Absolute Instinct

EIGHTEEN

With the exhibit up and already looking like a hit among cafe patrons at Avanti, Giles wandered outside to gaze at the cityscape and found himself and his box parked on a bench at the terminus of Oak Street overlooking the lake again. He kept staring up at the enormous, lovely, revolving, lit-by-a-million bulbs Ferris wheel at Navy Pier. The lights and sounds wafting across the lake from the joyous time people-normal people-were having there seemed so close, so within his touch. And yet so far from it.

A well of sadness balled up inside Giles for all the harm he had done in this world, in this life given him by some deity somewhere who must have known… had to have known what he would do with it, how he would ruin it, given all that he was even before exiting his mother's womb, and all that she molded him into; after all, such a deity did play with people's lives. He put Louisa Childe in harm's way, in Giles's path. He put Sarah Towne at that right juncture along that riding path in the park in Portland within miles of the Kanar Institute. He had placed Joyce Olsen at that park just as Giles had passed by, and he had molded the faces and bodies of these women to look and move just like Mother. After all was said and done, God had placed all the others within Giles's reach as well, Lucinda and that fool in Millbrook, the one who would never be found. His spine, along with all else, had been dug up by roaming animals, quarry dogs most likely, and dragged, he supposed into some deep cave or burrow to rot there-a waste of a good spinal column, but at least no one had ever discovered Cameron Lincoln's body. Not even Giles. By the time he'd gotten nerve enough to go back to where he'd hurriedly buried the art exhibitor, below a scattering of twigs and leaves, the dead man had disappeared into the deep Minnesota woods.

Giles stared up into the heavens at the night stars, the constellations winking in a clear, bright sky. “You planned all this right, God? You got those mysterious ways for us not to question, so whatever else, You-you're at back of all of it, invisible strings attached to our spines, manipulating all of it. Used to think it was Satan pulling my chain.”

He stood and lifted the opened box, the one with all the news clippings and the letter Mother had carefully typed out and lain across the pile of horror stories that explained who his father was. The one with the heavy metal and glass object lumbering about inside it.

The ribbons lay limp at each side, and Giles had read Mother's parting words at last. She, too, was created by God, and she and his father, were in their way both evil incarnate. While Mother had never killed anyone, she had destroyed a spirit-the spirit Giles might once have had a chance at being or at least at becoming-the shadowy other self who might have eschewed all that his father was, and fought off the ravages of his mother's assaults on that spirit, and overcome the genetic mark left on his soul by a monster seed.

All gone now… any flickering hope of chance for that other self to survive extinguished long ago with his first murder. Too damn much stacked too high against him, borne of man and woman, a creature carrying both the mark of Satan in his very makeup, in the soup of his mother's womb, and the mark created of her doing, of his upbringing and environment. God could not have found a way to save him from Mother when an infant? Why not? Why in God's name not?

Giles stood and looked down from what seemed a faraway place at the damnable, cursed box, realizing that it had been a blight on his soul from the moment Mother had handed it to him from her deathbed. She had had a lawyer bring it to her there in the hospital. It had been sealed for years until she herself broke a thick wax seal she had applied to it when the box had been placed into a bank vault for this day.

“You have a right to know precisely who and what you are, Giles. That is why I gift this to you. It is the gift of self-awareness and fear… Yes, the gift of fear. You rightly ought to fear the thing you are and until now you have had no idea what you are, not really. You only think you do. Ever wonder where you get the urge to kill a living creature and to feed on its… its spinal fluid and marrow?”

Now Giles knew what she had meant. For the first time everything fit, each puzzle piece in his brain, psyche and in his soul… it all fit. Finally, he understood precisely what Mother had had to live with, why she was so bitter, and why Mother, on bended knee, so often asked God why He had spared her for this-while pointing at Giles. Asking God why she had not been killed by his father.

Giles wanted to run from the box.

All these years since Mother's death, he had fixated on its contents-both fascinated with it and terrified of it at once. Drawn to its contents, closer and closer, until his fingers would inch inside it, fearful of the snakebite of its contents. At once wanting to bathe in it, to luxuriate in the sheer knowledge and power within the box, and to run in terror from it Finally, steeling himself, Giles reached in and snatched out a handful of the news clippings, snatching them from below the dead weight of the strange metal and glass tube device lying atop all. His eyes registered a kind of garden tool device like a hose attachment perhaps. He could not fathom its meaning, but he quaked at touching it. Then he abruptly closed the lid on the thing. Now he began to bravely, courageously read the bizarre stories in the clippings.

