Mr. X

"Who fills out these certificates?" Laurie asked.

"People at the hospital, but they would have obtained the father's name from your mother."

His essential decency made him hesitate, and I said, "Whatever you're thinking isn't going to hurt my feelings, Hugh."

"Marriage requires proof of identification. Even a justice of the peace wouldn't marry a couple unless they showed him driver's licenses and birth certificates. However. I don't know what you'll think of this idea, but it's certainly possible for a pregnant woman to marry another man. After delivery, she'd have every reason to name the husband as the child's father. Do you see what I mean?"

"Maybe you're right," I said.

“I feel uneasy suggesting something like that, but if she gave you your father's name and another name turns up in the records . . ."

“It makes sense," I said. "We have to go now, but could I see you again? I'd like to look up a few other things."

"Want to come back tomorrow morning? The doors will be locked, but if you bang hard enough I'll hear you."

Laurie kissed the top of his head. "You're wonderful."

"Laurie?"

"Hugh?"

"Dinner tonight? Or a movie? How about dinner and a movie?"

"Not tonight," she said. "But you're a darling."

• 45

• "That's ridiculous. Your father can't be a man named DonaldMessmer."

"Hugh had a good idea," I said. "She was pregnant when she got married. My mother was free-spirited when it came to official documents."

"We have to get in touch with this Messmer." She turned the key in the ignition and nudged the accelerator. "Posy Fairbrother, Cobbie's nanny, has a CD-ROM with addresses and telephone numbers from a million different cities. Now, where are we going?"

I showed her the slip of paper. Toby's slash-and-burn handwriting spelled out the nameMax Edison andV.A. Hospital, Mount Vernon. "That's a long way away, isn't it?"

“It's a hike, but the expressway goes right to it. We have plenty of time, if we don't stay long. There's a nice place to have lunch on the other side ofMarion."

We moved out into the traffic and headed toward the expressway.

"How did you get this name? Did Max Edison know your father?"

I said that I had heard about him from Toby Kraft, a pawnbroker onLanyard Street who had been married to my grandmother, Queenie Dunstan. "After we left Le Madrigal, Toby's the person I went to see."

"All," Laurie said.

"He wants to keep out of the picture. Toby only gave me this much on the condition that we never had the conversation, and the name didn't come from him."

Laurie swung into the northbound on-ramp.

"Your father's name was Yves D'Lency, and he drove across the African veldt to shoot lions?"

"Not really. It's a long story. You don't want to hear it."

"Try me," I said.

Yves D'Lency had been a glamorous daredevil born to an aristocratic family in possession of aGascony estate and a noble art collection. At eighteen, he had escaped to immerse himself in the literary and artistic worlds of postwarParis, where he supported himself by literary journalism and private art dealing. He learned to fly; he drove racing cars. At the end of the fifties, he moved toLos Angeles, where he already had several clients who trusted his taste in paintings. He married Laurie's mother and bought a house inBeverly Hills. Laurie was born, and for seven years all went well. Then he died. Laurie still had two paintings from his private collection.

"How did he die?"

Her glance was almost ferocious. "He was flying from an airfield in the San Fernando Valley to see a friend in Carmel. He had a little Cessna. The engine crapped out north of Santa Barbara. Down they fell, all the king's horses and all the king's men." Her right hand lifted from the wheel and fluttered down.

"You were seven."

"Ever since, the sight of a Cessna always makes me feel like puking." I got another burning flash from her eyes. She straightened her arms and pushed herself back into the seat.

"Tell me how you met Stewart Hatch."

Five years earlier, a reasonably attractive man of about forty had stationed himself beside Laurie D'Lency near midpoint of a party spilling upstairs, downstairs, and into the garden of a townhouse owned by an executive at the NBC affiliate in San Francisco. Stewart Hatch was an acquaintance of a KRON executive several rungs above the owner of the townhouse; he was neither charmless nor anything like too old; yet he did not interest her, especially when he confessed to being a businessman from an obscure city in Illinois. After three years of doing background for the news staff, Laurie knew she had a chance of beating out her competition, two other young women circulating like benevolent hurricanes through the townhouse, for an opening as an on-camera reporter. The Illinois tycoon might as well have been a black hole in a distant galaxy.

Stewart Hatch had rematerialized at the end of the party and offered a ride home in his limousine. The friends who had driven her to the party had disappeared, and the alternative to the limousine was a cab service. She accepted.

Thereafter, Hatch had laid siege, sending flowers, calling two or three times a day from the limousine, between meetings, from his suite at the Fairmont. He had sweaters and blouses delivered from Neiman Marcus and on his last night in San Francisco took Laurie to Il Postrio. During dinner, Stewart Hatch had astonished her with a proposal of marriage.

"Boy, what a con job that guy did on me."

"You didn't agree to marry him over dinner at Il Postrio," I said. "Unless it was the most amazing meal you'd ever had in your life, and Stewart ordered a couple bottles of great champagne."

"Roederer Cristal. Which, as Stewart took pains to instruct me, is akin to the Holy Grail. Children in third-world countries fling themselves into bottomless chasms for a glimpse of a single bottle. We had two. And the food was spectacular. But I turned him down. Was Stewart discouraged? Stewart doesn't know the meaning of the word."

• 46

• At the restaurant on the other side of Marion, an elderly waiter gave us menus taller than those at Le Madrigal and asked what we wanted to drink. "A glass of that nice Bordeaux," Laurie said. I said I'd have the same.

The waiter left, and I said, “I don't usually drink at lunch. It makes me sleepy."

"One glass of wine isn't reallydrinking," she said. "So tell me, why was Toby Kraft so secretive about Max Edison? Were they bad boys together? Did they convey tommy guns in violin cases?"

"Toby implied that he used to be mixed up in something, years ago."

"These days, there are criminals everywhere I look." She gave me a brief, rueful smile.

“I low did Stewart persuade you to marry him?"

"The old-fashioned way," she said. "The rat chased me until I fell in love with him." She described an aggressive long-distance courtship made up of telephone calls, deliveries of orchids and expensive clothes, and frequent visits. Hatch had promised her a busy, interesting life: trips toNew York and Europe, civic involvement at home.

“I thought I'd be able to join these commissions and boards and panels he was talking about. It sounded like a great life, keeping busy and doing good works."

"What went wrong?"

"None of it happened. Stewart went out of town by himself. I couldn't get on committees because I didn't know enough about Edgerton. Besides that, Stewart wanted a son right away. Not just a baby, a son. His grandfather, Carpenter, set up this complicated family trust that keeps passing the money to a firstborn male child, like something out of the Middle Ages. Eventually, I realized that he married me to give him an heir and impress his friends, and that was that."

The details of the extraordinary trust were so complicated that I forgot most of them as soon as they were out of her mouth. What I retained was that Cobden Hatch, Stewart's father, had modified its conditions so that evidence of criminal behavior eliminated the possibility of inheritance. Apparently his black-sheep brother had embarrassed the family.

The waiter lowered our plates to the table.

“In other words," Laurie said, “If Stewart is convicted of embezzlement and tax fraud and whatever, Cobbie gets it all. And as if that weren't reason enough for my darling husband to refuse me a divorce, or to demand custody if I manage to get one, his grandfather released control of the trust to whoever is the heir on January first of next year."

"You have no doubts that Stewart is guilty?"

"None."

“I don't get it. He was risking everything."

"You don't know Stewart. Whatever he did, he did out of state, through phony companies with bank accounts in the West Indies. He'sstill sure he'll walk away free and clear."

"But why would he do it in the first place?"

"He's greedy and impatient, and he wants everything now. And I bet he loved the idea of rubbing his grandfathers nose in the dirt. Stewart's into revenge in a big way."

Laurie concentrated on the other side of her fish and lifted the entire fillet off the small, white armature of bone. “I wish I were like your friend Ashleigh. In ten years, she'll be running her own law practice. As far as a career is concerned, my life is over. The only real purpose I have in life is raising Cobbie, and Stewart is going to do his damndest to take him away from me."

"The truth is, Ashleigh undoubtedly wishes she were more like you. When most men look at her, they think about carrying her back to the cave. When they look at you, they feel like groveling at your feet."

“Imagine how wonderful that must be." Laurie grinned across the table. "Tell me about Cherry Street. Tell me about your mother."

• During the rest of our drive, Laurie indulged me by recounting the miseries following her father's death. Her mother married a movie producer in BelAir, an acquaintance of D'Lency's, and what she had hoped would represent security became an incarceration. Pathologically jealous, the producer refused to let her leave his house unless she was accompanied by one of his female assistants. Because he did not trust his domestic help, he fired them, then fired their replacements until he was left with a single housekeeper too old and embittered to be anything but his watchdog. Laurie's mother began to drink during the day. The producer sent his stepdaughter to a Catholic girls' school notorious for its discipline, and one day, while searching through her dresser drawers, discovered a film canister packed with marijuana.

He dispatched her to a private residential facility. For six months, Laurie shared a room with a sixteen-year-old actress and was visited by tutors, counselors, psychiatrists, and the actress's drug dealers. When she returned home, she found her mother ramming clothes into suitcases. The producer had begun divorce proceedings and rented them a small house on the edge of Hancock Park.

They scraped along on the producer's support payments. Laurie went to John Burroughs High and did her best to care for her mother, who slid pints of vodka behind the toilet, under seat cushions, and anywhere else she thought they might go undiscovered. She died the summer after Laurie's high school graduation. Laurie put herself through Berkeley with the help of scholarships and student jobs.

"And now my tale is done, because coming up on our left is the V.A. Hospital."

• 47

• The drive curved toward a distant hill, where a structure the size of a federal office building rose above oaks and beech trees. In the middle distance, men in shirtsleeves or bathrobes sat at picnic tables and strolled across the lawn, some of them accompanied by nurses. The stone-colored beeches sent tall shadows across the parking lot.

Inside, the scale of the building shrank to a narrow hallway leading to an open counter, a couple of pebble-glass doors, and a set of elevators. Everything had been painted government green, and the memory of disinfectant hung in the air.

"Where is Goya when you need him?" Laurie said.

A clerk too old for his smear of a goatee and ponytail leaned on the counter. "You wanted?"

I told him which patient we wanted to see.

He thought it over. "E-D-I-S-O-N, as in light bulb?"

"M-A-X," I said. "As in 'to the.' "

On the fourth floor, a lanky attendant in green trousers and tunic had tilted his chair against the wall, knit his hands behind his head, and closed his eyes outside a darkened room where a dozen men were slouched in front of a television set. When Laurie Hatch and I came up to him, he dropped his hands and shot out of the chair. He was at least six-seven and skinny, almost gaunt, like many very tall men. In a backcountry accent, he said, "You lookin' for someone, Miss, or can I he'p you in some othuh way?"

Laurie told him we wanted to talk to Mr. Edison.

"Max? He's in the TEE-vee rahm heah. I'll tell him he has comp'ny."

The attendant moved into the flickering darkness. Laurie whispered,"TEE-vee rahm."

"Like CD-ROM," I said.

A few seconds later, a small, compact man of about seventy with close-cropped white hair, a neat white heard, steel-rimmed spectacles, and an air of perfect composure emerged to take us in with a curious, lively attentiveness that admitted a flicker of surprise when he looked at me. He had that flawless, dark-chocolate skin that goes unwrinkled, apart from a few crow's-feet and some lines across the forehead, until it weathers into a well-seasoned ninety. Max Edison could have been a retired doctor or a distinguished elderly jazz musician. He also could have been a great many other things. The Jolly Green Giant followed him out.

"Mr. Edison?" I said.

He stepped forward, examining us with the same wide-awake curiosity, then swiveled on the balls of his feet to look up at the Giant. "Jervis, I'm going to escort my visitors down the hall."

Edison brought us to a tiny room with a single desk and bookshelves crowded with files. "You people know who I am, but I don't believe I've had the pleasure."

I introduced Laurie and myself, and he shook our hands without any sign of having recognized our names. His jeans had a sharp crease, his shirt was freshly pressed, and his boots gleamed. I wondered what it took to maintain standards like that in the V.A. Hospital. “I hope you came to tell me I won the lottery."

"No such luck," I said. “I want to ask you about someone you might have known a long time ago."

"Why would that be?"

"Let's say it's a family matter," I said.

His face relaxed, and he seemed to smile without quite smiling, as if I had confirmed whatever had been going through his mind.

"Does the name Dunstan mean anything to you?"

He crossed his arms over his chest, still smiling without smiling. "How did you learn I was out here?"

"From someone who doesn't want to be named," I said. "When I asked him about this person you might have known, he wrote your name on a piece of paper."

"Water's getting deeper and deeper," Edison said. “I used to know a man who married a woman named Dunstan."

"That could be," I said.

"Will you stop beating around the bush?" Laurie said. "He obviously knows it was Toby Kraft."

Edison and I both looked at her, then at each other. We burst out laughing.

"What?"

"So much for that," I said.

"Rut you knew it was him."

"Man didn't want to be named," Edison said.

“I spoiled your fun. I apologize. But I bet Mr. Edison could already tell us who we came here to talk about, and I only have about an hour before I have to drive back to town."

"Could you?" I asked Edison. "Do you already know?"

"Why don't you tell me, so I won't have to guess?"

"Edward Rinehart."

Edisonlooked at the door, then, with less than his usual composure, back at me. "We should grab some fresh air. It's so pretty under those trees, you can almost forget where you are."

• “Toby Kraft. I called him 'Mr. Inside,' because that's what he was."

Max Edison faced the tall beeches and the long green lawn from the end of the bench across our picnic table. He had slipped dark glasses over his eyes, and his legs in their knife-creased jeans extended out to the side, crossed at the ankle. One elbow was propped on the surface of the table. He looked as though he had joined us for a moment before moving on.

"When I got back from the war, I had a leg injury that kept me from doing heavy work, so instead of one big job I had a bunch of little ones. Swept floors and washed windows. Ran numbers. Driving jobs. After a while, some people decided I was reliable."

Edison turned to me. "Know what I mean?"

"You did what you were supposed to do, and you kept your mouth shut."

"Toby Kraft asked me to help out in the pawnshop three days a week. I knew he was doing more business out back than up front. I'm not accusing him of anything, understand, but when Toby gave you my name he knew I'd have to say some of this. If I'm going to talk about Mr. Edward Rinehart, he's in there, too."

I nodded.

Edison turned the dark glasses to Laurie. "You don't have to hear any more than you want to, Mrs. Hatch."

She said, "At this point, Max, you'd have to drive me away with a whip."

Hesmiled, uncrossed his legs, and swung in to face us. He put his arms on the table and folded his hands together. "Every town the size of Edgerton has a Mr. Inside. He can tell you where to go if you want something, and the name of the guy who can help you get it and who to see afterward."

"Valuable guy," I said.

"Mr. Inside is like the post office. His lines goout. Back and forth down those lines movesinformation. Take on that role, you better keep the wheels greased. Outside you and your circle, other people are taking a steady interest."

"The police?"

He shook his head. "The force gets taken care of way down the line. They don't want you in jail, they want you out on the street where you can do some good."

"Then who are these other people?" Laurie said.

Edison flattened his hands on the table and tilted his head to look up at the great beeches. "About a year after I started part-timing for Toby, a fool named Clothard Spelvin came through from the office. They called him Clothhead because his brainpower could just about hold its own against a dishtowel. Light-skinned black man, but an ugly son of a bitch. Excuse me, Mrs. Hatch."

"No problem."

"Thank you. Clothhead said, 'Max, you don't work here no more. A man wants to see you.' I went in and asked Toby, 'Who does that dumbbell work for? I'm supposed to go with him.' Toby said, 'You'll be all right, it's all set up.' He took us through the storage room and slid open the back door. A big Cadillac was out in the alley. Dark blue. Enough wax on the chassis to shine at the stroke of midnight during an eclipse of the moon. Clothhead gave me the keys and told me, Drive north on old Highway 4. Just past the town line, he pointed at a roadhouse. The place was empty except for a goon up front at the bar and one man sitting way at the back. That man was my new boss, Mr. Edward Rinehart. For the next seven years, all hours of the day and night, I drove Mr. Rinehart wherever he wanted to go."

"Honest to God," I said. Laurie put her hands in her lap and looked back and forth between us like a spectator at a tennis match. When my astonishment let me speak again, I uttered, no less idiotically, "Really."

Edison could not entirely conceal his pleasure in my reaction to his story. "Why did you think Toby gave you my name?"

Unable to contain herself any longer, Laurie burst out with, "Well, what was helike?"

Max Edison waited for me to clear my head.

"He was a gangster?" I said at last.

"Maybe there is no organized crime. Maybe the newspapers made the whole thing up. But if it exists, does it seem like you can join up unless you're Italian? Even better, Sicilian? Mr. Rinehart was a man who worked by himself."

"So what did he do?" I asked.

"Where you find a Mr. Inside, eventually you will learn there is also a Mr. Outside. Mr. Outside is more important than Mr. Inside, but not many know about him. If you happen to be a professional criminal, one night you are invited to a hotel room. Shrimp, roast beef, chicken, whatever food you like, is laid out. All kinds of bottles and plenty of ice. The lights are turned down. Three, four guys similar to you are already there. Way back in the room where you can't see his face, Mr. Outside is sitting in a big, comfortable chair. At least one or two of the other guys seem to know him.

"When everybody's relaxed, Mr. Outside explains from now on, you won't do anything unless he tells you so. One-third of all your profits go straight to him. You want to walk out, but he starts to explain the benefits. He's covering all the expenses. There will be enough work to cover the missing third a couple times over. Then he lays out a couple jobs so nice and neat, you could only mess up by having a heart attack when you saw the money. There's more work on the come. Besides, you'll never go to the trouble of breaking into a place and discover it was already stripped clean. What do you say?"

" 'Show me the dotted line,' " I said.

"Edward Rinehart was Mr. Outside?" Laurie asked.

Edison pulled down his sunglasses and leaned forward. His eyes were surprisingly light, an unusual sandy brown flecked with green. The whites were the immaculate white of fresh bedsheets. "Did you hear me say that?" He turned his disingenuous gaze upon me. "Did you hear me say that?"

"You allowed us to form our own conclusions," I said.

He pushed the sunglasses up over his eyes.

"Mr. Rinehart doesn't sound like the sort of man who would write a book," I said.

Edisonlowered his chin and peered at me. I thought he was going to do the sunglasses trick again.

"What book?" Laurie asked. "You didn't say anything about a book."

“It was in the box my mother sent to herself, the one with the envelope and the key."

"Did you read that book?"Edisonasked.

"Not yet. Did you?"

"Mr. Rinehart gave me a copy, but it got lost along the way. You're right, he didn't seem like a man who would sit down to write a book. But Mr. Rinehart didn't do anythingordinary. For one thing, around the time he came out with his book, he retired. Every now and then he had me drive him somewhere, but basically, the man walked away. He told me he had a mission. What Mr. Rinehart used to say was, he wanted his stories to show people the real truth about the world."

"He talked to you in the car?" Laurie said.

Edison grinned. “I spent seven years driving Mr. Rinehart all over Hell's Half-Acre in the dead of night, him in the back of that Cadillac talking a blue streak. If Mr. Rinehart had been a preacher, his sermons would have rolled on for two days and nights."

Edison's laughter sounded as though he still disbelieved what he had heard coming from the back seat of the Cadillac.

"What did he talk about?" I asked.

"The true nature of the universe. And his book. If every book writer goes through the kind of misery Mr. Rinehart did, I'm glad I was a driver."

• After rejection from a well-known New York house, Rinehart had decided to publish the book himself. Regent Press & Bindery, a Chicago print shop with a subsidiary specializing in rebinding library books, shipped two hundred copies to Edgerton, where Rinehart stored them in a Hatchtown warehouse. For six weeks, Max Edison had loaded cartons into the Cadillac's trunk and ferried his employer to bookstores as far north as Springfield. Most of the stores had taken two or three copies ofFrom Beyond. Rinehart never invoiced them or requested sales figures. He had no interest in making money from his book; he wanted these copies available for purchase upon publication of the dazzled reviews it was certain to receive. When praise flooded in, he would once again submit the book to the firm in New York.

