Pandemonium

I barked a laugh. Lew nodded, keeping a straight face. The big man pulled the goggles down over his eyes. “Besides, somebody’s got to do it. As long as there’s a Harmonia Lake, there’s gotta be a Shug.”

He padded to the end of the dock, stopped, looked over his shoulder. His head like a planetoid embedded on rolls of neck fat. “Oh, try Louise’s walnut hotcakes.”

He dove in, vanishing beneath the water. When he didn’t come up, Lew and I walked to the end of the dock. The fog had burned down to wisps. Harmonia Lake was much larger than we had suspected last night. The opposite shore was dimly visible across the water, on the other end of a road of sunlight. I couldn’t guess at the lake’s shape; left and right the shoreline disappeared and reappeared as it traced scallops of land, the gaps hiding anything from shallow coves to vast expanses of water.

Lew and I watched for a few minutes, then started walking back up the dock, but both of us kept looking over our shoulders to see if the water had broken. At the shore we stood and waited: eight minutes, ten. We never saw him surface.

“Are you sure it was him?” Lew said. He was trying to pace, but the short metal leash of the pay phone kept yanking him back. Lew’s cell phone still hadn’t managed to find a signal, and it was cramping his style.

I stabbed another triple-stacked wedge of pancake, smeared it through the syrup. I’d stopped being even faintly hungry fifteen minutes ago. Now I was stuffed, engorged, infused . . . and I couldn’t stop putting the food in my mouth. The coffee was terrible and the bacon was ordinary, but the pancakes were avatars of some perfect Ur-cake whose existence until now could only be deduced from the statistical variations in other, lesser pancakes.

“Have you called the police?” Lew said into the phone. He glanced up at me, glared, then pivoted away. “I think you should call the police.”

I stabbed, I smeared, I swallowed. The Baby Condor woman, Louise, poured me more coffee and pointedly ignored Lew, who was obviously making too much noise.

Lew carefully put the phone back on the hook. He didn’t immediately come back to the table. He walked toward the gift shop, stopped, and then walked back. He leaned into the table, arms straight, and addressed the salt and pepper shakers in the middle of the table. “He’s sitting in a van outside our goddamn house.”

I didn’t have to ask who he was talking about.

“This van’s been parked on our street,” Lew said. “Amra passed it on the way to work, saw him sitting there. He’s fucking stalking her now.”

“Is he still there?”

“She called the cops, but the van was gone by the time they got there.” Lew stared at the checked vinyl.

I started to say: Bertram’s harmless, afraid of his own shadow.

“This is unacceptable, Del.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay?!”

“Okay!”

8

I got up awkwardly, levering my feet over the bench. A pound of weapons-grade carbohydrates sank lower in my gut. I sifted through my wallet until I’d found the ATM receipt where I’d written Bertram’s number after he’d called Mom’s house. My calling card was right there, but I didn’t know how many minutes were left, and why should I pay for it? I called collect. It rang only once—then there was a silence as whoever picked up negotiated with the computer to accept the call.

“Oh my God, is it really you, Del?” The connection had the clipped metallic sound of a cheap cell phone. His voice sounded strange—Bertram and I had never talked on the phone before—but I recognized him. “Where are you?” he asked.

There was no way I was telling him—the next day he’d be outside my cabin door. “What are you doing, Bertram? How the hell did you get to Chicago?”