Double Image

1

THE MOMENT THE DELTA AIRLINES 757 LIFTED OFF, its engines roaring, Tash said, “Let me see the photographs.”

But when Coltrane tried to lean forward to pick up the carrying case in the storage compartment under his feet, his seat belt prevented him. He started to unbuckle it, then thought better as the jet continued its steep climb. From his right-hand window seat, he noticed that they were passing above the yachts and sailboats at Marina del Rey. He had a painful mental image of Jennifer’s condominium down there. Saturday morning, she might be sitting on her balcony, drinking coffee, perhaps looking up at the jet flying over.

“I’d better wait until we level off,” he said.

“I could barely sleep for worrying that I wouldn’t be able to identify the face you’re suspicious about.”

“Identifying the face isn’t the problem. I already know who he is. The question is, will he look familiar to you?”

“You know who he is?”

“It came as a big surprise. In the photographs, there’s a man taking photographs of you. Randolph Packard’s assistant, Duncan Reynolds. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“No.” Confused, Tash searched her memory. “I don’t understand. What does Packard’s assistant have to do with me? Why would he single me out if I don’t know him?”

“Maybe you’ll soon have an answer.”

Glancing out the window again, Coltrane saw the gleam of sails on the wave-scudded ocean. Then the jet banked inland, heading south over the smog-shrouded L.A. basin. To the right, in the distance, he saw the tiny outline of Santa Catalina Island and was reminded that Packard’s mother and father had died in a sailing accident near there. Packard, then sixteen, had been the only survivor. According to his biographies, the family had just returned from a voyage to Mexico. Had they been to Acapulco, just as he and Tash were going there?

“The pilot isn’t climbing so steeply now,” Tash said.

His thoughts interrupted, Coltrane turned from the window and looked at her. Again, he was struck by her beauty. She had dressed casually: deck shoes, khaki pants, a yellow cotton pullover, and a linen jacket, it too khaki, the cuffs folded up. A turquoise necklace. Hardly any makeup, only subtle eyeliner that echoed something in the turquoise, and a touch of peach lipstick. But for all her casual appearance, she looked stunning.

“Yes.” He unbuckled his seat belt, leaned forward, and picked up the black case. When he opened it and handed her some of the photographs, he had never seen a more intense expression on anyone’s face.

“Which one?” Tash asked.

“I don’t want to prejudice you. I’m going to start with the first exposure I made. We’ll go through the locations in the order you visited them, starting with the Beverly Center.”

As Tash examined each one, she pursed her lips in concentration. “I don’t see anybody I recognize.”

“Here’s the next set.”

Again, Tash concentrated. “Nobody I recognize here, either.”

“No repeated faces?”

“None.”

She went through the third set with the same result. “There’s too much to pay attention to. I’m worried that I’m missing something.”

“Keep trying. Here’s the fourth set. We’re almost finished.”

Coltrane had put the photographs that troubled him into the middle, where they wouldn’t be conspicuous.

“Nope. Nothing on this one, either. And not on this one. And…” Words catching in her throat, Tash raised the next photograph, then went back to the three previous ones. Tensing, she looked at several of the next ones. “Him. The one with the camera.”

“I shouldn’t have mentioned the camera. It prejudiced you.”

“No. In fact, I went right by it. Your eyes for this are better than mine. But this man…” She tapped a face. “This man I recognize. He was with the attorney who came to my house and told me that Randolph Packard had included me in his will.”

Coltrane stared.

“But the name he used wasn’t Duncan Reynolds. It was William Butler. He said he worked for the attorney. What’s going on? Why did he lie to me?”

“Maybe he didn’t want you to know his connection with Packard. Obviously, if you knew who he was, you’d have asked him all kinds of questions about why Packard included you in his will.”

“Questions he didn’t want to answer.”

“It’s a reasonable guess.”

“But why wouldn’t he have wanted to answer my questions?” Tash’s voice had become so strong with anxiety that an expensively dressed couple in the adjacent row frowned at her. She leaned close to Coltrane and lowered her voice. “Why is he doing this to me?”

“I told you I did a photo assignment for the LAPD Threat Management Unit,” Coltrane said.

“Yes.”

“It taught me a lot. People think that stalkers are either rejected husbands and boyfriends, or fans obsessed with celebrities and politicians. But there are other categories. I found out some stalkers have only a casual relationship with their victims. A checkout kid at a supermarket becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman who shops there. He stands close to her while she pays by check, and he gets a look at her name and address. He starts driving by her house. When that doesn’t satisfy him, he watches the house at night. Then that’s not enough, and he follows her. He phones the house, hoping to hear her voice. He sends her flowers and notes. He takes surreptitious photographs of her. He wants desperately to have a relationship with her, but he knows that’s impossible, and as his frustration mounts, he gets angry. Finally he decides to punish her for being too good for him, so he gets a can of gasoline or a knife or a gun and…”

Tash shuddered. “You’re suggesting Duncan Reynolds fits that profile?”

“I wouldn’t have believed it without the evidence. To tell you the truth, I kind of like him. He doesn’t seem the type,” Coltrane said. “But then, what is the type? When neighbors find out the man living next door to them just went to where he works and shot five people, they always say, ‘But he was so quiet. I never would have expected him to do anything like that.’ Who knows what anybody’s capable of?”

Tash shuddered again. “What you said about the knife is a little too vivid.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.” Coltrane touched her hand to reassure her. A crackle of static electricity jumped from her.

They both stared at where it had happened.

“Maybe what I’m really giving off is fear.” Tash reached for the telephone attached to the seat back in front of her.

“What are you doing?” Coltrane asked.

“I’m phoning Walt. Now that we finally know who’s been threatening me, the police can arrest him. They can make the bastard admit he’s been stalking me.”

“No. Stop,” Coltrane said.

“What’s wrong?”

“Walt can’t do anything without evidence. He’ll want to see the photographs.”

“Then we’ll show them to him.” A thought struck her. “Oh.”

“You see what I’m getting at? You’ll have to explain why you can’t show him the photographs. A vague excuse about taking a brief trip first is only going to puzzle him. If your evidence is so convincing, why are you waiting a couple of days to bring it to him?”

“I’ll seem like a flake.”

“Unless you tell him the whole story,” Coltrane said. “That you didn’t see the photographs until you were on a jet to Acapulco. But once he knows where you’re going, he’ll ask why.”

“And our quiet getaway becomes everybody’s business.” Tash exhaled in discouragement. “If Carl finds out, he might even come after us.”

“Right.”

Her hand unsteady, Tash returned the phone to the seat back. “Duncan Reynolds doesn’t know where I am, either. For now, there are just the two of us.”

“You’re sure you weren’t followed to the airport?”

“I used a taxi. I told the driver to drop me off at United. Once inside, I hurried over to Delta. What was anyone following me going to do? He couldn’t just abandon his car in all that traffic at the departure doors. His car would be towed away while he was trying to find me in the terminal.”

“Is everything all right?”

Coltrane and Tash looked up in surprise at a female flight attendant.

“We just realized we had some business we forgot to take care of before we left,” Coltrane said. “I guess there’s no good time to take a vacation.”

“Well, the movie we’re showing is a comedy. Maybe it’ll help get you in a holiday mood.”

“I certainly hope so.”