Out went the review copies. A three-page letter accompanied the first twenty, sent to the newspapers and magazines Rinehart judged most crucial to literary success. Fifty publications occupying the second rung received a single-page statement. A simple card went out with the copies sent to pulp magazines.

Three months passed without acknowledgment from the significant and semi-significant publications. The pulps, from which Rinehart anticipated cries of rapture, were silent. Two months later, the irate author sent out letters reminding seventy editors of their obligations to literature. None responded.

Nine months later,Weird Tales proppedFrom Beyond against a brick wall and dispatched it in a public execution. Eight parallel columns spread over four pages condemned Rinehart's book for being formulaic, cliché-ridden, and self-parodying. A corrosive laughter washed through the review.

Weird Talessent Rinehart into orbit.

"He carried that review with him all the time. When we were alone in the car, he used to read it out loud. I must have heard different parts a hundred times over. Mr. Rinehart thought that magazine was going tolove him. Whole weeks went by when he tried to talk himself into believing they really did love him, and what they said looked bad only if you didn't understand it. Then he'd give up on that and go back to telling me how the man who wrote the piece was so stupid, anybody who knew anything would see the book had to be great. I don't think he ever got that review out of his mind. It wasn't long after that he retired."

"Did you see him after he retired?"

"He wasn't the kind of man to keep in touch. Anyhow, I got sent up to do a little stretch in Greenhaven."

Edisontook off his sunglasses and folded them on the table. "Then what happened, that Clothhead Spelvin I mentioned got busted for some dumb-ass thing, excuse me, Mrs. Hatch, a thing never would have happened earlier, and as soon as Clothhead started looking at jail time, he rolled over on Mr. Rinehart, andhe got arrested."

"Edward Rinehart went to jail?" Laurie asked.

"On a minimum ten-year sentence, yes, ma'am. I was present when he came in. Mr. Rinehart acted like he was on a first-class trip to Paris. He knew the only problem he'd have in prison was the problem of being in prison, which if you have connections like Mr. Rinehart's is like being outside, except you're in prison. At Greenhaven, he was free to do just about everything he wanted—except get out of prison. He got me a good job in the library and sent over a nice Italian dinner almost every week. Once Mr. Rinehart came into the population,

I had cigarettes and pints of whiskey whenever I wanted them, though I didn't abuse the privilege."

"You got whiskey and Italian dinners in jail?" Laurie asked.

“It's still prison, Mrs. Hatch. I was released in November 1958. A little over two years later, they hada big riot up there. When the troopers moved in, twelve men were lying dead in the yard, and one of them was Mr. Rinehart. He's up there in the Greenhaven cemetery. That's not a bad place for him."

"What?" Laurie said. "Oh. You were afraid of him."

Edison gave us a slow smile. "Sometimes I think I'mstill afraid of him."

Laurie and I said nothing.

A distant amusement shone in Edison's sandy eyes. "Believe this or don't, it's all the same to me. A couple of nights, I was driving all alone in the car to where Mr. Rinehart told me to pick him up, and I hear a lighter snap open behind me and see a flare in the mirror. There's Mr. Rinehart, lighting up. 'Sorry, Max,' he says. 'Didn't you hear me get in?' Those back doors never opened or closed. Is there any way I could missthat sound?

"One time, three, four o'clock in the morning, I took him to Mountry to meet a man named Ted Bright in a building back of a garage. We pulled up, and he said, 'Duck down and keep down until I get back.' I looked over my shoulder, and I guess either I went blind or the seat could talk, because Mr. Rinehart wasn't there. I ducked under the wheel so you'd have to walk right up to the window to see me. Footsteps came around from in front—two guys, moving slow and careful. One of them said, 'That's his car.' The other one said, 'Let's do the deed.' I can't swear what I heard next was shotguns being primed, but I'd put a hundred dollars on it. I said to myself,Max, you better cover Mr. Rinehart's backside, I was reaching for the door handle when I realized he told me to keep out of sight because he knew Homer and Jethro were on the way."

Laurie asked, "Did you have a gun?"

He nodded. "When I drove for Mr. Rinehart, I carried a weapon. Never fired it. Never even drew it from the holster, though I came close that night. With Mr. Rinehart, the smartest course was to follow orders, but I couldn't be sure he knew what was going down. I waited maybe a minute. Didn't hear a thing. I decided to crack the passenger door and sneak out and keep low, just in case. All of a sudden there was enough noise out there to wake up a graveyard. I grabbed the door handle with one hand, grabbed my gun with the other. Right in front of me, Ted Bright slams against the hood, covered neck to belly in blood. Bright rolls off and hits the ground. I look at the front of the building. A body's lying facedown in the dirt, holding the door open. There's another body halfway in, halfway out. Another one's down on the floor inside. Place looks like a slaughterhouse. Right behind me, someone clears his throat, and I almost jump out of my clothes. Mr. Rinehart's sitting in the back seat. 'Let's get back to civilization,' he says."

"Did you ask him what happened?" Laurie asked.

"Mrs. Hatch." Edison replaced his sunglasses. "Even if he felt like talking, I didn't want to listen. When I got home, I put away a pint of bourbon without benefit of ice or water. Next day on the radio, they said a businessman named Mr. Theodore Bright got killed attempting to escape from a kidnapping. As good as any other story, far as I was concerned. Mr. Theodore Bright brought it downon himself by himself."

"That was the real story," I said.

"I wasthere, and I don't know if there was any real story. What I'm telling you is, Mr. Edward Rinehart could be a one-manHalloween."

"You're right," I said. "The Greenhaven cemetery is a good place for him."

"We were talking about Clothhead Spelvin, who rolled over on Mr. Rinehart? He was in a holding cell when Mr. Rinehart was arrested. They put Mr. Rinehart two cells down, and that night Clothhead got cut to pieces. No one saw anyone go in or out of his cell."

Edison moved first one leg, then the other, from under the table. It cost him some effort. "Folks, sorry to break up the party, but I want to get back to my room." He wavered to his feet. "Maybe Toby didn't tell you, but I came down with cancer of the pancreas. They give me two more months, but I hope to push it to six."

He did his best to conceal his pain as he sauntered across the parking lot.

• 48

• “What kind of danger?"

Every time we reached the top of a hill, through the windshield I could see the low, sensible skyline of the city where I had been born. Such places were not supposed to contain people like Edward Rinehart. Families like mine, if there were other families like the Dunstans, did not belong in them, either.

"You and Cobbie shouldn't have anything to do with this Rinehart stuff. It's too risky. I'd rather be Donald Messmer's son."

"Cobbie and I can't be in danger from a dead man. And tonight, we are going to find this Donald Messmer."

“I thought Stewart was dropping Cobbie off."

"Afterwards. Posy will be back just afterfive o'clock, and I could pick you up around six. My son would love to see you again. He keeps saying, 'Is Ned coming to our house?' So come to our house, why don't you? Posy and I will give you dinner, and you can show me Edward Rinehart's book."

It sounded more interesting than dinner in Hatchtown and a return to the rooming house. My fears of endangering Laurie and her son no longer seemed rational; Max Edison had spooked me.

“I warn you, Cobbie is going to make you listen to his favorite music, so be prepared."

"What kind of music does he like?"

“I am baffled," Laurie said. "Cobbieis fixated on the last section ofEstampes, a Debussy piano thing, a Monteverdi madrigal called 'Confitebor tibi' sung by an English soprano, and Frank Sinatra doing 'Something's Gotta Give.' He can't really be only four years old. I think he's a thirty-five-year-old midget."

“Is the English soprano Emma Kirkby?"

"You know her?"

I laughed at the unlikeliness of the coincidence. “I brought that CD with me when I came here."

"That settles it. I'm picking you up at six."

A sign twenty yards down the road marked the boundary of Edgerton, the City with a Heart of Gold. The sign floated nearer, increasing in size. We came to within a foot, to within six inches, to a distance measurable only by a caliper, to nothing. The sign flew past the hood of the car and flattened into a two-dimensional vertical stripe parallel with my head. The air wavered, thickened, and seemed to shimmer up from the highway like a mirage.

• 49

• Helen Janette darted out before I reached the stairs. If the manila envelope in her hand was responsible for the expression on her face, I didn't want to know what was in it.

Like a matching automaton on a Swiss clock, Mr. Tite opened his door and stepped into the frame. The fedora shaded his nose, and the lumpy jaw looked hard as granite.

"A policeman was looking for you this morning." She crossed her arms over the envelope. “I didn't like the idea of plunking a thing withpolice department stamped all over it on my mail table."

"Did he give his name?"

Mr. Tite cleared his throat. “It was a gink named Rowley."

"Lieutenant Rowley was returning this to you." She surrendered the envelope.

OttoBremen boomed out my name before I could get the key into my lock. He was waving at me from the chair in front of his television set, and he looked a lot friendlier than my landlady and her guard dog. I went into his room.

Bremenstuck out a big, splayed hand. "Ned Dunstan, right? OttoBremen, in case you forgot." His handsome mustache bristled above his smile. "Grab a chair."

Bremen's room overflowed with chairs, dressers, little tables, and other things from wherever he had lived before moving to Mrs. Janette's. A cheerful jumble of photographs, framed documents, and tacked-up drawings by children covered the walls. The yellow banner I had noticed that morning hung across the top of the back wall.we love you otto had been printed three times in bright blue letters along its length.

“I guess they love you."

“Isn't that the cutest damn thing?" He looked over his shoulder. " 'We love you Otto, we love you Otto, we love you Otto.' From the graduating sixth-grade class atCarl Sandburg Elementary School, 1989." He lit acigarette."Mrs. Rice, the principal, called me up onstage during the ceremony. Most of those kids, I'd known since you had to take 'em by the hand and sing 'The Teddy Bears' Picnic' to get 'em across the street. I was so proud, I almost burst out of my suspenders."

It was the luxuriant, gravel-bottomed Western voice I remembered from that morning. If OttoBremen had sung "The Teddy Bears' Picnic," I would have followed him across the street, too.

He knitted his hands over his belly and exhaled. "First time any graduating class honored a crossing guard that way. Nine months of the year, I'm the crossing guard at Carl Sandburg." Bremen tapped the cigarette, and ashes drifted toward the floor. “If I had it to do all over again, I swear, I'd get a degree in elementary education and teach first or second grade. Hell, if I wasn't seventy years old, I'd do it now. Say, care for a drink? I'm about ready."

A few minutes later, I managed to get across the hall.

edgerton police departmentwas printed on the front and the sealed flap of the manila envelope Lieutenant Rowley had entrusted to Helen Janette. Inside it was a plastic bag, also sealed, with four white identification bands. A case number and my name had been scrawled on the top two bands. Lieutenant George Rowley and someone in the Property Department had signed the other two. The plastic bag contained a wad of bills. I dumped out the money and counted it. Four hundred and eighty-one dollars. I laughed out loud and called Suki Teeter.

• 50

• The bus dropped me off in College Park two blocks south of the Albertus campus. I walked down Archer Street until I saw the weathered wooden signboard,riverrun arts &crafts, over the porch of Suki Teeter's three-story clapboard building.

The room to the right of the entrance surrounded racks of posters and greeting cards with paintings, graphics, woven tapestries, and shelves of pottery and blown glass; the smaller room to the left doubled as an art-supply business and framing shop. Although she exhibited work by local artists, Suki supported herself mostly through poster sales and picture framing.

"This is the only place for decent brushes and paints in a hundred miles, but I can't afford the inventory I should have," she said. "Everything costs so much money! The roof needs fixing. I could use a new oil burner. Twenty grand would solve all my problems, but I can hardly pay my two part-time assistants. They stay on because I cook them dinner and act like Mom."

In her living room, abstract and representational paintings hung alongside shelves of clay pots and blown glass. "All this work is by artists I show in the gallery, except for that painting on your left."

A dirgelike complication of muddy, red-spattered browns occupied a fourth of the wall.

"What do you think?"

“I'd have to look at it for a while," I said.

“It's hopeless, and you know it. Rachel Milton gave me that painting years ago, and I never had the heart to get rid of it. Can I give you some tea?"

Suki came back with two cups of herbal tea and sat next to me on the yielding cushions. “I shouldn't be bitchy about Rachel. At least she kept in touch with Star, or vice versa. She might even come to the funeral."

Suki's glowing corona glided forward, and she wrapped her arms around my shoulders. I leaned into her aura of mint and sandalwood. She kissed my cheek. The golden haze of her face swam two or three inches back from mine. Her eyes shimmered, intensifying their deep jade green and shining turquoise. "Tell me. You know what I mean, justtell me."

I swallowed ginseng-flavored tea and described my mother's last day and night. At the mention of Rinehart's name, Suki gave me a glance of uncomplicated acknowledgment. Without saying anything more, I told her about Donald Messmer's appearance on the marriage license and my birth certificate.

“It's like I'm walking through a fog. My aunts and uncles act as though they're guarding atomic secrets." A tide of feeling surged through me, and everything else shrank before its necessity.

“I have to getout of the fog. I want to know who Rinehart was, and how this Messmer came into the picture."

She patted my hand and released it.

"Hewasmy father, wasn't he?"

"You look so much like him, it's eerie."

I remembered Max Edison's subtle relaxation when I said that I had come on a family matter. He had known instantly whose son I was. "Tell me," I said, echoing her words. "Please, justtell me."

Suki Teeter leaned back into her cushions.

• 51

• In the autumn of 1957, the more adventurous students of arts and literature at Albertus noted the frequent late-night presence at a rear table in the Blue Onion Coffeehouse of a man whose strikingly compelling face, at once pallid and dark, was framed by his black hair as he bent in concentration, one hand holding apapier mais Gitane cigarette and the other a hovering pencil, over what appeared to be a typewritten manuscript. This was Edward Rinehart. An awed fascination gathered about him.

Slowly, Rinehart's barriers relaxed. Yes, he was a writer; he had come to College Park to enjoy good bookstores and congenial companionship; if he wished for anything more, it was access to the Albertus Library, of course superior to its civic counterparts. Erwin Leake, a young English instructor among the earliest to establish a beachhead of acquaintanceship, soon found a mechanism, an only slightly dubious mechanism, granting Rinehart entry to the college library. Thereafter, Rinehart could often be discovered laboring over his art at one of the desks beneath the rotunda of the Reading Room. He was perhaps thirty-five, perhaps slightly older; his physical attractiveness was magnified, though it needed no magnification, by a kind of lawlessness. The Rinehart era had begun.

He became the intellectual and social focus of a select cadre of students, available for consultation at all hours. At the end of Buxton Place, an obscure cul-de-sac otherwise owned by the college, Rinehart had purchased two adjacent cottages as studio and living quarters. The elect, the chosen, the most passionate and promising of the Albertus population, congregated within his residence—the studio, being sacred, was off-limits. In Rinehart's house, someone was always talking, generally Rinehart. A perpetual sound track, usually jazz, drifted from the speakers. An unending supply of wine, beer, and other beverages magically replenished itself. Rinehart provided marijuana, uppers, and downers, the drugs of the period. His parties went on for two or three days in which the favorites wandered in and out, talked and drank until they could talk and drink no more, listened to readings, mostly by the host, and had frequent sex, mostly with the host.

Suki, Star, Rachel Newborn, and the other young women had fallen under Rinehart's spell. He was a charismatic, unpredictable man who encouraged their aspirations while seeming to embody them: unlike the boys who claimed to be writers, Rinehart had actually published a book, one they had no difficulty accepting as too fine and daring for the blockheads in charge of the publishing world.Of course the book was dangerous—Rinehart exuded danger. He had secrets past and present, and there were days when without explanation the house on Buxton Place stood locked and empty. At times, one or another of his harem glimpsed Rinehart getting into or out of a Cadillac parked at a Hatchtown curb. An overexcitable dual major in fine arts and philosophy named Polly Heffer discovered a loaded revolver in a bedside drawer and screeched loudly enough to bring Suki in from the living room at the moment a naked Rinehart entered disgusted from the bathroom. Rinehart silenced Polly with a growl, said that he kept the revolver for self-protection, and invited Suki to make up a threesome.

• Did she join in?

"You think I turned himdown?"

• Now and then, Rinehart's devotees would come upon him in conference with men clearly unconnected to Albertus. These men drew him whispering into a corner, Rinehart sometimes laying an arm across a burly shoulder. The younger, more presentable of these outsiders surfaced during the whirlpools of long parties, and the students included them in their circle. One of these men was Donald Messmer, who lived in the Hotel Paris on Word Street and did whatever came to hand.

• "Don Messmer wasn't a criminal," Suki said. "Basically, Don was this very easygoing guy who just sort of hung out. To us, he was like Dean Moriarty inOn the Road, but more laid-back. And he was crazy about your mother. The guy probably never read a book in his life, and all of a sudden he's walking around with novels sticking out of his back pocket because he wants to impress Star Dunstan. I used to hear her talking to him about, you know, Cezanne and Kerouac and Jackson Pollock and Charlie Parker—Don Messmer!—but he didn't have a chance, she was in love with Edward Rinehart, along with the rest of us."

"How did his name wind up on her marriage license?" "Hold on," Suki said, "let me tell you what I know."

•At the end of the semester, Suki transferred to Wheeler College in Wheeler, Ohio, ostensibly to continue training under a lithographer who had spent the previous year at Albertus. She had lost faith in Edward Rinehart and wanted to escape his sphere of influence. Erwin Leake, once a worthwhile English teacher, had become a drunken phantom; some of the boys Rinehart had declared artists of great promise were turning into drug addicts interested only in another handful of pills; her female friends thought of nothing but Rinehart and his satisfactions. Suki wanted out.

Late in the winter of the following year, Star Dunstan appeared in Wheeler, pregnant, exhausted, and in need of a safe place to stay. Suki relinquished half of her bed. For the next few days, Star said only that she had tohide, toconceal herself. Suki let her sleep and smuggled in food from her waitressing job. Star told her that she had married a man, but that the marriage had been a mistake. She trembled at the ringing of the telephone. When someone knocked at the door, she disappeared into the bedroom. After two weeks, Star recovered sufficiently to get a job at Suki's restaurant. After another month, she began auditing arts courses at Wheeler. Eventually, she told Suki that her husband had abandoned her when a doctor told her that she might be carrying twins. At the next appointment, the doctor informed her that she might be carrying only one child after all, but this news could not bring back the vanished husband.

An obstetrician in Wheeler pronounced Star fit and healthy and predicted that she would deliver twins, although the evidence was not as conclusive as he would like. She packed her things and left for Cherry Street.

At the end of the school term, Suki drove to Edgerton, found a new apartment, and moved in hours before the descent of a powerful storm. She called Nettie, without response. Perhaps the Cherry

Street telephone lines were out. She called Toby Kraft and got through. Toby told her that Star had been admitted to St. Ann's Community Hospital and was about to give birth. He was beside himself with worry. The river had overflowed its banks, and cables had blown down everywhere. Suki belted herself into her rain slicker, snatched up her umbrella, and went outside. Instantly, the umbrella flipped inside out and tore out of her hands.

•52

•Floodwater sluicing around the low wall of sandbags rose over her ankles. Under the slicker, her clothing was soaked. Suki climbed over the barricade and waded toward the hospital's entrance. The lobby looked like Calcutta. In the confusion, she managed to buttonhole a nurse, who focused on her long enough to tell her that only two expectant mothers, a Mrs. Landon and a Mrs. Dunstan, were up on the fourth floor in obstetrics. She advised Suki to take the stairs instead of the elevator.

Suki ran up to the cacophony of the obstetrics department. Babies shrieked from bassinets in the nursery. A nurse frowned at her muddy boots and said that her friend was in delivery room B, attended by Midwife Hazel Jansky. Suki grabbed her arm and demanded details.

