Your Heart Belongs To Me

A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young. -Edgar Allan Poe, “Lenore”

FORTY-FOUR

Late Sunday afternoon in Las Vegas, the low sky looked as gray as the face of a degenerate gambler standing up from a baccarat table after being busted to bankruptcy.

The high Mojave lay in the grip of a chill. Down from the bald faces of the mountains, down from the abandoned iron and lead mines long forgotten, off the broken slopes of pyrite canyons and feldspar ravines, across desiccated desert flats, through the bright barrens of the casinos came a damp wind, not yet strong enough to whip clouds of dust off sere and empty lots or to shake nesting rats out of the lush crowns of phoenix palms, but sure to swell stronger as the day waned.

At the private-plane terminal, George Zane waited with a twelve-cylinder black Mercedes sedan. The man looked even more powerful than the muscle car.

As he opened the rear door for Ryan, he said, “Good afternoon, Mr. Perry.”

“Good to see you again, George. Got some bad weather coming.”

“Whether we need it or not,” the big man replied.

In the car, as they turned onto the airport-exit road, Ryan said, “Do you know if Barghest is going to be out tonight? Will we be able to get into his place?”

“We’re headed straight there,” Zane said. “Turns out he drove to Reno for some kook conference, won’t be back until Wednesday.”

“Kook conference?”

“That’s what I call it. Bunch of our best and brightest getting together to talk about the benefits of reducing human population to five hundred million.”

“What’s that-six billion people gone? How do they figure to make that happen?”

“Oh,” Zane said, “from what I read, they’ve got a slew of ways figured out to get the job done. Their problem is selling the program to the rest of us.”

At an intersection, a few sheets of a newspaper were airborne on the breeze, billowing to full spreads, gliding slowly in a wide spiral, their flight as ponderous as that of albatrosses circling in search of doomed ships.

“Shouldn’t we wait a couple hours, until after dark?” Ryan wondered.

“Always looks less suspicious to go in during daylight if you can,” Zane said. “Straight on and bold is better.”

The neighborhood appeared even more conventional in daylight than it had been at night: simple ranch houses, gliders and swings on the porches, well-kept yards, basketball hoops above garage doors, an American flag here and there.

Dr. Death’s house looked as ordinary as any residence on the street-which made Ryan wonder what might be in some of the other houses.

As Zane swung the Mercedes into the driveway, the garage door rose. He drove inside, where earlier he had dropped off Cathy Sienna and where now she stood at the connecting door to the house.

As the garage door rolled down, she greeted Ryan with a professional smile and a handshake. He had forgotten how direct her stare was: granite-gray eyes so steady that she seemed to challenge the world to show her anything that could make her flinch.

She said, “I didn’t realize you enjoyed yourself so much the last time.”

“It wasn’t as much fun as Disneyland, but it was memorable.”

“This Barghest,” George Zane said, “gives crazy a bad name.”

In the kitchen, Ryan explained that he wanted them to look for places in which Dr. Death might have taken special pains to hide his files of assisted suicides. Trapdoors under carpets, false backs in cabinets, that sort of thing.

Meanwhile, he would be once more reviewing the ring binders full of photographs of dead faces.

Judging by the portion of the house that Ryan passed through, the connoisseur had not added to his macabre collection; it was a relief to discover the home office still contained no cadaver art.

Evidently, even Barghest needed a refuge where dead eyes were not fixed upon him.

A third ring binder stood on the bookshelf beside the two that had been there sixteen months earlier. Ryan took it down first and stood paging quickly through it, half expecting to be startled by a familiar face.

Of the eleven recent photographs in the new album, the oldest appeared to be of a man in his seventies. The youngest showed a fair-haired boy with delicate features, his blue eyes taped open, no older than seven or eight.

A windowpane rattled softly and rising wind soughed in the eaves. Something fluttered in the attic, perhaps a roosting bird.

Eleven assisted deaths in sixteen months. This ferrier had poled across the Styx with some regularity.

Ryan returned the album to the bookshelf, retrieved the original two ring binders, and carried them to the desk.

Having gone directly to the shelves on entering the room, he had not noticed the familiar book on the desk. A copy of Samantha’s novel lay facedown.

Staring at Sam’s jacket photo, Ryan settled in the office chair. He hesitated to inspect the book.

When finally he picked it up, he turned to the half-title page, then to the full-title. He was relieved to find no inscription from the author, no signature.

Paging through, he discovered notations in the margins, petty criticisms, some of them vulgar enough to sicken him. He read only a few before closing the book in disgust.

Understandably, Spencer Barghest would have been interested enough in the novel to buy a copy. He’d been in a relationship with Sam’s mother for at least six years. And he had in some way assisted her twin sister, Teresa, out of this world, which was either a noble act of compassion or cold-blooded murder, depending on your point of view.

The point of view that mattered most was Teresa’s, but given the shortage of reliable mediums these days, the authorities were not likely to obtain a deposition from her.

Putting the book aside, Ryan turned next to the first ring binder. Sixteen months earlier, none of these faces in this album had meant anything to him. He was curious to see if that would be the case again or if he might have overlooked something the first time.

Perhaps his personal journey over the past year had sharpened his sensitivity to suffering, because these faces affected him more profoundly than before. They remained death portraits, but on this second viewing, he was more poignantly aware that they were people, even in death each of their faces alive with character.

If he had missed anything important the first time through the binder, he missed it again-and did not have the courage to review it a third time.

The second album was the one from which he had extracted the photo of Teresa that had obsessed him. He had sat here, mesmerized by the reflections in her eyes-until Cathy Sienna had stepped in from the hall to say the house was giving her the creeps.

Ryan had agreed and, assuming that the discovery of Teresa’s death portrait was the lodestone that had drawn him here, he had closed the ring binder and returned it to the shelf.

Now he found the third plastic sleeve still empty. Perhaps Barghest had not discovered that Teresa’s photo was missing.

Twelve sleeves farther into the album, he came across someone he knew. He closed his eyes in disbelief.

If it belonged in this sick collection at all, surely this face should be in the third ring binder, the new one, among the portraits of the people to whom Barghest had evidently ministered since Ryan’s previous visit. Impossible that it belonged with the faces of those who had been unfortunate enough to come under his care years ago.

Heart knocking harder than it had when Lily’s sister had cut him in the parking lot, Ryan opened his eyes and found that he had not mistakenly identified the woman in the photograph.

I’m here. I’m watchin’ over you. You’ll be just fine.

The smooth dark skin.

Don’t hold your breath, honey.

The emerald-green eyes.

You hear him, don’t you, child?

Twelve sleeves after Teresa, who had been dead six years, was Ismay Clemm, one of the two cardiology nurses who had assisted Dr. Gupta with the myocardial biopsy.

FORTY-FIVE

The rising wind choked and wheezed in the eaves, as if words were caught in its throat, and in frustration thrashed the branches of the melaleucas beyond the study window.

Sixteen months ago, sitting in this room, Ryan had been certain he stood at the threshold of a discovery that would strip bare the lurid details of the conspiracy against him. Now the same conviction gripped him.

The first time around, upon finding Teresa’s photo, he thought he had before him the essential piece of the puzzle. Already half obsessed with the perfection of Samantha’s face, he was at once riveted by its perfect duplicate. Seeing the six-year-old death portrait mere hours after having risen from the bed of a lover whose countenance, as she slept, matched the dead face detail for detail, Ryan had been struck by an intense awareness of the eternal presence of death in life that at first disoriented him and then led him to focus on Teresa as the hub from which all the recent weirdness had radiated.

Teresa Reach, however, could neither complete the puzzle nor even contribute to its solution. She was not part of the web that unknown others seemed to be spinning around Ryan.

He couldn’t properly call her a red herring, because no one had planted her photograph in the ring binder with the intention of misdirecting him. In his eagerness to seize the moment, to act, he had raced to the conclusion that her presence in this collection of faces was the illuminating thing he had come to Las Vegas to discover.

But here, sixteen months and twelve pages later in the album, a greater astonishment and the true key lay before him: Ismay Clemm, the fiftysomething cardiology nurse, who had not only assisted with the myocardial biopsy but also had checked on him repeatedly, after the procedure, when he had been on the bed in the prep room, sleeping off the lingering effects of the sedative.

There, he had for the first time experienced the dreams that for a while plagued him: the black lake, the haunted palace, the city in the sea. As much as anything, those repetitive nightmares-and the paranoia that they reinforced, the suspicion of being drugged or poisoned that they enflamed-had motivated him to make that first trip to Vegas while waiting for Dr. Gupta to report the results of the biopsy.

Although Ryan now knew beyond doubt that Ismay Clemm was the pivot point on which he could turn from confusion to clarity, he paged through the rest of the ring binder, studying faces. He needed to be certain he did not make the same mistake now that he had made when he leaped to the conclusion that Teresa would be the key to the door of truth.

The remaining faces were those of strangers. He returned to the nurse. Not Ismay, surely. Ismay’s other.

If these events had a theme, it was identical twins. Samantha and Teresa. Lily and her deranged sister with the switchblade.

Ryan heard a rapping, but it was Zane or Sienna in another room, sounding out a wall for indications of a hidden cache.

He had no idea in what town Ismay Clemm lived. Because her name was unusual, Ryan used his cell to avail himself of a new information service that searched for listings not by city but by area code. He could find no number for Ismay in either the 949 or 714 areas, which might only mean that her phone was unlisted.

At four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, reaching Dr. Gupta to ask after Nurse Clemm would be difficult. Getting to him on a week-day would be no easier.

A year ago, after discovering that his patient had been under the care of Dr. Dougal Hobb for more than a month, Dr. Gupta had sent Ryan’s records to Hobb, and a curt note to Ryan expressing dismay that he had not been informed sooner of this decision. He was not likely to take or return a call.

As a consequence of all this, Ryan had changed internists, as well. He moved from Forry Stafford to Dr. Larry Kleinman, who offered a concierge medical practice.

He considered calling Kleinman’s 24/7 contact number to ask if the doctor would be willing to seek from the hospital the name of the other cardiology nurse who had assisted Gupta in the biopsy that day. But as he stared at the death portrait of Ismay’s twin, he remembered the lean nurse whose body fat was less than a cricket’s. Whippit. No. Whipset. First name Kara or Karla.

Of the Whipsets that he found in the 949 area code, one had a first name similar to what he recalled. He recognized it at once: Kyra.

He placed the call, and she answered on the third ring.

After he identified himself and apologized for intruding on her privacy and on her Sunday, Ryan said, “I’m hoping you might know how I can get in touch with Ismay Clemm.”

“I’m sorry. Who?”

“The other nurse who assisted in the procedure that day.”

“Other nurse?” Kyra Whipset said.

“Ismay Clemm. I very much need to talk to her.”

“I don’t know anyone by that name.”

“But she assisted during the biopsy.”

“I was the only nurse on the procedure, Mr. Perry.”

“A black woman. Very pleasant face. Unusual dark-green eyes.”

“I don’t know anyone like that.”

“Could she have been…assisting unofficially?”

“I think I would remember. Anyway, it’s not done.”

“But she was there,” he insisted.

His conviction made Nurse Whipset uncertain. “But how did she assist, what did she do?”

“When the first tissue sample was taken, she told me not to hold my breath.”

“That’s it? That’s the extent of it?”

“No. She also…she monitored my pulse.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, she stood beside the examination table, holding my wrist, checking on my pulse.”

With a note of bewilderment, Kyra Whipset said, “But throughout the procedure, you were hooked up to an electrocardiograph.”

He tried to recall. The memory wouldn’t clarify.

Nurse Whipset said, “An electrocardiograph with a video display. A machine monitored your heart activity, Mr. Perry.”

Ryan remembered the fluoroscope on which he had watched the tedious progress of the catheter as it followed his jugular vein into his heart.

He could not recall an electrocardiograph. He could not say for certain that she was wrong, and he had no reason to suspect that she might lie to him. But what he remembered instead of the ECG was Ismay Clemm.

