Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 127, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 775 & 776, March/April 2006

Uncle Blinky’s Corner of the World by Robert S. Levinson

Best known for his Neil Gulliver and Stevie Marriner series mysteries, California writer Robert S. Levinson recently extended his range to stand-alone thrillers — with stunning results. A starred review in PW greeted Ask a Dead Man (Five Star/2004), which was released in trade paperback in November 2005. Mr. Levinson’s latest thriller, expected from Five Star this spring, is Where the Lies Begin.

He looked the way he always did on television, Uncle Blinky: sporting the moon-pie face of a sad circus clown, real life hiding behind one of those garish, wild, and curly red fright wigs, an equally crimson bulbous nose sprouting wisps of whisker, almost-purple lips protected by a painted-on milk-white frown, and, of course, the oversized frames and lenses magnifying his bright and cheerful, constantly blinking eyes that signaled welcome to one and all, especially the youngsters who had formed his loyal, adoring audience over the past forty years.

“Tell me a secret about yourself,” he said, Uncle Blinky’s rich baritone of a voice gentle, exactly how Kim Gantry had carried it in her memory since she first saw him on the TV and made Uncle Blinky her own when she was four years old. Now, here she was, almost thirty years later, sitting across from him and praying the interview was going well enough for her to get hired.

She thought for a moment, as if it was a tough request.

“Uncle Blinky, I’m applying for the job because of my daughter,” she said.

“A friend of mine, as her mommy was before her?” His real mouth turning upward at the edges, probably thinking he already knew what Kim’s answer would be.

“Lily was a regular visitor to Uncle Blinky’s Corner of the World, before her passing,” she said, choking on the last few words.

Uncle Blinky lost the smile. His eyes turned somber and moist, glanced away from her, and fed into a grimace that defiled his appearance. “Oh dear, oh dear. My poor dear woman. I hope your Lily’s voyage to the Eternal Playground was an easy one.”

“Easy for her, maybe, Uncle Blinky. Six at the time of her passing.” She shut her eyes to the memory. “I don’t know anything that would make Lily happier than knowing I was working for you. You were her playground.”

Uncle Blinky nodded understanding and gave her a long study while he pressed the sides of his false nose against his skin to strengthen the connection. “The job as my assistant is twenty-four/ seven. That means seven days a week and on call twenty-four hours a day. That and me on the road constantly for personal appearances don’t make this exactly the right kind of position for a married woman, so I don’t understand why the agency sent you in the first place.” As if he was getting ready to dismiss her.

“My Garry’s also gone,” Kim Gantry said. “He took his own life, unable to stand the loss of our Lily.” Uncle Blinky grew more tearful. He ran a finger under his eyeglasses and worked at pushing aside his tears, first one eye, then the other. “What else can I tell you, except every day’s like a miracle I haven’t joined them?”

He came around from behind his desk and settled on the desktop, tipped her face upward with a finger at her chin. “Nothing else, dear woman. You’ve had enough disappointment to last you a lifetime. The job in my corner of the world is yours if you truly want it.”

A month later, Kim still hadn’t seen the face behind the clown’s mask.

It wasn’t just that he happened to be wearing the goop and stuff the day she interviewed, when she thought maybe it was because he was on his way to or from the stage where Uncle Blinky’s Corner of the World was taped three days a week before an audience of wide-eyed, worshipful children. Uncle Blinky always wore the goop and stuff. So far as she could tell, no one had ever seen him with his face as fresh as a new morning. Whatever he looked like was a secret he kept away from work. A secret he retained even inside his scandalously expensive home in the Palisades with its awesome view of the ocean, closed off from the world by a steep driveway protected by guards dressed like members of his show’s “Ugga-Bugga Buddy Squad.”

He was always made up before he joined her in the smaller dining room off the kitchen every morning, promptly at six, for a breakfast consisting of chilled orange juice, piping-hot oatmeal, and lukewarm black coffee, to which he promptly added three cubes of sugar and two teaspoonfuls of powdered milk. She’d nibble her way through a piece, sometimes two, of toasted whole wheat, always light on the butter and with maybe just a transparent layer of jam, and her own cup of coffee, caffeine-free, unadorned black, part of the diet regimen she had created for herself to keep trim at thirty-four, a hedge against the weight problems every woman faces the nearer she gets to forty. The night creams, the sunscreens, the daily workout in the state-of-the-art gym and the fifty laps in the Olympic-size pool also were helping to keep her youthful-looking, attractive, and desirable to someone like Uncle Blinky, who constantly disdained wrinkles and liver spots, convex bellies and bulging hips, gray hairs and bulging blue veins, anything that revealed the secret of youth: It doesn’t last.

