A Fistful of Rain

Burchett had moved forward and when I reached his side, he indicated the vent. Through the slats I could glimpse the street out front of the house, the tops of the apple and elm trees in my yard.

It took me another second before I could make out the antenna, short and stubby and rubber and black, attached to the underside of one of the slats. From outside, in the shadow of the house, it would have been invisible. Burchett had crouched and was fumbling beneath the crossbeams, and then he came up with what looked like a thin rectangular box, also black plastic. It had another antenna attached to it, even stubbier than the first, and a row of three lights, all of them off. A power cord ran away from it, disappearing in the insulation at our feet.

“The transmitter,” Burchett explained. “Broadband wireless; you can get one at just about any computer hardware store for a couple hundred bucks. All of the cameras in the house send to this little guy here, you see? Then this fella, he beams the signal to another unit somewhere, maybe only a couple blocks from here, maybe up to a mile away, and it downloads the signal onto tape or maybe even direct to a hard drive.”

“Tape?”

“The cameras, they’re video, Miss Bracca, not still-image. Those pictures of you, they’re not photographs, they’re video captures. This guy is taking videos of you, selecting the image he wants, pulling that, and cleaning it up. You see?”

I did see, and it alarmed me enough that I shot a glance back to Chapel, where he was wedged just inside the access way. From his expression, I knew that he’d seen it, too, was probably a lap ahead of me.

“There’s a fucking tape?”

“It’s possible.” Burchett looked at the unit in his hands, then back to me. “What do you want me to do with it?”

“Is it off?”

“Yes, ma’am. We did a frequency trap before disconnecting it, so there’s no need for it to ever get switched back on.” He moved the box to his left hand, went into the coin pocket on his Levi’s with his right, coming out with a thin and short metal tube that he held between his thumb and index finger for me to see. “This is one of the cameras. Not much to look at.”

There was a bead of glass on one end of the tube, two tiny wires running from the other. In the light I wasn’t sure, but the wires looked white and black. The whole thing wasn’t much longer or thicker than a matchstick.

“Easy to place, easy to hide, gives a stable enough image,” Burchett continued. “You have the right software, you can clean up whatever it provides pretty nice. Not terribly expensive, either. The technology’s gotten to the point that this is bush-league stuff.”

“Hurrah for technology,” I said.

Chapel finally spoke up. “Rick? How long to get this stuff out of her house?”

“Take us maybe an hour to disconnect everything, get it all pulled and all the little holes spackled so that you can’t much tell they were ever here.”

“Then do it,” I said.

“Then what?” Chapel asked.

“Then what what?” I asked.

“There’s a question of the tape.”

“Potential tape,” Burchett said. “Miss Bracca got home four days ago, that’s nearly a hundred hours of video if the perv who did this kept it all. That’s not likely, Fred. Gets expensive.”

“Just one tape is a problem, Rick. None of us wants to see a ‘Bracca Uncovered’ video hitting the Web.”

“No, don’t suppose we do.”

“Then I want to know who did this. And I want to make sure they don’t have anything damaging to my client.”

“More damaging,” I said, but I said it softly, and neither of them heard me.

Burchett was nodding. “With the frequency, we can track back to the receiver. But we’ll have to move on that fast. Our perv here most likely already knows his system’s gone down. He might guess we’re on to him.”

“Then get on it.”

“We could call the police.”

“No,” I said. “No cops, no publicity. Bad enough the pictures are out there, I don’t want the whole world seeing me like that.”

“Rick, you’ll have to handle this yourself,” Chapel said.

Burchett smiled, nodded his head at me as if tipping the brim of a hat, and I realized what it was that made him so disarming, and that maybe made him as good as Chapel said he was. A man he might be, but in that gesture, you could see the kid who wanted to be a cowboy when he grew up.

As if to prove me right, he said, “We’ll get saddled up.”

Burchett left with the scary woman, leaving the other guy to remove all the pink flags and the cameras they marked, and Chapel told me that he needed to get back to the office, but that I should call him if I wanted anything.

“You going to call Graham?” I asked him.

“That was my intention.”

“You’re going to tell him about the other pictures?”

“I don’t see how I can’t.”

I nodded, not liking it. It was stupid, maybe, but I knew what would happen as soon as Graham got the news. He traveled with a laptop, and it wouldn’t take long before Click and Van saw the pictures. Click would be bad enough, but the thought of Van staring at those images was hard to take. She’d see it not so much as my humiliation, but proof that she’d been right about me all along.

Chapel left me with his home number, and the number for his mobile, as well as the number for Burchett. He told me he’d get in touch as soon as he heard anything, and that I shouldn’t worry, things were well in hand, now. I walked him to the door, and when he was gone I went to the kitchen and got myself a beer, not really giving a damn what the remaining member of Burchett Security might think of that behavior.

I was halfway through the bottle when I realized just how set up I had been, and that brought some dark thoughts running home. Whoever had done this, they’d done it with a lot of time to spare. They’d done it easily, and covered themselves well.

Which made me think it had been an inside job, someone working with the carpenters or the electricians or someone.

There was only one person who had been inside while I’d been on tour, who could come and go as he pleased.

There was early rush-hour traffic on the bridges crossing the Willamette, and it took me close to twenty minutes to get from my place in Irvington to Mikel’s in the Northwest Hills. His condo was in a cluster of similar units, designed to look like Victorian town houses, off Westover. It was high enough that, on a clear day, you could see all of Portland spreading out to the east, with Mount Hood’s snowcap glistening in the far distance, and to the north, the broken top of Mount Saint Helens.

On a clear day. Not today, not with the evening clouds rolling in, heavy with payloads from the Pacific.

I parked on the street and strode to his front door, trying to think of what I would say if Tommy was there. Probably tell him to get the hell away from me, that I didn’t want to see him, that what I had was for Mikel’s ears alone. I’d seemed able to bully Tommy pretty successfully once already, so maybe it would work a second time.

All of the tenant spaces were empty except for Mikel’s, which was filled by his Land Rover, so I knew he was home, and I figured none of his neighbors were, yet. Tommy hadn’t brought a car when he’d visited me, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have one.

I knocked and didn’t get an answer, so I knocked again, harder, and still didn’t get an answer. It was starting to tick me off, to make my suspicions seem all the more grounded.

All of his alarm about the picture when he’d shown it to me, his need to hear me say that I hadn’t posed. I’d taken it as concern, but maybe it wasn’t concern as much as guilt. Maybe the cops had been right all along, that Mikel had let one of his friends crash at my place. And maybe that friend had made me his personal hobby, his cottage industry.

“Dammit, Mikel, open up!”

I pounded harder and even threw the toe of my boot, just for the added noise. No response.

I stopped banging the door, mostly to give my hand a rest. A wind had kicked up, making the trees along the hillside whisper. Distantly, I heard the whistle of an Amtrak train sliding into Union Station.

“Fucker,” I muttered, and tried the knob for the hell of it, and it turned easy, and the door came open.

From where I was standing in the doorway, I could see somebody’s leg at the end of the hall, sticking out from the living room. A whiff of alcohol and vomit, the scents of my bathroom, brushed my face.

I moved a couple steps forward, across the threshold. Everything in my chest felt like it was compressing, crumpling under pressure.

“Mikel?” I asked.

This time, when he didn’t answer, I knew why.

My brother lay on his side, the way he must have fallen, and there was dark blood down his front and his back, seeping into the white carpet. His eyes and his mouth were open, and I knew he had been in pain when he died.

I took it in, then saw the rest. The empty cans scattered on the carpet, the overturned chairs, the broken lamp.

My vision started to swim. I put a hand out on the wall, caught myself, tried to remember to breathe. The alcohol and puke smell was stronger. Something cracked, vibrating in my body, through my chest. Like I was the wishbone at somebody’s dinner party, like I was the losing end.

I heard myself moaning, though whether that was in my head or out of my mouth, I’m not sure. The wind outside got louder.

And again, it started to rain.

CHAPTER 15

Somehow I kept it together long enough to make it home, but I was fighting panic when I came through the door, and I nearly forgot to turn the alarm off before it started screaming. I shucked out of my jacket and went into the kitchen, and I cracked the seal on a new bottle of Jack and drank from it standing there, pulling again and again until the burn was too much and I had to stop for air.

I didn’t even bother with a chair, just slumped to the floor, bottle in my hand, feeling eleven again, feeling the world spinning out of control once more.

Not again, I thought. Not again, please not again.

I was in the backyard, face up to the falling rain, a new bottle in my hand, when the cops arrived. I’d been out there for an hour or so, singing to myself, and when I heard the car stop and the doors slam, I knew it was them, and decided to be a model citizen and go around front to meet them.

At the side of the house I leaned, turning my head so I could peek around the corner. The car was one of the Portland PD unmarked ones, white but glowing a little orange in the light from the street. It had a radio antenna mounted on the center of the trunk.

There were two of them at the door, up on my porch, a man and a woman. Both of them were white, and I couldn’t tell their age. The man was saying, “. . . know who she is, right?”

“I don’t fucking care who she is,” the woman said.

The man grunted and leaned on my doorbell again.

I said, “Over here.”

They turned and looked at me, doing a good job of not acting like I’d surprised them. Objectively, I must have looked like a drowned rat, my T-shirt and jeans soaked, my hair stuck to my skull. The woman came off the porch first, reaching into an inside pocket, the man following her.

“Miriam Bracca?”

“You found her,” I said, and pulled at the bottle again.

The woman hid annoyance by flashing her badge. “My name’s Hoffman. This is Detective Marcus.”

“Sure,” I said. “So, did you find him?”

Marcus glanced at Hoffman, but Hoffman didn’t take her eyes off me. “Find who?”

“Tommy.”

“Tommy?”

“My. Dad.”

“Why would we want to find your dad?” I thought Marcus was trying to sound very casual, but that it didn’t work, and that he sounded cagey instead.

“ ‘Cause he killed my brother,” I said. “Killed my mother, too, but that was a long time ago. Mikel, that was new. I think he did that today.”

They watched me, so I took another drink from the bottle.

“Maybe you’d better come with us,” Hoffman said, and she came forward to help, but I backed up and waved her off.

“Why? I haven’t done anything.”

“How did you know Mikel Bracca was dead?”

The woman had to be an utter fucking moron. “Because I saw him. I went over there this afternoon to talk, well, not talk, to yell at him, but he didn’t answer the door and it was open, so I went in and he was there and he was dead.”

“Okay, yeah,” Hoffman said. “You’re going to come with us.”

“I’m not,” I said, indignant.

“Yeah, you are,” she said, like she really wasn’t very interested, and she took handcuffs out from beneath her jacket and her partner was now at my side and taking the bottle out of my hand, and when I protested, he didn’t care, and when I tried to back away farther, he tried to grab my arms. I flailed and fell back with a splash, and the bottle fell and didn’t break. Then they were both helping me up, and my hands were behind my back and I couldn’t move them and that hurt.

“I want my lawyer,” I said.

“I’ll just bet you do,” Marcus said, and he led me to their car.

CHAPTER 16

They made me kiss the Breathalyzer, and ran a wet cotton swab over the backs of my hands before putting me in a cell to sober up. I passed out, only to be roused by an officer who dragged me to an interrogation room upstairs. It was cold, and even though my clothes had mostly dried, I sat there shivering. The drunk had gone, leaving me with a thickness in my head.

Marcus came in first, carrying two paper cups of coffee, one in each hand, and a legal pad clamped beneath his arm. Now that I could make him out, he looked parked in his late thirties, not unattractively so. He was maybe five foot ten or eleven, not as big as Tommy or Mikel, but with the kind of broad shoulders that Van went nuts for on a guy. The suit he was wearing was dark, charcoal and black, with a black tie and a white shirt, and even after what was probably a long night, he looked neat and pressed.

Marcus gave me a grin as he reached the table, offering me one of the cups. I decided to thank him.

“Sure. You want an aspirin?”

“Aspirin would be great.”

“I’ll see if we can find you some,” he said, and he went out again, leaving the pad and a pen behind on the table along with his coffee.

I waited and drank coffee and waited some more, and it seemed another long time before he returned. He had a paper cup of water this time, and aspirin, and Hoffman, too. She’d brought a file with her, and held it with one hand as she took a position leaning against the wall, where she could keep an eye on both of us. Marcus took the seat opposite me, and slid over the water and the aspirin.

I took them both, draining the cup, then thanked him again.

“Not what you’re used to, I’d guess, huh?”

“What?”

He indicated the empty water cup. “Tap water.”

“No, it’s . . . it’s great,” I said.

He smiled and leaned back.

“Am I under arrest?” I asked.

“Do you want to be?”

“No.”

“Well, let’s see if you can help us out here, and then you won’t have to worry about that.”

“It’s just that I have a lawyer,” I said. “I’m thinking I should probably call him.”

“If you want to, sure, but it seems like a waste of his time and your money to me. We’ve just got a couple questions.”

I looked over at Hoffman, idly tapping the end of her file against the cinder block wall. The look she returned was utterly flat, like she was looking through me, almost like I wasn’t there at all. Her hair was light brown, and she wore it full but short, and it ended about the middle of her neck. She had navy slacks and a black blouse and a black jacket. Like her partner, she seemed fit, but unlike him, she seemed long, rather than compact. I’d seen enough lately of how costumers dressed women to know that Hoffman knew she was attractive, and didn’t mind letting others see that, too. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, and I didn’t see any jewelry on her, either.

I looked back at Marcus, who sat waiting patiently.

“I guess it’s okay,” I said.

“Yeah, I’m sure it will be,” he agreed, and he uncapped his pen. “So why don’t we start with you finding your brother, okay?”

I told him how I’d found Mikel, what I’d seen. He didn’t interrupt, scribbling on the pad, and when I glanced at Hoffman, she was still looking through me. It was making me uncomfortable.

When I finished, he asked me to tell it to him again, just to make sure he’d gotten it all down right, and after I’d told it all a second time, he nodded and smiled and leaned back in his chair.

“So why were you in such a hurry to see your brother?”

I shook my head.

“Oh, c’mon, Mim. This has been easy so far, why make it hard now?”

“I really would rather not.”

“Was it to score? Is that why you went to see him?”

“Oh, God, no,” I said. “No. Jesus.”

“You know your brother dealt?”

I shrugged.

“But he didn’t deal for you?”

“No. I’m fine with alcohol. Anything stronger, I retain water.”

He grinned. “No sign of that.”

“He never gave me drugs, I never bought drugs from him. That’s not what happened, anyway, this isn’t a drug thing. It’s Tommy.”

“So you said. Why do you think that?”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“Well, it may be, but I’m asking you.”

“Look,” I said, trying to be patient. “Tommy’s a drunk, okay? It runs in the family. When I was eleven he got loaded and ran over our mother with his pickup, and he did it on purpose, and that’s the worst example of what he did drunk, but not the only one by a long shot. He got out of OSP a little while ago, he was staying with Mikel. Tommy got loaded and angry and shot Mikel.”

“Not the other way around?” Hoffman asked. “Not Mikel got loaded and angry and your father just defended himself?”

“Mikel didn’t drink. He didn’t use, either. He just sold the stuff.”

“Yeah, that makes it so much better,” Hoffman muttered, and went back to tapping her folder.

“Did Mikel own a gun?” Marcus asked.

“Not that I know of.”

“Did Tommy?”

“Well, he must have, because he shot Mikel.”

Marcus nodded, as if my logic was unimpeachable.

“Was Mikel violent?” Hoffman asked.

I glared at her. “No.”

“What about your father? Tommy?”

“Of course he’s fucking violent, I just told you, he murdered our mother!”

Hoffman’s expression curled, got a little tighter, and I finally realized what I was seeing. She didn’t like me. Maybe it was principle, maybe she was one of those fuck-you-rock-star types. Whatever. It was fine. I didn’t think I liked her much, either.

“When was the last time you saw your brother alive?” Marcus asked.

“Yesterday morning. He came over to my house.”

“So you saw him the day he died.”

“That’s what I just said.”

“What’d you talk about?”

I shook my head. “I really can’t say.”

“You can’t or you won’t?” Hoffman sounded snotty about it.

“I don’t want to, how about that?”

She turned her attention to her partner. “This is a waste of time. Let’s get this over and book her.”

“Tracy, calm down,” Marcus said.

“No, she’s pulling this bitch rock-princess act, she doesn’t give a damn her own brother was murdered, she’s holding out on us, the only reason to do that is guilt, far as I’m concerned.”

Marcus appealed to me. “Mim, you’ve got to help us out, here.”

I looked at him, then at Hoffman, then back to him, then figured it out.

“Good-cop, bad-cop, right? That’s what you’re doing now?”

“Actually, we’re both good cops. My partner’s just a little annoyed that you’re holding out on us.”

I considered, then asked, “Have you found Tommy?”

“We’re not talking about Tommy, we’re talking about you,” Hoffman said.

“Why won’t you answer my question?”

“Why did we find blood in your bathroom?” she asked.

The question threw me, coming unexpectedly. “You searched my house?”

“We had a warrant.”

I showed her my right palm. “I cut my fucking hand. I bleed when that happens.”

“Have you disposed of any clothes?”

“Disposed? What, you mean like thrown out?”

“Yes, I mean like thrown out.”

“No.”

“We only found blood on one shirt, not much. Most of it seems to be on the towels and a pillow and its case.”

“That’s because most of my bleeding was on the towels and the pillowcase,” I snapped.

“Lot of blood,” Hoffman said. “I’d think it’d have gotten on some clothes.”

“It didn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I was naked when I cut myself,” I told her.

If she had a mental image, it didn’t impress her.

“What about Tommy?” Marcus asked. “When was the last time you saw him?”

“Thursday morning. First time I’d seen him in fifteen years was Thursday morning.”

“Did your father say anything about Mikel when he came over? Did he indicate that he and your brother weren’t getting along?”

“We didn’t talk about that.”

“What did you talk about?”

I glared at Hoffman again. She took it the way she’d taken everything else so far. “He told me he’d heard my music and that he wanted to be my dad again.”

Marcus asked, “Did he ask you for money?”

“No.”

“Did you give him money?”

“No.”

“I’m asking because you seemed uncertain there, for a second,” Marcus said.

“I offered him money. He didn’t take it.”

“I get the impression you don’t like your father. Tommy.”

I bit off a laugh. “No, I don’t.”

“So why offer him money? Did you want him to leave you alone?”

I shook my head a little, then nodded a little. “Yeah. No. I wanted him to leave me alone, but that’s not why I offered him money. I thought that maybe that was what he wanted, but he didn’t take it, he just left.”

Hoffman sighed. “So you offered him money to leave you alone? Is that what you’re saying?”

“No, I offered him money to admit that he had meant to kill my mother, that it wasn’t an accident.”

“You said it was murder,” Marcus said.

“I say it’s murder, he says he was too drunk to remember. He pled to manslaughter.”

“Why don’t you tell us what you and your brother talked about?”

I shook my head. “If my lawyer says it’s okay, I’ll tell you, but I really have to talk to him first.”

Marcus shrugged. “It’s your choice, like I said, but—”

“Yeah, I know, but I really want to talk to my lawyer,” I said. “Right now.”

Marcus’s smile melted, and he capped his pen and flipped the pages of his legal pad, then got to his feet with a little sigh. Hoffman shoved off from the wall, went to the door, and leaned out to call to someone. A uniformed officer appeared in the doorway, and Hoffman told him that I wanted to use the phone. The officer nodded, glancing at me, then did a double take.

