Mr. X

He replaced the box on the shelf. "The Hatch material was over here." We moved down the wall, and Coventry drew out a box labeledH —Hatch Family (Mr. Stewart Hatch)."This is even harder to understand than the Dunstan misfiling. We had two separate folders in here, one with photographs and advertisements related to the fairgrounds and other early business interests of the Hatch family. The second folder contained photographs and studio portraits, plus some class photographs from Edgerton Academy. Worth their weight in gold."

"That's what he's looking for, right?" Spike asked.

Leona Burton and Marjorie Rattazzi stared at him. Spike threw out his arms and leaned toward them. "Ladies, you weren't even here when that stuff came in. It was just Hughie-baby, me, and Florence Flutter."

"Fluther," said Marjorie Rattazzi, the woman in the running suit."Floo-ther."

"Whenever FlorenceFloo-ther wanted to remember if R came before S she had to recite the whole alphabet. I had to check her work about six times a day. If something got balled up, you don't need a detective to figure it out. One more thing aboutFlorence. She used to hold her breath whenever I came into the room, butshe was the one who smelled."

Coventry looked at me with a mixture of apology and chagrin. "Mrs. Fluther volunteered here at the library for years, and we all appreciated her contribution."

"Okay," Spike said, "but he wants the Hatch stuff, doesn't he? You and Marjorie went through the Dunstan submissions, but I ..." Spike swiveled his pink head and gave me a lengthy scrutiny. An all-encompassing blush rose into his face.

"You thought I was interested in the Hatch photographs?"

"Hugh-baby, you got something else I could do? My eyes aren't focusing."

Coventry told him to go upstairs and reshelve books, and he scooted out of the room.

"That boy isn't nearly as terrible as I thought when I first laid eyes on him," said Marjorie Rattazzi, "but I don't think I understand half the things that come out of his mouth." She smiled at me. “I was here when Mr. Coventry came down with Mrs. Hatch and your aunts. Women like that are so strong, aren't they?"

"Never lost a match," I said.

•102

•Side by side on the davenport, hands clasped over their stomachs, their white-crowned heads bent in ferocious concentration, the aunts drank in the soap opera booming from the television set. Clark slumbered in the rocking chair. "Good thing I'm not a burglar," I said. "Well, hello, stranger," Nettie said.

Clark smacked his lips and took in my presence with a yellow eye. "Happen to pick up a six-pack on the way?"

"Sorry," I said.

"We still have a few in the fridge. I'd appreciate one. If you're in the mood, help yourself."

"There's tuna casserole on the table," Nettie said. "Fix yourself a plate."

“I want to talk to you two ladies."

"Oh, we heard all about it!" May said.

I took two bottles from the refrigerator, twisted off the caps, and came back into the living room. Clark accepted his beer in the way royalty accepts a chair, without looking at it. "What did you hear?" I asked the aunts.

"Took care of the whole shebang two seconds before you walked in," Nettie said. "My sisters and I know we are doing the right thing."

Clark detached the beer bottle from his mouth. "Maybe I should tag along behind Clarence and settle in beside him. A tragedy has the power to make a man think."

I looked back at Nettie. "You already heard from Mount Baldwin?"

“I spoke to a Mrs. Elizabeth Fanteen," she said. "Mrs. Fanteen is the executive director at Mount Baldwin. She asked for you, but in your absence Mrs. Fanteen was grateful to speak to me instead. You may be surprised, but that gracious Mrs. Milton called Mount Baldwin and found a place for Clarence. Mrs. Fanteen tells us that Clarence is welcome any time."

"Wonderful," I said.

"When Mrs. Fanteen asked me about Clarence's financial setup, I assured her that my sister and her husband are destitute."

“I'd better talk to Creech," I said.

“I spoke to Mr. C. Clayton Creech the minute I got off the phone with Mrs. Fanteen," Nettie said. "His manners may be peculiar, but Mr. Creech is a man who knows what's what. If you can stir yourself, Mr. Creech wants you to sign a few papers in his office at nine o'clock tomorrow morning."

"Which will give you plenty of time to pay our respects to old Toby," Clark said.

I looked back at Nettie.

"Mr. Creech informed me that the burial will take place at tena.m. tomorrow. We would like you to represent our family."

“I'll be there," I said.

“I'd like some of that tuna casserole," Nettie said. "Keep you company."

“I could manage a few bites," May said.

"Count me in," Clark said. "Food takes your mind off your sorrows."

I brought in plates and forks and watched them eat. "Did you tell me you called Laurie Hatch?"

“I believe so," said Nettie. "A lovely young woman. My heart goes out to her, with her husband under suspicion of wrongdoing."

"You said you were thinking about calling her. You didn't mention that you went to the library, too."

Nettie rebuked me with a glance. "Mrs. Hatch merely helped my sister and myself try to recover the photographs mislaid by Mr. Coverly, a man who couldn't point out the sky if he was lying flat on his back in an open field."

"Coverdale," said May. "You Coverdale. He can't be from around here. People around here don't name their babiesYou."

"Hugh," I said. "Hugh Coventry."

"An exceptionally nervous man," said May. “It's a pity when a man has a nervous disposition."

“In my opinion, it was Mrs. Hatch who made him nervous," said Nettie.

The faint, almost playful suggestion of an idea came to me, and I said, virtually without thinking, “I don't suppose Mrs. Hatch mentioned any other photographs."

“I don't remember anything like that," Nettie said. "We were thinking of having your birthday celebration at eleven A.M. tomorrow, if it suits your crowded schedule."

"You're changing the subject."

"Mrs. Hatch asked us to give her regards to Neddie. Didn't I tell you that, Neddie? Your friend asked us to convey her regards."

I smiled at May. "You're telling me you walked out of the library empty-handed?"

"Goodness, only a fool would pass up an opportunity like that. I found all kinds of useful things in there. A whole box of rubber bands,two boxes of those nice big paper clips, jumbo they call them, and a date stamp where you can change the numbers. We can stamp our own books!"

"May," I said, "You don't have any books."

She smiled at me like a cat.

"Oh, dear," I said. "Would you mind if I called Rachel Milton?"

“If you think it necessary," Nettie said.

When Rachel got on the phone, I said, “I can't believe you acted so fast. Thank you."

“I took a nap as soon as I got home and had two cups of coffee afterward. Liz Fanteen told me she would work out the details and get everything set up. Liz is a genius at the numbers game. By the way, Grennie raced in about an hour ago, fit to be tied. He locked himself in his study and made a million phone calls. Then he ran out again, shouting about having to see Stewart. For once, I don't think he was lying. If you hear anything from Laurie, will you let me know? It'd be easier to be supportive if I knew he was going to jail."

A few minutes later I went across the street, where Joy hovered in her doorway as I told her about Mount Baldwin. To my relief, Joy was delighted by the news. And did I know? Another wonderful thing had just happened—Toby Kraft dropped dead and left everyone a fortune!

•103

•It was a few minutes past 3:00p.m. when I walked past the shop windows on Fairground Road and turned into Buxton Place. The sunlight abruptly died. Beneath their Gothic rooftops, the cottages looked like malignant dwarfs. I was beginning to feel as though I had been strapped to a treadmill, and for a moment I thought about going back to my room for a nap.

The windows of 1 Buxton Place showed me no more than my own reflection. The same was true next door. I was wasting my time. The answers I needed were to be found in the present, not the past, and the nap was the best idea I'd had since telling the Reverend Swing about my mother's taste in music. Something Star said to me long ago, a description of an alto saxophone solo on "These Foolish Things" she had heard at a concert before I was born, came back to me, evoking her with painful clarity. I turned away, took a step toward the brilliant shaft of light at the end of the lane, and a man in a black Kangol cap and a short-sleeved blue shirt turned the corner and walked into the darkness. Moving over the cobbles with the trace of a limp, he began fingering through a crowded key ring. His dark skin had the dead pallor of flesh too long deprived of sunlight.

"Mr. Sawyer," I said. "How are you doing?"

Startled, Earl Sawyer looked up from his keys.

“I'm Ned Dunstan. I saw you in the ICU at St. Ann's."

“I remember." He took a slow step forward, then another.

"How do you feel?"

Sawyer found the key he wanted. "Fine. Got out of the hospital that night. After a few hours, all I had was a headache. Even the bruises went away. I don't keep bruises long, never have. What brings you up here?"

"My mother knew the man who owned these houses."

Sawyer tilted his head and waited for more.

"She died five days ago. I was hoping I might be able to talk to him."

His eyes seemed to change shape. "They were close?"

"Once upon a time," I said.

"What was his name, this friend of your mother's?"

"Edward Rinehart."

"You got the wrong address, sorry to say. I've been coming here twice a week for ten, fifteen years, and I never heard of him."

"This is the right place," I said. "Mr. Sawyer, who hired you? The owner?"

"Could be."

"Was his name Wilbur Whateley? Or Charles Dexter Ward?"

All expression drained from Sawyer's face, and his eyes momentarily retreated. A shy smile flickered over his mouth. He surveyed the stable doors on either side. "You surprised me with that one, my friend."

"So I noticed," I said.

He chuckled. “I was thinking, this guy got the address all wrong, and you come up with Charles Dexter Ward."

"Do you know Mr. Ward?"

"Never met him." Sawyer came up beside me and faced the bottom of the lane, as if to ensure that no one would overhear. “I answered an ad in theEcho. Thirty dollars a week for checking in on these properties, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Now it's up to fifty a week. I think I'll stay on. You know? Fifty dollars a week, quick trip on the bus, in and out."

His nod said it was better than stealing and twice as easy.

"How do you report to Mr. Ward?"

"He calls every Saturday, six P. M. sharp. 'Any problems?' he says. 'No problems, sir,' I say. Monday afternoon, a kid from Lavender Lane hands me an envelope with five ten-dollar bills. Nolly Wheadle." Sawyer chuckled at the image of the boy who had led me out of Hatchtown on the night Robert had first shown himself. "One time, years back, I had a rotten cold and missed a Wednesday. Mr. Ward called on the Saturday, and I said, 'No problem,' same as always. Mr. Ward—let's say I learned not to lie to Mr. Ward. My next envelope had only ten dollars in it."

"How did he know?"

"You got me. He comes here two or three times a month, though. There'll be glasses in the sink at Number One. A different stack of books on the table in Number Two."

"Mr. Sawyer," I said, “I know I'm asking an enormous favor, but would you let me look inside?"

He pursed his lips and jiggled his keys. "Your mother was a friend of Mr. Ward's?"

"Yes," I said.

"What was her name?"

I told him. He bounced the keys in his hand and debated with himself. "Just keep your hands off Mr. Ward's belongings."

Sawyer opened the door of number 1 onto a musty, charcoal-colored space shining with ghostly shapes. He slipped away to the left, and I heard the clicking of a switch. An overhead fixture shed reluctant light over the contents of Edward Rinehart's living room. Empty bookshelves covered the wall to my right. A Fisher amplifier, a Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder, and an A.R. turntable, stereo components that would have knocked your eyes out in 1957, lined a shelf on the near side of the fireplace. A Spanish bullfight poster and a reproduction of Picasso'sThree Musicians hung over the sound equipment. A shelf lined with LP records bracketed the fireplace on its far side, and past the records was a narrow door. A sofa and three chairs draped in languorous-looking sheets accounted for the ghostly shapes I had seen from the entrance.

"The door goes into Number Two," Sawyer told me.

Here, Rinehart had conducted his parties and unofficial seminars. He had posed in front of the fireplace and read passages of his work. He had draped himself across the sofa and murmured provocations. Albertus students, poor damned Erwin "Pipey" Leake, and people like Donald Messmer had streamed up Buxton Place and brought their various passions through the front door.

Earl Sawyer walked to the far end of the room and into the kitchen, where garbage overflowed from a metal washtub. We went upstairs and looked into a room with a bare double bed, an oak dresser and table. "Any of this interest you?" Sawyer asked.

"All of it interests me," I said. I had probably been conceived on that bed. Robert seemed to flicker into being alongside me—I felt his demanding presence—and disappeared without having been any more than an illusion.

"What?"

“I thought I heard something."

"These places make noises by themselves," Sawyer said.

Downstairs, he opened the door beside the record shelf. The room beyond gaped like the mouth of an abandoned mine. "Wait a second. I'll get the lights."

Sawyer walked into the darkness and became a thick shadow. I heard a thump and the sound of wood sliding over wood, then another thump, like the opening and closing of a drawer. “I always hit that damn table."

He turned on a lamp atop a side table. A book-lined wall came into view. Sawyer moved to a larger table in the middle of the room and switched on a lamp surrounded by mounds of yellowed newspapers and empty food containers. Tall bookshelves took shape on all sides. "Come on in."

Rinehart had turned the cottage into a library. The shelves extended upward to the roof and all the way to the back of the house. An iron ladder curved up to a railed catwalk. There were thousands of books in that room. I looked at the spines: H. P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft. I moved to the ladder and went up a couple of rungs. Multiple copies of every edition of each of Lovecraft's books lined the shelves, followed by their translations into what looked like every possible foreign language. First editions, paperbacks, trade paperbacks, collections, library editions. Some of the books looked almost new, others as though they had been picked up in paperback exchange stores. Rinehart had spent time and money buying rare copies, but he had also purchased almost every Lovecraft volume he had seen, whether or not he already owned it. “I think I know the name of his favorite writer," I said.

"Mr. Ward thinks H. P. Lovecraft was the greatest writer whoever lived." Sawyer scanned the shelves with mute, secondhand pride. "Years back, I started reading a couple stories when I finished my job. Mr. Lovecraft put a lot in them, but not everything he knew. I've had a lot of time to think about this subject."

This was the source of his pride—his theories about Lovecraft.

"You know what a parable is, I hope."

“I went to Sunday school," I said.

His smile vanished before the significance of what he had to say. "A parable is a story with a concealed meaning. You might not see it, but it's there."

"Some parables seem to have lots of meanings," I said. "The more you think about them, the less you can be sure what they say."

"No, you're reading them all wrong, they wouldn't beany good that way. A parable has only one meaning, but the trick is, you have to look for it. Mr. Lovecraft's stories are the same. They can teach you a lot, if you're strong enough to accept the truth."

I had seen the same kind of pleasure in the faces of men devoted to theoretical, Hydra-headed conspiracies that connected the Kennedy assassinations, the FBI, organized crime, the military-industrial complex, and Satanic cabals. The stink of craziness always enveloped these people.

"Look there." Sawyer pointed at a shelf filled with copies ofFrom Beyond. "A friend of his wrote that book. Mr. Ward said it ought to be famous, and he's right. It's a great book. Maybe my favorite."

His eyes met mine. "So were you telling me that Mr. Ward and Edward Rinehart are the same? Rinehart is what they call a pseudonym?"

He wanted to display his knowledge of the word.

"So is Charles Ward."

Sawyer's unhealthy face turned sullen.

I moved down rows of books and saw lodged at the end of a shelf what looked like a first edition ofThe Dunwich Horror. I pulled it out and saw penciled on the flyleafW. Wilson Fletcher, Fortress Military Academy, Owlsburg, Pennsylvania, 1941.

Earl Sawyer materialized at my side like an angry djinn and snatched the book from my hands. “I'm sorry, I should have said." He nudged the book back into place. "Mr. Ward told me not to touch that particular book. It's sacred, you could say."

Sawyer cut off my apology. "You have to leave. I made a mistake."

•104

•A tingling like the piercing by needles too small to be seen came over my hands when I drove through the southern fringe of College Park. I looked down and saw the steering wheel waver beneath two hand-shaped blurs.

A voice from the back seat said, "How do you do that?"

"You do it!" I yelled.

"Don't be paranoid," Robert said. “It's over. Look."

My utterly visible hands gripped the wheel.

“I could explain it, but you wouldn't understand." He patted my shoulder. "What were you up to in College Park? And what's the latest on the Joe Staggers front?"

"You don't know?"

“I can't keep up witheverything." Robert folded his arms on top of the passenger seat. "Talk to me."

"You can forget about Joe Staggers," I said, and described going through the Buxton Place cottages with Earl Sawyer.

"That gives me an idea. In the meantime, point us toward Ellendale. I think Stewart Hatch is hiding something we want."

The mystery of Robert's limitations faded before the suggestion that Hatch himself had walked off with his family photographs.

"He isn't at home," Robert said. "Stewart had troubling news today. He and Grenville Milton are deep in conference with their lawyer."

“I'm not going to break into his house."

"You won't have to. I'll go in and open the door."

"You don't need me to ransack Hatch's house," I said.

"Who knows? You might learn something about Laurie. In the meantime, explain why I should forget about Joe Staggers."

I told him that he wouldn't understand.

•105

•One leg planted on the driveway, a knee bent into the Mountaineer, Posy Fairbrother was leaning through the rear door to strap Cobbie into his seat. She looked like an idealized figure ona frieze.

Robert sighed. "Pity that Posy's too straitlaced to mess around with her employer's lover. Turn left, here's Bayberry."

Stewart's angular, contemporary house stood on two treeless acres at the end of the first street off Blueberry. I drove past it and parked around the corner on Loganberry.

In a hot, green emptiness, Robert and I cut across the lawn and climbed the steps to the gray wooden deck."Momentito," Robert said. He glided through the back door and, after a pause longer than I had expected, opened it. "Stewart didn't install an alarm system. I guess there's nothing worth stealing."

I looked around at the kitchen. "Not unless you have a forklift." A gas range faced a twelve-foot marble counter that extended past a double-doored refrigerator and a glass-fronted wine vault. On the shelves beside the wine vault were ranked a half dozen bottles of single-malt Scotch and a couple bottles of Belvedere vodka, undoubtedly awaiting their turn in the freezer.

A partition separated the dining room from what people like Stewart Hatch called a "great room." The furniture marooned in the vast space had been picked up at a Scandinavian furniture outlet in the local mall.

Upstairs in the master bedroom, a monumental television set faced the bottom of an unmade king-sized bed. Polo shirts and khaki trousers were strewn across a sofa. Robert opened the closet doors. I went through a rolltop desk and found boxes of canceled checks, flyers from Caribbean resorts, and two videotapes, labeledKinky Bondage, USA andLove in Chains.

A book titledManagement Secrets of the Ancient Chinese Warlords lay on the bedside table; in the drawer underneath was a box of steel-tipped cartridges and a nine-millimeter pistol. The next drawer down contained a jumble of handcuffs, leather thongs and straps, lengths of rope, metal-studded wristbands, and a couple of things I neither recognized nor wanted to think about.

I looked under the bed, saw only the carpet, and joined Robert in a space about the size of Star's old room at Nettie's house. Something like fifty suits and jackets, at least a hundred neckties, and dozens of belts and suspenders hung beneath yards of open shelves with sweaters and shirts sorted by color and shade. Robert reached up to a stack of Brooks Brothers boxes, chose one, and opened it to reveal a striped, button-down shirt in a plastic wrapper. I thought of Gatsby.

"Let's look at the office downstairs," I said.

Robert roamed througha file cabinet. The closet was empty, except for an unopened case of Belvedere. Just above eye level, a carton from Bear, Stearns tilted at an almost unnoticeable angle on the narrow shelf. I pushed back the carton and uncovered a legal-sized manila envelope. I pulled it off the shelf. "The green light at the end of the dock."

Robert came up beside me. “I don't even want to know what that means. Open it."

I took a folder crammed with photographs out of the manila envelope and silently apologized to Laurie and my aunts before I even realized that I had suspected them of walking off with Hatch's pictures.

"Three cheers for the home team," Robert said.

The two men in the double portrait on top of the pile could only have been Omar and Sylvan Dunstan. Both my heart and my stomach seemed to drop six or seven inches within me, and I went to the desk and dumped out the rest of the photographs. Attired in wing collar, dark, linear suit, and high-buttoned waistcoat, the twenty- or twenty-one-year-old Howard Dunstan stared up at me. As his daughters endlessly reiterated, Howard had been a handsome man. He looked intelligent, charming, reckless, willful, and, I thought, half mad: cruelty and despair had already begun to tug at the features of a face uncomfortably similar to Robert's and mine.

