I came ’round in stages, like a cat giving up, real reluctantly, on a sunbeam nap. One thing that slowed me down: that closet was dark, dark, dark. I mean dark. As in, no light anyplace, so the difference between me with my eyes open and me with my eyes shut was just about nothin’. The world was ink, and that gave me the time, in a woozy, punch-drunk way, to consider my latest predicament.
Not that I did real well at that. Every time I drifted up into consciousness or down into sleep, the two people that kept popping into my head were Sienna Green and Jill Young. They were both real concerned about me. Doc Green was asking if I’d kept up with my medications, and Jill had a washcloth and she kept putting it on my forehead, washing me down. I was scared for a second that the water in the cloth would be too hot or too cold, but no, Jill was a professional Goldilocks: the temperature was just right.
The only real disappointment was that neither Doc Green nor Jill was undressed, not even a little, but somehow it didn’t seem like the right time to ask for a striptease, so I just lay back and stayed comfortable and wondered every so often why the room I was in was so damn small, and how come every time I tried to sit up, I wound up with my head in a roost of clothes and fabric.
Maybe about the seventh time I came ’round, an awful thing happened. Jill and Dr. Green took note of each other. I mean one moment they were goin’ on about their business, which was takin’ care of me, and the next, they were rearing back, hands on hips, glaring at each other like maybe their glares could turn the whole world into daggers.
“You don’t fool me,” said Jill.
“I don’t need to,” said Doc Green. “I can brush you aside any time I please.”
“Don’t think I’m a pushover.”
Sienna Green chuckled, a deep rumble that came from so low in her throat that it felt like it was rising out of a cave. All but purring, she said, “No thinking required. We both know it’s true.”
For a second there, I thought Jill was gonna charge, fists balled and flailing. Instead, she knelt beside me and put an arm around my shoulders. “Leave him alone,” she said. “He’s mine.”
I liked that. He’s mine. Even a good old boy bachelor like me can’t help goin’ to town on that kind of sentiment.
Not that Doc Green shared my enthusiasm. “Take your pills, Dale,” she said, and she stepped back, vanishing behind a shadow I hadn’t even realized was there. She was still talking, though, and I caught every last teasing, sultry word. “If you take them like a good boy, when you get back into town, you can do what you like with me. Promise. Wouldn’t you like that, Dale? Me, served up on a platter of your choosing?”
Next thing I knew, both Doc Green and Jill were gone, popped like soap bubbles. Now I knew I was dreaming, but I didn’t want to end on a sour note, and I sure as hell didn’t want to risk bumping into Trooper DeKoven, so I stood up—which I guess I did in real life, too, ’cos I whacked my head somethin’ awful on a shelf full of shoes, most of which fell out of their boxes and rained down on me—in the dark, mind—and that spooked me five ways from tomorrow and sent me battering the walls, trying to find first my Stetson and then the door.
Well, I found both in the end, and I bolted out, tripped over about a million pieces of furniture, sprawled over a bed, and finally got a fix on a blind-covered window. What with fright, my hurt foot, and general disorientation, I was too clumsy, panicked and half-asleep to operate the slats, so I simply reached out, bear-hugged the whole enchilada, and tore the blinds right off the wall. A kind of half-light spilled in, soggy and gray. Sure enough, it was daylight outside, but wouldn’t you know it, the Santa Monicas were stuck in a fog bank and I couldn’t see a thing. “The marine layer,” the locals call it, like naming it something other than fog makes it bigger than it really is, more important. It’s all that cold water off shore is what it is, a Canadian chill sweeping down the coast. Thanks to the Beach Boys, Gidget, and Baywatch, most all the world thinks Southern California is not only fun in the sun, it’s warm in the water. Hogwash. You swim around here, without a wetsuit? You’ll be hypothermic in ten minutes flat. Ask anyone, especially the Coast Guard, the police, and private investigators—the kind I used to be. We know the truth, ’cos we’ve seen the bodies.
Most years, July doesn’t have much in the way of marine layer action; it’s usually done by June. Oh, well. Just my luck.
I took inventory. I had two, maybe three days of beard growth on my neck and jawline, which just by itself had me ornery as a cave bear, but at least I was dressed, so that was somethin’. My crutches were nowhere to be seen, which figured. As for body and soul, I felt decent. Not exactly perky, and nowhere near ready to run wind sprints or beat up on a tackle dummy, but my foot wasn’t near as swollen as it had been, and that was a victory right there. In fact, I felt close enough to normal that I figured I’d go find the reverend, Iris, and our screwy hostess to see about rustling up some breakfast.
Easier said than done. That Silva house was a maze, no two ways about it, and worse, it was bent. The builders must have had some bright notion to match the contours of the hill, some sort of ergonomic, environmental thing, but the result? No two parts were straight. The place was like an octopus, but with the limbs all bent and jointed, plus no head, no center.
