Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2009

FIRST EDITION

Copyright © Terry Goodkind 2009

Terry Goodkind asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover layout design © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2015

Cover Design by Richard Hasselberger

Cover photograph © JFCreative/Getty Images

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780007303670

Ebook Edition © September 2009 ISBN: 9780007350681

Version: 01-06-2015

To Jeri, the love of my life, who is always there for me. She gives me her strength when I’m weak and her special smile when I’m strong. No one knows as well as she everything that has brought me to this place, this book, this new road. I could never be who I am, or accomplish all that I do, without her at my side every step of the way. She completes me. This one is for her.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Chapter 57

Chapter 58

Chapter 59

Chapter 60

Chapter 61

Chapter 62

Acknowledgments

About the Publisher

1.

IT WAS THE PIRATE FLAG flying atop the plumbing truck that first caught his attention. The white skull and crossbones seemed to be straining to keep from being blown off the flapping black flag as the flatbed truck, apparently trying to beat the light, cannonballed through the intersection. The truck heeled over as it cut an arc around the corner. White PVC pipe rolled across the diamond plate of the truck bed, sounding like the sharp rattle of bones. At the speed it was traveling the truck looked to be in danger of capsizing.

Alex glanced to the only other person waiting at the curb with him. With his mind adrift in distracted thoughts he hadn’t before noticed the lone woman standing just in front of him and to the right. He didn’t even remember seeing where she’d come from. He thought that he saw just a hint of vapor rising from the sides of her arms into the chill air.

Since he wasn’t able to see the woman’s face, Alex didn’t know if she saw the truck bearing down on them, but he found it difficult to believe that she wouldn’t at least hear the diesel engine roaring at full throttle.

Seeing by the truck’s trajectory that it wasn’t going to make the corner, Alex snatched the woman’s upper arm and yanked her back with him.

Tires screeched as the great white truck bounced up over the curb right where Alex and the woman had been standing. The front bumper swept past, missing them by inches. Rusty dust billowed out behind the truck. Chunks of sod and dirt flew by.

Had Alex hesitated they both would have been dead.

On the white door just above the name “Jolly Roger Plumbing” was a picture of a jovial pirate with a jaunty black patch over one eye and a sparkle painted in the corner of his smile. Alex glared back as the pirate sailed past.

When he looked up to see what kind of maniac was driving he instead met the direct, dark glare of a burly passenger. The man’s curly beard and thick mat of dark hair made him look like he really could have been a pirate. His eyes, peering out of narrow slits above plump, pockmarked cheeks, were filled with a kind of vulgar rage.

The big man appeared infuriated that Alex and the woman would dare to be in the way of their off-road excursion. As the door popped open there was no doubt as to his combative intent.

He looked like a man stepping out of a nightmare.

Alex felt a cold wave of adrenaline flood through him as he mentally choreographed his moves. The passenger, who seemed to be getting ready to leap out of the still-moving truck, would reach him before the driver could join in, making it one against one—at least for a brief time. Alex couldn’t believe that it was happening, but it was and he knew that he was going to have to deal with it.

Calm fury filled him as he prepared himself for the unavoidable. Everything slowed until each beat of his heart seemed to take an eternity. He watched the muscles in the man’s arm bulge as he held the door open. In response, Alex’s own muscles tightened, ready to meet the threat. His mind was cocooned in silence.

Just as the passenger’s stout leg swung out the open door, flashing lights and the sudden wail of a siren made the burly man turn his attention away. A police car, tires squealing, launched across the intersection in a way that suggested the cops were angered by the truck’s stunt. The police car had been parked beside a hedge to the side of the drive into the parking lot across the street. As they had sped past, the men in the truck apparently hadn’t seen the parked police car watching traffic. Lost in his own thoughts, Alex hadn’t, either.

The loudspeaker crackled to life. “Pull it over!”

The world seemed to rush back in.

The white plumbing truck, trailing a fog of dust, slowed as it rolled off the curb up ahead, the black-and-white police car right behind it. As the truck stopped, two policemen leaped out, hands resting at the ready on their guns as they approached from both sides of the truck at the same time. They yelled orders and both men carefully emerged with their hands up. In an instant the officers had them out and leaning on the front fenders of the truck.

Alex felt the tension drain out of his muscles, leaving his knees feeling weak.

As he turned his glare from the men being frisked, he found the woman’s gaze fixed on him. Her eyes were the luscious color of his finest sable artist brushes. It was clearly evident to him that behind those sensuous brown eyes she appraised the world around her with an incisive intellect.

She glanced deliberately down at his big hand still tightly gripping her upper arm. He had intended to toss her back out of harm’s way so that the passenger couldn’t hurt her, but the police had shown up first.

She looked up at him in silent command.

“Sorry,” he said, releasing her arm. “You were about to be run down by pirates.”

She said nothing.

He had meant his comment to be lighthearted, to ease the fright of what had nearly happened, but by her calm expression she didn’t appear to be the least bit amused. He hoped he hadn’t hurt her arm. He knew that sometimes he didn’t realize his own strength.

Not knowing what to do with his hands, Alex combed his fingers back through his thick hair as he stuffed his other hand in a pocket.

He cleared his throat, changed his tone to be more serious, and started over. “I’m sorry if I hurt your arm, but that truck would have hit you if I hadn’t pulled you back out of the way.”

“It matters to you?”

Her voice was as captivating as her eyes.

“Yes,” he said, a little puzzled. “I wouldn’t like to see anyone get hurt in an accident like that.”

“Perhaps it wasn’t an accident.”

Her expression was unreadable. He could only wonder at her meaning. He was at a loss as to how to respond.

The memory of the way she’d been standing at the curb still hung in the shadows in the back of his mind. Even lost in distant, dejected thoughts at the time, he had noticed that her body language hadn’t been quite right. Because he was an artist, a person’s balance, either at rest or in motion, stood out to him. There had been something out of the ordinary about the way she had been standing.

Alex wasn’t sure if, by her answer, she was simply trying to do the same as he had been doing—trying to lighten the heart-pounding scare of what had nearly happened—or if she was dismissing his chivalry as a presumptuous line. He imagined that a woman as attractive as she was had to deal with men constantly trying clever lines in order to meet her.

The satiny black dress that hugged her curves looked to be either high fashion or oddly out of time and place—he couldn’t quite decide which—as did the long, deep green wrap draped over her shoulders. Her luxuriant fall of soft, summer-blond hair could have gone either way as well.

Alex figured that she had to be on her way to the exclusive jewelry store that was the anchor of the upscale Regent Center across the street. The slanted glass façade was just visible beyond the shade of ash and linden trees spread across the broad grounds separating the upscale shops from Regent Boulevard.

He glanced over at the plumbing truck sitting at the curb. The strobing lights from the police car made the white truck look alternately blue and red.

After getting handcuffs on the passenger, the police officer pointed at the curb and told the man to sit beside the driver. The man sat and crossed his legs. Both wore dark work clothes covered with grime. While both men quietly did as they were told, neither looked to be the least bit cowed.

One of the officers started toward Alex as the other spoke into the radio clipped to his shirt at the shoulder.

“Are you two all right?” the man asked as he approached, his voice still carrying an adrenaline edge. “They didn’t hit you, did they?”

Both of the cops were young and built like weightlifters. Both had bull necks. Black, short-sleeved shirts stretched over the swell of their arms served only to emphasize the size of their muscles.

“No,” Alex said. “We’re fine.”

“Glad to hear it. That was quick thinking. For a minute I thought you two were going to be roadkill.”

Alex gestured toward the men in handcuffs. “Are they being arrested?”

With a quick glance he took in the woman, then shook his head. “No, unless they come back with warrants. With guys like this you never know what you’ve got, so we often cuff them for our own safety until they can be checked out. When my partner is finished writing up that ticket, though, I don’t think they’ll be in the mood to pull a stunt like this again for a while.”

That two cops this powerfully built would be worried about the guys in the truck to the point of cuffing them made Alex not feel so bad for being spooked when he’d looked into the dark eyes of the passenger.

He glanced at the badge and extended his hand. “Thanks for coming along when you did, Officer Slawinski.”

“Sure thing,” the man said as he shook Alex’s hand. By the force applied to the grip Alex figured that the man was still keyed up. Officer Slawinski turned away, then, eager to get back to the pirates.

The driver, still sitting on the curb, was thinner but just as meanlooking as the burly passenger. He sat stone-faced, giving brief answers as the officer standing over him asked questions while writing the ticket.

The two officers spoke briefly, apparently about the results of the warrant check, because Officer Slawinski nodded, then uncuffed the passenger and told him to get back in the truck. After climbing back in, the passenger rested a hairy arm out the side window as the other cop started uncuffing the driver.

In the truck’s big, square side mirror, Alex saw the man’s dark eyes glaring right at him. They were the kind of eyes that seemed to be out of place in a civilized world. Alex told himself that it had to be that in such a newly built, luxurious part of town the work-worn construction vehicles, despite there being a lot of them, all seemed to be out of place. In fact, Alex recalled having seen the Jolly Roger Plumbing truck before.

Alex’s small house, not far away, had once been at the outskirts of town among a cluster of other homes built in the seclusion of wooded hills and cornfields, but they had long since been swallowed by the ever-expanding city. He now lived in a desirable area, if not exactly on a desirable street or in a desirable house.

Alex stood frozen for a moment, staring at the grubby, bearded face watching him in the truck’s mirror.

Then the man grinned at him.

It was as wicked a grin as Alex had ever seen.

As the black flag atop the truck lifted in a gust of wind, the skull also gave Alex a grim grin.

He noticed then that the woman, ignoring the activity, was watching him. As the light turned green, Alex gestured.

“Would you allow me to escort you safely across the street?” he asked in a tone of exaggerated gallantry.

For the first time she smiled. It wasn’t a broad grin, or a smile that threatened to break into laughter, but rather a simple, modest curve of her lips saying that this time she got the lighthearted nature of his words.

Still, it seemed to make the world suddenly beautiful on what was otherwise a rather depressing day for him.

2.

I’D LOVE TO PAINT YOU SOMETIME—if you’d be interested, I mean,” Alex said as they made their way across the broad boulevard.

“Paint me?” she asked, her brow twitching just a little. It was an achingly feminine look that invited an explanation.

“I’m an artist.”

He glanced at the traffic stopped across the intersection to his left, making sure that no rogue construction trucks were about to make another run at them. With the lights flashing on the police car sitting at the curb, everyone was driving cautiously.

He was glad to at last be away from the pirate plumbers. They looked to have developed a grudge. Alex felt a flash of anger at the injustice of their belligerent attitude toward him.

“So you paint portraits?” she asked.

Alex shrugged. “Sometimes.”

Portraits weren’t his specialty, although they did occasionally bring him some income. He would work for free, though, just for a chance to paint this woman. In his mind he was already analyzing the curves and planes of her features, trying to imagine whether he could ever get such an enchanting face right. He would never start such a work unless he was confident that he could get it perfect. This was not a woman he would want to render in anything less than perfection. Changing her in any way would be unthinkable.

He gestured to the low, elegant structure peeking through the shimmering leaves. “I have a few pieces at the gallery.”

She glanced to where he had indicated, almost as if she expected to see the gallery itself standing there.

“I’m headed there now, as a matter of fact. If you’d like to see some of my work, the gallery is down a little ways from Regent Jewelry…”

His voice trailed off. He suddenly felt a little foolish at his presumption. He imagined that a woman like her would be interested only in the exclusive jewelry store or the boutiques. Since she wasn’t wearing any jewelry he wasn’t sure why he assumed such a thing, but he guessed he feared that she probably wasn’t interested in art—or his art, anyway.

“I’d like to see your work.”

He looked over at her. “Really?”

She nodded as she pulled a wavy lock of blond hair back off her face.

Alex felt his cell phone vibrate silently in his pocket, letting him know that another text message was being delivered. He sighed inwardly as he cut a straight line across the nearly empty parking lot. It was only midmorning; most people didn’t arrive until closer to lunchtime. A few dozen expensive cars, glittering in subdued shades of silvers, reds, and ambers, were parked in a cluster around the main entrance.

Message delivered, his phone finally stopped vibrating. Bethany, he was sure, was responsible. He hadn’t even known that his phone was capable of receiving text messages until after he’d met her several weeks back. After he’d gone out with her a second time she had started sending him text messages. They were painfully petty. He rarely read them anymore. She usually asked things like if he was thinking of her. He hardly even knew her. What was he supposed to say? That she hadn’t entered his mind?

He ignored the phone as he opened the center-pivot glass door for the woman. It wasn’t the kind of shopping area that lent itself to the financially timid. She glided through the doorway with the kind of grace and confidence born of being used to such places.

Before the door closed Alex glanced back across the lot, between the linden trees lining the edge of the street, to the white truck still sitting at the curb in front of the police car. He couldn’t make out the men inside.

As they passed into the hushed, grand seclusion inside, he was a little surprised to see the woman only glance at the alluring glimmer of Regent Jewelry. As they strolled through the halls, her cool gaze took in each exclusive shop in equal measure. The dress shop, Alex knew, didn’t sell anything, except maybe a scarf, for less than four figures. The woman scanned the outfits in the window with no more interest than she took in the shoes in the next store window, or the purses in the next.

Alex saw other women cast appraising glances her way. She looked at the other women, but in an altogether different manner. They were evaluating her socially. She was assessing them…spatially, checking their distance before briefly taking in their faces as if to see whether she recognized them.

“Down here, around the corner,” Alex said, drawing her attention.

When he spoke to her she met his gaze with a focused involvement that was respectful and interested. He couldn’t imagine this woman ever sending him a text message.

She allowed him to direct her around the curve of the corridor decorated with sweeping inlaid metal lines in the speckled pink granite floor. Cast-stone arches stood at a branch of halls. The one Alex took led into a sunlit corridor. Skylights overhead let streamers of light play across the planters overflowing with philodendron and an assortment of salmon-colored hibiscus.

Alex drew them to a halt before the gallery window surrounded with ornate gold molding. The molding, meant to resemble a picture frame, showcased some of the more expensive and sought-after works just inside.

Alex gestured through the window. “This is the place.”

A twitch of disapproval ghosted across her features. “Do you mean to say that you…painted this?”

She was looking at the large piece displayed in the center of the crowded floor just inside the window. It had been done by R. C. Dillion, a midwestern artist who was becoming a national figure. It was said of him that R. C. Dillion was at the forefront of a new reality in art.

“No, not that one,” Alex said. He leaned closer as he pointed beyond the nonobjective works crowding the window to a small landscape displayed on an easel near the back. “That’s one of mine back there. The mountain scene with the pines in the foreground to the left.”

Alex was relieved to see that Mr. Martin, the gallery owner, had at least put a small spotlight on the painting rather than setting it on the floor, leaned against a wall, as he sometimes did. The small light made the sunlit clearing, within the hushed cathedral of trees, come to life.

“See the one I mean?” he asked as he glanced over at her.

Her mouth opened a little in surprise. “Alexander, it’s beautiful.”

Alex froze.

He knew that he hadn’t yet mentioned his name. He knew because he had been waiting for the right time to do so without sounding like he was coming on to her.

It finally dawned on him that she’d probably been to Regent Center before and she must have visited the gallery. That only made sense; wealthy women knew the gallery, after all—they just didn’t tend to take note of his work. Alex’s bio, with his photo, was posted beside his paintings. He signed his name in the longer form—Alexander—and that was also the way it was shown on his biography. She must have known his name from that.

She looked up to study his face intently. “Why did you paint that?”

Alex shrugged. “I like the woods.”

Her eyes began to look a little more liquid, as if what she saw in that painting had some hallowed meaning to her. “No, I mean why did you paint that particular place in the woods?”

“I don’t know. I just made it up from my imagination.”

She looked like she wanted to say something, but she instead turned back to stare through the window, looking too taken for words.

Alex was about to ask why that particular scene seemed to matter so much to her when his cell phone rang. He didn’t want to answer it, but the woman was staring through the window, absorbed in gazing at his painting, so he turned aside and opened the phone.

“Hello?”

“Alex, it’s me,” Bethany said.

“Uh, hi,” he said quietly as he hunched over the phone.

“Didn’t you get my text messages?”

“I’m sorry, I haven’t read any of them today. I told you, you should just call if you have something to say.”

“You’re so silly, Alex,” she said in a lilting voice that he found grating. “Who doesn’t use text? Don’t be so ancient. Everyone does it.”

“I don’t. So, what is it?”

“Well, if you would have read the messages that I took the time to send you, you’d know. I made plans to take you out tonight and get you good and drunk for your birthday.”

She sounded miffed. Alex didn’t really care. Nor did he care to get drunk or do anything else to celebrate such a somber day. He was even more annoyed at her presumption.

Bethany was beginning to assume that there was far more between them than was actually there. He’d taken her out a couple of times—enough to find out that they didn’t really have anything in common. The dates had been relatively short and unremarkable. He didn’t know what she saw in him, anyway. They just didn’t click. She liked expensive things and Alex wasn’t wealthy. She liked to party and Alex didn’t.

And, his art bored her.

“I’m sorry, Bethany, but let me read your messages and I’ll get back to you.”

“Well—”

He flipped the cover closed and turned back to the woman. She was watching him again in that way that he couldn’t quite figure out.

“Sorry.” He briefly held up the phone in explanation before stuffing it back into his pocket.

She glanced back over her shoulder to his painting. “Me too. My time is up,” she said as she turned away from the window to face him. “I have to go for now.”

“Really? Well can I at least—”

The phone rang again. He wished he had shut it off.

The woman’s small smile returned, curving her lips in a way that was bewitching. She arched an eyebrow as she gestured to his pocket. “You’d better talk to her or she’ll be even more angry with you.”

“I don’t really care.”