Stewart had stolen our folder, not his, from Coventry's files.

A car, then another, pulled into the driveway. Two doors slammed. I looked at Robert. He shrugged.

"You asshole," I said.

"Everybody makes mistakes."

I scooped up the photographs and shoved the folder back into the envelope. Through the window behind Robert, I saw Stewart Hatch entering the garage with Grenville Milton towering beside him. They moved out of the frame of the window, and their footsteps sounded on the cement floor.

"What do we do now?" I heard them enter the kitchen.

Signaling for quiet, Robert eased the door shut. "After the old guy leaves, Hatch will go upstairs."

Grennie Milton's voice thundered from the kitchen.

“If they come here, I'll take care of it," Robert said.

The refrigerator door opened. Ice clinked into glasses.

I put my hands on the window's sash and saw the screen blocking my way. "Wait," Robert whispered.

Like a blip traveling across a radar screen, Milton's aggrieved voice marked their progress through the dining room and into the main part of the house, where his words became audible. "These people havesomething, Stewart. They want financial records back to 1983. Does that sound like a coincidence to you?"

"Give me a break," Hatch said.

The footsteps advanced to the front of the big room. The two men dropped into chairs.

"My Louisville attorney wants me to separate our cases."

"These people don't know anything. They can't. It's as simple as that."

“I am not interested in going to jail. Jail is not in the program. Are you listening to me, Stewart?"

"Am I ever," Hatch said. “I've been listening to your hysterics all afternoon."

"Then hear this. If you go down, you go down by yourself."

"That's nice. Grennie, nobody is going down. It's all smoke. If you separate our cases, you make both of us look guilty. That's not exactly the perception we want to put out there."

"They're preparing indictments, how does that make us look?"

"You want to know why they're preparing indictments? Ashton went around taking statements from everyone under the sun. In the process, she rented cars, she flew in airplanes, she stayed in nice hotels and paid for expensive meals. Where does she come from? Kentucky. These people had noidea of the expenses she was running up. So she goes back home empty-handed."

"But—"

"Ashton gets back to bluegrass country and says, Sorry guys, no dice. Iknow that. Her boss says, Ashton, this is my job on the line here, we can't afford to give up now. So what do they do? They make up the indictments, Grennie, that's what they do, because the indictments justify her expenses. If nothing new turns up, hey, maybe they can cut a deal. It's about saving face, that's all."

"You can't argue away the break-in," Milton said.

"My system failed. A guy got into the building and trashed the computers. But, Grennie, our records, they were never touched. I guarantee it."

“I hope you're right," Milton said. “I'm too old for prison."

"So am I. Not to mention getting screwed eight ways to Sunday on the home front. I should never have put Laurie on the damn committee. Yet another example that trying to be good to people is generally a terrible idea. What about Rachel?"

"Rachel put a death lock on my wallet about a month before I gave her the best cosmetic surgery money can buy," Milton said. “I can't see her turning vindictive. Well, okay. We're just going around and around. I have to get home and change before I meet Ming-Hwa."

"You want something to worry about, pick her," Hatch said. "But what do I know?"

"You wish it was you instead of me," said Milton. They drifted to the front door and repeated half of what they had already said before Milton's size 13 wingtips clumped down the driveway.

Hatch closed the front door, walked to the staircase, and went up a few steps. He hesitated and began coming back down. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he turned toward the office. Robert winked at me and disappeared, leaving behind a vacant Robert-sized space.

The knob revolved, and the door began to swing open. I did the only thing I could, short of assault—at the moment Stewart Hatch walked into the room, I bit into time.

•When my eyes cleared, I was standing in an open field, experiencing the pains of my previous journeys, but to a lesser degree. Empty grassland rolled over the hills, and birds soared on outstretched wings through the flawless sky. I walked in what I hoped was the direction of the future Bayberry Lane, trying to remember the distance to the corner. When I thought I was getting close to the car, I did my trick and returned to the tiled border of a backyard swimming pool. Another foot to the right, and I would have been underwater.

My head felt fine, and my gut reported no more than a mild twinge. However, the woman wearing the bottom half of a bikini who was tilted back in the chaise ten feet in front of me seemed about to go into shock. She propelled herself forward and snatched up a towel. "Where didyou come from?"

"Miss, I'm as embarrassed as you are," I said. “I was hoping to findsomeone who could give me directions. I'm supposed to deliver this envelope to an address on Bayberry Lane, but I can't seem to find it. I hope you'll forgive me."

She tucked the ends of the towel under her arms and smiled. "Whose house are you looking for?"

"Mr. Hatch's," I said.

"Stewart?" She pointed without raising her arm. "That's his place." Fifty yards away, the gray deck jutted out over a smooth, vibrantly green lawn. I had come nowhere near the car. "Go down Elderberry, turn right on Loganberry and right again at the next corner."

When I turned the corner into Loganberry Street, Robert was leaning against the Taurus, grinning at me. "To hell with you," I said.

“I knew you didn't really need my help," Robert said. "But I hope you're going to tell me how you got away."

"Magic carpet," I said.

"Mysteriouser and mysteriouser. What do we do now?"

“I'm going to Laurie's, and you're not. Come to the Brazen Head tonight."

"You won't give me a ride back to town?"

"Robert," I said, “I don't think you'll have any trouble getting back to town by yourself."

He touched his forehead in a mocking salute and was gone. I went to the door of my car and heard someone say, "Mister?"

A woman in shorts and a halter top was staring at me from across the street. “I have to ask. How did youdo that?"

"My brother's been pulling that stunt ever since we were kids," I said. “It used to drive our mother crazy."

•106

•When Laurie opened her front door, I saw sheer, unalloyed pleasure radiating through all the complications of her beautiful face. "Ned! I'm so glad. Come in."

She moved into my arms. "Tell me about the funeral." “It was all right. An old friend of my mother's named Suki Teeter came, and so did Rachel Milton. The three of us had lunch afterward. Rachel isn't so bad, after all."

“I should phone her. Would you like to hear some good news? Ashleigh called to say they're working on the indictments. Grennie may not have long to enjoy true love."

"Even shitheads get the blues," I said.

"Let's celebrate with a really good bottle of wine." She went into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of Heitz Private Reserve cabernet and two glasses.

After I poured, she said, “I have to make sure this won't be too hard on Cobbie. I don't know how you explain to a kid that his father is going to jail, but I want to protect him. He's out with Posy, by the way. She took him to seeAladdin."

“It's nice to see you alone."

“I've been thinking." She leaned back into the sofa. "Columbia accepted Posy into their Ph.D. program. Cobbie's going to need more training than he could ever get here. New York might make a lot of sense for us."

"Would Posy stay on with you?"

"She'd jump at the chance, and having her with us would give Cobbie some continuity. Besides, I'm crazy about Posy Fairbrother—I don't want to lose her, either. If I bought a big apartment or a brown-stone, we'd all have enough privacy."

"The kind of place you're talking about costs a fortune," I said. "Private schools would be another ten or fifteen thousand a year. Plus the music lessons. Can you afford all that?"

"The trust can," she said. “I'm not going to let Parker Gillespie run my life."

It was the reason she had called Gillespie: Laurie had been thinking about moving to New York before she had ever met me. I said, “It sounds like a great idea. I want to be around the first time Cobbie hears Bach. Or Charlie Parker."

"You should be around. Cobbie needs more than music." Laurie smiled to herself, as if realizing that she had said too much. "Let me back up. Would you like it if I moved to New York?" She moved an inch away and, in a kind of compensation, put her hand on my knee. “I don't want to put you in an awkward position."

"Of course I would," I said. "Think of all the nice places we could go." I heard myself say the word "nice" and knew that I was talking about a fantasy. I wanted the fantasy to be true.

"What places?"

"The Metropolitan Opera. The Frick museum. The corner of

Bedford and Barrow in the Village.Second Avenueon a Sunday morning in August, when all the lights turn green at once and you hardly seea car for miles. The Great Lawn inCentral Park. The Esplanade in Brooklyn Heights. The Gotham Book Mart. About a hundred great restaurants."

"Let's find our favorite one and go there once a month, religiously."

"Laurie," I said, "when you met my aunts at the library, did you ask them to take some photographs?"

"Take snapshots? They didn't bring a camera."

A more innocent answer could not be imagined. I laughed. “I meant, take as in walk out with."

She looked puzzled. "Why would I do that?"

"Forget I asked. Hugh told me that Stewart's family photos had disappeared. He discovered they were missing after you visited the library with my aunts, who could stuff the Empire State Building into a couple of shopping bags without anyone noticing. I don't know, maybe you wanted to shake him up a little. It was a bad idea. Sorry." It was worse than a bad idea—it was ridiculous. Laurie could not have known that Stewart was going to demand the return of his archive.

"Now two sets of pictures are missing? Yours and Stewart's?"

"Awfully strange coincidence, isn't it?"

"So strange that you thought I must have had something to do with it. And then didn't tell you. Which makes it sound like, instead of trying to annoy Stewart, I was concealing something from you."

She was right: it did sound like that. I remembered what Rachel Milton had said to me about the Hatch photographs, but Laurie's talent for perception had already pushed this conversation past anything intended by my thoughtless question. "Whoa," I said. "Too far, too fast. Around you, I have to watch what I say."

"Who drove you to the V.A. Hospital?"

“I know," I said.

A car rolled into the driveway and stopped in front of the garage.

Laurie kissed my cheek. "Remember who your friends are."

•Cobbie burst in and squealed with pleasure. "Ned, Ned, I have a trick!"

Posy smiled at me, put down the stroller, and set two shopping bags on the counter. "After the movie, I bought some books and a couple of the CDs Ned recommended."

“I have a trick!" Cobbie's eyes were dancing. He smelled like popcorn.

"Let me know how much you paid, and I'll add it to your check." Laurie hugged Cobbie. "Hello, squirt. Did you like the movie?"

"Uh-huh. And I—"

"You want to show usa trick."

"Uh-huh." He paused for dramatic effect and sang an odd series of notes. Then he went limp with laughter.

“It's beyond me," Posy said. "He's been singing it over and over, and it cracks him up every time."

Cobbie began singing the peculiar melody again, and this time he found it so funny he could not get to the end.

"Do it all the way through," I said.

Cobbie stationed himself before me, looked directly into my eyes, and sang the entire sequence of notes.

I thought I knew why it sounded so odd. "Urn, backwards something singing you are, Cobbie?" It took me longer to work out the order of the six words than Cobbie had taken to reverse eight bars of melody.

"Huh?" Laurie said.

Chortling, Cobbie trotted to the piano and plunked out the notes.

"Now play it the right way," I said.

He hit the same notes in the opposite order and grinned at Posy.

"Oh, my God," she said. “It's from the movie."

"Whole wide World," Cobbie said.

"That settles it," I said to Laurie. "He's going to be Spike Jones when he grows up."

“Is Ned staying for dinner?" Cobbie asked.

“Is he?" Laurie asked me.

"As long as Cobbie and I can listen to one of those new CDs," I said, thinking that after dinner, I would go back to Buxton Place to see what Earl Sawyer had hidden in a drawer. Earl Sawyer was a troubling man. He cherished the notion that H. P. Lovecraft's stories described a literal reality, and he had nearly fainted when I had touched the first edition with the owner's inscription on the flyleaf. I tried to remember the name: Fleckner? Flecker? Fletcher. W. Wilson Fletcher, of theFortress Military Academy in Owlsburg, Pennsylvania.

•For about half an hour, Cobbie sat entranced through most of Haydn'sTheresienmesse, occasionally turning to see if I had heard some particular sonic miracle. Now and then, he said "Huh" to himself. During the "Credo" movement, he looked at me with an expression of puzzled delight. "That's called a fugue," I said. He turned back to the music and muttered, "Foog." When the movement came to an end, he announced that it was time for cartoons and sped into the room on the other side of the fireplace.

In the kitchen, Laurie and Posy were gliding back and forth between the counter and the stove. Posy asked if I had seen the books she bought for Cobbie, and I went back into the living room. Posy had found short biographies, written for children, of Beethoven and Mozart. The last book in the bag wasThe Best of H. P. Lovecraft's Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre.

I brought it into the kitchen and said, "You didn't get this for Cobbie, did you?"

"Oh, sure," Posy said. "Laurie and I were talking about the book you brought over the other day. Somebody Rinehart? Lovecraft's name came up, and I was curious. A guy in my neurobiology seminar is a big Lovecraft fan. I've never read anything by him, so I thought I'd take a look. One instance is chance, two are design."

"Huh," I said, and realized that I sounded like Cobbie.

"You're not allowed to ogle the staff," Laurie said. She handed me the wine bottle. "We'll be ready in about twenty minutes."

I poured out the last of the wine, went to the sofa, and began reading "The Dunwich Horror."

The story began with an evocation of a sinister area in northern Massachusetts. Cramped between looming hills, the town of Dunwich exuded decay. Generations of inbreeding had warped its native population into degeneracy. The story moved into particulars with the introduction of Lavinia Whateley, cursed by ugliness and albinism, who at thirty-five had given birth to goatish, dark-skinned Wilbur. The child began walking at seven months and learned to speak before his first birthday. Well in advance of his teens, he developed thick lips, yellow skin, wire-brush hair, and the ability to throw dogs into savage fits.

In the way a particle of food sticks between the teeth, an otherwise unnoticed detail seemed to have lodged in my mind, and I leafed back and found this sentence:"The only persons who saw Wilbur during the first month of his life were old Zechariah Whateley, of the undecayed Whateleys, and Earl Sawyer's common-law wife, Mamie Bishop."

I flipped through a couple of pages and saw,"Earl Sawyer went out to the Whateley place with both sets of reporters and camera men."

Goose pimples rose on my arms. Once was chance, twice was design. The Buxton Place houses had been bought under names taken from Lovecraft characters, and their caretaker went by the name of another. Earl Sawyer adored Edward Rinehart because he was Edward Rinehart.

"Laurie," I said before I knew what I was going to do, “I think I left something upstairs yesterday."

"What?" she called.

“I'll be right back." As though driven by a malign compulsion, I double-jumped the stairs and went into Laurie's bedroom. While a part of me stood by in horror, I pulled open her dresser drawers and searched through her clothing. I went to her closet and compounded my crime.

Laurie's voice came from the bottom of the staircase. "What are you looking for, Ned?"

"A pair of sunglasses. I just realized they're gone."

“I don't think they're here. Dinner in five minutes."

I looked under her bed and into her bedside table. I searched the bathroom. When I came out into the hallway, I glanced at Cobbie's door and moved to Posy's. I considered taking a look inside, rejected the idea, and turned toward the stairs. Posy Fairbrother was regarding me from the end of the hallway.

"Thank you for not going into my room," she said. "Am I to gather you thought I might have taken your sunglasses?"

"No, Posy, please," I said. “I was just trying to figure out where the blasted things could be."

“I don't think I've ever seen you wear sunglasses," she said. "Anyhow, we're ready to eat."

I got through dinner by steering the conversation toward cartoons, a subject on which Cobbie had a great many observations, and Haydn'sTheresienmesse, to which I had listened just often enough to fake an expertise. Posy sent me suspicious glances, and Cobbie, for whom dinner with the grown-ups was a special treat, threw in a couple of four-year-old apercus. ("That music was like very, very, very good food," and “It's nice when a bunch of singers don't make the notessmeary.") Both women seemed put out with me, and my apologies for fussing over a lost pair of sunglasses and having to leave after dinner did nothing to warm the atmosphere. A puzzled Laurie walked me to the door. I said that I expected to be busy all the next day, but would call if I could. Cobbie rocketed out of the kitchen, and I gathered him up

and kissed his check, He reared back and said, emphasizing every word, “I—want—to—hear—another—FOOG!"

•107

•I parkeda block south of Brennan's and hurried into narrow Buxton Place. Twilight had begun to sink into real darkness, and moonlight glinted from the windows in the old stables. As I had expected, the doors and windows of the cottages refused to budge. I kicked at cobbles until one dislodged. I wrapped it in my jacket, carried it back to number 2, and stepped up to the window.

A hand closed on my shoulder. I thought my heart would explode.

An inch from my ear, Robert's voice, my voice, said, "Have you lost your mind?"

I wanted to club him with the stone.

"You can't still be angry. I did you a favor."

"You ran out on me."

"Didn't you disappear a second after I did?"

"Did I?"

He chuckled. "Brother dear, the more you can discover in yourself, the better off we'll be tomorrow."

"Where have you been?"

"Speaking of favors," he said. "Blueberry Lane."

His smirk was unbearable. "Someone had to repair the damage. I apologized for my moodiness. I hadn't even thanked Laurie and Posy for their lovely dinner, and I hoped they would understand that my mother's funeral was having a terrible effect on my manners. I found the sunglasses in the car, sorry for letting them become the focus of my anxieties. Blah blah blah. There are things about human beings I don't understand, I know, but your fondness for that little boy really baffles me. I had to keep peeling him off my leg. If you don't watch out, you're going to spoil that child."

"You followed me?"

"No. I had the pleasure of an early supper at Le Madrigal. Julian flirted with me so sweetly that I'm joining him for a drink around one-thirty this morning. The boy is all aquiver."

"You're going to have sex with Julian?"

“I don't make pointless distinctions. Now that the ladies of Blueberry Lane have been pacified, tell me why we're breaking into this hovel."

"After we get inside," I said.

Robert filtered through the front door of number 2. As always, it looked like a special effect in a movie. The door swung open, and I dropped the cobblestone and walked in.

"Make sure the curtains are drawn," Robert said.

I tugged the curtains until they overlapped. "Can you see?"

"Not much better than you." He felt his way to the central table and fumbled with the lamp. “If Earl Sawyer already gave you the tour, why are we here?"

"His name isn't Earl Sawyer," I said, and told him what I knew.

For once, Robert seemed dumbfounded. "How can that ugly old man be Edward Rinehart? He doesn't look anything like us, and he's supposed to be our father?"

"Thirty years ago, he probably looked exactly like us. He's had a lousy life, he's about fifty pounds overweight, and he eats terrible food. On top of that, he's as crazy as a shithouse rat, which tends to distort the way you look."

“I could have killed him in the blasted Cobden Building."

"He didn't know who you were, either. He never really saw you. But he sure knew who I was when he let me in here this afternoon. He had to."

"Why didn't he try to kill you then?"

I gave him the only reason that made sense to me. "Because killing only one of us is no good."

"You're wrong, wrong, wrong," Robert said. "He doesn't know there are two of us. That's the reason I'm still alive."

"He has to know it now, Robert," I said. "Maybe he saw us on that night in Hatchtown. He's waiting until tomorrow, when he's counting on getting us together. But whatever he tries to do, we have one advantage over him."

Robert grasped the point. "He doesn't knowwe know."

“I hope that's an advantage. Anyhow, it's the only one we have."

He moved frowning across the floor and switched on the other lights. "Don't make assumptions about what I'll be willing to do."

"Robert," I said, "we will do what we have to do."

Two parallel lines cut through the dust on top of the table where Earl Sawyer had been standing when he summoned me into the room. One of the lines was about eight inches long, the other no more than two. A picture frame, I thought, propped on its cardboard leg. I pulled out the drawer and found nothing but mouse droppings. Sawyer had taken with him whatever he had hidden from me.

"Let's rattle his cage." Robert was virtually shimmering with excitement. "Let's make Edward Rinehart so angry he won't be able to think."

"How?"

Robert looked across to the thirty or forty copies ofFrom Beyond. “I suppose he is amazingly attached to those books."

"You have an evil mind," I said.

“I have some matches with me, but we'll need more."

“I believe I can help you there," I said.

"Then all we need is a metal container thingie about half the size of a bathtub. I want to do this outside, so we don't set the house on fire."