On my first go-round, I found the Carole Lombard wing, with its interview rooms and waiting areas and public restrooms—all the stuff I’d seen the night before, including that octagonal room with the big round red-sheeted bed. Which gave me the creeps, frankly. Not the feeling, no. Beds don’t do that, not normal ones. But still. Close enough. I mean, who sleeps in things like that?
Bed or no bed, that part of the house was deserted. Not even any sign of the gal with the Jackie Brown afro. I even limped outside to check the rental, which was the only car left in the lot, but no dice—and no sign that anyone had even been in the area. Not that I could see much. Take away the tires and the lights, our little silver Camry might just as well have been a fog bank in its own right.
When my cell phone rang, it gave me a serious start, in part because I’d forgotten I had it on me. I don’t deal in multiple, individualized ring tones, so I wasn’t sure who was calling. Not exactly sure, anyhow, but I’d have laid money on Jill, most likely calling with an update on the lodgers at Shelter From the Storm, or maybe just a quick good-morning “I love you”.
No such luck. Instead of Jill, I got Tina Wolving.
“Ooh, Dale,” she said, all breathless, which made her sound like a nervous twelve-year-old. “Can you come over?”
“Can I come over? No. I’m in California.”
“Oh! Is it sunny?”
If she’d been in range, I would’ve whapped her upside the head. “No,” I said, “it isn’t. Now what’s goin’ on?”
“Well, it’s the toaster. It’s all done.”
I figured she’d say more, but after a long five seconds of nothing, I knew I’d figured wrong. “And?” I said, prompting.
Tina giggled. “You know. It finished. It’s made all the letters it’s going to make. For this message, anyway.”
“Okay, and just how to do you know that?”
“It unplugged itself.”
I couldn’t help it, I burst out laughing. Which frankly felt real unsettling out there in all that fog, like noise of any sort would maybe make me a target, so I got hold of my personal volume switch, the one I don’t have—I’m loud and I’m proud, with no plans to change—and I said, quiet-like, “Unplugged itself, huh? Is that what it usually does?”
Her answer came back even quieter, like now we were spy-type conspirators set to rob a bank. “That’s right,” she said. “Ever since the very first message, way back, when the letters stop, the plug pops out of the wall. Boing!”
Boing. I had me a headache all over again.
From the far end of the line, I could hear chewing. Was Tina eating while talking to me? I mean, hey, I do that, too, but I hadn’t found breakfast yet, not to mention my morning meds, and now she had my stomach doing flip flops.
“Wait, I know!” said Tina, sounding a mite too pleased with herself. “I’ll text you a photo.”
“Tina, I seriously don’t want a photo of your toaster.”
“No, no—I’m not sending you a picture of the toaster. Hang on, let me get it in focus. There we go.” Her voice had grown distant, but now, apparently done with using the phone as a camera, she came back loud and clear. “I sent you a photo of the toast. We’ve got it all laid out on the counter. Although, hang on, I’ll have to send two. ’Cos remember, the letters are on both sides, right? So you won’t be able to puzzle this out if you can only see half the letters.”
At that point, and maybe it’s ’cos I was seriously starving, the fact is that I was trying to be rude. I drew a sigh so heavy it could’ve sunk an aircraft carrier. “Look, Tina, I don’t have time for this.”
“You do,” she said, cutting me off. “One thing we’re sure of is that it spelled out your name, remember? Q-U-I-S-T. And I’m telling you, you ignore our toaster at your peril.”
From somewhere behind her, I heard Tim say, “You tell him, sister,” which kind of got my goat, frankly. I mean, what the hell? Since when did I have to take direction from a countertop kitchen appliance?
“Listen,” I said, “I’ve got a situation right here, right now, and I appreciate the call and all—”
“Dale,” said Tina, and I could almost hear her spine straightening. “You can be a real pain in the ass, you know that? And a bully besides. I don’t even like you, and neither does Tim, so don’t think I’m doing this to be fun or friendly. I’m doing this because it matters, and because for whatever fucked-up reason, the toaster chose you. For this message. So you need to hear it, and you need to figure it out. You go right ahead and ignore this if that’s what you think you have to do—if whatever you’re doing out there in wonderful California is so incredibly great. But I’m trying to do you a favor. The least you could do is say thank you.”
To say she’d caught me off guard would have been the understatement of the year. Hell, I’d never guessed that Tina Wolving had such an apple-tart tongue. For a second there, all I could do was blink.
“Dale? I know you’re there. Say something.”
First I swallowed, and then I swallowed my pride. “I’ll look at the photos. Promise.”
“Okay, then. Have a nice day. Jerk.”
She hung up, and once again I was alone with the Camry, a big gravel lot, and the fog.
