“Child Support” by David Ballard. First published in New Mystery, Vol. V, number 2, Fall 1997. Copyright © 1997 by David Ballard. Reprinted by permission of Charles Raisch.

“Swear Not by the Moon” by Scott Bartels. First published in Tamaqua, Vol. VI, Issue II, Fall 1997 (Parkland College, Champaign, Illinois). Copyright © 1997 by Scott Bartels. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Keller on the Spot” by Lawrence Block. First published in Playboy, Nov. 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Lawrence Block. Reprinted by permission of Knox Burger Associates, Ltd.

“The Man Next Door” by Mary Higgins Clark. First published in The Plot Thickens (Pocket Books, Nov. 1997). Copyright © 1997 by Mary Higgins Clark. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“This Is a Voice from Your Past” by Merrill Joan Gerber. First published in The Chattahoochee Review, Vol. XVII, number 4, Summer 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Merrill Joan Gerber. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Old Spies Club” by Edward D. Hoch. First published in Ellery Queen‘s Mystery Magazine, May 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Edward D. Hoch. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Beyond Dog” by Pat Jordan. First published in Playboy, August 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Pat Jordan. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Find Miriam” by Stuart Kaminsky. First published in New Mystery, Volume V, number 1, Summer 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Stuart Kaminsky. Reprinted by permission of Charles Raisch.

“Secrets” by Janice Law. First published in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine,July/August 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Janice Law Trecker. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Adventure of the Giant Rat of Sumatra” by John T. Lescroart. First published in Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, Summer/Fall 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Lescroart Corporation. Reprinted by permission of Lescroart Corporation.

“Night Crawlers” by John Lutz. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, April 1997. Copyright © 1997 by John Lutz. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Prayer for Judgment” by Margaret Maron. First published in Shoveling Smoke: Selected Mystery Stories by Margaret Maron (Crippen & Landru Publishers, 1997). Copyright © 1997 by Margaret Maron. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Con Doctor” by Jay Mclnerney. First published in Playboy, Jan. 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Bright Lights Big City, Inc. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.

“Black Dog” by Walter Mosley. First published in Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, (W.W. Norton, 1997). Copyright © 1997 by Walter Mosley. Reprinted by permission of the author and W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

“Faithless” by Joyce Carol Oates. First published in Kenyon Review, Winter 1997. Copyright © 1997 by The Ontario Review, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Two Ladies of Rose Cottage” by Peter Robinson. First published in Malice Domestic 6 (Pocket Books, 1997). Copyright © 1997 by Peter Robinson. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Twelve Days Out of Traction” by Dave Shaw. First published in South Dakota Review, Vol. 34, number 4, Winter 1996, published in February 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Dave Shaw. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“The Power of Suggestion” by Helen Tucker. First published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, May 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Helen Tucker. Reprinted by permission of McIntosh and Otis, Inc.

“Take It Away” by Donald E. Westlake. First published in Mary Higgins Clark Mystery Magazine, Summer/Fall 1997. Copyright © 1997 by Donald E. Westlake. Reprinted by permission of Knox Burger Associates, Ltd.

“The Rest of Her Life” by Steve Yarbrough. First published in The Missouri Review, Dec. 1997, Vol. 20, number 3. Copyright © 1997 by Steve Yarbrough. Reprinted by permission of International Creative Management, Inc.

For just how many years have we heard the publishing axiom that short story collections don’t sell? When I was too young, too naive, to know this truth, I filled shelf after shelf with short story collections, unaware of my deviant behavior for engaging in this apparently unusual, if not outright bizarre, act.

Having continued down this awkwardly antisocial path for more years than it would be polite for anyone to enumerate to me, I am now struck by the fact that I have never had difficulty finding enough excellent collections (the work of a single author) and even more anthologies (stories by a variety of contributors) to satisfy my unending thirst. Can there be such generosity, such out-and-out charity, on the part of publishing houses to continue to publish these money-losing projects? If we are reading the same newspapers and magazines, with their endless lamentations about the strangulation of publishing houses by their new leaders, all accountants and lawyers still awaiting their first actual reading experience, that seems unlikely. Or — could it be? — short stories do sell.

When I consider the number of periodicals, anthologies, and collections I read to accumulate the best stories of the year, I cannot help but be cheered by the many markets open to short story writers. Nothing like the golden age before television, of course, but enough to ensure that any worthwhile piece of fiction will find a home.

While there are too few magazines specializing exclusively in the type of fiction contained in this volume, there are many mainstream consumer publications that use some mystery fiction, just as there are many small literary magazines that might be a trifle too blue-blooded ever to consider a mere mystery story but are happy to feature a tale of passion, fear, violence, suspense, or revenge that results in murder or its attempt or its aftermath. Finally, recent years have seen a dramatic increase in anthologies of original mystery fiction. Adding it all up, we counted nearly six hundred mystery-crime-suspense stories published in the calendar year 1997.

It has always been my practice to define mystery fiction broadly as any story in which a crime, or the threat of a crime, is central to the theme or plot. This definition opens the door to much that is not structured as a classic detective story.

In the United States, the professional organization of authors who produce this type of fiction is called the Mystery Writers of America. Its English counterpart is the Crime Writers Association. The members of both organizations are writers of mysteries, or stories essentially told from the point of view of the detective in which an attempt is made to discover who committed a crime or, more often nowadays, why the crime was committed. Both also count among their members writers of crime fiction, which is largely told from the point of view of the criminal: we see the crime committed, generally understand why it has been done, and then wait to discover how or why it all unravels.

As Sue Grafton points out in her introduction, there seems to be a preponderance of crime stories in this volume. It has, it seems to me, become more and more difficult for detective story writers to find new motives, or new clues, with which to fool readers. Agatha Christie consumed more than her share of original plot notions, leaving a pretty skimpy carcass for those who followed. On the whole, there seems a wider range of opportunity in the areas of suspense and crime than in the tightly plotted story of observation and deduction, so it cannot be a surprise that the output of contemporary authors reflects that shift of direction.

As is the custom in the Houghton Mifflin series of distinguished anthologies, the series editor (in this case, me) does the preliminary reading and passes along the best fifty stories to the guest editor (in this case, Sue Grafton), who selects the twenty stories to be published, with the remaining thirty listed in an honor roll at the end of the volume. To further enhance the reading experience, each author is invited to provide notes about his or her story and its genesis or other pertinent anecdotal material.

Happily, The Best American Mystery Stories enjoyed success with its initial volume in 1997 and gives the appearance of a series that will have a nice long run. It would be a shame to miss any eligible stories, so if you are an American or Canadian author of a mystery story published for the first time in the calendar year 1998, or if you have read one in a source that I am unlikely to have discovered, I would be happy to hear of it. Please write to Otto Penzler, Mysterious Bookshop, 129 West 56th St., New York, N.Y 10019.

O. P.

This collection of short fiction might more properly be labeled the “Best American Crime Stories of 1998.” Regardless of the angle of attack, all of these stories feature crime in some form, either as the central driving force or as the anchor for other, sometimes disparate, elements. Certainly, the mix includes many stories constructed along the lines of the classic mystery, but there are unconventional approaches to the subject as well. In reviewing the many fine submissions, we were impressed with the ingenuity employed by writers whose styles and stratagems ranged from the formal to the offbeat. Almost without exception, crime here is the metaphor for human beings in distress, and violence, whether actual or implied, provides the compression chamber for the resolution of interpersonal hostilities.

These stories are exquisite studies in the complexity of human nature. Whether told from the point of view of the criminal, the victim, or representatives of law enforcement, each story touches on a facet of evil and, by implication, sheds light on its counterpart, good. Stanley Ellin has defined the mystery story as “short prose fiction that is, in some way, concerned with crime.” This definition, while serviceable, scarcely speaks to the varied techniques these writers utilize to achieve their effects.

The construction of the crime story requires the establishment of a world easily recognizable to the reader. Whatever the parameters of this fictional universe, the reader must, early on, accept its reality, regardless of how alien it may seem to the reader’s own. From the moment of this connection, the reader is led through a dark and tangled wood to the light of revelation on the other side. At the end of the journey, the reader has experienced a shift in perception… the ahh! of understanding that gives a story its impact. It is the marvel of the short story that it can accomplish so much in so few words.

Ross Macdonald once said: “An unstable balance between reason and more primitive human qualities is characteristic of the detective story. For both writer and reader it is an imaginative arena where such conflicts can be worked out safely, under artistic controls.” Crime is the battering ram that breaches our defenses, forcing us to acknowledge how vulnerable we are. Given the daily newspaper accounts of crimes committed in cities across America, we’re forced to construct a wall of denial around us in order to keep functioning. How else could we dare to venture forth from day to day? Murder, assault, robbery, gang violence, muggings, random freeway shootings… these are the threats to our personal safety, dangers we must somehow find a way to keep at arm’s length.

Crime fiction is the periscope that permits us to peer over the wall without having to deal directly with the horror beyond. The crime story allows us to scrutinize the very peril we’re afraid to face. At the same time, crime fiction seduces us into acknowledging aspects of ourselves that we might prefer to repudiate. Through crime stories, we can wear the mask of the killer without risking arrest and conviction. Through crime stories, we can experience the helplessness of the victim without suffering real harm. Thus, the writer’s imagination authorizes an examination of the felonious outer world and our own concomitant emotional transgressions without compromising our humanity or surrendering our staunchly held moral views.

The stories in this collection serve as a seismograph, charting the effects of violence on the world around us. Sometimes what’s recorded is a brutal upheaval of the visible landscape, sometimes a subtle tremor occurring far below the surface. With the crime narrative, there is always the tension of not quite knowing when the next eruption will occur. Where suspense is created, we find ourselves subject to a heightened awareness, our comprehension of events distinctly sharpened by dread. Ordinary people are seen with extraordinary clarity. Extraordinary events are reduced to their baser components: greed, rage, jealousy, hatred, and revenge.

Since the biblical moment in which Cain killed his brother, Abel, we’ve seen the reflection of our Shadow side in the stories we tell. What can be darker than the taking of human life? What more illuminating than such a tale brought to consciousness? We’ve always been attracted to the sly charms of the crime story. Look at the list of best-sellers in any given week. Of the top ten best-selling books, close to half are devoted to crime and mystery. The form may vary from the legal thriller to romantic suspense, from the hard-boiled private eye to the police procedural, but the appeal is the same.

“Crime doesn’t pay,” or so the old saying goes, yet watching a fictional character violate the law is irresistible, not necessarily because we wish such misfortunes on our fellow humans, but because, through reading, we can watch the perpetrator’s destiny unfold without penalty to ourselves. Watching others get caught gives us the delicious sensation of our own safe delivery from our inner lawlessness. Crime fiction, like a report of political chicanery, allows us to identify with evildoers while we cling to our innocence, stoutly maintaining our disapproval of such behaviors. We can safely condemn offenses we might (with sufficient temptation or provocation) be capable of committing ourselves, staying a comfortable distance away from our own blacker aspects. A crime story allows us to plead “not guilty” to the sins of any given character. He was caught, and we weren’t. She crossed the line, while we remained on the side of right. Fiction points the finger at someone other than ourselves, and we feel giddy with relief. How else can we explain the universal fascination with trials and public executions? We want to see justice done… to someone else. We like to see the system work as long as it isn’t operating at our expense.

From the lowliest of criminals to the loftiest of public figures, retribution seems to catch up with every miscreant eventually. And nowhere is iniquity, wrongdoing, and reparation more satisfying to behold than in the well-crafted yarns spun by the writers represented here. While we’re plunged into the darkness by their skill and imagination, we’re simultaneously reassured that we are safe… from ourselves.

Sue Grafton

Dexter Harrison cursed the biting wind as he pushed the blue baby carriage up the park path with one gloved hand and struggled to hold onto the tugging dog leash with the other.

It was even colder at the top of the hill, and Harrison growled a curse at Lex, his black Lab, for refusing to drop his chewed red Frisbee as Harrison tried to free the dog from his choker collar. As he locked the carriage brake and handed a baby bottle to his son, Adam, Harrison clenched his teeth and swore at his soon-to-be-ex-wife and her idiot attorney for withholding the promised cash settlement until Friday, when Harrison desperately needed $16,000 today.

After shaking the Frisbee overhead like a tambourine to get the dog revved up, Harrison shouted, “Here we go, boy! Come on! Bet you can’t catch this one!” Harrison whipped the Frisbee so hard into the wind it sailed toward an abandoned soccer goal at the north end of the park. Lex bolted after it. He caught it easily with an airborne lunge, ending with the enamel crunch of sharp teeth clamped into plastic. As Lex trotted back with the Frisbee, Adam waved a mittened hand from within the baby carriage and squealed, “Dog-geee!”

From behind, Harrison heard the muffled whump-whump of two car doors slamming far away. He turned and saw a black Mercedes with darkened windows parked at the curb. Two figures leaned into the wind as they walked up the hill toward him.

Pretending not to notice, Harrison glanced around the deserted park. The overhead lamps down by the tennis courts were not yet lit, despite the gloomy overcast sky. The gunmetal gray playground equipment — the slide, a row of swings, and a tilted merry-go-round — sat neglected off to the east. The closest house with a porch light burning was across the street at the other end of the park, at least five hundred yards away. In front of him, Lex danced in anticipation, alert for another throw.

Without hesitating, Harrison threw the Frisbee again, and Lex flew after it, following the crimson arc of the Frisbee’s flight as the wind angled it toward the merry-go-round. Like a pro, the dog timed the approach perfectly, caught the Frisbee inches from the ground without breaking stride, and rushed back for another throw.

Harrison glanced sideways at the two men slowly walking toward him. One was tall and skinny, while the other was broad and immense. They both wore long black coats tied at their waists, and their attention seemed focused on Harrison the whole time.

This must be it, then, thought Harrison. Time to pay the piper.

Harrison looked at his son in the baby carriage, bundled in his little blue parka. “You’re my little rabbit’s foot, Adam,” he whispered as he bent down to take the Frisbee from Lex. “My lucky horseshoe. Nothing bad will happen. They only want to talk to Daddy. I’ll just explain the delay. They’ll understand.”

Adam beamed up at his father and grinned. He was a magnificent eighteen-month-old little boy — bright and inquisitive, with round blue eyes and hair the texture of cornsilk. Harrison treasured his son more than any of his possessions, and so far Adam represented the only profit resulting from Dexter Harrison’s dull and dreary marriage to Dr. Lynn Harrison.

As an attorney himself, Harrison had deftly whisked away temporary custody of their son from his wife. While he had been pondering a divorce, Harrison had spent months preparing a detailed and somewhat exaggerated chronology of all the abilities that made him a wonderful parent, while at the same time embellishing accounts of all of Lynn’s shortcomings, lapses in judgment, and blunders. When Harrison filed for divorce, his attorney obtained an ex parte order from the judge granting Harrison temporary custody of Adam, all before any of the divorce papers were even served on Lynn. Harrison had capitalized on the fact that, while Adam spent weekdays in the most expensive day care in town, Lynn could arrange no baby-sitting for the evenings and weekends she was on call at the hospital, especially on such short notice.

Harrison had supported his wife financially while she was in medical school, and now she earned almost ten times what he did with his floundering personal injury practice. The property settlement had already been reached in principle, with Harrison to receive a large part of it in cash this morning. Lynn’s attorney, however, had deliberately withheld the paperwork until Friday, probably out of spite.

I’ll get even at the custody hearing tomorrow, thought Harrison. His own attorney had assured him that all of their witnesses were lined up and that preliminary signs were good that Harrison would win permanent custody of Adam. Harrison smiled at this thought as he regarded his son. The ultimate prize.

The wind carried the steady sound of boot heels slowly approaching. The two men were thirty feet away.

Still composed, Harrison took the Frisbee from his dog’s mouth and let loose with a mighty throw. Lex pounded the ground after it as if his life depended on it. The dog’s head bobbed like a greyhound’s as he raced to get under the Frisbee before it floated to the ground.

That dog sure loved to run. As a sporting dog, Lex understood and appreciated the thrill of the chase, the electrifying rush of pursuit. He savored the hunt and the kill, even though his target may be only a softball, or a piece of flying plastic.

Lynn, on the other hand, simply had no imagination, no sense of adventure. She preferred her heavy medical books and mildewed chess manuals to the frenzied excitement of a race or the wild exhilaration of a home game.

Chess was boring. It was static, monotonous and simply uninteresting. Harrison would rather invest his leisure time tackling a high stakes poker game or watching a small fortune build at the track. The promise of the big payoff surged through Harrison like adrenaline. Although it was sometimes painful to lose money — and yes, a lot of it on rare occasion, Harrison insured against loss by placing only intelligent and calculated bets.

How was he supposed to know that last year’s Super Bowl champion would lose on Sunday to an expansion team?

Lex returned with the Frisbee just as the two men stopped in front of the baby carriage.

The tall one had the sunken sockets and bulging eyes of a fish, as if he spent days in the dark staring into a television screen. As he peered into the baby carriage and smiled, decayed yellow teeth seemed to burst from his mouth. His lips were circled by an untrimmed goatee that made Harrison’s own face itch when he looked at it.

Harrison gripped the vinyl handle of the baby carriage, trying to appear casual. Just keep breathing, he thought to himself. This is just like being in court.

“Cute little boy you got there, Mr. Harrison. Never seen a finer lookin’ little kid. Wouldn’t you agree with me, Mr. Corillian?”

The shorter man said nothing. He was massive and squat, like a sumo wrestler sizing up an opponent. Thick arms, thick neck — even his eyelids were thick slabs of flesh almost squeezing shut his eyes in a menacing squint. Tight ridges of chocolate skin rippled down the back of his scalp and into a blue turtleneck as he looked first to his right, and then left in smooth, fluid movements, checking out the surroundings.

“Yes,” the taller man concluded, as he clapped moist hands together for emphasis. “This is one snapper of a lad.”

Watching out of the corners of both eyes, Harrison quietly said, “Yes, I know.”

“That is a boy in there, ain’t it?” the tall man continued. “Kinda hard to tell when they’re that little, you know? Boys, girls, they’re more or less the same at that age, don’tcha think?”

Harrison suddenly felt crowded as he gripped the carriage handle tighter. “Who the hell are you guys? What do you want?”

“Ooooh, hey! Calm down, Sport. Don’t get all stimulated. By all means, introductions are most certainly in order. This, as you now know, is Mr. Corillian. He’s not very sociable, so I wouldn’t expect him to hold out his hand and shake.”

The taller man thrust out his own blistered hand to compensate, his naked wrist and forearm jutting out from inside the leather sleeve. “Call me ‘Fish-Hook.’ Pleased to meetcha, Mr. Harrison.”

As if to punctuate his introduction, he produced a long, rusty fish-hook from inside his sleeve after Harrison refused the handshake, and began teasing at lacerations in his palm with it.

Harrison swallowed. This definitely was not developing well. “What did I tell you, Mr. Corillian, we would find our Sport out here playing games. What sort of games do you like to play, Mr. Harrison? I’ll bet Hide-and-Seek is one of your favorite games.”

Harrison’s legs felt like bee hives. He looked over hopefully at Lex, still wagging his tail and waiting for someone to throw the Frisbee. No help there.

Harrison swallowed his initial panic and continued to pace his breathing, gaining control. He could take charge of this situation, with the right approach. He had done it a thousand times before, with a reluctant witness on the stand, or a suspicious client unsure of legal procedure. It was just a matter of setting the tone, controlling the conversation, directing the course of negotiations, and maintaining superiority over these opponents.

“I take it,” Harrison opened, “that you two are here representing the interests of Mr. Shaw.”

“You take it very well,” said Fish-Hook, who then savagely punched Harrison in the stomach.

Harrison’s grip on the carriage handle withered as he folded over and sucked wind. Lex whined in confusion and dropped the Frisbee, but he kept wagging his tail, ready to resume play.

“I don’t have the sixteen thousand,” Harrison managed after a moment with his hands on his knees. “Look, I expect to get at least ten times that much in my divorce settlement. It’s just that the papers haven’t come through yet.”

Fish-Hook arched one eyebrow and glanced down at Mr. Corillian, who shook his head.

“This is very bad, Mr. Harrison,” Fish-Hook said, “but such is not our concern. You will have to talk to our employer.”

“But I can’t—”

Harrison stopped as he noticed for the first time another figure walking up the park path. The man was huge.

Where Mr. Corillian was thick and massive, this man was all fat. His face was pink and completely hairless, with splashes of red stinging his cheeks. His gray eyes were intelligent and playful, and his blubbery smile was impish. A hearing aid was virtually lost in the expansive folds of one ear, and his face ended in an abundance of chins overlapping like snow drifts into his buttoned overcoat. He waddled as he walked, with his right hand poised out in front of him, as if he were carrying a phantom cane.

When the fat man spoke, his voice was gruff, but friendly. “Mr. Harrison. We had an agreement. I am somewhat disappointed.”

“Look, I thought I would have the sixteen thousand this morning, but I know I will have it for sure by Friday. You just have to give me a little more time.”

“Ahhh, Mr. Harrison, it appears you fail to grasp an essential truth here. By Friday, the amount you owe will no longer be $16,000. It will be $128,000. Compound interest, my friend. Compound interest.” At this he began to chuckle, a throaty, rumbling laugh that rocked his whole body. “Someone once asked Albert Einstein what he believed to be the most powerful force in the universe, and do you know what he responded? ‘Compound interest.’ In your case, my friend, it may also prove to be the most destructive.”

The fat man then bent down toward Lex and picked up the Frisbee. Lex sprang up in anticipation.

“A beautiful animal you have here, Sir. I have always loved a good sporting dog. You love sports, do you not, Mr. Harrison?”

The fat man then swung his arm forward to throw, but the Frisbee merely fluttered to the ground as soon as it left his hand. Lex scooped it up anyway, and brought it back.

“I propose a solution to our dilemma,” the fat man said, with a twinkle in his eye. “I am prepared to forgive your debt and wager you $100,000.” From within his broad overcoat, the fat man withdrew five thick stacks of cash, tightly banded, with hundred dollar bills visible under the rubber bands. He tossed all five stacks into the baby carriage.

At the sight of the money, Harrison tasted warm silver in his mouth. “What’s the bet?”

The fat man chuckled, as he picked up the Frisbee again. “Oh, that is very good, Mr. Harrison. I see you are interested. Very good, indeed. I have been watching you throw this device to your beautiful animal. How graceful he is. He is in his element here, is he not? This is what they were bred to do, and I see you have treated him well.”

The fat man looked Harrison directly in the eyes, his pupils like pinpricks. “I am prepared to wager $100,000 on whether this beautiful dog can catch this saucer eight times in a row.”

Harrison flinched only slightly, assuring himself that he heard the fat man correctly. “He could catch that thing a hundred times in a row!”

“Very well, then! Let’s make it a hundred—”

“No!… no,” interrupted Harrison. “Eight is good. I’m sure he can manage eight.”

“Very good, Sir. Eight times in a row, throwing from this walkway. Let’s say the throws have to go as far as that trash can. That’s approximately fifty yards. Does that seem fair to you?”

Harrison chewed on his thumbnail and considered it. The further the better, actually.

“All he has to do is catch it, right?”

“That is correct. Eight times in a row, without letting the saucer touch the ground. You win two thousand dollars per catch, and you can stop at any time.”

“And if he drops it?”

“Well, then,” the fat man began, and he reached into the baby carriage and softly stroked Adam’s tiny exposed hand. “How exactly did Rumpelstiltskin phrase it? ‘Living things are more important to me than all the treasures in the world.’”

Harrison’s stomach lurched — it felt worse than the punch FishHook had given him. He grabbed the carriage handle and wrenched it away from the fat man. “You’re crazy!”