"Hold on." I went through to number 1, groped into the kitchen, switched on the overhead light, and overturned the washtub I had seen earlier. Garbage showered onto the messy floor. I carried the tub back and found Robert standing outside in a small, bricked-in yard beneath the steadily darkening sky. Robert wheeled around, and I put down the tub and followed him to the shelf filled with copies ofFrom Beyond. It took us three trips to carry them outside. I brought the matches out of my pocket and picked up one of the books.

"Not yet." Robert folded back its covers and wrenched the glued pages away from the spine. He separated the wad of pages into halves, then into smaller and smaller sections. I began dismembering another copy. Loose pages fluttered to the cement floor.

When nearly half of the books had been destroyed, Robert knelt alongside the wreckage. "Now we get to the fun." He lit a match and held it to the bottom of a quire of pages. Yellow flame traveled up the first of them and spread to the second. Robert turned them over. The flame shrank and lost strength, then crept around the edges and took hold. Robert lowered the burning papers into the tub and held another section of pages over the fire.

"This is as close as you can get to feeling right about burning books," I said.

"Don't be an asshole," Robert said. Laughter bubbled in his voice.

I ripped books apart while Robert fed pages into the fire, laying in each new section like wood on a hearth and spreading the fire across the whole of the washtub. Scraps lifted burning into the air and floated toward the walls. In flight, some pages consumed themselves entirely, leaving behind not even ash. Some shrank to traveling dots of light, to fireflies; others blazed into flaming birds. A few burned on as they ascended, whirling far up into the night sky on the wind of their own destruction. Flames sent abrupt shadows capering along the walls.

As Robert bent over the washtub, erratic flickers of red and orange illuminated his face. It seemed almost ideal, no more like my own than mine was like Michelangelo's David. Robert's crisp eyebrows were streaks of black paint, the same smooth thickness all along their length. His eyes were clear and lustrous, his nose so perfect it might have been shaped by a godlike chisel. Deep shadows emphasized the cut of his cheekbones and the broad, well-defined mouth. The entire face spoke of quickness, assurance, grace, vitality—also, as he watched the fireflies and blazing birds dance upward, of the pure hunger that made him rejoice in destruction.

"Your turn." Robert jumped up to chase a soaring yellow wing.

I squatted beside the washtub and eased in pages, snatching back my hand from sudden flares. Beneath the body of the fire, lines of type seethed and coiled. Robert danced after his skittering yellow wing until it shrank to a glowing constellation of red sparks, then whirled to chase another flaming bird toward the back wall. He looked like the follower of some ancient god, his hair tied with ropes of golden grasshoppers, ecstatic in the performance of a sacrifice. Then I thought Robert looked not like a follower, but like a god himself, a god rejoicing in conflagration and disorder.

He danced back to hold a binding over the flames until a yellow tongue unfurled across the green board. My sense of the incomprehensible depth of his experience disappeared into, waserased by, the awareness that his insatiability, the intensity of his deprivations, had forever trapped him within childhood. Suddenly, Robert seemed stunted by the weight of all he needed, and for the first time I understood that he was imprisoned in a half-life from which only I could rescue him. Robert needed me more crucially, more centrally, than I had always needed him. Within whatever jealous, smoke-filled chamber that passed for his soul, Robert knew this, too, and pretended he did not.

His beautiful face darkened when he noticed me looking at him.

“I was thinking how we look exactly alike in one way, and not at all in another," I said, and received another edgy glance.

We went back to business until every copy of Edward Rinehart's hook had turned into ashes and a few, hall-burned bindings at the bottom of a washtub. The yard smelled like the remains of Helen Janette's rooming house. Black, charred black leaves littered the ground. Robert kicked one into fragments. "Let's trash some of his Lovecraft, too."

“I'm not burning anygood books," I said, "but that gives me an idea." I went inside and saw that my hands were smeared with ashes. I supposed the same was true of my face. Already distant, Robert stood in the doorway. Unlike me, he was immaculate. I used my handkerchief to slideThe Dunwich Horror from its shelf. “I think this is the first Lovecraft he ever read. I bet it's his bible."

Robert displayed a trace of interest.

"He'll do anything to get it back."

“In that case, we'll make him jump through hoops." He looked at his watch. "Clean yourself up. You're a mess."

"What about tomorrow?"

"Our adventures usually begin around three or four in the afternoon. I'll see you before that, wherever you are. In the meantime, don't do anything stupid."

"You, too."

Robert smiled at me. "Ned has a trick up his sleeve. Ned is not laying all his cards on the table. Let me ask this.He doesn't know thatwe know thathe knows there are two of us. Would you spell out how we're going to use that against him?"

"The way we did in Boulder," I said. I had no intention of telling him the rest.

“I refuse."

"You won't have any choice. It's all we have."

Robert glared at me, trapped between what he knew to be true and what he did not want to admit. “I'm not agreeing to anything."

I walked to the table from which I thought Earl Sawyer had removed a framed photograph of his younger self. "Come here." Robert moved unwillingly across the room. "Hold your hand under the light."

“If you must." He thrust his right hand, palm up and fingers extended, beneath the lamp. No creases divided his palm, and there were no ridges on his fingertips. His hand could have been made of a remarkably lifelike plastic.

"There weren't enough fingerprints to go around," Robert said. “I can't say I miss them."

Missing themcause's youmore pain than you can afford to admit, I thought.

He pulled his hand from the pool of light. "You have a lot to learn."

"At least I learned that much," I said. Robert was already gone.

•108

•A ragged boy squatted in front of the warehouse on Lavender Lane, his hands between his knees, a cigarette drooping from the fingers. His shoulders twitched, the cigarette rose, his mouth captured it. He had memorized every gesture ever made by Frenchy La Chapelle. When I came toward him, the boy shot to his feet and slithered around the door. A bolt slammed home.

I put my hands on the door and whispered. “I want to see Nolly Wheadle."

The words passed into silence.

"Nolly? You helped me out of Hatchtown last Friday night. I want to talk to you." These words, too, met a waiting silence. "There's five bucks in it for you."

I heard a scuffle of feet. A wised-up little voice said, "Ten."

"You got it," I said.

"Push it under the door," the voice said.

"Let me hear you slide the bolt."

"First the money."

I pushed a bill under the door. The bolt moved out of its clip, and the door rattled a foot sideways. I slipped inside. At my back, the door closed on utter blackness. Not to me, Nolly whispered, "Get away." Small, bare feet retreated over the earthen floor. My eyes began to adjust, and I saw dim outlines arranging themselves against the wall, like birds settling in for the night.

Nolly's vague figure moved toward the side of the warehouse. "Keep your voice down."

"You remember me."

"Aye," Nolly said.

"Two men were following us."

"People say you took care of one of them." His voice sounded like air leaking from a punctured tire.

"Somebody did," I said. Nolly made a hissing sound that I realized was a chuckle. “I think another person was there, too. Someone who saw us but was never seen. Someone you know. A man who pays you to do favors for him."

"We does favors," Nolly said. “It don'tmean nothing."

“I met him today. He said his name was Earl Sawyer." Whispers came from the rear of the old warehouse. “I think he sometimes wears a black coat and hat."

Nolly's shadowy form went rigid.

A voice from the back of the warehouse said,Black Death.

Nolly hissed, "Shut yer traps!"

"You call him Black Death?" I whispered.

A small voice said,Into the Knacker with 'im, Nolly, into the Knacker.

He leaned toward me. "You're not supposed to have heard of him, someone like you, and besides, you're mixed up in the head. You're putting together two different fellows who aren't the same."

"The Knacker?" I asked Nolly.

"Where they go when they go permanent," Nolly whispered. "Not only horses, neither."

He backed away, and I grabbed the tail of his shirt and pulled him deeper into the corner. Nolly submitted with a glum, heartbreaking passivity. I knelt down and put another five-dollar bill in his hand. “I know you're scared. I am, too. This is important to me."

"Life-or-death important?"

"Life-or-death important."

So softly that I could barely hear him, Nolly whispered, "There's a name you can't say, because he can hear through walls. Those that see him when he doesn't want to be seen are taught to be sorry. That is B.D. You know what I mean by that name?"

"Yes," I whispered back.

"He lives at night, and he has always been here. B.D. is not a true human being. Most of those back there, they see him as a vampire. I say, he's not a vampire but a demon from hell."

"He's always been here?"

"He was made whenHatchtown was made. B.D.is Hatchtown, as I think. That's why things are this way."

"Which way?" I asked.

Nolly made a contemptuous noise. "Water's bad, sewers don't work. Every time the river floods, we're underwater and covered in mud. This is Hatchtown. B.D., he's likeus, except he's a demon. If there is a Mr. Hatch, I reckon he made B.D. but I wish he hadn't."

I leaned back against the wall and put my hands over my face.

Nolly bent closer. "Earl Sawyer will be another five dollars." I gave him the bill.

"Mr. Sawyer is a sour old creature," Nolly said. "He'd sooner kick you than say a kind word, which he never does."

"Where does he live?"

“I usually see him in the vicinity of Leather Lane. But when he goes to ground, he goes to ground like a fox."

"All right," I said, and stood up. Nolly urged me toward the door and slid it open. I stepped into the lane, and, to my surprise, he slipped outside behind me. What I could see of his face looked like a catcher's mitt. He glanced from side to side and whispered something so quietly I merely saw his lips move.

I bent down, and he put his mouth close to my ear. "From what I heard, it was you seen two nights ago in Fish Lane with Joe Staggers from the town of Mountry."

“It might have been," I whispered, realizing that these kids heard everything.

"Joe Staggers has not been seen again. Which has caused no tears to fall. Not in Hatchtown. Nor in Mountry, either, I figure,"

"The gentleman was called away," I said.

“It must have been a powerful call."

What was Nolly doing, what was he looking for? "Too powerful for him, anyhow."

"A gun was fired, but no one was hit," Nolly said. "That's not your way, is it?"

"Nolly," I whispered, "do you want to tell me something?"

He hitched up one shoulder and tugged at the waistband of his trousers. He shifted his feet and jerked his head back and forth. In an imitation of Frenchy La Chapelle even better than the lookout's, he pulled at his sleeves and squinted as if trying to see around the curve in the lane. Frenchy had been one of these children, I realized, he had spent his nights in the old lavender warehouse and performed occasional services for B.D., the Hatchtown vampire. I thought Frenchy had continued to perform these services for the remainder of his wretched life.

Nolly was still trying to peer around the corner. "Do you know Horsehair?"

I shook my head.

"Horsehair issmall, and it isdark. Horsehair windsback andforth. In Horsehair, you can get to where you are going without no one knowing you are already gone. The general public never sees it, on account of its being the kind of thing it is." Nolly again tilted his mouth to my ear."He uses Horsehair. So if you wanted to find him, which I never did, you could maybe find him there."

"Where is it?"

"Everywhere," Nolly whispered. "For one example, rightthere." He pointed a grubby hand at a barely visible gap between two buildings and vanished back into the warehouse.

•109

•I stepped inside the space Nolly had shown me. Ahead, a dark, narrow artery stretched out for twenty feet or more before curving leftward. I felt as though Nolly Wheadle had shown me the secret within the secret, the key to Hatchtown's true interior. Horsehair brought me to Raspberry, then into desolate little Barrel Lane, and from there on a winding trail leading, I hoped, in the direction of Veal Yard. Sounds from other lanes reverberated off the narrow walls. A stench like that of Joy's house came to me, then sank back into the bricks. From somewhere near, I heard a man humming "Chattanooga Choo-Choo" and thought it was Piney Woods, staggering down Leather Lane. When at last I emerged into Veal Yard, I saw Horsehair opening like a paper cut beyond the dry fountain and knew how Edward Rinehart had witnessed Robert's first appearance before me.

6

HOW I SPENT MY BIRTHDAY

•110

•The next morning I wished myself a happy thirty-fifth birthday and hoped I would live to see thirty-six. When it came to birthday presents, you couldn't beat survival. After I dressed for Toby's funeral in a clean white shirt, gray trousers, a rep tie, and my blazer, I picked up the telephone and got the number for the Fortress Military Academy in Owlsburg, Pennsylvania. Who was W. Wilson Fletcher, I wondered, and how did Rinehart get his book? If Fletcher had made it through World War II, he was probably still alive, and he might remember giving the book to a fellow student.

I told Captain Lighthouse in the Alumni Office that I was doing background for an arts-page feature in theEdgerton Echo concerning the world's most extensive H. P. Lovecraft collection. For a sidebar tracing the history of the cornerstone of the great collection, a first edition ofThe Dunwich Horror, I wished to speak to its original owner, W. Wilson Fletcher, who had inscribed the book with his name, the name of the academy, and the year 1941.

"Sir, did Fletcher inscribe his name without indication of rank?"

"Just his name."

"Then he was a pledge. Let me check the Alumni Directory." He put me on hold. "W. Wilson Fletcher is not listed in the Directory, which means one of two things. Either he is deceased, or he fell through the cracks, which is something we don't like to happen. 1941, you said?"

"Right." I resisted the temptation to say "Affirmative."

“I'll look up the class lists for 1941 and the years on either side."

I asked Lighthouse if he was an academy graduate.

"Affirmative," he said. "Class of 1970. Did my twenty years and came back to help out my old school. I love this place, I really do. Let's see, now. 1941, no, not there. Maybe he was Artillery that year, which would put him in the class of '42. Yep, there he is, Wilbur

Wilson Fletcher, class of 1942. No wonder he used the W. I take it that you will be mentioning the academy in your article?"

"Of course," I said.

“If you don't mind being put on hold again, I want to check a few other sources. The Fortress Academy Roll of Honor will tell us if Fletcher was killed in action during his military service. If that fails, I'll try Major Audrey Arndt, the Academy's executive secretary. The major has been here since 1938, and she remembers everything and everybody. This place could hardly run without her. Do you mind waiting?"

"Not at all. I'm surprised you're still on the campus."

"My job goes year-round, and the major doesn't believe in vacations. Hold on, sir."

Captain Lighthouse kept me on hold for ten minutes. It seemed like enough time to wallpaper my room. I gathered that Wilbur had not helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima or won the Congressional Medal of Honor. I carried the telephone to the table and for the first time noticed that someone had carved, with a careful, almost witty precision, his initials and a date into its surface. P.D. 10/17/58. P.D. had done an elegant job. The almost calligraphically incised letters and numbers ran in an arc along the table's edge, so small as to go unnoticed unless you were looking directly at them. P.D., I gathered, had been excruciatingly bored. I wondered if he had been a musician waiting for the start of a concert.

The line clicked, and a muted Captain Lighthouse told me, "Major Arndt is on the line." Another click.

An authoritative female voice said, "Major Arndt here, Mr. Dunstan. Please explain your interest in Pledge Fletcher."

I repeated my story. “I was hoping to talk to Mr. Fletcher, and I thought the academy could give me his telephone number."

"Mr. Dunstan, the Fortress Military Academy is pleased to cooperate with the press, but cooperation works both ways. I want your assurance that what I am about to tell you will be handled discreetly and tastefully. And you will agree to fax me a draft of your article previous to publication."

My skin prickled. "Agreed."

"Unwittingly, I assume, Mr. Dunstan, you refer to the single unhappiest incident in the history of the Fortress Academy. Artillery Pledge Fletcher died as the result of an assault by an intruder shortly before the Christmas break of 1941. His assailant was never identified. As a result, this fine institution was subjected to a great deal of unwelcome publicity."

"You don't say."

“I would prefer that you make no mention of Artillery Pledge Fletcher's death in your article. More realistically, I ask you to describe it as an unfortunate tragedy, and leave it at that."

"Major Arndt," I said, "nothing in my piece requires me to dig up a fifty-year-old scandal. There is one more favor I'd like to ask, and I promise you, the same conditions will apply."

"Proceed," she said.

"Pledge Fletcher can't tell me how he acquired or disposed of the book, but some of his classmates may be able to fill in the gaps. If you would consent to fax me the 1939 to 1941 class lists from the Alumni Directory, I can take it from there. Nothing I might hear about the circumstances of Fletcher's demise will appear in the article. I'm only interested in the fate of the book."

"You are going to squander a great deal of time, Mr. Dunstan."

"Here at theEcho, Major, we practically eat time," I said.

• 111

•A Ford identical to mine drifted toward the long line of cars on the shimmering drive. Attired in a charcoal-gray wool suit and a gray felt hat, C. Clayton Creech took in the assembled gathering with his customary matchless cool. I glanced at the headstone next to Toby's grave.HENRIETTA "QUEENIE" DUNSTAN KRAFT, 1914-1964,A VIRTUOSO NEVER TO BE SURPASSED.

"Between you and me," I said to Creech, "how much of a crook was Toby, actually?"

“Indicted only once," Creech drawled. "Bum rap."

Down the slope, my Taurus's doppelganger parked at the end of the row of cars. Mr. Tite emerged from the driver's seat and opened the door for Helen Janette.

"Had nothing to do with the adoption business," I said.

"Hazel kept her mouth shut." Creech had not so much as glanced down the slope.

"What was it, then?"

"Jive bullshit."

Helen Janette and her guard dog reached the top of the slope. Frank Tite pretended not to notice that Helen was walking toward me.

The lawyer tipped his hat. "Good day, Mrs. Janette."

"Mr. Creech, I have something to say to your friend." She motioned me aside. “I want to apologize for the way I behaved the night of the fire. I was a miserable old woman, and I couldn't think straight."

“It must have been terrible for you," I said.

"Lose everything you own, you'll learn the meaning of terrible. I don't understand why that La Chapelle boy went so crazy."

"You knew him?"

"Frenchy grew up right around the corner. Him and Clyde Prentiss, knee-deep in trouble from day one."

The last of the mourners joined the throng behind Toby's grave. All but two or three of them were black, and everyone had dressed for the occasion.

“It starts withHatchtown," said Helen Janette. "Who needs a convention center? Stewart Hatch should tear down the whole place, rebuild it from the ground up. Or at least fix those properties. Your family would be happy to see some work done on Cherry Street, too, wouldn't they?"

"With them, you never know," I said. "But why would Hatch have anything to do with it?"

She said, "Okay, never mind," and left me.

Mr. Spaulding stationed himself beside the open grave. The quiet hum of conversation from the mourners ceased.

"Dear friends and neighbors, Mr. Kraft declined the services of a clergyman at his last rites, but he welcomed spontaneous reflections from those who have assembled here. If you care to express your feelings, step up and speak from the heart."

A little stir came from the crowd, and an elderly woman came forward. She raised her head, and sunlight sparkled off her glasses.

"Toby Kraft was not what I could call a close, personal friend, but I appreciated the man. He was honest with his customers. He treated a person with respect. He had a generous heart, too. Toby had a rough side, but I know there were times he offered a helping hand to lots of us here today." The crowd murmured affirmation. “In my opinion, Toby Kraft was a man who made a contribution. That's all I have to say."

One after another, seven other people moved up beside the grave and spoke about Toby. A white-haired man said, "Toby never appeared to he a romantic or a sentimental man, but no one could say he did not have a deep love for his wife."

I asked Creech if he had known Queenie.

"Toby was completely smitten," he said. "She could make his jaw drop open and his eyes spin around in his head. They had me to dinner many times, and Queenie's sweet-potato pie was like nothing I have tasted before or since." Creech smiled, more to himself than at me. "Hers was the only pie I ever observed rise an inch or two above the table, as if begging to be eaten."

The last speaker said, "Mr. Kraft acted like he ate hubcaps and razor blades for breakfast, but he was on our side. He once told me, 'Georgia, I may be a son of a bitch,' excuse my French, 'but watching out for you is part of my job.' He helped pay for my husband's funeral. When my daughter went to Morehouse, he sent her money every week and never asked for anything in return. I say, Toby Kraft was a good, good man."

Mr. Spaulding sifted through the crowd to shake hands with his future customers. People moved down toward their cars.

"Toby was an excellent fellow, all in all," said C. Clayton Creech. He gave me a lizardlike glance. “I trust you do not regret your decisions of the other day?"

"Toby would have approved," I said.

“I always enjoyed that whimsical streak of his. Most of my clients resist whimsy. As the years go by, I more and more appreciate evidence of the imaginative faculty."