Mrs. Dunstan had been in labor five hours. There were no complications. Since this was a first delivery, the process was expected to go on for hours more. Midwife Jansky was assisting at both of the night's deliveries. The nurse peeled Suki's hand from her arm and moved on.

Suki retreated into the waiting room. Behind the blurred reflection of her pale face suspended above a bright yellow slicker, the long windows revealed only a vertical black wall pierced by the lamp posts in the parking lot. Suki put her face against the glass, shielded her eyes, and looked out upon another black wall, this one stretched over the landscape and streaked with incandescent ripples. A dark, linear form she hoped was a tree trunk bobbed along in the wake of an automobile.

Some time later, a younger nurse ducked in to tell her that Mrs. Dunstan was making progress, but if her baby had any sense it would pull the emergency brake and stay where it was for another twelve hours. The next time Suki cupped her face to look out the window, the lamps in the parking lot had died, and objects too small to identify were swirling downstream, like toys. She lowered herself onto the sofa and fell asleep.

A muffled explosion, followed by women's screams, woke her up. The lights failed, and the screams lengthened into bright flags of sound. Suki groped toward the hallway and saw flashlight beams cutting through the darkness. She took off in search of Star.

Her hands discovered a wide seam in the wall. Suki felt her way sideways, pushed open a door, and charged into a dead-black chamber where an invisible woman wept and moaned.

"Star?"

A strange voice cursed at her.

Suki backed out. Further down, she came to the door of the second delivery room, which knocked her backward as it burst open. A figure put a hand on her shoulder and pushed her to the side. Suki groped forward and caught the door on its backswing. She stumbled in. Whoever was in the room whimpered. Suki bumped against a metal rail and reached down. She touched a wet, bare leg.

Star gasped and pulled her into an embrace. "Suki, they took my babies away."

As abruptly as it had failed, the electricity jumped back into life. Star shielded her eyes. Thick brush strokes and random spatters of blood smeared her thighs. Suki cradled Star's head and stroked her hair.

The midwife bustled in and placed in Star's hands a doll-like infant tightly wrapped in a blue blanket. Star protested—she had delivered two children, one that felt like giving birth to a watermelon, and another who had his bags packed and his passport ready. The midwife told her that what she had mistaken for a second child was the placenta.

Hours later, a harried doctor came in to reassure Star that she had delivered a single healthy child. When asked about Mrs. Landon, Midwife Jansky's other patient, the doctor said that Mrs. Landon's infant had been stillborn.

•Suki had stayed with Star until early the following evening, by which time the Fire Department had pumped the floodwater from the basement and ground floor of the hospital. Crews labored to clean away the sticky, foul-smelling layer of mud deposited by the Mississippi. While Star finished a lily-white dinner of chicken, mashed potatoes, and cauliflower, Nettie, Clark, and May swept in. The aunts pelted her with questions. Was it a normal baby? Could she be sure the hospital was not concealing something from her?

Nettie collared a hapless nurse and demanded that Infant Dunstan be removed from the nursery. Blissfully asleep within the confines of a bassinet, Infant Dunstan was wheeled in, snatched up, momentarily cuddled, unwrapped, and subjected to a brisk examination. Nettie passed the wailing child to its mother for rewrapping. Some abnormalities did not show themselves immediately, was Star aware of that?

Suki's indignation boiled over: what kind of late-blooming abnormality did Nettie have in mind, exactly?

Nettie turned and smiled. Isuppose her boy could wind up with different-colored eyes.

Suki fled as if pursued by Gorgons.

Thereafter, Star maintained a resolute silence about her pregnancy and marriage. Suki had seen the child develop into a four-year-old, a five-year-old, a six-year-old, and ideas of his paternity had come to her, but she never spoke of them. The boy's face declared it for her. Around the time Star began placing her son into foster care, Suki experimentally married a harpsichord player in the Albertus Music Department and moved to Popham, Ohio, where her husband had been appointed artist in residence at an obscure liberal arts college.

The Albertus circle had exploded into disconnected fragments, some to teaching positions, some to nine-to-five jobs, to mental hospitals,Europe, communes, death in Vietnam, law practices, jail terms, other fates. Edward Rinehart had been killed in a prison riot. Rachel Newborn had redesigned herself in a manner that dismissed Suki Teeter. Of her old friends, only Star Dunstan could still be seen, and Star returned to Edgerton only infrequently.

•Suki took me in the golden haze of her embrace and apologized for talking so much.

“I'm glad you did," I said.

Suki patted my cheek and said that maybe we could have lunch together after my mother's funeral. “I'd like that," I said, and a question came to mo. "Suki, it was obvious to you that Rinehart was my lather, but what about my aunts? Did Nettie and May ever meet him?" "Huh," she said. "Not when I was around, anyhow."

•53

•Otto Bremen swiveled his chair in my direction. One hand held a glass of bourbon, a cigarette burned in the other, and he was grinning like a Halloween pumpkin. "Come in and watch the Braves get the tar beat out of 'em. It's a beautiful sight."

I might have gone across the hall and spent the next ninety minutes helping Otto Bremen trounce the Atlanta Braves by drinking them to death, but Edward Rinehart's book tempted me more. After I tookFrom Beyond out of my knapsack, I flopped on the bed to read until Laurie Hatch showed up.

Torn between turning immediately to "Blue Fire" and avoiding it altogether, I took the easy way out and started at the beginning.

In "Professor Pendant's Inheritance," a retired professor of Middle Eastern studies moves to an eighteenth-century fishing village where a former colleague had unexpectedly bequeathed him an old house and a vast, legendary library. The retired professor plans to complete his study of Arabic folklore with the aid of this great resource. Forced into a pub during a downpour, the professor overhears a rumor oddly similar to a tale in one of his benefactor's rarest volumes; soon after, he discovers a twelfth-century manuscript of dire incantations. ... At the story's end, Professor Pendant is devoured by the ancient god, one-third octopus, one-third snake, and one-third indescribable but hideous all the same, summoned by the manuscript.

"Recent Events in Rural Massachusetts" described the visit to a bleak hamlet of a young scholar who falls prey to a race of stunted beings produced by sexual congress between primitive hominids and a ravenous deity from beyond the membrane of our universe.

"Darkness over Ephraim's Landing" ended with this sentence: Asthe bells of St. Arnulf's chimed, I burst into the sacrosanct chamber and by the flickering light of my upraised candle glimpsed the frothing monstrosity which once had been Fulton Chambers crawl, with hideous alacrity, into the drain!

All of this, even the exclamation point, reminded me of something I had read at thirteen or fourteen, but could not place.

As prepared as I would ever he, I began reading "Blue Fire." Half an hour later, I carried the book to the window and went on reading. "Blue Fire" was a novella about the life of one Godfrey Demmiman, whose experiences sometimes resembled nightmare versions of my own, and for all my fascination I had to struggle against the impulse to set the book on fire and toss it into the sink.

The child Demmiman receives a summons from an "ancient wood" at the edge of town. After he enters the woods, an inhuman voice informs him that he is the son of an Elder God, a new Jesus who shall bring about the Apocalypse by giving entry to his unearthly fathers. Through the agency of a sacred blue fire, he is granted unnatural powers. He displays these powers to local girls and kills them. Exiled to a military school, he drifts into madness under the influence of a sacred text.

In his early thirties, Demmiman moves to the city beloved of the text's author and is drawn to a forbidding manse. He imagines himself stalked by furtive beings connected to both himself and the house, breaks in and discovers the crypt of eighteenth-century Demmimans— it is his ancestral home. Returning night after night, he senses a presence, an Other, which searches for him but flees at his approach. Once, carrying a candle through the dusty ballroom, he glances into a mirror and catches sight of a dark figure behind him—he whirls around—the figure has vanished. Two nights later, a darkening of the atmosphere suggests that the Other will at last permit himself to be seen. The sound of footsteps padding through distant rooms brings him to the library at the top of the house.

At the sound of a car pulling up in front of the rooming house, I looked up and saw the Mountaineer backing intoa parking space. I jammed the book in my pocket, opened my door, and extended a foot through the frame. I could go no further. Like an X-ray, a sharp pain pierced my head from back to front.

Instead of Helen Janette's hallway and Otto Bremen beckoning from his easy chair, before me lay the room I had seen as a child and in the midst of my breakdown at Middlemount. A dying fern, a stuffed fox under a glass bell, and a brass clock occupied a mantelpiece. Somewhere out of sight, a man muttered an indistinct stream of words. All of this had existed long before my own time on earth. I lurched backward, and the scene dissolved.

The old man across the hall was looking at me. "Kid, you okay?"

"Dizzy spell." I ran downstairs toward Laurie Hatch.

54 •Mr. X

• O Great Ones, O cruel Masters, Your long-suffering but faithful Servant bends once again to the pages of his Journal. I wish to make a confession.

• Of late, my tales have much occupied my mind, one in particular. It was my longest, my best and most regretted. While writing it, I feltgodlike and fearful. My pen flew across the page, and for the first and only time in my life I wrote what I knew not that I knew until it was written—I knocked at the door of the Temple and wasadmitted —my life became adark wood, amaze, amystery —it was then first I entered theriver-bankish state—

Would that tale had never laid its hand upon my breast and whispered—take me in—

• I need a moment to collect myself.

• The inspiration descended during a weary, late-night return from Mountry Township in the summer of my last year as a Lord of Crime. A fool named Theodore Bright had attempted to eliminate me from my position in the criminal hierarchy. The necessary payback had been devoid of pleasure. I wanted out. My thoughts turned to the consolations of art, and a pleasing notion came to me, that of adumbrating the plight of Godfrey Demmiman, a half-human creature granted the freedom of a god. My alter ego was to re-enact my struggles toward the Sacred Purpose. But as I wrote, my intentions surrendered to what rose up within me.

I PROTEST!

Every other tale went where it was supposed to go. Why should onlythis seem inhabited by art? Let me say this, let me spell it out loud and clear—

I HATE ART. ART NEVER DID ANYONE A BIT OF GOOD. IT NEVER WON A WAR, PUT FOOD ON THE TABLE, SWEPT

THE FLOOR, TOOK OUT THE GARBAGE OR SLIPPED YOU A TWENTY WHEN YOU WERE DOWN AND OUT. ART DOESN'T ACT THAT WAY.

The beginning went as anticipated. Through the medium of Godfrey Demmiman's childhood and youth, I revisited my own. We had mystical experiences in a deep wood and the descent of godlike gifts. My tears brimmed over at the discovery of the Sacred Book. Then hoodlum Imagination brushed aside intention and destroyed my peace. In place of conviction—doubt; in place of clarity—confusion; of design—chaos; in place of triumph—who knows, but certainly not triumph.

Demmiman moves to Markham, the New England village beloved of his Master, and through its winding lanes and passages imagines himself led by misshapen beings to a long-abandoned house of evil repute. He breaks in and finds it to have been the residence of his ancestors. Within, a Presence stalks him—he stalks the Presence—they confront each other—horribly—of the blasphemous ending I decline to speak. For the sake of Coming Generations, I enter the following into the Record:

I Hereby Recant the concluding passages of the story entitled "Blue Fire," those beginning with the words,"Slowly, with dragging step, an indistinct figure emerged from the shadows," and place these conditions upon their distribution. They are to be banned from the Reading Lists of Your Secondary Schools and Institutes of Higher Education. Where available, access must be restricted to Historians and Other Scholars, and this Statement is to be printed in its entirety upon the facing page.

•What follows is an account of recent actions on Behalf of the Stupendous Cause.

•I had nearly forgotten my vow to protect Frenchy La Chapelle from the cowardice of his partner in crime, but when it came back to me, I repaired to the intensive care unit of St. Ann's Community Hospital.

At the center of a network of wires and tubes, a Hatchtown weasel I knew of old sipped the steady doses of oxygen provided by a mechanical ventilator. Like all Hatchtown weasels, including Frenchy La Chapelle, Clyde Prentiss had dared speak of me only in whispers during his urchin-hood. (None of them have ever known my name—any of my names and for decades have referred to me by a delightfully sinister sobriquet.) On a balmy evening twenty-live years in the past, happening to overbear the prepubescent Clyde Prentiss amusing his peers by a show of irreverence, I exploded into their clubhouse, grasped the little fellow by his ankles, carried the gibbering boy down the lanes to a little-noted structure, and suspended him head-down over the Knacker.

At a time when popular opinion dismisses every sort of nastiness as unacceptable, this eternal source of Hatchtown nightmares has not only been forgotten, its very existence has been denied. Accidentally or no, the Knacker's location has slipped from public record, conveniently assisting its ascent into mythical status.

I held the wriggling boy above the pit until a fragrant evacuation stained his dungarees. Having made my point, I lowered him to the floor. From that day forth, neither the boy nor his fellows offered ought but obedience. The comatose husk of that child's adult self lay before me.

I drew my knife to slice through the accordion folds of the ventilator tube. His spindly chest elevated and deflated. I threw back the sheet, punched the blade into his navel, and dragged it to his throat, which I laid open with a single lateral stroke. The guardian machines trilled, and Prentiss flopped up and down in lively consternation. I wiped the blade on the bottom of the coverlet and swept unseen around the nurse who had appeared at the front of the compartment.

I once again put the fear of God into Frenchy La Chapelle by seeming to materialize out of the refuse of a Word Street corner. "Good morning, Frenchy," I said. He levitated an inch or two off the pavement. "Time for your marching orders."

Frenchy emitted a moan, about what I had expected. “I tried to find Dunstan, but if he ain't here, it ain't my fault."

“I want to know where he's staying."

"How'm I supposed to dothat?" Frenchy whined.

"Look for him. When you see him, follow him home. After that, return to this corner and wait for me."

"Wait for you?"

"Pretend it's a train station, and I'm the train."

His mouth curved downward in a Frenchy-smile. "Lots of guys tryin' to find Dunstan."

He risked a peek beneath the brim of my hat. "The cops brought him in After that friend of Joe Staggers got his head hashed open, only they let him go. Staggers and his pals aren't loo happy."

"You'd better find him before they do," I said.

He rocked back and forth, gathering his courage. "Didn't you say something about a favor?"

"You could always call the hospital."

Frenchy stopped jittering, and a pulse beat in his temples.

"Step into Horsehair. I'll explain what you are going to do Monday night."

He held his breath as I moved in and blocked the opening. Frenchy had been one of the boys who had seen little Clyde's brush with the Knacker.

•55

•Laurie, who had listened with only half an ear as I described Rinehart's book and my conversation with Suki Teeter, came to life as we neared the expressway. "You solved everything in one day! Yesterday you didn't know anything, and now you know more than you want to! You're done! We have to celebrate."

I asked if Cobbie had come home all right.

"Yes." Her tone was dry and ironic. "Stewart brought him home and then favored us with his company for several hours. That's why I was late." She swerved onto the westbound ramp. "He helped himself to gallons of Scotch and repeated the same things over and over." Laurie glanced over her left shoulder and flattened the accelerator. We hit sixty before we shot out onto the expressway, and when we settled into the fast lane, the speedometer was climbing past seventy. "Most of them were about you."

I blurted, "Me?"

Grenville Milton had called Le Madrigal to complain about a man of my description who had insulted him outside the restaurant, then gone in—on Milton's recommendation! Vincent, the headwaiter, had identified me and informed Milton that I had joined Mrs. Hatch and Mrs. Ashton. Milton had reported to Stewart, who already knew, because his private detective had told him.

Laurie said, "This morning, some guy tailed me into town and watched us go to City Hall. After that, he followed us to the V.A. Hospital. When I got homo, he hightailed it around the corner for a little chat with Stewart. Who of course shoved Cobbie into his car and burned rubber all the way to my house."

I looked through the Mountaineer's big rear window. “If Stewart thinks I'm working for Ashleigh, he must be going batty trying to figure out what we were doing at the V.A. Hospital."

"Everything's driving Stewart batty. Stewart is especially batty when it comes to you." Her eyes flashed at me. "Going places with a Dunstan is like associating with Charles Manson. After destroying the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and introducing the Black Death to Europe, your family gotreally awful. They settled in Edgerton, where they practiced voodoo and cheated at cards. They made the Kennedys look like the Reagans!"

Gleaming with mockery, Laurie's eyes slid to meet mine. "He actually said that.They made the Kennedys look like the Reagans. It was very impressive."

"We always were a little peculiar," I said.

•The tiles on the roof of the big house on Blueberry Lane were made of rubberized plastic, and its design mismatched a Tudor manor with a Georgian townhouse. Stewart Hatch had probably fallen in love with the place the moment he had seen it.

"Who built this house?" I asked Laurie.

She grimaced. “It's one of Grennie Milton's masterpieces. To feel at home in it, you have to wear a pink blazer and green pants."

We went into a vast space in which islands of furniture seemed to float a few inches off a pale carpet. Footsteps clattered on a staircase. Cobbie hurtled around a corner, charged toward us, and wrapped his arms around his mother's legs. A dark-haired young woman in blue jeans and a loose cotton sweater appeared in his wake.

"Ned, Posy Fairbrother, my savior."

Posy gave me a crisp handshake and a smile that would have warmed a corpse. "The famous Ned Dunstan." From the mass of hair gathered behind her ears, wisps and tendrils escaped to fall about her face. She was about twenty-four or twenty-five and the sort of woman who wore lipstick only under duress. "Cobbie's been talking about you all afternoon." Posy turned to Laurie. "Feed him in about half an hour?"

Cobbie let go of his mother and tried to drag me away.

"After we get him in bed, how about helping mein the kitchen?"

Posy looked down at Cobbie doing tug-of-war on my hand and smiled at me. "The price of adoration." She knelt in front of him. "Give Ned some time to talk to your mother before asking him to listen to your music."

"Ned and I can both listen to the music." Laurie bent toward her son. "Cobbie, Ned likes that same Monteverdi piece."

Cobbie stepped into the space Posy Fairbrother had vacated. "You do?" His eyes held no trace of humor.

" 'Confitebor tibi,' " I said. "Emma Kirkby. I love it."

His mouth fell open. I might as well have said that Santa Claus lived on one side of me and the Easter Bunny on the other. He wheeled around and raced toward one of the floating islands.

Laurie and I sat on an oatmeal-colored sofa as Cobbie loaded a CD into a rank of sound equipment beneath a big, soulful self-portrait by Frida Kahlo. I couldn't take my eyes from it. I looked for the other painting she had inherited from her father, and above the fireplace to our left saw a slightly smaller Tamara de Lempicka of a blond woman at the wheel of a sports car.

"What astounding paintings," I said to Laurie.

Cobbie was exploding with impatience. "Sorry," she said. "We're ready now." He pushed theplay button.

Emma Kirkby's shining voice sailed out of invisible speakers, translating the flowing, regular meter into silvery grace. Cobbie sat cross-legged on the carpet, his head lifted, drinking in the music while keeping one eye on me. His whole body went still. The meter slowed down, then surged forward at"Sanctum et terrible nomen eius," and he braced himself. We reached the "Gloria patri," where Emma Kirkby soars into a series of impassioned, out-of-time inventions that always reminds me of an inspired jazz solo. Cobbie fastened his eyes on mine. When the piece came to an end, he said, "Youdo like it."

"You do, too," I said.

Cobbie picked himself up from the carpet. "Now hear the piano one."

Laurie said, “I'll mess around in the kitchen for a while," and disappeared around the corner. Cobbie inserted another CD and pushed buttons until he reached Zoltan Kocsis playing "Jardins sous la pluie," the last section of Debussy'sEstampes.

He closed his eyes and cocked his head in unconscious imitation of almost every musician I have ever met- even I do that when I'm listening hard. I could see the harmonies shiver along his nervous system. "Jardins sous la pluie" ends with a dramatic little flourish anda high, percussive E. When it had sounded, Cobbie opened his eyes and said "That's on our piano." He pointed across the room to a white baby grand angling out from a far wall, raced across the carpet, raised the fallboard, and struck the high E. I don't know what I felt most like doing, giggling in delight or applauding, but I think I did both.