2

IF THEY HADN’T BEEN SO PREOCCUPIED, the rest of the three-and-a-half-hour flight would have been a pleasure. The service was first-class, especially the Mexican lunch of sea bass with tomato sauce, olives, and sweet and hot peppers. The scenery was spectacular. Glancing out his window, Coltrane saw the blue of the Gulf of California, with the rugged coastal cliffs of Baja California on the right. Then Baja ended in a series of dramatic rock formations, and the Pacific Ocean was spread out before him, breathtaking, as the jet continued along its southeast route far down Mexico’s coast toward Acapulco.

When Cortés’s soldiers had discovered the area in 1521, it was obvious that the deep C-shaped bay would make one of the finest harbors in the world, an article in Delta’s seat-pocket magazine said. For hundreds of years, it had been a major trading depot, but not until the 1920s had the sleepy village with its pristine beaches and impressive mountainous background become prized as a recreation area. Rich vacationers from Mexico City were soon followed by the powerful and famous from other countries. B. Traven, Malcolm Lowry, and Sherwood Anderson had been there, as had Tennessee Williams, whose The Night of the Iguana was set there. But from its zenith in the fifties and sixties, Acapulco’s popularity had declined due to overbuilding and overpopulation. Only in the late eighties had the authorities made a major effort to refurbish the resort and return it to its former glory.

To get a good view, Tash and Coltrane had to leave their seats and shift over to the left windows as the pilot announced his descent past the city.

“I wasn’t prepared for how big it is.” Coltrane stared in wonder.

“The magazine article mentioned that more than a million people live down there,” Tash said.

“Yeah, and I bet very few of them can afford to stay in those hotels.”

Hundreds of them, huge and brilliant in the sun, rimmed the semicircular harbor or perched on tropical slopes beyond it. Coltrane took a mental photograph of the impressionistic display below him, the green of myriad palm trees blending with copper cliffs, coral roofs, golden sand, and the azure bay. Cruise ships waited near the mouth of the harbor while excursion boats streamed toward docks, passing speedboats, sailboats, and yachts.

“But it didn’t look like this in 1934,” Coltrane said. “There wasn’t a telephone until two years later. Land could be bought for three cents an acre. Only three thousand people lived down there. As hard to get to as it was, this would have been Eden’s outpost.”

“And Packard’s Eden, Espalda del Gato, was even smaller,” Tash said. “I wonder how Rebecca Chance reacted when Packard took her there.”

3

THEY HAD ONLY CARRY-ON LUGGAGE, so after obtaining their tourist cards and passing through immigration, they were able to leave the chaos of the hangarlike terminal sooner than they expected. An airport taxi drove them northward along a coast that had golf courses, beaches, and luxury hotels, one of which resembled an Aztec pyramid. After twenty minutes, the highway climbed to the rim of a hill, where the spectacle of Acapulco’s harbor appeared before them.

Costera Miguel Alemán, a scenic avenue that paralleled the curve of the bay, took them past modern-looking highrise buildings to the old part of the city, where the architecture was traditionally Mexican and where they got out at a small hotel called El Geranio Blanco, the White Geranium, which the driver recommended when he found out that they didn’t have a place to stay. He had a relative who worked there, he said, and although January was one of Acapulco’s busiest months, he was sure that a room could be obtained for a suitable price. And a suitable tip, Coltrane thought after the driver came back from speaking to his relative inside, announcing with a smile that everything had been arranged. The smile grew broader when Coltrane gave him fifty dollars. As the taxi pulled away, he and Tash peered up at the array of white geraniums on each of the hotel’s wrought-iron balconies.

“Let’s hope our driver was telling the truth about the relative he had inside,” Coltrane said.

They looked questioningly at each other and suddenly found the idea that they might have been cheated inexplicably funny. As things turned out, a room had indeed been obtained for them – one so small that the bed practically filled it, with only one window, on the fifth floor, the uppermost in a hotel that didn’t have an elevator, for a rate that Coltrane suspected was equal to that for the most luxurious in the building.

“What do you think? Should we go somewhere else?” Coltrane asked.

“From what our driver said, the town’s packed. I vote for staying,” Tash said. “Look on the bright side. At least we’ve got a bathroom.”

“But we have to crawl over the bed to get to it.”

“Details, details.”

“And there’s something else we have to do.”

“Are you still referring to the bed?”

“Carl Nolan.”

4

“I MADE A MISTAKE,” Tash said.

Coltrane inwardly squirmed. “How so?”

They sat at a small wooden table at an outdoor café in Old Acapulco’s busy plaza. Both had margaritas. Neither had touched them.

“The first thing you have to understand,” Tash said, “is the past few weeks, since my trouble started, Carl and I have been together a lot.”

Coltrane felt a sinking sensation.

“Nothing happened,” Tash said.

“Look, I feel terrible asking you about this. Your life is your own. This wouldn’t be any of my business if he hadn’t threatened me.”

“No,” Tash said. “I’d make it your business even if he hadn’t threatened you. If we’re going to have a future together, you have every right to know about my past.”

The plaza was shaded by palm trees. Children played on a bandstand. A Moorish-looking church with yellow spires and an onion-shaped blue top dominated the far end.

Coltrane registered none of this. “Is that what you want – a future with me?”

Tash smiled warmly. “I feel more comfortable with you than with any man I’ve ever met. As if I’ve known you a long time. But of course I haven’t, so I get to have all the fun of finding out about you.”

Emotion made it impossible for Coltrane to speak.

“Carl and I spent time together,” Tash said. “So did Lyle and I, Walt and I, the others. They’re my bodyguards, after all. One or another is usually with me – in cars, at the house. We share meals. We talk.”

Coltrane waited uneasily.

“When the package with the bull’s heart was delivered to my house, there was so much blood… It freaked me out. A lab crew came and took it. Then Carl showed up to see if there was anything he could do. Walt and Lyle were already there, but they couldn’t stay – they had a break-in to investigate. But Carl told them not to worry, that he’d hang around for a while, so they left.”

Coltrane leaned forward.

“I was so upset that I started sobbing,” Tash said. “I reached out and held him. I can’t tell you how tired I was of feeling frightened. When he started kissing me, I didn’t resist. It was human contact. It was… But then his kisses became more forceful, and he was touching me and-”

“Stop. You don’t need to put yourself through this,” Coltrane said.

“No, if Carl ever tells you I led him on, I want to make sure you understand everything. I want to explain this now so I don’t ever have to do it again.”

On the other side of the crowded plaza, a mariachi band started playing.

Coltrane didn’t hear it.

“I pushed Carl away,” Tash said. “I told him that he had the wrong idea, that sex wasn’t what I wanted, that all I needed was a little comfort. I told him my life was out of control as it was, without complicating things. He said he’d fallen in love with me. He wanted to know what was wrong with him that I didn’t want him, and I told him that under the present circumstances I couldn’t think about wanting anybody.”

Fidgeting, Tash glanced toward the harbor, where excursion yachts and fishing boats were docking, but the faraway look in her eyes made clear that what she was seeing had happened weeks earlier.