“Perhaps, for as you say, your lovely animal could catch many more throws than that on which I am prepared to wager.”

“Pick something else! I’m not betting on my son’s life!”

“Now, Mr. Harrison, you are committed to nothing. If at any point during the wager you wish to quit, you simply pocket your cash and walk away. At which point my associates will take it from you and remove one of your eyes as collateral for the balance owed. I do not believe you will enjoy their method.”

Harrison’s mouth went dry.

“Hang on a second,” rasped Harrison. He looked again at the trash can. “Say I accepted your wager. What’s to keep me from just running away with Adam if I lose? There are houses all around here. If I scream loud enough that my son is being kidnapped, someone should come out.”

The fat man smiled, a cold eel grin that showed no teeth. “That is true, Mr. Harrison, you could. We do not have to claim such a fine prize tonight. We have many means at our disposal. For example, please gaze at what Mr. Corillian is holding.”

Harrison had not even seen the silent hulk move. In a hand as broad as a tablet, Mr. Corillian held a laminated security card from the Little Treasures Day Care Center, with Adam’s picture on it, the I.D. needed to enter the Center’s front door.

My God, thought Harrison. They only give those cards to parents!

“How the hell did you get—”

Mr. Corillian snapped his hand shut and tucked the card into his coat pocket.

“So you see, Mr. Harrison,” chortled the fat man, “we have our means. This is only one potential avenue of collection. We are very resourceful, would you not agree?”

Harrison looked over at Lex, still wagging his tail, still full of energy. They had been playing only five minutes, and Lex looked like he could go another fifteen. The trash can wasn’t that far. Lex had done this a million times.

“You will find that I am a fair man, Mr. Harrison. You win, you walk away a rich man. You lose, you will pay the price, believe me.”

Harrison looked at Adam bundled in his carriage, but Adam’s attention was focused on the money. The stacks of money looked like heavy green bricks. Harrison took the one Adam was playing with and riffled the corners of the bills — they were all hundreds. The numbers danced in awkward animation as he thumbed through the stack, and then thumbed through it again. He lifted the stack and smelled it. He pressed it against his cheek. It felt scratchy and cool.

“I think we have a player, boys,” whispered the fat man. “Please give him room.”

Eight times. Harrison picked up the Frisbee and hefted it. Eight times. The Frisbee weighed 140 grams. It felt like a 14-pound brick. Eight times. Only eight. Eight is nothing. He pantomimed some throws with it, practicing his wrist flick. Eight. He looked at Lex, and Lex was eager. He was very eager. He was ready.

Eight times.

The wind swirled around Harrison, and it felt vigorous.

Eight times.

Eight.

Eight-eight-eight-eight-eight.

“Are you ready, Mr. Harrison?”

“I don’t see that I have much choice, do I?”

“You always have a choice, Mr. Harrison. That’s what makes life exciting, would you not agree?”

Harrison turned his back on the fat man and shook the Frisbee overhead again to re-ignite Lex, but it was hardly necessary. The dog had been standing at attention and staring at the Frisbee in Harrison’s hand with a single-minded focus, waiting for him to renew the game.

Harrison threw it, and the dog left tufts of grass flying behind him as he bounded after it. The Frisbee sailed well past the trash can, and for a second Harrison thought he may have thrown it too far. It seemed to hang in the air for a long time, until Lex arched up gracefully like a swordfish from the sea, bringing the Frisbee back down with a satisfying crunch.

Suddenly it felt to Harrison like eight was an eternity away.

“That’s one, Mr. Harrison,” said the fat man, who chuckled his throaty rumble again, shaking his entire body.

Without hesitating, without giving himself a chance to back out, Harrison took the Frisbee from Lex and threw it again. As soon as he released it, the wind gusted and blew the Frisbee so high that it careened in a vertical plunge toward the playground. The Frisbee fell like an arrow, gaining speed. For a moment Harrison forgot about the dog. The Frisbee was now a knife, plummeting toward Adam’s tiny heart.

Lex caught it again, smoothly, with fluid grace. He returned quietly with the Frisbee, and placed it in Harrison’s hand.

“That’s two. Excellent, Mr. Harrison. Would you like to up the wager?”

“No! I’ve got nothing left to bet. And stop that counting, would you? This is hard enough as it is.”

Amazingly, this brought no rebuke from the fat man or his assistants, and Harrison felt his confidence return. He cocked back to throw the Frisbee again, this time waiting for the wind to die down a little before releasing. As Harrison swung the Frisbee forward, Adam called out, “Dog-gee! Daddy — Daddy — Dog-geeeee!”

The Frisbee wobbled as soon as Harrison released it. Lex had already run out past it, unaware that Harrison had botched the throw. The Frisbee headed straight toward the trash can, barely three feet in the air, and Lex wasn’t going to see it.

“Lex! Oh, Jesus! LEX!”

Instantly, the dog slammed on the brakes, turned his head back, and miraculously reversed his momentum to charge toward the trash can. The Frisbee barely cleared the top of it, and Lex caught it low, with his chin brushing the grass.

“That’s three.”

“I quit, you son of a bitch. Give me my six thousand now and I’ll take my chances. I’ve got until the end of the day to get the rest anyway, don’t I?”

The fat man looked over at his two assistants and smiled. FishHook and Mr. Corillian walked forward, their hands in their coat pockets. The fat man turned his attention back to Harrison.

“You do have a point, Mr. Harrison, but I am disappointed in you. I thought you had more steel in you. But as I told you, I am a fair man. I will even give you a five-minute head start before my associates begin looking for you again, for I do not believe you will accumulate the rest of the money so quickly.”

“Just give me the money.”

“Ah, yes. The money.”

The fat man reached into the carriage and withdrew one of the stacks of cash. He tossed it to Harrison.

“Please be so kind as to count out sixty of those bills for me. I would hate for my count to be off.”

Harrison bobbled the stack like a hot potato, managing to unloop the rubber band. The crisp bills poured into his hands like a newly-opened deck of cards, cascading over his fingers. He counted out ten bills, then twenty, and lost count. The stack was so thick he could barely enclose it with one hand. Again he counted out ten, then twenty, and then he put those in his mouth. As he breathed through his nose, he inhaled the splendid perfume of green wagered and won. He counted out ten more bills, but the stack in his hand seemed boundless, like it would keep coming, as if it multiplied in his hands the more he handled it.

As he counted the fourth thousand the money seemed almost to talk to him. I could be all yours, it said, so much of me you could take a bath in hundred dollar bills tonight. You’ll be a winner tonight. On top. I know you will. You’ll win, and you’ll beat everyone. You’re almost there.

Harrison clenched the cool bills in his hand and knelt down to talk to his son.

“Adam, listen to me. I’m not going to lose. I can’t. Lex never misses. You’ve seen him. We’re going to win, Adam, just watch Daddy. In just five minutes we will be rich, I guarantee it. I feel it. I know it. This is the big payoff, Son, the one we’ve been waiting for.”

Feeling confident and justified, Harrison threw the bills back into the carriage, picked up the Frisbee, and threw. It climbed and lifted with another gust of wind, and the dog hustled after it. Lex jumped, and Harrison’s stomach lurched as he heard the crocodile click! of hard teeth snapping on empty air.

No!

Lex had only bounced the Frisbee further in the air, to his left. He stayed with it, and after cutting at a right angle, he caught the Frisbee and kept it from hitting the ground.

“Spectacular, Mr. Harrison! Your animal is simply amazing.” After a pause, the fat man added with a sly grin, “That’s four.”

When Lex returned, it was with shaky hands that Harrison took the Frisbee from him. The fifth throw sailed straight and solid, unaffected by the wind, and Lex caught it easily. The sixth angled a bit, but Lex understood the idiosyncrasies of the Frisbee, and recognized the physical forces affecting it. He compensated marvelously. The fat man continued to count out loud.

Harrison noticed the dog’s tongue lolling from the side of his mouth, sticking out from under the Frisbee. “Lex, lie down,” he said. The dog immediately dropped to the ground, apparently grateful for the break. It was getting colder, however, and Harrison was anxious to have all of this finished. Only two more catches. Two more catches and they were home free.

Fish-Hook walked over to Lex and knelt.

“Get away from him,” Harrison snarled. “I only need two more catches.”

“Take it easy, Sport. I just might help you out and buy this mutt off a you when you lose. He would look good on film, yes, I believe he would. Quite a virile specimen. I just happen to operate a side venture in the video industry.” Fish-Hook turned to Harrison and flashed a rotted grin. “Special orders, you might say.”

Good God, thought Harrison, as his hands turned to ice.

“Besides,” Fish-Hook continued, as he left the dog and touched Adam’s carriage, “I have some exciting plans for my new star here. Believe me, such young talent is in demand, and extremely difficult to obtain these days.”

Blood sank from Harrison’s face as he turned toward the fat man and croaked, “You can’t be serious.”

“My associate is quite serious, Mr. Harrison. He has become quite the enterprising producer.”

Fish-Hook knelt down and peered in at Adam, flicking his chalky tongue rapidly in and out at the boy. He then looked back at Harrison and shrugged. “Boys, girls, they’re more or less the same at that age, don’tcha think?”

Revulsion erupted inside Harrison as he lunged at Fish-Hook. “You bastard, you get away from—”

Again, Harrison never saw the thick man move a muscle. Before Harrison could reach his son, Mr. Corillian’s right arm was around Harrison’s neck. His left hand held a black device inches from Harrison’s face. It looked like an electric razor, but with two points protruding like silver mandibles from the face. Once Harrison stopped struggling, the strong hand gently squeezed the device, and a blue arc of electricity sizzled between the two probes.

“What was that you were saying, Mr. Harrison?” asked Fish-Hook, as he bounced on his toes. “I wouldn’t try that again, if I was you. Two hundred thousand volts would turn you to jelly for at least an hour. In fact, I think we should zap you right now, and just take the kid.”

“No, no,” interrupted the fat man. “I made a wager with the man. So far he has performed admirably.” Mr. Corillian released Harrison and resumed a quiet stance. “You do intend to finish, do you not, Mr. Harrison?”

“Just two more throws and you guys will leave me, and my son, alone?”

“Of course, Mr. Harrison. I am a man of my word.”

“And I get to walk away from here with the cash. No strings attached.”

“No strings attached. Absolutely.”

“You guys won’t come after me as soon as I turn around?”

“Mr. Harrison, you watch too much television. Do you plan to continue?”

Lex was standing already, refreshed from his rest, and Harrison picked up the Frisbee. This time, it felt weightless, and Harrison gripped it tight until the chewed plastic edge bit into the sides of his fingers. Two more times, he thought to himself. Take it easy, just two more. Please, Lex, don’t screw this up.

He felt numb as he threw the Frisbee, and once again it fell short and looked like it might not even reach the trash can. Like a bowler trying to will the ball to move left with body language to pick up that spare, Harrison swung both arms low and thrust them upwards, trying to create an updraft that might lift the Frisbee. Magically, a burst of wind did appear, pitching the Frisbee up high as if it were a small boat struggling to stay afloat in a storm. Lex watched it, waited for it to drop, and then stabbed out and caught the Frisbee before it hit the ground. Harrison cheered and dropped to his knees, his fists still up in the air, his mouth opened wide as he screamed with the surge of victory. When Lex returned, Harrison vigorously ruffled his fur and scratched at his neck in hearty celebration.

“That’s seven, Mr. Harrison.”

Yes, thought Harrison, that’s seven and there’s only one more to go and then it’s payday.

“Come on, boy,” he urged, “you can do this. Just one more, champ. Let’s go, boy, let’s do it. Let’s win.”

Harrison looked over at the fat man before the final throw, to see if he showed any sign of concern. To see if he was sweating as the final card was being dealt. If they had intended to cheat him all along, thought Harrison, they would probably look unconcerned, even bored.

The fat man’s eyes were fixed on the Frisbee in Harrison’s hands. Those eyes revealed intense interest. At least this appears to matter to him.

The fat man’s two assistants also stared at the Frisbee in Harrison’s hand.

So did Lex.

Harrison looked over at the baby carriage, and at the stacks of cold cash piled inside. This could finally be the big score.

It was getting darker, and Harrison looked out over the park and where he needed to throw the Frisbee. Just an easy toss, no need for anything fancy. He scraped the edge of the Frisbee with his fingernail as he wound back. Lex perked up, ready to take off. The Frisbee felt normal, finally. All he had to do was toss it. All he had to do was let go. Throw it like he had a trillion times before.

After what seemed like two days, Harrison finally swung his arm forward, and flicked the Frisbee into the air.

It sailed clear of the trash can, out in the open, with a slight arc to the right. Lex kept up with it easily, his dog tags jangling as he ran under it to position himself for its descent. Finally, he reached up to grab it, and Harrison heard the satisfyingly familiar crunch.

Except Lex missed it. The Frisbee looped from his mouth and rolled to the ground.

Harrison froze.

He stared at the Frisbee resting in the grass.

He could not breathe. His lungs had collapsed. His circulatory system immediately flushed as antifreeze surged through his veins. All he could do was turn his head toward his baby boy, toward the three men now hovering over him like crows over carrion.

With pain branching throughout his chest, Harrison saw that somehow he had crept at least twenty feet away from Adam — unconsciously, he had been hedging closer to the trash can with the last two throws. Suddenly he felt as if he were in a free falling elevator, whooshing away from his baby boy. As in every dream he had ever had where he had been chased by mobsters, Harrison’s feet felt like cement blocks trudging across hot sand as he struggled to reach his son.

The fat man, however, was not looking at Harrison, nor at Adam. He was looking at nothing, with his left index finger pressed into his hearing aid. Suddenly the fat man lifted the lapel of his jacket and began talking to it.

“Did you get all of that?”

Harrison stopped, numb.

“Good,” the fat man continued. “Good… Excellent! Oh, this is better than we hoped for. Mr. Harrison, I’m told that your expression just now came out wonderfully on the monitor. Dr. Harrison just informed us she will pay a bonus for a copy of the videotape alone! Oh, this is marvelous!”

Harrison stared, dumbstruck, as the fat man shook with laughter.

All three men then reached into their jackets, and it occurred to Harrison that they might just shoot him right there. Instead of pistols, however, each pulled out a business card, and held it out. Harrison took the one from the fat man and read:

“What—”

“Mr. Harrison,” the fat man began, “our client, Dr. Lynn Harrison, has been somewhat concerned with… oh, how should we put it, your fitness to be the custodial parent of young Master Adam here. With the custody hearing coming up tomorrow, I’m sure you can appreciate her need for a demonstration of your… concern toward your son’s welfare. Please direct your attention down the lane, toward our car.”

Harrison looked to where the fat man pointed, and the rear door of the black Mercedes opened. Out stepped Lynn, wearing a white sweater and tan skirt he had not seen before, and also holding a finger to her left ear.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Oh, believe me, Mr. Harrison,” Leonard Piper continued, “both the video and the audio portion came out extraordinarily well, as I understand both are being reviewed just this moment for clarity. Would you like to hear?”

Piper plucked the earpiece out by the cord with a pop! and held it out. Harrison saw a small dab of wax dangling from the rubbery insert.

“Get that thing out of my face! Even if you do have this on tape, none of it is admissible in court. You people deliberately set me up!”

“Ahhh, but it is admissible, and quite desirably so, as you should very well expect, Mr. Harrison, in matters central to the moral fitness of a custodial parent. How do you think the news agencies will react to your acceptance of and participation in our little wager? Or perhaps the bar association?”

Piper withdrew a stack of papers and a pen from inside his jacket. “We are no longer recording, Mr. Harrison. Please sign this consent decree. It indicates your desire to award permanent custody of Adam to Dr. Harrison, thus obviating the need for the hearing tomorrow. I’m sure you will find that everything is properly addressed within the document.”

Harrison grabbed the papers and scanned them. After a long moment, he took the pen. As he signed, he saw Piper replace the earphone and listen. Harrison looked back down the hill toward Lynn. The white sweater accentuated her long dark hair blowing in the wind. She held a small microphone with a cord trailing into the car, and Harrison could see her lips move as she spoke into it. “What is she saying, as if I really need to know?”

Piper clasped both hands together on his chest and chuckled again, his gelatinous body jiggling as he tried to find breath to speak. “Just this, Mr. Harrison,” Piper managed between snorts. “Checkmate.”

Harrison let loose with a string of profanities shouted at his wife, angry spittle flying from his mouth. Piper roared with laughter, but then interrupted Harrison suddenly with an outstretched hand. Piper touched his finger to his ear again, listening.

“I’ve just been instructed to make you a cash settlement offer, Mr. Harrison. Apparently, Dr. Harrison does not wish for the boy to be fatherless, nor for you to lose the ability to contribute child support. She has authorized me to present you with enough cash to pay off whatever stake there is against you. In exchange for the dog.”

Piper thumbed through a stack of cash and pulled out a chunk of bills. “Please count these,” he instructed as he tossed the still-banded remainder to Harrison. “I would hate for my count to be off.”

Two minutes later, Dexter Harrison stood alone in the park, the wind now colder in the twilight. He quietly cursed as Piper pushed the blue baby carriage down the park path with one chubby hand and struggled to hold onto the tugging dog leash with the other.

I was only nine the first time I was on fire. It was during a family vacation, or as close to one as we ever got seeing as Momma and Daddy gave up tryin’ to travel together since before I can remember. Winter break Momma would take us to Granny’s farm in Verde Pointe (good to wash the sin of the city out from under our nails, Daddy would say as he helped us pack the car). Summertime, me and him and David would strike for the beach in Mobile, or as near a beach as Alabama gulf coast comes. One time I asked him why we never went nowhere all together (except Carnival every February, and that just to shout “Repent!” at the revelers) and he just smiled that crooked smile of his — the one I later suspected he gleaned from Elvis and practiced in the cracked bathroom mirror all through high school — and said they always would fuss and fight over schedules and directions and all that shit. Not that Daddy ever said “shit” in his life. That glib hound-dog grin was as raucous as he ever got.

But that ain’t here nor there. It was during a summer trip and we had the tent up and the lines still in the water and a camp fire going under a new moon sky. A sky like that always makes me wonder how the shepherds made up all those constellations; sky like that has so many stars so close together, what you ought to do is make pictures out of the black spaces between them. Sayin’ shit like that always got David to raggin’ on me. Three years older and four years dumber and it was easier to bully and humiliate me than be overshadowed by my imagination. So while I was staring up at the rivulets of black creases between distant suns teeming with potential, David pushed me ass over teakettle into that camp fire.

I howled and rolled around in the sand long after the flames from my clothes and hair and eyelashes were out, trying to worm my way into the soft, gritty earth and save everyone the trouble of a decent burial. Daddy was in the tent and didn’t come out ’til I was screamin’ and writhing. My brother told him I was lookin’ up and musta got dizzy and fallen in. And later, after I got done floppin’ in the moist granules and spent shells; after I ran down to the ocean, refusing to heed my Daddy’s shouts; after I learned just how salt water feels on a fresh burn; after all that, I said: Yeah, Daddy, that’s just how it happened.

He tried to help me take my mind off the pain, joked about how I’d been “bathed in fire.”

“Speak us some tongues, Esau,” he egged me. (And yeah, that really is my given name, so now you know why I tell everyone to call me Creole, even though I ain’t one.) Didn’t take me to no doctor, though. Didn’t see no doctor ’til the day we got home and Momma took one look at my singed face and mostly scarred skull and that was the only time I ever saw my folks have it out. I remember Momma sayin’ something about Daddy bein’ stupid to think God would heal this one and I remember the slap (“Don’t doubt Him and don’t never doubt me”) and two hours later at Sisters of Mercy I remember me and Momma both getting bandages. To this day I still got no eyelashes and the crown of my bald spot is crinkly like pudding you left in the fridge for two weeks.

Keller, drink in hand, agreed with the woman in the pink dress that it was indeed a lovely evening. He threaded his way through a crowd of young marrieds on what he supposed you would call the patio. A waitress passed carrying a tray of drinks in stemmed glasses and he traded in his own for a fresh one. He sipped as he walked along, wondering what he was drinking. Some sort of vodka sour, he decided, and decided as well that he didn’t need to narrow it down any further than that. He figured he’d have this one and one more, but he could have ten more if he wanted, because he wasn’t working tonight. He could relax and cut loose and have a good time.

Well, almost. He couldn’t relax completely, couldn’t cut loose altogether. Because, while this might not be work, neither was it entirely recreational. The garden party this evening was a heaven-sent opportunity for reconnaissance, and he would use it to get a close look at his quarry. He had been handed a picture back in White Plains, and he had brought that picture with him to Dallas, but even the best photo wasn’t the same as a glimpse of the fellow in the flesh, and in his native habitat.

And a lush habitat it was. Keller hadn’t been inside the house yet, but it was clearly immense, a sprawling multilevel affair of innumerable large rooms. The grounds sprawled as well, covering an acre or two, with enough plants and shrubbery to stock an arboretum. Keller didn’t know anything about flowers, but five minutes in a garden like this one had him thinking he ought to know more about the subject. Maybe they had evening classes at Hunter or NYU; maybe they’d take you on field trips to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.

He walked along a brick path, smiling at this stranger, nodding at that one, and wound up standing alongside the swimming pool. Some 12 or 15 people sat at poolside tables, talking and drinking, the volume of their conversations rising as they drank. In the enormous pool, a young boy swam back and forth, back and forth.

Keller felt a curious kinship with the kid. He was standing instead of swimming, but he felt as distant as the kid from everybody else around. There were two parties going on, he decided. There was the hearty social whirl, and there was the solitude he felt in the midst of it all, akin to the solitude of the swimming boy.

Huge pool. The boy was swimming its width, but that dimension was still greater than the length of your typical backyard pool. Keller wasn’t sure if this was an Olympic-size pool, but he figured you could just call it enormous and let it go at that.

Ages ago he’d heard about some college-boy stunt, filling a swimming pool with Jell-O, and he’d wondered how many little boxes of the gelatin dessert it would have required, and how the college boys could have afforded it. It would cost a fortune, he decided, to fill this pool with Jell-O, but if you could afford the pool in the first place, he supposed the Jell-O would be the least of your worries.

There were cut flowers on all the tables, and the blooms looked like ones Keller had seen in the garden. It stood to reason. If you grew all these flowers, you wouldn’t have to order from the florist. You could cut your own.

What good would it do, he wondered, to know the names of all the shrubs and flowers? Wouldn’t it just leave you wanting to dig in the soil and grow your own? And he didn’t want to get into all that, for God’s sake.

So maybe he’d just forget about evening classes at Hunter, and field trips to Brooklyn. If he wanted to get close to nature he could walk in Central Park, and if he didn’t know the names of the flowers he would just hold off on introducing himself to them. And if—

Where was the kid?

The boy, the swimmer. Keller’s companion in solitude. Where the hell did he go? The pool was empty, its surface still. Keller saw a ripple toward the far end, saw bubbles break the surface.

He didn’t react without thinking. That was how he’d always heard that sort of thing described, but that wasn’t what happened, because the thoughts were there, loud and clear. He’s down there. He’s in trouble. He’s drowning. And, echoing in his head in a voice sour with exasperation: Keller, for Christ’s sake, do something!

He set his glass on a table, shucked his coat, kicked off his shoes, dropped his pants and stepped out of them. Ages ago he’d earned a Red Gross lifesaving certificate, and the first thing they taught you was to strip before you hit the water. The six or seven seconds you spent peeling off your clothes would be repaid many times over in quickness and mobility.

But the strip show did not go unnoticed. Everybody at poolside had a comment, one more hilarious than the next. He barely heard them. In no time at all he was down to his underwear. Then he was out of range of their cleverness, hitting the water in a flat racing dive, churning the water till he reached the spot where he’d seen the bubbles, then diving, eyes wide, barely noticing the burn of the chlorine.

