Lieutenant Dean March stared at Lacy DeBeck lying facedown on the rug in his library, a red stain spreading out from his chest. A few feet from DeBeck was a leather armchair and a small table with a half-finished glass of whisky and a magazine, Tennis. A second armchair with its own table and glass stood opposite the first chair. Dean’s chief, Bunk Cummins, was measuring the body’s position with a tape.

Dean left the body and went to a tall woman standing by a set of french doors that led onto a balcony. She had introduced herself as Trish Hazelton, a name that rang a faint bell in the back of his head. White-haired and straight-backed, she stared bleakly across the lawn toward a red clay tennis court. “Poor Tiffany,” she murmured.

“Tiffany?” said Dean.

“That’s my granddaughter. She’s supposed to meet me here any minute. She has Wednesdays off from her regular job at Brooks Drugs and was going to help me clean. When she sees this...” Mrs. Hazelton sighed. “Tiffany isn’t much for violence. Well, who is?”

“Someone was,” said Dean. “Was the house unlocked when you came to clean this morning?”

“Oh no. But I have a key. When Lacy didn’t answer my ring, I let myself in. Came upstairs and—” She stopped. “Why are you looking at me that way?”

“Sorry. I was thinking of something else.”

Hazelton? Didn’t a recent case involve that name? Something small but bizarre, even comical in a way, but he couldn’t place it. He’d ask Bunk when he got the chance.

Moments later the medical examiner and two plainclothes from the state crime lab showed up. Sketches were made, photographs taken, and the body rolled over. The M.E. confirmed death by a single bullet to the chest, and estimated time of death between eight P.M. and midnight the previous evening.

“No powder bums,” said the M.E., “so it wasn’t point-blank. The perp was probably sitting in this other chair.”

One of the lab technicians, a large man with bushy red hair, holding a magnifying glass, nodded. “Cosy scene, huh? The killer’s sitting in this chair having a drink and a smoke with DeBeck, chatting, maybe laughing, all of a sudden pulls out a gun and pow! I’ll tell you something else about the perp. He, she, was one careful dude. You can see where he wiped his prints off this glass and off the ashtray. We’ll take it all to the lab, though — glass, ashtray, cigarette butt.” With tweezers he picked up the lone butt, bent and long as if only one or two puffs had been taken, and placed it in a cellophane evidence bag. “And this book of matches from the Blue Note in Manhattan — hey, I’ve been there, great jazz club — and the magazine.” Bushy Head wiped a bead of sweat from his forehead and looked around. “Well well well.” He walked to a wall mirror between two bookcases. Leaning against a shelf beside the mirror was a black tennis racket and two golf clubs. “The guy wasn’t too vain, was he? A full-length mirror in his library?” He had started to reach for one of the clubs, a driver, when a female voice sounded on the stairs.

“Gran? Are you up there? What are those police cars doing—” A young woman in soiled bluejeans with a yellow bandana wrapped around her head stepped into the room. “Oh my God.”

Dean thought he had seen her around town, but that wasn’t why he was staring at her. He sensed Bunk watching him and looked away.

Mrs. Hazelton gave the newcomer a hug, patted her on the back, and turned toward Dean and Bunk. “This is my granddaughter, Tiffany.”

Something clicked inside Dean’s head. “Snoop Doggy Dogg,” he said.

Everyone looked at him. The lab people and the M.E. exchanged glances.

“A CD, right?” said Dean.

The granddaughter narrowed her dark eyes at him while Trish Hazelton blushed and then laughed.

“You remember.”

Returning from lunch with his meal repeating under his ribs, Chief Robideau was in no mood to display charm at finding Mrs. Robideau and a woman who looked like a small, anxious poodle waiting for him in his office. He mumbled a greeting, sat down, and rummaged in a desk drawer for an antacid pill. Mrs. Robideau jumped to her feet and fastened a scathing look on him.

“Where have you been?” Then, preferring her own response, she added, “I know where. Out wasting time while criminals go skulking around. Sometimes I wonder why we pay our taxes!”

“One reason we pay our taxes,” the chief gently reminded her, “is so that I can continue to draw my salary.” He swallowed one of the tablets dry, peering blearily around for something to wash it down with.

“This,” declared Mrs. Robideau, indicating the small woman as if introducing a royal personage, “is Betty-Anne Bretton, and she has a crime to report. Hear that? A crime! Go on, Bets, tell him. If he tries to bully you, I’m right here.”

The little woman continued to stare fixedly at the chief as if concerned that he might jump up at any moment and make a rush at her. She had a tiny voice.

“It’s... it’s something that I heard in the disposal chute.”

“In the what?” The chief’s rumble pressed the little woman back an inch.

“In the garbage chute,” interjected Mrs. Robideau, “aren’t you listening? Are you going to interrupt, or are you going to let her have her say?”

The chief rumbled again but said nothing. The woman explained, “I live in the Highcliff Apartments. I wasn’t actually in the disposal chute, of course, I was standing in front of it, holding the flap open, ready to drop my kitchen Tidy Bag in. That’s when I heard it.”

“Heard what?”

“Heard the murderer. I’ll remember his words for the rest of my life. They made my blood run cold! He said, ‘If you play games with me, I’ll fix you good.’ That’s what I heard. Those very words.”

The chief closed his eyes. “And you think that was a murder threat?”

“Well, the voice said—”

“ ‘I’ll fix you.’ That could mean a number of things.”

Betty-Anne closed her mouth with an audible click and turned in desperation to Mrs. Robideau, who placed a supportive hand on her shoulder. “Dear,” she advised, “be patient. The official mind is slow on the take sometimes, and things aren’t helped by the fact that my husband has obviously eaten something disagreeable for lunch instead of the nice sandwich I made him. It’s in his desk drawer. I looked. He’ll throw it away later. He thinks food grows on trees.”

“It does,” the chief reminded her. “And I’d have eaten that sandwich except that I was at the Sunrise Diner earlier, quoting our new bylaws to Rani Probal, the owner, and he practically shoved his chili burger special down my throat.”

Mrs. Robideau observed him as if from a distance.

“Yes, I can see how that might happen. He tied you to a chair with aprons and force-fed you with a pair of tongs. Now he’ll vanish from your inspection list.” She raised an eyebrow. “It’s strange how that happens. Like some kind of an X-File.”

The chief wisely abandoned the argument. “What about those details? If somebody’s making threats, I’ll look into it.”

“Looking is one thing,” said Mrs. Robideau airily. “Doing something is quite another. But there’s detail if you want it. We believe the threat was carried out, don’t we, dear?”

Betty-Anne nodded. “Well, I... I mean — yes!”

“Then let’s have it,” Robideau said. He wasn’t convinced. End of Main was small, the budget was small. Even when he had staff to assist him (a condition that came and went with each balance sheet), the chief dealt with every report personally, and in his experience most complaints derived from misunderstandings that could be put right with a phone call. But he tried to sound less grumpy. “Take your time.”

“Go ahead, dear,” said Mrs. Robideau encouragingly.

“Well, this all started a few weeks ago, on a Wednesday. I know it was Wednesday because we’d just had our card party — not a party party, but a get-together in the hospitality room for a few hands of whatever interests us — rummy, euchre, frustration...”

“Yes, yes, go on.” The woman dragged on like a magistrate.

“It was my job to tidy up afterwards. It’s a room we share, you see, and—”

“Right, yes.”

“—so it’s important to keep it tidy. Anyway, I finished up, locked the door, and went down to the end of the hall to drop the trash down the garbage chute.”

Hmm, garbage chute. The chief pulled his new list of potential bylaw infractions out of his top drawer and, yes, there it was, amendment 23: sec. B, para. 4: Trash disposal chutes prohibited... No new construction; existing installations to be sealed up in favor of recycling bins and the town’s normal refuse collection. As the chair of the Green Committee had argued, one couldn’t have people anonymously popping unsorted rubbish down a chute into an incinerator, plastics and God-only-knew-what-else spewing toxic fumes into the air. The chief saw the problem, but he did have other concerns — like the graffiti that seemed to be spreading like a blight throughout the town.

“The chute door is set in the wall. Heavy iron, a flap that lifts up. As soon as I raised it, I heard that voice.” Mrs. Bretton shuddered. “It was so cruel and cutting. I could easily imagine that threat being carried out.”

I’m sure you could, the chief thought. “Did you recognize the voice?”

She shook her head. “I couldn’t hear clearly.”

“Do you know where it came from?”

“It’s a chute. It serves every floor. I don’t know what else it connects to. You could ask the janitor.”

“And who’s that?”

“Leonard Boski.”

The chief winced. He knew Leonard. He was doubtful that Leonard could tell him anything besides the exact operating hours of every pub in a ten mile radius.

“Okay, so you heard this threat, but you also claim that the actual crime was committed.”

“Oh yes.” She was gaining confidence. She sat on the edge of her chair, erect, as if to convince him by her physical bearing.

“You see, Miss Lemay has disappeared.”

“Who?” The chief scowled. “Angela Lemay. A dancer who lived in our block. No one knew her well. She took the top corner suite only a week after old Mr. Jarvis left. But we tried to make her feel welcome — we all did. And now—”

“You say she was a dancer?”

“That’s right. Oh, not one of those kind. A real dancer. Ballet. A very cultured girl from the city who was going to open a dance school right here in town. Mr. Overberg — our landlord — says she was lucky to come along just when an empty suite was available.”

The chief cleared his throat. “So you want me to find this woman?”

Mrs. Bretton looked baffled.

“Well, certainly. We’re very afraid for her.”

“But you don’t know that the threat you overheard was directed at her—”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” interjected Mrs. Robideau, “she’s missing, isn’t she?”

“We can assume she’s missing, but there are less fanciful explanations. She could have gone on a holiday, be visiting friends, or—”

“Or she could be the victim of a horrendous outrage,” pronounced Mrs. Robideau, leaving no doubt that she had put up with all the procrastination she was going to. “For crying in the sink, aren’t you paying attention? A woman is threatened, then — poof! — disappears! If that doesn’t concern you, then no woman’s safe. Not even me. Especially not me!”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that with a husband as dense as you looking out for me, I might as well give myself up to the nearest murderer right this minute. Hang out a sign. ‘Easy pickings. Husband dumb as a post.’ ” She steered Betty-Anne to the door by the arm. “Don’t strain yourself over those new bylaws!”