“The truth is, I knew I could never have a relationship with him. But this is what went through my mind. I’m not proud of it. Even so, here it is. I was thinking that some nut was out there, probably planning to kill me, and I needed all the help I could get. So I wasn’t firm in rejecting him. When Carl asked, ‘Maybe not now, but what about later, after we find this creep and you don’t have to worry anymore?’ I didn’t have the courage to be honest. Instead of telling him no, what I said was that I couldn’t think about anything like that while I was jumping at shadows. Now I realize that the false hope he took from that conversation is all he’s been thinking about. When you showed up at my house on New Year’s Day, I could see his resentment when I asked you to stay and talk about the estate I’d inherited. I could feel his jealousy.”

“So he decided to pay me a visit at the Beverly Center and make sure I understood that I wasn’t welcome, that he had dibs on you,” Coltrane said.

“I’m afraid that’s how he sees it – that he has dibs on me.”

Coltrane’s cheek muscles hardened. “Well, when we get back to L.A., after we arrange for Duncan Reynolds to be arrested, I’ll make sure Carl gets his mind straight.”

“No, let the police handle it. I don’t want you to get hurt.”

“This time, he wouldn’t be catching me by surprise.”

“Please,” Tash said. “It was my mistake. There’s been enough trouble. Let’s not start more.”

Coltrane couldn’t resist her plaintive tone. “All right.” He worked to calm himself. “I’ll let the police handle it.”

“Thank you.”

When he touched her hand, he was pleased that this time there wasn’t any static electricity. “The main thing is, it’s almost over.”

“Almost over.” Tash sounded wistful. “Something worth drinking to.”

They picked up their margaritas, clicking glasses.

“In fact, if we hadn’t decided to fly down here, it would be over,” Coltrane said. “Do you want to go home tomorrow, settle everything, and come back for a real vacation?”

“A day longer isn’t going to make a difference. I need to know why Randolph Packard put me in his will. If we can find the estate I inherited, it might give me some answers.”

“Yes. From the moment I found Packard’s photographs of Rebecca Chance, I’ve had the sense that the past and the present are connected.” Coltrane set down his glass and picked up his camera. “Hold that pose.”

Now that he was paying attention to the plaza, he realized that this wasn’t the first time he had seen the Moorish-looking church behind Tash. Its onion-shaped top had been in one of the photographs in the vault. Rebecca Chance had been in this plaza. So had Randolph Packard.

Coltrane pressed the shutter button.

5

“WHERE IT’S JUST THE TWO OF US. Where we can talk and swim and lie on the beach,” Tash had said, describing some of the reasons she wanted to go to Acapulco. It was too late for the swim, but just the right time to take a stroll, hand in hand, up a shop-lined hill to the cliff above the harbor, and watch the crimson of the sunset tint the blue of the ocean. As Tash leaned her head against his shoulder, Coltrane put his arm around her. They peered out toward the sun sinking below the horizon, only a faint orange sliver visible.

“Watch for a green flash.”

She turned to him, puzzled.

“No, don’t look at me,” Coltrane said. “Keep your eyes on the horizon. In a second, there’s going to be a green flash.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Packard wrote a book about photography. He called it Sightings, and in it, he claimed that during the instant the sun vanishes below the horizon, there’s a green flash. He claimed to have seen it many times, something to do with a change in the spectrum of light, and he said it had been one of his career-long goals to capture a photograph of that flash, although he was never able to, because by the time he saw it and pressed the shutter button, the flash was over. He tried to anticipate it and press the shutter button just before he thought the flash was going to happen, but he never managed that, either. I’ve spent many evenings staring at sunsets, trying to see that flash, but I’ve never been able to.”

“Was Packard telling the truth? Do you think the flash really happens?”

“Other photographers claim to have seen it. Ansel Adams used to take guests onto his porch and try to show it to them.”

“But it’s always eluded you.”

“Yep.”

“Then what makes you expect you’ll see it tonight?”

“Because you’re with me.”

Tash didn’t say anything for a moment. “That’s the tenderest thing anybody ever told me.”

“Will you please stop looking in my direction?”

Tash giggled.

“Keep your eyes on the horizon.”

“Yes, sir.” Tash giggled again.

She peered away from him, watching the last speck of the sun’s faint orange vanish below the horizon, and inhaled sharply, for as black invaded the sky, a green flash shot amazingly up, like a monocolored single beam from the aurora borealis. With equal abruptness, it vanished.

“I’m almost afraid to ask.”

“I saw it, too.” Coltrane felt pounding behind his ears.

“Holy God.”

“Yes.”

“I feel as if we’re the only people in the world who saw it,” Tash said.

“Yes.”

“Our own private show.”

Coltrane turned her toward him and brought his mouth to hers. As the cliff seemed to waver, he had a fleeting sense that it wasn’t their bodies but their souls that were trying to merge. Maybe that’s why this is called a “soul kiss,” he thought. Then he was incapable of thought as they held each other tighter, kissing deeper.

6

THEIR HOTEL WAS ONLY A TEN-MINUTE STROLL AWAY, but Coltrane had no recollection of the restaurants and shops they passed, hurrying back, seeming to get there instantaneously, and yet he couldn’t recall an occasion when a comparable amount of time had seemed to take so long.

They barely managed to lock the door to their room before they were all over each other, unable to get enough of each other. Their hands slid urgently under each other’s clothes, their need so great that taking the time to undress would have been an unbearable postponement. Then it wasn’t necessary to take the time to undress, for they were suddenly naked, their clothes scattered everywhere as they pressed against each other, chest-to-chest, stomach-to-stomach, groin-to-groin, their skin itself a powerful sexual organ that drove them to even greater urgency. His back pressed against the switch on the wall, activating the overhead light. They didn’t care. The light didn’t matter. They were too absorbed by each other to turn it off. When they sank to the bed, Coltrane felt he was falling, never to stop. He rolled and twisted, sliding sweat-slicked over her, into her, moaning, seeming to soar above himself as he thrust, to plunge into himself as he withdrew. His brain pattern flashed white, black, white, black. Then there was only white, and he lay disoriented beside her.

Gradually, his heart pumped slower, no longer threatening to burst. When he finally mustered strength, he glanced toward Tash, whose eyes were closed contentedly, her body glistening with sweat.

“Don’t move.”

“I wasn’t planning to,” she murmured.

“I want to take your photograph.”

She didn’t answer for what seemed a long while. “Yes.”

When he stood and peered down, trying to decide what angle to use, he was so enthralled by the casual perfection of her unselfconscious nakedness that he almost forgot to reach for his camera. She was on her back, her arms spread with sensual exhaustion, her breasts at ease, gravity tucking her stomach in, her pubic hair a perfect triangle, her right leg straight, the left bent lazily.

He had never been with a woman who had so entranced him by the sheer fact of her being a woman. It was as if he felt attracted to her because of a subtle chemical signal that he was biologically programmed to find irresistible. But that didn’t explain it, even though the after-sex musk smell from her – it filled the room – made him feel intoxicated. His attraction was more than that. He had fallen in love with her long before he had met her. He had known her before and had been searching for her ever since.

He raised the camera, adjusted it, then lovingly sighted through the viewfinder, which heightened the impression she created. Her small, distant, yet close image became intensified, idealized. When he pressed the shutter button, he knew that this would be one of the finest photographs he had ever made. He took a dozen images from various angles, some of which were full shots, others half shots, a few of which showed only Tash’s breasts, one of which showed only her perfect dark triangle.

