Matt Shea always smiled when he walked into the house he’d bought his mother. It was a perfectly fine little house, a standard development little house, central air, attached garage, core appliances including self-cleaning oven and ice-making machine in the fridge.

But she’d turned it into a church. And the thing was, she wasn’t of that generation. You know, you see them at mass all the time, those generations of Irish and Czech and Hispanic women for whom it was common to turn houses into shrines or grottos. Framed religious pictures everywhere. Palm drooping from behind the pictures. Crucifixes large and small throughout the house. Three or four Bibles scattered around. Holy cards on end tables. Even, on certain occasions, the scent of incense.

Incense, Matt associated with covering up the smell of grass in his college dorm room.

The funny thing was, his mother had been a regular normal human being all the time he was growing up. There was even the family suspicion that she’d had an affair or two back in the seventies when it seemed everybody was having affairs. She walked around in halter tops and Levi cut-offs. She liked Clint Eastwood movies. She and his father put away a goodly amount of wine most weekends, and could frequently be heard banging around on their bed upstairs while he and Don were downstairs watching sci-fi on the tube.

But then his father got a brain tumor, forty-one years old and a fucking brain tumor, and his death was so agonizing, so prolonged that Cassie just flipped out. Couldn’t deal with it. Was drunk a lot. Threw up a lot. Stayed in bed and slept a lot. Anything to escape the fact that her beloved husband — and even if she had had those affairs, it was clear that she loved Rick above all others — was dying. And then he was dead and she went even more to shit, it was her college-age boys carrying her instead of the other way around, and then one day, they were never sure why, she got religion, maybe some minister she saw on TV or something, and started wearing dowdy dresses and telling the boys to watch their language and admonishing them not to practice “free love” or to use drugs. She was living in the old house at the time, the big Tudor that had been lawyer Rick’s pride-and-joy, but it was too much house as the realtors liked to say, and so she sold it and put the profits in the hands of stockbroker Matt, who saw to it that she’d never have to worry about money. This being the end of the eighties, Matt was hauling ass financially, making so much in fact that he could afford to make the grand gesture of setting Mom up in her own little tract house.

The house that was now a religious shrine.

The house Matt stood in now, warmed by late afternoon May sunlight.

His mom was on the couch. She’d aged, many long years past her halter and cut-offs stage. She wore a faded house-dress, prim little white anklets, and brown — if-you-could-believe-it — oxfords. She’d gone all the way, mom, fifty-one years old, a child of the upper middle-class, now looking like a cleaning woman in somewhat ill health.

“Do you ever watch Channel 28?” she said.

His smile. “You always ask me that, Mom.”

“I just think Sandy and you and the boys should make a point of watching it. You know, as a family.” Channel 28 was the religious channel.

“We’re pretty busy.”

“You should never be too busy for God.”

And just how are you supposed to respond to that?

“You’re right, Mom,” he said, “we should never be too busy for God.”

“I just wish Sandy was more religious.”

Another running battle. “She’s religious in her way, Mom. She really is.”

“She doesn’t go to church.”

“That doesn’t mean she’s not religious.”

“She doesn’t take the boys to mass. And you don’t either.”

“Sandy’s Jewish, mom. If she attended any kind of services, she’d go to synagogue, not to mass.”

“Then why doesn’t she go to synagogue? There’s nothing wrong with being Jewish.” Mom’s first major love affair had been with a Jewish kid.

“I’ll talk to her about it.”

“People should go to church. If they’re truly good people, I mean.” How could the college girl who’d spent many, many long hours smoking dope and listening to Led Zeppelin possibly have turned out this way?

“I brought you something,” he said. He reached in the suit coat pocket of his gray Armani and brought forth a small white jeweler’s box. “I got your necklace fixed.”

For her thirty-fifth birthday, Dad had given Mom a beautiful old chain necklace. But it had gotten broken and Mom had never gotten around to getting it fixed. She held it now, smiling. “I can still feel your father putting this on my neck. It was the first time he’d ever been able to afford anything really nice. He had such big fingers.”

“I thought you’d like it.” He leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. She was getting older, the texture and feel of her flesh was changing, and it startled him a moment. She was getting older, and just now that realization scared and saddened him. “Say, would you let me use your bathroom if I gave you a dollar?”

This was an old gag between the two of them. “Dollar-and a-half.”

“Dollar-and-a-half it is,” he said. Then, as he started back toward the bathroom, “You hear from Jim lately?”

“Just the other day.”

“How’s he doing?”

“He says he likes his new job. I just hope he can last at this one.”

Matt and Jim Shea were as different as brothers could be. Matt, handsome, self-confident, family man. Jim, pale, nervous, luckless. He’d worked sales in the computer department of a number of different local department stores. He was running out of stores. He always got fired and for reasons that were at best vague. He always seemed vaguely relieved, too. He didn’t mind living in his drab little apartment on unemployment insurance. Matt was always suggesting motivational speakers Jim go see but Jim always just grinned and shook his head. Though Matt thought of himself as a major player in the world of the local establishment, Jim saw him as a just one more Mercedes-driving Nazi. Jim called a lot of people Nazis.

Matt came back after a few minutes. He’d freshened up. He had a meeting at the club with some potential investors for a small shopping mall he was trying to develop. Time for a little hairspray, a little breath spray, a few eyedrops to take the red out.

Mom was still holding the necklace when he came back. “Say hi to that brother of mine.”

“I just wish you two boys got together more often.”

“Oh, that’ll happen as we get older, Mom. I’m sure it will.”

“Why don’t you take that box of paperbacks in the closet to Sandy? They’re Harlequins. She reads almost as much as I do.”

He smiled. “You two and your Harlequins.” He said it not with contempt but with a kind of awe. He had, in his life, finished reading exactly two novels, The Great Gatsby and Ethan Frome. Gatsby he liked — even though the narrator sounded sort of fruity — because of the love story, which he had to admit made him tear up a time or two, him having had a terrible love affair once himself; and Frome he liked simply because it was short and because of the irony of the ending. Every other novel he’d “read” had come in the yellow-and-black form of Cliff Notes. He’d been a 4-point student. He just preferred non-fiction was all. He got the box from the closet, kissed his mom once again as she opened the front door for him, and was then out the door.

He liked the way the new Mercedes four-door sedan stood so proudly in Mom’s driveway. He liked the way the men and women driving home from work to their little housing development here glanced at it. Envy. That, not imitation, was the sincerest form of flattery. Envy. I want what you have. He couldn’t think of a higher accolade, and hell, he’d be the first to admit he felt it, too, the way Giff McBride, ass-bandit of all ass-bandits out at the club, wheeled around in that little Brit classic car of his, Austin-Healy it was called, wheeled around and got 20 % of the married women at the club to spend time with him, not to mention an even higher percentage of the waitresses, even, it was rumored, a few of the college gals who worked there during the summers. College gals, sleek and slender and sun-brown. Now that was something to really envy, Giff McBride being in his early fifties.

He opened the trunk and set the box of romances inside. He had to be careful not to knock over the sloshing full red can of gasoline. It had already spilled some on the newspaper it rested on. He looked at the headline. Talk about irony.

He took another look at the red gas can. It looked so harmless most of the time sitting in garages to run power mowers and clean up paint spills.

But there were other uses for it, too. Yes, indeed.

They didn’t like me much and I guess I didn’t blame them. Nobody likes “experts” brought in from the outside to tell you that you’re doing a lousy job.

There were four of them, detectives, two male, two female, one black, one Hispanic. They sat at a plain table in a plain room and listened to me as long as they could stand. Then their eyes would look out the window that displayed the downtown across the narrow river and they had to be thinking longing thoughts about this gentle and colorful Iowa autumn afternoon. Football weather. They could be raking leaves, playing touch football with their kids, washing the new car, or sitting in a cop bar talking about the recent union meeting about the unpaid overtime hassle with the city council.

Instead, like school children being punished, they had to sit here, a narrow room painted city-sanctioned green, listening to me play at being a psychological profiler and private investigator for a large law-firm.

While they had their own individual cases, Captain Davidson, who’d introduced me, had put them all on the arson case, which was why I was here. The arsonist had burned his third dance club to the ground three nights ago. The first fire, two people had been killed, trampled in the melee. The second fire, nobody had died, but a number of people were in the hospital. The third fire, there’d been one more fatality, a just-divorced suburban housewife out celebrating with her girl friends. An upscale downtown dance club; a gay dance club; a black dance club. No pattern.

I said, “One thing distinguishes the arsonist from other serial murderers. The typical serial killer wants direct contact with his victims. So direct that sometimes he’ll reach in and take out a vital organ with his bare hands. He’ll also photograph or videotape what he’s done. He wants to remember the moment. He’ll masturbate to it later. The arsonist, however, wants the impersonality of setting a building on fire and standing back and watching what happens. A lot of the time, he’ll hide across the street so he can masturbate while watching the fire. Totally impersonal. Except for the fluid he uses to ignite the fire, he never gets his hands dirty as it were, never faces the victims. There’s an interesting note here. When you look into the background of the average serial killer, you see a dysfunctional boyhood often marked by cruelty to animals. You find that with serial arsonists, too. But with them you have to add bed-wetting. We don’t know why this is but from the hundreds if not thousands of cases we’ve catalogued, we’ve seen it play out time and time again.”

Detective Gomez raised her hand. “Who does this arsonist think he’s killing when he sets these fires?”

“Good question,” I said. “I just wish I had a good answer. As we know, many if not most male serial killers have real relationship problems with females. Even killing their victims isn’t enough. They’ll defile the corpses — make hideous slashes and cuts in the faces, cut off breasts, mutilate the genitals. So while we don’t know which female exactly the serial killer is destroying — a girl he is attracted to, his mother, maybe even his sister — we do know that in general he has a real problem with women.

“This particular arsonist, though, we just don’t know. Even in the male gay bar there were a few dozen women. But that still doesn’t tell us a lot. Based on what we know generally, we know he’s angry, we know he wants to kill people, and we know that in all likelihood, he’ll do this again.”

Detective Henderson, who looked like the poster-boy for clean-cut WASP detectives everywhere, said, “I take it he’s shy and withdrawn.”

“That’s probably right. Every profile I’ve ever seen on this kind of arsonist, he doesn’t have many social skills and he’s frequently unnoticed, even though he may hang around a lot. Almost invisible in some ways.”

They were paying attention now that the afternoon had gotten interactive. I should’ve done this earlier.

Detective Wimmers, the black man, said, “Are there any kinds of jobs this arsonist would be attracted to?”

“No job category, if that’s what you mean. But they’re likely to be low-level, relatively unsuccessful, whatever line they take up. These aren’t aggressive people. Not usually, anyway.”

Detective Holden, a red-haired, bulky man in shirtsleeves, loose tie, and an air of belligerence, said, “What if we waste our time looking for somebody like this and it turns out he isn’t anything like this at all?”

“Then he can sue the city,” I said. Nobody laughed. “This is isn’t an exact science. I make mistakes, no doubt about it. But generally profiling is helpful. And I think it’ll be helpful to you here. Any questions?”

There weren’t, of course. They just wanted out of here. All but one of them, anyway. Detective Wimmers, the black man. “Don’t pay any attention to them.”

I smiled. “Kind of hard not to. They always this pleasant?”

“They just don’t like outsiders.” He was tall, tending to beef, with a large, imposing face and a gold-toothed smile. With his red regimental-striped tie and herringbone slacks and polished black loafers with the tassles, he looked more lawyer than cop. Except lawyers don’t wear guns and badges on their belts. He pinched some skin on the thick black arm shooting from his short-sleeved white shirt. “I bring my sorry black ass in here six years ago — first black detective this city ever had — and you should’ve heard ’em, man. Always whisperin’ and jokin’ and pokin’ each other in the ribs. I coulda written all their jokes myself. Lots of watermelon and pork chops in the jokes, you know what I’m saying? They’d even leave notes in my locker. Death To Niggers. Shit like that.”

“I’m sorry.” And I was. That had to be a special hatred, to be singled out and despised that way.

“My wife and kids, they’d cry and beg me to quit. But I wouldn’t, ’cause I just wanted to piss these guys off. Stay in their faces. You know what I mean? I just wore ’em down. I didn’t go to the civil rights board. I didn’t complain to the police review board. I just stayed in their faces. And one by one, they started bein’ nice to me. The first guy, when he was nice, they started givin’ him more shit than they gave me. But one by one, we started bein’ friendly. And now they pretty much accept me. Our wives and kids get together. And we bowl and stuff after work. So it’s pretty good here, now. And the young black cops comin’ up say they aren’t havin’ much trouble at all, especially with the cops their own age.”

“I guess I’ll have to take your word for it, that these are really swell people.”