The day got off to a bad start when Efraín spilled the tin cup of salt into the cookfire.

He could have salvaged most of the salt from among the coals if he hadn’t snatched at the falling cup, trying to save it, and knocked the pot of water into the fire, too.

That put the salt beyond rescue and also extinguished the fire.

“You shouldn’t have left the salt there,” he snapped at Sulema.

She didn’t reply, just picked up some kindling and built a small fire to one side of the wet area. She refilled the water pot from the big bucket and set it on the new fire.

Efraín ate his saltless beans and rice in silence, then stood up. “I guess now I have to go to the store for salt,” he muttered.

Sulema glanced up. “The water’s boiling,” she said. “There’ll be coffee in a moment.”

“I can’t wait. I don’t want to waste any more of the day.” He started down the trail.

“Yes, you’d better hurry in case there’s a big run on salt this morning,” Sulema called after him.

The aroma of fresh coffee followed Efraín along the rain forest path. He could picture Sulema sitting on the log he’d cut into a chair, sipping her coffee in peace and playing with the baby. The farther he walked, the more he wished he’d stayed a few minutes longer and not been so short-tempered.

The reason he was angry had nothing to do with spilled salt, of course. Their cow was dying, and he couldn’t bear to tell Sulema.

Efraín had taken the older cow over to their new neighbors a few days before. The neighbor, Soto, planned to raise cattle on the farm he was cutting out of the rain forest. He was expecting a fine bull to be delivered from the big Ramos ranch on the other side of town. Efraín had arranged with Soto to leave the cow at Soto’s place to be bred when the bull arrived.

He and Sulema had talked a lot about all the things they could buy when the cow had her calf and the calf got big enough to sell. Efraín had said that besides being able to buy plenty of seed and pay off their bill at the local store, they could buy cloth at the big store in town for Sulema to make herself a new dress, and what color did she want? She’d talked all through dinner about the merits of yellow (cheerful in the rainy season) or blue (wouldn’t show stains) or maybe a print with flowers. Efraín didn’t see much difference between them, he thought they’d all look nice, but he liked watching her eyes flash with excitement. They both knew they’d probably end up keeping the calf, to make their herd bigger, but it was fun to dream.

Then late yesterday Soto had ridden over on his horse and said that Efraín’s cow was dying.

Efraín had hurried on foot to Soto’s farm. He hadn’t told Sulema what was wrong. The cow lay wheezing on her side. Her eyes seemed ready to burst out of her head. Saliva pooled around her mouth.

“She’s been like this since yesterday,” Soto said.

Efraín checked her all over but couldn’t find a bite or injury. He looked in her mouth, thinking that if she’d eaten a poisonous plant her tongue might be swollen, but it wasn’t.

“I never saw a sickness like this,” Soto had said.

Neither had Efraín. He rushed to the house of his other neighbor Catalino, but Catalino wasn’t there to advise him. Efraín waited till nearly dark and then went home.

So this morning Efraín planned to describe the ailment to the storekeeper and see if he knew what it was. The accident with the salt made an excuse for going to the store without having to tell Sulema about the cow.

Halfway to the store Efraín remembered that he had been the one to set the salt on the rock of the fire ring while he filled his plate with rice and beans.

When he sighted the store, Efraín realized that his day was not going to get any smoother. Four horses were tied under the cashew tree beside the small wooden building. A knot of men stood nearby. Efraín recognized most of them as neighbors. The storekeeper’s daughters, wide-eyed and solemn, leaned out the store window, listening to the men.

If it had been a Sunday, he would have assumed the girls were trying to overhear a bit of especially scandalous gossip. But on a weekday there shouldn’t be such a crowd. Something bad had happened.

“Did you hear the news?” asked old Adolfo, a distant neighbor.

“Nooo...” Efraín tried to think of the last time he’d heard anything that could be called news.

“About that rich cattleman.”

“The one who brought my new bull yesterday,” said a man that Efraín couldn’t place for a moment. Then he realized it was his new neighbor Soto. What was different about him? One of Soto’s teenage sons was there, too.

“What about him?” Efraín asked.

“Dead!” Adolfo burst out.

“Dead? How?”

“Beaten to death! Last night, on the road near the cantina, on the way to town. And all the money Soto gave him for the bull is gone.”

“That bull is mine now,” Soto said. “Fernando Ramos sold it to me, and I paid him for it. I’ve got witnesses — all my sons. He was a fool to go and get drunk in the cantina with so much money in his pocket.”

Soto’s bluntness brought a pause to the conversation.

“Well, it’s true that if he was going to drink, he shouldn’t have told everyone in the cantina how much money he’d made selling the bull,” admitted Adolfo.

“Or he should have given his money for safekeeping to someone responsible,” said another man.

“He should have had enough sense not to ride out alone at night,” Soto stated.

“How did the news get here so fast?” Efraín asked.

“I was there,” Adolfo said. “I happened to be in the cantina last night. It got late, so I slept on the bench. At dawn some boy ran in yelling about a dead man in the road. I hurried back here.” In a land without streetlights, those who stayed late at the cantina often slept on the long bench that ran along one side.

Efraín remembered his errand. “Where’s the storekeeper? I came to ask him about my sick cow.” He was afraid to ask Soto outright if the cow had survived the night.

“He just left, to see the body,” Adolfo said. “You know Mr. Ramos was a distant cousin of his.”

“Your cow’s still alive, but no better,” Soto remarked. “It must be some sickness she got before you brought her to my place. None of my cows have it.”

“I didn’t see the bull when I was there yesterday.”

“Ramos brought it right after you left.”

Efraín asked the other men if they’d ever run across the symptoms his cow had. They each had a different idea about what it might be, but no one seemed sure. There was no help for it. He’d have to hike to the cantina to find the storekeeper.

“I’m going that way,” said Soto. “You can ride that bay horse tied to the tree. I think my son’s staying here for a while.”

The son had gone over to the store and was chatting through the window with the girls. They were giggling, the cattleman’s tragedy forgotten.

Efraín suspected that Soto was mainly worried that if the cow died he wouldn’t get the four sacks of com that they’d agreed on as a breeding fee. But that was no reason not to take advantage of Soto’s generosity, whatever its motive. Efraín untied the bay, mounted, and set off down the trail behind Soto.

R. J. Begins:

The home of Byron L. Davis was almost new, virtually isolated in the countryside, and nearly the size and general likeness of the rural English manor houses you get a glimpse of sometimes in old Hitchcock movies. Instead of appearing to rise up out of the landscape, though, the way those generally do, the Davis place seemed as if it had been prefabricated elsewhere and lowered by a squadron of helicopters onto the wrong plot of ground, a treeless hillock that overlooked a year-old artificial lake to the west, a newly completed golf course to the east, and the poured concrete foundations of structures similar to itself to the north and south.

It was midaftemoon when I got out of the Chevy at the base of the hillock, and partly because I’d spent most of the day driving, I took a minute or so to stretch and look around before I tackled the ascent. The weather was warm for early April — at least in south-central Wisconsin — but the lake on the other side of the road was still an irregular stretch of soggy looking ice, and if the terraced lawn rising up to the house had ten green blades of grass on it, that was all it had.

I walked across to the verge of the lake and stared down at the grayish slush for a moment before I turned back and climbed the brick and pink-stone steps. As I got within about forty feet of the entrance, I could hear, from an open casement, the sound of a violin being played by someone with limited talent, and the inevitable recollection sprang to mind, from a radio program of my boyhood, of Jack Benny sawing away at “Love in Bloom.”

The person who came to answer the door wasn’t the violin player but a tall, muscular-looking male of around thirty in stylish tan slacks and a matching cotton sweater. He looked me over through the storm door to make certain I wasn’t peddling The Watchtower, peered past me down the slope at the Chevy, then opened the door a crack.

“What is it?”

I handed him one of my cards and said, “Václav Hucek — he’s still missing.”

He propped the door with his foot and examined the card closely, then fanned it with one hand against the opposite thumb.

“Mr. Davis can’t tell you anything,” he said.

“Then I won’t take much of his time,” I responded.

He looked me over again with the air of someone about to be forced by circumstance into committing an unpleasant but necessary act, so I drew the door open suddenly and said, “Look — I can come back with the sheriff if you want, but that’s what you don’t want and the sheriff won’t want it either if he has to come. Why not just skip the stale repartee and show me in? You can make jokes about my looks and my cheap suit after I’m gone.”

I stepped inside, forcing him back a pace, into a large parqueted foyer. “The name is R. J. Carr, just the way it reads on the card. Who are you?”

He stepped back two more paces as if he didn’t want to be close, but he did let me come in. The truth is, although he was big and tall, I was bigger and taller and tougher looking even though I’d just turned forty-eight. It was one of the few scenarios in which my birthmarked cheek and thick glasses were an asset.

“I’m... Mr. Davis’s man-of-all-work,” he said. “I manage the accounts, supervise the out-source help, cook, play games—” he hardened his stare “—such as chess and golf.”

“Do you have a name?”

“Clive Macmillan.”

“Were you here, Mr. Macmillan, on the night of December fifth?”

“Yes. But I can’t tell you anything either. Hucek never arrived, and that’s the extent of our knowledge on the subject.”

One of a pair of doors inset with stained glass opened to my right, and a tall, pear-shaped specimen choking a violin by the throat leaned out. “Is the man asking about Václav, Clive? Show him in.”

HEIAN-KYO (KYOTO), ELEVENTH CENTURY JAPAN SOMETIME DURING POEM-COMPOSING MONTH (AUGUST).

The sun had been up only a few hours but the archives of the ministry were already stifling in the summer heat. A murky, oppressive air hung about the shelves of document boxes and settled across the low desks. These were normally occupied by scribes and junior clerks, but at the moment they were empty.

Akitada, having celebrated his twentieth birthday with friends the night before — an occasion that involved emptying a cup of wine each time one failed to compose an acceptable poem — had overslept and crept in the back way. Now he knelt at his desk, feeling sick and staring blindly at a dossier he was supposed to be copying. He winced when two of his fellow clerks, Hirosawa and Sanekana, walked in chattering loudly.

“Sugawara!” Hirosawa stopped in surprise. “Where did you come from? The minister’s been asking for you. I wouldn’t give much for your chances of keeping your position this time.”