Tales of Father…

I could just walk away from it. Leave it right here. Never see it again,” Giles spoke to time, space, the stars and God as he stared down over the box, standing beside the park bench he'd been occupying as he'd read the accounts Mother had gathered over the years for his keepsake.

He took tentative steps away. “When they catch me, they'll think I'm monster enough without knowing who my father was. Least now I know he's long dead. Mother didn't lie about that. They'll think me a common unfeeling sociopath, a psychotic fucking horror to make a blood splatterrama film about, like they did about Father. They'll think me a thing worse than all the other horrors combined, a thing without an ent of humanity-all granite and nerve and unleashed animal instinct like a starved wolf escaped from an ancient cave, as guileless and without pity as Jack the Ripper or Father… dear well-remembered Father. The man everyone on the planet knew about but forgot about with his death, everyone except me. I didn't even have the luxury of forgetting about him, having never known.”

He halted, hearing a rustle behind him. A homeless man with a bundle of StreetWise newspapers to sell under his arm was now admiring the box, poking about its contents, curious as an overgrown cat.

Giles reacted instinctively. “Get away from that, old man! It's mine! I… I just forgot it there.” “I found it! It's mine,” argued the half-demented fellow.

“Here, here is for your newspapers!” Giles handed him a ten dollar bill.

The shaky hand extended toward Giles to brush his cheek in a moment of need for human touch. Giles felt the scratchy, rough fingers caress his cheek. “You remind me of someone… someone who loved me once,” said the old man in a sandpaper and gravel voice.

Giles pulled away after a moment. “You can keep the papers, re-sell them. Double your profits, old man,” he said as he lifted the ugly gift from Mother, her twisted homage to Father-every detail of his every crime against humanity. According to the news reports, the work of a man who lived a heartless, unfeeling double-life and killed wantonly like an animal by night while selling medical supplies by day. A man who had designed and patented his own medical device for extracting blood from the jugular artery as the hearts of his victims pumped blood to his waiting mason jars, each carefully labeled and packed into a cooler. Mother always said that Giles was neat to a fault, meticulous about his art supplies. Now he knew where he'd gotten the trait.

Father was a blood drinker, a man convinced of his own need for blood, a vampire named Matisak-Mad Matthew Matisak, the newspapers proclaimed him.

In the news stories, Father was characterized again and again as a weak little man suffering a debilitating disease who'd come to think of himself as a parasitic vampire who had to feed on the blood of other human beings to save himself from the disease that threatened to overtake him. One reporter wrote that his mental state had deteriorated far more quickly than had his physical condition, his physical state seemingly taking power from his each kill, and that he could be counted among the truly insane but masterful and ingenious murderers in murderer's row going back through all time. Another reporter claimed that Mad Matthew Matisak had established a strange bond with FBI Agent and Medical Examiner Dr. Jessica Coran.

Giles wondered what this woman could tell him about his father. He wondered how he might best his father's reputation and in doing so possibly meet this Dr. Jessica Coran. Father had wanted her to go into an eternal bliss with him, and he apparently damn near got his way in a warehouse in New Orleans many years ago.

Giles wondered if this FBI doctor were still alive, still working for the FBI, and if so, he wondered if she would feel any kinship-as strange as such a kith and kin might be- to the son of Matthew Matisak. He made his way toward the array of lights and the sounds of gaiety spilling from the ongoing Navy Pier fair. He felt an overwhelming need to be among people even knowing he would never fit in among people.

Unsure why the lights of the Ferris wheel pulled him, Giles began a brisk walk for the pier.

The homeless man looked after him until certain the young man had no intention of returning. He then unfolded the white sheath of paper with the sketch of the suspect in the Lucinda Wellingham-UPS murder case, with a strong possible connection to the Spine Thief mutilation murders.