He grinned with his gold tooth. “I guess they weren’t real friendly, Mr. Payne. I’m sorry. Maybe if you could spend a little more time with ’em—”

He held up a manila envelope.

“What’ve you got?” I said.

“Photos from the crime scene. I was going over them this morning and I found something. Captain Davidson said you were going to be here the next few days consulting on the case so I thought you might want to ride along with me this afternoon. I’ll tell you about it on the way.”

“Fine.”

Wimmers handed me a manila folder while we sat at a traffic light. He was a fast, savvy and aggressive driver. At one point he’d grinned and said, “You want to wear a crash helmet, fine with me.”

I’d said, “And I want to make sure my insurance is paid up.”

“I grew up in Chicago. My old man was a cabbie. He taught me how to drive.”

I’d spent three years working out of the Chicago FBI bureau — before going private as a profiler and investigator— so he didn’t need to say any more.

Just as the traffic light changed, I said, “Same guy.”

“Same guy at all three fires. Just standing around watching things.”

We were off. Wimmers wanted to be in the right-hand lane so we could get on the Interstate that cut through the city. God help anybody in his way.

“How many people you killed in your lifetime?” I said.

“Killed? You kidding, Payne? Hell, I’ve never even drawn my gun.”

“Not with your gun. Your car. You didn’t even notice that you ran over a couple of nuns back there.”

“Yeah?” he smiled. “Serves them right for wearing black. They should wear brighter colors.”

I decided to give up on my subtle drive-safely messages.

He said, “I know who the guy is.”

“In the pictures?”

“Yeah. Matt Shea. Country club set. Runs his own brokerage. Lots of money, lots of clout. Reporter on the Gazette I know happened to notice Shea when he was filing the photos. He sent them over to me.”

“Maybe Shea just likes to look at fires.”

“Maybe. But what’s he doing out so late, pillar of the community, family man, all that happy horseshit? The earliest any of those fires were set was 1:00 A.M.”

“Good point. So where we going?”

“His brokerage.”

“God, can it really be this easy?”

“Seems wrong, don’t it?” he said.

“You see a guy in some photos—”

“—and you drive over to where he works—”

“—and you ask him some questions and—”

“—case is closed. And you got your man.”

“I’ve never even heard of it happening like this.”

“Well,” he said, wheeling the police car into the parking lot of a new six-story steel-and-glass building, “there’s always a first time.”

The middle of a vast, calm sea on a sun-golden day on a sun-golden ship. The destination was Atlantis or some other fabled land where they would know peace and security and love for the rest of their lives, where their children would prosper, and their children’s children, and all would meet again in the sunny, leafy paradise that lies just beyond death.

The sound of a distant siren woke Jim Shea.

The dream vanished. The perfect dream.

Sway and jerk of moored boat. Stink of river water. Voices up on the dock. At day’s end everybody with a houseboat here descended on this place. One of the last few warm days before harsh prairie winter. Most of them didn’t even take their boats out. Just hauled out the aluminum tube chairs and sat there on Ellis landing listening to the Cubbies on the radio and laughing well into the work night. It was a pretty democratic place, the houseboat marina. You had lawyers talking with guys who worked on the line at Rockwell, doctors talking to guys who sold electronics stuff at Best Buys.

The boat belonged to Ella. It’d been her Dad’s. She’d inherited it when he died a few years back. Jim kept the curtains closed. They had as little to do with their neighbors as possible. Couple months back a few of the kids who belonged to a houseboat down the way laughed at Ella. Saw her face and laughed at her. She stayed in the houseboat bed for four days. Kept the place totally dark. Wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t even talk. Just kept herself unconscious with sleeping pills. Finally, he forced her to take a shower and eat the oatmeal and toast and strawberry jam he’d fixed for her. She couldn’t take it when people laughed at her. Unlike Jim, Ella had never had any practice at being ugly, at being the outsider. Indeed, she’d always been the beauty. Cheerleader. Homecoming queen at Regis. Prime U of Iowa heartbreaker. Two rich husbands, both of whom had begged her to stay. And then a year-and-a-half ago when her rich friend (and possible husband #3) had been all coked up and accidentally smashed his big-ass Caddy convertible into a bridge abutment north of Iowa City, her life changed. How it changed. He’d died instantly. The seat belt had saved her life but hadn’t done anything for her face. She’d gone through the windshield. Nearly a thousand stitches in her head and face. You ever see anybody with a thousand stitches in her head and face? We’re talking your basic Frankenstein’s monster here. The face now a series of slightly puffy sewn pockets, angled scars, red remnants of stitching. Snickers from little kids. Gasps from adults. She stayed in bed a lot. A lot. They were supposed to fly to Houston next month — there was a plastic surgeon there who’d developed some new techniques he thought might possible help her — but in the meantime Jim was still trying to get her to resume something like a normal life.

You’re beautiful to me, Ella. That’s all that matters.

You know, I don’t even notice the scars any more, Ella. I really don’t.

Don’t worry, Ella. I’m paying them back. Every one of them.

These were the things he said to her over and over here in the course of their dark houseboat days.

He lived for that gentle drifting time after they made love and just held each other. Complete peace. The golden ship on the ancient sea, drifting toward Atlantis, just the two of them.

He wanted to be thinking of Atlantis right now — even awake he could sometimes conjure up that ship and that sea — but instead all he could think of was the missing gas can and that stack of Cedar Rapids Gazettes he’d kept about the fires he’d set. Somebody had gotten into the trunk of his car and taken them. He wondered who. He wondered why.

Four days ago, it had been. Opened the trunk to put some groceries in and — gone. He hadn’t told Ella, of course. She didn’t need any more grief. It was up to him to find out what was going on here. But how to start? Who to suspect?

He wanted to be one of them, one of the children running along the dock outside, laughing and having a good time. He wanted that for Ella, too. God, if only this Houston surgeon could do what he said he could do.

He eased himself off the bed, not wanting to wake her. He had a lot to do tonight. Time to visit the fourth and final dance club. Now, he’d have to buy a new can and fill it with gasoline. He’d also have to scope the place out. There were sure to be extra cops posted around clubs these days. He might even have to wait a few days until the story faded from the headlines. He’d just have to see.

Matt, Jim’s older brother said, “It was pretty funny to us — to me and Mom and Dad, I mean — for a while anyway. We lived in this real bad part of town and this really beautiful little girl named Ella Casey moved in down the street and Jim — he and Ella were both in sixth grade at the time — it changed his whole life. He was obsessed with her right from the start. And he didn’t care who knew it, either. I mean, you know how boys don’t like you to know that they’ve got a crush on somebody? He’d come right out and tell you. I can still hear him sitting in the kitchen with Mom after school, talking about all his plans for when he and Ella got married. Mom tried to help him with it — tried to make him see that she was just too, you know, beautiful for him, I mean, Jim isn’t a handsome guy, I got the looks and he got the brains our Dad always said — but he didn’t listen. He got this paper route and he spent all the money he earned from it on Ella. He was always buying her stuff. She’d take the stuff but she’d never go to a movie with him or go for a walk with him or anything. She was so beautiful, she’s in ninth grade and she’s got senior boys literally fighting over her. She was the fucking trophy, man. She was the trophy. And Jim was always there for her. Always. She’d invite him over when she was depressed or didn’t know which boyfriend to choose or had some errand she needed run. And, man, he’d do whatever she wanted. He was like her shrink and her servant rolled into one. We thought maybe once he got out of high school, maybe one of them would go away to college. But Jim stayed here and went to the community college and she stayed in town and married this rich kid two days after she got out of high school. Eloped, because the kid’s parents were against it. (Grinning) They were part of the Cedar Rapids jet set, you know what I’m saying? and they just didn’t want their very special little boy laying it to white trash every night. All the time they were married, poor Jim was her confidante. She was always calling him, crying and bitching about how unhappy she was. He got so caught up in her problems, he dropped out of school. He lived at home so all he’d have to have was a part-time job. He wanted to be there when Ella needed him. Finally, Ella couldn’t handle the rich boy’s family any more, so she divorced him and got a very nice settlement out of it.

“That’s when she first started hitting the bars and the clubs. She’d never really done that before. Hadn’t had to. But she was mid-twenties now and starting to slip, looks-wise, just a little. Still very, very sexy, but not the new kid on the block any more, either. She becomes the queen of the local clubs. Guys literally line up along the bar to talk to her. Only the best clubs, only the best guys, young lawyers and young docs and young investment bankers, guys like that.

“She ends up finding hubby number two in a club. Advertising guy who’d just sold his agency to a bigger shop out of Chicago. Plenty of cash and recently divorced. Mid-forties. Real fading ass-bandit type. But with pretensions. Guys like him used to get involved in charities so they could show everybody how cool they were. This decade, they dabble in the so-called arts. Local art museum board. Symphony board. Reading endowments for the underprivileged. Previous wife had been big in the Junior League so he’s connected that way, too. And our little Ella is really taken in by all this. She thinks it’s very sophisticated and elegant and all. She asks Jim — she’s told her husband that Jim is gay, you know how a lot of women have male gay friends, and this fits right in with hubby’s image of himself, the local New Yorker-type is how he sees himself, tells him Jim’s gay even though he’s not because this is the easiest way to explain the friendship — she asks Jim to start giving her some background on all the great painters and composers and like that. And he does, of course. And that’s how things go for a few years until she starts having this thing with this college kid who buses dishes out at the club. Everybody in the club knows this is happening except her husband. She’s one of those women who doesn’t hit thirty well. The rich ones head to the plastic surgeons; the poor ones just have affairs. Ella does both. And then the new husband finds out and dumps her. He’s cheated on every woman he’s ever known but the one time he’s the cheatee, his ego absolutely can’t handle it. He gives her a lot of money on the condition that she gets out of his life immediately, which she does. But she’s already sick of the college boy, even though he’s real serious about her.

“She’s kind of in a panic, actually. Needs reassurance. This is the first time she ever lets Jim sleep with her. He told me about it, said she was having her period and everything, but he didn’t care, even had oral sex with her, told her he wanted their blood to ‘commingle.’ Of course, he had to explain to her what ‘commingle’ meant but that was all right because she said it was ‘beautiful.’ She went back to the clubs. Of course, by this time, there’s a whole new raft of beauties younger than she is. She’s still got men lined up along the bar but the lines aren’t quite as long as they once were. She’s thirty-one now. And there’s one thing she can never be again — and that’s new. And that’s what clubs like these always want. The new band. The new girl. The new drink. You know what I’m saying?

“Then she does the dumbest thing she’s ever done in her life, she falls in love with this bartender whose putting it to every babe in the place. He’s got lines of women around the block, including all the newest and the hottest. And she falls in love with him. He goes out with her a few times — hammers her like she’s never been hammered in her life — but then he dumps her; She’s not used to being treated like this. In her life, it’s supposed to be the other way around. She panics. Getting dumped undermines her whole life. She has money, a nice house, she can have all the plastic surgery she wants— but she knows that her time has passed as babe-of-the-moment.

“She starts stalking the bartender. She calls him night and day, she e-mails him, sends him flowers and candy, even gives him a car — a frigging Firebird, if you can believe it — and two or three times, she breaks into his apartment while he’s hammering some other babe in his bedroom. One night, he’s so frustrated, he punches her, gives her a black eye. Another night, she literally attacks his date in this restaurant. Throws her down on the floor and starts kicking her like some home boy would. And the coup de grace. She hides in his car, the car she bought him and he was asshole enough to accept, and at gunpoint forces him to take her for a long drive. She is very, very drunk. They drive around and around and she tells him all these plans she’s got for when they get married. The first thing she wants with him, she says, is children. One boy, one girl. She’s got access to enough cash to set him up in his own bar. An upscale one. No more club bullshit working for bosses who deal coke out their back door. And all of a sudden, he starts laughing at her. Which is not a good idea, somebody has a gun on you the way she does. By this time, they’re up in the red clay cliffs. And she grabs the wheel from him and stomps her foot on his on the gas pedal and they go shooting right off the cliff. And we’re talking a forty foot fall to the road below. He dies, her face is totally destroyed.

“Six, seven plastic surgeries in three years and there’s not much improvement. The last one, though, she kind of convinces herself that she’s looking better. And that’s when she starts going back to the club scene. And it’s a catastrophe. I only saw her once but she looked like a monster in a bad sci-fi flick. I mean, a $1.98 monster. But this monster is for real. People are so repelled by her, they don’t even laugh at first (she tells Jim all this later on), they just shy back from her like she’s got something contagious. Or she’s like an omen that’s going to bring them bad luck or something. Anyway, every place she goes, they just stare at her. The waitresses come over and they kind of smirk at her. And then people start getting mean. All the hotshots start asking her to dance. And some chick comes up and asks her what kind of makeup she’s wearing. Not even the people she used to think of as friends want anything to do with her. She was a pretty ruthless little bitch when she was young and beautiful, and they’re not all that sad to see her cut up this way. And every night, she goes up to her nice fancy lonely house and tells all this to Jim, who is by this time sort of her live-in shrink. And Jim is so pissed by what she’s telling him — how she was treated in these clubs — that he starts setting the places on fire, the clubs I mean. For her, that’s why he’s doing it. For her. Because he wants her to know how much he loves her, how much he’s willing to protect her. Because he knows that she’ll marry him now. Ever since he was a kid, that was all he wanted. For her to marry him. And now it’s finally going to happen.”