Searching for the boy. Groping, searching, then finding him, reaching to grab hold of him. And pushing off against the bottom, lungs bursting, racing to the surface.

The man next door had known for weeks that it was time to invite another guest to the secret place, the space he had fashioned out of the utility room in the basement. It had been six months since Tiffany, the last one. She had lasted twenty days, longer than most of the others.

He had tried to put Bree Matthews out of his mind. It didn’t make sense to invite her, he knew that. Every morning as he followed his routine, washing the windows, polishing the furniture, vacuuming the carpets, sweeping and washing the walk from the steps to the sidewalk, he reminded himself that it was dangerous to choose a next-door neighbor. Much too dangerous.

But he couldn’t help it. Bree Matthews was never out of his mind for an instant. Ever since the day she had rung his bell and he had invited her in, he had known. That was when his growing need to have her with him became uncontrollable. She had stood in his foyer, dressed in a loose sweater and jeans, her arms folded, one high-arched foot unconsciously tapping the polished floor as she told him that the leak in her adjoining town house was originating from his roof.

“When I bought this place I never thought I’d have so much trouble,” she had snapped. “The contractor could have redone Buckingham Palace for what I paid him to renovate, but whenever it rains hard, you’d think I lived under Niagara Falls. Anyway, he insists that whoever did your work caused the problem.”

Her anger had thrilled him. She was beautiful, in a bold, Celtic way, with midnight blue eyes, fair skin, and blue-black hair. And beneath that she had a slim athlete’s body. He guessed her to be in her late twenties, older than the women he usually favored, but still so very appealing.

He had known that even though it was a warm spring afternoon, there was no excuse for the way perspiration began to pour from him as he stood a few inches from her. He wanted so much to reach out and touch her, to push the door closed, to lock her in.

He had blushed and stammered as he explained that there was absolutely no possibility that the leak was coming from his roof, that he’d done all the repairs himself. He suggested she call another contractor for an opinion.

He had almost explained that he had worked for a builder for fifteen years and knew that the guy she had hired was doing a shoddy job, but he managed to stop himself. He didn’t want to admit that he had any interest in her or her home, didn’t want her to know that he had even noticed, didn’t want to give anything about himself away…

A few days later she came up the street as he was outside planting impatiens along the driveway, and stopped to apologize. Following his advice, she had called in a different contractor who confirmed what she had suspected: the first one had done a sloppy job. “He’ll hear from me in court,” she vowed. “I’ve had a summons issued for him.”

Then, emboldened by her friendliness, he did something foolish. As he stood with her, he was facing their semidetached town houses and once again noticed the lopsided Venetian blind on her front window, the one nearest his place. Every time he saw it, it drove him crazy. The vertical blinds on his front windows and those on hers lined up perfectly, which made the sight of that lopsided one bother him as much as hearing a fingernail screech across a blackboard.

So he offered to fix it for her. She turned and looked at the offending blind as if she had never seen it before, then she replied, “Thanks, but why bother? The decorator has window treatments ready to put in as soon as the damage caused by the leaks is repaired. It’ll get fixed then.”

“Then” of course, could be months from now, but still he was glad she had said no. He had definitely decided to invite her to be his next guest, and when she disappeared there would be questions. The police would ring his bell, make inquiries. “Mr. Mensch, did you see Miss Matthews leave with anyone?” they would ask. “Did you notice anyone visiting her lately? How friendly were you with her?”

He could answer truthfully: “We only spoke casually on the street if we ran into each other. She has a young man she seems to be dating. I’ve exchanged a few words with him from time to time. Tall, brown hair, about thirty or so. Believe he said his name is Carter. Kevin Carter.”

The police would probably already know about Carter. When Matthews disappeared they would talk to her close friends first.

He had never even been questioned about Tiffany. There had been no connection between them, no reason for anyone to ask. Occasionally they ran into each other at museums — he had found several of his young women in museums. The third or fourth time they met he made it a point to ask Tiffany her impression of a painting she was looking at.

He had liked her instantly. Beautiful Tiffany, so appealing, so intelligent. She believed that because he claimed to share her enthusiasm for Gustav Klimt, he was a kindred spirit, a man to be trusted. She had been grateful for his offer of a ride back to Georgetown on a rainy day. He had picked her up as she was walking to the Metro.

She had scarcely felt the prick of the needle that knocked her out. She slumped at his feet in the car, and he drove her back to his place. Matthews was just leaving her house as he pulled into the driveway; he even nodded to her as he clicked the garage door opener. At that time he had no idea that Matthews would be next, of course.

Every morning for the next three weeks, he had spent all his time with Tiffany. He loved having her there. The secret place was bright and cheerful. The floor had a thick yellow pad, like a comfortable mattress, and he had filled the room with books and games.

He had even painted the windowless bathroom adjacent to it a cheery red and yellow, and he had installed a portable shower. Every morning he would lock her in the bathroom, and while she was showering he would vacuum and scrub the secret place. He kept it immaculate. As he did everything in his life. He couldn’t abide untidiness. He laid out clean clothes for her every day too. He also washed and ironed the clothes she came in, just as he had with the others. He had even had her jacket cleaned, that silly jacket with the names of cities all over the world. He didn’t want to have it cleaned, but noticing that spot on the sleeve drove him crazy. He couldn’t get it out of his head. Finally he gave in.

He spent a lot of money cleaning his own clothes as well. Sometimes when he woke up, he would find himself trying to brush away crumbs from the sheets. Was that because he remembered having to do that? There were a lot of questions from his childhood, things he couldn’t fully remember. But maybe it was best that way.

He knew he was fortunate. He was able to spend all his time with the women he chose because he didn’t have to work. He didn’t need the money. His father had never spent a cent on anything besides bare essentials. After high school, when he began working for the builder, his father demanded he turn over his paycheck to him. “I’m saving for you, August,” he had said. “It’s wasteful to spend money on women. They’re all like your mother. Taking everything you have and leaving with another man for California. Said she was too young when we got married, that nineteen was too young to have a baby. Not too young for my mother, I told her.”

Ten years ago his father died suddenly, and he had been astonished to find that during all those years of penny-pinching, his father had invested in stocks. At thirty-four, he, August Mensch, was worth over a million dollars. Suddenly he could afford to travel and to live the way he wanted to, the way he had dreamed about during all those years of sitting at home at night, listening to his father tell him how his mother neglected him when he was a baby. “She left you in the playpen for hours. When you cried, she’d throw a bottle or some crackers to you. You were her prisoner, not her baby. I bought baby books, but she wouldn’t even read to you. I’d come home from work and find you sitting in spilled milk and crumbs, cold and neglected.”

August had moved to this place last year, rented this furnished and run-down town house cheaply, and made the necessary repairs himself. He had painted it and scrubbed the kitchen and bathrooms until they shone, and he cleaned the furniture and polished the floors daily. His lease ran out on May first, only twenty days from now. He had already told the owner he was planning to leave. By then he would have had Matthews and it would be time to move on. He would be leaving the place greatly improved. The only thing he would have to take care of was to whitewash all the improvements he had made to the secret place, so no one would ever guess what had happened there.

How many cities had he lived in during the last ten years? he wondered. He had lost track. Seven? Eight? More? Starting with finding his mother in San Diego. He liked Washington, would have stayed there longer. But he knew that after Bree Matthews it wouldn’t be a good idea.

What kind of guest would she be? he wondered. Tiffany had been both frightened and angry. She ridiculed the books he bought for her, refusing to read to him. She told him her family had no money, as if that was what he wanted. She told him she wanted to paint. He even bought an easel and art supplies for her.

She actually started one painting while she was visiting, a painting of a man and woman kissing. It was going to be a copy of Klimt’s The Kiss. He tore it off the easel and told her to copy one of the nice illustrations in the children’s books he had given her. That was when she had picked up an open jar of paint and thrown it at him.

August Mensch didn’t quite remember the next minutes, just that when he looked down at the sticky mess on his jacket and trousers, he had lunged at her.

When her body was pulled out of a Washington canal the next day, they questioned her ex-boyfriends. The papers were full of the case. He laughed at the speculation about where she had been the three weeks she was missing.

Mensch sighed. He didn’t want to think of Tiffany now. He wanted to dust and polish the room again to make it ready for Matthews. Then he had to finish chiseling mortar from the cinder blocks in the wall that separated his basement from hers.

He would remove enough of those blocks to gain entry into Matthews’ basement. He would bring her back the same way. He knew she had installed a security system, but this way it wouldn’t do her any good. Then he would replace the cinder blocks and carefully re-cement.

It was Sunday night. He had watched her house all day. She hadn’t gone out at all. Lately she had stayed in on Sundays, since Carter stopped coming around. He had seen him there last a couple of weeks ago.

He brushed away an invisible piece of dust. Tomorrow at this time she would be with him; she’d be his companion. He had bought a stack of Dr. Seuss books for her to read to him. He had thrown out all the other books. Some had been splattered with red paint. All of them reminded him how Tiffany had refused to read to him.

Over the years, he had always tried to make his guests comfortable. It wasn’t his fault that they were always ungrateful. He remembered how the one in Kansas City told him she wanted a steak. He had bought a thick one, the thickest he could find. When he came back he could see that she had used the time he was out to try to escape. She hadn’t wanted the steak at all. He’d lost his temper. He couldn’t remember exactly what happened after that.

He hoped Bree would be nicer.

He’d soon know. Tomorrow morning he would make his move.

Every woman gets a call like this sooner or later. The phone rings, a man says: “This is a voice from your past.” If you’re in the mood and the caller doesn’t find you in a room where other people are (particularly your husband), and if you have some time to spare, you might enjoy playing the game.

“Who is this?” I said, when my call came.

“Don’t you recognize my voice?”

“Not exactly.”

“Alvord’s class? Florida? Your senior year?”

I paused. There had been a number of young men in my life in college, in Florida, in my senior year — and most of them were in Alvord’s class.

This call — the first from Ricky — came just after I had given birth to my second daughter. I was living in California. I was in the kitchen cutting a hot dog into little greasy pieces for my two-year-old’s lunch and at the same time I felt my milk coming down, that sharp burning pain in both nipples, like an ooze of fire.

“Janet?” His voice was husky, or he was whispering. “This is a serious voice from your past. You know who I am. I think of you all the time. And I work at the phone company, I get free calls, so don’t worry about this long-distance shit, I can talk to you all night if I want to.”

“Tell me who you are,” I said, just stalling for time, but suddenly I knew and was truly astounded. I had thought of Ricky often in the kind of reveries in which we all engage when we count the lives that never were meant to be for us.

“You must know. I know you know.”

“Well, it must be you, Ricky, isn’t it? But I don’t have all night. I have two babies now, and I’m feeding them right this minute.”

“Is your old man there?”

“No.”

“Good, get the kids settled down and I’ll hold on. And don’t worry, I’m not going to complicate your life. I can’t even get to you. I’m in Pennsylvania — and out of money.”

“Hang on.” I did some things I had to do for the children and then talked to him with my big girl eating in her high chair a foot away from the frayed green couch where I reclined on a pillow, letting the baby suck from my breast. Ricky told me then that he couldn’t write a word anymore, it was killing him, he was drinking all the time, he had six kids, his wife was running around with someone else, and could I believe it, he, he, was working for the fucking phone company.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry, Ricky.”

It occurred to me that anything else I said would sound trite, like: “We all have to make compromises,” or “Maybe at some point we have to give up our dreams.” The fact was, I hadn’t given up mine but pursued it with a kind of dauntless energy. I didn’t count the dream that he might have been my true love because I knew even then, all those years ago, that it was impossible. When he read his brilliant stories in class, he was married and living with his wife in a trailer on the outskirts of the campus. He’d already written his prize-winning story that had brought our writing-class to its knees, the one chosen later for an O. Henry Award.

Alvord, our professor, a famous teacher and esteemed novelist, had informed us in class, in front of Ricky, that the boy had been touched by the wand of the muse. He spoke of Ricky as if a halo gleamed over his head. He made it clear that none of us would ever reach the heights (and should not hope to) for which this golden boy was destined. “A talent like his,” he told us once, “is like a comet. It appears only once every hundred years or so.”

I clung to my own modest talent and I was working on it; I couldn’t envy Ricky his, based as it was in Catholic guilt to which I had no access (his stories were all about sin and redemption). What I envied during that hungry, virginal senior year of college was his wife, the woman he held in his arms each night, the one whose face was caressed by the gaze of his deep-seeing, supernaturally wise, marble-blue eyes.

That day he called me as I sat nursing my baby girl, feeling the electric suck of her pulsing lips sizzle in a lightning rod strike from nipple to womb, I remembered an image of Ricky that rose up like an illumination. We were in the university library. Ricky had come in alone and had chosen to sit across from me at one of the long, mahogany tables where I was studying. He had his magic pencil in his long fingers and was bent over his lined notebook paper to create whatever piece of brilliant, remorse-filled prose he was writing. A long lock of his dirty-blond hair fell across his forehead, and his fingers scribbled, bent like crab pincers racing over the lined notebook page, wrote words that according to Alvord would turn out to be second only to James Joyce’s.

Ricky had told me that his wife worked in some office, typing business documents. He explained, in his breathy east-coast accent, that she was ordinary and dull and he had too young been seduced by her beauty, her astonishing breasts, and his own fierce desire. He assured me I knew him in a way that she never could. Our discussions after Alvord’s class, and in the cafeteria over coffee, and on benches in front of the library, our debates about literature and genius — who knows now if their content held anything more remarkable than youth and idealism cooked up in a predictable collegiate stew?

Still, that night in the library, he stopped his work to stare intensely at me across the table time after time — but didn’t smile. We were conspirators, we shared a plan, an ingenious plot to outfox time, mortality, death. We were both going to be famous writers, and we would, by our words alone, live forever.

At some point that evening, in his frenzy of writing, Ricky’s cramped fingers relaxed, his head dropped sideways onto his arm on the table-top, and he fell asleep in the library. He remained there, vulnerable and naked in my gaze, breathing as I knew he must breathe as he slept beside his wife in that trailer, his mouth slightly open, his blue-veined eyelids closed over his blue eyes, his nostrils flaring slightly with each breath.

I watched him till the library closed, watched his face and memorized every line of his fair cheek, the angle of his chin, watched fascinated as a thin thread of drool spooled from his slightly parted lips to the table-top. I looked around me to be sure no one was near or watching. Then, before he woke, I very slowly moved my hand across the table and anointed the tip of my pencil with his silver spit.

Rand had been retired from British Intelligence for a good many years, but it was not until he turned sixty that he was invited to join the Old Spies Club. That was not its official name, of course, but around London’s clubland it was often called that, especially by nonmembers who may have been a bit jealous of its exclusive status and impressive membership.

The club itself occupied three floors of a late-Victorian building on St. James’s Street, just a short walk from Piccadilly. The main floor was given over to the gentlemen’s lounge and the dining room, with a billiard room, card room, smoking lounge, library, and the other amenities one might expect. On the second floor were rooms for meetings or private dinners, along with the club’s offices. The third floor contained three dozen residential rooms where members might stay for a day or a year. These were often occupied by members in the city on a visit, although some members also found them useful when death or divorce suddenly changed their marital status.

Rand had taken a good deal of kidding from his wife Leila about being elderly enough for the Old Spies Club, and in truth he had never been much of a joiner. He was a bit dismayed the first time he took the train up from Reading and stopped in the place one warm July afternoon. The first person he met, just inside the door, was Colonel Cheever, a blustering old man who could have starred in any number of film comedies about the army. It was hard to imagine he’d ever been engaged in any sort of intelligence work.

“Rand! How are you, old chap? I saw your name come up on the new member postings. Good to have you aboard.” His gray moustache drooped around his thick lips and he had a habit of spitting when he spoke quickly, but Rand had to admit he seemed trim and in good health for his age. Cheever had been in army intelligence, far from Rand’s own sphere of activity. Their paths had only crossed a few times at government functions Rand couldn’t avoid.

Now, in trying to be politely friendly, he asked Cheever, “Do you come here often, Colonel?”

“I’m here for the meeting at two o’clock. I expect you are too.”

“No,” Rand admitted. “I was just in the city for the day and thought I’d acquaint myself with the place.”

Colonel Cheever smiled. “Let me give you the tour.”

Rand admired the comfortable leather armchairs in the lounge, wondering if he’d ever be elderly enough to pass his afternoons in such a place. “The air in here used to be blue with cigar smoke,” the colonel explained, “but now the smokers have been relegated to a smaller lounge down the hall. Times do change.”

He led the way through the spacious billiard room and the card room, where green-shaded lights hung down over felt-covered tables.

“I imagine there are some wicked card games in here,” Rand commented.

“Wicked, indeed! I prefer bridge, but most players like faster methods of losing their money.”

The dining room, with its rows of neatly arranged tables, was quite inviting and Rand made a mental note to dine there sometime with Leila. When they’d reached the second-floor meeting rooms it was two o’clock, time for the colonel’s meeting. Rand started to excuse himself but saw another familiar face among those entering the meeting room. “Harry! Harry Vestry!”

The slender smiling man turned at the sound of his name. “Well, if it isn’t Rand! Good to see you, old chap. How long have you been gone from Concealed Communications now?”

“Too long, Harry. I’m old enough to qualify for this club, after all. And Double-C doesn’t even exist anymore under that name.” Vestry chuckled. Rand had been a close friend of Vestry’s when they were recruited together for intelligence work, but the vagaries of overseas assignments had separated them after a few years. “Look, why don’t you sit in on our meeting, Rand? It’s nothing really secret, and you may have some good suggestions to toss in.”

“I don’t even know what it’s about,” Rand protested mildly.

Vestry smoothed back his thinning gray hair. “Finding the truth, old chap. That’s what it’s about.” Then, acknowledging Cheever for the first time, he urged, “Bring him along, Colonel. It’s an open meeting.”

Cheever placed a hand on Rand’s shoulder. “You heard the man. Come along and join us.”

There were a dozen of them around the long oval table, though seats had been provided for twice that number. Rand had already observed that, like most London clubs, this one had not yet progressed to admitting women. Harry Vestry took his place at the head of the table, ready to conduct the meeting, and it was obvious he’d been within his rights when he invited Rand to sit in. Looking around the table at the other men, all about his age or slightly older, Rand was surprised that he knew so few. Cheever and Vestry were the only two he could have named, though a tall man with a red face and a bald head like a bullet seemed familiar.

“I think we all know the purpose of this meeting,” Vestry began when the others had quieted their conversations.

Rand raised his hand. “I’m afraid I don’t.”

“Of course, Jeffrey. I forgot. Well, you probably read in the papers last winter about the death of Cedric Barnes during heart surgery. He was the author of all those books on famous British spies, double agents, MI5, MI6, and Air Intelligence. I believe he even did a volume on Concealed Communications, your old department.”

Rand remembered. He’d read it when it came out, feeling a perverted sense of pride when he found sixteen references to himself in the index. Even in a top-secret organization it was nice to achieve some level of recognition. Oddly enough, he’d thought of Cedric Barnes just a few days earlier, after reading a news account from America that stated that the CIA had agreed to stop employing journalists in the gathering of intelligence data. “I had lunch with the man once,” Rand said. “He wanted an interview but it was forbidden by the Official Secrets Act. I don’t know where he obtained all his information.”

“It hardly matters now,” Vestry said. “What matters is that his daughter Magda intends to auction off the furnishings from his country house. Barnes’s wife has been dead about ten years, so everything went to the daughter. The auction is scheduled here in London next week, at Sotheby’s. Many of us believe grave danger can be done to the country if that auction is allowed to go forward.” Rand was a bit surprised when he allowed his gaze to circle the table and saw that the others were taking this seriously. “Do you really think he had some top-secret papers hidden in a piano leg?”

“Such things are possible,” the tall red-faced man said. “He worked at home with his daughter’s help, and we already know certain well-placed journalists will be bidding on select pieces. A diary or journal could be invaluable.”

Harry Vestry continued. “My proposal, gentlemen, is that we stop this auction by placing a preemptive bid for the entire offering. I have already spoken to Magda Barnes about the possibility and she is agreeable.”

“How much does she want?” Colonel Cheever asked.

“One million pounds.”

There were sighs and groans from around the table. “The club doesn’t have that sort of money,” someone said.

“We may be able to negotiate a lower figure,” Vestry tried to reassure them. “But we must all realize the importance of this matter.”

Rand spoke again. “If it’s so important, why doesn’t the government step in and take action?”

“We understand they have done all they can on an official basis,” Vestry answered vaguely. Rand wondered if he was implying that the government had appealed to the Old Spies Club for financial backing in the matter.

It was Colonel Cheever who seemed most vocal in opposing Vestry. “Are you saying you expect the members in this room to come up with the million pounds necessary to cancel the auction? Such a suggestion borders on the ridiculous!”

Vestry tried to remain calm against this attack, but the members around the table quickly chose sides. After most of them had spoken, it seemed obvious he was in the minority. “The money just isn’t there,” the red-faced man said.

“Do you have any other suggestions, Shirley?” Vestry asked.

At first the use of the feminine name jarred Rand, but then something clicked in his memory. Shirley Watkins, the man with a woman’s name. During his years of covert government service Shirley’s job had always been assassination. Few knew his name and fewer still had seen his face. Rand had met him just once in Berlin, twenty years ago, but supposed him long dead. Could this possibly be the same man?

“Let me talk to the daughter,” Shirley suggested. “Maybe I can make her see reason.”

It might have been an innocent remark, but coming from this man it could also have been a death threat. Rand knew his imagination was running away with him but still he raised his hand and spoke. “If you’ll excuse me, I wonder if I might be of service, gentlemen. As I said, I had lunch with Cedric Barnes a few years back when he wanted an interview for the Double-C book. His daughter might remember my name if she helped him with the book.”

“That’s very good of you, Rand,” Colonel Cheever said at once. “What say you all? Shall we take Jeffrey up on his offer?”

There were assents from around the table, and perhaps a sense of relief. Rand wondered what he was getting himself into.

The two waitresses stood in the shade of the service bar waiting for their drink orders. The brunette sneaked a drag of her cigarette and put it back in the ashtray on the bar.

The blonde said, “You gonna tell ’em, or me?”

The brunette glanced over her shoulder. The outdoor tables on the deck of the Mark Hotel’s Chickee Bar were filled mostly with tourists drinking margaritas and rumrunners in the hot Fort Lauderdale sun. Some wore baggy shorts and T-shirts with PARTY NAKED on the front. Others wore cruisewear bathing suits from Bloomingdale’s. They didn’t talk much, except now and then to whisper to one another and point down below at the male and female strippers lying on the sand, wearing only G-string bikinis, their perfectly tanned bodies glistening with coconut oil.

“You mean the mutt?” said the brunette. “With Spike and the hunk?”

“Who else?”

A man and a woman were seated off by themselves at the far corner of the deck. Only their backs were visible to the waitresses. The man looked like a bodybuilder, hugely muscular and tanned, with a bleached-blond ponytail and narrow, dark eyes. The woman was older, muscled, tanned and bleached blonde, too, with close-cropped hair that stood up like spring grass. She wore a G-string bikini and smoked a cigarette, very lady-like, limp-wristed, while with her other hand she stroked the fur of the dog sitting at her feet. The dog had reddish-orange-and-white fur and looked like a cross between a wolf and a fox.

The blonde waitress set down their drinks. Jim Beam, rocks, for him. Vodka, rocks, for her. The man handed her a twenty and told her to keep the change.

“Thank you, sir,” the waitress said. She stood there, hesitating.

The woman ignored her. She sipped her vodka and said to the man, “What time is he supposed to get here?”

“Twenty minutes ago,” said the man.