Kim had learned that by researching him, preparing herself for the day she’d find a route into Uncle Blinky’s confidence. It was in the transcript of an interview with Barbara Walters, telling her: “The terrible thing about children, Barbara — they grow up. These lovely little creatures of God, sadly they blossom into youth and middle age and old age and, finally, no age at all. Oh, but that they could stay young forever, Barbara — these children so dear to my heart.”

On and on he went, hammering the theme, applauding the boys and girls who worked at keeping their youthful appearance despite the knowledge it was a battle they could never win for long, finding in it a continuity of the naiveté he so coveted in the guileless visitors to his corner of the world; Barbara wondering, “Your corner of the world, Uncle Blinky, might you consider it your concept of Heaven?” Uncle Blinky responding, “My vision of Heaven, yes; a corner of the world where life goes on forever.”

It was late into the next month when he shared his vision with Kim.

They were in the den, Uncle Blinky stretched out on the overworked, cracked, and peeling leather divan, hands cupped behind his head, legs crossed at the ankles, dressed in the towel that told her he had come straight from the sauna; she as usual at the elegant, inhibiting secrétaire en pente that dated back a couple hundred years to some French craftsman, an antique out of place in the otherwise masculine surroundings of a room heavy on glass-fronted display cases full of awards trophies and walls infested with mounted animal heads staring back wherever she looked.

He listened attentively, nodding approval as Kim ticked off the cities and route proposed by his agents at the William Morris Agency for the next Uncle Blinky national tour, and when she finished, he added enthusiastic applause. “Perfect from the sound of it. Perfection,” he said. He tamped down the brow webbing on his fright wig and bulb nose, spotted the question mark on her face. “Something is it, Kimberly?” he said. He’d taken to calling her by her full name, the way some members of her family still did, the way Garry had always done.

“Two major cities from your last itinerary are missing, Uncle Blinky.” He raised his furry eyebrows, pressed his goggle glasses tighter to his face, and signaled her for more. “Chicago and Detroit. You did sell-out business in both, like everywhere else, so—”

He cut her off with a gesture. “No oversight. The boys at the Morris office understand my thinking without being told. Not places I’m anxious to go back to in the foreseeable future... I see you’re curious to know why.” He rolled off the divan, adjusted the sarong, and slipped into his go-aheads. “Come. I’ll show you.”

Kim followed his duck walk and waddle outside and north about fifty yards, parallel with the beachfront, to the heavy iron fence dressed in an impenetrable hedge rising twenty or twenty-five feet. He hid the keypad with a hand while tapping in the code that clicked open the gate, and ushered her inside. “Welcome, Kimberly, to Uncle Blinky’s Heaven,” he said, extending his hand toward the magnificent white marble building, circular and windowless, capped by a domed roof that belonged at Forest Lawn or Mount Olympus.

He guided her up the white marble lane that bisected a Technicolor-green lawn, up three narrow steps to a slab that looked like it weighed a thousand pounds but slid open easily when he gave it a modest push. Kim didn’t know what to expect inside, least of all what she saw when Uncle Blinky tapped somewhere and the interior erupted with brilliance from a chandelier of tiny floodlights mounted in the dome.

Scattered around the walls in no discernible pattern were photographs of boys and girls in simple black aluminum frames, twenty-one by her quick count. They came in all sizes, as did the children. Each had attached to the base a small engraved metal plaque carrying a name, a year, a city.

She turned to Uncle Blinky for an explanation. He had taken a seat on one of the viewing benches, his back toward her, but knew the question coming without waiting to hear it from her. “My vision of Heaven, Kimberly, created as a living memorial to lost children, snatched from us by unseen forces, from the bosom of their loving families, to a fate unknown; here to be eternally young and remembered.” His voice filling with phlegm and emotion.

“Why these children, Uncle Blinky?”