My phone let out a plaintive little bing sound, which it does when I get a text, which ain’t often, that’s for sure. I really didn’t want to look, but in the end, I opened up messages and pressed my finger on the photo for download. Sure enough, Tina Wolving had sent me a picture of a big spread of oatmeal toast, all set up in a messy, lopsided grid. The lettering was there, clear as day—or at least, clear as a foggy day. My name was easy enough, they’d left that right across the top so it would be easy to spot. As for the rest, it was a total jumble. Incomprehensible. And then, to make matters worse, as I chewed on my lip and tried to will the toast to rearrange and spell something useful, Tina’s second photo arrived, with all the first pieces flipped over and showing a whole different set of letters.
I did the only two things I could. I groaned aloud and turned off my phone.
Back inside I went, and round and round, too. I found interior courtyards. I found a sauna. I found a wine cellar, two humidors, and a chapel that would have scared Anne Rice. Sometimes I went up steps, sometimes down. It was like bein’ inside a real wealthy version of the Winchester Mystery House, but no tour guide and no map. I didn’t like it, no, sir, and I was grumpy as a water buffalo when I finally stumbled on the library.
What a disaster. I could tell at a glance that Bonesy had paid a visit, ’cos nobody but her would leave so many books just thrown all over the place. The room itself was like a movie set, the kind of place where you’d meet up with Sherlock Holmes or a pack of rear admirals all chomping on stogies, their moustaches waxed and sticking out like fins. Not really my kind of dive, but I knew a couple things right off. First, the fireplace hadn’t been used in days, maybe years; there wasn’t even a hint of that dead-as-ashes stink that a working fireplace always gets. Second, someone had been in the room besides Renner and Bonesy: there was a briar-stem pipe sitting on an end table, balanced in a red glass ashtray. Third, Bonesy hadn’t been around for a while, and I knew that because my neck, back, and shoulders felt normal. Or as normal as could be considering what I’d been through so far, and what I was facing.
Ten minutes later, I found the Silvas’ breakfast room, and in it, four people, three of them alert and awake. Not Renner. He’d been laid out cadaver-style on a long orange table, with a white towel jammed under his head for a pillow. Hands folded across his stomach, he lay on his back, eyes closed. He seemed to be breathing evenly, except that as I glanced at him, he shivered, the way my dad’s old hound dogs used to do when they had nightmares. He wasn’t wearing his glasses, and without them, he looked sort of naked, like he’d lost something important—his personality, maybe.
Iris sat in a corner, hunched over a laptop, typing. A borrowed laptop, presumably; she sure as hell hadn’t fled her apartment with any such thing. She nodded as I stepped into the room, and said, peering over a pair of bifocals, “Dale, good morning. There’s coffee, if you want it. And you should meet our hosts, Mariel and Roberto Silva. This is not at all what they bargained for, so please, for Renner’s sake, be polite.”
She jerked her chin toward the room’s other occupants, who sat on stools at the kitchen counter, a surface just as orange as the table. Come to think of it, the entire room was done up in shades of lemon and orange with white trim, and it put me in mind of Renner’s Bug (or maybe a Denny’s, if only Denny’s had designers and a budget).
Roberto Silva stood up, and we shook hands. He was a medium guy: medium sized, medium suave, medium handshake. He was dressed for the office, but LA-style, which meant sport jacket yes, tie no. He said, with no trace of an accent, “Welcome. And this is my wife, Mariel.”
I make it a policy to be stoic even when surprised, but I know I hesitated on that one. Mariel? Hadn’t we met? Sick I’d been, sure, but I’d spent most of the last night in the same room with her—or had I? Sure enough, when I looked to Mariel, her face told the story. So far as she was concerned, she’d never laid eyes on me before.
“Hello,” she said, extending her hand in turn. “It’s very nice to meet you.”
She wasn’t Carole Lombard anymore, that was for certain, in part because her English now had a light Mexican lilt, and also because she’d exchanged her evening wear for sweats and a V-neck scarlet tee. Her hair was in a ponytail, and she wasn’t wearing any giant Hawaiian flowers. Did any of that make a difference? I mean, she hadn’t ever been a blonde bombshell, not really, not with that complexion. Maybe with a couple gallons of peroxide, but otherwise? Never.
“So,” I said, “is someone gonna explain to me why the reverend is crashed on the table?”
Once again, Iris lowered her spectacles enough to look my way. “We found him last night in the library.”
“We were all in the library,” said Roberto, as if that explained a great deal.
“We’ve tried all the obvious things,” Iris went on, “but we cannot get him to wake up.”
I was all set to propose a trip to the local hospital, the one Iris had wanted for me the night before, but Mariel read my mind. “His vital signs are normal. We employ a private physician, he checked.”
Lifestyles of the rich and reclusive. They probably had a helicopter, too, and maybe a couple yachts on the side.
