Lost Boy Lost Girl

“I don’t know what’s the matter with you,” his mother said.

“Aw, I don’t want to talk about Mark anymore.”

“You get back here right now, young man.”

“I wish he’d of stayed in New York,” Jimbo muttered, already moping back up the alley and into the yard.

“You are going to tell Mr. Underhill everything you know,” Margo said. “Don’t you want to help Mark?”

“Help him do what?”

Margo thrust out a handsome arm and pushed him into the house. “Don’t you talk back to me. Don’t you remember that those boys died?”

Jimbo slouched into the living room and collapsed onto the sofa like a broken marionette. “Okay, I give up. What do you want to know?”

I told him that he knew what I wanted to know—everything Mark had told him about his experiences in the Kalendar house.

His eyes flared.

“What were you hiding from me in the restaurant, Jimbo?”

He squirmed. “It’s not important.”

“Why isn’t it important, Jimbo?”

“Because Mark lied to me,” he said, revealing the core of his reluctance. He felt wounded by what he saw as his friend’s mendacity while wishing to keep it out of sight. This was intensely loyal, and in spite of what Philip had said, I thought Mark had been lucky to have had such a friend.

“Tell me about the lie, then. It won’t make me think any less of my nephew.”

Jimbo stared down into his lap for so long I thought he might have fallen asleep. When he finally spoke, he did not look up until he had come almost to the end of what he had to say.

“He said he could sort of feel that someone else was in the house with him. He called it the Presence. And he said it was a girl. And he was going to go back there every day and wait for her to show herself.

“The next day he said he could hear her moving around behind the walls. Hiding from him. Running away whenever he got close. The day after that, according to him, it finally happened. He said she came out through the secret door under the stairs and walked right up to where he was waiting. She took his hand, he said. Her name was Lucy Cleveland, and she was nineteen years old. According to Mark, she was the most totally beautiful girl he’d ever seen. He said it almost hurt to look at her, she was so beautiful.

“What she said was, she was hiding from her father. Her father did terrible things to her, so she ran away. This was a long time ago. Ever since, she hid out in that house and a few other empty houses in this part of town. Only she called it Pigtown, the way people used to.”

On his third visit after their initial meeting, Mark and Lucy Cleveland had sex together—made love. Jimbo used the word “screwed.” They screwed—made love—on the giant’s bed, Mark told Jimbo. He added that Lucy Cleveland had a way of finding the comfortable places on that ugly bed, and if he positioned himself just as she advised, he could have been lying on his own bed at home.

The second time they made love, Lucy Cleveland told him to put one of his wrists into one of the cuffs on the bed, and when he had done so she fastened the second cuff on her own wrist. Mark said that was fantastic, Jimbo told me. Being bound to the bed that way made the sex even more incredible. Mark said that it was like being carried away on the back of some huge bird, or being swept along by a great river.

“He wanted to spend the whole night with her,” Jimbo said, “but he knew his father would go crazy if he did. ‘Tell your dad you’re staying with me,’ I said. ‘He’ll never check.’ So that’s what he did. And the next morning he came over here from her house and my mom made us pancakes. When she left us alone, I asked him if he was bringing Lucy food, and he said, ‘She doesn’t eat.’

“‘Doesn’t eat’? I asked. ‘Everybody has to eat.’ ‘Everybody except her,’ Mark said. ‘Don’t you get it? She was left behind .’

“It’s all such crap. Last year, Mark told me he had sex with this really hot girl in our class, Molly Witt? Later, he confessed he made it all up. If he did it once, he could do it again. And this time it was a girl I didn’t know, and she was older. But he was so happy! He was completely in love with this Lucy Cleveland. He was sort of glowing.”

Jimbo was wild with curiosity. To accept the existence of Lucy Cleveland, he would have to see her, and he was hungry to know if she was as beautiful as Mark claimed. Jimbo knew instinctively that he would not be welcome in the house if Lucy was there. Could she leave the house? Of course she could leave the house, Mark said. Then take her somewhere where I can meet her, or at least see her, Jimbo said. Mark insisted that Lucy Cleveland would refuse to meet him; in fact, she had told Mark that she wanted to know no one in the world but him. Another possibility occurred to Jimbo. He asked Mark to take Lucy Cleveland out for a walk. Unobtrusively, he would appear on the opposite side of the street, say nothing, and melt away again.

But Lucy was afraid to go outside, and when she did leave the house, it was always very late at night. She feared being seen by her father.

They arranged a compromise that satisfied both of them. At noon, Mark would try to get Lucy Cleveland into the living room. He would tell her something about Mr. Hillyard or the Rochenkos, and she would come near him, which meant near the window, to look at the place he was talking about. Across the street, Jimbo would do his best to conceal himself somewhere that allowed him a good view of the front window.

“I got there about ten to twelve,” Jimbo told me. “I got up beside Old Man Hillyard’s porch and sort of hunkered down to wait. Old Man Hillyard takes a nap right around then, I knew, and Skip was so used to me by then he didn’t pay me any attention at all. A couple of minutes later, I could just barely make out Mark moving around way at the back of the room. He vanished, and he came back again. It looked like he was talking to someone. I assumed he was trying to get Lucy Cleveland to come into the room and look out the window. I really felt relieved. If he was talking to her, then she was there.

“Anyhow, at just about noon on the dot, Mark came across the room and up to the window. He was talking, but no one was with him. Mark gets this big grin on his face, and he’s talking, and he’s looking next to him, and waving his hands around, and he looks really happy. Only there isn’t anybody standing beside him! This stupid charade goes on for a minute or two, and Mark turns away from the window. Before he disappears again, he looks over his shoulder and gives me a thumbs-up.”

Jimbo at last looked up at me. I saw anger and pain stamped into his good-natured face. “I pulled out my cell phone and called him, but his was turned off. So I left him this pissed-off message. When he finally did call me back, I was still angry. ‘Why did you wait so long to call me back?’ I said. He said, ‘I was busy with Lucy.’ ‘You’re a liar,’ I said, and he said, ‘She told me you’d say that.’ ‘Say what?’ I asked. ‘That I was lying to you. You can’t see her, that’s all, not unless she wants you to see her.’ I told him that was the biggest bunch of bullshit I ever heard and he said no, no, Lucy Cleveland wasn’t an ordinary person. ‘I guess not,’ I said, and I hung up on him.”

And that night, which was the night before Mark’s disappearance, he went to Jimbo’s house to try to explain—to give him his story. Lucy Cleveland wasn’t an ordinary person, he said. He wasn’t really sure what she was. But she had been waiting for him; he had called her into being. All Mark really knew was that Lucy Cleveland was everything to him, and vice versa.

Jimbo couldn’t stand listening to this stuff. He yelled at Mark. Mark just wanted him to think he was having sex with a gorgeous nineteen-year-old girl. It was like Molly Witt all over again, only worse, because now he was saying his sex partner could make herself invisible! He couldn’t dream up a more obvious lie if he worked at it.

Mark said he was sorry Jimbo thought that way, and went back home.

By the next morning, Jimbo regretted yelling at his friend. He’d had a bad night’s sleep, and he got out of bed long before the usual hour. After an agreeably surprised Margo had scrambled a couple of eggs for him, he went back to his room and called Mark.

“Good, you decided we’re still friends,” Mark said.

“I’m sorry I yelled at you. What do you want to do today?”

“I’m spending most of the day with Lucy Cleveland,” Mark said. “Sorry. I forgot, you don’t think she’s real.”

“She’s not real!” Jimbo shouted, and managed to bring himself back under control. “All right, let’s do it your way. Are you going to spend the entire day hooking up with your imaginary friend, or just part of it?”

“How about we meet around six-thirty at your house?” Mark said.

“If you think you can tear yourself away.”

For the rest of the day, Jimbo wavered between anger and a puzzled variety of forgiveness. He had the idea that Mark’s lie had been caused, in some way he did not really grasp, by his mother’s suicide. Maybe he was using fantasy to replace her; maybe he was so far gone he believed his own fantasy. Once again Jimbo found himself thinking that it was important for him to take care of Mark, insofar as Mark would permit it. Shortly after Mark turned up at his back door, which was closer to seven o’clock than six-thirty, it became apparent that Mark would allow him only a very little caretaking.

But the first thing Jimbo noticed when he answered his friend’s knock was the blissfulness that shone in his face, and the almost alarming degree of contentment and relaxation radiating from him. The second thing he noticed was that if Mark Underhill appeared to be the happiest young man on the face of the earth, his happiness had come at a price. Mark looked subtly older to him, somehow more defined than ever before, and so exhausted he could have fallen asleep leaning against the door.

“How’s Lucy Cleveland?” Jimbo asked, unable to keep from sounding sarcastic. But even as he registered his lack of belief in that invisible young woman, he felt jealousy moving through his system. Jimbo would have done anything to know that bliss, to have earned that spectacular exhaustion.

“Lucy Cleveland is extraordinary. Are you going to let me in?”

Jimbo backed away, and Mark entered. Margo Monaghan was out shopping for groceries, so the boys went into the living room, where Mark fell onto the sofa. He drew up his knees and curled around them as comfortably as a cat.

“Was this the last time you saw him?” I asked Jimbo.

He nodded.

“What kind of mood did he seem to be in? Besides happy, I mean. Was there anything more?”

“Yeah. I thought he looked kind of . . . I don’t know what the word is. Like he couldn’t make up his mind about what he was going to do next. ‘So how do you feel?’ I asked him.

“‘Tired, but happy.’ He uncurled and stretched out. He said, ‘You’d think I’d be able to sleep at night, but when I get on the bed all I can do is think about her, and I get so excited it’s impossible to fall asleep.’ Then he stared up at the ceiling for a little while. Then he said, ‘I have to think about something. I came here to think, but I can’t really talk about it.’

“I said, ‘Thanks a lot,’ and he said that Lucy Cleveland had asked him to do something.”

Mark refused to tell Jimbo what Lucy wanted him to do but he had—as do I—the feeling that it would have been on her behalf. According to Jimbo, he refused to say any more, except that he was thinking about the choice she had given him. Jimbo wondered if he was deliberating whether or not to tell him the truth, that he had invented Lucy Cleveland to impress his friend. But when Mark spoke, it was to another purpose entirely.

He chuckled, and Jimbo said, “Yo, is something funny?”

“I was just remembering something,” Mark said.

“This better be good.”

“When I was sitting in the living room over there, waiting for her to show herself—and I didn’t know anything about her then, I didn’t even know her name. Back then, she was just the Presence. All I knew was, she was in the house with me, and I knew she was getting closer. I’m sitting on the bottom of the staircase, and all my stupid shit is laid out in front of me. The hammer, the flashlight, that stuff. And I began to smell something really good.”

Mark sensed, knew, understood that the sudden arrival of this delicious odor meant that the presence in the house was on the verge of showing herself to him.

Mark went on: “I just couldn’t believe that I didn’t recognize the smell. It was completely familiar, like almost an everyday smell, but really, really good. I heard a footstep behind the closet door, so she had come down those hidden stairs and was about to walk out through the closet. The next thing I heard was the panel opening up and her taking two steps to the closet door.

“And that’s when I remembered what that smell was—when she opened the closet door and came out. You won’t believe what it was. Chocolate-chip cookies! When they’re still in the oven, but almost done. Bubbling up and already that nice brown color.”

To Jimbo, this was a sure sign that Mark had lost his mind. A beautiful woman who smelled like chocolate-chip cookies? How ridiculous could you get?

No, Mark told him, Lucy Cleveland didn’t smell like chocolate-chip cookies. Lucy Cleveland smelled sort of like sunlight and fresh grass and fresh bread, things like that, if she smelled like anything. The odor was an announcement, it was like a trumpet fanfare. It meant she was here, she was ready to enter.

Jimbo could only goggle at him.

Mark pushed himself off the sofa and said his father never noticed he wasn’t coming home at night. Philip had stopped attending to his curfew. Actually, he had stopped attending to Mark, and the two of them moved around the house like distant planets, connected by only the vestiges of gravity.

Jimbo asked him where he was going now, and if he wanted company.

No, Mark told him. He was just going out, so he would be able to think a little more. Being able to walk around might help.