“Gangaroos, one and all. Visitors to my corner of the world when the tour came to their city. Personally picked from the audience by Uncle Blinky to join the Ugga-Bugga Buddy Squad on its visit to AnyOtherPlace. Then—” coughing his throat clear — “we’re no sooner on to the next city, I learn they’ve disappeared, these darling little ones. Again and again it’s happened, through the years. Not one ever found. Not one, Kimberly.” Throwing his hands to the walls. Turning to face her. “The fourth or fifth time, I recognized I was a carrier of misfortune, a traveling plague. I pondered about forsaking my career, then recognized the disappointment it would bring to my millions of young fans. I prayed God grant me a better solution and He answered me in my heart. He directed me to build this shrine.”

Uncle Blinky moved from the viewing bench and stood beside two framed pictures on the wall to her left. “This dear child was Detroit, last year. This child, Chicago. At God’s direction, I don’t visit a city for two years after a disappearance — why you didn’t find Detroit or Chicago on the itinerary prepared by the boys at William Morris. One more year before I’ll go back to either city. Meanwhile, the good Lord willing, those two children will be returned to the bosom of their loved ones, alive and unharmed.”

Kim glanced around the room and took a deep breath. “Have any ever returned to their homes, their families, Uncle Blinky?”

“Not that I ever heard. Not one. All still missing, except here in this divine room. All here together, taking comfort from one another.”

She locked her arms over her body to ward off the chill his answer brought. “That’s all?”

“What is it you’re thinking, Kimberly, that there are more than photographs here? That this is some mausoleum and there are bodies deposited inside the walls? Bodies turned to bone and dust? Me, Uncle Blinky, some insane monster showing off for you?” His voice crackling with an anger that turned his body into a block of tension; his fists bouncing with a need to strike out.

She refused to panic. He didn’t need to know what she was thinking. She offered a Don’t be silly gesture. “This room, this kind of tribute, honors not only their memory but the man who created it, Uncle Blinky.”

He briefly meditated over her words before he joined a smile to hers. “Yes. Yes, it does, Kimberly. Thank you for recognizing that. Thank you for understanding. Thank you for sharing.”

He duck-walked back to the bench and eased into a kneeling position, with his elbows on the seat and his hands locked under his chin; began a rhythmic mumble Kim thought was prayer until his words climbed loud enough to be understood and she recognized he was performing the Uncle Blinky theme song:

The size of the plaques on the frames and her distance from them had made it impossible for Kim to read and commit to memory more than half a dozen names on her way out of the room. She waited until they were at the studio — Uncle Blinky taking his ritual half-hour alone for whatever it was he did behind the locked door of his dressing room before skipping and dancing onstage to a volcanic eruption of screams and cheers — to seal herself in the show’s production office and jumpstart her laptop.

Hurrying against the clock, fearful Uncle Blinky might come knocking with one of his spur-of-the-last-moment commands, she Googled the Internet for newspapers in the cities she remembered, then keyed in the names of the missing children.

The first three searches turned up nothing, as if the kids had also been kidnapped from the headlines. She had better luck with the other three: huge stories before they diminished into back-page items, then leaped into large type again.

A body discovered.

A body recovered.

A positive identification by investigators, confirmed by traumatized parents, in one case by a grieving social worker.

None of the stories mentioned Uncle Blinky, or the children having attended his shows; not that or anything else to connect him to the disappearances.

That didn’t bother Kim. She had Uncle Blinky’s walls for that, his own admissions. She had a clear vision of the child she would see soon enough in one of the photographs on the wall: her Lily. She exploded with self-pity, was turning the emotion into loathing for Uncle Blinky when—

— a hand settled on Kim’s shoulder.

Her fingers jumped off the keyboard and she slammed against the backrest, throwing her head hard enough to send a sharp pain spiraling down her neck.

She wheeled around expecting to see Uncle Blinky, her mind already processing excuses for what he’d certainly have seen her reviewing on the monitor.

Lenny, the show gofer with the spiked blue hair and a missing left earlobe, backed away a step, stammering apologies for the interruption. “Uncle Blinky told me to track you down and deliver this,” he said, displaying a bottle of mountain spring water. “Uncle Blinky said to remind you this is not the kind he likes, that should always be in his room, and you know better, so to fix it.”

She took the bottle from him.

Lenny fled with a “No problem” to her “Thank you” and banged the door shut.