But Alex knew that Bethany wasn’t going to give up, so he finally pulled the ringing phone from his pocket. He held a finger up toward the woman. “Give me just a moment, please?”

The woman took one last look through the window and then turned back to him, considering. The way her expression turned serious made him pause in place.

The phone stopped ringing as it went to message.

“Be careful of mirrors,” she said at last into the quiet. “They can watch you through mirrors.”

Goose bumps tingled up Alex’s arms.

He almost dropped the phone when it rang again.

“What?”

She only stared at him with that bottomless gaze.

“Please,” he said, “hold on for just a second?”

She melted back into the shadows between the shops, as if to give him his privacy on the phone.

He turned away and flipped open the phone. “What?”

“Alex, don’t you ever—”

“Look, I’m right in the middle of something important. I’ll call you back.”

He flipped the phone closed without waiting for Bethany to agree and turned back to where the woman waited in the shadowy nook.

She was gone. Simply…gone.

3.

ALEX CRANED HIS NECK, looking around at the well-dressed shoppers strolling the hushed hall. Most were women. He didn’t see the one he was looking for.

How could she have vanished so quickly?

He trotted to the archway, looking back toward the massive Regent Jewelry, but he didn’t see her there, either. It was not simply startling that she had left so quickly, it was maddening. He had wanted to get her name, at least.

He hadn’t expected that he would so abruptly run out of time. He had missed his chance.

But maybe not. She had said that she had to go “for now.”

He wondered what she’d meant by that.

He let out a long sigh. Probably nothing. She was probably only being polite. She’d probably wanted to be rid of him the same way he’d wanted to be rid of Bethany.

Somehow, though, it didn’t seem like that was it. Something else was going on, he just didn’t know what.

In the hallway filled with the whisper of footsteps and soft conversation sprinkled with light laughter it began to feel like he had just imagined the whole thing.

That was a thought he truly didn’t want to have, especially not on this day of all days.

The Regent Center suddenly felt very empty and very lonely. His mood, which had only started to lift, sank back down.

He pressed his lips tightly together in agitation at Bethany and her mindless text messages and phone calls. They were never important, but they had just interrupted something that was.

Letting out another sigh of disappointment, he finally made his way back through the clusters of women out for a bit of shopping. He scanned the faces, absently looking for the one who had vanished. He eventually ended up back at the gallery without seeing her, somehow having known that he wouldn’t find her.

Seized by a sudden idea, he peered in the window, wondering if maybe the woman had actually gone inside to look at his painting while he was answering the phone. Maybe he simply hadn’t noticed. Maybe she’d just wanted to see it up close. After all, she had seemed to be taken by the painting.

Peering in the gallery window, he didn’t see the woman, but Mr.

Martin saw him and flashed a polite smile. Hand-wrought Tibetan bells hung by a knotted prayer cord on the door into the small shop rang their simple, familiar chime as Alex closed the door on his way in. He only glanced at the featured pieces on his way past. He had trouble calling them “works.”

The slender Mr. Martin, dressed in a dark double-breasted suit, had a habit of nesting his hands one atop the other. He usually reversed the order several times before their arrangement suited him. A bright pink tie flared from his collar just below his prominent Adam’s apple.

“Mr. Martin, how are things today? I just stopped by to see if—”

“Sorry, Alex. None of your pieces have sold since the one last month.”

Alex drew his lower lip through his teeth. “I see.”

He guessed he would have to walk whenever possible until he could get his truck fixed. Fortunately the places he needed to get to were close enough, now that shops and stores had opened in the last year. His grandfather’s house had always been within walking distance. Ben, in fact, was probably waiting for Alex to stop by.

Mr. Martin drew on his thin smile again as he leaned in patiently. “If you would let me guide you, Alex, I know that I could make a name for you—along with a lot of money.” He lifted a hand, waggling his lithesome fingers toward the painting displayed in the center view of the window. “R. C. Dillion is making himself a fortune with his striking works. His all too obvious anguish and distress over the ruination of the planet is not just heartbreaking, but sought after. Collectors want an artist who can bring such meaningful emotion to the canvas. It gives them a certain sense of pride to let others see the important concerns they so obviously share with the artist.”

Alex glanced at the angry slashes of red paint. It certainly did represent ruin. “I hadn’t been aware that that was what R. C. Dillion was trying to portray.”

“Of course not, Alex, because you won’t take my valuable advice and open your mind to the essence of other realities, as important artists do.”

“I like painting the essence of our own reality,” Alex said as civilly as he could. “If you think that the buyers are so interested in the planet, why don’t you show them my paintings of it?”

Mr. Martin smiled in that tolerant way he had. “I do, Alex, I do, but they’re more interested in true artistic vision than…than what you do. You show nothing of the rapacious nature of mankind. Your work is charming, but not important. It’s hardly groundbreaking.”

“I see.”

Had he not been so dejected, Alex likely would have gotten angry. Through his gloom, though, the slight didn’t lift his hackles. Instead it only served to weigh him down further.

“But I assure you, Alex, I do display your work as favorably as possible, and we have had some minor success with it.” The smile became fawning as Mr. Martin remembered that occasionally one of Alex’s paintings did sell, and that his gallery took a forty percent commission. “I’m hoping for better sales of your work when the holidays come around.”

Alex nodded. He knew that arguing his beliefs about art was pointless. It only mattered if he could sell his work. He had success with a few people who appreciated his landscapes. There were still people who wanted to see works like his, paintings that crystallized the beauty of a scene. There were people who appreciated a vision that uplifted them.

The woman, after all, had liked it, and she easily appeared more intelligent than any of Mr. Martin’s collectors. She knew what she liked and wasn’t afraid to say so. Most of Mr. Martin’s clients depended on him to tell them what they should like. They were willing to pay handsomely for such erudite guidance.

Still, Alex needed to eat.

“Thanks, Mr. Martin. I’ll check back—”

“Don’t worry, Alex, I’ll call you right away if one of your pieces sells, but please think about what I said.”

Alex nodded politely before he headed for the door. He knew that no matter how hungry he got he would never throw paint at a canvas and pretend it was art.

It was turning out to be an even more depressing birthday than he had expected. His grandfather might cheer him up, though.

He paused, then turned back. “Mr. Martin, I need to take this one with me.”

A frown creased Mr. Martin’s brow as he watched Alex lift the small painting from the easel. “Take it? But why?”

Taking one painting left the gallery with six of his pieces to sell. It wasn’t like there was a run on his work.

“It’s for a gift—for someone who values it.”

A cunning grin overcame Mr. Martin. “Clever, Alex. Sometimes a small gift can be the seed that starts an expensive collection.”

Alex forced a brief smile and nodded as he tucked the painting under his arm.

He didn’t know if he would ever see the woman again. He realized that it was rather silly to think that he would.

But if he did, he wanted to give her the little painting. He wanted to see her smile again, and if it took only a painting then it would be more than worth it.

4.

ITHINK THE MIRRORS ARE WATCHING ME,” Alex said as he stared off into distant thoughts.

Ben shot him a look back over his shoulder. “Mirrors tend to do that.”

“No, I mean it, Ben. Lately it feels like they’re watching me.”

“You mean you see yourself watching you.”

“No.” He finally focused his gaze on his grandfather. “I mean it feels like someone else is watching me through mirrors.”

Ben gave him a look. “Someone else.”

“Yes.”

Alex wondered how she knew.

He was beginning to seriously doubt that she had been real. Was it possible that he could have imagined such a thing?

Was it beginning to happen to him, too? He fought back a ripple of panic at the thought.

“Don’t let your imagination get the best of you, Alexander,” his grandfather said, turning back to the work at his bench.

Alex’s gaze again wandered off into gloomy memories.

“Do you think that I’ll end up crazy, too?” he murmured after a time.

In the dead silence he turned to see that his grandfather had halted his tinkering at his timeworn workbench to stare up with an unsettling look, a kind of hard glare that could have been born only in dark and angry thoughts.

Alex found such a look frightening in that it was so unlike his grandfather, or at least the man Alex knew.

A wrinkled smile finally banished the forbidding look. “No, Alex,” the old man said in a gentle voice, “I don’t think that at all. Why would you come up with such depressing thoughts on your birthday?”

Alex leaned back against the paneling covering the stairwell nook so that the mirror on the wall to his left couldn’t see him. He folded his arms.

“I’m the same age, you know. Today I’m twenty-seven, the same age as she was when she got sick…when she went crazy.”

The old man stirred a long finger through a battered aluminum ashtray overflowing with a collection of odd screws. Ben had had that ashtray full of used screws for as long as Alex could remember. It wasn’t a convincing search.

“Alexander,” Ben said in a soft sigh, “I never thought your mother was crazy then, and I still don’t.”

Alex didn’t think that Ben would ever come to grips with the sad reality. Alex remembered all too well his mother’s inconsolable, hysterical fits over strangers who were supposedly after her. He didn’t believe that the doctors would keep the woman locked in an institution for eighteen years if she wasn’t seriously mentally ill, but he didn’t say so. Even having the silent thought seemed cruel.

He had been nine when his mother had been institutionalized. At such a young age Alex hadn’t understood. He had been terrified. His grandmother and Ben took him in, loved him, took care of him, and eventually became his legal guardians. Living just down the street from his parents’ house kept continuity in Alex’s life. His grandparents kept the house clean and in shape for when his mother got better and was released—for when she finally came home. That never happened.

Over the years as he grew up Alex would go over there from time to time, usually at night, to sit alone in the house. It felt like his only connection to his parents. It seemed to be another world there, always the same, everything frozen in place, like a stopped clock. It was an unchanging reminder of a life that had been abruptly interrupted, a life suspended.

It had made him feel like he didn’t know his place in the world, like he wasn’t even sure who he was.

Sometimes at night, before he went to sleep, Alex still worried that he, too, would end up falling prey to insanity. He knew that such things ran in families, that insanity could be passed down. As a boy, he’d heard other kids say as much, even if it had been in whispers behind his back. The whispers, though, had always been just loud enough for him to hear.

Yet when Alex looked at the way other people lived, the things they did, the things they believed, he thought that he was the sanest person he knew. He often wondered how people could be so deluded about things, like the way they would believe it was art if someone else simply said it was.

Still, there were things when he was alone that worried him.

Like mirrors.

He studied the side of the old man’s gaunt face as he searched through all the odd bits of junk littering the workbench. His gray stubble showed that he hadn’t shaved that morning and possibly the morning before that. He had probably been busy in his workshop and had no idea that the sun had come and gone and come again. His grandfather was like that—especially since his wife, Alex’s grandmother, had died. Alex often thought that his grandfather had his own difficulties dealing with reality after his son and then his wife had both passed away.

No one thought the old man was crazy, exactly. Most people thought that he was merely “eccentric.” That was the polite word people used when a person was a little loony. His grandfather’s impishly innocent outlook on life—the way he always smiled and marveled at everything, and the way he became distracted by the most ordinary objects, along with his utter lack of interest in the business of others—reassured people that he was harmless. Just the neighborhood nut. Most people regarded Ben as a meaningless old man who tinkered with the likes of tin cans, tattered books, and odd assortments of mold that he grew in glass petri dishes.

It was an image that Alex knew his grandfather cultivated—being invisible, he called it—and was quite different from the kind of man Ben was in reality.

Alex never thought that Ben was crazy, or even eccentric, merely…unique, a singular, remarkable individual who knew about things that most people could not even imagine. From what Alex gathered, Ben had seen enough death. He loved life and simply wanted to investigate everything about it.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” Ben asked.

Alex blinked at the question. “What?”

“It’s your birthday. Shouldn’t you be with a young woman, out enjoying yourself?”

Alex let out a deep breath, not wanting to get into it. He forced a smile. “I thought you might have a present for me, so I came by.”

“A present? What for?”

“My birthday, remember?”

The old man scowled. “Of course I remember. I remember everything, remember?”

“Did you remember to get me a present?” Alex chided.

“You’re too old for a present.”

“I got you a present for your birthday. Are you too old?”

The scowl deepened. “What am I to do with, with…whatever that thing is.”

“It makes coffee.”

“My old pot makes coffee.”

“Bad coffee.”

The old man shook a finger. “Just because things are old, that doesn’t mean they’re of no use anymore. New things aren’t necessarily any better, you know. Some are worse than what came before.”

Alex leaned in a little and lifted an eyebrow. “Did you ever try the coffeemaker I got you?”

Ben withdrew the finger. “What is it you want for your birthday?”

Alex shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought you’d get me a present, that’s all. I don’t really need anything, I guess.”

“There you go, then. I didn’t need a coffeemaker, either. Could have saved your money and bought yourself a present.”

“It was meant to show respect. It was token of love.”

“I already know you love me. What’s not to love?”

Alex couldn’t help smiling as he slid onto the spare stool. “You have a funny way of making me forget about my mother on my birthday.”

Alex immediately regretted his words. It seemed inappropriate to even suggest that he might want to forget his mother on his birthday.

Ben, a tight smile on his lips, turned back to his workbench and picked up a soldering iron. “Consider it my birthday gift.”

Alex watched smoke curl up as his grandfather soldered the end of a long, thin metal tube to the top of a tin lid.

“What are you making?”

“An extractor.”

“What are you trying to extract?”

“An essence.”

“An essence of what?”

The old man turned in a huff. “Sometimes you can be a pest, Alexander, do you know that?”

Alex lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. “I was just curious, that’s all.” He watched in silence as solder turned to liquid metal and flowed around the end of the tube.

“Curiosity gets you into trouble,” his grandfather finally said, half under his breath.

Alex’s gaze dropped away. “I remember my mother saying—back before she got sick—that I got my sense of curiosity from you.”

“You were a kid at the time. All kids are curious.”

“You’re hardly a kid, Ben. Life should be about being curious, shouldn’t it? You’ve always been curious.”

In the silence of the basement room, the only sound was the “tick” made each time the plastic tail of the black cat went back and forth, marking each passing second on the clock in the cat’s stomach.

Still hunched over the bench, Ben turned his dark eyes toward his grandson. “There are things in this world to be curious about,” the old man said in a soft, cryptic voice. “Things that don’t make proper sense, aren’t the way they appear. That’s why I’ve taught you the way I have—to be prepared.”

A shiver tingled up between Alex’s shoulder blades. His grandfather’s chilling tone was like a doorway opening a crack, a doorway into places Alex could not begin to imagine. It was a doorway into places that were not the realm of lighthearted wonder that usually seemed to make up Ben’s life. It was the flip side of lighthearted, seen only during training sessions.

Alex was well aware that, for all his tinkering, his grandfather never really made anything. Not in the conventional sense, anyway. He never made a birdhouse, or fixed a screen door, or even cobbled together lawn art out of scraps of metal.

“What essence are you extracting?”

The old man smiled in a curious fashion. “Oh, who knows, Alexander? Who really knows?”

“You must know what you’re trying to do.”

“Trying and doing are two different things,” Ben muttered. He looked back over his shoulder and changed the subject. “So, what is it you want for your birthday?”

“How about a new starter motor for my truck.” Alex’s mouth twisted in discontent. “Not all old things are so great. Women aren’t much impressed with a guy who has a Jeep that won’t start half the time. They’d rather go out with a guy with a real car.”

“Ah,” the old man said, nodding to himself.

Alex realized that, without meaning to, he had just answered the question he’d avoided when he’d first come down into Ben’s workshop. He realized that he hadn’t remembered to call Bethany back. He supposed it was more avoidance than forgetfulness.

“Anyway,” Alex said, leaning an arm on the bench, “she’s not my type.”

“You mean she thinks that you’re too…curious?” The old man chuckled at his own joke.

Alex shot Ben a scowl. “No, I mean she’d rather be out going to clubs and drinking than doing anything with her life. In fact, she wants to get me drunk for my birthday. There’s more to life than just partying.”

“Like what?” Ben prodded softly.

“I don’t know.” Alex sighed, tired of the subject. He slid off the stool. “I guess I’d better get going.”

“A date with someone else?”

“Yeah, with a junkyard to try to find a cheap starter motor that works.”

Maybe if he did ever see the strange woman again, and his Cherokee would start, he could take her for a drive in the country. He knew some beautiful roads through the hills.

He considered his memory of the woman, the way she walked through Regent Center as if she belonged in such places, and dismissed his daydream as unrealistic.

“You should get a new car, Alex—they work a lot better.”

“Tell that to my checking account. The gallery hasn’t sold one of my paintings in nearly a month.”

“You need money for a car? I might be able to help out—considering that it’s your birthday.”

Alex made a sour face. “Ben, do you have any idea what a new car costs? I’m doing all right but I don’t have that much money.” Alex knew that his grandfather didn’t, either.

Ben scratched the hollow of his cheek. “Well, I think you just might have enough for any new car you could want.”

Alex’s brow twitched. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s your twenty-seventh birthday.”

“And what does that mean?”

Ben tilted his head in thought. “Well, as near as I can figure, it has something to do with the seven.”

“The seven what?”

“The seven…in twenty-seven.”

“You lost me.”

Ben squinted off into the distance as he journeyed into distracted thoughts. “I’ve tried to figure it out, but I can’t make sense of it. The seven is my only real clue, the only thing I have to go on.”

Alex heaved a sigh in irritation at Ben’s habit of wandering off down rabbit holes. “You know I don’t like riddles, Ben. If you have something to say, then tell me what you’re talking about.”

“The seven.” Ben looked up from his essence extractor. “Your mother was twenty-seven when it came to her. Now you’re twentyseven, and it’s come to you.”

The skin of Alex’s arms tingled with goose bumps. By her twentyseventh birthday insanity had come to his mother. The familiar basement was beginning to feel claustrophobic.

“Ben, stop fooling around. What are you talking about?”

Ben paused at his work and twisted around on his stool to study his grandson. It was an uncomfortable, searching gaze.