Sometime between 7:15 and 7:30 Patrolman Jester observed my nephew seated on one of the benches lining the pathway to the fountain. He appeared to be working out some problem or decision; his lips were moving, though Patrolman Jester had no particular interest in what Mark was saying to himself. In any case, he could not hear it.

By the time Jimbo Monaghan had reached the point in his story where Mark was moving down the walk and waving good-bye, he looked barely capable of going on. He slumped into the back of the sofa like a leaky sack of grain.

“What do you think happened to him after that?” Tim asked.

The boy’s eyes found his, flicked away. “Everybody knows what happened to Mark. He walked into Sherman Park, and the Sherman Park Killer, or the Dark Man, or whatever you call him, grabbed him. Mark wasn’t even thinking about his own safety. But don’t ask me what he was thinking about, because I couldn’t tell you. He was in his own little world.” Again the watery red eyes met Tim’s. “I think that terrible house screwed him up, if you care about what I think. It got to him, right from the start. It changed him.”

“What about Lucy Cleveland?”

“There was no Lucy Cleveland,” Jimbo said. He seemed amazingly weary. “A gorgeous nineteen-year-old girl hides out in an empty house and lets a fifteen-year-old boy have sex with her all day long? A gorgeous nineteen-year-old girl that nobody else can see? Yeah, that happens all the time. In books, maybe.”

“Exactly,” Tim said.

Skip poised at the top of the front steps, gazing at Tim while trembling with what looked like the desire to attack. Then it occurred to Tim that the dog was not baring its teeth or snarling, standard behavior for dogs in attack mode. It was trembling with old age, not aggression. The dog was probably cold all the time. Probably Skip spent the whole day on the same few feet of porch because that was where the sunlight fell. Tim extended a hand, and Skip permitted his head to be scratched.

“That poor old animal’s so arthritic he doesn’t move much anymore. Spends all day sacked out in that one spot of sunlight.”

Tim had not heard the front door open. He looked up to see Omar Hillyard gazing at him through the screen door.

“Sort of like me,” Hillyard said. “You decided to come back, I see.”

“Yes,” Tim said. “I hope you don’t mind.” He stepped up beside the dog. Leaning on his cane, Mr. Hillyard opened the screen door, awkwardly. “Just walk around Skip and come on in. He’ll move back to his spot, but it’ll take him a little while.”

Tim took another step, and Skip either moaned or sighed. Tim looked down at the old dog. When Skip got his front end pointed toward his favorite place, his stiff legs began to carry him toward it.

“He makes a splendid noise when he collapses into the sunlight,” Hillyard said.

Together, they watched Skip hobble across the porch. The old dog moved like a clumsy piece of machinery that had been assembled by someone who had failed to read the manual. He reached the little square of sunlight and fell into it, all at once, and landed with an audible thump. He made a sound of pure contentment, like humming, deep in his chest.

“Know just how he feels,” Hillyard said.

He moved back, and Tim walked through the front door into the living room, which bore a generic resemblance to Philip’s, except that the furniture was cleaner and not so old. Stumping in behind him, Hillyard waved toward a brown love seat covered in threadbare corduroy. “That one’s still pretty comfortable. Me, if I sit over here, I can lean my crutch on the footstool, makes it easier to get up.”

He parked himself in a high-backed armchair and propped the cane beside him.

On both sides of the room, framed photographs and drawings of young men, most of them nude, looked out from the walls. Two facing drawings depicted young men in a state of arousal.

“I don’t believe I told you this, but the boy on the left is me,” Hillyard said. “Back in 1946, right after I got out of the army. The other one is my lover, George Olander. He was the artist. George and I bought this house in 1955, when people still used the term ‘bachelor.’ We said we were roomies, and nobody bothered us. George died in 1983, exactly twenty years ago. At first your friend Sancho was thrown off course by these pictures, but he decided not to think about it, and pretty soon he was all right.”

“He came over to ask about Joseph Kalendar.”

“Like you. Actually, he came about the house, but pretty soon that brought us to Joseph Kalendar. I’ve got some iced tea in the kitchen, if you’d care for any.”

“No, thanks.”

“I don’t want you to think I’m inhospitable. Truth is, I’m out of practice. For obvious reasons, George and I never had the neighbors in, and I have continued the tradition. Fact is, I went out of my way to discourage visitors. Then I fell down and hurt myself. But am I supposed to take down all my pictures just because the Monaghan boy comes over here?”

“How are you now?”

“Improving. Nothing broke, thank God. Just busted off a few chips, that’s all.”

Tim’s love seat gave him a perfect view across the street to the Kalendar house. “I didn’t ask you earlier if you ever saw the boys going to that house. It seems they were obsessed with it, my nephew especially.”

“I saw it all,” Hillyard said. “Either from exactly where you are now, or through my kitchen window. I saw your nephew and his friend stare at that place hour after hour. You could always hear them coming, because of their skateboards. I saw them come over here one night and shine a light on the window. Sancho saw something that knocked him flat on his rear end.”

“He told me about that,” Tim said.

“I always wondered if maybe what he saw was the other fellow.”

“Ah,” Tim said, feeling something hitherto unknown slide into a place exactly its size and shape. “The other fellow. They called him the Dark Man. My nephew told Jimbo he was something like a ghost.”

“Not unless ghosts are flesh and blood. Man looked kind of like Joseph Kalendar, except he wasn’t quite so huge. He dressed like Kalendar, too. Long black coat.”

“You saw this man? What did he do?”

“He came around at night. Just like the boys, he went to the back of the house and let himself in. I only saw him a couple of times. Even then, I couldn’t be sure I wasn’t just dreaming.”

“Did you tell Jimbo about this man?”

Hillyard shook his head, looking both fussy and bloated with self-importance. “Didn’t think it was any of his business. Besides, I couldn’t be certain I really did see that guy. It was pretty dark out there, and the shadows have a habit of moving around. Anyhow, the boy only wanted to hear about Mr. Kalendar, and I gave him an earful, but there’s as much of what I didn’t tell him as of what I did.”

“Because you didn’t think it was any of his business.”

“And one more thing.” He smirked at Tim. “He didn’t ask me the right questions.”

“Are you willing to tell me what you didn’t say to Jimbo?”

“If you ask the right questions.”

Tim looked at him in exasperation. “I’ll try. To start with, why don’t you fill me in on what you did tell Jimbo?”

“It was pretty much what I told you, the first time you came here. The man was a psycho killer of the first water,” Hillyard said. “Joseph Kalendar did away with his whole family, and God knows how many women besides. Turned his house into a kind of torture chamber. Brought his own son along with him when he went out raping and murdering, and later on he even murdered the boy! A lunatic, pure and simple. Not that we should have been surprised, mind you. Wouldn’t you say there was something wrong with a man that never wants to show his face?”

Tim thought of the snapshots Jimbo had described to him. “Never? Not just in photographs?”

“The man was extremely uncomfortable showing his face. That’s why he eventually grew that big, thick beard. When he lived around here, Kalendar wore a hat, and he turned up the collar of that coat he was always wearing. Sometimes, he went so far as to hold his hands in front of his face. He was always turning his back on you.”

“Did you have much contact with him?”

“Oh, now you’re asking better questions. Yes, I did, a bit. The man was a good carpenter, after all. When George and I needed some new shelves, we called Mr. Kalendar, and he did a beautiful job. So a few years later, when we found dry rot in some of the timbers and floorboards, we went back to him. Kalendar gave us a good price and replaced all the wood in short order.”

“From what I’ve been hearing,” Tim said, “he must have been a great carpenter. I guess you must have liked him, since you hired him twice.”

“Liked him?” Omar Hillyard scowled. “No one can say I liked Mr. Joseph Kalendar.”

“But he spent a lot of time in your house.”

“His prices were low, and the man lived across the street. Otherwise, we would never have spoken to him, much less had him in our house.”

“Ah.” Tim gestured toward the drawings and paintings on the walls. “He objected to your situation.”

“He hated our situation. The man had religious objections to homosexuality, and no doubt other objections as well. But after he let us know what he thought, and said he was going to pray for us, it wasn’t much of a problem anymore. The problem was him. The problem was what he did.”

“Like what?”

“Joseph Kalendar made rooms feel smaller and darker than they were. He had that power. Just by being there. He removed all the extra air from wherever he was. When you were with him, you felt like you were carrying a tremendous weight. Of what, I can hardly say. Hostility. It was like a black cloud surrounded him. When you were with him, it surrounded you, too. You felt all that stifled anger and hostility and depression even when he was telling you that he would pray for you. I’ve often thought that’s what evil feels like. That the evil in him poisoned the atmosphere and made it awful to be around him.”

“I’ve heard of people like that,” Tim said. “But only in psychoanalytic case histories.”

“Of course you don’t feel it right away. At first, Kalendar seemed like an ordinary, taciturn sort of working man. You had to let him get entangled a bit with you before you got the full effect.”

“Imagine being in the family of a person like that,” Tim said.

“That’s why his wife’s disappearance never aroused much suspicion. We all thought she ran off to get away from him. And the boy wouldn’t have gone with her. He was Kalendar’s assistant in the carpentry business ever since he was old enough to pick up a hammer. Dropped out of school. Completely loyal to his father. That’s why Kalendar wound up taking him along on his excursions. Naturally, after Myra took off they could bring the bodies home, dispose of them in the furnace. That’s where they found what was left of the boy—in the furnace.”

“And here you were,” Tim said. “Living right across the street from him. Didn’t anything ever strike you as funny? Were you even suspicious? Even if you wouldn’t have gone to the police with your suspicions, didn’t you have some?”

“Kalendarstruck me as funny,” Hillyard said. “Are you kid-ding? After I knew he was crazy, everything he did seemed wrong to me.”

“You must have been here when he saved the two children from next door.”

“You did some homework, didn’t you? But it wasn’t next door to here, it was 3325, the house just up the street from him. A black family named Watkins lived in that house.”

“Did you see any of what happened?”

“Saw it all, more or less.”

“Just out of curiosity, did this happen before or after he added the strange extra room to his house and built that wall to hide it?”

“That’s a very good question,” Hillyard said. “He rescued the Watkins family only two days before he started working on that big wall at the back of his property. He must have added the room after he finished the wall.”

“How did you know about the extra room if you’ve never been in the house?”

Hillyard bristled.

“I mow the lawn over there once every couple of months, don’t I? Well, I used to, before I got laid up like this, and I’ll be doing it again, I can tell you that.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply anything.”

“What could you have implied?”

“Nothing,” Tim said, taken aback. “I don’t know. I just meant, I seemed to have annoyed you with an innocent question.” It occurred to him that Hillyard might have been one of the people who tried to burn down Kalendar’s house.

“George used to tell me I sometimes got touchy for no good reason, and I’m probably worse now than I was then. We were talking about Kalendar and the fire. Tell me, Mr. Underhill. You’re a writer. Doesn’t that episode strike you as a little out of character for the man I just described?”

“Wouldn’t a very religious man feel it his duty to rescue people from a burning building?”

“Kalendar hated the blacks,” Hillyard said. “He didn’t even think they were people. I had the feeling he’d have been just as happy if the whole Watkins family had burned to a crisp.”

“My brother told me he kept running back in, he was so determined to save them.”

Hillyard gazed at him, looking superior and self-satisfied, like a cat with a bird in its mouth. “Suppose I tell you what happened, and then see what you think.”

“All right,” Tim said.

“Kalendar was in his backyard when the fire broke out. The flames were mainly at the back of the house, and he had to run around and break down the front door. The whole thing fell down flat. In he charged. Even from my porch, I could hear him yelling, but I couldn’t make out the words. In two or three minutes, a long time in a burning house, he came out, carrying one of the Watkins children and holding the other one by the hand. The kids were screaming and wailing. He sure looked like a hero to me, and I couldn’t stand the sight of the man.

“I called the fire department as soon as I saw smoke, and I was just hoping the trucks would arrive to save Kalendar and the kids’ parents. He dropped the kids down on the front lawn and ran back in. Smoke was pouring out of the side windows, and through the living room window I could see the flames. Right away, he came outside, shoving Mr. and Mrs. Watkins ahead of him. Then he turned around and ran back in. He was yelling a name.”

“A name?”

“‘Lily! Lily!’”

“Who was Lily?”