Kim pulled her cell phone from the tote and keyed the number on automatic dial. She answered her husband’s hello, saying, “I’m satisfied we have our man.” She told him what she had learned. “Enough for me, baby,” she said. “You?”

“Whatever makes you happy makes me happy, baby.”

“Lily, in the picture with the big smile, the one all the television stations used, and also the newspapers. That’s the one on his wall.”

“I know, where Lily looks like a younger version of you.”

“My favorite picture of Lily.”

“Carrying a copy here in my wallet, too.”

“So we’re going to do it, right, baby?”

“As rain, baby. Finally give you some peace of mind.”

“His turn next?”

“His turn next.”

By the time the tour began a month later, they had their plan ready, put in place through phone calls and e-mails with wording couched as carefully as a wartime military code. Originally inclined to deal with Uncle Blinky in Omaha, the hometown impossible to call home after Lily’s damaged body was found, they realized that would mean getting too close to people who might recognize or remember them, maybe even link them to Uncle Blinky because of some screw-up impossible to sense, see, or guard against in advance.

They moved on to their second choice, the first stop on the tour, Las Vegas, where Uncle Blinky would be playing host to the Twenty-Eighth Annual Uncle Blinky’s Corner of the World International Convention, agreeing it would be far easier to get lost in a crowd there, only after he wondered, “Those CSI people in Vegas, they’re pretty sharp?”

“Television, baby. The tube,” Kim said. “We’re dealing with real life here.”

“And real death,” he said, bringing her to laughter that rippled as hard as his gushed.

The scene in Vegas was everything Kim knew to expect.

Francis Albert Sinatra Hall was a carnival of confusion, alive with three thousand Uncle Blinky conventioneers wandering a maze of aisles lined on two sides with merchants hawking Uncle Blinky merchandise, collectibles, and memorabilia. The youngest of Gangaroos clutched the hands of parents and sucked up the atmosphere with wonder and amazement. Hundreds of the older ones, including parents gone gray everywhere but in their cherished memory of Uncle Blinky, were costumed as the champion of their youth or a member of his Ugga-Bugga Buddy Squad, in particular “Boss Horse of Course.”

Excitement had a sound here, almost patriotic, like bombs bursting in air, at its loudest when an actual cast member used the hall as a shortcut to the Holy See showroom next door in the Vegas strip’s new Vatican Hotel, his presence announced over a speaker system loud enough to wake the saints. For all the noise of adulation, the fans treated them respectfully, oohing and aahing, cheering and applauding, lighting the hall with their camera flashes, but never stopping them or blocking their way on the Red Carpet Road to snare handshakes or autographs.

The invisible glass walls were at their tallest, thickest, and most impenetrable for Uncle Blinky. His presence wasn’t announced, but everyone seemed to know at once that he’d entered.

Silence set in as he strolled along the Road to a mute chorus of overgrown eyes, gaping jaws, and pointing fingers, as if he were the Pope. Mingled with them were the questioning stares of convention veterans who’d never seen Uncle Blinky make this kind of entrance, aware it was his custom and practice to go directly from his hotel suite to his dressing room in the Holy See.

Kim walked a respectful six paces behind Uncle Blinky, costumed as “Bag Woman Billie the Kidney,” who wore a knapsack on her back, a paper bag over her head with cut-out eyes and a smiley-smile drawn in lipstick, and said things like “Give me a smile” to Uncle Blinky, who would tell her to stand on her head, because “My frown is only a smile turned upside down.”

They moved faster once out of the convention hall and past the unmarked doors feeding into the special backstage corridor reserved exclusively for show headliners. Uncle Blinky gave the security cameras a Blinky Wave before stepping inside his dressing-room suite. Bag Woman Billie the Kidney did the Baggie Bow and followed along.

She threw the door lock and said, “Ready, baby?”

“Ready, baby.”

Kim removed the paper bag, tossed it aside, and gave her head a few hair shakes. She called, “Uncle Blinky, it’s me, Kim.”

Seconds later, an inner door opened. Uncle Blinky revealed himself, well into expressing his irritation at being disturbed: “...know not you or anyone is supposed to be here now, the time when I—” He looked hard at the two of them, his Coke-bottle eyes scavenging for understanding. “What’s this about, Kimberly? What’s going on here? Who’s this? Who are you?”