He knelt, easing his right hand onto her mound, luxuriating in its softness.

Tash placed her left hand over his. “That feels nice.”

Coltrane heard the forceful pounding of his heart.

“Do you think the photographs will be good?” Tash asked.

“Yes,” Coltrane managed to say.

“I’m surprised that I let you take them.”

“Thank you for letting me.”

“I trust you. I know you wouldn’t do anything with those photographs that would cheapen me.”

“… Never,” he said gently.

7

IN EYE-SQUINTING SUNLIGHT, the soldier, one of three at a roadblock between two Jeeps, held up his hand for Coltrane to stop. Coltrane was driving a five-year-old blue Ford station wagon with a crumpled fender and eighty thousand miles on it, the only vehicle that he had been able to find for rent. The car-rental agency had told him that the next day something better would be available, but Coltrane hadn’t wanted to wait. So, after making sure to get a good map and buy plenty of Mexican car insurance, they had headed south from Acapulco. Forty minutes beyond the airport, the rain forest-lined road had long since become two lanes, and the soldiers blocked their way.

Coltrane nodded in what he hoped looked like respect, asking in Spanish if anything was wrong.

Instead of responding, the soldier scowled into the station wagon’s backseat and rear compartment, both of which were empty except for an ice cooler on the back floor. The soldier lifted his right hand from his automatic weapon and motioned that he wanted the cooler opened. Tash bent over the backseat and complied, the two soldiers on her side of the car concentrating on her hips as she showed them that the cooler contained only soft drinks. With a dismissive gesture, the first soldier indicated that Coltrane could proceed.

“What was that about?” Tash asked.

“The man at the car-rental agency said the army’s been checking vehicles for guns and drugs.”

“They looked so sullen, God help anyone they decide to arrest.”

“This heat can’t have improved their humor.”

The temperature was almost ninety. The car’s air conditioning wasn’t working, forcing them to drive with the windows open. Away from the ocean breeze, the humidity seemed to have increased. But at least the air wasn’t hazed with automobile exhaust.

“If this map is accurate,” Tash said, “Espalda del Gato is the third village ahead of us – another thirty miles.”

“And if this road gets any worse,” Coltrane said as the station wagon jounced over a series of deep potholes, “it’ll take us all morning to get there.”

Tash handed him an ice-beaded can of Coke.

They got there in an hour. The first two villages were dilapidated, causing Coltrane and Tash to assume the worst when they rounded a foliage-rimmed curve and stopped to peer down at their destination. Surprised, they saw neat-looking thatch-roofed houses and shops in a small cove that had cliffs on the north and south and an inviting beach in the middle.

“It’s sort of a miniature Acapulco,” Tash said. “The way I suppose Acapulco once was.”

A few small boats were pulled up onto the beach. Other boats bobbed on waves beyond the cove’s entrance.

“Looks like a fishing village.”

“But not for long.” Coltrane pointed toward a yacht in the harbor. “It’s been discovered.”

When Coltrane got out to take photographs, something on the cliff opposite him made him focus his zoom lens in that direction. “Check this.”

He handed the camera to Tash, who peered through it toward a cluster of white structures on the cliff beyond the village. “Seems to be an estate.”

“Aim the camera farther to the right,” Coltrane said.

She did, then suddenly lowered it, turning toward him. “That rock formation up there.”

“A cat arching its back. The same as in Packard’s photograph. We found it.”

Excited, they got back in the car, but despite their eagerness to hurry into town, they were forced to drive slowly down a narrow switchback road. On the left, scarlet, pink, and white flowers thrived beneath a canopy of trees. On the right, a cliff dropped into the ocean. At last, the road leveled off, winding through rain forest. They passed a villager leading a burro laden with firewood. Several women carried baskets filled with bananas. The roadside activity increased. Rounding a bend, they came into the village, its picturesque buildings made of upright poles woven together, the palm-leaved roofs tied neatly, layered thickly. Locals glanced with curiosity toward the unfamiliar car and the two strangers inside it.

The plaza appeared, stalls set up for market day, villagers shopping, children scampering. A centuries-old church stood at one end. A stone well and a trough for watering animals occupied the middle. Coltrane parked outside a tavern called La Primorosa, the Beautiful Woman, and surveyed the activity. This far south, much of the population was Indian, their copper-colored narrow faces, sloped foreheads, and pointed chins looking especially strong in profile, reminding Coltrane of the sharp details on newly minted pennies. The men wore white cotton trousers and shirts, their large sombreros woven from what might have been strands of dried palm-tree leaves. The women wore ankle-length skirts and colorfully embroidered blouses. All were either barefoot or in sandals. Hoping that his camera wouldn’t offend them, trying to conceal it, he took several photographs through his open window, the possibilities exciting him. If he could capture the textures before him…

“Assuming that is your estate up there,” he said, “you live in a pretty good neighborhood.”

A teenage girl went by, selling yellow gardenias nestled in a banana frond. He called her over, bought one of the flowers, and gave it to Tash. “A homecoming present.”

“A little premature, but a lovely thought.” Tash smelled the flower, enjoying its fragrance.

Puzzled, Coltrane noticed that the girl hadn’t moved. What’s the matter? he wondered. Does she want me to buy more? Didn’t I pay enough? But the girl wasn’t gazing at him – only at Tash. “You’ve got a fan.”

Tash smiled at the girl, who looked startled by the attention, stepped back, and hurried into the crowd.

“You’re going to have to tone down your smile,” Coltrane said.

“Probably not used to outsiders.”

They got out of the station wagon.

Coltrane assessed the Coca-Cola sign on the exterior of the tavern he had parked next to. “I suppose this is as good a place as any to ask if anybody knows about the estate up there.”

But before he could enter, he paused for an elderly woman with waist-long braided hair who frowned as she approached them. Passing, she frowned back harder.

But not at Coltrane.

“First the flower seller. Now that woman. What’s going on?” Tash said.

A bandy-legged gray-haired man carrying a chicken by its feet looked astonished when he noticed Tash.

“What on earth?” Tash asked.

“I don’t get it, either,” Coltrane said. “I’m the one who looks foreign. If you were wearing a long native skirt and your hair was braided, you’d fit right in. They should be staring at me.”

Another woman stared.

“Come on. Let’s get off the street,” Tash said.

They crossed hard-packed earth, stepped under a canopy of palm leaves, and entered the tavern. Coltrane’s eyes took a moment to adjust to the softer light. The place was clean. It had a plank floor, simple chairs, and trestle-style tables. A child petted a dog in a corner. Americans, presumably from the yacht, looked up with mild curiosity, nodding before redirecting their attention to bottles of Corona beer. Locals, however, set down their drinks and looked startled.

So it isn’t just that we’re outsiders, Coltrane thought. Trying to seem oblivious, he escorted Tash to the worn mahogany counter. But as he started to ask the bartender what he knew about the buildings on top of the cliff, a row of photographs on a warped shelf behind the bartender caught his attention.

Simultaneously, the gangly bartender glanced up from washing cups, got a look at Tash, and couldn’t stop his mouth from hanging open.