Sanekana, a pimply fat fellow, sniggered. “You should have seen his face,” he announced gleefully. “He was positively gloating at the thought of getting rid of you. Better go to him quick!”

Akitada blanched. He could not afford to lose his clerkship in the Ministry of Justice. It had been the only position offered to him when he graduated from the university. If only the minister had not formed such an instant dislike of him: inexplicably, His Excellency, Soga Ietada, had found fault with everything Akitada had done until he had become too nervous to answer the simplest question. As a result the minister had banished him to the archives to do copy work alongside the scribes. To make matters worse, his fellow clerks had recognized Akitada as a marked man and had quickly disassociated themselves from him. Akitada eyed Sanekana and Hirosawa dubiously. “I don’t suppose you would cover for me?” he asked. “I might have stepped outside when you looked for me.”

They burst into laughter.

With a sigh, Akitada rose.

His heart was beating wildly and his palms were sweating when he was shown into the great man’s office with the painted screens of waterfowl, the lacquered document boxes, and the broad desk of polished cryptomeria wood. On the desk stood the porcelain planter with a perfect miniature maple tree, the bronze brazier with its enameled wine flask, and the ministerial seal carved from pale jade — all of them witnesses to Akitada’s prior humiliations.

The minister was not alone. A thin, elderly man in a neat, dark grey silk robe was kneeling on the cushion before the great man’s table. “It is a matter of honor, Excellency, no, of life and death to me,” he said, his voice uneven with suppressed emotion. “I have, as I explained, exhausted all other possibilities. Your Excellency is my last hope.”

“Nonsense!” barked Soga Ietada. Being stout, he was sitting cross-legged at his ease, tapping impatient fingers on the polished surface of his desk. “You take it too seriously. Young women run away all the time. She’ll show up one of these days, presenting you with a grandchild, no doubt.”

The old man’s back stiffened. He did not glance at Akitada, who hovered, greatly embarrassed, near the door. “You are mistaken,” the man said. “My daughter left my home to enter the household of a nobleman. She would never engage in a fleeting, clandestine affair.”

Soga raised his eyes to heaven, caught a glimpse of Akitada, and glared, saying coldly to his guest, “As you say. I can only repeat that it is not in my power to assist you. I suggest you seek out this, er, nobleman. Now you must excuse me. My clerk is waiting to consult me on an urgent case.”

Akitada’s heart skipped a beat. Maybe it was not another reprimand after all. A case? Would he finally be given a case?

The older man bowed and rose. He left quickly, with only a passing glance at Akitada.

When the door closed, the minister’s expression changed to one of cold fury.

“And where were you this morning?” he barked.

Akitada fell to his knees and touched his forehead to the floor. “I... I was feeling ill,” he stuttered. Well, that was the truth at least. His stomach was heaving, and he swallowed hard, waiting for the storm to break over his head.

“No matter!” snapped the minister. “Your work has been unsatisfactory from the start. As you know, you came here on probation. Since you have proved inept at all but copying work and are now far behind in that, you cannot afford the luxury of ill health.”

“Yes, Your Excellency. I shall make up the time.”

“No.”

Akitada looked up and caught a smirk of satisfaction on Soga’s face. “I assure your Excellency...” he began earnestly.

“I said no!” thundered the minister. “Your time has run out. You may get your property and leave the ministry this instant.” He slapped a pudgy hand on the document before him. “I have already drawn up the papers of dismissal, and they spell out your gross inadequacies in detail.”

“But...” Akitada sought frantically for some promise, some explanation that might sway the minister’s mind, at least postpone his dismissal. “Your Excellency,” he pleaded, “you may recall that I earned my position by placing first in the university examinations. Perhaps if I had been given some legal work, I might have proved satis...”

“How dare you criticize my decisions?” cried the minister. “It is a typical example of your poor judgment. I shall add a further adverse comment to my evaluation of your performance.”

Akitada bowed wordlessly and left the room. He went straight to his desk, ignoring the curious eyes and whispers of Sanekana and Hirosawa, and gathered his things. These consisted of some writing implements and a few law books and were easily wrapped into a square of cloth, knotted, and tossed over one shoulder. Then he left the ministry.

Suffering under the humiliation of his dismissal, he did not pause to consider the full disaster, the fact that he would no longer draw the small salary which had kept rice in the family bowls and one servant in the house to look after his widowed mother and two younger sisters, until he had passed out of the gate of the Imperial City.

Then the thought of facing his mother with the news made his knees turn to water, and he stopped outside the gate. Lady Sugawara was forever reminding him of a son’s duty to his family and complaining about his inadequate salary and low rank. What would she say now?

Before him, Suzaku Avenue stretched into the distance. Long, wide, and willow-lined, it bisected the capital to become the great southern highway to Kyushu — and the world beyond.

He longed to keep walking, away from his present life, with his bundle of books and brushes. Somewhere someone must be in need of a young man filled with the knowledge of the law and a thirst for justice.

But he knew it was impossible. All appointments were in the hands of the central government, and besides, he could not desert his family. A son’s first duty was to his parent. He despaired of finding a clerkship in another bureau. If only there were someone, some man of rank, who would put in a good word for him, but Akitada was without helpful relatives or patrons of that sort.

He sat down on the steps of the gate and put his head in his hands.

“Young man? Are you ill?”

Akitada glanced up. An elderly gentleman in a formal robe and hat regarded him with kindly interest. Belatedly recognition came. This was the man who had just been turned away by Soga, a fellow sufferer. Akitada rose and bowed.

“Are you not the young fellow who came in while f was with the minister?” the man asked.

“Yes.” Akitada recalled the embarrassing subject under discussion and blushed. “I am very sorry, but I had been sent for.”

“I know. But I thought you had an urgent case to talk over with the minister?”

Akitada blushed again. “I have been dismissed,” he said.

“Oh.”

A brief silence fell. Then the older man said sympathetically, “Well, it looks like we’ve both been dismissed. You look pretty low.” He paused, studying Akitada thoughtfully, then added, “Maybe we can be of assistance to each other.”

“How so?” Akitada asked dubiously.

The gentleman gathered the skirt of his gown and lowered himself to the step next to him.

“I have lost a daughter and need someone to help me find her, someone who knows the law and can quote it to those who keep showing me the door. And you, I bet, could use the experience, not to mention a weekly salary and a generous reward?”

Akitada looked at the gentleman as the answer to a prayer. “I am completely at your service, sir,” he said with fervent gratitude. “Sugawara Akitada is my name, by the way.”

“Good. I am Okamoto Toson.”

“Not the master of the imperial wrestling office?”

The modest man in the grey robe smiled ruefully. “The same. Let’s go to my house.”

It took the combined strength of the Devil’s Disciple and the Winged Angel to transport the body to its disposal site. After the Devil’s Disciple did the deed, the Winged Angel appeared (too late, yah yah yah, too late) to sigh and cry and suggest the use of the purloined Walgreen’s cart to carry the body the final two hundred fifty yards. She was heavier than the Devil’s Disciple had figured, so now that the deed was done, the Angel agreed to help push. “You’ll get yours, you know,” said the Angel, wings fluttering in agitation. “Oh, shut up,” said the Devil’s Disciple.

Oswald, Plummer, Oxford don of paleontology, was told by his doctor to stop his excessive drinking. So Plummer moved to France, where his drinking was considered moderate; someday he would retire to Finland, where he’d be considered a model of sobriety. Oswald now gave tours of the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux, the one town in France where you couldn’t get a decent meal. His days were spent one hundred feet underground in a small, damp cave filled with American tourists. If this wasn’t Hell, Oswald thought, it was just a few yards away. Today’s group consisted of the thick-waisted and — witted Jeter family from someplace called Tuscaloosa.

“Behold the dwellings of Cro-Magnon man,” Oswald began dramatically. “Perhaps fifty cavemen lived here in a complex, tightly knit community. Despite their scruffy appearance, the Cro-Magnon were as intelligent and sophisticated as you or — son, please don’t lick the cave. That can’t be good for either of you.”

Ten-year-old Jason Jeter, about whom few things weren’t piggish, had licked his way through a three week tour of France. He had licked the D-Day Memorial at Normandy, the tomb of Napoleon, the Plexiglas that covered the Mona Lisa. Now he was licking the historic caves of Lascaux. “Why’s it taste so sweet?” Jason oinked.

“Bat droppings. Now, if you’ll follow me, I’ll show you a sight once reserved for the gods,” said Oswald, herding them deeper into a tiny chamber in the rock. Above their heads was a breathtaking mural: a thickly muscled bison snorting as he charged, deer skittering in all directions, an explosion of brightly colored spirals and polka dots, and a single handprint, the signature of the long-forgotten artist. “The colors are just as vibrant, the animals just as animated as they were when first painted, over thirty-five thousand years ago. In order to preserve the mural, we ask that you not take any flash—” Oswald saw a sudden burst of bright light. It might have been a flashbulb. It might have been his hangover.

I broke my ankle the week before the Great Ice Storm, but I did what I could during the emergency. With a cast halfway up to my knee I couldn’t handle a chain saw or drive a truck or run a back-hoe, so I worked in the shelter the fire department had set up in the Fountain Town Hall.

As people were driven out of their houses by the storm, they were brought to the shelter; we assigned them cots and issued blankets. The women’s auxiliary kept the kitchen open day and night. Since I used to be a deputy sheriff, I know most of the people on this side of the county, and I kept a log of names so relatives could find each other.

It snowed on Sunday, and a heavy freezing rain began on Monday. In hours everything was coated with ice. Twigs as small as pencils were encased in three inches of ice. Mature trees splintered and fell under tons of weight. In less than a day power lines were down, phones were out, roads were blocked from the Adirondacks far into Canada. There was a continuous barrage of noise — limbs tearing away from trunks and crashing into ice-coated underbrush.

By Tuesday the shelter was pretty well organized. The fire department had hooked up some generators to provide light. The Red Cross sent in cots and blankets and bottled water. Without electricity, grocery stores had no refrigeration; they donated meat and produce and milk.

Fountain was dark and deserted. Schools were closed. The only traffic was work crews. The hardware store had been open but was out of batteries, flashlights, any kind of heaters. The Mobil station pumped gas with a standby generator until the underground tank ran dry. We had already had four inches of freezing rain.