We moved down the slope. "What was the reason he went to jail?" I asked.

Creech's car keys twinkled in his milk-white hand. “I suppose he possessed enough imagination to recognize he had no other choice."

•112

•The aunts were bustling back and forth in front of the stove. Splendid in a canary-yellow sports jacket, Clark looked up from the table. "Look here, boy, I got a new coat to celebrate your birthday!"

Nettie sang out, "Happy Birthday!" and bussed my cheek. May said, "Stay right there, I'll get your present."

"Old Toby's funeral was a lonely business, I reckon," said Clark.

"No, a lot of people turned up," I said. "Some of them spoke about how much he loved Queenie."

"You can't take that away from him," said Nettie. "From the moment Toby Kraft laid eyes on my sister, he was a man under a spell."

"And I wanted to ask you something," I said.

May returned with a plastic bag bearing the logo of a local grocery store. She looked almost coquettish. "When I gave you those socks and undergarments, Ned, I was keeping a secret for your birthday."

"You're giving me a secret for my birthday?"

“It won't be a secret any longer." She pulled from the bag a pink sports jacket randomly imprinted with golf bags, golf clubs, and greens with flags jutting from the cups. Grenville Milton would have drooled.

I shrugged off my blazer and got into May's pink extravaganza. It was exactly my size.

"Damn, boy," Clark said. "Now you look like you know how to have a good time."

"And there's another treat," said Nettie. "Sweet-potato pie. Mine is as good as Queenie's, you wait and see."

"What else do we have in the works?" I asked.

"Dry-rubbed pork ribs and my black-eyed peas. May brought over homemade bread. There's the marshmallow salad fromThe Ladies of Galilee Cook Book, and we still have plenty of that tuna casserole from yesterday. There is no need to worry aboutfood."

"We deserve a feast, after all our sorrows," Clark said. "Now that he has passed away, I miss old Toby more than I expected I would. Is there any progress on bringing his murderer to justice?"

“I don't think so."

"Jack the Ripper is running around Edgerton, but the police won't admit it. Tell you why. The news would alarm the populace."

“It isn't only Jack the Ripper," Nettie said, sounding ominous.

"No, sir. Take the events in College Park last night."

I felt as though I had been stung by a bee. "What events?"

"Around onea.m., people up there heard a god-awful noise. A good many windows blew out of their frames. They say a light filled the sky, and that the light wasblue."

“It is undoubtedly a sign," May said.

"A fellow on the radio this morning said the ruckus was brought on by an alien spacecraft. That idea deserves consideration."

Through the kitchen window, I looked out at the paper tablecloth and jugs of Kool-Aid and iced tea on the old picnic table. "Too bad Joy can't be here."

"Joy wouldn't talk to me this morning," May said. “I wouldn't be surprised it she has had second thoughts about putting Clarence in that home."

A premonitory tingle coursed through my chest, in its mildness suggesting that I had three or four hours before onset of the seizure. "Mr. Creech was at the funeral," I said. “I asked him why Toby went to jail, but he wouldn't talk."

"Today," Clark said, "we should remember the good things about the man, not his misdeeds."

"Which were legion," said Nettie.

"Numbered like the grains of sand on a beach," said May. "Are we ready to start the festivities?"

•On the other side of the picnic table, Clark made the most of a single black-eyed pea. Substantial piles of bones had accumulated on the aunts' paper plates. My warning signals hummed quietly in the background. All of us felt the warm, expansive sensation that follows a satisfying meal. At the moment when I was thinking about bringing up Toby Kraft's incarceration again, May did it for me.

"Nettie, do you remember? When Toby was sent away, Queenie still had that little icebox, and she was upset because she wouldn't have the time to pick out a new one for six whole months? When Toby came back, I remember, he told Queenie to get a new icebox right away."

“If he served only six months, his crime wasn't very serious," I said.

"Not only was his offense not serious," May said, "he didn't do it. Why would Toby Kraft break into another man's house? If that was what he wanted, he would have had some fool do it for him."

"He was home with Queenie the whole time." Nettie glanced at me. "She testified to that effect, but the jury chose not to believe her, which was the same as saying that she told a pack of lies. Our sister was the picture of honesty. Honest as sunshine."

"At times," May said, "our sister's honesty was of a sort to make you check and see where you were bleeding. I'd like more ribs, please, Ned, and some of the marshmallow salad from the Ladies of Galilee."

"Toby didn't say anything to save himself?" I asked.

"Didn't, couldn't, wouldn't." Nettie took the bowl of marshmallow salad from May and spooned half of it onto her plate. Disgust won out over her reservations. "Toby hardly talked to his own lawyer. They convicted him of stealing a silver picture frame, all because a Hatchtown no-good claimed he saw Toby hanging around outside the house."

A familiar sensation, that of steady electrical pulsations, flowed into my arms, and the colors around me blazed. I could not be sure how much time was left me. Robert lingered somewhere close by, burning with jealousy. I said, "This is a wonderful birthday party, but I should go inside and lie down for a while."

"That's all right," Nettie said. “If you were to fall to the ground and foam at the mouth, I'd feel like a miserable old woman."

The buzzing pulse quieted in my veins; the yellow flare around Clark's chest and shoulders receded back into his jacket. "At Toby's funeral, someone made a comment that made me think Stewart Hatch owned these houses. I always thought they belonged to you."

May frowned. Clark sneered thoughtfully at a flake sectioned from a pork rib. Nettie patted my hand. "Son, you don't have to worry about us."

"Which means, I suppose, that he does own your houses."

"Over the years, our family has done a lot of business with the Hatches. At a time when money was running low, Mr. Hatch became aware of our difficulties, and he stepped in to do us some good."

"What kind of good?"

"Mr. Hatch plans to develop this area. In the meantime, we can stay here for the rest of our lives."

"What if Hatch goes to jail?"

"No matter what happens, we'll be fine."

"We are protected, and we did it all ourselves," said May. "Toby's money is what I call the icing on the cake."

Clark said, "Speaking of dessert, where's that sweet-potato pie?"

"You'll wait until the boy's had his fit," said Nettie. “It isn't your birthday."

•113

•I walked through the kitchen, feeling his hovering presence with every step, and said, "Show yourself, Robert."

I came into the living room. "Did you know Stewart owned their houses? What's going on? He can't develop one block on Cherry Street." I imagined my silent double standing before me, grinning at my perplexity.

Trudging up the stairs, I thought:Four hundred and eighty thousand dollars is just the icing on the cake?

I moved over the landing and shuddered to a halt. Howard Dunstan regarded me with dispassionate curiosity from the end of the hallway. I resisted the impulse to run downstairs. A faint smile played over Howard's mouth. He was enjoying my birthday. Robert and I had eased the boredom of eternity by providing him a drama more entertaining than he had expected.

"Go outside, give your daughters a thrill," I said. “I'm sick of the sight of you."

The expression on his face said,You don't get it, you are missing the point. He turned aside, inclined his head to the window behind him, and faded from view.

I went to the window and looked down. Four people in festive spirits sat at the picnic table. Imbuing his duplicate of the pink extravaganza with an elegant raffishness, Robert spoke to Nettie and made her dimple with pleasure. He looked astonishingly handsome, even as I took in the roaring deprivation I had seen while he cavorted among fireflies and flaming birds.

I moved from the window and saw the door to Nettie and Clark's bedroom. It was half open. Scarcely believing what I was doing, I went into their room. Two freestanding wooden cabinets stood against the back wall, and two upholstered chairs faced me from beyond a double bed with white pillows and a faded yellow coverlet. I felt like a rapist. A tall chest of drawers faced the bed. The room's only closet took up the wall to my right.

The sweet, musty odor of a lavender sachet filtered toward me. Clark's outfits took up half of the rail, Nettie's long, loose dresses the other. Tidy stacks of sweaters and sweatshirts covered most of the shelf above the rail. A manila folder lay an inch back from the edge of the shelf beyond the sweatshirts.

The folder contained a lot of black-and-white photographs. They could have been of Nettie and her sisters arranged tallest to smallest in front of the house onNew Providence Road; of Clark Rutledge striking a pose in high-draped pants; of Star Dunstan beside a nightclub piano, singing "They Can't Take That Away from Me." Looking at them was the only way to clear the aunts of my suspicions. I took out three of the photographs and knew that whoever these people might have been, they were not Dunstans.

A young man in a straw boater propped one foot on the running board of what I thought was a Marmon. In a studio portrait, a girl of perhaps eighteen with straight, dark bangs and wearing pearls, a white, midcalf dress, and gleaming silk stockings smiled at a rolled diploma. Older versions of the same people, he in a three-piece suit, she in a cloche hat, posed behind two boys in sailor suits, one of them not long out of infancy. I slipped the photos back into the folder and took out another. My symptoms surged back into life, promising me a merry ride.

Dressed for the occasion in a doll-like jacket and bow tie, a small boy with bangs like his mother's perched on a photographer's stool in front of a backdrop depicting an Italian hill town. His face was nearly identical to that of the three-year-old Ned Dunstan in the photograph my mother had given me.

I pulled out one of the Edgerton Academy class photos pink-haired Spike had assumed I wished to find. Twenty boys in their early teens stood in three rows on the steps in front of a school. Glowering at the camera from the end of the last row, apart and unhappy, as dark as Caliban, was the image of myself at thirteen.

I walked out of the bedroom to find Robert leaning against the wall, smiling at me. He said, "Nettie and May are a perfect pair of rogues. And I can't say enough about Clark. The man belongs in the Senate. You don't mind my taking advantage of your absence to get acquainted with the family, do you?"

"Would it make a difference?"

Robert looked at the folder and narrowed his eyes. “Is that what I think it is?"

I pushed it toward him. "Take this to the car. I have to get back to the Brazen Head before my attack."

"Can you hold it off that long?"

“I have more control than I used to," I said.

"We're developing all sorts of new skills." Robert took the folder and disappeared.

When I came back out into the back yard, Clark and the aunts looked at me with gratified surprise. "Bounce back faster than a rubber ball, that's what you do," Nettie said.

“It's still on the way," I said. “I should get back to my hotel. But thank you for my birthday party. And I love my new jacket, Aunt May." An unanswered question came to me. "We were talking about Toby. Did they say he broke into a house in Hatchtown?"

"Do they have silver picture frames in Hatchtown?" Clark sneered.

"Nettie said a Hatchtown character saw him outside the place."

"A lowlife named Spelvin claimed to see Toby out in Ellendale. People like him didn't go wandering through Ellendale in those days, not without getting rousted."

"Where in Ellendale?" Electrical current sparkled through my veins.

"Manor Street," Clark said. "Where the mansions went up in the twenties."

"Whose mansion in particular?" I already knew.

"Carpenter Hatch's place," Clark said. “I don't know how a jury decided Toby Kraft could get so down and out stupid."

I faded from the back yard with none of Robert's impressive immediacy.

•114

•Sprawled across the back seat, Robert said, "What do you make of these pictures?"

"You first."

He put on a mock-professorial voice. "These photographs represent approximately fifteen years in the life of an increasingly well-off Midwestern family. We begin with a clever roughneck and the little beauty who had the misfortune of marrying him. In time, the roughneck transforms himself into a stiff-necked dictator, and the bride dwindles into a cringing phantom. They have two sons, seven or eight years apart, who are sent to a horrible school established to reinforce the fantasy that they are landed aristocracy."

"Anything else?"

"The first son looks like us."

"He also looks a lot like Howard Dunstan."

Robert waited.

"The roughneck was Carpenter Hatch. The girl who turned into a phantom was called Ellie, short for Ellen, as in Ellendale. Their first son wound up in jail, disappeared, and supposedly died. The second son, Cobden, went to work for his father, got married, and had a son.

All his life, Cobden Hatch was afraid his son, Stewart, might turn out like his brother."

"Who happened to resemble Howard Dunstan. And when he was supposed to be dead, this cuckoo in the nest tame back to Edgerton, calling himself Edward Rinehart."

"He came back a second time as Earl Sawyer. A lot of people have done their best to keep me from finding out that he was my father. Our father."

"That would mean ..."

"Tell me," I said. “I'd like to know."

“It means Edward Rinehart was a Dunstan, and you and I are Hatches. Good old Dad ties the two families together, and what's the physical proof? Ned Dunstan. No wonder Stewart grabbed our photographs and wanted you run out of town. You could ruin his family's reputation." He laughed. “It's delicious. Rinehart worked for his nephew for fifteen years, and he was so blown out Stewart never recognized him. The only way Stewart knew him was in these pictures."

What about Nettie and May?I wondered. Nettie would instantly have recognized "Edward Rinehart" as her father's illegitimate son. But "Edward Rinehart" had avoided the Dunstans as he must have avoided the Hatches; he had never even allowed himself to be photographed. If the aunts had not known the identity of Star's lover, they could not have blackmailed Stewart Hatch, and there was no way they could have known it.

I swerved into a parking place on Word Street, where the facade of the Hotel Paris shimmered like lava. A hot electrical tingle moved across my scalp, down my spine, and into my arms. The more I learned, the more confusing it became. Every new bit of information led into another blind alley.

"Go to my room," I said. “I'll be right there."

“I'm not making any promises." Robert disappeared from the back seat.

I sped through the bursting sounds and blooming colors in the lanes and charged across Veal Yard. The grain of the wood on the Brazen Head's reception desk swam up through layers of lacquer. "Yes, we have a fax for you, Mr. Dunstan," the day clerk said. With a thunderous explosion of summery blue from his shirt, the clerk produced a bundle of ivory-gray fax paper.

I went to the stairs reading the brilliant black lines of the fax. Major Audrey Arndt was pleased to supply, so on and so forth, with the understanding that I had agreed, so on and so forth. Her signature boomed from the page like a cannonball. I read down names listed under the years from 1938 to 1942. The fifth name down in the class of 1941 was Cordwainer C. Hatch.

Robert was standing near the window when I came in. From the edge of the table, the jewel-like arc of P.D. 10/17/58 floated out into the room. "You got a fax?"

"Cordwainer Hatch," I said. "Cobden's brother. I think he killed a student at a military school to get his hands on the book I stole from Buxton Place." Blue light flashed at the periphery of my vision, and the immense pressure in the atmosphere concentrated into a steady urgency. "You know what we have to do, Robert."

He held up his hands. "You don't understand. It would be harder on you than on me. I don't know if you could take it."

I moved toward him. An ivory-colored haze I would not have seen at any other time floated through his skin and hung like tobacco smoke. In the second before I reached for him, I took the copy ofThe Dunwich Horror from the table and rammed it into a pocket of the pink jacket. Everything crashed and boomed. I fastened my hand on Robert's, knowing exactly what we were about to see.

115 • Mr. X

•O You SwarmingMajesties Cruelties, Who Giveth with one hand and Taketh Away with the other—I begin to see—

•First I must address amore crucial point.I only now

It is bitter, bitter, with a bitterness I only now begin to comprehend.

•As the decades passed—I grew accustomed to the consolation of a Fancy—that a Godlike & Ironic Amusement—abstract—beyond the ken of the Providence Master—hadBlessed Lumbered me with the Task—Mighty—of Killing the Antagonist—or—as I have discover'd— Antagonists.—Ican only here inscribe that the Horrors—perpetrated by these Same—haveled me to believe taught me that I misunderstood Your True Nature. Gifts and Revelations encouraged this Servant's Illusion of a Favored Election—foolish,IMBECILE me.

•Last night—in Darkness—my Madness Soared—before the evidence of a Great Destruction. The Sacred Flameboiled tortured the Heavens—I stood in Ashes—below—

And—in Horror & Despair—Receiv'd the Gift.

I stood, as if Youdidn't know knew not, a'midst the Ashes—as Smoke from the Cannon's Mouth—sent Rage streaming forth—& then—Devour'd—the Substance Molten—Which is Time—& Travel'd Back—Godly & Engorg'd—to Where I shall once again slay Ferdy Dunstan, called Michael Anscombe, and Moira Hightower Dunstan, called Sally Anscombe—and Then—in Triumph—Destroy the Twin Antagonists—

•Humor—has no Place in Your Realm—Irony—as foreign as Pity. I lash myself, that I so fell short—that I could not see my Gethsemane— my Golgotha—

•The River-bank—has its Purpose & its Purpose—Terrifying. Pain equal to Pain—Rage equal to Rage—no Triumph without a Testing. Here are my wrists and ankles Pierced—here the Centurion's Sword is Thrust—

Crucifixion is no picnic, let me say that. Let me add that a half-human Wretch and Outcast can only take so much! I scream—my Scream shall reach the Heavens—they have Destroyed my Work!

Yet—in the midst of Annihilation—I get the point—You Creeping Obscenities—& Bless my Wounds & Sword Slits—My Great Loss— & Torment—is foreshadowing of the Great Fire to come—For my Identity cannot be Gainsaid—the Great Fire Follows the Smoke from the Mouth of the Cannon—

Half-mad with rage—with insult—Since discovery of the Crime, sleep has not been mine—I tremble & sweat, soak my clothing through & cannot eat—These Blessings are given in earnest of the End— when I shall Perish—to gain Eternity—

My foes Torment me—I call to them—as of old—the Advantage Mine—my Army Mightier—in Intelligence—a New Ability given me by Need—& the Foe ignorant of my Earthly Name—Even more—I known them Two—a Grand Superiority—They do not Suspect—And will Show One—whilst I conquer Time—

In the midst of Rage—I Laugh—to regard such Play—

I set down the Pen—& close the Book—theTriumph hastens— My Heartless Fathers—

•116

•A half second before we were to be delivered to Boulder, Colorado, I was united with my shadow again.

As in childhood, I recoiled from trespass and invasion; this time, I felt Robert's revulsion as well as my own. We were thirty-five, not nine, and the shock was far greater. But I had become more like Robert than I knew: the powers I had discovered and those he had known all his life shared a common root. There came again a breathtaking expansion into unguessed-at wholeness and resolution that in no way erased our separate individuality. We knew what the other knew, felt what the other felt, but within this symbiosis remained a Robert and a Ned. Surprisingly to both, it seemed that Ned was in charge of the decisions.

In the year 1967, we stood, adorned in a pink sports jacket flecked with golf bags and putting greens, on the Anscombes' front lawn. The moon hung like a monstrous button over a ridge of mountains, and the air smelled of fir trees. Blue fire shone from a window in a new addition at the far left of the house. The Mr. X of 1967 was prowling in search of his son. A shaft of blue light, sent as a flag of ironic welcome byour Mr. X, Cordwainer Hatch, flared through a crack in the living room curtains. On the steps to the attic, our nine-year-old selves were meeting for the first time. Neither we nor the demon in the living room were to be seen, because we had not been seenthen.

A well-known pressure moved us through the front door. In a shapeless garment that fell to the tops of her feet,Goodnight Moon in one hand, her hair a matted tangle, Mrs. Anscombe stared down at her husband's corpse. Our Mr. X loomed behind her, displaying an enraged, grotesque smile beneath the brim of his hat. Mrs. Anscombe padded into her husband's blood. Frank Sinatra sang of the encounter on a lovely night between a force not to be resisted and an object not to be moved.

Mrs. Anscombe said, "Shit on a shingle." She turned her face to us. "Who the hell are you, Bob Hope?"

Unable to see the thirty-five-year-old man who had materialized near the front door, nine-year-old Robert was watching her from the kitchen. As if following the direction of my thoughts, Mrs. Anscombe looked toward him and walked deeper into the red pool. A dim recognition moved across her face, and the book slapped into the blood. Her eyes swung back. "Why are you doing this?" she shouted. "Don't you understand I'm already in hell?"

"Don't worry, Mrs. Anscombe," said Cordwainer Hatch. "You will be taken care of soon enough."

She took another dazed step toward the kitchen. "Shit, I really am in hell," she shouted, "only the son of a bitch isn't RED, it's BLUE!"