“My God,” Coltrane said. He pointed toward the photographs. They were old and yellowed – a dozen eight-by-tens. They all depicted a beautiful woman, hence the name of the tavern, La Primorosa. The face of the woman was the same in each photograph. In unconscious imitation of what the flower-selling teenager had done when Tash smiled at her, Coltrane gaped. “Rebecca Chance.”

“They think it’s me,” Tash murmured.

“Un fantasma,” the bartender managed to say.

“No,” Coltrane said hurriedly in Spanish. “Not a ghost. My friend is the granddaughter of the woman in the photographs.”

“¿La nieta?”

“Sí,” Coltrane said. “De Rebecca Chance.”

“¿Señorita?” a frail voice asked.

They looked toward a stoop-shouldered, white-haired, white-bearded man in the doorway. Unlike the Indians in the village, he had a broader facial structure – of Spanish descent.

“¿Quién es usted?” Who are you? The old man seemed afraid to ask.

“Mi nombre es Natasha Adler.”

“La nieta,” the bartender said. The granddaughter.

The old man stepped uneasily closer. Behind him, a crowd had gathered beneath the portal.

“¿Es verdad?” The old man paused before Tash, studying her. Is it true?

“Sí.”

“Después de tanto tiempo.” After so much time. The old man continued in Spanish: “You must speak with Esmeralda.”

The name jolted into Coltrane’s memory. Esmeralda had been the first name of the woman whom Tash’s mother had said was Tash’s grandmother. But she couldn’t be. Rebecca Chance was Tash’s grandmother.

“Esmeralda Gutiérrez?”

“Sí. Mi esposa,” the old man said. My wife.

8

A SPLENDID FLOWER GARDEN SEPARATED THE SMALL COTTAGE from the rain forest. Sitting in chairs made of woven branches, with glazed cups of papaya juice on a table in front of them, Coltrane and Tash peered mystified toward a wizened, cinnamon-skinned, white-haired woman, who kept staring at Tash, shaking her head, and fingering her rosary.

“You look exactly like her,” the old woman, Esmeralda, said in Spanish, pointing toward faded photographs of Rebecca Chance that her husband had brought from the house.

“My mother claimed that you were my grandmother,” Tash replied in Spanish.

“No,” Esmeralda said, “although I did take care of your mother.”

How old must she be? Coltrane wondered in dismay. In her eighties?

“Especially afterward.”

“Afterward?”

“After your grandmother’s death.” Esmeralda’s voice was whispery with age. Coltrane had to lean forward to hear what she said.

“Then why did my mother lie to me?”

“Why does anyone lie? To avoid the truth.”

“Do you know the truth?”

The old woman nodded. “I regret so.”

“Drink,” Esmeralda’s husband said. “This talking will make you thirsty.”

Esmeralda dropped her rosary into her lap and used both hands, slightly atremble, to raise her cup of juice to her wrinkled lips, then set it back down. “Why have you come here?”

“Because of a man named Randolph Packard.”

The old woman grimaced.

“You know of him?”

“Too well. If he sent you here-”

“No. He died recently.”

Esmeralda’s aged eyes narrowed. “Randolph Packard is dead?”

“A few months ago.”

“Then the world is a better place, but I pity the poor souls in hell.”

“I inherited some property from him. We think it’s the estate on top of the cliff to the south of the village.”

“Burn it.”

“What?”

“Destroy it. It can only bring you harm.”

“What are you talking about?”

The old woman shook her head in distress.

“Tell them,” the old man said. “It was so long ago. If Randolph Packard is truly dead, you no longer have anything to fear.” He looked at Tash and Coltrane for confirmation.

“I saw his ashes sprinkled into the ocean,” Coltrane said.

Her hands more unsteady, the elderly woman again raised the earth-colored cup to her lips, drinking, then slowly setting it down.

9

WHEN SHE WAS SEVENTEEN, she said, the village was so isolated that Acapulco was a three-day trek along a snake-infested trail through the rain forest. Outsiders were unheard of. Then the first stranger she had ever met – and the first gringo – sailed into the harbor.

“He was amazingly tall. His leanness emphasized his height. But what I noticed most were his oddly handsome face, his shock of black hair, and his eyes, which never stopped searching.”

“Randolph Packard,” Coltrane said.

Esmeralda nodded. “He told us that he planned to live near the village, that he wanted to be a good neighbor, that he had brought us gifts of clothing, tools, and medicines. He would pay us generously to work for him, he said. So the corruption began. Each year after the rainy season, he returned. In the meantime, we built his estate up there, tended his gardens, kept everything clean and in repair, flowers in vases, fresh linen on the beds, ready on a moment’s notice for when the sails of his sleek boat would reappear, approaching the harbor. We grew dependent on him. If he was late, we worried that he might not come at all. Without the money, goods, and medicines he brought, we knew we would suffer.”

One year, Packard didn’t come alone. He brought many other boats and an army of gringos who unloaded electrical generators, cameras, lights, sound equipment, sets, tents, an invasion of movie equipment that the locals knew nothing about and that caused chaos within the village. Along with the invasion came more money and luxuries than they had ever seen. The corruption worsened. Esmeralda hated all of it. With one exception – an actress, the most beautiful woman she had ever seen, to whom she was assigned as a maid.

Esmeralda’s wrinkled gaze lingered on the face in the yellowed photographs on the table. She redirected it toward Tash, reverential, as if Rebecca Chance sat before her.

It soon became clear, she said, that the reason Packard had brought the movie company to the village was to ingratiate himself with Rebecca, to put her in debt to him for going to such extremes to advance her career. At the same time, it also became clear that Packard had a rival for Rebecca’s affections – the film’s producer, Winston Case.

The name brought Coltrane and Tash to greater attention.

Esmeralda learned about Rebecca’s situation because the actress, who spoke Spanish, confided in her. Winston Case had produced Rebecca’s previous three films. They had formed a close professional and personal relationship. Knowing her struggle to rise within the film industry, he had even given her a house that he owned in Los Angeles. She was indebted to him. But at the same time she was attracted to Randolph Packard, whom she had met one day when she discovered him photographing her house. A conversation had led to a dinner, then other dinners, then weekend outings. His flamboyance and wit had been irresistible.

Esmeralda felt helpless, watching the two men vie for Rebecca’s attentions, seeing how Rebecca was torn between them. But Esmeralda wasn’t the only one who noticed, for the film crew and the actors soon realized that their work was secondary to the greater drama developing behind the scenes. Several times, Winston Case and Randolph Packard exchanged angry words in front of the company. Packard wanted to take photographs of her whenever she wasn’t working. Winston Case wanted her to spend every evening with him. Their persistence so wore her down that she finally demanded that they both leave her alone, and there the matter remained when the film was finished and the cast and crew returned to Los Angeles, including Rebecca, who accompanied Winston Case, while Packard followed her.

“I never expected to see Rebecca again,” Esmeralda said, “but the boat came back in less than a year, Rebecca and Packard, no one else. To my delight, I was asked to be Rebecca’s maid again, but my delight became worry when Rebecca told me that she had not come willingly, that Packard had invited her onto his boat for a weekend cruise and then had kept sailing, refusing to let her off. Escape through the snake-infested jungle was out of the question. But Rebecca vowed to get away and prayed for someone else’s boat to enter the harbor.”