“I have something that comes to be yours on your twenty-seventh birthday, Alexander. It came to your mother on her twenty-seventh birthday. Well, it would have…” He shook his head sadly. “The poor woman. Bless her tortured soul.”

Alex straightened, determined not to get caught up in some fool word game with his grandfather.

“What’s going on?”

His grandfather slipped down off the stool. He paused to reach out with a bony hand and pat Alex on the shoulder.

“Like I said, I have something that becomes yours on your twenty-seventh birthday.”

“What is it?”

Ben ran his fingers back over his head of thin, gray hair. “It’s…well,” he said, waving the hand in a vague gesture, “let me show you.

The time has come for you to see it.”

5.

ALEX WATCHED AS HIS GRANDFATHER shuffled across the cluttered basement, kicking the odd cardboard box out of his way. At the far wall he moved rakes, hoes, and shovels to the side. Half of them fell over, clattering to the floor. Ben grumbled under his breath as he used a foot to push the errant rakes away until he had cleared a spot against the brick foundation. To Alex’s astonishment his grandfather then started pulling bricks out of a pilaster in the foundation wall.

“What in the world are you doing?”

Holding an armload of a half-dozen bricks, Ben paused to look back over his shoulder. “Oh, I put it in here in case of fire.”

That much made sense—after a fashion. Alex was perpetually surprised that his grandfather hadn’t already burned down his house, what with the way he was always using matches, torches, and burners in his tinkering.

As Ben started stacking bricks on the floor, Alex turned to check. Just as he’d suspected, his grandfather had forgotten the soldering iron. Alex picked it up just as it was starting to blacken a patch on the workbench. He set the hot iron in its metal holder, then sighed in exasperation as he wet a finger with his tongue and used it to quench the smoking patch of wood.

“Ben, you nearly caught your bench on fire. You have to be more careful.” He tapped the fire extinguisher hanging on the foundation wall. He couldn’t tell if it was full or not. He turned over the tag, squinting, looking for an expiration or last inspection. He didn’t see one. “This thing is charged and up-to-date, isn’t it?”

“Yes, yes,” Ben muttered.

When Alex turned back, his grandfather was standing close, holding out a large manila envelope. Traces of ancient stains were visible under a layer of gray mortar dust.

“This is intended for you…on your twenty-seventh birthday.”

Alex stared at the suddenly ominous thing his grandfather was holding out.

“How long have you had this?”

“Nearly nineteen years.”

Alex frowned. “And you kept it walled up in your basement?”

The old man nodded. “To keep it safe until I could give it to you at the proper time. I didn’t want you to grow up knowing about this. Such things, before the right time, can change the course of a young person’s life—change it for the worse.”

Alex planted his hands on his hips. “Ben, why do you do such strange things? What if you’d died? Did you ever think of that? What if you’d died and your house got sold?”

“My will leaves you the house.”

“I know that, but maybe I’d sell it. I would never have known that you had this hidden away down here.”

His grandfather leaned close. “It’s in the will.”

“What’s in the will?”

“The instructions that tell you where this was kept and that it’s yours—but not until your twenty-seventh birthday.” Ben smiled in a cryptic fashion. “Wills are interesting things; you can put a lot of curious things in such documents.”

When his grandfather shoved the envelope at him Alex took it, but only reluctantly. As strange as his grandfather’s behavior sometimes was, this ranked right up there with the strangest. Who would keep papers hidden in the brick wall in his basement? And why?

Alex was suddenly worried about the answers to those questions—and others that were only beginning to formulate in the back of his mind.

“Come on,” his grandfather said as he shuffled back to the workbench. With an arm he swept aside the clutter that covered the work surface. He slapped his palm on the cleared spot on the bench. “Put it here, in the light.”

The flap was torn open—with no attempt to be sneaky about it. Knowing his grandfather, he would have long ago opened the envelope and studied whatever was inside. Alex noticed that the neatly typed address label was made out to his father. He pulled a stack of papers from the envelope. They were clipped together at the top left corner. The cover letter had an embossed logo in faded blue ink saying it was from LANCASTER, BUCKMAN, FENTON, a law firm in Boston.

He tossed the papers on the workbench. “You’ve known all along what this is?” Alex asked, already knowing the answer. “You’ve read it all?”

Ben waved a hand dismissively. “Yes, yes. It’s a transfer of deed. Once it’s executed, you become a landowner.”

Alex was taken aback. “Land?”

“Quite a lot of land, actually.”

Alex was suddenly so full of questions that he couldn’t seem to think straight. “What do you mean, I’ll become a landowner? What land? Why? Whose is it? And why on my twenty-seventh birthday?”

Ben’s brow creased as he paused to consider. “I think it has to do with the seven. Like I said, it went to your mother on her twentyseventh birthday—because your father had died before his twenty-seventh birthday when it would have gone to him. So, the way I figure it, the seven has to be the key.”

“If it went to my mother, then why is it mine?”

Ben tapped the papers lying on the workbench. “It was supposed to go to her, because your father had passed away, but the title to the land couldn’t be transferred to her.”

“Why not?” Alex asked.

His grandfather lowered his voice as he leaned closer. “Because she was declared mentally incompetent.”

The silence dragged on a moment as Ben let that sink in before he went on.

“The stipulations in this last will and testament specify that the heir to whom the title is transferred must be of sound mind. Your mother was declared not to be of sound mind and has been in that institution ever since. There’s a codicil to the will that stipulates that if the heir in line isn’t able to take ownership of the title to the land because of death or mental incapacitation, then it remains in abeyance until the next heir in line becomes twenty-seven, whereupon it is automatically reassigned to them. If there is no heir, or if they are likewise declared in violation of the stipulations—”

“You mean crazy.”

“Well, yes,” Ben said. “If for any reason the title can’t be transferred to your father, mother, or any of their issue—that means their descendants, and you’re the only one of those—then the land goes to a conservation trust.”

Alex scratched his temple as he tried to take it all in.

“How much land are we talking about?”

“Enough for you to sell it and buy yourself a new car. That’s what you ought to do.” Ben shook a cautionary finger. “This business with the seven is nothing to fool around with, Alex.”

For some inexplicable reason beyond his grandfather’s admonition, Alex didn’t feel at all fortunate at the windfall.

“Where is this land?”

Ben gestured irritably. “Back East. In Maine.”

“Where you used to live?”

“Not exactly. It’s farther inland. It was land that has been in our family forever, but they’re all dead now, so it goes to you.”

“Why not to you?”

Ben shrugged. “Don’t know.” He suddenly grinned and leaned in. “Well, actually, it’s probably because they never liked me. Besides, it’s just as well—I’ve no desire to live there again. Blackflies and mud in the spring, mosquitoes in the summer, and endless snow in the winter. I’ve spent enough of my life hip deep in mud and bugs. The weather here suits me better.”

Alex wondered if the people who made up the will had discounted Ben because they didn’t consider him of sound mind in the first place.

“I’ve heard that autumn is beautiful back East,” Alex said.

Autumn would soon arrive. He wondered if there was enough land to get away and be alone for a while to paint. From time to time Alex liked to hike into wilderness areas to be alone and paint. He liked the way the simplicity of primeval solitude allowed him to lose himself in the scenes he created.

“How much land are we talking about? Is there at least a few acres or so? I’ve heard that some of the land in Maine is pretty expensive.”

“That’s on the coast,” Ben scoffed. “This is inland. Inland the land isn’t worth nearly as much. Still…”

Alex gingerly lifted the cover letter, as if it might suddenly bite him, and scanned the legal jargon.

“Still,” his grandfather went on, “I’d venture to say that this is enough to buy you a car.” He leaned closer. “Any car you want.”

Alex looked up from the papers. “So how much land is it?”

“A little under fifty thousand acres.”

Alex blinked. “Fifty thousand acres?”

His grandfather nodded. “You’re now one of the largest private landowners in Maine—other than the paper companies. At least, you will be once the title is transferred.”

Alex let out a low whistle at the very thought. “Well, I guess I very well might be able to sell a piece of it and buy me a car. I might even sell enough to build—”

Ben was shaking his head. “Sorry, but you can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Sell a part of it. The covenants to the deed say that you can’t sell any part of it. If you ever want to sell, you have to sell the whole thing, all in one lot, all together and intact, to the conservation trust that’s holding the land. They own the surrounding land.”

“I’d have to sell it all—and just to this one group?” Alex frowned. “Are you sure I couldn’t just sell some of it if I wanted to? Just a little?”

Ben was shaking his head. “Back when the papers first came your father and I studied the documents. We even went to a lawyer friend your father knew. He confirmed what we thought from what we’d read. It’s airtight. Any violation of the stipulations will result in the title reverting permanently to the conservation trust.

“It’s a very tricky document. It’s drawn up in a way that ensures that any deviation from the stipulations will cause the land to go to the trust. There’s no wiggle room. It’s constructed so as to tightly control what happens to the land. You might say that it doesn’t grant an inheritance so much as it offers choices among very limited options.

“With your father’s premature passing, and then your mother getting sick, the transfer of title wasn’t able to go forward, so it was put in abeyance, in limbo, until you were twenty-seven.”

“What if I don’t want to decide right now what I want to do?”

“You have the year you are twenty-seven to decide to take title or not. You don’t have to take the land. You can refuse it and then it goes to the trust. If you don’t act while you’re still twenty-seven, title to the land automatically transfers to the trust—except under one condition: your heir.

“You’re presently the last heir in line, Alex. You aren’t allowed to will the land to anyone other than a direct descendant. If you never have children, then, when you eventually die, the land goes to the trust.”

“What if next week I get hit by a bus and die?”

“Then the title immediately transfers to the trust—permanently—because you don’t have an heir, a child. If you become a father, even if you don’t act to claim rightful ownership during the time you’re twenty-seven, then that child becomes part and parcel of the will. It waits for them to come of age. In fact, that’s how you came to this place. If you’re hit by a bus it doesn’t affect any offspring’s rights, just as your father’s death didn’t negate your rights.

“You can take title and enjoy the land all you want and if you ever have children you can pass it on to them, providing you haven’t sold it to the trust. Once sold to them it’s theirs forever.”

“If I can only sell to the trust, then they can set the price cheap.”

Ben flipped through the pages, searching, until he found what he was looking for. “No, look here.” He tapped the page. “You have to sell it to the Daggett Trust—that’s the conservation group—but they must pay fair market value. You can name your own appraiser to ensure that the price is fair. And I can tell you that at fair market value that much land, even being inland, is worth a fortune.”

Alex stared off in thought. “I could paint all I want.”

Ben smiled. “You know that I think a person should prepare for the worst but live all they can of life. You could sell the land and then paint the rest of your life and never have to sell one of them. I hate to see you having to sell your paintings. They hold such love of life. I hate to see you part with them.”

Alex frowned as he came back from imagining. “Why would this trust want to buy this particular piece of land?”

Ben shrugged. “They already own all of the surrounding land. None of it has ever been developed. Most of it is virgin timber that’s been in trust for ages; they want to keep it that way. Our family’s piece is the last remaining part to the puzzle.

“The land owned by the trust is closed to people. No one is ever allowed onto the land—not even hikers. The Nature Alliance is a little miffed that they aren’t allowed in. They think they should have special access since they’re so devoted to preserving nature and all. I guess they went along, though, since the conservation group’s purpose seems so high-minded.”

“Well, what if I decide I don’t want to sell it? What if I want to keep it and build a house on it?”

Ben tapped the papers again. “Can’t. The deed comes with a conservation easement. That’s why we’ve never had to pay any property taxes. It’s some kind of special state wilderness area act that exempts land from taxes if it has a conservation easement constructed in the way this one has been drawn up.”

“So, then, the land is of no use to me. I can’t use it for anything?”

Ben shrugged. “You can enjoy it, I suppose. It’s your land if you want it. You can walk it, camp on it, things like that, but you can’t build any permanent buildings on it. You also must abide by the trust bylaws that you won’t allow strangers—hikers, campers, and such—on the land.”

“Or I can sell it.”

“Right. To the Daggett Trust.”

It was all so unexpected and overwhelming. Alex had never owned any land, other than the house that had been his parents’. The house, just down the street, the home where he’d partially grown up and now lived, was now in his name. In a sense it still felt like it belonged to the ghosts of those long gone. With his home on an ordinary lot Alex had a difficult time imagining how much land fifty thousand acres was. It seemed enough land that a person could become forever lost there.

“If I can’t really do anything with it, maybe I should just sell it,” Alex said, thinking out loud.

Ben pulled his soldering project closer. “That sounds wise. Sell it and buy yourself that car you want.”

Alex suspiciously eyed the back of his grandfather’s head. “I like the Cherokee. I only want a starter motor.”

“It’s your birthday, Alex. Now you can buy yourself a proper present. The kind none of us could ever afford for you.”

“I never really wanted for anything,” Alex said in quiet protest as he laid a hand gently on his grandfather’s shoulder. “I always had everything I needed, and what I really needed the most.”

“Kind of like my coffeepot,” his grandfather muttered. “Never wanted anything better.” He abruptly turned back, looking uncharacteristically stern. “Sell the land, Alex. It’s just trees and rocks—it’s good for nothing.”

Trees and rocks sounded good to Alex. He loved such places. That was his favorite thing to paint.

“Sell it, that’s my advice,” Ben pressed. “You’ve no need of Castle Mountain.”

“Castle what?”

“Castle Mountain. It’s a mountain that sits roughly in the center of the land.”

“Why’s it called Castle Mountain?”

Ben turned away and worked for a time bending the tubing on his essence extractor to some plan known only to him. “People say it looks like a castle. Never saw the resemblance, myself.”

Alex smiled. “I don’t think Indian Rock looks much like an Indian.”

“There you go. Same thing. People see what they want to see, I guess.” Ben didn’t look back as he handed the papers over his shoulder. “Get the deed transferred, then sell the place and be rid of it, that’s my advice, Alex.”

Alex slowly made his way to the stairs as he considered it all. He paused and looked back at his grandfather.

A dark look shadowed Ben’s face. “This is one of those things that I mentioned before, Alex, one of those things that doesn’t make proper sense.”

Alex wondered at seeing such a forbidding look for a second time that day. “Thanks, Ben, for your advice.”

His grandfather turned back to his soldering. “Don’t thank me unless you take the advice. Unless you heed it, it’s just words.”

Alex nodded absently. “I’m going to go see my mom.”

“Give her my best,” Ben murmured without turning.

His grandfather rarely went to visit his daughter-in-law. He hated the place where she was confined. Alex hated the place, too, but his mother was there and if he wanted to see her he had no choice.

Alex stared down at the envelope in his hand. It seemed that such an unexpected birthday present should make him happy, but it didn’t. It only reminded him of his dead father and his mother lost to another world.

Now this unknown connection to the past had found him.

Alex ran his fingers lightly over the age-dried label made out to his father. A faded pencil line ran through the name. Above, in the same nearly vanished, ghostlike pencil, was written his mother’s name. Her name was stricken through with a dark, angry line drawn in black ink.

Above that, in his grandfather’s handwriting, it said “Alexander Rahl.”

When Alex reached the landing on the stairs he thought that he saw someone out of the corner of his eye.

He turned only to see himself looking back from a mirror.

He stared for a moment; then his cell phone rang. When he answered it, he could hear only weird, garbled sounds, like disembodied whispers churning up from somewhere deep on the other side of the universe. He glanced at the display. It said OUT OF AREA. No doubt a wrong number. He flipped the cover closed and slipped the phone back in his pocket.

“Alexander,” Ben called.

Alex looked back, waiting.

“Trouble will find you.”

Alex smiled at his grandfather’s familiar mantra. It was meant as a world of love and concern wrapped in a call for vigilance. The familiar touchstone made him feel better, feel resolute.

“Thanks, Ben. I’ll talk to you later.”

Alex picked up the painting that he had brought from the gallery and headed up the stairs.

6.

ALEX HAD BEEN FORTUNATE. His Jeep Cherokee had started on the first try.

After the long drive to the older part of downtown Orden, Nebraska, he parked near the end of a side street that sloped off downhill. That way, if his Jeep wouldn’t start, he could let it roll to get the engine to turn over.

In this older section of town there wasn’t much parking other than on the tree-lined streets. The needs of a hospital, parking being only one of them, had long ago rendered the facility obsolete and so it had been converted to a private asylum: Mother of Roses. The state paid for patients, like Alex’s mother, who were placed there by the order of the court.

In the beginning Ben had tried to get his daughter-in-law released into his and Alex’s grandmother’s custody. Alex had been too young to understand it all, but the end result had been that Ben had eventually given up. Years later, when Alex had pursued the same course, he had likewise gotten nowhere.

Dr. Hoffmann, the head of the psychiatric staff, had assured Alex that his mother was better off under professional care. Besides that, he said that they could not legally give him the responsibility of caring for a person who in their professional opinion could still become violent. His grandfather had put an arm around Alex’s shoulders and told him to come to terms with the fact that while there were those who went to Mother of Roses to get help, to get better, his mother would likely die there. It had felt to Alex like a death sentence.

The mature trees on the streets in that part of town and on the limited grounds of Mother of Roses asylum made the place look less harsh than it was. Alex knew that the somewhat distant hill where he’d parked made a convenient excuse to delay walking into the building where his mother was imprisoned. His insides always felt like they knotted up when he went into the place.

On the way over he had been so distracted by scattered thoughts competing for attention that he’d nearly run a red light. The thought of Officer Slawinski scowling at him had dissuaded him from trying to make it through the yellow. As it turned out, the light had switched to red before he’d even reached the crosswalk.

For some reason it felt like a day to be careful. Staring up at the glow of a red light that had come quicker than expected had felt like cosmic confirmation of his caution.