The cop's excited hands revealed shaking manicured, painted nails below the gloves as the detective tore them away, finally able to open the tightly folded paper on the likeness. There seemed a definite rough similarity between the man with the box and the man in the sketch. But undercover police detective Tanith Chen, peeling away a layer of her stifling makeup that created the rough texture and manly appearance she was known for, as it was the opposite of her feminine beauty, remained unsure. This kid parked so long on a park bench and talking to himself was new to the area, else he'd have known about her and her nightly collars of degenerates and drug dealers using her territory for all manner of perversions in the park, perversions now on the decline thanks to her collaring so many who dared “do their thing” on her watch. She'd kept one eye on the suspect in the distance now, his back to her. She began to slowly, cautiously follow the stranger, curious as to what he'd been up to. She'd watched earlier from a safe distance, watched him intentionally leave the package like it was some ransom demand or something. Certainly, her blue sense told her not everything in this picture was kosher.

She found a park lamppost, one of those almost useless ones put up for decoration in the park by the pork-barrel politicians and Daley. Make Chicago beautiful… keep Chicago beautiful… the park is for the people… all a lot of crap, a moneymaking boondoggle the whole thing, as dripping of political favoritism and corruption as the deal with the tow-truck companies in this town. She laughed lightly to herself, recalling what her partner, Gene Kelley said just the night before at the Red Lion Inn where they mingled with other cops and writers and cops who wanted to be writers and writers who wanted to be cops. In a Faux baritone voice, he declared, “If Christ came to Chicago, his fucking donkey would be ticketed at the curb and more'n likely towed to boot by the Lincoln Park pirates. And where in the love of God is Christ going to come up with that kind of cash?”

Under the weak glow of the old-world styled lamppost, Detective Chen pulled forth the stolen note she'd palmed from the box, a cryptic note from mother to son as it turned out, but an eerie, even chilling note at the same time. As Chen read it, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. She felt her skin crawl as if a sudden cold rash of creeping satanic fingertips scraped over her soul. She gasped, glanced all around, over her shoulder, half certain that the son of the infamous Matthew Matisak must have the eyes and instincts of a tiger, that he could not only pierce the night with his vision but her very mind, to know what she held in her hand, and to kill her for it.

“My God… it's him… gotta be the one the APB's out on, the creep that rips people's backs open for their spines, and he and I are the only two people on the planet who know who… who he is.”

Tanith Chen had never felt so vulnerable or so absolutely alone in her territory before. She feared, even as good as she was, she'd be no match for this cunning madman.

Still he'd kept going, moving north toward the lights of Michigan Avenue, Saks, Neiman Marcus, Lord amp; Taylor, Water Tower Place. He'd be swallowed up in the crowds. She had to follow, to again catch sight of him, and she had to get backup. She folded and put away the note and the police sketch, noticing that her hands shook. Her fingers struggled with the keypad on her cell phone. As she called for help, she began tearing away her baggy, oversized clothing, dropping it as she went to rid herself of the disguise he would spot. At the same time, her feet moved her fluidly toward Michigan Avenue in the direction the son of Matisak had taken. She'd lost sight of him, and having to pass by hedges, she feared he knew what she was thinking and who she was, and that he might, at any moment, dart out at her. Fleeting thoughts of how great it would be to have the Spine Thief collared by an Asian Chicago policewoman flitted through her mind as well.

And the note she had plucked from the box and folded away. What about that? This was hardcore evidence. It must not be lost or damaged or ruined by her fingerprints or perspiration any further. It needed to be under glass and studied by the experts chasing this guy. It needed FBI attention. This whole damn night needed FBI attention.

Her call to her partner for help went through. Looking now like a jogger, all her makeup peeled away, wearing only sweatpants and T-shirt-a bit chilled by the mix of cool air and stumbling onto the biggest case of her career, Tanith Chen tried consciously to slow both her mind and her breathing. It didn't work. She breathlessly told her partner what she had, standing now at the perimeter of the park in the shadow of the Drake Hotel, traffic noise causing her to shout into the mouthpiece.

“Where is he now?” asked her partner, Gene Kelley.

She looked all round her. He was nowhere in sight. She had to admit this to Gene. As she did so, she wondered if the killer had somehow doubled-back and faded into the green blackness of the park foliage. Or had he stepped up his pace, going north on the Magnificent Mile?

Gene promised a shitload of backup, so they could cordon off the entire area for six blocks. But Tanith cautioned any sirens, and any big show of force. “You'd just alert him to the fact we're on to him.”

“How can you be on to him if you don't know where the fuck he is?” countered Kelley.

