DEAN KOONTZ

The Darkest Evening of the Year

Dedication

To Gerda, who will one day be greeted jubilantly in the next life by the golden daughter whom she loved so well and with such selfless tenderness in this world.

AND TO

Father Jerome Molokie, for his many kindnesses, for his good cheer, for his friendship, and for his inspiring devotion to what is first, true, and infinite.

Contents

Cover Title Page Dedication Part One Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Chapter Nine Chapter Ten Chapter Eleven Chapter Twelve Chapter Thirteen Chapter Fourteen Chapter Fifteen Chapter Sixteen Chapter Seventeen Chapter Eighteen Chapter Nineteen Chapter Twenty Chapter Twenty One Chapter Twenty Two Chapter Twenty Three Chapter Twenty Four Chapter Twenty Five Chapter Twenty Six Chapter Twenty Seven Chapter Twenty Eight Chapter Twenty Nine Chapter Thirty Chapter Thirty One Chapter Thirty Two Part Two Chapter Thirty Three Chapter Thirty Four Chapter Thirty Five Chapter Thirty Six Chapter Thirty Seven Chapter Thirty Eight Chapter Thirty Nine Chapter Forty Chapter Forty One Chapter Forty Two Chapter Forty Three Chapter Forty Four Chapter Forty Five Chapter Forty Six Chapter Forty Seven Chapter Forty Eight Chapter Forty Nine Chapter Fifty Part Three Chapter Fifty One Chapter Fifty Two Chapter Fifty Three Chapter Fifty Four Chapter Fifty Five Chapter Fifty Six Chapter Fifty Seven Chapter Fifty Eight Chapter Fifty Nine Chapter Sixty Chapter Sixty One Chapter Sixty Two Chapter Sixty Three Chapter Sixty Four Chapter Sixty Five Chapter Sixty Six About the Author Also by Dean Koontz Copyright About the Publisher

PART ONE

“The woods are lovely, dark, and deep”

—ROBERT FROST

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Chapter 1

Behind the wheel of the Ford Expedition, Amy Redwing drove as if she were immortal and therefore safe at any speed.

In the fitful breeze, a funnel of golden sycamore leaves spun along the post-midnight street. She blasted through them, crisp autumn scratching across the windshield.

For some, the past is a chain, each day a link, raveling backward to one ringbolt or another, in one dark place or another, and tomorrow is a slave to yesterday.

Amy Redwing did not know her origins. Abandoned at the age of two, she had no memory of her mother and father.

She had been left in a church, her name pinned to her shirt. A nun had found her sleeping on a pew.

Most likely, her surname had been invented to mislead. The police had failed to trace it to anyone.

Redwing suggested a Native American heritage. Raven hair and dark eyes argued Cherokee, but her ancestors might as likely have come from Armenia or Sicily, or Spain.

Amy’s history remained incomplete, but the lack of roots did not set her free. She was chained to some ringbolt set in the stone of a distant year.

Although she presented herself as such a blithe spirit that she appeared to be capable of flight, she was in fact as earthbound as anyone.

Belted to the passenger seat, feet pressed against a phantom brake pedal, Brian McCarthy wanted to urge Amy to slow down. He said nothing, however, because he was afraid that she would look away from the street to reply to his call for caution.

Besides, when she was launched upon a mission like this, any plea for prudence might perversely incite her to stand harder on the accelerator.

“I love October,” she said, looking away from the street. “Don’t

you love October?”

“This is still September.”

“I can love October in September. September doesn’t care.”

“Watch where you’re going.”

“I love San Francisco, but it’s hundreds of miles away.”

“The way you’re driving, we’ll be there in ten minutes.”

“I’m a superb driver. No accidents, no traffic citations.”

He said, “My entire life keeps flashing before my eyes.”

“You should make an appointment with an ophthalmologist.”

“Amy, please, don’t keep looking at me.”

“You look fine, sweetie. Bed hair becomes you.”

“I mean, watch the road.”

“This guy named Marco—he’s blind but he drives a car.”

“Marco who?”

“Marco something-something. He’s in the Philippines. I read about him in a magazine.”

“Nobody blind can drive a car.”

“I suppose you don’t believe we actually sent men to the moon.”

“I don’t believe they drove there.”

“Marco’s dog sits in the passenger seat. Marco senses from the dog when to turn right or left, when to hit the brakes.”

Some people thought Amy was a charming airhead. Initially, Brian had thought so, too.

Then he had realized he was wrong. He would never have fallen in love with an airhead.

He said, “You aren’t seriously telling me that Seeing Eye dogs can drive.”

“The dog doesn’t drive, silly. He just guides Marco.”

“What bizarro magazine were you reading?”

“National Geographic. It was such an uplifting story about the human-dog bond, the empowerment of the disabled.”

“I’ll bet my left foot it wasn’t National Geographic.”

“I’m opposed to gambling,” she said.

“But not to blind men driving.”

“Well, they need to be responsible blind men.”

“No place in the world,” he insisted, “allows the blind to drive.”

“Not anymore,” she agreed.

Brian did not want to ask, could not prevent himself from asking: “Marco isn’t allowed to drive anymore?”

“He kept banging into things.”

“Imagine that.”

“But you can’t blame Antoine.”

“Antoine who?”

“Antoine the dog. I’m sure he did his best. Dogs always do. Marco just second-guessed him once too often.”

“Watch where you’re going. Left curve ahead.”

Smiling at him, she said, “You’re my own Antoine. You’ll never let me bang into things.”

In the salt-pale moonlight, an older middle-class neighborhood of one-story ranch houses seemed to effloresce out of the darkness.

No streetlamps brightened the night, but the moon silvered the leaves and the creamy trunks of eucalyptuses. Here and there, stucco walls had a faint ectoplasmic glow, as if this were a ghost town of phantom buildings inhabited by spirits.

In the second block, lights brightened windows at one house.

Amy braked to a full stop in the street, and the headlights flared off the reflective numbers on the curbside mailbox.

She shifted the Expedition into reverse. Backing into the driveway, she said, “In an iffy situation, you want to be aimed out for the fastest exit.”

As she killed the headlights and the engine, Brian said, “Iffy? Iffy like how?”

Getting out of the SUV, she said, “With a crazy drunk guy, you just never know.”

Joining her at the back of the vehicle, where she put up the tailgate, Brian glanced at the house and said, “So there’s a crazy guy in there, and he’s drunk?”

“On the phone, this Janet Brockman said her husband, Carl, he’s crazy drunk, which probably means he’s crazy from drinking.”

Amy started toward the house, and Brian gripped her shoulder, halting her. “What if he’s crazy when he’s sober, and now it’s worse because he’s drunk?”

“I’m not a psychiatrist, sweetie.”

“Maybe this is police business.”

“Police don’t have time for crazy drunk guys like this.”

“I’d think crazy drunk guys are right down their alley.”

Shrugging off his hand, heading toward the house once more, she said, “We can’t waste time. He’s violent.”

Brian hurried after her. “He’s crazy, drunk, and violent?”

“He probably won’t be violent with me.”

Climbing steps to a porch, Brian said, “What about me?”

“I think he’s only violent with their dog. But if this Carl does want to take a whack at me, that’s okay, ’cause I have you.”

“Me? I’m an architect.”

“Not tonight, sweetie. Tonight, you’re muscle.”

Brian had accompanied her on other missions like this, but never previously after midnight to the home of a crazy violent drunk.

“What if I have a testosterone deficiency?”

“Do you have a testosterone deficiency?”

“I cried reading that book last week.”

“That book makes everyone cry. It just proves you’re human.”

As Amy reached for the bell push, the door opened. A young woman with a bruised mouth and a bleeding lip appeared at the threshold.

“Ms. Redwing?” she asked.

“You must be Janet.”

“I wish I wasn’t. I wish I was you or anybody, somebody.” Stepping back from the door, she invited them inside. “Don’t let Carl cripple her.”

“He won’t,” Amy assured the woman.

Janet blotted her lips with a bloody cloth. “He crippled Mazie.”

Mouth plugged with a thumb, a pale girl of about four clung to a twisted fistful of the tail of Janet’s blouse, as if anticipating a sudden cyclone that would try to spin her away from her mother.

The living room was gray. A blue sofa, blue armchairs, stood on a gold carpet, but a pair of lamps shed light as lusterless as ashes, and the colors were muted as though settled smoke from a long- quenched fire had laid a patina on them.

If Purgatory had formal parlors for the waiting multitudes, they might be as ordered and cheerless as this room.

“Crippled Mazie,” Janet repeated. “Four months later, he …” She glanced down at her daughter. “Four months later, Mazie died.”

Having begun to close the front door, Brian hesitated. He left it half open to the mild September night.

“Where is your dog?” Amy asked.

“In the kitchen.” Janet put a hand to her swollen lip and spoke between her fingers. “With him.”

The child was too old to be sucking her thumb with such devotion, but this habit of the crib disturbed Brian less than did the character of her stare. A purple shade of blue, her eyes were wide with expectation and appeared to be bruised by experience.

The air thickened, as it does under thunderheads and a pending deluge.

“Which way to the kitchen?” Amy asked.

Janet led them through an archway into a hall flanked by dark rooms like flooded grottoes. Her daughter glided at her side, as firmly attached as a remora to a larger fish.

The hall was shadowy except at the far end, where a thin wedge of light stabbed in from a room beyond.

The shadows seemed to ebb and flow and ebb again, but this phantom movement was only Brian’s strong pulse, his vision throbbing in time with his laboring heart.

At the midpoint of the hallway, a boy leaned with his forehead against a wall, his hands fisted at his temples. He was perhaps six years old.

From him came the thinnest sound of misery, like air escaping, molecule by molecule, from the pinched neck of a balloon.

Janet said, “It’ll be okay, Jimmy,” but when she put a hand on the boy’s shoulder, he wrenched away from her.

Trailed by her daughter, she proceeded to the end of the hall and pushed the door open, and the stiletto of light became a broad-sword.

Entering the kitchen behind the two women and the girl, Brian could almost have believed that the source of the light was the golden retriever sitting alertly in the corner between the cooktop and the refrigerator. The dog seemed to shine.

She was neither pure blond nor the coppery hue of some retrievers, but clothed in many shades of gold, and radiant. Her undercoat was thick, her chest deep, her head beautifully formed.

More compelling than the dog’s appearance were her posture and attitude. She sat erect, head lifted, alertness signified by a slight raising of her pendant ears and by the ceaseless subtle flare-and-quiver of her nostrils.

She didn’t turn her head, but she shifted her eyes toward Amy and Brian—and at once refocused on Carl.

The man of the house was at the moment something less than a man. Or perhaps he was only what any man eventually might become when guided by no hand but his own.

When sober, he probably had a neighborly face or at least one of those faces that, seen by the thousands in city streets, is a bland mask of benign indifference, with lips compressed and eyes fixed on a distant nothing.

Now, as he stood beside the kitchen table, his face was full of character, though of the wrong kind. His eyes were watery with drink and blood, and he looked out from under a lowered brow, like a bull that sees on every side the challenge of a red cape. His jaw hung slack. His lips were cracked, perhaps from the chronic dehydration that afflicts an alcoholic.

Carl Brockman turned his gaze on Brian. In those eyes shone not the mindless aggression of a man made stupid by drink, but instead the malevolent glee of a chained brute who had been liberated by it.

To his wife, in a voice thick with bitterness, he said, “What’ve you done?”

“Nothing, Carl. I just called them about the dog.”

His face was a snarl of knotted threats. “You must want some.”

Janet shook her head.

“You must really want some, Jan. You do this, you know it’s gonna get you only one thing.”

As though embarrassed by the evidence of her submissiveness, Janet covered her bleeding mouth with one hand.

Crouching, Amy called to the dog. “Here, cutie. Come here, girl.”

On the table stood a bottle of tequila, a glass, a salt shaker in the shape of a white Scottish terrier, and a plate holding slices of a fresh lime.