“After the procedure, I had to lie down on the bed in the prep room, to let the sedative wear off. She checked in on me a few times. She was very kind.”

“I looked in on you a few times, Mr. Perry. You were dozing.”

Staring at the death portrait in the ring binder, he said, “But I remember her clearly. Ismay Clemm. I can see her face now.”

“Can you spell the name for me?” Nurse Whipset asked.

After he spelled it, she spelled it back to him to make sure she had gotten it right.

“Listen,” she said, “I suppose it’s possible for some reason she briefly visited the diagnostics lab during the procedure, and I was too busy to pay much attention to her, but she made an impression on you.”

“She made an impression,” he assured Kyra Whipset.

“Because of the sedative, you might not recall it clearly. Your memory might have exaggerated her time in the room, the level of her involvement.”

He did not disagree with her, but he knew it had not been that way, not that way at all.

“So,” she said, “give me a number where I can reach you. I’ll make a couple of calls to people at the hospital, see who knows this woman. Maybe I can get contact information for you.”

“I’d appreciate that. Very kind of you,” he said, and gave her his cell number.

Rap-rap-rapping: George Zane and Cathy Sienna testing walls, testing cabinets.

Ryan removed Ismay Clemm’s death portrait from the plastic sleeve in the ring binder and put it on the desk.

The sharpening wind was a scalpel now, stripping the skin off every tract of bare land it found. Beyond the window, trees shuddered in clouds of yellow dust, in the acid-yellow light of late afternoon.

From the manila envelope that he had brought with him, Ryan took the photos of Teresa Reach and Lily X. He lined them up with the death portrait of the woman who looked like Ismay Clemm.

He knew now a disquiet that was different in character from any he had known before.

This journey had taken him from dead-center in the realm of reason, where he had lived his entire life, to the outer precincts, where the air was thinner and the light less revealing. He stood on the borderline between everything he had been and a new way of being that he dared not contemplate.

He had half a mind to return two photos to the ring binders and leave at once with just the picture of Lily.

The problem with that was-he had nowhere to go except home, where sooner or later he would be slit open and have his heart cut out of him again, this time without anesthetics.

After a while, the air acquired a faint alkaline taste from the dust-choked wind that relentlessly groaned and snuffled at the windows.

When eventually Ryan’s cell phone rang, the caller was not Kyra Whipset, but a woman named Wanda June Siedel, who said that she was calling on Nurse Whipset’s behalf.

“She says you want to know about Ismay Clemm.”

“Yes,” Ryan said. “She was…very kind to me at a difficult time in my life.”

“That sounds like Ismay, all right. Sure does. She and me were eight years best friends, and I don’t expect ever to know somebody sweeter.”

“Ms. Siedel, I’d very much like to talk with Nurse Clemm.”

“You call me Wanda June, son. I would sure like to talk to Ismay myself, but I’m sorry to tell you, she’s passed on.”

Gazing at the nurse’s photo on the desk, Ryan avoided for the moment his most important question. Instead he said, “What happened?”

“To be blunt, she married wrong. Her first husband, Reggie, he was a saint to hear Ismay tell it, and I expect he must have been if half her stories about him were true. But Reggie, he died when Ismay was forty. She married again seven years later, that was to Alvin, which is why she came here and I ever met her. She loved Alvin in spite of himself, but he never set well with me. They made it eight and a half years, then she fell backwards off a convenient stepladder and smashed the back of her skull bad on some convenient concrete.”

When Wanda June did not continue, Ryan said, “Convenient, huh?”

“Son, don’t take me wrong on this. I’m making no accusations, have no intention to smirch anyone’s reputation. Lord knows, I’m no policeman, never even watched them CSI shows, and there was plenty of policemen on Ismay’s case, so it’s got to be that they knew what they were doing when they called it an accident. Can’t be but crazed with grief and loneliness why Alvin took up with another woman just a month after Ismay’s gone. Crazed with grief and loneliness, crazed by the estate money and the insurance money, poor crazed and lonely Alvin.”

“She died in the fall, Wanda June?”

“No, no, son, they did some powerful surgery on her, and she had brain swelling bad for a time, didn’t know who she was, but she came around, she had fortitude and the Lord. No memory of the convenient stepladder or the convenient concrete, but she was getting back all the rest of herself, she got to be Ismay again. She was in a rehab hospital, working on some left-arm paralysis, which she was nearly shed of, when she was slammed by a convenient massive heart attack, while poor Alvin was visiting her with some friend of his, them alone in the room with Ismay and the door shut, and that was just one convenience too many for Ismay, God bless and keep her.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, Wanda June. I can hear in your voice how close you were to her.” He asked the most important question: “When did Ismay die?”

“It was three years ago this past Christmas Eve. Alvin, he was bringing her a gift, this beautiful silk scarf, which I guess was so beautiful it gave her a heart attack, which is comforting to think that beauty was what did her in, ’cause it wouldn’t have been anyway convenient if the heart attack didn’t happen and somebody then had to strangle her accidentally with the scarf.”

If Wanda June Siedel could be believed, Ismay Clemm had died twenty-one months prior to the myocardial biopsy during which Ryan had met her.

He sat listening to the angry yellow wind, the gears of his mind having ground to a halt on the thought-obstructing fact that had just been thrown into them.

Wanda June didn’t need encouragement to continue: “Ismay, she met Alvin on a Christian Internet site, which right there is some contradiction, the Internet being the devil’s playground. If Ismay hadn’t gone on the Internet, she wouldn’t ever met Alvin, she would still be out there in Denver with her sister, which means she and me never would have been friends, but I’d rather never known her than her be dead before her time.”

“ Denver,” Ryan said.

“That’s where she was born, lived as a girl, and then married to Reggie. She moved here to Newport, to Costa Mesa actually, she was forty-seven, because Alvin had a job here, such as it was, and so she got on with the hospital.”

“And her sister-she’s still alive?”

“The sister, Ismena, she didn’t marry Alvin, she doesn’t do e-mail let alone Internet, so she’s still not fallen off a stepladder or swallowed a silk scarf or anything, she’s doing fine, she’s a sweetheart like Ismay.”

Reason might have returned to the universe. If there was a sister, an explanation might exist that would comport with the world of laws and logic with which Ryan was comfortable.

“So you’ve stayed in touch with Ismena,” he said.

“Ismena Moon, that’s the maiden name, Alvin was a Clemm. Ismena and me write each other, talk on the phone some.”

“She still lives in Denver?”

“She does, she lives in the very house Ismay and Reggie owned, bought it away from Ismay once Ismay up and married the supposedly Christian Alvin, not that it’s my place to question anyone’s faith, stepladder or no stepladder.”

“Wanda June, what did Kyra Whipset tell you about me?”

“Didn’t even talk to her. She just knew somebody who knew me and knew I was friends with Ismay. They said you’d been impressed by her or something, would I call you.”

“As I said earlier, Ismay was very kind to me at a terrible time in my life. I wanted to…to repay that kindness. But I didn’t know she had passed on.”

“Son, I would love to hear that story, her kindness, what she did for you, put it in my Ismay-memory book.”

“I’ll tell you sometime, Wanda June. I promise. But right now, I was hoping you might put me in touch with her sister, Ismena.”

“Ismena misses Ismay so terrible, she would enjoy a polite young man like you with something good to say about the late lamented. I’ll give you her number.”

FORTY-SIX

In the Mercedes sedan, on the return trip to the airport, George Zane drove, Cathy Sienna rode shotgun, and Ryan slouched in the back, slowly shuffling again and again through the photographs of the three women-Teresa, Lily, Ismay-each of them having been one half of a set of identical twins, each of them with a living sister.

According to Samantha, good stories had deep texture. They acquired texture in numerous ways. The texture of character faults and virtues, of intentions contrasted with actions, of personal philosophy shaped by backstory, of mannerisms and habits, of contrasts and contradictions, of mundanities and eccentricities, of points of view and styles of speech. The texture of vivid visual images, of smells that came off the page, of sounds that resonated in the mind’s ear, of metaphor and simile. She could list dozens of sources for narrative texture. Ryan couldn’t remember them all.

In the texture, you began to see patterns. Some were patterns of plot, which you could think of as like the center lines on a highway and the guardrails at its extremes, there to be sure that you got to your destination without getting lost in byways of meaningless event. Others were patterns of the obvious theme, to give the story purpose that made it meaningful, in part just as the rules of construction for a sonnet gave it meaning, in part just as the truth of human suffering in a blues song made it worth singing.

The most difficult patterns of all to understand, the most intriguing, and usually the most ominous were those that arose from subtext, not from the surface theme but from the implicit meaning of the tale. The less you thought about those patterns, the more you understood them, for they were the patterns of primal truths, some of which the modern mind rejected on a conscious level.

Studying the photos of the three dead women, brooding about their living sisters, Ryan suspected that this pattern of twins, though seemingly the key to the plot, rose more from subtext and that the more intently he focused on it, the farther he traveled from the revelation he sought.

The yellow wind made pendulums of the traffic lights suspended over intersections, tore dead fronds off tall palm trees, harried tumbleweed out of vacant lots and along busy streets, buffeted the car, hissed at the windows, and in general made such an exhibition of its power that a pagan might have cast basketfuls of flower petals into it as an offering, to solicit exemption from the miseries of the coming storm.

Returning the photographs to the envelope, he said, “George, Cathy, I’m flying out to Denver from here. I don’t know that I’ll really need anyone with me, but there’s a longshot that I may have a security issue. I’d feel a lot more comfortable with someone who had a license to carry.”

“We’re both cool to carry in Colorado,” Zane said, “and Cathy has all the gun training that I have. Fact is, she may be the better shot.”

“I’ll lay twenty to one on that,” she said.

Ryan asked, “Are you up for Colorado, Cathy?”

“I only brought one change of clothes in my overnight bag.”

“That’s all you’ll need. We’ll be going back to California tomorrow.”

In truth, it didn’t seem likely that Ismena Moon, a fifty-eight-year-old woman described as a sweetheart, would prove to be a threat to Ryan’s physical safety.

He wanted someone with him more for company than protection. He had been something of a loner the past year, and solitude had taken its toll.

Denver in particular seemed to be a dangerous place for him to be alone. On his previous visit, he had arrived confused, as he would be arriving this time, and he had departed confounded, in a condition close to despair.

Besides, since he had first seen Cathy this afternoon in Spencer Barghest’s garage, Ryan had felt there was a question he wanted to ask her. Needed to ask her. A question of considerable importance. He just didn’t know what it might be. He sensed the question half-formed in the back of his mind. Perhaps it would fully coalesce in Denver.

Forty minutes out of Las Vegas, high over Utah, above the weather and bound for Colorado, Ryan excused himself and went to the lavatory.

He dropped to his knees and threw up in the toilet. He had developed a nervous stomach awaiting takeoff, and it had grown worse in flight.

At the sink, he rinsed out his mouth twice and washed his hands. He was struck by the paleness of his fingers, as white as bone.

When he looked at his face in the mirror, he found that it was paler than his hands, his lips without color.

Reluctantly he met his eyes and for some reason thought of Alvin Clemm and the convenient stepladder, the convenient concrete, the silk scarf and the convenient heart attack.

His legs grew weak, and he sat on the toilet. His hands were shaking. He clasped them, hoping one would steady the other.

He didn’t know when he had gotten up to wash his hands again. He found himself at the sink, scrubbing.

He was sitting on the toilet again when he heard a rapping, which quickened his heart until he realized this really was a hand upon a door.

“Are you all right?” asked Cathy Sienna.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

“You’re okay?”

“A little airsickness,” he explained.

“Do you need anything?”

“Just a minute. Give me a minute.”

She went away.

Airsickness wasn’t the correct diagnosis. He was sick with fear about what he would find on the ground, in Denver, in the house of Ismena Moon, which had once been the house of Ismay.