“You go with him,” Marcus said. “He’ll take you to a phone.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh, it’s the least we can do,” Hoffman said. “After all, you’ve been so helpful.”

CHAPTER 17

They let me use the phone at one of the detective desks, and I dialed Chapel while my guardian officer stood by, just far enough to stay out of earshot if I kept my voice low, but close enough to stop me if I decided to make a break for it. There were other cops around, too, other people I assumed were detectives, and they each took their turn staring at me.

The clock on the wall said it was twenty-seven past six, and the lightening gray out the windows confirmed that it was in the morning. I had to call Chapel’s office, because that was the only number I could find, and I got an answering service, and the guy who took the call asked if he could take a message.

“No, actually, you can’t,” I said. “You need to call him and say that Miriam Bracca’s been arrested.”

The answering-service guy told me he would do just that, and I hung up, thinking that it wouldn’t be long before Chapel called back. The officer moved me from the desk to a cheap plastic bench on the other side of the room to wait. Hoffman and Marcus went to their desks and proceeded to ignore me.

The clock read three minutes to seven when Chapel walked through the door. His hair was wet, either from his morning shower or the still falling rain, and he was wearing a suit today, and it fit him perfectly. He made straight for me, and he didn’t look happy at all, and Hoffman and Marcus saw him enter, and moved to join us, but he beat them to it.

“How long have you been here?” Chapel asked me.

“I’m not sure, maybe six, seven hours.”

“Dammit, Mim, why didn’t you call me sooner?”

“She couldn’t,” Hoffman told him. “She was drunk off her ass.”

“Repeat that outside of this room, it’s slander,” Chapel told her.

“Actually, Mr. Chapel, it isn’t,” Marcus said. “I’ll swear out an affidavit to that effect, if you like.”

“I’ll let you know if it’s necessary,” he said. “Is she under arrest?”

Hoffman shook her head.

“Splendid. Now I’d like to speak to Miss Bracca alone, if you don’t mind.”

“Be our guest,” Hoffman said.

Chapel and I talked for most of an hour, with me laying out every damn thing, including my reason for storming over to Mikel’s and the large quantity of Jack Daniel’s I’d consumed on getting home. I fumbled some of it, and he made me go over those parts again, and when I had to describe finding Mikel, it made me want to start crying, because it was finally sinking in.

“I didn’t tell them about the pictures,” I said. “I don’t suppose it matters now, but I didn’t.”

“No, it really doesn’t,” Chapel said. “I’m going to have to tell them about that.”

I nodded.

“All right, I’ll talk to them now. You just sit tight.”

I nodded again, feeling my exhaustion.

It took another fifteen minutes, at the end of which all three of them came back.

“Let’s go,” Chapel told me.

“We’re done?”

“For now,” Marcus said. “We know how to reach you if we need you.”

We were in the elevator going down to the garage when Chapel said, “You can’t go home.”

“But—”

“Mim, the media’s going to climb on this like nobody’s business. They’ll be camping outside of your place, they’ll be dogging you everywhere you go. Unless you want that, and my read on your personality is that you really don’t, you can’t go home.”

“I could stay with Joan.”

“Joan’s your lover?”

“God, what is it with you? Joan’s my foster mother!”

He shook his head. “The press can find her, it won’t be secure enough. I want to check you into a hotel.”

“I don’t want to go to a hotel.”

“It’s either that or meet the press.”

The elevator stopped, and we were in the garage. Chapel led the way to his TT, popping the locks with his remote. He put me in the passenger seat and told me to buckle up, then went around to his door.

“What hotel?” I asked.

“The Heathman.”

At least it was a nice hotel.

“Duck,” he said.

We were on the exit ramp, about to hit the street, and I didn’t get it, just looked at him blankly.

“Duck, dammit,” Chapel said again, and he reached over with his free hand and took my head and shoved me down, and then I got it.

“You’re shitting me,” I said, more to the floorboard than to him.

“Wish I was. All local affiliates have vans, and I’m seeing multiple photographers. Stay down.”

“I don’t have anything,” I said, feeling miserable. “I don’t have clothes or anything for a hotel.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“I need to change clothes.”

“Give me your sizes, I’ll have someone pick you up some things.”

“But my guitars are at home.”

“You can buy a new guitar, Mim.” He checked his mirrors. “Okay, you can come up for air, now.”

I sat up, craned around in my seat. We were already a block away, but I could see the vans. He hadn’t been exaggerating. I also saw that we weren’t headed for the Heathman, but instead for the Hawthorne Bridge.

“You’re going the wrong way.”

“I’m making certain we’re not followed.”

That seemed to me to be overly paranoid, and I said as much.

“You really have no idea, do you?” Chapel said, reaching over to the mobile phone that was sitting in a cradle on the dash.

“I have idea, I have plenty idea,” I said.

“Barry,” Chapel told his phone, and the speaker came on and the tones of the number began to fill the car. While it was dialing, Chapel said, “No, I don’t think you do. I think you left on tour a year ago and you were a musician, and sometime during the past year, you became a celebrity, and nobody sent you the memo. You keep on pretending your life is normal, all you’re going to do is keep getting into trouble, Miriam.

“You are no longer normal, and it would serve you well to remember that.”

There was a click from the speakers, and a man’s voice came on. “Yes?”

“Barry, it’s Fred. We’ve got a situation, you’ll hear about it as soon as you turn on the news. I need you to get a couple things together for me and take them over to the Heathman for a guest, name of Lee.

“I need your sizes,” Chapel said to me.

I gave him my sizes.

“Anything in particular?” Barry asked.

“She likes jeans and T-shirts. She’ll need underwear, toiletries, all those good things. Shoes, too. What size are your feet?”

“Seven.”

“You hear that, Barry?”

“Got it. Anything else?”

“That’s it.”

“I’ll have it by eleven,” Barry said, and hung up.

We crossed the river back to the east side, then turned north and up to Burnside, then west again and back across the river. Chapel drove calmly, eyeing his mirrors. I didn’t say anything for a while, lost in my thoughts.

It occurred to me that I didn’t know how to be a grown-up.

With my mother, there hadn’t even been a memorial, and the body had eventually been disposed of by the State of Oregon in some way or another that to this day remains a mystery. Once they had put her in the ambulance, I never saw her again. I didn’t even know where she’d ended up, if she’d been buried someplace, or cremated, or what.

“I can’t go to a hotel,” I said suddenly. “I can’t go to a hotel, I have to plan the funeral. That’s what I’m supposed to do, isn’t it? He has to be buried, and I have to plan that, and I have to call his friends and tell them he’s dead and I have to call the paper and do the obituary and all of it. That’s what happens now, doesn’t it? I have to do all that.”

“Don’t worry about it right now,” Chapel said.

“But I have to do it, Tommy won’t do it, God, they don’t even know where Tommy is—”

“Your father’s being held right now, it looks like they’re going to charge him.”

“They’ve got him?” I asked, stunned. “They had him the whole time, that’s what you’re saying?”

“He’s under arrest, they picked him up early last night at your brother’s place.”

I digested that, and it seemed good, but then it didn’t, because in a way it only made things worse.

“Then I have to go to the condo,” I said. “Mikel’s condo, I have to go there and get his things and . . . and what do I do with his things? I mean, he doesn’t have a will, I’m sure he doesn’t even have a will, why would he, twenty-nine years old and shot dead, how could he see that one coming, huh?”

“Mim, just relax.”

“I have to handle his estate. No, settle his estate, that’s what it’s called, right? You’re an attorney, you know. It’s called settling the estate, right?”

We’d stopped in front of the Heathman, and I wasn’t certain how long we’d been parked. The engine was silent, and the uniformed doorman was coming to help me out of the car.

Chapel put a hand on my arm.

“Mim, you’ve got to calm down. Just wait here. Don’t get out of the car.”

He waited until I nodded, then his hand slid from my arm, and I heard him take his keys from the ignition and get out of the car. The doorman was portly, black coat, black hat, red stripes, with a bushy beard and mustache, and after Chapel entered the hotel he turned back to me, curious. I looked away hastily, up the street, to the Portland Center for the Performing Arts and the Schnitz and the movie theater on the corner, its marquee listing all the films currently being shown.

The Black Tarot topped the bill.

Then my door opened, and I gasped, relaxed when I saw it was Chapel. He helped me out of the car, into the hotel, to the elevator, and then down the hall and into the suite.

It was a Van-quality room, nicer than I was used to. There was a sitting area with a couple of armchairs and a desk and a couch, and nice abstract paintings on the walls. A sliding partition at one side was open, leading to a raised king bed. The furnishings were wood and looked expensive, and there was an electric kettle on a table, and a miniature French press coffeemaker, and two tins of ground coffee. There was a minibar with a basket of treats and three bottles of Oregon wines, and two televisions, and three telephones, and two bathrooms, and flowers in a vase on a nightstand.

Chapel went to the closet and pulled it open, taking down one of the complimentary robes for me and draping it over the back of a chair. I looked at it and at him.

“You should shower and get some sleep,” he said. “You’re going to need your health and your rest.”

I nodded, dropped into a chair, thinking to hell with my health, what I wanted was a drink and a smoke.

It was like he was reading my mind. “How drunk were you when the cops picked you up?”

“Drunk,” I admitted.

“Blackout drunk?”

“Not that drunk.”

“I couldn’t ask you this at the station, so I’m asking you now. Did you kill Mikel?”

I came out of my chair and tried to punch him. He blocked it easily, pushing my arm away, and I tried to swing at him again, calling him a list of names, beginning with the basic profanities and working up to the multitiered ones. He was shouting back at me to calm down, and he blocked again and then gave me a shove, sending me back into the chair. I had to flail for the armrest to keep from falling.

“You motherfucker—”

“Did you?”

“No! Jesus fucking Christ, what are you? How can you even ask that?”

He drew his lips back, pinching them together, breathing through his nose.

“How can you even ask that?” I repeated.

He crossed to the window in the sitting room, looked out, then closed the blinds. The blinds, like the other furnishings, were wooden, too. Once he was satisfied that we couldn’t be spied upon, he moved to the nearest easy chair.

“I had to ask.”

“You didn’t.”

“I did, because the police are asking it, too. You’re the one who said it could have been Mikel who was responsible for those cameras in your house. It’s possible you went over there and confronted him and things turned violent.”

I just shook my head, wouldn’t look at him.

“You have to look at it from the cops’ point of view.”

It sunk in. “They don’t really think it was Mikel selling those pictures of me?”

“They have to consider it.”

“But he’s the one who told me about them! That makes no sense!”

“It’s the way they work, they have to consider it. They have to consider Tommy, too.”

“It wasn’t Tommy.”

“Oh?” Chapel raised an eyebrow. “I’d think he’d have been at the top of your suspect list.”

“I’m not saying he didn’t kill Mikel. I’m saying he’s not responsible for the pictures. Look, he came to my house Thursday, and just . . . there’s no way he could do that. He’s too pathetic. Crime of passion, sure. But install cameras in my house? That’s just not him, no way.”

Chapel thought, barely nodded.

I asked, “How long do I stay here?”

“Next forty-eight hours, at least. This will get bad, Mim, and I want you as far out of it as possible. The media’s going to go nuts, if they haven’t already. Your brother dealt drugs, your father’s a convict, you’re a celebrity . . . reporters wait their whole lives for this kind of thing. Throw in that you’re the subject of someone’s commercial voyeurism, and we have what we refer to in the legal profession as a fucked-up mess. I don’t want you leaving these rooms. I don’t even want you calling for room service. Don’t use the phone at all, unless it’s to call me. If someone comes to the door, you hide in the bathroom. I don’t want anyone knowing where to find you.”

“The police—”

“They want you, they’ll come to me,” he said.

“Where are you going?”

“Time for me to earn what Graham and the label and you have been paying me for. I’ll handle the press, the police. I’ll arrange for your brother’s funeral. You leave all that to me.”

“I should be doing something.”

“You stay sober. Can you stay sober, Miriam?”

I nodded.

“Really? Or should I get the wine out of the room?”

“You going to remove the minibar, too?”

“I’ll be keeping the key.”

I twisted on the chair, uncomfortable, and wanting him to shut up. “I’m out of cigarettes.”

“I’ll have Barry get you a carton.”

“I don’t want to be alone.” It sounded more plaintive than I wanted it to.

He nodded. “Who do you want to stay with you?”

“Joan.”

He took a different mobile from his pocket, matte black and no bigger than a credit card, and asked me for her number. I gave it to him, and he dialed. It seemed to ring several times before anyone answered, and then Chapel started speaking, introducing himself. He didn’t hand over the phone, just saying that he represented me, that my brother had been murdered, and that for the sake of my privacy he had moved me from my home to a hotel. I couldn’t hear Joan’s half of the conversation, not even when Chapel told her about Mikel. He asked her if she would mind joining me, staying with me for a day or so, and there was no appreciable pause for her to answer, and then he was saying I was at the Heathman, under the name Jennifer Lee, and that the sooner she got here, the better.

Then he hung up and said, “She’s on her way over.”

“I wanted to talk to her. You should have let me talk to her. She knew Mikel.”

He slid his phone back into his jacket, exhaling, and his face changed, smoothing. I realized that he’d been as worked up as I was, that he was as worried as I was, though maybe not for all the same reasons.

“I should have,” Chapel said. “I apologize.”

I thought about saying that I accepted it. Thought about offering him an apology of my own, too, for whatever good it would do. Maybe to bank against future transgressions.

Instead, I got up and grabbed the robe off the back of the chair, then went into the bedroom to change, slamming the partition behind me.

CHAPTER 18

Barry had dropped off clothes and smokes before Joan arrived, and Chapel left almost immediately after she got there. I had showered and eaten a room-service sandwich—ordered by Chapel—and was feeling so sleepy I was having trouble keeping my eyes open.

Joan gave me energy, though, along with unconditional comfort. I took it greedily, trying not to remember that I hadn’t been around to give her the same when Steven died.

Chapel returned Saturday night, about an hour after I woke up, with a long list of accomplishments. He’d arranged the funeral for Monday afternoon, at a parlor called Colby’s in Southeast. He’d picked Colby’s, he told me, because they could be discreet, and that was going to be even more important, because Van and Click and Graham all intended to be at the service. He’d spoken to Graham, and passed along concern and condolences from all involved. Apparently even Oliver Clay had expressed sympathy for my loss. Big of him.

It was the mundane questions that threw me. What kind of casket did I want for Mikel? What kind of flowers? Should there be music at the service? Choral, or organ, or something else? Was there a song he liked? Did I, perhaps, want to play? Did Mikel want to be cremated, or buried, and if buried, where? Who of his friends did I want invited to the funeral?

“I don’t know his friends,” I admitted.

“If it’s all right with you, I can go through his things, see if I can find an address book. Did he keep an address book?”

“He had a PDA, one of those pocket things,” I said. “Should be at his house.”

“Then I’ll bring that back here, and you can put together a list of guests.

“You remember a car on your street, a gray Chevy?” Chapel asked me. “It was parked down the block from your house.”

“The beater?”

“Burchett’s people figured that’s where the signal from your house was going, that the receiver was in the car.”

“So Burchett found the tapes?”

“He couldn’t get into the vehicle. But he told the police about it, and they’ve moved it to their lot. Their people are going over it.”

“But that means that the police will have the tapes,” I said. “If there are tapes, then they’ll have them.”

“Yes, but as evidence. Their existence might be leaked, but not their contents, not until they’ve got the people responsible.”

That didn’t actually reassure me very much at all.

Chapel went on, telling us that Tommy was still in custody, but that he hadn’t been charged.

I asked him why.

“A guess? The police don’t have the evidence and they’re trying to get it.”

“What about Miriam?” Joan asked. “Is she a suspect?”

“For about six hours, she was the prime suspect,” Chapel told her.

Joan was almost incredulous. “For heaven’s sake, why?”

“The search they executed at her home turned up a lot of blood, they thought it might have been her brother’s.”

“It wasn’t,” I said. “It was mine.”

“They know that now.” Chapel shook his head. “No, she’s in the clear for the time being. Even if she wasn’t, the D.A. would want to be damn certain before he took the publicity of charging her.”

Joan was looking at me. “Why did they find blood in your house?”

“My hand,” I said.

“You said you cut it on tour.”

“I lied.”

“Why would you . . .” And Joan trailed off, because she figured out the answer to that one, and it led to another question. “That’s why you’re home? Because you couldn’t stay sober on tour?”

Chapel wasn’t speaking, and from his expression, he looked like he wasn’t listening, either. I knew he was, but he did a good job of pretending not to.

I tried to make a joke, I said, “It’s just the way Steven told it, Joan. It’s just part of the job.”

“He never said that.”

“He sure did.” I was indignant. “Before I left for the Scandal tour, we went to dinner, and you and he talked about the wild life on the road. About the way you two used to party when you were touring.”

Joan’s expression shifted, moved away from her anger to an almost curiosity, as if she was seeing me for the first time. “When was this?”

“When we went to Ringside for dinner, just before I left.”

She glanced over at Chapel, then back to me, and now the curiosity had become concern. “That never happened, Miriam.”

“It did!”

“We didn’t eat at Ringside. We had dinner at our place before you left, sweetie, and you left early, because you had to get home and pack.”

I tried to remember, and the thing was, now that she’d said it, I knew she was right. But I really thought we had gone to dinner at Ringside, I was certain I could remember the sound of Steven’s voice, the way he kept laughing as he told his anecdotes about life on the road.

But it hadn’t happened, and I withdrew to silence, feeling foolish and confused, and a little scared. If I was making that up, then what else was I creating in my mind? What else was I lying about?

CHAPTER 19

Sunday was broken only by Chapel’s arrival with Mikel’s PDA. I composed a list of fifteen names I thought I recognized, people that Mikel had actually liked, or at least, that I thought he’d liked, and I looked around for an entry for Jessica and didn’t find one, but there was one for a girl named Avery Sanger, so I put her on the list, too.

Chapel told me he’d make calls, letting them know the when and where of the service, and then he left us alone again, and that was the most exciting thing that happened on Sunday.

We left the hotel in the darkness before dawn the next morning, Chapel guiding me out much the way he’d guided me in, straight to his waiting Audi. We were followed by the guy Burchett had sent over, and it was the first time I’d seen him, though Chapel assured me there’d been someone on duty outside my room the whole time.

As we were getting into the car, Burchett called Chapel and confirmed that it was safe for me to return home, that the press had finally gotten bored with waiting for my return. I was grateful for the news. I wanted to get home and get changed, to have some time by myself before the funeral.

Joan stayed behind on the curb, waiting for the valet to bring her Volvo, promising she’d pick me up for the service that afternoon.

In the car, Chapel gave me the latest.

“Now they’re onto the pictures,” he said. “The story has been on the networks, MTV and the like. NME and Dotmusic are covering it. Rolling Stone’s guy arrived in town yesterday. There’s a good chance reporters will show up at the service since they know you’ll be there, and if that happens I want you to keep your mouth shut. Don’t answer any questions. Nothing, Miriam. Just keep your head down.”

“I will.”

“Van, Click, and Graham got in last night. They released a statement through the label about how they needed to be with you, to support you, and they’ve canceled the next week of dates to be here.”