The waitress hovered. Finally, she said, “Excuse me.” The woman glanced up, still stroking her dog. “I’m terribly sorry,” the waitress said, “but it’s against the rules.” She pointed at the dog. The dog looked up at her with an eerily human expression. “No dogs, I’m afraid.”

The woman took a drag from her cigarette and exhaled. “Really?” she said. She was older than she looked from behind, maybe 45, but attractive. The woman smiled down at the dog. “Did you hear that, Hosh? You’re not welcome.” She poured her glass of water into a tin bowl and put it down for the dog.

The waitress shrugged and returned to the service bar as a bald man with a big belly and a goatee walked toward the table. Sunlight glinted off his gold-framed sunglasses, his gold necklaces, his gold bracelets, his gold Rolex. His buttondown shirt was open to the navel, exposing his chest hair. Three beepers were hooked to his white tennis shorts.

“Hello, Sheila,” he said, leaning down to kiss the woman on the cheek. He sat down across from Bobby.

“Hello, Solly,” she said.

“A day late, Solly,” said Bobby.

“I had things to do.”

The dog raised up on his hind legs and put his paws on Sol’s arm. “The Hosh!” Sol said. “How’s my man?” The dog wagged his tail. When the waitress appeared at Sol’s side, the dog sat down quickly, as if to be unobtrusive.

“I’ll have a rumrunner, honey,” Sol said. “And a hamburger.”

“What are you, a fucking tourist?” Bobby said when the waitress had gone.

“Right,” Sheila said. “With three beepers on his hip.”

Bobby leaned across the table and said, “So, what’s the big hurry, Sol, that you bring us out with all the tourists?”

“I thought I’d toss this one to you, Bobby. Some sandblasted types in Miami. I don’t feature dealing with them.” He grinned. “I figure you and the spies have something in common, you know. Men of color and all.”

Bobby smiled. “What’s the product?”

The bald man looked around at the tourists, studying them.

“Oh, Solly,” Sheila said, “you’re so fucking dramatic.”

The waitress came back with the rumrunner and burger and Sol raised his eyebrows for silence. After she left, he said, “Do you mind if we get back to business?” Bobby nodded. Sol leaned toward him. “The spic needs a few pieces, Bobby, maybe a couple hundred. Small stuff, mostly. CZs. AKs. Uzis. They like that foreign shit. He says that he already got his big stuff — SAMs, Stingers — from some raghead in Boca.”

“So why does he need us?” Bobby said.

“Because, fuckhead, he can’t buy the stuff in Miami. He’s a big-fucking-deal exile, on TV all the time, screaming how him and his compatriots are gonna take back their fucking island paradise by force. Building an army, he says, a lot of fat old spies in camouflage out in the Everglades, huffin’ and puffin’ through the fuckin’ swamp, blasting gators with grenade launchers.”

“So why doesn’t he just come up here to get his product?”

“You know how spies are, Bobby. Like guineas in the Bronx. Hate to leave their stoop. Besides, a sandblasted nigger like him in Lauderdale, sniffing around for product, would draw flies. He needs a buyer. Someone knows his way up here, got contacts. Preferably a white man, he says.” Sol grinned evilly and winked at Sheila. “What they call that, honey?”

Sheila looked startled, then smiled. “I think you mean irony.”

“Irony, Bobby! You and him become asshole buddies, talk politics, maybe he can loan you some Stingers so’s you can recapture the fucking Indian reservation. Dinner at his hacienda. Him and his wife, you and Sheila.” Sol took a bite of his hamburger. “Know any Spanish?”

Sheila stubbed out her cigarette and looked for the waitress, to order another drink. When she turned back, Sol was sneaking a piece of hamburger to Hoshi.

“Solly! I told you not to feed him that shit.”

“He’s a dog, for Christ’s sake. He eats meat.”

“Yeah, well, not that stuff. It fucks up his stomach, so please, Sol? And another thing: Don’t call him a dog.”

“Jesus. He is a dog.”

“No he’s not. He’s beyond dog.”

“All right, all right.” But the hamburger had already disappeared and Sol turned back to Bobby. “The spic expects you at his house tonight for dinner. Midnight. Them spies eat late. It’s in the Gables.” Sol slid a folded piece of paper across the table. Bobby unfolded it and looked at it.

The waitress appeared. “Another round,” Sheila said. Then, smiling at Sol, she added, “And don’t forget to put the little umbrella in his rumrunner. OK, honey?”

Sol ignored her and went on. “There’s no number on the front gate. But you can’t miss it. Big fucking concrete wall, razor wire on top. You know how they are. Makes ’em feel important. I told him to expect a Mr. Bobby Squared. Just announce yourself at the gate. They got this little box you talk into, they let you in.”

Sol lowered his voice and leaned closer to Bobby. “One other thing. Don’t pack. He’s fuckin’ paranoid.” He smiled at Sheila. “Very good, Sol.”

“Par-a-noid, Bobby. Drives one of them ten-ton Bentleys that fucking bazookas bounce off. Guats patrolling the grounds with Macios and guard dogs, big fucking mutts like in the movies.”

“Rottweilers,” Sheila said.

“Whatever. Dog shit everywhere. Wear your cowboy boots, Bobby. And don’t pack. They’ll pat you down at the front door, and you don’t want to piss these guys off.”

Bobby nodded. “What’s my end?”

“All of it. It’s a present. You always stood up for me.” Sol’s tone changed for an instant, not the wise guy now, but genuine. Then he went on talking, all business again. “The product will costya, maybe 75 large. The spic will give you a hundred. You keep the change.” He leaned closer to Bobby and said softly, “Bobby, you know there’s only one guy deals in so much product.”

“I know.”

“You ever met him?”

Bobby shook his head.

“He’s fucking wacko. Old bastard thinks he’s God. From the Old Testament — you know what I mean. Watch yourself.” Absentmindedly, Sol broke off another piece of his hamburger and handed it to Hoshi. The dog wolfed it down.

“Jesus, Sol. What did I tell you? You’re a fucking mule!” Sheila stood up. “Come on, Hosh.” She walked off the deck onto the sand and headed toward the ocean.

“What’d I do?” Sol said.

“You pissed her off,” Bobby said. He followed Sheila with his eyes as she walked in the sand in that distinctive way of hers that always turned him on. She twisted the balls of her feet so that her small, high ass swiveled left and right. Bobby watched as she turned at the water’s edge and began walking away. Hoshi trotted beside her, well away from the water. The only time he ever pissed and moaned was when they gave him a bath.

“How old would you say I am?”

I looked at the dark handsome man standing next to the railing of his penthouse balcony overlooking Sarasota Bay. He was just a bit bigger than I am, about six feet and somewhere in the range of one hundred and ninety pounds. His open blue shirt, which may have been silk, showed a well-muscled body with a chest of gray-brown hair. The hair on his head was the same color, plentiful, neat. And he was carefully and gently tanned. He had a glass of V-8 in his hand. He had offered me the same. I had settled for water. There was a slight accent, very slight when he spoke and I realized he reminded me of Ricardo Montalban.

I’m forty-four, on the thin side, losing my hair and usually broke or close to it. I’d come to Sarasota two years earlier, just drove till my car gave out and I felt safely in the sunshine after spending my life in the gray of Chicago. I had driven away from a wife who had dumped me and a dead-end investigator’s job with the State’s Attorney’s Office.

Now, I made my living finding people, asking questions, answering to nobody. I had a growing number of Sarasota lawyers using me to deliver a summons or find a local resident who hadn’t turned up for a court or divorce hearing. Occasionally, I would turn up some street trade, a referral from a bartender or Dave the owner of the Dairy Queen next door to the run-down two-story office building where I had my office and where I lived. I had a deal with the building manager. The landlord lived in Seattle. By giving the manager a few extra dollars a month beyond the reasonable rent for a seedy two-room suite, he ignored the fact that I was living in the second room of a two-room office. The outer room was designed as a reception room. I had turned it into an office. The room behind it was a small windowed office which I had turned into a living space. I had fixed it up to my satisfaction and the clothes I had brought with me from Chicago would hold out for another year or two. I had a bed, an old dresser, a sink in the corner, a television set and an aging green sofa and matching armchair. The only real inconvenience was that the office, like all the others, opened onto a balcony with a rusting railing facing a parking lot shared with the Dairy Queen and, beyond it, the heavy traffic of Route 301. To get to the bathroom, which had no bath, I had to walk past five offices and take whatever the weather had to offer. I showered every morning after I worked out at the downtown YMCA.

There was nothing but my name printed on the white-on-black plastic plate that slid into the slot on my door. I wasn’t a private detective, didn’t want to be. I did what I know how to do, ask questions, find people.

“Just a guess,” Raymond Sebastian asked again, looking away from the beautiful sight of the boats bobbing in the bay and the busy bridge going over to Bird Key.

Answering a question like that could lose me a job, but I hadn’t come to this town to go back to saying “yes, boss” to people I liked and didn’t like.

“Sixty,” I guessed, standing a few feet away from him and looking him in the eyes.

“Closer to seventy,” he said with some satisfaction. “I was blessed by the Lord in many ways. My genes are excellent. My mother is ninety-two and still lives in good health. My father died when he was ninety-four. I have uncles, aunts… you wouldn’t believe.”

“Not without seeing them,” I said.

Sebastian laughed. There wasn’t much joy in his laugh. He looked at his now-empty V-8 glass and set it on a glass-top table on the balcony.

“Lawrence told you my problem?” he asked facing me, his gray-blue eyes unblinking, sincere.

“Your wife left. You want to find her. That’s all.”

Lawrence Werring was a lawyer, civil cases, injury law suits primarily, an ambulance chaser and proud of it. It had bought him a beautiful wife, a leather-appointed office and a four bedroom house on the water on Longboat Key. If I knew which one it was, I could probably see it from where Sebastian and I were standing.

“My wife’s name is Miriam,” Sebastian said handing me a folder that lay next to the now-empty V-8 glass. “She is considerably younger than I, thirty-six, but I believed she loved me. I was vain enough to think it was true and for some time it seemed true. And then one afternoon…”

He looked around as if she might suddenly rematerialize.

“…She was gone. I came home and her clothes, jewelry, gone. No note, nothing. That was, let me see, last Thursday. I kept expecting to hear from her or a kidnapper or something, but…”

I opened the folder. There were a few neatly typed pages of biography. I skimmed them. Miriam Latham Sebastian was born in Utah, earned an undergraduate degree in social science at the University of Florida and moved with her parents, now both dead, to Sarasota where she worked for a Catholic services agency as a case worker till she married Sebastian four years earlier. There was also a photograph of Miriam Sebastian. She was wearing red shorts, a white blouse and a great smile. Her dark hair was long and blowing in the breeze. She had her arm lovingly around her husband who stood tall, tan and shirtless in a pair of white trunks looking at the camera. They were standing on the wide sands of a Florida Gulf Coast beach, a few apartments or condos behind them.

“Pretty,” I said closing the folder.

“Beautiful,” he corrected. “Exquisite. Charming.”

“Any guesses?” I said. “About what happened?”

He shrugged and moved from the balcony back into the penthouse apartment. I followed as he talked. We stopped in front of a painting of his wife on the wall over a big white sofa. The whole room was white, but not a modern white. There was a look of tasteful antique about the place. Not my kind of home, but I could appreciate it.

“Another man perhaps, but I doubt it,” he said. “We have had no major quarrels. I denied her nothing, nothing. I am far from a poor man, Mr. Fonesca and…”

He paused and sighed deeply.

“And,” he continued composing himself, “I have checked our joint checking and savings accounts. Most of the money has been removed. A little is left. I have my corporate attorney checking other holdings which Miriam might have had access to. I find it impossible to believe she would simply take as much money as she could and just walk out on me.”

“You had a little hitch in your voice when you mentioned another man,” I said having decided the chairs in the room were too white for me to sit on.

“She has had a good friend,” he said gently. “This is very difficult for me. I am a proud man from a proud family.”

“A good friend?” I repeated.

“For about the last year,” he said, “Miriam has been seeing a psychiatrist, nothing major, problems to be worked out about her childhood, her relationship to her parents. The psychiatrist’s name is Gerald Bermeister. He’s got a practice over one of those antique stores on Palm Avenue. I’m not a young man. I am not immune to jealousy. Gerald Bermeister is both young and good looking. There were times when I could not determine whether my suspicions were simply that of an older man afraid of losing his beautiful young wife or were valid concerns.”

“I’ll check it out,” I said.

“Miriam was a bit of a loner,” he went on. “But because of business connections we belong to a wide variety of organizations, Selby Gardens, Asolo Angels, charity groups, and we’re seen at balls and dances. Miriam said that in three years we had been on the Herald-Tribunes society page eleven times. In spite of this, Miriam had no really close friends with one possible exception, Caroline Wilkerson, the widow of my late partner.”

“And what do you want me to do?” I asked.

“Find her, of course,” Sebastian said turning from the painting to look at me.

“Has she committed a crime?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” he said.

“So, she’s free to go where she wants to go, even to leave her husband, take money out of your joint accounts and wander away. It may be a boyfriend. It may be a lot of things.”

“I just want you to find her,” he said. “I just want to talk to her. I just want to find out what happened and if there is anything I can do to get her back.”

“She could be half way to Singapore by now,” I said.

“Your expense account is unlimited,” he answered. “I will want you to keep me informed if you leave town in search of Miriam and I would expect you would, as a professional, keep expenses to a minimum and give me a full accounting of all such expenses when you find her.”

“If I find her,” I said. “I’ll do my best to find out why she left. I’ll have to ask her if she’s willing to talk to you. I’ll tell you where she is if she gives me permission to tell you.”

“I understand,” he said.

He moved again. I followed into an office where he moved to a desk and picked something up next to a computer.

“Here’s a check in advance,” he said. “Larry said your fee was negotiable. Consider this expenses and, if anything is left, part of your payment. I propose one hundred and twenty dollars a day plus expenses.”

I nodded to show it was fair and took the check. It was made out to me for five hundred dollars. He had been ready and expecting that I’d take the job.

“How long?” I asked.

“How long?”

“Do I keep looking before I give up? I expect to find her, but it may be hard or easy. It may, if she’s really smart, be impossible.”

“Let’s say we re-evaluate after two week’s if it goes that long,” he said. “But I want her back if it’s at all possible. I’m too old to start again and I love Miriam. Do you understand?”

I nodded, tucked the folder under my arm after dropping the check into it and asked him for the numbers of any credit cards they shared, the tag number and make of her car and various other things that would make my job easier.

While he found what I asked for he admitted, “I tried going to the police first, but they said they really had no reason to look for Miriam unless I thought she might be dangerous to herself or had been taken against her will. They also said I could file a missing persons report but there was little they could do even if they found her other than inform me that she was alive and well, unless she had committed a crime, which she hadn’t. I’m talking too much.”

“It’s understandable,” I said as he ushered me to the door and handed me an embossed business card, tasteful, easily readable black script: Raymond Sebastian, Investments, Real Estate. There was an office address and phone number in the lower left-hand corner. He had written his home phone number on the back of the card but I already had that.

“Keep me informed,” he said taking my hand. “Call any time. As often as you like.”

He waited with me at the elevator. His was the only apartment on the floor, but he was on the twelfth floor and the elevator took a few minutes.

“Anything else I can tell you?” he asked.

“She have any living relatives?”

“No, it’s all in the material I’ve given you,” he said. “Just me. I don’t think she’s gone far. We’ve traveled all around the world, but she considers the Gulf Coast her home. I could be wrong.”

“I’m going to start with her friend Mrs. Wilkerson,” I said.

“Good idea though I don’t know what Caroline can tell you that I haven’t. Yet, maybe there was something said, some… I don’t know.”

The elevator bell rang and the doors opened. I stepped in and smiled confidently at Raymond Sebastian who now looked a little older than he had on his balcony.

When I’m not working, I bike. Not a motorcycle. A bike. Sarasota isn’t that big and it has a good cheap bus system that not enough people use. When I’m on a case, I rent a car and charge it to my client. I had left my bike, an old one-speed, chained to a tree. No one had taken my battered bike pack. It wasn’t worth the effort and besides, we were a little off the regular haunts of Sarasota’s downtown homeless. I put the folder in the bike pack, took off the chain and dropped it into the second pouch of the pack. I biked. It was summer, the day was hot. I pedaled to my place behind the Dairy Queen on 301. I pedaled slowly. I was wearing my best clothes — sport jacket, pressed pants, white shirt — and I didn’t want to get them sweat drenched if I could help it.

When I got back to my office, I made three calls. First, I called the little independent car rental company I used and we agreed on our usual deal. I said I’d be over to pick up a Toyota Tercel within the hour. Then I called Caroline Wilkerson, who was in the phone book, and made an appointment with her that afternoon. She said she was worried about Miriam and Raymond and would be happy to talk to me. I called Dr. Gerald Bermeister, got a typical he’ll-call-you-back. I told her it was urgent, about Miriam Sebastian. The woman put me on hold for a minute so I could listen to the Beach Boys and then came back on to say Dr. Bermeister could see me for fifteen minutes at four-forty-five. I said I’d be there.

I put on my jeans and a black pull-over tee shirt, washed my face and went down to the DQ where I had a burger and a Blizzard and talked to Dave who owned the place. Dave was probably about my age but years of working in the sun on his boat had turned his skin to dark leather. I’m a sucker for junk food and I’ve got no one to tell me to eat well. Dave doesn’t eat his own food, but I knew he kept the place clean. I worked out every day at the YMCA where I biked every day and told myself that covered the burgers, fried chicken, ribs and hot dogs. I could tell myself lies. Who was there to contradict me?

I walked to the car rental office about a mile and a half north on 301, past antique shops, a girlie bar, a pawn shop, some offices and restaurants, a rebuilt and new tire garage and a Popeye’s chicken. I had worked up a sweat when I got the car. I turned on the air conditioning and headed for Sebastian’s bank where I cashed the check for five hundred. Then I drove back to my office and my room to wash and change into my good clothes.

Caroline Wilkerson met me at the Cafe Kaldi on Main Street. I had no trouble finding her even though the coffee house tables were almost full in spite of the absence of the winter tourists. She sat alone, an open notebook in front of her, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. She was writing. A cup of coffee rested nearby. I recognized her from the society pages of the Herald-Tribune. When I sat across from her, she looked at me over her glasses, took them off, folded her hands on the table and gave me her attention.

The widow Caroline was a beauty, better in person than in the papers. She was probably in her late forties, short, straight silver hair, a seemingly wrinkle-free face with full red lips that reminded me of Joan Fontaine. She wore a pink silky blouse with a pearl necklace and pearl earrings and a light-weight white jacket.

“Would you like to order a coffee?” she asked.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I’ve had my quota for the day.”

She nodded, understanding, and took a sip of her coffee.

“Miriam Sebastian,” I said. “You know she’s apparently left her husband?”

“Raymond told me,” she said. “Called. Frantic. Almost in tears. I couldn’t help him. She hasn’t contacted me. I would have thought, as Raymond did, that if Miriam did something like this, she’d get in touch with me, but…”

Caroline Wilkerson shrugged.

“Did they have a fight?”

A trio of young women suddenly laughed loudly a few tables behind me. When they stopped, Caroline Wilkerson closed her notebook.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I can’t be certain. But Raymond said nothing about a fight and I don’t recall ever seeing them fight or hearing from Miriam that they had fought. Frankly, I’m worried about her.”

“Any idea of where she might have gone?” I asked.

The pause was long. She bit her lower lip, made up her mind, sighed. “Gerry Bermeister,” she said softly meeting my eyes. “He’s her analyst and… I think that’s all I can say.”

“Mr. Sebastian thinks his wife and Dr. Bermeister might have had an affair, that she may have left to be with him.”

She shrugged again. I handed her one of my cards, asked her to get in touch with me if she heard from Miriam Sebastian, and said that she should tell her friend that her husband simply wanted to know what happened and if he could talk to her.

She took the card and I stood up.

“I hope you find her,” she said. “Miriam has had problems recently, depression. One of her relatives, her only close relative, a cousin I think, recently died. That’s hardly a reason for what she’s done, but… I frankly don’t know what to make of it.”

At the moment, that made two of us.

“Are you permitted to let me know if you find out anything about where Miriam is and why she’s…”

I must have been shaking my head “no” because she stopped. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You’ll have to get that from her or from Mr. Sebastian. Whatever I find is between me and my client.”

“I understand,” she said with a sad smile showing perfect white teeth. “That’s what I would expect if you were working for me.” When I got to the coffee house door, I looked back at Caroline Wilkerson. Her half glasses were back on and her notebook was open.

One of the criminal attorneys I did some work for had access to computer networks, very sophisticated access. An individual in his office did the computer work and was well paid. Since some of what he did on the network was on the borderline of illegal, the attorney never acknowledged his access to information the police, credit agencies, banks and almost every major corporation had. I had some time before I saw Bermeister so I dropped by the attorney’s office. He was with a client but he gave me permission through his secretary to talk to Harvey, the computer whiz. I found Harvey in his small windowless office in front of his computer. Harvey looked more like an ex-movie star than a computer hacker. He was tall, dark, wearing a suit and sporting shot hair of gold. Harvey was MIT. Harvey was also a convicted cocaine user and former alcoholic.

It took Harvey ten minutes to determine that Miriam Sebastian had not used any of her credit cards during the past four days. Nor had she, at least under her own name, rented a car or taken a plane out of Sarasota, Clearwater, St. Petersburg, Tampa or Fort Meyers.

“You want me to keep checking every day to see if I can find her?” he said.

“I’ll bill my client,” I said.

“Suit yourself,” said Harvey showing capped teeth. “I like a challenge like this, pay or no pay. Me against her. She hides. I find her.”

“You want her Social Security number?” I asked.

Harvey smiled.

“That I can get and access to bank accounts and credit cards. You want that?”

“Sure. I’ll call you later.”

I made it to Dr. Bermeister’s office with ten minutes to spare. The matronly receptionist took my name and asked me to have a seat. The only other person in the waiting area was a nervous young woman, about twenty, who hadn’t done much to look her best. Her hair was short and dark. Her brown skirt didn’t really go with her gray blouse. She ruffled through a magazine.

I was reading an article about Clint Eastwood in People magazine when Bermeister’s door opened. He was in his thirties, dark suit, dark hair and ruggedly good looking.

“I’ll be with you in a few minutes, Audrey,” he said to the nervous Audrey who nodded frowning.

“Mr. Fonesca?” he said looking at me. “Please come in.”

I followed him into his office. He opened his drapes and let in the sun and a view of Ringling Boulevard. The office wasn’t overly large, room for a desk and chair, a small sofa and two armchairs. The colors were all subdued blues. A painting on the wall showed a woman standing on a hill looking into a valley beyond at the ruins of a castle. Her face wasn’t visible.

“Like it?” Bermeister said sitting behind his desk and offering me the couch or one of the chairs. I took a chair so I could face him. “The painting? Yes,” I said.

“One of my patients did it,” he said. “An artist. A man. We spent a lot of time talking about that painting.”

“Haunting,” I said.

“Gothic,” he said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Fonesca, but I’m going to have to get right to your questions.”

“I understand. Miriam Latham Sebastian,” I said.

“I can’t give you any information about why she was seeing me, what was said.”

“I know,” I said feeling comfortable in the chair. “Do you know where Mrs. Sebastian is?”

“No,” he said.

The answer had come slowly.

“Any ideas?”

“Maybe,” he said.

“Want to share them?” I asked.

He didn’t answer.

“This one will probably get me kicked out, but you’re in a hurry. Mr. Sebastian, and he’s not the only one, thinks you and Miriam Sebastian were having an affair.”

Bermeister cocked his head and looked interested.

“And if we were?”

“Or are,” I amended. “Well, it might suggest that she would come to you. Her husband just wants to talk to her.”