FORTY-SEVEN

Leaving stars behind, and moon, they descended through deep clouds, a white boil at the portholes, and then Denver appeared below, sparkling in the clear night air.

In flight, Ryan had phoned Ismena, telling her only that her late sister had done a kindness for him that he’d never forgotten and, as he was in Denver, he would like to stop by and find out more about Ismay. After Ismena welcomed their visit, Ryan had arranged for a Cadillac Escalade, which awaited them at the airport.

The January night was so bleak that his cold hands felt warm by comparison. His breath plumed from him, curls of vapor lingering for brief moments before deliquescing into the still air.

His stomach was settled, but not his nerves, and after they put their two small pieces of luggage in the back of the Escalade, he asked Cathy Sienna to drive. In the passenger seat, he read Ismena’s address from a notepad on which he had written it, and Cathy keyed it into the navigator.

She drove well, handling the big SUV as if she had put fifty thousand miles on it before this. Ryan suspected that she was good not merely with a gun and a car but also with just about any machine or tool, good with things because she preferred them to people.

The very act of driving brought a slight unconscious smile to her. Although she usually guarded her expressions closely, her face was not a mask at this moment, but relaxed as Ryan had not before seen it.

“Do I need to know who this woman is, why we’re here?” she asked.

He told her only about Ismay Clemm’s kindness to him during the myocardial biopsy-and then that he had this day learned the nurse had died twenty-one months before he met her.

Of the reactions he expected from Cathy, she exhibited none. The faint smile remained, and she kept her eyes on the road, as if he had said nothing more surprising than that, judging by the lowering sky, snow would soon fall.

“Twenty-one months. What do you make of that?” she asked.

“Ismena and Ismay are identical twins.”

“So you-what?-think it was Ismena at the biopsy?”

“Maybe. Probably.”

“But she was using Ismay’s name? Why would she?”

“That’s one thing I want to find out.”

“I guess you would.”

He waited for her to say something more. She drove in silence, and only spoke to say “Yes, ma’am,” each time the computerized voice of the navigation system gave her an instruction.

For her line of work, Cathy had been trained to listen carefully to what a client needed to tell her about his problems and to have no curiosity about any portion of his story that he failed to disclose. But her ability to feign disinterest in this case seemed almost superhuman.

As the navigator announced a final turn to the left coming in three hundred yards, Ryan recognized the park with the aspen trees and the church beside it.

“Pull over,” he said. “I know this place. If her house is just around the corner, we can walk from here.”

Their jackets were not heavy enough for the weather, but the air remained still, with no wind-chill factor. Hands in their pockets, they walked first into the park.

The aspens had shed their leaves for winter. The smooth bare limbs described pale geometries against the night sky.

A recent snow, not yet despoiled by children’s boots, mantled the grass, and the brick walkways wound like channels of dark water through the whiteness.

“I was here once,” he told Cathy, “sixteen months ago.”

She walked with him and waited.

“That time, I had the most powerful experience of deja vu. The air was as still then as now, but the aspens were whispering, as they always do when they’re leafed out. And I thought how much I’d always loved that sound-and then realized I’d never heard it before.”

A lamppost spilled light upon an iron bench. Icicles depended from the front skirt of the bench, and ice glazed the bricks directly under them.

“Sitting on this bench, I became convinced I’d sat here many times in the past, in all seasons and kinds of weather. And I felt the most powerful nostalgic sense of…of love for this place. Strange, don’t you think?”

Again surprising him, she said, “Not really.”

Ryan looked at her. Aware of his stare, she did not return it.

“Are you experiencing any of that now?” she asked, gazing up into the aspen architecture.

Shivering, Ryan surveyed the park. “No. It’s just a place this time.”

They walked to the front steps of St. Gemma’s Church, where a bronze lamp in the shape of a bell brightened the oak doors.

“I knew what the church would look like before I went inside. And when I went in…I felt I’d returned to a much-loved place.”

“Should we pay a visit?”

Although he knew he could not have been located and followed to Colorado so quickly, Ryan imagined that if he went into the church, he would find waiting for him the woman with the lilies and the knife, this time without the lilies.

“No,” he said. “It won’t feel special now. It’ll be like the park-just a place.”

His ear lobes began to sting with cold, his eyes watered, and the icy air had a faint ammonia scent that burned in his nostrils.

On the opposite side of the church from the aspen grove lay an expansive cemetery. No fence encircled it, and lampposts flanked a central walk.

“I didn’t see this before,” he said. “I didn’t come this far. When I left the church, I was so…spooked, I guess, I just wanted to get back to the hotel. I thought I’d been poisoned.”

This statement seemed to strike Cathy Sienna as more peculiar than anything else that he had revealed. As they walked past the cemetery toward the corner, she was first silent, but then said, “Poisoned?”

“Poisoned or drugged with hallucinogenics. It’s a long story.”

“No matter how long it is, seems to me poisoned-and-drugged is a bigger leap than some other explanation.”

“What other explanation?”

She shrugged. “Whatever other explanation you didn’t want to consider.”

Her answer disturbed Ryan, and suddenly so did the graveyard.

“I’ll bet she’s buried here,” he said.

“You mean Ismay Clemm?”

“Yeah.”

“You want to look for her?”

Grimacing at the gravestones in the snow, Ryan said, “No. Not in the dark.”

On the first block of the next cross street, houses stood on only one side, facing the cemetery.

The sixth house, a Victorian place with elaborate cornices and window-surround moldings, belonged to Ismena Moon. The porch light welcomed them.

Lace curtains on the mullioned windows and a brass door knocker in the form of a wreathed cherub holding a diadem in both hands suggested the interior style.

A slim handsome woman in her mid-sixties answered the door. She had white hair, a light café-au-lait complexion, and large clear brown eyes. Her sensible black dress shoes with block heels, blue rayon dress with high round neckline and narrow white collar, white cuffs, and gathered sleeves suggested she had recently returned from vespers or another service.

“Good evening, ma’am. I’m Ryan Perry, and this is my associate, Cathy Sienna. We have an appointment to see Ismena Moon.”

“That would be me,” the woman said. “So pleased to meet you. Come in, come in, you’re dressed to catch pneumonia in this weather.”

Ismena and Ismay were not identical twins, or twins of any kind.

FORTY-EIGHT

The parlor was high Victorian: floral wallpaper; deep maroon velvet drapes, trimmed and tasseled; lace curtains serving as sheers between the velvet panels; a cast-iron fireplace complete with kettle stand, with a black-and-gold marble surround and mantel; an étagère filled with collectible glass, two Chesterfield sofas, plant stands with ferns, sculpture on pedestals; a side table draped with a maroon cloth covered by a crocheted overlay; and everywhere a fabulous and precisely arranged clutter of porcelain busts, porcelain birds, groupings of ornately framed photographs, and knickknacks of all kinds.

Ismena Moon prepared coffee, which she poured from a Victorian-silver pot, and with which she served a generous selection of exotic cookies that she called biscuits.

While Ryan had been expecting a fifteen-minute meeting in which he might get to the truth of events on the day Dr. Gupta performed a myocardial biopsy, Ismena imagined their visit to be an occasion for socializing, with one of her favorite subjects-her sister, Ismay-as the inspiration for the get-together. She was such a charming woman, and so gracious, that Ryan could not disappoint her.

Besides, his identical-twin theory had deflated as completely as a hot-air balloon lanced by a church steeple. He needed a rational explanation for how a woman dead twenty-one months could have spoken with him on that day. For a moment, when he discovered there was a third sister, Ismana, his hope revived that she was Ismay’s twin, but she was the oldest of the three, and had died before Ismay.

“I can see how the similarity of the names would lead you to think twins,” Ismena said. “But they’re all just forms of Amy, you see, which was quite a popular name in the Victorian era, with many derivatives. Amia, Amice, Esmee, on and on.”

Victoriana, Ismena explained, had fascinated the Moon family going back to their grandfather, Dr. Willard Moon, who had been one of the first black dentists west of the Mississippi, with a patient list of mostly white folks. Ismay had been somewhat less infatuated with all things Victorian than was Ismena, but like everyone in the Moon family, she had been a great reader, and her favorite books and writers were mostly from the nineteenth century, primarily from the Victorian part of it.

Ismena indicated a book-lined alcove off the parlor, which featured two leather armchairs and reading lamps. “She was never happier than when she was in one of those chairs with a book.”

As Ismena had been talking, Ryan had stepped to the alcove to look over the titles on the bookshelves, which included complete collections of Dickens and Wilkie Collins.

Moving along the shelves, he stepped around a white marble bust displayed on a pedestal.

Ismena said, “That was a favorite thing of hers. Of course, she had to have it fixed above the parlor door, exactly as in the poem, but I am definitely not comfortable with a thing that heavy hanging over my head.”

“Like in what poem?” Cathy asked.

“‘The Raven,’” Ismena said. “Poe was her very favorite, though the poetry more than the stories.”

While she spoke, Ryan came to the Poe collection.

Ismena recited the verse from memory: “‘And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting / On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door.’”

The meter of the verse, the compelling repetitions, the rhymes, the alliteration conspired to catch Ryan’s breath for a moment, not because the poem was new to him-it wasn’t-and not only because it was lyrical and brilliant, but also because the unmistakable style of Poe, his essential voice, seemed of a piece with the strange events of the past sixteen months.

As he withdrew a volume of Poe’s collected poetry from a shelf, a yet more powerful sense of the uncanny overtook Ryan when he heard Cathy, in the spirit of the moment, recite: “‘Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore-’”

“‘-While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,’” Ismena continued with delight, “‘As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.’”

“Not sure I remember,” Cathy said, “but maybe…‘ “’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door-/ Only this and nothing more.”’”

“But it wouldn’t be only a visitor, would it?” Ismena asked. “Not in one of Mr. Poe’s creations.”

The rapping.

Ismay had known about the rapping.

After the biopsy, as he dozed in the prep room, she had said to Ryan, You hear him, don’t you, child? Yes, you hear him.

He didn’t understand how she could have known about the rapping, but of course that was not as much of a stumper as how she could have been there almost two years after dying.

You must not listen, child.

Now he opened the volume of verse to a random page-and saw a poem titled “The City in the Sea.”

“Ismay knew all of Mr. Poe’s verses by heart-except for ‘Al Aaraaf.’ She just couldn’t make herself like that one.”

Ryan scanned the early lines of “The City in the Sea,” and found something that he felt compelled to read aloud: “‘But light from out the lurid sea / Streams up the turrets silently / Gleams up the pinnacles far and free / Up domes, up spires, up kingly halls / Up fanes, up Babylon-like walls…’”

His voice must have trembled or otherwise betrayed his fear, for Ismena Moon said, “Are you all right, Mr. Perry?”

“I had a dream like this,” he said. “More than once.”

After scanning more lines, he looked up, realizing that the two women were waiting for him to explain himself.

Rather than elucidate, he said, “Ms. Moon, I see that you have half a dozen copies of Poe’s collected poetry.”

“Ismay bought it over and over again every time she found a new edition with different illustrations.”

“May I pay you for one of them? I’d like it as a…as a memento of Ismay.”

“I wouldn’t think of accepting a dime,” she said. “You take whichever one you like. But you still haven’t told me what kindness she did for you that impressed you so much.”

Carrying the book, he returned to the Chesterfield on which Cathy sat, and settled there to spin a story peppered with a little of the truth. He set the date of this tale before Ismay’s death, did not mention a heart transplant, but instead gave himself a multiple bypass. He told of how afraid he’d been that he was going to die, of how Ismay counseled him so wisely for an hour in the hospital one night, two hours the next night, and how she stayed in touch with him after his release, keeping his spirits up at a time when he would otherwise have fallen into depression.

He must have told the story well, because Ismena was moved to tears. “That’s her, all right, that’s how Ismay was, always giving.”

Cathy Sienna watched him dry-eyed.

Ismena pulled on calf-high boots and a coat, and walked with Ryan and Cathy across the street to the cemetery. She led them to Ismay’s grave and focused her flashlight on the headstone.

