"Don't touch anything down there," Jeff called from the kitchen. "I'll finish up when I get home."
      Amy appeared at the door, holding his coat. She watched him scrub at the caked yellowish clay and the blood on his hands with the dish soap and frowned. Jeff rinsed the hacksaw and put it away under the sink. "It's almost done, anyway," he said. "I'll finish later when I get home and I can forget about this. That's the most sickening thing I've ever had to do."
      There was nothing she could add to that.
      "Be careful if you have to go down there today," he added. "Part of an elbow's still showing. Best to stay out of there."
      He came to her, throwing the towel onto a chair. He took her in his arms and said, "The Anderson audit will be done this morning, so I might be able to put this in the past by supper."
      She nodded and went with him to the door. He turned to her and said gravely, "And if anybody comes to the door, don't answer it. Understand? Just don't answer it."
      "I won't," she said.
      "I mean it. I don't want the police here because you couldn't keep quiet."
      "I said I wouldn't."
      She busied herself with the house and the yard all through the morning. At ten Jeff called, as he usually did. She answered it from the flower garden next to the porch.
      "Yes, they're on the coffee table. Do you want me to bring them?"
      "No, that's okay. I don't need them today. Just don't let anybody in and don't talk to anyone, remember."
      "I won't, Jeff. I told you I wouldn't."
      She straightened the NO SOLICITORS! sign at the sidewalk gate and went back to her zinnias, thinking that perhaps no one at all would come around.
      Nevertheless, two salespeople came up to her within an hour as she tended the flowers. One with encyclopedias that she got rid of quickly by telling him she was the cleaning lady, which wasn't precisely a lie. The second, a professed college student selling magazines, was irritating in his aggressiveness, and she finally had no remaining option than to feign a probably overdone meat loaf and shut the door on him behind her. Where did they all come from?
      Now that she was back inside the house, she decided that she would do exactly as Jeff had cautioned her to do for the remainder of the day, but when the chimes finally did sound an hour later she found herself peeking out the window at the fellow on the porch. She knew she shouldn't, that if Jeff came home there was no way of telling what might happen.
      Her mind racing, she went to the basement, then bounded back up the steps and out to the living room. The door chime was still going. The man was still there. He's my husband, she thought, and I do love him, but I have to do something. There's right and there's wrong no matter how you try to talk your way around it.
      She opened the door a few inches and peered out with wide eyes at the redheaded man holding the suitcase.
      "Good afternoon," he said cheerfully. "We're conducting a product survey in your neighborhood, and I assure you that I'm not here to sell you anything at all."
      Get away from here, she thought. Get away while you can.
      She undid the chain, hesitantly, trying twice before it slipped off the slide. "I really don't need anything, but I -"
      "That's fine," he cut her off, "because I'm not selling anything. At Home Glow, we're launching a new product line and we'd like to get reactions -"
      "My husband will be home soon."
      Get away, she repeated in her head.
      "Fine, fine," he nodded, stepping around her and into the living room. "He might be interested, too," he went on as he sat on the sofa and began undoing the straps of his sample case.
      "You...you don't understand," she told him. "My husband doesn't like salesmen. I mean, he really doesn't like them."
      He grinned widely and kept bringing out bottles of some kind of cleaner. "That's fine," he said. "I don't like them much myself. As I said, I'm not a salesman, so nothing to worry about."
      She watched him arrange the line of little bottles for a few seconds, then said, "Can I ask you something?"
      "Well, sure, sure," he said quickly. "The happiest customer is an informed customer. Did I say customer? Well, I suppose you are, in a way, a future customer for these wonderful household aids, but you can't buy any of these because..."
      "Because you're not selling anything."
      He chuckled. "That's right. If you feel confidant in the products, you are entitled to purchase more than the trial sizes you see here at pre-market cost, but that's your choice and there's certainly no pressure on you to do so."
      "Can I ask you something?" she repeated the question. He didn't seem to have a response this time. "If you know about something terrible, but the person that it has to do with is important to you, should you say anything about it? To other people, I mean."
      "I'm sorry?"
      "Like the police."
      The pitchman stared at her. "Excuse me?"
      Amy put her hands to her face and moved them in a washing motion. "I don't know exactly how to say this to a stranger, so I guess I'll just say it as simply as I can.
      "I'm not very assertive with people, my husband says, and I suppose he's right. On Tuesday, day before yesterday, another salesman was here, selling vacuums. I already have a vacuum cleaner, and I told him that, but he kept talking anyway even though I told him how my husband is and that he would be home. He had glasses, too, like yours, only smaller. Jeff - that's my husband, Jeff - especially dislikes salesmen with glasses."
      The man smiled thinly. "Say again?"
      She shrugged. "I know it sounds peculiar," she said. "But we get an awful lot of salesmen here, almost every day. Probably hundreds over the years, and the ones we've had the worst experiences with did seem to all wear glasses. Just coincidence, but Jeff says it's so we can't see their eyes clearly, that he can always tell when a man's lying to him if he can see his eyes." She looked at him somberly, almost apologetically. "He's actually a good person, he really is. He just sees certain things in certain ways.