“Van must have bled over that,” I said.

Chapel ignored the comment, turning us onto the Broadway Bridge. “Not as relevant, but it may interest you to know that as of Saturday night Nothing for Free had jumped twelve spots on Billboard’s Top Fifty, to eleven. We’re expecting to hear it’s in the Top Ten sometime today. Scandal reentered at sixty-seven. ‘Queen of Swords’ is in heavy rotation in just about every major outlet, and it’s been the most requested video on MTV for the last two nights. You can interpret that however you like.”

“My interpretation is that this is one fucked-up world,” I said.

“I’m not sure I disagree. The third single off Scandal, what was that one called?”

“ ‘Lie Life.’ ”

“Was that written about Tommy?”

“I was riffing off ‘Lush Life’ by Billy Strayhorn. Van had this idea for a song about this asshole she’d been seeing, he was also a musician in town. So she wanted a breakup song where she could get angry and kick and growl, and I wanted to play with an old standard. That’s all it is.”

“There’s a lot of death imagery in the song. It’s getting play now, too.”

“It’s about how this relationship was bleeding her dry,” I said. “The single didn’t do very well.”

“That may be, but it’s getting play now.”

“If you tell me the label’s released a Greatest Hits compilation, I may have to kill myself.”

“Don’t do that.”

“It was a joke.”

“It wasn’t funny.”

The way he said it told me I should just shut up now.

There was no sign of the police, or the press, or even of Burchett’s people. The lawn beneath the trees had been chewed by footprints, and pockets of mud slopped over the sides of the path. Copies of the last couple issues of the Oregonian were still on my porch, too, but those were the only real indications that I’d been gone. I unlocked the door and switched off the alarm, and Chapel told me he’d talk to me if he had more news later.

“You’ll be at the funeral?” I asked.

“I wasn’t planning on it,” he said. “You don’t need me there.”

That disappointed me for a moment, and then I realized that he’d never known Mikel, and that he really didn’t know me. I wasn’t his friend. I was his client.

He got back in his Audi and pulled away, and I locked up and looked at the clock, and it wasn’t even a quarter past six. I put on a pot of coffee, cleared my voice mail while it brewed, and drank a cup while smoking a cigarette, feeling oddly empty inside. The sun came up, and from the backyard it looked like the day would be clear and cold. At least it would be beautiful at the cemetery.

I fixed a bowl of shredded wheat and opened the copy of today’s paper, heading for the funnies. When I finished the comics, I searched out the obituaries, finding them paradoxically at the back of the “Living” section. Chapel must have gotten something to the paper, because there was a notice about Mikel’s passing. It was short, and didn’t really say much about who he had been. There were no details included about where the service would be, or when, and the only connection between my brother and my celebrity was in our last name. I was simply his surviving sister, Miriam.

I decided I’d read the rest of the paper, too, mostly to see exactly how bad things were looking for me, personally. The story was still on the front page, but now below the fold for only two paragraphs before jumping to the end of the section.

That’s how I learned that Tommy had been released.

I wasn’t sure what I could conclude from that, if it meant that the cops didn’t think he’d done it, or they did and just didn’t have enough evidence to charge him. If Chapel had known, he hadn’t bothered to tell me for some reason. If he didn’t know, then calling him would be pointless.

I could call the cops and ask them, but that seemed to me to be asking for trouble.

Tommy had been released.

I realized, with some alarm, that I was relieved. When I looked at the feeling harder, I realized why.

Tommy hadn’t killed Mikel. It had to have been someone else.

Fuck if I knew who.

Upstairs, I went through my closet, looking for something to wear to the funeral. Everything I had in black was inappropriate. Even my dresses, all of them too formal or too ratty or too sexy. There’d been a phase of Tailhook where we’d all gone for the Man in Black look, Van and I in short black skirts and black nylons—Van had gone with garters—and black suit coats and blindingly white blouses, and Click in the complementary suit. I had black jeans, black tanks, black tees, black shoes, black boots, black undies.

Nothing I could wear to my brother’s funeral.

So I took my car to the Nordstrom at the Lloyd Center, the mall that got dropped in the Northeast by mistake. It’s an indoor mall, with an ice skating rink at its heart, and I got there just as they were opening the doors, making straight to the east end for my shopping, dodging mall walkers and professional consumers. Fifteen minutes got me three outfits that looked like they would fit, and I thought about trying them on, but shoppers and salespeople had begun to recognize me, and the thought of getting trapped in a dressing room made me want to spit. I got out as fast as I could, was back home only forty-nine minutes after I’d left, and felt that at least I’d managed the shopping successfully.

I laid out my outfits on my bed, but the silence of the house started to grate on my nerves, so I hit the remote and switched on the television. I was picking out shoes and stockings with no holes when MTV News came on the screen, and Gideon Yago ran down the bullet points, and then he hit the tragedy in Portland.

I stopped what I was doing and turned to watch him. He said my brother’s name, and my own, and the band’s. He talked about how Tommy had been questioned and then released. A picture of me that I had never seen before came up on the screen behind his head, somewhere sunny, me smiling broadly at the camera.

He offered me MTV’s deepest condolences.

I turned the television off, threw the remote across the room.

The last drink I’d taken had been in the wee hours Friday morning, just before I’d earned myself handcuffs. I’d been dry for over two days.

This seemed as good a reason as any to break the fast.

CHAPTER 20

The service was well attended, if small. Van and Click and Graham were there, and Joan. A handful of other people who had known my brother, including a couple women, one of whom I took to be Avery, his newest. Marcus and Hoffman were there, too, but stayed clear of the crowd, at the back.

Tommy stayed in the back, wearing a suit that must have come from Goodwill or St. Vincent de Paul. He was there when I arrived, and he tried to speak to me, but I moved away before he could. I had Joan on one arm and Van on the other, and they provided insulation. After that, he kept his distance.

But not out of sight, and at the grave, when we were finished and moving to the cars, I looked back to see him standing beside where the marker would go. He looked hunched, and I realized he was sobbing.

Maybe if I hadn’t been so drunk, I’d have gone to him.

Joan had found Van at my door when she came to get me for the service, and they came in together to discover me upstairs, in a corner of my bedroom, crying hysterically. I’d finished the bottle of Jack when I’d told myself I was only going to have one drink, and I was really worked up because I couldn’t decide which of the three outfits I was going to wear. Van got the shower running and Joan got me undressed, and the two of them cleaned me up under the ice-cold water, washing vomit off my chin and out of my hair. I fought them a little, spitting and yelling.

“Knock it the fuck off!” Van finally snarled at me. She was in black, not too expensive, not too flashy, and she’d only put on a little bit of makeup. I thought she looked jet-lagged and she was certainly angry. She’d taken the coat off to keep it from getting wet. “Jesus Christ, Mim, it’s your goddamn brother! Couldn’t you just give it a fucking rest?”

“I hate you,” I told her.

Together, they got me sober enough to stand, and dressed me. I was back in my head enough to exert some will, and that made it easier on them when I was willing to do what they said, and harder on them when I wasn’t. Once they finally had my clothes in place, Joan sat me on the edge of the bed and held me while Van got my shoes on me, then went back into the bathroom for some makeup. She did my eyes and my lips, and when she was finished, they helped me down the stairs. Van put me in Joan’s car, got me buckled in, and then went to her Beemer to follow us.

Joan didn’t look at me once as she drove to the funeral home.

The service was blurry and went by fast, and there was a guy named Damien who was about Mikel’s age and who gave the eulogy. Mikel had brought him along to a couple of the shows we’d played in town, and he was nice, and he spoke nicely, and he said all of the nice things, and I wondered if maybe he knew about pinhole video cameras and wireless broadband transmission.

I sat with Joan, and Van, Click, and Graham filled out the rest of our pew. I spent most of the time biting my tongue, trying to keep the drunk from making me soggy. The coffin was open, and Mr. Colby of the Colby Funeral Home had done a good job, because Mikel didn’t look like he had when I’d found him, hurting and scared. He looked like he was faking sleep, that was all.

When the service finished, Click and Graham joined the pallbearers, and the rest of us followed them out. I walked between Joan and Van, following the coffin, and once it was loaded in the hearse we turned to our vehicles and got a face full of flashbulbs and hot spots mounted on television cameras.

It must have been every local affiliate, all of them out to catch the show, and there were even a couple out-of-towners trying to make their own coverage. Faces I recognized from television screens and studio interviews dimly remembered, all of them nonetheless strangers.

Most kept their distance, due in part to the six Portland police officers positioned around the entrance and on the curb. But there was one bitch who launched herself forward with microphone leading, cameraman over her shoulder, looking for the kill.

“Mim! Mim! Did you know that the Portland PD hasn’t ruled you out as a suspect?”

I kept my head down, remembering Chapel’s warning, but mostly because I was afraid I’d throw up again.

The Bitch pressed, “Is it possible your brother’s murder is related to your own drug problems? Or to the pornography of you that’s been released on the Net?”

Van let go of me, moving to block. “Hey, bugfuck, leave her be or we’ll be planting two bodies at the cemetery.”

“Excuse me, I’m talking to Mi—”

Van grabbed the mike from her hand, then used it to hit the end of the cameraman’s rig. There was shouting. The police officers started trying to separate Van and the woman, and Hoffman waded in and put herself between the camera and us.

“Trouble with that?” Van was shouting. “My friend has no goddamn comment, okay?”

She threw the microphone overhand into the street, where it bounced off the side of a parked news van. Then she seized my arm so hard it hurt, and helped me again into the Colby Funeral Home’s complimentary limousine, and I was on my way to the cemetery.

Joan had insisted on holding the reception at her house, and I skirted the fringes, not wanting to mingle with the other mourners. Damien tried to corner me twice, and I retreated farther into the house, trying to find a quiet space to be alone.

I ended up finding Click, Van, and Graham in Steven’s old music room. Click and Graham had both worn sensible, somber suits, and neither of them looked comfortable or even correct in them. Graham looked like his tie was going to choke him to death, and there was just no way Click could sell mainstream with his tattoos and piercings.

Steven had collected instruments, a lot of them drums. Most were busted, ones he’d intended to repair. Before we’d signed with the label, he’d even worked over Click’s kit a few times. He had two Ghanaian tribal drums resting next to a mismatched collection of snares, even a steel drum he’d made himself.

“No Clay, huh?” I asked.

“He thought it’d be presumptuous,” Click said. “Considering how you barely know him. Offers his deepest sympathies.”

I nodded, and there was a beat that threatened to become an awkward pause, and then Graham asked, “How you holding up, Mimser? You good? Given the circumstances?”

“Not so good. I’m sorry about all this press.”

“Ink is ink. You just got to ride it out. Really sorry about that craptroll at the funeral home.” Graham’s face twisted alarmingly with sudden hatred. “Fucking E!, I hate them, I fucking hate them.”

“Van shut that down.”

“I spoke to Fred. He says things don’t look that bad for you.”

“Depends from where you’re looking.”

“He’s good at his job, Mimser, he’ll do his best for you. You’ve got to give the man some credit, he’s managed to keep things pretty level on this end.”

It sounded like he was talking as much about the pictures as Mikel’s murder, but I wasn’t certain. So far, none of them had told me they’d as much as heard about the images, and it added yet another tension, because now I wasn’t certain if I should be embarrassed, or just should anticipate embarrassment.

“He seems more interested in the fact that Nothing for Free might break the Top Ten,” I said.

“Ink is ink, like I said. Not to be a total dickwad, but that’s kind of an upside, maybe, for a darkness, huh?”

I just stared at him. Every sale was more money in the pocket, and if Mikel was now serving to further promote Tailhook, well, there was really no way that Graham or the label could see his death as an entirely bad thing. It was the way it was, and there was nothing to be done about it. For that instant, though, I hated them all so much I wanted to scream their dead hearts to life.

“That was the first time I’d ever seen your dad,” Van said. “At the service.”

“Tommy,” I said. “Call him Tommy.”

“I didn’t know about your mom.”

“Now everyone does.”

“I thought I knew just about every one of your dark secrets.”

“I don’t write about that one.”

“You will,” she said.

“No I won’t. I can’t.”

She shook her head. “Clay’s temp, I’d have you back in a heartbeat. But you’ve got to deal with this thing.”

I held up my glass. “Mineral water.”

“Not this morning it wasn’t.”

I tried to change the subject. “How long you guys back?”

Van looked annoyed, but Click cut her off. “Couple more days, time to see family and pay bills. Graham figured if we were going to have to cancel one date, might as well cancel three.”

“Where to next?”

“Glasgow, then Dublin.”

“It’ll be cold,” I said. “Bundle up.”

“Our shit is squared away,” Van said, pointedly. “Look after your own, Miriam.”

The reception, such as it was, started breaking up before five, and I wandered upstairs as people began to leave, to get away from the platitudes, eventually reaching my old bedroom. Tommy was sitting at my desk, looking out the window. The room faced west, and the sunset was starting to fade, and that was the only light in there.

He caught me staring at him, got up hastily from the desk, trying to straighten his awful suit. Maybe it was the shadows, but he looked a lot worse for wear, and he hadn’t looked all that good when I’d seen him on Thursday morning.

The silence got awkward fast, so I spoke, told him the first thing that came to mind.

“I used to live here.”

He nodded. “I spoke to Mrs. Beckerman when I arrived. She told me . . . she told me where your room was.”

“How long you been here?”

“Only a half hour. I didn’t . . . I didn’t know if I should come or not.”

“Tell me you didn’t do it.”

He grimaced, slowly, as if feeling heartburn. “I didn’t, Miriam. You’ve got to believe me.”

“Do you know how it happened?”

He shook his head. “I’d been drinking. . . .”

“You said you’d stopped.”

“I had.”

“You know about these pictures? About this fucker who was taping me in my own home?”

He flinched, nodded as if hoping he could get by with only the barest of confirmations.

“Do you know who did that? Was it one of Mikel’s buddies? Damien?”

“I don’t know anything about that.” Tommy ran his hand over the top of the old stereo, disturbing the light dust. “You were drunk at the service.”

“It would be you who could tell.”

“I wasn’t the only one who could tell.” When I didn’t say anything, he added, “You need to stop doing that. Need to stop drinking like that.”

“I don’t need this kind of advice from you.”

Tommy took a step forward suddenly, grabbing my arm. I felt his grip tightening on me. My insides fell to liquid, seemed to foam up and fill my lungs, flooding them and forcing away my breath. I was eleven again, small and scared.

“Listen.” He hit both syllables evenly, equally. “Listen to me, Miriam. You don’t know how dangerous this is. You don’t know what could happen.”

I tried to pull away, to back away, but his grip just tightened. I suppose I could have kicked or punched or screamed, but I didn’t think of it, I didn’t even consider those actions as options.

He was my father. His anger, his power, all over again, inescapable.

It froze me in place, and it terrified me.

All I could manage was, “Please.”

The word was enough, the effect was enormous. Tommy dropped my arm like I was a hot wire, backing away, and his expression changed from anger to alarm, and then to something else. He seemed confused, as if he’d lost his bearings.

“Oh, God,” Tommy said. “Oh, Mim. I’m so sorry.”

Then he pushed his way past me, going for the stairs, taking them quickly, double, triple steps at a time.

When I got downstairs, he had gone, and the party was over.

CHAPTER 21

The caterers were out of the house within minutes of the last guest’s departure.

Even though Click and Graham had departed, Van had lingered, offering to help with the cleanup. I could hear her and Joan talking in the kitchen, and just from the tenor of their voices, I knew they were talking about me, trying to stay quiet. I stood just outside the arch which opens into the kitchen, listening.

“. . . bad it was,” Joan was saying.

“She took a fall in Tokyo,” Van said. “End of the third set, just went right off the stage. Didn’t even know she’d done it.”

“She’s not made for it.”

“She’s brilliant.”

“She’s a musician, Vanessa. Not a performer, not like you.”

“She’s great onstage.”

There was a rustle, the sound of a cabinet opening and closing. “My husband knew.”

“About the drinking?”

“Not that, not specifically. But he knew what she was in for, knew where you were all headed. He tried to warn her. He wanted her to understand how isolating it would be, how lonely. But mostly, I think, he wanted her to understand that she shouldn’t trust it, not any of it, not anyone.”

“You mean me, too?”

Another cabinet opened, closed. I heard a sigh. “Sending her home proved him wrong about you. But even now he’d say that for everyone else—and he really did mean everyone—it’s about money. How much of it they can make off her, off the band. Those people, they don’t care about art or entertainment. They just want to keep getting richer.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being rich.”

“Depends how you get there, Vanessa. There was this thing, I heard it on the news this morning, about how the albums have shot up the charts.”

“You think it’s someone close to her?” Van asked. “Someone who put the cameras in her house and killed Mikel?”

“She doesn’t want to think that her brother could have done a thing like that.”

“Would you?”

I’d heard more than enough, retreated, back to the living room. Their voices faded, leaving me with my own.

We’d been with the Larkins for just under two weeks when the same Gresham detective, Wagner, came to talk to us again. He came in the afternoon, after school, and he got lucky, because Mikel was actually at the house, along with me. Mrs. Larkin invited him in and offered him a soda, then went to fetch us.

Mikel and I had been sitting together, in the room he shared with the eldest Larkin boy. I’d been trying to do homework, taking comfort in having him close. When Mrs. Larkin stuck her head in to tell us that Detective Wagner was here, Mikel put his magazine down and told her we’d be right there.

“What does he want?” I asked him as soon as she was gone.

“He wants to know what we saw.” He said it all flat, trying to be bored by the horror of it all. “Dad’s going to be on trial and stuff, and he wants to make sure that he really killed Mom.”

“But he already asked. We already told him.”

“He wants to check it.”

“I didn’t really see,” I said, after a moment. “I was going back to the porch.”

“You saw enough.”

“But I didn’t really see it, Mikel.”

“I did.”

“He just ran her over?”

He nodded, slowly, as if leery of the memory, then got off the bed. “We should go down.”

I followed reluctantly, trailing after him down the stairs. The detective scared me, the thought of talking to him again, remembering again, disconcerting. I was still having nightmares, and having to listen to questions that would force me to see things I hadn’t, make me recall things I was trying so hard to forget, filled my feet with lead.

But Mikel, he was tougher, and if he was scared, it didn’t show, and that made it easier when I followed him into the kitchen. Wagner was at the dining table, with a smile this time, and Mrs. Larkin guided us to him, put us in chairs.

“I just want to check some things, all right?” he told us.

“Sure,” Mikel said.

He started by asking where we were when it happened, what we were doing. Wanted to know how long Mom and I had been working on the pumpkin in the driveway, wanted to know how she’d been acting. If she was upset with me, perhaps, or maybe just upset about something else entirely. My answers were sullen, one-word, a string of nos.

“He picked me up on the corner,” Mikel told Wagner.

“Where were you going?”

“Meet some friends.”

“And your father saw you?”

“He stopped the truck. He was mad. He doesn’t like my friends. Told me I had to come home.”

Wagner asked some questions about Mikel’s friends, and my brother confirmed that they sometimes got into trouble. Sometimes they broke things, sometimes they took things, but it wasn’t like it was ever anything someone would miss, it wasn’t ever anything important, Mikel said. Wagner asked him if he was still getting into trouble, and after glancing to Mrs. Larkin, Mikel confirmed that, too. Not embarrassed, almost defiant.