Hillyard shrugged. “At that point, the fire trucks arrived, and a lot of firefighters ran into the house, and the hoses started up, and in a couple of minutes the firefighters were dragging Kalendar outside and congratulating him for saving the lives of four people. To me, he seemed awfully disoriented, like he wasn’t really sure why these people were being so nice to him. He got away as soon as he could. But the Ledger and the TV people got hold of the story anyway, and they pushed it as far as Kalendar would let them. A racial harmony story, a feel-good story. This was only a few months after the big riots in Chicago and Milwaukee, remember—1968, it was. Detroit, too. Black people burned down their own businesses. It was a hideous tragedy. You must remember it.”

“I was out of the country in 1968,” Tim said. “But you could hardly say that I escaped violence altogether.”

“Do tell.” Hillyard’s eyes went flat. “I went on a lot of marches in 1968. We were marching against racism and against war.”

“Mr. Hillyard, you and I were both unhappy with what was going on in Vietnam.”

“All right,” Hillyard said. Tim could tell things were not all right. Omar Hillyard still had all the noblest principles. If he’d had any medals, he had returned them to the government in 1968 or 1969. When he had marched, he’d held up a sign that read VETERANS AGAINST THE WAR. He couldn’t get over it. He was still pissed off by people like Tim Underhill, whom he thought had taken a great army and marched it into a swamp. People like Underhill had tampered with his pride, and he could not forgive them.

“If I hadn’t been drafted, I would have been marching right alongside you.”

“All right,” Hillyard said again, meaning This subject is now officially closed. “I was talking about Joseph Kalendar and the press. When he refused to cooperate with them, they called him a modest man, a hero who shunned the spotlight. A nice story, you know? But when the reporters began to ask around about the new hero, it fizzled out in a hurry. The world’s most antisocial man wasn’t about to invite reporters and photographers into his house. He put up that hideous wall, and we all thought it was to keep the snooping press out of his backyard. At the front of his house, at least he could see the bastards coming.”

“He couldn’t have been a hundred percent antisocial,” Tim said.

Mr. Hillyard’s expression changed to stubborn frustration. He reminded Tim of photographs of Somerset Maugham in old age.

“Jimbo Monaghan saw pictures of you and other people socializing with Kalendar at a lakeside tavern. He said it looked like quite a party.”

Hillyard’s face relaxed. “How in the world did that boy come across those photos, anyhow?”

“He and Mark found them in the house.”

“Those pictures were taken at a neighborhood party, except it was up at Random Lake, not far from Milwaukee. Someone had a cabin up there, near a little tavern with a pier and a beach. That must have been one of the few times Kalendar did something to make his wife happy. He had a good reason to keep her happy, but all the same, he was Joseph Kalendar. He did his best to enjoy himself, but it was all an act. He hated being there. And the feeling was more or less mutual. Kalendar had the power to kill all the pleasure in his vicinity. I actually felt sorry for him. You could see him going up to people and trying to join in the conversation, which meant he just stood there, until one by one the other men peeled away and left him by himself.”

“What do you mean, he had a reason to keep his wife happy?”

“Myra Kalendar had a big, big belly. She must have been seven or eight months pregnant.”

“With their son, the poor devil.”

“I don’t think so.” Hillyard seemed irritatingly smug. “The party at Random Lake was in 1965. In 1965, Billy Kalendar was four years old.”

“I don’t get it.”

Omar Hillyard continued to smile at him. “A month after the party at Random Lake, Kalendar put out the word that his wife had miscarried. They wanted no calls or notes of sympathy, thank you. You can draw your own conclusions.”

22

From Timothy Underhill’s journal, 27 June 2003

There he was, Omar Hillyard, annoyed with me but still handing me the secret, the key that unlocked the last, inmost door. I remembered Philip telling me that Myra Kalendar had one day appeared at their house in Carrollton Gardens begging Nancy to do something for her. Help me save my child’s life. Did she say, Take her from me?

I explained all of this to Tom Pasmore shortly after I turned up at the big old house on Eastern Shore Drive, but he refrained from comment until we were climbing the stairs to get to the room that contained his computers and computer paraphernalia. He said, “In your view, then, your nephew met Joseph Kalendar’s daughter in that house. She somehow managed to appear before him in physical form, made love to him day after day, and finally talked him into joining her in a kind of spirit-world?”

“Put that way, it sounds absurd,” I said.

He asked me how I would put it.

“I wouldn’t,” I said. “But remember this sequence. Joseph Kalendar really does have a daughter he conceals from the world. Early one morning when she is three years old, she slips out of the house and hides, probably in the back garden or the alley. Kalendar rushes outside to find her and sees that the house next door is burning. Two little girls live in that house. Isn’t it likely that Lily would have watched those girls through the windows, that she would have yearned to play with them? Kalendar thinks so, because he races into the burning house. After rescuing everyone, he charges back in, looking for her. After that, he builds an enormous wall at the back of his garden to hide the next thing he builds, a horrible annex alongside his kitchen. In that room, he tortures his daughter.

“Three years later, his wife makes a desperate attempt to rescue her daughter, but her husband’s cousin, Nancy Underhill, turns her down flat. Philip would never have let her interfere, and he would certainly not have let Kalendar’s daughter move into his house.

“Then comes Kalendar’s meltdown. He murders a lot of women, undoubtedly including his wife and daughter. In 1980, he is arrested and convicted. Five years later, Kalendar is murdered by a fellow inmate, and the story seems to be over.”

We had reached the computer room. Tom walked around turning on the lights and hearing me out, nodding as he went. I didn’t want him to agree with me, I just wanted him to see the pattern.

“This is the interesting part,” I said. “About three weeks ago, my nephew, who has no conscious knowledge of this story whatsoever, suddenly becomes obsessed with Kalendar’s house. His mother forbids him to go near the place. A few days before, a pedophile murderer snatched a boy from Sherman Park.

“My nephew becomes increasingly obsessed with the Kalendar house, and one night he lies to everyone about his plans for the evening and he goes around the block and attempts to break in. He is repulsed by a kind of horrible negative energy. The next day, his mother kills herself.”

“Well, well,” Tom said.

“She’s picking up something from her son. Her guilt comes back to her, and what’s happening in the neighborhood makes it worse. She can’t bear it. The next day, her son finds her body in the bathtub. What do you think that would do to a fifteen-year-old boy, finding his mother’s naked corpse in the bathtub?

“Then Mark returns again and again, finding all the creepy modifications Kalendar made to the house. After two days, he tells his best friend that he senses the presence of a young woman, and on the fifth day, she appears, calling herself Lucy Cleveland. Lucy is hiding from her father, a figure Mark has been calling the Dark Man, and whom he has seen on at least two occasions. Mark says Lucy has a plan, she wants him to do something, and he needs time to think about it. He goes off to the park to think, and is never seen again.”

“Very suggestive,” Tom said. “So you think that while he was in the park, he made up his mind to join Lucy Cleveland and—am I right?—protect her from her father? And after his mind was made up, he went back to 3323 and gave himself to her.”

“Joined her,” I said. “But gave himself to her, too, yes.”

“Do you think he will ever be seen again?”

“I’m sure of it,” I said. Even then, I could not bear to tell Tom about the e-mail I had found, via a program called Gotomypc.com, on my computer at home. “Because he isn’t dead, he’s just elsewhere.”

“You love your nephew, don’t you, Tim?”

Suddenly, my eyes burned with tears.

“How much of what you told me do the police know?”

“As much as they could understand. I tried to get them interested in that house, but they blew me off.”

“Well, I think it’s worth a good, long look. Let’s see what we can discover.” Tom had placed himself before a computer wired up to a machine that resembled an enormous toaster equipped with rows of small red lights. It said VectorSystems on the side, not that I know what that means. Thick cords led from the giant toaster to a number of enigmatic black cubes, some of which clicked and whirred.

“I’ll see him again,” I said to Tom Pasmore.

“If she lets him be seen.”

“There’s always that,” I said. “She will, though. I’ll never talk to him again, but I’ll see him.”

“And that will be enough?”

“Almost enough,” I said.

“When it happens, will you tell me about it?”

“I’ll have to tell someone.”

He smiled up at me, glanced at the screen, then back up at me. “Do you really want me to do this?”

Of course I wanted him to do it.

“Then come around behind me, so you can see, too.”

I moved behind him and watched him type 3323 N. Michigan Street into a blank form he had called up from some municipal office with no idea that Tom Pasmore was roaming through their records. He hit ENTER.

In a nanosecond, these words appeared on his screen:

Ronald Lloyd-Jones

159 Tamarack Way

Old Point Harbor, IL 61725

“Our Ronnie lives in a pretty nice part of town,” Tom said.

“This doesn’t make a lot of sense,” I said. “Millionaires don’t usually mess around in Pigtown . . .”

Old Point Harbor was a long-established eastern suburb of Millhaven with Tudor mansions, Gothic piles, and huge contemporary houses tucked into wooded landscapes on meandering roads illuminated by imitation gas lamps.

“Wait,” I said. “What did you say?”

“I think what I said was, ‘Our Ronnie lives in a pretty nice part of town.’ Isn’t that what we’re talking about?”

“You called him Ronnie,” I said. “It’s Ronnie! The guy in the park.”

“What guy in the park?”`

I told him about the astronomy professor and the boy and the police sketch.

“Amazing,” Tom said. “Your friend Sergeant Pohlhaus should have taken that house a little more seriously.” He looked back at the screen.

“When did Ronald Lloyd-Jones buy our little house, I wonder?” Tom pushed a few keys, and the answer appeared in a window on the screen: 1982.

“He’s owned that place for twenty-one years,” Tom said. “In fact, he bought it even before Kalendar was killed. This could . . . hmmm.”

“Why would a guy from Old Point Harbor buy a house on Michigan Street?” I asked.

Some of what Tom did then must have been illegal. Actually, there’s no way it could not have been, but I have to say it was amazingly effective. Half an hour later, we knew more about Mr. Lloyd-Jones than his parents did.

Ronald Lloyd-Jones was born in Edgerton, Illinois, in 1950. He graduated from Edgerton East High School in 1968. And from the University of Illinois, which he attended on a football scholarship, in 1972. He married pretty Edwina Cass, heiress and orphan, in 1975, and Edwina died in a boating accident in 1978. Lloyd-Jones had inherited approximately twenty million dollars, which matured into something like twice that amount, thanks to the ’90s market and other investments. His portfolio was spread across three brokerage houses. An accountant in Chicago handled his bills. He had never remarried and had no children. His garage housed a Jaguar Vanden Plas, a Chevrolet pickup truck, and a Mercedes sedan. A state-of-the-art security system guarded his home and the ten acres surrounding it. Lloyd-Jones had $65,374.08 in his checking account at First Illinois, and his Visa, MasterCard, and American Express accounts were fully paid up. He bought a lot of things on-line, ’80s rock music and James Patterson novels in particular. At six foot three and 235 pounds, he was a large man; he had an eighteen-inch neck and a forty-inch waistband, and he wore size thirteen shoes. Lloyd-Jones drank single-malt Scotch. He visited porn sites and downloaded photographs, which he attempted to delete the next day. His teeth were perfect. He had a gun room with antique pistols and rifles in glass cases, a music room with astonishingly expensive sound equipment, and a screening room with a big flat-screen plasma TV. The screening room speakers had cost him $250,000. He belonged to no club or social organization. No church numbered him in its congregation. He had never voted. This multimillionaire owned the house in Old Point Harbor, a two-bedroom apartment on Park Avenue and East Seventy-eighth Street, a great little farmhouse in Périgord . . . and the house on Michigan Street, the first property he had ever purchased.

The only photograph Tom could find of this man was his high school graduation photo. “Before it gets dark, I think we should take a little spin out to Old Point Harbor, don’t you?” Tom asked.

“He has a great sound system and a mountain of CDs. This guy really is the Sherman Park Killer. We have to call the police.”

“First we get a look at Ronnie, then we call the police. I don’t want to tell the Millhaven Police Department, especially not Sergeant Franz Pohlhaus, what I just did here. You remember the police sketch pretty well, I hope?”

“Pretty well,” I said.

“Sounds like probable cause to me,” Tom said.

Ten minutes later, I was driving Tom Pasmore up Eastern Shore Drive in my rented Town Car. Twenty minutes after that we had passed from the farthest outposts of Millhaven into Old Point Harbor. The landscape had opened out into gentle hills sprinkled with a lot of oak trees and tamarack pines. Hidden far back from the road, big houses flickered like mirages among the tree trunks.