Raising his right hand from his side and high above his head, Carl revealed a tire iron. He gripped it by the pry end.

When he slammed the tool down hard upon the table, slices of lime leaped from the plate. The bottle of tequila wobbled, and the ice rattled in the glass.

Janet cringed, the little girl stoppled a cry with her thumb, Brian winced and tensed, but Amy just continued to coax the retriever to come to her. The dog was neither startled nor made fearful by the crash of iron on wood.

With a backhand swing of the tool, Carl swept everything off the table. At the farther end of the kitchen, tequila splashed, glass shattered, and the ceramic Scottie scattered salt across the floor.

“Get out,” Carl demanded. “Get out of my house.”

Amy said, “The dog’s a problem. You don’t need a problem dog. We’ll take her off your hands.”

“Who the hell are you, anyway? She’s my dog. She’s not yours. I know how to handle the bitch.”

The table was not between them and Carl. If he lurched forward and swung the tire iron, they might be able to dodge a blow only if the tequila made him slow and clumsy.

The guy didn’t look slow and clumsy. He seemed to be a bullet in the barrel, and any wrong move they made or wrong word they spoke might be the firing pin that sent him hurtling toward them.

Turning his malevolent gaze upon his wife, Carl repeated, “I know how to handle the bitch.”

“All I did,” Janet said meekly, “was give the poor thing a bath.”

“She didn’t need a bath.”

Pleading her case but careful not to argue it, Janet said, “Carl, honey, she was filthy, her coat was all matted.”

“She’s a dog, you stupid skank. She belongs in the yard.”

“I know. You’re right. You don’t want her in the house. But I was just, I was afraid, you know, afraid she’d get those sores like she did before.”

Her conciliatory tone inflamed his anger instead of quenching it. “Nickie’s my dog. I bought her. I own her. She’s mine.” He pointed the tire iron at his wife. “I know what’s mine, and I keep what’s mine. Nobody tells me what to do with anything that’s mine.”

At the start of Carl’s rant, Amy rose from a crouch and stood staring at him, rigid and still and moon-eyed.

Brian saw something strange in her face, an expression he could not name. She was transfixed but not by fear.

Pointing the tire iron at Amy now, instead of at his wife, Carl said, “What are you staring at? What’re you even doing here, you dumb bitch? I told you Get out.”

Brian put both hands on a dinette chair. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but with it, he might be able to block the tire iron.

“Sir, I’ll pay you for the dog,” Amy said.

“You deaf?”

“I’ll buy her.”

“Not for sale.”

“A thousand dollars.”

“She’s mine.”

“Fifteen hundred.”

Familiar with Amy’s finances, Brian said, “Amy?”

Carl transferred the tire iron from his right hand to his left. He flexed his free hand as if he had been gripping the tool with such ferocity that his fingers had cramped.

To Brian, he said, “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m her architect.”

“Fifteen hundred,” Amy repeated.

Although the kitchen was not too warm, Carl’s face glistened with a thin film of greasy perspiration. His undershirt was damp. This was a drunkard’s sweat, the body struggling to purge toxins.

“I don’t need your money.”

“Yes, sir, I know. But you don’t need the dog, either. She’s not the only dog in the world. Seventeen hundred.”

“What’re you—crazy?”

“Yeah. I am. But it’s a good crazy. Like, I’m not a suicide bomber or anything.”

“Suicide bomber?”

“I don’t have bodies buried in my backyard. Well, only one, but it’s a canary in a shoe box.”

“Somethin’s wrong with you,” Carl said thickly.

“His name was Leroy. I didn’t want a canary, especially not one named Leroy. A friend died, Leroy had nowhere to go, he had nothing but his shabby little cage, so I took him in, and he lived with me, and then I buried him, though I didn’t bury him until he was dead because, like I said, I’m not that kind of crazy.”

Under his brow, Carl’s eyes were deep wells with foul water glistening darkly at the bottom. “Don’t mock me.”

“I wouldn’t, sir. I can’t. I was pretty much raised by nuns. I don’t mock, don’t take God’s name in vain, don’t wear patent-leather shoes with a skirt, and I have such an enlarged guilt gland that it weighs as much as my brain. Eighteen hundred.”

As Carl transferred the tire iron from his left hand to his right, he turned it end for end, now gripping it by the lug socket. He pointed the pry end, the sharp end, at Amy, but said nothing.

Brian didn’t know if the wife-beater’s silence was a good sign or a bad one. More than once, he’d seen Amy talk an angry dog out of a snarl, into a belly rub; but he would have bet his last dollar that Carl wasn’t going to lie on his back and put all four in the air.

“Two thousand,” Amy said. “That’s as much as I have. I can’t go any higher.”

Carl took a step toward her.

“Back off,” Brian warned, raising the dinette chair as if he were a lion tamer, although a lion tamer would also have had a whip.

To Brian, Amy said, “Take it easy, Frank Lloyd Wright. This gentle man and me, we’re building some trust here.”

Carl extended his right arm, resting the tip of the pry bar in the recess between her collarbones, the blade against her throat.

As though unaware that the point of a deadly weapon was poised to puncture her esophagus, Amy said, “So—two thousand. You’re a tough negotiator, sir. I won’t be eating filet mignon for a while. That’s okay. I’m more a hamburger kind of girl, anyway.”

The wife-beater was a chimera now, only part angry bull, part coiled serpent. His gaze was sharp with sinister calculation, and although his tongue was not forked, it slipped between his lips to test the air.

Amy said, “I knew this guy, he almost choked to death on a chunk of steak. The Heimlich maneuver wouldn’t dislodge it, so a doctor cut his throat open there in the restaurant, fished the blockage out.”

As still as stone, the dog remained alert, and Brian wondered if he should take his lead from her. If the bottled violence in Carl was about to be uncorked, surely Nickie would sense it first.

“This woman at a nearby table,” Amy continued, “she was so horrified, she passed out facedown in her lobster bisque. I don’t think you can drown in a bowl of lobster bisque, it might even be good for the complexion, but I lifted her head out of it anyway.”

Carl licked his cracked lips. “You must think I’m stupid.”

“You might be ignorant,” Amy said. “I don’t know you well enough to say. But I’m totally sure you’re not stupid.”

Brian realized he was grinding his teeth.

“You give me a check for two thousand,” Carl said, “you’ll stop payment on it ten minutes after you’re out the door with the dog.”

“I don’t intend to give you a check.” From an inside jacket pocket, she withdrew a wad of folded hundred-dollar bills held together by a blue-and-yellow butterfly barrette. “I’ll pay cash.”

Brian was no longer grinding his teeth. His mouth had fallen open.

Lowering the tire iron to his side, Carl said, “Something’s for sure wrong with you.”

She pocketed the barrette, fanned the hundred-dollar bills, and said, “Deal?”

He put the weapon on the table, took the money, and counted it with the deliberateness of a man whose memory of math has been bleached pale by tequila.

Relieved, Brian put down the dinette chair.

Moving to the dog, Amy fished a red collar and a rolled-up leash from another pocket. She clipped the leash to the collar and put the collar on the dog. “Nice doing business with you, sir.”

While Carl was conducting a second count of the two thousand, Amy tugged gently on the leash. The dog rose at once and padded out of the kitchen, at her side.

With her little girl in tow, Janet followed Amy and Nickie into the hallway, and Brian went after them, glancing back because he half expected Carl to find his rage again and pick up the tire iron.

Jimmy, the keening boy, was silent now. He had moved from the hallway to the living room, where he stood at a window in the posture of a prisoner at his cell bars.

Leading the dog, Amy went to the boy. She stooped beside him, spoke to him.

Brian couldn’t hear what she said.

The front door was open, as he had left it. With the dog prancing smartly at her side, Amy soon joined him on the porch.

Standing on the threshold, Janet said, “You were… amazing. Thank you. I didn’t want the kids to see… see it happen again.”

Her face was sallow in the yellow light of the porch lamp, and the whites of her eyes had a jaundiced tint. She looked older than her years, and tired.

“You know, he’ll get another dog,” Amy said.

“Maybe I can prevent that.”

“Maybe?”

“I can try.”

“Did you really mean what you said when you first answered the door?”

Janet looked away from Amy to study the threshold at her feet, and shrugged.

Amy reminded her: “You wished that you were me. ‘Or anybody, somebody.’”

Janet shook her head. Her voice lowered almost to a murmur. “What you did in there, the money was the least of it. The way you were with him—I can never do that.”

“Then do what you can.” She leaned close to Janet and said something that Brian could not hear.

Listening intently, Janet covered her split and swollen lip with her right hand.

When Amy finished, she stepped back, and Janet met her eyes once more. They stared at each other, and although Janet didn’t say a word or even so much as nod, Amy said, “Good. All right.”

Janet retreated into the house with her daughter.

Nickie seemed to know where she was going, and moved forward on her leash, leading them off the porch, to the Expedition.

Brian said, “You always carry two thousand bucks?”

“Ever since, three years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to save a dog if I hadn’t had the money on me to buy it. That first one cost me three hundred twenty-two bucks.”

“So sometimes to rescue a dog, you have to buy it.”

“Not often, thank God.”

Without command or encouragement, Nickie sprang into the cargo space of the SUV.

“Good girl,” Amy said, and the dog’s plumed tail swished.

“That was crazy, what you did.”

“It’s only money.”

“I mean letting him put the pry bar to your throat.”

“He wouldn’t have used it.”

“How can you be sure?”

“I know his type. He’s basically a pussy.”

“I don’t think he’s a pussy.”

“He beats up women and dogs.”

“You’re a woman.”

“Not his type. Believe me, sweetie, in a pinch, you’d have whupped his ass in a New York minute.”

“Hard to whup a guy’s ass after he embeds a tire iron in your skull.”

Slamming shut the tailgate, she said, “Your skull would be fine. It’s the tire iron that would’ve been bent.”

“Let’s get out of here before he decides he should have held out for three thousand.”

Flipping open her cell phone, she said, “We’re not leaving.”

“What? Why?”

Keying in three numbers, she said, “The fun’s just getting started.”

“I don’t like that look on your face.”

“What look is that?”

“Reckless abandon.”

“Reckless is a cute look for me. Don’t I look cute?” The 911 operator answered, and Amy said, “I’m on a cell phone. A man here is beating his wife and little boy. He’s drunk.” She gave the address.

Nose to the glass, peering from the dark cargo hold of the SUV, the golden retriever had the blinkless curiosity of a resident of an aquarium bumping against the walls of its world.

Amy gave her name to the operator. “He’s beaten them before. I’m afraid this time he’s going to cripple or kill them.”

The breeze stirred faster, and the eucalyptus trees tossed their tresses as if winged swarms spiraled through them.

Staring at the house, Brian felt chaos coming. He had much hard experience of chaos. He had been born in a tornado.

“I’m a family friend,” Amy lied in answer to the 911 operator’s question. “Hurry.”

As Amy terminated the call, Brian said, “I thought you took the steam out of him.”

“No. By now he’s decided that he sold his honor with the dog. He’ll blame Janet for that. Come on.”

She started toward the house, and Brian hurried at her side. “Shouldn’t we leave it to the police?”

“They might not get here in time.”

Vague leaf shadows shuddered on the moon-silvered sidewalk, as if they were a thousand beetles quivering toward sheltering crevices.

“But a situation like this,” he said, “we don’t know what we’re doing.”

“What we’re doing is the right thing. You didn’t see the boy’s face. His left eye is swollen. His father gave him a bloody nose.”

An old anger rose in Brian. “What do you want to do to the son ofabitch?”

Climbing the porch steps, she said, “That’s up to him.”

Janet had left the front door ajar. From the back of the house rose Carl’s angry voice and hammering and crystalline shatters of sound and the sweet desperate singing of a child.

At the core of every ordered system, whether a family or a factory, is chaos. But in the whirl of every chaos lies a strange order, waiting to be found.

Amy pushed open the door. They went inside.