Everybody knew what had to be done. Clear the roads so repair crews could reach downed power lines. Check the houses, transport people to the shelter. Watch for wires on the ground, stay clear of overhead branches. The fire department, the ambulance squad, the highway crews all worked double and triple shifts.

The Town Hall had a basketball court — that was where we set up some eighty cots. I slept that night in the clothes I had on, my cane and some aspirin for my ankle at hand. The rumble of generators outside and snoring and coughing inside didn’t keep me awake.

Like the other small mountain towns we were isolated, but we were in good shape. We had radio contact with the police and hospitals; we had bottled water, kerosene, and the promise of oxygen tanks tomorrow. The radio said the storm was not about to let up, but we were too tired to worry about it.

All tales have a beginning (“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth”; “Call me Ishmael”; “It was a dark and stormy night”). This tale — a tale of murder gone awry — may be said to have its beginning on a lovely summer morning in 1942 in Hillsdale, the county seat of Ashford County in the Appalachian foothills of southwestern Pennsylvania.

Six-month-old Elizabeth Watson, a chubby blonde darling, was having a wonderful time playing with her toys in her playpen in the back yard when a wee intruder appeared. Just out of the nest, exploring the great big world for the very first time, a meadow mouse (M. Pennsylvanicus) hopped into the playpen squeaking baby mouse noises.

Oh, oh, oh, a new toy and it makes funny noises, thought Elizabeth happily. She grabbed it, squeezed it tightly in her baby fist. The squeaks became shrill squeals as the frightened mouse fought to free itself from the clutches of this monster. It made it. It ran up the baby’s arm, leaped onto her blonde head, began digging frantically.

Elizabeth screamed. Her mother, who had been keeping a watchful eye on her from the back porch swing, flew down the steps, ran to the playpen, swatted the mouse so hard that it landed twenty feet away. Squeaking pathetically, it ran for home, a lesson learned; it’s a dangerous world out there.

The mouse hadn’t broken the skin, but it left a permanent scar. That terrifying experience marked Elizabeth for life. She was petrified of mice, an incurable musophobe, haunted by musophobia, one of over two hundred phobias (fears) listed in psychiatric dictionaries. Others are ailurophobia (fear of cats; Bunny Ainsworth — she who was once plain Elizabeth Watson — loves cats; they catch mice), and phasmophobia (fear of ghosts).

Bunny is not alone. There are thousands of women and who knows how many men who, given the choice, would take a cackling ghost in the attic to a squeaking mouse in the bedroom. It is unlikely that anyone has ever died of musophobia or phasmophobia. Let us hope not; there are already enough goofy ways to die. And Elizabeth “Bunny” Watson Ainsworth didn’t die of her phobia. But it was close, a narrow squeak.

When a hurricane forms out in the Atlantic, the whole East Coast gets nervous. Hurricanes always appear headed directly for Florida when they start out. So the people in Florida from the Keys up to about Vero Beach get especially frantic.

This hurricane was still out there almost five hundred miles away, heading right toward Miami. It already had a name: Buford. Alphonsina, who had preceded Buford two weeks earlier, had spun off to the north and died out. But all Buford was doing was growing stronger and getting closer.

As you might imagine, nobody in the Miami area was happy about Buford — nobody except Tommy Brokenbridge.

Brokenbridge was not Tommy’s real name. Tommy played the horses and the numbers. And he played them a lot. When he’d worked at the Bridge Hotel, to his bookmaker he was Tommy Bridge. When he quit the Bridge Hotel, his bookmaker changed Tommy’s name to Tommy Brokenbridge. Just one of the ways bookies have of keeping track of their customers.

Later Tommy started working at one of the beach hotels. But forever after, he was Tommy Brokenbridge. I don’t think I ever heard his real last name.

Tommy was happy about Buford because of the numbers, which I’ll get to in a minute.

My name is Joe Standard. I run Standard Investigations. You’ll have a problem finding Standard Investigations in Dun & Bradstreet because most of my clientele don’t provide the type of high profile cases needed to build the reputation and bottom line requisite to be listed by such a venerable firm. That is not to say that all of my clientele are lowlife scum, but I get a high percentage.

The problem is, I work cheap. I have to. With most of the people who come to me, it’s chicken or feathers. None of them are flush very often. And when they are, they don’t seem to stay that way long.

It all works out because I’ve got a low overhead operation. I have a small office in the back of the Sunbelt Realty Company. There’s a cot in my office just under my big blowup photograph of the illustrious Seattle Slew galloping to glory in his Preakness victory. The cot cuts down on the need for an expensive apartment. And, only two doors down, they put a shower in the can for me. Sunbelt Realty collects only minimal office rent. The place is located in a dangerous part of Miami — my being there helps to keep out the riffraff. So it kind of works out for everybody. But let me get back to Tommy.

I mentioned that Tommy was a gambler. He played the numbers every day — mostly the Cuban bolita. It paid out better than the Florida lottery, but he played that, too, and jai alai and the horses.

Tommy was not a handicapper in the real sense of the word. He just generated numbers: license plates, house numbers, street numbers, Social Security numbers, any numbers that struck his fancy — but most of all, hurricane tracking numbers. When Hurricane Andrew descended on the people of Miami and Homestead, Tommy tracked it all the way in. He hammered the Cuban bolita and also managed to hit five Cash Three’s, three Play Fours, and two Fantasy Fives in the Florida lottery, eight trifectas at Miami jai alai, and an untold number of exactas and trifectas at Calder Race Course. Before Andrew destroyed Homestead, Florida, Tommy had won over one hundred twenty-eight thousand dollars. He bet the longitude and latitude numbers that were being reported on the hour after he plotted them on his hurricane map.

Tommy claims he could have made a million if all the action hadn’t shut down when the hurricane hit. He managed to hold onto the money for over a year before he went bust and had to go back to work as a waiter at the New Horizons Restaurant just down from my office.

Tommy gave up his apartment to accumulate cash for the anticipated hurricane-betting frenzy that began when Alphonsina got her name. When he was flush, Tommy had bought a new Ford van with captain’s chairs. He parked the van every night in the Sunbelt Realty parking lot. That’s where he slept. I let him use my can for twenty a week. When the radio in his van conked out and he couldn’t get good numbers, it was a panic situation for him. But he refused to cough up any of his precious bankroll for a cheap radio.

Now, Tommy seemed like a good enough guy, so like some kind of boob I allowed him to camp out in my office. He used my TV and my desk to plot his numbers for an additional twenty a week. When Alphonsina hit the newscasts and started to get close, Tommy began to send it in: to the corner convenience store for Florida lottery tickets; to the track; to the outstretched hand of the constantly underfoot bolita runner.

Worst mistake I ever made. Having Tommy there was bad enough, but I didn’t factor in the accordion. We weren’t long into our arrangement when Tommy turned up one night, half in the bag, with his accordion. He insisted on playing “Roll Out the Barrel” and a medley of other polka times for me. I tossed him out and locked the door. He persisted with the serenade in the parking lot. At one point he went into a incompetent, drunken, barely recognizable rendition of “Amazing Grace.” It was too ghastly for description.

These accordion nights, as they came to be known, were all too frequent. I tried desperately to get him to leave. But he wouldn’t. He had paid me for the month, which still had two weeks to run, and he wouldn’t take back a partial payment.

“Look, Joe,” he pleaded, “Buford will hit in a couple of days, long before the end of the month. By then I’ll have all the green I can use. I’ll go then and give you a bonus to boot.”

“So how much have you grossed so far?” I asked him.

“Well, nothing yet,” he admitted. “But that’s because Alphonsina didn’t come ashore. It will be different with Buford. It’s headed right for us.”

There is little doubt that Tommy’s train had left the track some ways back. But I couldn’t take any more accordion. I could hear the tuneless, discordant, unmelodious racket through the walls at night when he played the vile instrument in the van. So when Buford was about three days out, I enlisted Bullseye Larry, who owed me a favor, to steal the van while Tommy was down at the corner with his Florida lottery bets. Not to chop it up or send it to Venezuela, mind you, but long enough to dump the dreaded accordion in the Intercoastal. He could park the van up the street when he was done.

Unfortunately, Bullseye got caught with a hot Honda Prelude and ended up in the Dade County slammer before he was able to heist the van. Two important things happened next. The first thing was, Brokenbridge didn’t seem to be collecting on any of his numerous bets.

“Something is wrong with the numbers, Joe,” he confessed to me when Buford was but two days away. “I should be up a bundle by now. It ain’t workin’ right. I don’t think Buford is going to hit Miami.”

The second thing was Tommy’s bolita runner. I should tell you about him. He was the bag man for the local bolita and well known to everybody in the neighborhood because of a singular characteristic. Years ago he was working out in West Hialeah in the industrial parks at a zinc die cast place that made jalousie window cranks. He worked one of the big presses that cut the sprue away from the casting. Got his hand caught in the press one day. He lost all but his pinkie finger on the right hand. His little finger looked about eight inches long. And he couldn’t bend it. It stuck straight out, ramrod stiff. The Cubans called him Tubo de Relámpago. Rough translation in English: Lightning Rod. But everybody else just called him Lightning.

Lightning was terrified of Buford. The closer the hurricane got, the more agitated he became. He began to spend his nights out at Tommy’s van, drinking beer and enduring the accordion — strange behavior.

My part-time operative Frankie Swinehart, or Swine as he came to be commonly dubbed, had just landed a cushy job with Calder Race Course security. A position he’d struggled to obtain after many years of working drudge security in chilly car lots and crowd control at dangerous Cuban dances for the big firm in town. I was a bit surprised to see him come through my office door in uniform in the middle of a working day a half hour before post time.

He picked up Tommy’s chart off the lone office chair. “What’s this?” he said.

“Ain’t you supposed to be work-in’?” I asked.

He threw the chart on the floor and sat down. “Got a big problem, Joe. Everybody’s trying to move their horses out on account of the hurricane. We’re goin’ nuts over at Calder.”

“I can imagine. But what are you doin’ here?”

“There’s been an accident in the backstretch — Arnie Ritter.”

“Arnie! What happened?”

Arnie was a horse trainer. Years ago I was an assistant trainer under Buddy Wayne. I kept my track license up over the years and did odd jobs for some of the trainers in the backstretch. Arnie Ritter was one of them. He was a good trainer and a longtime friend.