To the room at large, I said, “So what are supposed to do? Just let him lie around?”
Iris’s response was a what-can-we-do shrug.
Roberto, shame-faced, his fingers knotted, said, “In my line of work—and that of my wife, there really is such a thing as bad publicity. If this can be solved with patience, biding our time…”
A new thought struck me. I said, to Mariel, “Did we finish that whole translation thing?”
She shook her head. “No, and now we couldn’t if we tried. First because I don’t read Latin, which Iris tells me is what we were dealing with, and second—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa. What do you mean you don’t read Latin?”
Mariel’s stare was the kind a big sister gives her nitwit little brother. “Carole reads Latin. Not me. So as I was saying, the other problem is that your friend Bonesy ran off with the book.”
That didn’t compute, not at all. “Bonesy?” I said. “Was here?”
“Without doubt.” This from Roberto, who I could see now was acting calmer than he felt. He’d actually crossed his legs, like he needed a restroom. “She attacked me,” he said, “if you want to know the truth. Or at least, jumped at me. I got scared, knocked my chair over with me still in it. I hit my head. I didn’t see anything after that.”
“Carole,” said Mariel, “was trying to give Bonesy the book, but when she got into the library, Bonesy was somewhere above her, and next thing Carole knew, books were hitting her all over, hard. She tried to cover her head, but one of those books must have been heavy. Boom, out like a light.”
“I found them,” said Iris, “and I brought them round. Bonesy was gone. So was the book, but Renner was there, lying on his back under the window. That’s all I know.”
So Bonesy was AWOL. I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that—“Keep your enemies close,” right?—but then again, maybe she was at this very moment burying herself six feet under, or jumping off Zuma Point. After all, she had what she wanted—didn’t she?—so it stood to reason that she could get back to the business of being dead and buried.
Iris interrupted my daydream. “Oh, and Dale. Before I forget, we threw out your so-called medicine.”
I stiffened. “You did what?”
“It wasn’t normal,” said Mariel, her big eyes moon-serious, “so Carole poured them into the garbage disposal.”
They all stared at me as I looked at the sink. I was thinking, maybe they hadn’t run the disposal yet, and the pills were still in the trap, and I could scoop them out.
“No,” said Iris. “Wrong sink, for one thing, and for another, yes, we threw the switch.”
I exploded. “I need that stuff! I’m sick!”
“That I don’t doubt,” said Iris. “If I were ingesting crap like that, I’d be sick, too.”
“Those pills are making me better!”
“If anything, based on what I’ve seen these last two days, they’re turning you into a junkie. But you’ll be pleased to hear that we’ll soon know all about your precious meds. We saved one of each, and gave them to the Silvas’ doctor. He’s delivering them to a lab right about now, for a full-scale chemical analysis.”
I felt wobbly, weak-kneed. I also felt betrayed. I sagged against the nearest counter—orange, of course—and pushed my hat back. My stomach let out the kind of full-throated gurgle that no one in polite company ever wants to hear.
“You know what that means?” said Iris, from the corner.
“Yeah, I’m dying.”
“No. It means you’re hungry—and lucky you, we saved you sausage and eggs.”
Out of nowhere, Mariel produced a plate, laden with steaming scrambled eggs and four link sausages browned just the way I like ’em. My stomach did a kind of jig, and my salivary glands zipped straight into overdrive. If I’d drooled right then, I would’ve filled a bucket.
So I chowed down while Roberto kissed his not-blonde, not-Carole wife, and headed for a far wing of the house—today, he said, he would be working from home. On his way out, he assured us that private security guards were now stationed throughout the interior and at perimeter points outside as well. Made me wonder, as I stuffed in more ground-up pig-meat, if I’d been surrounded when I’d talked on the phone, in the fog, to Tina Wolving. Who knew how many trigger-happy would-be heroes had locked me in their sights?
Mariel had slipped away, leaving me with an empty plate, Iris, and a useless Renner. I didn’t mind his deep breathing, but the twitching? That I didn’t care for, and while the breakfast went down easy—along with about a pot of straight black coffee—my shoulders got tighter every time I looked the reverend’s way. He wasn’t asleep, that I knew for an unprovable fact. Somethin’ had hold of him, and I had a bad feeling that something was Bonesy.
Meanwhile Iris was typing like the wind and muttering to herself. I got up, banged my dishes into the sink, rinsed them more for show than anything else, and leaned back against the counter. I said, to Iris, “You sure must love email, or whatever the hell it is you’re doing.”
Iris whipped off her bifocals and glared. “I am now days behind—days—which in my world means it will take weeks to catch up. Do you understand? Weeks. I’m supposed to be officiating a wedding this afternoon, and I’ve missed the rehearsal, not to mention the dinner, and now I’ll miss the real thing. Meanwhile I’ve got one congregation in meltdown, another that’s investigating its treasurer for fraud and thinks I’m their lawyer, and don’t get me started on what’s happening in Boston. So if you want to rephrase for a moment and consider that my email is my work, and my work is my life, and my life is service, then we might have something to talk about.”