Chapter 2

Ceramic salt and pepper shakers, paired dogs—sitting Airedales, quizzical beagles, grinning goldens, prancing poodles, shepherds, spaniels, terriers, noble Irish wolfhounds—waited in orderly rows on shelves beyond open cabinet doors, and others stood in disorder on a kitchen counter.

Shaking, face pale and wet with tears, Janet Brockman moved two sheep dogs from the counter to the table.

The tire iron swung high as the woman moved, descended as she put the shakers on the table, and barely missed her snatched-back hands. Salt and ceramic shrapnel sprayed from the point of impact, then pepper and sharp shards.

The double crack of iron on wood was followed by Carl’s demand: “Two more.”

Watching from the dark hallway, Amy Redwing sensed that the collection must be precious to Janet, the one example of order in her disordered life. In those small ceramic dogs, the woman found some kind of hope.

Carl apparently understood this, too. He intended to shatter both the figurines and his wife’s remaining spirit.

Clutching a ragged pink rabbit that might have been a dog toy, the little girl sheltered beside the refrigerator. Her jewel-bright eyes were focused on a landscape of the mind.

In a small but clear voice, she sang in a language that Amy did not recognize. The haunting melody sounded Celtic.

The boy, Jimmy, evidently had taken refuge elsewhere.

Alert to the fact that her husband would as soon shatter her fingers as break the salt and pepper shakers, Janet flinched at the whoosh of arcing iron. She dropped a pair of ceramic Dalmatians on the table.

Crying out as the weapon grazed her right wrist, she cowered back against the ovens, arms crossed over her breasts.

When the lug wrench rang off oak, sparing both the salt and pepper, Carl snatched up a Dalmatian and threw it at his wife’s face. The figurine ricocheted off her forehead, cracked against an oven door, and fell dismembered to the floor.

Amy stepped into the kitchen, and Brian pushed past her, saying, “Leave her alone, Carl.”

The drunkard’s head turned with crocodilian menace, eyes cold with a cruelty as old as time.

Amy had the feeling that something more than the man himself lived in Brockman’s body, as though he had opened a door to a night visitor that made of his heart a lair.

“Is she your wife now?” Carl asked Brian. “Is this your house? My Theresa there—is she your daughter now?”

The sweet song rose from the girl, her voice as clear as the air and as strange as her eyes, but mysterious in its clarity and tender in its strangeness.

“It’s your house, Carl,” said Brian. “Everything is yours. So why smash any of it?”

Carl started to speak but then sighed wearily.

The tide of foul emotion seemed to recede in him, leaving his face as smooth as washed sand.

Without the anger he had shown previously, he said, “See… the way things are… nothing’s better than smashing.”

Taking a step toward the table that separated them, Brian said, “The way things are. Help me understand the way things are.”

The hooded eyes looked sleepy, but the reptilian mind behind them might be acrawl with calculation.

“Wrong,” Carl said. “Things are all wrong.”

“What things?”

His voice swam up from fathoms of melancholy. “You wake in the middle of the night, when it’s blind-dark and quiet enough to think for once, and you can feel then how wrong it all is, and no way ever to make it right. No way ever.”

As clear and silvery as the music of Uilleann pipes in an Irish band, Theresa’s small voice raised the hairs on the nape of Amy’s neck, because whatever the girl’s words meant, they conveyed a sense of longing and loss.

Brockman looked at his daughter. His sudden tears might have been for the girl or for the song, or for himself.

Perhaps the child’s voice had a premonitory quality or perhaps Amy’s instincts had been enriched by the companionship of so many dogs. She was suddenly certain that Carl’s rage had not abated and that, concealed, it swelled toward violent expression.

She knew the iron would swing without warning and take the broken wife in the face, breaking her twice and forever, shattering the hidden skull into the living brain.

As if premonition were a wave as real as light, it seemed to travel from Amy to Brian. Even as she inhaled to cry out, he moved. He didn’t have time to circle the kitchen. Instead he scrambled from floor to chair to table.

A tear fell to the hand that held the iron, and the fingers tightened on the weapon.

Janet’s eyes widened. But Carl had drowned her spirit. She stood motionless, breathless, defenseless under a suffocating weight of despair.

As Brian climbed toward confrontation, Amy realized that the bludgeon might as likely be flung at the child as swung at the wife, and she moved toward Theresa.

Atop the table, Brian seized the weapon as it ascended to strike a blow at Janet, and he fell upon Brockman. They sprawled on the floor, into broken glass and slices of lime and puddles of tequila.

Amy had left the front door open, and from the farther end of the house came a voice: ”Police.” They had arrived without sirens.

“Back here,” she called, gathering Theresa to her as the girl’s song murmured to a whisper, whispered into silence.

Janet stood rigid, as if the blow might yet come, but Brian rose in possession of the tire iron.

Braided leather gun belts creaking, hands on the grips of their holstered pistols, two policemen entered the kitchen, solid men and alert. One told Brian to put down the tire iron, and Brian placed it on the table.

Carl Brockman clambered to his feet, left hand bleeding from a shard of embedded bottle glass. Once burning bright with anger, his tear-streaked face had paled to ashes, and his mouth had gone soft with self-pity.

“Help me, Jan,” he pleaded, reaching out to her with his bloody hand. “What am I gonna do now? Baby, help me.”

She took a step toward him, but halted. She glanced at Amy, then at Theresa.

With her thumb, the child had corked her song inside, and she had closed her eyes. Throughout these events, her face had remained expressionless, as though she might be deaf to all the threats of violence and to the crash of iron on oak.

The only indication that the girl had any connection to reality was the fierceness of her grip on Amy’s hand.

“He’s my husband,” Janet told the police. “He hit me.” She put a hand to her mouth, but then lowered it. “My husband hit me.”

“Oh, Jan, please don’t do this.”

“He hit our little boy. Bloodied his nose. Our Jimmy.”

One of the officers took the tire iron off the table, propped it in a corner beyond easy reach, and instructed Carl to sit in a dinette chair.

Now came questions and inadequate answers and gradually a new kind of awfulness: the recognition of lost promise and the bitter cost of vows not kept.

After Amy had told her story to the police, and while the others told theirs, she led Theresa out of the kitchen, along the hallway, seeking the boy. He might have been anywhere in the house, but she was drawn to the open front door.

The porch smelled of the night-blooming jasmine that braided through the white laths of a trellis. She had not detected the scent earlier.

The breeze had died. In the stillness, the eucalyptus trees stood as grim as mourners.

Past the dark patrol car at the curb, in the middle of the moon-washed street, boy and dog seemed to be at play.

The tailgate of the Expedition was open. The boy must have let Nickie out of the SUV.

On second look, Amy realized that Jimmy was not playing a game with the retriever, that instead he was trying to run away. The dog blocked him, thwarted him, strove to herd him back to the house.

The boy fell to the pavement and stayed where he dropped, on his side. He drew his knees up in the fetal position.

The dog lay next to him, as though keeping a watch over him.

Settling Theresa on a porch step, Amy said, “Don’t move, honey. All right? Don’t move.”

The girl did not reply and perhaps was not capable of replying.

Through a night as quiet as an abandoned church, breathing eucalyptic incense, Amy hurried into the street.

Nickie watched her as she approached. Under the moon, the golden looked silver, and all the light of that high lamp seemed to be given to her, leaving everything else in the night to be brightened only by her reflection.

Kneeling beside Jimmy, Amy heard him weeping. She put a hand on his shoulder, and he did not flinch from her touch.

She and the dog regarded each other across the grieving boy.

The retriever’s face was noble, with at this moment none of the comic expression of which the breed was so capable. Noble and solemn.

All the houses but one remained dark, and the silence of the stars filled the street, disturbed only by the boy’s softly expressed anguish, which grew quiet as Amy smoothed his hair.

“Nickie,” she whispered.

The dog did not raise its ears or cock its head, or in any way respond, but it stared at her, and stared.

After a while, Amy encouraged the boy to sit up. “Put your arms around my neck, sweetheart.”

Jimmy was small, and she scooped him off the pavement, carrying him in the cradle of her arms. “Never again, sweetheart. That’s all over.”

The dog led the way to the Expedition, ran the last few steps, and sprang through the open tailgate.

While Amy deposited the boy in the backseat, Nickie watched from the cargo space.

“Never again,” Amy said, and kissed the boy on the forehead. “I promise you, honey.”

The promise surprised and daunted her. This boy was not hers, and the arcs of their lives likely would have only this intersection and a short parallel course. She could not do for a stranger’s child what she could do for dogs, and sometimes she could not even save the dogs.

Yet she heard herself repeat, “I promise.”

She closed the door and stood for a moment at the back of the SUV, shivering in the mild September night, watching Theresa on the front-porch steps.

The moon painted faux ice on the concrete driveway and faux frost on the eucalyptus leaves.

Amy remembered a winter night with blood upon the snow and a turbulence of sea gulls thrashing into flight from the eaves of the high catwalk, white wings briefly dazzling as they oared skyward through the sweeping beam of the lighthouse, like an honor guard of angels escorting home a sinless soul.

Chapter 3

Brian McCarthy and Associates occupied offices on the ground floor of a modest two-story building in Newport Beach. He lived on the upper floor.

Amy braked to a stop in the small parking lot beside the place. Leaving Janet, the two children, and the dog, Nickie, in the SUV, she accompanied Brian to the exterior stairs that led to his apartment.

A lamp glowed at the top of the long flight, but here at the bottom, the darkness was unrelieved.

She said, “You smell like tequila.”

“I think I’ve still got a slice of lime in my shoe.”

“Climbing the table to jump him—that was reckless.”

“Just trying to impress my date.”

“It worked.”

“I’d sure like to kiss you now,” he said.

“As long as we don’t generate enough heat to bring the global-warming police down on us, go ahead.”

He looked at the Expedition. “Everybody’s watching.”

“After Carl, maybe they need to see people kissing.”

He kissed her. She was good at it.

“Even the dog’s watching,” he said.

“She’s wondering—if I paid two thousand for her, how much did I pay for you.”

“You can put a collar on me anytime.”

“Let’s leave it at kisses for now.” She kissed him again before returning to the Expedition.

After watching her drive away, he went upstairs. His apartment was spacious, with Santos-mahogany floors and butter-yellow walls.

The minimalist contemporary furnishings and serene Japanese art suggested less a bachelor pad than a monk’s quarters. He had gutted, rebuilt, and furnished these rooms before he met Amy. He didn’t want to be either a bachelor or a monk anymore.

After stripping out of his tequila-marinated clothes, he took a shower. Maybe the hot water would make him sleepy.

Still feeling as alert and wide-eyed as an owl, he dressed in jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. At 2:56 a.m., he was awake for the day.

With a mug of fresh-brewed coffee, he settled at the computer in his study. He needed to get work done before sleep deprivation melted the edge off his concentration.

Two e-mails awaited him. The sender was pigkeeper.

Vanessa. She hadn’t contacted him in over five months. He had begun to think he would never hear from her again.

For a while, he stared at the screen, reluctant to let her into his life once more. If he never again read her messages, if he never answered them, he might be rid of her in time.

Hope would be gone with her, however. Hope would be lost. The price of freezing Vanessa out of his life was too great.

He opened the first e-mail.

Piggy wants a puppy. How stupid is that? How can a piggy take care of a puppy when the puppy’s smarter? I’ve known houseplants smarter than Piggy.

Brian closed his eyes. Too late. He had opened himself to her, and now she was alive again in the lighted rooms of his mind, not just in the dark corners of memory.

How are you doing, Bry? Do you have cancer yet? You’re only thirty-four next week, but people die young of cancer all the time. It’s not too much to hope for.

After printing a hard copy of her message, he filed the e-mail electronically under Vanessa.

To avoid slopping coffee out of the mug, he held it with both hands. The brew tasted fine, but coffee was no longer all that he needed.

From the sideboard in the dining room, he fetched a bottle of cognac. In the study once more, he added a generous portion of Rémy Martin to the mug.