“Arnie asked Jimmy Cox to let me off to come over and see you. He knows me, and you know each other. That big Glitterman colt Arnie’s been prepping gave him a shot in the chest. Broke some ribs and collapsed a lung. He’s in pretty bad shape.” The accordion music started up out in the parking lot. “Jeesus, what’s that racket?” Swine asked.

I told him about Tommy and Lightning and surmised that the two idiots had got an early start on a beer-drinking accordion night.

Swine continued, informing me that Arnie didn’t want me to waste time visiting him in the hospital. “Arnie’s son Bill has twelve head at Fairgrounds in Louisiana,” Swine said. “Arnie wants you to make sure his two colts in the Calder backstretch get out before the hurricane. He wants them shipped to Bill in Louisiana. Arnie told me to tell you that he has it fixed with the horseman’s bookkeeper to cut you a check for fifteen hundred to arrange transportation.”

“I don’t know nothin’ about arranging transportation,” I readily confessed. “Where am I supposed to find transportation?”

Swine shrugged. “How tough can it be? Find somebody with a horse trailer willing to take two head to Fairgrounds for fifteen hundred. Thing is, you ain’t got much time. That hurricane is supposed to come ashore around midnight.”

From the parking lot came a barely recognizable accordion interpretation of “Easter Parade,” vocal by Lightning Rod in slurred Spanish. “You got any good news for me?” I asked.

Swine pushed his bony body up from my client chair. “Yeah, I got to get back to work. That guy out there singin’ sounds like somebody wounded him in the throat.”

Up to now I hadn’t worried much about the hurricane. I’d been through a few. When Andrew hit, I was holed up at a hurricane party in the Surfer’s Bar and Grill just around the corner. They don’t normally have much surf in Florida, and it’s doubtful that a genuine, actual surfer ever set foot in Surfer’s Bar and Grill. But it was a hell of a party. We were all rather relaxed, so we just sort of crammed into the dining room when the front half of the roof blew down the street.

Remember I told you that Tommy was the only one happy about the hurricane? I might have been mistaken. Buford was less than twelve hours away. No matter which TV station I turned to, the weathermen were positively orgasmic. They seemed to be on a hurricane high. There was much grinning and jumping about. How the weather people were able to repress the urge to break out into joyous, hysterical laughter is a mystery — and more, a real tribute to their professionalism. Documentaries and specials were presented endlessly while hurricane watches and hurricane warnings choked off scheduled broadcasting. Anywhere up and down the coast from Key West to Vero Beach you were already a victim unless you had stockpiled a two months’ supply of canned goods, flashlight batteries, bottled water, and plywood sheets, and, oh yes, portable radios and a bathtub full of water to flush the john. They neglected to mention that given all the hysterics it would require a trip to North Carolina to find a retailer with items such as candles and batteries still on the shelf; provided, that is, one were able to get onto a major thruway going north. And all I had to do was get two horses to Louisiana.

I do have a company car, a ’65 Mustang convertible. Me and the Mustang crawled north toward Calder amidst the unwashed, with-out-plywood-sheets, no-bottled-water, batteryless rabble who were trying to put Buford in their rear view mirrors.

Calder was practically abandoned. Diehard, dedicated horse-players were clearly a solid minority in Miami this day. There were just a few hundred fans sprinkled about. In the backstretch it was a different story — one titled Pandemonium. It looked like a horse push-pull-drag-get-’em-in-the-van contest.

I found Jimmy Cox at track security. He had Arnie’s check from the bookkeeper. I jammed it in my rear pocket. It was about two hours before the banks closed; after that, everything would be buttoned up awaiting Buford. I headed down the shed row to Arnie’s barn. I propositioned everybody loading a horse. There were a couple of vacancies going to Monmouth but nothing else. And nobody was heading for Fairgrounds.

Arnie had one stall converted for use as a feed room. It contained some feed and hay along with assorted training paraphernalia. Tack adorned one wall. In addition there was a small table with a single chair. I plopped down to ponder my next move. A sign to the right of the stall opening, at eye level, caught my attention:

I read it several times. There aren’t many things certain in this world, but if there is one universal truth, Anonymous has grasped the essence of it. Anybody in the P.I. business will testify to that. Anybody in any business, I suspect, would agree. You want tangible proof, look at my current good deed status.

I checked the two colts in the next stalls over. They seemed okay. I went back to the tiny table to study the situation. I didn’t want to let Arnie down, but I was clearly out of options. I put my head in my hands and cogitated over my next move.

“This is a stickup!”

I uncovered my eyes to behold a husky fellow with a bent nose standing in the stall entrance with an adhesive-backed deodorant in hand.

“Who are you?” the visitor asked. “Where’s Arnie?”

I explained my presence in the stall, which I noticed did have a subtle stench about it. I asked the stickup man to respond in kind.

“George Foreman,” he said, extending his hand.

“Hold on,” I said. “You ain’t George Foreman, you don’t look nothin’ like him.”

“Not the boxing George Foreman,” he explained. “I’m the horse training George Foreman. I keep my string a coupla stalls down the shedrow.”

George asked after Arnie’s health and then explained that his dog Alfred had wandered off earlier and had elected to dump a load in the corner of Arnie’s office stall. Unfortunately, some of it went up under the stall partition and couldn’t be retrieved; hence, the stickup.

“In the supermarket I had to fight off several thousand crazed women swinging water jugs and flashlights to get this deodorant,” George said. “I hope Arnie appreciates it.”

George and his string were leaving within the hour for Belmont in New York. He was sympathetic to my plight but could offer little help. He prepared the deodorant and pressed it onto the back wall under a nylon halter. He wished me good luck and disappeared through the stall opening.

A few seconds later he returned. “I just remembered something,” he said. “My sister lives in West Palm Beach, about fifty miles up the road. She has a few hunter jumpers she keeps up there. She’s got a two-horse trailer she almost never uses. She might let you use it if you have some way to get it. If you want, I’ll give her a call.”

I tossed this idea about. Arnie had a half-ton pickup, but he had the keys at the hospital, and all the car switching and the drive to West Palm would eat up a lot of time and time was quickly running out. Besides, who would drive the truck to Louisiana? Then I had my inspiration: Tommy Brokenbridge. He had a van with a V8 and a trailer hitch. He could really use seven hundred and fifty dollars. I know what you’re thinking, but I had to toss something to George’s sister for the trailer and I deserved something for my anguish. Besides, I knew Tommy was desperate enough to work cheap. And best of all, him and the evil accordion would be out of my fife. I made a mental note to give Tommy only half up front — three hundred fifty. That would give him some incentive not to sell the trailer before he started back. There was little doubt he would return. Florida numbers betting was the only fife he knew. It was a lifestyle not easily accommodated elsewhere.

George cleared it with his sister and gave me written directions to her place in Wellington, a horse community in West Palm Beach. Swine agreed to check on Arnie’s colts while I enlisted Tommy’s aid.

Going south was a breeze, just a few cars. A check issued on Calder Race Course is solid gold at any bank in Florida, but I’ve suffered a few unfortunate setbacks in my banking career over time. In the interest of haste and to avoid problems I bypassed my own bank and cashed it at the bank it was written on. With the money warming my pocket, I headed back to the office and the Sunbelt parking lot to look for my musical friend Tommy.

I could see a problem developing. Tommy was no doubt the most ceaseless nitwit I’d ever run across in my travels. But he was psychotic in his habits. He did everything by the numbers. He was methodical in the time and sequence of his bets. He timed his trip to the corner store for lottery tickets to the second. What I’m saying is, he’s predictable. Tommy runs a tighter schedule than the airlines. When I had left earlier, he’d started an early accordion night. If anything, he should be staggering around with the accordion or passed out in his van by now. But the van was gone. Something was amiss. Then came more trouble: Huey, Dewey, and Louie.

At least that’s what everybody called them behind their backs. Humbierto, Diaz, and Louis ran the Cuban bolita in Little Havana. Never was clear who the big cheese was, but I always suspected Huey. Diaz and Louis always dressed elegantly — suit and tie, shined shoes, the whole gangster bit. Huey was different. Braced on either side by the well-manicured Dewey and Louie, Huey stood before me in my own office smiling at me under his ragged, burrito-infested mustache, sporting ragged denim shorts and shower thongs. His English was pretty good.

“Where he es, Brokenbreedge?” Huey wanted to know.

I went around my desk and sat down. “I got one word for you guys: Adios!”

I knew they probably wouldn’t mess with me. They were businessmen first. As such, they were aware of my own reputation and connections. They commenced to argue among themselves in Spanish. Even in Spanish the word relámpago is tough to mistake. As the argument heated up, relámpago seemed to punctuate every other sentence.

It didn’t take long to figure out what was happening here. The head office of the Cuban bolita wouldn’t be out trying to collect from Tommy. They had knucklebusters for that. They were looking for Lightning Rod. That could only mean one thing. Lightning had made off with their collection money.

It fit together. Lightning was terrified of the coming hurricane, and Tommy was near broke. It seemed pretty clear that Tommy and Lightning had absconded with the swag.

Huey then asked me if I had seen Lightning Rod lately. I told him the truth: that Lightning and Tommy were here earlier but not now. The group pondered that for a bit, then left. They were still discussing the situation at the top of their collective voices well into the parking lot. There was no chance that Huey and company would bring the cops into this. Lightning was away clean, or so it seemed.

None of this was helping me at all. I made a call to George’s sister and told her I wouldn’t be coming for the trailer. I guessed the only thing left was to sit and brave it out. I made a call to Calder and talked to Jimmy Cox in security. I told him that Arnie’s horses were staying.

“We’re putting all the horses still here into the receiving barns where we can button up and keep an eye on them,” he told me. “You want me to have Swine take Arnie’s horses over now?” he asked.

I told him to go ahead. I called Arnie at the hospital, but he was in surgery. There wasn’t much left to do but amble over to the Surfer and wait for Buford. I clicked on the TV. Buford was still about eighty miles out but had speeded up. New predictions indicated Miami didn’t have seven hours left. It was now estimated to be less than three hours. As I watched, the television began to beep, and a message printed across the bottom of the screen. At the same time the now weary weatherman seemed reinvigorated.