Walking beneath the enclosing shade of the mature oaks and maples, Alex headed around the side of the nine-story brick building. The front, on Thirteenth Street, had broad stone steps up to what he supposed was a beautiful entrance of cast concrete meant to look like a stone façade of vines growing over an ornate pointed arch framing deep-set oak doors. Going in the front was a lot more trouble because it required going through layers of bureaucracy needed for general visitors. Close family were allowed to go in through a smaller entrance at the rear.

Grass under the huge oaks in back thinned to bare dirt in patches where the ground was heaved and uneven from massive roots hidden beneath. Alex glanced up at the windows all covered with security wire. Flesh was no match for that steel mesh. The back of the building was more honest about what it was.

The sprawling lower floors of the hospital were for patients who went to Mother of Roses for treatment for emotional disorders, substance abuse and addiction, as well as rest and recovery. Alex’s mother was imprisoned on the smaller ninth floor, a secure area reserved for patients considered dangerous. Some of them had killed people and had been found to be mentally incompetent. Several times since Alex’s mother had been confined at Mother of Roses there had been serious attacks on other patients or staff. Alex always worried for her safety.

He scanned the top row of almost opaque windows, even though he had never seen anything more than shadows in them.

The steel door in back had a little square window with safety wire crisscrossed through it. When he pulled open the door he was hit by the hospital smell that always made him resist taking a deep breath.

An orderly recognized him and nodded a greeting. Alex flashed a wooden smile as he tossed his keys, pocketknife, change, and phone in a plastic tub on a table to the side of the metal detector. After he passed through without setting off the buzzers, an older security guard, who also knew Alex but didn’t smile, handed over the phone and his change. He would keep the knife and keys until Alex left. Even keys could be snatched from a visitor and used as a weapon.

Alex bent at the steel desk beyond the metal detector and picked up a cheap blue plastic pen attached by a dirty string to the registry clipboard. That string was the most lax security in the entire building. The woman at the desk, Doreen, knew him. Holding the phone to her ear with a shoulder, she flipped through a ledger, answering questions about laundry deliveries. She smiled at Alex as he looked up from signing his name. She’d always been nice to him over the years, sympathizing with him at having to visit his mother in such a place.

Alex took the only elevator that went to the ninth floor. He hated the green metal doors. The paint had been scratched off in horizontal patches by med carts hitting into it, leaving dirty metal to show through. The elevator smelled musty. He knew the tune of every clunk and clatter it made on the way up, anticipated every shimmy in its labored travel.

The elevator porpoised to a stop and finally opened before the ninth-floor nurses’ station. Locked doors led to the women’s wing on one side, the men’s on the other. Alex signed his name again and put in the time: three p.m. Visitors were carefully monitored. He would have to sign out, with the time, when he left. The elevator door at the top was kept locked and no one would unlock it without a completed sign-in-and-sign-out sheet—a precaution against a patient talking his way past a gullible new employee.

An orderly in white slacks and smock came out from a small office in the back of the nurses’ station, pulling his keys out on a thin wire cable extending from the reel attached to his belt. The orderly, a big man who always hunched, knew Alex. Just about everyone working at Mother of Roses knew Alex Rahl.

The man looked through the little window in the solid oak door and then, satisfied that the way was clear, turned the key in the lock. He yanked open the heavy door.

The man handed over a plastic key for the buzzer on the other side. “Ring when you’re finished, Alex.”

Alex nodded. “How’s she doing?”

The man shrugged his rounded shoulders. “Same.”

“Has she caused you any trouble?”

The man arched an eyebrow. “She tried to stab me to death with a plastic spoon a few days back. Yesterday she jumped a nurse and would have beaten her senseless if another orderly wouldn’t have been ten steps away at the time.”

Alex shook his head. “I’m sorry, Henry.”

The man shrugged again. “Part of the job.”

“I wish I could make her stop.”

Henry held the door open with one hand. “You can’t, Alex. Don’t beat yourself up over it. It’s not her fault; she’s sick.”

The hall’s grayish linoleum floor was struck through with darker gray swirls and green speckles, presumably meant to add a little bit of interest. It was as ugly as anything Alex could imagine. Light from the sunroom up ahead reflected off the ripply floor, making it look almost liquid. The evenly spaced rooms to each side had varnished oak doors with silver metal push plates. None had locks. Each room was home to someone.

Cries coming from dark rooms echoed through the hall. Angry voices and shouts were commonplace—arguments with imaginary people who bedeviled some of the patients.

The showers at the rear of the bathroom were kept locked, along with a few of the rooms, rooms where patients were placed when they became violent. Locking a patient in a room was meant to encourage them to behave and be sociable.

The sunroom, with its skylights, was a bright spot in a dark prison. Varnished oak tables were neatly spaced throughout the room. They were bolted to the floor. The flimsy plastic chairs weren’t.

Alex immediately spotted his mother sitting on a couch against the far wall. She watched him coming without recognizing him. On rare occasions she did know who he was, but he could tell by the look in her eyes that this time she didn’t. That was always the hardest thing for him—knowing that she usually didn’t have any idea who he was.

A TV bolted high on the wall was tuned to Wheel of Fortune. The gaiety and laughter from the TV struck a stupefying contrast with the somber dayroom. A few patients laughed with the TV audience without comprehending what they were laughing at. They only knew that laughter was called for and so they laughed out of a sense of social duty. Alex guessed that it was better to laugh than cry. Between the laughter, some of the younger women glared at him.

“Hi, Mom,” he said in his sunniest voice as he approached.

She wore pale green hospital-issue pajama pants and a simple flower-print top. The outfit was hideously ugly. Her hair was longer than the other residents’. Most of the women had their hair cut short and curled. Alex’s mother was protective of her sandy-colored, shoulder-length hair. She threw fits if they tried to cut it. The staff didn’t feel it was worth a battle to cut it short. Occasionally they would try, thinking she might have forgotten that she wanted it long. That was one thing she never forgot. Alex was glad that she had something that seemed to matter to her.

He sat on the couch beside her. “How are you doing?”

She stared at him a moment. “Fine.” By her tone, he knew that she didn’t have a clue as to who he was.

“I was here last week. Remember?”

She nodded as she stared at him. Alex wasn’t sure if she even understood the question. Sometimes she would say things that he knew weren’t true. She would tell him that her sister had visited. She didn’t have a sister. She would say that she had gone shopping. She was never allowed to leave the confines of the ninth floor.

He ran his hand down the side of her head. “Your hair looks pretty today.”

“I brush it every day,” she said.

An overweight male orderly wearing shiny black shoes that squeaked rolled a cart into the sunroom. “Snack time, ladies.”

The top of the cart displayed a few dozen plastic cups half filled with orange juice, or something that resembled orange juice. The shelves in the cart held baloney-and-lettuce sandwiches on wheat bread. At least, Alex assumed it would be baloney. It usually was.

“How about a sandwich, Mom? You’re looking kind of skinny. Have you been eating?”

Without protest she rose to take a sandwich and glass from the man with the cart when he rolled it near. “Here you go, Helen,” the man said as he handed her a plastic cup of orange juice and a sandwich.

Alex followed as she shuffled to a table off in the far corner, away from the other residents.

“They always want to talk,” she said as she glared at the women clustered on the other side of the room, where they could see the television. Most of the people in the place talked to imaginary people. At least his mother never did that.

Alex folded his arms on the table. “So, what’s new?”

His mother chewed a mouthful for a moment. Without looking up she swallowed and said under her breath, “I haven’t seen any of them for a while.”

“Is that right?” he asked, playing along. “What did they want?”

It was hard to make conversation when he didn’t know what she was talking about half the time.

“What they always want. The gate.”

“What gate?” He couldn’t imagine what she imagined.

She suddenly looked up. “What are you doing here?”

Alex shrugged. “It’s my birthday, Mom. I wanted to spend it with you.”

“You shouldn’t spend your birthday in this place, Alex.”

Alex’s breath halted for an instant. He could count on the fingers of one hand the times she had called him by his name except when prompted.

“It’s my birthday. It’s what I want to do, Mom,” he said quietly.

Her mind seemed to drift away from the subject. “They look at me through the walls,” she said in an emotionless tone. Her eyes turned wild. “They look at me!” she screamed. “Why won’t they stop watching me!”

A few of the people on the other side of the room turned to look at the screaming woman. Most didn’t bother. Screaming in the institution wasn’t an uncommon occurrence and was usually treated with indifference. The orderly with the cart glanced over, appraising the situation. Alex put a hand on her arm.

“It’s all right, Mom. No one is looking at you now.”

She glanced around at the walls before finally appearing to calm down. In another moment, she went back to her sandwich as if nothing had happened.

After she took a sip of orange juice, she asked, “What birthday is it?” She put the sandwich up to her mouth.

“My twenty-seventh.”

She froze.

She took the sandwich out of her mouth and carefully set it down on the paper plate. She glanced around, then seized Alex’s shirtsleeve.

“I want to go to my room.”

Alex was a bit puzzled by her behavior, as he frequently was, but he went along. “All right, Mom. We can sit in there. It’ll be nice, just the two of us.”

She held his arm in a tight grip as they walked back down the depressing hall. Alex walked. She shuffled. She wasn’t an old woman, but her spirit always seemed broken.

It was the Thorazine and other powerful antipsychotic drugs that made her that way, and made her shuffle. Dr. Hoffmann said that Thorazine was all that kept her functioning as well as she did, and that without it she would become so violently psychopathic that she would have to be restrained twenty-four hours a day. Alex certainly didn’t want that for her.

When they went into her simple room she shut the door. The doors didn’t lock. She opened it and checked the hall three times before she seemed satisfied. Her roommate, Agnes, was older. She never spoke. She did stare, though, so Alex was glad that she had stayed in the sunroom.

The TV, bolted high on the wall, was on, but the sound was muted. He rarely saw the TV turned off. The sound was usually muted, though. He’d never seen his mother change the channel. He didn’t understand why she and Agnes wanted the TV on without the sound.

“Go away,” Alex’s mother said.

“After a while, Mom. I’d like to sit with you for a time.”

She shook her head. “Go away and hide.”

“From what, Mom?”

“Hide,” she repeated.

Alex took a deep breath. “Hide from what?”

His mother stared at him for a time. “Twenty-seven,” she finally said.

“Yes, that’s right. I’m twenty-seven today. You had me twenty-seven years ago, nine in the evening on the ninth of September. That’s the date today. You had me here, at this very place, back when it was a regular hospital.”

She leaned close and licked her lips. “Hide.”

Alex wiped a hand across his face. “From who, Mom?” He was tired of the pointless, circular conversation.

His mother rose from where she sat on the edge of the bed and went to a small wardrobe. She pawed through the items folded on the shelf. After a brief search she came up with a shawl. At first, Alex thought that she was cold. But she didn’t put the shawl around her shoulders.

She stood before the small dresser and draped the shawl over the polished metal square, bolted to the wall, that served as a mirror.

“Mom, what are you doing?”

His mother turned back with fire in her eyes. “They look at me. I told you. They look at me through the windows in the walls.”

Alex was starting to feel creepy.

“Mom, come sit down.”

His mother sat on the edge of the bed, closer, and took one of his hands in both of hers. It was an act of affection that unexpectedly brought a tear to Alex’s eye. She had never done such a thing before. Alex thought that it was the best birthday present he could have gotten, better even than fifty thousand acres of land.

“Alex,” she whispered. “You must run and hide before they get you.”

It was startling to hear his name from her lips for the second time in the same day. It took a great effort to summon his voice.

“And who is it that I should hide from, Mom?”

She glanced around and then leaned closer so he could hear her whisper.

“A different kind of human.”

He stared at her a moment. It made no sense, but something about it sounded serious, sounded sincere.

Just then something on the TV caught his eye. He looked up and saw that it was the local news. A police spokesman was standing before a cluster of microphones.

A news crawler moving across the bottom of the screen said “Two Metro officers found dead.”

Alex reached over for the remote and turned up the sound.

“Do you know why they were there, in behind the warehouses?” a reporter asked through the clamor.

“The Center and Ninetieth Street section was within their patrol area,” the official said. “Alleys throughout there provide access to loading docks. We check them often, so there was nothing unusual about them being there in that location.”

Alex remembered when Ninetieth Street, about ten or twelve miles from his house, used to be the outskirts of town.

Another reporter shouted the others down. “There are reports that both officers were found with their necks broken. Is that true?”

“I can’t comment on such stories. As I’ve said, we will have to wait for the coroner’s report. When we have it we will release the findings.”

“Have the families been notified?”

The man at the microphone paused, obviously having trouble getting words out. Anguish shaped his features. He kept swallowing back his emotion.

“Yes. Our prayers and sympathy go out to their families at this difficult time.”

“Can you release their names, then?” a woman waving her pen for attention asked.

The official stared out at the tight knot of reporters. His gaze finally dropped away. “Officer John Tinney, and Officer Peter Slawinski.” He started spelling the names.

Alex’s whole body flashed as cold as ice.

“They break people’s necks,” his mother said in a dead tone as she stared at the TV. He thought that she must be repeating what she’d just heard. “They want the gate.”

Her eyes went out of focus. He knew; she was going back into that dark place. Once her eyes went out of focus like that she wouldn’t speak again for weeks.

He felt his cell phone vibrate in his pocket. Another text message from Bethany. He ignored it as he put an arm tenderly around his mother’s shoulders.

7.

ALEX SAT FOR A WHILE just holding his mother, trying to imagine what madness haunted her. She no longer seemed to know that he was there.

The worst part was that he had no hope. The doctors had said that she would never get better, never be her old self again, and that he needed to understand that. They said there was brain damage that couldn’t be reversed. While they weren’t exactly sure what had caused the damage to her brain, they said that, among other things, it caused her to sometimes become violent. They said that such damage was not reversible. They’d said that she was a danger to herself and others and always would be.

After a while Alex gently laid her back on her bed. She was as limp as a doll—just a bundle of bone and muscle, blood and organs, existing often without conscious awareness, without anything other than a vestigial intellect. He fluffed up the pillow under her head. Her empty eyes remained fixed on the ceiling. As far as Alex knew, she didn’t know where she was, or that there was anyone there with her. She was for the most part dead to the world; her body just hadn’t fully caught up with that fact.

He pulled her shawl off the mirror, folded it, and replaced it in the wardrobe before sitting again on the edge of the bed.

When his phone rang he pulled it out and answered.

“Hey, birthday boy,” Bethany said, “I have a big surprise for you.”

Alex made an effort to keep the annoyance out of his voice.

“Well, I’m afraid that—”

“I’m sitting outside your house.”

He paused a moment. “My house.”

Her voice turned flirtatious and lilting. “That’s right.”

“What are you doing there?”

“Well,” she said in an airy, intimate whisper, “I’m waiting for you. I want to give you your birthday present.”

“Thanks for the thought, Bethany, but I really don’t need anything, honest. Save your money.”

“No money involved,” she said. “Just get your tail home, birthday boy. Tonight you’re going to get yourself laid.”

Now Alex was really getting annoyed with her. He thought it easiest not to say so, though. He didn’t want to have a fight with a woman he hardly knew. There was no point to it.

“Look, Bethany, I’m really not in the mood.”

“You just leave that to me. I’ll get you in the mood. I think you ought to get lucky on your birthday, and I’m just the girl to make it special.”

Bethany was an attractive woman—in fact she bordered on being voluptuous—but the more he got to know her the less and less attractive Alex found her to be. She had nothing more than a superficial allure. He couldn’t talk to her about anything meaningful, not because she wasn’t intelligent enough, but because she didn’t care about anything meaningful. In a way, that was worse. She was a living, breathing example of superficial, and willfully so. She seemed to have no interests other than that she had a kind of odd, narrow focus on him and the two of them having a good time—or, at least, what was a good time by her definition.

“I can’t, right now,” he said, trying not to sound angry, even though he was getting angry.

She let out a low, breathy chuckle. “Oh, I’ll make sure you can, Alex. Don’t you worry about that. You just get yourself home and let Beth take care of everything.”

“I’m visiting my mother.”

“I think I can throw a better party. Promise. Just come give me a chance to make your birthday something you’ll never forget.”

“My mother is in the hospital. She’s ill and not doing well. I’m going to be sitting with her.”

That finally threw Bethany into silence for a moment.

“Oh,” she finally said, the sexiness gone from her voice. “I didn’t know.”

“I’ll call you later,” Alex said. “Maybe in a few days.”

“Well,” she said, sounding uncertain and reluctant to end the conversation so quickly, “I’m sure your mother is going to need to get her rest. Why don’t you call me later today, after your visit?”

Somehow, it didn’t sound quite like a question. It sounded more like an instruction. He hadn’t wanted to have this conversation—not at the moment, not sitting there with his mother—but Bethany was giving him no choice.

“Look, the truth is I don’t think I’m the guy for you. You’re an attractive woman, you really are. There are a lot of guys who like you. I think you’d be better off with one of them instead of me. You’d have a lot more fun with them, with guys who are interested in the same things that interest you.”

“But I like you.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.” She paused a moment. “You get me hot,” she finally said, falling back on her lusty voice, as if lust was magic that could banish any objections. He imagined that it very well might with most men, but he wasn’t most men.

“I’m sorry, Bethany. You’re a nice enough person, but we’re just not right for each other. It’s as simple as that.”

“I see.”

He didn’t say anything, hoping that she would leave it at that and not decide to make it ugly. It wasn’t like they’d been seeing each other for any length of time. There was no reason to make a big deal out of it. It had been a couple of dates, nothing more. He’d kissed her a few times. That was it. She’d made it clear that he was welcome to go farther, to go as far as he wanted, but something had made him keep her at arm’s length. Now he was glad he had.

“Alex, I’ve got to go. I need…I need to think about this.”

“I understand. You think about it, but I think it’s best if we go our separate ways.”