She paused, either for breath or fresh ammunition, I’m not sure which. Either way, I was kind of impressed. A dressing-down like that can be slam-bang cathartic, no two ways about it. “Look,” I said, “I know this is all kind of awkward, but you and me, we should be friends—”
“We are,” she shot back, cutting me off. “So as a friend, what you can do for me, right now, is to leave me in peace. Renner claims you’re an investigator, or used to be. Are you any good? Can you think of something relevant to our situation that you could investigate?”
“Lady,” I said, “you can bet your boots that I’m good. So yeah, I’ll go do my kind of work, and leave you to it. But maybe between emails, you can figure out a way to say thank you for saving your sorry-ass life.”
Without giving her a chance for a parting shot, I banged out the door and made a limping beeline for the library. Once there, I barked at a cleaning girl who was picking up the fallen books, and she skedaddled like she were a deer and I was a rifle. I threw myself into a great big leather armchair, draped my right leg over the arm, and gave in to a long fit of the sulks. I’ve got a talent for that, I admit. Not that I usually allow myself to indulge—I’m a busy guy—but once in a while, a man’s got to give in to the blues. All the great jazz players knew that for a fact, and most great actors, too. The men, anyway. I wasn’t real sure about the women, especially the real old-time dames. Carole Lombard, for example.
Fuming is a lot like playing sports. Football, maybe. You can only keep your game face on for just so long. That’s why overtime is such a killer—and a judge. You hope to hell it’s the other guy that blinks first. With me in the Silvas’ library, there wasn’t any competition, except maybe my pride, and eventually I kicked that to the curb and stood up, feeling not exactly better, but human. Able to think.
I made my way out to the Camry and dug my bag from the trunk. I rummaged ’til I found my back-up cell phone, the one I keep in service just in case, the one with the Los Angeles area code. Then I hobbled back to the library, where the fog was still pressed up tight to the windows, and I swung my boots up onto the gorgeous coffee table—solid walnut?—and set to work. I started with my regular phone, ’cos it’s got a touch screen, and I punched in the one piece of information we’d never looked into: Swayfield-On-Witham. The phone’s little maps app took me right to it, a miniscule British dot north-north-east of London and not so far from a bigger burg called Lincoln. I liked that: nice of the Brits to name a city after our best president.
Once I’d zoomed in, using both a streetmap view and Google Earth, I knew just about everything there was to discover about Swayfield-On-Witham, which frankly weren’t much ’cos there weren’t much of it. A crossroads, really, of red-brick two-story buildings and a jetty or two extending into the river. The Witham River, that is, a slow-lookin’ thing, calm like a canal. Skinny wooden houseboats were moored along the banks, mostly adjacent to the churchyard. The landscape was flat and marshy, field after hedgerow field, and there couldn’t have been more than thirty homes, at least a quarter with a barn and pastureland beyond.
Lucky me, there was also a pub, the Two Butchers. Kind of an unpleasant name, but hell, if they wanted to run themselves out of business, that was their lookout.
In another three minutes, I had their phone number. Best of all, the time zone was in my favor. In the U.K., it was just after five o’clock.
A woman answered on the third ring, “’Allo, the Butchers.”
“Lieutenant Martin,” I said, making sure to add a little extra Stateside drawl. “I’m attached to the Los Angeles Police Department.”
A lie, sure, but hell, I wasn’t actually claiming to be a member of the LAPD. Never impersonate a cop, that’s a cardinal rule—but if the need is great, and it won’t cause no harm, a certain amount of what the reverend would call “obfuscation” is sometimes just what the doctor ordered, and “attached” is one of those vague, roomy words that belongs in every PI’s arsenal.
“From America, then?” said the woman in England.
“That’s right. I’m hoping to speak to the parish priest, or the vicar. Whatever you call him.”
“Oh, you won’t find ’im ’ere,” the woman said, as if this were the cheeriest of subjects. “First off, because he don’t drink, not a tipple. Second, because he’s in Wales. Anglican business, I suppose. Conferences: not really my cup of tea.” She laughed at that, a bubbly, girlish sound, though I’d already placed her at well past fifty. “Listen to me go on,” she said. “You’ll think I’m balmy.”
I told her I didn’t think anything of the kind, and that I loved the British, the Beatles (which weren’t entirely true) and British ale, to boot (which weren’t entirely untrue, although on my one trip across the pond, with the dratted reverend in tow, I’d had more trouble finding a cold beer than I would have believed possible—or, sometimes, beer at all. All the Brits wanted when I was there was some nasty sweet stuff they called “cider”).