[After reading a section of an early journal of mine, Maggie Lah said, “You write your journal like it was fiction.” I said, “What makes you think it isn’t?”]

There were very few street signs. It was one of those communities that do not wish to induce comfort in visitors or deliverypeople. In its mild, slightly wayward northern course, Loblolly Road intersected two apparently anonymous streets before crossing a slightly wider road called Carriage Avenue. Either one of them could have been Tamarack Way.

“Keep going,” Tom said. He had a map of Old Point Harbor in his head, as he had maps of a hundred different cities and towns, large and small. “Two streets ahead, you take a left, and Tamarack Way is the first corner you come to.”

“Do I turn right or left?”

“How the hell should I know?” Tom said. “I don’t memorize addresses.”

At the unmarked intersection with what Tom said was Tamarack Way, I turned left and began paying attention to the numbers on the mailboxes. Someone had made a fortune selling rich midwesterners on the idea of oversized mailboxes painted with New England themes: lighthouses, lobster boats, saltbox houses, beach dunes. We passed 85, 87, 88, 90.

“As the waiters at the Fireside Lounge are fond of saying, good choice,” Tom said.

“You’re nice and relaxed.”

“I love this part,” Tom said. “I get to see if I was right.”

We drifted up Tamarack Way, watching the numbers on the mailboxes get higher.

“Just out of curiosity,” I asked, “what do you intend to do when we get to 159?”

“I intend to sit in the car. Who knows, maybe we’ll get lucky and find him outside, uprooting dandelions.”

He was dressed in one of his typical Tom Pasmore outfits, a light-gray windowpane plaid suit with a dark-blue vest, a forest-green patterned tie, the most beautiful crocodile shoes I’d ever seen in my life, and big round sunglasses. He looked like a Danish count masquerading as an architect.

“What do you envision me doing while you sit in the car?”

“I’ll tell you when we get there.”

The number 159 appeared on a standard-fare Old Harbor Point mailbox, an aluminum shell large enough to hold a fleet of toy trucks and embellished with a painting of a steepled old church and a few rows of tilting headstones. Nice touch. A wide black driveway wound in from the road on a long loop toward an immense gray two-story house. Through the trees, we could just make out the glint of a huge circular window set high above the baronial front door. The lawn gleamed an unnatural-looking green.

“Well, he’s not doing any yardwork,” Tom said. “Turn in and drive up to the house.”

I stepped on the brake. “He’s probably watching everything we do. Remember that security system. He’s got cameras all along this drive.”

“But you don’t know that. You’re a tourist in a rented car, and you got lost looking for your cousin’s house on Loblolly Road.”

“You want me to ring his bell?” I was incredulous.

“Can you think of a better way to get a good look at him?”

“Yes. From the other side of a one-way mirror. What if he wants to know my cousin’s name?”

“Your cousin’s name is Arnold Trueright.”

“Give me a break,” I said.

“Seriously. Arnold Trueright is my accountant and he lives at 304 Loblolly Road.”

Shaking my head, I took my foot off the brake and rolled up the long, curving driveway. Gradually, the house came into view. Half Manderley, half Bill Gates. The enormous round window looked like a well-tended blister.

I got out of the car, knowing that at least one camera, and probably two, were trained on me, and thought of “Ronnie” scrutinizing my image. It was a deeply uncomfortable moment. When I looked back at Tom Pasmore, he flipped his hand toward the front door. A team of horses could have fit through that thing. The flat gold button of the bell shone from the fluted center of the frame. I pushed it down and heard nothing. I pushed it again.

Without warning, the door swung open. I found myself looking into the bland face and intense, lively eyes of a large, black-haired man in a blue blazer, a white shirt, and khakis. His nice white smile and nearly snub nose made him appear friendly, harmless, eager to please. Professor Bellinger’s description to the police sketch artist had been as accurate as Sergeant Pohlhaus hoped it would be.

“Sir,” he said, and glanced quickly at Tom in the passenger seat, then back to me. Instantly, he noticed something in my face or eyes. “What? Do we know each other?”

“No,” I said, alarmed. “For a second I thought you looked familiar. I guess you kind of remind me of Robert Wagner twenty years ago.”

“I’m flattered,” he said. “Is there some way I can assist you gentlemen? I’m sure you rang my bell for a reason.”

“We got lost,” I said. “I’m trying to find my cousin’s house on Loblolly Road, but I keep driving around and around past the same houses.”

“What part of Loblolly Road?”

“Number 304.”

He hmmm ed. His eyes were full of light and amusement. My bowels felt cold and watery. “What’s your cousin’s name, by the way? Maybe I know him.”

“Arnold Trueright.”

“Arnold Trueright, the daredevil CPA. Right over on Loblolly, that’s correct.” He gave me excellent directions back the way we had come. Then he peered into the car and gave Tom a cheerful little wave. “Who’s your well-dressed friend? Another cousin?”

In my haste to get away from Ronald Lloyd-Jones’s chilling force field, I said something stupid. “Another accountant, actually.”

“Accountants don’t look like that. Your friend reminds me of someone . . . someone rather well known who lives in town, I can’t think of who it is. Name’s right on the tip of my . . .” Still smiling in Tom’s direction, he shook his head. His own folly amused him. “Never mind. Not important. Take care, now.”

“Absolutely,” I said, and moved away as quickly as I could without revealing my alarm.

Lloyd-Jones disappeared behind his fortress door before I got to the car.

“That was him,” I said. “That’s the son of a bitch who tried to pick up the boy in the park.”

“Sometimes,” Tom said, “I really am forced to admire my genius.”

While we were driving past Arnold Trueright’s beautiful imitation Victorian on Loblolly Road, Tom talked to Franz Pohlhaus on his cell phone. It was simple, he was saying. I’d been so convinced that the Michigan Street house had something to do with Mark’s disappearance that we looked up the property records and drove out to see what its owner looked like. What do you know, he looks just like the police sketch of the mysterious Ronnie! Sounded like good probable cause, didn’t Sergeant Pohlhaus agree?

Evidently, the sergeant did agree.

“Rich people don’t get arrested the way poor people do,” Tom said. “It’s going to take hours to get all their ducks in a row. They’ll get him in the end, however. They’ll come out with a search warrant and tear that house apart. Lloyd-Jones is going to be taken away in handcuffs. No matter how loudly his lawyer yells, he’s going to get arrested, booked, and charged with at least a couple of murders, depending on what and how much they find in his house. He will not get bail. Your Professor Bellinger will positively I.D. him as the man she saw in Sherman Park, and sooner or later, the police will uncover human remains. Just for people like him, I wish this state still had the death penalty. Nevertheless, thanks to you and me, Mr. Lloyd-Jones is going to spend the rest of his life alone in a cell. Unless he’s killed in prison, which is actually pretty likely.”

“I wish Mark were here to see this,” I said. “Boy. I feel like I could run a marathon, or jump over a building. What happens now?”

“Pohlhaus promised to keep me in the loop. He’ll call me after Lloyd-Jones gets processed through, and he’ll let me know if the search of his house turns up anything incriminating. From the look of the guy, they’ll find enough to indict him.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s so arrogant, that’s why. At the very least, I bet we’re going to find out that he’s obsessed with Joseph Kalendar. That’s why he bought that house on Michigan Street. And I bet somewhere in this house, in a closet, an attic room, something like that, he has a little shrine to Joseph Kalendar.”

He took in the expression on my face, leaned toward me, and patted my knee. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to make a stop downtown.”

All the way back to Eastern Shore Drive, I kept seeing Ronald Lloyd-Jones’s face in front of me. The impact he had made on me diminished hardly at all as the miles rolled by. He had smiled, he had called me “Sir” and probed my story. He had been completely accommodating and agreeable. He had frightened me very badly. For far too many people, a number at which I could not even guess, that amused, well-cared-for face had been the last thing they had seen. Ronald Lloyd-Jones had appointed himself the escort to the next world, and he loved his work. After having met him, I was even more grateful that Mark was elsewhere.

As proof or reassurance or something of the kind, he wonderfully showed himself to me while I drove Tom to his errand, which turned out to be picking up a Basque beret and a gray homburg hat at one of the few places in America where such things can still be found. Identifying a serial killer, buying two fancy hats, this was a real Tom Pasmore kind of day. We had just pulled up at the light on the corner of Orson and Jefferson streets, directly across from the little pocket park where on my first day back in Millhaven I had seen two boys who turned out to be Mark and Jimbo. At that moment, just before the light changed, there occurred the remarkable event I alluded to earlier, the one that has elevated my spirits from then to now.

Not looking at anything in particular but merely letting my gaze drift across the immediate surroundings, I happened to take in the large plate-glass window of a crowded Starbucks. Young people read newspapers at small tables or picked at the keyboards of their laptops. The first thing that caught my attention was the stunning combination of almost unearthly beauty and real richness and warmth of character shining forth in the face of a young woman at one of the window tables. No matter how long you live, said a voice in my head, you’ll never see anything more beautiful than that.

A kind of electrical tingle ran up my arms. A boy—a young man—was leaning across the table, saying something to the young woman. I noticed that the young man wore layered T-shirts like Mark’s before I saw that the young man was Mark. He turned his head to the window, to me, and in that half second, two things became radiantly clear: he seemed more adult than he had been, and he was blazingly happy.

It was a gift. Not the only one, but the first. Mark and his “Lucy Cleveland,” whose real name I knew, had exited their elsewhere long enough to display themselves before me in all the fullness of their new lives. After all, the elsewhere was right next door.

The light changed. The horns erupted and hallooed behind me, and I made myself accelerate slowly forward, toward the Pforzheimer and Grand Avenue. A big loop onto Prospect Avenue, then Eastern Shore Drive would bring us home. A share of that blazing joy resided in me now, and I thought it would be mine for eternity. It partook of eternity. What I had seen, that glory, burned in my memory. What I saw there and then, on Jefferson Street at approximately four-thirty in the afternoon, burns in me still, as I sit here in Tom Pasmore’s vast, eccentric living room waiting to hear from Sergeant Pohlhaus or one of his juniors.

God bless Mark Underhill,I say within the resounding chambers of my heart and mind, God bless Lucy Cleveland, too, though already they are so blessed, they have the power to bless me.

This, too, was a blessing, and I had kept it a secret since the day Philip called to accuse me of hiding his son in my loft. I could have said, “Actually, Philip, two days after he vanished, Mark sent me an e-mail,” but certain things about the e-mail made me decide to keep it to myself, at least until I got to Millhaven. The “Subject” and “From” lines would have raised questions I could not have answered, and they might even have led Philip and the authorities to question its authenticity. Certain other things about the e-mail, sitting ever at the back of my mind, had given direction to my search. Philip and Sergeant Pohlhaus would have dismissed it as a fraud, so I had kept it to myself until this moment. But after that incredible gift, I could not resist; I had to share what I knew. So I showed Mark’s “posthumous” e-mail to Tom.

He had made our drinks. We were sprawled on the sofas in the section of the big, mazy room where the sound equipment lives. Tom was tilted back like Henry Higgins, his eyes closed, listening to whatever he’d put in the CD player. Mozart piano sonatas, maybe, Mitsuko Uchida or Alfred Brendel, I don’t know which—I wasn’t paying attention to either the music or what he told me about it. Little Richard could have been playing Mozart. I could barely hear. The roaring of angels’ wings filled my ears.

“This is going to sound pretty crazy to you,” I said.

Tom opened his eyes.

“When we were stopped at Cathedral Square, I saw Mark through the Starbucks window. He was with Lucy Cleveland.”

“You mean Lily Kalendar?” Tom said.

“What she calls herself doesn’t matter,” I said. “You should have seen her.”

“As beautiful as Mark told his friend.”

“You have no idea.”

“If you’d said something at the time, I could have seen them, too.”

“I don’t think I could have said anything. I was so stunned, and then so grateful.”

“You’re sure it was Mark?”

“I couldn’t be wrong about this, Tom.”

“How did he look?”

“A little older. More experienced. Very, very happy.”

“I take it this—sighting—was not an accident.”

“He wanted me to see them. He wanted me to know he was all right.”

Tom said a strange thing then. “Maybe you think he’s all right because the Sherman Park Killer is being arrested this evening.” When it became clear that I had not understood his remark, he added, “Because he can tell us where he put the bodies.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t really get you.”