Wind rattled the warped wood-framed windows. The linoleum was so old it was worn to floor in several places. The one big room smelled of cigarettes and Aqua Velva and whiskey, and a bathroom smelled of hair tonic and toilet bowl cleaner. There were doilies on the ragged armchair and the wobbly end tables and even on top of the bulky table model TV that dated from the sixties. The windows were so dirty you could barely see outside. If you listened carefully, you could hear the spectral echoes of all the lonely radio music that had been played in this shabby for-rent room down the decades, Bing Crosby in the Thirties and Frank Sinatra in the Forties and Elvis in The Fifties, and God only knew what else since then. A lot of animals crawl away to die in hidden shadowy places; this was a hidden shadowy place for humans.

“It’s only $150 a month is why he lives here,” Matt Shea said.

“They should pay him,” I said.

“Yeah, it is pretty grim.”

We’d spent three hours trying to find he and Ella. No luck. The times we’d called the landlady, she’d said he wasn’t home. I finally said we should check out his apartment anyway. Shea agreed and here we were.

“We need to go to the police,” I said.

“I know.” He made a sour face. “This gets out, I’m going to have a hell of a time holding on to some of my clients. You don’t want your lawyer having a god damned whacko for a brother.”

He didn’t seem unduly concerned about the people who’d died, or what fate awaited his brother.

He said, as if reading my mind, “I know I sound pretty selfish. But I came from the west side. I just don’t want to see it all go to hell.”

I started looking through the faded bureau. The mirror atop it was yellow. There were ghosts trapped in the mirror. You could sense them, dozens, maybe scores, of working men and women who died out their time in this room, staring at their fading lives in this mirror.

There was a bundle of photographs inside a manila envelope. There were maybe thirty pictures and every one of them was of the same person. Ella at ten, Ella at fifteen, Ella at twenty and so on. She was a true beauty, all right. Her smile could jar your teeth loose and give you a concussion. She was innocence and guile in equal measure, and she probably couldn’t tell the difference between the two, and neither could you, not that you gave a damn anyway, she was trophy blond, eternal blonde, slender and supple goddess blonde, with just enough sorrow in the blue blue eyes to give her an air of fetching mystery, not ever completely knowable or possessable, this Ella girl and Ella woman, not ever.

I found it significant that there were no photos of them together. Ella was always alone. Beautiful and alone. The stuff of myth.

“Maybe he left town,” Shea said.

“Maybe.”

“She’s got plenty of money. They could go anywhere.”

“He isn’t finished yet.”

“Finished with what?”

I showed him the piece of Yellow Pages I’d just found in the bottom drawer. It had been ripped out, jagged. Under DANCE CLUBS, there were six names. He’d crossed off four of them.

“Looks like three to go,” I said.

“That crazy son-of-a-bitch.”

“We need to find him fast.”

Then I saw the edge of another photo sticking out from beneath a sack of cheap white socks that were still in their plastic bagging.

“You find something else?” Shea said, as I stooped over.

“Uh-huh.”

I snatched the photo and stared at it. “He a fisherman?”

“No way. Why?”

“He’s got a photo of the marina here.”

He took the photo from me. “Hey, I forgot about her houseboat.”

“Ella’s?”

“Yeah.”

“Big-ass houseboat. Really fancy. Out at the Ellis marina.”

“Sounds like it’d be worth checking out,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “It does.”

Ellis Park was the place to go to see summer girls. At least it used to be when I’d visit my Cedar Rapids cousins back in the sixties and early seventies. The girls came in all colors and shapes and sizes and they were probably just as afraid of you as you were of them but their fear was more discreet than ours, and they passed by on bare sweet grass-flecked feet and tire-thrumming ten speed bikes and in the backs of shiny fine convertibles and on the rear ends of motorcycles driven by boys with biceps like softballs.

The summer girls were long gone now. Autumn was on the land, and on the water too, and the bobbing boats, mostly cabin-style or house boats, looked lonely in the dusk and the first faint light of winter stars. Here and there you saw cabin lights. In the summer they would have been welcoming and beacon bright but now there was something faded and desperate about them.

We pulled up on the ridge above the marina. Matt said, “I want to go down there alone first.” Wimmers had been pulled on an emergency case, a bank robbery.

“The one you pointed out, there aren’t any lights on.”

“She doesn’t want any lights on. Ever. Her face. He told me that. She gets pissed when he turns lights on.” He shook his head. “All this shit comes out at the trial, I’m fucking dead meat. My father-in-law’s a wheel at the country club. They’re gonna be all over his ass.”

“Maybe you should concentrate on your brother right now.”

He glared at me. “Oh, I’m concentrating on him, all right. He’s some psycho and he’s going to destroy everything I built for myself in this town. So don’t fucking tell me about concentration, all right, Payne?”

He got out of the car and then ducked his head back in. “If he’s down there, I’ll bring him back. You got any handcuffs or anything like that?”

“No.”

“Great,” he said. “Fucking great.”

Every so often, Jim’d realize the significance of the moment. How long he’d loved her. How long she’d been denied him. And now, how free she was with him.

Lying in the big double bed on the house boat. In the darkness so she didn’t feel bad about her face. Right next to her in that silk sleeping gown of hers. God her body. Such a perfect body. No reason for her to feel bad about her face when she had a body like that. No reason for her to feel bad about her face when he loved her so much. And someday, she’d understand that. That her face didn’t matter as long he was there to protect her and comfort her.

Slight sway of boat, lying there; slight wind-cry outside in the night sky.

He worked himself against her spoon-fashion; a perfect match. Her sleeping. Careful not to wake her.

And then he heard it.

Somebody on the wooden walk of the marina. Footsteps coming this way.

Somebody.

He reached down to the floor where he kept the gun.

Somebody coming.

She’d argued with him about the gun at first. Guns scaring her. Guns going off when you didn’t want them to and accidentally killing people. A gun was something only bad people owned. (Forgetting that she’d pulled a gun on the loverboy bartender.)

Now, he was glad he’d talked her into letting him keep it.

By the time Matt Shea reached the dock, he was lost in the dusk. Only as he passed lighted boats did I get a glimpse of his silhouette.

I wanted to be somewhere else. In a nice restaurant with a nice lady. Or in my Cedar Rapids apartment with my cats reading a book and dozing off under the lamp.

But not here with Matt Shea and all his country club concerns, and his sad crazed brother, and the once beautiful Ella. Sometimes, it’s fun, the pursuit; but sometimes it’s just sad, you learn something (or are reminded of something) you’d just as soon not know — the knowing changing you in some inalterable way — and then you wish you drove a cab or bagged up people’s groceries.

He was gone fifteen minutes before I started to think about going down there.

All sorts of possibilities presented themselves. I’d kept the window rolled halfway down so I could hear shouts or screams. The marina was settling in for the night. A few cars wheeled into the parking lot. Men and women with liquor bottles tucked under their arms trekked from cars to boats. They laughed a lot and the laughter seemed wrong, even profane, given the moment, crazy Jim and scarred-up Ella. I waited another few minutes and then went down there.

The board walkway pitched beneath my feet. I could glimpse people behind houseboat curtains. They were searching for summer, even if it was only the memory of summer their boats offered them.

Ella’s boat was three slips away from its nearest companion. This gave it a privacy the others lacked. No lights as I approached, no sound except the soft slap of water, and the tangle of night birds in the tangle of autumn trees.

I jumped aboard and went to the door. Locked. I walked to the window to the left of the curtain. The curtains were pulled tight. I listened carefully. Nothing.

And then I heard the sobbing. Male sobbing. Throaty and uncomfortable, as if the man didn’t know how to sob, hadn’t had sufficient practice.

I went to the door. Tried the knob again. Useless. “Matt? Are you in there?”

The sobbing. Barely audible.

I got out the burglary tools I keep in my pocket most of the time. I went in and clipped a light on.

Smell of blood and feces. And something even fouler. He brought it with him when he staggered up off the chair and fell into my arms. Matt Shea.

The knife was still in his chest. Just to the right of his heart. A long, pearl-handled switchblade. The sobs were his. “This is really going to look like shit in the papers tomorrow.” All this, and his primary concern was still his rep with the country club boys. “Son-of-a-bitch stabbed me. His own brother.”

I half-carried him back to the chair he’d been in and sat him down. There might still be time for an ambulance. I went to the phone and dialed 911.

The boat was laid out with bunks on both sides, a tiny kitchen, and a living room arrangement dominating the center of the room. The couch had been opened up to become a bed and now there were two people in it. One of them was alive. That was Jim Shea. The other was dead, six, seven days into death judging by what I could see of the lividity and rigor mortis. The body was bloated and badly discolored. There were flies and maggots, too. The facial flesh itself had separated and spoiled but even so you could still see the scarring. Jim Shea didn’t seem to notice any of this. He wore a black T-shirt and chinos. He lay up against her, an arm wrapped around her hip with great proprietary fondness. She was his woman, the woman he’d dreamt of most of his life, and he wasn’t going to let go of her even now. He probably didn’t even know she’d been dead for nearly a week. Or maybe he didn’t care. She wore a white blouse and a dark skirt. No blanket covered them. There was a bullet wound in her right temple. I was going to say something to him but then I looked at his eyes and saw that it was no use. Certain mad saints had eyes like his, and visionaries, and men who believe that God told them to go down to the local school and open fire on the children on the playground.

The note was still on the small dining table. Simple enough. She couldn’t handle it and killed herself. But he’d kept right on taking care of her, killing those who had made fun of her at the clubs.

“I work my ass off and make something of my life and this is what I fucking get for it,” Matt Shea said somewhere behind me.

After the DA decided to go with a plea bargain and a reduced sentence — Jim Shea’s defense attorney deciding to drop the insanity defense even though Jim was clearly insane — I got a call from Matt Shea thanking me for everything. He said things hadn’t gone so badly for him, after all. In fact, ironically, some of the members feeling badly for him, he’d been nominated to sit on the board of the country club. First time a west sider had ever been nominated.

Then he said, “You hear about Jim?”

“No.”

“Killed himself.”

He was so calm, I thought he might be talking about some other Jim. “Your brother?”

“Yeah. Started squirreling socks away in jail. Made a noose for himself.” Pause. “I know you think I’m a callous bastard, Payne. But it’s better for everybody.”

“He belonged in a psychiatric hospital.”

“You know what that fucking trial would’ve done to me? All those headlines day after day? They wouldn’t’ve done my mother any good, either, believe me.”

“That’s touching, you caring about your mother and all.”

“Believe it or not, Payne, I do. And Jim was never anything but a burden to her. His whole life. If he’d lived, she would’ve had to go up to the penitentiary and see him every month.”

“You wouldn’t have?”

“Sure, sometimes. When I had the time, I mean. But prisons spook me. Like hospitals. Or graveyards. I just think it’s bad luck to be anywhere around them. Well, I just thought I’d catch you up on some things. You get my check by the way?”

“Very generous. I appreciate it.”

“You helped me, Payne, and I appreciate it. Well, listen, gotta run.”

My first thought was to have one of those dramatic little moments you see in bad movies and tear his check up into a thousand pieces. Moral outrage.

But then I realized that I badly needed the money, the old cash flow not being so hot lately.

I went down and deposited it right away. Just the way Matt Shea would have.

Nicole Sanders went to the nurse’s office during third hour and put on a pretty good imitation of a genteel seven-teen-year-old girl down with the flu, genteel meaning a quiet, pretty girl who was still a virgin, had never tried drugs in any form, and read Cousin Bette for relaxation.

Of course, it helped that she was a good student (usually, a four point average), and generally perceived as a reliable girl. Nobody on the staff of Woodrow Wilson High School would suspect her of faking flu so she could get off from school. She had a near-perfect attendance record. She just wasn’t the kind to lie.

But lie she did.

In the parking lot, she climbed into the sensible little forest green Toyota Gran had bought her for her seventeenth birthday last month. Gran was her best family friend now. Dad was off in California with his new wife. And Mom...

“I sure hate to see you come down with this stuff,” the nurse said sweetly.

She headed home. This late in the morning, the expressway traffic was heavy. The sometimes foggy March rain didn’t help, either.