“This just in from the Weather Center. Buford has veered sharply north. The indication now is that it will miss the Miami area... I repeat... Buford will miss the Miami area. Where, or if, it will come ashore has not been passed along to us as yet. Stand by; we will try to get a prediction on that.”

So Tommy had been right about why his numbers didn’t work. The hurricane wasn’t going to hit Miami. I locked up and went around the corner to the Surfer’s Bar to watch the outcome on satellite TV with a Budweiser in my fist. I made a mental note to get up early so I could tend to Arnie’s horses.

The next day word on the street was that Lightning had made off with over eight thousand dollars. In other news, Buford had come ashore briefly. The hurricane had veered in about a hundred twenty miles north of Miami at Hobe Sound, bounced around some, then headed northeast and out to sea. Later on in the day the news crew came on television to report the damage. For the most part it was just a few signs knocked down, with only one serious incident. There were few cars on the highway because of the relentless warnings. But it was reported that two Miamians driving a van with no radio did not receive any warning that the hurricane had veered north and was headed directly for them. On U.S. 1, just past Hobe Sound, their van was lifted and tossed into forty feet of Hobe Sound inlet water. Tommy, Lightning, the accordion, and the bag money went in the drink together. Only Tommy and Lightning came out. It was reported that the two behaved rather badly and had to be restrained by police from diving back into the tortuous sea to regain their possessions.

I still don’t know if all the hysteria is warranted — but it looks like there might be some merit in at least having a radio.

I first saw him when I was seven years old. A realtor who specialized in country estates was showing us the living room of a house on a seventy acre nonworking “farm” in Connecticut. It was a red brick house with white storm shutters, and nearby there was a gentle rock-strewn brook that tumbled quietly through an ancient oak grove. The house would be ample for my parents, my two sisters, and myself without requiring a housekeeper or other help. The living room had a vaulted ceiling, built-in bookcases, a maple floor, a stone fireplace, and tall, clear, very large multipaned windows. The broker, a perpetually smiling middle-aged man of lofty stature and prematurely silver hair, was pointing to a three-pronged electrical outlet as proof that the old house had been rewired. Being a child, I saw no significance in the fact, since the wires were inside the walls, i.e. invisible, and therefore it shouldn’t matter whether they were old or new, but my father seemed pleased to hear it. I assumed that he was only being polite. My father — and my mother too, for that matter — were polite to a fault. It was at that moment that a lanky, slightly stooped man of sixty or more years dressed in a denim workshirt and faded overalls walked through the front door. He nodded to us as he crossed the living room toward a door that led into the hall. He disappeared through the door.

For a moment everyone was too stunned to say anything.

“That’s just Claud Heister,” said the broker at last. He laughed. “He comes with the house.”

My parents laughed, so I and my sisters — although too young to understand the joke — did also. The broker resumed showing the remainder of the property, and Claud Heister was forgotten.

After the tour my father told the broker that he would call tomorrow to let him know if he was interested in making an offer. I was hoping that he would be interested. I really liked the place. There was plenty of room to play and to ride the horse that I believed I would receive someday. My sisters, who at five and four were too young to understand what was happening, watched and listened to the conversation without perception or bias. But I wanted him to buy.

My parents had been actively looking for a house in Connecticut for almost a month. It was to serve as a weekend and holiday retreat from our home in New York City. Most of our friends owned retreats in Connecticut or the Hamptons. For me, the place we had seen that day was perfect.

It turned out that my view wasn’t an isolated one. After we’d all slid into my father’s Imperial, my father asked Mother what she thought of the farm. “I think it’s perfect,” she said.

“Good,” he said. “I feel the same. It’s larger than we’d discussed, and will cost more than we’d budgeted, but we can swing it.”

Swing it they did. Several days of negotiation ended with the purchase. There was a further delay in our going there while Mother acquired exactly the right sort of furniture she wanted for the living room, dining room, master bedroom, and the two bedrooms that we kids would occupy. Furniture for the other rooms could wait, but Mother insisted on acquiring the basic stuff immediately.

Finally, after days of impatient waiting, moving day arrived. This was the long-awaited moment when the movers would haul all the furnishings from the storage warehouse in the Bronx to the house in Connecticut. They would follow the Imperial, and later Mother would direct them in the placement of the new furniture. Actually, because Mother had complete charge of where things went, there was little need for the rest of us, but Father was the family’s only licensed driver and they couldn’t have kept us children away without enduring more crying, whining, and complaining than it would have been worth.

When we reached the farm, my father parked beyond the front porch so the movers would have plenty of room. He had already cautioned us children to stay out of the way and out of the house, and he did it again right after we left the car. When Father went to open the front door of the house, he found it unlocked. He looked surprised but not concerned. The movers backed their van up to the front porch and began unloading. I remember that the first item they took out was the long mahogany cabinet that now belongs to my sister Alicia. Mother followed the movers into the house to show them where she wanted it, while Father strolled over to a garage that once had been a barn. My sisters and I stayed to watch the movers.

The movers came out and went back in with another item while Mother remained inside. The process was repeated several times before she came out again. It was while she was outside pointing to the piece of furniture she next wanted taken inside that Claud came out the front door onto the porch. When Mother turned and saw him, she sort of gasped. Evidently he’d been inside the house the whole time that they’d been taking in furniture. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was in my room and didn’t hear you folks arrive or I woulda been out earlier to help you.”

Before she could say anything, one of the movers said, “We can always use some free help.”

Claud went right to it, helping move the lighter pieces, and Mother said nothing. Of course, what could she say? She didn’t know what he was doing there, but she wasn’t really sure that he had no business being there because sometimes Father arranged for things without telling her. She tried to ignore the circumstances and treat him like he was just another one of the movers. After the lighter stuff had been taken inside, he disappeared. I doubt that she forgot about him exactly, but I suspect, knowing her, that she refused to admit to herself that the whole situation wasn’t resolved by his temporary disappearance.

When Father reappeared, she mentioned nothing about it to him. Of course she was still busy, getting the last pieces of furniture placed just right and getting dinner fixed at the same time. Part of the problem with country living is the lack of pizza delivery systems.

Dinner was served in the small dining room. The living room was to one side, and a door that led into the big kitchen and pantry was to the other. The room was more long than wide, with cream-colored walls and a couple of windows with a splendid view of the countryside. The table was a long, heavy, elaborately carved black walnut piece Mother had found in a store that specialized in antique furniture. It dated from the mid-nineteenth century. She took great delight in anticipating the first setting of it. It didn’t matter that eight chairs came with the table but there were only five of us.

Or rather, as it turned out, six of us.

Just as she finished setting the table, Claud reappeared. He walked into the kitchen where she and my older sister were, sniffed the air, and asked, “What’re we having?”

“Uh... roast beef with candied yams and sweet peas.”

“That oughta be good. I ain’t had a good female-cooked meal since this place went on the market four months ago. Mrs. Carstairs could sure cook up a fine dinner. Made good waffles for breakfast, too. Do you make waffles for breakfast, Mrs. Hinton?”

“Uh... yes... sometimes.”

“Good. I sure like waffles for breakfast. Of course, anything you fix is fine with me. I ain’t particular. How long before dinner’s ready?”

“Ready? Oh, about another five minutes.”

“Just enough time to wash my hands.” He left, and Mother went looking for Father. Unfortunately Father had found something urgent that needed doing outdoors, and she couldn’t find him. She didn’t have a full five minutes to look because she needed to set another place at the table.

By the time Father finished his odd job we were all seated at the table: Mother, myself, Alicia, Janet, and Claud. Father sort of flinched when he saw Claud there, but he didn’t ask any questions or say a word about it. Claud looked up at him, smiled, and nodded, and Father stalled and nodded back at him and then took his seat at the table. Father looked at Mother and then at Claud and then back at Mother, but he said nothing. While eating, though, he kept sneaking glances at Claud.

Nobody said much during dinner other than to ask people to pass this or pass that. But it wasn’t because of Claud. Mother and Father believed it impolite to talk during meals, and so it wasn’t done. Claud must have been of the same opinion because he didn’t say anything either.

After dinner Mother began clearing away the dishes, and Father went into the living room. He pretended as though he were intent on surveying his new property from the big living room windows, but actually the tight clasping and unclasping of his hands behind his back signaled that he was bursting with questions that his politeness wouldn’t allow him to ask. Claud stopped in the living room after he left the table.

“Do you play cards, Mr. Hinton?” he asked.

“Cards? No. No, I don’t. Why? Do you?”

“Mostly patience. Sometimes, when there’s someone around who’s game, a little poker.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I... I don’t play cards.”

“Too bad. Mr. Carstairs could play a mean hand of draw poker. So could Mr. Tillman.”

“Tillman? I don’t recognize that name.”

“He used to own this place.”

“You mean before Mr. Carstairs?”

“Yes. Not just before him. There were two owners between them... Well, I’ll just head for my room. I’m in the middle of a good western novel. Do you read westerns, Mr. Hinton?”

“No. Nonfiction, a few mysteries, that’s about it.”

“I see. Well, I’ll just head for my room.”

Father watched him go. More than that, my usually polite and circumspect Father shadowed him part of the way. He had reason, though: he wanted to discover which room was Claud’s so he wouldn’t accidentally walk into it uninvited.

Which isn’t to say that my parents immediately accepted this puzzling situation. They did not. On the contrary, I learned much later, they stayed up half the night discussing it. Mostly they tried to recall exactly what the real estate broker had said about Claud Heister and the way he’d said it. They finally went to bed after agreeing that the following morning Father would drive into New York to see the broker and discover exactly who Claud was and what he was doing in their new house. One thing only Father was certain of: there was no mention of Claud Heister in the real estate sales agreement.

The next morning Mother fixed waffles for breakfast. Normally she didn’t. Waffles were always something of a treat. Usually we had Quaker Oats or cream of wheat on cold mornings, and pancakes, bacon, and eggs or cold cereal on other mornings. It was obvious that she’d made them for Claud. It was the polite thing to do, of course.

“My oh my,” he said after he’d tasted one, which he’d saturated with Brer Rabbit molasses. “That is certainly a first-class waffle, Mrs. Hinton.”

“Is it as good as Mrs. Carstairs’ waffles?”