“And you just want to find her for him?” he asked.

“That’s it,” I said.

“First,” he said getting up from his desk chair. “I am not and have not been having an affair with Miriam Sebastian. In fact, Mr. Fonesca, I can offer more than ample proof that I am gay. It is a relatively open secret which, in fact, hasn’t hurt my practice at all. I get the gay clients, men and women, and I get women who feel more comfortable talking to me. What I don’t get are many straight men.”

“Mrs. Sebastian,” I said.

“She doesn’t want to see her husband,” he said sitting on the sofa and crossing his legs. “She doesn’t want him to know where she is.”

“I told Sebastian that I planned to talk to her if I found her and that I wouldn’t tell her husband where she was if she told me she wouldn’t talk to him under any circumstances.”

“Which,” said Bermeister, “is what she would say.”

“I want to hear it from her,” I said. “Until I do, she can’t use a credit card, can’t cash a check in her own name, can’t use her Social Security number without my finding her. My job is finding people, doctor. I do a good job. If you want references…”

His right hand was up indicating that I should stop. He looked up at the painting of the woman looking down at the ruins.

“I made some calls about you after I scheduled this appointment,” he said. “Actually, Doreen, my secretary, made the calls. You haven’t been here long, but your reputation is very good.”

“Small city,” I said.

“Big enough,” he said taking a pad out of his pocket and writing something. He tore the page out and looked at it.

“I have your word,” he said.

“I talk to her. Try to talk her into at least a phone call and then I drop it if she wants to be left alone.”

He handed me the sheet of paper. It had two words on it: Harrington House. I folded the sheet and put it in my jacket pocket.

“I don’t want people hounding Miriam,” he said. “She… she can tell you why if she wants to. By the way, I plan to call her the instant you leave. She may choose to pack and leave before you get there.”

“I think it would be a good idea if she just talked to me.”

“I think you may be right,” he said. “I’ll suggest that she do so.” He ushered me to the door and shook my hand.

“I’m trusting you,” he said.

I nodded and he turned to the nervous young woman.

“I have to make one quick call, Audrey,” he said smiling at her. She had no response and he disappeared back into his office.

I was parked in front of the hardware store on Main. I stopped at an outdoor phone booth where there was a complete phone book and had no trouble finding Harrington House. It was in Holmes Beach, a Bed and Breakfast. That was on Anna Maria Island. I’d been there to try to find the house where Georges Simenon had lived for a while. The house was gone. I called Harvey the computer whiz.

“Miriam Latham Sebastian has been turning her investments into cash and emptying her joint bank accounts,” he said happily. “I’ve got a feeling there’s more.”

“Keep at it,” I said.

I hung up and wondered why Dr. Gerald Bermeister had been so cooperative. I considered calling Harvey back and asking him to check on the good doctor, but decided that could wait.

I got into my rented car, flipped on the air conditioner and eased back through a break in traffic. I made a left and then another left and then another which brought me right back to Bermeister’s office building. I got out fast, ran into the office building, rode the elevator up to Bermeister’s floor and then rode back down again and got into my car.

The blue Buick was idling half way down the block near the curb. He had followed me around the block and was waiting for me now. I hoped I had given the impression of someone who had left something in the doctor’s office.

I had noticed the blue Buick when I picked up my rental car, but it hadn’t really registered. I hadn’t been looking for someone who might be following me. But I had spotted what I thought was the same car when I came out of the Cafe Kaldi. Now I was sure. I eased past the Buick, looking both ways at the intersection and catching a glimpse of the man behind the wheel. This guy was short, wore a blue short-sleeve shirt and looked, from the color of his hair and sag of his tough face, about fifty.

There must have been lots of reasons for someone to follow me, but I couldn’t think of any good ones other than that the guy in the Buick was hoping I would lead him to Miriam Sebastian. I could have been dead wrong, but I didn’t take chances.

He was a good driver, a very good driver, and he kept up with me as I headed for Tamiami Trail. I pulled into the carry-out lane at the McDonald’s across from the airport hoping he would follow me in line. I even timed it so a car would be behind me other than the Buick which was the way the guy who was following me would want it, too. My plan was to order a sandwich and pull away while the Buick was stuck behind the car behind me. If I was lucky, there would also be a car behind him so he couldn’t back up.

He was too smart. He simply drove around and parked between a van and a pick-up truck in the parking lot.

Hell. I decided it was all-out now. He had almost certainly figured I had spotted him by now, and I didn’t have time to keep playing tag. Miriam Sebastian might be gone by the time I got to Harrington House which was still at least forty minutes from where I took my cheeseburger, put it on the seat next to me and peeled off fast to the right, away from the direction I wanted to go. In the rear-view, I watched the Buick back out as I sailed at sixty down Route 41. He was good, but there’s a definite advantage in being the one who is followed. It took me ten minutes to lose him. By then I guessed he knew I wasn’t going to lead him to Miriam Sebastian. I ate the burger while I drove.

I took the bridge across to St. Armand’s, the same bridge you could see from Raymond Sebastian’s apartment, and then drove straight up Longboat Key through the canyon of high-rise resorts and past streets that held some of the most expensive houses, mansions and estates in the county.

I went over the short bridge at the end of the Key and drove through the far less up-scale and often ramshackle hotels and rental houses along the water in Bradenton Beach. Ten minutes later, I spotted the sign for Harrington House and pulled into the shaded driveway. I parked on the white crushed shell and white pebble lot which held only two other cars.

Harrington House was a white three-floor 1920s stucco over cement block with green wooden shutters. There were flowers behind a low picket fence and a sign to the right of the house pointing toward the entrance. I walked up the brick path for about a dozen steps and came to a door. I found myself inside a very large lodge-style living room with a carpeted dark wooden stairway leading up to a small landing and, I assumed, rooms. There were book cases whose shelves were filled and a chess table with checkers lined up and ready to go. The big fireplace was probably original and used no more than a few days during the Central Florida winter.

I hit the bell on a desk by the corner next to a basket of wrapped bars of soap with a sketch of the house on the wrapper. I smelled a bar and was doing so when a blonde woman came bouncing in with a smile. She was about fifty and seemed to be full of an energy I didn’t feel. I put down the soap.

“Yes sir?” she said. “You have a reservation.”

“No,” I said. “I’m looking for Miriam Sebastian, a guest here.” Some of the bounce left the woman but there was still a smile when she said, “No guest by that name registered.”

I pulled out the photograph Raymond Sebastian had given me and showed it to her. She took it and looked long and hard.

“Are you a friend of hers?”

“I’m not an enemy.”

She looked hard at the photograph again.

“I suppose you’ll hang around even if I tell you I don’t know these people.”

“Beach is public,” I said. “And I like to look at birds and waves.”

“That picture was taken three or four years ago, right out on the beach behind the house,” she said. “You’ll recognize some of the houses in the background if you go out there.”

I went out there. There was a small, clear-blue swimming pool behind the house and a chest-high picket fence just beyond it. The waves were coming in low on the beach about thirty yards away, but still moaned as they hit the white sand and brought in a new crop of broken shells and an occasional fossilized shark’s tooth or dead fish.

I went through the gate to the beach and looked around. A toddler was chasing gulls and not even coming close, which was in the kid’s best interest. A couple, probably the kid’s parents, sat on a brightly painted beach cloth watching the child and talking. Individuals, duos, trios and quartets of all ages walked along the shoreline in bare feet or floppy sandals. Miriam Sebastian was easy to find. There were five aluminum beach loungers covered in strips of white vinyl. Miriam Sebastian sat in the middle lounger. The others were empty.

She wore a wide-brimmed straw hat, dark sunglasses and a two-piece solid white bathing suit. She glistened from the bottle of lotion that sat on the lounger next to her along with a fluffy towel. She was reading a book or acting as if she was knowing I was on the way. I stood in front of her.

“War and Peace,” she said holding up the heavy book. “Always wanted to read it, never did. I plan to read as many of the so-called classics as I can. It’s my impression that few people have really read them though they claim to have. Please have a seat, Mr. Fonesca.”

I sat on the lounger to her right, the one that didn’t have lotion and a towel, and she moved a book mark and laid the book on her lap. She took off her sunglasses. She was definitely the woman in the picture, still beautiful, naturally beautiful though the woman looking at me seemed older than the one in the picture. I showed her the picture.

“Mr. Sebastian would like to talk to you,” I said.

She looked at the photograph and shook her head before handing it back.

“We spent two nights here after our honeymoon in Spain,” she said. “You would think Raymond might remember and at least call on the chance that I might return. But…”

“Will you talk to him?” I asked.

She sat for about thirty seconds and simply looked at me. I was decidedly uncomfortable and wished I had sunglasses. I looked at the kid still chasing gulls. He was getting no closer.

“You’re not here to kill me,” she said conversationally.

“Kill you?”

“I think Raymond is planning to have me killed,” she said turning slightly toward me. “But I think you’re not the one.”

“Why does your husband want to kill you?” I asked.

“Money,” she said and then she smiled. “People thought I married Raymond for his money. I didn’t, Mr. Fonesca. I loved him. I would have gone on loving him. He was worth about one hundred thousand when we married, give or take a percentage or two in either direction. I, however, was worth close to eleven million dollars from an annuity, the sale of my father’s business when he died, and a very high yield insurance policy on both my parents.”

“It doesn’t make sense, Mrs. Sebastian,” I said.

“Miriam,” she said. “Call me Miriam. Your first name?”

“Lewis,” I said. “Lew.”

“It makes perfect sense to me,” she said. “I know that Raymond has been telling people that I am having an affair with Dr. Bermeister. Lew, I’ve been faithful to my husband from the day we met. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about him. I have ample evidence, including almost interrupting a session between Raymond and Caroline Wilkerson in the buff in our bed about five weeks ago.

It seems the man almost old enough to be my grandfather married me for my money. After I carefully closed the door without Raymond or Caroline seeing me, I went out, stayed in a hotel and returned the day I was supposed to.”

“Reason for divorce,” I said.

“My word against theirs,” she said. “He’d drag it on, hold up my assets. I haven’t the time, Lew.”

“So…?”

“So,” she said, “I did a little digging and discovered that Caroline was far from the first. I don’t know if he is just an old man afraid of accepting his age or if he simply craves the chase and the sex. I know he had no great interest in me in that department for the past year.”

“You waited five weeks after you knew all this and then suddenly walked out?” I asked.

“It took me five weeks to convert all my stocks and my life insurance policy to cash and to withdraw every penny I have in bank accounts. I didn’t want a scene and I didn’t want Raymond to know what I was doing, but by now he knows.”

“And you think he wants to kill you?”

“Yes. I don’t think he knows the extent of what I’ve done, nor that I’ve cashed in the insurance policy,” she said. “Raymond claims to be a real estate dealer. He has averaged a little over twenty-thousand dollars on his real estate deals each of the years we’ve been married. As for his investments, he has consistently lost money. I’d say that at the moment my husband, who is nearing seventy, thinks he’ll have millions when, in fact, he has what’s left on his credit cards, ten thousand dollars in his own bank account and a 1995 paid-for Lincoln Town Car.”

“And he’s trying to kill you before you get rid of your money?”

“Yes. But it’s too late. I’ve put all the money, but the thirty thousand I’ve kept with me in cash, into boxes and sent the boxes anonymously to various charities including the National Negro College Fund, the Salvation Army and many others.”

“Why don’t you just tell him?” I asked. “Or I can tell him.”

The toddler’s mother screamed at the boy who had wandered too far in pursuit of the gulls. The kid’s name was Harry.

“Then he wouldn’t try to have me killed,” she said.

“That’s the picture,” I said. “You know a short bulldog of a man, drives a blue Buick? He’s probably about ten years younger than your husband.”

“Zito,” she said. “Irving Zito.”

“He was following me today. I lost him.”

She shrugged.

“Irving is Raymond’s ‘personal’ assistant,” she said. “He has a record including a conviction for Murder Two. Don’t ask me how he and Raymond came together. The story I was told didn’t make much sense. So Irving Zito is the designated killer.”

“If you don’t tell your husband your money is gone and you just stay here, he’ll find you even if I don’t tell him.”

“And you don’t plan to tell him?” she asked.

“Not if you say ‘no,’” I said.

“Good. I say ‘no.’ Did he pay you by check?”

“Yes.”

“Cash it fast.”

“I did,” I said, “I thought it was too easy.”

“Too easy?”

“Finding you. Talk to Caroline Wilkerson at your husband’s suggestion. She sends me to Dr. Bermeister. He sends me to you and you wait for me. You wanted me to find you.”

“I wanted whoever was going to kill me to find me,” she said. “I’ll just have to wait till Zito and Raymond figure it out. If they don’t, Raymond will probably find another private detective with fewer scruples than you who will find me right here. I hope I have time to finish Tolstoy before he does.”

“You want to die?”

“I’ve left a letter with my lawyer, with documents, proving my husband’s infidelity, misuse of my money which I knew about but chose to ignore, and the statement that if I am found dead under suspicious circumstances, a full investigation of the likelihood of my husband’s being responsible is almost a certainty. Now that I know Irving Zito is involved, I’ll drive into Sarasota with a new letter including Zito’s name and add it to the statement I’ve given my lawyer.”

“You want to die,” I repeated though this time it wasn’t a question.

“No,” she said. “I don’t. But I’m going to within a few months even if Raymond doesn’t get the job done. I’m dying, Lew. Dr. Bermeister knows it. I started seeing him as a therapist when I first learned about the tumor more than a year ago. I didn’t want my husband to know. I arranged for treatment and surgery in New York and told my husband I simply wanted six weeks or so with old school friends, one of whom was getting married. He had no objections. I caught him and Caroline in bed the day I returned. I had hurried home a day early Obviously I wasn’t expected. Treatment and surgery proved relatively ineffective. The tumor is in a vital part of my brain and getting bigger. Raymond has never even noticed that I was ill. I don’t wish to die slowly in the hospital.”

“So you set your husband up,” I said.

Harry the toddler was back with his mother who was standing and brushing sand from the boy who was trying to pull away There were gulls to chase and water to wade in.

“Yes,” she said. “You disapprove?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “It’s your life.”

My first and only failing grade in school came in sixth grade, when Miss Solway asked us to write a paragraph about a secret. Patty Tolliver set to work about a surprise birthday party for her dad. I could see “birthday party” and “hiding presents” and the rest of the story emerging in her big curling script. Eric Rodriguez printed something about fireworks in steeply angled lines. His letters grew smaller and messier as they approached the right edge of his paper, then swelled again into big, assertive words with each new line. Even Jon Hansem, the slowest kid in the class, was hard at work, but my mind refused to function. I sat sweating at my desk and turned in a blank page. At the end of the period Miss Solway called me up to her desk. She looked disappointed and asked if I was feeling all right. I said I was fine; I just didn’t have any secrets worth writing about. Miss Solway was unconvinced: I was considered a good, even an imaginative, student.

“I just couldn’t think of anything,” I wailed, and though Miss Solway was one of my favorite teachers, I added, “It was a dumb topic anyway.” I was almost twelve years old, and I already knew that there are some secrets too big to tell, like the one about my mother and Mr. Conklin and what happened the July that I was ten years old.

That summer was hot, dreadfully, dreadfully hot. We should have been used to it after three years in Hartford, but we weren’t. Days when the thermometer crept up into the eighties and then the nineties, my mother would wipe her face and say, “What I wouldn’t give to be back in Ireland now. It was never imagined to be this hot in Ireland.”

Of course other days Mother “wouldn’t have had Ireland as a gift,” as she’d say, not with my dad dead. “Not an honest day’s work to be had. Nothing but pride, poetry, and ignorance. It’s bad times here, but worse there. You remember that and work hard in school, my girl.” I would promise, of course. I liked school and did well, even though I was in the public school and not with the sisters, who provided a really good education. But Catholic school was out of the question, an unimaginable luxury. Although Mother worked hard, cleaning at the motel and the restaurants, we still lived from week to week. Her pay was usually owed from the moment she got it, and we ate cereal or beans for supper most Wednesdays and Thursdays.

I don’t suppose we’d have managed at all if it weren’t for Mr. Conklin, our tyrant and savior, who was a distant relative of my late father. Mr. Conklin owned a triple-decker house near his “Irish pub.” He also owned a motel and a snack shop at the shabby end of Park Street where the Puerto Rican section stopped and the Portuguese, new immigrants like ourselves, were moving in. Their children went to the big, frightening city schools — rough and full of black people, Mr. Conklin said — while we had the top apartment of his triple-decker just over the city line in an old Irish-Italian neighborhood. The schools in the suburb were much, much better Mr. Conklin said, as “they damn well should be, considering the taxes.” Both the apartment and my admission to the local elementary school were the direct result of Mr. Conklin’s intercession. It was understood that either could be withdrawn at a moment’s notice.

Stout and redfaced with a pug nose and a loud, jovial voice, Joseph P. Conklin was a sentimental bully with unsettling moments of gaiety and kindness. He brought me a doll once — and occasionally chocolates for Mother — and he sang “Danny Boy” every St. Patrick’s Day as the restaurant was closing. But even in his best moments I was leery of him. I hated it when he wanted me to sit on his knee and tell him how I was doing in school. Fortunately his interest was usually focused on his property: the restaurants, his triple-decker, and his motel. He hiked his profits and kept his costs down by employing illegal immigrants like Mother, for whom he had originally gotten a visitor’s visa.

As relatives, Mother and I occupied a privileged position; we were given the apartment and protected from the school authorities. In exchange, Mr. Conklin paid Mother less than the minimum wage and visited every Saturday around five o’clock on his way to the restaurant. If it was nice weather, Mother would send me out on the big front porch of the triple-decker, where I would watch the traffic and try to spit on the drooping heads of the hydrangeas that flanked the front steps far below. If it was bad weather, Mother would tell me to go down and see Annie on the first floor. Annie was a stooped, arthritic old lady with a close and cluttered apartment and a fat gray neutered cat. She was lonely for company and never minded my visits. We would sit companionably, watching her old black and white TV or crocheting, until I heard Mr. Conklin’s smart patent leather loafers descending the stairs. Then I would tell Annie I had to go to dinner.

Upstairs, Mother would set the table and lay out dishes without saying much. When we first came, she’d cried and talked to her saint and said Aileen — this was Mr. Conklin’s wife, who’d had polio and was in a wheelchair — would put a stop to it; later on, she was flustered and ashamed; finally she was bitter. That was when she realized we were trapped. Mr. Conklin relied on that. “You’re nobody,” I heard him say to her once. “Nobody knows you’re here. You’re invisible and be damn glad you are or Immigration’ll have you back on the blessed Old Sod before you can pack your bags.”

Working in the restaurant and the motel and being visited by Mr. Conklin changed my mother. She lost the prettiness I can see in her old photographs, and she lost the playfulness and sweetness that she had when my dad was alive. She grew tired and silent and tough. I was not tough — not then and not for many years. That July I was still afraid of the dark people at the far end of the street and of the sirens and night noises and of Mr. Conklin, who held our lives in his clean, meaty hands.

Since Mother was out working during the day, I spent afternoons in the local park, where there was a pool, picnic tables, a playground, and an organized recreation program. Whenever the swim team or adults had the pool, the rec department supervisors encouraged us in messy arts and crafts and group singing. Eventually, some of us formed a chorus, and the plan was that we would sing for our parents and for the local convalescent home at the end of the summer.

Everything about the chorus was wonderful: the rehearsals under the maple trees during the hot afternoons, the schmaltzy songs like “It’s a Small World” and “Frere Jacques,” the giggling groups of gossipy, self-important little girls. The only difficulty came when the chorus voted to wear dresses for our concerts. I had a skirt for Mass, of course, but for the concerts a dress, preferably a pretty sundress, was essential, and for weeks I teased Mother and scoured the newspaper ads for sales. Finally she announced that she’d gotten some material. Secretly I would have preferred something from Caldor’s or Ames, but the material she pulled out of the bag — light blue with small pink and yellow flowers — was soft and pretty.

“With a ruffle,” I asked. “Can we have it with a ruffle?”

Mother smiled. I look at her pictures now and think how pretty she was, how very pretty before she grew tired and overworked and tough. Once she had liked nice clothes, been flirtatious, carefree, popular; she understood the importance of a ruffle. Mother started the dress early the next morning, before she went off on the bus to clean at the motel, and she finished it late the same week, after she came in from mopping up the snack bar. On Saturday morning, I found the dress waiting for me, a pinafore style with ruffles around the arm holes and two pockets on the skirt.

I put it on. It was not just a perfect fit but a perfect, transforming dress. I was undersized, bony and plain. In the dress, I seemed dainty; the effect was charming; I was enchanted.

“Take it off and hang it up,” said Mother. “You’ll have it dirty before the day’s out. It has to be kept for good.”

I hung the sundress up in our closet, but as soon as I came back from the park, I ran to look at it, to stroke the ruffles and spread out the skirt. And when, just around four, the phone rang and Mother had to go out on an errand, I could not resist trying on my dress again.

I dragged a kitchen chair into the bathroom and climbed up to look in the mirror of the medicine cabinet. I was standing there admiring myself when I heard the knock on the door followed by the sound of a key turning in the lock.

“Are you home, Patsy?” Mr. Conklin was the only one who ever called my mother Patsy.

“Patsy?” I heard him walking softly through the living room and down the hall. For a fattish man he had a light tread.

I didn’t want to see him, and if I hadn’t been afraid of dirtying my dress, I’d have slipped under the bed. In my moment of hesitation he appeared in the doorway.

“Where’s your mother?”

“She had to go to the store,” I said.

“Don’t you answer the door when someone knocks?”

I shook my head.

“Where are your manners?” he asked. “Who else visits you every Saturday?” Then he laughed. “But there’ll be boys around soon enough,” he said, looking at me more closely. “Very pretty.” He reached out and touched the ruffle. “I must be paying Patsy more than I thought.”

I flinched away from him. “Mother made this for me,” I said, almost in tears. His remark spoiled my happiness. I wished I’d never put on the dress; I wished Mother would come home; I wished he was dead.

“There there now,” he said, hitching up his light summer pants and sitting down on the edge of the bed. “Who’s your pal, eh? Who brought you that Barbie doll?”

I bit my lip and didn’t answer.

He ran his finger along the ruffle again, then smoothed the front of my dress. “I don’t have a little girl of my own, you know,” he said. “Wouldn’t have been as pretty as you anyway. Your mother now, there’s a pretty woman. I met her on a visit to the Old Country. She wasn’t much older than you, and she was one of the prettiest girls in Belfast; that’s the truth.”

He took my arm although I tried to ease away. “Come sit here for a minute,” he said. His voice sounded different, soft and sort of sticky, like something Mother would say was “too sweet to be wholesome.”

“Since your mother is out.”

“You called her,” I said, frightened by sudden knowledge. “You asked her to get something for the snack shop.”

“Did I now? And me with a car and going out anyway as I always do on a Saturday evening? Would I do such a thing?”

“You called her,” I said, stubborn despite my fear.

“You’re a clever girl,” he said, settling me on his lap. “Maybe we should send you to the sisters at St. Bridget’s. Would you like that? Wear a nice little uniform, they do. Gray blazer,” he said, running his hand down my dress again, “little maroon tie, little maroon and gray kilt, little gray kneesocks. Just to here. Wouldn’t you like that? Lots of nice Irish boys and girls at St. Bridget’s.”

I stopped trying to squirm away from him. “I like my school,” I said, “but I’d like St. Bridget’s better.”

He laughed. “I just bet you would. I just bet you would. Well, it depends if you’re good.” He was stroking my knee, and I both did and did not know what he meant. I’d heard a fair bit out on the porch on those warm evenings.

“We’d have to ask my mother,” I said.

