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freezer?"
    "Oh, goodness, no," she replied, amused. "Hillfolk don't have need fer such modern things. We smoke our meat, jar our fruit'n vegetables, pickle whatnot, and don't hardly never have ta spend cash money at the store."
    "I guess there's a lot to be said for that," he suggested, and semi-longed for a simpler life. But it was her body he longed for more. The lambent white skin of her face, her cleavage and her bare shoulders —it all coalesced to something like an aura. Now the sweat misting on her bosom made her breasts and nipples even more apparent.
    "'N'fact, just yesterday we'se smoked some muskrat'n squirrel. My husband, Noot, he built the smokehouse."
    "That's quite an art." He paused. "But...you don't have electricity?"
    "Oh, shore, when we'se need it, which ain't much." Her elegant fingers picked up a plastic card advertising a plethora of lattes and frappes to fan herself. "We gots a wood-gas generator ta watch the old TV sometimes, or when my husband Noot need ta run his tools."
    "A wood-gas generator?"
    "Ain't never heard of "em?" Each stroke of the make-shift fan caused black tendrils of hair to puff as she leaned back in the chair with her legs crossed, A flip-flop hung off the foot of her crossed leg; she wagged it back and forth. "Noot built it hisself from my Grandpop's 'nstructions. He just take a old hot water-heater, then put two more littler metal drums in it, which ya fix with copper tubing'n set over a wood fire, but first ya fill that heater full up with wood chips'n seal the lid. Instead'a burnin', the heat turn the wood chips inta gas, and then through the tubes the gas go to a little pull-motor which runs the generator. S'how folks droved their cars in the War, Grandpop Orne say, 'cos they had somethin' back then calt gas rationing."
    World War II, Westmore guessed. "That's fascinating," he said, but thought, YOU'RE fascinating... "Modernity definitely makes people" —he chuckled— "especially people like me, take things for granted." But, next, he nearly moaned aloud when she plucked a single cube from her drink and daintily glided it over the hollow of her throat, then...lower.
    "This ice just feel so dandy on a day hot as this. See, it don't get too hot where's we live on account'a the shade from all the trees..."
    Westmore stalled, watching the ice-water trickle down her cleavage in shining rivulets. Is she trying to seduce me? GOD, I hope so, but he knew it was folly. She was just a simple woman from a simple life.
    "But tell me sumpin', Westmore, if'n a'course, ya don't mind my askin'." She picked up the memo-corder and smiled at it. "You say you have a bunch'a these machines, but...why?"
    "For my job." The ice cube had melted away, leaving her upper bosom gleaming. "In case I think of something when it's not convenient to write it down, I just whip out the memo-corder and say whatever it is I'd thought of. I'm a writer."
    Her brows rose. "A writer? Like...a book writer?"
    "Yeah," he answered rather sheepishly. "Get ready to laugh, but I write non-fiction books about...haunted houses."
    She sat up straighten keen on what he'd said. "Ya don't say? Why...I never met a book writer before!"
    "It's no big deal. I got lucky, had a bestseller several years ago" —he chuckled once more—"called The Hildreth House of Horrors. It was about a mansion in Florida supposedly haunted. It did well, so now my publisher wants the same sort of stuff, Amityville for the new millennium, my editor said."
    She squinted, still fanning. "I don't know no Amityville, but I once knew a gal named Amity, Amity Pierce...but she die, poor thing, from drinkin' bad moonshine. Evil stuff, that 'shine. Lotta folks swear it was Amity's husband, Delany, who put sumpin' in it so's ta kill her —varnish, maybe. See, Delany had his-self a lover on the side, and, well"—she leaned over and whispered—"his lover? It were a fella, not a gal."
    Westmore could summon no response.
    "But there's more'n a peck of bad houses