Home was a nice Tudor in a small, upscale suburb of nice Tudors and nice Spanish styles and nice multi-level moderns. Mom had gotten the house in the divorce settlement. Dad made a lot of money at his law firm and he’d inherited quite a bit when his father died several years earlier.

Nicole didn’t stop at her house. She went down to the end of the block and parked behind a stand of pin oaks that was part of a small park-like area.

The cop-show phrase for what she was doing was “stakeout.” She’d heard her mother call in sick this morning — she was a far better actress than Nicole and had put on a breathtaking performance — and now Nicole wanted to see what her mother did all day. As she’d passed by the house, she’d seen her mother’s car in the drive. So Mom hadn’t gone anywhere. Yet. And if Mom did go somewhere, Nicole had a terrible feeling that she knew where it would be...

“I really think Mamet sold out. You know, when he went out to La-La-Land.”

It was a good thing she had a lovely pair of breasts because otherwise Mitchell Carey would have kicked her ass out of the apartment as soon as he got done screwing her last night.

He’d picked her up at a cast party. A small theater group had put on an ancient Mamet one-act. It was the sort of theater group that attracted the worst kind of pretentious wannabes and the worst kind of cruising idle rich, the rich seeing theater groups (correctly) as being ripe with sex, drugs and just about any kind of octopus-like emotional entanglement a man or woman could want. It was from the idle rich, a few of whom were Mitch’s customers, that he’d heard about the play; so, having made the club scene earlier in the evening, having played his role as the handsome, fortyish Jay Gatsby to the disco and angel dust crowd, he decided to pop in on the theater folk. He’d stayed only long enough to meet Paula and woo her back to his den, whereupon he’d defiled her with great desperate pleasure. He hadn’t merely screwed her, he’d ravished her and it had been wonderful. Three times they’d made love before heating up the remnants of a Domino’s pizza lurking in his refrigerator. Then they’d found a great old Lawrence Tierney B-movie flick on a cable channel, “San Quentin,” and only after it was over and they were back in bed again with the lights out, only then did she start talking about herself (age 39, born in Trenton, New Jersey, three husbands, worked as a street mime and part of a comedy group a la Second City, had in fact come here to Chicago to get into Second City but so far no luck, look at Jim Belushi, she said, only reason a no-talent like him ever got in was because of his brother and everybody knew it) but by then he’d put a finger in his ear and switched the HEARING button to Off. By the time she got to voicing her plans to audition for the revival of Cat On A Hot Tin Roof at the Ivanhoe (“I lose a little weight, and wear violet contact lenses like Liz Taylor, and learn how to talk Southern, I think I’d make a great Maggie The Cat, don’t you?”) he was blissfully asleep.

But now it was morning and she was standing naked at the sink in the bathroom while he was toweling off from his shower. And she was talking about how Mamet had sold out. Like Mamet would really give a shit about her opinion.

Then he noticed the time on the face of his Rolex that he’d set down on the tiny hutch next to the towel closet. He bought the best, man. Noticed the time and remembered his appointment. He had a customer he needed to meet at eleven-thirty. And it was now a quarter to eleven.

“I’ve got to hurry,” he said. “I just remembered an appointment.”

She was putting on her lipstick. She had remarkable lips.

“I hope we’re going to do this again,” she said, still drawing the blood tube across her mouth.

“Absolutely.”

She glanced at him skeptically in the mirror. “For real?”

“For real.”

“I hate bullshit promises. I’d rather have you say you won’t be calling again than, you know, stringing me along.”

“I’m not stringing you along.”

“We did this Cole Porter show in Denver, you know? And anyway there was this guy and that’s all he ever did. We spent one night humping like bunnies and the rest of the run, he’d call me to make a date an then call me back to break it. I guess I should be happy he at least called to tell me he was standing me up.”

“You’ve sure had an interesting life.”

She glanced at him in the mirror again to make sure that he wasn’t putting her on. “Really?”

“Really.”

She seemed satisfied. “You know, I wouldn’t mind blowing you before we trundle off.”

“That’s all right. I really am late.”

He could never figure out why he felt so good at night with them in the bed and so bad — and so sad — with them in the morning when they were getting ready to go.

What he needed was some kind of new kick. Ennui was the word he wanted. Ennui was what he was suffering from. He made a nice living, he got all the ass a reasonable man could want, and yet he was a little bored. Something new was what he needed.

But there wasn’t any time for navel-contemplation this morning.

Had to hurry. He had an eleven-forty-five customer.

Thank God she’d been smart enough to take her watch along yesterday. Over noon, she’d hocked it. Place not far from the office where she worked in Lincoln Park. Guy with a glass eye and bad b.o. appraising both the watch and Kate herself. The watch he didn’t have any problem with. Knew the exact market value. What he could pay out, what he could take in. The exact market value of the woman standing in front of him was another matter. Tall, elegant, beautiful in a nervous, vulnerable way. But going fast. Probably no more than forty-three, forty-four or so but going fast. He seemed to know why, too. Four-hundred, she got. Four-hundred.

Their house is shrinking. That’s how she thinks of it. The last time after coming out of rehab and being a good little girl, the last time she fell off she hocked the TV, the stereo, the good china and the good silver. She’d had a good run. This was in the summer, Nicole visiting her father and his teenage-bride (Gwen is twenty-three, actually) for a month. Kate started hitting the clubs again, feeling good and young again. Sleeping around a little (always safe sex, of course), even developing a quick crush or two on younger men, the kind who used to be all over her, even when she was married, giving her ultra-conservative ex-husband one more reason to treat her like a whore. She could still remember the night a year into their marriage, that she’d told him about this little habit she had, which was where a lot of her household budget was going, and how he looked so dashed and doomed. It was almost comic, the way he looked right then, so shattered but self-righteous, too, as if it was impossible that anybody he’d even associate with could possibly be a junkie. A beautiful girl, the daughter of a powerful state senator, a Radcliffe grad, a suburban siren of stunning seductiveness, a coke head? There ensued eleven years — she had to give him that, he hung in there for eleven years — of one rehab program after another, trendy clinics and experimental programs all over the country. She’d gone as long as a year-and-a-half clean and sober, as they say. So much hope, so much anger, so much fear, so much despair, so much failure, hope-anger-fear-despair-failure, the same cycle over and over again. He never quite believed that she couldn’t help herself. At least that was how she saw it. He never quite believed that she truly tried to kick once and for all. Poor sweet Nicole, she believed. That’s why she was losing weight all the time and going into these terrible depressions (she’d been twelve when she took her first Prozac) and staying in her room practically every weekend when her mother was using. She could have joined her father in LA with his new bride but she feared for her mother, feared that if she went to California, her mother would die somehow. So she stayed. “You’re such a good girl,” her mother was always saying. Kate looked pretty good. The bones were the secret. She had good bones. Killer cheeks and a mouth that was erotic and just a wee bit petulant. Not enough to put men off. Just enough to intrigue. And the bod, even twelve pounds lighter than it should have been, the bod was good, too.

Four-hundred dollars in her purse and a day free of Mr. Cosgrove, her boss at the public relations agency, an egomaniacal twit who was always broadly hinting that she should go with him on one of his business trips east.

And on top of that, she would soon be seeing her old buddy Mitch Carrey.

Life was beautiful. Life was good.

In the daylight hours, the jazz clubs and the art galleries and the odd little shops of Lincoln Park lost some of their nocturnal allure. A wild wailing sax sounded better carried on the wings of neon than on the gritty breezes of daytime. And crumbling brick facades had no romance to offer even the dullest of tourists.

Nicole followed her mother to a restaurant called The Left Banke, the intentional misspelling too clever by half. Good student Nicole knew that the original Left Bank in Paris, home to the cubists and the impressionists, not to mention Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein, had probably been pretentious but at least had spared its tourists coy restaurant names.

Mom was driving the four-year-old Buick. The last time she’d gone off, she’d been forced to sell the Mercedes-Benz station wagon to make house payments. Nicole never told her father any of these things. She got tired of his sanctimony. Her mother suffered enough. At the meetings Nicole attended a few years ago, she learned that she was probably what the social workers called an enabler; i.e., she helped her mother keep up her habit. But what was the choice? What would happen to her mother if Nicole didn’t help her? Easy enough for them to say let your mother hit bottom and find her own way back up. But what if the bottom was death? How could Nicole live with herself? She had tried everything to get her mother to stop. A year ago, she’d even cut her own wrists and been rushed to the hospital and put in the psychiatric clinic for three days of observation. Now, she was working on her own last, desperate plan, a way to force her mother to turn herself back into rehab and this time— Oh please God, please God, let it work for her this time — start on a life without cocaine. But first she had to find one thing out...

Her mother didn’t get out of the Buick.

Just sat inside as the light rain started.

Slick new cars disgorged slick new people running in their Armani suits through the rain, laughing and swearing as they reached the canopied entrance.

And her mother just sat inside the Buick.

He drove an old red MG, the steering column on the right side. He wore a tweed jacket in honor of the MG. He even had a pipe stuck jauntily in the corner of his mouth. He looked like a soap opera’s impression of a sensitive British novelist: dark, shaggy hair, and an angular face handsome but with a hint of cruelty in the eyes and mouth. He parked next to her mother and then quickly got of out the MG and hopped into the driver’s side of the Buick.

“You look tired, Mrs. Sanders,” Mitch said when he got in the Buick and looked over at her.

“I have a pusher who calls me ‘Mrs. Sanders,’ ” Kate said, a touch of desperation in your voice. “Is my life fucked up or what?”

“You know,” Mitch said, “this makes the third time I’ve had to warn you. And right now, with the rain and all, I’m in a pissy enough mood to just open this door and walk back to my car and not sell you anything at all.”

“Oh, God,” Kate said, genuinely scared. “I forgot. I used the P word, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you did.”

And he had indeed warned her before. About the P word. P for Pusher. He’d explained his circumstances. What he was: Mitchell Aaron Carey. What he hoped to be, with his looks and all, was an actor. And he’d tried hard for several years, too. All the humiliating auditions. All the even more humiliating little jobs around the various theaters (he’d actually scrubbed toilets at the Astor one weekend). Now he was just taking it easy. Doing “favors” for upscale people afraid of or put off by the usual array of street people who dealt drugs. How many pushers could give you twenty minutes on Aristotle’s theory of drama? How many pushers had ever had a two-line part in a Woody Allen picture? How many pushers had Chagall prints hanging on their walls? He was no pusher. He was just an actor temporarily between gigs making a little jack on the side, and being very, very civilized about it.

“God, I’m sorry. I really am.”

He smiled. “I guess I really don’t feel like going back out into the rain right now.”

“I brought the money.”

“You’re kind’ve strung out, huh?”

“Yeah. Yeah.”

He was torturing her a little for having called him a pusher. “You thinking of maybe doing a line right here?”

“You wouldn’t mind?”

He smiled again. “You’re a good looking woman, Kate.”

“Thank you.” But it wasn’t compliments she wanted. It was the stuff.

“In fact, I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately.”

“You have?”

“Yeah,” he said, and reached in the pocket of his stylish leather car coat. He took the stuff out and showed it to her. “Yeah. I’ve been thinking about you quite a bit lately.”

She followed him home. Watched him park. Watched him go up to his apartment. Then went into the vestibule and checked his name on the mailbox. The only male name on the four mailboxes.

She didn’t feel quite ready for it yet. Tomorrow. She’d sleep on it. Sleep on it and think it through and kind of rough out how she’d approach him. Tomorrow was Saturday. No school. Tomorrow would be better.

When she walked in the house, her mother was dusting the living room and actually humming a song.

Nicole got tears in her eyes. This was her mother of long ago, before she’d discovered cocaine at a Los Angeles party ten years ago. She’d been there with her husband, visiting his relatives, and they’d ended up at a party in Malibu and she’d been drunk and up for just about anything — the party showing her just how much of her youth and adventurousness she’d had to give up as the wife of a neurosurgeon and so unbeknownst to Ken she’d tried it — and now she was happy only when she was stoned.

Dusting. And whistling. With the wonderful scent of a pot roast floating out of the kitchen.

She was Mom again. Nicole couldn’t help herself. She flew to her and took her in her arms and suddenly they were both crying without a single word having been said, just holding each other. And then Mom said, “You’re such a good girl, Nicole. And I love you so much.”

In the first week, Nicole took all her meals in her room. She barely spoke to her mother, and she wouldn’t speak to him at all. She spent several Friday and Saturday nights staying over at her friends’ houses.

Mitch enjoyed the setup. He was tired of all the artistes and pretenders he’d hung out with the past ten years. It was enjoyable to get up in the morning and have a home-cooked meal and then spend a few hours “blocking out” a novel. That’s what he called it, blocking out. Taking notes and filling up lined pages with blue ballpoint ink. Such and so would happen in Chapter Six, such and so would happen in Chapter Ten and so on. He liked to think he was editing a film, moving this scene from here to here. The writing itself, after all this preparation, was bound to be simple. Or so he told himself. Of course, in ten years, he’d actually never written a word of text. But what the hell. That really would be the easy part.