He could hear her breathing for a moment; then, without a further word, she hung up on him.

“Good,” he said under his breath as he used his thumb to push the phone back into the pocket of his jeans.

He glanced over at his mother. She stared unblinking at the ceiling.

Alex picked up the TV remote when he saw another report about the two murdered Metro officers. The place they’d been found was a good dozen miles from where he had met Officers Tinney and Slawinski earlier that day.

It shook Alex to realize that the two men were dead. If he found it shocking, he could only imagine how horrifying the news had to be for those close to them.

Both men had seemed so competent, so in control. He’d seen them for only a few minutes, but it seemed impossible to think that both of those men could be dead. The swiftness of such a thing left Alex feeling shaken and even more depressed.

He envied people who enjoyed their birthdays.

Just then his phone rang again. He was reluctant to answer it, thinking it would be Bethany with a list of grievances over her hurt feelings and wanting to rant at him, but when he checked the small exterior display window it said OUT OF AREA.

Alex flipped open the cover and put the phone to his ear. “Hello, this is Alex.”

Weird, garbled sounds and disembodied whispers crackled through the receiver. The sounds made his mouth go dry.

Alex immediately flipped the cover closed. He stared at the phone a moment, then finally slipped it back in his pocket.

The sounds had been so unusual, so haunting, that he distinctly remembered hearing them before. It had been the call he had gotten earlier, just as he had been about to leave his grandfather’s house, just after he had learned about the land that came to be his on his twenty-seventh birthday.

He remembered that he’d gotten the call right after he had thought that someone had been looking at him through the mirror.

It had also been shortly after he had asked if Ben thought he would end up crazy like his mother.

Alex glanced at the polished metal mirror before looking around at the mint-green room. He wondered if he was destined to end up spending the rest of his life in a place like this, like his mother.

He wondered how he would know if he had gone crazy. He didn’t feel crazy.

He bet that his mother didn’t feel crazy, either.

8.

WHEN MR. MARTIN CALLED out of the blue, Alex could hardly believe the news. All six of his paintings had sold.

Holding the phone to an ear with a shoulder, Alex had swirled his brush in a jar of murky water and then wiped it on a paper towel as Mr. Martin asked him to come collect his money. Alex had been deeply absorbed in the work of painting an eerie evening mist along a shoreline of a mountain lake and didn’t want to stop, but Mr. Martin had seemed unusually anxious that Alex get there as soon as possible. He wouldn’t say anything about the person who had bought the paintings, only that they had paid cash and he wanted to give Alex his portion. He had made a weak excuse that he knew Alex needed the money.

Alex hadn’t talked to Bethany since she’d called him while he had been visiting his mother two days before. Things seemed to be looking up in more ways than one. His truck even started on the first try.

When he pulled into the parking lot at Regent Center it was early afternoon. The gray sky looked to be a harbinger of an approaching storm. The air had an unusual chill to it, a first breath of the coming change of season.

Alex parked next to a new Jeep, hoping that his would start again later without a lot of difficulty. With the sale of the six paintings he could certainly afford to get the starter fixed. He had thought to replace the starter himself but he reconsidered; he would need to finish up the painting he was working on when Mr. Martin had called. The gallery would need to have more of his paintings if the buyer should decide to return and collect more of Alex’s pieces, or if another buyer came along. It was far easier to sell paintings and get commissions if there was something on display.

Before he locked his truck, Alex picked the small painting wrapped in brown paper off the floor of the back seat. He didn’t want to give it back to Mr. Martin to sell or display, but he was afraid of it being stolen out of his truck. He’d brought the painting with him because he wanted to give it to the woman if he ever saw her again.

The halls of Regent Center were more crowded than they had been the last time he’d been there, the day he had seen the woman. With the painting tucked under his arm he quickly made his way toward the gallery, checking the faces of people along the way just in case she was there. He thought that it was a baseless hope, even a silly hope, but he couldn’t help himself from hoping to see her. When he caught sight of himself in a mirror displayed in the window of a boutique, he stepped a little quicker to get out of sight of it.

As he walked in front of the gallery window Alex spotted Mr. Martin pacing near the rear of the shop. He had on a dark suit with a bright orange tie, an odd choice that on Mr. Martin somehow worked. The bells on the door softly rang their familiar strain as Alex went inside. Mr. Martin, dry-washing his hands, stepped briskly among the pieces on easels.

“Ah, Alex, thank you for coming so quickly.”

“It’s been a while since my last payday,” Alex said with a smile as he tried to figure out why the man wasn’t smiling.

“Indeed,” Mr. Martin said without catching Alex’s attempt to lighten the mood.

Alex followed the gallery owner to the rear of the shop, where Mr. Martin sat on a rolling swivel chair and nervously worked a key to open a locked drawer. Once he had the drawer open he unlocked a metal box inside and pulled out a thick envelope. Inside was a stack of cash. He stood to count out the payment.

“Wait a minute,” Alex said, holding up a hand. “You usually give me the story, first. I’ve never sold six pieces at once before. It must have been an unusual sale. Who was the buyer? What happened? How did you convince them to buy six paintings? Did they just love the paintings and have to have them all?”

Mr. Martin gazed into Alex’s eyes for a moment as if overwhelmed by the barrage of questions. Alex realized that he was probably spooking the man. Alex frequently found that he made people nervous with his questions.

“Well,” Mr. Martin said at last, seemingly trying to recall it in exact detail, “a man came in. He glanced around but I soon realized that he wasn’t looking at the things that were on display—wasn’t looking at different pieces the way people usually do. He seemed to be searching for something specific. I asked if I could show him something special.

“He said yes, that he would like to see the work of Alexander Rahl. Naturally I was only too happy to show him your paintings. Before I could begin to talk you up, he said that he would take them. I showed him that I had six of your paintings and asked which of them he would be interested in. He said he would take them all. I was momentarily stunned.

“The man asked how much he owed. He never even asked the price. Just asked what he owed.”

Mr. Martin licked his thin lips. “I was overjoyed for you. I knew how much you need the money, Alex, so as I regained my wits I took the opportunity, as the gallery owner and your representative, to get the best possible price for you. I quickly considered the dated, low price we were asking and then, in view of the man’s interest, added some to it.”

Alex was slightly amused at his good fortune, and Mr. Martin’s quick thinking. “So how much did you add?”

Mr. Martin swallowed. “I doubled the price. I told the man that they were four thousand apiece—and a good investment in an upand-coming contemporary artist.”

“That’s twenty-four thousand dollars,” Alex said in astonishment. “You certainly earned your commission, Mr. Martin.”

Mr. Martin nodded. “That makes your portion, after commission, fourteen thousand four hundred dollars.”

Without delay he started counting off hundred-dollar bills. Alex was a bit dumbfounded and just stood there as the man counted out the money. When finished, the gallery owner took a deep breath. He seemed to be glad to be rid of the money. Alex straightened the thick stack of hundred-dollar bills before returning them to the envelope. He folded it in half and stuffed it all in the front pocket of his jeans.

Alex couldn’t understand why the man seemed so nervous. Mr. Martin often sold paintings for a great deal more than Alex’s work. One of R. C. Dillion’s paintings would have gone for well over what Alex had just earned for six. Maybe it was just that it had all been in cash.

“What then?” Alex asked, his suspicion growing. “Did the man say anything else?”

“There’s a little more to the story.” Mr. Martin straightened the orange knot at his throat. “After he had paid—in cash, the same cash I just gave you—he said, ‘These are mine, now, right?’ I said, ‘Yes, of course.’

“He then picked up one of his paintings, pulled a fat black marker out of his pocket—you know, the indelible kind—and started writing all over the painting. I was stunned. I didn’t know what to do.

When he had finished, he did the same to each in turn. Wrote all over them.”

Mr. Martin clenched his hands together. “I’ve never had such an experience. I asked the man what he thought he was doing. He said that they were his paintings and he could do any damn thing he wanted to with them.”

Mr. Martin leaned closer. “Alex, I would have stopped him, I swear I would have, but, well, they were his, and he was very…insistent about what he was doing. By his change in attitude I was beginning to fear what would happen if I were to interfere. So I didn’t. I had the money, after all—cash at that.”

Alex stood with his jaw hanging. He was overjoyed to have the money from the sale but at the same time he was incensed to hear that his work had been defaced.

“So he finished marking all over my work and then just took his ruined paintings and left?”

Mr. Martin scratched his jaw, his gaze turning aside. “No. He set them down and said that he wanted me to give them back to you. He said, ‘Give them back to Alexander Rahl. My treat.’”

Alex heaved a sigh. “Let me see them.”

Mr. Martin gestured to the paintings sitting against the wall in the corner of the office area. They were placed face-to-face, and no longer in frames.

When Alex lifted the first one and held it out in both hands he was struck speechless. In fat black letters sprawled diagonally across the painting it said FUCK YOU ASSHOLE.

The painting was covered with every other hateful, vile, vulgar name there was.

“Alex, I want them out of here.”

Alex stood, hands trembling, staring at his beautiful painting covered with ugly words.

“Do you hear me, Alex? I can’t have these in here. What if a customer should happen to see them? You have to take them with you. Right now. Get them out. I want them out of here. I want to forget all about this.”

Through his fury Alex could only nod. He knew that Mr. Martin didn’t fear a customer seeing them. Many of Mr. Martin’s artists routinely spoke like this in front of customers. The customers took the artist’s “colorful” speech as an indication of social sensitivity and artistic introspection. The more times an artist could drop the F bomb in a sentence the more visionary he became to them.

No, Mr. Martin was not offended by the words—he was used to hearing them in the gallery—he was frightened by the man who had written them, and by the context of those words: raw hatred.

Mr. Martin cleared his throat. “I’ve been giving the matter a great deal of thought, and I think it best if for now we don’t display any of your work.”

Alex looked up. “What?”

Mr. Martin gestured to the painting. “Well, look at it. This kind of man could get violent. He looked like he was ready to break my neck if I dared lift a finger to stop him.”

Alex’s first thought was that it was Bethany’s doing, but he dismissed the idea. He was pretty sure she didn’t have that kind of money to spend on a grudge.

“What did this guy look like? Describe him.”

“Well,” Mr. Martin said, taken aback a little by the heat in Alex’s tone, “he was tall, and good size—about like you. He was dressed casually but not expensively. Tan slacks, some kind of bland shirt, not tucked in. It was beige with a vertical blue stripe of some sort down the left side.”

Alex didn’t recognize the description.

He felt sick with anger. He ripped the canvas off the stretcher, then did the same with the other five. He only briefly saw the insults and obscene words desecrating the scenes of beauty. The range of profanity turned his stomach, not so much because of the words themselves, but because of the naked hate they conveyed.

They were just paintings of beauty. That’s all they were. Something to uplift people who looked at them, something to make people feel good about life and the world they lived in. To harbor hatred for beauty was one thing, but to go to great expense just to express that hate was quite another.

Alex realized that Mr. Martin was right. Such a man could easily become violent.

Alex hoped to meet him.

9.

WITH THE ROLLED-UP RUINED CANVASES under one arm and the painting that he’d carefully wrapped in brown paper tucked under his other arm, Alex left Mr. Martin’s gallery without an argument. Despite how much he was fuming, there wasn’t any point in arguing. Mr. Martin was afraid.

Alex couldn’t really blame the man. Alone as he was most of the time, he was a sitting duck in the gallery. The stranger could come back at any time. What was Mr. Martin supposed to do? Alex couldn’t expect the gallery owner to have it in him to be able to handle an altercation that could become violent.

Conflicting emotions raged through Alex’s thoughts as he made his way out into the elegant halls. He was depressed, he was furious. He wanted to run home and lock himself away from a world where such people roamed free. He wanted to find the guy and shove the black markers down his throat.

When Alex looked up, the woman was standing not far off in front of him, watching him approach. He slowed to a stop.

She was in the same black dress, with the same green wrap draped over her shoulders. He thought that he saw wisps of vapor—a hint of steam or smoke—rising from her fall of blond hair and her shoulders, but as soon as he focused on it, it was gone.

As impossible as it seemed, she looked even better than he remembered.

“You come here often?” he asked.

Her gaze never left his as she slowly shook her head. “This is only my second time here.”

Something about the serious set of her features gave him pause. He knew that she wasn’t there to shop.

His grandfather’s old mantra, Trouble will find you, echoed through his mind.

“Are you all right, Alex?” she asked.

“Sure.” The sound of her voice made him all right. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”

A small smile softened her features as she glided a step closer. “I am Jax.”

Her name was as unusual as everything else about her. He could hardly believe that he was really seeing her again.

“I’d give anything to paint you, Jax,” he said under his breath to himself.

She smiled at his words, smiled in a way that accepted them as a compliment, but didn’t reveal her view of them or her willingness to be the subject of a painting.

He finally pulled his gaze away to check around, to see if anyone was close. “Did you hear the news on the TV?”

Her brow twitched. “News? No. What news?”

“You remember the other day when we first met out on the street? When that truck nearly ran us over.”

“The pirates, as you called them. I remember.”

“Well, later that same day those two cops who stopped the truck were found dead.”

She stared at him a moment. “Dead?”

He nodded. “The news said that both men had been found with their necks broken.”

The method of murder registered in her eyes. She let out a long sigh as she shook her head. “That’s terrible.”

Alex suddenly wished he hadn’t started the conversation with grim news. He gestured to a bench set in among a grouping of large round planters.

“Would you sit with me? I’d like to show you something.”

She returned the smile and at his bidding sat on the small mahogany bench. Huge split-leaf philodendrons created a green roof over the bench. The planters overflowing with plants to either side and behind made it resemble a forest retreat for just the two of them. The planters and vegetation blocked them off from most but not all of the shoppers strolling the halls.

Alex set the rolled-up canvases on the bench to his right, on the side away from her. He placed the painting on her lap.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“A gift.”

She stared at him a moment, then pulled off the brown paper.

She looked genuinely stunned to see the painting. She lifted it reverently in her hands. Her eyes welled up with tears.

It took her a moment to find her voice. “Why are you giving me this?”

Alex shrugged. “Because I want to. You thought it was beautiful.

Not everyone thinks my work is beautiful. You did. I wanted you to have it.”

Jax swallowed. “Alex, tell me why you painted this particular place.”

“Like I told you before, it’s from my imagination.”

“No, it’s not,” she said rather emphatically.

He paused momentarily, surprised by her words. “Yes it is. I was merely painting a scene—”

“This is a place near where I live.” She touched a graceful finger to the shade beneath towering pines. “I’ve spent countless hours sitting in this very place, gazing off at the mountain passes here, and here. The views from this hidden place are unparalleled—just as you’ve painted them.”

Alex didn’t know what to say. “It’s just a painting of the woods. The woods can look much the same in one place as another. A species of tree all look pretty much the same. I’m sure that it simply reminds you of this place you know.”

With the edge of a knuckle she wiped a tear from under an eye. “No.” She swallowed and then pointed to a spot he clearly recalled painting. For some reason he’d put extra care into the trunk of the tree. “See this notch you put in this tree?” She glanced up at him. “I put that notch there.”

“You put it there,” he said in a flat tone.

Jax nodded. “I was testing the edge I’d put on my knife. The bark is thick there. I sliced paper-thin pieces of it to test the edge. Bark is tough, but is easier on a freshly sharpened blade than other things, like wood, might be.”

“And you like to sit at a place like this?”

“No, not a place like this place. This place. I like to sit at this place. This place is Shineestay.”

“Shineestay? What’s that mean?”

“It’s an ancient word that means ‘place of power.’ You have painted that exact place.” She looked again at the scene and tapped a spot to the side of the sunlit glen. “The only minor difference is that there is a tree, here, near the side of this open area, that you have not painted. This is the exact same spot, except for that one tree that’s missing.”

Alex felt goose bumps tickle the nape of his neck. He knew the tree she was talking about. He had painted it.

He had originally painted it exactly where she was pointing, but while it might have been right in such a forest, it had been compositionally wrong for the painting, so he had painted over it. He recalled at the time wondering why he’d painted it in the first place, since it didn’t fit in the composition. Even as he looked where Jax was pointing, he could see the faint contour of the brushstrokes of the tree beneath the paint that now lay over it.

Alex was at a loss to explain how it could be the place she knew. “Where is this place?”

She stared at him a moment. Her voice regained a bit of its distant, detached edge. “Alex, we need to talk. Unfortunately, there is a great deal to say, and like the last time, I can’t stay long.”

“I’m listening.”

She glanced at passersby. “Is there somewhere not far away that’s a little more private?”

Alex pointed down the hall. “There’s a restaurant down there that’s nice. The lunch rush is over, so it would be quiet and more private. How about if I buy you lunch and you can tell me what you have the time to tell me?”

She pressed her lips tightly together a moment as she considered the place he’d pointed out. “All right.” He wondered why she was being so cautious. Maybe she had a grandfather like Ben.

As they stood, she held the painting tightly to herself. “Thank you for this, Alex. You can’t possibly know what this means to me. This is one of my favorite places. I go there because it’s beautiful.”

He bowed his head at her kind words. “I painted it because it’s beautiful. That you like it is a greater reward for me than you could know.”

He still wanted to know how he could have painted a place she knew, a place she knew so well, but he sensed the tension in her posture and decided to go easy. She’d said that she wanted to explain things, so he thought it best if he didn’t intimidate her out of wanting to do so.

Alex picked up the rolled canvases and then tucked them under an arm as they started down the hall.

“How did you come by the name Jax?”

She brightened, almost laughed, at the question. “It’s a game. You toss jax on the ground, throw a ball up in the air, and then try to pick up the jax and catch the ball in the same hand after it bounces once. It’s a simple child’s game but as you try for ever more jax it requires a sharp eye and quick hands. Certain people were amazed at how quick I am with my hands, so my parents named me Jax.”