      "Anyway, Jeff came home early, while the man was still here, and started to argue with him. It got worse, and, well, my husband - you'd have to know him."
      The man's eyes narrowed as he tried to fill in the spaces. He finally asked, "What happened?"
      "What happened was, Jeff hit him on the head with the part that you hold onto when you're using it, the metal pipe thing."
      The man's eyes widened. "Good Lord. Is he all right?"
      She bit her lip. "I'll show you."
      She started for the basement stairs, but the man hadn't moved since standing up. "Look, lady, I don't think I want to get involved in this. Whatever it is."
      "Please," she said. "I wouldn't ask you, but I'm at the end of my nerves about it. Please, I really need somebody's help. I need somebody to tell me what to do."
      He didn't want to go, but there was a curiosity now, intruding on caution. "First, what's down there?"
      She shook her head and opened the basement stairway door. "Please."
      She flipped the light switch at the top and they went down the creaking risers until they stepped off the last one onto the dirt floor. She walked across until, about center, she turned to him and gestured to a mostly filled-in area of about two by eight feet. A large cardboard box with a thick crimson smear on the lid sat on the freshly tamped area. Throughout the smear were tiny shreds of...what?
      He looked at it for a long time, then breathed, "What's in the dirt under the box?"
      She looked away from it and stifled a sob.
      Without really thinking about it, the man backed up and grabbed the stair railing for support. "Wait a minute. He killed the guy? Is that what you're saying? You're kidding me, right?"
      She raised her eyes to meet his. They were abject, pleading. "He didn't mean to. I was there. I mean, even if he hit him, if he didn't mean for this to happen, then it's an accident. Isn't it?"
      He shook his head violently. "No. No accident, lady. When you take a dead man to the basement and bury him, that's not an accident. Are you crazy?" He spied the glasses that lay at the edge of the fill dirt, smeared with mud and the same dark red amalgam that was on the box. "Whose glasses?"
      She didn't answer, but stared at him, glancing down at the dirt twice.
      "Holy Christmas!"
      She tried to keep up with him, sobbing and grabbing at his suit jacket when she could reach it as he ran clumsily back up the steps and to the couch, and began throwing his samples back into the case. "You people are out of your minds. You can't do things like that, lady. You just...can't!"
      "What should I do, then? How..." When she heard the engine sound and turned to see the car through the window, she stopped in mid-sentence, considering her next move. If he came in and the man was still there, Jeff wouldn't know what she had told him, but he would assume that she had told him something. Amy knit her fingers together and clutched them against her stomach. "Oh, no."
      His hands froze on the straps he was trying to work. "Oh, no, what?"
      "He's here. Don't let on that I said anything. Promise me you won't. Just leave before he comes in. Get out now, I beg of you!"
      She made a dash toward the basement steps as he jabbed the strap of his sample case through the buckle and bolted for the door, hooking one foot on the coffee table leg and tripping. He went down on top of the case, freeing the unlatched strap and sending plastic bottles tumbling and bouncing on the floor. He frantically stuffed them back inside and snatched up the case as a bundle in his arms, reaching the door as Jeff stepped onto the yard walk.
      He leapt off the porch and met Jeff halfway along the walk. The man threw Jeff a terrified look and made a choking sound in his throat, then swept past him to the sidewalk and ran south toward Elm, looking over his shoulder as he went. Jeff stared at him until he vanished around the corner.
      Amy met Jeff at the door, winded. He stepped past her into the living room, looked around, then turned and eyed her without expression. He brought his open hand up toward her face.
      Brushing her cheek, he said, "What did you say to him?"
      She looked at his scraped and scratched hands and asked, "How are they?"
      "All right," he said evenly. "What did you say to him?"
      She said simply, "Í'm sorry," without much conviction, and walked away toward the kitchen. He watched her until she disappeared through the doorway, wondering if he should try to find out exactly what she had said to the man, knowing there was nothing he could do about it now, then shook his head and fell heavily onto the sofa.
      He picked out a magazine, although it seemed a silly thing to do just then, and surveyed the top of the coffee table. Finding what he was looking for, he picked them up from where he had forgotten them that morning, examined them, and sighed. All he could do now was hope the man hadn’t gone to the police, and that there wouldn’t be a knock on the door and people in uniforms asking questions about the basement.
      There was nothing to do except wait, but he couldn't just sit and wait.  He dabbed at the yellow mud with a tissue. "I guess I don't want to know what you told him.”
      Maybe they won’t even bother coming this time, he thought optimistically. Sometimes they don't. And she really is a wonderful wife. Not a mean bone in her body....
      From the kitchen she sweetly called out her answer to his implied question: "That's probably best, honey."
      "I thought so." He began to wipe the mud and strawberry jam from his reading glasses. "I'm going to go down and bury that last elbow, and the new sewer pipe will be over and done with." Well, maybe one mean bone, labeled Traveling Salesman.