He took another bite, chewed very carefully, his eyes up at the ceiling, as though carefully weighing the question with both his brains and his tastebuds. We all watched him and waited for his verdict.

“You know,” he said at last, “I believe they are as good.”

Everybody breathed in relief. Even Father appeared pleased by the judgment.

That did not prevent him from driving into New York to see the broker. It did not help his disposition that the broker was out of town showing a house and that he had to wait at the man’s office until midafternoon.

I was not present for the meeting, of course, and only learned about it years later. Although polite as ever, Father was adamant in demanding an explanation. The broker said he’d told Father that Claud came with the house, but Father was having none of that. He had taken it as a joke, he said. Anyone would take such a comment as a joke. I don’t know what the broker thought he was doing when he tried to excuse the situation so lamely because obviously the effort would fail. Nobody would believe himself legally informed by such a casual statement.

In the end the broker had to provide a full explanation that made some sort of sense. I say “some sort” because no complete sense was ever made of the situation.

According to the broker, Claud Heister had lived in the house for at least three decades. No one — or more accurately, no one the broker knew of — was exactly sure how long he’d been there. He literally came with the house. He was not mentioned in the contracts, but he was there. Every new owner had been surprised in turn by his presence (apparently it was a practice of both seller and broker not to inform the buyer of everything he was getting) but had eventually accepted it.

“They recognized that Claud is a benefit,” said the broker.

“A benefit? How is it beneficial to have a man we don’t know living in our house?”

“Your country house,” corrected the broker. “You’re usually not there.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Claud’s presence is a deterrent to thieves and vandals. Your house is safer because he’s in it. And when you are there, he’s barely noticeable. He occupies one bedroom.”

“But he’s not a member of my family.”

“Look at it this way. You have a watchman on your property, guarding it day and night twelve months of the year, paid for by the government.”

“The government?” asked Father.

“He lives on his Social Security. You pay him nothing. In return, your house is protected. You suffer no real inconvenience at his hands. All you give up is one bedroom in a five-bedroom house.”

“But... but he isn’t part of my family.”

“Mr. Hinton, he’s lived there for at least three decades. At least three. Do you really want to be responsible for evicting this man from his home?”

Of course that was the best argument in the world to use with my father. He caved. Claud became a permanent fixture at the Hinton country house — as he’d been before the Hintons had the country house.

Naturally, at the time, my sisters and I knew nothing of these events or the dismay produced in my mother when she learned we had acquired a permanent houseguest. What we did know was that Claud was always at the farm. In the way of children, we did not question his presence, did not question who he was, did not question what his function might be. The adult world was filled with things too complex for us to understand, so there were things we seldom questioned and this especially included why certain adults happened to be in certain places. We always assumed, for example, that a waitress was a waitress because that’s what she was, not because it was what she chose to be or what she had to be. We never looked into anyone’s motives for being in a certain job or a certain place. Claud was Claud and he was at the country house; that was all there was to it.

Perhaps some questions might have formed in our minds if we had come to know him better. But we never did come to know Claud. He appeared at meals; otherwise we saw him infrequently. Sometimes we would see him walking toward the front gate, going somewhere, and sometimes we would see him coming from the front gate, coming from somewhere, but he never did anything on the farm itself. He never worked or played. He just came and went. Indoors, other than at meals, the only times we saw him — and they were seldom — were when he was seated at the otherwise empty dining table playing patience. On those occasions he wore a green plastic eyeshade.

It was because of Claud that we kept the country house when Father experienced severe financial trouble during a recession. He needed money, and he wanted to sell the farm. But he couldn’t because of Claud. Father was simply too much of a gentleman to allow a broker not to warn a potential new buyer about Claud, yet obviously nobody would buy it knowing that a permanent houseguest came as part of the package. So we kept the farm and Father barely avoided bankruptcy. It put him through the wringer. In the end it turned out well because Father survived without selling the farm.

Claud died last summer. It was sudden and unexpected. He was walking down the road and just dropped dead of a heart attack. The doctor said that sort of heart attack seldom happened. Father claimed it was the best way to go. I’m not so sure; I think I would want some warning.

Father paid for Claud’s burial in the nearest cemetery and for a nice headstone after a quick investigation confirmed that he had no family.

It was only then, when Father was going through Claud’s papers in his room (the court appointed him and a local lawyer co-executors) that he found the promissory note. Forty years earlier it had been given to Claud Heister, farmhand, by the then owner of the farm, John Williams. The note was for accumulated back wages, which Williams was unable to pay, amounting to two thousand three hundred dollars. The interest was eight percent a year, compounded annually. An attached statement signed by Williams stipulated that Claud Heister would be allowed to live on the farm rent-free until the note and interest were paid and that the promise was binding on Williams’ heirs, assigns, and other successors in ownership of the farm.

We have since wondered, and probably will wonder ever after, whether Claud had slyly refrained from mentioning the debt to later owners after it had been forgotten, realizing that the free room was a better deal than the money (although the money would have amounted to almost fifty thousand dollars by the time he died), and if someone ever did order him to leave he could always produce the note and collect the money. But maybe that wasn’t the reason he’d never referred to the note. Maybe he’d simply been too polite to mention it.

At twilight the crickets and frogs began serenading one another, the bats made their first low flights over the tree-tops, and Midgy Lunken emerged from her underground burrow into the shadows of the night. Everything she wore had been salvaged from trashcans or stolen from careless shopkeepers. Everything she possessed in the world she carried in a dingy, threadbare knapsack.

Her home was the transformer vault of an abandoned tire factory where mice ate anything not stored in metal and sometimes bit her while she slept on her bed of newspapers and rags. Midgy Lunken was just under five feet tall, with eyes like a ferret’s and a nose like a blob of putty. It was three weeks since she’d washed her hair, in the ladies’ room at the bus station, when both of the female security guards were off on the same night.

She started her nightly round at the trash receptacle behind the Elite Bakery. Working in the dark, she searched a long time before finding and consuming a couple of stale rolls. Then she emptied a heavy-duty plastic garbage bag of its contents and set off to fill it with aluminum cans picked up from the wayside and salvaged from the hundred or so trashcans along her regular route.

She kept to the alleys, the unlighted passages, the dark sides of walls and fences. It wasn’t other nocturnal predators she feared — on them she could exercise nails and teeth, and fists hardened by hunger into hammers. But the police were merciless toward vagrants, and she had vowed not to survive another stretch in the workhouse.

Around two o’clock in the morning, with her bag full of cans, she slipped through a hedge and followed her usual course along Pemberton Avenue, a.k.a. Business Route 5. A high chain-link fence followed the curve of the road here, hugging the gravelly shoulder so closely as to leave no room for pedestrians. Midgy Lunken’s path lay between the fence and a dense thicket that cloaked the slope rising sharply to her right, above which the rooflines of houses showed vaguely against the velvet sky.

The traffic on Route 5 never quite died down at any hour of the night. Guided by the lights of passing cars, Midgy made her way with ease through the shadows. All the same, she nearly fell over the figure huddled motionless on the path before a stray beam of light limned it momentarily.

A hungry belly has no conscience, much less a scrap of compassion. Midgy had rolled a few drunks in her day. Her only concern was that some sharp-eyed driver would see her at it and have the police on the scene before she could get away. She knelt quickly in the mud and ran her hands over the prostrate form. A man — a big man, muscular, but just now limp as a rag. A wallet where it ought to be. She snatched it and scampered back along the path by which she’d come, trailing her bag of empty cans noisily behind her.

At length she stopped under a viaduct to examine her spoils by the feeble glow of a streetlight. Besides the usual cards and papers, the wallet contained a substantial wad of bills. With many a glance over her shoulder she counted them out — sixty-eight dollars’ worth of them.

Midgy Lunken dropped the plundered wallet down a storm sewer and left her bag of cans tumbled in the gutter for somebody else to find and redeem. She padded off into the night, her mind astir with plans for spending her windfall. First a visit to the coffeeshop at the bus station. Then a bath and a four dollar bed for the rest of the night at the Brethren’s Hostel. And in the morning, Eleanor’s Beauty Salon as soon as it opened — if they’d let her in.

David Bannerman knew it as a sad, cynical truth. When you’re feeling happy, at the crest of a wave, hold on tight — there’s often a deep trough of misery lurking on the other side. He heard a sigh come from Helen Bannerman, his sister and business partner, and knew she felt the same.

Andrew Adams, the man seated opposite them, was in his fifties, well-dressed and prosperous, a director in a rock-solid Scottish stockbroking firm. He had arrived without an appointment at the Banner Agency, the small private investigation and security consultancy the Bannermans operated from the top floor of an old Georgian building in the heart of Edinburgh.

But Adams had a handwritten introduction from the banker who nursed the Bannermans’ joint overdraft through moments of crisis. So they’d listened, almost able to feel his despair.

Two weeks earlier the world had been bright for Andrew Adams. He and his wife had been in New York, where his only son was being married. Now they’d been told their son was dead, buried under an avalanche in Switzerland.

“Except you don’t believe it,” said Bannerman softly. “So you want us to find the truth.”

“Win or lose,” agreed his visitor tightly. “Will you try?”

David Bannerman glanced at his sister. She gave a fractional nod, which made it unanimous.

“We’ll try,” said David. He walked to the window and looked over the grey slate rooftops of the Scottish capital towards the medieval bulk of Edinburgh Castle.

“Let’s go over the basics again. Your son’s name is Mark, he’s a newly qualified lawyer, his bride’s name is Susan, she’s an American citizen from—”

“From New York,” nodded Andrew Adams. “They met when Mark was in the States on a graduate exchange scheme. Susan is a nurse.”

They’d met at a university party and been engaged within a month. The wedding was in New York; then Mark Adams had brought his bride back to Europe, to honeymoon in Switzerland. They had collected a Volvo in Edinburgh and had driven across Europe to the Bernese Alpine resort village of Grindelwald, close under the legendary Eiger mountain. Telephone calls to both sets of parents had said everything was fine. But it was now forty-eight hours since Mark had vanished. The last thing known was that he’d gone walking near the mountain while his bride had a hair appointment at the village beauty salon.

It was early spring; there’d been late snowfalls and risks of avalanches. The young lawyer had simply disappeared without a trace.