“Oh, your mother can’t afford St. Bridget’s. Never in this life! Don’t imagine your mother can afford to send you to the sisters.”

“My mother decides,” I said.

He laughed. “Does she now?” I could see the veins in the whites of his eyes; I could smell his aftershave, and something else, a raw, dangerous smell.

“I want to get down now,” I said.

“Not yet,” he said, sliding his meaty red fingers under my dress. “Not if you want to get to St. Bridget’s.”

A minute later I started to scream.

“Shhh,” said Mr. Conklin, and when I didn’t stop, he yelled, “Shut up, shut up, you little bitch!”

I wasn’t tough like my mother. The scream wasn’t under my control, it went echoing around my head and burned between my legs and poured out like blood from a wound. I couldn’t stop, not even when he slapped me. The scream was so independent, so beyond my control, that at last it even frightened Mr. Conklin, who did up his pants and hurried down the hall and out the door.

Mother came home just minutes later. I was sitting on the bed. My dress was torn, and there was blood on my legs. Mother took one look at me, and her face went white. She wrapped her arms around me, cursing and sobbing at the same time. When she stopped, she said, “I’ll fix that bastard. He’ll never hurt you again.” Taut with anger and pain, her face was almost unrecognizable, and I was nearly as frightened of her as of Mr. Conklin. “I promise,” she said. “As God is my witness.”

“No,” I said, “no!” I had an intimation of disaster, loss, some terrible punishment. Good or bad, Mr. Conklin was the chief power in our small universe.

“You’ll see,” Mother said. “I won’t bear this.” Then she sat back on her heels and looked at me. “It’s got to be a secret. God forgive me, you’ve got to keep this a secret. The police would tell Immigration. Do you understand that? We can’t tell anyone what that bastard did.”

I nodded my head. I didn’t want to tell anyone. I had no words for what had happened. “A secret,” I said.

“A deep, dark secret,” Mother said grimly.

Sometime after ten P.M. the next Friday Mr. Conklin died behind his fast food restaurant. A stab wound stopped his heart so suddenly that he was dead before he hit the pavement. The papers made much of the speed of his passing, and for years I carried an image of Mr. Conklin tumbled like a large, ungainly bird from the sky and dying in mid-fall.

That night my mother was late coming home from work. The city sounds made me nervous — the sudden shrieks and eerie lights of police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances, the accelerating hot rods with their booming radios, the hoarse, quarrelsome voices of men drifting back from the bars — and I was still awake at eleven o’clock when I heard her footsteps. I ran to unlock the door.

Mother’s weary face was bloodless. “I’m sorry I’m so late, darling,” she said. “I had to wait and lock up. Mr. Conklin didn’t come back from making the night deposit.”

“I hope he never comes back,” I said.

Mother gave me a sharp look. “Be careful what you wish for,” she said, then she went into the bedroom and began to pack our cases.

Mr. Conklin looked out at us from the morning paper. His picture made him seem younger and more benevolent than he ever looked in life. The accompanying story told us about his violent end. I was thrilled and horrified by his death, by the unlooked-for fame of one of our acquaintances. These were sensational and superficial emotions, but I was genuinely sorry and frightened about leaving our apartment.

“My job’s gone,” Mother explained. “We don’t exist. There never were any papers, agreements.”

I asked about school, about the park chorus, our concerts; Mother looked me in the face and shook her head. I felt suspicion dawn in a shiver of anxiety that grew stronger when we caught the morning bus to Boston without saying goodbye to anyone, not even to Annie. Once in Boston, the MTA took us to the South End, where we started calling ourselves Malloy instead of O’Brien and quietly disappeared into the Irish community. We put down a security deposit on a shabby apartment, and a very distant relative of Mother’s found her a job in a sweatshop sewing curtains.

That fall I attended a real urban school, where I learned to smoke and swear and became outwardly tough. Inside I was frightened of a lot of things, all related to secrets and to July: men, sex, sudden death, Immigration. Underneath were even deeper fears, more terrible because unacknowledged: the fear of guilt, police, and discovery; the fear, worst of all, of being separated from Mother, whose protection, I sensed, was both sure and terrible.

It was several years before I learned that my particular horrors were not unique. Fear and loss were the common experiences of my classmates, and the art of keeping secrets was so essential to our survival that, though we could not forget old fears, we could push them down relentlessly. I put away my suspicions and learned to live with ambiguity. When I graduated from high school, I joined the army, where I became a citizen and trained as a nurse. Amid the suffering of others I at last grew really tough, tough enough to ask Mother the question that had haunted my youth.

It was on another summer day, and tough or not, I would probably not have dared ask if we hadn’t gone to Hartford. I had to attend a lecture at the medical center, and Mother said she’d ride along and visit a friend who lived nearby in Farmington. When I picked her up after the program, she suggested driving down to Park Street to see the old triple-decker. At once my childish fears returned. I stopped in the parking lot and looked at her.

“If it’s not out of the way,” said Mother, handsome in her dark navy dress. For years she had worn only dark colors, black, navy, deep purple, somber shades that gave her a vaguely European air. The rich ladies who patronized the bridal salon where Mother worked thought her taste distinguished and sophisticated.

I shook my head. “Is it wise?” I asked.

Mother gave nothing away. “Who do you think will notice us?” she answered.

Of course she was right. I parked near the house, and Mother got out on the sidewalk and looked up at the big solid building with the flaring eaves and the prowlike porches. Blue-gray vinyl siding covered the dark wood shingles, and Mother approved. “Saves the painting,” she said. “Clean-looking. Young Joe must be up on all the latest.”

“Young Joe?”

“Mr. Conklin’s son. He must be just a few years older than you are. Aileen’s probably turned everything over to him by now. It was her money, part of it anyway. Her people owned some grocery stores, you know.”

I did not know, and I thought Mother might say more about the Conklins, but she took a last look up at the apartment and got back into the car. “I’ve never been so hot as in that third floor flat,” she said. “Remember how hot it used to get?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Go on down Park,” Mother said. “We might as well stop by the snack shop, too.”

She spoke so casually that I felt guilty for all the years of suspicion and apprehension. Nonetheless, I drove downtown carefully, nervously alert for stop signs, traffic lights, and squad cars. Next to me, Mother looked out the windows and remarked on changes in the neighborhood. The Portuguese shops had mostly gone, leaving a mix of Indian and Southeast Asian businesses: Bombay Foods, a Vietnamese market, shops that promised to speak Khmer, Vietnamese, Hindi, or Laotian. The old snack shop had been transformed into the New Thai Palace Restaurant, and Mother said, “Turn in. There’s room for you to park.”

I pulled next to a van labeled NEW THAI PALACE — RESTAURANT, CATERING, TAKEOUT and shut off the motor. The late spring evening was mild and pleasant. The sun turned the bricks of the restaurant to gold, and the sky was a peachy shade of pink. Mother stepped out of the car and walked around behind the restaurant where a big exhaust fan whirred out the smell of hot oil and spices. Beyond a brown board fence, children were shouting and playing, and on the sidewalk two women in saris and dark sweaters pushed their children in strollers. Mother studied the restaurant, the garbage cans, the little open porch that led into the kitchen. Long ago Mr. Conklin had been seized by some swift and terrible force right at the foot of those steps.

For years I had wondered about the precise agent. Now that I was on the verge of discovery, I found I’d rather not know. “Please let’s go,” I said.

Mother seemed surprised that I was nervous. She herself was perfectly composed, a fine looking woman somewhere in middle age, her hair still dark, her face only faintly lined, old hardships and weariness visible only in her eyes. The days of sweatshops and exploitation had eventually ended in Boston, where she had turned her toughness into such elegance that men admired her and were afraid of her. Six years ago she had married a brave one who owned a fancy funeral home and had become comfortable and happy.

“There is no danger,” she said as she walked back to the car. “I told you that years ago.”

I remembered the hot apartment, panic, fear, and pain — and Mother’s contorted mask-like face. “You said you’d fix Mr. Conklin.”

“I wanted to comfort you,” my mother said, looking at me calmly. “But people are different. You would have been happier not knowing. You lack the taste for vengeance. It is a shame you never went to the sisters. They would have approved.”

“I would have suspected anyway,” I said. “We packed right up and left.”

Mother gave a slight shrug. “We’d have gone immediately in any case. Aileen hated me; she’d have had us out of the apartment before his funeral.”

“I was terrified you’d be questioned,” I said. “For years I worried that someone would come, that you’d be taken away, that somehow…”

“We didn’t exist,” said Mother. “If he told me that once, he told me a hundred times.”

“But the knife, the fingerprints, the other workers? There must have been evidence. Look at this place — where was there to hide anything?”

Mother got back in the car and fastened her seatbelt before answering. “I didn’t have a plan,” she said. “I’ve been told that makes a difference, not planning I mean. I don’t even know all that was in my mind when I went out the door after him. It was around ten fifteen. He was going to the night deposit, but first he stepped out for a smoke — one of those vile cigars. There was a boning knife on the counter, sharp as a razor. I picked it up because I wanted him to know I was serious. I was desperate and hot and sick, and my heart was breaking. He’d gone too far. I wanted to tell him that he was never, ever to touch either of us again.”

“What did he say?”

Mother’s face grew dark and reflective. “He laughed,” she said. “He had trampled my heart; he had hurt the one person I had left, my only treasure, and still he laughed — you see what it is to be rich and powerful. Then he said that I was looking older, and I understood everything. We were nothing to him, nothing at all, and he was thinking of you for a replacement.”

“I was ten years old,” I said in a small voice.

“There was really nothing else to do,” Mother said. “I was surprised he took such a long time to fall.”

I imagined the night parking lot with the moths swirling around the security lights, the long shadows, the urban smells of hot asphalt, exhaust, and garbage cans, and my mother, young then and frightened, standing by the stair with a knife in her hand. “Everyone thought it was a robbery,” I said.

“So it was: the day’s taking from two restaurants,” Mother said with a slight smile. “The police blamed the gangs, the Puerto Ricans, wild kids from the project. What else could they do? He’d managed very carefully, and very few people knew me.”

“But the knife?” I asked. “What about the knife?”

“You don’t know restaurants,” she said. “Restaurants are full of knives. I rinsed off the boning knife in the sink and threw it in the dishwasher. As far as I was thinking at all, I figured the staff would unload it the next morning and put it back in the rack as usual.”

“Of course,” I said. I realized that my brave and decisive mother was untouched by fantasy. While I had been tormented for years by fears of discovery and loss and guilt, failure had never crossed her mind. She was a woman without imagination. “But didn’t he have a wallet? Didn’t he used to carry something for the money?”

Mother opened her pocketbook and pulled out a battered green leather zippered purse that I’d seen a thousand times without recognition. “No matter where you discard things, they’re apt to be found,” she said calmly.

I was dazzled by the simplicity of her strategy, which had required only nerve and silence. Until now. I could not decide whether her guilty secret had finally and irresistibly resurfaced — as guilty secrets are supposed to do — or whether she felt a satisfaction that demanded recognition. I realized uneasily that the parish gentlemen who admired and feared my mother were right. Life had made her desperate, and then it had made her remarkable. Mr. Conklin had been hit by a force quite out of his reckoning.

We were seated over breakfast, my friend Mr. Sherlock Holmes deeply engrossed in his morning paper, when I heard him mutter something. “I beg your pardon, Holmes?” I asked.

“Sumatra,” he repeated, all but to himself. “My God, even for Moriarty this is appalling!”

“Holmes,” I exclaimed, “what is it?”

He put down the paper and looked in my direction, but he appeared not to see me. That in itself was so singular that I was immediately on my guard. When Sherlock Holmes looked, he saw — it was one of his dicta. But on that cold December morning in 1888, he stared as if through me out to the drizzly fog that enshrouded London.

I tried again to speak to him, but he waved me off impatiently. “Watson, please, don’t interrupt me. It may already be too late.”

Accustomed as I was to his outbursts, his tone still smarted. I started to remonstrate, but he had already risen and gone to the corner by the coal scuttle in our rooms at 221B Baker Street. There he kept his stack of past editions of London’s newspapers. As I watched in growing concern, he attacked the pile, throwing whole sections out behind him when they didn’t contain that for which he was searching.

Then, with an armload of papers, he half fell into his chair, grabbing his pipe on the way down. For the next quarter hour he sat engulfed in tobacco smoke, muttering or cursing one moment, and the next falling into a quiet and desperate depression. After watching him for a time, I ventured another syllable.

“Holmes?”

He flung some of the papers at me. “Read it for yourself, Watson. It may be the end of us all.”

I picked the papers from the floor and began perusing them. Some were up to two years old, and I must confess I saw nothing in them but yesterday’s news. Nevertheless, I slogged through the sections, pausing from time to time at a familiar name or at the mention of a case in which Holmes and I had been involved. While I read, Holmes evidently finished his work and rang for Mrs. Hudson. When our landlady appeared, he sent her to fetch Billy the page, saying it was a matter of the utmost urgency.

Quickly, he scratched a note on a pad and then, filling another pipe, turned to me as he lit it. “Well, Watson, I must say that as a doctor you are calm enough about it.”

I must have looked at him blankly.

“The plague, Watson! The plague! Can it be you don’t see it?” Before I could respond, he had rushed to the table and snatched several of the papers away from me. “Look here!” he exclaimed. “And here! And here! You see nothing? Nothing?” He was grabbing and pulling the sections every which way. I had never seen him so agitated.

“Holmes! There’s no need to be rude.”

That brought him up short. He visibly summoned that control upon which he prides himself, straightening himself to his full height, taking a deep breath. “My dear man, please forgive me.”

“It’s nothing, Holmes, it’s forgotten. But what is it? Please tell me.”

Looking at the door, he came to some decision. “Well, I guess there is time before Billy comes.” And he sat down, pulling that day’s Times in front of him.

“Here, Watson, on page five — the article on our old friend Colonel Sebastian Moran.”

I had read it, of course. The travels of the famous hunter were always of interest to me, both because they were often fascinating in themselves, but also and not least because of his position as Professor Moriarty’s chief lieutenant. The article was an account of a Boer pirate attack on Moran’s ship as it had been rounding the Horn on its return from Sumatra, loaded with hunting trophies. Moran and his crew had fought off the belligerents, hauled the injured ship back to Johannesburg and delivered it and its dead crew to the British authorities. A particular point of interest was that they had neither docked nor resupplied at port and had allowed no one to board their vessel.

“It seems like a typical Moran adventure,” I said upon rereading it.

“By itself, you may be right, Watson. But what of this?”

He placed before me the oldest of the newspapers and pointed to a piece on the outbreak of bubonic plague that had occurred two years before on Siberut, a tiny island off the west coast of Sumatra.

“And these…”

The other articles related to a Dr. Culverton-Smith, who had announced and then retracted the news that he had developed and hoped shortly to perfect a serum that would prevent and cure bubonic plague.

I had just finished the last of these when there was a sharp rap at our door, followed immediately by the entrance into our quarters of Billy. One of the street urchins who frequented the alleys hereabouts, Billy had more than once proved a useful ally to my friend and me.

Holmes wasted no time on greeting him but handed him the note he’d scribbled earlier. “Ah, Billy, here. Deliver this at once to the address listed, and wait there for a reply.”

Without a word, the boy was off, and I was again left alone with Holmes, pondering the obscure links in this bizarre chain. “What is this about, Holmes? What was that note?”

Now that he had taken some action, he reverted to that languid pose I knew so well. His eyes had become so black they appeared nearly hooded. But this time there was none of the sparkle in them that always appeared after the “view halloo” had been sounded, when the game was afoot. This time it was no game.

“The note was to Dr. Culver ton-Smith, Watson — one of the most evil and brilliant men to ever grace your profession.” He took a long pull at his pipe. “I wondered how long it would be before Professor Moriarty and he made each other’s acquaintance.” Then he sighed with an ineffable sadness. “I only wish I had acted to prevent it. I only hope now I’m not too late.” He sighed again, wearily.

“What did the note say?”

He waved his pipe. “Oh, it was prosaic enough. It said, ‘England will pay you more than Moriarty.’”

“For what?”

“For the serum, of course. The cure for bubonic plague.”

“My God, Holmes, could it be…?”

“I don’t know yet. I won’t know for sure until Billy comes back. Halloa? That would be him now.”

He jumped up and ran to the door, opening it before the panting boy could even knock. Breathlessly, Billy handed a missive to Holmes, who ripped open the engraved envelope. As he read, his shoulders sagged.

Absently, he forced some coins on Billy and rather unceremoniously shooed him out. I thought he was a little too brusque with the boy and told him so.

“Watson, it’s as I suspected. Moriarty, Moran and Culverton-Smith are in it together, and no one must know. There would be panic.”

“What does the reply say?”

Holmes smiled but with no humor. “‘My dear Mr. Holmes,’” he read, “‘Your offer is interesting. Unfortunately, what England can pay me is rather off the point, since within a year, my associates and I will England.’”

“Holmes!” I exclaimed.

“Exactly. Moriarty plans to inoculate himself and his henchmen against the plague, then introduce the disease into England.”

“How would he do that?”

“Probably through an animal that Moran has captured and smuggled onto his ship.”

The pieces were beginning to fit, though my own enlightenment had none of the epiphanic quality of Holmes’s. “But if they merely patented the serum,” I argued, “they would be millionaires many times over.”

Again that frigid grin. “Power, Watson. Power is more seductive than money, and for Moriarty it is everything. His mind envisions an England desolate and depopulated but one where he is absolute ruler, a medieval king. The population not under his power — including you and me, my friend — would die in swollen, boil-infested agony.”

“You shock me!”

“Depend on it, Watson. I know my man.”

“What can we do?”

The grin softened to a smile. “Good old Watson,” he said. “Where there is danger, you have no fear. Where courage is needed, you have no peer. It would be a good epitaph.”

The warmth I felt at the compliment quickly chilled at the vision of my own tomb. “Still,” I said, “what can be done?”

Within moments, I had my answer. I had been reading again, trying to piece together the disparate elements of this diabolical plot, when Holmes tapped my shoulder. I must have been deeply engrossed in my researches not to have noticed Holmes leave the room. But now he was back, dressed and bundled for an excursion.

“Get your coat, Watson. I think we should pay a visit to the Diogenes Club.”

There’s plant life in parts of the Everglades that’s to be found nowhere else in the country, spores carried by hurricane winds from the West Indies that take root and flourish in the steamy tropical climate and are exotic and primitive and sometimes dangerous. Some say that in Mangrove City there’s animal life to be found nowhere else.

Mangrove City isn’t really a city unless you use the term generously. It’s a stretch of ramshackle, moss-marred clapboard buildings where the road runs through the swamp along relatively dry land. The “city” is a few small shops, a restaurant, a service station with a sign warning you to fill your gas tank because the swamp’s full of alligators, a barber shop with a red and white barber pole that’s also green with mold. There’s a police station in the same rundown frame building as the city hall, and a blackened ruin that was Muggy’s Lounge until it burned down five years ago. Next to the ruin is the new and improved Muggy’s, constructed of cinder block and with a corrugated steel roof. Not a city, really. Barely a town. More like something unfortunate that happened on the side of the road.

A mile before you get to Mangrove City, that is before if you’re driving west the way Carver had, is the Glades Inn, a sixteen-unit motel. It’s a low brick structure, built in a U to embrace a swimming pool. Carver couldn’t imagine anyone ever actually swimming in the thing. The algae on its surface was green and thick. A diving board sagged toward the water and was draped with Spanish moss. From the far corner of the pool came a dull plop and a stirring of sluggish water as a bullfrog, tired of Carver’s scrutiny, hopped for green cover. Carver set the tip of his cane on the hot gravel surface of the parking lot and limped toward the office.

As he pushed open the door, a bell tinkled. That didn’t seem to mean much. The knotty-pine-paneled office was deserted. Behind the long counter, whose front was paneled to match the walls, was a half-eaten sandwich on a desk, next to an old black IBM Selectric typewriter. The only furniture on Carver’s side of the desk was a red vinyl chair with a rip in its seat that revealed white cotton batting struggling to get out. On the wall near the chair was a framed color photograph of a buxom woman in a bikini and cowboy boots, riding on the back of a large alligator. She was grinning with her mouth open wide and had an arm raised as if she were waving the ten-gallon hat in her hand. Carver leaned close and studied the photograph. The woman was stuffed into the bikini. The alligator was just stuffed.

“Some sexy ’gator, don’tcha think?” a voice said.

Carver turned and saw a stooped old man with a grizzled gray beard that refused to grow over a long, curved scar on his right cheek. The right eye, near the scar, was a slightly different shade of blue from that of the left and might have been glass. The man had a wiry build beneath a ragged plaid shirt and dirty jeans. He was behind the desk, and Carver couldn’t see much of the lower half of his body, but what he could see, and the way the man moved, gave the impression he was bowlegged. His complexion was like raw meat, almost as if he’d been badly burned long ago.

“I didn’t see you there,” Carver said, noticing now a paneled door that matched the wall paneling behind the desk.

“I was in back, heard the bell, knowed there was somebody out heah.” He had an oddly clipped southern accent yet drew out the last words of his sentences: heeah. He leaned scrawny elbows on the desk and grinned with incredibly bad teeth, shooting a look at Carver’s cane. “What can I do ya, friend?”

Carver saw now that he had a plastic nametag pinned to his shirt, but it was blank. He immediately named the man “Crusty” in his mind. It fit better than the baggy shirt and pants the man wore. And it certainly went with his faint but acrid odor of stale urine. “You can give me a room.”

Crusty looked surprised. Even shocked. “You sure ’bout that?”

“Sure am. This is a motel, right?”

“Well, ’course it is. ’S’cuse my bein’ put back on my heels, but this heah’s the off-season.”

Carver wondered when the “on” season was. And why.

Crusty got a registration card out of a desk drawer and laid it on the counter along with a plastic ballpoint pen that was lettered Irv’s Baits. “You want smokin’ or nonsmokin’?”

Carver thought he had to be kidding, but said, “Smoking. Every once in a while I enjoy a cigar.”

“Be eighty-five dollars a night with tax,” Crusty said.

“That’s steep,” Carver commented as he signed the register. Crusty shrugged. “We’re a val’able commodity, bein’ the only motel for miles.”

“You might be the only anything for miles that doesn’t swim or fly.”

“Then how come you’re heah” — Crusty looked at the registration card — “Mr. Carver from Del Moray?”

“The fishing,” Carver said.

Crusty’s genuine-looking eye widened. “Not many folks come here for the fishin’.”

“No doubt they just come to frolic in the pool,” Carver said. “You take Visa?”

“Nope. Gotta be good ol’ U.S. cash money.”

Carver got his wallet from his pocket, held it low so Crusty couldn’t see its contents, and counted out 850 dollars. The cost of doing business, he thought, and laid the bills on the desk.

Now both of Crusty’s eyes bulged. The glass one — if it was glass — threatened to pop out.

“Ten nights in advance,” Carver explained. “I always give myself enough time to fish until I catch something.”

Crusty took the money and handed him a key with a large red plastic tag with the numeral 10 on it. “End unit, south side,” he said. Carver thanked him and moved toward the door.

“You got one of the rooms with a TV, no extra charge,” Crusty said. “Ice machine’s down t’other end of the buildin’. Just keep pressin’ the button till the ice quits comin’ out brown.”

“I’ll make myself at home,” Carver told him and limped out into the sultry afternoon, astounded to realize it was cooler outside than in the office.

Number 10 was a small room with a dresser, a tiny corner desk, and a wall-mounted TV facing a sagging bed. The carpet was threadbare red. The drapes were sun-faded red. The bedspread matched the drapes. An old air conditioner was set in the wall beneath the single window that looked out on the unhealthy hole that was the pool, then across the road to the shadowed and menacing swamp.