The Black Death of the Hatchtown lanes drifted toward us. A sickening wave of almost limitless rage poisoned by an insanity deeper than Alice Anscombe's streamed from him as his mind reached out to engulf mine and Robert's. For the first time, I knew I could resist his strength. Robert yelled, Dosomething! and I told him,Wait. Cordwainer's mind battered on mine like a wind flattening against an oaken door.

That means nothing. Move!

The air gathered into a solid substance, pushed us back through yielding walls, and deposited us in a small room stacked with cardboard boxes. Cordwainer was only inches away. He stank of river-bottom. Blue light filtered in from the living room, where the Mr. X of 1967 berated Mrs. Anscombe. Our Mr. X blasted a roar of outrage into our minds:You destructive, destructive, destructive little vandal! You monster! He drew a knife from his coat.

A furious bellow and a series of muffled noises reported the demise of Mrs. Anscombe. Mr. X's younger self uttered a screech of frustration, thundered into the kitchen, and transported himself outside in pursuit of a small boy he knew had escaped him yet again.

“I guess you're angry about the books," I said.

Cordwainer grabbed our shoulder, spun us around, and clamped us to his chest. He dug his knife into our neck.

Is this what you had in mind?Robert asked me. Sorry,but I'm not hanging around to get killed. I told him to calm down.

"You could say that, yes. I am angry about the books." He nudged the blade another eighth of an inch into our neck. "Satisfy my curiosity. Where did you learn the name Edward Rinehart? Was it your mother? That old fool Toby Kraft?"

"Lots of people told me about Edward Rinehart," I said. "Where are we?"

He sniggered. "Don't you remember the Anscombes? Does Boulder, Colorado, ring a bell? We have journeyed back through time, the Substance Molten, a matter undoubtedly beyond your comprehension, that I might inquire how you managed to get away from methat time. Speak, please. I am deeply interested, I assure you."

Why aren't you DOING anything?Robert yelled.Are we just going to TALK to a guy who's sticking a knife in our neck?

Shut up and let me handle this,I said to Robert.We have to talk to him.

To Cordwainer, I said, “I can tell you who you really are. You'll find that tremendously interesting, I promise. It surprised me, too."

"Enough of this charade. Let's see if any other book burner wants to join the fun."

A great wind whipped into the room, flattening the pink jacket against our chest. Furniture slid across the living room floor. It sounded as though every dish and glass in the kitchen blew off the shelves and smashed against the walls. The window behind me exploded. I told Robert part of what I had in mind and heard him chuckle.

Did you think you actually had me fooled?

Everything in the house flew before the heightening wind. The living room window bulged and detonated. A kind of ecstasy flowed from Robert.

"Are you looking for someone?" I asked.

You destroyed my books! That is an OUTRAGE! Where is he?

“I want to show you something, Mr. Sawyer," I said. "People are going to be able to see us. If you have any sense, you'll take the knife out of my neck."

His arm tightened over our chest. “I'll humor you," he said. The knife came out of our neck and jabbed into our lower back.

Robert asked,What the hell are you doing now? I told him to hope for the best, and all three of us dropped through the floor into suddenly malleable time.

•117

•I was aiming for something I wasn't sure I could find. Even if I could find it, I had no certainty of what we would see.

The world ceased to swim. We were standing on a beaten footpath beside a two-lane macadam road. Horse-drawn wagons and old-fashioned automobiles rolled past in both directions. Robert was shouting that he did not understand what was happening, and Cordwainer was jabbing a knife into our back. Immediately, proof that we had arrived at the right place appeared before us.

To our left, Howard Dunstan's mad, bearded face scowled through the windscreen of a high-topped car chugging toward us down Wagon Road. His wife languished beside him. As they pulled nearer, two pretty young women who must have been Queenie and Nettie became visible behind them. Just entering their teens, May and Joy peeped out from the rumble seat.

This means nothing,Cordwainer said.Nothing. An illusion, a sideshow. Where is the other, you wicked boy?

On the far side of Wagon Road and in the wake of a horse-drawn cart heaped with burlap sacks, a vehicle sleeker and more expensive than Howard Dunstan's floated into view. Carpenter Hatch, already frozen into eternally disapproving vigilance, muttered a remark that made the already wilting Ellie sink away. Through the rear passenger window of their automobile peered a sulky replica of myself and Robert at the age of five. Putting along behind the Hatches and moving inexorably toward the Dunstans was a third vehicle, grander than Howard's but less impressive than the Hatch swan boat. The little girls in its rear seat pointed at the Dunstans, now nearly parallel to the swan boat. May Dunstan fixed her eyes upon the sullen childish face in the passing car. Howard stared straight ahead. Ellie Hatch, visible for a final second, shifted in her seat and regarded an empty field. A moment after the two cars separated, Wagon Road turned into chaos.

Every windscreen and headlight within fifty yards exploded into flying glass. Tires flew from their axles and spun over the macadam. Panicked horses reared, bolted forward, and rammed their carts against whatever was in their way. Burlap sacks spilled potatoes across the road. I saw a horse go down and vanish beneath wreckage, its toothpick legs sawing the air. The pressure of Cordwainer's arm lessened, and the knife fell away.

Over the sounds of collisions came the screaming of horses and the shouts of men. As the swan boat swerved off the road to veer around the damage, Ellie Hatch's weeping sounded in my ear from two feet away: it was not the voice of the woman now speeding into the distance, but her voice as remembered by the child in the seat behind her. Robert and I had colonized Cordwainer's mind and memory.

A bluebird tumbled to the floor of the ruin on New Providence

Road; a naked girl of eleven or twelve pressed her hand to the wound in her bleeding chest and reeled over the filthy cement; the young Max Edison nodded from behind the wheel of a limousine;The Dunwich Horror leaped from the extended hand of a uniformed boy;a uniformed man saiddisease; in a doorway on Chester Street, a knife entered a whore's belly; cartoon monsters descended from a cartoon sky; a fountain pen glided across a lined page; something lost, something irrevocably damaged, flew through the Hatchtown lanes, and that something was Cordwainer Hatch.

Robert shouted,Kill him, kill him! What's wrong with you?

I tasted Cordwainer's egotism and the illusion of a sacred cause and thought:Iknow how this ends.

The screams of terrified horses, the noises of collisions billowed from Wagon Road. I took the knife from Cordwainer's hand.

Release me!

"Okay, I'll release you," I said, and set him free. Robert shrieked in protest.

Cordwainer stumbled back, laughing. "You're too weak, you couldn't hold me." He looked at his empty hand. "Do you think I need a knife? Without your brother, you're nothing."

"What did you see?" I asked. "Did you see yourself?"

He surged over the grass. When Cordwainer slammed into me, I twisted sideways to absorb the shock and wrapped my arms around him. The three of us fell through a sudden trap door at the side of the beaten path.

•118

•Still in the momentum of his assault, Cordwainer Hatch rolled from my grip and struck the table in my room at the Brazen Head. He groaned and pressed his hands over his eyes.

"Take your time," I said.

Cordwainer lowered his hands, examined his surroundings, and swept the hat from his head. The ghost of Edward Rinehart shone in his ruined face. "Even the weakling has a little fight in him." He glanced over his shoulder and backed against the wall, weighing his options.

Killhim! Robert urged.He's confused, he doesn't understand what happened.

It's going to get a lot worse for him,I told Robert. Justwait. To Cordwainer, I said, "Do you remember that day? Do you know what happened on Wagon Road?"

I could see him decide to sound me out. He lowered his hat to the table in a parody of a diplomatic gesture—he was hooked, and his next words proved it. "Let's declare a temporary truce. This is about the last thing I anticipated, but now we have this interesting opportunity to hear what the other has to say. I want you to describe your fantasies. When you have finished, I will explain reality. Reality is going toastound you. Considering what you did to me, my offer is extraordinarily generous. But you will pay for your obscene crime, I assure you."

Robert said,Let's put his eyes out. Let's make him squeal.

He's going to squeal, all right,I said back.The worst moments of his entire life are about to happen.

"Looks like I guessed wrong," I said to Cordwainer. "You were supposed to get so angry you wouldn't be able to function."

"Oh, youangered me. And I'll grant you this, you're stronger than I imagined. But there's no sense continuing this discussion without your brother. You've lost whatever surprise factor you were counting on, so bring him in."

“I eliminated my brother this morning. He was a useless impediment. Since you're willing to listen to my fantasy, as you call it, I want to show you a few things."

Cordwainer gave me a wary scrutiny. Whatever he saw must have persuaded him that I was telling the truth. "Congratulations. Why don't you begin by telling me what you find significant about a few ancient collisions on Wagon Road?"

At that moment, I felt very much like Robert. “Instead, why don't you begin by telling me about the house on the edge of Johnson's Woods?"

Cordwainer's face twisted into a smug, ghastly smile. "You wouldn't understand. You couldn't."

"Then I'll give you some information you probably don't know. Carpenter Hatch bought that property from Howard Dunstan's daughters. It was where Howard spent his whole life, and when it burned down, he died in the fire."

He moved alongside the table, settled his hand on the back of a chair, and gazed at the ceiling. Cordwainer had decided to humor me. "Really, this is completely absurd. The man I thought of as my father bought that land to build houses for what he called the rising scum. The Dunstans never had any connection to the property. They swarmed into Cherry Street like roaches, and they never left."

The same crazy triumph with which he had told me about secret messages in H. P. Lovecraft irradiated him. "That house was the residence of a god."

"Howard Dunstan was a sort of Elder God," I said. "That's what is so interesting about what he did to you."

Cordwainer's mouth opened in soundless hilarity.

"You're amused," I said.

“I'm in awe. Your mother filled you with the most amazing nonsense."

I took the photograph of Howard in his wing collar and high-buttoned waistcoat from the folder and slid it toward him. He smiled at it in negligent disdain. "You're looking at Howard Dunstan," I said. "Your real father."

"Did you make this up all by yourself, or was Star crazy, too?"

I moved a photograph of Carpenter Hatch alongside the first. "Which one of these men would you say was your biological father?"

Cordwainer barely glanced at the photographs. “I don't expect you to understand this, but my true fathers were not of this earth."

"Let me tell you about your half-sister Queenie," I said. "The first of Howard's four daughters. Queenie could read people's minds and go from one place to another in an eye-blink. She didn't walk, she didn't bother to open doors or climb stairs, she justwent. It's a Dunstan talent, like walking through walls, and she got it from Howard. When May Dunstan, her sister, was a young woman, a boyfriend tried to rape her. She turned him into a green puddle."

Cordwainer's face twitched. His eyes rose to meet ours.

"May caused that scene onWagon Road. The instant she saw you, she knew you were Howard's son. You looked too much like him to be anything else. Look at his picture, Cordwainer. Whatever abilities you and I have, we inherited from Howard Dunstan."

"She reduced a man to a green puddle?" Cordwainer was staring from the far edge of the table. "You know that for a fact?"

“I hardly know what a fact is anymore," I said. "Neither one of us ever had much contact with facts. Only instead of H. P. Lovecraft, I had you."

His mouth tucked in at the corners, and his eyes shifted. Once again, I saw a remnant of Edward Rinehart momentarily surface in his face. "What was my mistake? Calling myself Earl Sawyer? I didn't think anyone would catch that."

“I almost missed it," I said.

Cordwainer moved the photographs closer to him. "You want me to talk about Wagon Road? I remember that girl staring at me from the rumble seat. I had no idea who she was. Then our windshield blew up, and everything went crazy. My father—my legal father— drove home as if nothing had happened."

"How did your father treat you?" I sorted through the pictures until I found a seven- or eight-year-old Howard posed in front of a seated, blazing-eyed Sylvan.

Cordwainer put it alongside the others. "When he wasn't lecturing me, he tuned me out. I depressed him. Of course, he had Cobden, the apple of his eye. Cobden could do no wrong, the little prig."

"And Cobden looked like him."

"This is so interesting." Cordwainer was still staring down at the photographs. “I'm not saying you're right, but it would explain a great deal about my childhood. Neither of my parents ever showed me much warmth, but they doted on my brother."

"Carpenter probably never really admitted the truth to himself. It would have been too disgraceful."

“I could almost believe it." He smiled down at the photographs. "You know, I think I do believe it. My mother must have been more adventurous than I ever imagined." He looked up. "And it would explain where my looks came from. I was always a handsome devil, like you. But the identity of my earthly parents . . . really, that's all the same to me."

"Howard Dunstan manipulated you. He led you into the woods and brought you to what was left of his house. Heshowed you things. He made sure you came across a certain book and primed you with fantasies about H. P. Lovecraft. All along, he was just amusing himself. It was a game."

Cordwainer glanced at the photographs again, then turned his poached eyes and lifeless face back to us. "All nature spoke. The Old Ones spoke."

"Haven't you ever had doubts? Weren't there times when you realized that everything you believed came from short stories written by a man who never pretended they were anything but fiction?"

“I have had my doubts." Cordwainer spoke with undeniable dignity, and, unlike Robert, I felt a spasm of pity. “I have known the Dark Night of the Soul."

"Now and then, even false Messiahs probably have their bad days."

“I am notfalse!"Cordwainer thundered.

"No, you're not," I said. "You're a real Dunstan. Everything your father made you believe was half true. Howard settled in to watch you try to eliminate me. He doesn't care how the game turns out."

"Evidently, my fathers have toyed with you," Cordwainer said. "They are merciless, I can testify to that."

"What happened to a Fortress Academy pledge named W. Wilson Fletcher?"

Cordwainer eyed us. "Busy little bee, aren't you?"

"You were startled that May Dunstan turned a man into a puddle of bile," I said.

I had guessed right: his face turned to lard.

"Maybe Fletcher showed you a certain book. Or maybe you saw him reading it one day. But something happened to you. You needed that book, didn't you?"

I pulledThe Dunwich Horror from my pocket. Cordwainer's eyes fastened on the cover. (Gothim, Robert said.Landed. Flopping on the deck. )

A bolt of feeling ran through his stolid face. "You stole that book from me, and I demand its return. You have no idea of its meaning."

“I'll give it back after we visit Howard Dunstan. He's been waiting for us." I set the book down. When Cordwainer lunged across the table, I wrapped my fingers around his wrist.

•119

•Resistlessly, we fell into the dense, darkly teeming world, half Hansel and Gretel and half unknowable mystery, of a forest at night. I hoped it was late evening, June 25, 1935.

Cordwainer seized our arm and yanked us to his side. “I don't recognize this. Where are we?"

"Johnson's Woods, about sixty years ago," I said. "On this night, you're a little boy asleep in a house on Manor Street."

“I rarely slept in those days," Cordwainer said. "Human life was a torment, and I preferred to bellow. I also wet the bed, deliberately. Compared to mine, your childhood was straight out of Mother Goose." In the darkness, his cannonball head loomed over his black coat, as if hanging in midair. "All right, make a fool of yourself. Where's the house?"

"Not far away," I said, without any idea of where in Johnson's Woods we were.

Cordwainer jerked us off balance, clamped an arm around our neck, and held us against his body. He was much stronger than I had expected. His arm tightened on our windpipe, and the twin stenches of mania and river-bottom invaded our nostrils. His mind probed at the perimeters of mine, like Aunt Nettie's before she had lifted me off her kitchen chair. I slammed my mental gates, and Cordwainer chuckled. His arm closed in and cut off our air. "Funny, I don't see a house. I don't see any lights."

As my eyes adjusted, the trees separated from the darkness and became a series of stationary columns daubed by moonlight. Before us stood a big maple I had seen before, though not in my waking life. I made a croaking sound, and Cordwainer eased the pressure on our neck. "You had something to say, little Robert?"

"The house is up ahead, about thirty yards to the right."

“I could almost believe you." A wave of river-bottom vapor floated from his pores, his bald head, his mouth. "How much longer are you going to keep up this pretense?"

Robert was seething. Robert had had enough, and he was ready to explode. My mouth opened, and Robert spoke through me: “Isthe fucking truce over, then?"

"Oh, no," Cordwainer said. “I haven't explained Reality yet. Are you admitting that you were lying? Are you ready to listen to the truth?"

"Let me ask you something in return," I said. "Are you afraid of what you might see?"

"That's ridiculous."

"All right, humor me. Take your arm off my neck and give me five more minutes." To which Robert added,"And if you don't, I'll finish what I started in the Cobden Building."

“I owe you for that, too," Cordwainer said. "Five minutes, that's what you get. Go on, continue the charade."

We crossed the open ground and entered the scattering of maples I remembered from my dream. Ahead, the massive oak reared through the canopy. Robert knew this terrain as well I did, although he, too, had never seen it while awake. It occurred to me that after a thousand repetitions we had changed places: now I was the shadow moving toward our destination.

“I reject the idea that you are capable of moving through time," Cordwainer said. “It was I who took us back to Wagon Road."

"Then who brought us here?" I asked.

“I have no doubt of your ability to move through space," Cordwainer said. "That, you inherited from me."

"Look to your right. In about ten seconds, you'll see a lighted window." We moved through the last of the oaks. Cordwainer chuckled at my attempts to hoodwink him. Two steps later, a yellow glow shone through the trees.

Cordwainer stopped moving. The triangular outline of a dormer rose above the cloudy heads of the trees. "Think I'll fall for that?" Cordwainer strode into the meadow. I heard the hissing of his breath. Cordwainer was staring at the portico, the facade slanting across the edge of the forest, the chimneys rearing against the sky.

"What house is this?"

"Move closer," I said. "He can't hear us, and he can't see anything but his own reflection."

Cordwainer took a couple of paces along the back of the meadow and came to a halt. “I know those walls." Unwelcome recognition had begun to blossom in his face. "That front window is like the very one I crawled through as an ignorant boy." He spun to glare at me. "Oh, you are a treacherous, treacherous fiend, but I see your shabby plan. You have brought me to its likeness."

"Wait until you see who's inside," I said.

"This isunbearable. It isblasphemy. Within walls like those, my Great Fathers spoke to me. That building was myschool."

"And your teacher was Howard Dunstan. He's in the big room on this side. Go on, look in the window. Think of it as a test of your faith."

"My faith has been tested my whole life long," Cordwainer muttered. "And so has my patience, but never as sorely as this."

We came to within ten feet of the shining window. Across the shabby room, an expiring Boston fern and a fox strutting to the edge of a glass bell occupied a white mantel. Shiny weights whirled left-right, right-left beneath a brass clock that reported the hour as 11:31p.m.

“If anyone is there," Cordwainer said, "let him show his face."

On cue, Howard Dunstan strolled into sight, his face ravaged, his hair and beard white, but still recognizable as the subject of his studio portraits and the man who had driven his family down Wagon Road. He was speaking with the slow, unstoppable rhythm of a hypnotist. I knew who stood just out of sight. Howard's weary despair concealed a witty, calculating expectancy that had eluded me until this moment. His face was that of a being who had never spoken a straightforward word, committed a spontaneous deed, or revealed more than what was necessary—it was a face poisoned by isolation.

As if drawn by magnetic attraction, Cordwainer Hatch unwillingly moved forward.

I saw myself walk into the shining frame and the year 1935 from an afternoon on which Stewart Hatch had gestured across an overgrown field and more than hinted that his grandfather and Sylvester Milton had destroyed the building in front of us. Now I knew that Stewart had it all wrong: Cordwainer had already given me the real story. I also knew that two earlier versions of Ned Dunstan, aged three and eighteen, had minutes or seconds before momentarily flickered into view and disappeared again because they had come too early, and they had come alone. I looked dazed but irate enough to take care of myself. When I said something to Howard, he kept talking, and I tried to interrupt his flow by asking,What are we?

Howard shook his head and mouthed,We are what flew from the crack in the golden howl, then something I could not lip-read. Beside me, Cordwainer gasped. All the air seemed to leave his body. Howard moved down the room and out of sight. I thought:He knows we are out here, he's playing to both of his audiences, every last lousy flourish is in place —

Cordwainer took a quick backward step, stumbled around, and dove into the woods with surprising speed. I went after the bulky form dodging through the trees. He stopped running when he reached the maple grove. His face was an unreadable blur.

"Still think it's some kind of trick?" I asked.