“I’m the man with a .38 loaded for bear pointed at you.” He gave Uncle Blinky a better look at the gun and used it to motion him to the lounger. “Barrel looks longer than it is because I already rigged the silencer.”

Kim said, “My husband.”

“Husband? You said your husband was deceased. I remember distinctly.”

“That was Garry.”

“I’m Harrison, like the actor Harrison Ford, and to us you’re one cruel junkyard dog,” Uncle Blinky’s Doppelganger said. “I thought I said sit, dog.”

Uncle Blinky adjusted the lounger into an upright position. He sat down and gripped the armrests as if he was about to take his first flight. He played with his glasses and his nose while his face, his entire body, turned nervous tics into a sideshow of fear his makeup and his costume couldn’t disguise. “What are you accusing me of, Kimberly?”

“What does it sound like? Stealing off with my Lily, then stealing away her life.”

“That’s crazy. I never—”

“You have her picture up on your ghoulish wall along with pictures of every other child who died an ugly death at your hands. You’re the crazy one, Uncle Blinky.”

“I explained that to you, Kimberly. I never killed one of them. It’s a memorial. A loving memorial to all those precious children whose memory burns in my soul.”

“Tell that to mothers and fathers who didn’t see what I saw or couldn’t follow their worst suspicion and track after you to find out the truth. Now, to sit here staring me in the face and still tell a lie—”

“I know every name on the wall by heart, in my heart. I can tell you where each one... The city. The year. There is no Lily Gantry.”

“Cummings. Lily Cummings. Garry’s name, our married name, was Cummings.”

“I’m Gantry,” Kim’s husband said. “Harrison Gantry.”

“Kimberly, no child on the wall is named Lily. None. Not one. No, no, no, no, no. No Lily.”

“Lily Cummings. My Lily. Only six years old.”

Uncle Blinky’s head shook violently. “When we’re back home, we’ll go right over. You’ll see the photographs. You’ll see I’m telling you the truth.”

“You mean what passes for the truth in your corner of the world, Uncle Blinky?”

Uncle Blinky pushed up from the chair. He stepped forward and raised his right arm as if taking an oath.

In a blur of movement, Kim gave her husband a hand signal. He passed over the .38. She moved into a shooter’s stance, took urgent two-handed aim, and squeezed the trigger. The bullet caught Uncle Blinky in the chest. He reeled backward into the lounger. A second shot splintered his left Coke-bottle lens.

Kim struggled for breath and broke into tears.

Harrison Gantry stepped over, took back the .38, and wrapped her in his arms. “Save it for later, baby. We’re not finished yet. Okay? Okay, baby?”

“Okay, baby.”

He gave her a lingering kiss, wet, his tongue electric against hers, then rescued the paper-bag mask. He fit it over her face and tested it for snugness. Satisfied, he swung Kim around and aimed her for the door. “Now scat, baby, scoot,” he said. “Time’s awastin’.”

Kim hit the hallway running, pausing only to give the security camera a Billie the Kidney nose-thumb. She weaved through the convention hall, losing herself in the crowd on her way to a ladies’ room. She waited out a short line for a stall, then stripped off the costume and traded it for the simple wash-and-wear blouse and slacks outfit and heels stored in the knapsack. Everything she needed to clean off her face and apply fresh makeup was also in the knapsack. Harrison had seen to that. One of his traits she liked most, besides his always wanting to please her: Harrison was thorough about everything, the kind of person who washed the dishes before racking them in the dishwasher.

She gave a few extra finger-fluffs to her hair, dumped the bag in a trash barrel, and headed back to the convention floor, to the door that took her back to Uncle Blinky’s dressing room suite under the watchful eye of the security camera.

She knocked a musical rap-a-tap-tap on the door. “It’s Kim, Uncle Blinky. Need you for a few minutes.” She counted out ten seconds to herself, knocked and called for him again. Gave it another ten seconds before shrugging and going for the door key in her slacks pocket.

She entered the dressing room and, a second or two later, screamed.

“And you say you never saw the victim before?” The lead detective, sounding as if she had watched one TV cop opera too many, asking Harrison Gantry the question a second time.

Gantry head-shook the answer. “Not until I thought I heard someone and stepped out from the other room there.” Pointing. “He looked like that, like me, without the blood, though. My face. My costume. Like all those other fans out there in Sinatra Hall.”

“And a woman with him, you said?”