Carver tossed his single scuffed-leather suitcase onto the bed, then went over and opened a door, flipped a wall switch that turned on a light, and examined the bathroom. The swimming pool should have prepared him. There was no bathtub, only a shower stall with a pebbled-glass door. The commode and sink were chipped, yellowed porcelain and so similar in design that they looked interchangeable. A fat palmetto bug, unable to bear the light, or maybe its surroundings, scurried along the base of the shower stall and disappeared in a crack in the wall behind the toilet.

I guess I’ve stayed in worse places, Carver thought, but in truth he couldn’t remember when.

As he was unpacking and hanging his clothes in the alcove that passed for a closet, he laid his spare moccasins up on the wooden shelf and felt them hit something, scraping it over the rough wood. He reached back on the shelf and felt something hard that at first he thought was a coin, but it was a brass Aztec calendar, about two inches in diameter and with a hole drilled in it off-center, as if to make it wearable on a chain.

Carver stood for a moment wondering what to do with the brass trinket, then tossed it back up on the shelf. People might have been doing that with it for years.

He sat down on the bed and picked up the old black rotary-dial phone. Then he thought better of talking on a line that would undoubtedly be shared by Crusty the innkeeper and replaced the receiver. He decided to drive into town and make his call.

Outside Muggy’s Lounge was a public phone, the kind you can park next to and use in your car, if you can park close enough and your arm is long enough. There was a dusty white van parked next to the phone, with no one in it. So Carver parked his ancient Olds convertible on the edge of the graveled lot, climbed out, and limped through the heat to the phone. If the humidity climbed another few degrees, he might be able to swim.

He used his credit card to call Ollie Frist in Del Moray. Frist was a disabled railroad worker who’d retired to Florida ten years ago with his wife and teenage son. The wife had died. The son, Terry, had grown up and become a cop in the Del Moray police department. Terry had come to Mangrove City six months ago, telling anyone who’d asked that he was going on a fishing trip. Ollie Frist had gotten the impression his son was working on something on his own and wanted to learn more before he brought the matter to the attention of his superiors. Two days later Ollie Frist was notified that Terry had been found dead in the swamp outside Mangrove City. At first they’d thought the death was due to natural causes and an alligator had mauled and consumed part of the body afterward. Then the autopsy revealed that the alligator had been the natural cause.

The Del Moray authorities had gotten in touch with the Mangrove City authorities. Accidental death, they decided. The grieving father, Ollie Frist, didn’t buy it. What he had bought were Carver’s services.

“Mr. Frist?” Carver asked when the phone on the other end of the line was picked up.

“It is. That you, Carver?” Frist was hard of hearing and roared rather than spoke.

“Me,” Carver said. He knew he could keep his voice at a normal volume; Frist had shown him the special amplifier on the phone in his tiny Del Moray cottage. “I’m checked into the motel where Terry stayed.”

“It’s a dump, right? Terry said when he phoned to let me know where he was staying that the place wasn’t four-star.”

“Astronomically speaking, it’s more of a black hole. Did Terry actually tell you he was coming to this place to fish?”

“That’s what he said. I didn’t believe it then. Should I believe it now?”

“No. There’s some fishing here, I’m sure. But there’s probably more poaching. It’s the kind of backwater place where most of the population gets by doing this or that, this side of the law or the other.”

“You think that’s what Terry was onto, some kinda alligator poaching operation?”

“I doubt it. He wouldn’t see it as that big a deal, or that unusual. He probably would have just phoned the Mangrove City law if that were the case.” A bulky, bearded man wearing jeans and a sleeveless black T-shirt had walked around the dusty white van and was standing and staring at Carver. Maybe waiting to use the phone. “I’ll hang around town for a while,” Carver said, “see if I can pick up on anything revealing. There’s something creepy and very wrong about this place. As of now it’s just a sensation I have on the back of my neck, but I’ve had it before and it’s seldom been wrong.” The big man next to the van crossed his beefy arms and glared at Carver.

“Keep me posted,” Frist shouted into the phone. “Let me know if you need anything at this end.”

Carver said he’d do both those things, then hung up the phone.

He set the tip of his cane in the loose gravel and walked past the big man, who didn’t move. His muscular arms were covered with the kind of crude, faded blue tattoos a lot of ex-cons sport from their time in prison, and on his right cheek was tattooed a large black spider that appeared to be crawling toward the corner of his eye. He puffed up his chest as Carver limped past him. He probably thought he was tough. Carver knew the type. He probably was tough.

The striking thing about Mangrove City’s main street, which was called Cypress Avenue as it ran between the rows of struggling business establishments, was how near the swamp was. Walls of lush green seemed to loom close behind the buildings on each side of the road. Towering cypress and mangrove trees leaned toward each other over the road as if they yearned someday to embrace high above the cracked pavement. The relentless and ratchety hum of insects was background music, and the fetid, rotting, life-and-death stench of the swamp was thick in the air and lay on the tongue like a primal taste.

The humid air felt like warm velvet on his exposed skin as Carver crossed the parking lot and entered Muggy’s Lounge.

Ah! In Muggy’s, it was cool.

There were early customers scattered among the booths and tables, and a few slumped at the long bar. Carver sat on a stool near the end of the bar and asked the bartender for a Budweiser.

The bartender brought him a can and let Carver open it. He didn’t offer a glass. He was a tall, skinny man with a pockmarked face, intent dark eyes set too close together, and a handlebar moustache that was red despite the fact that his hair was brown.

“So whaddya think of our little town?” he asked.

It’s conducive to insanity, Carver thought, but he said, “How do you know I’m not from around here?”

The bartender laughed. “There ain’t that many folks from around here, and we tend to know each other even if we ain’t sleeping together.” Someone at the other end of the bar motioned to him and he moved away, wiping his hands on a gray towel tucked in the belt of his cut-off jeans.

Carver sipped his beer and looked around. Muggy’s was a surprisingly long building with booths lining the walls beyond where the bar ended. On a shelf high above the bar was a stuffed alligator about five feet long, watching whatever went on with glass eyes that nonetheless seemed bright with evil cunning. There were box speakers mounted every ten feet or so around the edges of the ceiling, tilted downward and aimed at the customers as if they might fire bullets or dispense noxious gas. Right now they were silent. The only sound was the ticking of one of the half-dozen slowly revolving ceiling fans, stirring the air-conditioned atmosphere and moving tobacco smoke around. It occurred to Carver that the clientele in Muggy’s might have stopped talking to each other when he walked inside.

The bulky man who’d been watching Carver outside entered the lounge and swaggered toward him. He was about average height but very wide, with muscle rippling under his fat like energy trapped beneath his skin and trying to escape. He smiled thinly at Carver, then sat down on the stool next to him as if using the phone in succession had formed some sort of bond between them. When he smiled, the spider tattoo near his eye crinkled. Carver had seen real spiders do that after being sprayed with insecticide.

“You Mr. Fred Carver?” the man asked in a drawl that moved about as fast as the alligator above the bar.

“How did you guess?” Carver asked, continuing to stare straight ahead at the rows of bottles near the beer taps.

“Didn’t guess. I was told you checked in at the Glades Inn. I went and talked to the desk clerk, found out who you was.”

“Why?”

“Curious. Stranger here’s always news. Ain’t much happens to amuse us ’round these parts. We take our pleasure when we can.”

“You think I’m going to amuse you?”

“You got possibilities fer sure.”

Carver decided to meet this cretin head-on. “Ever hear of a man named Terry Frist?”

“Sure. Got his fool self killed and damn near et up by a ’gator a while back. Terrible thing.”

“Alligators usually kill their prey, then drag it back to their den at water’s edge where they hide it and let it rot until they can tear it apart easier with their teeth. The way I understand it, Terry Frist’s body was found on land.”

“Yeah. What was left of it. He was a cop, we found out later. From over in Del Moray. Say now, ain’t that where you’re from?”

Maybe not such a cretin. “It is,” Carver said, “but Frist and I didn’t know each other. I read in the newspaper about what happened to him here.”

“What is it you do for a livin’ there in Del Moray?”

“I’m in research. Decided to come here for the fishing.”

“Really? We ain’t known for the fishin’.”

“Didn’t I see a bait shop when I drove into town?”

“Oh yeah. Irv’s. Well, there’s some fishin’. More likely you’ll catch yourself a ’gator like that Frist fella did. Fishin’ suddenly becomes huntin’ when that happens, and you ain’t the hunter.”

The pockmarked bartender came over and asked what the big man was drinking.

“Nothin’.” He slid off his stool and looked hard at Carver. “Fishin’s no good this time of year at all. Not much reason for you to stay around town.”

“I like a challenge.”

“You’re more’n likely to get one if you go fishin’ in them swamp waters.”

“Can I rent an airboat anywhere around here?”

“Nope. Nowheres close, neither. Fella name of Ray Orb rents ’em some miles east, but the swamp’s too thick around these parts for airboats to get around in it. I think you best try someplace in an easterly direction.” He winked, then turned to leave.

“You didn’t mention your name,” Carver said.

“I.C. is what I’m called. Last name’s Unit. The I.C. stands for Intensive Care.” The spider crinkled again as if dying, and I.C. threw back his head and roared out a laugh. Carver watched him swagger out through the door, noticing that all the other customers averted their gazes.

“That his real name?” Carver asked the bartender when I.C. had left.

“He says it is. Nobody much wants to differ with him.”

“He as tough as he acts?”

“Oh yeah. Him and his buddies from over at Raiford.”

“Raiford? The state penitentiary?”

“That’s right. The three of ’em, I.C., Jake Magruder, and Luther Peevy, was in there together after they come down from Georgia and committed some heinous type crime. Some say it was murder. Luther Peevy, his folks died and left him a place nearby, so I guess that’s why they all settled in here ’bout a year ago.”

“I’ll bet the town was happy about that,” Carver said.

“This town was never happy,” the bartender said and moved away and began wiping down the bar with his gray towel.

Carver finished his beer, then walked around the town for a while before going into its only restaurant, Vanilla’s, for lunch, even though it was just eleven o’clock. He was hungry and he was here, and he didn’t know if the Glades Inn had a restaurant and didn’t want to find out. Crusty was probably the cook.

Though Vanilla’s was a weathered clapboard building that leaned on its foundation, it was surprisingly neat and clean inside. Small but heavy wooden tables were grouped evenly beneath a battery of ceiling fans rotating only slightly faster than the ones in Muggy’s. There was a small counter and double doors into the kitchen. Carver saw an old green Hamilton-Beach blender behind the counter and wondered if Vanilla’s sold milk shakes.

There were two men in white T-shirts and bib overalls at the counter, drinking coffee and eating pie. One of them, a redheaded man wearing a ponytail, turned on his stool, glanced at Carver, then went back to work on his apple pie. They seemed to be the only other warm bodies in Vanilla’s.

“’Nilla!” the redheaded man yelled. “You got yourself a customer.”

The double doors opened and a heavyset, perspiring woman in her fifties emerged from the kitchen. She had a florid complexion, weary blue eyes, and wispy gray hair that stuck out above one ear as if she’d slept too long on that side. She was wearing maroon slacks and a white blouse and apron and had a faint moustache. “Sit anywhere you want,” she told Carver in a hoarse voice as deep as a man’s.

He was aware of her looking at his cane as he limped to a table near the wall, well away from the counter. Fly-specked menus were propped between the salt and pepper shakers. He opened one and saw that the selection was limited.

Vanilla came over with an order pad and Carver asked for a club sandwich. Then he asked her if she served milk shakes and she said she did. He said chocolate.

“Why do people call you Vanilla?” he asked when she returned with his food and a thick milk shake, half in a glass, half remaining in the cold metal container that had fit onto the mixer.

“I used to be a blonde,” she said simply, then put his lunch on the table and went back into the kitchen.

Carver had eaten a few bites of the sandwich when he heard the door open and close. He looked in that direction and saw that a uniformed cop had come in, a short, obese, sixtyish man in a neatly pressed blue uniform with a gold badge on his chest.

He waddled directly to Carver’s table. “I’m Mangrove City Police Chief Jerry Gordon,” the cop said. He was one of those very fat men who breathe hard all the time, even when they speak.

Carver shook hands with Gordon and invited him to sit down.

“You’re Fred Carver from Del Moray,” Gordon said, settling his soft and wheezing bulk into the chair across the table from Carver.

“Your job to know,” Carver said, unsurprised. Everyone in town apparently knew his name and where he lived.

“It is that.” Gordon smiled. “You’re the only guest out at the Glades Inn. Only outsider in town, matter of fact. So you’re bound to be noticed. We ain’t exactly Miami here, Mr. Carver.”

“I guess you were told I’m here for the fishing,” Carver said.

“Oh, sure. I got a yuk out of that. Most folks’d rather drop a line in water where there’s more likely to be fish than something that’s gonna eat their bait then have them for dessert.”

“There must be some good fishing. Terry Frist came here a while back. He usually knew where they were biting.” A different lie for Gordon. He’d told I.C. Unit he hadn’t known Frist in Del Moray. Which had been the truth. Or part of the truth. The useful thing about lies was that they were so adaptable.

Chief Gordon gave Carver a dead-eyed, level look, the kind cops were so good at. “Way I recall it, Terry Frist didn’t catch nothin’ but a big ol’ ’gator. I’d be careful walkin’ in his footsteps.”

“Are you warning me to be careful in and out of the swamp, Chief?”

“Cautionin’ you, is the way I think of it.” He put his elbows on the table and leaned toward Carver. “I gotta tell you, there’s some angry people out there, in and around the swamp, all through these parts.”

“Angry at what?”

“Ever’thin’ from violence on TV an’ in the movies to supermarket bar codes. You don’t wanna do no verbal joustin’ with ’em. We got folks around here, Mr. Carver, would shoot you dead over violence on TV.”

“You think that’s what happened to Terry Frist? An argument over politics or the price of something in produce?”

“I think somebody shoulda warned Terry Frist. I read he was a cop. Maybe he was workin’ undercover, an’ this was no place for him to be.”

“Maybe he found out about something. Say, a drug-smuggling operation.”

Chief Gordon grinned. “Why, you’re fishin’ already, Mr. Carver.”

“Maybe. But Mangrove City’s near enough to the coast that drug shipments from the sea could be brought here by airboat through the swamp, and the law would never be able to figure out the routes or the timing. A cop — as you say, maybe working undercover — was killed here recently. And I met I. C. Unit this morning in Muggy’s and was told he’s part of a set and recently of the Union Correctional Institution over in Raiford. And now here you are…”

“The local cop on the take?” Gordon didn’t seem angry at the suggestion, which made Carver curious. “That’s so preposterous I ain’t even gonna respond to it, Mr. Carver, except to say we got creatures in the swamp more deadly than any ’gator. Maybe one of ’em killed Terry Frist.”

“And you don’t want to be next, is that it?”

“Nor do I want you to be, Mr. Carver. I.C. and that Peevy and Magruder, those are bad men. A ’gator grab one of ’em an’ it’d spit him right out. I did feel compelled to warn you, an’ now I have.” Chief Gordon shoved back his chair and stood up, tucking in his blue shirt around his bulging stomach.

Carver felt sorry for him. He was past his prime and dealing with local toughs who had him and the rest of Mangrove City under their collective greasy thumb.

“Do you think Terry Frist was murdered?” Carver asked.

Again Chief Gordon was impassive. “What all I think publicly, it’s all in my report, Mr. Carver. If you’re really serious about doin’ any fishin’ while you’re here, you oughta see Irv down at his bait shop. He’ll tell you where they’re bitin’ an’ you might not get bit back.” He raised a pudgy forefinger and wagged it at Carver. “You remember I said might.” He turned and waddled out, swinging his elbows wide to clear his holstered revolver and the clutter of gear attached to his belt.

Carver poked his straw into the thick milk shake and took a long sip. It was the best thing he’d encountered since arriving in Mangrove City.

Certain smells take you back in time as quickly as any period song. One whiff of Evening in Paris and I am a child again, watching my mother get dressed up. The smell of woodsmoke, bacon, newly turned dirt, a damp kitten, shoe polish, Krispy Kreme doughnuts — each evokes anew its own long sequence of memories… like gardenias on a summer night.

They’ve come for you at last. Outside your cell door, gathered like a storm. Each man holds a pendant sock and in the sock is a heavy steel combination lock which he has removed from the locker in his own cell. You feel them out there, every predatory one of them, and still they wait. They have found you. Finally they crowd open the cell door and pour in, flailing at you like mad drummers on amphetamines, their cats’ eyes glowing yellow in the dark, hammering at the recalcitrant bones of your face and the tender regions of your prone carcass, the soft tattoo of blows interwoven with grunts of exertion. It’s the old lock’n sock. You should have known. As you wait for the end, you think that it could’ve been worse. It has been worse, Christ, what they do to you some nights.

In our village, they were always known as the “Two Ladies of Rose Cottage”: Miss Eunice, with the white hair, and Miss Teresa with the gray. Nobody really knew where they came from, or exactly how old they were, but the consensus held that they had met in India, America, or South Africa, and decided to return to the homeland to live out their days together. And, in 1939, they were generally believed to be in or approaching their nineties.

Imagine our surprise, then, one fine day in September, when the police car pulled up outside Rose Cottage, and when, in a matter of hours, rumors began to spread throughout the village: rumors of human bones dug up in a distant garden; rumors of mutilation and dismemberment; rumors of murder.

I was twelve days out of traction in a 7-11 outside Poughkeepsie cradling Slim Jims and a six-pack of RC’s, pretending to ponder the price of a three-week-old loaf of Wonder while I was deciding how to slip on the freshly mopped floor so that the unhidden video camera behind the front counter might give me the best possible out-of-court settlement, when in comes this hoss wearing a ski mask and sombrero, waving a .22 and telling everybody freeze or we’ll be having our heads blown off. I’d just about settled on a basic ass-first prat, which would’ve been risky because sometimes they’re unbelievable when they replay it slow frame, but I didn’t really have my heart in one of those realistic, wrenching, twisting falls that actually does hurt when you land on a shoulder or something, because my left wrist and lower right leg were still casted and my back was still sore from the traction and the memory of the Honda’s bumper I had stepped into three and a half months before outside an Acme in Binghamton. Some old bat had decided to give me a love tap with the gas instead of braking and that laid me up a little longer than it should have and gave me black outs for a while and six total broken or fractured bones, not to mention fusing vertebrae numbers 7 and 8. It’s a living, or so I thought. Then into the Poughkeepsie 7-11 came the Bandit and his .22, which meant no falls for me that day with all the cops that’d be crawling around the place in a matter of minutes, all of them disturbed about missing the “Mexican Bandito” as everyone was calling him even though he had a Canadian accent, and none of them having time to fill out a report on a guy who might have permanent back pain as a result of a slip on the negligently wet floor by the Wonderbread. It was too bad because by the time Prudential would have figured out that most of my injuries were old ones, I would have turned the settlement check into small bills and gotten a new p.o. box.

Next thing I know after the Poughkeepsie 7-11, I’m thinking about retiring at the ripe old age of 41. When you think about it, there are a lot of disincentives to working your chosen profession in this country. Chief among them in my case being the occasional competition for attention with Mexican-Canadian gun-waver types, and the complete lack of benefits, too, such as health care. For instance, with the Acme run-in with the bumper the whole hospital thing came to damn near forty-seven thou, and the settlement was only for sixty, which meant I would have only netted thirteen K for three months of sucking pureed chicken out of rubber bags. I say would have, because when you don’t have health care, you learn to tiptoe out of the hospital at midnight before everything’s completely done healing and the blue suit guy drops in to see about settling up. I’m sure in the end they’ll just mail the bill to me, Earl Lester, Binghamton. Unfortunately for them, today I’m Lester Earl, Ithaca, living off sixty grand in twenties.

I do have to share some of the pie. My lawyer is any number of men named Homer Pierce. They all go by Homer Pierce because of a little joke of ours, having originated six years ago from a newspaper story about a lawyer in Utica named, you guessed it, Homer Pierce, who had been cited by the State Bar for seventeen ethics violations and only been placed on probationary status. One night in Troy while we played a little seven card with twos, fours, nines, one-eyed jacks and suicide kings wild, I and three of the eleven future Homer Pierces decided why risk inadvertently tarnishing a good lawyer’s name by using an alias other than Homer Pierce for all our lawsuits. The joke, of course, was that we knew full well there weren’t any “good” lawyers.

So far Homer Pierce has represented me on seventy-eight suits. He’s been victorious in procuring settlements in fifty-nine of these, a pretty nice rate of return for a lawyer, but you got to have someone who knows how to fall, too. Homer Pierce’s height varies from suit to suit, from 5′6″ to 6′3″, his weight from about 165 to 310. Like his size, his settlements vary, too, from the paltry $500 dust-yourself-off money to the big rips, like the Acme gastapper and the time the cop inadvertently ran into me last year on a sidewalk outside a bank in Schenectady after I had advertently gotten in his way while he was chasing a burglar, bank bells clanging and everything. The burglar, of course, was wearing a sombrero, but he wasn’t famous yet, and the police and everybody made time to pay me some attention while he got away. You should have seen me moaning about my back on that one. Homer Pierce had to do damn near nothing for the check from the bank’s insurance company. None of the Homer Pierces have any real licenses to practice anything, but they’re good at the verbal muscle game and making official looking stationery, and they’ve got a rudimentary knowledge of law which is more than is needed, I assure you. I can assure you because once in a pinch I had to be my own Homer Pierce after a tractor ran over my toe during a free tour of a dairy farm outside Herkimer.

The clincher, of course, is that in reality I am no victim and in reality I am sick to death of all the victim talk sweeping the damn country. No wonder the Mexican-Canadian has been coming down (or up) here to do all his damage. He probably thought the money would practically jump into his hands, this countryful of victims we got just waiting to give it away, and so far it practically has. Kills me, really. The way I see it, if you don’t have your own scam, that doesn’t make you a goddamn victim; it only makes you a goddamn idiot. Case in point: Newt Gingrich. Genius. And since the Poughkeepsie episode, I’ve been thinking that this is at the root of what I think will make retirement a little harder to handle — worrying about eventually feeling like the rest of the average ducks out there, blending in and not giving a damn, whining my ass away. I’d rather somebody just blow my goddamned head off if it comes to all that. Damn these back pains.

The guy who certifies my injuries as one hundred percent bona fide and worth the price of settlement is Dr. Richard Greggson, who got his degree through mail order from the Pacific Coast Institute of Medicine and Pharmacology. He’s got two diplomas because, on occasion, circumstances arise which dictate him being Greg Richardson. Essentially it’s the same service either way, although sometimes Greg Richardson will throw a free twenty-one day Valium prescription into the deal, whereas Richard Greggson, who got a Certificate of Ethics via mail while I was in the hospital waiting for the clock to tick, will usually raise objection to the pills.

Both Richard Greggson and Greg Richardson were delighted about the Acme gastapper incident because there were actual broken bones involved. The two of them have so many repros of the hospital x-rays filed away that every settlement from here on out would start negotiations at a decent five figure minimum. Neither Richard Greggson, Greg Richardson, or Homer Pierce are happy, though, about my thinking about retiring. I am the key man in our little industry.

But there have been aggravations, and not just what happened after the Bandit walked into the Poughkeepsie 7-11. For instance Homer Pierce has been acting more like a real lawyer lately, always greed greed greed, where’s my cut? never any respect for the art of the fall. I get laid up and everybody gets delusions of seriousness. I met with the original three of him in a Burger King in Spectator the day before the Poughkeepsie incident, and it was all I could do to stop myself from punching his goddamn noses in. We sat at a window table and discussed why we were not going to actually litigate anything, even though that was where the “big money” was. Our primary problem was, of course, that none of him had any kind of license to litigate jack, and unlike the field of medicine, they do actually check things like that, especially when you actually take a case to trial.