“What about you, Miriam? You staying out of trouble?”

“Trying,” I said.

“That’s good.”

I looked at Mikel, longing to be tough like he was, to be strong and act like I didn’t care. Wagner made more scribbles on his pad, flipped pages, asked a couple more questions. He asked if Tommy ever hit our mother, if he ever hit us.

“He never hits Mim,” Mikel told him, by way of an answer.

Joan was saying my name, and Van was standing at the door, ready to take me home, and I got off the couch, feeling caught by the memories.

Joan gave me a hug and a kiss, and I thanked her for everything.

“I mean everything,” I said.

“You’re worrying me, Miriam,” she said, and then told me to call in the next day or so. She’d be back in school, teaching again, but she said she’d try to keep her evenings free.

The top was up on Van’s convertible, and when she switched on the engine the stereo began blaring Radiohead, and she lunged for the button to turn it off. There wasn’t much of a point to the silence; we didn’t have anything to say to each other.

She drove me home, and I got out of the car, thanked her for the lift.

“I’m having a thing at my house,” Van said. “Tomorrow night. If you want to come.”

“You mean a party?”

“Just for fun. I’m keeping it small.”

“I’ll probably give it a miss,” I said.

“Thought I’d offer.”

“I don’t really hate you, you know that, right?” I said.

“Sure you do,” Van told me. “Just not for the reasons you think.”

There was a new mess to clean up after I’d changed into comfortable clothes, and I went through my bedroom and bathroom, mopping up the spills and finding the top to the bottle of Jack, trying to ignore the smell. I brought it downstairs and poured a small shot before putting it in the pantry with its brothers-in-proof, then checked the phone for messages while I took the drink. The voice-mail lady told me there were two messages, which I took to mean that the press had found a new story to pursue for the time being.

The funeral home had a question about the bill, but said it could wait until tomorrow. The other one from Hoffman had been left only ten minutes before I’d gotten home. She said she had some questions for me, and would I please call when I got the message. She left her home number.

Chapel would throw a fit, but if Hoffman had questions for me, maybe I could ask some questions of her, maybe get an idea about what was going on with Tommy. That’s what I told myself, anyway.

“This is Tracy.”

“It’s Miriam Bracca, I’m calling for Detective Hoffman.”

“This is she.” She sounded surprised. “Didn’t think I’d be hearing from you.”

“You left a message.”

“I’ve got some questions I’d like you to answer.”

“I don’t know. I’m thinking I should probably talk to Chapel, first, or at least have him present.”

“Look, you’re not a suspect, and I’m not going to try to trick you into anything. I’ve got some questions, I’m hoping you can help me find your brother’s killer, that’s all this is. Chapel would just complicate it.”

“Is my father still a suspect?”

“Are you willing to talk to me?”

“Yeah, if it’s actually a conversation and not an interrogation.”

“Are you at your home?”

“Why?”

“Could I come over there? I’m in Sabin, it’d take me about ten minutes or so to get there.”

“You’re sure I’m not a suspect?”

“You’re not a suspect,” she assured me.

“Then why do you want to talk to me?”

“I’m hoping you can help me find a new one.”

It made me laugh, I don’t know why.

“Sure,” I said. “Take your best shot.”

CHAPTER 22

I’d left the porch light on, and it was her, and I shut off the alarm and let her in, saying, “Did you speed?”

“Why else become a cop?” Hoffman said. “For the perks.”

“The perks?”

“I get to shoot people, too.”

“Oh.”

I peered past her at the street, not seeing much but Hoffman’s car—it was a VW Passat, either black or blue or green, I couldn’t tell—and my trees. I stepped back in and locked up once more, but didn’t bother with the alarm, this time. After all, she had perks.

“We towed the Chevy, if that’s what you’re looking for,” Hoffman told me.

“No. Just keeping an eye out for reporters. What’d you do with the car?”

“Evidence of a crime, we brought it in, had the lab go over it. It was the receiver base.”

“So now you guys have voyeur video of me.”

“We should be so lucky. All of the storage devices had been removed from the car. If you’re on tape, you’re on tape somewhere else.”

“You know who owns it? The Chevy?”

“It was stolen out of Roseburg back in May.”

I nodded as if this was significant information, and we went into the kitchen. I parked at the table with an empty cereal bowl for an ashtray. Hoffman had come over wearing a coat and hat, one of the black watch cap ones, and she removed them both before sitting down. She had on a Lewis & Clark sweatshirt, and a turtleneck beneath that, black. She was wearing faded Levi’s, and short black boots, and she had that aura that some PNW women get, the very healthy ones who are fit and stay fit and spend summer weekends windsurfing in the Gorge and winter ones skiing or snowboarding Mount Hood.

“Bet you rock climb, too,” I said.

“Do I have granola in my teeth?” She smiled at me, and I understood she was making an effort to get us started on good terms, both with her manner and her words.

“Call it a lucky guess.”

I waited for her to take the seat opposite me, expecting her to get out a pad and a pen. She draped her coat over the back of the chair, after stuffing the cap in a pocket, then sat down.

“You’re not going to take notes?”

She tapped her forehead. “Like a steel trap.”

“You want a cigarette or some coffee or something?”

“No, I’m fine.”

I shrugged and lit one for myself. She looked me over as if trying to find clues, then pushed the bowl a little closer to me, so I wouldn’t have to reach. Her fingers were long, like Joan’s. On her right thumb was a ring, a simple silver band with an inlaid and intertwined repeating symbol. I stared at it a second before recognizing the letter as Greek.

“Oh, my God,” I said. “I get it now. You’re a dyke.”

She arched an eyebrow at me. “Sure. Aren’t you?”

“What? No!”

Hoffman’s head came back a little bit, and her expression plainly was asking me to give her a break.

“I’m not,” I said.

“You speak queer.”

“Passing queer. Pidgin queer. Not fluent queer.”

“I’m not here to out you.”

“I’m not gay. God, Chapel thinks I’m gay, too. I’m not, see, what I am is single. You’re confusing images. I’m the Quiet One. Van’s the Sexually Adventurous One, the Possibly Bi One, the Maybe a Confused Lesbian One.”

“Van’s not gay,” Hoffman said, matter-of-factly. “Everyone who is knows she isn’t. There are people in the Black Hills of South Dakota who haven’t come out to themselves yet, they know Van in Tailhook is straight.”

“So I’m the Gay One?”

“I know a lot of women who will be very disappointed if you’re not.” She looked me over, as if appraising. “Or see it as a challenge. Don’t tell me this is news to you.”

“It is news to me. You’re telling me that I now not only have to fear that every man I meet has seen naked pictures of me, I’ve got to include women, too?”

“Not all women. One in ten to one in four, depending whose study you believe.”

“That makes it so much better.”

“You’ve got a huge lesbian following, you didn’t know that? I thought you celebs tracked things like that, where you’re getting coverage. You practically have a column devoted to you in Curve.”

“Now you’re just yanking my leg.”

“Maybe a little. But you do know what Curve is.”

“I know what Soldier of Fortune is, too, that doesn’t make me a mercenary.”

She smiled again, then said, “You still willing to answer some questions for me, Miss Bracca?”

“Mim. One dyke to another?”

“That had been my intent, but I’ll settle for closeted dyke to out dyke, if you like.”

I blew some smoke off to a side, shaking my head. “Go ahead.”

“Do you have a drug problem, Mim?”

I was getting tired of having to answer that question, and maybe that was why I surprised the hell out of myself by saying, “Yeah, I drink too much.”

“That’s all?”

“Isn’t that enough?”

“Alcohol is legal.”

“If I tell you about the illegal stuff, you gonna slap cuffs on me?”

She shook her head. “You don’t do coke or heroin or anything like that?”

“None of those things. Chapel asked me this stuff, too, when I went to see him about the pictures.”

“He was asking for a different reason. He was asking to spare you embarrassment, maybe to anticipate possible blackmail. You’re saying you’ve used?”

I held up a hand and ticked off controlled substances. “I’ve done coke, pot, X, shrooms, dropped acid, and even eaten opium. That was when we were in Hawaii.” I brought the hand down. “Once each for all of it, and only ever on the tour. Look, I know what you’re thinking, and I’ll say it again. Mikel never sold me drugs, never gave me drugs. He hated the fact that I drank, and he didn’t like me smoking.”

“Both your parents drink, or just your father?”

It was like being in the Larkins’ dining room all over again, except this time there was no Mikel, and Wagner was being played by a woman. I didn’t answer, but she waited me out.

“Both,” I said.

She leaned back in her chair, thinking. I finished my cigarette and crushed it out. Her eyes were on something past my shoulder, and I guessed this was what detectives looked like when they were trying to crack mysteries.

“Can I ask you something, Detective?” I said.

She came back. “Tracy.”

I needed a second, and then another, before I started laughing. “Detective Tracy? Dick Tracy? A lesbian Dick Tracy?”

She smiled, more amused at me than at the joke. She’d probably heard it a lot before.

“Sorry,” I said.

“What were you going to ask?”

“Is Tommy still a suspect?”

“Yes, he is.”

“Are you looking at any of Mikel’s friends?”

“We’ve talked to his friends. Their alibis check.”

“If you think it’s Tommy, why’d you let him go?”

“We didn’t have enough to charge.”

“So you don’t have evidence that he did it, but you think he did.”

“That’s not what I’m saying, Mim. I’m saying he’s still a suspect, that’s all.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because your father’s got three hours he can’t account for, roughly from the time your brother was murdered until the time he called in the nine-one-one.”

This was news. “Tommy’s the one who reported it?”

“He called from the condo to say his son had been shot. The first unit found him there, took him into custody. He was drunk, he blew a point one-nine on the Breathalyzer. To put it in perspective, you blew a point one-three when we picked you up.”

“I told you he’d been drinking—”

“No, you told us you thought he had, because your brother didn’t, and you’d seen bottles and cans throughout the condo.”

“You’re saying that my father shot my brother, then left long enough for me to come by and discover the body, and then he came back, got drunk, and called the police?”

“If I thought you were lying about the bottles, yes. But I know you’re not. That’s where it falls apart.”

“Only there?”

She ignored that. “We didn’t find a weapon anywhere, we didn’t find gloves, and Tommy’s GSR test came back negative.”

“GSR?”

“Gunshot residue.”

I remembered that they had swabbed my hands after they’d brought me in, too. Then I wondered how seriously they’d looked at me for my brother’s murder.

She turned in the chair, showing me her profile and raising her right hand, as if shooting my microwave. With her other hand she made sprinkling motions over her right hand and forearm. “When you fire a gun, traces of the charge get absorbed into the skin. The test is very simple, very accurate. Both you and your father tested negative.”

“And no gloves means what?”

“Either he ditched the gloves, along with the gun, or he didn’t do it. We’re still looking for the gun.”

For a long time I didn’t say anything, and it was like that morning, when I’d read in the paper that Tommy had been released. Surprise at what I was feeling, and relief, and more, and I didn’t know why I even cared. It bothered me that Hoffman was sitting there, telling me that Tommy was still a suspect.

“Why would Tommy kill Mikel?” I asked. “Mikel had been nice to him, Mikel was taking care of him. If he was going to kill one of us, it would’ve been me.”

“What if he learned that his son had been selling naked pictures of his daughter on the Internet?”

This time, I got really angry. “People keep saying that! Mikel didn’t do it!”

“Fine, give me proof.”

“I don’t—”

“Mikel had access to your home the entire time you were away,” Hoffman interrupted. “He knew enough about computers to set up the system here. He sold drugs, and apparently he did it only for the money, not for the product. Why not try to make a little extra off his sister?”

“There are so many things wrong with that, I don’t know where to start! He was my brother, don’t you get that? He would never do that to me, he was always trying to protect me. And as for money—Jesus, all he had to do was ask.”

Hoffman didn’t say anything for a moment, giving me time to calm down.

“It wasn’t Mikel who took the pictures,” I insisted. “And it wasn’t my father who killed him.”

And as soon as I’d said it aloud, I discovered that I believed it. Tommy had committed a great many sins, but he could never have taken a gun and shot his son. It didn’t matter how drunk he might’ve been, it didn’t matter how provoked he might have felt. It never would happen. And if he wasn’t drunk, if he was sober when he did it, then we were talking about a level of premeditation that was beyond him. He wasn’t a planner. He was like me; life happened to us, we didn’t do things to life.

I sat there, and I thought about it and thought about it, and the only thing I discovered was that the more I thought about it, the more certain I became. Maybe it was utter bullshit, maybe there was no reason or logic to it.

But if the cops pinned the murder on Tommy, either because he was a drunk or a bastard or had one murder to his name already, it meant that the son of a bitch who had killed my brother would get away with it. I couldn’t let that happen. If not for Tommy’s sake but for Mikel’s, there was no way in hell I could let that happen.

Hoffman gazed at me, and it was disconcertingly close to the looks she’d shot at me in the interrogation room three nights before.

After a second, I said, “Tommy knows what happened. He didn’t do it, but he knows what happened. He says he doesn’t remember, but I think he’s lying.”

“And you know this how, exactly?”

“Because I know how that works.”

“That’s not really something that’ll stand up in court.”

I fidgeted with my pack of smokes, trying to use my hands to keep my brain quiet. “My brother’s been murdered, you’re accusing him of pimping my image. You’re saying my dead brother is responsible for some asshole in ass-crack Dakota beating off to my picture every night.”

Hoffman considered, just watching me. I hated the look, because I had no idea what was going on behind it. I got out a new cigarette, lit it, blew smoke. It was like she was hardly breathing.

“What?” I finally demanded.

“I’m just trying to figure you. You go on stages around the world, and you play guitar, and you sing, and jump and run and sweat and dance, and you have thousands of people watching your every move when you do that.”

“Van,” I said. “Not me.”

“Van more often, sure, but you, too. And television, you go on television, and millions—literally millions—of people watch what you do. Those people, they’re watching your body as much as hearing the music, they’re objectifying you just as much, they’re sexualizing you just as much.”

“You’re saying that the pictures shouldn’t bother me? Isn’t that like telling me I was asking for it?”

Hoffman shook her head vigorously. “No, hell no. What’s been done to you, it’s a kind of rape, and I wouldn’t dare diminish it.”

I threw up my hands, frustrated, not getting it, not getting her.

“It’s you,” she said. “It’s you, your body, and if it were me, I wouldn’t be ashamed, even if I could afford to be. I’d sure as hell be angry, I’d be boiling, but I wouldn’t be ashamed.”

“Well, you weren’t the one humiliated.”

“It’s only humiliating if you let it be, if you give it that power.”

“You know what? I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“You’ve got to own it—”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” I repeated, slower and clearer, to make sure she understood.

She did. “You’re used to getting your own way, aren’t you?”

“Ah, here we go. This is the part where you call me a bitch rock-princess again, is that it?”

Hoffman slid her chair back and rose, pulling her coat free. “No. You’re a bitch because you’re pretty blatantly miserable. The rock-princess part, that’s just frosting.”

“I’ve got a reason to be miserable.”

“Sure. But maybe you just like it.” She had the coat on, adjusting it. She took the cap from her pocket and set it on her head, tucking stray hair beneath it. “Hell, you’re an artist, you’ve got to suffer, right?”

“And it was going so well,” I said. “Yet here we are, back to the fuck-yous.”

“Hey, gumdrop, if this was a date, you’d have known it. Don’t get up. I can find my way out.”

CHAPTER 23

The ringing phone pulled me free from the nightmare.

Reporters and humiliations, of cameras on me at all the worst times. Flashes capturing me in bed in Montreal, not with a groupie but with a cop, and photographers pursuing me into bathrooms, finding me drunk and naked and lying in my own vomit and blood. Big Technicolor production, cast of thousands, everyone from the funeral, everyone from the press, everyone from the audience. Chapel taking notes on his legal pad, and Joan standing with dead Steven, each looking pained with disappointment. Damien asking me to sign something, even though I wasn’t Van.

So the phone was really a lifesaver, as far as that went.

“Hello?” I said. It came out more as a slurry than a word.

“This is Scanalert operator one-four-seven; is this Miriam Bracca?” The voice was male, and young, and very efficient.

I sat up, felt around for the light. It had started raining again, and there was the sound of it pattering on the roof and running along the edges of the house. “Uh, yeah?”

“We’ve registered an alarm activation at this number.”

“You have?”

“Are you alone?”

“Yeah,” I said, and then thought maybe it was a reporter being cagey. “Why?”

“If you are not able to speak freely, say the word ‘later,’ now.”

“I’m alone. There’s no alarm going off here.”

“May I have your password?”

“My what?”

“I need your password for a system reset.”

“I don’t know. Joan? Mikel? Tailhook? Telecaster?”

“ ‘Telecaster’ is the password. I’m very sorry to have bothered you, ma’am.”

“Wait, that’s it?”

His efficient yap disappeared, and now he sounded slightly exasperated. “If there’s no audible going off there must be a malfunction in the system. We’ll run a diagnostic and send someone out later tomorrow to see if we can’t isolate the problem. Once again, sorry for the inconvenience. Thank you for using Scanalert.”

I rubbed my eyes and listened to the dial tone, then put the receiver back in the cradle and got out of bed. It was cold, and I put on my robe and my slippers. The cable box on the television was reading 3:48.

I went out to the top of the stairs and listened.

Nothing but rain.

The steps creaked when I descended, and I hadn’t noticed how irritating that was until now. It was stupid, too, because that, more than anything else, made me feel nervous. Creaking stairs and rain on the roof, and a phone call in the dead of night. Maybe it had just been some reporter with a clever way of trying to find out if I was sleeping with someone. Hell, maybe it was a reporter who knew Dyke Tracy had paid me a visit, and was hoping she’d stayed. Clearly a chunk of my subconscious had done the same.

The alarm panel was showing red lights when I checked it, armed. The LCD said that we were safely in “Stay” mode, with “all portals secure.”

Not a bad title for a song, maybe. All portals secure. No way in. No way out.

I went back upstairs and found my notebook in the nightstand, wrote, “All Portals Secure!” in it, then underlined it. I left the book out, so that I’d see it in the morning. I probably wouldn’t even remember why I thought the line was so intriguing when I woke up.

I took off my robe and my slippers and got back under the covers, clicking out the light. I listened to the rain overhead, to the layers of sound. One instrument, many notes, I thought.

When I fell asleep, I didn’t have any more nightmares.

The next time the phone woke me it was day. The cable box said it was 10:12 , and the voice on the phone said it was Fred Chapel.

“I heard from Detective Marcus this morning,” Chapel told me. “He informs me that the Portland police are not pursuing you as a suspect in your brother’s murder.”

“Oh, goody,” I said.

“They’re going to want your help. They’ll most likely come by in the next few days for a follow-up interview, to see if they missed anything, and they’ll have questions about the pictures as well as your brother. I’d still prefer it if I were with you should that come to pass, but for now, you’re off the hook.”

I didn’t tell him he was a day late and a dollar short, and that I’d already tried being helpful to the cops, and it hadn’t gone very well.

“Does that mean I can go back to the bottle?” I asked.

He didn’t think it was a joke. “If that’s your thing, go ahead.”

Showered and dressed and with a fresh cup of Peet’s blend in my hand, a cigarette cornered in my mouth, I went to shut off the alarm and get the morning paper. When I opened the door, a FedEx envelope fell inward, onto my bare feet. I picked it up and there wasn’t an address tag on it, just the envelope. It didn’t feel like there was anything inside.