"Did he say,We are the smoke from the cannon's mouth?" He might have been talking in his sleep.

“I think so, yes. I remember that."

Cordwainer made the phlegmy, guttural sound of someone attempting to expel a foreign substance from his lungs. “I was watching his lips. He said something about a golden bowl. Then he said,We arethe smoke front the cannon'smonth."

"Have you heard that before?"

"Oh, yes. I have, yes. I have heard it on a number of occasions." His voice was wet. "During my boyhood."

Heavy footsteps came toward us from the center of the woods. Cordwainer turned around with a stiff, grave immobility, as though his neck had fused to his spinal column. A dancing glimmer of light bobbed toward us out of the darkness. "Men from town," I said. "They're coming to burn him out. About a hundred and fifty years before this, the same thing happened in Providence."

"Howard Dunstan never lived in Providence."

"One of his ancestors built a place people called the Shunned House. Sylvan Dunstan moved it here brick by brick."

The light separated into three torches advancing through the trees. Cordwainer yanked me behind the shelter of a pair of maples.

•120

•Torchlight surrounded them with a uniform glow traveling through the forest like a spotlight. Occasionally, a cluster of leaves popped into brief flame. Cordwainer plunged deeper into the woods. He paid no attention to me—he no longer cared if I existed.

The man in the lead was Carpenter Hatch, older and heavier than when seen on Wagon Road. Apart from the torch in his hand and the vindictive expression on his face, he looked precisely like the affluent small-town stuffed shirt he had always intended to become. Three feet behind him and side by side marched a pair of men separated as much by mutual distaste as by social standing. The grim, balding man at least ten years older and nearly a foot taller than Carpenter Hatch had to be Sylvester Milton. Ferrety Pee Wee La Chapelle hustled along beside him.

Cordwainer and I moved behind an oak twenty feet in front of them. Breathing hard, he watched the man he had thought was his father march toward us, his torch upright and his face blazing with hatred. Milton's torch ignited another low-hanging cluster of leaves.

"Watch that, Mr. Milton," said La Chapelle.

"Shut up, Pee Wee," Milton said.

Cordwainer jumped into their path. The three men halted, confronted by what must have looked for at least a couple of seconds like the sudden appearance of a severed head.

Carpenter Hatch recovered from his shock and said, "Clear off. This business does not concern you."

"He's seen us," Milton said.

"Stop quaking, Sylvester, and take a good look at that old man," Hatch said. "He's a degenerate half-wit." In a ringing voice, he said, "Listen to me, old fellow. You no longer work for Mr. Dunstan. He is a wicked man and must be punished. I have fifty dollars in my pocket. That's a lot of money, I know, but it will be yours if you take off now and keep your mouth shut afterwards."

Cordwainer let out a howl and charged them. Milton and La Chapelle dropped their torches and ran. Carpenter Hatch glanced over his shoulder, jumped back, and hurled his torch at Cordwainer. Before Cordwainer snatched it out of the air, Carpenter was already in flight. I sprinted from cover, picked up the fallen torches, and stamped out the advancing flames. Cordwainer held his torch over his head, listening to the panicky sounds of their retreat. His shoulders rose and fell like pistons. I couldn't tell if he was sobbing or just breathing hard.

He spun around and hurtled toward the house. Over his head, leaves sputtered into flame.

When I ran out of the woods, Cordwainer was plunging up and down the side of the house, keening. Tears shone on his face. I came to within six feet of him, and his face went slack with shock, then flared in a kind of recognition. An anguished bellow erupted from the flap of his mouth."Do you know what he did to me?"

"He lied," I said.

Gripping the torch like a lance, Cordwainer ran to the edge of the meadow and circled away, circled back. Because I did not understand that he was looking for something, I thought he had passed into pure animal craziness. On his second circuit, he fell to his knees and unearthed a long, flat, dirt-encrusted rock. He picked up the torch with his left hand and plunged back to the building. The rock sailed like a discus toward the window and smashed through it in a glittering shower of broken glass. With another wide swing, he lobbed the torch through the broken window.

Cordwainer whirled around, uttering squeals of excitement and agony. All he saw of me were the torches he ripped from my hands before he took off for the front of the house.

The portico light switched on. A bolt slid into its catch with a tremendous metallic clank, and the front door swung open on an empty hallway leading to a room where flames mounted between piles of books.

Cordwainer screamed,"Where is he?"

Through the lighted front windows, I saw Howard's white-haired figure slipping into a doorway at the far end of the room in which Cordwainer had received his tutorials in lunacy. From the back of the house, feeble light appeared in the window above the portico. I heard, or imagined I heard, batlike squeals. Streamers of fire moved across the floor of the study, fattened on the night air, and billowed into the hallway. "He's going to the attic," I said.

Cordwainer turned a furious glare upon me.

"Where the others are. You must have heard Carpenter and Ellie whispering about them."

Cordwainer's strangled voice said,"A octopus, centipede, spider kind o'thing."

We stepped back and looked upward. The attic windows turned soft yellow.

What Cordwainer did next, when I was expecting him to fulfill his own prophecy and run into the burning house, astounded me—he uttered a scarcely human sound that expressed condescension and mirth by wrapping them in lunacy. I needed a second to realize that he was giggling.

"Robert! It's a shame you didn't have the wit, the courtesy to read my stories before destroying them. Had you done so, you would comprehend our position. All is written! We brought each other to this place."

I tried to find Robert, but Robert had departed. "Written?" I said, now really playing for time. "How?"

"By grace . . ." An ecstatic smile widened across his face. "By grace, I am delighted to say, of my genius. What a fool I was. I rejected my masterpiece." Cordwainer started laughing in high-pitched, ecstatic scoops of sound.

This evidence that his humiliation had ascended nearly without transition into euphoria scared me more than anything that had happened earlier, and I moved away, furious with Robert for having abandoned me again. "Are you saying you wrote about Howard Dunstan?"

“I wrote of an Other, whose name I knew not. He betrayed me, Robert—you were absolutely, wonderfully right!"

"So join him," I said. “If that's what you wrote, get in there before it's too late."

"How is it possible you don't comprehend?" Cordwainer shouted. "Both of us are meant to join him."

In a repetition of the worst moments from my childhood, a force like a giant hand lifted me off my feet and muscled me in the direction of the open door. Exalted, his feet inches above the ground, Cordwainer sped toward me. I flew back at least ten feet, the fire seeming to stretch out its arms behind me, before I summoned the strength to resist him. It was as though—looking back, I remember, it seemed as though—I managed to draw upon some lingering portion of Robert's being. When I slammed to a halt at the edge of the portico, the heat curled against my back like a huge animal and threatened to ignite my clothes through sheer proximity. Cordwainer stopped, too. From a couple of yards away, he blasted out the same dictatorial energy that once had held me helplessly in thrall, and I found I could stand fast. Hairs crisped in my nose. I didn't move.

Cordwainer howled in frustration.

We faced each other, locked in a stalemate that would endure until one of us weakened. Without Robert, I felt handicapped, doomed. Then a secret door opened in my mind, and from the great, dark, unknown space beyond it Star Dunstan said,Like hearing the whole world open up in front of me. With a sense of yielding to that which all my life I had most feared and distrusted, I passed through the door—I can't put it any other way. In terrified, necessary surrender, I moved into an elemental darkness, Ipassed through. Forces and powers I had never known I possessed and never wanted to command streamed out from the center of my being and went prowling through Cordwainer's psychic hurricane.

"You must go inside!" Cordwainer bellowed. "Don't you understand? Move!"

“It was your story, not mine," I said, took a step away from the portico, and wrapped him in the terrible glamours I had inherited from Howard Dunstan. My old enemy, Edward Rinehart, Mr. X,

Cordwainer Hatch, opened his month and screamed like a rabbit that had just felt the trap bite into its leg. I felt like screaming, too. Instead, I propelled him howling past me and into our blazing ancestral house.

Somewhere within, timbers crashed down. The attic windows flickered red, then an incandescent blue. I moved back from the conflagration and softly, stupidly, spoke Robert's name. The fire drowned my voice. Another beam thundered toward the basement. Flames erupting through the roof vanished into the sheet of darkness welling behind them, and I sent myself back to the Brazen Head.

•121

•My body shook from the inside out, and the smell of smoke clung to my clothes. I flattened my hands on the table. When they stopped trembling, I tugged Cordwainer Hatch's bible out of my pocket. Like my clothes, it stank of destruction. I opened it at random and read the first sentence to meet my eye:

". . .It was a octopus, centipede, spider kind o' thing, but they was a haff-shaped man's face on top of it, and ..."

I threw the book on the table.

Feeble lamplight shone on the fountain in Veal Yard. Perhaps two hours of my time had brought me into the ordinary world's night. I scrubbed my hands and face, shoved the photographs into their folders, and went down to the lobby.

The night clerk pretended not to smirk at my jacket. "Message for you, Mr. Dunstan. I was about to send it up this very second."

"Read it to me," I said.

Raising his eyebrows, he reached under the desk and unfolded a slip of paper. " 'Happy Birthday. I called Nettie to see if you were there, and she spilled the beans. Want a nice present? Come to my house. Laurie.' " The clerk managed to make every word sound obscene. He refolded the paper and offered it to me with elaborately ironic courtesy. "Would you care to keep this lovely memento, sir?"

•Stewart Hatch's 500SL slanted over the edge of Laurie's driveway with its front wheels on the lawn. I swung around it, trotted to the front door, and let myself in.

Posy Fairbrother was holding Cobbie in her arms at the bottom of the staircase. He looked as rigid as a flagpole. Stewart shouted in the kitchen, but I could not make out his words. Cobbie reached for me, and I pulled him to my chest. I could feel his heart beating.

"Should I call 911?" Posy whispered.

A plate smashed against the kitchen wall. Stewart let out a drunken bellow. Another plate exploded. Cobbie began to cry. “I'll take care of it," I said. "Cobbie, can you go back to Posy?" His head nodded against my neck. "Here we go." Posy folded him into an embrace and moved up the stairs.

I walked into the kitchen. Standing at the counter next to the alcove, Laurie looked at me and communicated that she was frightened but in charge of herself. Fragments of broken plates covered the floor between her and Stewart Hatch, who was beside the gaping china cabinets, his feet planted wide to keep himself steady. He had perspired through the back of a nice small-check Italian shirt. "Don't you ever get sick of lying?" Stewart yelled. He grabbed another plate and fired it against the wall five feet to her left. Laurie glanced at me again, and Stewart turned to look over his shoulder. Sweat glued his executive hair to his forehead, and the whites of his eyes were blotched with red.

"Get the hell out of my house." Then he brought his legs together and put his back against the counter, smiling. "Jesus, Dunstan, even you ought to know better than to wear a jacket like that."

"Cobbie's frightened," I said. "Why don't you go back to your place?"

"This isn't about Cobbie! This bitch ruined my life." He wagged a finger at me. "But you know all about that, don't you?" Stewart took an insinuating step forward. "Screw my wife, send me to jail, is that the deal?"

"Are you going to jail, Stewart?"

“I hate to say it, Ireally hate to say it, but I may be given that delightful honor. Ashton did the impossible, and we know how, don't we? I'm a reasonable guy, I'd just like to hear the truth for a change." Boozy rage darkened his flush.

He was getting close to losing control again, and he liked the idea. Losing control would make him feel better than he did now.

"This is what puzzles me," Stewart said. "ThatKentucky nobody tied me into deals she couldn't have known about unless some underhanded piece of shit turned over the documentation. Which nobody knew I had, except Grennie, and he sure as hell didn't do it."

He grinned at me, looked down at half of a perfectly bisected plate, and kicked it aside with one of his tasseled, basket-weave loafers. He gave a demented Huckleberry Finn chuckle. "We have been requested to appear at Police Headquarters at nine o'clock tomorrow morning to undergo"—he raised his head and searched for the word—"theformalities before questioning on a number of criminal charges. Fraud, for example. Tax evasion. Embezzlement. Getting down and dirty with that glorious institution, the U.S. Post Office. Grennie is shitting porcupines. My guess is, he'll eat a bullet. Won't that make me look good?"

“I like your compassion," I said.

"Yeah. I like yours, too." Stewart wiped his hands over his face. "Be a stand-up guy, tell me how you did it. I'm in the dark here. Help me out."

"Stewart," I said, “I don't know what you're talking about."

He flattened a hand over his heart. "Did you break into my building after all? The rules of evidence say that's a no-no."

"You were a lousy criminal," I said. "You didn't even know enough to hire C. Clayton Creech."

Stewart wheeled sideways and raised his arms."Creech! My father would rather have crossed the street than say good morning to C. Clayton Creech."

"Your father wasn't a criminal," I said. "Cordwainer took care of that for him."

Stewart's face took another incremental step toward purple. He looked at Laurie, who shook her head. "No? Well, no. I suppose not." He swung back to me, ticking toward eruption. "Now, little buddy, did I happen to tell you about my departed Uncle Cordwainer? Refresh my memory."

"You told me about him," I said.

"Did I happen to mention his name? I think not."

"Cordwainer's name is plastered all over town. But I understand why you'd prefer to keep quiet about him."

He reared back. "Who have you been talking to?"

"All secrets come out in the end," I said. "Even yours. Go home, Stewart."

"You know? I think the Sesquicentennial was a really crummy idea."

He laughed, making a sound like a crow, dry, self-important, completely without humor. "Maybe this bitch with a cash register for a soul, and I speak of my dear wife, maybe she didn't sell me out after all."

"Don't think I wouldn't have," Laurie said.

"And she'smarried to me," Hatch said. He laughed his ugly laugh,caw caw caw. "Does that tell you anything?" He was on the edge of the explosion he had wanted all along. "Tell me about secrets, Dunstans.

I'm getting a better picture here, I'm getting, what's the word, some perspective."

“If you don't get out, I'll put you out."

"Do you think I have anything to lose?" He stepped toward me. There was a tight grin on his face. “I don't. But you do." He threw a lazy punch at my head.

I dodged to the left and hit him in the stomach.

Laurie yelled, "Stop it!" Stewart staggered back. "Cute," he said. "Know my golden rule?"

I shook my head.

"Never fight when you're shitfaced." Stewart dropped his hands and took a step toward the back door. When I moved closer, he pivoted on his heel and fired off a fast, hard left that would have broken my jaw if I hadn't ducked. His fist rammed into my skull. My head rang. I saw Stewart move in to follow up with a right and punched him in the gut again, harder than the first time. He shuffled into the counter and said, "Uh-huh." His eyes were almost entirely red. He reached behind his back, fumbled in a drawer, and came out with a paring knife.

“I was looking for something a little more imposing," he said.

Laurie started to move toward the living room. Stewart pointed the knife at her and yelled, "You stay put!" She glanced at me.

“I'm sick of Hatches coming at me with knives," I said. Too angry for common sense, I went straight at him. "Stick me, you white-bread, chicken-shit, overprivileged future convict."

To keep me in my place, Stewart jabbed at nothing. He shifted to the side, went a hair off-balance, and tried to correct himself by leaning forward and taking another poke at me. I grabbed his wrist, yanked him forward, and kicked him in the ankle. He toppled facedown onto the kitchen tiles and the broken plates. In tribute to Lieutenant Rowley, I kicked Stewart in the ribs.

"Stop!"Laurie shrieked.

I straddled him and dropped to my knees. He grunted. I took the paring knife out of his hand.

"Don't kill him!" Laurie said.

"Be quiet, please, Laurie," I muttered, and twisted Stewart's right arm behind his back. Then I hauled on his arm and pulled him to his knees. Another pull got him upright. "Damn, Stewart," I said. "You need a keeper." I biffed him in the ear with my left hand. "Should we call the police, tell them how you tried to knife me?"

"Fuck you if you can't take a joke," Stewart said. “I'm under a little stress right now."

I wrested his arm another two inches up his spine, and he cried out in pain. “I know you're troubled, Stewart. But you pulled a knife on me, and I can't say I dislike the idea of hurting you."

Stewart kicked the heel of a tasseled loafer into my right shin and tried to break away. I rammed his arm toward the back of his neck and heard the tearing of ligaments and the loud pop of the ball detaching from his scapula.

Stewart groaned and staggered forward.

"You broke his arm!"

"Actually, what I did was, I pulled his shoulder out of joint," I said. "After good old Stewart drives to Lawndale and checks into emergency, a nice doctor will pop it back into place right away. You can drive with your left arm, can't you, Stewart?"

"They wouldn't let you in the door at Lawndale," Stewart said.

I whapped him in the shoulder. Stewart yelped, and his knees wandered.

“I can drive."

I pushed him down the counter and told him to open the door. We went out to his Mercedes. "Where are your car keys?"

"Right pocket."

I dipped into his pocket for the keys. Stewart collapsed onto the leather seat and dragged his legs under the wheel. I put the keys in his left hand. Sweating and grimacing, he managed to start the car. He twisted sideways to get his left hand on the shift lever. Whimpering, he put the car into reverse and backed into the driveway. The sound of crumpling metal and breaking glass told me he had also backed into the Taurus. The Mercedes shot down the driveway and rocketed into Blueberry Lane. One of its tail lights swung from a tangle of wires. The right rear panel of the Taurus looked like a used tissue. I took the folders off my passenger seat and looked over the top of the car to see Laurie gazing speculatively at me from the living room window.

•122

•She stepped outside and hugged me. "Thank you, thank you, thank you for coming. I don't know what he would have done, he was so out of his mind." I smelled a faint, not unpleasant trace of whiskey.

“Is Cobbie all right?"

“I told him you helped calm his father down." She moved through the doorway, sighed, and rested her head on my shoulder. "The poor kid should fall asleep in about a minute and a half."

“I hope so," I said. "Cobbie didn't need that." I kissed the top of her head, and she clung to me a moment longer.

“I reallyam grateful, Ned." She looked up at me and smiled. "Did you get my message?"

"Yes. Thanks."

"You didn't tell me it was your birthday! I had to find out from Nettie."

“I didn't want you to go to any trouble," I said.

She raised her mouth for a kiss. "Until you got here, was it a nice birthday?"

I laughed. "You could say that."

"What did you do?"

"My aunts had a party for me. I've kind of been on the run ever since."

"They must have had a barbecue. Your jacket smells like smoke." She leaned back with her arms still around me and smiled beautifully up. “It's a verysuburban sort of jacket."

"May magpied it for me," I said. "Do you like it?"

"Of course. After the way you handled Stewart, I want to keep you in a good mood. You look gorgeous in pink. You should always wear pink pants, pink shirts, and pink suits with little sailboats and nautical flags."

Her ability to reduce the ugly scene into a shared joke pulled me into her private aura. I felt the deep tug of having whatever troubled me being met with this same teasing, dissolving irony. Then the thought came to me that seeing it in this way meant that I had already separated myself from it.

“I'm sorry if I frightened you."

"Stewartfrightened me. You impressed me."

"You knew you were going to take care of things, in the end. Maybe I made it worse."

"Hardly." She kissed me again. "After demolishing my china cabinet, I think he was going to move on to the glasses. Will you help me clean up the wreckage?" She glanced at the folders under my arm. "What's that?"

“I'll show you later." I put the folders on the coffee table, and we went into the kitchen and started sweeping up broken plates. Shards and sections of china lay in archipelagos down the floor and made irregular islands on the counters. Shaken, Posy came in and began picking up the mess beside the butcher block. "Cobbie finally went to sleep, but I practically had to read every book he owns. Is everything all right?"

"Ned was heroic," Laurie said. "You should have seen him. Stewart pulled a knife."

"A paring knife," I said. "Even he was embarrassed."

When we had bagged all the broken china, Posy asked if she could do anything else.

"No, we're fine," Laurie said.

“I'm glad Ned came along to drive out the wild beast."

I bowed, and she blew me a kiss and left the kitchen. Her soft footsteps went up the stairs.

"Wouldn't you say we deserve a drink?" Laurie asked.

“I don't think we can catch up with Stewart," I said, "but I'm willing to give it a try. I'm going to have a whopper of a bruise on the side of my head, and my hand hurts. No wonder boxers wear gloves."