Alex frowned as he tried to reconcile the story. “But when you were born you couldn’t have played anything yet. A kid has to be, what, five to ten years old before they can play that kind of game? How could your parents know you were going to be quick with your hands when you were just born?”

She stared straight ahead as she walked. “Prophecy.”

Alex blinked. “What?”

“A prophet told them about me before I was born, told them how everyone would be amazed at how quick I would be with my hands, how it would first be noticed because I would be a natural at the game of jax. That’s why they named me Jax.”

Alex wondered what kind of weird religion her parents belonged to that put that much stock in the words of prophets. He thought that if her parents expected her to be quick with her hands then they would encourage her to practice and as a result she would end up quick. He wanted to say so, to say a lot of things, ask a lot of questions, but a growing sense of caution reminded him to take it easy and let her tell her own story. So he kept his questions on the light side.

“But Jack, like in jacks, is a boy’s name.”

“The boy’s name Jack is spelled with a k. My name is spelled with an x. J-A-X comes from the game of jax, not the boy’s name.”

“But the game is called jacks, J-A-C-K-S.”

“Not where I come from,” she said.

“Where’s that?”

“You wouldn’t know it,” she said after a moment. “It’s a long way from here.”

For some reason she had avoided answering his question, but he let it go.

As they strolled down the hall he watched her out of the corner of his eye. He often watched people, studied their posture, their natural way of moving, their attitude expressed through the way they carried themselves, to help him accurately paint the human form.

Most people when in public conveyed either a casual or a businesslike attitude. People were often focused on the place they were headed, never really aware of anything along the way. That tunnel vision affected the way they moved. Those projecting a businesslike attitude held their bodies tight. Others, being self-absorbed and out of touch with their surroundings, moved in a looser fashion. Most people were self-absorbed, unaware of who was around them or of any potential threat, and their body language betrayed that fact. In some cases that casual attitude drew dangerous attention. It was what predators looked for.

Most people never consciously considered the reality that bad things happened, that there were those who would harm them. They simply had never encountered such situations and didn’t believe it could happen to them. They were willfully oblivious.

Jax moved in a different way. Her form, unlike the tight businesslike posture, carried tension, like a spring that was always kept tight, yet she moved with grace. She carried herself with confidence, aware of everything around her. In some ways it reminded him of the way a predator moved. Through small clues in her posture she projected an aura of cool composure that bordered on intimidating. This was not a woman whom most men would approach lightly.

In fact, that awareness was what he found the most riveting. She watched the people moving through the halls—every one of them—without always looking directly at them. She kept track of them out of the corner of her eye, measuring each, checking each one as if for distance and potential threat.

“Are you looking for anyone in particular?” he asked.

Absorbed in thoughts of her own, she said, “Yes.”

“Who?”

“A different kind of human.”

In an instant Alex yanked her around a corner and slammed her up against the wall. He hadn’t intended to be so rough about it, but the shock of hearing those words tripped something within him and he acted.

“What did you say?” he asked through gritted teeth.

He held her left arm with his right hand. The painting was pressed between them. His left forearm lay across her throat, his hand gripping her dress at her opposite shoulder. If he were to push, he could crush her windpipe.

She stared unflinching into his eyes. “I said I was looking for a different kind of human. Now, I suggest that you think better of what you’re doing and carefully let go of me. Don’t move too fast or you’ll get your throat cut and I’d hate to have to do that. I’m on your side, Alex.”

Alex frowned and then, when she pushed just a little, realized that she was indeed holding the point of a knife to the underside of his chin. He didn’t know where the knife had come from. He didn’t know how she had gotten it there so fast. But he did know that she wasn’t kidding.

He also didn’t know which of them would beat the other if it came down to it. He was fast, too. But it was not, and had not been, his intent to hurt her—merely to restrain her.

He slowly started to release his hold on her. “My mother said the same thing to me a few days ago.”

“So?”

“She’s confined to a mental institution. When I visited her she told me that I must run and hide before they get me. When I asked her who it was that was trying to get me, she said ‘a different kind of human.’ Then the report came on about those two officers being murdered. It said they were found with their necks broken. My mother said, ‘They break people’s necks.’ Then she retreated into that faraway world of hers. She hasn’t spoken since. She won’t speak again for weeks.”

Jax squeezed his arm sympathetically. “I’m sorry about your mother, Alex.”

He glanced around to see if anyone was paying attention to them. No one was. People probably assumed that they were two lovers whispering sweet nothings to each other.

His blood was up and, despite her calming voice and her gentle touch, he was having trouble coming back down. He made himself unclench his jaw.

Something between them had just changed, changed in a deadly serious way. He was sure that she felt it as well.

“I want to know how it is that you said the very same thing my crazy mother said. I want you to tell me that.”

From mere inches away she gazed into his eyes. “That’s why I’m here, Alex.”

10.

THE DOOR TO THE REGENT GRILL, covered in tufted black leather, closed silently behind them. There were no windows in the murky inner sanctum of the restaurant. The hostess, a pixie of a woman with an airy scarf flowing out behind, led them to a quiet niche that Alex requested. With the exception of two older women out in the center of the room, under a broad but dimly lit cylindrical chandelier, the restaurant was empty of patrons.

Empty or not, Alex didn’t want his back to the room. He got the distinct feeling that Jax didn’t, either.

They both slid into the booth, sitting side by side, with their backs to the wall.

The padded, upholstered walls covered with gold fabric, the plush chairs, the mottled blue carpets, and the ivory tablecloths made the restaurant a quiet, intimate retreat. The location in back felt safe in its seclusion.

After the hostess set the menus down and left and the busboy had filled their water glasses, Jax again glanced around before speaking. “Look, Alex, this isn’t going to be easy to explain. It’s complex and I don’t have enough time right now to make it all clear for you. You need to trust me.”

Alex wasn’t exactly in an indulgent mood. “Why should I trust you?”

She smiled a little. “Because I may very well be the only one who can keep you from getting your neck broken.”

“By who?”

She nodded toward the rolled-up canvases on the bench on the far side of him. “By the people who did that to your paintings.”

His brow twitched. “How would you know about that?”

Her gaze turned down to her folded hands. “We caught a glimpse of him doing it.”

“‘We’? What do you mean, we caught a glimpse of him doing it?”

“We were trying to look through the mirror in Mr. Martin’s gallery.

We were trying to find you.”

“Where were you when you were ‘looking’ through the mirror?”

“Please, Alex, would you just listen? I don’t have the time to explain a hundred different complicated details. Please?”

Alex let out a deep breath and relented. “All right.”

“I know that the things I’m telling you might sound impossible, but I swear that I’m telling you the truth. Don’t close your mind to what is beyond your present understanding. People sometimes invent or discover things that expand their knowledge so that they accept as possible what only the day before they had thought was impossible. This is something like that.”

“You mean like how people used to think that no one would ever be able to carry around a tiny little phone without it having to be connected to wires.”

She looked a little confused by the analogy. “I suppose so.” She turned back to the subject at hand. “One day I hope I can help you better grasp the reality of the situation. For now, please try to keep an open mind.”

Alex slowly twirled the stem of the water glass between his thumb and first finger, watching the ice remain still in place as the glass spun. “So, you were saying how you were looking for me.”

Jax nodded. “I knew that you had a connection to the gallery. It’s how I knew where you were today. I had to hurry if I was to catch you. Because we had to hurry we couldn’t prepare properly and as a consequence I don’t have much time here.”

Alex wiped a hand across his face. He was starting to feel like maybe he was being played for a fool. “You need a room with my mother.”

“You think this is some kind of joke?” She looked up at him with fiery intensity. “You have no idea how hard this is for me. You have no idea the things I’ve been through—the chances I’ve had to take to come here.”

She clenched her jaw and swallowed, trying to keep her voice under control. “This isn’t a joke, Alex. You have no idea how afraid I am, how lost I feel here, how alone, how terrified.”

“I’m sorry, Jax.” Alex looked away from the pain in her brown eyes and took a sip of water. “But you’re not alone. Tell me what’s going on?”

She let out a calming breath. “I’ll do my best, but you have to understand that for now I simply can’t tell you everything. It isn’t just that I don’t have the time to explain it all right now, it’s also that you aren’t yet ready to hear it all. Worse, we’re in the dark about a lot of it ourselves.”

“Who is this ‘we’ you keep mentioning?”

She turned cautious. “Friends of mine.”

“Friends.”

She nodded. “We’ve been working for years, trying for years to figure some of it out. They helped get me here.”

“Get here from where?”

She looked away and said simply, “From where I live.”

Alex didn’t like her evasive answer, but he decided that there was no harm in just letting it play out for the moment.

“Go on.”

“We finally came to a point where we thought it would work, so despite the risk we attempted it, but we don’t yet know how to make it work reliably. Not like the others do.”

“You mean work to get here, to where I live, from where you live?”

“That’s right.”

“What would have happened if you hadn’t gotten it right, if it didn’t ‘work’?”

She stared into his eyes for a long moment. “Then I would have been lost for all eternity in a very bad place.”

Alex could tell by the tension in her expression how real the peril was—to her, at least—and how much the thought of failure frightened her. Considering that this woman was not easily intimidated, that in and of itself gave him pause.

He was about to again ask who the others on her team were when a waitress came up to the table and smiled warmly. “Can I get you two something to drink? Maybe a glass of wine?”

“I could really use some hot tea,” Jax said.

The tone of that simple request revealed how weary she was, and how close she was to her wits’ end.

“I’m fine with water. The lady doesn’t have a lot of time, though. Maybe we could order?” He turned to Jax as he picked up a menu. “What would you like? Chicken? Beef? A salad?”

“I doesn’t matter. Whatever you’re having is fine.”

It was clear that she didn’t care about food, so Alex ordered two chicken salads.

As the waitress left, Alex’s phone rang. He reflexively asked Jax to excuse him a moment as he pulled the phone out of his pocket.

“Hello, this is Alex.”

He’d thought that maybe it was Mr. Martin calling to say that he’d changed his mind. Instead, Alex was greeted with garbled noises. He heard a strained, disembodied voice torn by howling that sounded like it said, “She’s there. She’s there.” Otherworldly whispers and strange, soft moans underlay the crackling static.

And then Alex made out his name in the background whispers.

Jax leaned in. “What’s wrong?”

He was going to flip the cover closed and tell her that it was nothing, but for some reason he decided that maybe she should hear it. He held the phone up to her ear.

She leaned in closer, listening.

And then the blood drained from her face.

“Dear spirits,” she whispered to herself, “they know I’m here.”

“What?” Alex asked. “Do you recognize it?”

Stricken with alarm, she stared wide-eyed at him as she listened to the sounds. “Make it stop.”

Alex took the phone back and closed it.

“They’re tracking you with that thing.”

“Tracking me?”

Her face still ashen, she said, “From the other side.”

Alex frowned. “The other side of what?”

When she only stared with a haunted look, Alex turned the phone off. Before putting it in a pocket, just to be safe, he popped out the battery and put it in a different pocket.

The waitress swooped in and set down a cup for Jax and a pot of hot water along with a small basket of tea bags.

After the waitress left, Jax poured herself some hot water. Her hands were trembling.

For a moment she sat staring at the cup of hot water, as if she expected it to do something. She finally picked up the cup, brought it close, and peered down into the water. She set the cup back down.

Jax nested her hands in her lap. Her brow wrinkled as she fought back tears.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

For a woman who had the presence of mind to put a knife to his throat when he had unexpectedly shoved her up against the wall, she seemed pretty shaken.

“How do you make the tea work?” she asked in a broken voice on the ragged edge of control.

Alex was baffled. “Make the tea work? What do you mean?”

“I never imagined how hard this would be,” she said, more to herself than him.

“The tea?”

She crumpled her napkin in a tight fist as she fought back tears.

“Everything.” She swallowed and then with great effort summoned her voice. “Please, Alex. I want some tea, but I don’t know how to work it.”

Seeing her genuine distress made his heart hurt. He wouldn’t ever have imagined that this woman would let herself be seen as helpless. Something was bringing her to the edge.

Alex gently touched his fingers to the back of her hand. “It’s all right, Jax. Don’t let it get to you. We all have days when we’re overwhelmed. It’s no big deal. I’ll help you.”

He pulled a package of tea from the basket, opened the paper flap, and pulled out the tea bag. He held it up by the square paper at the end of the string.

“See? The tea is in here, in the tea bag.” Her gaze tracked the tea bag the whole way as he lowered it into the cup and draped the string over the edge. “Just let it steep for a little bit and you’ll have tea.”

She leaned in and looked down into the cup. As she watched, the water started darkening.

Jax’s sudden smile banished her tears. Her face took on the look of a child who had just seen a magic trick for the first time.

“That’s how it works? That’s all you have to do?”

Alex nodded. “That’s it. You obviously don’t have tea bags where you come from.”

She shook her head. “It’s very different here.”

“You like it better where you live, don’t you?”

She considered the question only briefly. “Yes. It’s home. Despite the trouble, it’s home. I think you would like it there, too.”

“What makes you think that?”

She reached over and trailed her fingers tenderly across the painting. “You paint such places. You paint beauty.” She looked back up at him. “This will help me convince the others.”

“Convince them of what?”

“Convince them to trust my choices.”

“Who are these others, Jax?”

“Others something like me.”

“They live in this other place? Where you live?”

“Yes. Do you remember the two men when you first saw me?” she asked, seemingly changing the subject. “The two that the authorities stopped?”

Alex nodded. “The pirates. Do you know who they were?”

“Yes. They were a different kind of human. Different from you. Different from your mother. Among other things, they will break the necks of anyone who gets in their way. Those are the people your mother feared.”

“What do you mean they—”

The waitress appeared with two plates. “I had them put a rush on it, since you haven’t much time.”

“Thank you,” Jax said with a sincere smile.

After the waitress had hurried off to her work, Alex went back to his questions. “What do you mean—”

“Do I have to do anything to this so that I can eat it?” Jax looked up from the salad. “Is there anything I need to do first?”

Alex held up a fork. “No. Just dig in.” He stabbed a piece of chicken with the fork. “The chicken is cut up so you don’t even have to use a knife.” He realized that if a knife was needed she would have that knack down pat.

He ate the bite to demonstrate.

She smiled. “Thank you, Alex, for being patient. For understanding that patience is needed in this.”

If she only knew how impatient he was, but he didn’t want to spook her.

“Why?”

“Because if I were to tell you everything right now you wouldn’t believe me, and you need to believe me. But, on the other hand, time is slipping through my fingers, so I have to tell you at least some of it.”

Alex almost smiled at the curious dance they were doing, both trying not to spook the other.

“Jax, how did my mother know those things—know about a different kind of human, about men who break people’s necks?”

“I think in part because we tried to warn her.”

“About what?”

“That people were hunting her. But we couldn’t get here, yet. The others could. They’ve been coming here for some time now. We tried to warn her through mirrors, but they apparently got to her.

We tried to warn you, too.”

The hair on the backs of Alex’s arms stood up on end.

“My grandfather showed me some papers about an inheritance. Does that have anything to do with these other people you tried to warn my mother about?”

She stared down at her plate for a time before answering. “All we know at the moment is that there are some very dangerous people who are up to something. We haven’t yet managed to fit the pieces together.”

Alex wanted a better answer. “My grandfather said that the inheritance was supposed to go to my father on his twenty-seventh birthday, but since he died before then it was reassigned to my mother. She had to be put in an asylum before the inheritance could go to her on her twenty-seventh birthday. It seems logical that this inheritance might be connected with what happened to her.”

“I don’t know, but it’s possible. I’m sorry we weren’t able to help her, Alex. I’m sorry your family has had such trouble.”

Alex ate silently for a moment. “My grandfather, Ben, says that he thinks that the whole troublesome matter has something to do with the seven—the seven in twenty-seven.”

“The seven?” She looked incredulous. “That’s just crazy.”

“That’s what I thought.”

She shook her head to herself. “The seven. How could he ever come up with something like that? It’s the nine.”

Alex’s forkful of chicken paused on the way to his mouth.

“What?”

“It’s the nine. It’s not the seven in twenty-seven—it’s the nine. Two plus seven. Nine. Nines are triggers.”

“That doesn’t make sense. I was nine, once. My father was. My mother was. We were all eighteen. The one plus the eight in eighteen equals nine, just like the two plus the seven in twenty-seven equals nine.”

Alex couldn’t believe he was arguing such a point.

Jax was shaking her head. “Yes, but the nine and the eighteen are the first and second occurrence of a nine. Twenty-seven is the third nine. It’s the third that’s important.”

Alex stared at her. “The third nine.”

She nodded. “That’s right. Threes are pivotal numbers—spells of threes and such.”

Alex blinked in disbelief. “Spells of—”

“Three is a base component of nine. The multiplying element.” Jax gestured with her fork, as if to imply that it was self-evident. “That’s why twenty-seven is key: it’s the third nine. It’s called the Law of Nines.”

“The Law of Nines,” Alex repeated as he stared. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“It’s easier than tea.”

“Somehow, I don’t think so,” Alex said.

The woman believed in numerology. Alex thought that Ben should be the one sitting there having such a conversation.

Alex couldn’t believe that a number could have any kind of real meaning. A thought came to mind. He almost hated to mention it.

“I was born on September ninth. Ninth month, ninth day, at nine in the evening.”

“To be precise, you were born at nine minutes after nine.”

A chill tickled up between his shoulder blades to the nape of his neck. “How do you know that?”

“We checked.” She took a sip of tea as she watched him over the rim of her cup.

“What else do you know about me?”

“Well, you don’t remember your dreams.”

Alex’s frown deepened. “How in the world would you know that?”

“You’re a Rahl.” She shrugged. “Rahl men don’t remember their dreams.”