“I should be there,” said Andrew Adams in a weary voice. “But there is my wife to consider—”

Mark Adams’ mother had a weak heart and had collapsed on hearing her son was missing. She was in hospital, too ill to be moved. The other set of parents, now in regular telephone touch from New York, were getting ready to fly over to be with their daughter.

“But you say Susan wants everyone to wait until she has more news,” frowned Helen, puzzled.

“That’s what she says,” Andrew Adams nodded. “And all we can get from the police is that this was just another tourist accident.” His mouth tightened. “I know what that means. They’ll leave things until summer; they’ll look for a body when the snow melts.”

“There’s probably not a lot we can do,” warned David.

“Maybe not, but forget the cost.” The stockbroker clenched his fists. “On the phone Susan sounds near collapse. But something’s wrong. She’s no fool. It’s as if she’s holding something back. Something she’s frightened to tell me.”

“Give me a moment,” said Helen Bannerman. “I’ll be right back.”

By the time she returned, her brother had gathered more details and the stockbroker had produced a wedding day photograph of the couple. Mark Adams was a dark-haired man in his twenties with a plump, cheerful face. His bride Susan was about the same age, slim and attractive, with blonde, shoulder-length hair.

Andrew Adams left. Once he’d gone, the Bannermans exchanged a wry glance. “Better see when we can get a flight,” suggested David.

“I already did,” said Helen mildly. “I spoke to that redhead you know at the airport.”

“And?” said her brother warily.

“We’re booked on the next Swissair flight, at one A.M.” She grinned. “For you, says your redhead, anything.”

I held my breath and ducked into the upstairs eaves of Prudence Geasley’s Victorian, unable to suppress the feeling.

It was shock, I suppose, then sheer anger, when I first discovered my late husband Jeb and Eva Wadsell in the catacombs of his law office “looking for something” as Jeb had so eloquently put it. I tried not to remember the scene: Eva giggling, scrambling for her Chinese mother-of-pearl comb and Jeb, shoeless with a face full of frosted-pink smears.

After that Jeb swore he’d never venture there again, although I suspected he’d carried on in other dark and sundry places with other reckless and irrelevant women.

I whacked at a cobweb, bumping my head on the slanted ceiling, my shins grazing cardboard boxes stacked in the vicinity of alphabetical order.

Years ago Prudie had raised the rent five dollars when Jeb had asked permission to store “dead” files in what he’d dubbed “the catacombs.” Lawyers had to keep everything, he’d said. Malpractice claims were rampant. You get rid of something today, and the next day they want it on a silver platter with a serving of smoked salmon and dill sauce.

I rooted toward some peeling magnolia wallpaper around the chimney, grabbed the entire carton of M’s, and ducked back through the doorway, smacking my crown on the way out.

I dropped the box on Jeb’s pressed pecan desk thinking a lawyer’s s work was never done, especially a dead lawyer’s work. I knew lawsuits weren’t limited to the living, that malpractice claims could also be brought against the paltry estate of a formerly careless, now deceased lawyer like Jeb. That’s why I wasn’t exactly waxing nostalgic. As far as I knew, he’d left me with no will whatsoever, his law office rent, and an address book full of Tammies and Mimis and Darlas.

I couldn’t find the deed. Ernest Minks’ vulture neighbors were putting up chain-link faster than an uphill semi could chum exhaust, and I had to find the deed to his sixty acres, the deed my late husband had failed to record at the Poke County Clerk’s office twelve years ago.

My fingers rustled the tops of the manila folders. It was unfair, the pressure I was feeling to satisfy Jeb’s already unsatisfied clients. The law office had closed the day after his heart attack. And besides, the place was now my part-time investigative headquarters where I occasionally took orders to retrieve stolen bicycles or spy on unfaithful spouses. If things really got hopping, I might be asked to find somebody’s lost dog, who could be identified by no collar and a mild case of the mange.

I found Myrick, Mason, McClary. The files were nowhere near in alphabetical order. I’d almost exhausted the entire M section when I saw the Murdock name filed next to Meeples. MURDOCK, JEB E. I jerked the manila folder out of its slot, opened it, and stood there. I vaguely remember my mouth dropping open and the sound of the rotating fan rustling a legal pad on the desk behind me.

Inside the folder was the will I’d thought never existed, a document Jeb drew up for himself four years ago, six years after we married.

It was a standard draft with a peculiar ending. Jeb had bequeathed all his worldly goods to me, “especially the Eastlake walnut secretary, which I hope she will cherish since it was left to me by my Grand-daddy O’Neil Murdock and holds a sacred and undeniable truth in the bottom drawer.”

I read it again. And again. Sacred and undeniable? It didn’t sound like Jeb. And why couldn’t he have just stated his truth right there in the will? Probably in too much of a hurry to meet one of his redheaded conquests, perhaps the one who misfiled his will.

Furthermore, the Eastlake secretary was a nine foot tall monstrosity with the one redeeming quality of a small amount of burled wood along the upper cabinet edges. Besides that, I’d already cleaned it out and sold the thing to an antique dealer named Nell last summer because I hadn’t entirely cherished it as Jeb had hoped. I in fact loathed Jeb’s Eastlake secretary. One of the reasons being that the now noteworthy bottom drawer, the only drawer, stuck. Actually, the drawer had a small keyhole, and Jeb had always claimed he’d locked it and accidentally lost the key (with Jeb everything was an accident). I’d halfheartedly tried to pop the drawer open with a bobby pin before I sold it, figuring there was nothing of value there.

The stepback, he had called it. Grampy’s Eastlake stepback.

I don’t remember how long I sat in front of the fan with Jeb’s will in my lap, another one of his bombshell surprises. I was smack in the middle of my summer vacation from teaching high school algebra to the brazen juveniles of Deerfoot, Tennessee, and I’d fully intended to spend the weeks enjoying the unfettered company of Clint Knuckles, the new history teacher at Deerfoot High. His mustache reminded me of a thin Clark Gable. And he’d promised me my first official date as a widow that very evening — buttered popcorn and a decent movie at the Hippodrome Theater.

One thing was certain, I fully did not intend to spend my summer traipsing around Poke County looking for some walnut malformation with a stuck drawer. Jeb’s stepback could be in North Dakota for all I knew. Also, I wasn’t certain what he might’ve deemed sacred and undeniable.

Until my eyes wandered toward Jeb’s prized print of Thomas Jefferson on the wall near the doorway.

Sacred and undeniable truths? It was in the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson’s original text.

Goosebumps materialized on my forearms, and I wondered what could ever be more sacred and undeniable than the truth. I suddenly knew how Jeb had chosen his words so carefully sitting there at his desk four years ago.

“Shoot-fire,” I said, and grabbed my Deerfoot directory.

Granny Grace couldn’t stop my sister’s wedding, but she did succeed in postponing it: she died. Despite Savannah’s histrionics, Grandpa refused to put his mother on ice while he jetted off to give away his eldest granddaughter into connubial bliss. So instead of flying east for New York nuptials, I headed west to pay my final respects to Granny.

Donner House presided over its acreage with nothing but a single tree to block its view of grazing cattle and pumping wells. I had no sooner climbed the steps than I had the first indication that this trip was going to be even more bizarre than usual: an icy hand touched my shoulder. I know that sounds like something Nana Nelle might say, but that’s what it felt like. I decided I was overwrought.

Nana greeted me warmly. “It’s high time you got here, Dallas.” (Mother had this thing for naming daughters after the place where she met their fathers. I’ve always been grateful she didn’t meet Daddy in Bull Head City or Buffalo.)

“It’s nice to see you, too, Nana.”

“Do something with your sister!”

I would have preferred an easier task, like teaching ballet to a longhorn.

Savannah had locked herself in what used to be her bedroom and was doing her best to get into the Guinness Book of Records for nonstop bawling. I had raised my hand to knock when Savannah screeched, “That old goat planned this! She didn’t have to die now!”

While it’s true Granny was dead set against the marriage, I had difficulty believing we should take that literally. I lowered my hand without knocking, turned, and walked into Granny’s room instead.

Granny’s belongings lay where she’d left them. I fingered a ball of yam from her knitting basket. A tear slid down my cheek.

“Well, it’s nice to know someone cared!” A voice behind my back startled me. “I knew I could count on you, Dallas,” said a young woman swathed in a fringed red chemise with matching headband and beads nearly down to her knees.

“What are you doing in here?”

“I spent a good portion of my life in here.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Really, Dallas! Don’t you recognize your Granny Grace?”

My Granny Grace? I was deciding what to do about this psycho when she said, “All right. If you must see.”

Right before my eyes she shifted into the shape of the old woman I had known. My knees didn’t take time to shake. They simply folded me ungracefully to the floor.

“Now, Dallas, you can’t possibly be afraid of your great-granny.” She faded, then popped back as the flapper. “Much better. Looking twenty-one again is the best part of being dead.” She floated up and hovered over the desk. “This is grand! Nothing hurts!”

I pulled myself to my feet. “How come you’re not knocking on the Pearly Grates, looking for Great-grandpa Rhett?”

“All in due time.” She dropped into a more normal position. “First, we have to do something about Savannah. She’s about to marry a reprobate.”

“It runs in the family. Why are you so excited about this particular one?”

“He’s a St. James.”

“A very prominent family, not to mention filthy rich.”

“Filthy’s the word all right. That’s how the old man made it — bootlegging, gambling, prostitution, and a few other rackets to boot. I’ll die before I’ll see a St. James in this family.”

“You did.”

“Don’t sass your elders.”

“Savannah is determined to marry Langston St. James. Just because his great-grandfather was a crook doesn’t mean he is.”

“Trust me. That polished veneer is covering the same sleazy genes. We’re going to stop this wedding.”

We? I didn’t like the sound of that. “Granny, it’s been very nice seeing you so... ah... young and spunky, but I’d really rather remember you the way you were. Savannah never listens to me anyway.”

“Not so fast, Dallas. I’ve been checking out this ghost stuff.”

“You always did keep up with the times.”

“Some of it is very liberating, but it has drawbacks. You pretty well have to be attached to something — a house, a person, something. I’ve latched onto you.”

“Me?”

“There’s no reason to haunt the house. It’s not going to the wedding.”

I ran a mental check of acceptable reasons for my not going either. It didn’t take long; death or the intensive care unit. Being kidnapped by terrorists was just a maybe. Anything less I would hear about until Mother’s dying breath.