Ryan thought about how things would have been different from the way they were now if he had found this cemetery and this grave on his previous visit to Denver, before his transplant.

FORTY-NINE

In the Escalade, Ryan was neither in a mood to talk nor capable of thinking of anything to say. Cathy remained professional and uninquisitive.

Painted with reflected city light, mottled black and chrome-yellow, the low sky seemed to be smouldering. Like drifting ashes, snow flurries fluttered across the windshield.

At the hotel, her room was four floors below his. Getting off the elevator, she said, “Dream well,” as the doors slid shut between them.

Because he had only an overnight bag, Ryan had not wanted the assistance of a bellman. When Cathy left him alone in the elevator, his stomach turned over, and he felt as if the cab would plunge to the bottom of the shaft.

Instead, it took him to his floor, and he found his suite.

Beyond the windows, Denver rose in a lurid light, as if Ryan had brought the city in the sea with him out of a dream.

Sitting at a desk, he took his medications with a bottle of beer from the honor bar.

When he swallowed the last of two tablets and five capsules, he opened the book of poetry and paged through it from the beginning.

He found a poem titled “The Lake,” and it was the wild lake of his dream, lovely in its loneliness, bound all around with black rocks and tall pines.

When he came again upon “The City in the Sea,” he read it silently twice, and the final four lines a third time, aloud: “‘And when, amid no earthly moans, / Down, down that town shall settle hence, / Hell, rising from a thousand thrones, / Shall do it reverence.’”

Farther into the volume, he found his third dream in a poem titled “The Haunted Palace.”

He could think of no chain of sound reasoning that would explain Ismay Clemm or those dreams that had been inspired by the work of her favorite writer.

As for diving into unreason and conjuring some supernatural explanation, Ryan had no practice swimming in seas of superstition. This seemed to be a dangerous time to take the plunge.

He did not believe in ghosts, but if Ismay had been a ghost with a message to impart, he could not puzzle out her meaning.

He almost put the book down without paging to the end, but he remembered how he had put aside the ring binder in Barghest’s study after finding Teresa’s photo-delaying for sixteen months the discovery of Ismay Clemm’s photo, twelve sleeves later.

The next-to-last poem in the book, titled “The Bells,” called to mind something else Ismay had said to him. He heard her admonition now almost as clearly as if she had been here in the hotel room with him.

If you hear the iron bells, you come to me.

Poe’s “The Bells” had four sections, and Ryan read them with growing disquiet. The first celebrated the merry bells on Christmas sleighs. The second dealt with the harmony of wedding bells. The third part took a dark turn, describing fire-alarm bells and the human tragedy they could foretell.

The fourth part spoke of iron bells rung by ghouls high in a church, the melancholy menace of their tone.

“‘For every sound that floats,’” he read aloud, “‘From the rust within their throats / Is a groan.’”

Hearing the words spoken disturbed him more than reading them from the page, and he fell silent.

The extraordinary rhythms, rhymes, and repetitions of the rest of the poem brought back to him the cacophony and the chaos of the ringing bells that had awakened him in the hospital bed on the night before his transplant.

He could see, he could smell, he could hear the room again, Wally at the window, looking down, down, down, into waves of rising sound, a gloss on every surface, even shadows with a shine, and the shiver of the bells in his bones, in his blood, ringing thickly in his blood, and the smell of rust, a red and bitter dust, washing wave after wave, after heavy warning wave.

Finally he put the book aside.

He did not know what to make of any of this. He did not want to know what to make of it.

He knew that he would not sleep. Not in his current condition.

But he was desperate for sleep, for dreamless sleep. He could not tolerate being awake.

He did something then of which Dr. Hobb would not have approved, not for him or for any heart-transplant recipient. He raided the honor bar and hammered himself into sleep with a series of gin-and-tonics.

FIFTY

In the Learjet, Ryan at first sat apart from Cathy Sienna. Because he had awakened with a hangover and had needed time to chase off his headache, to settle his stomach with bland food, and to pull himself together, they were late leaving Denver. The runway rush, the lift-off, and the big banking turn across the Rockies had the potential to bring up his breakfast, and he preferred to ride out the start of the trip by himself.

Safely airborne, he went to her. The jet had conference-style seating. He sat facing her, and after concluding a paragraph, she looked up from a magazine.

“You have exceptional self-control,” he said.

“Why? Just because I made you wait ten seconds while I finished reading?”

“No. You’re self-controlled in every sense. Your pretense of being without curiosity is particularly impressive.”

“Mr. Perry, each day, life presents us with much more than we can understand. If I chased after everything that makes me curious, I’d have no time for the part of life I do understand.”

The flight attendant arrived to ask if they would like a snack or anything to drink. Ryan ordered a bit of the hair of the dog in the form of a Bloody Mary, and Cathy asked for black coffee.

“Anyway,” she continued, after the attendant went away, “an understanding of what’s important comes to you if you’re patient.”

“And what’s important to you, Cathy?”

She had been holding the magazine, one finger marking her page, as if she expected to return to it in a moment. Now she put it aside.

“No offense, but of the things that are the most important to me, there aren’t any that I just talk about with a stranger on a plane to pass the time.”

“Are we strangers?”

“Not entirely,” was the most that she would give him.

He studied her forthrightly: her lustrous dark hair, her high brow, wide-set and deep eye sockets, nose with a slight endearing crook, that sensuous mouth, proud chin, strong but feminine jaw, and back to her granite-gray eyes that made you feel as if she had rolled you out as thin as phyllo on a cold slab of baker’s granite. Although attractive, she lacked the physical perfection of Samantha, yet something about her convinced him that, in profound ways, she was enough like Sam to be her twin, which made him feel comfortable with her.

“A year ago, I had a heart transplant,” he said.

She waited.

“I’m glad to be alive. I’m grateful. But…”

He hesitated to continue for so long that before he spoke, the flight attendant returned with the Bloody Mary and the coffee.

Once he had the cocktail in hand, he didn’t want it. He nestled the glass in a drink holder in the arm of his chair.

As Cathy sipped her coffee, Ryan said, “The heart I received was from a young woman who sustained major head trauma in a car crash.”

Cathy knew dead Ismay-or someone pretending to be her-appeared to him prior to the transplant, and she knew that he had experienced one dream, maybe others, related to the nurse. Now Ryan could see her fitting those pieces of knowledge together with smaller bits she knew and others that she might infer, but still she asked no questions.

“Her name was Lily,” he continued. “Turns out, she has a sister, an identical twin.”

“You were sure Ismay must be a twin.”

“I thought identical twins were a theme, I needed to figure out the meaning of the theme. But maybe twins are just a motif.”

His terminology clearly puzzled her, but she said nothing.

“Anyway,” he said, “Lily’s sister-I think she was driving the car when the accident happened.”

“We could find out easily enough. But why does it matter?”

“I think she’s eaten with guilt. Guilt that she can’t endure. So she’s resorting to what psychiatrists call transference.”

“Shifting her guilt to you.”

“Yes. Because I received Lily’s heart, the sister blames me for Lily being dead.”

“Is she dangerous?”

“Yes.”

“This isn’t an issue for private security alone. Call the authorities.”

“I’m reluctant to do that.”

Her gray eyes now seemed to be the shade of the snow-cloud layer above which they flew, and he could no more see below the surface of her gaze than he could see the land below the storm.

Into her silence, he said, “You’re wondering why I’m reluctant. I’m wondering, too.”

He looked out the porthole beside him.

Eventually, he said, “I think it’s because I’m at least a little bit sympathetic to her, to the way she feels.”

And after a further passage between the winter clouds and the fierce blind sun, he said, “Going into this, I didn’t realize the emotional weight that accompanies…living with someone else’s heart. It’s this great gift but…it’s a terrible burden, too.”

All the time he had been looking out the porthole, she continued to watch him. Now as he turned to her again, she said, “Why should it be a burden?”

“It just is. It’s like…you have an obligation to live not just for yourself but also for the one who gave you her heart.”

Cathy was silent for so long, her gaze fixed on her mug, that Ryan thought she would pick up the magazine again when she had drunk the last of the coffee.

He said, “The first time we met in Vegas, sixteen months ago, do you remember telling me that I was haunted by my own death, that I felt an ax falling but couldn’t figure out who was swinging it?”

“I remember.”

“Do you remember helping me to consider my possible enemies by listing the roots of violence?”

“Of course.”

“Lust, envy, anger, avarice, and vengeance. The dictionary says avarice is an insatiable greed for riches.”

She finished her coffee, put the cup aside, but did not return to the magazine. Instead she met his stare.

Ryan said, “Do you think avarice can be a greed for something other than money?”

“A synonym for avaricious is covetous. A man can covet anything belonging to another, not just money.”

The flight attendant arrived to ask if Cathy wanted more coffee and whether something was wrong with Ryan’s Bloody Mary. She took the mug and the glass away.

Following the attendant’s departure, Cathy Sienna broke a mutual silence. “Mr. Perry, I need to ask a terrible question. Blunt and direct. Do you want to die?”

“Why would I want to die?”

“Do you?”

“No. Hell no. I’m only thirty-five.”

“You do not want to die?” she asked again.

“I’m terrified of dying.”

“Then there are steps you’ve got to take, and you know them. But in addition to going to the authorities, you’ve got to do more. I think you must make…the heroic act.”

“What do you mean?”

Instead of answering, she turned to the porthole beside her and stared down upon the field of winter clouds, the barren furrows under which seeded snow was harvested by a hidden world below.

Her skin seemed translucent in the high-altitude light, and when Cathy pressed a few fingers to the glass, Ryan had the strangest notion that, if she wanted, she could reach through that barrier as if it were less substantial than a gauzy membrane, even less solid than the surface tension on a pond.

He did not repeat his question, because he recognized that this withdrawal was different from her other silences, more contemplative and yet more urgent.

When she turned to him again, she said, “You may not have time for the heroic act. To be effective for you, it requires a future of satisfactory works.”

The directness of her stare, the tone of her voice, and her earnestness implied that she believed she was speaking plainly to him, her meaning unmistakable.

Confused, Ryan did not at once ask her to clarify, because he recalled what she had said earlier-that understanding comes with patience-and he suspected that any question he asked would be met with the same advice.

“What you need to do,” she continued, “is offer yourself as a victim.” Perhaps she saw bafflement in his face, for she elaborated. “Suffer for the intentions of others, Mr. Perry. If you have the courage and the stamina, offer yourself as a victim all the rest of your life.”

If he’d been required to put into words the course of action that she had just suggested, he could not have made much sense of it. Yet on some deep level of his mind, in some profound recess of his heart, he knew that she had planted a truth in him and that in time he would understand it fully, and only in time.

Without another word, he returned to the seat in which he had been sitting before joining Cathy, and they completed the flight apart from each other.

Crossing Arizona into California, Ryan considered that he did not have to go home, where Lily’s sister must be waiting. He could go anywhere, to Rome or Paris, or Tokyo. He could spend the rest of his life on the run in high style and never exhaust his fortune.

Nevertheless, he rode the plane down to southern California, where the day was overcast and the sea choppy in the distance.

On the Tarmac, before going to the limo that Ryan had arranged to transport Cathy back to Los Angeles, she came to him and said, “You remembered what I said about the roots of violence. Do you remember the taproot-always the ultimate and truest motivation?”

“The hatred of truth,” he said. “And the enthusiasm for disorder that comes from it.”

To his surprise, she put down her small suitcase and hugged him, not in the manner of a woman embracing a man, but with a fierceness that expressed more than affection. She whispered in his ear and then picked up her suitcase and went to the car that waited for her.

In his own limo, leaving the airport, Ryan thought again of escape. They could drive to San Francisco. He could get a new car there and drive himself, next to Portland then east to Boise, down to Salt Lake, to Albuquerque and Amarillo. Spending a night or two in each place, on a perpetual road trip.

His cell phone rang.

He checked the screen. His father was calling.