“Final resting places and all that. Decent burials. No more speculation on the part of the families. Everybody can get down to the business of grief.”

“I don’t have to grieve for Mark,” I insisted. “I’ll see him again, here and there. Maybe I won’t see him now for years, but I will see him again. He can show himself to me anywhere. And he will always be with Lucy Cleveland.”

“I suppose that’s true,” Tom said. “You might see him anywhere.”

“Which means, Tom, that he was not a victim of that monster I talked to today. He was not mistreated and tortured. He was not subject to the desires of that psychotic creep. What happened to Shane Auslander and Dewey Dell and all the others did not happen to Mark Underhill. His name is not on that list.”

“I see,” Tom said, meaning that he didn’t.

“You will,” I said. “I want to show you something. Would you mind going back up to the computer room?”

“You want to show me something on a computer?” He was already standing up.

“I want to show you something on my computer.”

He led me up the stairs. Inside the room, he went around turning on the lights.

“Should I use a specific machine, or doesn’t it matter?” I asked.

“Use the one I used to look up the address.”

I sat down in front of the keyboard and typed in Gotomypc.com, a site that lets me connect to the monitor of my own computer from the keyboard of a remote machine.

I got to the website and put in my user name and password. Much faster on Tom’s T1 line than on Mark’s computer, the screen changed and asked me for my access code. I tapped it in.

On Tom’s beautiful nineteen-inch screen, my seventeen-inch screen appeared, a little smaller and muddier than in reality, but my screen all the same.

“Fascinating,” Tom said. “Do you use all those programs?”

“Of course not,” I said, and clicked on the envelope that stood for Outlook Express.

Three-fourths of the headings in boldface were spam. Size Does Matter, Earn $50,000 in Three Days at Home, Other Singles in Your Area, Free Viagra Pak. I took a moment to delete them.

“Now look at this one.” I clicked on Subject: lost boy lost girl; From: munderhill. “Do you see that date?”

“Um,” Tom said. “Looks like it was sent on Sunday, the twentieth of June.”

“That was two days after Mark’s disappearance.”

“My goodness.” Tom put a hand to his mouth and bent toward the screen. “Right you are. Extraordinary.”

This e-mail appeared on my screen and Tom’s.

From: munderhill

To: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com

Sent: Friday, June 20, 2003 4:32 AM

Subject: lost boy lost girl

u know u have done work enuf

u can rest old writer

we r 2gether

in this other world

rite next door

m

“Print that out,” Tom said.

“If I did, it would use my printer, not yours.”

He grimaced. Nice as he is, Tom likes getting his own way. “‘u can rest old writer’?”

“He’s telling me not to worry about him.”

“‘u know u have done work enuf’? What does that mean? He wants you to stop writing?”

“I’ve done enough for him,” I said. “I’ve done all I have to do.”

“There’s no domain name,” Tom said. “Where did he send it from?”

“From wherever they are.”

“This is astonishing—two days after . . .”

“Back in New York,” I said, “before I knew that Mark’s mother had killed herself and I would have to come here, I saw lost boy lost girl stenciled on the sidewalk. In black paint. The next time I looked, it was gone.”

“They do that to advertise things.”

“I know, Tom. I’m just telling you what I saw. I never even mentioned it to Mark.”

“I think you liked the phrase,” Tom said. “I think you saw it on the sidewalk, and it stuck in your head. Somehow or other, you told Mark about it. That’s the way you work. It’s the way all writers work.”

“You don’t know everything,” I said.

Tom put his hands in his jacket pockets and bent his neck. He frowned at his shoes. “Tim,” he said. His voice was as relaxed and soft as an old glove. “Is this thing real?”

“As real as it can be,” I said.

On a humid, sunny afternoon in June, Mark Underhill sat at the bottom of the stairs in an empty house he knew not to be empty. It never had been, he thought. A presence had inhabited it from the first. The presence was female, and she had come for him. Her arrival in the house, which once had been a stage for the enactment of unspeakable and sacred horrors, had tumbled him off his skateboard and rooted him to the middle of Michigan Street. In what now seemed the last days of his childhood, she had stopped him cold. She had whispered to his mind, to his heart, and without hearing he had heard.

A light footstep sounded from somewhere above him. Successive footsteps proceeded softly overhead, he thought either in the bedroom or the corridor hidden behind it.

Above, a door opened or closed. Mark’s body tightened, then relaxed. He thought he heard faraway laughter.

When he thought of the giant’s bed two rooms away, the entire house filled with heat and light. The ugly added room that contained the bed rang and vibrated with a deep, resonant note that only a second before had melted into the material of the floor and walls. A great tuning fork had been struck. This was what he had been called to witness, Mark thought—this enormous thing that had already passed from view. The great feathers of its mighty wings beat the air, and in the tumult of its wake rode endless loss. His heart filled.

Mark listened to the small, light footsteps descending a staircase parallel to his, but narrower, steeper, and enclosed. When she at last showed herself, if this time she did, she would emerge through the closet door ten feet to his left. The footsteps chimed like brush strokes. It was like hearing someone stepping down a passage within his own head.

As though it shared his substance, 3323 North Michigan contracted, and he felt himself contract around his excitement. The little brush strokes descended another few steps and drew level.

That sound of wing beats; blood rushing through his ears. No, he thought, actual wing beats, those of birds that were not there and, to begin with, were not even birds.

He had no idea what was going to happen to him. He had put himself here, and now he would have to accept what occurred. If there was any comfort in the sudden chill awareness that everything was about to be immeasurably different, it was that he had not been placed in this moment randomly, by luck or chance. It had been waiting for him ever since the house had risen up before him like a castle rising from a plain.

Trembling, he shifted, drew up his knees, and fixed his eyes on the closet door. There came the pad of a soft footfall, the first faint click of a doorknob gripped and revolved. In the quarter second before the door began to swing open, time stopped for Mark Underhill.

Dust motes hung unmoving in the still air.

There came a sound, quiet at first, not to be identified. As it grew, he thought it was the overtone of a note from an upright bass, hanging in the air after the note itself had faded—

Then he thought he heard the hot buzzing metallic hum of a thousand cicadas. A mindless drone, greedy, intrusive . . . were there cicadas in Millhaven?

Cicadas?he thought. I don’t even know what a cicada looks like!

Ten feet to his left, the door opened on its hinges, and unlocked from some old chamber in his memory, the smell of chocolate-chip cookies drifted toward him—his mother had been baking cookies, and now they were swelling swelling swelling on the baking pan, melting beyond their boundaries, pushing up and forward and out. A slight figure slipped into the room.

That day, she told him her name.

The next, she threw off the simple things she had been wearing, then undressed him, and led him to the sheet-covered sofa. After that, Mark felt as if branded. She brought him hand in hand to the giant’s terrible bed and taught him to arrange his limbs in its grooves and hollows, which received her as well as him, so that they seemed almost to remake the giant’s bed beneath them as they moved.

He could not say to Jimbo: I wore her body like a second skin.

Is this real?he asked.

As real as it can be,she said. As real as I can make it.

Time changed its old, old nature and gave them its first, primal face. A single hour rocketed by in a lazy month. There was no time.

Go now and think,she said. Do you leave your world with me or in some lesser way? For all in your world must in their own time leave it.

She said, Make haste make haste the sun swims round the Dark Man cometh. But you may come with me.

Mark met his dearest friend and knew he would do so no more. He walked into the park on a summer evening and sat on a familiar bench. The first faint coolness of the coming night touched his cheek. The breeze said, Make haste make haste. Soon he rose and walked.

23

“Apparently he wants to talk to you,” Philip said. “You know that. I already told you.”

“It would be nice to know why.”

Philip pulled into a parking lot a block away from police headquarters, where some nineteen hours earlier Ronald Lloyd-Jones had been fingerprinted, photographed, stripped of his valuables and personal items, and formally charged with multiple homicides. The attending officers considered that he had endured these humiliations with an unsettling degree of good humor. He had refused to make a statement until his lawyer was present, but guess what? His lawyer was on a golfing vacation in St. Croix and would not be returning for another two or three days. Under the circumstances, he requested the dignity of a private cell, regular meals, and the use of legal pads and writing implements with which he could, as he said, “begin to organize my defense.” And, oh, by the way—did his arrest have any connection to the two gentlemen who had driven up to his house that afternoon, asking directions to Loblolly Road? The first half dozen officers he encountered knew nothing and, repulsed by their big, smiling captive, would have remained silent even if they had been able to answer his question. The seventh officer Lloyd-Jones met in the course of his busy afternoon was Sergeant Franz Pohlhaus. Pohlhaus informed Lloyd-Jones that he could not go into that matter.

—Then tell me, Lloyd-Jones said, since you must feel you have grounds for my arrest, were you acting on the basis of an identification made from a sketch?

Franz Pohlhaus allowed that a police sketch had played a role in the events of the afternoon.

—Was your witness the strange old lady who approached me in Sherman Park while I was engaged in an innocent conversation?

—Anything is possible, sir.

—Sounds like a yes to me. And the man who came to my front door was checking out my resemblance to the sketch made from that woman’s description?

—I cannot really tell you that, sir.

—This man came accompanied by someone else. If I am not mistaken, the gentleman accompanying him was Mr. Thomas Pasmore.

—You are not mistaken, Pohlhaus said.

—I am honored.

That was it for the rest of the evening. Ronald Lloyd-Jones was granted his single-occupancy cell, a dinner he declined to eat, and writing implements. The following morning the sergeant once again met Lloyd-Jones in an interrogation room. Lloyd-Jones complained of being unable to bathe himself, and Pohlhaus explained that he would not be able to shower until the initial proceedings had been completed. Unless he wanted to give a full confession at that moment, his shower would have to be delayed until the arrival of his attorney.

—If that’s how you want to play it, Lloyd-Jones said. But in your position, I would do everything in my power to make me a comfortable prisoner.

—You seem pretty comfortable to me, Mr. Lloyd-Jones, Pohlhaus said.

Lloyd-Jones said he had been doing some thinking, primarily about Thomas Pasmore. —I read the papers like everyone else, you know, and I have some idea how Mr. Pasmore works his miracles. Uses public documents and public records a good deal, doesn’t he?

—That is well known, Pohlhaus said.

—Sounds to me like a fellow who’s good with computers and codes and passwords could get into a lot of trouble that way. If he were to step outside of the legal limits, all sorts of evidence would be inadmissible, wouldn’t it?

This gave Sergeant Pohlhaus an uneasy moment. He had no idea how many legal boundaries Tom Pasmore might have stepped over.

—Would you be willing to tell me who the other man was, the one I actually spoke to?

—You’re going to find that out anyhow, as soon as your lawyer shows up, so I might as well tell you. His name is Timothy Underhill.

—Timothy Underhill the writer?

—That’s right, yes.

—You’re kidding me.

Pohlhaus gave him a glare that would have burned the eyelashes off an ordinary man.

—Forget everything I told you, Lloyd-Jones said. Get Tim Underhill to come down here, because I want to talk to him. I want to talk to him now. I’m not talking to anyone else until that happens.

“I think he knows you,” Pohlhaus told Tim as the three of them went through the maze of corridors. “Your books, I mean.”

“What gives you that idea?”

“His reaction to your name.”

Tim was a little winded from their race through the hallways. In the rush, he had been able to take in only Pohlhaus’s excitement and, pinned to the message boards they passed, the usual business cards offering the services of lawyers specializing in divorce. Pohlhaus came to a stop in front of a green door marked B.

“He wants to talk to you alone,” he said. “Your brother and I, along with the lieutenant from the Homicide Squad, will be watching through a one-way mirror. A voice-activated machine will record everything the two of you say.”

“What do you want me to do?” Tim asked.

“Let him talk. See if you can get him to say anything about your nephew. You could ask him about Joseph Kalendar. With luck, maybe he’ll divulge where he hid the bodies. What can I tell you? The more he says, the better.”

“Is he in there now?” Tim felt a moment of irrational terror. Despite his curiosity, walking into that room was the last thing he wanted to do.

Pohlhaus nodded. “Let me give you a proper introduction.”