He was not much of a drinker. He kept the Rémy for visitors. The visitor tonight was unwelcome, and here in spirit only.

For a while he wandered through the apartment, drinking coffee, waiting for the cognac to take the edge off his nerves.

Amy was right: Carl Brockman was a pussy. The drunkard reeked of tequila, but even at a distance, Vanessa smelled of brimstone.

When Brian felt ready, he returned to the computer and opened the second e-mail.

Hey, Bry. Forgot to tell you a funny thing.

Without reading further, he pressed the print key and then filed the e-mail under Vanessa.

Silence pooled in the apartment, and not a sound ascended from the office below or from the dark depths of the street.

He closed his eyes. But only genuine blindness would excuse him from the obligation to read the hard copy.

Back in July, the pigster built sandcastles all day on the little beach we have in this new place, then wound up with a killer sunburn, looked like a baked ham. Old Piggy couldn’t sleep for days, cried half the night, started peeling and then itched herself raw. You might expect the smell of fried bacon, but there wasn’t.

He was a swimmer on the surface of the past, an abyss of memory under him.

Piggy is pink and smooth again, but there’s a mole on her neck that seems to be changing. Maybe the sunburn made some melanoma. I will keep you informed.

He put this second printout with the first. Later he would read both again, searching for clues in addition to “the little beach.”

In the kitchen, Brian poured the contents of the mug down the drain. He no longer needed coffee and no longer wanted cognac.

Guilt is a tireless horse. Grief ages into sorrow, and sorrow is an enduring rider.

He opened the refrigerator, but then closed it. He could no more eat than sleep.

Returning to the study and working on one of his current custom-home projects had no appeal. Architecture might be frozen music, as Goethe once said, but right now he was deaf to it.

From a kitchen drawer, he extracted a large tablet of art paper and a set of drawing pencils. He had stashed these things in every room of the apartment.

He sat at the dinette table and began to sketch a concept for the building that Amy hoped he would design for her: a place for dogs, a haven where no hand would ever be raised against them, where every affection wanted would be given.

She owned a piece of land on which hilltop oaks spread against the sky, long shadows lengthening down sloped meadows in the early morning, retracting toward the crest as the day ripened toward noon. She had a vision for it that inspired him.

Nevertheless, after a while, Brian found himself turning from sketch to portrait, from a haven for dogs to the animal itself. He had a gift for portraiture, but never before had he drawn a dog.

As his pencils whispered across the paper, an uncanny feeling overcame him, and a strange thing happened.

Chapter 4

After dropping Brian at his place, Amy Redwing called Lottie Augustine, her neighbor, and explained that she was bringing in three rescues who were not dogs and who needed shelter.

Lottie served in the volunteer army that did the work of Golden Heart, the organization Amy founded. A few times in the past, she’d risen after midnight to help in an emergency, always with good cheer.

Having been a widow for a decade and a half, having retired from a nursing career, Lottie found as much meaning in tending to the dogs as she had found in being a good wife and a caring nurse.

The drive from Brian’s place to Lottie’s house was stressed by silence: little Theresa asleep in the backseat, her brother slumped and brooding beside her, Janet in the passenger seat but looking lost and studying the deserted streets as if these were not just unknown neighborhoods but were the precincts of a foreign country.

In the company of other people, Amy had little tolerance for quiet. Enduring mutual silences, she sometimes felt as though the other person might ask a terrible question, the answer to which, if she spoke it, would shatter her as surely as a hard-thrown stone will destroy a pane of glass.

Consequently, she spoke of this and that, including Antoine, the dog driver who served blind Marco, out there in the far Philippines. Neither the two troubled children nor their mother would take the bait.

When they came to a stop at a red traffic light, Janet offered Amy the two thousand dollars that she had given to Carl.

“It’s yours,” Amy said.

“I can’t accept it.”

“I bought the dog.”

“Carl’s in jail now.”

“He’ll be out on bail soon.”

“But he won’t want the dog.”

“Because I’ve bought her.”

“He’ll want me—after what I’ve done.”

“He won’t find you. I promise.”

“We can’t afford a dog now.”

“No problem. I bought her.”

“I’d give her to you anyway.”

“The deal is done.”

“It’s a lot of money,” Janet said.

“Not so much. I never renegotiate.”

The woman folded her left hand around the cash, her right hand around the left, lowered her hands to her lap as she bowed her head.

The traffic signal turned green, and Amy drove across the deserted intersection as Janet said softly, “Thank you.”

Thinking of the dog in the cargo area, Amy said, “Trust me, sweetie, I got the better half of the deal.”

She glanced at the rearview mirror and saw the dog peering forward from behind the backseat. Their eyes met in their reflections and then Amy looked at the road ahead.

“How long have you had Nickie?” Amy asked.

“A little more than four months.”

“Where did you get her?”

“Carl didn’t say. He just brought her home.”

They were southbound on the Coast Highway, scrub and shore grass to their right. Beyond the grass lay the beach, the sea.

“How old is she?”

“Carl said maybe two years.”

“So she came with the name.”

“No. He didn’t know her name.”

The water was black, the sky black, and the painter moon, though in decline, brushed the crests of the waves.

“Then who named her?”

Janet’s answer surprised Amy: “Reesa. Theresa.”

The girl had not spoken this night, had only sung in that high pure voice, in what might have been Celtic, and she had seemed to be detached in the manner of a gentle autistic.

“Why Nickie?”

“Reesa said it was always her name.”

“Always.”

“Yes.”

“For some reason… I didn’t think Theresa said much.”

“She doesn’t. Sometimes not for weeks, then only a few words.”

In the mirror, the steady gaze of the dog. In the sea, the sinking moon. In the sky, a vast intricate wheelwork of stars.

And in Amy’s heart rose a sense of wonder that she was reluctant to indulge, for it could not be true, in any meaningful sense, that her Nickie had returned to her.

Chapter 5

Moongirl will make love only in total darkness. She believes that her life has been forever diminished by passion in the light, when she was younger.

Consequently, the faintest glow around a lowered window shade will burn away all of her desire.

A single thread of sunshine in the folds of drawn draperies will in an instant unravel her lust.

Light intruding from another room—under a door, around a crack in a jamb, through a keyhole—will pierce her as if it is a needle and cause her to flinch from her lover’s touch.

When her blood is hot, even the light-emitting numerals of a bedside clock will chill her.

The luminous face of a wristwatch, the tiny bulb on a smoke detector, the radiant eyes of a cat can wring a cry of frustration from her and squeeze her libido dry.

Harrow thinks of her as Moongirl because he can imagine her loose in the night, silhouetted naked on a ridge line, howling at the moon. He doesn’t know what label a psychologist might apply to her particular kind of madness, but he has no doubt that she is mad.

Never has he called her Moongirl to her face. Instinct tells him that to do so would be dangerous, perhaps even fatal.

In daylight or dark, she can pass for sane. She can even feign wholesomeness quite convincingly. Her beauty beguiles.

Especially in purple, but also in pink and white, bouquets of hydrangea charm the eye, but the plant is mortally poisonous; so, too, the lily of the valley, the blossoms of bloodroot; the petals of yellow jasmine, brewed in tea or mixed in salad, can kill in as little as ten minutes.

Moongirl loves the black rose more than any other flower, though it is not poisonous.

Harrow has seen her hold such a rose so tightly by its thorny stem that her hand drips blood.

Her pain threshold, like his, is high. She does not enjoy the prick of the rose; she simply does not feel it.

She has total discipline of her body and her intellect. She has no discipline of her emotions. She is, therefore, out of balance, and balance is a requirement of sanity.

This night, in a windowless room where no starshine can reach, where the luminous clock is closed in a nightstand drawer, they do not make love, for love has nothing to do with their increasingly ferocious coupling.

No woman has excited Harrow as this one does. She has about her the ultimate hunger of the black widow, the all-consuming passion of a mantis that, during coitus, kills and eats its mate.

He half expects that one night Moongirl will conceal a knife between mattress and box springs, or elsewhere near the bed. In the blinding dark, at the penultimate moment, he will hear her whisper Darling and feel a sudden stiletto navigate his ribs and pop his swelling heart.

As always, the anticipation of sex proves to be more thrilling than the experience. At the end, he feels a curious hollowness, a certainty that the essence of the act has again eluded him.

Spent, they lie in the hush of the blackness, as silent as if they have stepped out of life into the outer dark.

Moongirl is not much for words, and she always speaks directly when she has something to say.

In her company, Harrow follows her example. Fewer words mean less risk of a mere observation being misconstrued as an insult or a judgment.

She is sensitive about being judged. Advice, if she dislikes it, might be received as a rebuke. A well-meant admonition might be interpreted as stinging criticism.

Here in the venereal aftermath, Harrow has no fear of any blade she might have buried in the bedding. If ever she tries to kill him, the attempt will be made between the motion and the act, at the ascending moment of her fulfillment.

Now, after sex, he does not seek sleep. Most of the time, Moongirl sleeps by day and thrives in the night; and Harrow has reset himself to live by her clock.

For one so ripe, she lies stick-stiff in the darkness, like a hungry presence poised on a branch, disguised as bark, waiting for an unwary passerby.

In time she says, “Let’s burn.”

“Burn what?”

“Whatever needs burning.”

“All right.”

“Not her, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“I’m not thinking.”

“She’s for later.”

“All right,” he says.

“I mean a place.”

“Where?”

“We’ll know it.”

“How?”

“When we see it.”

She sits up, and her fingers go to the lamp switch with the unerring elegance of a blind woman following a line of Braille to the end punctuation.

When he sees her in the soft light, he wants her again, but she is never his for the taking. His satisfaction always depends on her need, and at the moment the only thing she needs is to burn.

Throughout his life, Harrow has been a loner and a user, even when others have counted him as friend or family. Outsider to the world, he has acted strictly in his self-interest—until Moongirl.

What he has with her is neither friendship nor family, but something more primal. If just two individuals can constitute a pack, then he and Moongirl are wolves, though more terrible than wolves, because wolves kill only to eat.

He pulls on his clothes without taking his eyes from her, for she makes getting dressed an act no less erotic than a striptease. Even coarse fabrics seem to slide like silk along her limbs, and the fastening of every button is a promise of a future unveiling.

Their coats hang on wall pegs: ski jacket for him, black leather lined with fleece for her.

Outside, her blond hair looks platinum under the moon, and her eyes—bottle-green in the lamplight—seem to be a luminous gray in the colorless night.

“You drive,” she says, leading him toward the detached garage.

“All right.”

As they pass through the man door, he switches on the light.

She says, “We’ll need gasoline.”

From under the workbench, Harrow retrieves a red two-gallon utility can in which he keeps gasoline for the lawn mower. Judging by the heft of the can and the hollow sloshing of the contents, it holds less than half a gallon.

The fuel tanks of both the Lexus SUV and the two-seater Mercedes sports car have recently been filled. Harrow inserts a siphon hose into the Lexus.

Moongirl stands over him, watching as he sucks on the rubber tube. She keeps her hands in the pockets of her jacket.

Harrow wonders: If he misjudges the amount of priming needed, if he draws gasoline into his mouth, will she produce a butane lighter and ignite the flammable mist that wheezes from him, setting fire to his lips and tongue?

He tastes the first acrid fumes and does not misjudge, but introduces the hose into the open can on the floor just as the gasoline gushes.

When he looks up at her, she meets his eyes. She says nothing, and neither does he.

He is safe from her and she from him as long as they need each other for the hunt. She has her quarry, the object of her hatred, and Harrow has his, not merely whatever they might burn tonight, but other and specific targets. Together they can more easily achieve their goals, with more pleasure than they would have if they acted separately and alone.

He places the full utility can in the sports car, in the luggage space behind the two bucket seats.

The single-lane blacktop road, with here and there a lay-by, rises and falls and curves for a mile before it brings them to the gate, which swings open when Moongirl presses the button on the same remote with which moments ago she raised the garage door.

