Now that he was out of bed and on his feet, now that he was irrevocably committed to descending the stairs and confronting whoever he might find in his house, Pullman felt that there was no shame in wishing that it were otherwise. After all, it was not feeble or unmasculine to want to avoid violence. It was not due to frailty or cowardice that he felt no desire to save his belongings, that he would gladly let the burglar run off with whatever they could get their hands on, that he would happily go back to sleep (if he thought that possible) and call the police in the morning, when the sun was up.

He crept across the room to the door and placed his hand on the knob, listening.

“Oh sure, I heard him all right. But I didn’t think it was really worth getting out of bed for. I mean, a VCR, a couple of hi-fi speakers, a couple hundred CDs, a mountain bike, a food processor, an old camera — these are only things, after all, replaceable, ultimately disposable things. What’s the big deal?”

“Yes,” the officer — or his wife — would say, “but what if he had come upstairs?”

He turned the knob and stepped out onto the landing. There was no sound, no movement. Everything was as it always was. The girls’ door was shut. A balled-up towel lay on the floor outside the bathroom. A parallelogram of moonlight had stretched itself, complacent and catlike, across one wall.

Gently, he closed the bedroom door behind him and slowly began to descend the stairs.

There was no one in the living room. There was no one in the kitchen. There was no one in the dining room. The door to the basement was locked from this side. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed. Could the intruder have come and gone without taking anything? But that was impossible.

Either something was missing, or the burglar was still here.

He opened the door to the basement. He found what he wanted on the top step, next to a baseball glove and one of the girls’ shoes. He carried the bat with him back into the foyer, where he began his diligent, hopeful search for some sign of having been robbed.

He found what seemed at first like conclusive evidence: the front door was unlocked. Instinctively and with relief, he locked it.