When Ryan answered, the old man said, “What the shit is going on, kid?”

“Dad?”

“How deep is the shit you’re in? Are you gonna drown in it? Am I going down with you, what the hell?”

“Dad, take it easy. Calm down. What’s happening?”

“Violet is happening, right here, right now, get your ass over here.”

For a moment, Ryan thought his father had said violence was happening, but when the word registered properly, he repeated it: “Violet.”

“What’re you doing with a psycho bitch like this, kid? Are you out of your freakin’ mind? You get her out of here. You get her out of here now.”

Lily and Violet, sisters in life, sisters forever.

FIFTY-ONE

Nearly nine years earlier, Ryan had bought houses for his mother and father-Janice and Jimmy-and put them on monthly allowances. Considering the general indifference with which they raised him and the number of times the indifference was punctuated with craziness and cruelty, he didn’t feel that he owed them anything. But he was famous, at least in the business world; the media lived to make a goat of a guy like him, which would be inevitable if they found his parents living in near destitution. Besides, there was a kind of satisfaction in treating them better than they had treated him.

Because Janice and Jimmy divorced when Ryan was nineteen, he put his mother in a view house on the hills of Laguna Beach, and settled his father closer, in a place half a block from the beach in Corona del Mar. Janice liked glitz and square footage, but his father wanted a cozy bungalow with “attitude and funk.”

Corona del Mar, which was a part of Newport Beach, didn’t have a reputation for funk. Ryan found a 2,200-square-foot cottage-style bungalow with enormous charm, confident that Jimmy would bring plenty of attitude and funkiness with him.

Unsure of the situation he would find, he had his limo driver park a block away, and he walked to the house.

Step by step, he considered backing off until Wilson Mott could get armed escorts here.

The United States was one of the few places in the world where a wealthy man could safely live without being parenthesized by bodyguards. In the interest of leading a normal life, with as much liberty as he could keep, Ryan used Mott’s armed escorts only when absolutely necessary.

In this instance, while prudence argued for backup, instinct said he must go in alone. Instinct and a belated acknowledgment of the truth also told him that by his actions, he had narrowed his many possible futures to this one aneurysm in the time stream, and Fate would either end him here or give him another chance. Only he could save himself.

He opened a white gate in a white picket fence and walked under a trellis draped with bougainvillea in its less flamboyant winter dress but still with an impressive spray of red petals as bright as blood. A brick walkway led to a porch with side trellises up which climbed trumpet vines.

A gardening service maintained the landscape. Left to Jimmy, the lawn would be dead, and everything else would have rioted into a tangle reminiscent of a third-act set for Little Shop of Horrors.

The front door stood ajar. He did not ring the bell, but pushed the door open and stepped inside.

He seldom came here, so the time warp always surprised him, just as it always depressed him. The Age of Aquarius had passed in most of the rest of the world, but here the clocks had stopped in 1968. The psychedelic posters, the Grateful Dead memorabilia, here Sly and the Family Stone, there Hendrix and Joplin, here the Jefferson Airplane, the Day-Glo peace signs, the portrait of Chairman Mao, bamboo window shades flanked by tie-dyed drapes, and of course the hookah on the coffee table.

Jimmy sat on the sofa, and Lily’s sister, Violet, stood over him with a silencer-equipped pistol.

Seeing Ryan, his father said, “Shit, man, you took long enough. We have a situation here. Whatever you did to make it, you unmake it right now, ’cause this bitch is a stone-serious psycho.”

At sixty-three, Jimmy had no hair on the top of his head but a sufficient crop at the back to make a ponytail. He wore a headband like one that Pigpen had worn, a mustache like David Crosby’s, beads purportedly worn by Grace Slick. The only thing about him that was not copied after someone else were his eyes like burnt holes into which had drained water and ashes, the aftermath of a fire, full of childlike calculation and need and quiet desperation, restless eyes that Ryan could bear to meet only when his old man was sufficiently stoned that the fear and resentment and bitterness were for the moment drowned in chemical bliss.

“Bamping,” Violet said.

Hearing movement, he turned to see a man step into the living room from the hallway. He was Asian, Ryan’s size, and had a pistol of his own.

Indicating Jimmy, she said to Bamping, “Take him to his bedroom and keep him quiet until this is done.”

“I don’t want to go back there,” Jimmy said. “I don’t want to go with him.”

Violet put the muzzle of the silencer against Jimmy’s forehead.

“Dad,” Ryan said. “Do what they want.”

“Screw ’em,” Jimmy said. “Fascist shits.”

“She’ll blow your brains out, Dad. What can he do to you that would be more final?”

Licking his lips and the fringe of mustache that overhung them, Jimmy rose unsteadily from the sofa. He was a skinny wreck. The seat of his jeans sagged, he had no butt left, and sticking out of his T-shirt, his elbows looked almost as big as his forearms.

“She’s making this worse for me,” Jimmy said to Ryan. “Bitch won’t let me have a joint. Make her let me have one.”

“I don’t set the rules here, Dad.”

“It’s your house, isn’t it?”

“Dad, go with Bamping.”

“Go with what?”

“Bamping. That’s his name. Go with him now.”

“What kind of name is Bamping?”

“Don’t do this anymore, Dad.”

“When they bought your company, did they buy your balls?”

“Yes, they did, Dad. They bought them. Now go with him.”

“This sucks. This whole situation sucks.”

“It’s no tangerine dream, that’s for sure,” Ryan said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

“It means something, all right. Wise-ass.”

At last Jimmy allowed Bamping to escort him back the hall to the bedroom. A door closed.

“Very carefully,” Violet said, “take off your jacket.”

“I’m not carrying a weapon.”

“Very carefully,” she repeated.

He took off the jacket and draped it over the sofa, where she could examine it if she wished. At her command, he took off his shirt and placed that beside his jacket, and then he turned in a circle with his arms extended like the wings of a bird.

Satisfied that he wasn’t armed, she pointed to a La-Z-Boy recliner and said, “Sit there.”

Obeying, Ryan said, “Funny.”

“You are amused?”

“I wouldn’t go that far. But it’s funny how the warriors of the Greatest Generation and washouts of the next both like their La-Z-Boys.”

He did not recline but sat straight up, leaning forward.

“Where have you been?” she asked.

“ Denver.”

She kept at a distance from him, not willing to get as near as she had been to Jimmy. “Were you running away?”

“I thought about it,” he admitted.

“I didn’t expect you to come here.”

“If I didn’t, you would have killed him.”

“Yes.”

“I guess you still might.”

“I might,” she said. “I will certainly kill you.”

“Maybe I didn’t come alone.”

“You came in a limousine, which is parked a block away. There is only the driver. He is in the car, listening to very bad music and reading an obscene magazine.”

Although Ryan’s fear was not diminished, a peculiar calm came over him, as well. He wanted not a single day more that was alike to the days of the past sixteen months. He had been saved from certain death, but he had lost Samantha, he had lost a sense of purpose, and he had lost the capacity for pure joy. His lifelong conviction that the future was worth the travails of the day, while not broken, had been shaken. He had arrived at a lever-point moment. Here he must pivot to a better future or give up the game.

“If you’re going to kill me,” he said, “may I have the courtesy of knowing fully why?”

FIFTY-TWO

The bamboo shades, dropped to sills, were dimly backlit by the overcast day but admitted no light to the living room or to the dining room that lay beyond a wide archway. Illumination came from two table lamps turned low, from the luminous shapes everchanging in a lava lamp, from three candles glimmering in colored glasses on the fireplace mantel, and from two glass vessels on the coffee table, in which floating wicks burned scented oils.

More than light, shadows shaped the room, smoothing every sharp corner into a radius, layering velvet folds of faux draperies over flat surfaces, and conspiring with the pulsating candlelight to suggest that the ceiling had an undulant form.

The woman roamed ceaselessly through orderless patterns of pale light and masking shadow, through shimmering nimbuses and quivering penumbras. Her languid movements might have seemed lethargic to some, but not to Ryan, who saw in her the measured restlessness and the lethal power of a tiger.

“Who is this?” she asked, pointing with the pistol to a poster.

“Country Joe and the Fish,” Ryan said.

“I don’t see fish.”

“It’s the name of the band. They changed the world.”

“How did they change the world?”

“I don’t know. That’s what my father told me.”

Lamplight uplit her face and, with illusory powder and mascara, painted her features into a stark kabuki mask.

“What is the stink?” she asked.

“Scented candles, scented oils.”

“The other odor, under that.”

“You’re probably smelling the pot.”

“Marijuana?”

“Yeah. The smoke saturates things. That’s why he burns scented candles, to mask it.”

“Why does he smoke pot?”

“I don’t know. Because he always has.”

“He is addicted?”

“They say it’s not addictive.”

“Doesn’t marijuana make you mellow?”

“I don’t use it. I don’t know. That’s what they say.”

“He isn’t mellow,” she said.

“No. He never has been.”

Dressed in black slacks, black sweater, and black jacket, she was a shadow moving through shadows. For the most part, the various lamps and candles confirmed her presence only as their light found her hands and her face. Whatever the denomination of the light that paid on her skin, it was given back as gold.

Ryan knew he should be alert for an opportunity to rush her and struggle for the weapon. Often, she pointed the gun away from him and seemed to be distracted by Jimmy’s nostalgic collection.

He suspected, however, that her distraction was more apparent than real, that any opening he saw was only an opportunity to be gut-shot.

Indicating another poster, she asked, “Who is this?”

“Another band. The Grateful Dead. They changed the world.”

“How did they change it?”

“I don’t know. Maybe Dad can tell you.”

“I know where your mother lives, but I have not met her yet.”

“You’re in for a treat,” Ryan said.

“Is she like him?”

“Like but different. With her it’s alcohol and men, especially men who like alcohol.”

“I am thinking about killing all three of you.”

Ryan said nothing.

At another poster, she said, “Who is this?”

“Jim Morrison and the Doors.”

“Did they change the world?”

“That’s what I hear.”

As Violet moved past him into the portion of the room that lay behind his La-Z-Boy, Ryan turned his head and started to turn in his seat to follow her.

“Face forward,” she said, pointing the pistol at the bridge of his nose.

He did as he was told.

“If you turn your head to look back, I will shoot you. The people in these posters-where are they now?”

“I don’t know. A lot of them are dead.”

“So the world changed them,” she said.

He could barely hear her soft steps. She must have picked up something to have a look at it, for it knocked slightly against a table when she put it down.

In the lengthening silence, he searched his mind for a question or a comment that would begin to give him some control of their conversation.

From so close that her voice startled him, from just behind his right ear, she said, “I told your father my name. Do you know the name of my sister?”

The difference of intonation between the statement and the question was the difference between an emotionless declaration and the apparently innocent but entrapping query of a police detective. Her last eight words were a bottled accusation, and the wrong reply would pull the stopper, releasing her anger.

After a hesitation that he realized might be dangerous, he said, “Yes. Her name was Lily.”

“How did you learn her name? Did you deduce it from my flowers, from something that I said?”

“No. I asked the family for it, and for a photo, which is how I know you’re identical twins.”

“You were given a photo by the family?”

“Yes.”

“But I am the family.”

“Well, I guess it came from your parents.”

“Liar,” she said.

She slammed the side of his head with what might have been the butt of the pistol, and blood burst from his crushed ear.

As he tried to push up from the chair, the next blow landed on the top of his skull, so swiftly delivered after the first that the agony in his ear had just begun to bloom.

A scintillation of pain followed the natural sutures between the frontal bone of his skull and the two parietals. Behind his eyes, which had squinched shut with the pain, he saw the squiggly line of those sutures picked out in the darkness by sputters of coppery sparks.

Defensively, frantically, he clasped the top of his head with his hands, so the third blow cracked his fingers. He cried out, or thought he did, but even if he screamed, the fourth blow cut it short, and knocked him unconscious.