In another half-mile, they come to the two-lane county road.

“Left,” she says, and he turns left, which is north.

The night is half over but full of promise.

To the east, hills rise. To the west, they descend.

In lunar light, the wild dry grass is as platinum as Moongirl’s hair, as if the hills are pillows on which uncountable thousands of women rest their blond heads.

They are in sparsely populated territory. At the moment, not a single building stands in view.

“How much nicer the world would be,” she says, “if everyone in it were dead.”

Chapter 6

Amy Redwing owned a modest bungalow, but Lottie Augustine’s two-story house, next door, had spare rooms for Janet and her kids. The windows glowed with warm light when Amy parked in the driveway.

The former nurse came out to greet them and to help carry their hastily packed suitcases into the house. Slender, wearing jeans and a man’s blue-and-yellow checkered shirt with the tail untucked, gray hair in a ponytail, eyes limpid blue in a sweet face wizened by a love of the sun, Lottie seemed to be both a teenager and a retiree. In her youth she had probably been an old soul, just as in her later years she remained a young spirit.

Leaving the dog in the SUV, Amy carried Theresa. The child woke as they ascended the back-porch steps.

Even awake, her purple eyes seemed full of dreams.

Touching the locket Amy wore at her throat, Theresa whispered, “The wind.”

Carrying two suitcases, followed by Janet with one bag and with Jimmy in tow, Lottie led them into the house.

Just beyond the threshold of the kitchen door, still in Amy’s arms and fingering the locket, Theresa whispered, “The chimes.”

Cast back in time, Amy halted. For a moment, the kitchen faded as if it were only a pale vision of a moment in her future.

The child’s trance-casting eyes seemed to widen as if they were portals through which one might fall into another world.

“What did you say?” she asked Theresa, though she had heard the words clearly enough.

The wind. The chimes.

The girl did not blink, did not blink, then blinked—and plugged her mouth with her right thumb.

Color returned to the faded kitchen, and Amy put Theresa down in a dinette chair.

On the table stood a plate of homemade cookies. Oatmeal raisin. Chocolate chip. Peanut butter.

A pan of milk waited on the cooktop, and Lottie Augustine set to making hot chocolate.

The clink of mugs against a countertop, the crisp crackle of a foil packet of cocoa powder, the burble of simmering milk stirred by a ladle, the soft knocking of the wood ladle against the pan…

The sounds seemed to come to Amy from a distance, to arise in a room far removed from this one, and when she heard her name, she realized that Lottie had spoken it more than once.

“Oh. Sorry. What did you say?”

“Why don’t you and Janet take their bags upstairs while I tend to the children. You know the way.”

“All right. Sure.”

Upstairs, two secondary bedrooms were connected by a bath. One had twin beds suitable for the kids.

“If you leave both doors open to the shared bath,” Amy said, “you’ll be able to hear them if they call out.”

In the room that had one bed, Janet sat on the arm of a plump upholstered chair. She looked exhausted and bewildered, as if she had walked a hundred miles while under a spell and did not know where she was or why she had come here.

“What now?”

“The police will take at least a day to decide on charges. Then Carl will need to make bail.”

“He’ll come looking for you to find me.”

“By then, you won’t be next door anymore.”

“Where?”

“Over a hundred sixty people volunteer for Golden Heart. Some of them foster incoming dogs until we can find each one’s forever home.”

“Forever home?”

“Before we make a permanent placement of a rescued dog, we have a vet make sure it’s healthy, up-to-date on all its shots.”

“One day when he was gone, I took Nickie for her shots. He was furious about the cost.”

“The foster parents evaluate the dog and make a report on the extent of its training—is it housebroken, leash friendly.…”

“Nickie’s housebroken. She’s the sweetest girl.”

“If the dog has no serious behavioral problems, we find what we hope will be its forever home. Some of our fostering volunteers have room for more than visiting dogs. One of them will take in you and the kids for a few weeks, till you get on your feet.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Most golden-rescue people are a class apart. You’ll see.”

In Janet’s lap, her hands worried at each other. “What a mess.”

“It would have been worse to stay with him.”

“Just me, I might’ve stayed. But not with the kids. Not anymore. I’m… ashamed, how I let him treat them.”

“You’d need to be ashamed if you stayed. But not now. Not unless you let him sweet-talk you back.”

“Won’t happen.”

“Glad to hear it. There’s always a way forward. But there’s no way back.”

Janet nodded. Perhaps she understood. Most likely not.

To many people, free will is a license to rebel not against what is unjust or hard in life but against what is best for them and true.

Amy said, “It might be too late to help the swelling, but you ought to try putting some ice on that split lip.”

Rising from the arm of the chair, moving toward the bedroom door, Janet said, “All right. But I heal fast. I’ve had to.”

Putting one hand on the woman’s shoulder, staying her for a moment, Amy said, “Your daughter, is she autistic?”

“One doctor said so. Others don’t agree.”

“What do the others say?”

“Different things. Various developmental disabilities with long names and no hope.”

“Has she had any kind of treatment?”

“None that’s brought her out of herself. But Reesa—she’s some kind of prodigy, too. She hears a song once, she can sing it or play it note-perfect on a child’s flute I bought her.”

“Earlier, was she singing in Celtic?”

“Back at the house. Yes.”

“She knows the language?”

“No. But Maev Gallagher, our neighbor, loves Celtic music, plays it all the time. She sometimes baby-sits Reesa.”

“So once she’s heard a song, she can also sing it word-perfect in a language she doesn’t know.”

“It’s a little eerie sometimes,” Janet said. “That high sweet voice in a foreign tongue.”

Amy removed her hand from Janet’s shoulder. “Has she ever…”

“Ever what?”

“Has she ever done anything else that strikes you as eerie?” Janet frowned. “Like what?”

To explain, Amy would have to open door after door into herself, into places in the heart that she did not want to visit. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I meant by that.”

“In spite of her problems, Reesa’s a good girl.”

“I’m sure she is. And she’s lovely, too. Such beautiful eyes.”

Chapter 7

Harrow drives, and the silver Mercedes conforms to curves with the sinuous grace of free-flowing mercury, and Moongirl simmers in the passenger seat. No matter how good the sex has been for her, Moongirl always rises in anger from the bed. Harrow is never the cause of her rage. She is furious because she can only have carnal satisfaction in a lightless room.

She has put this condition of darkness upon herself, but she does not blame herself for it. She imagines herself to be a victim and instead blames another, and not just another but also the world.

Drained of desire by the act, she remains empty only until the last shudder of pleasure has passed through her, whereupon she fills at once with bitterness and resentment.

Because she has the capacity for ruthless discipline of the body and the intellect, her undisciplined emotion can be concealed. Her face remains placid, her voice soft. Always she walks without a single

footfall thae is lithe, graceful, with no telltale twitch of tension in her stride or gestures.

Occasionally Harrow swears that he can smell her fury: the faintest scent of iron, like that rising from ferrous rock scorched by relentless desert sun.

Only light can vaporize this particular anger.

If they lie together in the windowless room in the daytime, she wants afterward to be in the light. Sometimes she goes outside half clothed or even naked.

On those days, she stands with her face turned to the sky, her mouth open, as if inviting the light to fill her.

Although a natural blonde, she takes the sun well. Her skin is bronze even into the creases of her knuckles, and the fine hairs on her arms are bleached white.

By contrast to her skin, the whites of her eyes are as brilliant as pure arctic snow, and the bottle-green irises dazzle.

Most often she and Harrow make loveless love at night. Afterward, neither the stars nor the moon is bright enough to steam away her distilled fury, and though she sometimes refers to herself as a Valkyrie, she does not have wings to fly into the higher light.

Usually a bonfire on the beach will reduce her anger to embers, but not always. Occasionally she needs to burn more than pine logs and dried seaweed and driftwood.

As though Moongirl can will the world to meet her needs, someone ideal for burning may come to her at the opportune moment. This has happened more than once.

On a night when a bonfire is not enough and when fate does not send her an offering, she must go out into the world and find the fire she needs.

Harrow has driven her as far as 120 miles before she has located what requires burning. Sometimes she does not find it before dawn, and then the sun is sufficient to boil off her rage.

This night, he drives thirty-six miles on winding roads through rural territory before she says, “There. Let’s do it.”

An old one-story clapboard house, the only residence in sight, sits behind a well-tended lawn. No lamps brighten any window.

The headlights reveal two birdbaths in the yard, three garden gnomes, and a miniature windmill. On the front porch are a pair of bentwood rocking chairs.

Harrow proceeds almost a quarter of a mile past the place until, prior to a bridge, he comes to a narrow dirt lane that slants off the blacktop. He follows this dusty track down to the base of the bridge and parks near the river, where sluggish black water purls in the moonlight.

Perhaps this short path serves fishermen who cast for bass from the bank. If so, none is currently present. This is an hour made more for arsonists than for anglers.

From the two-lane county road above, the Mercedes cannot be seen here at the river. Although few motorists, if any, are likely to be abroad at this hour, precautions must be taken.

Harrow retrieves the two-gallon utility can from the luggage space behind the seats.

He does not ask her if she has remembered to bring matches. She always carries them.

Cicadas serenade one another, and toads croak with satisfaction each time they devour a cicada.

Harrow considers going overland to the house, across meadows and through a copse of oaks. But they will gain no advantage by taking the arduous route.

The target house is only a quarter-mile away. Along the county road are tall grasses, gnarls of brush, and a few trees, always one kind of cover or another to which they can retreat the moment they glimpse distant headlights or hear the faraway growl of an engine.

They ascend from the riverbank to the paved road.

The gasoline chuckles in the can, and his nylon jacket produces soft whistling noises when one part of it rubs against another.

Moongirl makes no sound whatsoever. She walks without a single footfall that he can hear.

Then she says, “Do you wonder why?”

“Why what?”

“The burning.”

“No.”

“You never wonder,” she presses.

“No. It’s what you want.”

“That’s good enough for you.”

“Yes.”

The early-autumn stars are as icy as those of winter, and it seems to him that now, as in all seasons, the sky is not deep but dead, flat, and frozen.

She says, “You know what’s the worst thing?”

“Tell me.”

“Boredom.”

“Yes.”

“It turns you outward.”

“Yes.”

“But toward what?”

“Tell me,” he says.

“Nothing’s out there.”

“Nothing you want.”

“Just nothing,” she corrects.

Her madness fascinates Harrow, and he is never bored in her company. Originally, he had thought they would be done with each other in a month or two; but they have been seven months together.

“It’s terrifying,” she says.

“What?”

“Boredom.”

“Yes,” he says sincerely.

“Terrifying.”

“Gotta stay busy.”

He shifts the heavy gasoline can from his right hand to his left.

“Pisses me off,” she says.

“What does?”

“Being terrified.”

“Stay busy,” he repeats.

“All I’ve got is me.”

“And me,” he reminds her.

She does not confirm that he is essential to her defenses against boredom.

They have covered half the distance to the clapboard house.

A winking light moves across the frozen stars, but it is nothing more than an airliner, too high to be heard, bound for an exotic port that at least some perceptive passengers will discover is identical to the place from which they departed.

Chapter 8

Having moved the Expedition from Lottie’s driveway to her own carport next door, Amy opened the tailgate, and Nickie leaped out into the night.

Amy remembered coming out of the Brockman house and finding the tailgate open, Jimmy trying to run away and the diligent dog herding him toward home.

He must have freed Nickie with the expectation that they would escape together. Having endured four months with Carl Brockman as its master, any other dog might have led the boy in flight.

As Nickie landed on the driveway, Amy snatched up the red leash, but the dog had no intention of running off. She led Amy around the vehicle, into the backyard. Without any of the usual canine ritual, Nickie squatted to pee.

Because Amy had two golden retrievers of her own—Fred and Ethel—and because often she kept rescue dogs for at least a night or two before transporting them to foster homes, she assumed that Nickie would want to spend some time sniffing around the yard—reading the local newspaper, so to speak.