He opened the door, and for a second Tim thought he smelled something acrid, smoky, and bitter. Then Pohlhaus walked into the room, and the odor disappeared. Fighting the impulse to turn around and walk away, Tim followed the sergeant’s tall, slender back, straight as a plumb line, into the interrogation room. The man at the far side of a wide green metal table had already risen to his feet, and was staring at him with an expectant smile. Apart from the light in his eyes and his expression of comic chagrin, he could have been a fan waiting in an autograph line.

“You two have met before,” Pohlhaus said. “Tim Underhill, Ronald Lloyd-Jones.”

Lloyd-Jones grinned and held out a firm, pink hand, which Tim reluctantly shook.

“Mr. Lloyd-Jones, you may wish to remember that you are being observed, and that your conversation will be recorded. Once again, anything you say may be used against you. And I would like you to verify that you have declined to have your attorney present for this interview.”

“Bobby will get his turn later,” Lloyd-Jones said.

“Then I will leave you to it.”

As soon as Pohlhaus had left, Lloyd-Jones gestured to the chair on the other side of the table and said, “We might as well make ourselves comfortable.”

Unwilling to surrender control so quickly, Tim said, “Satisfy my curiosity. Why did you ask to see me?”

“I like your books—what other reason could I have? You’re one of my favorite writers. Have a seat, please.”

They lowered themselves to their chairs.

“My friend, you need a new author photo,” Lloyd-Jones said. “If the sergeant hadn’t told me who you were, I’d never had recognized you. How old is that picture, anyhow?”

“Too old, I gather.”

“Make your publisher pay for someone good, someone with style. You have a nice face, you know, you should make the most of it.”

The way you made the most of yours,Tim said to himself.

Which was exactly what Lloyd-Jones wanted him to think, he realized. He had no real interest in Timothy Underhill; he wanted to amuse himself. No mere incarceration could keep him from playing his games.

“I’m sorry I failed to recognize Tom Pasmore before you drove away. One of Millhaven’s most famous residents, wouldn’t you say?”

Tim nodded. This encounter was beginning to make him feel as though soon he would have to lie down.

“I suppose Mr. Pasmore was the one who thought I was worth a visit. To compare with the sketch, I mean.”

“Yes,” Tim said.

“What exactly was his basis for focusing on me?”

“Your name came up.”

Lloyd-Jones gave him a smile of pure sympathy. Light danced in his slightly close-set eyes. “Let’s think about that a little more. I understand from reading about your friend that he gets many of his—shall we say, inspirations?—from public records. So clever, I’ve always thought. If you can remember, I’d be very interested to know if it was something in the public records that brought my name to Mr. Pasmore’s attention. And to yours, of course.”

“It was, yes.”

“Tom Pasmore, true to form. And what sort of records were they, Tim? Tax records, something of that sort?”

“We wanted to find out who owned Joseph Kalendar’s old house,” Tim said. “And there you were.”

Lloyd-Jones blinked, and some of the suppressed glee drained from his face. He recovered almost instantaneously. “Oh, yes, of course. I bought that little place as an investment, then never did anything with it. Let’s go on to something a great deal more important to me.

“Here I am, identified by you as the person some elderly female described to a police sketch artist after something silly brought him to her attention. She objected to a harmless chat I was having with a delightful young man in Sherman Park. I freely admit to being the man in the sketch, for I certainly am the man who was chatting with the boy. But I believe that is about as far as you can go, isn’t it?”

The room seemed to be a degree or two warmer and a bit darker and dimmer, as if the overhead lights were failing.

“Go with what?”

“The identification. A woman sees me in the park, a police artist draws up a sketch, you see a resemblance between me and the sketch . . .” He looked up at the mirror behind Tim’s head. “And what does that prove, Sergeant? Nothing at all. It certainly is not the basis for an arrest, is it, unless talking to people in the park has suddenly become a crime.”

“I suppose they must have more to go on.”

Lloyd-Jones regarded Tim as he would a charming though backward pupil. “Why in the world should you and Mr. Pasmore have been interested in that little house on Michigan Street?”

Tim took a photograph Philip had given him from his pocket and slid it across the table toward Lloyd-Jones, who raised his expressive eyebrows and gazed blandly down at it. “Nice-looking boy. Your son?”

“My nephew, Mark Underhill. Does he look familiar to you? Have you ever seen him before?”

“Let me see.” He drew the photograph toward him and bent over it. The thought that he might touch it made Tim feel ill.

Lloyd-Jones smiled at him and deliberately, using only the tips of his fingers, slid the photograph back across the table. “I don’t think he looks familiar, but it’s hard to be sure. Especially with an old photograph like that one.”

“Mark was fascinated with what you called that little house on Michigan Street. According to his best friend, he went so far as to break in and look around. He found all kinds of interesting things. It didn’t take him long to learn its history.”

“That’s really too bad. I’m sorry to hear it.”

“Why is that, Mr. Lloyd-Jones?”

“Please—call me Ronnie. I insist.”

The thought of Franz Pohlhaus watching from the other side of the mirror made Tim acquiesce. “If you like.”

“Good. Of course, what I find regrettable is that your nephew trespassed on my property. And since you have told me that he did, I must tell you that although I could not recognize him from that picture, I did in fact notice a teenage boy lurking around that house from time to time.”

“How did you happen to notice him, Ronnie?”

“From inside, how else? Through the window. Now and again, I used the place as a getaway. I liked to go over there and collect my thoughts. It was extraordinarily peaceful. I’d just sit in the dark and, I suppose you could say, meditate. Your nephew’s persistent attentions were a terrible distraction. One night he and his friend went so far as to shine a light in the window. I was in there at the time, and I sort of showed myself. Scared the hell out of the little snoops.”

“Were there other times when you deliberately showed yourself to my nephew?”

A smile tucked the corners of Ronnie’s mouth. “Yes, a few. Once, I stood up the hill with my back turned to him. I did things like that a couple of times. I was hoping it might frighten him off, just a bit.”

“Did you ever go into his house? On the day of his mother’s funeral, did you let yourself into his kitchen?”

Ronnie looked shocked. “Please let me express my sympathy for the loss of your sister-in-law. But no, of course not. I’d never do a thing like that.”

“Why did you think standing with your back to him would be frightening?”

“Because of Joseph Kalendar, of course. Kalendar was in the habit of turning his back on photographers. He did it as often as possible. I assume that Kalendar was the reason for the boys’ fixation on my property.”

“You were interested in Kalendar yourself, weren’t you?”

“Most people in this city were interested in Joseph Kalendar, at one time.”

“In 1980, maybe. Not now.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that, Tim. Have people forgotten about Jack the Ripper? Men of colorful accomplishments tend to be remembered long after their deaths. Wouldn’t you agree?”

The walls seemed to have drawn in, the air become foul. The rage and depression streaming from smiling Ronnie Lloyd-Jones made Tim feel as though he were trapped in a cave with him. It was as if Ronnie were standing on his chest.

“Up to a point, I agree with you.”

“I am very, very happy to hear that, Tim. I have a proposition to make to you.”

Tim knew what the “proposition” was going to be, and the thought of it made him feel sick.

“Can I be frank, Tim? I’d like nothing better than to be frank with you.”

“Sure, you be Frank. I’ll be Dino.”

Tim was looking hard at a spot on the table between his spread-out hands. The muscles in his neck and upper arms had begun to ache. A long time ago, someone had used a pocketknife to scratch a slogan into the top of the table. THEEZ COPPS SUK.

“You’re a brilliant writer, Tim. You understand things. You’re insightful. And you’re a great storyteller.”

“Don’t do this,” Tim said.

“We could do an enormous amount of good for each other. I want it to be a partnership. The second I heard that you were the man who came to my door yesterday, I understood why you’d come. You’re the only person in the world who could do justice to my story.”

Before Tim had time to react, Ronnie Lloyd-Jones leaned across the table and forced him, as if by black art, to meet his eyes.

“Please understand me—I’m not confessing to anything. I say this to you personally and for the record. I am completely innocent of these Sherman Park murders, so of course I can’t confess to them. What I can do, however, and this might be helpful to everyone, is to describe a certain hypothetical situation. Shall we consider this hypothetical situation?”

“I don’t think I could stop you,” Tim said.

“I’m going to pretend that I am the Sherman Park Killer. If I were guilty of his crimes, I would be able to give you complete details of every murder, going back to before people knew there was a Sherman Park Killer. If I were guilty of those crimes, I would give you access to every aspect of my life. Still speaking hypothetically, I would tell you exactly where to find the bodies. All of them. I assure you, there would be a tidy little number.”

“Impossible,” Tim said.

“All I’d expect is an account that presented my hypothetical point of view. Fair-mindedness is what we’re looking for here. Joseph Kalendar would have to be a part of it. The spiritual rapport, the scale of his achievement. The scale of mine, plus a close look at the workings of my psyche.

“Let me make it easy for you, Tim. If you accept, I’ll guarantee you compensation in the amount of one million dollars. I’ll give you twice that if the book turns out as well as it should. This is irrespective of whatever advance you get from publishers. Your publishers are going to do cartwheels. Remember Mailer and The Executioner’s Song? I can do wonders for your career.”

“I can’t stand this horrible bullshit anymore,” Tim said, looking over his shoulder at the mirror behind him. “I’m getting out of here.”

Seconds later, Sergeant Pohlhaus strode into the room and said, “This conversation is now at an end.”

When Pohlhaus led Tim out of the interrogation room, Philip surged forward. “What’s wrong with you? He was going to tell you where he buried my son!”

“Mr. Underhill,” Pohlhaus said. The authority of his tone instantly silenced Philip. “It is extremely unlikely that Lloyd-Jones would have told your brother the truth. He would have fed him one story after another, having the time of his life.”

“I’m sorry to let you down,” Tim said, “but I couldn’t agree to work with him. I couldn’t even lie about it.”

“You did a fine job,” Pohlhaus said. “I’m very happy with what happened in there.”

“I never saw anyone turn down two million dollars before,” Philip said. “Did you enjoy throwing all that money away?”

Unable to help himself, Tim burst into laughter.

“There isn’t any two million dollars,” Pohlhaus said. “The money was bait, like the CDs he promised to give the boys. Mr. Lloyd-Jones is aware that he’s going to spend the rest of his life in jail, and he was trying to arrange a hobby for himself. Plus whatever else he could get out of having your brother write about him. Let’s duck in here, okay?” He opened the door to the room in which he had met the parents of the missing boys.

“I think we’re done here, Sergeant,” Philip said.

“Indulge me, Mr. Underhill.”

Once inside, they took their old places at the table, with Pohlhaus at the head and Philip and Tim seated on his right side.

Pohlhaus leaned forward to look at Tim. “Did you notice when Ronnie lost his composure?”

“When I asked if he’d ever gone into Philip’s house?”

“And what was the purpose of that?” Philip roared.

Pohlhaus ignored him. “It happened when you told him that Tom Pasmore discovered that he owned Joseph Kalendar’s old house.”

“What did your men find at his house?” Tim asked. “Pictures of Kalendar?”

“Pictures, articles, clippings, even clothes like Kalendar’s. . . . One of his rooms is like a Kalendar museum.”

“You can’t convict someone on those grounds,” Philip snapped.

“Conviction won’t be a problem,” Pohlhaus said. “We found photographs of boys who looked drugged, photos of boys tied up, and photos of boys who were obviously dead. It’s clear that Mr. Lloyd-Jones assumed his house would never be searched. He kept wallets and watches, articles of clothing.”

“Did you find Mark’s clothes?” Philip asked.

“At this point, we haven’t identified any of the clothing,” Pohlhaus said. “We will, and we’ll do it before long. It isn’t just clothing and photographs, either. Ronnie had the fanciest stereo system you ever saw in your life, and yes, he owned a thousand CDs. But the ones he kept next to his CD player had all been burned on a laptop equipped with a camera. They’re like home movies. The one I looked at showed boys pleading for their lives.”

“Did he kill them at the house in Old Point Harbor?” Tim asked.

“Yes. It’s nice and secluded.”

“Which leaves the question, What made him so uneasy about our knowing he owned Kalendar’s house?”

“Exactly,” Pohlhaus said. “I want to go over there and poke around. If you promise to behave, you can join me. Just don’t touch anything or get in the way.”

“Now?” Tim asked. “Well, why not?”

“You can’t be serious,” Philip said.

“You’re invited, too, Mr. Underhill, under the same conditions.”