"See?" He struck it again, percussively, and lifted his finger to cut off the note.

"Do you remember the big note before that?"

He spun back to the keyboard and hit the high B. “It's five down and five up,it's funny."

The B was a five-step down from the E, so after all the previous harmonic movement, the E came as an almost comic resolution. It was no wonder Cobbie could imitate voices perfectly. He had perfect pitch, or what we call perfect pitch, anyhow—the ability to hear precise relationships between sounds.

"How did you know where they were?"

He walked up to me, laid his forearms across my knees, and stared into my eyes, asking himself if I were really that dumb or just pretending. "Because," he said, "one is very, very, veryred. And the big one is very, very, veryblue."

"Naturally," I said.

"Very, veryblue. Now can we have the funny Frank Sinatra song?"

"Just what we need," I said.

He charged back to the player, inserted the CD ofCome Dance with Me, and called up a crisp drum roll and Billy May's brass figures. Cobbie sank to the floor and crossed his legs, listening to Sinatra's perfectly timed entrance on "Something's Gotta Give" with the same concentration he had brought to Monteverdi and Debussy. He twinkled at me at the beginning of the bridge and smiled at Sinatra's stretching out of the rhythm after the instrumental break. Because I was listening partially through Cobbie's ears, what I heard gleamed with a loose, confident power. But for some reason, a part of me shrank away—Sinatra's "Something's Gotta Give" was the last thing I wanted to hear. The track ended with a swaggering downward phrase and an exultantCome on, let's tear it up that made Cobbie laugh out loud.

He fastened his eyes on mine. "Again?"

"Ring-a-ding-ding," I said.

The jazzy call to arms from the drummer; urgent shouts from the trumpets and trombones; the saxophone section unfurlinga carpet-smooth lead-in; at the exact center of the exact center of the first beat of the first bar of the first chorus, a lean baritone voice took off in a racing start. Fear slid up my spine, and goose pimples bristled on my arms.

When the song ended, Posy Fairbrother appeared at the entrance of the room. "Let's tear up some wild, knocked-out, koo-koo spaghetti, what do you say?"

Cobbie plunged toward her. At the corner leading to the kitchen, he looked back at me. "Ned! We're having knocked-out, koo-koo spaghetti!"

"You and I are having spaghetti, Frank," Posy told him. "You can say good night to Ned afterward, and then he's going to have dinner with your mommy."

Laurie moved around them, holding a wineglass in each hand. "You and Posy go in the kitchen. I'll be there in a minute."

Cobbie put his hand into Posy's and vanished around the corner. For what seemed an absurdly long time, Laurie and I walked toward each other. When we stood face to face, she leaned forward to kiss me. The kiss lasted longer than I had expected.

"What did you think? Whatdo you think?"

"He's incredible, that's what I think. I think he should skip grade school and go straight to Juilliard."

Laurie put her forehead on my shoulder. "Now what do I do?"

"You should probably start him on piano lessons with a good teacher. Five years later, get him a great teacher and hire a lawyer whose nickname is Jaws."

She straightened up and stared at me, almost exactly as Cobbie had done while explaining that E and B were colored red and blue.

"What impresses me most is that he's such a good kid. I think he's going to need as much protection as encouragement. Apart from that, just stand back and enjoy the show. But, hell, I'm just making this stuff up, I don't know anything."

Laurie moved against me once more, put an arm around my back, and then broke apart and held out a slip of paper. "Posy found a listing for a Donald Messmer in Mountry. While I spend a little time with Cobbie, would you like to see what he has to say?"

I took the paper from her.

The fireplace came through into a kind of television room or den with track lighting aimed down at half-empty shelves. Toy trucks and children's books were scattered across the carpet. I sat on the sofa and picked up the telephone, but the first person I called was Nettie.

"Your Mountry trash came around this morning," she said. “I told that sorry excuse for a man he needed more than a big mouth and a baseball bat to scareme. Sent them away with their tails between their legs. You don't happen to have a piece, do you?"

I laughed. "No, I don't have a gun."

"Get one. Show iron to fools like that, they get out of your face lickety-split."

Rinehart's book dug into my side, and I took it out of my pocket before dialing the other number.

Posy's CD-ROM had located the right Donald Messmer, but it took me a couple of minutes to get him talking.

"You saw my name on the marriage license, and you got curious about me, huh? Guess I can't blame you for that."

I thanked him and called him Mr. Messmer.

"Star let you know I wasn't your dad, I hope?"

We spoke a little more. Messmer said, “I'm real sorry about your mom. If you don't mind my saying so, I was nuts about her. I would have done anything for Star Dunstan."

It was the reason he had married her. Two months after getting pregnant and moving in with Rinehart, Star's infatuation had curdled into fear. When she had confided to Messmer that she thought Rinehart intended to injure her, the child, or both of them, Messmer helped her escape from Buxton Place. They were married by a justice of the peace and fled across Ohio and into Kentucky, where Messmer had family. When his relatives proved hostile to Star, the couple went to Cleveland. They took jobs in restaurants and lived together in reasonable happiness. A month later, Star went for a medical checkup, and everything changed.

“I was this stupid kid," he said. “If something was more than five minutes ahead of me, I couldn't think about it. The idea of having a child was almost more than I could handle, so I just tried to forget it, figuring it would work itself out. When she came back from the doctor and said it was twins, it was like, Sorry, Don, you're spending the next twenty years in slavery."

"And the twins weren't yours," I said.

“I'm glad you can understand that. A week later, I was shaving in front of the mirror, and this corpse looked back at me. I packed my stuff and took off. I should have been a better guy, but I did what I did. Does that make sense to you?"

"You did her a favor by getting her away from Rinehart."

"That's a nice thing to say. The truth is, we wouldn't have stayed together anyhow."

After arriving in Mountry, he tended bar until he had saved enough money to buy his own place, which he still ran. His wife had died three years ago, and he had two daughters and six grandchildren. When Messmer looked back at the young man who had run away from Edgerton with Star Dunstan, he saw a person he could scarcely recognize.

"Do you know a man named Joe Staggers?"

"Everybody in Mountry knows Joe Staggers. Most wish they didn't. Why, you run into him somewhere?"

“It's all a mistake, but Staggers thinks he has a grudge against me."

"The asshole's whole life is a mistake." I could hear him wondering how far he wanted to go. "This grudge, was a guy named Minor Keyes involved in that?"

"So I hear," I said.

“If you're going to be around more than a couple days, you might see can you borrow a weapon from someone. Staggers is a mean son of a bitch."

•Cobbie was polishing off his spaghetti at a table in a windowed alcove next to the kitchen door. Laurie asked, "How did it go?"

"He's a nice guy. Have you ever been to Mountry?"

She shook her head. "Why?"

"Let's promise never to go there."

Cobbie chanted, "Somewhere, somehow, someone'sgotta be kissed."

Posy sprang from her chair. "Bedtime for the Rat Pack." She wiped the red smears from Cobbie's face. "All right. Upstairs."

"Do I have to?"

She put her hands on her hips. "Would I lie to you?"

"Have to have to?"

She looked at me. "Cobbie wondered if you could make out a list of CDs he would like."

“I'll try to hold it down to the top one hundred."

"Maybe we can get Ned to say good night to you once you're in bed."

Cobbie looked at me with a blast of anticipatory joy. I would have, bet anything that Stewart never tucked him in or read to him at night.

"And I'll read you a book," I said, "but it has to be a short one."

"Goodnight Moon,"he said. I felt an inexplicable chill of resistance.

"Goodnight Moon?"Posy said.

Laurie said, “Isn't that a little babyish for you?"

He shook his head."Goodnight Moon."

"Sure," I said. “It's about the perfect way to go to sleep." The same part of me that had resisted "Something's Gotta Give" was sayingno no no to Cobbie's chosen book. I knew it came from the same place, wherever that was.

"You're a lucky kid," Posy said.

Laurie smiled at me and told Cobbie, "Just once."

He kissed her and flew out of the kitchen, Posy behind him.

Laurie drank the last of the wine in her glass without taking her eyes from my face. “I don't suppose you have three or four children you play with every afternoon and read to every night, one after the other."

"Six," I said. "Plus the twins inBoulder."

My mouth went dry. I had intended to say "San Diego," butBoulder had come out as if a wizard had put a spell on my tongue. For the third time, a powerful and irrational unease spread its wings. Boulder?

Laurie stood up to get the bottle. "You know, Stewart never read to Cobbie at bedtime, not once. What happened to your glass?"

“I left it in the other room," I said. "Hold on, I'll find the dog sled." When I returned, I sat down next to her and putFrom Beyond on the table.

Laurie flipped through random pages. Something made her snicker, and I said, "What?"

She grinned. "'Mr. Waterstone,' creaked the old librarian from the musty darkness of his sinister lair, 'the means by which you acquired that ancient text are of no interest to me.' In books, I don't think people shouldcreak or anything else like that. They should just say things."

"Edward Rinehart may not be the author for you, he surmised."

She closed the book. "Tell me about Donald Messmer."

Icondensed Messmer's tale without mentioning what he had said about Joe Staggers. “It's funny. I thought there'd bemore. I'm almost disappointed there isn't."

“It's amazing, how much you got done in one day. Now you can think about the rest of your life."

Posy Fairbrother swung around the entrance to the kitchen and came as far as the central island. "Your admirer awaits you. He hasn't looked atGoodnight Moon for so long it took me ages to find it, but he promised to go to sleep after one reading. Laurie, what can I do while Ned is being wonderful?"

"Help me with the hollandaise for the artichokes, and if you put a salad together, I'll handle the rest."

"Do you want me to clean up afterwards?"

"One of us will." Laurie pushed her chair back and stood up in a single gesture. The glowing shield of her face revolved toward me. "Ready to be wonderful all over again?"

•56

•Separated by expanses of ocher wall, doors stained to look like rosewood marched toward a floor-to-ceiling window with an arched fanlight. The second door on the right stood partially open.

Sending out waves that would set off a Geiger counter, the book lay on the chair beside Cobbie's bed. Already yawning, he was hugging the teddy bear. A stuffed black cat and a stuffed white rabbit stood guard at the foot of his bed, and a foot-highTyrannosaurus rex reared on the headboard.

Margaret Wise Brown's hymn to bedtime seemed almost poisonous. To distract myself, I asked Cobbie how my namesake was getting along. Ned the bear andTyrannosaurus rex had become excellent friends. Was Cobbie ready for his book? Yes, emphatically. Hoping that I was as ready as he, I opened the book, turned sideways and held it out so he could see the pictures, and began to read.

Instantly, my phobia disappeared, and all sense of danger went away. Cobbie's eyelids reached bottom when I was five pages from the end. I closed the covers and, in the spirit ofGoodnight Moon, whispered good night to all and sundry. The phobia reasserted itself when

I placed the book on the headboard. I turned off the lamp, realizing that I had learned something as mysterious as the original phobia: I was afraid of the jacket, not the hook.

In my inner ear, Frank Sinatra belted out a fragment of "Something's Gotta Give":Fight . . . fight . . . fight it with . . . aaaall of your might. . .

Halfway down the stairs, I met Posy Fairbrother coming up. She was in a rush; she had to do at least four hours of work that night. All the more beautiful for being attuned to the task ahead, Posy's face seemed nearly kittenish as she wished me a wonderful evening.

•57

•Laurie Hatch and I were borne along on a tide of conversation that seemed infinitely expandable into realms more and more intimate by grace of a shared understanding. I had not had an evening like it in at least ten years, and none of those soulful interchanges of my twenties had felt so much like real contact.

The conviction that one's own experience has beenmirrored by the other's, that whatever is said will be understood, soon begins to confirm itself out of sheer momentum, and, of course, I did not dare to be as open as I appeared. Neither did Laurie. Of my "attacks," Mr. X, the weirdness of the Dunstans, and the shadow-double who had saved my life, I said nothing. I never considered being completely honest with Laurie Hatch. She would have been alarmed, taken aback—I did not want to make her think I was crazy.

If conversations like ours did not always contain a degree of falsity, they would not be so profound.

We managed to get through a bottle and a half of wine, and the table was covered with serving dishes. "Why don't we clear this stuff up?" I said.

"Forget it." Laurie tilted back in her chair and ran a hand through her hair. "Posy will take care of that."

"She has hours of work ahead of her. Let's give her a break." I carried bowls to the sink and scraped artichoke leaves into the garbage disposal.

Laurie helped me load the dishwasher and filled its soap trays. “I feel like one of the shoemaker's elves. What were we going to do now, do you remember?"

"Did you want to hear the end of that Rinehart story?"

"The perfect farewell to Mr. Rinehart." She emptied the last of the wine into our glasses and led me back to the sofa.

•Curled next to me with her head on an outstretched arm, Laurie said, "This is the story you were reading when I showed up?"

“I was almost done."

She took a sip of wine. "Professor Arbuthnot has discovered a book of the extremest age and rariosity. The three old men murdered in an opium den had been tattooed on their left buttocks with an ancient Arabic curse. On his way to interview a sinister dwarf, our hero catches sight of an infant with yellow eyes and a forked tongue."

"This one's a little different," I said. "The whole first half sounds almost autobiographical." I condensed Godfrey Demmiman's early life into a couple of sentences and briefly described his adventures in the village of Markham, the obsession with his ancestral house, his simultaneous flight from and pursuit of the Other, leading to the night when he was drawn to the library on the top floor.

"Carry on, she implored."

With the conviction that it was on this night that he should encounter the figure so long hidden from view, Demmiman entered the old library and eased the door shut behind him. Immediately, Demmiman became aware that his conviction was no mere fantasy. The Other's presence etched itself upon the endings of his nerves, and as he took it in, he took in also the state in which he should discover his adversary.

After preparations no less fearful, no less uncertain than his own, the Other awaited his arrival with an equal terror, which served only to chill the blood in Demmiman's veins. Nonetheless, Godfrey found it within himself to advance forward and cast his eye over the musty vacancy.

"Who are you, unholy figure?" he brought forth.

There came an irresolute, hesitating silence. "Come forth. By all that is within me, I must see you."

The pressure of the silence about him nearly sent him in flight to the door. At the last moment of his endurance, a footfall sounded from a distant region of the library.

“It's no good if the guy comes out, and he's just another monster," Laurie said.

"We'll see," I said.

Slowly, with dragging step, an indistinct figure emerged from the shadows. Demmiman found himself unable to breathe. Here was what for either release or surrender he knew he must confront at last. The intensity of his curiosity gave him the dim figure of a man decades older than himself and formed by experiences far beyond his own, experiences before which Demmiman knew his own imagination to fall short.

His dark, formal dress was that of a provincial man of business elevated to a tyrannical success. Scarcely had Demmiman taken in a white, exposed froth of beard than he saw, upon a forward step, that what had made the face indistinct was the pair of raised hands concealing it in— Demmiman felt—a gesture of shame.

He separated his feet and planted himself on the dusty floor.

The figure lifted its head and spread its fingers, seeming to sense his shift of mood. Then, as if in a sudden moment of decision, it dropped its hands and bared its face with an aggression Demmiman knew beyond his own capabilities. Horror held him fast. A thousand sins, a thousand excesses had printed themselves upon that face. It was the record of his secret life, hideous and inescapable, and yet, however coarsened and inflamed, the Other's features were hideously, inescapably Demmiman's own.

"Are you all right?" "Why?"

“It sounded like your throat tightened up. Drink some wine, that'll help."

Had all his efforts been designed but to bring him face to face with this monstrous version of himself? Part of Demmiman's humiliation lay in the recognition that the hideous being's strength far surpassed his own. The Other stepped forward, blazing with the claim it made upon him, and he could not bear up before the demand for recognition. Godfrey Demmiman turned and ran for his life.

He thought he heard laughter behind him, but the laughter was only an echo of his shame; he thought dragging footsteps pursued him down the stairs but heard only the pounding of his heart. From half-open doors and shrouded corners, the lithe, misshapen creatures seemed to peer out, awaiting his final surrender.

He would not yield in defeat. He had been born to a great purpose, of which the encounter in the barren room was but the key that opened the lock. His destiny, Demmiman took in, held a majesty he had only begun to comprehend.

Demmiman advanced upon the door to the gallery, thrust it open, and found in his pocket the book of matches he had used to light the tapers in the crypt. The bright flame trembled as he knelt before the first of the long curtains. A small, quivering flame sprang to life and inched upward. Demmiman moved to the next and struck another match. When the second curtain was alight, he ran to the mouldering draperies across the gallery. Then, in the dancing, irregular light, he examined his handiwork.

Rows of flame from the upright columns spread across the floorboards and the ceiling. Scouts and runners had taken another of the rotting panels, and lines of red flame crept along the surface of the wall. The walls opened to the flames as if in welcome; the floor set itself alight in a dozen places. He backed into the smoky hall and let himself out into the night.

On both sides of the narrow street, the dirty brick and blank windows of abandoned buildings took no notice of the red glare visible within their neighbor. The alarm would come long afterward, when flames rose into the dark sky. Demmiman moved into the shelter of a doorway.

The ground-floor windows shattered and released plumes so dark as to obscure the blaze within. With a great rush, the fire took the second floor. Flames surged out and vanished within a massive column of smoke.

The third floor went, and the fourth followed. Above the roar of the conflagration, Demmiman fancied that he heard the high-pitched screams of the creatures trapped at the top of the house, and the thought of their panic caused asavage rejoicing in his breast.

The dark blanket swarming over the front of the building hid from view the topmost windows, and Demmiman sped across the cobblestones to secrete himself in the doorway of an adjacent building, from whence he was able to observe the final progress of the blaze. No sooner had he cast his eyes upward to glimpse the fifth-floor windows than the first signs of firelight shone behind them, then deepened from yellow to red.

A silhouette moved into the frame of the window nearest and looked out with supernal calm. The entire structure offered a groan of imminent collapse. The figure in the window cast its unseen eyes upon him. In the distance, a siren, then another, came screaming toward the blaze. The eyes hidden within the black silhouette maintained their hold.

The window frame ignited around the dark shape, illuminating the ruined visage so like and unlike his own. The Other again issued his implacable claim. His hair burst into flame. Behind him, the fire darkened from red to the deep blue once witnessed at the heart of an ancient forest. Demmiman moved from the doorway and into the cobbled street. In the Other's demand, it came to him with the weight of a majestic paradox, lay an unforeseen fate to which Demmiman's suddenly exalted spirit gave its full assent.

He sprinted from cover and plunged into the burning building. An instant later, what remained of the interior gave way, and with a yielding sigh of capitulation the great structure folded in upon itself and shuddered downward upon Godfrey Demmiman's ecstatic release.

"He had to rid the world of himself? Not to mention his family house and the little crawly things?"

"Poor old Godfrey."

"We could manage a happier ending than that. Are you interested? Aha. What we have here is a decided show of interest, What did Edward Rinehart know about ecstatic release?"

•58

•The sight of that beautiful, tawny face so close to mine made me feel blessed. Some of the women I had known may have been more passionate than Laurie, but none were more gracefully attuned to the capacity of each individual moment to spread its wings and glide into the next. She also had the gift of what some would call a dirty mind and others inventiveness. The more we explored our bodies and celebrated their abilities, the more unified we seemed to become until at last we seemed to pour into each other and become a single, profoundly interconnected thing. When we swam apart to lie side by side, I felt as though filmy trails of my self were still drifting back into me.

"Can you even begin to guess how good you make me feel?" Laurie said.

“I think I'll build a shrine to you," I said.

A few hours later I awakened with the old sense of having to get on my way before trouble found me. Besides that, I was falling in love with Laurie Hatch far too quickly. I had no business falling in love with her at all. In a few days I was going back to New York, and after that I would probably never see her again. What I chiefly represented to Laurie was danger, and I had to protect her from that. I moved her arm off my shoulder and slid out of bed.