Instead, upon completion of her business, the dog went directly to the back porch, up the steps, and to the door.

Amy unlocked the door, unclipped the leash from the collar, stepped into the house, and switched on the lights.

Neither Fred nor Ethel was in the kitchen. They must have been asleep in the bedroom.

From the farther end of the bungalow arose the thump of paws rushing across carpet and then hardwood, swiftly approaching.

Fred and Ethel did not bark, because they were trained not to speak without an important reason—such as a stranger at the door—and they were good dogs.

She most often took them with her. When she left them at home, they always greeted her return with an enthusiasm that lifted her heart.

Usually Ethel would appear first, ebullient and grinning, head raised, tail dusting the doorjamb as she came into the room.

She was a darker red-gold than Nickie, although well within the desirable color range for the breed. She had a thicker undercoat than usual for a retriever and looked gloriously furry.

Fred would probably follow Ethel. Not dominant, often bashful, he would be so thrilled to see Amy that he’d not only wag his tail furiously but also wiggle his hindquarters with irrepressible delight.

Sweet Fred had a broad handsome face and as perfectly black a nose as Amy had ever seen, not a speckle of brown to mar it.

At Amy’s side, Nickie stood alert, ears lifted, gaze fixed on the open hall door from which issued the muffled thunder of paws.

A sudden drop in the velocity of approach suggested that Fred and Ethel detected the presence of a newcomer. She checked her speed first, and Fred blundered into her as they came through the doorway.

Instead of the usual meet-and-greet, including nose to nose and tongue to nose and a courteously quick sniff of butts all around, the Redwing kids halted a few feet short of Nickie. They stood panting, plumed tails swishing, with cocked-head curiosity, eyes bright with what seemed like surprise.

Keeping her own tail in motion, Nickie raised her head, assuming a friendly but regal posture.

“Ethel sweetie, babycakes Fred,” Amy said in her sweet-talk voice, “come meet your new sister.”

Until she said “new sister,” she hadn’t known that she’d decided beyond doubt to keep Nickie rather than placing her with an approved family on the Golden Heart adoption list.

Previously, both kids had reliably been suckers for their master’s squeaky sweet-talk voice, but this time they ignored Amy.

Now Ethel did something she always did with a visiting dog but never until the meet-and-greet was concluded. She went to the open box of squeeze toys and pull toys and tennis balls inside the always-open pantry door, judiciously selected a prize, returned with it, and dropped it in front of the newcomer.

She had chosen a plush yellow Booda duck.

The message that Ethel usually managed to deliver with the loan of a toy to a visitor was this: Here’s one that’s exclusively yours for the length of your visit, but the rest belong to me and Fred unless we include you in a group game.

Nickie studied the duck for a moment, then regarded Ethel.

All the protocols were being revised: Ethel made a second trip to the box in the pantry and returned with a plush-toy gorilla. She dropped it beside the duck.

Meanwhile, Fred had circled the room to put the breakfast table between him and the two females. He lay on his belly, watching them through a chromework of chair legs, tail sweeping the oak floor.

If you are a dog lover, a true dog lover, and not just one who sees them as pets or animals, but are instead one who sees them as one’s dear companions, and more than companions—sees them as perhaps being but a step or two down the species ladder from human kind, not sharing human exceptionalism but not an abyss below it, either—you watch them differently from the way other people watch them, with a respect for their born dignity, with a recognition of their capacity to know joy and to suffer melancholy, with the certainty that they suspect the tyranny of time even if they don’t fully understand the cruelty of it, that they are not, as self-blinded experts contend, unaware of their own mortality.

If you watch them with this heightened perception, from this more generous perspective, as Amy had long watched them, you see a remarkable complexity in each dog’s personality, an individualism uncannily human in its refinement, though with none of the worst of human faults. You see an intelligence and a fundamental ability to reason that sometimes can take your breath away.

And on occasion, when you’re not being in the least sentimental, when you’re in too skeptical a mood to ascribe to dogs any human qualities they do not possess, you will nevertheless perceive in them that singular yearning that is common to every human heart, even to those who claim to live a faithless existence. For dogs see mystery in the world, in us and in themselves and in all things, and are at key moments particularly alert to it, and more than usually curious.

Amy recognized that this was such a moment. She stood quite still, said nothing, waited and watched, certain that forthcoming would be an insight that she would carry with her as long as she might live.

Having dropped the plush-toy gorilla beside the Booda duck, Ethel made a third trip to the toy box in the pantry.

Nickie peered at Fred, where he watched from behind a bulwark of chair legs.

Fred cocked his head to the left, cocked it to the right. Then he rolled onto his back, four legs in the air, baring his belly in an expression of complete trust.

In the pantry, Ethel bit at toys, tossed them aside, thrust her head deeper into the collection, and at last returned to Nickie with a large, plush, eight-tentacled, red-and-yellow octopus.

This was a squeaky toy, a tug toy, and a shake toy all in one. And it was Ethel’s favorite possession, off limits even to Fred.

Ethel dropped the octopus beside the gorilla, and after a moment of consideration, Nickie picked it up in her mouth. She squeaked it, shook it, squeaked it again, and dropped it.

Rolling off his back, scrambling to his feet, Fred sneezed. He padded out from behind the table.

The three dogs stared expectantly at one another.

Uniformly, their tail action diminished.

Their ears lifted as much as the velvety flaps of a golden are able to lift.

Amy became aware of a new tension in their muscular bodies.

Nostrils flaring, nose to the floor, head darting left and right, Nickie hurried out of the room, into the hall. Ethel and Fred scampered after her.

Alone in the kitchen, acutely aware that something unusual was happening but clueless as to what it meant, Amy said, “Kids?”

In the hallway, the overhead light came on.

When she crossed to the doorway, Amy found the hall deserted.

Toward the front of the house, somebody switched on a light in the living room. An intruder. Yet none of the dogs barked.

Chapter 9

Although Brian McCarthy had a talent for portraiture, he was not usually capable of swift execution.

The human head presents so many subtleties of form, structure, and proportion, so many complexities in the relationship of its features, that even Rembrandt, the greatest portrait painter of all time, struggled with his art and refined his craft until he died.

The head of a dog presented no less—and arguably a greater—challenge to an artist than did the human head. Many a master of their mediums, who could precisely render any man or woman, had been defeated in their attempts to portray dogs in full reality.

Remarkably, with this first effort at canine portraiture, sitting at his kitchen table, Brian found the speed that eluded him when he drew a human face. Decisions regarding form, structure, proportion, and tone did not require the ponderous consideration he usually brought to them. He worked with an assurance he had not known before, with a new grace in his hand.

The drawing appeared with such uncanny ease and swiftness that it almost seemed as if the whole image had been rendered earlier and stored magically in the pencil, from which it now flowed as smoothly as music from a recording.

During his courtship of Amy, his heart had been opened to many things, not least of all to the beauty and the joy of dogs, yet he still did not have one of his own. He didn’t trust himself to be equal to the responsibility.

At first he didn’t know that he was rendering not merely the ideal of a golden retriever but also a specific individual. As the face resolved in detail, he realized that from his pencils had come Nickie, so recently rescued.

He did not have more difficulty drawing eyes than he did any other detail of anatomy. This time, however, he achieved effects of line and tone and grading that continually surprised him.

To look real, the eyes must be full of light and marked by the mystery that light evokes in even the most forthright gaze. Brian focused with, for him, such unprecedented passion on the portrayal of this light, this mystery, that he might have been a medieval monk depicting the receiver of the Annunciation.

When he finished the drawing, he stared at it for a long time. Somehow the creation of the portrait had lifted his heart. Vanessa’s hateful e-mails had left him under a pall of sorrow, which now weighed less heavily on him.

Hope and Nickie seemed inextricably entwined, and he felt that he could not have one without the other. He did not know exactly what he meant by this—or why it should be so.

In the study once more, he composed an e-mail to Vanessa, alias pigkeeper. He read the message half a dozen times before sending it.

I am at your mercy. I have no power over you, and you have every power over me. If one day you will let me have what I want, that will be because it serves you best to relent, not because I have earned it or deserve it.

In previous e-mail exchanges, he had either argued with Vanessa or had attempted to manipulate her, although never as obviously as she worked to sharpen his guilt and to put a point on his sorrow. This time he avoided all appeals to reason and all power games, and just acknowledged his helplessness.

He expected neither an immediate response nor any response at all; and even if his plea elicited only vitriol, he would not reply in kind. Over the years, she had humbled him, then further humbled him, until he harbored no more anger toward her than a wizened sailor of a thousand journeys harbored resentment toward the raging sea.

In the kitchen, at the table, he turned to a fresh page in the art- paper tablet. He sharpened his pencils.

An inexplicable exhilaration had overcome him, a perception that new possibilities lay before him. He felt as if he were on the brink of a revelation that would change his life.

He began to draw the dog’s head, but this time not in a slight turn to the left with a moderate up view. Instead, he approached the subject straight on.

Furthermore, he intended to depict the face only from brow line to the part of the cheek called the cushion, thereby focusing on the eyes and the structures immediately surrounding them.

He marveled that his memory of the dog’s appearance should be so exquisitely detailed. He’d seen her only on one occasion and not for long, yet in his mind’s eye, she was as vivid as a fine photograph, a hologram.

From mind to hand to pencil to page, the golden’s gaze took form in shades of gray. From this new perspective and proximity, the eyes were huge and deep, and full of light, of shadow.

Brian was seeking something, a unique quality that he had seen in this dog but that he had not at once consciously recognized. His subconscious wanted now to bring forth what had been glimpsed, to see it rendered and to understand it.

A tremulous expectation filled him, but his hand remained steady and swift.

Chapter 10

Veils and shimmery flourishes of eye-deceiving moonlight render the night subtly surreal, yet the pride with which the owners maintain this property is everywhere evident.

The rails and posts and pales of the picket fence are white geometric perfection in the gloom. The lawn lies as even underfoot as a croquet court, lush but precisely mown.

The single-story house is humble yet handsome, white with a dark trim of some color not discernible. A simply carved cornice enhances the eaves and is echoed by window surrounds, no doubt fashioned by the homeowner in his spare time.

From the bentwood rocking chairs on the front and back porches, the birdbaths, the miniature windmill, and the garden gnomes, Harrow infers that the residents are near or past retirement age. The place feels like a nest meant for a long and well-earned rest.

He doubts that a single porch step or floorboard creaks, but he doesn’t risk treading on them. He pours the gasoline between the railings, first at the back porch, which looks out across fields and ancient oaks, and then at the front.

A thin drizzle of fuel across the grass connects the porches, and with the last contents of the can, he spills a fuse along the front walk toward the open gate in the picket fence.

While Moongirl waits for him at the safe end of the fuse, he returns to the house to set the empty utility can quietly on the porch. The still air hangs heavy with fumes.

He has dripped nothing on himself. As he walks away from the house, he cups his hands around his nose, and they smell fresh.

From a pocket of her leather jacket, Moongirl has extracted a box of matches. She uses only those with wooden stems.

She strikes a match, stoops, and ignites the wet trail on the walkway. Low blue-and-orange flames dance away from her, as if the magical night has brought forth a procession of capering faeries.

Together, she and Harrow walk to the west side of the house, where they have a view of both porches. The only doors are at the front and back. Along this wall are three windows.

Fire leaps high across the front of the house, seethes between the railings, and dispatches more dancing faeries along the drizzle that connects the porches.

As always, after an immediate whoosh, the flames initially churn in near silence, feeding on the gasoline, which needs no chewing. The crunch and crackle will come soon, when the fire takes wood in its teeth.

Chapter 11

Following the hallway to the living-room archway, Amy said, “Hello? Who’s there?”