Laurie took a glass from the shelf and another from beside the sink, pressed them against the ice lever in the refrigerator door, and brought out a liter of the late Tobias Kraft's favorite liquor. She poured whiskey over the ice until the glasses were three-fourths full.

"You were having a drink when Stewart showed up," I said.

"Was I?" I could not tell if she had forgotten, or was pretending to have forgotten. Then I saw that she was presenting me with a mild challenge. "Oh, yes. I gave you a clean glass, but I took this one from the counter. Ah, I see. Whilst enumerating my flaws, Stewart included heavy drinking."

"He skipped that one. People who drink as much as Stewart don't think it's a flaw."

"Good point," Laurie said. "God, let's sit down." She put an arm around me, and we moved into the living room.

We settled on the long sofa in front of the coffee table. The big room seemed as vibrantly empty as an abandoned airline terminal.

“I'm sorry about yelling," Laurie said. "Vastly to my surprise, I discovered that I felt sorry for Stewart."

I took a slug of Scotch.

She let her head roll back on the cushion. "What do you think is going to happen to him? Is he going to be all right?"

"You want to know what's going to happen to good old Stewart?" I said. "Let me tell you. After a year in prison, Stewart will have a personal encounter with Jesus and become a born-again Christian. For the rest of his sentence, he'll lead prayer groups and Bible study classes. When he gets out, he'll get ordained by some third-rate Bible college and devote a few years to a prison ministry. He'll send out press releases, and a lot of articles will be written about him. Let's face it, it's a great story—civic leader and heir to private fortune falls into crime, finds salvation in jail, devotes himself to good works. The guy can't miss. In three years, he'll have his own church and a good-sized staff. When he describes his past, Ellendale will sound like Sodom and Gomorrah. Rare steaks, fancy cars, expensive suits, chains, leather, and whips. His congregation will quadruple, and he'll buy a new building with a television facility. Then he'll write a book and get on talk shows."

The bit about chains and leather popped out while I was rolling along. That so much anger still boiled away within me came as a surprise.

She was clear-eyed and amused. “I bet you're right. Where did you get the stuff about chains and whips? He's too normal for S and M."

“I threw it in for the sake of a better conversion story. Once Stewart's locked up, I should write him that fiction is way more effective than reality."

Laurie looked at me with the same contemplative speculation I had seen from over the roof of my car. "You said you were sick of Hatches coming at you with knives."

"Heat of the moment."

"You threw that in, too? How many Hatches are there, after all?"

Oh, no,I thought.

Her eyes underwent a subtle change. "What? I don't get it."

I swallowed another mouthful of whiskey, preparing myself. I did not want to prepare myself.

"Ned?"

"You're right," I said. “I have to explore something with you."

"You were going to show me those folders." Her crisp voice rose wonderfully to the challenge. Laurie sounded like an army poised at the top of a hill, pennants flying and weapons at the ready. I felt nothing but admiration.

"First you have to hear about the past two days. I owe that to you. You introduced me to Hugh Coventry, and you helped me learn about Edward Rinehart."

"That's what you want to explore?" The pennants rippled beautifully in the wind.

"That's what we have to explore," I said.

•123

•I began with Buxton Place and Earl Sawyer. After leaving the cottages, I said, I had come to Blueberry Lane and seen the caretaker's name in Posy's Lovecraft collection.

"That's why you got so strange?" Laurie said. "Posy and I couldn't understand what happened to you."

“I know, I'm sorry. I had to get away and think."

"Well, thank God, you came back. What then?"

"At Toby's funeral, someone implied that Stewart owned my aunts' block on Cherry Street. It didn't make sense. All along, I never understood why they pretended not to know anything about my father."

"Me, neither," she said. "But I don't see the connection."

“I did something I shouldn't have. I looked through Nettie's closet. That's where I found one of those folders. The other one came from Stewart's house."

"You broke intoStewart's house?"

“I didn't have to break in. I took the folder, but he stole it first. I was reclaiming it."

"He had your aunts' pictures?"

"He wanted to keep them out of the exhibition."

"The other ones were at Nettie's? Well, at least you got that settled. They were holding them for ransom. Nettie and May, they're not stupid."

"Nettie and May know how to get what they want." I grinned. "The question is, what did they want?"

Laurie gazed imperturbably back. "They must cherish those photos."

"Let me show you some of them."

“I can hardly wait." She set down her glass and leaned toward the coffee table.

I slid the photograph of Omar and Sylvan out of the folder. "Remember these faces." Next came the photograph of Howard Dunstan I had put before Cordwainer.

"He looks like you." She turned to me with a shining smile and looked back down at the picture. “In a way. You don't have those heebie-jeebie eyes."

"That's Howard Dunstan. Nettie and May were his daughters."

"Complicated so and so, wasn't he? What's this?" She took another photograph from the pile. Under the eye of a squat foreman in a derby hat, two men pushed wheelbarrows toward a lattice of scaffolding and girders rising from a muddy lot. From the right side of the frame, two others carried an armload of two-by-fours across Commercial Avenue. A Model T Ford and a slat-sided truck were parked a little way down from the site. A well-upholstered onlooker in a seersucker suit and a boater like the one worn by the young Carpenter Hatch took in the excitement from a few feet behind the supervisor in the derby. The angles of their hats and their postures matched with the neatness of a rhyme.

"That's Merchants Hotel, under construction in 1929. Hugh Coventry liked this picture."

“It's good, isn't it? There's a lot of movement in it, and the two guys in hats are like a joke."

"Here we have baby me." I put down the photograph from my third birthday.

"God, what a beautiful child." Pleasure and humor shone from her eyes. “I mean, of course you were a great-looking kid, but you were areally great-looking kid. You should have been on billboards."

"My mother would have agreed with you. Now, here are some from the Hatch folder." I showed her the photographs of Carpenter showing off his new car and Ellen's graduation.

"Who are these people? Stewart's grandparents?"

"Right."

"She was a nice-looking girl, wasn't she? On the other hand, he looks like an excellent source of ham steaks. Look at those soon-to-be ponderous thighs."

I pulled out the image of bow-tied Cordwainer Hatch peering from beneath his bangs.

Laurie bent forward. She took a swallow from her nearly empty glass and looked back at me. “Is that you? It can't be. You weren't even born when this was taken."

"This is the black sheep of the Hatch family," I said. "Stewart's Uncle Cordwainer."

"He looked like you."

“I look like him. Laurie, back when the first submissions were coming in, did you see any of these pictures?"

Her lower lip tucked under her front teeth. “I honestly don't remember."

"Rachel Milton did. She told me to look for them."

“I don't understand." Her eyes showed nothing but innocent confusion. "Did Rachel say that I had seen them?"

"No. Just that you could have."

"Maybe I did. I wouldn't have paid much attention. I didn't even know you then."

"Stewart knew who I was the second he saw me. Cordwainer was supposed to have died before Stewart was born, and I don't imagine he ever saw any pictures of his disgraced uncle while he was growing up, so he didn't even know what Cordwainer looked like until he collected the family pictures for the exhibition. He couldn't have missed the resemblance between his uncle and Howard Dunstan."

Laurie shook her head. Her hair sifted over her cheek, and she brushed it back. “I have to say. . ." She shook her head again. “I think I need another drink. How about you?"

I propped my head against the cushion. I felt completely uncertain. A voice in my mind said:I want to be uncertain.

Laurie circled back into the room and moved around the table rather than sliding in over my legs. She sat down about a yard away and took a swallow from her amber, ice-filled glass. “I'm trying to figure out what's going on with all these pictures. Your aunts took Stewart's pictures as ransom, but why would Stewart hide theirs?" She moved Cordwainer in his bangs and bow tie next to me in my striped T-shirt. "Oh. Because the black sheep uncle was your father?"

I picked up the studio portrait of Howard Dunstan and placed it beside the other two. "Does anything else occur to you?"

She leaned forward, looked at Howard, then at me.

“If you want, I can show you some other pictures of Cordwainer."

She pushed herself back into the sofa and smiled at the nice white emptiness in front of us. “I don't have to see any more. I guess I understand why Stewart wanted to squirrel these away."

“I think he gave my aunts a lot of money," I said.

She laughed. "Stewart isn't exactly an egalitarian, you know. He would not be overjoyed by a blood connection between his family and the Dunstans. In fact, he'd do everything he could to hide it." An idea moved into her eyes, and she edged toward me, radiating conviction. "Your aunts knew it right from the beginning!"

“I guess so, but they claim they never met Edward Rinehart. Even if they did, how would they know who he was?"

“It doesn't matter how! They knew! Of course they could never tell Star—it was their secret. And Stewart tried to have you run out of town before you could even begin to learn anything."

"But why would he give my aunts a fortune for three old houses? I can't believe he cares that much about his grandmother's reputation."

"Stewart's a snob. He likes being a high and mighty Hatch. He'd spend a fortune to protect that."

“I feel like I came to the end of something, only it didn'tend."

Laurie twisted sideways, drew up a leg, and slid her elbow over the back of the sofa. She propped her head on her hand and waited for more.

“I don't know what to say," I told her, having left everything crucial unsaid.

"Say something about Hatches coming at you with knives."

I swallowed watery whiskey and slivers of ice. “In all honesty, Laurie, if I told you everything, you'd think I was either lying or crazy."

One of her knees floated above the cushion, and her calf slanted down over the edge of the sofa. She was leaning sideways, her chin on her hand. Evenly suspended, compassionate determination shone from her face.

"You met your father, this Edward Rinehart. Cordwainer Hatch. Am I right? And he attacked you with a knife. Was it in Buxton Place?"

"Boy, you're smart," I said.

“I pay attention. Where did it happen?"

"A couple of places." I smiled at her.

"You went to a couple of places with your father. And, for reasons yet to be explained, the gentleman tried to do away with you."

"Laurie," I said. “I'm really sorry, but you're not going to get anywhere."

"Since you are here, he did not manage to do away with you. Should I assume that you did away with him?"

I said as much as I could. "He did away with himself when he found out that he was Howard Dunstan's son. That's all I can tell you."

She did not move. "Somewhere in or around Edgerton is the dead body of Cordwainer Hatch. Eventually, this body will be discovered. Not long afterward, it'll be identified."

"That won't happen," I said. "Believe me."

Her hand sank away from her chin; her forearm slipped down the back of the sofa; her knee moved to the edge of the cushion. In a paradoxical form of rejection, Laurie's face came nearer to mine. "Everything you say is sovague. You want me to believe you, but you get less and less believable. Trust me enough to tell me where you went, at least."

Hostility I barely knew I felt made me reckless. Laurie Hatch hung before me like an untrustworthy angel, and at that moment, more than I wished to open to her the secret parts of my life, I wanted to repay her for being untrustworthy.

“I'll do better than that," I said. “I'll show you."

"Show me? I don't want to go anywhere now, Ned."

I held out my hand, unable to stop myself from making an irrevocable mistake. "Put down the glass and take my hand."

Slowly, without taking her eyes from mine, Laurie placed her glass on the table. I thought that she had not been so unable to read a man's intentions since the days with Morry Burger. By the time she moved in with Dr. and Mrs. Deering, Laurie's peripheral vision had taken in everything on both sides and behind her, too. Ever since, she had been able to see around corners and the corners beyond those corners.

If you want to know about me,I thought,you'd better know about this.

Laurie Hatch grasped my hand, and with the usual sense of dropping through a sudden hole in the earth I pulled her into what I already knew she would never be able to accept. We came to rest on the corner of Commercial Avenue and Paddlewheel Road, a short distance from the future offices of C. Clayton Creech. The brownstones were still single-family houses with private access to the park, which was enclosed within a tall iron gate. Directly across the avenue, a Model T Ford and a truck with slat sidewalls stood at the curb beside a construction site.

Scaffolding encrusted the first two floors of a structure ascending into a skeleton of girders. Men crawled along the scaffolding and disappeared into the regions behind it. At the front of the unfinished building, a man in a derby hat yelled at two workmen next to a vat of cement; directly across the gated tip of the park on our side of the avenue, two men unloaded timber from a horse-drawn wagon. A man in a boater and a seersucker suit that did not disguise his resemblance to either President Garfield or Luciano Pavarotti, depending on your frame of reference, strutted toward the frame from behind the parked vehicles. It was a mild, slightly overcast afternoon in what felt like mid-September.

About ten feet from Laurie and me, the photographer who would freeze this moment watched his composition move into being from behinda tripod and a bellows camera the size of an orange crate. One arm held his flash and the other the black veil attached to his camera. He looked like a magician.

Laurie sank to the sidewalk, pressing her free hand to her forehead. I pulled her to her feet.You wanted answers? I thought.Look around. Her face had an unhealthy shine, and her eyes were dazed. "Try not to throw up," I said.

“I never throw up." She lifted her head. "Whereare we?"

"Paddlewheel Road and Commercial Avenue," I said. “In 1929. Take a look."

The elements of the scene moved toward their defining moment. Garfield-Pavarotti rounded the corner and came to a halt behind the foreman, whose bellow at the men just now trundling their wheelbarrows away from the vat could barely be heard over the din from the building. The photographer ducked beneath the black veil. The sawmill hands finished unloading the wagon, got their arms under the ends of a dozen two-by-fours, and began their journey across the avenue. The cement workers bent like pit ponies to their task. The foreman crossed his arms, pushed out his chest, and spread his legs in a posture of command. The heavyweight in the seersucker suitcrossed his arms, pushed out his chest, and spread his legs to keep his balance. Under the Mack veil, the photographer spread his legs and leaned into his viewfinder. The workmen advanced into the frame and turned their eyes to the girders. A row of flashbulbs exploded witha yellow flare and a sharp, percussivepop!

Laurie jumped. The wheelbarrows rolled up a plank runway to the scaffold; the two-by-fours passed over the curb. The spectator in the boater navigated around the foreman, and the foreman bawled at the pit ponies. The photographer emerged from his veil and arched his back.

"Ned, I don't want. . . Ned,please," Laurie whispered.

The enormous room on Blueberry Lane took shape around us. Laurie reeled around the coffee table and sank to her knees a foot from the sofa. She doubled over and rested her head on the carpet, like Mr. Michael Anscombe in his last moments. I knelt beside her and stroked her back. She waved me away.

"Can I help you?" I asked.

"No." She crept forward, levered herself onto the sofa, and went limp. After about a minute, she sat up and flopped against the cushion. “I almost broke my golden rule and puked all over the carpet."

"How does your head feel?"

"Attached." She tilted forward, picked up her glass, then sank back and held the glass to her forehead. Her eyes closed. She stretched out the parallel lines of her legs. The glass descended to her mouth. “I want to see that picture again."

Laurie hitched forward and fumbled through the photographs. Her eyelids looked swollen. "Two minutes ago, we were standing right there."

"Any closer, we would have been in it," I said.

“I don't understand this, and for sure I don't like it."

“I don't like it much, either," I said.

Laurie pushed herself back and straightened up. "But youdid it. Youtook me there. That isn'tright."

“It isn't right or wrong," I said. "But you sure could say it's irregular. Unexpected."

"Unexpected!" Her face blazed a smooth, bright red. "Why didn't you tell me what you were going to do?"

"Would you have believed me?"

Observant insightful intelligence moved back into her eyes. She was fully present again. That she felt as though she had the flu meant nothing. She saw it all, oven the anger to which I had been blind. "Do you do that a lot?"

“I do that as seldom as possible, I'll probably never have to do it again."

“Is this something you inherited from Cordwainer Hatch?"

"From his father," I said.

“I can't deal with any more of this tonight."

"Whatever you say." I began pushing the photographs into their folders. My mind felt as though it had been clamped in a vise and beaten with a hammer. Laurie drew her knees under her chin and watched me leave. After I made it through her door and into the Taurus, I looked at my watch. My thirty-fifth birthday had disappeared into history. On the way back to town, I had to pull off the highway and pass out for an hour.

•124

•Officer Treuhaft monitored my progress around the dead fountain as though waiting for me to bolt.

"Looks like I have guests," I said.

"Captain Mullan and Lieutenant Rowley are waiting for you, sir."

"What do they want to talk about?"

Treuhaft blinked. “I believe it's related to your visit to Headquarters this evening, sir."

"Makes sense to me. Have you been here long?"

"Maybe two minutes."

Inside, the night clerk waved me toward the desk. He leaned on his counter and spoke almost without moving his lips. "Two cops went up to your room. If you want to split, the back door's that way." He extended his little finger and pointed past the desk to stairs descending to a narrow hallway.

I gave him a five-dollar bill and put the Lovecraft book and the folders on the counter. "Would you hold these things for me?"

The clerk shrugged, and the counter was clear.

When I walked into my room, Lieutenant Rowley uncoiled from the side of the bed. Captain Mullan gave me a weary nod from the chair at the near end of the table. "Please be seated, Mr. Dunstan." He gestured at the chair across from him.

My fingers met the little calligraphic are ofP.D. 10/17/58, and I heard my mother telling meIf Icould sing the way that man played alto, Neddie, I’d stop time forever . . .

"Describe your actions before your visit to Headquarters."

Robert had been busy.

“I drove around."

"Drove around." Rowley thrust his hip against the table. "Did our travels take us to Ellendale?"

I heard Star say,At first, I wasn't even sure I liked that group. It was a quartet from the West Coast, and I was never all that crazy about West Coast jazz. Then this alto player who looked like a stork pushed himself off the curve of the piano and stuck his horn in his mouth and started playing "These Foolish Things." And oh, Neddie, it was like ...

“I believe they did," I said.

"About ten-thirtyp.m., Stewart Hatch turned up in the emergency room at Lawndale Hospital," Mullan said. "He claims that he surprised you in an intimate situation with Mrs. Hatch, and you attacked him with a knife."

"Are you carrying a knife?" Rowley asked.

"Mr. Hatch further claims that during the ensuing struggle, you dislocated his shoulder and otherwise assaulted him. He wishes to bring charges."

. . .going to some new place you'd never heard about, but where you felt at home right away. He just touched that melody for a second before he lifted off and began climbing and climbing, and everything he played linked up, one step after another, like a story . . .

“I don't care what Stewart Hatch does," I said. “It won't work. He's telling his story backwards."

"Mr. Hatch dislocatedyour shoulder?"

"Let's see the knife, Dunstan," Rowley said.

“I don't have one." I told them about going to Ellendale and tussling with a drunken Stewart Hatch. "Finally, he reached into the knife drawer and came out with a paring knife. He said something like, 'I was looking for something a little more impressive.' Then he rushed me, and I yanked him off his feet and dislocated his shoulder. I kicked him in the side, too, because by that point I was not in a good mood. After that, I threw him out of the house. He rammed into my rental and took off for Lawndale at about a hundred miles an hour. I'm surprised he's so stupid. His wife saw the whole thing."

"His alcohol level was four times over the limit," Mullan said. "By the way, according to the officer who took Mrs. Hatch's statement, the word her husband used when he saw the paring knife was 'imposing,' not 'impressive.' 'I was looking for something a little more imposing.' That's a nice touch."

"Captain," Rowley said, "they cooked this story up between them. Mr. Hatch caught them in bed, and Dunstan pulled a knife."

"The officer who questioned Mrs. Hatch was shown a garbage bag loaded with broken plates. I think he we can dismiss Mr. Hatch's accusations."

"You went out there already?"

"We can move pretty quick, when we want to."

Neddie!I heard my mother say.It was like hearing the whole world open up in front of me. It was like going to heaven.

A chain-saw noise came from Rowley's throat. "This guy is all over the place. Wherever we go, there he is. Nobody's seen Joe Staggers in two days, and weknow Staggers was after him. What do you think happened to Staggers?"

"So far, no one's filed a Missing Persons."

"Dunstan hands out alibis, and women back him up. Mr. Hatch's troubles are going to blow away, and before long, Dunstan's going to blow away, too. Then it'll be business as usual. Who do you want in your corner, Captain?"