Meanwhile, she pretended to be sympathetic to Randolph’s attentions. To keep him from suspecting her plans, she let him photograph her. To further confuse him, she submitted to the indignity of agreeing to remove her clothes before his camera. But after a few weeks in which no opportunity for escape presented itself, a new source of tension afflicted her – because changes in her body made it obvious that she was pregnant.

Esmeralda’s first thought was that Randolph had forced himself upon her, but Rebecca confessed that in a moment of weakness and passion she had given herself to Winston Case. It had been Packard’s suspicion about their intimacy that had driven him to abduct her. Now the growing evidence of that intimacy made Rebecca fearful for the baby’s safety, an apprehension that seemed justified when approaching sails made Randolph lock her away.

The boat that entered the harbor belonged to Winston Case, who had finally suspected where she was. But when he hurried up to the estate, he found that Packard had hired a dozen men from the village to guard the property and keep him from getting inside. Reduced to staying in the village, he gazed up longingly at the estate, his only consolation the messages that Esmeralda brought whenever Rebecca sent her on an errand into the village.

The rainy season arrived as Rebecca’s pregnancy reached its term. Winston waited for Rebecca to regain her strength while the baby, a daughter, became strong enough to travel. Then, with Esmeralda’s help in relaying messages, Winston used the cover of an evening storm to sneak past the guards. He hid until the storm cleared and the estate was in darkness, then used a club to overcome a guard sleeping outside Rebecca’s room.

Immediately, Rebecca was at the window. She handed the baby to him, climbed out, and rushed after him through the darkness toward a path that zigzagged down from the cliff to the harbor. Winston had hidden a lantern behind the rock formation, but before he could light it, the baby started to cry, and Packard, who had not yet fallen asleep, burst from the house, shouting for help, racing toward the cries from the baby.

He caught them at the rock formation. Winston still held the baby, but either Packard didn’t realize it or else he didn’t care, because he kept shoving at Winston, causing Rebecca to scream in protest. She lunged between the two men and reached for the baby, but Packard kept shoving, and the next thing, Rebecca’s scream was one of fright as she plummeted over the edge, vanishing into the darkness, her scream ending on the surf-pounded rocks far below.

Packard couldn’t move. Anguished, he gaped downward for the longest time, then wailed. By the time the guards arrived, Winston had scrambled down the path with the baby.

10

ESMERALDA’S GAZE RETURNED FROM A FARAWAY PLACE. She cast another look at the yellowed photographs on the table in the flower garden, then shook her head and glanced toward Tash.

“I was waiting at the bottom. I asked where Rebecca was. He didn’t answer, just kept urging me toward the rowboat that would take us out to his sailboat. While I held the baby, he pulled at the oars with a strength that I never would have dreamed he possessed. By the time we reached the sailboat, we heard Packard and his guards on the beach. They jumped into fishing boats to chase us. But Winston raised his sails and disappeared into the darkness before they came close.”

Esmeralda’s frail voice dwindled.

Her husband helped her to drink more juice, then told Coltrane and Tash, “You must leave now, so she can rest.”

“We understand,” Coltrane said. “Just one question. Señora, if you got ahead of Packard, you should have been able to escape to Los Angeles. But Tash’s mother said that you and Winston and the child roamed from village to village here in Mexico, where he earned food by working as a carpenter. He was rich. Why didn’t he take advantage of his wealth?”

“Winston said that if we went to Los Angeles, we would never be safe from so powerful a man as Randolph Packard. Our only way to disappear was by doing something that Randolph would never have dreamed of, by becoming poor. Only after several years did he think Randolph’s anger would have cooled enough for him and the child to enter the United States.”

“You didn’t go with him?”

“Please,” Esmeralda’s husband objected, “no more questions for now.”

“I would have given anything to continue to take care of Rebecca Chance’s daughter,” Esmeralda said, “but Winston insisted that I had my own life to lead, and he made me go back to the village. As soon as he returned home, he promised to send payment for my years of service. He kept his word. One day a messenger arrived with photographs of the child and more money than anyone in the village had ever seen.”

“And now.” Esmeralda’s husband stood.

“Thank you, señora.” Tash clasped her hands.

“No, I thank you. Seeing you is like seeing Rebecca again.” A tear rolled down the old woman’s cheek.

“May we come back after you’ve rested?”

“Please.”

Coltrane and Tash followed the old man into the house. At the last moment, Coltrane looked back, seeing the old woman pick up one of the photographs.

“Where did you get those, señora?”

“Rebecca gave them to me. She’s still alive as long as they exist. The more people who see them, the more she remains alive. I have put them throughout the village. Once a year, on the day of her death, a Mass is said for her. The village prays over her photographs.” Esmeralda shook her head dismally. “But in this climate, the images decay.”

“And Randolph Packard?”

“He abandoned the village, as I always knew he would.”

11

THE ROAD UP TO THE ESTATE WAS SO OVERGROWN THAT Coltrane wasn’t sure the rented car would make it to the top. Leaves blocked his windshield. Branches scraped the doors. As the Ford’s wheels jounced over a fallen tree limb, sunlight gleamed, butterflies scattered, and the estate was spread out ahead.

What had seemed white from the distance of the village was now revealed as the gray of concrete from which stucco had fallen, a few surviving patches indicating that the original color had been coral. Some buildings had one level, others two. All had an elegant simplicity that reminded Coltrane of pueblo architecture. A jumble of fallen poles and decayed thatching visible through an open doorway showed where woven palm-leaf roofs supported by timbers – peaked as in the village – had long ago collapsed.

“Imagine how magnificent this place once looked,” Tash said as they stopped outside a low vine-covered wall that enclosed the compound.

“And how everything went wrong.” As Coltrane stepped from the car, he admired the gardens that had run wild, hibiscus, bougainvillea, and orchids seemingly everywhere. He raised his camera and took a photograph.

“I don’t know what I expected to find here,” Tash said. “The truth is down in the village. With Esmeralda.”

“I’m not so sure. Some inconsistencies bother me.”

Tash looked puzzled.

“If Randolph Packard killed Rebecca Chance, why did he keep hunting Winston Case? Revenge couldn’t have been a factor. Rebecca’s death was Packard’s fault, not Case’s.”

“Maybe it wasn’t Winston he was hunting. Maybe he wanted the child.”

“Why? If the child was Winston’s, as Esmeralda claims, why would Packard have wanted her?” Coltrane asked.

“Maybe he wanted to kill the child to get even with Winston.”

“For what? For making Rebecca Chance pregnant? Packard had plenty of opportunity to hurt the child when it was born.”

“And risk losing any hope of making Rebecca love him?” Tash said.

“True.” Coltrane brooded about it. “But that still doesn’t explain why Packard was so desperate to get the child after Rebecca was killed. Unless… Do you suppose he believed he was the father? He was trying to get his daughter back.”

Tash raised a hand to her throat. “You’re suggesting Randolph Packard is my grandfather?”

“It explains why he put you in his will. He spent most of his life trying to find his daughter. But she was dead by the time he did, and he was near death when he learned about you. He couldn’t reveal his connection with you without incriminating himself. Still in love with the woman he had killed, all he could do was give you the place where she gave birth to your mother.”

“A ruin.”