I got the paper, brought it and the envelope back to the table. I pulled the tab and tore it open. The contents refused to dump out when I shook it, and I had to reach in to free them. There were two items, a piece of paper, and a thicker sheet, a little tacky on one side.

It took a moment for me to realize that the tacky sheet was a photograph. I’d never seen one like it. It was eight by ten, and it felt fresh, as if it had just come from some one-hour place. The image was in shades of red, popping out of a black background. People seen in red.

I was looking at my bedroom. I was looking at myself, asleep, in bed.

With a man, standing beside me, and holding a thing that wasn’t as red as I was, or as he was, in his hand. Pointing it at my head.

A man pointing a gun at my head.

I dropped the coffee and the cigarette and the photograph all at once, felt the scald as the liquid splattered from the mug to my leg. The cigarette died with a sizzle in the spill.

The other piece, the paper, was a typed photocopy, with toner streaks across its face. It read:

GO ASK TOMMY WHY I’M HOLDING A GUN TO YOUR HEAD.

I dropped that one, too.

In my chest I could feel my heart beating so savagely and so hard, I imagined bruises rising on my skin.

I had to get out of this house. It wasn’t a safe place, it wasn’t my place, it had become someone else’s. I picked up the photograph and the paper, each of them now stained with spilled coffee, and stuffed them back in the envelope, panicked trying to find my keys and my coat.

And I went.

All portals secure.

Bullshit.

CHAPTER 24

Maybe there’s a lower brain, or a higher one, or something, a part that understands before the conscious kicks in.

Maybe I was just so worked up, I didn’t even realize that I was thinking.

I was racing in the Jeep, and I wasn’t trying to think at all, but I was realizing shit left and right. By the time I’d hit Broadway I understood my nightmare on a whole different level, knew that at least one of the cameras had been literal.

The man with the gun, he was alone, I was sure he was alone, because the angle, it was from the bureau, and that was where he had set the camera holding his fancy film. Working in the dark, without the light, and he had set the auto feature or whatever it was, and gone and posed with his gun and my head, and the camera had snapped, and in my dream last night, that was the noise that had registered.

I was crossing the Broadway bridge, passing people illegally, and I had to brake hard at the curve, where the road turns unexpectedly north-south. I passed the post office, turned west again, heading up Flanders. I ran the lights at Eighteenth and Nineteenth, over the freeway, not even realizing I had done it until the sound of horns penetrated my shell. I didn’t slow down, climbing the hill, and I was sure that was where Tommy would be. He didn’t have anywhere else to go.

Mikel’s.

Parked on the street, out of the car holding the envelope so tight it hurt, bending the cardboard in my fist, and with my other fist, I pounded on the door. Mikel’s Land Rover was still in its spot, and there was another car in the berth next to it, an older Ford SUV, dingy and dinged. I was trying to remember if I had seen it before when I heard the door open.

I turned, starting to say “Tommy—” and then I didn’t say anything else, because it wasn’t Tommy I was looking at.

The man standing there was about six or seven inches taller than me, wide, but how wide I couldn’t tell, because he was wearing a big black Columbia rain parka, the kind with flaps and pockets and an oversized hood, and it hid a lot of his shape. The hood was up, and in that frozen instant when the door opened and I took it all in, I remember thinking he didn’t have a face inside that hood, that it was just darkness, nothing more.

Both of his hands came up, gloved in black leather, but in one of them was a gun, maybe the same gun from the photograph. I tried to react, to step back and shout and escape, but he grabbed me by the shirt and yanked me inside. I fell coming over the threshold, hitting the wall, and I dropped the envelope and brought my hands up to protect my face.

The door slammed, and I felt a hand against my back, felt the palm between my shoulder blades, and the Parka Man shoved me, and I twisted to keep from getting my nose smashed against the wall. He held me upright, pressed against the wall, and he put the gun against my neck. The emptiness in the hood leaned closer, and I saw his eyes and his mouth through narrow holes in the mask.

“You’ve sure grown up,” the Parka Man said in my ear.

The hand on my back bunched into a fist, taking my coat, and he yanked hard, pulling me off my feet. He was probably twice as heavy as I was, and it seemed like he was twice as strong, and I felt like a straw doll when he forced me down the hall, the gun still biting into my neck. When we reached the entrance to the living room, his fist opened, and he shoved forward, hard, and I staggered, lost my balance, and went sprawling onto the carpet.

Tommy was on the floor in the center of the living room, not quite where Mikel had fallen only four days before. His knees were drawn up to his belly, and his arms were bent behind his back, and his face was bleeding a new stain into the carpet. His mouth and brow looked like a mess of torn skin, and I saw froth at his lips as he struggled to breathe. I saw something white shine in all of that red and pink, a broken tooth or an exposed bone.

Parka Man grabbed my arm, and I was twisted around, and I saw the gun coming up at me again, and he hit me with it. There was a gap, jarring like a bad edit, and then I was on my back, still on the floor, and pain was blossoming from my forehead, making the world tumble, making everything so very much brighter.

The Parka Man leaned down and reached for me again, and I tried to fend him off, screaming and kicking. He shoved his gun against my cheek and his other hand into my throat, forcing my head back down. The barrel of the gun on my skin was sharp and wet. I couldn’t breathe.

“Scream again and I write this off here and now,” Parka Man said softly. His mouth was close to mine, and his breath hit my lips and ran up my nose, and if I’d had the air, I would have gagged. “Scream, I do you both right here.”

I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t even nod. The terror was so complete that it felt like I had no body, that I was just a form of fear, lying on my dead brother’s floor. I tried to make some kind of noise of understanding or assent or surrender, but the flat pressure on my throat grew as Parka Man pushed the barrel of his gun a little harder into my skin, his gloved hand a little harder on my throat. Then both were suddenly gone, and he was backing away. I started coughing, rolled onto my side, trying to stop it, terrified that even that would be too much noise, and I saw Tommy again, and he hadn’t moved.

“Get up,” Parka Man said.

I tried, had turned onto all fours in an attempt to rise, but it still wasn’t quick enough for him. He came back and grabbed me by my hair, and I started to shriek but stopped myself, even though I felt roots tearing. He shoved me at the easy chair by the foot of the couch, and I went into it headfirst, twisting. When I completed the turn, he was standing by Tommy, holding the gun on me.

“Sit. Still.”

I felt blood running from my forehead, catching in my right eyebrow. It felt like it would start dripping into my eye. I didn’t move.

Parka Man backed out of the room, into the entry hall, out of sight. There was a cordless phone on the wall by the stairs to the second floor, where Mikel’s bedroom had been, but before I even thought about going for it, he came back. He was folding the FedEx envelope in both hands, forcing the cardboard to bend down, and as soon as he’d finished he put it in one of the parka pockets, then brought the gun out again from another.

“He’s alive,” Parka Man said, and he used the gun to indicate Tommy. “Remember that. Bad as he looks, he’s alive.”

I could see that Tommy’s hands were cuffed together behind his back.

“You want him to stay that way, you’ll listen to me,” Parka Man said.

The blood that I’d feared would run into my eye turned right, flowing along the ridge of my brow, and I could feel it trickling along my hairline, down my jaw.

Parka Man came closer, holding the gun casually in his hand, pointed down. I waited for him to stop, but he didn’t, kept coming, until he was standing over me in the chair. I stared at his middle, at his parka, at all the shiny metal of his zippers and buttons and clasps.

His free hand came up to my face, and I flinched, but kept silent. I felt a gloved thumb touch my brow, follow the line of blood, wiping it away. I could feel the stitching that surrounded his finger. When he reached the end of the blood trail, he dragged it across my cheek, toward my mouth. He touched my upper lip, pressed, then flicked his finger away.

It felt like something inside me would explode. Somewhere beneath the edge of the parka was his groin, and I thought about kicking, striking out hard.

Then I remembered the gun.

He made a noise, like he was happy with the way things looked, like he was satisfied. He backed away, toward Tommy, and used the toe of a black work boot to roll him onto his belly.

“Didn’t want to have to do it this way,” Parka Man said. “But he was being stubborn. I’d have settled for a hundred thousand, honestly, but he had to get a spine or soul or whatever you friggin’ drunks discover in AA, so now we’re doing it the hard way. So the price goes up, too.”

I stared, confused, terrified, trying to make sense of the words. It was as if he wasn’t really talking to me, more to himself. I told myself he was crazy, but he didn’t sound crazy; he sounded like someone who enjoyed having power, enjoyed using it.

“Straight to the source this time,” the Parka Man said, and his black-toed boot kicked Tommy in the gut. It wasn’t savage, almost absent, and I thought I heard Tommy groan. “No middleman.”

He looked up from where Tommy sprawled, the emptiness inside his hood settling on me.

“A million dollars. Not too much, not for you. You’ve got until noon Friday to get it, in cash. Soon as you have it, you go home, turn on your porch light. Leave it on. I see the light, I know you’re ready, and I’ll tell you where to bring it. I don’t see it on, the next time you see your daddy is when the Detective Division comes and asks you to identify the body. You understand me?”

Tommy made a cracked sound that died in the carpet.

“Yes,” I heard myself say.

Parka Man slid his gun back in his pocket, crouching. He grabbed Tommy with both hands, one on the cuffs, the other on his upper arm, hoisting him to standing. Tommy’s legs seemed like they were hollow, like they were crazy straws beneath his torso, and they bent with his weight, unable to support him.

“Believe me when I say this,” Parka Man told me. “I’ll know if you talk to the cops. I will know if you even whisper to them. If that happens, I’ll kill Tommy, here. I’ll take my time about it. Then I’ll come and kill you, too. You understand that?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good. Who says celebrities are unreasonable, right?”

“Right.”

“You just sit there and catch your breath, think sweet thoughts for a couple minutes after I’m gone. You’re in no hurry. You’ve got until noon on Friday, like I said.”

He grunted, turning Tommy and then hoisting him onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. They went down the hall, out of sight, and I heard the front door open. A couple seconds later I heard it close. An engine started outside, and I supposed it was the Parka Man’s SUV, and it sounded like it was coming closer, and then it was moving away, and then it was gone.

The shaking started in my hands. It ran up my arms, it slid into my legs. My stomach went wild. It felt like stage fright, and it felt nothing like that, because this was terror, and it was different.

I was certain I was going to vomit, steeled myself for it, but it didn’t happen. Then the shakes went away, just as they had come, and I thought about getting up, but didn’t. My stomach settled, and I started to feel heavy and strangely euphoric, almost postorgasmic. All of the adrenaline, I guess, leaving me high.

The room had huge windows on the east side, to allow the view of the city. The room had been tidied after Mikel’s death, and the fresh bloodstains on the carpet looked grotesque next to the ones that had refused to come out.

There wasn’t really any doubt, anymore.

It didn’t matter if Tommy was everything he had claimed when he’d come and asked to be my father again. It didn’t matter if he was as sorry as he said, as sad as he seemed. Maybe he wasn’t. It didn’t matter.

I couldn’t be the reason he died.

He was all I had left.

Outside, I heard a siren coming closer, and I didn’t think it was coming here, and I didn’t know what I would do if it did. The wail climbed, fell, climbed, and then receded, passing by.

I made my way into the bathroom, turned on the light over the sink. There was a gash on my forehead, not very deep, but long. The skin was torn, and in the opening I could see red flesh, still seeping. The blood that the Parka Man had smeared was already dry, tight on my skin. There was some bleeding on my scalp, too, showing through the curls where the Parka Man had torn hair.

I splashed water on my face, and the cut stung, but in its way that made me feel a little better, made me focus a little more.

A million dollars, that was a lot of money, but I had more than that. It couldn’t be that hard to get the cash, and Parka Man had given me most of four days to do it.

I’d get the cash.

Explaining the cut, that would be something else. It looked like I imagined a gash from the edge of a piece of furniture might look, if for example someone had tripped and not caught themselves in time. Something a drunk might not even remember doing to herself if she had gotten really hammered after her brother’s funeral.

I can do this, I told myself. I can do what needs to be done.

I didn’t think I was lying this time.

CHAPTER 25

It was stupid, but it was the only disguise I could think of, so I wore a ball cap and sunglasses when I went to the bank. I’d bought both of them at a Walgreen’s down the block from my branch, and maybe it was the cut, or maybe I just didn’t matter that much anymore, but no one seemed to recognize me when I made the purchase.

There was a small group waiting in the teller lines when I got to the bank, the last of the lunch crowd, and I stayed out of their way, trying to be inconspicuous, and it totally backfired and people stared. Maybe sunglasses and a ball cap would do it at the movies, but in a bank, it just made me stick out a little more. I got a withdrawal slip from the stand and filled it out precisely, and waited until the line died down before attaching myself to the end. That didn’t work, either, because another three people came in right after I’d done it, and assembled behind me. They were all women, professionally dressed, and none of them looked much older than I.

Four people in front of me, and the line had just shortened to three, when I heard one of the women say, “You know who she looks like? She looks like the girl from Tailhook.”

“That’s not her. She’s too short to be her.”

“Not Van, not that one, the other one, the one whose brother just got killed.”

“That’s not Mim.”

“I don’t know, it looks like Mim.”

“It could be.”

“No it couldn’t, she doesn’t live in town, she lives out in Lake Oswego.”

“That’s Van, Van lives in Oswego. She has that big house they showed on television that time.”

The line had shortened to one, and I really wanted the women behind me to shut up.

“Did you hear about the photos? There was this bit on the news about these photos.”

“Oh, God, I know! My boyfriend showed them to me, can you imagine letting someone do that to you?”

“You could ask her, you could ask if that’s her.”

“I wouldn’t want to be rude.”

There was a teller open, and I moved to his station. He was middle-aged, balding, and he smiled at me when he took my withdrawal slip, then looked at it and laughed and handed it back to me.

“I think you need to fill out a new one,” he said with a very amused smile.

I checked it, shook my head, slid it back. “No, it’s correct.”

“I think you wanted those zeros after the decimal point, not before.”

“No, it’s correct.”

He stopped being amused. “Young lady, you’re not very funny.”

“I’m not trying to be funny. I need it in cash, please.”

The teller took the slip once more, went over it again, then frowned at me with suspicion. He asked me to wait a moment, then began tapping on the terminal to the left of his cash drawer. He scowled at the figures on his screen, and I figured he was just making certain that the money was there. Then his posture changed, and he leaned forward on the shelf, gesturing for me to come closer.

“I’m terribly sorry, Miss Bracca,” the teller said. “I’ll get the manager.”

I started to protest, but he was already out of the station and heading down the row of fellow tellers. I told myself not to worry, that he probably needed the manager’s permission to access that much cash. I was a little surprised he hadn’t already asked to see some identification.

Along the line of tellers, one of the women was finishing her transaction. I caught her staring at me, and when I caught her, she blushed and turned away hastily.

My teller came back, flanked by an older woman. The woman wore glasses, and had red hair, and it was obviously dyed.

“Miss Bracca,” the woman said. “I’m Catherine Lumley, why don’t you come with me?”

“Fine,” I said, and got out of line. Catherine waited for me at the end of the counter, and she pulled the short door back, allowing me through. With her free hand, she pointed to her office, past the vault door, and I headed inside. She followed close behind me.

The office was carpeted, and then had an Oriental rug on it, to add to the plush. There were four filing cabinets and a big desk and three leather chairs. The cabinets and the desk were some dark wood, like the rosewood used in fretboards, and all of the handles for all of the drawers were brass and shiny. I could almost feel the money.

“Please have a seat,” Catherine Lumley said. “Would you like something to drink? Coffee? Water or anything?”

I took one of the chairs facing the desk, and she surprised me by staying on my side and taking one of the seats beside me.

“I’m fine,” I said. Even knowing the balance in my account, I was starting to feel like an imposter.

“You should have come to me right away. As a valued client, if you ever have any trouble with any of our personal bankers, you should never hesitate to speak to the manager.”

I looked at her blankly. Then I took off my sunglasses and repeated the look.

“If you’d like, I can call Mr. Rodriguez in here.” She added it in the same apologetic tone that the teller had used.

“You mean the teller? No, I mean, he was fine, everything’s fine.”

“He should have recognized you, of course. But I can call Mr. Rodriguez right now.”

“Okay,” I said. “I give up. Who is Mr. Rodriguez?”

Lumley chuckled, then stopped when she realized I wasn’t kidding. “Oh, I’m so sorry, I thought you knew. He’s your banker.”

“I don’t have a banker. I have a bank, this bank. This is the bank I’ve been using since high school.”

“Yes, and we do appreciate your continued patronage, Miss Bracca. But in cases of accounts in excess of one million dollars, we always provide our clients with personal banking facilities. Alexander Rodriguez has been handling your account since February.”

“Doing what?”

“Ideally, whatever you require.”

“I see,” I said. “Well, I require withdrawing a million dollars in cash, if that’s all right.”

She hesitated, and I was afraid she was going to ask what I needed it for, and I realized with a little feeling of panic that I didn’t have a good lie ready. “I hope this doesn’t mean you’re closing the account?” she asked.

“No, not at all.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“So . . . it won’t be a problem?”

“No.” She smiled at me, then got up and went around to her side of the desk, to her computer. She clacked keys for a couple of seconds, and the smile remained, even seemed to grow a fraction. “Will hundreds do? Or smaller bills?”

The Parka Man hadn’t specified. “I think hundreds will be fine.”

Lumley straightened, beaming at me. “Then I’ll have Mr. Rodriguez call you Monday, as soon as the cash is together.”

“Monday?”

“Yes, it’ll take until then for us to get that much cash.”

Someone living in my belly inflated a balloon, painted the word “panic” on it, then let it go to ride the currents up to my head.

“I need it sooner,” I told Lumley.

Lumley began to look concerned again. “I’m afraid there’s no way we can do that.”

“Who can? There must be someone who can, right? I have the money, I have more than enough money.”

“Your combined balance currently stands at four million, six hundred and eighty-seven thousand, nine hundred and eleven dollars,” Lumley said. “That’s not the problem, Miss Bracca. We’re a bank, not the Federal Reserve. We simply don’t have that much currency here, in fact, we never do unless we know there will be a need for it.”

“Can I open an account at another bank?” I asked, trying to keep the balloon from going higher. “Do a wire transfer?”

“You misunderstand me, I’m afraid. It’s not us, it’s the amount. Any bank in the region will have the same problem. What you’re asking to withdraw is a very large amount of currency.”

It was Tuesday afternoon. If I believed Lumley, and I didn’t have a reason not to, then it wouldn’t matter where I went. I suddenly realized I’d have the same problem no matter who I banked with. Which meant that come Friday noon, I wouldn’t have the money, and I didn’t believe Parka Man would give me a reprieve. Clearly, he’d anticipated this problem, but not how long it would take; that was why he had given me the time. If four days later I still didn’t have the money, he wasn’t going to be happy, and his unhappiness would probably manifest itself by inflicting a lot of pain, and probably death, on Tommy.

The beating had looked so painful, the damage so much, and sitting in Catherine Lumley’s office, I saw Tommy again in my mind’s eye. All the times I’d wished him to suffer, and now that he was suffering, I felt sick.

Lumley was waiting for me.

“How much can you get me by Friday?” I asked.

“I’d say five hundred, perhaps six hundred thousand dollars.”