“How do you know about Rahl men? Are there Rahls where you come from?”

“No,” she said with a suddenly wistful look. “Where I come from the House of Rahl has long since died out.”

“Look, Jax, I’m only getting more confused.” He refrained from using a stronger word than “confused.” “You’re making me think all kinds of things about you that I’d really rather not think.” He was starting to think that she was crazy—or maybe that he was. “Why don’t you clear it up for me.”

“I’m not from your world,” she said in quiet finality as she looked into his eyes. “I’m a different kind of human than you.”

11.

ALEX STARED FOR A MOMENT. “You mean you’re an alien. From Mars, or something.”

Her expression darkened. “I may not know what Mars is, but your tone is all too clear. This isn’t a joke. I risked my life to come here.”

“Risked your life how?”

“That isn’t your concern.”

“What is my concern?”

“That there are people from my world, dangerous people, who are likely to come after you for reasons we don’t yet fully understand. I wouldn’t like you to be unprepared.”

He wondered how one prepared for people from some other dimension or time or twilight zone or something—he couldn’t imagine what—who were liable to come looking for one.

Alex tapped his fork on a piece of chicken in his salad as he considered her words. If there was ever a look that meant business, she was giving it to him.

Still, he just couldn’t bring himself to take seriously such talk of people coming from a different world. He wondered yet again if his lifelong worry was coming to pass: he wondered if he could be going crazy like his mother had. He knew that she believed things that weren’t real.

He pushed the thoughts aside. He wasn’t crazy. Jax was real enough. It actually made more sense for him to believe that she was crazy. Yet, despite how absurd her story was, she simply didn’t strike him as crazy.

Even if he couldn’t believe that this woman was from some other world, something seemed to be going on, and it was serious. Deadly serious, if he was to believe her.

He wanted to ask her exactly how she had traveled from this other world, but he instead checked his tone and started over. “I’m listening.”

She took a sip of tea. “Someone is meddling.”

“With my family?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Most likely because you’re a Rahl. We believe that unless you have children you will be the last in the Rahl bloodline.”

“And you think someone is interested in the Rahls?”

“If I had to guess I’d say that they may have killed your father to prevent him from getting to his twenty-seventh birthday.”

“My father died in a car accident. He wasn’t murdered.”

“Maybe not.” Jax arched an eyebrow. “But if you had been run down the other day don’t you suppose it would have looked like an accident?”

“Are you saying that was intentional? That those men were trying to kill me? Why?”

She leaned back and sighed as she dismissed the suggestion with a flick of her hand. “I’m only saying that if they had been trying to kill you it would have looked like an accident, don’t you think?”

He stabbed a piece of chicken as he recalled the murderous look the bearded man had given him. He looked up at her. She was watching him again.

“Why are these people so interested in the Rahl bloodline?”

“We’re not entirely sure, yet. Like I said, we don’t fully understand their reasons or what is going on.”

She seemed not to be sure about a lot of things. Alex didn’t know if he believed that she was as in the dark as she claimed, but he decided that since she chose not to tell him yet she must have her reasons, so he let it go.

Jax sat back a little as she went on. “When I was but a child, a few people started to get an inkling that something was going on, something nefarious. They dug into things, followed people, spied on them, and eventually, along the way, as one thing led to another, they found out that your mother was in danger. They tried to help her. In the end they weren’t able to do so. They didn’t yet know enough.”

“If twenty-seven is so important, what with the Law of Nines and all,” he asked, “then why didn’t these dangerous people do anything to my grandfather, Ben? He’s a Rahl.” There were just too many holes in her story. He gestured with his fork to make his point. “Or, for that matter, why not come after any of the previous generations?”

“Some of my friends believe that these other people simply weren’t able to get here yet.”

“But you think differently?”

Reluctantly, she nodded. “I think that important elements of the prophecy weren’t yet in place. It was too soon. Up until now it had been the wrong time, the wrong Rahl, for the prophecy.”

“I don’t believe in fortune-telling.”

She shrugged. “It could be that you’re right, that it’s nothing more than some kind of baseless lunatic idea they came up with. They would hardly be the first group of people who acted on a completely deluded idea.”

He hadn’t expected her answer. “That’s true enough.”

“Whatever their reasons, some time ago they found a way to come here. These are people who, in my world, kill for the things they believe in.”

Alex again thought about the plumbing truck that had nearly run him down. He thought about the two dead officers, their necks broken. He remembered his mother saying “They break people’s necks.” He didn’t want to ask the question for fear of lending credibility to a subject he didn’t think deserved it, but he couldn’t help himself.

“What is this prophecy?”

She glanced around the empty room, checking that no one was near. The two women had already paid their check and left. The waitress was at a distant wait station, her back to them, folding a stack of black napkins for the dinner setting.

Jax leaned in and lowered her voice. “The gist of the prophecy is that only someone from this world has a chance to save our world.”

He bit back a sarcastic remark and asked instead, “Save it from what?”

“Maybe save it from these people who are coming here to make sure that the prophecy can’t come to pass.”

“Sounds like a dog chasing its own tail,” he said.

She opened her hands in an empathetic gesture. “For all we know, it could be that they don’t believe you’re a part of this prophecy.

Maybe they want something else from you.”

“But you think I’m involved in this in some way.”

She laid her fingers on the sunlit place in the painting beside her before looking up at him. “You may live in this world, be a part of this world, but you have links, no matter how insubstantial, to our world. You proved it by painting a place in my world.”

Or so she said. “It could just be a place that resembles it.”

She remained mute, but the look she gave him was answer enough.

Alex ran his fingers back through his hair. “Your world, my world. Jax, I hope you can understand that when all is said and done I can’t really believe what you’re telling me.”

“I know. I couldn’t believe it when I first came here and saw what looked like huge metal things floating in the air, or carriages moving without horses, or any of a dozen other things that to me are impossible. It’s not easy for me to reconcile it all in my own head. This will not be easy for you, either, Alex, but I know of no other way if there is to be a chance to save our world.”

He felt as if he had just seen a sliver of light through the door she had opened a crack. This was a mission of desperation as far as she was concerned. She meant for him to help her save her world.

He wasn’t sure if she had intended for him to see that brief glimpse of her purpose. Rather than try to pry at that door and have her slam it shut in his face, he asked something else, hoping to put her at ease.

“How is your world different from mine? Is it that they don’t have advances like airplanes, cars, and the technology we have?” Were he not sitting with a woman who seemed deadly serious, he doubted that he could have asked such questions with a straight face. “What makes the people there, what makes you, a different kind of human?”

“This is a world without magic,” she said without a trace of humor.

“So…you mean to imply that there is magic in your world? Real magic?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve seen it? Seen real magic.”

She studied his eyes for a moment before a slight but intimidating smile grew at the corners of her mouth.

“Among other abilities, I am a sorceress.”

“A sorceress who can’t make tea.”

“A sorceress who in my world can do a great deal more than make tea.”

“But not in this world?”

“No,” she finally admitted, her daunting smile fading. “Not in this world. This is a world without magic. I have no power here.”

He found that to be rather convenient.

“So, we come from very different worlds, then.”

“Not so different,” Jax said in a way that sounded like it was somehow meant to be comforting.

Alex studied her placid expression. “We don’t have magic. You say your world does. How much different could our worlds be?”

“Not so different,” she repeated. “We have magic, but so do you, after a fashion. It’s just that it manifests itself in a different way. You do the very same things we do, if with different methods.”

“Like what?”

“Well, that thing in your pocket.”

“The phone?”

She nodded as she leaned back and pulled something out of a pocket near her waist. She held up a small black book.

“This is a journey book. It works much like that phone you get messages on. Like your phone, we use this to get messages from people and to convey information to others. I write in my journey book and through magic the words appear at the same time in its twin. You say words on your phone device and words come out somewhere else. I am accustomed to writing messages, not speaking them. But you can also make your phone device function as a journey book, make words appear in it, am I right?”

Bethany’s text messages sprang to mind. “Yes, but that’s all done through technology.”

She shrugged. “We do the same things you do. You do it by means of technology, we use magic. The words may be different but they do basically the same thing. They both implement intent and that’s all that really matters. They both accomplish the same tasks.”

“Technology is nothing at all like magic,” Alex insisted.

“Technology itself is not what’s important, is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you really know any better than I do how a phone device works? Can you explain to me how the message gets from one place to another”—she waggled her fingers across in front of them—“how the words come invisibly through the air and end up here, in the device in your pocket, in a way that you can understand them? Do you really know what makes all that technology work? Can you explain all the unseeable things that happen, the things that you take for granted?”

“I guess not,” he admitted.

“Nor can I explain how a journey book works. What’s important is that the people here used their minds to create this technology in order to accomplish their ends, much like those where I come from think up ways to create things using magic to accomplish what we need to accomplish. It’s as simple as that. It’s second nature to both of us. We both use what has been created. For all you know, your phone really could work through magic and you would never know the difference.”

“But there are people here who understand the technology and can describe exactly how all of the parts work, how the phone works, how the words appear.”

“I know people who can describe exactly how a journey book works. I’ve even sat through long lectures on the subject, but while I get the general nature of it I still can’t tell you exactly how to align the fibers within the paper with Additive and Subtractive elements to give them the sympathetic harmony needed to make words appear. It’s not my area of expertise. What matters most to me is that someone somehow did create it and I can use it to help me accomplish the things I need to do.

“We simply say that it works by magic and leave it at that. How it works isn’t so important to me. That it does work is what matters.

“If you wish to describe what we do in our world as merely a different form of technology rather than use the word ‘magic,’ if that makes it easier for you to accept, then call it by that name. The name makes no difference.

“Magic and technology are merely tools of mankind. If you called that phone a magic talking box, would you use it any differently?”

“I concede the point.” Alex gestured. “So, do something. Show me.”

She leaned back and slipped the little black book back where she kept it. “I told you, this is a world without magic. I can’t use magic here. Magic doesn’t work here. Believe me, I wish it did, because it would make this a lot easier.”

“I hope you realize how convenient that excuse sounds.”

She leaned in again with that deadly serious look she had. “I’m not here to prove anything to you, Alex. I’m here to find out what’s going on so I can try to stop it. You just happen to be in the middle of it and I’d not like to see you get hurt.”

That reminded him of what he’d said when he had pulled her back from getting run over by pirate plumbers—that he’d not like to see her get hurt.

“A little difficult, isn’t it, if you can’t use your sorceress powers, considering that you don’t know how this world works. I mean, no offense, but you didn’t even know how to make tea.”

“I didn’t come here thinking it would be easy. I came out of desperation. There is a saying in our world that sometimes there is magic in acts of desperation. We were desperate.”

Alex scratched his temple, unable to contain his sarcasm. “Don’t tell me, the people who sent you are sorcerers. A whole coven of sorcerers.”

She stared into his eyes for a moment. Tears welled up.

“I didn’t risk eternity in the black depths of the underworld to come here for this.”

She set down her napkin, picked up the painting, and stood. “Thank you for the beautiful painting. I hope you heed my warnings, Alex. Since you don’t seem to need my help, I’ll attend to other concerns.”

She stopped and turned back. “By the way, covens have to do with witches—thirteen of them—not sorcerers. I’d not like to even contemplate thirteen witch women all together in one place at once. They’re known for their rather rash temperament. Be glad they can’t get here; they’d simply gut you and be done with it.”

She marched away without a further word.

Alex knew that he’d blown it. He’d crossed a line he hadn’t known was there. Or maybe he crossed a line that he should have known was there. She had wanted him to listen, to try to understand, to trust her. But how could he be expected to believe such a preposterous story?

The waitress had seen Jax leaving and headed for the table. Alex pulled out a hundred-dollar bill—the only kind of cash he had—threw it on the table, and told the waitress to keep the change. It was the biggest tip he’d ever left in his life. He rushed across the quiet room, weaving among the tables.

“Jax, wait. Please?”

Without slowing she glided through the door and out into the halls, her black dress flowing out behind like dark fire.

“Jax, I’m sorry. Look, I don’t know anything about it. I admit it. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be so flippant—it’s one of my faults—but how would you react if the situation were reversed, if before today I told you how we make tea?”

She ignored his words.

“Jax, please, don’t go.”

He broke into a trot trying to catch up with her. Without looking back she turned down a small, dimly lit hall toward a side exit. Long skeins of wavy blond hair trailed out behind her like flags of fury. An exit sign cast the hall in hazy red, otherworldly light.

Jax reached the door before he could catch up with her. She stopped abruptly and turned to him in a way that made him stop dead in his tracks. He was almost close enough to reach out and touch her. Something warned him to stay where he was.

“Do you know the meaning of the name Alexander?”

Alex wanted to say something to her, to apologize, to talk her into staying, but he knew without a doubt that he had better answer her question and no more or he would cross a line…forever.

“It means ‘defender of man, warrior.’”

She smiled to herself just a little. “That’s right. And do you value your name, its meaning?”

“Why do you think I sign my work, my passion, ‘Alexander’?”

She gazed at him a long moment, her features softening just a bit. “Maybe there is hope for you. Maybe there is yet hope for all of us.”

She abruptly turned and threw open the door. Without looking back she said over her shoulder, “Heed my words, Alexander, defender of man: Trouble will find you.”

Harsh afternoon light flared into the hall, turning her figure into nothing more than a harsh fragment of silhouette twisting the shafts of light.

Alex reached the door just as it slammed shut. He threw it open again and ran out into an empty side parking lot. Trees grew in a green band close to the building. Beyond grassy hillocks waited parked cars that in the flat gray light of the overcast afternoon no longer looked nearly so lustrous.

Jax was nowhere to be seen.

Alex stood staring around at the quiet, empty surroundings.

She’d been out of his sight for only a few seconds. She couldn’t have been more than a half-dozen steps ahead of him. It seemed crazy, but she had vanished. The woman had just vanished into thin air.

Just like she had vanished the last time.

He wondered if this was how it had been for his mother.

12.

ALEX REALIZED THAT it was dark and that he had been driving around in a daze for hours. He found it unnerving that he hadn’t even noticed that it had gotten dark.

Jax’s final words, her warning, kept echoing in his thoughts. He didn’t know if she had meant them literally, or in the way his grandfather always meant them. He was beginning to wonder if his grandfather had always meant more than Alex had thought. While Ben had the seven wrong—according to Jax—he had been on to something, or close to it, anyway.

But that was only if the things she had been saying were true. If not, then it made Ben just the eccentric old man most people believed him to be. But Alex knew him to be a strong and wise man, a man in many ways shaped, perhaps haunted, by his years in special forces, doing only god knew what back before Alex had been born.

Alex had learned only obliquely, from his parents’ conversations, the shadowy shape of Ben’s history. Alex had on occasion seen medals usually kept out of sight. Twice he had heard phone calls from men Ben only addressed as “sir.” Ben would smile in that distant way he had and thank the caller for letting him know. Ben never talked about the things he had done, dismissing them as his past, as his time away.

But he did pass on lessons from those times. Ben thought it was important for Alex to know certain things that few others could teach him. Those lessons spoke volumes about the teacher.

Alex again wondered about Jax’s warning, and about Ben’s.

Alex didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know how to handle such a strange situation. It just didn’t fit any template he knew of. No one, not even Ben, had ever told him how to handle a person who said they were from a different world.

He felt foolish taking such a story seriously, but at the same time he wanted to believe her. She had needed him to believe her. He felt trapped in a situation where if he believed her he might end up being a fool, a dupe, but if he didn’t believe her, and what she was telling him actually was true, then he might end up being responsible for some undefined but terrible consequences.

But how could such a story be true? How could he even consider believing such a story about visitors from other worlds? It simply wasn’t possible.

Yet his mother had warned him of some of the very same things Jax had tried to warn him about. He couldn’t make that add up. How could he not take such a thing seriously?

Jax was the key to finding the truth. More than that, even, it felt to him like she was somehow the key to his life.

He felt drawn to her in a way he’d never been drawn to anyone else. She was a mesmerizing woman. For Alex, her insight and intelligence amplified her beauty. Despite all of her mystery and the strange things she had to say, he felt comfortable with her, more comfortable than he had ever felt with anyone. She had the same inner spark—some way of looking at the world—that he had. He could see it in her eyes. He almost felt as if he could look into her eyes and see her soul laid bare to him.

Gloom crushed him for having driven her away.

In his mind, he again ran through a speech he would like to make. He would like to ask her to imagine how she would feel if he were to abruptly show up in her world and tell her that he talked into a metal device and people anywhere in the world could hear him. How would she have taken the news if he told her that people in his world flew in metal tubes tens of thousands of feet in the air? He couldn’t stop his racing mind from coming up with examples of technology that she would surely find impossible to believe. If he had come to her in the way she had come to him, would she have believed him?

It troubled him somewhat that even thinking of what he might say to her might be taking her story too seriously and falling into some kind of con game.

He wanted to tell her so much, to find out so much. Some of the things she’d said were just flat too eerily correct to discount, but at the same time her story was beyond hard to swallow. Other worlds. Who was she trying to fool? There were no other worlds.

Did she expect him to believe that some sorcerers had boiled up a magic brew and somehow beamed her to the Regent Center? And that yet others had placed a call to his phone from a different universe, or planet, or dimension, or something?

He wondered why, if her story was so hard to swallow, he had smashed his cell phone.

He realized that he needed to talk to her more than any other person in the world. Or in both worlds, if it really was true.

But if it wasn’t true, then what had he seen? What about the things she knew, the things she could tell him that she shouldn’t be able to know. How in the world could she know that he didn’t remember his dreams? That was just plain creepy. Was she simply taking a wild stab in the dark? Guessing? After all, a lot of people probably didn’t remember their dreams.

Or did she really know?

