By the Light of the Moon

46

Great pines, both conical and spreading varieties, many standing over two hundred feet tall, built sublimely scented palaces on the slopes around the lake, green rooms of perpetual Christmas ornamented with cones as small as apricots and others as large as pineapples.

The famous lake, seen through felicitous frames of time-worked branches, fulfilled its reputation as the most colorful body of water in the world. From a central depth greater than fifteen hundred feet to shoreline shallows, it shimmered iridescently in countless shades of green, blue, and purple.

Folding from the magnificent barrenness of the desert to the glory of Tahoe, Jilly exhaled the possibility of scorpions and cactus moths, inhaled air stirred by butterflies and by brown darting birds.

Shepherd had conveyed them to a flagstone footpath that wound through the forest, through a softness of feathery pine shadows and woodland ferns. At the end of the path stood the house: Wrightian, stone and silvered cedar, enormous yet in exquisite harmony with its natural setting, featuring deeply cantilevered roofs and many tall windows.

'I know this house,' Jilly said.

'You've been here?'

'No. Never. But I've seen pictures of it somewhere. Probably in a magazine.'

'It's definitely an Architectural Digest sort of place.'

Broad flagstone steps led up to an entry terrace overhung by a cedar-soffited, cantilevered roof.

Ascending to the terrace between Dylan and Shepherd, Jilly said, 'This place is connected to Lincoln Proctor?'

'Yeah. I don't know how, but from the spoor, I know he was here at least once, maybe more than once, and it was an important place to him.'

'Could it be his house?'

Dylan shook his head. 'I don't think so.'

The front door and flanking sidelights doubled as sculpture: an Art Deco geometric masterpiece half bronze and half stained glass.

'What if it's a trap?' she worried.

'No one knows we're coming. It can't be a trap. Besides… it doesn't feel that way.'

'Maybe we should run a little surveillance on the joint for a while, watch it from the trees, till we see who comes and goes.'

'My instinct says go for it. Hell, I don't have a choice. The compulsion to keep moving is like… a thousand hands shoving on my back. I've got to ring that doorbell.'

He rang it.

Although Jilly considered sprinting away through the trees, she remained at Dylan's side. She in her changefulness no longer had any refuge in the ordinary world where she could claim to belong, and her only place, if she indeed had one at all, must be with the O'Conner brothers, as their only place must be now with her.

The man who opened the door was tall, handsome, with prematurely snow-white hair and extraordinary gray eyes the shade of tarnished silver. Those piercing eyes surely had the capacity to appear steely and intimidating, but at the moment, they were as warm and as without threat as the gray skeins of a gentle spring rain.

His voice, which Jilly had always assumed must be electronically enhanced during his broadcasts, possessed precisely the reverberant timbre and the smoky quality familiar from radio, and was instantly recognizable. Parish Lantern said, 'Jillian, Dylan, Shepherd, I've been expecting you. Please come in. My house is your house.'

Apparently as stunned as Jilly, Dylan said, 'You? I mean… really? You?'

'I am certainly me, yes, at least the last time I looked in the mirror. Come in, come in. We've much to talk about, much to do.'

The spacious reception hall had a limestone floor, honey-tone wood paneling, a pair of rosewood Chinese chairs with emerald-green cushions, and a central table holding a large red-bronze jardiniere filled with dozens of fresh yellow, red, and orange tulips.

Jilly felt surprisingly welcome, almost as if she had found her way as sometimes a dog, lost during its family's move from one city to another, can travel by instinct across great distances to a new home it has never seen.

Closing the front door, Parish Lantern said, 'Later, you can freshen up, change clothes. When I knew you'd be coming and in what condition, without luggage, I took the liberty of having my houseboy, Ling, purchase fresh clothes for all of you, of the style I believe you prefer. Finding Wile E. Coyote T-shirts on such short notice proved to be something of a challenge. Ling had to catch a flight to Los Angeles on Wednesday, where he obtained a dozen in Shepherd's size at the souvenir shop on the Warner Brothers Studio lot.'

'Wednesday?' Dylan asked, with a trowel's worth of bewilderment plastered on his face.

'I didn't even meet Dylan and Shepherd until last night,' Jilly said. 'Friday night. Less than eighteen hours ago.'

Smiling, nodding, Lantern said, 'And it's been quite a thrilling eighteen hours, hasn't it? I'll want to hear all about it. But first things first.'

'Cake,' said Shep.

'Yes,' Lantern assured him, 'I've got cake for you, Shepherd. But first things first.'

'Cake.'

'You're a determined young man, aren't you?' Lantern said. 'Good. I approve of determination.'

'Cake.'

'Good heavens, lad, one might suspect that you're possessed by a cake-loving brain leech from an alternate reality. If there were such things as brain leeches from an alternate reality, of course.'

'I never believed there were,' Jilly assured him.

'Millions do, my dear,' said Lantern.

'Cake.'

'We'll get you a big square of cake,' Lantern promised Shep, 'in just a little while. But first things first. Please come with me.'

As the three of them followed the talk-show host out of the reception hall and through a library that contained more books than did the libraries of most small cities, Dylan said to Jilly, 'Did you know about all this?'

Amazed by the question, she said, 'How would I know about this?'

'Well, you're the Parish Lantern fan. Big Foot, extraterrestrial conspiracy theories, all that stuff.'

'I doubt that Big Foot has anything to do with this. And I'm not an extraterrestrial conspirator.'

'That's exactly what an extraterrestrial conspirator would say.'

'For God's sake, I'm not an extraterrestrial conspirator. I'm a standup comedian.'

'Extraterrestrial conspirators and standup comedians aren't mutually exclusive,' he said.

'Cake,' Shep insisted.

At the end of the library, Lantern halted, turned to them, and said, 'You've no reason to be afraid here.'

'No, no,' Dylan explained, 'we were just goofing, a private joke sort of thing that goes back a long way with us.'

'Almost eighteen hours,' Jilly said.

'Just remember at all times,' Lantern said cryptically yet with the warmth of a loving uncle, 'regardless of what happens, you've no reason to be afraid here.'

'Cake.'

'In due time, lad.'

Lantern led them out of the library into an enormous living room furnished with contemporary sofas and armchairs upholstered in pale-gold silks, enlivened by an eclectic but pleasing mix of Art Deco decorative objects and Chinese antiquities.

Formed almost entirely of six enormous windows, the south wall provided a magnificent panoramic view of the colorful lake between the graceful framing branches of two giant sugar pines.

The vista was so spectacular that Jilly spontaneously exclaimed – 'Gorgeous!' – before she realized that Lincoln Proctor stood in the room, awaiting them, holding a pistol in his right hand.