He stayed in a basement room that was fixed up for guests. He had his own bathroom and shower and TV set. He even had his own entrance, right on the side. His MG fit nicely into the third stall of the garage. He walked around the neighborhood on the sunny days. It was like being in a sitcom, all the neighbors tending their lawns and waving to him, the sounds of friendly dogs and driveway basketball, the aromas of backyard cookouts and fresh hung laundry on outdoor lines.

This was the change he needed. No doubt about it. He had business to tend to but that took two, three hours at most a day. Had to keep his hungry little junkies hungry, and had to resupply his own stash with his own wholesaler. He always liked to tell people he was in retail, and so he was. This was the change he needed. A new kind of lifestyle. He felt invigorated, young.

He went easy on the sex, mostly for the sake of Nicole. If she found her mother in bed with him, she’d freak. Absolutely freak. She was a very pious little thing, sweet Nicole. Kate said she got the self-righteousness from her father. She said that was one reason she was so glad their marriage was over, so she didn’t have him in her face all the time dispersing rules with a ferocity that would have put Moses to shame.

One rainy Saturday night, with Nicole sleeping over at a friend’s house, he nailed her. She was as hungry for sex as she was cocaine. She was damned good: knowing, patient, clever and seemingly tireless. At one point, he rolled off the bed and lay on the floor laughing and screaming “Call 911! I can’t take it any more!” And then she’d started laughing, too, and jumped off the bed, landing right on top of him. They spent an hour on the floor violating every silky hot orifice in her body.

He kept her coked up, and she kept him sexed up. At first, the first three-four weeks, they were discreet. Wouldn’t want little Nicole to find out now, would we? They waited until she was gone before they did anything. There were a lot of nooners, Kate rushing home from the office for a line or two of coke and a ripping good time in the sack.

One night, when Nicole was upstairs in her room doing homework, they decided to do it in his room in the basement. It was like high school, the sneaking around, Nicole the stern repressed Midwestern parent, and them the fuck-happy teenagers. She didn’t catch them. The next night and the next night and the next night and the next night, they did the same thing, Nicole working on her homework and them humping in the basement. God, it was great, and the danger made it just that much more delicious.

One Saturday afternoon, she caught them.

Nicole had come home early from the library, tired from a long day’s studying. They didn’t hear her. They were having too much fun in Kate’s bedroom. But Nicole heard them. She flung the door open and stalked into the bedroom and went over to him and grabbed him by the long, dark hair. A handful came off in her grip. She pushed him off the bed and to the floor and shrieked, “I want you out of here! And I mean right now!”

Humiliated, enraged, Kate flew from the bed and slapped her daughter hard several times across the face, hard enough to draw blood.

Nicole spat at her, silver spittle hanging comically on the end of Kate’s classical nose, and then stormed out of the bedroom, and out the house.

She didn’t come home that night.

Kate started calling all her friends. None had seen her.

Mitch said that she was just punishing Kate, trying to scare her. Everything would be fine. He cooed, he cajoled, he caressed, and he finally got Kate back in bed. But the little bitch had spoiled his evening for him. Kate just wasn’t there for him that night. Oh, they had sex all right, but there was none of her usual passion or ingenuity. It was like screwing a hooker who was having an off night. The little bitch really pissed him off. He was enjoying his suburban sojourn. He didn’t want it ruined by all these mother-daughter politics.

She didn’t come home until Monday after school. By then, even stoked up on coke, Kate was a nervous mess. Pacing. Biting her nails. Jumping every time the phone rang.

The little bitch.

She pulled in just as dusk was making it a better world.

She sat in her car in the garage a long time. Kate kept wanting to go out there. Mitch wouldn’t let her. “That’s what she wants you to do.”

“I’ve been such a terrible mother to her, Mitch. I really have.” She was begging him to let her go out to the garage. But by now, Mitch was genuinely resentful of the little prig. She resented him because he’d usurped her place as head of the family. Without him here, Nicole would be giving the orders. That’s how it was in some junkie homes. The older kid took over and became the parent while the parent became a pathetic child. A power thing. Nicole had enjoyed the power. Now Mitch had the power. And he wasn’t about to give it up.

She finally came in an hour later. She didn’t say anything. Didn’t even look at them. She just went straight up to her room and quietly closed her door. Kate spent the night fluttering around Nicole’s door like a moth around a summer night’s streetlight. But it did no good. Nicole wouldn’t acknowledge her in any way.

Kate wouldn’t come down to the basement, not this night or the next or the next. Kate pleaded with Nicole to speak to her. But Nicole came in the door at night and went straight to her room and reappeared only the next morning, in time to go to school. She wouldn’t even say goodbye.

Mitch took it for a week, feeling helpless and sorry for himself. He did not like being at the mercy of the little bitch. She was spoiling his time with middle America. But Mitch, failed artist, failed husband, failed father, failed son, was nothing if not ingenious.

Mitch had a plan.

She finally gave in, of course. Nicole.

Mitch was out somewhere. Mom was sitting in the kitchen. Drinking coffee. She looked great. The coke was killing her but it was a trade off. While she was dying, Kate looked better than she had in a long time, and was in a much better mood, too. Nicole poured herself a cup from Mr. Coffee and then came over and sat down at the kitchen table. The sunlight was bright and lazy in the air.

Neither of them said anything for a time. For this uneasy moment, they were strangers.

“You been all right, Nicole?”

“Yes. You?”

“This would be a very happy time for me if my daughter and I were getting along.”

“Are you in love with him?”

Kate smiled. “God, no.”

“But you sleep with him, anyway?”

“I enjoy him, honey. And part of that enjoyment is sex.”

“And the drugs.”

“Have you noticed how much happier I am? I mean, until you and I had our falling out?”

Nicole nodded.

“Have you noticed how much better I look?”

“I know what you’re going to say, Mom. But you’re wrong. The coke may make you feel better right now but it’ll kill you eventually.”

“Maybe that’s not the worst thing, Nicole. To die, I mean. I enjoy the high, hon. I don’t know how else to say it. When I’m high. I’m fine. And when I have my own pusher living right in my own home—” She smiled. “A junkie’s dream.”

“You shouldn’t call yourself that, Mom.”

“Well, that’s what I am.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“I’ll never go back to another rehab program, Nicole. I don’t want to be one of those zombies who just hangs on her whole life, trying to put off taking another line of coke. It’s not a way to live. Especially since Mitch is right under my own roof.”

“He doesn’t care about you, Mom.”

“And I don’t care about him. Except that he keeps me happy with his drugs, and satisfied with his sex. You’re old enough to understand that, Nicole.”

“So I just live here with you?”

“You’ll be leaving for college in California in four months. Then you won’t have to worry about it any more.” Then, “Don’t you want me to be happy, Nicole?”

“You know I do.”

“Then let me live the way I want to, hon. Then you can go away to college and not have to worry about me anymore.”

“Oh, right. I go away to college and then I magically never worry about you anymore? It doesn’t work that way, Mom. In case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Just be civil to him. That’s all I ask. He doesn’t like the way you and I are carrying on. Just be civil so he can enjoy himself while he’s here.”

Nicole carried her cup to the sink, washed it out, put it in the washer.

Then she went over and slid her arms around her mother and they hugged each other and they both cried and Kate said. “I just want to be happy and feel good for a little while, honey. That’s all.”

Nicole held her and kissed her. Tears filled her eyes.

A few minutes later, she was in her car and headed to the library. She had things to do.

It was during Mitch’s fourth week in the house that he cut Kate off. Unbeknownst to both Nicole and Kate, this was the plan he’d been working on for the past few weeks. He wanted to dominate his circumstances completely. And there was only one way to do that.

One afternoon, late, Kate came home from work tense and showing signs of needing her friend the white powder. Long day at work, the boss on her case, two of her co workers in particularly grumpy moods. She related all this as she stripped out of her clothes and lay down on the bed with Mitch. Ordinarily, Mitch would have been right there with the coke. But not today.

When he didn’t offer, she said, “I could really use a little boost, Mitch.” That was her coy name for it. “Boost.”

“You do for me, I do for you.”

Her head had been on his naked chest. Now she rolled away from him and looked at his face. “Is something wrong?”

“You do for me, I do for you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She was already getting a little shaky. “Please, Mitch, I don’t mind playing games, but give me a little boost first, all right?”

He leaned over on an elbow and looked at her. “This is a good time for you, isn’t it, Kate?”

“Yes. You know it is, Mitch.”

“Me here. You getting a ‘boost’ whenever you need it. And the sex isn’t bad, either.”

“The sex is great.”

“And you don’t want it to end, do you?”

A flutter of fear in her eyes and her voice. “Don’t want it to end? What’re you talking about, Mitch? Why would it end?”

He hesitated. Went into one of his Acting 101 routines. Looked down at the nubby bedspread, looked up at her briefly, then looked down at the nubby bedspread again. Troubled young man. Searching for the right words. Pure ham. But most of the ladies loved it. He said, in barely a whisper. “I’m going to ask you to do me a favor and you’re going to get all pissed off and self-righteous and probably throw me out.”

“I’d never throw you out, Mitch. God, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t.”

Impish grin. “That’s because I haven’t asked you my favor yet.”

“Just ask me, Mitch. Just ask me.”

So he asked her.

“Oh, Mitch.” she said. “I should’ve known you were pulling one of your jokes on me. Get me all scared the way you did.”

“It isn’t a joke, Kate.”

“C’mon, now, Mitch. I know how you like to put me on.”

“No put on, Kate. I’m very serious.”

“But you can’t be serious.”

But then she saw that he was serious.

And she got all pissed off and self-righteous and demanded that he leave the house right now. And for good.

A number of the neighbors commented on the screeching, dish-throwing, foul-mouthed argument that ensued within the walls of the Sanders place but that could be heard as far as half a block away. It went on like this, grand-opera style, for at least an hour. The neighbors hadn’t heard arguments like that since the good doctor, her ex-husband, had moved out. Things must be going badly with her live-in.

Things must be going very badly.

When Nicole got home that night, she found her mother at the kitchen table, her head down on her hands. Something was terribly wrong. She used to sense that when she was a little girl and her Dad was still living at home. She’d come home after school in the echoes of one of their arguments and her stomach would knot up and she’d feel alone and scared, scared that one of them might have killed the other, and she would start to shake and cry and say little prayers over and over again that everything would be all right.

A half-filled bottle of J&B scotch sat on the table in front of her. One glass. No ice.

Kate looked up at her wildly in the wan glow of the kitchen stove light. She was inching back toward her bag-woman demeanor, the hair wild and ratty, the eyes sunk deep and rimmed with black circles, the mouth slack with sparkling spittle collected in the corners. She’d been at work today. How had she accomplished all this just since work?

She was sitting in her bra and panties, with her long, lovely legs crossed. She was swinging her right foot to a rhythm only she could hear.

Nicole sat across from her. “Where’s Mitch?”

“You’re late.”

“I was over at Sherry’s.”

“You should’ve called.”

“I want to know what’s going on.”

“Nothing’s going on.”

“Bullshit, Mom. Bullshit.”

Kate sighed. “I kicked him out.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s an asshole.”

“That isn’t an answer, Mom.”

“It is for me. I kicked him out because he’s an asshole. That sums it up pretty damned well, I think.”

“You’re shaking all over. He didn’t give you a boost?”

“Screw his boost. I don’t need his boost.”

Mitch’s words came back to her. About how happy her mother had been when everything was going well between her and Mitch. How he’d get all the boosts she wanted. How she kept herself looking great. How she was productive and happy. This was already like the old days. It was scary and sad. And not for the first time in her life did Nicole think of getting the gun out of her mother’s dresser drawer and putting it in her mouth and killing herself. Many, many nights during the divorce, she’d thought of doing this.

“You want me to fix you something to eat?” Kate said.

Her words, her manner put a melancholy smile on Nicole’s face. “Oh, yeah, Mom, you’re in great shape to cook. One more drink of scotch and you’ll pass out.”

“And that’s just what I intend to do, too. And don’t you try to stop me.”

Nicole sat there with her and watched her take one more drink. A good, big one. All the while muttering about how much better her life would be now that the asshole was out of it.

Nicole managed to get her to the downstairs john before she started throwing up. Then she managed to get her upstairs and in bed. Kate started snoring immediately. Nicole clipped the light off and went back to the kitchen.

She fixed herself a tuna sandwich on toast and had a few chips and a diet Pepsi. She cleaned up the kitchen and went to bed. But she didn’t sleep. She wondered what had gone wrong with Mitch and her mother.