While I was groping for my socks, I bumped into a lamp, and the noise woke her up. Fuzzily, she asked what I was doing. I told her that I had to get back to the boarding house.

"What time is it?"

I looked at the green numerals on the digital clock. "One-fifteen."

She turned on a low bedside lamp and sat up, rubbing her face. “I'd drive you, but I'm so tired I think I'd go off the road."

“I'll call a taxi," I said.

"Don't be silly. Take Stewart's car—his other car, the one he left in the garage. We'll figure out a way to get it back. Because you are definitely coming back here, Ned, there are no two ways aboutthat."

I went to the bed and kissed her. The sheet lay rumpled across her waist, and her torso seemed dusky and golden in the dim light.

"Call me tomorrow." She switched off the light as soon as I finished dressing.

Stewart Hatch's "other" car was an ivory two-seater Mercedes 500SL, a fact that would have amazed me had I not been past all amazement. After I started the ignition, I looked at the controls, put the car into reverse, and nearly backed through the garage door. It took mea moment to learn how to change the headlights from bright to dim, and after I had dialed them back to bright I left the car throbbing in neutral and retrieved my mother's package from the back seat of Laurie's car.

I drove back to central Edgerton in high style, singing along with the jazz on the Albertus radio station, and passed up a spot in front of the rooming house to park around the corner on Harry Street.

•59

•As I went up the stairs I heard the unmistakable noise of a party going on at the far end of my floor. A cluster of young people filled the hallway at the rear of the house. The girls were mostly gleaming legs, the boys wore bristling haircuts and polo shirts, and all of them were holding plastic cups, waving cigarettes, and gabbing. A black-haired girl whose bangs brushed her eyebrows flapped her cigarette at me.

"Hey, new neighbor! Come to our party!"

"Thanks, but not tonight," I said. "Partied out."

I waved at her and glanced through the open door across the hall. Most of Otto's lights had been turned off, and illumination from the television screen flickered over the form slumped in the easy chair. The neck of a Jack Daniel's bottle protruded from his crotch, and about half an inch of dark brown liquid remained in the glass beside his chair. I wondered if I should turn off his television and help him get to bed. When I took a step toward him, I smelled burning fabric.

A curl of smoke arose just beyond Otto's limp hand. From the tip of a half-smoked cigarette, a circle of sparks on the arm of his chair brightened and lengthened into flames.

I ran into the room and began beating the flames with my hands. Otto's head jerked up. Two scarlet-threaded eyes looked at me without recognition.

"Otto," I said. "You—"

"Get the heck out!" he yelled. "Dang crook!"

I saw a big list traveling across his chest. The fist walloped into my shoulder, and I thumped onto the floor. A blaze roughly the shape and color of an autumn leaf arose from the sleeve of his sweater.

"Gol-durn robber!"

Otto planted his left hand in the midst of the flames and rocketed bellowing out of the chair. The Jack Daniel's bottle bounced to the floor. He staggered forward and noticed that his sweater was on fire.

I yelled, "The sink, Otto!" and grabbed a sweatshirt from the bottom of his bed, hearing him rip off a series of six-gun curses worthy of Gabby Hayes.Dadgum dangfool tarnation shitfire dadblasted thing is this?

A crowd of young people filled the doorframe, stubbing cigarettes on the floor and sipping from plastic cups. Otto and I were better than television.

I flattened the sweatshirt over the arm of the chair and smacked it.

The black-haired girl with the bangs edged forward. "Mr. Bremen, he isn't a robber, he's the guy who moved into Mrs. Frahm's room."

“I know, honey."

She smiled at me. "Hey, I'm Roxy Redman, and this is Charlie and Zip and my roommate, Moonbeam Challis."

A pretty blond in what looked like a slip that showed her bra straps fluttered her fingers. "My real name's Audrey, but everybody calls me Moonbeam."

"Of course they do," I said. "My name is Ned, but everybody calls me Ned."

Moonbeam tittered, and Charlie or Zip gave me a look that was supposed to make me pee in my pants.

Otto appeared beside me, holding a glass of water. Footsteps came pounding up the stairs. "Peel her off." I pulled the sweatshirt away, and Otto emptied the glass onto the blackened mess.

Invisible behind the throng, Helen Janette announced that the party was over. Mr. Tite's fedora floated into view. "You heard the lady. Get on home."

"Sorry, kid," Otto said. "Guess the stupid old man got a little fuzzy." He picked the bottle up off the floor and dropped it in the wastebasket. "Time to eat a hundred miles of you know what."

Roxy, Moonbeam, and their friends drifted away in a cloud of muted laughter, allowing me a glimpse of Mr. Tite that explained the mirth. Beneath the fedora. Tite was wearing the mesh T-shirt I had seen that morning and striped boxer shorts stained yellow at the fly.

Cinched into a pink bathrobe over a nightgown, Helen Janette marched in and established a command post. “I demand an explanation."

Otto did his best. He had fallen asleep while smoking, I had startled him, he was sorry for all the excitement. Nothing like this had ever happened before, and it would never happen again.

Mrs. Janette intensified her air of authority. “I amdisgusted." Mr. Tite moved into position behind her. "This roomreeks of alcohol. You passed out with a cigarette in your hand and almost started a fire. We can have no more of this, Mr. Bremen."

"Right," said the watchdog.

"This here was a one-time mistake. I'll take more care in the future." Otto straightened up. I thought he looked like John Wayne. “Is there anything else you care to say?"

"Open your windows and let out the stink. This is supposed to be a decent house."

"My windows are open already. If you want to run a decent house, you could get rid of Frank Tite. Just my humble advice."

Tite lurched forward, and Mrs. Janette halted him with a raised hand. She glared at me. "Mr. Dunstan, I want no further difficulties from you."

“I did you a favor," I said.

She stamped out.

Bremen looked at me and shrugged. We heard them march downstairs and close their separate doors. "What's Tite's story?" I asked.

"Frank Tite's a bum who got thrown off the police force, that's his story." He pulled off his sweater and tossed it in the direction of the wastebasket. "There's another bottle of sour mash around here somewheres. Join me in a nightcap?"

I got out with a promise to visit him soon. Rinehart's book and the package from the safety-deposit box had been kicked into the corner near the window. I carried the package to my table and stripped off layers of brown paper until I uncovered a large, old-fashioned scrap-book in a quilted forest-green binding. Taped to its front cover was a notecard inscribed with my mother's handwriting:For Ned.

•60

•I flipped through the pages of Laurie's Russian doll, my last, secret gift from my mother, growing more and more baffled. Glued front and back to more than half of its thick pages were . . . newspaper clippings about crimes? A few of them came from theEdgerton Echo, but most of the articles had been clipped from out-of-town papers. Nearly all the stories reported unsolved violent deaths, none of which seemed to have any connection to Star or me. Disturbed, I began going through the scrapbook more methodically, and a name I had heard from both Hugh Coventry and Suki Teeter jumped out at me from the first few articles.

The headline above the first clipping readmidwife accused of baby-snatching, admits charges. Hazel Jansky, a local midwife, had come under suspicion when an administrator at St. Ann's Community Hospital noted that over the previous decade she had been present at nine stillbirths. Jansky had given plausible accounts of the incidents, but the hospital had asked nurses to monitor her performance. Two weeks later, one of the nurses learned that a patient of Jansky's had delivered a dead child moments before. A hospital maintenance man told her that he had seen the midwife rushing down the service stairs. Inspired, the nurse took the staff elevator to the basement, there to find Hazel Jansky trotting toward a flight of steps leading to a back door. She caught up with her outside the door and saw a waiting car speed off. The nurse conducted Jansky to the administrator's office, where the infant was discovered concealed inside her coat, bathed, swaddled, and unquestionably alive. At Police Headquarters, Jansky admitted participation in four transactions involving the sale of newborn infants to couples unable or unwilling to go through the normal adoption process. She denied having an accomplice or accomplices.

The story was dated March 3, 1965. Four months before my seventh birthday, my mother had opened the morning paper and discovered what she considered proof that she had delivered not a single child, but twins.

A day later, theEcho announcedbaby-snatcher midwife confesses, defends actions. Hazel Jansky had identified the four "black-market babies" and claimed to have acted in their interests by rescuing them from unfit mothers. Jansky had also named their purchasers, but efforts to trace the new parents had not been successful, "which," reported theEcho, "has led to speculations that the purchases were made under false names."

Her trial began in May and lasted three weeks. Of the four mothers whose children had been abducted and sold, one had been killed in a tavern brawl; another died in a drunken traffic accident that took two other lives; one disappeared without a trace; after hearing that her son was alive, the fourth complained that the defendant kept the money for herself instead of splitting it fifty-fifty.

The jury found Jansky guilty and recommended mercy. A week later, the judge spoke. Although the illegality of the defendant's actions could not be overlooked, neither should it be forgotten that Midwife Jansky had chosen infants whose mothers' conduct put them at risk. The judge wished also to take into account her record of service to the community. Therefore, he accepted the recommendations of the jury and sentenced the defendant to three years at Greenhaven Penitentiary, with possibility of parole after eighteen months.

She stole four children and told their mothers they were dead, this Hazel Jansky. Because a judge and jury found that she had acted in the interests of the stolen children, she spent only eighteen months in jail. Hazel Jansky's photographs did not depict a person to whom one would entrust social policy. A compact blond in her mid-thirties, she glowered from the pages of theEcho with the irascibility of one who had learned that unrelenting crabbiness served her far better than cheerfulness and was not about to forget it.

I thought the court had shared her contempt for her victims. If Hazel Jansky had sold the babies of middle-class mothers, she would still be in jail. And I wondered if the murdered woman and the one killed while driving drunk would have turned out differently had they not been told that their babies were stillborn.

The next clipping, from theMilwaukee Journal and headeddouble murder in suburbia, introduced the unsolved homicides. Milwaukee County pathologists had discovered that Mr. and Mrs. William McClure, previously thought to be victims of the fire that had destroyed their house on Salisbury Road in the suburb of Elm Grove, had died as a result of multiple stab wounds. Their three-year-old daughter, Lisa McClure, had not, as originally supposed, perished from asphyxiation but from traumatic injury to the neck. Resident in

Elm Grove for only six months, the couple had remained largely unknown to their neighbors, one of whom toldthe Journal reporter that Mr. McClure claimed to have moved from St. Louis tor business reasons. Missing from the scene was eight-year-old Robert McClure, Mr. McClure's nephew, who had been enrolled in the coming term's third-grade class at Elm Grove Elementary School. While not ruling out the possibility that the boy had been abducted by the assailants, police held out hope that he had escaped before his presence was noted. Efforts to reach the boy's parents had not been successful, but Elm Grove's chief of police, Thorston Lund, expressed confidence that they would soon be heard from.

The next clipping was headedmystery of slain couple.

The investigation into Wednesday's brutal triple murder and arson in Elm Grove took a surprising turn this morning with the announcement that two of the victims, William and Sally McClure, may have been living under assumed names. According to a confidential source in the Elm Grove Police Department, a routine background check has revealed that on at least two previous occasions the couple had given fictitious addresses.

When purchasing the Salisbury Road property and again when enrolling eight-year-old Robert McClure, Mr. McClure's missing nephew, in Elm Grove Elementary School, the McClures listed their previous residence as 1650 Miraflores, San Juan, Puerto Rico, a nonexistent address. On Robert McClure's enrollment form, his previous school was given as St. Louis Country Day School, which has no record of his attendance.

A high-ranking officer in the Elm Grove Police Department reports that the McClures purchased the Salisbury Road residence through the Statler Real Estate Agency by means of a cash payment. Thomas Statler, the president of the agency, says that a cash sale is unusual but not unprecedented in the Elm Grove area.

One local resident described Mr. McClure as "swarthy," but with no trace of a Puerto Rican accent. Sally McClure is said to speak with a "New York" accent. "Mr. McClure wasn't like the normal person from around here. He tried to be polite, but you wouldn't call him a friendly man."

In a statement issued today, Elm Grove's chief of police, Thorston Lund, speculated that the murders could he connected to Mr. McClure's past.

The child claimed to be the couple's nephew, eight-year-old Robert McClure, remains missing.

On the next page, theJournal announcedslain elm grove couple HAD CRIMINAL BACKGROUND.

At a press conference yesterday evening, police departments of Milwaukee and Elm Grove announced that the Federal Bureau of Investigation identified William and Sally McClure, slain last Wednesday in their exclusive Salisbury Road residence, as Sylvan Booker and his common-law wife, Marilyn Felt, fugitives from criminal justice. Their two-year-old daughter, Lisa Booker, was identified as the third victim.

Agent Charles Twomey of the FBI's Milwaukee office announced that Booker and Felt had been under intensive investigation in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, area. "Arrests were expected imminently," said Agent Twomey. “It is our speculation that they were tipped off. They tried to run, but the wrong people caught up with them."

Agent Twomey could not account for the presence of eight-year-old "Robert McClure" in the household, and said, "We continue to see the boy as a valuable source of information."

In the next story, theMinneapolis Star-Tribune reported the murders in their Hennepin Avenue apartment of Philip and Leonida Dunbar, a retired couple described as "private" by their neighbors. Police expressed confidence that the guilty party would swiftly be apprehended.

police station enigma,from Ottumwa, Iowa, described another sort of mystery. A police officer named Boyd Burns had noticed a boy of eleven or twelve loitering on the local fairgrounds and suspected him of being a runaway. When approached, the boy refused to give his name or home address. "He didn't act like the normal runaway," Burns said. “If anything, he acted cocky. I took him to the station house, sat him down, and told him his parents had to be worried half to death about him."

When asked to turn out his pockets, the boy proved to be carrying more than four hundred dollars. Suspicious, Burns fingerprinted him, only to discover that the tips of his fingers were devoid of the ridges and whorls that make up individual prints. Questioned about this anomaly, the boy replied that he had no need of fingerprints.

“It was like he was making fun of me," Burns said. “I asked him to give me his first name, anyhow, and he told me I could call him 'Ottumwa Red.' I have to say, that made me smile. I asked if he wanted anything to eat, and he said he wouldn't mind a hamburger. So I sat him down in the Duty Office and told the half dozen guys there to keep an eye on him until I got back." Burns walked to Burger Whopper, a block away. "Before I went in, I heard this big whooshing sound. I turned around and saw the whole station go dark for a couple of seconds." He ran back.

The desk sergeant and the officers in the reception area lay groaning on the floor. Prisoners groaned in the holding cells. "My friends in the Duty Office, they were gone, vanished—the place looked like theMarie-Celeste. And the kid was gone, too."

Asked for his opinion about what had happened, Burns said he believed the boy had been an alien being. "Like from another galaxy. One thing about earth people, they do have fingerprints. All I can say is, I'm glad the kid isn't inOttumwa anymore."

A building had imploded in Lansing, Michigan, killing thirteen people. Three other couples had been slaughtered in their houses. On the next page was a clipping about the murder of two young women who had been hiking in Vermont. I turned off the light and fell into bed without bothering to take off my clothes.

•61

•Dream-ropes and dream-weights held me to the bed. Held captive in the mind of Mr. X, I saw a door mist into haze; I saw a knife blade, a dark-complected man rise frowning from a chair. When he opened the door, Mr. X flowed in and said, "Mr. Booker, you have something that belongs to me."

Was that something me? No: the something was gone, it had already escaped.

Booker sank to his knees, and Mr. X glided behind him and slashed his throat.

No, I thought,that was Anscombe . . .

No, there was Frank Sinatra singing"Fight . . . fight . . . fight it with . . . aaaaall of your might ..."

It was not the spectacle of Mr. X savaging a man named Sylvan Booker that whirled me away, it was what happened when Frank Sinatra was singing and the air smelled like pine needles and the people were named . . .

A stuffed black cat and white rabbit lay tumbled on the floor. Into the mirror before me swam a misshapen figure shaking with malicious laughter. Horrified, I burst my ropes, threw off the weights, and woke up standing beside the bed with my hands flattened over my eyes.

•62

•The Russian doll gave me the detail that explained everything I was ready to understand. Nearly all the entries were dated within a day or two of June 25th. I had visited the murdered couples with Mr. X—I hadseen them murdered. Star had collected these stories because she feared . . . that Robert was behind them? That Rinehart was? She thought that Robert had obliterated half a dozen policemen in Ottumwa, Iowa, and killed two young women hiking in Vermont. The newspapers had told her that her second son was loose in the world, wandering from one tragedy to another like a furious ghost.

Robert had sent Ashleigh Ashton to the Motel Comfort because he had known I would be there. The next day, he had rescued me from life in prison by going to bed with her.

I felt as though I, too, were a kind of Russian doll, hiding secrets inside secrets that led to an unknowable mystery. Robert; Edward Rinehart. It was too much, I could not work it out. Neither could I continue to endanger Laurie Hatch. I decided to go out and walk the streets until weariness forced me back to bed.

When I stepped outside, a white sliver of my landlady's face disappeared behind the fold of a curtain. I closed the door with a loud, satisfying bang. I wanted a drink. Maybe three drinks.

Sounds of a commotion grew louder as I walked down Chester Street. All thetroublemakers in Hatchtown had not yet found their heels.Idid not want to be Robert's toy. I haled the idea that he had been maneuvering me, directing me, shaping my life. Well, why? I stopped walking, struck by the most obvious question imaginable.

The answer came when I remembered:"Mr. Booker, you have something that belongs to me."

Once a year, Mr. X had gone in search of Robert, my shadow. A connection of which I had known nothing had pulled me, the shadow's shadow, into the search. Star and Robert had met at least twice, in front of Biegelman's department store and outside Nettie's house; surely, there had been other meetings. Maybe she had somehow kept Mr. X at bay. Our birthday arrived on the day after her funeral, and Robert could not face the annual challenge alone. He had saved my life because he needed me.

I didn't need him. Robert could go to hell. It was fine with me if Mr. X erased him.

Brimming with rage, I took another step forward and realized that what I had missed all my life was the being I had just consigned to destruction. A tide of emotion I can only describe asyearning nearly brought me to my knees. Every cell in my body called out for reunion with its other, split-off self. All over again, more painfully for being an adult, I felt like an amputated half, bleeding for the want of what would make it whole.This is crazy, I said to myself.You felt like that when you were three years old.

The enormous ache of yearning slipped back beneath its scar tissue, and Chester Street once again stretched out through the lamplight, peaceful and empty in the night air. It was past 3:00 on a Sunday morning in Edgerton. If Robert needed me to defeat Mr. X, I would help him or not, depending on how I felt at the time. But I was here because he was: Robert had set me on the path that led from Ashleigh Ashton to Laurie Hatch.

I was still worrying about Laurie when I reached Merchants Park, decided to get a drink from her husband's self-aggrandizing fountain, and finally noticed the flashing lights of the squad cars and ambulance in front of the Cobden Building. The voices I had heard came from the crowd at the top of the park and the smaller groups scattered beneath the trees.

•63

•A little man with a halo of curls fanning out beneath his cap waved a brown bag at me from a bench.

I sat down next to him. "Hello, Piney. What's going on?"

"Hell if I know. Looks like trouble in the Cobden Building."

Two more patrol cars came screaming into Ferryman's Road. At the top of the stairs, the ambulance attendants were talking to a gray-haired man whose tired face shone pink and red in the flashing lights. His stomach protruded like a shelf over the waistline of his suit. "Captain Mullan," I said.

"Your buddy. Have a taste."

Whatever was in the bottle tasted like cigar smoke.

"Just a naive little domestic burgundy, but I thought you'd be amused by its pretensions." Cackling, Piney raised the bottle. "A saying of my old friend Erwin Pipey Leake's. Pipey used to be a professor at Albertus, came out with the damndest shit." He stiffened with emotion."Follow a shadow, it still flies you;/ Seem to fly it, it will pursue. You know who wrote that?"

I shook my head.