Why let that stop us? One of him snapped, his mouth full of Whopper. Nothing’s stopped us yet, blah blah blah. Yeah, said another of him, we can beat some of these bastards big.

I suggested that maybe we hadn’t been stopped by anything because we had a proven method. Then I reminded each of him of that one time when I was him in Herkimer, and it’d be just as easy to do that from now on, cut out the middle action. You could see who really needed who in his darting little eyes then. I also told him that the three of him were acting like real lawyers. To which each of him sort of looked at me like yeah, well, what’s your point?

I had in fact forgotten the point, although I began to wonder if it might have something to do with why my goddamn lawyer couldn’t have driven to visit me in the Binghamton’s County Memorial. Then all of a sudden the Arby’s next door was being robbed by a gun-toting guy in a big sombrero, and people were standing around out front like they were thinking about clapping. Then they parted for him like the Red Sea when he darted for his car. That Mexican-Canadian must not ever sleep.

Deep down I’m sure Homer Pierce knew I wasn’t going to leave him dry. There’d be too many ways for everything to fall apart if each fall was a one-man operation, and, hell, what was I going to do, go back to hustling pool? I’d had my fill of that in Niskayuna, and it was the most boring predictable depressing thing in the world. Got so bad playing dumbass Hubris-filled make-pretend sharks I had to start giving people breaks like, okay, if this asshole doesn’t act like he knew he was going to hit this shot that he’s never made before in his whole life, I won’t run the table on him; or okay, if this pretender doesn’t act pissed off after he’s missed a three banker, I won’t take all of his money. Goddamn if most of the time the assholes didn’t keep puffing out their chests and kissing away cash. It’s like the ear-benders were all caught in raccoon traps, you know, where you put a treat inside a can with a hole only big enough for a raccoon to get an unclenched paw in through and when he grabs the treat he’s stuck, not knowing all he’s got to do is let go of the treat and he can get his paw out. Raccoons don’t ever have the wherewithal to let go. Same thing hustling pool suckers in Niskayuna. I had to get out.

I’d always been good at taking a fall, ever since I used to go tumbling down the stairs just to get my father to glance up from his numbers. After a while he got so used to my careening from step to step that he’d just say, “Earl, cut it out,” without even raising his eyes. Sometimes I’d even lie in one place at the bottom of the stairway for ten or fifteen minutes, pretending I was paralyzed with my eyes stuck crossing toward my nose. Nothing, not a peep from him. My mother found me that way once and nearly had a heart attack. “Lester! Lester, speak!” I was a natural making a living doing it. That is until Poughkeepsie.

It was after I met with Homer Pierce at the Burger King that day before Poughkeepsie that I first realized I was still in quite a bit of goddamn back pain from when the damn Honda had rolled me. I was hoping to find Dr. Greg Richardson in Albany to make me feel better, but instead Dr. Richard Greggson was in, who suggested, instead of Valium, maybe a steam bath or a whirlpool might do me a world of good, and he’d also read up on some new balms which could do miracles. He said this with a straight face, even crinkling up his high forehead as if he’d been born to practice medicine all his life. I wondered if I should give him a black eye. Instead, I patiently asked him when Dr. Richardson might be back. He assured me it would not be for some time, his blue eyes dancing behind his fake non-prescription glasses. The IRS was looking for him.

The drive to Poughkeepsie was a long, unpleasant, stiff one. I thought maybe I should start making a little book to tide me over until it would be easier to do proper falls; but if you think hustling’s like setting raccoon traps, you haven’t seen anything compared to taking bets. Then whizzing toward me down two lane Route 46 came a brown Ford Escort that switched back to its side of the road just in time. The driver, of course, was wearing a sombrero. I started questioning what had happened to my work ethic.

In Poughkeepsie I got a room at a trap and went for a six-pack at the 7-11 I was going to fall in the next day. It was around 9:30, and I commented to the young greaser behind the counter that the floors could use a mopping. They do it in the mornings, he said, it wasn’t his business. Right, I said, nothing he could do. Then he asked had I heard the Bandito had hit a Safeway on the other side of town that evening and wasn’t this guy something?

“It’s a little blatant,” I said to him, feeling my jaw jut a little, “isn’t it? All this stealing with a gun?”

The greaser had no idea what I was talking about. “He’s the Bandit, man.” He said this like it answered all arguments, his eyebrows bunching into an earnest sense of purpose. He couldn’t wait to get robbed.

And, sure enough, the next day I did get to see the Bandit, man, live and in person, ruining what would have been a perfectly functional prat. When he burst into the 7-11 waving the .22, my first instinct was to try to do whatever I could to speed the whole thing up because the floor was drying fast, and I still had to discreetly nudge out of view the “Wet Floor” stand-up sign, to secure the full prize. If the warning isn’t clearly displayed, the store insurer basically has to start negotiations mid-twenties.

But the Mexican-Canadian was a bit of a showman, a charmer, taking his time with things, and all of a sudden, realizing the situation, I was feeling like the gatecrasher. He spoke slowly through the black ski mask like he was everybody’s friend, nodding the big sombrero in everybody’s directions as he spoke, peppering his phrases with “okays” and “ays” and an occasional French word.

When he said the words “heads blown off’ to the duchess behind the counter and the five or six of us scattered around the store, it was like he meant taking a quiet nap in the woods. Then all of a sudden everyone was down on the floor except for him and me.

“Please,” he said to me, “you, too.” From about ten feet away he fixed the .22 between my eyes, and I realized that the easiest, least painful way for me to get my casted self down actually would have been for me to do a nice safe fall, but I couldn’t risk getting pumped because some sudden jerky-ass landing on the linoleum startled him. “Please,” he said again, this time with a little less charm, “down.”

I struggled to get down on one knee, focusing on his faceless ski mask, big nails of pain tearing up my back, when it dawned on me he might take my slowness as defiance.

“I’ve been in an accident,” I said to him. “I’m still in pain.”

“Yes,” he said, following his outstretched .22 toward me, “I’m sure you are. Get down.”

I dropped to all fours, felt myself grimace, felt a tendon rip in the casted wrist. Then finally I was doing a dead man’s float on the cool damp linoleum, ammonia clearing a space behind my eyes. My back was spasming as he stepped over me and stood with a foot on each side of my ribs, still pointing the gun, I was sure, at my head.

I tried to talk myself through it. Told myself that that very day Homer Pierce and I would file suit against the 7-11 for having such a blatantly insecure store. Sure, a settlement was iffier, taking it that route, but the potential payout was higher. Hell, look at the trauma I was going through. Maybe we’d even litigate this one.

But I was fooling myself. Instead of thinking about a nice thick settlement check, I found myself reaching for my wallet out of my back pocket, and blindly handing it up to him. Then I slid my Rolex off the uncasted wrist and easily handed that back, too, without turning my head. Maybe it was the ammonia working me over. Everything in my body loosened up there for a moment. Hell, for a moment, even the muscles in my back relaxed.

It was getting weird. Downright scary, in fact.

At first he had thought it was a trick, some kind of practical joke she was playing on him. But he soon realized that was a stupid idea, because in the fifteen years they had been married, he’d never known her to play a joke on him or anyone else, practical or otherwise. Nelda was not the joking type. For that matter, more often than not, she didn’t even get the point of a joke he told. She would give that little artificial laugh, but he could tell by the vacant look in her pale blue eyes that she simply didn’t get it.

After deciding it wasn’t a joke, he was positive that it must be some kind of fad or craze going around that he hadn’t heard about. After all, he worked all day and didn’t have time to waste on finding out what sort of nonsense currently occupied the minds of women. He was forty-two years old, one of the leading designers in Beldon and Nelms Architectural Company, and before the year was out, he expected to be made a partner in the firm. Sometimes he even worked at night (and sometimes he didn’t, but Nelda thought he did). You didn’t get to be a partner by staying home day and night to see what your wife was up to or what kind of crap she was reading. Before all this weird stuff began, he’d never known Nelda to read anything but fashion magazines and books about the beautiful people, whoever the hell they were.

He figured Nelda was pretty typical of the average forty-year-old housewife. She had a rinse put on her blond hair, which she wore in a Dutchboy cut, every so often to keep it that color, her skin was still pretty good (probably thanks to whatever that stuff was she slapped on at regular intervals), and she didn’t need a lot of makeup. She was tall, five-eight, and her figure was still good, though she had thickened a bit in the middle. She dressed sensibly, but always in style, and spent just about all the money he gave her on clothes. She could pass for… oh, maybe thirty-five, if you stretched your imagination a bit. She was interested in buying nice things for the house, trying out new recipes, her weekly bridge game with “the girls,” and lunching twice a week with some of her old college friends who lived in the city. To his knowledge, she had never been interested in occult mumbo jumbo or reading books about same.

The weird stuff started about six weeks ago and showed no signs of stopping or even letting up. It was, in fact, getting worse. Actually, it might have been going on for a while before he noticed. He first became aware of the spooky undertones one night after dinner when he sat down on the sofa, on the end by the three-way lamp, to catch up on the latest Architectural Digest. On the table, under the lamp, was a pile of books. The title of the top book was Psychic Experiences Through the Ages. What the hell was Nelda doing with a book like that? He took the second book off the pile. Early Spiritualism. The third book, Psychical Research. And the fourth, Telepathy in Everyday Life. Beneath that book was a bunch of brochures and pamphlets on clairvoyance, extrasensory perception, precognition, and altered states of consciousness.

“Jehovah’s Jaguar, Nelda! Where’d you get this stuff?”

She looked up briefly from her Queen Anne chair by the fireplace. “The library.” Then she was buried again in the book she held, the title of which was Hypnosis and Dream Telepathy.

“Why’re you reading this junk?”

She looked up again, the epitome of patience. “I don’t think it’s junk, Hugh. They were all written by experts in their field.”

“Whatever. Why’re you reading it?”

She lowered the book again. “A couple of the girls think I may have ESP or something like it, and I thought if I read up on the subject, I could find out for sure.”

“So now you’re going to start telling fortunes?”

“Hardly.” She gave him a condescending smile. “Some rather… odd things have been happening lately, and I confess I’ve been a bit shaken by them.”

“Like what?”

“Well, at a recent bridge game, it occurred to me suddenly that I knew every card that was going to be played before it was played.

When I realized that, I also sensed that I knew what cards were in the other three hands even before the bidding began. Of course, with an advantage like that, I mopped up that afternoon.”

He laughed, first uproariously, then derisively. “I’ll take you with me to my next poker game.”

“It isn’t funny, Hugh. It’s a little… frightening.” She paused, then said, “The next thing that happened was a lunch a couple of days later. Ruth and Barb and I were to meet at The Tea Kettle. Ruth arrived at the same time, and I said to her — I don’t know where I got the idea — ‘Barb isn’t coming. She’s going to phone and tell the hostess to tell us she’s ill.’ Sure enough, we had no sooner sat down than the hostess came over and said, ‘Mrs. Long just called and said to tell you she’s not feeling well and can’t make it today.’”

He couldn’t think of a word to say. He just looked at her, wondering if his very practical, down-to-earth wife had all of a sudden run mad.

He had planned to go to Sonja’s that night. After all, he hadn’t seen her for three days. But something about the seriousness of Nelda’s expression, her tone of voice, made him decide to stay home. It was easy enough to get away when he wanted to. All he had to say was, “We’re having some problems with the Grandy building,” or, “That new house on May Avenue, well, the owner has changed his mind about the shape of the deck, so I’ve got to have it done by tomorrow.” And he’d be off for a few hours of bliss with Sonja. Nelda was gullible as hell. She never suspected anything. But tonight — he didn’t know why — he thought he’d better not go.

“Anything else?” he asked. “Or is that the sum total of your psychic experiences?”

“Are you making fun of me?” A small frown furrowed her forehead.

“No, of course not. I’m just curious.”

There’ve been some little things that made me wonder, but nothing as significant as the two I told you about. The thing is, these experiences, as you call them, are happening more often, and each time I get a stronger premonition.” She stopped suddenly and looked toward the telephone on the end table. “Like right now. The phone is going to ring.”

He waited. A minute, two minutes, three minutes. Nothing happened. And then the phone rang.

“Don’t bother to answer it,” she said. “It’s a wrong number.”

An act of Congress could not have prevented him from picking up the phone. “Hello.”

“Has Jimmy come in yet?” asked a gruff voice.

He held the phone away from him, looking at it as though it were a hissing viper, then he barked into it, “Wrong number!”

She continued with her reading without looking up and without saying “I told you so,” for which he would have been grateful had he not been so befuddled. What the hell was going on here? Had the woman suddenly become possessed with some kind of strange powers? Ditch-water dull Nelda, whom he could read like a child’s primer? It couldn’t be.

“Has something happened to you, something strange?” he asked. “I mean — do you feel, er, different? Headache or… anything?”

“Not at all. I feel the same as I always have.”

He couldn’t think of anything else to ask, so he just sat staring at her, going over in his mind the horrendous difference it could make in his life if his wife really had suddenly become a seer into the future. But, of course, he didn’t believe in that stuff and his first thought had been correct. It was just a fad, a phase she was going through, reading all those crazy books. She’d get tired of it soon enough and go back to being ditch-water dull Nelda whose every move and sentence he could anticipate. And that made him psychic in his own right, didn’t it?

But that didn’t explain the telephone business. How had she known?

It had taken him hours to get to sleep that night, but by the next morning he was ready to pooh-pooh the whole psychic business. If you played bridge with the same people week after week, year after year, you could tell by looking at their expressions what kind of cards they were holding, just as he could tell by the expressions, or lack thereof, on the faces of the members of his poker club. And it was a safe enough guess that Barbara Long wouldn’t show up for a lunch date: That hypochondriac canceled half her social engagements because of some imaginary illness. As for the phone, what the hell? They never got any calls at night anyway, so if the phone rang, there was a ninety-five percent chance it was a wrong number.

Nelda was getting ideas from all that crap she was reading. She’d lose interest pretty soon and go back to fashion magazines and the beautiful people, whoever the hell they were.

He scrutinized himself in the mirror extra carefully while shaving. Had it been that long since he’d checked, or had his hairline receded a bit more overnight? And was that puffiness under his eyes the beginning of bags? He worked out at the gym once a week in an effort to keep a flat stomach, but there was nothing the gym could do about eyes and hair. He couldn’t afford to let himself go in any way, not if he wanted to keep Sonja. She was a beaut: statuesque brunette, heart-shaped face with sexy, pouty lips, skin that almost glowed in the dark, and she was fifteen years younger than he. He’d already invested a fortune in her: all that jewelry, lingerie, champagne, and room-service dinners (he couldn’t afford to take her out and be seen by someone who knew him; it would jeopardize his partnership). So he paid her rent in the hotel suite on the twelfth floor, and he hoped that he was the only one who visited her there. Had to be, he kept telling himself, because she was always available for him, even on the spur of the moment.

Tonight he would see her for sure. Nelda could predict ringing phones, sick friends, card games, or the end of civilization as we know it; his own prediction was that he’d have one hell of a night with Sonja.

“Nice night for a stakeout.”

Well, that startled me, let me tell you. I looked around and saw I was no longer the last person on line. Behind me now was a goofy-looking guy more or less my age (thirty-four) and height (six feet) but maybe just a bit thinner than me (190 pounds). He wore eyeglasses with thick black frames and a dark-blue baseball cap turned around backward, with bunches of carroty-red hair sticking out under it on the sides and back.

He was bucktoothed and grinning, and he wore a gold-and-purple high school athletic jacket with the letter X hugely on it in Day-Glo white edged in purple and gold. It was open a bit at the top, to show a bright lime green polo shirt underneath.

His trousers were plain black chinos, which made for a change, and on his feet were a pair of those high tech sneakers complete with inserts and gores and extra straps and triangles of black leather here and there that look as though they were constructed to specifications for NASA. In his left hand he held an X-Men comic book folded open to the middle of a story. He was not, in other words, anybody on the crew, or even like anybody on the crew. So what was this about a stakeout? Who was this guy?

Time to employ my interrogation techniques, which meant I should come at him indirectly, not asking “Who are you?” but saying “What was that again?”

He blinked happily behind his glasses and pointed with his free hand. “A stakeout,” he said, cheerful as could be.

I looked where he pointed, at the side wall of this Burger Whopper, where it was my turn tonight to get food for the crew, and I saw the poster there advertising this month’s special in all twenty-seven hundred Burger Whoppers all across the United States and Canada, which was for their Special Thick Steak Whopper Sandwich, made with U.S. government-inspected steak guaranteed to be a full quarter-inch thick.

I blinked at this poster, with its glossy color photo of the special Thick Steak Whopper Sandwich, and beside me the goofy guy said, “A steak out, right? A great night to come out and get one of those steak sandwiches and take it home and not worry about cooking or anything like that because, who knows, the electricity could go off at any second.”

Well, that was true. The weather had been miserable the last few days, hoveringjust around the freezing point, with rain at times and sleet at times, and at the moment — 9:20 P.M. (2120 hours) on a Wednesday — outside the picture windows of the Burger Whopper, there was a thick, misty fog, wet to the touch, kind of streaked and dirty, that looked mostly like an airport hotel’s laundry on the rinse cycle.

Not a good night for a stakeout — not my kind of stakeout. All the guys on the crew had been complaining and griping on our walkie-talkies, sitting in our cars on this endless surveillance, getting nowhere, expecting nothing, except maybe we’d all have the flu when this was finally over.

“See what I mean?” the goofy guy said, and grinned his bucktoothed grin at me again and gestured at that poster like the magician’s girl assistant gesturing at the elephant. See the elephant?

“Right,” I said, and I felt a sudden quick surge of relief. If our operation had been compromised, after all this time and energy and effort, particularly given my own spotty record, I don’t know what I would have done. But at least it wouldn’t have been my fault.

Well, it hadn’t happened, and I wouldn’t have to worry about it. My smile was probably as broad and goofy as the other guy’s when I said, “I see it, I see it. A steak out on a night like this — I get you.”

“I’m living alone since my wife left me,” he explained, probably feeling we were buddies since my smile was as moronic as his. “So mostly I just open a can of soup or something. But weather like this, living alone, the fog out there, everything cold, you just kinda feel like you owe yourself a treat, know what I mean?”

Mostly, I was just astonished that this guy had ever had a wife, though not surprised she’d left him. I’ve never been married myself, never been that fortunate, my life being pretty much tied up with the Bureau, but I could imagine what it must be like to have been married, and then she walks out, and now you’re not married anymore. And what now? It would be like if I screwed up real bad, much worse than usual, and the Bureau dropped me, and I wouldn’t have the Bureau to go to anymore — I’d probably come out on foggy nights for a steak sandwich myself and talk to strangers in the line at the Burger Whopper.

Not that I’m a total screwup — don’t get me wrong. If I were a total screwup, the Bureau would have terminated me (not with prejudice, just the old pink slip) a long time ago; the Bureau doesn’t suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. But it’s true I have made a few errors along the way and had luck turn against me, and so on, which in fact was why I was on this stakeout detail in the first place.

All of us. The whole crew, the whole night shift, seven guys in seven cars blanketing three square blocks in the Meridian Hills section of Indianapolis. Or was it Ravenswood? How do I know? — I don’t know anything about Indianapolis. The Burger Whopper was a long drive from the stakeout site — that’s all I know.

And we seven guys, we’d gotten this assignment, with no possibility of glory or advancement, with nothing but boredom and dyspepsia (the Burger Whopper is not my first choice for food) and chills and aches and no doubt the flu before it’s over, because all seven of us had a few little dings and dents in our curricula vitae. Second-raters together, that’s what we had to think about, losing self-esteem by the minute as we each sat alone there in our cars in the darkness, waiting in vain for Francois Figuer to make his move.

The dog was a mixture of God knows how many breeds, but the vet had told them he had at least some rottweiler blood. You could see it in his shoulders, you could hear it when he barked, which he was doing that night when they pulled up at the gate and Chuckie cut the engine.

“Butch is out,” Dee Ann said. “That’s kind of strange.”

Chuckie didn’t say anything. He’d looked across the yard and seen her momma’s car in the driveway, and he was disappointed. Dee Ann’s momma had told her earlier that she was going to buy some garden supplies at Western Auto and then eat something at the Sonic, and she’d said if she got back home and unloaded her purchases in time, she might run over to Greenville with one of her friends and watch a movie. Dee Ann had relayed the news to Chuckie tonight when he picked her up from work. That had gotten his hopes up.

The last two Saturday nights her momma had gone to Greenville, and they’d made love on the couch. They’d done it before in the car, but Chuckie said it was a lot nicer when you did it in the house. As far as she was concerned, the major difference was that they stood a much greater chance of getting caught. If her momma had walked in on them, she would not have gone crazy and ordered Chuckie away, she would have stayed calm and sat down and warned them not to do something that could hurt them later on. “There’re things y’all can do now,” she would have said, “that can mess y’all’s lives up bad.”

Dee Ann leaned across the seat and kissed Chuckie. “You don’t smell too much like a Budweiser brewery,” she said. “Want to come in with me?”

“Sure.”

Butch was waiting at the gate, whimpering, his front paws up on the railing. Dee Ann released the latch, and they went in and walked across the yard, the dog trotting along behind them.

The front door was locked — a fact that Chuckie corroborated the next day. She knocked, but even though both the living room and the kitchen were lit up, her momma didn’t come. Dee Ann waited a few seconds, then rummaged through her purse and found the key. It didn’t occur to her that somebody might have come home with her momma, that they might be back in the bedroom together, doing what she and Chuckie had done. Her momma still believed that if she could tough it out a few more months, Dee Ann’s daddy would recover his senses and come back. Most of his belongings were still here.

Dee Ann unlocked the door and pushed it open. Crossing the threshold, she looked back over her shoulder at Chuckie. His eyes were shut. They didn’t stay shut for long, he was probably just blinking, but that instant in which she saw them closed was enough to frighten her. She quickly looked into the living room. Everything was as it should be: the black leather couch stood against the far wall, the glass coffee table in front of it, two armchairs pulled up to the table at forty-five degree angles. The paper lay on the mantelpiece, right where her momma always left it.

“Momma?” she called. “It’s me and Chuckie.”

As she waited for a reply, the dog rushed past her. He darted into the kitchen. Again they heard him whimper.

She made an effort to follow the dog, but Chuckie laid his hand on her shoulder. “Wait a minute,” he said. Afterwards he could never explain to anyone’s satisfaction, least of all his own, why he had restrained her.

David Ballard was born and raised in Middletown, Ohio, the son of two teachers. He majored in English at Miami University, and he received his law degree from the Ohio State University. He lives in South Bend, Indiana, with his wife, Jeanne, and his son, Jack. “Child Support” is his first published story.

• I am addicted to games. I also love reading suspense stories where a character encounters some sort of contest or wager, whether by choice or coercion, and naturally the stakes are high. My earliest influences are the stories of Roald Dahl, Richard Matheson, and the early nonsupernatural stories of Stephen King.

“Child Support” is that kind of suspense story. The idea began as a “what if’ scenario while I was throwing Frisbee in the park with Jake, our black Labrador, and Jack was watching in his stroller. I began playing a mental game of how many Jake could catch in a row, and then it struck me just how secluded we really were in that park as it was getting darker.

I listen to movie soundtracks as I write. I’ll pick a certain one to set the right mood for a particular story, and then I’ll play it over and over until the story is finished. For “Child Support,” I must have listened to the soundtrack for Pulp Fiction at least three hundred times.

Charles Raisch at New Mystery Magazine accepted my story and published it as an “author debut,” something he tries to accomplish in each issue. I cannot imagine any better care and handling of a new writer than what the folks at that magazine gave me.