“Now I obviously can’t tell you what I’m calling about,” I said. “Police business, you understand. And let me be real clear, we don’t think anyone in your neighborhood is guilty of any wrongdoing—”
“Oh, I should hope not.”
“—but I can tell you that as regards this investigation, we’re interested in the church, in a piece of church property. I wonder, is there someone around who’d be familiar with the building, with what’s inside?”
She giggled again, flattered to be aiding and abetting important police business. “I know who you want,” she said, in a confidential undertone. I heard her put her hand over the mouthpiece and called out, “Lawrence Bennet, you’re wanted on the phone!” Then she was back with me. “You’re in luck, Officer. Mr. Bennet’s the caretaker at the church, like, and I’m sure he can tell you whatever you need to know.”
A caretaker. I imagined a ponderous, shambling sort of man, slow in his habits, slow in his work, his colorless coat smeared and shabby, but the voice that eventually came on the line was lively and warm, the kind you’d expect from a toymaker or a stand-up comic. It also gave away his age: this guy was near or past retirement.
“Cheers,” he said, which I thought was a funny sort of opener. “Who’s this, then?”
I explained again about who I wasn’t, and reassured him that I wasn’t tracking any sort of crime, or not exactly. “What I’m interested in is your church brass,” I told him, and he thought that was hilarious, and asked, did I mean military brass? I said no, but the exact word had escaped me. “You know, those things on the floor. People rub on them with crayons.”
“Oh! Them monumental brasses. That’s what we call ’em here. I expect you don’t have many in your part of the world.”
“Listen,” I said, “the one I’m inquiring about, it’s a skeleton. No clothes, just bones. Ring any bells?”
It rang bells, all right. Phones aren’t exactly ideal for reading a man’s body language, but Lawrence Bennet’s hesitation, and the slight rise in his voice, spoke volumes. “I know just the one,” he said. “The fact is, she was in storage for years. Centuries, even. Churches like ours, out of the way, like, we had to protect what brasses we had. Every time you had a war on, back in the day, you know, people would smash in your doors looking for anything they could melt down, like. Them brasses, they were a real prize. So we hid ’em away, you see? Not me, you understand. I’m talking generations back, the forbears and what have you. Secret and secure, that was their motto. Even so, it’s a blessed wonder that a single one survived.” He paused again, gave a cough, and said, “If you want my opinion, in some cases, it’s a pity they did survive.”
Did a few hairs on the back of my neck prickle? Oh, yes they did.
When I asked Mr. Lawrence Bennet to elaborate, he said, “The fact is, we had several brasses, when I started. More than most, and that’s a fact. Still in storage, though, so most people ’ad no idea, and the vicar thought—as a fundraiser, you know—that it might be worth opening up, as it were. Let the masses do the odd rubbing now and then. Lay in a few supplies, paper and whatnot, and charge by the drawing. Because you see, sir, most of the big cathedrals, the ones that had brasses out and available, they were pulling the plug. Brass is soft, right? And most all of the originals were out of circulation. Now I’m talking here about the late seventies, see, when I was just out of school, and starting in them days, if your odd tourist wanted a rubbing almost anywhere else in the country, they had to work off a copy. But here? Well, Swayfield-On-Witham may not be the center of the universe, and if it is, nobody knows it, so either way, what brasses we had were in fine fettle. Excellent condition. And anyway, the vicar didn’t want to spend the money on getting copies made. That would have been quite the rigmarole, I can tell you. So we set out the ones we had as best we could, and the vicar really did think we’d hear the clink of money ringing in the plates, if you know what I’m saying. But of course, it didn’t work out that way. We had a few visitors, now and then, here and there, but there’s no train, hardly any bus. If you don’t live here, you’re somewhere else.”
By now, I was guessing that my new besty Lawrence had a few pints in him. Maybe more than a few.
“Anyway,” he said, starting again, “I don’t suppose you’d call a single one of our brasses popular, but the ones that got the most work on ’em were the lords and ladies, like, and maybe a knight. Sir Peter Prior, he was. Very dashing. But the skeleton? Only the kids ever wanted to do her, sir, and then after a while, well, not even them. We got complaints, see. Complaints.”
Did a river of goosebumps wash over my arms, then my legs? Oh, yes. Oh, yes they did. “What,” I asked, “do you mean by ‘complaints’?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Nothing much, really. Hard to remember, in all honesty. This was twenty years ago, now. More. Twenty-five.”
“Mr. Bennet,” I said, letting my voice rumble, which damn near always works in my favor, especially when I’ve got a source who’s just hell-bent on dissembling, “I need specifics.”
“Ah, Christ. It’ll sound like rubbish. Fairy talk, Enid Blyton.”
“Here’s the deal,” I said. “You talk, and let me be the judge of what is and is not rubbish.”