Not even the other cops much liked Frazier. He was too angry, too bitter to spend much time with. And he enjoyed the dirty aspects of the job too much. Hurting people. Shaking down shopkeepers and pushers and the richer variety of junkies. Getting freebies from the hookers and then beating them up afterwards and daring their pimps to do anything about it. In Vietnam, it had been called fragging, a grunt shooting his superior officer in the back and blaming it on the Cong. There’d been more than one boozy cop-bar conversation about good old Frazier getting fragged some night.

He pulled over to the curb. Waited for the cop to appear. A few cars went past, surveying the scene. Wondering what he’d done.

No swagger. Unassuming walk. Flipped open his ticket book as he approached.

Josh had his window rolled down. The night smelled of distant rain and cold. It was in the low forties.

“Evening, sir.”

“Evening.”

“May I see your license?”

“Sure.”

Showed him his license.

“The information here correct?”

“Yes; yes, it is.” It was a good thing she’d taken the gun from him. He wanted to kill this man right here.

“Was I speeding, officer?”

“No.”

“Taillight out or something?”

“One thing about a silver gray Saab. Brand new one.”

“Oh? What’s that?”

“There aren’t very many of them.”

“No, I don’t suppose there are.”

The cop handed him his license back. “Why’re you following me, Mr. Madison?”

“Following you? You were behind me.”

“The other night it was the shoe repair shop. Tonight it’s the video store. And then you just follow me around in general sometimes. What’s going on?”

“Gosh, I wish I knew what you were talking about.”

For the first time he saw anger in the cop’s face. “I catch you following me again, something bad could happen, Mr. Madison. You understand?”

Put the bullet right in the center of his throat. Watch the life choke out of him as he grabbed and clawed at the wound. “You keep that in mind, Mr. Madison.”

Josh woke up around two o’clock. A light rain haloed the streetlight outside. Elise was awake, too. They made love. He surprised them both with the power of his ardor. He could have killed him. He knew now he was capable of it. It gave him new strength. He didn’t tell Elise about seeing the cop.

Three weeks later, they were having after-dinner brandies in the TV room when Elise said, “My God, it’s him.”

Nine O’clock News on WGN.

“Patrol officer Earl Frazier has been accused of rape by South Side resident Oreila McGee.”

Frazier’s photo was a color close-up taken some years ago.

“While McGee’s lawyer, Jefferson Hardin, freely admits that his client is a prostitute, he insists that Officer Frazier beat and then raped his client this past Thursday night. Police spokesperson Donald Thomas said that the department will issue a statement tomorrow morning. But that as far as he knew, Officer Frazier would stay on his regular duty at full pay.”

“Earl Frazier,” Josh said. Now he knew the bastard’s name.

“They’ll laugh her out of court,” Elise said, “a prostitute accusing a cop like that.” Then, quietly, “He’s just going to keep on doing it, isn’t he?”

“Yeah,” Josh said. “Yeah, he is.”

“That poor woman,” she said.

At breakfast, Lisa decided to decorate herself for the holidays. She got most of her Gerber’s pureed carrots all over her face, hands, arms and hair. The carrots looked especially fetching dangling from her left ear lobe. She looked intensely, radiantly pleased with herself.

Josh fed her. He loved feeding her. “I think I’ll run her through the car wash this morning,” he said. “That’ll clean her up.” He’d almost cleaned out the small glass jar.

He glanced at Elise. She looked drained, tense. “You all right, honey?”

“I should’ve gone to the police that night. I should’ve told the truth. But it’s way too late, now. It’d be just my word against his.”

“Yours and a prostitute.”

“God, I really want to see him in prison.”

“So do I.”

“But how can we do it now?”

He was glad that Lisa chose this moment to smear more of the carrot puree all over her face. “Gee, look, honey,” he said, not answering her question. “An orange baby.”

The parking lot of Frazier’s apartment house told its own story. All the cars were wannabes, knock-offs of this or that sports car. Josh knew the place by reputation. The last bastion of middle-aged swingers. A number of divorced ad people lived here. A cop could do well for himself here. A certain kind of woman liked authority figures a lot.

He found the building he wanted and went inside, glad for a respite from the numbing cold. It was only a few degrees above zero and the clouds hiding the moon forebode more days of similar freezing.

Dance music filled the lobby from a nearby apartment. Some kind of updated disco number. It was a well-kept place. New carpeting recently vacuumed. Fresh paint. Window casings in good repair. He found Frazier’s apartment and knocked. No answer.

Down the hall two fifty-year-old women emerged from another apartment. They were nice-looking. They smiled at him. “You’re cute,” one of them said. “You want to come along?”

“Maybe some other time.”

“You a cop, too?” the other one said.

“No, just a friend.”

“Well, that story about him raping that hooker — he’ll need all the friends he can get. It’s too bad when some old whore can make trouble for a man like Frazier.”

“He’s very nice to everybody,” the other one said.

“And — no offense — but some cops are pretty hard to deal with. Especially after they’ve had a couple of drinks.”

The other one giggled. “Remember Larry?”

Her friend returned the giggle. “After a couple of drinks, he’d always haul out his bass guitar and take his pants off and walk around in his boxers.”

“I guess he thought he was turning us on,” the lady laughed. “Well, toodles, and if you see Frazier, tell him Kitty and Candy said hi.”

After they were gone, he knocked again. What the hell was going on? Where was Frazier?

He tried knocking again. Then he started jiggling the doorknob. A man came out of an apartment down the hall and stared at him. Josh left.

In his car, starting the engine, he wondered what kind of game Frazier was playing.

He drove away, preoccupied. He didn’t notice, as he reached the slippery nighttime street, that a blue Chevrolet was following him.

All this started one spring when I couldn’t find any women. The weather was so beautiful it just made me crazier. I’d lie on my bed in my little apartment feeling the moonbreezes and would ache, absolutely fucking ache, to be with a woman I cared about. I was in one of those periods when I needed to fall ridiculously in love. It wasn’t just that the sex would be better — everything would be better. Fifty times a day I’d spot women who seemed like likely candidates — they’d be in supermarkets or video stores or walking along the river or getting into their cars. The first thing I did was inspect them quickly for wedding rings. A good number of them were unburdened. But still, meeting them was impossible. If you just walked up to them and introduced yourself, you’d probably look like a rapist. And if you told them how lonely you were, you might not look like a rapist but you’d sure seem pathetic. I tried all the usual places, the bars and the dance clubs and some of the splashier parties, but I didn’t see it in their eyes. They were looking for quick sex or companionship while they tended broken hearts or simply a warm body at their dinner tables when too many lonely Saturday nights became intolerable — but they weren’t looking for the same thing I was, some kind of spiritual redemption. Not that I didn’t settle a few nights for quick sex and companionship, but next morning I felt just as lonely and disconsolate. But I couldn’t settle very often. I wanted my ideal woman, this notion I’ve had in my mind since I was seven or eight years old, this ethereal Madonna I had longed for down the decades.

So of course the night I met Linda I wasn’t even looking for anybody. I just walked into this little coffee shop over by the public library and there she was, sitting alone at the counter drinking coffee.

I wasn’t sure she could rescue me, and I doubt she was sure I could rescue her, but at least the potential was there so two nights later we started going to bed and even though we were sort of awkward with each other, we kept trying until we got it right, and then we became pretty good lovers. The only thing that got me down was she was still pretty hung up on this football coach who’d dumped her recently. She kept telling me how it had only been for sex, and how he was an animal six, seven hours a night, which did not exactly fill me with self-confidence. I wasn’t jealous of the guy but I didn’t necessarily want to attend his testimonial dinner every night either.

The only thing that bothered me was her two teen-aged daughters. They were usually around the house while Linda and I were making love. Linda always laughed when I got uptight. “Hey, what do you think they do in their bedrooms when they bring their boyfriends over here?”

Linda was one of those modern parents. I’m not. My two kids, daughter and son, were raised pretty much the way I was: what your parents don’t know won’t hurt them. One boozy New Year’s Eve I actually heard this teenage girl talking to her mother about how her tenth-grade boyfriend wasn’t any good at oral sex. Linda wasn’t that far gone but she was more liberal with her daughters than I would’ve been. Even when my wife and I split up, we agreed that our kids would be raised properly, at least as we defined properly.

I kept wanting Linda to go to my place to make love but one night she laughed and said, “But your place is such a pit, Dwyer. I’m afraid I’d have cockroaches walking up my thigh.”

Linda was three years divorced from a very prosperous insurance executive. She’d gotten the big house and the big car and the big monthly check. She only had to work part-time at a travel agency to make her monthly nut.

So we made love at her place and even though we both figured out pretty quickly that we weren’t going to rescue each other, the thing we had was better than nothing and so we kept it up, even though I had a sense that she was vaguely ashamed of herself for liking me. Her previous boyfriends had run to doctors and shrinks and business executives. Security guard was a long way down the ladder.

Then one night I came over and she was late getting home from work. And that was the night it happened, with her sixteen-year-old daughter Susan, I mean.

So it was back to the streets for me the rest of the summer. I kept thinking about Molly and how beautiful she was and how otherwise sensible men, young and older alike, seemed to take leave of their senses when they were around her. While I wasn’t looking for virginal fifteen-year-olds, I was looking for the same kind of explosive love affair those men were, one that blinds you to all else, the narcotic that no amount of drugs could ever equal. In a few years, I’d be fifty. There weren’t many such love affairs left for me. I’d had three or four of them in my lifetime, and I wanted one more before the darkness. So I went back to the bars, I became infatuated ten times a day in grocery stores and discount houses and even gas stations when I’d see the backside of a fetching lady bent slightly to put gas in her tank. But mostly my reality was my solitary bed and moonshadow, white curtains whipping ghostly in the rain-smelling wind, my lips silent with a thousand vows of undying love. A drinking buddy tried to make me believe that this was simply an advanced stage of horniness and I said it was, it was spiritual horniness and when I said spiritual he gave me a queer look, as if I’d told him that I’d started sending money to TV preachers or something.

The summer ground on. One of the investigators at Allied Security had to have a heart by-pass so they shifted me from security (which I like) to working divorce cases (which I hated). While I’ve committed my share of adultery, I can’t say that it’s ever pleasant to think about. Betrayal is not exactly a tribute to the human spirit. The men seemed to take a strange kind of pride in what they were doing. They didn’t seem particularly concerned about being secretive, anyway. But the cheating women were all a little furtive and frantic and even sad, as if they were doing this against their will. Maybe they were paying back cheating husbands. Four weeks of this stuff before the investigator came back to Allied. My Advertising daughter came to town just as August was starting to punish us. My son drove in from med-school in the east. Their mother had married again, third time a charm or so she said, a man with some means apparently whom they liked much better than husband number two, a bank vice-president with great country club aspirations. “You’ve got to find yourself a woman,” my daughter said right before she kissed me goodbye at the airport.

One night in late September, beautiful Indian summer, I came home and found Linda sitting in my living room.

“Your landlady let me in,” she said. Then: “This is really a depressing place, Dwyer. You think we could go somewhere else?”

She didn’t like any of the bars I recommended. Too downscale, presumably. We ended up in a place where businessmen yelled and whooped it up a lot about the Hawkeyes. The way they shouted and strutted around, you’d think they owned copper mines down in Brazil, where they could make people work for twenty-five cents an hour.

“Did you hear what happened to Molly? It was in the news about three weeks ago.”

“I guess not.”

“Somebody cut her up.”

“Cut her up?”

“Slashed her cheeks. Do you remember a New York model that happened to a few years ago?”

“Yeah. She wasn’t ever able to work again.”

Linda’s eyes glistened with tears. “The plastic surgeon said there’s only so much he can do for Molly. She looks terrible.”

“What’re the police saying?”

She shook her head, sleek and sexy in a white linen suit, her dark hair recently cut short. “No leads.”

“Molly didn’t see her assailant?”

“It was dark. She parked her car in the garage and was just walking into the house — through the breezeway, you know — and he was waiting there. I guess this happened before— somebody in the breezeway I mean — but neither Molly or Susan told me about it. Why should they tell me anything? I’m just their mother.”

“She’s sure it was a ‘he’?”

“That’s the assumption everybody’s making. That it was a guy, I mean.”

“She doesn’t have any sense of who it might’ve been?”

Linda sighed. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

She nodded. “I think she knows who it was but won’t say.”

“Why would she protect somebody?”

“I’m not sure.” Pause. “I’ve been having terrible thoughts lately.”

“Oh?”

“I’ve been thinking that Susan may have done this.”

“Your daughter?”

“Yes.” Pause. “She’s very, very jealous of Molly. Molly... well, a few of Susan’s boyfriends have fallen in love with Molly over the last year or so. About a month ago, Susan made up with this boy, Paul, the one who’d fallen in love with Molly. But then she came home one night and found Paul drunk in the living room putting the moves on Molly.”