"Ben Jonson.Darkling I listen; and for many a time/I have been half in love with easeful Death, / Called him soft names in many a mused rhyme,/ To take into the air my quiet breath. John Keats."

My scalp tingled.

"People took Pipey for a bum. Nobody gave a damn when Black Death come along and took him out." Piney wiped his eyes and jerked himself off the bench.

He shambled forward, and I followed him through the crowd at the narrow end of the park. A man in a black leather jacket glanced at me, glanced away. Frenchy La Chapelle had been drawn out of his hole.

Across Ferryman's Road, bands of colored light flew across the front of the Cobden Building. Captain Mullan stood in front of the half-opened door in conversation with a man in a blue suit who looked as though he were hoping he might wake up to find himself back in bed.

"Who's that with Mullan?"

A burly guy with slicked-back dark hair said it was Hatch's chief of security, Frank Holland.

"My boy, Bruce McMicken," Piney said.

“I'm not your boy," Bruce said.

"Somebody broke into the Cobden Building?"

Bruce McMicken gave mea sidelong glance. His slablike face made him look like eithera bartender or a patrolman. "According to one of the cops, whoever got in trashed the place. Screwed up the computers. Roughed up the guard, too. That's why the ambulance."

"An older man? I saw him going in the other day."

"Yeah, Earl."

“I got no use for Earl Sawyer," Piney said. "Standoffish."

"Earl's just unfriendly," said Bruce. "At least he doesn't sleep in alleys, like you."

Piney uttered a phlegmy chuckle, as if he had been complimented.

"Here's the boss."

A thickset man in a blue button-down shirt, khaki shorts, and loafers without socks burst through the door and took charge. He had the broad, executive face and beveled haircut of an untrustworthy senator.

"Stewart Hatch?"

"Of the Hatchtown Hatches," Piney said.

The paramedics carried the stretcher through the door, and the three men on the steps went down onto the lawn. Earl Sawyer's battered face protruded from one end of the blanket. His eyes were closed, and a stripe of blood crossed his cheek like a banner. Lieutenant Rowley followed the paramedics down the steps and joined Captain Mullan on the short front lawn. Stewart Hatch climbed into the ambulance after the paramedics.

Bruce, Piney, and I moved onto the sidewalk. The paramedics were shifting the unconscious guard onto a gurney. Frank Holland wandered up to the rear of the ambulance.

"Shitting in his pants," Bruce said. "They got a top-of-the-line security system in there. A fly lands on a lampshade, sirens are supposed to go off."

Holland turned away from the ambulance, and Hatch and one of the paramedics jumped down. The paramedic shut the doors and trotted up to the driver's seat.

"By the way," Piney whispered, “It wasn't you, was it?"

"Me?" I thought he was talking about Earl Sawyer and the Cobden Building. “I just got here."

"That deal Friday night."

"No," I said. “It wasn't me."

Piney patted my arm. The ambulance pulled out into Commercial Avenue. Stewart Hatch began jabbing his index finger into Frank Holland's chest.

Bruce McMicken said, "Adios, amigos," and vanished through the diminishing crowd.

I saw Lieutenant Rowley take in my presence. He bent toward Mullan. None too happily, Mullan looked at me. I nodded.

Stewart Hatch gave a dismissive glance at the onlookers. "Go home," he called out. "The show's over." His eyes stopped when they came to me.

Stoppedis not quite the word. When Stewart Hatch's eyes met mine, they widened with a kind of shock of recognition that immediately gave way to what looked like loathing.

He had us followed,I thought.He saw pictures of Laurie and me.

"Don't expect no Christmas cards," Piney said.

Hatch's thick, already suntanned legs propelled him before Rowley and Mullan. Looking as though some portion of him were continuing to churn forward, he rammed his fists into the pockets of his shorts and tilted his head to Rowley's ear.

Rowley found me with his dead face and dead eyes. Hatch churned into the Cobden Building with his security director scuttling behind him.

Rowley looked as happy as someone like Rowley can get. He no longer had to pretend to be my best friend. Piney had disappeared. The few people near me melted away as Rowley moved up onto my side of the street, planted himself in front of me, and exhaled recycled cigarette smoke.

"Nice seeing you again, Lieutenant," I said.

Rowley looked from side to side. His corpse's face swung back to me, and the creases dividing his cheeks filled with shadows. "You're even dumber than I thought. What is your problem, Dunstan?"

“I couldn't sleep," I said. “I went out for a walk and saw all the excitement."

He stepped forward, forcing me back. "The bus station is on Grace

Street, three Mocks down fromTown Square. That's one choice. Or, stick around and have us drop in tomorrow morning."

"Did Hatch tell you to say that, Lieutenant?"

Rowley hit me in the stomach, hard. All the air went out of me, and I staggered backward. He clipped the side of my head with a jab that spun me onto the grass. I rolled away, fighting for breath. Rowley skipped up and kicked me under my ribs. He squatted and thumped my head. "Help me out here. You were saying something?"

I managed to drag in a breath. “I'm beginning to get your point."

The cops on the other side of the street had turned their backs.

Rowley stood up and took a step back.

"One thing," I said.

He placed his hands on his knees and bent toward me. His face was a black, featureless pane.

I took another breath. "When I opened that package, I thought we had an arrangement."

"An arrangement."

“I thought a hundred bucks would keep me from getting kicked in the side."

Rowley snapped to his feet and walked away.

•When I put my key in the front door the back of my neck tingled, and I glanced over my shoulder, expecting to find Rowley summoning me into the back of a patrol car. All I saw was Frenchy La Chapelle twitching up Chester Street. Frenchy checked the number on an apartment building, then glanced at me. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket, wandered to the curb, and looked down the street as if waiting for a ride. After another glance in my direction, he shifted into his usual sidewalk boogaloo and slid around a corner into Hatchtown.

•64

•At 10:00a.m. on Sunday morning, there was a rap on my door while I was trying to persuade Laurie Hatch to drive Posy Fairbrother into town to retrieve the Mercedes. “I have a visitor," I said.

"Get rid of herand come to my house. I'll give you a tremendous brunch."

The knock came again, in triplicate. “I think it's a cop who doesn't like me very much."

"Put down the phone and let him in, so I can hear what happens. Then let him know you're talking to me."

Helen Janette's voice came through the door. "Mr. Dunstan, if you don't open up, I'll do it myself."

Clustered behind my landlady were Captain Mullan, Lieutenant Rowley, Officer Treuhaft, the human totem pole who had come with Rowley to Nettie's house, and, so close to Rowley that they could have held hands, Stewart Hatch. Stewart was wearing white trousers and a blue double-breasted blazer over a polo shirt with an upturned collar. All he needed was a yachting cap.

"This is the last straw, Mr. Dunstan," said Helen Janette, and barged away.

Captain Mullan said, "May we come in?"

"Be my guest. I'm on the phone."

The four men pushed past me. Hatch started walking around and smirking at my surroundings, and the other three watched me sit on the bed and pick up the telephone.

“I have to hang up. Captain Mullan, Lieutenant Rowley, Officer Treuhaft, and a gentleman who appears to be Mr. Stewart Hatch just came in."

"Stewart's there?"

Hatch turned around when he heard his name. "Who are you talking to?"

"My attorney," I said.

Hatch looked at Mullan. “I take that as an admission of guilt."

"The great Roy Cohn," I said. "A little dead, a little moldy, but still vicious as all get-out."

Mullan smiled, and Hatch spun around and opened my closet. "Step back, Mr. Hatch," Mullan said.

"Should I talk to him?" Laurie asked.

"Probably not a good idea," I said, and put down the telephone.

“I want this man arrested for auto theft, Mullan," Hatch said. "This time, keep him in a cell while we work on the other charges."

"Sit down, please, Mr. Hatch," Mullan said, giving a disgusted look at Rowley. "You're an interested party, not a police officer."

"Mr. Hatch is the victim here, Captain," said Rowley.

Mullan stared at Hatch until he dropped into the chair near the window. "Mr. Dunstan," Mullan said, "do we have your permission to search your room?"

"Please do," I said. "But if this is about Mr. Hatch's Mercedes, you're wasting your time. It's not here."

Treuhaft unzipped my knapsack and turned it upside down over the bed. Rowley pulled out dresser drawers and rummaged through my socks and underwear.

"Mr. Dunstan," Mullan said, "did you remove a Mercedes 500SL from a garage at the residence at 4825 Blueberry Lane in Ellendale between the hours of midnight and twoa.m. this morning and transport it to Harry Street, around the corner from this building?"

"Of course he did," Hatch said.

"Of course I did," I said. "At the request of Mrs. Hatch."

"Ask him what he was doing there in the first place."

Mullan looked back at me. I said, "Mrs. Hatch invited me to dinner. I don't have a car, so she came in and picked me up. During and after dinner, we had several glasses of wine. At the end of the evening, she asked if I would mind driving myself back in a car her husband had left in her garage."

I looked over at Hatch. “It's a beautiful car, Mr. Hatch." His eyes went flat. To Mullan, I said, "This morning, I suggested to Mrs. Hatch that she and Posy, the nanny, come in together, so that Posy could drive the Mercedes back to Ellendale."

"Posy," Hatch said. He made it sound like the name of a poisonous insect.

"This guy always gets his alibis from women, have you noticed?" Rowley came over to the bed. "Why did you conceal the car?"

“I didn't conceal it. I parked around the corner so my landlady wouldn't see me getting out of a Mercedes."

Rowley picked up the scrapbook and dropped it back on the table. "You have the keys?"

I took them out of my pocket and offered them to Mullan, who looked at Stewart Hatch. "Do you want us to call your wife? Frankly, I don't think there's any point."

"Okay," Hatch said. "Let's stop farting around and get to the point." He stood up and came forward, extending his left hand. I held out the car keys. Hatch stepped closer than I had expected and grasped my wrist. He snatched the keys with his right hand, rammed them into a pocket, and bent down to inspect my fingertips.

"Let go of him," Mullan said. "Now."

Hatch dropped my wrist and wiped his hands on his white trousers.

"Mr. Dunstan has been fingerprinted," Captain Mullan said. "And if I see any more initiative out of you, Mr. Hatch, I'll have Officer Treuhaft escort you out."

I remembered what Officer Boyd Burns had told a reporter about "Ottumwa Red," and Rowley saying to a young cop,"Blanks? No ridges?"

The knowledge of who had broken into the Cobden Building and beaten an elderly guard made me feel sick to my stomach. Stewart Hatch pointed at me. "This man is in league with my wife, that's obvious. Who drove him into town? Who has he been seen with, for God's sake?"

"You must be desperate," I said.

"How much are they giving you?" he asked me. "Or are you in it for something besides money?"

"Shut up, the two of you," Mullan said, and turned to me. "Do you have any interest in Mr. Hatch's legal affairs?"

"None at all."

"Your relationships with Assistant D.A. Ashton and Mrs. Hatch are purely social and grew out of accidental encounters?"

"That's right," I said.

"From our viewpoint, you understand, that's a little hard to accept. If you bear no animosity against Mr. Hatch, why did you go out of your way to insult his friend and associate Mr. Milton, on Friday night?"

"Mr. Milton insulted me first. Ask the doorman."

"And you had nothing to do with the break-in at the Cobden Building early this morning?"

“I'll tell you what interests me about that," I said. “I wonder why Mr. Hatch told Lieutenant Rowley to order me out of town and rough me up if it looked like I wasn't going to obey."

Hatch's voice was low and measured. “I don't give Rowley orders, because Rowley doesn'ttake orders from me."

"The lieutenant is a hard man when it comes to orders." Mullan sounded more than ever like an Irish bartender. "Did you have words with Mr. Dunstan, Lieutenant?"

Rowley's dead eyes met mine. “I made sure he knew he was supposed to stick around."

"Do we need to listen to more of this crap?" Hatch said.

Mullan had been eyeing Rowley in a speculative manner, and Rowley had been pretending not to notice. "Mr. Dunstan, are you willing to accompany us to St. Ann's? Mr. Sawyer, the security guard who was injured during the break-in, is being held in the ICU. If you refuse, you will be taken to the station, go through the procedures all over again, and then be escorted to the hospital. If you come with us now, Mr. Sawyer will either identify you or put you in the clear."

“I'll come," I said, hoping that the guard had not had anything like a good look at Robert. "But you should know that Mr. Sawyer and I had a short conversation while he was letting himself into the building on Friday evening."

Rowley and Hatch erupted. They erupted all over again after I explained how I had happened to talk to Earl Sawyer. I had been casing theCobden Building, I was laying the groundwork for the case that any identification now was mistaken.

"Let's see what our victim has to say." Mullan opened the door.

“I'mthe victim here," Hatch said. He marched out like a general at the head of his troops.

•65

•Treuhaft opened a rear door of the patrol car, and Mullan gestured me in, Stewart Hatch moved up beside him. "You want to get your Mercedes out of this neighborhood, Mr. Hatch," Mullan told him. Hatch grunted and spun away. Mullan followed me into the back seat. Rowley got in beside Treuhaft, shifted sideways on the front passenger seat, and grinned at me. "What were you supposed to find? Did your friend the lady D.A. give you a list of files?"

“It wasn't me, Lieutenant," I said.

"You're a computer geek, aren't you?"

“I know how to write programs. Whatever it would take to convict Stewart Hatch is a mystery to me, and he can't be dumb enough to leave it on a hard disk."

“I was hoping for peace and quiet," Mullan said. "Let's all get together and make a great big effort."

•Rowley pushed the button for the elevator, and a few couples gathered in the familiar corridor. I felt as though I had gone back in time—everything, even the visitors in their shorts and T-shirts, looked exactly the same. The people with us recognized Stewart Hatch. Like a movie star, he was used to being recognized. Following Hatch's aristocratic example, we sailed through the swinging doors. Nurse Zwick goggled at Hatch and blinked when she saw me, but instead of sending us out to wash our hands, she darted around the desk and led us toward the far side of the unit.

Yellow tape sealed off the compartment where the despised Clyde Prentiss had languished. Beneath the curtain, loops of dried blood covered the floor. I asked what had happened.

“It was terrible," said Nurse Zwick. "Mr. Dunstan, I'm so sorry about your mother."

June Cook strode toward us. "You want Mr. Sawyer, I gather? I'd like to ask why."

"We want him to look at Mr. Dunstan," Mullan said.

The head nurse gave him a doubtful nod. "Mr. Sawyer's condition is stable, but he is still seeing double as a result of concussion. I'd strongly advise waiting another twenty-four hours."

"My doctor says he's healthy enough to make an identification," Hatch said. “I imagine you know who I am. And I'm sure you're acquainted with Dr. Dearborn's reputation."

June Cook was as valiant as I remembered her. “I imagine everyone on this floor recognizes you, Mr. Hatch. And I have the greatest respect for Dr. Dearborn, but his evaluation was made on the basis of a telephone conversation."

"Which led him to conclude that Sawyer is fit enough to make an identification."

June Cook's eyes flicked at me, then back at Hatch. "You can spend ten minutes with my patient. But if he makes an identification in his present state, I will have something to say about it in court."

Hatch smiled.

I asked her what had happened to Clyde Prentiss.

"Mr. Prentiss suffered fatal knife wounds," she said. "Nobody saw anything. Mr. Hatch's friends on the police force seem to be as baffled as we are."

“Imagine, a thing like that in this well-run hospital," Hatch said.

June Cook went through the curtain. Treuhaft obeyed a silent command from Mullan and stayed outside when she returned to wave us in.

The old man in the bed glared at our invasion through glittering eyes surrounded by an interlocking network of bruises. A cone-shaped structure had been taped over his nose, and his mouth described a downturned U. He glanced back and forth as Mullan and I went up one side of the bed, Hatch and Rowley the other. I wondered how many people he saw.

"Nice of you to drop by, Mr. Hatch."

Hatch tried to pat his hand.

Sawyer pulled his hand away. “I talked to your doctor a couple hours ago. He wants me to go to Lawndale, but the only place I'm going is home. You know how much it costs to rent space in an ICU?"

"Earl, your costs are taken care of," Hatch said. "Don't worry about anything. We'll work something out."

“I got no health insurance and no pension plan," Sawyer said. "You want to talk about working something out, let's work it out now, in front of witnesses. How do I know I'll ever see you again?"

"Earl, this is not the time to discuss business." Hatch grinned at the two cops. "We'd like you to look at the man in the blue shirt on the other side of the bed and tell us if you recognize him."

"You used the word 'business,' " Sawyer said. "Considering I got injured on the job, what are we talking about? You agreed to cover the medical expenses. Health insurance would have been a better deal, but I'm not complaining. In fact, I'm grateful."

"Thank you," Hatch said. "Can we get down to the present business, Earl?"

"Present business is what I'm talking about. I put in fifteen years with you, and some guy comes along and pounds the bejesus out of me. I'm sixty-five years old. You know what would be right? A lifetime pension at seventy-five percent of my salary."

"Earl, we can't—"

"Here's another option. A one-time settlement of twenty-five thousand dollars. You'd probably come out ahead that way."

Hatch stared up at the dim ceiling of the ICU. "Well, Earl, I hadn't really expected to get into a negotiation here." He sighed. Mullan and Rowley were both eyeing him. “If you think a settlement like that would suit you, you got it. It's the least I can do to express my gratitude for your years of service."

Sawyer nodded at him. “I'm glad we're in agreement, Mr. Hutch. You'll cover my medical bills, and the check for twenty-live grand will be waiting for me at your front desk by ... what day is this? Sunday? By Wednesday morning."

Hatch raised his arms in defeat. "Earl, I could use you on my team. All right, Wednesday morning."

"You had me on your team, Mr. Hatch. That's what you're paying for. Who am I supposed to identify? Him?"

Hatch moved away from the bedside, shaking his head. Mullan said, "You've already had an opportunity to take a look at him, Earl, but I want you to look again and tell us if he resembles the man who assaulted you in the Cobden Building."

Earl Sawyer squinted at me. "Come closer."

In their nests of bruises, the old man's eyes were shiny with malice. "Bend down."

I leaned toward him.

"Didn't I talk to you a couple of days ago? When I was letting myself in?"

"Friday evening," I said.

"You heard Mr. Hatch agree to my deal, didn't you?"

“I did."

"You got the wrong guy," Earl said. "You have to remember, I hardly saw the guy. But this isn't him."

"Are you seeing double?" Rowley asked.

"So I see two of the wrong guy. I see two of you, but I still know you're a son of a bitch named Rowley."

"This is a travesty," Hatch said. "Earl can't see straight. He had us come in here to work out a pension deal."

"He can see well enough to clear Mr. Dunstan," Mullan said.

"Send the nurse in here, will you? Mr. Hatch, I want you to sign a written agreement."

Outside the cubicle, June Cook gave me a small, triumphant smile and said, “I heard the patient's request." She leaned over the counter for a sheet of paper and drew a pen from the pocket of her green tunic.

While Hatch signed away $25,000, the four of us drifted toward the top of the unit. I looked again at the bloody floor inside Prentiss's sealed cubicle. It reminded me of something I had heard in the past few days, but could not quite remember. Mullan was looking at the bloodstains, too, and I asked him how soon his men would be done with their work. “In there?" he said. "Rowley, we're finished with this scene, aren't we?"

“I'll send a man over," Rowley grumbled.

"Clothhead Spelvin," I said. “I knew this reminded me of something."

Captain Mullan slowly turned his head to regard me in ill-concealed amazement.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Rowley asked.

"An oldie but goodie," Mullan said, still marveling at me. "That's very interesting. Would you care to say more?"

"Wasn't Spelvin knifed to death in a cell? Whoever killed him got past the guards and the other prisoners without being seen."

"Pretty good trick, wasn't it?" Mullan said.

"Funny thing, nobody ever sees squat when jungle justice goes down. You close it as a suicide, right?"

"That's how it was closed," Mullan said, still looking at me.

Stewart Hatch thrust the curtain aside and stamped out. His face was tight with anger. No one spoke during the wait for the elevator, and the arctic silence continued as we descended, elbow to elbow with strangers, to the ground floor.