“Given the nature of the beast, innocent lives could be put at risk if you come rushing in like the cavalry, Gene. Look, I think he went south on Michigan. I'm going to do what I can to get and keep a visual on him. But no helicopters or guys rappelling down on the avenue unless they can stay out of his sight.”

“You go cautiously, Slick.”

“I talked to him, Gene. He's a cool customer. Didn't spook, but then he was convinced I was Barney the Street-Wise salesman. He had no idea who I was.”

“We've all got his likeness now. You were out when it was disseminated. We all know what the guy looks like.”

“So do I… now.” She spotted him in the crowd ahead. She'd jogged, stopping only to talk to Gene. “My God, I got a visual on him!”

“Where's he headed?”

“I dunno. The Tribune tower maybe?”

“What, to give himself up?”“Could be.”

“Keep your eyes on him.”

“Wait… where'd he go? Shit… disappeared like smoke. Stepped into a shop doorway or down a side street.”

“He may be on to you. Don't take another step. We're on our way.”

Two squad cars converged on her location, followed by Gene's unmarked sedan used in backing her up in the park. All the uniformed cops spread out with the caveat to locate Giles Gahran, each with a photo in hand. Gene put a big arm around Tanith. “How's my lady love, Slick?” He'd begun using the nickname shortly after their first partnering.

“Slick is just fine, but damn I really wanted this guy.” She carefully pulled out the note she'd lifted from the unattended box. “You think the way I got hold of this it'll stand up in a court of law?” She held it out between thumb and forefinger, gingerly, when a Chicago gust stole it away, sending her chasing after it.

“Fuck!” The document seemed as elusive as Gahran. It took Gene stomping on it, dirtying it badly, to stop it from completely blowing off.

“You got hold of the FBI?” she asked.

“They got word, yeah. All nine yards of it. Couple of their agents from Milwaukee've been canvassing and scouring the city for Gahran. Imagine it, Slick, this freak that rips out people's goddamn spines.”

“So you tell 'em about the note?”

“Yeah.”

“And the news that this guy is… or may be related to Mad Matthew Matisak, the creep caught here in Chicago like a decade ago and put away and escaped and finally brought down in New Orleans?”

“I relayed all of it, Slick, all of it.”

“Then why in hell aren't they all over this? Where the fuck are they?”

“Apparently, they've run down an apartment house where he's staying. They're sitting on it.”

“A stakeout?”

“Waiting, yeah, for a damn warrant for search and seizure, all ready to make an arrest if and when he shows.”

Another unmarked car arrived, and a tall, broad-shouldered, handsome FBI agent who introduced himself as Laughlin made long eye contact with Chen in her sweats. “You're the one with the weird story of having run into Giles Gahran, and is that the document you found?”

She looked down at the soiled note, the stains now smeared across the ink lettering. Agent Laughlin said, “Looks like an old Underwood style typewriter. But our boys and girls at the lab'll know soon enough. They're trained on this kind of thing.”

“Sorry about the mess we made of it,” she apologized.

“Don't worry. We've managed around a lot worse.” He read the note and his face went ashen, two shades lighter.

“You all right, Agent Laughlin?” she asked.

“This is what I call the true nature of evil.”

“A real Mommie Dearest story in it, that's for sure.”

“Look… it appears you all have lost sight of him, and our best chance now is to catch him at the rental, and Petersaul and Cates have that covered, so… how 'bout if…”

Gene instinctively read her body language that told him to disappear.

“Yes, Agent?”

“Well, I mean… have you had a bite? There's a great restaurant-Joe's Chicago just a couple blocks up back of the Marriott. Best of Chicago.”

“Oh, yeah, great place across from the… yeah… I am famished after all that's happened.”

“I'll get your stuff outta the park if none of the real bums have stolen it already,” Gene called to her. Gene signaled tothe uniforms moving from storefront to storefront on the most protected mile of real estate in the city that they were done here.

The police presence disappeared as quickly as it had materialized.

GILES Gahran had insisted he be allowed to take his box up on the enormous shining Ferris wheel with him. The operator argued that he'd be happy to set it aside and hold it in a safe place until his return. It took an additional twenty to show the man how seriously Giles wanted to take the box on the ride.