Yet again he worried that the whole thing could be some kind of elaborate trick. There were stage magicians, after all, who could make a woman, an elephant, or even a plane disappear. Even though they made it look completely convincing he knew that such things weren’t real, knew it was all a trick.

Alex didn’t like being tricked by magicians. It always struck him as a form of dishonesty about the nature of reality. Maybe that was why he didn’t like magic tricks—and magic, real magic, simply didn’t exist. He’d always felt that reality was better than magical; it was wondrous. That was part of the reason he never tired of painting the beauty of the world.

But why would Jax try to trick him? What reason would she have for doing such a thing? What was there for her to gain?

The fifty thousand acres came to mind.

He couldn’t stop wondering if it could be some kind of trick to con him out of the inheritance. That much land was worth a fortune.

She claimed to have watched through a mirror as someone had gone into the gallery and defaced his paintings, but wouldn’t it make more sense that it had been done by someone working with her? It seemed like a lot of money for a con, but if she was really after the land, the cost of the paintings would be a pittance in comparison to what they stood to gain if they could somehow trick him out of a fortune likely to be worth millions.

Such a motive easily made more sense than that she had come from some distant world, that she was a different kind of human, a sorceress with magical abilities. Who was she kidding? A sorceress. What kind of fool did she take him for? Did she really expect him to believe her?

But he did.

Against everything, he did. He couldn’t explain why, but he believed her. There was something about her that struck him as not only sincere but desperate.

Either she had to be the best con artist ever born, or she really was a different kind of human from a different world. He couldn’t imagine how it could be anything other than a trick or the truth. It came down to one of those two choices, and that was what was driving him crazy.

If she really was telling him the truth, then maybe his father, who had died in a car accident, had really been murdered and his mother’s brain damage wasn’t anything natural, like a stroke, as the doctors had thought. If Jax really was telling the truth, that meant that there really was something going on, something deadly serious.

But instead of telling her that he believed her, or at least listening respectfully, he’d chased her away. He desperately wished he hadn’t done that, but he hadn’t been able to help himself.

Maybe he’d just been afraid of being a sucker, of being the dupe of a beautiful woman. Wasn’t that how con artists worked? Use a beautiful woman to lull a guy into believing anything, doing anything?

But he did believe her.

Right then, more than anything, lacking Jax, Alex decided that he needed to talk to Ben. His grandfather, strange as he could sometimes be, seemed like the right person to help unravel what had become a tight knot of doubts.

Alex smiled at the thought of explaining that it wasn’t the seven in twenty-seven, but the nine, a number powered by threes, that was really what was important. His grandfather would be astounded. His grandfather would take such talk seriously. His grandfather might even be able to put it all into some kind of context that made sense.

As Alex turned onto Atlantic Street, headed home, he saw a red glow in the sky. Within a few blocks it became clear that it was a fire. A house in the distance was burning. A red glow lit billowing black smoke.

He soon realized that the blaze was in the direction of his house. Alex gripped the steering wheel tighter and tighter the closer he got to home. Could someone from this other world already be trying to cause him trouble, maybe even kill him? He sped up, suddenly eager to get home, hoping that it wasn’t his house that was burning—there were valuable paintings there. Valuable to him, anyway.

When he spotted flashing lights in the rearview mirror he pulled over. An ambulance raced past. He suddenly felt guilty worrying about mere paintings and hoped no one was hurt in a fire. He couldn’t imagine the horror of being burned.

His heart in his throat, Alex pulled around the corner, accelerating up the street, past houses with lights all on and people standing out in their yards looking toward the blaze.

With a jolt, he realized that it was his grandfather’s house that was burning.

Alex slammed on the brakes as he pulled to the side of the street and parked crookedly at the curb. Cars with onlookers had parked to watch.

Fire trucks crowded the street, all parked at cockeyed angles. Amber lights on the fire trucks strobed the night. A police car, blue lights flashing, was parked crossways, blocking traffic.

Alex set the brake and leaped out. He ran with all his strength toward his grandfather’s house. His vision narrowed down until all he saw was the familiar home engulfed in a terrifying glow of yellow and orange flames. He didn’t even see all the firefighters in heavy yellow coats and helmets striped with reflective tape. Panic powered his legs as he ran.

An arm suddenly hooked him around the middle, spinning him around, stopping him cold. He pushed at the arms that came around and encircled him.

“Let me go! It’s my grandfather’s house! Let me go!”

“Hold on there,” a big cop said. “You can’t get any closer.”

“I have to! We have to get him out!”

Two firemen stepped in around him.

“He’s already out, son,” the older man said.

Alex stared at him. “He is?” He looked around as the cop finally released him. “Where is he?”

The senior fireman put an arm around Alex’s shoulders and walked him toward one of the two ambulances. All the flashing lights up and down the street made the scene seem surreal, otherworldly. One red-and-white ambulance was parked, all its doors closed. The back doors of the other were spread wide. Paramedics stood around, not looking at all in a hurry.

Even at a distance the heat was so intense that it hurt the side of Alex’s face. Acrid smoke burned his throat. Hoses snaked all over the street. Streamers of water arced off into the furnace of flame. It was easy to see that there was shortly going to be nothing left of his grandfather’s house.

As they got closer, Alex saw a gurney with the slight form of what might have been a body entirely covered in a gray blanket. Two paramedics stood over it on the far side.

“I’m sorry,” the man holding Alex’s shoulders said as they approached. “He was long gone when we got in there.”

Alex stood staring at the gurney. He ran the words through his mind again, and then again. They didn’t seem real.

“He’s dead? Ben is dead?”

“I’m afraid so. From the looks of it, the fire started downstairs in a workshop. That’s where we found the gentleman. One of my men looked in the basement door and spotted him reflected in a mirror. He was on the floor not far to the side. There wasn’t much left of him by then but we were at least able to use the hoses to cool the doorway enough to manage to recover his remains. I’m sorry, son.”

“I’m his only family,” Alex said in a distant voice, somehow feeling that it all couldn’t be real. “The only family left. I always told him to be careful with torches and soldering irons down there.”

“It very well may be that he passed on from a heart attack or stroke and then something hot left unattended started the fire. I’ve seen it happen that way with older people.”

“But he was burned?”

“I’m afraid so, but it’s very possible that it was after he was already gone. We don’t know yet.”

“Ben,” Alex said in a tearful voice as he knelt beside the remains covered in a gray blanket, “please don’t leave me like this. I need you so much right now.”

It felt like the world was falling in on him.

Some of the rafters gave way and the entire roof came crashing down. Huge flames roared up into the air. Columns of sparks and billowing smoke lifted into the night sky.

Alex laid an arm over his grandfather and broke down in tears.

13.

THE CORONER’S OFFICE HAD BEEN unable to determine the actual cause of death. They said that the remains were too badly burned to make that determination, but that since he had been found on the floor down in his workshop, rather than in bed, it was improbable that Alex’s grandfather had been overcome by smoke in his sleep. The fire extinguisher, hanging nearby on the foundation wall, was charged and in working order, but it hadn’t been used. There was an exit door not far away.

Considering those factors and the lack of any evidence to the contrary, the coroner’s finding was that Benjamin Rahl had most likely lost consciousness or died of natural causes before the fire started, and the fire had been the result of something hot left unattended at his workbench while he was either unconscious or already deceased.

Alex had his grandfather’s remains cremated. Ben had always said that he didn’t want his corpse rotting in the ground, that he’d rather have the clean purification of fire consume his worldly self. Still, considering what had happened, having Ben cremated seemed insensitive. Alex knew, though, that it was what his grandfather had wanted.

But more than that, Ben, who Ben was, was gone. The remains were not Ben, not to Alex, anyway. Those remains had been released by the fire to return to the elements of the universe.

The house was gone as well. Even much of the foundation had collapsed and what hadn’t was unstable, leaving a hazardous sight. After the fire marshal and the insurance company adjuster finished their investigation, they had turned the property over to Alex. At the city’s insistence Alex had hired a company to haul away the debris and fill in the hole.

Since then, whenever he walked up the street to his grandfather’s place, the journey felt dreamlike. Even standing there staring at the open gap in the neighborhood, at the smoothed-over lot, he couldn’t believe it. His mind filled in the empty hole with a ghostlike memory of the home. It seemed impossible that it was all gone—both his grandfather and the house where Alex had been raised for the last half of his childhood.

In the weeks that followed, that wasn’t all that felt dreamlike. Alex at times wondered if it was possible that he had imagined Jax.

In the beginning, under the choking weight of grief, he hadn’t thought a lot about her. He lost himself in the routine of his daily workouts. All he could really think about was Ben. He had real issues to deal with and there was no one else to handle things, no one else to help him.

But over time, nagging thoughts of Jax returned. With his mother in a mental institution it was only too easy to imagine that he was falling prey to the same sort of delusional madness that had overcome her. It sometimes felt like that madness was lurking just out of sight, ready to smother him, too.

He tried hard to keep such fears in perspective, tried hard not to give them any power over him, tried hard not to let his imagination get the best of him. Yes, his mother was sick, but that didn’t mean that the same thing would happen to him.

His mother hadn’t spoken since his birthday, when she had told him to run and hide, when she had warned him about a different kind of human who broke people’s necks. He worried at times that he’d somehow built upon his mother’s strange words to come up with Jax and her story—created a delusion of his own.

On one hand he knew that it wasn’t possible that he could have imagined Jax, but on the other hand it often seemed easier to believe that he had dreamed her up, much the way he did the scenes he loved painting. He knew, though, that such thoughts were most likely born of his dejection that she had never tried to contact him again. He was just beating himself up over having driven her away, just feeling sorry for himself.

For a time his desire to believe Jax’s story had been bolstered when he had spotted a popular science magazine in the store. On the cover had been a star field strewn with galaxies. The headline read “Our universe and multiplicity theory; maybe we’re not alone.”

That night Alex sat in his quiet house and carefully read the series of articles revolving around the possibility of other universes beyond what was called the “Light Horizon,” the term used in Big Bang cosmology to describe the edge of the observable universe, the farthest distance astronomers could see. Since the light beyond the Light Horizon had not yet arrived to be seen, it was not known how large the universe actually was or what, if anything, might be beyond it.

Astrophysicists speculated how the universe, made up of space, time, and matter, might be able to bend back on itself through wormholes so that the most distant parts of the universe would be but a step away. They went further to talk about how the universe itself might not be singular, not everything there was, and that there might be others out beyond. Through theories that touched on black holes, white holes, dark matter, dark energy, the nonlinear oddities of the space-time continuum, string theory and superstring theory which suggested as many as ten dimensions, it was hoped that physicists would eventually be able to come to understand if and how other universes existed beyond our own.

Some astrophysicists postulated that the universe was like a bubble, and the events that created the bubble of the universe created others, a whole mass of them, each bubble a separate universe sparking into existence, growing, and expanding in a larger mass of universe bubbles. Other scientists believed that the universe was in fact like a sheet of time, space, and matter—four dimensions—floating in a greater void of a fifth dimension along with other universes, other four-dimensional sheets of time, matter, and space.

These physicists believed that there were dimensions beyond the four familiar dimensions, and that these additional dimensions were membranes that when they touched threw matter into the four dimensions we know. In other words, created universes that floated in this fifth dimension.

They even proposed that these other dimensions might be gateways between the universes.

Alex couldn’t help wonder if Jax had come from one of those places. Perhaps she wasn’t so much from another world as she was from another universe and had traveled through a gateway of other dimensions. While it gave him chills to ponder the possibilities, he felt in his heart that it was nothing more than daydreaming, a mere hook upon which to hang his hope that she was real and that she had been telling him the truth.

He needed her to be telling him the truth, or his entire impression of her, what he thought of her—her intelligence, her passion for life, her presence—would crumble. He didn’t want to believe she was from another world. How could he believe such a story?

But if she was lying to him that would be worse.

Alex felt trapped in that dilemma, not wanting to believe her story, yet not wanting her to end up being nothing more than a scheming con artist, a liar.

But Jax was gone. He didn’t really have any reason to hope that she would return. Alex knew that he’d missed his chance to ever find out more, to ever solve the riddle.

By the time he’d finished reading, it was dark in the house beyond the single lamp beside his chair. He felt not only alone but lonely in that enveloping darkness. The information in the articles hadn’t convinced him of anything, as he had hoped. In fact, in an odd way it only left him feeling more convinced of the impossibility of it all. It seemed to him that the physicists were seducing themselves into ever more grand, fantastical theories. The science, if it really was science and not the projection of wishes, was beyond him.

As the rhythm of life demanded his attention he increasingly lost interest in the magazine articles. He had real life to deal with.

A week after finally cremating his grandfather, Alex had gone back to painting. At first it had seemed like it was only something to do to try to fill the emptiness. The world felt so quiet, so dead, so sad. It had never seemed that way before. He had talked to Ben almost every day. In many ways it was Ben who had made the world all the more alive for him.

As time wore on, Alex found that painting at least took his mind to other places, other worlds, and helped him forget his grief. He was alone most of the time, gone into those worlds that came to life on his canvases, and that suited him.

He supposed that he could at least find some solace in the fact that Ben had led a full life. He had relished every day he’d had. That was more than most people ever did. A lot of people merely marked time until a holiday, until they could go on vacation, until they could retire, always waiting for their life to begin. Ben never waited. He had lived each day.

After a few weeks, when Alex thought that maybe enough time had passed, he had called Mr. Martin to see if he would consider taking some paintings for the gallery. Mr. Martin was apologetic but said that he didn’t feel comfortable doing so. The man was insistent. Alex saw no point in pushing. It was the way it was.

Rather than dwelling on the problem, Alex decided that he needed to find a solution, so he made the rounds of galleries where he thought he would feel comfortable showing his work. He finally managed to find one down in the old market district that agreed to take on a few smaller pieces. The shops were less expensive there, but they drew a variety of people and within a week the gallery had managed to sell a small painting for nine hundred dollars. The gallery had been pleased and asked Alex to bring in a few more paintings, one or two a little larger, so they could try to sell some of his more expensive work.

Before the month was out Alex had also contacted Lancaster, Buckman, Fenton, the law firm in Boston, and asked if they could see to transferring the title to the land to his name. They assured him that they could handle it and in fact, according to the stipulations in the will, they were the only law firm legally allowed to handle anything to do with the land.

It also turned out that there were hefty legal fees involved if he wanted to take title to the land, but considering the money he had from the six paintings that had been defaced at Mr. Martin’s gallery and the settlement check for his grandfather’s house due from the insurance company, Alex would have no problem handling the legal fees. The land would be his and the matter would be settled.

He hadn’t yet decided if he wanted to sell the land, but he figured that he had the rest of his life to decide. Mr. Fenton from the law firm assured Alex that he could sell the land to the Daggett Trust at any point should he decide to do so. Alex asked if Mr. Fenton thought they could afford to pay fair market value for so much land. The man went out of his way to assure Alex that the Daggett Trust was well funded and would be able to handle such a purchase without any difficulty.

If Alex died without ever deciding to sell, and if he had no heir, the land would revert to the conservation group without them having to pay a penny, so in a way it made sense to sell the land, because then the money would be his no matter what happened. But, on the other hand, if he died he wouldn’t be able to spend money from the grave.

Mr. Fenton told him that the Daggett Trust had made inquiries, hoping for Alex’s decision on selling sooner rather than later. Something about it riled Alex and made him come to a decision. He asked Mr. Fenton to tell the people at the trust that he was taking title and had every intention of keeping the land. The lawyer had then gone to great lengths to make certain that Alex understood the restrictions to the deed, and that any violation would result in him losing the land, even after he had title. Alex had assured the man that he understood.

Alex was looking forward to the transfer of title being completed. He wanted to spend some time alone in the woods painting. He was warming to the idea of such a vast place being his, of having a world to explore and call his own.

As he sat in his studio listening to the rain beat against the window, he realized that after nearly a month he was finally starting to feel better, to get beyond his grief, to again find satisfaction in his work and at least a little quiet pleasure in life. He had a new gallery that wanted his work, and he was starting to think about a trip to Maine to begin to explore the wilderness and fill his mind with impressions to paint.

It felt like things were getting back to normal. Things were moving forward. In a sense, it felt like a new beginning, like his life could at last really begin.

Jax, as well, was becoming a distant—if haunting—memory. Whatever the real story with her was, she hadn’t made any attempt to contact him again. The more time that passed the more his hopes faded. If she was real, if her story was for real, she surely would have done something by now. She would have contacted him, sent a message…something.

He couldn’t be sure that she hadn’t been involved in some scheme with people trying to con him. He didn’t think that was true, but the possibility existed and it troubled him.

He’d seen no evidence of otherworldly people. In fact, he didn’t like to dwell on her revelations because the whole idea was seeming more absurd with each passing day and he didn’t like to think of Jax in such an unflattering light. He didn’t like to think of her as playing a part in a con game, but neither did he like to think of her being a wacko who imagined she was from a different planet. Having a mentally ill mother was more than enough craziness for Alex.

In the end he didn’t know what to think, so he tried to put thoughts of Jax aside and devote himself to his painting.

Outside, in the blackness, lightning ignited in staccato flashes, giving ghostly form to the glistening trees. When the wind blew and the lightning strobed and flickered, it made the branches seem to move in abrupt fits, almost as if the trees were staggering through the inky blackness. At times the rain pattering against the window became heavy, turning the soft sound to a low roar. As the night wore on, the rain at times came down in curtains that swept over the house as if trying to beat it down and wash it away.

The storm suited Alex as he painted mountains with clouds stealing in among the towering peaks. The thunder brought nature in to him in a visceral way as he worked on the gloom in the forest beneath towering clouds.

Near midnight the doorbell rang.

14.

ALEX FROZE FOR A MOMENT, brush in hand, as the echo of the bell slowly died out. His first thought was to wonder if it was possible that it could be Jax.

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