FIFTY-THREE

He regained consciousness in stages defined by an increasing tolerance for light. At first, rising from oblivion, he found the oil lamps unendurably bright, their flames so sharp that it seemed each flicker lacerated his eyes. He didn’t know where he was or to whom the lamps belonged, and his head was such a mass of pain that he could not think of the words to ask that the wicks be snuffed. He sank back into senselessness, returned, sank again, and by degrees adapted to light and recovered his memory.

When he knew who he was and where and in what circumstances, he raised his chin from his breast and focused on Violet, who sat in an armchair, across the coffee table from him.

“Do you know your name?” she asked.

He could hear her clearly with his left ear, but her words came to his right as though water flooded the canal. Perhaps the torn ear was only pooled with blood and he was not to any degree deaf.

“Do you know your name?” she asked again.

His answer cracked unspoken in his dry throat. He worked up some saliva, swallowed, and said shakily, “Yes.”

“What is your name?”

“Ryan Perry.”

He sensed that she possessed the skill to administer a pistol-whipping without risking a concussion, but that she lost control this time and was concerned that she would be able to have less fun with him than she originally intended.

“What is the date?”

He thought for a moment, remembered, told her.

From ear to ear and nose to nape, his head ached, not in a way that mere aspirin could address. In addition to the ache were more intense paroxysms, recurring and receding waves radiating from the right side around to the back of the skull, and trailing these stronger tides of pain were quick but even sharper pangs, six and eight and ten at a time, tattooing a line from his right temple, across the orbit of that eye, and down the bridge of his nose.

When he lifted his left hand off the arm of the chair, intending to put it to his head, he inhaled with a hiss through clenched teeth, because it seemed that broken glass must be embedded in his knuckles.

The index finger was bent immovably at an unnatural angle, and the little finger appeared to have been crushed beyond repair. His hand dripped blood, and the leather upholstery glistered with a slickness of it.

Half of Violet’s face lay in soft shadows, half shone gold in lamplight, but both celadon eyes were bright with interest.

“Once more I ask-who gave you a photograph of Lily?”

“Supposedly the family. It came through my surgeon.”

“Dr. Hobb.”

“Yes.”

“When did you receive the photo?”

“Yesterday morning.”

“Sunday morning?”

“Yes. And I saw she was your twin.”

“And then you fled to Denver.”

“First to Las Vegas. Then to Denver.”

“Why there?”

He could not explain Ismay Clemm to himself, let alone to this woman. He said, “You cut me in the parking lot. You invaded my house and covered every trace of how you got in and out. You screwed with the security recordings, opened blind deadbolts-”

“Electromagnets can open blind deadbolts. Did it seem like sorcery?”

“I was scared. I had to go somewhere you couldn’t find me, somewhere I could think.”

“What thoughts did you have in Denver to bring you home again?”

He shook his head, and that was a mistake. A liquid pain sloshed through his cranium.

When the agony passed, he said, “There’s no way to put it into words. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” he repeated.

Ryan began to contemplate using the coffee table to turn this situation around. The two glass vessels, if overturned and shattered, might splash burning oil not only on the floor and furniture but also on Violet.

She said, “I didn’t expect you to come here.”

“Yeah. You already said.”

“I thought you would let me kill your father.”

“I didn’t come here just for him.”

“What else did you come here for?”

He did not answer. He didn’t have to answer everything. She would eventually kill him whether he replied to all her questions or not.

Violet said, “Do you wonder who I am-besides being her sister?”

“I’m pretty sure you’re not a schoolteacher.”

“What does that mean?”

“A schoolteacher like she was.”

“Lily was not a schoolteacher.”

Because space had been allowed for the La-Z-Boy to expand to its full length as a recliner, the chair stood farther from the coffee table than Ryan would have liked. If he had been closer, he could have thrust out his legs, kicking the table, tumbling the lamps to shatter on the floor.

“Lily was a seamstress.”

“Why would they lie about what she did?” he asked.

Instead of answering the question, Violet said, “I am a security agent. Government security. But different from the FBI, the CIA. Oh, very different, Mr. Perry. You have never heard of this bureau, and you never will.”

“Secret police.”

“Yes. Essentially. Your bad luck to take the heart of someone with a sister capable of taking it back.”

“I didn’t take anything. You feel the way you feel. I understand why you might feel that way. I really do. But I was on a recipient list, and she was on a donor list, and we matched. If not me, someone else.”

“The list you were on-the United Network for Organ Sharing.”

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“How long did you wait for a heart, Mr. Perry?”

If she pointed the pistol away from him or if she started to get up from the armchair, or if she was distracted for any reason, he might be able to throw himself off the chair, overturn the table, spill the lamps, and in the flare of flames and chaos somehow avoid being shot. The scene played in his mind, admittedly a Hollywood moment of stuntman choreography, but it might work, just might, because there were moments when life imitated movies. He had to play along with her, keep her talking, and hope she gave him an opportunity.

“Dr. Gupta-he gave me a year to live. A year at the most. But I might have been dead in six months, even less. They didn’t find a match for almost four months.”

“Some people wait a year, two years,” she said. “Many never find a match. You had a perfect match…in one month.”

“No. Four. Four months.”

“One month after coming under Dr. Hobb’s care.”

“Because Dr. Hobb is an exceptional surgeon with a worldwide reputation, licensed to practice in several countries. He can get his patients on the list of the International Network for Organ Sharing.”

Her pale-green eyes widened as if he had told her something she did not know, information that she must now factor into the equation. “The International Network for Organ Sharing.” She nodded thoughtfully, as if absorbing this news, but then her eyes narrowed. “There is no such list, Mr. Perry.”

“Of course there is. I was on it. Your sister was on it. After her accident, they matched us, and Dr. Hobb got the call.”

She rose from the armchair, but because the pistol remained trained on Ryan, he had no clear chance to get from the recliner to the coffee table.

“What accident do you refer to?” she asked.

“The car crash. Her head trauma.”

In the flat, uninflected voice of someone in a trance, Violet said, “Lily was in a car crash.”

Her celadon eyes were hard and cold and glazed. She moved slowly around the coffee table, diminutive but no less the predatory tiger.

“Listen…things happen,” Ryan said. “They just happen. It’s nobody’s fault.”

“Things happen,” she said flatly. “Nobody’s fault.”

“If maybe…”

“If maybe?” she asked, pausing by the fireplace.

“If maybe you were driving, you can’t blame yourself.”

“You think I was driving.”

Anything he said could be the wrong thing to say, but silence might itself inspire her to shoot him.

“I don’t know. I just thought maybe that explains…explains the intensity of your feelings. Explains why…we’re here like this.”

If eyes revealed intentions, hers told him that he was a dead man. Her stare felt as sharp as shards of porcelain, shatters of her insane rage borne on her gaze.

“I was not driving, Mr. Perry, because there was no accident. No car crash, no head trauma, no international list. Fully alive, perfectly healthy, Lily was matched to you and then put to death so you could have her heart.”

FIFTY-FOUR

Shaking his battered head made the throbbing pains swell stronger, striking up an internal sound like the repeated hard plucking of the bottom-note string on a bass fiddle, and fired off sharper pangs by the quiverful. Yet he shook his head, shook it, denying what Violet had said.

“Why did you fly to Shanghai for a transplant, Mr. Perry? Why all the way to Shanghai?”

“That’s where the car crash happened. She was on life support, brain-dead, they kept her alive until I could get there with Dr. Hobb and his surgical team.”

“Do you know what Falun Gong is, Mr. Perry?”

He shook his head. He didn’t know. She made it sound like he should, but he didn’t.

“Falun Gong is a spiritual practice expressed through certain exercises and meditations.”

“I never heard of it. Why should I?”

“It was founded in 1992 and banned in 1999 after ten thousand Falun Gong practitioners silently protested the government’s arrest and beating of many people in the city of Tianjin.”

Shaking his head not only exacerbated the pain but also cast his thoughts into a junkshop jumble, as an earthquake dumps the orderly contents of supermarket shelves onto the floor in a seismic potluck. Yet he continually shook his head, as though he didn’t want either the pain to stop or his thoughts to clear.

“A spiritual life is not an approved life. Half the people in my country’s labor-camp prisons are Falun Gong,” she continued. “They are beaten, worked to death, and tortured.”

Judging by the sound of her voice, Violet had moved around the La-Z-Boy, in back of him. He raised his head, and though his vision brightened and dimmed somewhat with the ebb and flow of the pain, he could see well enough to confirm that she was not in the part of the room that lay before him.

“Face forward,” she commanded. “Do not turn.”

Ryan did not think that she would shoot him in the back of the head. She would first want to hurt him more, and when the time came to finish it, she would want him to be staring down the muzzle of the gun when she squeezed the trigger.

“Lily was Falun Gong. A poor, sweet dreamer of a girl. My twin but nothing like me. My mind is darker, and my heart.”

As if she knew what he had thought, Violet pressed the muzzle of the pistol to the back of his skull, which forced him to stop shaking his head.

“Oh, God, don’t. You’re making a mistake.”

The round muzzle seemed to imprint a third eye in the back of his head, for when he closed the pair with which he had been born, he could see down the barrel to the bullet.

“Lily was a seamstress living on subsistence wages, seeking something to brighten and give meaning to her existence. Falun Gong.”

On his face, on his hands, on the chair, his spilled blood issued a faint odor that perhaps only he could smell, and nausea threatened.

She said, “They arrested Lily two years ago. I spent a year trying to get her freed, trying so cautiously, so surreptitiously.”

His darkness yawed like the deck of a ship, and he opened his eyes, fixing his stare on the armchair where previously she had been seated, forcing stillness on the room to stave off nausea.

“Forced labor, beatings, torture, rape-not all the Falun Gong prisoners are subjected to those things. Some are kept in good health to be harvested.”

A sob escaped Ryan, and he struggled to control himself, for he intuited that instead of earning sympathy for him, his tears would inspire only a murderous contempt. His best hope was steadiness, the exercise of restraint, and an appeal to reason.

“I never heard of Falun Gong,” he insisted. “Never.”

“There is a hospital in Shanghai that exists for two purposes only. First for certain…experiments. Second, to provide transplant procedures for exalted state officials in ill health and for wealthy foreigners who can meet the very high cost.”

To his surprise, the woman stepped into view again on his left side. She had pressed the muzzle so hard against the back of his skull that he felt the impression of it even after the pistol had been taken away.

“I learned three days before your surgery that Lily had been transferred from the labor camp to that hospital.”

She held the pistol in a two-hand grip, five feet from him, aimed at his throat but no doubt allowing for the barrel to pull up with the shot, to shatter his teeth with the bullet and to punch out the back of his head.

“My sweet Lily’s kidneys were needed by two comrades, her liver by another, corneas by a fourth, and her heart by some lord of the Internet, one of the hundred most eligible bachelors.”

He learned now a new thing: Fear could take such a grip on a man’s emotions that he could experience no other sentiment, on his intellect that he could think of nothing but dying, on his spirit that he could not hope, on his body that he could suddenly not feel the pain of terrible wounds, but could feel only terror with every fiber of his being.

“I didn’t know,” he groaned, but the words came from him without premeditation, like a chant or litany that had been repeated on ten thousand other occasions and was now, with thought denied him, the only thing he knew how to say.

“You knew,” she insisted.

“I swear I didn’t.” More litany. “I swear I didn’t. I swear I didn’t. I couldn’t have done this if I’d known.”

“Dr. Hobb brings patients from around the world. Over the years, a hundred sixty of Dr. Hobb’s patients have been matched in a month or less. Dr. Hobb knows.”

“Maybe he does, I can’t speak for him, I can’t defend him. But I didn’t know.”

“They say so many have been harvested that where their bodies are buried, the ground grows red bamboo. Groves of red bamboo.”

“I didn’t know.”

She lowered the muzzle from his face, and the sound-suppressor on the pistol allowed only a soft and surprisingly biological sound when she shot him in the left foot.