Golden retrievers are not bred to be guard dogs, and considering the size of their hearts and their irrepressible joy in life, they are less likely to bite than to bark, less likely to bark than to lick a hand in greeting. In spite of their size, they think they are lap dogs, and in spite of being dogs, they think they are also human, and nearly every human they meet is judged to have the potential to be a boon companion who might, at any moment, cry “Let’s go!” and lead them on a great adventure.

Nevertheless, they have formidable teeth and are protective of family and home.

Amy assumed that any intruder who was able to induce three adult goldens to submit without one bark must be not foe but friend, or at least harmless. Yet she approached the living room with a curiosity that included a measure of wariness.

When Amy had answered Janet Brockman’s plea to rescue Nickie, she had not left Fred and Ethel in a dark house. One lamp in her bedroom and a brass reading lamp in the living room provided comfort.

Now the hallway ceiling fixture blazed. Also, ahead and to her right, the front room loomed brighter than she had left it.

When she passed the open bedroom door on her left and stepped through the living-room archway, she found no intruder, only three delighted dogs.

As any golden would do in a new environment, Nickie had gone exploring, chasing down the most interesting of all the new smells, weaving among chairs and sofas, mapping the landscape, identifying the coziest corners.

Filled with pride of home, Fred and Ethel followed the newcomer, pausing to note everything that she had noted, as if sharing with her had made the bungalow new again to them.

Sniffing, grinning, chuffing with approval, tails lashing, the new girl and her welcoming committee rushed past Amy.

By the time that she turned to follow them, they had vanished across the hall, into her bedroom. A moment ago, only a nightstand lamp had illuminated that room, but now the ceiling fixture burned bright.

“Kids?”

Matching plump sheepskin-covered dog beds mushroomed in two corners of the bedroom.

As Amy crossed the threshold, Nickie bumped a tennis ball with her nose, and Fred snatched it on the roll. Nickie checked out but didn’t want a plush blue bunny, so Ethel snared it.

The bedroom and the attached bath lacked an intruder, and by the time Amy followed the pack to the study, the fourth and last room in the bungalow, the ceiling light was on there, too.

Fred had dropped the ball, and Ethel had cast aside the bunny, and Nickie had decided not to stake a claim to a discarded pair of Amy’s socks that she had fished out of the knee space under the desk.

Paws thumping, nails clicking, tails knocking merrily against every crowding object, the dogs returned to the hall, then to the kitchen.

Puzzled, Amy went to the only window in the study and found it locked. Before leaving the room, she frowned at the wall switch and flipped it down, up, down, turning the ceiling fixture off, on, off.

She stood in the hall, listening to thirsty dogs lapping from the water bowls in the kitchen.

In the bedroom again, she checked both windows. The latches were engaged, as was the one in the bathroom.

She peered in the closet. No boogeyman.

The front-door deadbolt was locked. The security chain remained in place.

All three living-room windows were secure. With the dampers closed, no sinister Santa out of season could have come down the fireplace chimney to play games with the lights.

Behind her, she left on only the single nightstand lamp and the reading lamp in the living room. At the end of the hall, she stopped and looked back, but no gremlins had been at work.

In the kitchen, she found the three goldens lying on the floor, gathered around the refrigerator, heads raised and alert. They looked from her to the refrigerator, to her again.

Amy said, “What? You think it’s snack time—or am I going to find a severed head in the lettuce drawer?”

Chapter 12

Fire spawns fitful drafts in the still night, brief twists of hot wind that stir Harrow’s hair but dissipate behind him.

The people asleep in the house, if in fact anyone is at home, are strangers to Harrow. They have done nothing to him. They have done nothing for him, either.

They mean nothing to him.

He doesn’t know what they mean to Moongirl. They are strangers to her, as well, but they have some meaning for her. They are more to her than a mere medicine for boredom. He wonders what that might be.

Although curious, he will not ask her. He believes that he is safer if she thinks his understanding of her is complete, if she believes they are alike.

Flames engulf the back porch, and the sounds of consumption begin to arise from the front.

Moongirl’s hands are in the pockets of her black leather jacket. Her face remains expressionless. In her eyes is nothing more than a reflection of the fire.

Like her, Harrow has discipline of his intellect and of his body, but unlike her, he also has discipline of his emotions. Those are the three hallmarks of sanity.

Boredom is a state of mind akin to an emotion. Perhaps the emotion to which boredom most often leads is despair.

She seems too strong to be seriously discouraged by anything, yet she fights boredom with such reckless entertainments as this burning, which suggests that she dreads falling into an inescapable well of despair.

Laceworks of firelight flutter across the grass, and across Moon-girl, dressing her as if she is an unholy bride.

A light appears in the middle window.

Someone has awakened.

Sheer curtains deny a clear view, but judging by the murkiness of the light and by the amorphous shadows, smoke already roils in the room.

The house is pier-supported. Evidently, the flames writhed at once into the crawl space, a thousand bright tongues flickering, hissing poisonous fumes up through the floor.

Harrow thinks he hears a muffled shout, perhaps a name, but he cannot be certain.

Instinct, imperfect in the human species, will harry the rudely awakened residents toward the front door, then toward the back. They will find a deep wall of flames at either exit.

The moon seems to recede as the night grows bright. Fire wraps the corners of the house.

“We could have driven in another direction,” says Moongirl.

“Yes.”

“We could have found a different house.”

“Infinite choices,” he agrees.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“No.”

“It’s all the same.”

From inside, screaming arises, the shrill cry of a woman; and for sure, this time, a shout, the voice of a man.

“They thought they were different,” she says.

“But now they know.”

“They thought things mattered.”

“The way they took care of the house.”

“The carved cornice.”

“The miniature windmill.”

Now the character of the screaming changes from a cry of terror to shrieks of pain.

Sullen fire throbs inside, beyond the windows. The place has been tinder waiting to be lit.

Likewise, the people.

At the middle window, the sheer curtains vanish with a quick flare, like diaphanous sheets of flash paper between a magician’s fingertips.

In front of the house, the lonely two-lane road dwindles into darkness that even the dawn might not relieve.

Glass shatters outward, and a tormented figure appears at the middle window, in silhouette against the backdrop of the burning room. A man. He is shouting again, but the shout is half a scream.

Already the woman’s voice has been stifled.

The French panes do not allow an easy exit. The man struggles to twist open the lock, to raise the bottom sash.

Fire takes him. He falls back from the window, collapsing into the furnace that was once a bedroom, suffering into silence.

Moongirl asks, “What was he shouting?”

“I don’t know.”

“Shouting at us?”

“He couldn’t see us.”

“Then at who?”

“I don’t know.”

“He has no neighbors.”

“No.”

“No one to help.”

“No one.”

Heat bursts a window. Blisters of burning paint pop, pop, pop. Joints creak as nails grow soft.

“Are you hungry?” she asks.

“I could eat something.”

“We’ve got that good ham.”

“I’ll make sandwiches.”

“With the green-peppercorn mustard.”

“Good mustard.”

Spirals of flame conjure the illusion that the house is turning as it burns, like a carousel ablaze.

“So many colors in the fire,” she says.

“I even see some green.”

“Yes. There. At the corner. Green.”

Smoke ladders up the night, but nothing climbs it except more smoke, fumes on fumes, soot ascending soot, higher and higher into the sky.

Chapter 13

With breakfast and the morning walk only a couple of hours away, Amy would not let the gang of three panhandle cookies from her. “No fat dogs,” she admonished. In the refrigerator she kept a plastic bag of sliced carrots for such moments.

Sitting on the floor with the kids, she gave circles of crisp carrot first to Ethel, then to Fred, then to Nickie. They crunched the treats enthusiastically and licked their chops.

When she had given each of them six pieces, she said, “Enough. We don’t want you to have bright orange poop, do we?”

She borrowed a dog bed from the study and put it in a third corner of her bedroom, and filled a second water dish to put beside the first.

By the time Amy changed into pajamas, the dogs appeared to have settled in their separate corners for what remained of the night.

She placed her slippers next to her bed, plumped her pillows, got under the covers—and discovered that Nickie had come to her. The golden had both slippers in her mouth.

This might have been a test of discipline or an invitation to play, although it did not feel like either. Even with a mouthful of footwear, Nickie managed a solemn look, and her gaze was intense.

“You want to bundle?” Amy asked.

At the word bundle, the other dogs raised their heads.

Most nights, Fred and Ethel slept contentedly in their corners. Occasionally, and not solely during thunderstorms, they preferred to snooze in a pile with Mom.

Even made anxious by thunder, they would not venture into Amy’s queen-size bed without permission, which was given with the phrase Let’s bundle.

Nickie did not know those words, but Fred and Ethel rose from their sheepskin berths in expectation of a formal invitation, ears raised, alert.

Wrung limp by recent events, Amy needed rest; and this would not be the first time that elusive sleep had come to her more easily when she nestled down in the security of the pack.

“Okay, kids,” she said. “Let’s bundle.”

Ethel sprinted three steps, sprang, and Fred followed. On the bed, assessing the comfort of the mattress, the dogs turned, turned, turned, like cogs in a clockworks, then curled, dropped, and settled with sighs of satisfaction.

Remaining bedside with a mouthful of slippers, Nickie stared expectantly at her new master.

“Give,” said Amy, and the golden obeyed, relinquishing her prize.

Amy put the slippers on the floor beside the bed.

Nickie picked them up and offered them again.

“You want me to go somewhere?” Amy asked.

The dog’s large dark-brown eyes were as expressive as those of any human being. Amy liked many things about the appearance of this breed, but nothing more than their beautiful eyes.

“You don’t need to go out. You pottied when we came home.”

The beauty of a retriever’s eyes is matched by the intelligence so evident in them. Sometimes, as now, dogs seemed intent upon conveying complex thoughts by an exertion of sheer will, striving to compensate for their lack of language with a directness of gaze and concentration.

“Give,” she said, and again Nickie obeyed.

Confident that repetition would impress upon the pooch that the slippers belonged where she put them, Amy leaned over the edge of the bed and returned them to the floor.

At once, Nickie snatched them up and offered them again.

“If this is a fashion judgment,” Amy said, “you’re wrong. These are lovely slippers, and I’m not getting rid of them.”

Chin on her paws, Ethel watched with interest. Chin on Ethel’s head, Fred watched from a higher elevation.

Like children, dogs want discipline and are most secure when they have rules to live by. The happiest dogs are those with gentle masters who quietly but firmly demand respect.

Nevertheless, in dog training as in war, the better part of valor can be discretion.

This time, when Amy took possession of the slippers, she tucked them under her pillows.

Nickie regarded this development with surprise and then grinned, perhaps in triumph.

“Don’t think for a second this means I’m going to be on the dog end of the leash.” She patted the mattress beside her. “Nickie, up.”

Either the retriever understood the command itself or the implication of the gesture. She sprang over Amy and onto the bed.

Fred took his chin off Ethel’s head, and Ethel closed her eyes, and as the other kids had done, Nickie wound herself down into a cozy sleeping posture.

All the mounded fur and the sweet faces inspired a smile, and Amy sighed as the dogs had done when they had settled for the night.

To ensure that the bungalow remained a hair-free zone, she combed and brushed each dog for thirty minutes every morning, for another ten minutes every evening, and she vacuumed all the floors once a day. Nickie would add to the work load—and be worth every minute of it.

When Amy switched off the lamp, she felt weightless, afloat on a rising sea of sleep, into which she began dreamily to sink.

She was hooked and reeled back by a line cast from the shores of memory: I have to wear slippers to bed so I won’t be walking barefoot through the woods in my dream.

Amy’s eyes opened from darkness to darkness, and for a moment she could not breathe, as if the past were a drowning flood that filled her throat and lungs.

No. The game with the slippers could not have been for the purpose of reminding her of that long-ago conversation about dream-walking in the woods.

This new dog was just a dog, nothing more. In the storms of this world, a way forward can always be found, but there is no way back either to a time of peace or to a time of tempest.

To the observant, all dogs have an air of mystery, an inner life deeper than science will concede, but whatever the true nature of their minds or the condition of their souls, they are limited to the wisdom of their kind, and each is shaped by the experiences of its one life.