Now I knew for sure he’d been drinking, because I could hear him pause, tip a glass to his lips, and swallow. After a long exhalation, he said, “Well, there were girls, see? Twins. Maybe nine, ten years old. And next thing I knew, we had the parents calling up the vicar and demanding he get rid of Bonesy.”
“Whoa, hang on,” I said. “You called the skeleton Bonesy?”
“We all did, by way of a nickname. You know how names stick.”
He had no idea. “Go on,” I said.
“Well, they were having nightmares, see. And not just one, over and done like you might expect. These girls were awake all night. Kept talking about gibbets and dead babies—things no little girls should even know about, right? So the parents had taken the rubbing out of their room, down from where they’d hung it up, like, and put it out with the tip. And just like that, they said, the nightmares had disappeared. Gone. But then, see, it was catching, like. Like these witch trials you read about. Kids all over the village were coming down with sweat-drenching nightmares. And it turned out,” his voice dropped as if he were a Soviet defector handing over the juiciest of state secrets, “every single affected child had done a drawing—a rubbing—of Bonesy.”
Had the Silvas’ library gotten darker, all of a sudden? It couldn’t have, not really, since the fog still encased the house outside, and it wasn’t any thicker than before, but even so, I couldn’t help turning to look behind me. To make sure nothing was sneaking up when I wasn’t looking.
“Go on,” I muttered.
“I ’ave to say,” said Lawrence, pulling again at his pint, “it was the darndest thing. The whole village was up in arms. There was one night, I’d gone over to babysit my niece, set my sister free for a couple hours, you know the drill, and next thing I know I hear this wail, this banshee wail, and I rush up the stairs, taking three at a time, thinking God help me, I’m on watch—and I didn’t know a thing about the other kids at this point, not a blessed thing—so I burst into her room, see, and she’s standing on the bed in her nightie, wringing her hands, eyes squeezed shut, and when I grab her, ask what’s the matter, she hits me full out, right in the eye. Had no idea who I was. So I got hold again, see, and I carry her right out of the room and downstairs, and I get her some warm milk, turn on every light, and the whole time it’s nothing but screeches and whimpers and wails. When she finally calms down, which must’ve taken, oh, forty minutes if it took an inch, she tells me that she is never, ever going to be a doctor. Now that floored me, because Kay, my niece, she was only ten, mind, but she’d wanted to be a doctor for ever so long. Years and years, and now, bang! So I say, ‘Kay, let’s not be hasty, you had a bad dream,’ and she says, ‘No, I’ve seen what they do to the doctors, and I won’t. I can’t!’ And then the poor tyke burst out crying again, and she went right on ’til her mum came home, and there was a scene, I can tell you. But do you know what she said, as soon as she saw her mum? ‘Mummy, don’t let them put me in the gibbet. Don’t let them put me in the gibbet.’ I tell you, it broke my heart. Broke it clean open. So much outright terror in a child so young. And of course what did she have up on the wall in her room? That’s right. Bonesy.”
Through the phone, I heard a soft, dragging sound, as if Lawrence had wiped at his nose with his sleeve. Then he went on.
“So what could we do? We gathered up what rubbings were left and had ourselves a bonfire. Not a ceremony, no. The vicar, he didn’t want the attention, and quite right, too. He just asked me to take care of it, and I did. We’ve a barrel out back, perfect for burning up the odd collection of branches or what have you. So that was it. I burnt the lot. Cinder and ash.”
Again, I checked around the library, every corner. Nothing moved. I was alone. Wasn’t I?
“Tell me what happened to the original,” I said. “To Bonesy.”
“Well,” he said, and then he stopped. His voice lowered to a whisper. “Please tell me you’re not from the National Trust.”
“The National Trust?” I said, none the wiser. “No, look, I told you. I’m calling from Los Angeles.”
Lawrence didn’t seem to have heard. “’Cos you know how those people are about anything old. They can’t get wind of this. They just can’t.”
By now, I was pretty sure I was one step ahead of my subject. “Mr. Bennet,” I said, “if you disposed of the brass in some way, that’s your business, and I assure you, that is not what I’m calling about. I have no interest in prosecuting anyone for protecting a whole village of frightened children.”
It can be tough to hear a sigh of relief over a telephone, but I heard that one loud and clear. The poor man had only just figured out what a hole he’d been digging for himself, and if I didn’t show him a way clear, he’d clam up or hang up, and either way, that would be the end of my Swayfield enquiries.
“Right, well. What happened to Bonesy, you ask? We melted her down, that’s what ’appened. Ironic, really: history having the last laugh. And I’m not sorry for it, either. We took her to the nearest bespoke ironworks where I had a mate, and we melted her down to nothing.”
“Hang on,” I said. “So you’re saying there’s not a single copy left? You burned the paper, or the kids’ parents did, and you took care of the brass itself. Right?”