Instead of ramming his way through the people before him, Hatch let them depart and nodded at me to get off. I thought he was going to go back to the ICU and rip up the agreement he had signed, but when the elevator had emptied, he moved out into the corridor. For a moment, he pressed his hands to his face and held them there, as if concealing his anger or reining it in.

Hatch lowered his hands. He took a deep breath. “I didn't know the old bastard had it in him." His face split into a grin, and he chuckled. The chuckles built into outright laughter. I would not have been more surprised if he had started passing out hundred-dollar bills. All of us started laughing. Treuhaft boomed out huge bass cannonballs, and Rowley contributed a toneless noise that sounded like a child's first assault on a violin.

"Old Earl," Hatch said through gasps of laughter. "Hesnookered me. He flatbushwhacked me." He tilted back his head and roared.

I confess, this performance disarmed me. In spite of everything I knew or thought I knew about Stewart Hatch, at that moment I could not help liking him. His ability to laugh at himself put him in a different category from self-important toads like Grenville Milton.

He wiped his eyes with the back of a hand, still chuckling. "All right. Live and learn. I can take Mr. Dunstan home. You guys have things to do, and it's on my way."

When we had all spun through the revolving door, Mullan questioned me with a look, and I said, "Sure, why not?"

Stewart Hatch opened the passenger door of his Mercedes and beckoned me in with a flourish.

•66

•We drove out of the hospital grounds like a couple of old friends. Hatch was smiling, and his eyes were filled with a comfortable, humorous light. Top down, the car flowed up the street with the weighty ease I remembered. "You liked this little sweetheart, didn't you?" Hatch asked me. “I keep forgetting how much I enjoy driving it."

“If you're going to Ferryman's Road, I'll get out there. There's no reason for you to take me back to my place."

"Let's drive around a while. It'll give us a chance to get to know each other. Wouldn't you agree we should talk?"

“If you think so." I braced myself.

"Oh, I do, definitely." He smiled at me again, his eyes dancing. "There's something I'd like to show you. We can get there in about twenty minutes."

"What is it?"

“I don't want to spoil the surprise. Can you spare the time?"

"As long as you're not going to march me into a field and show me a gun."

Five green lights and a nearly empty road had appeared before us. Hatch twinkled at me. "Watch this." He touched the accelerator, and the car concentrated upon itself for a tenth of a second before rocketing ahead. I watched the speedometer glide past sixty before we sped through the first light. It kept climbing as we blasted toward the second. The breeze whipping past our heads shifted the line of Hatch's hair about an eighth of an inch backward. He kept the car at a steady eighty miles per hour through the fourth light, and brought it smoothly down to thirty only in time to make it past the fifth and swerve right onto Commercial Avenue. His hair sprang perfectly back into place.

"You can get this baby up to a hundred and ten before you actually feel like you're speeding."

"Now that we're together like this, Stewart," I said, "can I ask you a couple of questions?"

"Anything."

"Between you and me, is Rowley your inside guy at Police Headquarters?"

"Lieutenant Rowley works for the city of Edgerton. The man is a dedicated public servant. His passion for justice may sometimes get the better of him, but that comes with the job."

"And you didn't tell him to order me out of town."

"Of course not."

"And you realize I had nothing to do with what happened at your building."

“I'm relieved, as a matter of fact. Now I don't have to figure out how you broke in. We have the most sophisticated security system you can imagine. Nobody not on the inside could get around the pressure sensors and the electronic beams and disarm the contact points, so it must have been an employee of the security company. We'll get him, but that still leaves me with the computer damage." Hatch gave me an inquiring look. "Aren't you an expert in that area?"

“I wouldn't go that far," I said.

"Would you like to make ten thousand dollars a week? It looks like about half the files are missing from our hard disks, and I need to recover them. All I'd ask is that you sign a confidentiality agreement. The work might not even take as long as a week. You get me set up and running in a day or two, the money's the same. Sound interesting?"

“It sounds great," I said, "but the answer is no."

"Can I ask why?"

"No offense intended, but I'd rather not be on the Hatch payroll."

"Too bad. It was a long shot, but too bad."

We cut through the southern end of the business district, turned west, and drove into a part of town I had never seen before. Uptilting blocks lined with peeling frame houses dropped away toward an overgrown baseball diamond and rotting bleachers. Beyond the next rise, a few women trudged along dusty paths in a trailer park. A bare-chested kid aimed a BB gun at us from beneath a limp Confederate flag.

"You liked this car, didn't you?" Hatch asked.

“It handles beautifully."

"And what about my wife?" He grinned. This time, the light in his eyes was still humorous, but not at all comfortable. "Would you say she handles beautifully? Accelerates smoothly? Did you find her well engineered?"

"Forget it, Stewart," I said. "Your marriage has nothing to do with me."

"You would admit, wouldn't you, that my wife is an extremely good-looking woman? Even a beautiful woman? What you might call an attractive bit of horseflesh?"

"She's attractive, yes," I said. "But if you're having someone follow her around with a camera, I feel sorry for you."

"Bear with me," he said. “I bet you wondered why a woman like that would marry me. After all, I'm rich, but not superrich, I'm twelve years older than she is, and I live in a nowhere Midwestern town. Am I right?"

“I wondered about some of that," I said.

"Sure you did. If you hadn't, she would have done it for you. Now, between us, she isn't so great in bed, is she? When it comes to performance, this car is a lot more satisfying. My wife is too selfish to be a good lay."

"Stop it. You're embarrassing yourself."

"You ought to know who you're dealing with. Laurie is nothing like what you think she is. For her, you're only a convenient way to make more trouble for me. She's a soulless bitch."

“If she's that terrible, divorce her."

"Jesus, I don't care about her personality." He laughed at me. "This isn't the fucking Boy Scouts. I just want her to do what I say."

"You should be wearing a loincloth and carrying a club."

"Good Lord," he said. "A feminist. Did my dear wife tell you anything about the trust?"

"What trust?"

"Let's find out what she said about herself. Did she tell you about her background, her family, anything like that?"

"A little," I said.

"Wonderful story, isn't it? I'm crazy about it."

An empty, brown hillside sloped down to the right side of the road. Far away on our left, little ranch houses stood on quarter-acre lots. Every other one looked unoccupied. Stewart pulled to the side of the road and switched off the engine. He drew up one knee and twisted on his seat to face me.

“I take it you heard about Yves D'Lency, the poet and art dealer who ran away from his noble family and palled around with artists and so forth before he came to America. The poor guy's plane went down outside Santa Barbara, right?"

"What's your point?" I said.

"Laurie's father's real name was Evan Delaney, a product of Trenton, New Jersey. He was a part-time bricklayer with a big appetite for booze. When he couldn't get work in Trenton anymore, he packed up the family and drove to Los Angeles, where he branched out into the stickup business. One day a tough old bird who owned a liquor store blew him away. Bye-bye, Dad. Mom traded her ass for favors from her boyfriends until she married a cameraman at Warner Brothers. This is the guy my wife refers to as a movie producer."

"You want me to believe this," I said.

"Believe it, don't believe it, but this information cost me more money than I just gave Earl Sawyer. Mom married the cameraman. Guess what? He's another drunk. After the studio fired him, he took out his frustrations by beating up his wife and stepdaughter. Laurie dropped out of high school and did so many drugs she wound up in a mental hospital. When she was straight enough to figure out how to act, she got acquainted with a nice old doctor named Deering. Deering thought she was a poor, misguided orphan who deserved a break. He and his wife took her in. They bought her good clothes and sent her to private school, which is where she learned about table manners and grammar. After she graduated from the private school, she ran away to San Francisco. Pretty soon, she was living with Teddy Wainwright. Remember him?"

I knew that Teddy Wainwright had played the leading man's best friend in a lot of romantic comedies made in the fifties. Later on, he had starred in two television series.

What I had not known was that in the early seventies, no longer able to find roles in Hollywood but grown rich from real estate investments, Wainwright had decked himself in beads and Nehru jackets and moved to San Francisco to enjoy a second youth. Laurie Delancy had moved in with him when he was seventy-one, she twenty-one. Through multiple infidelities and other tempests on her part, including the refusal to marry him, they stayed together until his death four years later. Wainwright had rewritten his will to give her two paintings from his extensive art collection, a Frida Kahlo and a Tamara de Lempicka, plus $250,000 and the use of his apartment until she married, when the apartment reverted to his only child, a daughter. The daughter inherited the majority of his estate, including the rest of his collection, at the time appraised at $5 million.

"Turns out, back in the twenties old Teddy bought two Picassos, a Cezanne, and a Miro, and sometime in the fifties, he squirreled them away in a vault. His collection wound up being worth seventy, eighty million. You can bet Laurie's still kicking herself for not marrying the old guy. She landed a job at KRON, where she wanted to end up doing the local news, but oops, no experience. No journalism background, no degree, nothing. She was a production assistant—a gofer. A year later, when I met her, she was a PR girl. Laurie acted like she fell in love with me, and I do mean acted. It could have worked out, except she was a phony."

"How soon after you were married did you hire the private detective?"

“I hired a detective as soon as I got interested in her. I didn't tell her until we were on our honeymoon. A bungalow at a great resort in theCaribbean. Champagne on the balcony. Moonlight on the water. 'Listen to this,' I said. 'You won't believe it.' She cried real tears. An amazing woman."

"And she gave you a son and heir."

Hatch smiled. "Cobbie's going to be a fine young man after I knock that music crap out of him and get him involved in sports."

"And your son is the reason you can't divorce Laurie."

His smile shrank. “It seems she mentioned my family's financial arrangements after all. What kind of spin did she put on it?"

I described what I could remember.

"Not bad, as far as it goes," Hatch said. "At thirty-five, Cobbie will come into a great deal of money. I want to make sure he knows how to handle it." His eyes charged with amusement. "Do you know why my father wrote in the condition about criminal charges?"

"Laurie said something about his brother."

“It had nothing to do with that." The amusement came back into his eyes. He was trying to charm me, I realized, and he was doing a good job. "When were you born?"

“In 1958."

"You were too young for the sixties. I turned eighteen in 1968." He laughed. "My senior year atEdgerton Academy, my hair came downto my shoulders. I used to lock my door and crank up the stereo until I couldn't hear the old man bitching at me. The Stones, the Doors, Iron Butterfly. Cream. Paul Butterfield. I played rhythm guitar with this hand, Delta Mud. You can imagine how terrible we were."

"White-boy blues," I said.

"Whitepreppy blues. WhiteMidwestern preppy blues." He biffed my upper arm, jock-style. "God, we were crazy. Toke up on the way to school. Get wasted from Thursday night to Monday morning. We had one honest-to-God musician in our band, the guy played theshit out of the blues. Amazing player,amazing. We'd show up in front of these Albertus frat boys who didn't care about anything except a steady beat, and ... it was like hearing God play guitar. You probably heard of him. Goat Gridwell?"

Gridwell's power-guitar blues jams had sold millions of records through the seventies and into the next decade. Whenever someone had made me listen to a Goat Gridwell record, what struck me was how much better he was than most guitarists who played that kind of music. I remembered noticing his yellow-gold hair and green eyes on the cover ofRolling Stone and thinking that I had never before seen a face that looked cherubic and dissipated at the same time.

"Our senior year, he got kicked out of the academy and took off for San Francisco. I asked Laurie if she'd ever heard him play, and she had no idea. To her, all music sounds the same. Anyhow, Goat got too rich and too famous. The old story. Fried his brain, the poor bastard. He's back in Edgerton now. There's nothing left. I slip him a couple of bucks now and then, but the guy stares right through me."

If I were Goat Gridwell, I'd ignore you, too,I thought.

"So one night after dinner, I forgot to lock my door. I'm sitting on the floor with 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' blasting through my speakers and smoking dope. Wham! In comes my father. Cobden goes nuts. He let me stay in school, but I had to cut my hair, and he let me know that if I ever got into trouble with the law, I wouldn't get a penny from the trust."

"Are you worried about the case in Kentucky?"

“It's nothing but dust and hot air. Be gone in a week. But this might interest you. Yesterday afternoon my wife called the attorney for the trust, Parker Gillespie. He's the son of Charles Gillespie, who set it up. Seventy-three years old, loyal as a pit bull. Laurie never showed the slightest interest in him before, and all of a sudden, she's looking for an education. You tell me, what did she ask Gillespie?"

"No idea," I said.

"She's concerned about the clause my lather added to the agreement. If I'm convicted of these crimes I of course did not commit, am I really disinherited? Unfortunately, Gillespie said, that would be the case, Mrs. Hatch. Then she asked, What's my son's position? Well, in the absence of any other male heir the child would inherit the whole of the trust. Who would look after the trust? she asks. That is the role of the administrator, Gillespie said. Laurie asked him, If the worst happens, will you continue to administer the trust, Mr. Gillespie? Gillespie told her he would be pleased to give her all the assistance she desired. Beginning to see the picture? She wants the money."

"She wants to protect it for Cobbie."

Hatch's sneer was worthy of Uncle Clark. "Cobbie wouldn't inherit until thirty-five. In the meantime, the administrator has discretion over the money. Laurie would appoint herself administrator and grab whatever she wanted. That's what she is about."

"Thanks for the explanation," I said. "Take me back to town."

“I want you to see something, remember? You'll be astonished. History is going to rise up and speak." He smiled in spurious camaraderie. “I'd never forgive myself if I didn't show it to you." He switched on the engine and dropped the car into gear.

•67

•Sixty years ago, the overgrown field had been a meadow, the stark remains at the edge of the wood a tall stone house with dormers and a portico. I was trying to control the disquiet brought on by the feeling that if I walked into the woods about thirty feet to the right of the ruined house, I would find a lightning-blasted oak.

"Has anyone ever told you about the old Dunstan place?"

"After his brother was killed, Sylvan imported the stones from England and had it rebuilt."

Hatch raised his eyebrows."England? It was Providence, Rhode Island. That's why this street is named New Providence Road. I know more about your family than you do."

"That wouldn't be hard to do," I said, thinking that there were things about the Dunstans Stewart Hatch would never know or guess.

"Do you know who originally built the place?"

"Who was Frank Lloyd Wright?" I said. "Sorry, Alex, I hit the buzzer by accident." My cars were ringing, and my stomach was queasy.

"A man named Omar Dunstan. He turned up in Providence in the 1750s with a bunch of West Indian servants and a lot of money. Dunstan called himself an importer and shipowner, but none of his ships ever docked in Providence. He made frequent trips to South Carolina, Virginia, and New Orleans. What do you think he was importing?"

"What are the blues?"

"Human beings. His men bought or captured slaves in West Africa and the Caribbean and sold them in the Southern colonies. Dunstan wasn't married, but he produced three or four children who almost never left the house. The neighbors heard strange noises and saw peculiar lights in the windows. There were rumors about witchcraft and black magic. Finally, a party of citizens raided the house with the intention of driving the family out of town. They were too late. The place was empty."

I had to sit down, and I parked myself on the hood of the Mercedes.

"The place stood empty for decades. Its reputation was so bad that the city couldn't find anyone willing to tear it down. People called it 'the Shunned House.' In the end, they built a fence around it and let it crumble for the next hundred years."

The Shunned House? It rang a bell too distant to be identified. Stewart Hatch's voice wavered like a bad radio signal before the emanations coming from the ruin.

"During the Civil War, two brothers named Dunstan escaped from the stockade, where they were being held for corpse robbing. In 1874, Omar and Sylvan Dunstan turned up in Edgerton and moved into the Brazen Head. Before long, they had enough money to set up in business, Omar as a pawnbroker and Sylvan as a moneylender. These were Reconstruction days, remember. Ten years later, they had taken over the bank and were living out in the boonies on Cherry Street. When floods bankrupted people, they foreclosed and Sylvan bought their properties for next to nothing. I always thought it was kind of strange that Omar was the one who got killed, because people here really hated Sylvan. Like to hear my father's theory?"

"Life wouldn't be complete without it."

"No one but Sylvan ever saw the so-called gunman who shot his brother and rode off down the street. My father thought Sylvan made him up because he killed Omar. By then, Omar was turning into a respectable citizen. He owned half the properties on Commercial Avenue. My father said Sylvan didn't give a damn about respectability. And he was tired of sharing Omar's wife."

“I heard about their arrangement," I said.

"Sylvan shipped these stones from Rhode Island and brought out a crew of Portuguese workmen he put up out here in shacks. He said he wanted the house restored to its original condition, and the local guys didn't know enough about the detail work. People in town thought he didn't want them to know what his house was like."

"There were rumors," I said.

"Chains attached to beds in the attic. Concealed hideaways. Weird stuff. You know what small towns are like. Sylvan could have let people in, showed them around, but instead he holed up and fended people off. When he came into town, he carried a gun. His kids grew up like animals. Some of them ran off, no one knows where. A couple got killed swimming in the river and fighting in taverns. Howard, your grandfather, stayed on the plantation, even though he hated his old man. Supposedly, Sylvan shot himself cleaning a gun, but some said your grandfather did it for him. Sounds like poetic justice to me." Hatch's voice came from a long way away.

"People who talk about poetic justice don't know anything about poetry."

"Cute. I'll have to remember that. Anyhow, Howard buried his father behind the house. Then he had Omar's coffin moved from Little Ridge and buried next to it. Then he went the same way as Sylvan and screwed every woman he could get his hands on. If his wife didn't run off, he killed her, too. Ran the bank into the ground, threw away his money. You know what people used to say about him when I was a kid?"

"That he could be in two places at once," I said. "Go through doors without opening them. Read your mind and predict the future. Float off the ground and hang in the air."

Hatch gave me a surprised disgruntled look—I was not supposed to know about Howard Dunstan. “It's a good thing his daughters moved back to Cherry Street, because one night the house burned up around him."

"How did that happen?"

"This part's extremely interesting," Hatch said. I could scarcely hear him over the tumult from whore I least wanted to go. "My lather told me that on the night of the fire his father, Carpenter Hatch, locked himself in the library with Sylvester Milton, Grennie's father, and a little guy named Pee Wee La Chapelle, who used to do odd jobs for them. He saw them go out, and late that night he heard them come back. Do you supposethey burned the place down?"

"Stewart," I said, “I don't care who burned it down."

"These bones turned up. Not human, but not from any known animal, either. We're talking 1935, remember, practically the Dark Ages. Who knows what they were? Howard's daughters got the insurance money, and that was that."

I barely felt him putting his hand on my shoulder.

"No matter what my wife says, Stewart Hatch is not a bad guy." He patted my cheek. "Out of the kindness of my heart, I am presenting you with certain facts."

"Mighty white of you," I said.

"You turned down my offer. Fine. It's time to go back where you belong."

“I can't believe you were in a band with Goat Gridwell," I said.

He laughed. His teeth were marvels of dentistry, his eyes shone with a companionable gleam, the blazer clung to the back of his neck like a tape.

"Stewart, you can be completely charming, but you belong in jail. It would be a tragedy if you got custody of your son."

He jerked his hands out of his pockets. “If you want a lift back to town, try the pay phone down the road."

I turned my back on him, stepped across the dusty verge and moved like a sleepwalker into the dense growth covering the field. An engine whirred into life, and gravel flew like buckshot from beneath squealing tires.

•68

•Darkness and nightmare boomed from the ruined house and the trees behind it. My dream-shadow had told me,All your life, you have felt the loss of something extraordinarily important. If you found it, could you live with the consequences? I had answeredYes, and in spite of my fear and nausea, in spite of my desirenot to know, now my response was the same.

Something brushed my mind and instantly laded. I almost turned back. Whatever had touched me was what I did not want to know.

The two remaining stone walls supported what was left of the roof. Two blackened chimneys reared upward. The right half of the house had collapsed into a soft depression. The old entrance yawned over a mat of vines. I walked up to an empty casement and looked in at a filthy cement floor gradually disappearing beneath the green carpet rolling in from the back of the house.