“Look man, I got no metal detectors here. I can't know what the fuck is in that box. And never in life ever seeing a box like that. You say it's just photos and papers, stuff important only to you, but how am I to know you ain't got something, you know, sinister in the box. And even if you don't got something, you know, like that in there, I got people I gotta answer to and I need this job. You got no idea.”

“Look,” Giles directed his eyes to the box. Giles shuffled his hand through all the papers. Just paper. Feel how light.”

The operator waved him off. “Yeah… OK… I can see it ain't nothing but paper, but still the rule is nothing carried on, not even a friggin' umbrella even, not even if it looks like rain, you know, 'cause if something fell off, it's a damn instant projectile, you see my drift?”

Giles slipped in another forty atop the twenty.

The operator glanced around. Finally, he nodded, a cigar bobbing in his mouth. “OK, but you gotta promise to keep that thing from falling. It falls out, you could hurt somebody at such heights, you know. Don't matter how light it is.”

Giles got aboard the car with the box. He'd had to again untie it to demonstrate its harmlessness to the fool, and now he could not place it on his lap because of the bar placed across his front. From his coat pocket, he pulled forth the Spigot-his father's blood-draining device-and replaced it in the box.

“The wheel's so damn big, it only goes around once, you know? Don't want any complaints,” the operator said in a monotone that spoke of an eternal boredom. And so the ride began.

The operator moved Giles and his cargo by increments as he let off others who had already made the trip to the top, carefully monitoring weight and balance as he did so. Giles's trip to the stars was stop-start, stop-start, not the smooth ride he'd expected, and it didn't allow for any sensation of flight to occur. Rather for Giles, the box of the gondola gave him the sensation of being inside the box he carried on with him.

Finally, he arrived near the top of the mammoth arc. Held here as the operator far below now continued his endless quest of balance, counterweight, balance, counterweight, working now with people at Giles's extreme opposite as new arrivals boarded.

Then the gondola lurched, and Giles's box slid from the seat beside him, spilling onto the footrest, clippings and photos threatening to spill over the side, along with the glass-and-metal contraption his father's patent papers had referred to as the Spigot.

Giles knee-jerk response had him reach for the box, and in lurching forward, the gondola swung wildly beneath him, and one of the news clippings scuttled over the side. Unable to grab the box, the Spigot or the papers, his arm and body held in check by the bar, Giles watched the devilish wind whip in and dance around the papers, flirting with the papers as they continued to move snakelike from the spilled box. “Fuck, fuck, fucking hell! Is this how you want it, Mother? Is this what we've been waiting for?”

People below began to see small newspaper clippings floating down to the midway at Navy Pier. People in the cars below him caught a few of the clippings in their cars, and they heard his swearing, although they could not see him. One man yelled up at him, “Shut your dirty mouth! I have little kids down here!”

Giles finally pried loose the restraining bar but his foot kicked the box as if guided there by Mother, and the entire box, along with the Spigot, slid incrementally along the floorboard of the car. Giles went to his knees for the box, but the foot area refused to accommodate his size. As a result, his bulk shook the gondola badly. The operator had begun cursing sailor fashion at Giles to remain seated and to calm himself. People on the ground feared a suicide attempt in the making.

Then he realized the note written by Mother to him overlaying the pictures and the clippings that told of the history of Mad Matthew Matisak was gone. He knew it had not been swept out of the gondola, but he could not see it anywhere with the paperwork.

He finally got a firm hold of the box and the Spigot and returned to his seat, clutching both in his lap, rifling through the dense pile for any sign of Mother's departing note to him. It had simply vanished. But he had not seen it go out over the side.

“The bum in the park. That old bastard… like some kind of prophet. It had to be him.”

The wheel lurched forward and down, stopping at each gondola now as the operator began pulling people off as quickly as possible. Those pulled off began to form a small crowd at the base of the Ferris wheel, some angry, most confused, all of them looking up to where Giles sat waiting his turn to be removed from the wheel.

“Lovely up here, isn't it, Mother? Just beautiful. Wonder what it would be like to end it all right here. To take the one-hundred-fifty-foot leap. You, me, Father here. What a spectacular splash we'd make. Surely, it will make my artwork go through the roof at Cafe Avanti, if they sell it before the cops can confiscate it.”