“Fitting, given all the lives that were ruined in the name of love.” For a moment, Coltrane couldn’t help thinking of the ruin his own father had caused. But not me, Coltrane thought. He dismally surveyed the husks of the buildings. “Well, as long as we’ve come this far…” He walked along the wall, passing a gigantic aloe vera, approaching the back of the estate.

“Where are you going?”

“To see where your grandmother died.”

Tall cacti stood like sentinels as Coltrane approached the cliff. Ignoring a lizard that scurried underfoot, he concentrated on the catlike rock formation before him. “Definitely the formation in the photographs that Packard took of Rebecca Chance.”

He paused a few careful steps from where the cliff fell away to the sea. The pounding of surf against rocks rumbled up, making him uneasy.

“The lantern was behind this rock formation,” Tash said. “The path down the cliff is… over here, where the coastline curves toward the village, forming the bay. This is where Randolph Packard and Winston Case fought.”

“And where Packard inadvertently pushed the love of his life over the cliff. He spent the rest of his days mourning for having killed the woman he worshiped. He couldn’t let the world know what had happened, so he built a secret monument to her, where he achingly studied the photographs he had taken of her.”

Although the day was hot, Tash hugged herself and shivered.

“Stay there for a moment. Just like that,” Coltrane said.

He stepped back from her, moving farther along the ridge, putting the cliff on his left and Tash’s profile ahead of him. As a breeze pushed her hair, he raised his camera, sighting through the viewfinder. Reality and his memory coincided. “Packard once stood on this very spot, taking a photograph of your grandmother on the spot where you are now, in that same pose.”

Tash shivered again.

Coltrane pressed the shutter release. “If you were wearing a white shawl, the images would be virtually identical.”

“This gives me the creeps.”

“The height doesn’t help much, either,” Coltrane said.

“Good-bye.” Tash peered down, as if addressing the soul of her grandmother.

“I warned you,” a voice said from behind.

Spinning, Coltrane just had time to see the blur of a fist before it jolted him off his feet.

12

SPRAWLED NEAR THE ROCK FORMATION, Coltrane struggled numbly to raise his head. Blood streaming from his mouth, he stared up dizzily at the impossible towering presence of Carl Nolan.

“I gave you a fair chance.” Nolan’s face was livid, twisted with fury. “I told you nicely.” The sergeant’s powerful arms, his weight lifter’s muscles bulging in a short-sleeved flower-patterned shirt, dragged Coltrane to his feet and shook him so hard that Coltrane’s teeth snapped together. “But a smart guy like you just can’t listen, can you? You always know better. Well, maybe you’ll listen to this.”

The second blow struck Coltrane harder. Ears ringing, his vision blurring, he landed hard, but his head seemed to be falling farther, and at once his consciousness cleared enough for him to realize that his head had indeed fallen farther. Half of him was hanging over the cliff.

“Or to this.” Nolan kicked him another few inches over the cliff. “I told you not to touch her again, but you went ahead and did it anyhow. You never take advice.”

This time, when Nolan kicked him, the force was so great that it shocked Coltrane over the edge. A groan escaping him, stomach rising, he clawed at the rock wall, scrabbling to find an outcrop. With a strain that threatened to dislocate his arms, he jerked to a halt, his body dangling, his fingers clinging to a two-inch ledge ten feet below the top. A hundred feet farther down, the hungry, pounding surf waited for him.

“Still hanging around?” Nolan frowned over the edge. “What do I have to do, drop a rock on your head?”

Staring up helplessly, his ribs aching from where he’d been kicked, Coltrane opened his mouth to say… he didn’t know what. Whatever it was came out as a hoarse inhuman croak.

Above him, Nolan looked around, presumably for the rock he meant to drop, then scowled at something behind him. “Hey, where the hell do you think you’re going?” He charged away from the cliff.

Tash, Coltrane thought. She must be running for help. He’s trying to stop her.

Despite the agony that racked his body, Coltrane scraped his shoes against the cliff. Unnerved by the thunder of the surf below him, he trembled, feeling a surge of hope when his right shoe found support in a crevice.

Do it! he mentally shouted. He lifted his left foot, taking three tries before he pressed his shoe onto a rock spur. His mind became gray. No! Clinging more fiercely, he inhaled deeply. His heart pounded faster. His consciousness focused, the gray dispersing. Move!

But his body didn’t want to obey.

Then his reflexes took control when he heard Tash shouting. He reached up his right hand, wedged his fingers into a crack in the stone, lifted his right foot, scraped it against the cliff, planted it on an outcrop, and pulled himself higher. The camera around his neck snagged on something. He squirmed, fearful that his movements would dislodge him, imagining his plunge to the rocks.

Again Tash shouted. He freed the camera and stretched higher, lifting, pawing, groping. Then he couldn’t find another handhold. His strength dwindling, he clawed at air, heard Tash shout a third time, and realized that the reason he couldn’t find another handhold was that there weren’t any to be found. His fingers were at the top. All he had to do was grip the edge, push himself up, and…

13

THE ROCK FORMATION CAME INTO VIEW. Squirming over the rim, he rolled onto his back, but he couldn’t allow himself to rest, and he rolled again, onto his hands and knees. The next shout from Tash made him waver to his feet and charge in her direction.

Her cry came from somewhere among the ruins. Adrenaline giving him strength, he didn’t waste time looking for a gate through the waist-high wall. He raced straight ahead, sending more lizards scurrying as he scrambled over the wall. Landing among a tangle of ferns and flowers, he heard Tash yell within the maze of buildings. His camera thumping against his chest, he charged past the shells of what might once have been guest houses and servants’ quarters. Vines tugged at his ankles, threatening to topple him as he veered around a corner and saw Nolan push Tash against a wall, trying to kiss her.

This time, it was Nolan who was caught by surprise. Before he could register the noise behind him, Coltrane slammed against his back, driving him hard past Tash, ramming him against the wall. With a groan, Nolan sagged, then spun, only to double over from Coltrane’s fist in his stomach.

But before Coltrane could strike again, Nolan rammed his head forward. Colliding with Coltrane’s chest, he propelled both of them across a flower-choked courtyard, walloping Coltrane against the opposite wall.

Coltrane wheezed, his breath knocked out of him. He did his best to punch Nolan, but his arms were weak from struggling up the cliff, and he had no effect on Nolan’s solid body. Nolan’s hands found his throat, gripped the camera strap around it, and twisted. Wheezing again, Coltrane fought to breathe, his face swelling as Nolan tightened the camera strap, cutting into Coltrane’s neck.

Coltrane’s strength failed. His vision dimming, he fumbled to try to peel Nolan’s hands away. He brushed against the shutter button on the camera, unintentionally tripping it, the camera’s whir barely audible, the last sound he might ever hear. No! Conscious of Tash’s frightened presence, he told himself he had to save her. He rammed his knee into Nolan’s groin. Again. Again. Nolan lurched back in pain.

It was the sweetest breath Coltrane had ever known. As he filled his lungs, Nolan kept stumbling away, needing to gain as much time as he could to recover from his pain. Then Nolan took one step back too far, tripped over vines, and toppled backward into the wreckage of a ruined building. Coltrane gaped. His eyes had to be playing tricks on him, he thought, for the decayed thatch of the collapsed roof suddenly came to life when Nolan landed, poles and twigs and strands of fiber thrashing into motion, snapping at Nolan, twisting, rippling over him, and – Oh, my God, Coltrane thought, those aren’t poles and twigs and strands of fibers. Those are snakes.