Mullan clasped his hands on his belly and regarded the ceiling of my room. "All in all, Lieutenant, I think you can go home for the night. Tell Officer Treuhaft he can leave, too."

"Think it over, Captain."

"Thank you for your assistance, Lieutenant. We shall see each other tomorrow."

Rowley's dead eyes moved from Mullan to me and back to Mullan. "Up to you, Captain." He slammed the door behind him,

Mullan regarded me with the same opaque, detached gaze he had trained on my ceiling. "You're a strange man, Mr. Dunstan."

"So I've heard," I said.

Mullan's bleak smile told me only that Robert had been unimaginably reckless. “I assumed you would be waiting to hear from me."

“I am."

Mullan did not move so much as a centimeter. Even the wintry smile stayed in place. "Do you remember my mentioning an anonymous telephone call from someone accusing Earl Sawyer of a number of homicides?"

"Sure," I said.

"That's what makes you a strange fellow. I didn't mention it."

“I'm sorry," I said. "There's too much going on."

"You wouldn't be the fellow who placed that call, would you?"

“I would not," I said.

"But the subject is of interest to you."

“I can't deny that," I said, feeling my way through the minefield Robert had laid.

"At approximately nine o'clockp.m., you visited my office for the purpose of informing me that you suspected Earl Sawyer of being the man once known as Edward Rinehart." He raised his eyebrows, as if for corroboration. I nodded. "That would make two people who wanted to talk to me about Earl Sawyer. I don't believe in coincidence, Mr. Dunstan."

“I thought the police got anonymous tips all the time."

"Be nice if we did. This old man wouldn't have to work so hard. All right, forget the call. Correct me if I'm wrong here. When we went to St. Ann's, didn't you refer to Clothard Spelvin? Clothhead?"

"There's nothing wrong with your memory," I said. “I don't suppose there ever has been."

"At Headquarters, you said your mother had given you Rinehart's name."

His smile still looked like a map of the tundra, but he did not seem hostile. In a series of careful steps, Mullan was working up to something, and he had sent away Rowley and Treuhaft because it had to be kept between us. I had no idea what Robert had said to Mullan, and I could not afford to make a mistake. Nor did I have a hint of where Mullan was going.

"Not long before she died," I said.

Mullan stretched out his legs and put his hands behind his head. "Let's see if I have this straight. You got word that your mother had returned to Edgerton in ill health. How did that happen? Did one of her aunts call you in New York?"

"Yes, but I was already on my way," I said. “I had some vacation time, so I thought I'd hitchhike across the country. I know that sounds crazy, but the idea appealed to me. I was going to work my way to Illinois, visit my aunts, and fly back. Two days before my mother died, while the truck driver you talked to, Bob Mims, was taking me across Ohio, I. ... I don't know how this is going to sound to you."

Mullan said, "Give it a try."

“I had a strong feeling that she was having serious health problems, and that I had to get here in a hurry."

"Although your mother was not a resident of Edgerton."

“I knew she'd come home if she thought she was dying."

"You were driving across Ohio with Bob Mims. You got the strong feeling that your mother had come home because she thought she was dying."

“It sounds funny, but that's what happened."

"Then what?"

"Mims went off his route to drop me in front of the Motel Comfort, where I met Ashleigh Ashton, and she agreed to give me a ride here the next morning."

"When you reached Edgerton the following morning, you requested Assistant District Attorney Ashton to drop you at St. Ann's Community. Not on Cherry Street. You must have had another strong feeling."

"You could put it that way. Captain Mullan, why are we talking about this?"

"For a couple of reasons. Okay. You go to the ICU. You learn that your mother hada stroke. Her heart's in bad shape. Deep down, you know she's dying, but at least you got there in time to see her, talk to her. Communication isn't easy. Every word costs her tremendous effort, and you have to strain to make them out. All these factors make everything she says extremely significant. Am I right?"

Mullan was still gazing across the room with his legs out before him and his hands laced behind his head.

“It sounds like you were there."

“I have been there," Mullan said. He took another step toward his mysterious destination. "Under these conditions, your mother does something unexpected. She grabs your hand and says, 'Edward Rinehart.' And she manages to give you some information about this unknown gentleman."

Captain Mullan had fed me precisely enough to let me off the hook. Anything affirmative I said would be right. Mullan wanted to see if I knew that Rinehart was my father.He knew, and at a mere agreement that Star had indeed given me information about the unknown gentleman, he would tell me in a way that implied I had known, too. Mullan wasleading me through a maze. He had pulled the rug from under my feet, but even more, I thought, he had yanked it from beneath Robert's. For reasons of his own, he wanted to find out how deeply into the maze I had already penetrated.

"She said Rinehart was my lather."

"You must have wanted to see what you could learn about the man. You thought Toby Kraft might be able to help you."

"Toby was the first person I asked," I said.

"Did he help you? Indirectly, I mean? For example, did you and Mrs. Hatch go to the V.A. Hospital in Mount Vernon on Toby's recommendation?"

Mullan had been doing his homework. "He suggested I talk to a man named Max Edison, and Mrs. Hatch offered to take me there."

Mullan turned his head to me without altering his posture in any other way. “I don't suppose you know about Edison. It never made the papers."

I could already see the corpse lying across the bloody bed, the severed throat.

“It was a lot like Toby Kraft, except there was a knife next to him. Same night. Suicide, is the general opinion. Which is fine with me. The guy has maybe three, four months to live, and he decides to get out while he can still make decisions for himself. But here's an interesting thing. A clerk out there says a private detective named Leroy Pratchett turned up to see Edison the day before. A scrawny guy in a black leather jacket. He had a goatee."

"Frenchy," I said.

"You have a suspicious mind," Mullan said. "How did you connect Rinehart with Earl Sawyer?"

I told him about Buxton Place and Hugh Coventry's recognizing the owners' names. I described meeting Earl Sawyer, being let into the cottages, seeing the books by Rinehart and Lovecraft and finding Sawyer's name in "The Dunwich Horror."

Mullan tugged his chair closer to the table and did his best to look as though he believed what I was saying. "Did you pay a second visit to Buxton Place at a time when Sawyer was not present?"

I shook my head.

"You were not responsible for the destruction of those books?"

I realized what he was telling me. "You went to Buxton Place."

"Mr. Dunstan, I have spent the evening going wherever I thought I might find Earl Sawyer." He stretched his arms and yawned. "Excuse me. I'm too old for this crap. Fairly soon, or so I hope, Edward Rinehart's coffin at Greenhaven penitentiary will he disinterred. Maybe we'll find out who is buried in the damn thing. It sure as hell isn't Rinehart."

“I don't suppose it can be," I said.

"What do you call that, understatement?" Mullan asked me. "On your feet, Mr. Dunstan. You and I are going for a walk."

•125

•Mullan gestured to the far end of the reception desk and the steps down to the back door. "This way." The clerk came through the office door and spun around to inspect the junk mail on a shelf behind him.

I followed Mullan down the stairs and over the concrete floor to the exit. Moving faster than I had expected, the captain banged the door open and marched out. I caught the door on the backswing and went into a narrow brick trench that had to be Horsehair. The gray blur of Mullan's suit and a smudge of white hair were vanishing into the obscurity to my left.

I thought I recognized Lavender's double doors and listing buildings as we rushed across into the continuation of Horsehair. Mullan stopped moving, and the pale blur of his Irish face revolved toward me. "Let's talk about your suspicious mind. This so-called Pratchett turns up at the V.A. Hospital. Suppose he was Frenchy. What does that mean? Prentiss, he's already dead. The next night, bang, like ducks, all in a row, Edison, Toby Kraft, Cassandra Little, and La Chapelle. Between you and me, is it possible that you have some hypothetical sort of explanation?"

"Speaking hypothetically, I guess I do," I said. "Helen Janette told me Frenchy grew up in these lanes. Maybe Rinehart—Earl Sawyer— had scared him, one way or another, since he was a kid." I told him Sawyer's story about "Charles Ward" having a boy named Nolly Wheadle deliver his weekly salary and Nolly's account of a figure he called Black Death.

"Maybe Rinehart, Sawyer, whatever you want to call him, sent Frenchy to the V.A. Hospital to find out if I had been there asking questions. Some of the staff told him that two people had been talking to Max Edison, and maybe Edison said those two people got his name from Toby."

“In all our many conversations, Mr. Dunstan, you never said a word about Edison or Edward Rinehart."

"Captain, as entertaining as our get-togethers were, they didn't seem to have anything to do with my father."

"Was Edison the person who told you about Clothhead Spelvin?"

"Yes," I said. “I liked Max Edison. He deserved better than being slaughtered in his bed." I remembered that we were supposed to be speaking hypothetically. “If that's what happened."

“If that's what happened, tell me the rest."

"Sawyer took care of Max and Toby, and after that he had to get rid of Frenchy. He thought Frenchy probably said more than he should have to his girlfriend, so he killed her, too. Clyde Prentiss, I don't know." I remembered seeing Frenchy and Cassie Little in the ICU. "You know, maybe it was a kind of down payment. Prentiss could have saved himself some jail time by naming Frenchy."

Mullan bristled. "Earl Sawyer killed four people because he didn't want you to know he was your father, is that what you're saying?"

"He felt betrayed," I said.

"Do you want to add anything to that?"

"Do you want to tell me what you're doing? Why did you think I might be working for the Louisville D.A.'s office or some federal agency?"

"Let's say I feel betrayed." Another glacial smile appeared and disappeared on what I could make out of his face. "You may be able to do your bit for civic order, Mr. Dunstan." Mullan plunged ahead.

The odor I associated with Joy's house again filtered out from the bricks; after another twenty paces, Mullan wheeled into Raspberry. In the darkness, the cobbles descended into a sunken vale where two policemen leaned against the walls on either side of a door sealed with yellow tape. They pushed themselves upright when they saw Mullan.

"This should interest you."

By the time we reached the door, the two cops looked like sentries guarding Buckingham Palace. "Take off," Mullan said.

They gave me that indifferent cop scrutiny and sauntered up the lane.

Mullan pulled away strands of tape. "Earl's phone is still listed under Annie Engstad, the person who lived here before him, but

Hatch's security chief had the address on file. I had to bust the lock to get in. If you're worried about Mr. Sawyer's rights, Judge Gram, one of the guys I play golf with every Saturday, signed a search warrant."

He opened the door, and the river-bottom stench moved out at us like an invisible wall. Mullan went inside and switched ona light. I heard rats scrambling for cover.

I said, "Good God."

The door opened into a low-ceilinged room about twelve feet square that looked as though a bomb had gone off inside it. It was the ultimate residence of Cordwainer Hatch. Heaps of refuse, some waist-high, undulated over the floor. Newspapers crisped against the walls like dried sea foam. Against the wall to the left, a jumble of filthy shirts, socks, sweatshirts, and sweatpants lay over a narrow bed; against the opposite wall, geological deposits of junk flowed over the edge of a table to meet junk rising in layers from the floor. The enormity of the disorder made me feel dizzy. Rags, pizza boxes, glasses, crumpled magazines, paperback books without covers, plastic cups: the frieze of rubble lapped beneath and around a chair and washed into the room beyond, here and there parting to allow for passage.

"Earl's living room and bedroom," Mullan said. "This is going to sound funny, but don't touch anything unless I give you permission. Some of this material is going to be used as evidence." He pointed at the back room. "That was his kitchen and work room, I guess you'd call it. It's even worse. Before we go in there, look at the closet."

He waded through debris and tugged open a door. The shirt and trousers of Sawyer's uniform hung beside a tan windbreaker and a pair of khaki pants. One wire hanger was empty. The uniform cap faced visor-out from the shelf alongside his Kangol cap, a long, black flashlight, a billy club, and the rounded ends of objects I could not immediately identify. The yellow eyes of a scrappy-looking rat stared up from a jumble of shoes on the closet's floor.

Mullan yelled, "Scram!" and stamped a foot on the rubble. The rat whisked through an opening in the wall about as wide as a dime. "Look next to the baton."

I stepped over spongy detritus, went up onto the balls of my feet, and saw a row of knives—kitchen knives, knives with stag handles and wooden handles, knives that folded into black metal handgrips, and knives with blades that flicked out of molded steel cases.

"Look closer," Mullan said.

I leaned forward and saw rusty stains and dried palm prints.

"Earl liked knives," Mullan said. "But he didn't care about cleaning his tools any more than he did about cleaning anything else, as long as he kept his uniform and a few other things presentable enough to wear outside."

I slogged behind him to a fan-shaped stain in the far right corner of the room, where he unearthed a half-buried cardboard box. "Fortunately, Earl kept souvenirs." Mullan picked up a bent metal rod that had once been part of an umbrella and pried open the flaps on top of the carton.

I peered in at a jumble of wristwatches, bracelets, mismatched earrings, a couple of key rings, and old wallets scattered with small, white bones and the curving fragment of a human skull to which adhered a nugget of gristle.

Mullan tapped the fragment with the umbrella rod. “I wouldn't be astonished if this used to be part of a gentleman named Minor Keyes. Remember him?"

"How could I forget?" I said. “It was the first time I was ever accused of murder."

"See these little bones? My guess is, they're what's left of the hands cut off a newborn baby we found on top of a Dumpster about four years ago. We brought in the mother the next day. Sixteen years old. Charleen Toomey, a nice Irish girl. She confessed that she had placed her infant daughter on top of the Dumpster, but swore it was breathing at the time. According to Charleen, she hoped some good Samaritan would come along and give her baby a home."

"And according to you?"

"According to me, she was going to toss it in, but she chickened out at the last minute." He poked one of the wallets. "Property of a drunk named Pipey Leake, who was beaten to death in the service alley alongside Merchants Hotel in 1975. This one came from a kid named Phil Doria, hung around the Buffalo Hill area at night and mugged older guys. In 1979, someone stabbed him to death. This bracelet probably belonged to a runaway smack addict who peddled her tail along Chester Street under the name Sidewalk Molly."

"Shouldn't this stuff be taken to Headquarters?"

“It will be," Mullan said. "Shortly after that, Earl Sawyer-Edward Rinehart is going to become public property. And you are, too, Mr. Dunstan. Right now, we still have a chance to decide what kind of story it's going to be, and how much attention you come in for."

"What are you saying?"

Mullan tossed the rod onto a mound of refuse. He no longer looked anything at all like a bartender. "Certain aspects of the way your friend Stewart Hatch likes to operate are probably bringing my department under investigation. I'd like to keep the scandal down toa dull roar. It'll be bad enough without dragging in Jack the Ripper."

"You want to cover this up?" I was—only one word will do— aghast.

"Even if I was stupid enough to want to, I couldn't. You can't cover up a story like this. Even Rowley can see that he might pocket some more of Hatch's money by pushing you into the spotlight. It wouldn't do that much good, but it sure as hell would draw attention away from Stewart."

"Pushing me into the spotlight," I said.

"About two hours ago, Grenville Milton packed a bag and drove across the river to a motel outside Cape Girardeau. He booked two first-class tickets to Mexico City on a seven-thirtya.m. flight tomorrow from St. Louis. He had a hundred and thirty thousand dollars and a Ruger .45 with him. I don't know what it is about Rugers. Guys like Milton, they want a weapon, that's what they buy."

"Two tickets," I said. "First class."

"Then he called a woman named Ming-Hwa Sullivan. Ming-Hwa is a piece of work. She refused to come to the motel, and she laughed at the idea of meeting him at the airport. He said he'd kill himself, and she said, 'Grenville, if you were a grown-up, you'd understand how little I have to do with that decision.' Her words. When she got off the phone, she called us, and we talked to Cape Girardeau. They had two units out on a gunfire report. Fifteen minutes later, the captain there called back. Milton fired the Ruger four times. He killed the telephone in his room. He killed his TV set. He opened his window and killed the neon sign in front of the motel. Then he sat down on the floor, stuck the barrel in his mouth, and blew off the top of his head."

"Does Hatch know about this?"

"Not yet."

“I don't understand what you're doing," I said.

Mullan stepped carefully around me. "Come into the kitchen."

•126

•More rats, along with several cockroach nations, scuttled into hiding when he switched on the overhead bulb. In the back half of the room, ecstatic flies congregated over coalesced, shining foothills of green jelly divided by trails leading to the bathroom, the sink, and the back door. The bathroom door stood open far enough to let me know that I never wanted to see it when the light was on.

Like a clearing in a forest, a rectangular section of the table at the left of the kitchen stood apart from the mess rising up around it. At the center of the clearing, a black, gold-trimmed fountain pen lay parallel to the edge of a bound journal similar to those in which Toby Kraft had entered his fictional accounts. Above the rubble at the far end of the table hung a photograph in a silver frame. Crayons and a golden marker had overlaid the image within the frame: the photograph had been taken out and deliberately altered before being replaced. I moved up through the chaos surrounding Captain Mullan and myself; I stood in front of the table and took in what my father had done to a formal portrait of the Hatches.

Hand-drawn knives and arrows bristled like quills from Carpenter and Ellen Hatch. Their eyes had been inked out, and vampire smiles erased their mouths. Swirls of black crayon eradicated small Cobden Hatch. A golden crown broadcast vibrating rays from the head of young Cordwainer, and a golden heart flamed at the center of his chest.

"You noticed that picture," Mullan said.

It was what Earl Sawyer had shoved into a drawer on Buxton Place; it was what Edward Rinehart had ordered Toby Kraft to steal from his family's house on Mansion Row.

"Tell me the name of the kid wearing the crown."

"Earl Sawyer," I said. "Edward Rinehart."

"Congratulations, Mr. Dunstan. Your father and Stewart's father were brothers, which makes you and Stewart first cousins."

“I guess Earl wasn't too fond of his family," I said.

"Pull that chair out," Mullan said. "Swing it around and sit down."

I pulled out the chair in front of the table and sat down.

"Here we are, Mr. Dunstan," Mullan said. "You and me. Lieutenant Rowley is working the phone, shoring up his walls, doing his best to bribe or threaten himself above flood level, but Rowley can't touch what we do in this room. Do you understand that?"

"What docs Rowley know about Earl Sawyer?"

Another wintry smile. "He knows that Earl has been going around murdering people for the past thirty years. The exciting little twist that Earl Sawyer happens to be long-lost Cordwainer Hatch has not yet come to his attention."

"And are we supposed to hide that?"

"We can't keep that from coming out. I don't give a damn if itdoes. All I want to do is hold the publicity to a minimum and walk away with my reputation and my pension intact. Reporters are going to pile in from all over the country. I'll have to dodge microphones every time I walk out of Headquarters. I can handle that."

"So why are we here?" I asked him.

“If you're willing to help me see what's going on, maybe we can salvage something out of this mess. Do you trust me, Mr. Dunstan?"

“I can't answer that," I said.

"All right. Nothing you say to me is on the record. That is a promise. Do you want to keep talking?"

"Let's see how it goes," I said.

"There may be hope after all." Mullan gazed at the mutilated photograph behind me. "You weren't surprised to hear that the boy in that picture was Cordwainer Hatch."

“I learned that Cordwainer Hatch was my father about twelve hours ago." I told him I had dropped into Hugh Coventry's office and heard about the disappearance of the Hatch photographs. I gave him a vague reason for suspecting Nettie and described finding the file in her bedroom. "As soon as I looked at them, I knew Cordwainer was my father."

“I take it that Cordwainer is dead."

I did not answer.

"What I want to do is going to be a lot easier if I don't have to set up a manhunt for Cordwainer Hatch while his nephew is on trial. I think something happened today—a showdown—and because you're still here, he probably isn't. Say something to me."

I said nothing.

"This is between you and me, Mr. Dunstan. If you tell me you killed him with your own hands, I wouldn't consider bringing charges against you."

"Cordwainer Hatch is dead."

"You could do us both some good by telling me where to find his body."

"Nobody is ever going to find his body."

Mullan regarded me utterly without judgment. "Two years from now, some guy on a backhoe, or a kid out walking in the woods, is not going to come upon his remains. The next time the river floods, his body is not going to wash up ona sandbar."