“Which?”

“Six hundred thousand,” Lumley said. “Yes, I should think that wouldn’t be a problem.”

“Then I’d like you to do that, please.”

“We’d be happy to. I’ll have Mr. Rodriguez call you as soon as your cash is ready.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“No,” said Lumley. “Thank you for banking with Four Rivers.”

Graham’s apartment was in the Pearl, and that’s where I headed next. During the last few months I’d been with the tour, he’d made a habit of traveling with cash, upward of fifty thousand dollars at a time on some legs. He’d kept it in his briefcase, used it to pay for incidentals and emergencies and shopping sprees, but mostly it was for travel. Cash was the best way to get around the paparazzi and their penchant for digging through credit card receipts.

There was no way he was carting four hundred grand around in his briefcase, but he’d know where I could get it.

I took Burnside across the river, back into downtown, then up toward Powell’s. The Heineken Brewery used to be on Burnside, this huge old brick building that had stood since the bad old days, when Portland was renowned by sailors the world over as “the worst port in the world.” But Heineken sold the property a couple years ago, and some developers bought it and promptly tore the whole thing down. Now there were expensive condos and yuppie health food stores.

Graham’s apartment was in an earlier iteration of the process, a twenty-odd-story collection of new apartments with an Art Deco feel. He’d bought it after Scandal, when it had become clear that Tailhook was staying together, and that he was part of the package. Prior to that, he’d lived exclusively in L.A., and he still kept a home there. He’d bought in the Pearl because it was considered the trendiest damn section of town, full to the popping with young urban professionals, all of them beautiful, all of them eager, and most of them looking for a date. Click had his place just a little farther north from Graham’s.

I parked the Jeep and hopped out, and there was a security guy at the desk in the lobby, and he wanted to know who I was visiting. I told him I was Miriam Bracca to see Graham Havers, and the guard got all flustered and begged my pardon and told me he hadn’t recognized me.

“It’s okay,” I said.

“Mr. Havers has some company there already, I don’t think it’ll be a problem if you head on up without me calling first,” the security guy said.

“If it is, I’ll tell him I snuck past you.”

Security Guy grinned like we’d just become the best buds in the world. “Cool. And if anyone asks, I’ll say I’ve never seen you.”

I laughed and he grinned even bigger, and then I got in the elevator and went up to eighteen. There was no one in the car and no one in the hall, and I rang the bell beside Graham’s door, and waited. There was no music coming from inside, which was strange, because normally when Graham was home, he was playing something, usually a new band, usually someone none of us had ever heard before.

Graham answered the door, looking like he’d had some rest and wasn’t planning on any company coming by. He was in purple Adidas workout pants and a white V-necked silk shirt, and he was barefoot.

“Mimserama!”

“Hey, can I come in?”

He threw a glance over his shoulder, into the main room, then reached a hand for my shoulder, to guide me inside. The gesture popped a sudden memory of the Parka Man’s gloves on my arms and face, and I stepped back without thinking. Graham looked confused, but before he could voice it I went past him.

“Guy downstairs said you had company,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“No, it’s not a problem. You’ve met them, I think.” Graham edged around me, leading down the hall and gesturing into the main room, where his lifestyle was plain for any and all to see. He had a wide-screen Philips monitor mounted on the wall, between two arched windows that looked out into downtown, and two huge Klipsch speakers at the far corners of the room. The stereo setup was NAD and multicomponent, each piece seated gently in a chrome cabinet. The space was open, with low furniture, all modular, all vaguely Danish.

Detective Marcus had been standing at one of the three CD racks, examining the titles. Hoffman was on the couch. Both now directed their attention to me.

Graham continued past, saying, “You guys know Mim, of course, talked to her already. They just dropped by for a few questions.”

He told the last to me, adding a little shrug, as if to say that it all seemed silly to him.

“Miss Bracca,” Marcus said. “Pleasant surprise.”

“You and me both.”

Hoffman didn’t say anything.

“I can come back,” I told Graham.

“No, we’re pretty much finished here,” Marcus said, before Graham could answer. “We’ll be going now. Thanks for your help, Mr. Havers.”

“Hey, anything to assist, you know how that is.”

“You’d be surprised what a minority you’re in.”

Graham made a comment about being grateful for the police in general, then headed back down the hall, to get the door. Marcus followed, wishing me a good day, and Hoffman came last, but she stopped as she was passing me.

“Rough night?” she asked.

It took me a second to realize she was talking about the cut on my head. I tried to fumble out my prepared lie, but I didn’t need it, because she’d already continued on her way. I watched her and Marcus shake Graham’s hand, and then they left, and he shut the door after them.

“No idea what the hell that was about,” he told me cheerfully when he came back. “Just dropped by, wanted to know if I had any idea about anything about your brother or those pictures. Wanted a list of possible enemies, shit like that. I told them every unsigned guitarist. Then they asked for disgruntled employees. I told them I’d try to get them something, but the way Van is, that list would be fifty pages long.”

“Just for the tour managers,” I said.

He nodded, grinning, then focused on me, concerned. “What happened to your head? You take a spill?”

“A bad one.”

“Were you loaded, Mimser?”

“No. I’m just a klutz.”

He laughed. “I love it, an Oregonian using Yiddish. Klutz. You’re not a klutz, kiddo. You want something, I’ve got stuff in the fridge, I’ve got some chai and some of those energy drinks that you and Van were chugging on the road. Bought a damn flat of the stuff, and I can’t stand it. Taurine, what kind of fucking flavor is taurine?”

“It’s kinda citrus,” I said. “I don’t need anything.”

“God, I do. I’ve got an ounce and a half of coke in the bathroom, I was gonna wet myself when that Hoffman one asked if she could use my facilities. Don’t think she noticed it, though.”

“You left it out on the counter?”

“Hell, no, it’s in my shaving kit.”

Graham left me laughing and went into the kitchen, then came right back, opening a can of soda. He flopped on the couch, and waved at me to take any seat I wanted.

“You hear the latest?” he asked me. “Nothing for Free is at seven, and Scandal just hit forty-nine. Our illustrious sponsor called me this morning, offering to tack on another twenty-five dates.”

“You going to take them?”

Graham chugged his soda like it was water, then lowered the can and began drumming one of his irregular beats on its side, staring at me. I wondered if he was actually on the coke he’d been talking about.

“Talked to Van about the albums, didn’t talk to her about the dates yet, there’s an issue, kind of, but maybe you should talk to her.”

“There’s an issue?”

“There’s a request, it’s not an issue, it’s a request that if they do add the dates, they add them with you back on the stage, not with Clay.”

“Oh.”

Graham swept on, ignoring the awkwardness. “I got a call, there’s a company down in L.A. called Muze Media, they put out videos, you know, the kind you see advertised on the cable outlets, late-night. Sexy Coeds in New Orleans Show You Their Hooters and shit like that, but they’re asking if we have any home video, maybe from the tour, anything like that. They’ll package and sell it, they’re offering a sweet deal on that.”

“We don’t have anything like that.”

“The Midwest stuff, this past summer, on the bus, Click had a camera, we were all passing it around, you remember, right? You and Van and Click all goofing around, making your home movie. You know who has that tape? Do you have it?”

“I’d think Click does.”

“I’ll have to call him.” He drained his soda, then began working the can in one hand, making the aluminum pop and crinkle. He was staring out the window, or maybe at the window, and his expression went a little blank, as if he was totaling figures in the spreadsheet of his mind.

“Hey, Graham?” I said.

“What? Sorry, honey, just thinking, you know.”

“Yeah, listen. I need some money.”

“You have money. You have more than some money.”

“Yeah, but I need cash,” I said. “It’s hard to explain, but there’s a purchase I need to make, and I have to do it by the end of the week, and the bank, they can’t get me the cash in time. But I was thinking, you’ve got cash, and you always said it was our cash.”

“You mean the Mad Road Money? Yeah, that’s Tailhook’s, that’s not mine. I’ve got a couple grand here, if that’ll do it, but I’d think the bank could cover that. How much you need, baby?”

“Four hundred thousand,” I said.

Graham stopped working the can and stared at me. “Come again?”

“I know it’s a lot.”

He continued to stare at me, and all of his nervous energy was gone. “Why do you need four hundred thousand dollars in cash, Mim?”

“Like I said, I’m buying this thing and—”

“What thing?”

“Property, it’s in Lake Oswego, near the water. Secluded, but it’s one of those private communities, you know, and they’re nervous about me moving in, because of everything and all. But if I can pay this guy in ready cash, he’s willing to sell to me.”

“You’re dumping your place?”

“It’s just . . . the cameras and everything, Graham, it’s just been too much, you know?”

“But you put so much work into that place.”

“I know, I know, but I can’t . . . I can’t stay there. And Lake Oswego, you know, it’s quiet, it’s real secluded. If I pay this guy in cash, then maybe the press won’t find out about it. I could use a place like that.”

He was wavering, I could see it.

“Be a good place for me to dry out.”

That was the push, and it took. “I can see that. But four hundred, Mimser, I’ve never carried a quarter that much. I can free up about a hundred, hundred fifty thousand.”

“I’ll write you a check.”

“Yeah, and you should talk to Van, too. She watches the money and she’ll want to know why I’m spraying cash like a stuck cow. Pig. Whatever it is that sprays when it’s stuck.”

“Normally a pig,” I said.

“You need it when?”

“By Friday. I have to meet this guy Friday noon, so if I can get it no later than Friday morning, that’d be great.”

“Yeah, I can do that,” Graham said, after a second. “We’re leaving tomorrow evening, but I should be able to get it to you before then.”

I got up and went and gave him a kiss on the lips, just a thanks. “You’re a saint.”

“You’re gonna have to talk to Van, you know. You should ask her at the party tonight.”

“I’m not going.”

“I know it’s soon after the funeral, but it could cheer you up.”

“I don’t think I’d be comfortable.”

“Mim, you’re part of the band, honey. Van loves you, she’s just being a hard-ass because she cares. That thing in Sydney, that’s not what this is about, that’s just the symptom, you know. Van’s got voice and she’s got presence, and even she knows that it’s worth shit if she doesn’t have you giving her a way to use them. We all want you back, we all want you healthy and happy, not . . . you know.”

“The way I am now?”

He crinkled the can again. “You should go, baby, at least stop by.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“I’ll be there. Click’ll be there. Be a chance to talk about these new dates, too. You tell Van what you told me, about this place, this Oswego lakeside-rehab-hideaway you’re buying, she might think that’s a big step, might lift her anti-Bracca embargo.”

“You think?”

“It’s what she says, it’s about the band. Getting you onstage, that’d be good for the band,” Graham said. “You should go.”

I told him I’d think about it, and let him hug me before I went out the door. Graham’s hugs are small things, as if he’s afraid that pushing his body against yours would be too sexual, would somehow corrupt the manager-talent relationship. But he gave me a good squeeze this time, as if to say that he knew I was fighting the good fight, that he was in my corner.

I headed out, back to the car, thinking that all I needed now was a quarter of a million dollars in cash, and that either Van or Click could easily provide it. Click was probably the safer bet. But Graham would talk to Van, tell her what I was doing, and if I didn’t then go to her, she could shut the whole thing down, at least for the time being. So Click wasn’t going to be an option.

The clock said it was almost four-thirty, and if I headed out to Lake Oswego now, I’d get swamped by traffic, and it’d take an hour, at the least. Which meant I’d arrive as Van was preparing for her party, something I didn’t want to do, because a party, to Van, was like a show. She wouldn’t want to be distracted before the curtain went up.

So I headed home, thinking that what was best for the band wasn’t always what was best for the performers, and wondering what I should wear.

CHAPTER 26

Van’s place was custom all the way, built in the hills of Lake Oswego, about twenty minutes southeast of Portland when the traffic was behaving. Lake Oswego once upon a very long time ago was big with loggers and cowboys and pioneers who wandered west on the Oregon Trail. Now it was big with money, fringed with upper middle class, an exceptionally white neighborhood in an already very white state, where urban professionals moved their families because the thought of raising those same families in the city made their bowels go loose. The Big Wealth surrounded the actual Oswego Lake, in houses shrouded in trees, with boat docks and views without neighbors.

Van’s house was still experiencing growing pains; like me, Van had been dumping money into her home ever since the tour began. Unlike me, though, Van had started from scratch, buying the property, then leveling the structure that stood on it. She’d had all sorts of headaches from the local homeowners and the county—Lake Oswego is in Clackamas County, unlike Portland, which is in Multnomah—but in the end, being Van, she’d won out. Her lawyers shouted louder, perhaps. Or maybe she just crooned at them with the mike.

Whatever the case, when I pulled up, I could see that the majority of the work had been completed. The house was bilevel, built onto the slope, so that the entry floor was actually the second, with another below, closer to the water. The drive down from the road dipped sharply before winding through the trees, and it provided a nice curtain of anonymity. But when I hit the bottom of the drive I could see the lights on, and over the Jeep’s engine, I could hear the music. There were already two dozen cars parked all around and along the driveway, and I could see some late-arriving guests making last-minute adjustments in rearview mirrors.

I parked and got out, and the music was louder. Van was still on the Radiohead kick. The song was “You and Whose Army?”

Seemed a fair question, and I just stood by my Jeep for a couple minutes, smoking a cigarette and trying to screw up my courage as each new arrival pulled up. “Keeping it small” meant only about fifty to seventy-five people were expected. Van’s really big parties drew more than two hundred. Sometimes it seemed like the only thing you needed to get invited was to be able to find the place on a map.

I didn’t want to ask Van for money. I didn’t want to be at a party. I didn’t, especially, want to be at one of Van’s parties. The last one I’d attended had been the night before we’d left on the most recent leg of the tour, and I’d spent almost the entire night getting drunk out on the balcony, throwing things into the lake.

“Mim?”

It was Click, and he’d come up behind me, and the surprise had my heart checking the exits. If he’d bothered to dress up for the party, I couldn’t tell. Maybe he’d changed to his really good Winterhawks jersey. The Chuckies were still mismatched.

“Just me,” he said mildly.

“You.”

“I said your name twice, nothing.”

“Lost in thought.”

He came up beside me with a chuckle, looking at the house and pulling his rolling kit from his back pocket. “You’ve got a lot of those to be lost in at the best of times.”

“Goes with being The Brains.”

“I’m just the central nervous system, I wouldn’t know about that.” Click rolled himself a cigarette, and I lit it for him, and he thanked me and blew out a plume. “Surprised you came.”

“I need to talk to Van.”

“You’re not going to change her mind. I already tried.”

“It’s not about the band.”

“No? Then you better get to her early. She’s gonna be busy tonight.”

“Fleet week already?”

Click made a grunting noise, like I’d socked him. “Rose Festival’s not until summer, you know that. Might want to check your claws at the door.”

I dropped my butt and stomped it out. He was right; if I was already this defensive and Van wasn’t even present, things weren’t likely to go well once we got face to face. I was going to have to get that under control, and fast.

“Heard about the album?” Click asked.

“Graham says it’s at seven.”

“Must feel strange to you. Feels fucking strange to me.”

“It does,” I agreed.

He was still watching the house, smoking his hand-rolled. “Don’t change the fact that it’s a good album.”

“Guess not.”

“Might want to keep that in mind, that’s what I mean.” He flicked his cigarette down the driveway, toward the house, and it sizzled out in a puddle. Then he offered me his arm. “Let’s wow the little people, what do you say?”

“How can I refuse?”

“Oh, hey, so it turns out we’re sleeping together,” he told me when we were halfway down the walk.

“No shit?”

“Turns out that’s why you’re on hiatus. We had a messy breakup, you and me. Apparently I’m seeking solace with Van.”

“Brutal.”

“Tell me about it.”

A haze of smoke was leaking out of the house as we reached the door, a mix of cigarette and pot, and the music was louder, almost to the point of distortion. We stepped into a crowd of men and women, most of them in our age group, and I instantly realized the small-party estimate had been off, and that there must have been more cars parked outside than I had noticed.

There were hip-hopsters and punkers and retro grungers and people like me and Click, who’d decided that what we wore would be what we wore. I’d defaulted to my band outfit, just cargo pants and a black long-sleeved T-shirt, but only because it was too cold to wear the tank.

A couple of people shouted at us when we entered, waving hands or bottles, but their voices were swamped by the music, and Click and I just smiled and waved back. He dropped my arm and shouted in my ear.

“I’m gonna get a liquid. Catch you later?”

“I’ll be around,” I shouted back.

Click headed in the most likely direction of the kitchen. I worked my way past the entry crowds, down the stairs to the main room on the lower floor. Several people broke their conversations to watch me pass, and most even said hello. What they were actually thinking as I passed was anyone’s guess.

The living room space was a cavern, two stories high and long, and most of the party had moved there, doing nothing to defeat the size of the room. Another stereo was going down here, fighting with the music playing above, blasting dance remixes. A cluster near the far wall writhed, shimmied, and ground to the beat. On a big-screen television, one of the guests was playing a video game. The volume on that was cranked up, and the explosions on the screen seemed to keep fairly good time with the surrounding music.

Graham was with the dance contingent, grooving away, and he saw me come off the stairs and raised a hand, and I raised one back, then did a double take. My eyes were playing tricks. I looked hard, saw it again, and this time I was certain.

Dyke Tracy was dancing with him, her hair slicked back, working up a sweat. The outfit was new, not the work clothes and not what she’d worn when she’d grilled me in my kitchen the previous night, very casual, this time, just the jeans and the tee and the sneakers. Graham said something to her, and she shot a look my way and grinned.

I didn’t know if I should panic or laugh. Both seemed reasonable options.

Marcus wasn’t on the floor, and I cast around for him, trying to find him in the corners or on the stairs, but he wasn’t there, either. I took that to mean Hoffman was here on her own accord, not on the job, but that didn’t raise my comfort level.

Time to do what I came to do and get the hell out.

I stopped and listened at Van’s bedroom door, and didn’t hear anything like sex going on, so I figured it was safe to knock.

“Who?”

“Mim.”

There was a pause, and then the door swung open and Van stood there. I’d interrupted her halfway through makeup, and she’d done her eyes, but everything below the nose was still untouched. She didn’t look surprised or thrilled to see me, just turned and went back to her makeup table.

“Would you close it?” she asked.

I shut the door and took a moment to appreciate the room. It was large and white and functional. A big bed, good for sleeping or playing, a big television in the corner, and the makeup table. Doors led to the bathroom and the closets. One wall had a beautiful oil painting, a field of trees in what looked like a pretty fierce autumn storm, and when I moved my head, the light on the painting seemed to change, pulling the background into relief.

Van finished with her lips, capped the stick, and then turned to give me some attention. She was wearing another of her tees, this one gray and with the sleeves cut off. On it was a fifties-style woman’s face, neatly coiffed, eyes beneath sleepy lids, her mouth open, wiping at her chin with the back of her hand. Beneath it all was the slug GOT CREAM?

It was the kind of shirt she wore simply to get a response, and for that reason alone, I ignored it.

“You have a detective on your dance floor,” I told her.

“Only one? I invited two.”

“Did you?”

“Two came by today, Portland PD, Graham sent them over. About what happened to your brother and the pictures and all of it. I was doing party prep at the time.”

“I know them.”

“Right, of course you do.” Vanessa turned back to the mirror on her table, picked up the hairbrush. “Anyway, I invited them. As guests, not cops.”

