t like Peg to exaggerate.
    Bits of information kept arriving. The maiden name of Nora Weeble. Driscoll. Nora Driscoll. Someone knew a woman who had taught at the same school with her in Hamilton. Well-liked as a teacher, a fashionable dresser, she had some trouble keeping order. She had taken a French Conversation course, and a course in French cooking.
    Some women here had asked her if she’d be interested in starting a book club, and she had said yes.
    He had been more of a joiner in Hamilton than he was here. The Rotary Club. The Lions Club. Perhaps it had been for business reasons.
    They were not churchgoers, as far as anybody knew, not in either place.
    (Robert was right about the reasons. In Gilmore everything becomes known, sooner or later. Secrecy and confidentiality are seen to be against the public interest. There is a network of people who are married to or related to the people who work in the offices where all the records are kept.
    There was no investment scheme, in Hamilton or anywhere else. No income-tax investigation. No problem about money. Nocancer, tricky heart, high blood pressure. She had consulted the doctor about headaches, but the doctor did not think they were migraines, or anything serious.
    At the funeral on Thursday, the United church minister, who usually took up the slack in the cases of no known affiliation, spoke about the pressures and tensions of modern life but gave no more specific clues. Some people were disappointed, as if they expected him to do that—or thought that he might at least mention the dangers of falling away from faith and church membership, the sin of despair. Other people thought that saying anything more than he did say would have been in bad taste.)
    Another person who thought Peg should have let him know was Kevin. He was waiting for them when they got home. He was still wearing his pajamas.
    Why hadn’t she come back to the house instead of driving to the police station? Why hadn’t she called to him? She could have come back and phoned. Kevin could have phoned. At the very least, she could have called him from the store.
    He had been down in the basement all morning, watching television. He hadn’t heard the police come; he hadn’t seen them go in or out. He had not known anything about what was going on until his girlfriend, Shanna, phoned him from school at lunch hour.
    “She said they took the bodies out in garbage bags.”
    “How would she know?” said Clayton. “I thought she was at school.”
    “Somebody told her.”
    “She got that from television.”
    “She said they took them out in garbage bags.”
    “Shanna is a cretin. She is only good for one thing.”
    “Some people aren’t good for anything.”
    Clayton was sixteen, Kevin fourteen. Two years apart in age but three years apart at school, because Clayton was accelerated and Kevin was not.
    “Cut it out,” Peg said. She had brought up some spaghettisauce from the freezer and was thawing it in the double boiler. “Clayton. Kevin. Get busy and make me some salad.”
    Kevin said, “I’m sick. I might contaminate it.”
    He picked up the tablecloth and wrapped it around his shoulders like a shawl.
    “Do we have to eat off that?” Clayton said. “Now he’s got his crud on it?”
    Peg said to Robert, “Are we having wine?”
    Saturday and Sunday nights they usually had wine, but tonight Robert had not thought about it. He went down to the basement to get it. When he came back, Peg was sliding spaghetti into the cooker