“You really think it’s possible that Susan could do something like this?”

“She’s been upstaged by Molly all her life. Even as a baby, Molly sort of unhinged people. I mean, she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. And I think I’m being objective about that.”

“Anybody else who might have done it?”

“The police are talking to one of Molly’s teachers, this Mr. Meacham. That’s another thing my girls didn’t tell me until after this happened. It seems this Mr. Meacham offered to leave his wife and daughter for Molly. He’s forty-three-years-old. My God.”

“Anybody else you can think of?”

After another drink was set down in front of her, she said, “I have to tell you something. It’s so ridiculous, it pisses me off to even repeat it.”

I just waited for her to say it.

“Last night, my dear sweet daughter Susan accused me of slashing Molly’s face.”

Calmly as I could, I said, “Why would she say something like that?”

“I’m kind of embarrassed telling you the rest.”

“Maybe it’ll make you feel better.”

“I trashed Molly’s room.”

“When?”

“Late August, I guess.”

“Why?”

“Brad.”

“The guy from the travel agency?”

“Uh-huh. He’d started phoning her, Molly I mean, when I wasn’t there. Then one night he came right out and asked me. I mean, I suspected something was wrong. He hadn’t touched me in two weeks. Then this one night he said, ‘Would it really piss you off if I asked Molly out?’ I didn’t want to let him know how pissed I was so I just said that I didn’t think that was such a great idea but I said it in this real calm voice. I told him that technically she wouldn’t reach the age of consent until October, and he said he’d wait. Then after he left — I sat in the den and got really drunk and then I went upstairs and started screaming at Molly, and then I started trashing her room.”

She started crying, “My own daughter, and I treated her that way.”

I changed the subject quickly. “You mentioned Susan’s ex-boyfriend.”

“Paul.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Right. He calls Molly four times a day. He says he doesn’t care about her face being cut up. He loves her. His parents have called me, they’re so worried about him. He went from A’s to D’s last semester. They want him to see a shrink. When Molly won’t come to the phone, he gets furious.”

“And you think Molly might know who did it?”

“I think so. Would you talk to her?”

“It’d probably be easier if you went through the agency. Ask them to assign me to you. I don’t really have much time for any freelance on the side.”

“Fine. I’ll call them tomorrow. I really appreciate this, Jack.” Then: “Oh God.”

“What?”

“It’s almost ten. I’m supposed to meet somebody at ten-fifteen way across town.” She shrugged. “Met somebody new at the agency. He’s a little older than Brad.”

“Sixteen?”

She smiled. “Wise ass.” Then: “I really am sorry. You know, about Brad and everything.”

“I survived.”

“I’d always be willing to see you again.”

“I never take handouts except at Christmas time.”

What the hell, it never hurts to sound dignified once in a while.

The next day, Linda led me up to the second floor den. “She sits in the dark. The blinds are drawn and everything, I mean. You’ll get used to the shadows. She doesn’t want anybody to see her. But I convinced her you only wanted to help her.” Then she went away.

I knocked and a small voice said to come in and I went in and there she sat in a leather recliner by a TV set that was playing a soap opera. Just as I started to sit down in the chair facing her, a commercial came on, the bright colors flashing across the screen illuminating her face.

He’d done a damned good job. If it was a he. Long deep vertical gashes on both cheeks. The stitches were still on and that just made her look worse. But even with the stitches gone, her beauty would be forever and profoundly marred.

“Remember me?”

She looked at me with solemn eyes and nodded.

“You think we could turn the TV down a bit?”

She picked up the remote and took the volume down to a low number.

“Your mom wants me to make sure that you told the police everything, Molly. You understand that?”

Again she nodded. I had the unnerving sense that she’d also been struck mute.

“She told me what Susan said. About hearing somebody run away right after it happened, right?”

She said: “I wish I didn’t have to go through this, Jack.”

“I wish you didn’t have to either, sweetheart.”

“I mean your questions.”

“Oh.”

“My mom talked to the principal this morning. I’m going to finish my classes at home this year. So I don’t have to see— anybody. You know, at school.”

“You’re going to sit in this room, huh?”

“Pretty much.”

“With the blinds drawn.”

“I like it when it’s dark. When nobody can see me this way.”

“Can I tell you about the breezeway, Molly?”

“The breezeway?”

“Uh-huh. I came out here last night and checked it out when everybody was asleep. You’ve got an alarm system that kicks on the yard lights whenever anybody approaches the house.”

“I guess so.”

“That means that when the person who did this to you ran off, you had a very good chance to see his face.”

“Oh.”

I waited for her to say more and when she didn’t, I watched her for a moment — she wore an aqua blouse and jeans and white socks — and then I said, “I think you know who did this to you. And I think that you’re trying to protect him.”

“You keep saying ‘him’, Jack. Maybe it was a woman.”

“Is that what you’re telling me? That it was a woman?”

“No, but—”

“It’ll come out eventually, Molly. One way or the other, the police are going to figure it out who did this to you.”

“I just want it to be over with. I’ve accepted it and I just want it to be over with.”

“It was either Paul or Mr. Meacham, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t want to talk anymore, Jack.”

“Your mother loves you, Molly.”

“I know.”

“And she’s very worried about you.”

“I know that, too.”

“She doesn’t like the idea that whoever did this is still out there running around free.”

“It’s over with, Jack. It happened. And I don’t have any choice but to accept it. People accept things all the time. There was a girl in my class two years ago who lost her legs in a tractor accident. She was staying on her uncle’s farm. She’ll never be able to walk again. People accept things all the time.”

“He should have to pay for doing this, Molly. I don’t know what’s going through your head, but nothing justifies somebody doing this to you. Nothing.”

I stood up.

“Susan is worried about you, too.”

She nodded. “I’d like to watch this show now, if you don’t mind.” And smiled for the first time. Her scars were hideous in the flickering lights of the TV picture tube. “I appreciate you caring about me, Jack. You’re a nice guy. You really are.”

When I got downstairs, I found Susan and Clarence waiting for me. The big sheepdog lay next to the desk where Susan was working on her homework.

As always, the overtrained dog barked as I approached. I was going to get him some Thorazine for Christmas.

“Mom said to say goodbye. She had to run back to work.” Then: “How’d it go with Molly?”

I told her about coming here last night and testing the yard lights. “She had to’ve gotten a good look at the person who did this.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive. Tell me one more time. You were sitting in here watching TV—”

“—and I heard her scream and then I ran out to the breezeway and I saw somebody at the edge of the yard running away. He went up over the white fence out there.”

“You said ‘he’. Male?”

“I think so.”

“And Molly was—”

“Molly was in a heap on the breezeway floor. When I flipped on the light, all I could see was blood. She was in pretty bad shape. Then Clarence came running out and he was barking like crazy.” Then: “I think she knows. Who did it, I mean.”

“So do I.”

“But why would she protect him?”

“That’s what I need to figure out. I’m going over to see our friend Paul.”

“I’m trying to keep an open mind. The way he dumped me for Molly, I mean, I really hate him. But that doesn’t mean he’d do something like this.”

“No, I guess it doesn’t.” I leaned over and gave her a kiss on the forehead. “Anybody ever tell you what a nice young woman you are?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Paul used to tell me that all the time. Before he fell in love with Molly.”

Paul lived in a large Colonial house on a wide suburban street filled with little kids doing stunts on skateboards.

As soon as his mother learned who I was, her polite smile vanished. “You don’t have any right to ask him any questions.”

I was still outside the front door. “The family has asked me to talk to him.”

“He didn’t do it,” she said. “I’ll admit that he’s been pretty involved with Molly lately. But he’d never hurt her. Ever. And that’s just what we told the police.”

She was a tall, slender woman in black slacks and a red button-down shirt. There was a kind of casual elegance to her movements, as if she might have long ago studied dance.

Behind her, a voice said: “It’s all right, Mom. I’ll talk to him.”

Paul was taller than his mother but slender in the same graceful way. There was a snub-nosed boyishness to the face that the dark eyes belied. There was age and anger in the eyes, as if he’d lived through a bitter experience lately and was not the better for it.

“You sure?” she said to Paul.

“Finish fixing dinner, Mom. I’ll talk to him.”

He wore a Notre Dame football jersey and ragged Levi cut-offs. His feet were bare. There was an arrogance about him, a certain dismissiveness in the gaze.

His mother gave me a last enigmatic look and then vanished from the doorway.

“I don’t have much time,” he said.

“I just have two questions.”

“The police had a lot more than two.”

“Can you account for your time the night Molly was cut up?”

“If I have to.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning I mostly drove around to the usual places.”

“And ‘the usual places’ would be what exactly?”

“The mall and the parking lot next to the Hardees out on First Avenue and then out to the mall again.”

“And you can prove that?”

“Sure,” he said. But for the first time his lie became obvious. His gaze evaded mine.

I said: “I saw her.”

He didn’t ask me who “her” was.

“When?”

“A few hours ago.”

“Was she—”

“I didn’t get a real good look at her. The room was pretty dark.”

He surprised me, then, as human beings constantly do. His eyes got wet with tears. “The poor kid.”

“She’s a nice girl.”

“She’s a lot more than nice.”

“Susan’s nice, too.”

“Yeah, she is. And I treated her like shit and I’m sorry about it.” He cleared tears from his voice. “I couldn’t help— what I feel for Molly. It just happened.”

“Molly’s mother thinks you’re obsessed with her. In the clinical sense, I mean.”

“I love her. If that’s being obsessed.” He sounded a lot older and a lot wearier than he had just a few minutes ago.

“Her mother also thinks you were the one who cut her.”

He smiled bitterly. “That’s funny. I’ve been thinking it was her mother who did it.”

“Are you serious?”

He nodded. “Hell, yes, I’m serious. Her mother’s got a real problem with Molly. She’s very jealous of her. Molly told me how bitter she was when this Brad started coming after her. She pushed Molly down the stairs, bruised her up pretty bad.”

“She show you the bruises?”

“Yeah.”

“She wasn’t exaggerating?”

“Not at all.”

Somewhere inside, a telephone rang, was picked up on the second ring. His mother called: “Telephone, Paul.”

“Maybe I’d better get that.”

“You can prove where you were when Molly was being cut?”

He surprised me again. “No, I can’t, Mr. Dwyer. I can’t. I was alone.”

“How about the mall?”

He shrugged. “I just made it up.”

“Then you were doing what?”

“Just driving around.”

Mother: “Honey, somebody’s waiting on the phone.”

“Just driving around?”

“Thinking about her. Molly. I really have to go, Mr. Dwyer.”

“Honey!” his mother called again.

This was the kind of neighborhood college professors always lived in in the movies of my youth, a couple blocks of brick Tudors set high up on the well-landscaped hills. The cars in the driveways ran to Volvos and Saabs, and the music, when you heard through the occasional open window, ran to Brahms and Mahler. At night, the professors would sit in front of the fireplace, blanket across their legs, reading Eliot or Frost. Even if life here wasn’t really like this, it was nice to think that even a small part of our world could still be so enviably civilized.

A knock and the door opened almost at once. A heavy woman in a green sweater and a pair of too-snug jeans stood there watching me with obvious displeasure. She wore too much makeup on her fleshy, bitter face. Women who lived in these houses were supposed to look dignified, not like aging dance club babes. “Yes?” she said. Her mouth was small and bitter. She’d sucked on a lot of lemons, at least figurative ones, in her time.

“I’d like to see Bob Meacham.”

She did something odd, then. She smiled with a kind of nasty pleasure. “Oh, God, you’re another cop, aren’t you?”

“Sort of.”

I showed her my license.

“Well, come in, Mr. Dwyer. Would you like some coffee?”

“No, thanks.”

I couldn’t figure out why she was so happy to see me suddenly. Why would the presence of a private detective bring her such pleasure?

She flung an arm to a leather wingback chair that sat, comfortably, near a fireplace. An identical chair sat just across the way.

“I’ll be right back.”

She didn’t go far. The floor creaked a few times and then she said, “So it’s all over, is it, you bastard? Well, guess who’s here to see you? Another cop. Your little girlfriend must think you were the one who cut her up.”

When he appeared, moments later, he kept looking over his shoulder at his wife, as if waiting for her to put a knife in his back.

He came over and said, “I’m Bob Meacham.”

“Jack Dwyer. Nice to meet you.”

We shook hands.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Dwyer?”

“I wanted to ask you some questions about Molly.”

“Oh. I see.”

His wife, who stood to the side of him, smirked at me. “When we first got married, Mr. Dwyer, I used to worry that my husband was secretly gay. I guess I should be happy he just has this nice heterosexual thing for underage girls.”

Meacham obliged her by blushing.

Seeing that she’d scored a direct hit, she said, “I’ll go back to my woman’s work now, and leave you two to discussing the wages of sin.”