He stood in the gondola, rocking it as he prepared to jump. But a dizziness from having had nothing to eat for more than twenty-four hours and the height conspired against any resolve he may have had. He plopped back onto the seat and, in a fit of rage at having lost his resolve to end this misery called life, began filling his hands with words of Father and tossing all the photos, clippings, sketches, court documents, paperback books and magazine articles and bubble-gum cards devoted to Matthew Matisak out over the side of his sinking ship.

The papers floated down the length and breadth of the Ferris wheel like confetti now, growing larger as they meandered down and down. The first snowflake-like sheets and half sheets were now within grasp of the adults standing guard about their children below. In a moment, the midway floor around the wheel was littered with the debris of the box.

Save for the Spigot, the box sat empty now, and it lay sad beside Giles as the operator pulled him roughly out of the gondola, angry and snatching at his clothes, whipping him to the ground and throwing the box at him, shouting, “And don't fucking ever come back!”

The curious who could read stood about looking at the clippings and pictures they'd gathered up, and they stared from the newspaper stories and other stuff to Giles. He felt no pity or concern from this crowd, only confusion and fear and perhaps, if they guessed the truth, loathing.

Giles handed the ornate box with its now rattling contents to a small smiling boy standing closest to him, his mother's arms draped about him in protective stance.

“What's your name?” he asked the boy.

Perhaps five or six, the handsome, happy little boy proudly shouted, “Kevin!”

“Go ahead. You like the box? You keep it.”

Little big-eyed Kevin looked up to his mother on high, craning his neck, for the OK. She nodded her approval.

“Put your frogs and your play toys in it for me, Kevin. All the things that make you happy.”

“I will… I will.”

Giles got to his feet and shambled off, muttering, “The box'll like that, having a new owner with new stuff.”

Giles heard the sound of sirens. Someone had called the cops.

He must get away. Must blend into the crowd and rush, get some rest, try to clear his head now that he had divested himself, finally, of Father. What to do next? Where to go? What of his showing at the cafe? All seemed lost and confused now. But after a good night's rest… perhaps he could think clearly enough to find a way out, one that didn't involve a Ferris wheel and a failed attempt at leaping off it.

“Maybe I can find the nerve to use this,” he said aloud to himself, fingering the.22-caliber gun he'd purchased earlier on the street. “A shoot-out with the cops. They're bound to kill me. They gotta fire on a man who opens up on a crowd like this.”

He saw a small army of uniforms coming at him, and a number of plainclothes detectives as well. A door marked GARAGE opened on the enormous parking facility at Navy Pier. Giles weaved in and out of the aisles as police rushed the Ferris wheel, responding to a call about some nutcase dropping newspaper clippings from atop the wheel, all of which related to Mad Matthew Matisak.

Giles held firm to the gun in his pocket, at the ready if he had a moment's opportunity to take advantage of the cops, to use them one final time. To go out under his own terms. But he waltzed from the garage unimpeded and down the darkened little street running alongside the inlet to the Chicago River where boats sat silent, some idling, waiting to board passengers.

He grabbed on to a rope and climbed aboard one of the many cruise boats plying up and down the water, asking if he might exit at Irving Park.

“Absolutely,” said the captain's mate who welcomed him aboard. “What sort of ruckus is going on at the midway?”

“Not sure… some damn fool caused a big disturbance at the Ferris wheel, I think.”

Giles found a seat on the boat and stared across the water. A waitress came to his table and asked what he'd like to drink.

“Spinal fluid,” he said.

She laughed a giggling, tinkling, feminine laugh. She had a southern accent. “Ho-whoa, now you are a funnin' me ain't-cha now? I been waitressin' from Georgia to here for six years, but I never heard that one. Bartender's gonna hafta dig out his drink manual for a Spinal Tap. Is it some new kinda Chicago drink?”

“Yeah, tell your bartender to mix Johnnie Walker Red in equal parts with a tumbler of Absolut Vodka, J amp;B Scotch, gin, vermouth and three inches of white grape juice-and you got Spinal Fluid.”

“I better write that down!” she joked back.

The boat began to move away from the dock, the pull of the current wanting to take it opposite of its engines, but the engines revved and they were off to follow the coast of the lake first south toward the museums to see the magnificent multicolored Buckingham Fountain and the skyline of Chicago, for the photo-obsessed tourists, and then they would turn and do the shuttle run north.

The city lights twinkled as if alive in the distance. Beautiful beneath a warming breeze. How Lucinda would have loved this boat ride, Giles thought.