FIFTY-FIVE

Terror could not anesthetize against a bullet wound, at least not entirely, and it could not staunch the blood. But the wound proved less debilitating than Ryan would have imagined, producing not violent and thrilling throes of pain, not agony, but suffering of a kind that cleared his fogged thinking, that broke him out instantly in a head-to-foot sweat even as a chill settled through his stomach and his bowels, racking him with shudders that rattled his teeth.

He didn’t scream because he didn’t have the wind for it, but the woman said, “If you scream, I’ll make you stop the hard way, and then what follows will be even worse for you than it would have been.”

The sounds he made were sometimes low and choked-off, sometimes thin and tremulous and pathetic, but they would not carry beyond the walls of the house.

Instead of sliding to the floor, he withdrew into the commodious recliner, holding in his right hand the soft shoe that encased his wounded foot, because he found that gentle pressure eased the pain.

“After losing my Lily, I lived to find you.”

With that singular languid restlessness, Violet circled the room again, like some black bird that had flown in through an open door, a winged messenger of merciless intent, seeking now a permanent roost.

“I needed ten months to escape China. Three of us defected on a mission. Then two more months to get to this country, to study you and plan.”

Behind the brightness of his pain, a dark incoming tide washed through Ryan’s mind, rising above all the sea walls of his defenses, and from beneath his fear of death welled a worse fear that until now he had neither experienced nor imagined to exist.

“Hobb knew,” she said as she roamed.

And now all that Ryan could say was, “He didn’t tell me.”

“Of course he didn’t say, ‘Let’s go to Shanghai and tear open a perfectly healthy girl for you.’”

“If he didn’t tell me, how could I have known?” he pleaded, but the plea sounded weak to him. “How could I have known?”

“By what he implied.”

To this he could say nothing.

She would not relent: “And by what you inferred.”

The dark tide breaching his long-defended sea walls was a tide of truth.

She said, “By the implicit meaning of an international donor’s list, by the implicit meaning of only a one-month wait for a match, by the implicit meaning of the astronomical cost, by the implicit meaning of an emergency flight to Shanghai, by the implicit meaning of the thousand winks and nods you must have witnessed.”

The word shuddered from him: “Subtext.”

Actions had consequences. Having always understood this, he had largely lived by the rules in business and in his personal relationships.

The new and most devastating fear welling in him, which he had never known before in thirty-five years, was the fear that actions also had consequences beyond this life.

Her anger having given way to a calm determination to have justice, the woman approached him, with a grave and stern decorum.

“I was groomed to pass for American. To come here one day and form a secret cell.”

A note of profound resignation informed her voice, her green eyes seeming to be dreaming.

“My secret plan was to bring Lily, disappear into new identities and truly become Americans. Now this country is ruined for me. And China. And I have nowhere.”

She stared at him along the barrel of the gun.

Thick blood oozed slowly from the bullet hole in Ryan’s shoe, his broken left hand curled into a claw, his head ached as if it were held together by tightly pulled barbed wire, but none of his pains squeezed the tears out of him. They were pressed from him by the recognition of the willful blindness with which he had committed himself to Dr. Hobb, with which in fact he had led his entire life.

Less to Violet than to himself, in response to a confessional impulse, he said, “That night Samantha told me I had to be careful. ‘You especially,’ she said. ‘You, being you, have to be careful.’”

Violet asked, “The author?”

“She said I should just let it happen, I shouldn’t handle it, just accept, let it happen the way it should.”

Again his pain entirely receded, as previously it had been for a while suppressed by terror that crowded out all other feelings.

“My God, she knew what I was capable of. She knew when I didn’t. When I didn’t know, she knew…but loved me.”

This time terror, too, was extinguished with the pain, and he had the capacity for only one sentiment, which ruled his emotions, his intellect, his body, a feeling that was new to him but at once familiar: shame.

Ryan Perry had not known until this moment that something in him was broken.

The roots of violence included avarice. Greed.

He said, “My blind greed killed your sister.”

“Greed? You’ve got all the money in the world.”

“A greed for life.”

He had coveted her heart, any healthy heart, and had lied to himself, had hid himself from himself.

Violet looked at him along the barrel of the pistol.

Now, too late, he realized that sixteen months earlier, in the early hours of his crisis, he had been given an extraordinary grace, a chance to achieve the insight Samantha needed to see in him if they were to marry: an awareness that life and the world have subtext, implicit meaning, that this meaning has consequences. Ismay Clemm, a victim of her husband’s greed and of Spencer Barghest’s lust for death, had traveled farther than from Denver to California, to warn him away from one path and to lead him toward another. In urgent dreams, Ismay revealed to him three Hells, but he saw them only as three puzzles.

“Nine rounds left,” said the voice of the lilies. “Eight to wound and one to finish.”

By whatever office Ismay held in death, she had revealed the simple truth. Ryan saw now that he had turned that truth inside out, twisted and knotted it, until he made a mare’s-nest of it. Instead of wonder, he reacted with suspicion. He saw dark conspiracy where he should have seen grace. He reasoned his way to explanations that required sinister poisoners, hallucinogenics slipped into his food, conniving employees, a whole world turned mysteriously against him. Only one conspirator had existed: He had conspired against himself to avoid facing the reality of a deeply layered world and eternity.

Looking up at Violet, he said, “The taproot of violence is the hatred of truth.”

Dead Lily’s living twin shot Ryan high on the left side, just under the shoulder blade.

He was still of this room but not entirely, in part transported and removed from his pain, his body so weak that it no longer had the capacity to share with him the symptoms of its suffering. But this time he entertained no illusion that anyone had secretly slipped drugs to him.

“Ismay gave me…one last chance. The bells.”

He met Violet’s eyes because he felt he owed her the right to see life fade from his.

“Bells?” she said.

“Months before the transplant. Ismay said, if I heard bells…come for her. I didn’t.”

“Ismay. Who is she?”

Lacking both the strength and the clarity of mind to explain, he said merely, “My guardian.”

“I rang the bells,” Violet said.

He did not understand.

“In the old days, they left some churches standing. Only to hold events in them that would mock their purpose.”

“Iron bells.”

“The day Lily died, I got a message to her. Said…I’d be with her in spirit. I’d ring the bells to testify.”

Ryan recalled the ominous tolling, tolling, tolling. And the terrible feeling that he had made a grave mistake of which the bells were warning him.

“Told her I’d ring bells to promise justice,” Violet continued. “Told her, when she heard the bells, to know she’ll live forever in my heart.”

Although afraid of death, Ryan did not think he could take much more of life. He assured her, “It’s all right. It’s justice.”

While talking, she had lowered the pistol. She raised it again.

He said, “Fulfill the promise of the bells.”

She shot him high on the right side, under the shoulder blade.

Jolted by the shot, ripped, with the stink of blood now seeming to him like the lovely scent of sacrifice, he saw shadows throughout the room moving toward him.

Little more than an hour earlier, at the airport, before Cathy Sienna had boarded her limo for Los Angeles, she had hugged Ryan fiercely and had whispered in his ear four words no one had ever said to him before. Now for the first time in his life, he spoke those same words to another, with a humility and a sincerity that he was grateful to find within himself: “I’ll pray for you.”

Because he had one foot outside of time, Ryan could no longer accurately gauge the passage of seconds, but it seemed to him that Violet regarded him for a full minute or more between shots. He was summoning the strength to reassure her again when she turned away from him and fired at one of the posters.

Six shots remained in the magazine, and she used them on dead celebrities, on Chairman Mao, on the lava lamp, which burst brightly.

Without another look at Ryan, she walked out of the room and left him to die.

FIFTY-SIX

Whether he was weak from loss of blood or loss of motive, Ryan made no attempt to move from the La-Z-Boy, where he curled like a dog seeking sleep, both legs drawn up, his head resting upon one arm of the chair.

When the lava lamp had exploded, one of the two table lamps was knocked over and extinguished by flying debris. Now largely lit by candles and by two wicks floating in pools of scented oil, the room, though little damaged, seemed strangely like a ruin brightened only by the last residual flames of a great fire.

Whether long after Violet had gone or immediately in her wake-Ryan could not be certain-a hunched and scampering figure entered, muttering worriedly, cursing angrily. It hovered over him, touching and poking, its breath sour enough to be the exhalations of a troll that ate whatever might wander under its bridge, and then it went to a tall sapphire-blue cabinet painted with stars and moons.

When the figure had been bent over him, Ryan hadn’t been able to focus his failing vision; but from a distance, he now identified his father.

The cabinet of stars and moons featured doors on top and drawers below. Jimmy pulled out one of the drawers and emptied its contents onto the floor.

“Dad.”

“All right, I know, all right.”

“Call 911.”

Carrying the drawer, he hustled back to Ryan. Reflected oil-lamp light made lanterns of his eyes.

“Can’t let the sonofabitch cops find my stash.”

He released the false bottom of the drawer, plucked it out, threw it aside. Next he removed a four-inch-deep, rectangular metal lockbox of the kind in which small businesses secured their folding cash at the end of the day.

“I’m shot.”

Fumbling with the lockbox latches, Jimmy said, “Minute, minute, minute.” From the metal box he took plastic bags of pot and hashish. “Gotta flush, then I’ll call.”

“Call then flush.”

“Too much shit going down here, too much shit. Can’t get caught with this stuff, too.”

“Dad. Please. Call.”

As Jimmy scuttled away through the baleful light, muttering to himself-“Gotta flush, gotta flush, gotta flush”-he was reminiscent of no one so much as Rumpelstiltskin, except more demented.

Ryan tried to get up from the chair. He passed out.

Approaching sirens woke him.

Jimmy was bent over the La-Z-Boy, pressing a rag to Ryan’s head.

“What’re you doing?”

“Gotta stop the bleeding.”

The damp rag smelled like dishwater, but Ryan didn’t have the strength to push it away. He spoke through it as it fluttered against his face: “Dad, listen.”

“They’re almost here.”

“Wore masks.”

“Who did?”

“Broke in wearing masks.”

“Like shit they did.”

“We never saw faces.”

“I saw their faces.”

The tail of the rag flicked into his mouth, and he spat it out. “They had…wrong address.”

“Be quiet. Keep your strength.”

“They wanted Curtis someone.”

“Shit they did. No Curtis here.”

“Shot me before they realized.”

As the sirens died, Jimmy said, “Pullin’ up in front.”

Rallying himself, Ryan grabbed the rag and tore it away from his face. “Listen. That’s the story.”

Confused, his father said, “We need a story?”

Ryan would not finger Violet and her two associates. He didn’t want the old man to do it, either.

“Deep shit, Dad. We need a story.”

“Masks, wrong address, Curtis someone,” Jimmy said.

“Can you do it?”

“Bullshit cops? Been doing it all my life.”

A moment later, paramedics were in the room.

So recently willing to die, Ryan was surprised, as the medics bent to him, how much he wanted to live.

FIFTY-SEVEN

Three years and five months after the release of her first novel, Samantha published her third. Lexington, Kentucky, at the end of her twenty-one-city publicity tour, was not a standard stop on authors’ promotional schedules. She had asked her publisher to include it after Atlanta, to bring her close to St. Christopher’s Ranch, which would give her an excuse to phone him.

She thought he might feel less comfortable agreeing to see her if she came across the country just for that purpose, and might be more relaxed if he thought she happened to be in the neighborhood. Two weeks earlier, when she called him, he seemed pleased to hear from her, and she secured an invitation without pressing for it.

That morning, she rented a car and drove deep into the Bluegrass region, taking back roads where she could, in no hurry, enchanted by the rolling rural landscape, the miles on miles of black plank fences, white plank fences, and limestone walls, beyond which magnificent Thoroughbreds grazed in pristine meadows.

St. Christopher’s Ranch sat on seventy acres. Its meadows were as lush as any in the area, and the horses at pasture were beautiful though not Thoroughbreds. The main house stood far back from the county route, at the end of a driveway overhung by ancient oaks.

Encircled by a deep veranda, this enormous but elegant Kentucky manor house, white with black trim, was shaded from the worst of the June sunshine by the largest willow trees that Sam had ever seen.