“Dressed like Bag Woman Billie the Kidney.”

The detective made a note in her pad. “Growing up, she was my favorite. How about you, Ms. Gantry?”

“I liked her a lot, but I think Boss Horse of Course more.”

“I meant, did you see her, this woman?”

“Just him, in the chair. I had some last-minute things to go over with Uncle Blinky. I saw him in the lounger, dead like that, and screamed, thinking it was Uncle Blinky, before I saw him standing over there.” Pointing. “He was like a zombie, staring at the dead Uncle Blinky like he was seeing himself dead like that. Holding a gun and looking at it like he couldn’t understand why there was no flag that said BANG! coming out from the barrel.”

Gantry said, “He said he was going to kill me.”

“Why, Uncle Blinky? Did he say why?” Her voice was as friendly and inquisitive as her cherubic face, just beginning to hint at the laugh lines and wrinkles that would be in full bloom by the time she eased out of her thirties.

“Because I wasn’t the Lone Ranger, he said, and only the Lone Ranger had the right to always wear his mask... Clayton Moore.”

“Your assailant said his name was Clayton Moore?”

“No. That’s who played the Lone Ranger in the movies and on television. He always kept his mask on, and when the people who owned the rights to the Lone Ranger wouldn’t allow that, he used sunglasses shaped like a mask. When he got ready to shoot me, I couldn’t stand still for that. I have a show to do. I can’t disappoint all my fans. I went for him. Surprised him. Got my hands on the gun, and—” A shrug and a noisy breath. “I didn’t intend what happened to happen, you know that, don’t you, Detective?”

“The Uncle Blinky Code of Life.”

“The Uncle Blinky Code of Life, indeed.”

“And Bag Woman Billie the Kidney?”

Gantry threw open his hands. “She saw he was dead and raced away. For all I know, she could be with all those other Bag Woman Billie the Kidneys out there waiting for my show. You think so, Kimberly?”

Kim looked at her watch. “It is getting on that time.”

The detective looked up from her notepad. “Given what’s happened, how close you came to being shot, you’re up to performing?”

“You know how it is: The show must go on. Can’t disappoint all my Gangaroos, can I?”

“He’s third-generation Uncle Blinky,” Kim said. “His grandfather and father before him. The reason he always wears his clown face, because—”

“Not because I’m some scarred puss like the Phantom of the Opera,” Gantry said.

“For the continuity. Because it keeps the illusion alive,” Kim said.

Gantry returned her smile and said, “Like Ol’ Man River, Uncle Blinky just keeps rolling along.”

The plan didn’t call for Gantry to take to the stage, although he had studied, practiced, and rehearsed Uncle Blinky’s show, his every move, the nuance of every gesture, in the months since Kim had decided beyond a reasonable doubt that Uncle Blinky had killed Lily. Too risky, they’d agreed, no matter how well rehearsed Harrison might be.

Instead, halfway to the wings, Gantry faltered. He staggered to a wall for support, but his legs gave out anyway. His knees buckled. He fainted. Kim was instantly beside him, shouting for a doctor, an ambulance.

The Twenty-Eighth Annual Uncle Blinky’s Corner of the World International Convention concluded without him.

Thousands of get-well cards were waiting for Uncle Blinky when Kim and Gantry got back to the Palisades. Mail sacks were piled by the box at the foot of the drive and more were stacked on the porch and in the reception hall. “I’ve never in my life been this loved,” he said, stretching his arms as wide as they could go.

“Except by me, baby.”

“More than life itself, baby?”

“More than you’ll ever know, baby — since the night we met.”

“And it took a tragedy to bring us together, finally. Two of them. Lily, then Garry.”

“Can’t think of anything that still hurts so much, except the thought of life ever going on without you.”

“Now, it’s clear sailing ahead for us.”

Kim nodded agreement. “We’ll finally be free as the wind, once I tell the police and everyone back in Omaha about Uncle Blinky and what I found out.”

Gantry awarded her two thumbs up. “By then, Uncle Blinky’s gone. Poof! Disappeared. Never to be seen again.”

“And no more cause for them to keep suspecting you or me over what happened to Lily, and Garry after her.” She flicked away some unplanned tears and offered Harrison her biggest smile.

Gantry answered Kim in kind and said, “Just you and me, baby, together in our own corner of the world.”