“The whole idea is ridiculous.”

“All right, then,” Pohlhaus said. “Drive yourself home. Your brother can drop in on you later, if there’s anything to report.”

“Philip?” Tim said.

“I don’t care what you do,” Philip said, already bolting from the room.

From Timothy Underhill’s journal, 28 June 2003

One of the strangest trips of my life, that drive to Michigan Street with Sergeant Pohlhaus. Ronnie Lloyd-Jones’s toxins had not yet fully left me, and I kept having the fantasy that the unmarked car was the size of a go-cart, and that Pohlhaus and I were like a pair of dwarfs hurtling through an underground tunnel. The man made me feel depressed and unclean, blocked in every way. I suppose that’s one way to define evil: as the capacity to make other people feel unclean and stifled. Philip scarcely made me feel much better, although then more than ever I saw him as the clueless little boy paralyzed by Pop’s aimless brutality.

Pohlhaus pulled into the little half-drive, and we got out and walked around to the back. I thought of Omar Hillyard perched on his love seat, watching everything we did. His eyes were practically drilling into my back.

Like Mark, we went in through the back door, but I felt nothing of what he had on first going into Kalendar’s house. It was almost disappointing. I had been half-expecting the ectoplasmic spider webs, the terrible smell, and the rejecting force field. Instead, all that happened was that the sergeant and I walked into an empty kitchen.

“Ronnie didn’t spend a lot of time in this place,” Pohlhaus said. “He said he tried to scare the boys away, didn’t he? Why should he bother?”

“Maybe there was something he didn’t want them to see,” I said.

“That’s what I think.”

“But Mark went all through the house,” I told him. “And he didn’t find anything except what Joseph Kalendar left behind.”

“So let’s look at what Kalendar left behind,” Pohlhaus said.

Unlike the boys, we began with the added room and what Mark had called “the giant’s bed.”

“God, that’s nasty,” Pohlhaus said.

“Kalendar had a daughter,” I said. “He told everyone his wife had miscarried, and he kept the child a secret from everyone outside the house. When she was three or four, she tried to escape, and he added this room and slapped this so-called bed together so he could torture her on it.”

“Where does this stuff come from? There was no daughter.”

“Not officially, no. But she existed.”

“And we never knew anything about this daughter? That’s hard to believe.”

“If you want to hear the story, talk to a man named Omar Hillyard. He’s lived across the street since 1955.”

Pohlhaus gave me an interrogative glance. “I think I’ll do that.” He prodded the straps with a ballpoint pen.

Mark and “Lucy Cleveland” came vividly to mind: they had coupled here to vanquish the memory of her torture; or to accomplish some darker, still restorative purpose. What you can’t convert, you can sometimes incorporate exactly as is, or so I found myself thinking. Either way, you make it yours.

Together, we walked through every inch of that place. I saw exactly where Mark had been when he found the photograph album; I saw the hole in the plaster he made with his crowbar; like him I moved down the narrow secret corridors and staircases between the walls. In the living room, I saw their footprints in the dust, Mark’s and Jimbo’s, and some that must have been Ronnie Lloyd-Jones’s. I also thought I saw the small, high-arched traces of Lucy Cleveland’s lovely naked foot.

Sergeant Pohlhaus was astonished by the hidden passages. All of this was new to him. The peculiarities Kalendar had added to his house had never figured in the official accounts of his crime, because they had remained undiscovered until Mark opened them up.

In the basement, a real warren, the old coal-burning furnace that had been original to the house stood next to an oil burner installed sometime in the fifties. The newer heating system was piped into the old flues.

Here were the chute and the metal “operating table” Mark had described to Jimbo, the empty hampers and the trunk filled with women’s hair—the legacy of Joseph Kalendar’s insanity.

“This is what turned Ronnie on,” I said.

Pohlhaus nodded. He was moving carefully around the furnace, picking his way through the old stains as he stared down at the floor. I watched him bend down on a clear spot and look at a blackened feather of blood as if he expected it to sit up and talk. When he had enough of the old stains, he stood up again and went around to the front of the older of the two furnaces. He swung open its heavy door. From a jacket pocket he pulled out a flashlight the size of a ballpoint pen and shone it into the furnace’s maw.

“Pretty clean,” he said.

I thought he was acting exactly like a civil servant. I did my best to play along. “Didn’t Kalendar burn some of his victims in there?”

“That he did.” Pohlhaus swung shut the furnace door and began to do his tiptoeing-through-the-tulips act again with the antique bloodstains. He turned his little pocket flashlight on the floor, and when the narrow beam of light fell on the stains, they seemed to turn purple, as if they were molten at the core.

I said, “You wouldn’t think there’d be color like that in thirty-year-old bloodstains.”

“They aren’t that old,” he said. “Some of them might be ten years old, but most of them were deposited more recently.”

“How could that be?” I asked, still not getting it.

“Joseph Kalendar didn’t spill this blood,” Pohlhaus said. “Your friend Ronnie did. This is where he brought some of the boys he abducted. Your brother suspected that we would find something like this. That’s why he couldn’t face the idea of coming along.”

I looked at the floor in horror.

“The next question is, Where did he bury the bodies?”

The faces of dead boys stared up at me from a few inches beneath the concrete.

“Not down here,” he said. “This whole surface is uniform and intact. We have to check outside.”

I must have looked stunned, because he asked me if I was all right.

we r 2gether,I remembered.

He pulled out his cell phone as we walked up the stairs. Half of what he said into it was code, but I understood that he was asking for a crime-scene unit to be detailed to Michigan Street, along with two pairs of officers.

“You look a little off your feed,” Pohlhaus said. “If you’d like to go to your brother’s house while I do this, I’d understand. Or if you’d like to go back to the Pforzheimer, I’ll have one of my officers take you there.”

I told him I was fine, which was stretching a point beyond recognition.

“I won’t send you away if you still want to help out here,” Pohlhaus said. “But your family was involved, and this might be hard for you.”

“My nephew is okay.”

“Your brother doesn’t seem to share your opinion.” Pohlhaus scanned me with his hunter’s eyes. I was sure that he had no doubt as to Mark’s fate.

“Philip gave up as soon as Mark vanished. He couldn’t bear the anxiety of wondering if his son was still alive. So he quit wondering.”

“I see.”

“He buried his own son. I’ll never forgive him for it.”

“If your nephew is okay, where is he?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

We were standing at the top of the basement stairs, just inside the door to the kitchen. Some of those footprints in the dust were Mark’s, and some of them were another’s.

Pohlhaus said, “Let’s go out in back.”

We went outside onto the broken steps. Insects buzzed in the tall grass. “We have dogs that can sniff out bodies, but for the moment let’s see what we can do by ourselves, all right?”

“Look at those weeds,” I said. “Nobody’s been buried back here, at least not recently.”

“You could be right, Mr. Underhill.” He stepped down into the waist-high tangle of weeds and grasses. “But he did kill his victims here, at least some of them. And given his reverence for Joseph Kalendar, I think this yard is still a good bet.”

I stepped down beside him and pretended to know what I was looking for.

The trail beaten down by Mark and Jimbo, then by Mark alone, straggled toward the wooden steps and the kitchen door from the lawn on the south side of the house. There were no other signs of passage through the backyard.

“If he carried the bodies out here, there’d be beaten-down grass, there’d be some kind of trail.”

“Don’t give up so soon,” Pohlhaus said. He loosened his tie and wiped his handkerchief across his forehead. In spite of this gesture he still looked impervious to the heat. My hair was glued to my head with perspiration.

“Do you know how you can always tell if you’ve found a place where someone stashed a corpse?”

I looked at him.

“Push in a shovel. A stick does just as well. All you need is an opening. The smell builds up underground, waiting to jump out at you.”

“Swell,” I said. “I still say he couldn’t have buried anything back here. We’d be able to see his tracks.”

Pohlhaus began ambling along toward the back of the yard and the big fence. He was moving slowly and keeping his eyes on the ground. I shuffled here and there, positive I would find nothing. After a little while, I realized that Pohlhaus was moving in a straight line for about six feet, then turning on his heel and reversing himself along the path he had just taken. In effect, he was creating a grid, which then could be linked to other grids until every inch of the weedy ground had been inspected.

“You can leave, if you want to. In another couple of minutes, we’re going to be drowning in cops here.”

I said if he wasn’t going to give up, neither was I.

The forensic team showed up, and after introducing me, Pohlhaus went inside to show them the basement and the bloodstains. The patrolmen rolled up and were organized to put up crime-scene tape and keep civilians away.

“At this point, you’d better stand down, Mr. Underhill,” he told me.

Two uniformed men I remembered seeing in Sherman Park divided the front half of the yard between them. They were wasting their time, I knew. I wanted to see Pohlhaus admit he’d been wrong.

A criminalist named Gary Sung, who had been introduced to me as a trainee from Singapore, popped out of the back door, waved Pohlhaus toward him, and engaged in a brief conversation that required his pointing several times toward the wall. I had no idea what they were talking about, so I ignored it. I was leaning against the side of the house, just at the edge of the overgrown yard.

The two officers I had seen in the park, Rote and Selwidge, looked at something and called for Pohlhaus. He walked up to them and stared down at whatever they had discovered. He waved me toward them. When I got there, I saw what the height of the grasses had until then kept from view. Someone, having decided to clear a long strip of ground about three feet wide and running the length of the property from fence to fence, had overturned the earth in that strip a thousand times, breaking up the surface, softening the ground, and leaving a nice fat stripe of brown earth, through which only a few weeds had begun to protrude. It had been cultivated, that little strip of land.

“I wonder,” I said. “If that’s it, how did he . . .?”

“If I’m right about what Gary Sung told me, any minute now we’re going to see him pop up out of the ground right over . . . there.”

He had just spotted exactly what he had been hoping to see.

“Out of the ground?” I asked. Then I understood: I knew what he had known for the previous twenty minutes or so.

There came a groaning noise, and the sound of earth and pebbles clattering into a hole. Exactly at the few square feet of ground where the sergeant was pointing, a panel of weeds and grass swung up into the air and fell away, revealing the sweaty, smiling face of Gary Sung.

“It’s dahk in there!” Sung crowed.

I moved toward his head, which by stages rose out of the ground as he climbed up the steps built into the earth.

“Do you believe this madman?” Sung sprang out of the hole, waving an entrenching tool. “He dug a tunnel and hid it behind a daw you can’t see!”

Mark had not noticed the door in the basement wall; Sergeant Pohlhaus and I had failed to see it; only Gary Sung had seen it, and he was transported with pleasure. “So now we know,” he said. “Gotta be careful.”

“Very careful,” Pohlhaus agreed. He looked at me. “Our Dangerous Materials Squad handles this kind of thing. I’ll get them out here. We’ll probably want to pull down that miserable wall, give us some room to maneuver.”

He went up to the strip of ground that looked like temporarily neglected farmland. “Gary, give me that tool, please.”

Gary Sung went across eight feet of ground and passed it to him, handle first.

“Come over here,” Pohlhaus said to me.

I moved up beside him. He hunkered down next to the wide brown stripe on the ground, slid the entrenching tool into the soft earth, and scooped away some dirt, then a little more. “Ah,” he said. I bent over and caught the stench drifting out of the little opening Pohlhaus had made; death and rot and ammonia, a smell of primal process. In a second, it seemed to coat my skin.

I’ve been writing for more than an hour, and I can’t go on. Anyhow, some kind of earthmoving machine is coming up the alley, making a noise like a motorcycle gang.

Tim put down his pen and thought about what he was going to do next. Dressed in his Principal Battley costume of gray suit, white shirt, and necktie, Philip had announced that he had no interest in “standing around” in his backyard and “gawking at” the police while they leveled the cement wall and excavated for bodies. While Tim had occupied himself with his journal, Philip had wandered around the house, snapping the television on and off, picking up magazines and putting them down again. Around three P.M., Philip clumped up the steps; he reappeared downstairs ten minutes later minus the necktie.

“I hope you’re not going to stand out there and watch,” he said. Without his necktie, he looked oddly naked, like a man seen for the first time without his glasses.

“They’re just going to knock down a wall,” Tim said.

“I mean after that.” He was obviously in anguish, and just as obviously had no idea of how to cope with it. “Anybody can knock down a wall. I could knock down a wall. Even you could knock down a wall. It’s the part that comes after. You might want to spectate, but not me. I’m serious.”