“You live dangerously,” I said.

She laughed at my reflection. “You’re one to talk.”

“Not kidding, Van. There are at least fifteen people smoking joints upstairs, and God knows what’s going on in the bathrooms.”

“Nothing’s going to happen.” She began pulling the brush through her hair, still watching me in the mirror. “Graham told me you’d be by.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“He said you needed to get together some cash for a purchase, and you couldn’t get the bank to hand it over in time.”

“I’m not after a loan, Van. I need to cash a very large check, and the bank can’t cover it in time.”

She finished fixing her hair, then got up and went to the closet. There was another mirror hanging from the inside of the closet door, a double full-length one, and she checked herself very carefully in it. I didn’t see anything wrong, but Van apparently did, and she spent a couple seconds adjusting the waist of her jeans, making sure they hugged low on her hips.

“So tell me about this place you’re buying.”

I’d refined the lie in the intervening hours, and I thought it flowed easily, not too smooth, but honest. “It’s on the other side of the lake, smaller than this place, but it’s really nice. Four bedrooms, two full baths, and there’s a really good space for a music room. And there’s a deck, you know, with a hot tub. The whole thing’s right on the water, really quiet. But you know how they are out here, they’re all worried about the publicity and noise and shit, and if I can get them a big lump sum down, that’ll make me look good.”

“Graham said it’d help you dry out.”

“I think it would.”

She nodded slightly, then checked herself again. She indicated her shirt. “You haven’t commented.”

“You wouldn’t like what I had to say.”

“Please, go ahead.”

I sighed. “All right, I think it’s sexist, gross, and that it pretty much declares that you’ll give a blow job to any guy who wants one.”

Van examined herself in the mirror again. “You get all that from the shirt?”

“You asked.”

“Shit.” Van pulled the shirt off, tossing it on the closet floor, then disappeared inside, rummaging around. “How much you need?”

“Two hundred and fifty thousand in cash. But I need it by Friday.”

“Three days? And how much is this place?”

“Seller’ll let me have it for a million.” I managed to say it like the number wasn’t significant, like we all were used to dealing with seven figures as a matter of course.

Van emerged, pulling on a green silk shirt. It clung to her shape, and she fixed the middle two buttons, leaving the others open. Her belly, flat and toned, and her cleavage, not flat but also toned, were deftly exposed. The hoop in her navel glinted.

“Better?”

“You look hot.”

She made a noise of agreement, then checked herself in the mirror a final time. Satisfied, she closed the closet door, then addressed me.

“What’s really going on?” Van asked. She didn’t sound angry or annoyed, just very matter-of-fact, as if she was used to all of my lies, and this was merely another of the legion.

“Nothing. Look, Van. I’m just trying to buy this place and this guy already has another buyer. He said if I paid him in cash, he’d sell to me. But he’s only giving me until Friday.”

“I had that company you used, the one Chapel called, come by. They went through this whole house, did a complete search. I figured it was prudent, especially with what happened at your place. They didn’t find anything.”

“This isn’t about the pictures.”

“Mim, I’m not an idiot, okay? Please, please, please stop treating me like one.”

“I don’t treat you like an idiot—”

“Then why do you keep lying to me?”

“I’m not—”

“Is whoever took those shots blackmailing you? Are there more pictures?”

“It’s not blackmail.”

“Paying isn’t going to stop it. You pay, whoever he is, he’s just going to come back for more. You can’t do this.” Van came closer, lowering her voice. “You can’t do this, Mim.”

“That’s not what this is. That’s just not what this is, Van.”

“Who hit you?” Van asked. “Your father? Did Tommy hit you?”

“No. No, it’s—”

“You’ve got a bruise on your throat, you know that? Right under your chin, it’s hard to see, but when you move your head and the shadow’s gone, it’s visible, and it’s a bruise.” Her face suddenly went blank, and her highlighted eyes widened. “Oh God, Mim, did someone choke you?”

She reached a hand for my chin, and I evaded it by stepping back and looking away.

“Please, Van,” I said. “I need the money, and I need it in cash, and if I could get it myself I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t ask. My bank can’t get it to me until Monday. I’m good for it, you know I can write you a check or make a wire transfer or whatever you want, but I’ve got to have the money, and I’ve got to have it by Friday.”

The way she was looking at me, it made me think of Joan.

“Mim.” Van said my name softly. “I just want to help you—”

“The way you sent me home?” It burst out as a shout, and I felt like shit the second after I heard myself say it, but I followed it up anyway. “You mean the way you helped me like that? You want to help me, Van, just give me the cash!”

It hurt her, and it showed in the anger that flared in her eyes, and I had to look away from her again.

“All right, Mim. You write me the check and I’ll call my banker tomorrow, have him get the cash together. You can pick it up from Graham when it’s ready.”

I had my checkbook in one of my cargo pockets, and a ballpoint, and I went to the makeup table and wrote it out. After I signed my name I looked up at the reflection, and Van wasn’t even watching me anymore, but was sitting on the edge of the bed and looking at the door. I tore the check free and put the book and the pen back in my pocket, then brought it over to her.

She looked at it in my extended hand, and I felt sick because I thought she was going to tell me she had changed her mind, but she took it. She folded the paper perfectly in half.

“Thank you,” I said.

“It’s funny,” Van said quietly. “I never figured out of the three of us, that you’d be the cliché.”

“And what does that mean?”

“It means you’re the one angling to live fast, die young, and leave the good-looking corpse.” She got up and tucked the check into her jeans pocket. “You’re going to self-destruct or something. It’s becoming pretty obvious that I can’t stop it, either, any more than I can stop you drinking.”

“Would it make you happy to know I haven’t had a drink since my brother’s funeral?”

“You think that’s a fucking achievement? Sober for twenty-four hours? Call me in a month, tell me the same thing.”

“I will.”

“I don’t think you will. I don’t think you’ll be able to.”

She went to the door, ready to leave and join her guests. I followed her out, into the hallway. The party noise rushed at us, loud voices and the thunder of music. We walked back to the main room together, but just before we hit it, Van put her hand on my arm and stopped me.

“Whoever it is, whatever they have on you, they’re never going to stop,” she said. “They’ll bleed you until you’re dead, and then they’ll pick over your corpse. Think about that.”

Then she waded into the room, taking hugs and laughter, pulling admirers into her wake exactly like what they were—groupies following a rock star.

CHAPTER 27

I was out the door and halfway to my car when Hoffman caught up with me, saying, “Hey, wait a minute.”

“No,” I threw over my shoulder, and kept going. I heard her sneakers slapping in puddles as she accelerated, long strides, coming alongside. She reached the Jeep ahead of me, put herself between me and the driver’s door. It was cold enough that her breath made clouds with each exhale.

“Please get out of my way,” I said.

“Look, you’re not a suspect, it’s okay to talk to me.”

“I don’t want to talk to you. Hell, I don’t want to see you. You weren’t even supposed to be here tonight.”

“I was invited.”

“Well, that was Van’s mistake, and I shouldn’t have to suffer for it.”

Hoffman gave a half-laugh. “You really have no idea how to deal with me, do you? Your gaydar went off and you went straight to the bunker.”

“If that’s what you want to believe.”

“I think we both know it’s the truth. I think we both know you’ve been waiting for a nice butch to come along and take care of you for a while now.”

“I think we both know you’re full of shit,” I said, or at least started to say, but everything after “think” was lost in her mouth, because she started kissing me.

She was fierce about it, and a flicker ran through me, urging me to resist, but there was another one, stronger and hotter, and that was the one I went with, feeling the cool of her sweat and the heat of her skin and the warmth of her body against the chill of the air. I pressed myself into her, and she put her hands on my hips and pulled me with her as she stepped back, and we moved, me pushing up on tiptoe to keep my lips to hers, as she got me around to the back of the Jeep and out of the light.

Her fingers came up, touched my neck, light on my collarbone, and I tried to touch her back, but she wouldn’t have any, batting my hand away and pinning me to the back of the car with a thigh between my own. The pressure transferred to muscles, my knees shaking, and she put her mouth on my neck, and it felt wonderful and strange, that softness against the bruise there. I let my head rest against the Jeep, feeling the cold metal and glass on my back, and I pulled air loud, pulled it again louder when her hands went under my shirt.

There were stars visible through the trees, and the music was still whispering in the background, and I heard her breathing, quick and sure, and my own, more ragged, louder. She growled from her throat, her hands shifted, my breathing caught, resumed, faster. Her mouth brushed my ear.

“Jesus God, I want you,” she murmured.

And it was so nice to be wanted, and she rocked against me, and I thought I would dissolve, and there was no panic and no fear, and for a euphoric moment, there wasn’t even me.

Then she was pulling away, catching her breath as I tried to catch my own. She gave me another kiss, the ferocity gone.

“You’ve got my number,” Hoffman said. “Give me a call.”

CHAPTER 28

It was just eleven when I got home, and I locked up and set the alarm, thinking that whatever had just happened, I was happy for it. That lasted until I saw the “all portals secure” message on the LCD.

Like the alarm had done me a damn bit of good thus far. Like I was going to be able to sleep in my bed tonight feeling anything close to secure.

I took a long shower, realized that I wasn’t ready to sleep just yet, and pulled on some clothes. There was a last, lonely beer in the fridge, and I opened it, lit a smoke, and went down to the music room.

He waited until I’d set the bottle down and was reaching for the Les Paul, and I heard the sliding of nylon on nylon, and then he grabbed me from behind, easily, like he did this sort of thing all the time. I started to scream, first in surprise, though terror was next on the list, but there was leather suddenly covering my mouth and nose, fingers strong and hard pressing with the one hand while he wrapped his other arm around my middle, pulling me back, pinning me to him.

I struggled, just blind panic, my feet lashing out in the air. My right toe hit the stand for the Les Paul, and it toppled and took one of the Strats and the Godin LG with it, sending them all into my Marshal half-stack with a crash. His grip stayed tight on my face, and he was pinching my nose, and I was suffocating. I got my hands up on his arms, trying to break the grip that was killing me, and I realized I’d never had the strength to do that kind of thing, and I never would.

There was sound in my ears, feedback, high-pitched and ascending, but with a fuzz beneath it, like white noise. I tried biting the hand over my face, but my teeth touched nothing but leather. It felt like I was drunk, and I could feel my hold on his fingers and hand slipping.

A voice broke through all the noise in my head, hanging in my left ear, terrifying because of its lack of feeling.

“Thing about a soundproof room,” the Parka Man said. “You can scream all you want.”

Then he pitched me forward, letting go of my face, and I felt the concrete beneath the padding on the floor, and I slammed into the guitar stands. The headstock of the fallen Strat caught me in the right side, in the ribs, and it hurt and made me cry out with what little air I had remaining. I tried righting myself, gasping, and he came at me again, pulling me up by my shirt. Threads popped in his grip.

“Go ahead, scream.” The voice came from beneath the hood, behind the mask, and I saw his lips for a second in the cutout, thin and curling. From the corner of my eye, I caught the movement of his free hand, and it disappeared, and then my belly was crushed.

I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t see, the world swimming. He must have dropped me then, but I don’t remember it. I was still choking for air, but now I couldn’t inhale, it was as if my diaphragm had frozen, locked in a sustain. Nothing coming in, nothing coming out, and I was going to die without making a sound.

Parka Man dropped a knee beside my head, grabbed my hair again in one gloved hand. He lifted my face, twisting, making sure I could see him, making sure that I couldn’t see anything.

“Cops,” he said. “Talking to you, you talking to them.”

New shame cascaded through me, the knowledge that he’d been watching me at Van’s, had seen Hoffman and me. I tried shaking my head, to tell him that he was wrong, that I hadn’t told anyone anything, that the thing between Hoffman and me was just a stupid kiss, nothing more. His grip was so tight that when I tried the movement, I felt my hair tearing.

“You better not,” he told me. “Nothing about me, about you, about Tommy. They ask whatever they want, you don’t answer. Lie to your heart’s content, they expect that, but you don’t ever mention me. I’ll know.”

The shake hadn’t worked, so I tried a nod, still pushing for a breath. Everything below my ribs felt like it had just stopped working, like it wasn’t even attached any longer.

“I’ll know,” he repeated.

He shoved my face down again, into the floor, letting go of my hair. I saw the edge of a boot, and then my diaphragm unlocked with a spasm, and I gasped in a breath. He made the same noise he had in Mikel’s condo, the one that sounded like he was happy, but he wasn’t moving, and I could feel him looking at me.

“Roll over.”

I couldn’t even manage a plea.

“Roll. Over.”

I closed my eyes and pushed my palms against the carpet, rolling onto my back. I brought my arms around, I suppose it was a strange, instinctive kind of modesty, trying to protect my chest, and I thought he would at least let me keep that, but I felt his gloves on my arms, and he pulled them away.

“Open your eyes,” he told me.

It might have been the hardest thing I’d ever been asked to do, and for what felt like minutes, I couldn’t, I just couldn’t. I thought about his threat, about screaming, calling for help, but even if I had lungs like Van, no one would come. In my music room, soundproofed and cocooned, I had no way out.

Nothing looked back at me, just the mask inside the hood, dark on darker, empty. I couldn’t even find his eyes, but I could feel the stare creeping down me. Everything Hoffman had said rushed back at me. I’d felt the eyes of tens of thousands watching me live, I’d known millions more had done the same on screens and pages. Pictures taped to walls and downloaded onto desktops, the gaze of men and women, boys and girls, and I’d had to accept it without too much thought, because it was the kind of thing you couldn’t think about for too long, and even now, with the new pictures, they paled next to this.

This was new humiliation, and I wanted to wail. I wanted to beg him to release me, to leave me alone, because I didn’t deserve this.

Some songs end the way they want to end, you can’t do anything about it, and when you fight it, you end with junk. It was his song now, I realized: he’d pick the ending.

The Parka Man put the heel of his boot on the fingers of my left hand, my fretting hand, and let the promise of more weight rest there, pressing just a little. His head hadn’t moved, the dark, vacant holes still watching me. I bit into my tongue, not wanting to give him a sound.

“I’ll know,” he said.

Then he dropped the rest of the weight, and I tasted blood in my mouth as he ground his heel on my fingers. In my knuckles, I felt bone grinding on cartilage. My eyes filled with tears, hot ones, spilling down the sides of my face, dripping into my ears.

It hurt so bad that when he stopped, I didn’t know it.

“I own you,” the Parka Man said, and I heard his boots climbing the stairs. Then only silence.

I rolled onto my side, holding my fingers in my right hand, and I wept.

CHAPTER 29

It took two rapid-fire shots of Jack to make the pain in my hand subside a little, and even then, the sickness in my head remained. I broke ice into a dishtowel, wrapped my fingers with it, praying they weren’t broken. The ache was constant, and felt deep in the bone.

I checked the whole house, trying to make certain he was gone, looking in all the closets, in all the hiding places. It was when I was checking the pantry that I saw how he’d done the alarm, and that was the final straw, maybe.

The control box was high on the wall, above my stock of canned goods, and the door to it was open. I had to take a chair from the kitchen table to get a good look, and when I did I saw that all of the fuses had been pulled, except for the one to the control panel. It could tell me that all portals were secure to the day I died, it would always be lying.

He could come and go as he pleased. He’d done it twice already, maybe more than that. He certainly had been waiting for me in the basement even before I got home.

It was what Van had said, too. He wouldn’t ever stop. Even if he was sincere now in his promise to return Tommy to me in exchange for cash, that would change, that would change as soon as he saw how easily he could control me.

Which is what made me remember the other thing Van had said, about how I was going to end up. But Van was wrong about one thing: I was doubting that the corpse I left behind would be all that nice on the eyes.

He owned me.

He would kill Tommy. Then he would kill me.

The only way I could stop it was if I found him first.

It took me until dawn to find a place to start, and it seemed weak, even by my desperate standards, but I didn’t have anything else. Thinking about everything he’d said, how he’d said it, the one thing I kept coming back to were the words he’d used in Mikel’s condo.

You’ve sure grown up.

It could mean a lot of things, I told myself. It could mean all kinds of things.

But maybe it means foster care.

There were forty-nine Larkins in the Qwest White Pages, and another twenty-three when I used the iMac in my office to do a Google search. Since I couldn’t remember the first name of either of the parents or most of the kids, I almost panicked. I couldn’t remember the name of any of the four sons.

Of the two daughters, I knew one of them was called Sheila, and I remembered that because I had been so mean to her. Another Google search, this time specifically for Sheila Larkin in Portland, Oregon, kicked back several hits, and by the time I’d sorted all of them it was already past nine, but I’d narrowed it down to three. One of them was thirteen, and had a page devoted to her favorite television shows, movies, and musicians.

She wasn’t a fan.

The second one was just a faculty listing at OHSU, in the Pediatric Care Unit.

The third was attached to a Web site for “Cuddle Group Daycare,” and that was the one I went with, because at the top of the Web page for the site there was a spinning Jesus fish. A phone number and e-mail link were included at the bottom of the page.

I called, and it was answered after four rings. Children were hollering in the background.

“Cuddle Group Daycare.”

“I’m trying to reach Sheila Larkin,” I said. “Is she there?”

“This is she. Who is this, please?”

“My name’s Miriam Bracca. I don’t know if you remember me.”

There was the barest of pauses. “Of course I remember you. What can I do for you, Miss Bracca?”

“It’s actually a little awkward, I was wondering if I could come and talk to you.”

Another pause. I heard a child’s shriek, but I couldn’t tell if it was delight or outrage.

“When?” Sheila Larkin asked.

“Sooner the better, actually.”

“If you don’t mind some dirty diapers, you can come over now.” She gave me an address in the southeast part of town, near Reed College, and I told her I thought it would be about an hour before I got there, and she said that would be fine.

I changed into day clothes, then gave myself a status report in the mirror. My fingers hurt, and the knuckles were swollen, but I could move them, and there was no visible bruising. The gash on my forehead looked calmer, too, less angry. But now I had a golf-ball-sized bruise on the side of my chest from the collision with the Strat, and the marks on my throat were clearly visible, if somewhat faint.

I used makeup to cover what I could, and was headed downstairs when the doorbell rang.

It was Hoffman and Marcus. He was wearing a duplicate of his work suit, and she was going with another slacks-blouse-blazer combo, and when I opened the door she shot me a grin, and when I didn’t return it, it crumpled like rice paper.

“I was on my way out,” I said.

“This won’t take long,” Marcus said. “Could we come in?”

I tried to look past them without being obvious about it, tried to determine if the Parka Man was watching. Leaving them to linger on the porch was only going to make matters worse, but letting them inside might get Tommy killed.

“What’s this about?”

“Let’s go inside, we can talk.”

My hesitation was growing obvious, and I caved, letting them through and then closing the door fast behind them. I had to hope Parka Man wasn’t watching, that he was confident in the scare he’d thrown into me the night before.

They waited, followed me down the hall to the kitchen. Hoffman held up just inside the archway, watching me with her cop look, the one that made it impossible to read her emotions. Marcus went to the table and took a seat.

“What’s this about?” I asked again.

“Have you seen your father in the last twenty-four hours?” Hoffman asked.

“Nope,” I said, and I sounded convincing to me.

“He was staying at your brother’s place, did you know that?”

“I’m not surprised. I don’t think he had anywhere else to go.”

“But you haven’t been to see him there?”

“Why would I?”