Nevertheless, the slippers now under her pillow reminded her of another pair of slippers, and the recollected words replayed in her mind: I have to wear slippers to bed so I won’t be walking barefoot through the woods in my dream.

Ethel had begun to snore softly. Fred was a quiet sleeper except when he dreamed of chasing or of being chased.

The longer Amy lay listening for Nickie’s rhythmic breathing, the more she began to suspect that the dog was awake, and not just awake but also watching her in the dark.

Although Amy’s weariness did not abate, the possibility of sleep receded from her.

At last, unable to stifle her curiosity any longer, she reached out to where the dog was curled, expecting that her suspicion would not be confirmed, that Nickie would be fully settled.

Instead, in the gloom, her hand found the burly head, which was in fact raised and turned toward her, as if the dog were a sentinel on duty.

Holding its left ear, she gently massaged the tragus with her thumb, while her fingertips rubbed the back of the ear where it met the skull. If anything would cause a dog to purr like a cat, this was it, and Nickie submitted to the attention with palpable pleasure.

After a while, the golden lowered her head, resting her chin on Amy’s abdomen.

I have to wear slippers to bed so I won’t be walking barefoot through the woods in my dream.

In self-defense, Amy had long ago raised the drawbridge between these memories and her heart, but now they swam across the moat.

If it’s just a dream woods, why wouldn’t the ground be soft?

It’s soft but it’s cold.

It’s a winter woods, is it?

Uh-huh. Lots of snow.

So dream yourself a summer woods.

I like the snow.

Then maybe you should wear boots to bed.

Maybe I should.

And thick woolen socks and long johns.

As Amy’s heart began to race, she tried to shut out the voices in her mind. But her heart pounded like a fist on a door: memory demanding an audience.

She petted the furry head resting on her abdomen and, as defense against memories too terrible to revisit, she instead summoned into mind the many dogs that she had rescued, the abused and abandoned dogs, hundreds over the years. Victims of human indifference, of human cruelty, they had been physically and emotionally broken when they came to her, but so often they had been restored in body and mind, made jubilant again, brought back to golden glory.

She lived for the dogs.

In the dark she murmured lines from a poem by Robert Frost, which in grim times had sustained her: “‘The woods are lovely, dark, and deep. But I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep. And miles to go before I sleep.’”

Head resting on Amy’s abdomen, Nickie dozed.

Now Amy Redwing, not this mysterious dog, was the sentinel on duty. Gradually her heart stopped pounding, stopped racing, and all was still and dark and as it should be.

Chapter 14

At the windows, dawn descended, pressing darkness down and westward, and away.

Traffic noise began to arise from the street, the wheels of commerce and occasionally a far voice.

On the kitchen table lay the drawing of Nickie and two studies, from memory, of her eyes. The second study included less surrounding facial structure than the first.

Brian had begun a third study. This one involved only the eyes in their deep sockets, the space between, the expressive eyebrows, and the lush lashes.

He continued to be enchanted by the task that he had set for himself. He also remained convinced that he had seen something in the dog’s gaze that was of great importance, an ineffable quality that words could not describe but that his inexplicably enhanced talent, his seemingly possessed drawing hand, might be able to dredge from his subconscious and capture in an image, capture and define.

The irrationality of this conviction was not lost on him. An ineffable quality is, by its nature, one that can’t be defined, only felt.

His determination to draw and redraw the dog’s eyes, until he found what he sought, was nothing less than a compulsion. The extreme mental focus and the emotional intensity that he brought to the task perplexed him, even worried him—though not sufficiently to make him put down the pencil.

In Rembrandt’s famous Lady with a Pink, the subject doesn’t communicate directly with the viewer but is portrayed in a reverie that makes you want to enter her contemplation and understand the object of it. The artist gives her nearer eye a heightened color contrast, a clear iris, and a perfectly inserted highlight that suggests a mind, behind the eye, that is no stranger to profound feeling.

Brian had no illusions that his talent approached Rembrandt’s. The subtlety of the translucent shadows and luminous refractions in this latest version of the dog’s eyes was so far superior to the quality of anything he’d drawn before, both in concept and execution, that he wondered how he could have created it.

He half doubted that the drawing was his.

Although he was the only presence in the apartment, although he had watched the series of pencils in his hand produce the image, he became increasingly convinced that he did not possess the genius or the artistry required to lay down upon paper the startling dimension or the luminous mystery that now informed these finished eyes.

In his thirty-four years, he had no slightest experience of the supernatural, nor any interest in it. As an architect, he believed in line and light, in form and function, in the beauty of things built to last.

As he tore the most recent drawing from the tablet and put it aside, however, he could not dismiss the uncanny feeling that the talent on display here was not his own.

Perhaps this was what psychologists called a flow state, what professional athletes referred to as being in the zone, a moment of transcendence when the mind raises no barriers of self-doubt and therefore allows a talent to be expressed more fully than has ever been possible previously.

The problem with that explanation was, he didn’t feel in full control, whereas in a flow state, you were supposed to experience absolute mastery of your gifts.

In front of him, the blank page in the tablet insisted on his attention.

Go even closer on the eyes this time, he thought. Go all the way into the eyes.

First, he needed a break. He put down the pencil—but at once picked it up, without even pausing to stretch and flex his fingers, as if his hand had a will of its own.

Almost as though observing from a distance, he watched himself use the X-acto knife to carve away the wood and point the pencil.

After he sharpened a variety of leads, to give them typical points, blunt points, and chisel points, and after he finished each on a block of sandpaper, he put the last pencil and the knife aside.

He pushed his chair back from the table, got up, and went to the kitchen sink to splash cold water in his face.

As he reached for the faucet handle, he realized that he had a pencil in his right hand.

He glanced at the table. The pencil that he thought he had left beside the art tablet was not there.

Before Amy had called him to assist on the rescue mission, he’d had only an hour’s sleep. Weariness explained his current state of mind, these small confusions.

He put the pencil on the cutting board beside the sink and stared at it for a moment, as if expecting it to rise on point and doodle its way back to him.

After repeatedly immersing his face in double handfuls of cold water, he dried off with paper towels, yawned, rubbed his beard stubble with one hand, and then stretched luxuriously.

He needed caffeine. In the refrigerator were cans of Red Bull, which he kept on hand for those design deadlines that sometimes required him to pull an all-nighter.

The pencil was not clutched in his right hand when he opened the refrigerator door. It was in his left.

“Weariness, my ass.”

He put the pencil on a glass shelf in the refrigerator, in front of a Tupperware container full of leftover pesto pasta.

After popping the tab on a Red Bull and taking a long swallow, he closed the fridge without retrieving the pencil. He clearly saw it on the shelf in front of the pesto pasta as the door swung shut.

When he returned to the table and put down the Red Bull, he realized that the pocket of his Hawaiian shirt contained a pencil.

This had to be a different pencil from the one in the fridge. It must have been in the pocket since he’d risen from the table to wash his face.

He counted the pencils on the table. Two should be missing: the one in his pocket, the one in the fridge. But he was short only one.

Disbelieving, he returned to the refrigerator. The pencil that he had left on the shelf in front of the Tupperware container was no longer there.

Now you see it. Now you don’t.

Sitting at the table again, Brian took the pencil from his shirt pocket. With flourishes and a nimbleness akin to prestidigitation, his fingers manipulated the instrument into the proper drawing grip.

He had not consciously intended to play with the pencil in that fashion. His fingers appeared to be expressing a memory of diligent practice from a previous life when he had been a magician.

The point touched the paper, and graphite seemed to flow almost as swiftly as a liquid, pouring forth the enigmas of luminous flux and translucent veils in the dog’s far-seeing eye.

He gave less thought to what he would draw, then less, then none at all. Independent of him, his inspired hand swiftly shaped shadows and suggested light.

On the nape of his neck, the fine hairs rose, but he was neither frightened nor even apprehensive. A quiet amazement had overtaken him.

As he had half suspected—and now knew beyond doubt—he could not claim to be the artist here. He was as much an instrument as was the pencil that he held. The artist remained unknown.

Chapter 15

After a few hours of sleep, Amy woke at 7:30, showered, dressed, served three bowls of kibble, and took the kids for a morning walk.

Three big dogs could have been a test of Amy’s control and balance. Fortunately, Nickie seemed to have received good training. Each time Amy dropped the leashes to blue-bag the poop, Nickie respected a sit-and-stay command as reliably as did Fred and Ethel.

The pleasantly warm morning was freshened by a breeze as light as a caress, and the feathery fronds of queen palms cast shadows that resembled the plumed tails of the goldens.

Having overslept, Amy brushed all three dogs in just one hour. They lay as limp as citizens of leisure being pampered at a spa. She spent more time on Nickie than on the other two, but found no ticks.

By 9:40, the four of them were aboard the Expedition, outbound from Laguna Beach on an adventure.

They stopped first to see Dr. Sarkissian, one of a network of veterinarians who treated rescue dogs at a discount until they were placed in forever homes.

After an examination, Harry Sarkissian gave Nickie a full array of inoculations. He put her on medication to control fleas, ticks, and heartworm. Results of a blood workup would come back in two days.

“But there’s nothing wrong with this girl,” he predicted. “She’s a beauty.”

With Nickie, Amy returned to the Expedition, where Fred and Ethel sulked briefly. They knew a visit to the vet always included a cookie. Besides, they could smell it on their sister’s breath.

Renata Hammersmith lived inland, where pockets of horse country still survived the relentless march of southern California suburbs.

She dressed so reliably in boots, jeans, and checkered shirts that it was easy for Amy to believe that the woman slept in a similar outfit, impossible to imagine her in pajamas or peignoir.

Surrounded by white ranch fencing, her three-acre property once featured horses grazing in a meadow that served as the front yard.

The horses became a luxury when Jerry, Renata’s husband, was disabled. His beloved 1967 Ford Mustang was hit head-on by a pickup.

Paralyzed from the waist down, Jerry had also lost his spleen, a kidney, and a significant portion of his colon.

“But I’m still full of shit,” he assured friends.

He had not lost his sense of humor.

Drunk, unemployed, and uninsured, the driver of the pickup had walked away from the collision with two broken teeth, an abrasion, and no remorse.

Six years ago, the Hammersmiths sold Jerry’s construction business, banked the capital gains, cut expenses, and hoped to make the money stretch the rest of their lives. They were now fifty-two.

Because Renata could not look after Jerry and hold a job, she feared having to sell their land one day. She had lived always with elbow room. The thought of having neighbors a wall away chilled her.

Amy drove past the ranch house, where thriving red clematis festooned the veranda roof and the posts that supported it. With a cell-phone call en route, she had learned that Renata was working with the ghost dogs in the exercise yard.

The kennel, converted from a stable, adjoined a fenced green lawn. An immense California live oak shaded half the grass.

Six golden retrievers were sitting or lying at separate points in the big exercise yard, most of them in the shade. Renata sat on a blanket in the center of the space, a seventh golden at her side.

As Amy opened the tailgate and let her kids out of the SUV, she looked back the way she had come, past the house, to the county road.

On the farther side of the two-lane blacktop, opposite the entrance to the Hammersmith property, parked in the purple shadows cast by a small grove of jacarandas, stood the Land Rover that had been following her all morning.

When she opened the gate to the exercise yard, Fred and Ethel led Nickie directly to Renata, to receive the affection they knew she would bestow, and to greet Hugo, the golden at her side.

As Amy arrived amidst the slow swarm of four socializing dogs, Renata held up to her the binoculars that she had asked for on the phone.

With them, Amy looked back toward the distant jacarandas and adjusted the focus, pulling the Land Rover toward her.

The trees spilled a currency of shadows and a few coins of light across the windshield, conspiring to obscure the face of the man— if it was a man—who sat behind the wheel.

“Is it the wife-beater?” Renata asked.

“Can’t tell. Probably not. I don’t think he could have been sprung from jail this quick.”

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.