“Spectate?” Tim said.

“Frivolity is par for the course with you, isn’t it?” He charged into his den.

“I never heard the word before,” Tim said to himself. “Spectate. Philip chooses not to spectate.”

The living room seemed to retain some of the tension of Philip’s little speech and annoyed departure. Tim felt like moving around, going somewhere, yet he did not want to leave Philip alone, if only because it would be counted against him later. Then he remembered that Mark’s computer—the very computer from which he had e-mailed his Uncle Tim—was still upstairs, waiting to be used. With the help of good old Gotomypc.com and Mark’s laptop, he could spectate his e-mail, see if anyone interesting had written to him, and clean out the spam before it became overwhelming. It would be a way to fill the time: spam as distraction.

“Philip,” he said to the obdurate door, “I’m going upstairs to look at my e-mail on Mark’s computer. Do you mind?”

Philip said he could do whatever he liked.

Upstairs, Tim sat in Mark’s desk chair and clicked open the lid of the laptop. He felt slightly guilty, as if he were trespassing on his nephew’s privacy. Instantly, the computer screen sprang to life. Icons in neat rows arranged themselves across a charcoal-green field. Tim clicked an icon and waded through the inevitable commands and delays before he managed to get connected.

On a dial-up modem, his program moved with excruciating sluggishness, and the server was having a grouchy, error-ridden day. After three tries, Tim finally succeeded in linking up with his computer at home. Using Mark’s mouse, he moved his cursor to the Outlook Express icon on his screen and clicked once. It was like watching the Mississippi River drift around a wide bend: everything swam along in a brown, sleepy current. The boldface of the new e-mails came to life on his screen. Five and six appeared, then a rapid, ascending column that even at one remove hit the screen with the rapidity of microwave popcorn exploding in a bag. The number at the bottom of Tim’s screen rose from 24 to 30 to 45 to 67. There it stayed, all the popcorn having popped.

He read wearily down the From list, bypassing Depraved and PC Doctor and Virtual Deals and the first names of women he did not know because they did not exist, and was then all but levitated out of the chair by the familiar but entirely unexpected name munderhill. munderhill had e-mailed his old adviser and confidante tunderhill a message bearing the subject line 4 u 2 c . There was no date.

Tim selected this heading with a click and cursed the draggy modem, the draggy server, and the sluggish program.

At length, the message appeared in the wide lower-left-hand box.

From: munderhill

To: tunderhill@nyc.rr.com

Sent:

Subject: 4 u 2 c

deer :) my unk

old writer

try this link

lostboylostgirl.com

it is

4 u 1nce 2 c

so u know

u have & hold our luv

m & lc

Did he hesitate, did he think about it? He rammed the cursor over the blue underlined text and double-clicked, double-clicked, double-clicked.

Another brown, blurry Mississippi episode overtook both monitors, his on Grand Street and Mark’s in Millhaven, and while it lasted, Tim Underhill, otherwise known as tunderhill, leaned forward far enough to breathe on the screen were he breathing. Onto his screen, then Mark’s, appeared the ordinary Explorer window bearing the link’s URL.

Across the top of the larger interior window scrolled the words BROUGHT TO YOU BY lostboylostgirl.com. Beneath that was: 1-Time Only Showing! The Windows Media Player’s rectangle opened beneath the caution, if that was what it was and, without the conventional delay for buffering, filled immediatelty with light and color. So Tim was to see a film clip. The line on the bottom of the rectangle told him that the clip ran for one minute and twenty-two seconds, one of which had already slipped into oblivion. A golden beach ornamented with arching palm trees, a long blue ocean, occupied the little window. A movie, a webcam? A webcam, Tim thought, broadcasting to an audience of one from a world where there were no webcameras. Faintly, he heard the sound of gentle surf and wind rustling the palm fronds. His heart tightened.

The bright sky darkened above the water. First a blond head, then a dark, entered the screen from the bottom left-hand corner. “Lucy,” lc, and Mark, moving hand in hand into the frame, leaving the prints of their bare feet on the sand beneath them as they went. There was the faintest suggestion of haste. A rattle of palm came from the speakers. From the left, heavy dark clouds swam in above the sea; a branching reddish light irradiated the open sky. Hasten hasten the globe revolves. Wind rustled and stirred their scant garments, little better than rags, though beautiful rags. Moving quickly but without running, they briefly occupied the dead center of the Windows Media rectangle, then moved rightward toward the margin. Boiling darkness occupied the distant reaches of the sky, and a harsh illuminated red forked above, distant but traveling forward. The timer showed one minute and two seconds to go.

They paused, the lovers, mid-beach and looked toward the turmoil over the darkening water, which rolled toward them. Oh stay; oh hurry.

b safe my deers:)

Their beautiful poised slim legs lifted into a sprint; their rags flew.

Tim could not see the faces turned from him, but he knew them. They were unforgettable. Through the Starbucks window, indelible, that staggering goddess-visage: he did not have to see it again to remember it.

Now the whole sky grew dark, ripped through with dark, dark red. Thirty-two seconds remained. It seemed an eternity. These luxurious thirty-two, now thirty-one seconds, would last him the rest of his life. But the timer sped up, cruelly, and the lost boy and lost girl sprinted toward the margin of the little frame. Tim Underhill sent himself toward them, as if he could, poor bereft old man, to absorb every particle, mote, and cell of their departing seconds, which numbered fourteen, thirteen, ten, six. Mark’s head turned, and his upper body twisted not even a quarter turn, sufficient for his smile to shine forth and his eyes to meet tunderhill ’swith the force of a soft, underground explosion—four seconds, rain sluiced over their heads, two, they flew into the not-to-be-seen, none, they were gone utterly.

It was to gasp, it was to tremble.

The Media Player rectangle with its buttons and keys vanished into the gray beneath Mark’s charcoal-green. Tim clicked the little x on the top right-hand corner of both screens. The linked website should have zipped away and revealed his e-mail window. Instead, it collapsed into itself to leave no more than an impression of broken glass shattering inward. His screen flashed the flat deadly blue of hard-disk crashes and visits from or to the local computer wizard; it hung there for perhaps another second, then faded away to nothing, to disengaged gray, as if a fuse had blown.

For a while, Tim kept hitting the return key and double-clicking on everything in sight. Then he noticed that the green strip of Gotomypc.com still ran across the top and bottom of Mark’s screen. Trying to control his panic, he managed to back out of the program and get Mark’s computer off-line.

Through the bedroom’s closed window came the sounds of metal scraping on stone and the whining of gears. He groaned, clutched his head, bent over the keyboard, groaned again. His need for drama satisfied, Tim unfurled from the chair and went to the window. Just beyond the flattened wooden fence, a yellow earth-moving machine nearly the width of the alley was pushing its enormous blade into what remained of Joseph Kalendar’s rear wall. The concrete blocks at the edge of the blade shattered into chunks of powder, and the rows above them swooned outward, bulging before they separated, and crashed down into the blade and the alley. Through the dust, a portion of the wide brown strip of exposed earth became visible.

Tim fished his cell phone from his jacket pocket and dialed a number at 55 Grand Street. Since all there were close friends of his, and everybody spent hours in one another’s lofts, it almost didn’t matter who answered. As it happened, he had dialed Vinh’s number, and Maggie Lah answered. He told her to go upstairs and look at his computer, then call him back on his desk telephone. When Maggie called back, it was to say that his computer appeared to be deceased. Expired. Not a single vital sign. He asked Maggie to call Myron, the wizard next door, and tell him he was having an emergency caused by Gotomypc.com, which Myron had installed on his computer.

Down in the alley, the bulldozer was collecting broken concrete blocks in its bucket and depositing them into the back of a pickup truck dropping progressively lower on its wheels. Uniformed policemen, four men in yellow space suits, and detectives in sports jackets milled around in Kalendar’s backyard and the alley. Sergeant Franz Pohlhaus was watching the wall removal from just inside Philip’s ruined fence. To Tim’s amazement, Philip stood next to him.

Myron called to say he was walking up the stairs at 55 Grand.

“You’re the man,” Tim said.

“You’re still out of town, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“Okay, I’m in your apartment,” Myron said.“Here we are. Are you sure this thing is plugged in? . . . Okay, it’s plugged in. You were using that program I installed?”

“Yes,” Tim said. “I want to return to the last website I was on. I want to go back to where I was when the computer crashed.”

“Nothin’s shakin’,” Myron said. “Let me undress this thing, see what I can see.”

For a minute and a half, Myron wielded his screwdriver and removed the case. “Now, let me get it turned around. . . . Holy shit. Maggie, look at this.”

Tim heard Maggie giggle.

“What’s so funny?”

“Your hard disk, man. It like . . . squirted out. I can just about wiggle it free, but it’s, like, misshapen. And it’s hot! What did this? The program didn’t do it.”

“I know,” Tim said. “I just said that to get you over to my apartment in a hurry.”

Myron agreed to set up a new hard disk before Tim returned to New York the next day.

“What was that website you wanted to get back to?”

“It’s not important. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, all right?”

Tim hung up and returned to the window. He felt shaken and oddly dispossessed by what had just happened. Mark, Lucy: running barely covered from the storm, like Adam and Eve. Even, it seemed, in that world, safety was fragile and came at a price. Yet their joy had burned through the image on his commandeered monitor, along with their absolute connection. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight, Tim remembered, red sky at morning, sailor take warning. The Old Farmer’s Almanac neglected to consider the case of red sky at midafternoon, when ragged beautiful Adam and ragged beautiful Eve made haste, made haste.

He watched the bulldozer scrape away and decant into the laden pickup the last of Joseph Kalendar’s eight-foot wall. As docile as a probationer, Philip Underhill had not strayed from Franz Pohlhaus’s side.

Tim let the screen door bang behind him. Philip turned his head to give his brother the glance of a captain to a platoon leader who had arrived late for a briefing. What he had seen must stay with him, Tim realized.

The fat, red-haired man in the cab of the bulldozer shouted, “Excuse me, Sergeant. Sergeant! Excuse me.”

“Sorry,” Pohlhaus said. “Yes?”

“Should I start on the ground now? We got a good clear shot.”

“Nice and slow,” Pohlhaus said. “Plus I want a DM man. Thompson! Pick up a shovel and work alongside Dozier here, will you?” One of the men in yellow space suits and clumsy boots trotted forward.

“The rest of you guys, move in as soon as we find something,” Pohlhaus said.

He gave Tim an unreadable glance. “Little news flash.” He seemed entirely gathered into himself, like a creature enfolded within its own wings. “Lloyd-Jones took himself out.” Anger surrounded him like a red mist. “Out of the game.”

“Oh, no,” Tim said. In his brother’s grim satisfaction, he saw that Philip already knew.

“About an hour ago, Lloyd-Jones killed himself in his cell. He ripped his shirt in half, tied one end around his neck and the other around one of his bars, and he rolled off the bed. You wouldn’t think it would work, but it did.”

“He got off so, so easy,” Philip said. “That sick bastard.”

“I guess he realized your brother wasn’t going to write a book about him,” Pohlhaus said.

The bulldozer snorted and jerked to a halt, rocking on its treads. Thompson, who had been treading backward in front of the machine as it delicately sliced away a thin layer of earth, shouted, “Sergeant! We got one!”

All three men at the bottom of Philip Underhill’s backyard walked over the defeated fence and into the alley. Officer Thompson scraped the blade of his shovel across the strip of earth, then bent down. Using one of his space gloves, he tugged into view a gray-green human hand, then an entire forearm, encased in a white sleeve.

“That’s not Mark’s arm,” Philip said.

Pohlhaus waved them back. The brothers retreated to Philip’s lot line and looked on as the first of the adolescent dead began his journey upward into daylight.

Acknowledgments

For professional assistance in the writing of this novel, thanks go to Visconti pens (Van Gogh and Kaleido), Boorum & Pease journals (900-3 R), and Kathy Kinsner (eighty words a minute); for moral and emotional support during the writing of this novel, grateful thanks to Lila Kalinich and Susan Straub; for her inspired editing, pro-found thanks to extraordinary Lee Boudreaux.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Straub is the author of sixteen novels, which have been translated into more than twenty languages. He lives in New York City with his wife, Susan, director of the Read to Me program.