“You haven’t been there?” Hoffman asked again.

“No, I haven’t seen him since the funeral.”

“He’s not at your brother’s,” Marcus said. “We went by to talk to him this morning, early, and he wasn’t there.”

Hoffman’s expression faltered, her brow creasing, and I knew she was trying to figure out why I’d gone cold on her, and I only hoped she took it the wrong way.

She said, “Normally, someone doesn’t answer the door, we don’t make a thing out of it. They’re out or they’re asleep.”

“Both possible,” I said.

“That’s what we’d be thinking, too, except that Allan, here, he saw something that got us a little worried. He saw some blood, dried blood, on the front step of the condo.”

She paused, waiting for me to react. I didn’t say anything.

Marcus picked it up. “Blood at a crime scene, that’s not unusual, you know. And your brother’s place, that’s a crime scene. So I’m all fired up to go in, hey, it’s blood, maybe there’s trouble. But Tracy here, she’s cooler than me, she says wait a sec, she pulls out her phone, gets one of the state techs on the line, one of the guys who processed your brother’s murder. And she asks them if they pulled any blood evidence from outside of the house. You know what the answer to that is?”

I shrugged, shaking a cigarette loose from my pack on the counter. It was easier to look at the yellow box of smokes than at either of them.

“The answer was no, there was no blood pulled from outside. So we effected an entry, because that’s probable cause, you see.”

“Your father’s missing,” Hoffman said. “There’s a large amount of blood—and it’s new, it’s not your brother’s—in the living room there. Your father’s clothes are still in the guest room. How’d you cut your forehead, Miss Bracca?”

It was the refusal to use my first name that did it, made me see where they were going.

“I took a spill,” I said.

“Looks nasty.”

“I was pretty loaded.”

There was silence. Marcus and Hoffman waited. I tried to think of something to say, and it occurred to me that any lie I gave them now was only going to make things worse. If they knew it was Tommy’s blood on the carpet, then they had probably found some of mine, too; if they had, then they’d be able to match it to the samples they’d taken from my towels and sheets and so on when they’d searched my own home.

Which meant they’d know I had been there. It was only a matter of time.

Marcus asked, “We’re wondering if you’d be willing to come downtown with us and answer some more questions.”

“I really can’t,” I said. “I have an appointment I need to keep.”

“It won’t take long,” Marcus said.

“I’m thinking I should call my lawyer.”

“As always, that’s your prerogative.”

Hoffman didn’t say anything.

I found Chapel’s number and called his office as they watched me. When the receptionist answered, I gave her my name and said I needed to speak to Mr. Chapel.

“I’m sorry, Miss Bracca, but he’s busy at the moment,” the receptionist said.

“It’s Joy, right?” I asked.

She seemed pleased that I’d remembered. “Yes, it is.”

“Joy, could you tell him that there are two detectives in my kitchen asking me to go downtown with them?”

“Just a second,” she said.

The hold music, appallingly enough, was Rosie 105 FM, and they were halfway through the second verse of “Lie Life.” I thought about singing along, and decided against it.

As the third chorus was ending, Chapel came on the line. He was brusque.

“It’s Hoffman and Marcus?”

“Yeah.”

“Put one of them on,” Chapel said.

I extended the phone to Hoffman. “He wants to talk to you.”

She took the phone out of my hand, meeting my eyes. There was anger, and there was hurt, and I tried to give her nothing in return. She put the phone to her ear and said her name, and then for most of a minute, didn’t say anything else.

Then she said, “No, you’ve made that perfectly clear,” and offered the phone back to me.

“They’re leaving,” Chapel told me. “I’ve told them that they are under no circumstances to question you about anything without me present, and that if they want to take you downtown, they’re going to need a warrant. I’m going to stay on the phone. You follow them out, make sure they leave your property. I’ll wait.”

“Gotcha.”

I set the phone down on the counter, and Marcus was already halfway to the front door, Hoffman following. I went after them. Marcus exited first, but Hoffman stopped on the porch to pick up the morning paper and hand it over.

“Don’t make last night a mistake,” she said. “Let me help you.”

I shook my head, said, “I don’t need help.”

And I shut the door on her.

“Why were they there?” Chapel demanded.

I relayed everything the detectives had told me, without embellishment.

“Do you know where your father is?”

“No idea.”

“And you haven’t been to your brother’s condo?”

“Not since I found his body,” I said. “Can I ask you, that bit about a warrant? Are they liable to come back with one?”

“Not unless they’ve got some damn compelling evidence and the D.A. is willing to charge you. It’s the same situation as before. And with the pictures in the media, and so soon after your brother’s murder? Unless the D.A. knows you did something wrong, unless he can prove it, he’d look like a complete asshole. If what you’re telling me is right, they don’t even have a crime.”

“They said there was blood.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. Suppose your father went on a bender, cut his wrists, and then thought better of it? Maybe he’s in a bed at Legacy Emanuel or Providence as a John Doe. Until they know what’s happened to him, they’ve got nothing. And if they think there’s a murder, they need a body, or a head, or some heart or brain matter. Otherwise, they’ve got nothing.”

“So I don’t have to worry about them?”

“Not unless there’s something you haven’t told me,” Chapel said.

I was finding it easier and easier to lie without pause. “No, nothing. They just made me nervous, that’s all.”

“They’re detectives, they do it on purpose. Call me if they come back.”

I told him I would, hung up, and headed for my appointment with Cuddle Group Daycare.

CHAPTER 30

It was Sheila Larkin’s business, and she ran it out of her home eight blocks south of the Reed campus. I drove past the grounds and its falling leaves, onto the slender streets with the slightly upscale housing dedicated to the campus faculty. Pumpkins perched on porches and walks, waiting to be lit up as soon as night fell, and a couple of the homes had more prominent Halloween decorations, paper skeletons hanging from awnings. One home had an elm in its front yard with half of a broomstick jutting from its trunk on the one side, a witch splayed against the tree on the other, as if she’d crashed her flight.

The decorations at Cuddle Group Daycare were bright and nothing as sinister, construction-paper pumpkins of orange and black smiling brightly from where they’d been taped to the windows. There were eleven kids under care, and three other providers aside from Sheila, all of them women her age or younger. The kids ranged from a towheaded toddler who careened around the playroom, head-butting all of the adults in their legs, to a four-month-old little girl, who sobbed hysterically in one woman’s lap.

Sheila Larkin looked nothing like I remembered, and when she answered the door, I didn’t recognize her at all. She seemed to have stopped growing upward shortly after I’d come out from beneath her parents’ roof, then made up for the lack of progress by expanding horizontally, instead. Her hair was long and worn in a ponytail, and it made her seem shorter and fatter.

She smiled at me, though, and offered me her hand, and I followed her into the din of children. We negotiated the playroom, stepping over toys and tots. The other women were all careful to not look at me, or at least, to not look at me when they thought I could see them doing it, and I wondered what Sheila had told them. There were small gates up in every doorway, and Sheila had to open and close three of them before we were done. The kitchen was clean, but cluttered, and smelled of last night’s fried chicken and baby poop. Sheila offered me a seat at the table and a glass of something to drink, and I took the seat and passed on the glass, and after some more mild fussing about, she joined me.

“I was surprised to hear from you,” Sheila said. “I didn’t think you’d even remember us.”

“I wish I could say I’m surprised that you remembered me,” I said. “But I think I made a lasting impression.”

Sheila smiled, and seemed to relax a little. “You know, it was Donny who told us first, that you were a big rock star, now. We were all so impressed, I had to call Daddy and tell him, and he sounded so happy that you had grown up well. He said that all those prayers we were making for you, some of them must have gotten through.”

“I guess some of them did.”

Her face fell. “I’m so sorry about your brother. I barely remembered him, but then I saw it on the news last week, and all I could think was that it didn’t seem fair at all. And they say your daddy did it?”

“He’s a suspect,” I said. “But they don’t know who did it.”

Sheila adjusted herself in her seat. “I don’t expect this is why you called, though, is it? To talk about that?”

“No. I’m actually wondering if you can tell me about your family. After Mikel’s funeral, I started thinking about all the people who had taken us into their homes, and about how . . . how rotten I was, at least. And I wanted to say I was sorry. I was hoping to start with you, sort of work my way through the tree, so to speak.”

“I’m not sure that’s necessary. You had been through some awful things, we all understood.” Sheila looked embarrassingly touched, for a moment.

“It doesn’t really excuse the behavior.”

“Well, if it matters, I forgave you long ago. I know my parents did, too.”

“How about your brothers?”

Sheila grinned. “Oh, you don’t have to worry about them.”

“No? They’re well?”

She laughed. “They’re crazy, that’s what they are! Moved up to Alaska about two years ago, the lot of them. Donny’s teaching Eskimo boys and girls out in the bush, I think that’s the word for it, and William, Ben, and Bobby, they’re entrepreneurs. They’ve got a couple planes, they all learned how to fly, you see, and they sell tours.”

Scratch the Larkin boys, I thought, and she saw disappointment on my face and misread it as something else.

“Oh, I know,” Sheila said. “I think it’s crazy, too, but they love it. Only problem they’re having, according to what Mom says, is that they can’t find any women. Not enough single girls in Alaska, I guess.”

I made a sympathetic noise, and asked her a few more questions, mostly to round out the conversation. She told me that she’d been married for six years, now, and that she had three kids of her own, only one of them part of the quorum in the next room. Her husband was an investor-broker for Prudential here in town, and they were very happy. Before she’d had her first child, she didn’t know what it was she wanted to do with her life. But when the first baby was born, she had discovered that she had a knack for child care, and she’d gone to school to get certified, and opened the business on her own. She said the work fulfilled her.

“That must be what making music is like for you,” Sheila said.

I started feeling the foreboding as soon as I was back behind the wheel of the Jeep. The Larkins had been a long shot in the sea of long shots, and if I’d been honest with myself, I wouldn’t have gone with them first.

The Quicks should have been number one.

My dashboard clock said it was coming up on noon, and it adjusted my priorities.

I had to get over to Graham’s before he left town, to pick up the cash.

The guard in the lobby was the same one from the day before, and he grinned at me when I came in, saying, “Hey there, Miss Bracca.”

“Hi,” I said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name yesterday.”

He looked almost embarrassed. “Oh, yeah. I’m Lee.”

“Nice to meet you, Lee. I’m Mim.” I shook his hand.

He laughed. “You can go on up, Mim.”

Graham answered his door within seconds of my knocking. He was dressed in his travel suit, which was one of the nicest he owned. I’d asked him once why he always wore a three-piece for an airplane, and he’d hemmed and hawed, then admitted that he was scared to death of flying. When I’d said that wasn’t really an answer, he’d gone into a lengthy explanation about how many rock stars die in plane crashes, and the reason for that being that musicians travel a lot, always going from gig to gig, and with odds like that, he figured he should be ready.

“It’s my good-luck charm,” he’d said. “I figure the one day I don’t bother to get dressed up, that’ll be the day the plane goes down.”

He had all but one of the three pieces in place, the jacket draped over the arm of the couch, and he ushered me in and then presented me with the bag of cash as if he was introducing a deb at a ball. The duffel was bright yellow, with black trim, and had a Nike swoosh on the side. He pulled open the top flap, and revealed a mass of bills, hundreds, strapped together in bunches with paper bands.

“Got Van’s donation to the fund this morning. You want to count it?” Graham asked, leaning over my shoulder and nudging me. “Make sure it’s all there, huh?”

“That is a fucking lot of money,” I said.

“That is, indeed, a fucking lot of money. It has its own smell; you smell that?” He took a deep and audible inhale through his nose. “Paper and ink and something else, you know what I mean? You got to get it out of here, it’s making me horny as hell, and I’ve got a strict hands-off policy with the talent.”

I zipped the duffel shut and hoisted it onto my shoulder, and was surprised at how much it weighed. Not as much as my Tele, but close, and I wondered what another six hundred thousand dollars would do to the weight.

“Off to Glasgow?” I asked.

“Yeah, flight’s in just over three hours. I’ve got to hustle. I’ll walk down with you.”

He pulled on his jacket and got his travel bag from where it was waiting by the door, and we rode the elevator together. Lee wished us both a safe and good trip, and I didn’t challenge his assumption that I was back to gigging. I suppose it was the duffel on my shoulder that did it, made him think that I was hitting the road again.

“Can I drop you anywhere?” I asked Graham.

“You can put me on the MAX line, if you would, that’d be nice,” he told me.

“No cab?”

“Hey, I can get out to the airport hassle free for a buck fifty, why should I pay for a cab?”

“Because Van hires a limo.”

“Van’s the star. I’m management.”

We climbed into the Jeep, and I dropped him at one of the many MAX stops on Yamhill, so he could catch the train. I wished him a safe trip.

“What happened to your hand?” he asked as he was climbing out.

“Nothing.”

“Mim, your knuckles are all bashed up. That’s not good, that’ll screw your playing.”

“I’ll get it checked out.”

“You had damn well better. I never did take out that policy from Lloyds.”

“Did Van get her shrine?”

“Still working on that, too.”

I grinned and kept it in place until he’d slammed the door and turned away, and then I popped into gear, and headed for the main branch of the Multnomah County Library.

He’d never been anyone but “Mr. Quick” to me, so the first thing I looked for was his Christian name. The government employee listings did the trick, though I had to search back three years before finding Gareth Quick, in the Office of the State Treasurer. Either he’d retired or been laid off or quit, but he hadn’t appeared to have died, because there was a listing in the Salem White Pages for a Gareth and Anne Quick, and the address given rang true in my memory, and I figured it was the same place, the same house. There were no listings for either Chris or Brian Quick, though, so I’d have to talk to the parents to find them.

It was late afternoon when I was finished, and I was getting anxious to get back to my house and get the money out of my car. Lugging it around in the library had made me feel odd, and I’d kept expecting someone to ask me to open the bag. Even though the money itself wasn’t illegally acquired, the thought of having to explain it made me nervous.

Trick-or-treaters were already out and moving along the sidewalks, jack-o’-lanterns on every residential block glowing a warm orange. I didn’t have anything to give any visitors who might stop by, so I stopped at the Safeway near my house on the way home and dumped forty dollars on bags of assorted sweets.

Inside, I made sure the porch and all of my front lights were off, then took the duffel bag down to the basement. I supposed there were safer places to store the money, but I hadn’t been able to think of anything. In the end, I folded the bag up as small as I could get it, and then stuck it in the hollow back of my Fender blues amp, then pushed the amp so its back was against the wall. As long as I didn’t switch the thing on, it shouldn’t be a problem.

I filled a big bowl with candy, positioned it and a chair just inside my front door, then turned on the lights, trying to make the house as welcoming as possible. It was probably silly, but Halloween was the way I remembered my mother, because she always loved it. No matter what else was going on in my life right now, if I was going to have to wait until morning before I went to see the Quicks, I’d damn well honor her memory tonight.

While I was waiting for the first trick-or-treater to arrive, I checked my messages. There were five of them, and only four from people I didn’t want to talk to. A guy calling himself Peter Bergman who said he was from Rolling Stone had called, wanting to talk about my brother for the story he was writing, and he left a callback number; two of the local television outlets and one radio had called, asking if I’d be willing to do an interview; and Click, who chastised me for ditching him the night before, and wished me well, and said that he’d call to check in from the road.

The doorbell rang just after I’d finished, and I went to answer it, ready with the bowl of candy.

It was Joan, bundled in the same old coat she’d worn every winter for the last decade, carrying a pizza box.

She saw the look on my face and said, “You didn’t think I’d forget?”

“I almost forgot myself,” I admitted. I let her get the box on the kitchen counter and herself out of her coat before giving her a hug. “You are too nice to me.”

“If it’s true, then you shouldn’t be pointing it out.”

I got down plates and cans of soda, and we pulled slices of pizza and sat in the front hall, making small talk and eating. She told me about her day, about the trouble with the music program, the ever-present budget cuts.

She waited until I was done eating and had taken our plates to the kitchen before she asked me what happened to my forehead.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Accident-prone.”

“It looks painful.”

“It’s not too bad. Only hurts when I think.” I furrowed my brow, to prove the point.

There was a brief, but very awkward pause, and her eyes seemed to get a little dimmer. She tried to hide it, but I knew what she’d concluded, that she had gone to my lie without needing any direction, because it was the logical place to go. I wanted to tell her she was wrong, that I hadn’t been drunk, that I hadn’t been drunk since before the funeral, but I knew she wouldn’t believe me.

We were spared by the doorbell, a group of two Harry Potters, a Hermione, and a very traditional bedsheet ghost. One of the Harrys was actually a girl, and after they’d stated their demands, I went after her.

“So what’s the trick?” I asked.

She didn’t miss a beat. “Turn you into a newt.”

“That’s a good one; think I better pay up.” To Harry Number Two, I asked, “And you?”

“Newt?”

“Taken.”

He adjusted his plastic glasses. “I’ll give you warts. Warts all over your face, they’ll be totally gross and stuff.”

“Ew. All right, a handful, that’ll keep my skin clear?”

“For now.”

“Oh, a tough guy. Okay. Next?”

The ghost told me he’d haunt me until I was so scared I’d wet my pants. Both of the Harrys and the Hermione thought that was funny, and giggled. Joan, listening in the hall behind me, nearly bust a gut. The ghost got a really big handful.

Hermione told me that she’d make me rich.

“I am rich,” I told her.

“I’ll make you richer.”

“Not sure I want that.”

She frowned, gnawed on her lip, adjusted her pillowcase full of swag. “Nobody else does this, everyone else just gives us candy.”

“Hey, you want candy, you got to do it right.”

Hermione smiled with an idea, said, “Okay, see, I know who you are, and if you give me candy, I’ll bring your brother back from the dead.”

It threw me for a second.

“You can do that?” I asked.

“Not yet,” she admitted.

I dumped two handfuls into her bag. “Let me know when you’ve worked that out, okay?”

Joan pulled another chair from the kitchen and joined me, and we had fun with it, and for a while again, I forgot to be afraid. It had been Joan who made Halloween a pleasure for me again, she who had explained that it was trick or treat, and that you had to play along with the extortion.

Given where I was, this kind of blackmail was a hell of a lot more enjoyable.

It was when I was dumping candy into the bags of unidentifiable monsters, soldiers, and two teenagers too old for it, but in good costumes—both were Star Wars Jedi Knights—that I registered what I’d been seeing on the street the whole time.

A car, parked just inside the view from my door, across the street. That alone wasn’t alarming, but there was someone inside of it, and that gave me pause.

I told myself it wasn’t the Parka Man, that even if my porch light was on, he had to know it was for Halloween. Since there’d been no return visit after the two cops had descended that morning, I had to assume he had faith that the terror he’d put in me would stay, that I’d pay up on time, without causing him trouble.

Couldn’t be him.

It wasn’t something I could concentrate on, either, with Joan beside me and kids parading to and from my doorstep. Each time I looked out, I tried to keep it subtle, and, once, I saw whoever was in the car move, but I didn’t see any features.

The last trick-or-treater came by just before nine, and that was good, because I’d almost run out of candy. I’m very generous on Halloween, I give handfuls, not just one or two pieces, and some years I’ve been reduced to giving away whatever is suitable in the kitchen, bags of pretzels or chips. I never give fruit or vegetables or things like that. What kid in their right mind wants an apple when they can have a Snickers bar?