“I know what you must think of her,” Meacham said softly as his wife left. “But it’s my fault. I mean, I’ve made her like this. I’ve... I’ve had a lot of affairs over the years. We should’ve gotten divorced a long time ago but — somehow it’s just never happened.”

He didn’t fit the professorial mould, either. He was a little too beefy and a little too rough in the face. He’d probably played football at some point in his life. Or boxed. His nose and jaw had the look of heavy contact with violence. He wore a chambray shirt and jeans. His balding head didn’t make him look any more professorial, either. It just added to the impression of middle-aged toughness. He didn’t belong in a Tudor house with a Volvo in the drive and T. S. Eliot lying open on his knee.

“You said you’ve had some affairs.”

“Yes.”

“Were they with young girls?”

“Youngish.”

“Meaning?”

“Always of consenting age, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Molly isn’t of age.”

“Molly’s the first. A fluke. Being that young, I mean.”

“You realize that hustling her has opened you up to several legal charges if the cops want to press them.”

“You may not believe this, Mr. Dwyer, but I wasn’t hustling her. We haven’t slept together. I don’t plan to sleep with her till we’re married. I know people laugh at me, I mean I know I’m not much better than a dirty joke these days, but I don’t give a damn about anything or anybody other than Molly.”

He looked at me.

“You’re smiling, Mr. Dwyer.”

“Are you seeing a shrink?”

“No.”

“You should be.”

“I’m in love with her.”

“She’s fifteen.”

“She’s also the most spiritually beautiful creature I’ve ever known. That’s why I say I’m not hustling her, Mr. Dwyer. That’s why I say we won’t make love till we’re married.”

“Or at least till he gets out of prison,” Mrs. Meacham said, walking back into the room.

For the first time I saw the sorrow Meacham had hinted at. Saw it in the slump of her shoulder, saw it behind the pain and anger of her gaze. She looked old and sad and slightly adrift.

“He’s going to lose his teaching job — the school is already seeing to that — and then the district attorney will charge him with contributing. He brought her over here one day while I was gone and they drank wine together. Isn’t that sweet?” She hovered at the back of his chair. The smirk back.

“He said he’s going to leave me everything, when he runs away with her. Probably Tahiti, is what I’m thinking. He’s always been obsessed with Gaugin. He even got sweet Molly interested in him.”

She started wandering around the living room. We watched her with great glum interest.

“He’s going to leave me everything, Mr. Dwyer. The mortgage. The car that has nearly 175,000 miles on it. The bank account that never gets above $2,000. And the cancer. I’ve had three cancer surgeries in the past four years, Mr. Dwyer. And I’ll know in a few weeks if I need another one.” This time there was no smirk, just grief in the eyes and mouth. “And you know the worst thing of all, Mr. Dwyer? I still love him. God, I’m just as sick as he is but I can’t help it.”

After a moment, Meacham said, “Why don’t you go upstairs and lie down? You sound tired.”

She looked at me. “I’m sorry for all this, Mr. Dwyer.”

I didn’t know what to say.

“That’s why we don’t have friends anymore. Nobody wants to come here and hear all this terrible bullshit we put each other through.”

Then: “Goodbye, Mr. Dwyer.”

After she left, he said, “I suppose you’re getting a bad impression of me.”

I almost laughed. He was pursuing a fifteen-year-old, cheating on his wife with cancer, and thinking of running away and leaving that same wife with all the bills. Gee, why would that give me a bad impression of him?

“My opinion doesn’t matter.”

He stared at me a long time. “I’m a romantic, Mr. Dwyer. I believe in the ideals of art and beauty. That’s why I was so drawn to Molly. She’s beautiful in an idealistic way — perfectly — a virgin of body and mind. That’s why I want to take her away — to save her so that she doesn’t become corrupted.”

I thought of Brad dumping Linda for Molly; and Paul dumping Susan for Molly, and taking her picture all the time, and following her around obsessively; and I thought of how I’d been all summer, meeting perfectly fine women whom I rejected because they didn’t fit my ideal. A dangerous thing, beauty. It brings out the best and the worst in men. The trouble is, sometimes the best and the worst are there at the same time — Meacham here loving Molly in the pure way of a college boy dumbstruck by the beauty of art; and yet at the same time willing to hurt a wife who was sick and needed him. The best and the worst. Beauty has a way of making us even more selfish than money does.

“She said no.”

“Who said no?”

“Molly.”

“She told you that, Mr. Dwyer?”

“In so many words.”

“So you think that because she was taking some time to think it over—”

I sighed. “Meacham, listen to me. She wasn’t thinking it over. There was no way she was ever going to run off with you. Ever. But maybe deep down you really understood that. And maybe deep down that’s why you cut her face.”

“My God, you really think I could do that?”

“I think it’s possible. You’re so obsessive about her that—”

“ ‘Obsessive.’ That’s a word my wife would use. A clinical word. There’s nothing clinical in my feelings for Molly, believe me. They’re pure passion. And I emphasize pure and passion. There’s no way I could cut her up. She’s the woman I’ve waited for all my life.”

I wondered if I happened to be blushing at this point in the conversation. I thought again of all the women I’d stayed away from because they weren’t my ideal. Good women. There’s nothing like hearing your own sappy words put in the sappy mouth of someone else. Then you realize how inane your beliefs really are.

“Were you here the night it happened?”

“No, Mr. Dwyer, I wasn’t. I was walking, actually.”

“The entire night?”

“Most of it. You’re wanting an alibi?”

“That would help.”

“I don’t have one — other than the fact that I’m a creator, Mr. Dwyer, not a destroyer. I have created something with Molly that is too beautiful for anybody to destroy. Even I couldn’t destroy it if I wanted to.”

I had to agree with his wife. I don’t know why she stuck it out all these years, either.

“I’ll be going now, Mr. Meacham.”

A chill smile. “You don’t like me much, do you, Mr. Dwyer?”

“Not much,” I said.

“You’re like her,” he said, and nodded upwards to where his wife lay in her solitary bed. “Very middle-class and judgmental without understanding what you’re judging.”

“Maybe you’re right,” I said. “But I doubt it.”

I left.

Clarence started barking at me the minute I pulled into the drive. He was in the breezeway, where he spent a lot of time on these unseasonably warm autumn evenings. Linda came out and calmed him down and let me in.

“I guess we should be grateful he barks so much, as a watch dog and all, but sometimes he drives me crazy.” Then, apparently out of guilt for saying such a thing, she bent down and patted his head fondly, and said in baby talk, “You drive Mommy crazy, don’t you, Clarence?”

Susan was in the kitchen setting out placemats on the breakfast nook table.

“We’re doing Domino’s tonight,” Susan said. “Are you going to join us, Jack?”

I still couldn’t imagine either of them doing it, cutting her up that way, daughter to one, sister to the other.

“Pepperoni and green pepper,” Linda said.

“You convinced me.”

Susan got beers for her mother and me and a Diet Pepsi for herself. Just as we were sitting down in the nook, Clarence exploded into barks again. The Domino’s man had pulled into the drive.

“Maybe Clarence needs some tranquilizers,” Susan said.

“I put a twenty on the counter there, hon,” Linda said to her.

While Susan was out paying the pizza man, and calming Clarence, Linda said, “Did you talk to them?”

“Yes.”

“Any impressions?”

“They’re both good possibilities,” I said. “Especially Meacham. I’ve been learning some things about him. He’s a real creep. His wife has cancer and he’s still running around on her. He thinks he’s the last of the Romantic poets.”

“Good for him. He’s the one I’d bet on. For doing that to Molly, I mean.”

Susan came back with the pizza and we ate.

Halfway through the feast, Linda said, “Tell him about Mark.”

“Oh, Mom.”

“Go on. Tell him.”

Susan shot me a you-know-how-moms-are smile and said, “Mark Feldman asked me to the Homecoming dance.”

“Great,” I said.

“Honey, Dwyer doesn’t know who Mark Feldman is. Tell him.”

“He’s a football player.”

“Jeez, honey, you’re not helping Dwyer at all. Mark Feldman just happens to be the best quarterback who ever played in this state. He’s also a very nice looking boy. Much better looking than that creep Paul. And he’s really got the hots for my cute little daughter here.”

“God, Mom. The ‘hots.’ That sounds like something you’d get from a toilet seat.”

We all laughed.

“Congratulations,” I said.

“And she was worried that nobody’d want to ask her out anymore, Dwyer. Pretty crazy, huh?”

A knock on the breezeway door.

Susan went out to the breezeway to see who was there. She came back in carrying two pans.

“Bobbi brought your cake pans back, Mom. She said the upside down cake was great and thank you for the recipe, too.”

“Thank Gold Medal flour,” Linda said. “The recipe was on the back.”

I guess it was the silence from the breezeway I noticed. Clarence tended to bark at strangers when they came up to the door and when they were leaving. But he hadn’t barked at all with Bobbi.

“Why didn’t Clarence bark just now?” I said.

“Oh, you mean with Bobbi?” Linda said.

“Right.”

“He knows her real well. He doesn’t bark with our best friends.”

Then I remembered something that Susan had said to me back when I’d first met her.

I said, “He doesn’t bark when Paul comes up, either, does he?”

“No,” Susan said.

“The other night, when Molly was cut, you said you heard screams from the breezeway. But did you hear barking?”

Susan thought a moment. “No, I guess I didn’t.”

“Would Clarence have barked if Meacham had come up?”

“Absolutely,” Linda said.

I tried not to make a big thing of it but they could see what I was thinking. I finished my three slices of pizza and my beer and then said I needed to go and do some work.

He wasn’t too hard to find. I spent some time in the parking lot with some burglary tools I use on occasion, and then I went inside the mall looking for him.

He was hanging out with some other boys in front of a record store.

When he saw me, he started looking nervous. He whispered something to one of his friends.

Three good-sized boys stepped in front of him, like a shield, as I started approaching.

They were going to block me as he ran.

“Molly wants to see you,” I said over the shoulders of the boys.

He had just started to turn, ready to make his run, when he heard me and angled his face back toward mine.

“What?”

“She wants to see you. She sent me to get you.”

“Bullshit,” he said.

I shrugged. “All right. I’ll tell her you didn’t want to come.”

The boy in the middle, who went two-twenty easy, decided to have a little fun with the old man. He stepped right up to me and said, “You want to rumble, Pops?”

The other kids laughed. Nothing kids love more than bad dialogue from fifties movies.

“Like I said, Paul, I’ll tell her you didn’t want to see her.” I looked down at the tough one and said, “If that’s all right with you, Sonny.”

I hadn’t kicked the shit out of anybody for a long time but the tough one was giving me ideas.

“Fuck that ‘Sonny’ bullshit,” the tough one said.

But Paul had a hand on his shoulder and was turning him back.

“She really wants to see me?”

“Yeah,” I lied. “She does.”

Paul looked at the tough one. “I better go, then, Michael.”

“With this creep?” Michael said.

“Yeah.”

Michael glowered at me. The others did, too, but Michael had done some graduate work in glowering so he was the most impressive.

“Nice friends,” I said, as we turned back toward one of the exits. I said it loud enough to get Michael all worked up again. “Especially the dumb one with the big mouth.”

“I’m having one, too,” Susan said, when her mother asked her to bring us beers.

She brought three and we sat in the breakfast nook and I told them what had happened.

Linda cried and Susan held her.

“You think we should go up there, Jack?” Susan said as her mother wept in her arms.

“I’d give them a few more minutes.”

“Do you think she’s sane?” Susan said.

I shrugged. “I think she probably needs to see a shrink.”

Linda sat up suddenly. She was angry. “That little prick took advantage of her. That’s why he cut her face that way. He figured if he made her ugly nobody else would want her. He was just being selfish, that’s why he did it.”

She made a fist and muttered a curse beneath her breath.

“You think that’s true, Jack?” Susan said.

“Maybe.”

“Maybe he did it because he really loves her,” Susan said.

“Maybe,” I said.

“I’m not going to sit here and listen to that bullshit,” Linda said. “I’m going up there.”

And with that, she forced Susan out of the booth.

“Mother, maybe you’d better stay down here for a little while,” Susan called.

“She’s my god damned daughter,” Linda said, sounding hysterical. “My god damned daughter.”

She stormed off to the front of the house and the stairway.

Susan shook her head. “Maybe he really did do it because he loved her. Isn’t that possible, Jack?”

She wanted to believe in love and romance, just the same way I wanted to believe in being redeemed by the right woman. There was a good chance we were foolish people. Maybe very foolish.

Then Linda was screaming and Molly was sobbing and a terrible rage and despair filled the house, like the scent of rain on a sudden chill black wind.

Susan said, “Could I hold your hand for a minute, Jack? For just a minute.”

I did my best to smile but I don’t think it was very good. Not very good at all.

“For just a minute,” I said. “But not any longer.”