I moved to the rear of the house. It was like looking at a photograph from a bombed city—blackened walls and empty space. I stepped back, and my feet met a flat stone surface. When I bent down and parted the grasses, I saw a gray marble slab carved with the legendOMAR DUNSTAN D. 1887. My heart jumped into my throat. Its companion was three feet away.SYLVAN DUNSTAN D. 1900.

"How about you, Howard?" I said.

About six feet from Sylvan's marker was:HOWARD DUNSTAN, OUR DEAR FATHER. 1882-1935. "Better than you deserved," I said, and noticed an area where the grasses bent over the ground. Before the first of the trees, a flat granite slab lay over the gray-brown mulch. I read the eroded, still legible words: ANGELS NOT OF THIS EARTH.

Altogether, eight other markers lay hidden in the grass. Some of the names had worn away, and none were the kind of names parents give their children. I rememberfishy, screamer, gossamer, splithead, brightness, andtonk.Dogs and cats, I told myself, shuddered back as from a terrible recognition, and snagged my foot in a tangle of weeds. I spun around to keep from falling and saw a green carpet rolling into a dim, two-sided room. My foot tore free of the snag, and I went forward over the cushiony pad of the carpet.

Pigeon feathers stirred in the sun-shot air. Remembered pain pierced my forehead, and I dropped through an empty shaft like a stone.

•69

•I’m not in my time,I thought. Then,Oh, I'm here again.

On all sides, the scene solidified. A tired fern and a stuffed fox in a glass bell flanked a brass clock on a mantelpiece. Tobacco smoke fouled the air. Across the room, a white-haired man in a dark blue, once-elegant velvet smoking jacket faced the window. He held a cigar in one hand and a glass half-filled with amber liquid in the other. The world was dark. I realized that I knew the man's name. The hands of the brass clock said the time was 11:40.

The man facing the window had been expecting me; he was going to speak. These facts declared themselves in the weariness of his posture and the theatrical, even stagy unhappiness in the slouch of his back. Impatient irritation replaced my nausea and pain: Here I was, what did he want? The man at the window raised his glass. He sipped. His shoulders slumped. Finally, he spoke.

You're here again, but I don't care what happens to you. Things fall apart. The center cannot hold. Do you know who said that?

"William Butler Yeats," I said. "Fuck you, too, Howard."

The golden bowl is broken, it bears an unseen crack. I hear the roar of cannons everywhere.

"What are you trying to tell me?"

Once your father had been created, I decided to amuse myself by driving him mad. He was to be the tool of our destruction. Yet since you have found your way to me over and over, perhaps after all you will destroy him instead. The outcome of the game no longer matters to me.

I called him a wicked, malicious old man—it was the main thing I understood. He chuckled.

We flew from the crack in the golden bowl. We were stolen from the corpse on the battlefield. We are the smoke from the cannon's mouth. I drove my son mad to hasten our end. Their faith in us died. Everything happens over and over, and each time it means less.

"You say things, but they don't make sense. Whose faith? Why am I here?"

In my great-grandfather's time, the god Pan was a composer of remarkable accomplishment. In my grandfather's, he was a pianist who excited the females in his audiences to incomprehensible ecstasies.

In mine, he is a drunken poet who writes of nothing but descents to hell and similar degradations. Byyour time, he will become a mindless addict of alcohol and opiates. If you see him, tell yourself, Here is what remains of Pan and understand why we should be gone from the earth.

"Pan never existed," I said. "Not in the real world."

What you call the real world never existed, either. It was created over and over by belief. Belief is subject to change. Human beings need stories to make sense of their accident-ridden lives, and their stories refused to let us go. I'm sick of it. They're always telling one small fragment of the same huge story, and they'll never get it right.

Torchlights wobbling toward us appeared in the window. Overhead, I heard a scurry of wings and claws.

You were to come here with another. Perhaps you and he are here, but elsewhere. We shall see, you and I. My toy, my game, is ending. Mistake upon mistake. What wretched lives we were given.

My eyes darkened. My joints sang with pain, and someone banged me on the head with a mallet. When my vision cleared I was on my knees, drooling vomit into the tall grass behind the ruin.

•70

•Helen Janette was stationed in front of her door. “I hope you're prepared for what I have to say, Mr. Dunstan."

The door behind me clicked open. Mr. Tite had joined the party.

"This morning, two detectives and an officer in uniform came knocking at my door."

"Plus Stewart Hatch," I said. "Didn't you feel honored?"

"Stewart Hatch should hang himself from the nearest tree." She crossed her arms over her chest. "You have half an hour to pack your things. No refund on your charges."

I stamped upstairs. Resonant snores came through Otto's door. When I came back down, they were posted on opposite sides of the entry like Swiss guards. “I wish I knew why you're so afraid of cops."

Helen Janette held out her hand. "My key."

The bitter satisfaction I saw in her face as I surrendered the key gave me my answer. "Excuse me, Mrs. Janette."

"We have nothing to say to each other."

"Did your name used to be Hazel Jansky?"

I heard Mr. Tite breathing through his mouth.

"You went to prison," I said. "That's why you don't like cops."

"Get out of here." Mr. Tite jabbed my shoulder with an index finger that felt like a lead pipe.

I moved out of range and kept my eyes on her.

"My name is Helen Janette."

"You were the midwife at my birth—the twenty-fifth of June, 1958. St. Ann's was struck by lightning. The power went out."

Her face filled with grim pleasure. "Mr. Tite, assist the gentleman outside."

Tite gripped my shoulders with both hands. His sick breath enveloped me. I twisted to one side and knocked him off balance with the duffel bag. He stumbled a half step away and cocked his right fist.

I lifted my hands. “I'm going. It's all over."

They watched me wrestle the duffel through the door.

I turned into Word Street and found my way to Veal Yard and the Brazen Head Hotel. A clerk with purple bags under his eyes informed me that I could have a second-floor room with a bath for sixty-five dollars a night or one with a bathroom down the hall on the fourth floor for fifty. I took the second-floor room. He pointed to the stairs. "Elevator tends to be slow," he said. "Tends to stall, too."

Room 215 at the Brazen Head, directly across from the staircase, was twice the size of my accommodations at Helen Janette's. The bed jutted out into the room, pointing toward a desk and two wooden chairs in front of a dusty window looking out onto Veal Yard. A sign taped to the mirror advised guests to use the bottled water in the minibar instead of drinking the tap water. The bottled water was free of charge.

For a while, I drank Poland Spring water and tried to make sense of what had happened to me. Had I traveled back to 1935 and called on Howard Dunstan?

I wasn't that crazy. On the other hand, neither did I believe that I had been hallucinating. The Dunstans were not an average American family, though we could match dysfunctions with the best of them. Maybe I was a late bloomer, and time-travel had come down to me from an eighteenth-century slave trader resident in Rhode Island. Maybe I was having another breakdown and would spend the next few weeks in a padded room. But this did not feel like a breakdown. If I was sane, thenI had traveled back to 1935 and met my great-grandfather.

The god Pan lived on as an Edgerton derelict? We were stories whose time had ended? I put this stuff out of my mind and considered Helen Janette-Hazel Jansky. Almost certainly, they were the same person, but I doubted that I could get her to admit to abducting the infant Robert, if shehad abducted him. Then I began wondering about the coincidence of my having taken a room in Hazel Jansky's rooming house and remembered that Toby Kraft had sent me there. Toby and Helen-Hazel had a relationship. Of what kind? Toby's predilection for women with pretty faces and beachball breasts eliminated the obvious answer. It was another brick wall.

I gulped Poland Spring and wondered why the Brazen Head did not trust Hatchtown's water. Then I recapped the bottle and set off for City Hall.

•71

•No lights burned in the vast lobby, and I rapped on the monumental door with a sense of comic hopelessness. Upstairs in a closed office, Coventry might as well have been in another building. I pounded the glass again, felt even sillier, and walked back through the row of columns. When I reached the top of the stairs, the door clanked open and Coventry called out, "Ned, hold on!"

Smiling, he held the door and beckoned me in. “I had to run down all those stairs!" His rolled-up sleeves, bow tie, and khakis made him look like an aged schoolboy. “I'm glad to see you!" Coventry glanced past me, then to both sides.

"She's not here," I said. “It's nice to see you, too." I went in and waited while he locked the door. "How did you hear me?"

“I was kind of waiting for you. How goes the research?"

“I'm making progress," I said. "Do you have time to look up some property records?"

"No problem." He smiled at me again, almost apologetically. "Too bad Laurie couldn't join you. She really brightens up the day, don't you think?"

"You're fond of her," I said.

"Whenever I see Laurie,I feel better about everything. She has a sort of gift."

“I suppose Laurie has all kinds of gifts," I said.

"Odd you should say that. I have the same feeling. Extraordinary, I must say." He tilted his head and smiled at the ceiling, remote and all but invisible in the darkness. "That you should sense it, too, I mean. You're a sensitive man." Coventry's chin snapped down. “I'm sorry. Did that sound condescending?"

"Maybe a little," I said.

"Dear me. I meant, you must be more perceptive than most men. You know what I mean, don't you? Of course you do." He pressed his fingertips to his forehead. "Do I seem to be making sense?"

“Indirectly."

Coventry guffawed and ducked his head. He was a nice, sweet guy. "When most men look at Laurie, all they see is ... well, the obvious. You and I see someone with a brilliant mind, a wonderful soul, and a whole range of abilities she's only begun to tap."

"She must value your friendship," I said.

He gave me a quick glance. "The two of you are fast friends, and all that?"

“I enjoy her company," I said. "But I'm not going to be in Edgerton very long."

Coventry bounded up the stairs. I had lightened his spirits. When he reached the landing, he turned around and propped a hand on a marble upright. His eyes were glowing. "Did she tell you about her background?"

"She said a lot about her father."

Coventry restrained himself to keep pace with me. He wanted to take the stairs three at a time. "He had a tremendous influence on her,tremendous."

On the second floor, he snapped on the fluorescent lights over a counter in front of two cluttered desks and rows of filing cabinets. “I confess I still haven't turned up Mrs. Rutledge's photographs, but I promise you, they will be found." He went behind the counter. "What properties were you interested in?"

"The first one is a tract of land near the woods on New Providence Road."

Coventry disappeared into the rows of cabinets and came back with a thick file.

In 1883, Sylvan Dunstan had purchased from Joseph Johnson tenthousand acresthat included Johnson's Woods. Howard Dunstan had inherited the property, and in 1936 Carpenter Hatch bought it from his daughters for a surprising sum. I thought that my aunts must have invested the money and lived on it ever since.

"What else?"

"Have you heard the term 'the Shunned House'? Someone mentioned it today, and I can't figure out why it sounds familiar."

“Isn't that from H. P. Lovecraft? I read a lot of Lovecraft when I was a kid. I think he based the Shunned House on a building in Providence. He spent most of his life there."

Lovecraft was the writer of whom Edward Rinehart's stories had reminded me.

"Weren't you interested in some other properties?"

"Yes," I said. "One was a little street in College Park. I can't remember the name, damn it."

“It'll come to you in a second. Fascinating area,College Park. Do you know it was the site of the old Hatch Brothers Fairground?"

"The Hatches owned the fairground?"

Hugh Coventry's smile contained more than a hint of complicity. "You'd never guess, would you? Mr. Hatch doesn't want you to, either. He made it clear that we were to underplay his family's earlier endeavors, but the fairground was a money-spinner for years. That was how they were able to buy up the area that came to be known as Hatchtown."

"What happened?" I asked. "Did they sell it to Albertus?"

"An unbelievable bit of luck. The Hatches moved up in the world, and by the 1890s they were just leasing the land. It was pretty seedy. Strippers and freak shows, bootleggers and prostitutes thrown in. The houses for the fairground workers were put up higgledy-piggledy. There were a couple of shady doctors, too. A Dr. Hightower peddled drugs to his patients, and the other one, Dr. Drears, was, I'm afraid, the archetypal backstreet abortionist. Infected or killed half of his patients."

"So Hatch wants to sweep this part of the family history under the rug?"

“I can't blame him," Coventry said. "After all, they just owned the property. By the mid-twenties, it was nothing but vacant land and empty houses. Then the Albertus people came along and bought the whole shebang. Before long, enrollment went up, merchants moved in, and the area took off. What street did you want to check?"

"Buxton Place," I said, naming Edward Rinehart's old address as if I had remembered it from the start.

Coventry disappeared into the files again and returned with a hound journal about two feet high and a yard wide. "This is a curiosity." He thumped the journal onto the counter, turned it sideways so that we could both see the pages, and opened it. A hand-drawn map of four or five streets divided along property lines took up the right-hand page. The page on the left recorded the sales of the buildings and lots, with a numbered key referring to the map. "What a gorgeous artifact," Coventry said. "You hate to replace a thing like this with entries in a data base."

I asked him how to find Buxton Place in the gorgeous artifact.

"With luck, there'll be an index." He turned to the last pages. "Oh, these people were great. So, Buxton Place ..." He ran his finger down a handwritten column and flipped back through the pages. "Here we are." Coventry squinted down and tapped his finger on a tiny lane. “It's a cul-de-sac. What was on it? What used to be stables, mostly. And two houses, probably for the grooms and stable hands. Let's see the ownership records for lots 60448 and 60449."

We went down the list of numbers on the facing page.

"Here, 60448," Coventry said. "Owned originally by Hatch Brothers Fairground, as of 1882, anyhow. What do you know?" He started to laugh. “In 1902, sold to Prosper Hightower, M.D."

I looked at him.

"Hightower. The drug doctor, remember? Then what? Acquired byEdgerton Township, 1922. Sold to Charles Dexter Ward, 1950. So what about its next-door neighbor?Lot60449. Hatch Brothers Fairground. Purchased in 1903, Coleman Drears, M.D. Incredible! Here is our abortionist. They lived next door to each other! And I bet I know why—Buxton Place was more a back alley than a street. No neighbors watching their patients come and go. What happened when Drears took off? Acquired by the township in 1924, sold to a Wilbur Whately in 1950." His head jerked up. "Weren't we just talking about H. P. Lovecraft?"

I nodded.

Coventry giggled and shook his head in a transport of disbelief.

"What?"

"Lovecraft wrote a novel calledThe Case of Charles Dexter Ward, and Wilbur Whately is a character in 'The Dunwich Horror,' one of his stories. I am truly happy. I'll have to mark the day on my calendar. Never before have I come across a literary allusion in City Hall."

"Would you mind looking up one more?"

"After that? Of course not."

I gave him the address of the rooming house on Chester Street. In less than a minute Coventry was back at the counter with a manila folder. "How far do you want to go with this one?"

"Who's the present owner?"

Coventry took the last page from the folder and slid it toward me. Helen Janette's building had been purchased by a company on Lanyard Street in August of 1967. "T.K. Holding Company. Does that tell you what you want to know?"

“It tells me something I should have known," I said.

Toby had bought the rooming house one month before Hazel Jansky was due for release. By present standards, $27,000 wasn't much of a down payment, but after twenty-six years it still represented an impressive gift.

The great door closed behind me. I went down the long steps and looked across Grace Street to the square. An old woman was scattering bread crumbs before lots of bustling pigeons. The golden-haired derelict I had seen before rocked back and forth over his guitar. Beyond the fountain, a graceful male figure was leaning against the trunk of a maple. The arm dropping in a straight line between the tree and the angle of his body ended in the rectangular outline of a briefcase.

The breath stopped in my throat. The man across the square was Robert. Although the shadow of the maple hid his face, I knew he was smiling at me. Robert pushed himself off the tree and walked into the sunlight, the case swinging lightly at his side.

•72

•I trotted down the steps, across the sidewalk, and into the street, only barely registering the traffic. Horns blared, brakes squealed. I got to the median unscathed and dodged through the southbound traffic, then jumped onto the pavement and ran up the long path to the fountain. Pigeons feuding over bread crumbs scattered at my footsteps. The golden-haired trump on the other side of the path hunched over his guitar. I looked past an elderly couple at the opposite end of the square and glimpsed Robert's head and shoulders in a group waiting for the light to change at the end of the next block.

When the group moved ahead, Robert was a few paces behind the others. His blazer and jeans were identical to mine. The tramp played a sequence that gave me the title of the song he was playing, "Keys to the Highway," one of Goat Gridwell's signature tunes. He was bending notes and stretching out his phrases, and when I came to within about six feet of him I took my eyes off Robert and glanced down. From a beaten, hardscrabble face, bright green eyes met mine. It felt like slamming into a force-field, and I stumbled forward. The green eyes charged with playful knowledge.

Goat Gridwell held my eyes with his until I trotted past him. For all I know, he watched me pick up speed and run out of the square.

Robert had reached the middle of the next block when I came around the fountain and started down the path to the east end of Town Square. He was moving with an easy stride that ate a lot of ground. I got to the end of the path and saw him turn right at the corner. I plunged ahead. Robert had deliberately invited me to follow him, but I had no faith in his patience.

I ran two blocks and wheeled right. The tail of a blue blazer and a portion of a caramel-colored satchel swung past the building on the next corner and vanished.

Robert seemed to be working toward Commercial Avenue. I could beat him to it by running straight down to the right from where I stood, but he might have been directing me to some other location along the way. I took a few deep breaths, ran down the block, flew across the next intersection, and spun into Grenville Street. The blazer and the elegant satchel were slipping left onto Commercial Avenue.

"Damn you," I said, and took off down Grenville. Through the plate-glass window of a pizzeria I took in Helen Janette leaning over a table and waving a peremptory finger at Toby Kraft. I picked up speed and raced out onto Commercial Avenue.

Thirty yards down the sidewalk and a short distance from the entrance to Merchants Hotel, Robert was leaning on one hip, swinging the satchel in his hand, and looking right at me. Then he was gone. I moved along the sidewalk. When I reached the spot where he had been, the revolving door of Merchants Hotel released a chalk-faced old party under the care of the doorman who had witnessed my encounter with Grenville Milton. The doorman assisted his charge into the back seat of a waiting car, nodded at me, and swept his arm toward the entrance. Having been told what to do, I walked into the lobby. A good-looking clerk smiled at me from behind the desk. I smiled back at her. Thanks to Robert, I was a familiar visitor. At the top of the stairs to the right of the lobby, Vincent's unoccupied podium stood guard over the darkened reaches of Le Madrigal. I turned to the marble stairs on the other side of the lobby. From the mezzanine, Robert looked down at me and disappeared again.

I mounted the marble stairs and went into the men's room. Robert was leaning against one of the sinks, both of his hands on the grip of the leather satchel. The mirror behind him reflected only the row of urinals and the tiled wall.

Robert was grinning. "So here we are, at last."

5

HOW I LEARNED TO EAT TIME

•73

•Afterward, I changed my mind about the similarities between Robert and myself almost every time I was with him, but what struck me then was the magnitude of the differences between us. Didn’t see how anyone could mistake him for me: despite a structural likeness, the ruthlessness stamped into Robert's features obliterated any resemblance. That he should not be reflected in mirrors seemed absolutely right. Then my eyes moved to the mirror and saw there the reflection of the back of his head. It was as though he had increased in substance at the expense of my own. When I looked again at his face, it was identical to mine in every particular.

"What the hell are you?" I asked.

"You know what I am." Robert held out the satchel. "Go up to 554 and give this to Ashleigh. She'll be so grateful, she'll rip off your clothes."

"What's in here?" As soon as I asked, I thought I knew.

"Don't be stupid." He thrust it into my hands. "This morning, someone who refused to give his name called the Brazen Head and said he heard you had dinner with Ashleigh and Laurie Hatch last Friday. He assumed that you would be willing to assist the case against Stewart Hatch. These documents will give Ashleigh everything she needs to mount a successful prosecution. Hatch has no idea they're gone."

"So you did break into that building." He shrugged. "Hatch must have checked to see if this stuff was still there. How can he not know it's missing?"