Both ramps and steps rose from walkways to the veranda. She took the wide steps.

This spacious porch was furnished with gliders and large padded wicker chairs, in one of which sat a tow-headed and freckled boy of about thirteen, tanned and barefoot, in blue-jean shorts and a DOGS ROCK T-shirt. He was reading a book and, because he had no arms, he turned the pages with his toes.

“Hey,” he said, looking up from his book, “you ever been told you sure are pretty?”

“Heard it a couple times,” she said.

“What’s your name?”

“Sam.”

“With a name like that, a girl better be pretty. If I was ten years older, you’d be toast.”

“You ever been told you’re a terrible flirt?”

“Heard it a couple times,” he said, and grinned.

As instructed by phone, she went through a screen door into a front hall with a lovely old walnut floor. Here the ranch offices were situated in an atmosphere so relaxed, all the doors stood open.

Father Timothy was in his office, at his desk, where she had been told he would be when she arrived. Tall, stoop-shouldered, with a face weathered by sun and wind, he could have passed for any ranch hand or experienced horseman if he had not been in a monk’s habit.

“Because this is a dog-wash day, Binny had a lot to do this morning, and since he wasn’t sure exactly when you’d get here, he asked me to take you to him.”

“Binny,” she said.

“Oh, you wouldn’t know, we call him that around here. His name being well known, and him wanting a low profile. It’s just what we call him instead, for privacy’s sake.”

In her first novel, there had been a character nicknamed Binny.

Father Tim led her through the main house to what he called the park, which was rather like a quadrangle on a college campus. Three other houses, similar to the original manor house but newer, embraced this large paved area, which was shaded by a grove of oaks.

The park bustled with festive activities. Children in wheelchairs sat at low tables, working on all manner of craft projects. A group of ambulatory kids in karate pajamas took instruction in martial arts. A storybook hour was under way, with children seated on pillows, in a semicircle around an animated nun evoking a rabbit’s surprise and fright with flamboyant gestures. And everywhere dogs lazed or frolicked, golden retrievers and Labradors, all vigorous and well-groomed and happy.

“The brothers live in the expanded main house,” Father Timothy explained as Sam accompanied him through the oak-shaded park, “and the sisters have a convent farther back on the property. These three other houses are dormitories, but we need to build a fourth. We don’t segregate the children by types of disability, Down syndrome rooms with paraplegic, so they can learn to appreciate one another’s special strengths.”

St. Christopher’s accepted orphans and abandoned children with special needs of all kinds. The younger ones eventually might be adopted, but those over six, who were harder to place, most likely could expect to live at the ranch until they were adults.

The brothers’ several enterprises included the breeding and raising of show-quality dogs. Although this work produced a profit, the unsold dogs ranked as important as those who went on to show-prize glory or to happy homes, because these remained on the ranch and were not merely companions to the children but were also trained to socialize them and to help them learn confidence.

Beyond the park, wide paved pathways led to stables and riding rings, to more fenced pastures, to the convent, and to service buildings, one of which contained the on-site veterinary office and the dog-grooming facility.

Father Tim escorted Sam to the dog-wash, opened the door, and said, “I’ll not intrude upon your reunion. You’ll recognize Binny-as the kids say, if he had one more floppy ear, he would be just like the dogs.”

The big room included bath sinks, grooming tables, and dog dryers. One golden retriever sat in a dryer, gazing out mournfully, as if imprisoned. Ryan, assisted by a Down syndrome boy of about fifteen, administered astringent gel to the ears of a black Lab who had already been dried.

Not having noticed Samantha yet, Ryan said to the boy, “Find his collar there, Rudy, and take him back to Sister Josephine.”

Rudy said he would, then saw Sam and smiled. Ryan knew the meaning of the smile, and turned.

He wore rubber boots and a rubber apron over khakis and a green knit shirt. Sam had never seen him dressed with such disregard for style-nor had he ever looked more elegant.

Because she had not been sure how this would unfold, she was moved and happy to see that at the sight of her, his face brightened with unmistakable delight.

“There you are,” he said. “My God, there you are.”

The way he looked at her brought tears to her eyes, and seeing this, Ryan busied her with an introduction to Rudy and then to Ham, the Labrador who needed to be returned to Sister Josephine.

“Rudy here,” Ryan said, “is going to be a great dog groomer.” The boy ducked his head shyly. “He’s already pretty good except he doesn’t like the part where you have to express their anal glands.”

“Yuch,” the boy said.

As Rudy left with Ham, Ryan said, “Let me get out of this gear, wash up. We’ll have lunch. I made it. The lunch, I mean.” He shook his head. “You’re actually here. Don’t go anywhere. Let Tinker out of the dryer, she’s done. She’s mine. She’ll be going to lunch with us.”

The retriever was grateful to be paroled and doubly grateful for an ear massage and a chin scratch.

Ryan took off the apron, hung it up, took off the boots, laced on a pair of running shoes, and then scrubbed his hands and forearms at one of the long, deep dog-wash sinks.

“Tinker is wonderful,” Sam said.

“She’s the best. She wonders why she’s stuck with me instead of with a kid who’ll throw the ball all day for her.”

“I’m sure she adores you.”

“Well, yes, ’cause I’m the one with the cookies.”

Ryan took her hand so naturally that it seemed they had never been apart, and Tinker led them outside, around the building, and up a set of exterior stairs to a second-floor porch.

His apartment was smaller than the one that she’d had on Balboa Peninsula: kitchen and living room in a cramped space, the bedroom positively tiny.

Lunch consisted of cold chicken, cheese, potato salad-“I make a killer potato salad”-fresh tomatoes and cucumbers. Together Ryan and Sam prepared the table on the porch.

Unlike the porch she’d had on Balboa, this one enjoyed no all-embracing pepper tree, but it had a roof. The view was of a baseball diamond and fenced pastures beyond.

“How’s the book doing?” he asked.

“Fastest-selling yet.”

“Fantastic. I told you. Didn’t I tell you? You’re no one-hit wonder.”

They talked about the book business, about what she was writing now, and about St. Christopher’s, of which it seemed he might be able to talk for days and never exhaust his supply of charming stories.

She had come to see if he was well and happy, for it mattered very much to her that he should be both. When a man went to the extraordinary length of giving away his entire fortune, you had to worry that he had done so under the misguided romantic notion that he would find his problems lifted from him with the weight of the wealth, only to discover that the world was a harder place without a bottomless bank account. But he seemed happier than she had dared to hope, and she knew he was not putting on a show for her, because he was still as easy to read as any book by Dr. Seuss.

“The days, the weeks, the years are so full here, Sam. There are always dogs to wash, stables to paint, lawns to mow, and always kids who think only I can solve their problems because I’ve got one dog-ear. I love the kids, Sam. God, they’re great, they struggle with such limitations, but they never complain.”

He could have had the ear repaired with cosmetic surgery, but for reasons she could only guess at, he had chosen to live with it. Likewise the scars on his head: Tufts of hair bristled at odds with all the hair around them or didn’t grow at all. Poor nerve response in his left foot caused it to drag a little, but he didn’t limp; he moved with his usual grace, adapting to the foot as if he had been born with the problem. He remained the handsomest man she had ever known, and now he possessed a sweet beauty that had not been his before, that had nothing to do with looks.

They talked through the afternoon, and although Samantha had no intention of asking him what had happened back in the day, when his life had changed so radically, he eventually came to talk of it, and for the first time she heard about all that he had withheld from her-Ismay Clemm, the dreams, the paranoid pursuit of conspiracies that for a while he believed extended to her mother, even to her. He spoke of his blindness and of his mistakes with an ease and humility-even with a slightly melancholy humor-that made this the most riveting narrative to which she had ever listened, no less because of the way these events had so profoundly changed him than because of the events themselves.

She questioned none of the supernatural elements of his story, for though she had never seen a spirit herself, the world had always been to her a place of infinite layers, and all its flawed people a community of saints potential. And most of the time, as Ryan now knew, grace is offered not in the form of a visitation like that of Ismay, but in the form of people just like us. People like Cathy Sienna, who had known Ryan needed to be told the roots of violence, even if he would not consider them until too late, and who later, on that flight back from Denver, had told him that he should offer his suffering and his achievements for the intentions of others, which was now in fact how he lived, with no expectation of ultimate mercy but with the hope that others might receive it.

She had been in love with him once, and still she loved him. This was a different love, emotional and intellectual and spiritual, as before, but not sensual. Through his suffering, he learned to love truth, and on this afternoon she saw that his love of truth led him to an understanding of her that he had never possessed before, an understanding of her so complete that perhaps he alone in the world really knew her. During this astonishing afternoon, her love for him had grown deeper, and she wondered if in her life she would know anything again quite like it.

In late afternoon, when the time came to part, they both knew it and rose together from the table. He and Tinker escorted Sam back across the ranch, past the stables and the riding rings, through the quadrangle, to her car in front of the original manor house.

As they walked, he said, “One more thing I need to say to you, Sam, and I know you’ll want to argue, but I ask you up front to cut me some slack. No argument. No comment. Just listen. I’m a fan of your books, after all, so that ought to earn me a big measure of courtesy. A writer needs to keep her fans happy.”

She perceived in his calculated light tone that what he needed next to say to her was more important to him than anything else they had talked about throughout the afternoon. By her silence, she assented.

He took her hand again, and they walked a few steps before he said, “Looking back on it all, for the longest time, I couldn’t see why a guy like me was so important to the universe that I would be sent Ismay Clemm or be given all the signs that could have prevented me from being a user who now lives with a dead girl’s heart and with her life on my conscience. Why would I be given so many chances when I was so clearly not a guy who would take them or even recognize them? And then one day not long ago, I knew. Reading this third book of yours, I knew. It was you, Sam. I was given all those chances because of you.”

“Ryan-”

“You promised no comment. See, here’s how it is. You’re a fine person, more than fine, you’re grace personified. And what you’re doing with your life is important. It’s necessary that you’re happy, because in your happiness, you’re going to show so many other people the way, through your books. Be happy, Sam. Find someone. Marry. Have kids. What an incredible mother you will be. Have kids, Sam, embrace life, and write your brilliant books. Because if there’s any hope for me, when my time comes, it’s not because I gave everything away, and it’s not because I live here among monks, not one myself and never can be. No, if there’s any ultimate redemption, it will be because I passed through your life without scarring you, and did not diminish who you are. No comment, now, not a one.”

They had reached her car, and she did not know that she could drive or that she could talk. But she knew what he wanted of her, what he needed. So she found within herself the depth of courage to make no comment on what he had said, and instead to smile at him and find something to say that might end this on a lighter note.

“You never did tell me…what was the William Holden film that you kept waking to and thinking had a message for you?”

By his smile and then his soft laugh, she knew that she had found a right question.

“God must have a sense of humor, Sam. And for sure He became so exasperated with me that He tried to hammer me over the head with a sign only less obvious than a burning bush. It’s not what the movie is about that matters. It’s the title that might have made me think-if I’d taken the clue and bothered to research it.” He paused for effect. “Satan Never Sleeps.”

She found a laugh in that, though of the kind that bruises.

He held her for a moment, and she held him, and she kissed his cheek, and he kissed her brow.

Driving away, she looked once in the mirror and saw him standing in the lane, watching her leave, and she could not look back again.

Along the county road, when she found a widening of the shoulder where she could park, she stopped the car.

An unfenced meadow sloped up toward a trio of oaks. She climbed the meadow to the trees and sat with her back against the largest of them, hidden from traffic on the road below.

For a long time, she wept, not so much for him and not at all for herself, but for the condition of all things and for the way the world could be but is not.

In time, she found herself thinking about nothing more than the birds and their songs, the sound of the breeze in the high branches of the oaks, and the shafts of sunlight, clear and pure, that fell through the trees and found the grass and caressed it.

She rose then and returned to the car. She needed to go home. She had a new book to write. And a life to find.