Nolan barely got a shriek out before his body tensed and trembled, dying. Snakes that had made their home in the ruin slithered out of the doorway.

“Tash!”

Momentarily paralyzed, she snapped into motion and rushed toward Coltrane. As the snakes hissed and coiled, Tash and Coltrane raced from the chaos of the ruins, staring frantically around to make sure they weren’t running into others. Every bush seemed a danger, every cluster of flowers a trap. They squirmed onto the wall, hesitating, afraid of what might be hiding beneath the shrubbery below them. The quick-legged scamper of a lizard made Tash cry out and jump down past ferns, racing toward the car.

Coltrane was only a few hurried strides behind. They scrambled into the car and yanked the door shut, breathing in a frenzy.

“Dear God,” he managed to say. His chest wouldn’t stop heaving. Sweat mixing with the blood from his swollen lips, he turned toward Tash, whose head was pressed exhaustedly against the back of the seat. Her eyes wide with panic, she stared at the ceiling.

“Are you…” Coltrane filled his oxygen-starved lungs.

“I think I’m…” Her chest rose and fell in alarming turmoil. “I think I’m all right. He had me trapped. If you hadn’t climbed to the top…”

“How the hell did he know where we’d be?”

“He shouldn’t have. We were careful.”

“I don’t understand. What did we do wrong?”

“Somehow he followed us.”

“I can’t believe I’m still alive.”

Trembling, Tash held him.

“I was sure I was going to fall,” Coltrane said.

“Alive.” Tash held him tighter. “My God, I was so scared. I am scared.” Her mouth was suddenly on his, and the pain of the pressure against his mangled lips was nothing compared to the life-affirming force of their embrace. Alive, Coltrane thought.

14

BUT HE COULDN’T STOP FEELING NUMB AND HOLLOW.

“Talk to me,” Tash said.

He kept shaking his head, staring out the window.

“What are you thinking?”

The car seemed filled with the smell of fear and death.

“Get it out of you,” Tash said.

“We can’t leave him like this.”

“We can’t take him with us.”

Coltrane frowned toward the ruins.

“All those snakes. You’re not suggesting we go back there and get his body.”

“Of course not,” Coltrane said. “But we can’t just drive away. Somebody has to be told.”

“The police? No way.”

“We don’t have a choice.”

“You bet we do,” Tash said. “We can get back to the States as fast as we can. The Mexican police scare me to death. They have a different kind of law down here. It’s based on the Napoleonic Code. You’re not innocent until proven guilty, the way we’re used to. The reverse. You’re guilty until you prove you’re innocent, and this might not look like self-defense to them. They might decide it’s manslaughter. What if someone thinks you pushed him onto those snakes? Down here, they don’t believe in the right to a speedy trial.”

“But the village knows we went up here,” Coltrane said. “It’s a safe bet they’re also aware of another stranger in the area, that Nolan went up here. So what are they going to think when you and I come down but Nolan doesn’t? Some of them are going to get curious enough to hike up and look around. As soon as they find Nolan’s body, the police will be looking for two outsiders in a car that fits this one’s description. They’ll be waiting for us at the airport. Because we tried to run, we really will look guilty. Don’t you see that we have to go to the police before the police come to us?”

15

A RED PONTIAC WITH A RENTAL-CAR STICKER ON IT WAS PARKED among ferns at the bottom of the overgrown lane. Nolan must have left it there and hiked up, Coltrane thought. That’s why we didn’t hear him. The rumble of the surf muffled his footsteps as he walked up behind me.

About to turn left onto the jungle-lined road that led into the village, he had to wait for an exhaust-spewing yellow bus to rattle past. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Tash fidgeting. Sweat stuck his back to the seat.

“Pull ahead of that bus and make it stop,” Tash said.

“What for?”

“If the driver says it’s going farther north to Acapulco, I’m getting on it.”

“Getting on it?” Coltrane looked at her in astonishment.

“A woman with my features isn’t going to have a pleasant time in a Mexican jail.”

“There’s no guarantee you’ll spend any time in a Mexican jail.”

“I’m not going to take the chance.” Tash kept hugging herself. “I saw the way those soldiers looked at me when they were checking for drugs and guns.”

“Tash, nothing’s going to happen.”

“You bet it isn’t – because the Mexican and U.S. police are going to sort this out after I get home.”

“But the local police will find out we were together.”

“Not if you tell them you went up there alone, that I wasn’t feeling well and took the bus back to Acapulco.”

“Tash-”

“Please. I’m asking you. Pull ahead of that bus and make it stop.”

16

“THAT VINE IS WHERE HE TRIPPED,” Coltrane said. His mouth throbbed where he had been punched. “Be careful. There were snakes inside that building the last time I was here.”

“Yes, I see one in the corner.”

“What?”

“An especially nasty type.”

Coltrane’s skin turned cold. He had needed all of his willpower to guide the policeman through ferns and flowers toward this spot. Now he needed even stronger willpower not to bolt back to the car.

“A team of medical experts will have to drive here from Acapulco to examine the body before they move it.” The policeman, the only one in the village, was middle-aged and heavy, with a thick dark mustache and solemn eyes. “You say you had a fight.”

“Yes.”

Coltrane had considered inventing a story in which he had happened to find Nolan already dead, but he couldn’t think of a way to explain his mangled lips, not to mention the bruises that the medical examiner would find on Nolan’s groin.

“Over a woman,” the policeman said.

“Yes.”

“And this woman…”

“Isn’t here. As I explained, she wasn’t feeling well. She took a bus back to Acapulco while I came up here.”

“But meanwhile, this man…”

“Came up here also.”

“He followed you from Los Angeles.”

“Yes. He was very angry about the woman. He and I had a similar argument about her back in Los Angeles.”

“But this time, while you tried to defend yourself, he stumbled back and…” The policeman gestured toward motion inside the building.

“I never meant for that to happen.”

“Of course.”

“There’s something else I have to tell you.”

“Yes?”

“The dead man is a U.S. police officer.”

17

IT TOOK A WEEK TO STRAIGHTEN THINGS OUT. Coltrane endured most of that time in a crowded, noxious-smelling cell, not in the village, which was too small to have a jail, but in Acapulco, where his belongings were brought from the hotel, and where he learned that Tash had flown to the United States the day Nolan died. In Los Angeles, she had hired an attorney to fly to Acapulco and consult with a Mexican attorney about gaining Coltrane’s freedom. The Los Angeles Police Department was disturbed that another of its officers had died, and equally disturbed about Nolan’s behavior. For the sake of public relations and morale, it was decided to say only that Nolan had been on vacation and had died by misadventure: snakebite. Privately, the policeman whom Coltrane had first spoken to expressed severe reservations about Tash’s sudden departure from Mexico the day of the death – “She was extremely ill,” Coltrane emphasized – but the Mexican attorney earned his substantial fee, and Coltrane was eventually on a plane to Los Angeles. He had suffered doubts about how soon he would be released. He had definitely suffered from the privations of a Mexican jail. But throughout he had kept his emotional strength.

Because Tash had not gone to jail.