“Well, I wouldn’t go quite that far. We didn’t have Bonesy available for more than a few weeks, ’cos like I say, these complaints started up right away, but I seem to remember there was a woman, an American woman. A graduate student or some such, divinity school. Stuck out like a sore thumb, she did. She’d hitched her way into town on a farm truck, and hitched her way out, too, when she went.”
He cleared his throat, swigged his beer, and said, “Anyhow, I remember her because she made a copy of every brass we had. Every single one, Bonesy included. And later, when it was time to warn her, when we knew what was happening, we didn’t know how to get in touch. We didn’t know her name, and yours is an awfully big country, now, isn’t it? Awfully big.” He paused, and I could hear the question coming a mile off—or maybe five thousand miles off. “Is that why you’re calling, sir? Because you found her, and she’s in trouble?”
So much for the shambling, slow-thinking caretaker I’d initially envisioned. With a little encouragement, an ounce or two of training, Lawrence Bennet would’ve made a decent detective.
“Something like that,” I said, “but you don’t have to worry. You won’t have any pigeons coming home to roost.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“But I have another question.”
“I’m sorry, I have to go.”
Give me a witness face-to-face any day of the week. Getting information is so much easier when the other guy can’t threaten you with the old “Gotta go” routine and hang up. The solution? Appeal to their better natures, and do it fast.
I said, “Lawrence, you could be a big help, here. Fact is, you already have. All I want to know is if you’ve had any trouble in the church since then. Since Bonesy.”
It was only a hunch, and not a very good one, but hell, I’d had hunches play out before. It’s like fly fishing. You cast, you put your fly on the water, you try to think like a trout. Sometimes you get a fish. Either way, knowing what you’re gonna reel in isn’t the point, it’s the way you disturb the waters. Do it right, miracles can happen—and in this case, it worked. What Lawrence Bennet said next had me sitting bolt upright before he’d halfway finished.
“We did have a break-in,” he said, and the last traces of that cheerful toymaker’s voice vanished. “Not even a year ago, now, so quite recent, and bold as anything. Somebody came in, broke into the vestry, and smashed up the display case where we keep the silver. You know, for communion and such.”
“Was anything missing?”
“At first, we thought no. Every cross and chalice, still right where they were supposed to be, or maybe knocked over but present and accounted for, even the Bible—we’ve got a copy from 1107, and very valuable it is, too, sir. So it took us a bit to realize they’d taken the other book, which was quite old in its own right. I don’t know, you might never have had quite this sort of thing in your country. A Book of Hours, we called it. Mostly prayers, psalms, lists of holy days and the like. I’m told it was early sixteenth century, and just like that, gone. I mean, of all the things to take. Of all the bloody things.”
In my mind’s eye, I could see the folded corner of the paper on which Iris had originally set her rubbing of Bonesy, I could see it plain as day: Swayfield-On-Witham; original date, 1519. Early sixteenth century.
“Mr. Bennet,” I said, “you’ve been very helpful.”
“I feel as I’ve just dug my own grave.”
For once in my career, my reassurances were genuine. “No,” I said, “you’ve got nothin’ to worry about. You get on back to your regular life, and don’t give me or Bonesy a second thought.”
“I’ll try, but Lord knows, there’s nothing like dredging up the past to shipwreck a fine Sunday evening.”
I snapped my fingers. “Hang on, almost forgot. Your niece, Kay. All grown up?”
“Oh, a fine girl, absolutely. Married, two kids of her own. But she never did go to medical school. Never even took the exams. She bakes bread, Lieutenant, and when folks ask her why a smart girl like her never went off to school, why she stopped taking everybody’s pulse and stopped giving them diagnoses like malaria and God knows what—for play, you know, when she was little, for fun—and when they ask why she stays here in the village, twiddling her thumbs, you know what she says? ‘I wouldn’t be a doctor for the world. I wouldn’t be a doctor for the world.’”
I let him go, and as I placed my phone gently on the cushion next to me, it seemed to me that the room, with its litter of left-behind books, had grown darker still. It didn’t matter that it hadn’t, really. For the first time since startin’ in on the whole Bonesy business, I was well and truly frightened. Iris had hold of something that didn’t belong, and was maybe more potent than any of us had realized. It must’ve been her that’d gone back on Bonesy’s behalf to fetch the book; Bonesy had wanted that book in spitting distance, and she’d gotten her way. But why? Did proximity give her a boost, like an energy drink, or uppers, or Seitapar? No. That couldn’t be it.
But Iris had gone back to Swayfield-On-Witham, of that I was positive. Not that she seemed to remember the trip. How could I prove it?
She’d have a passport. She’d have to have that, and the passport would have a stamp. Proof positive. Unfortunately, unless she carried her passport with her, it was at her apartment, which was six hours away and surely a hot zone for police. Dead end. Unless…
I picked up my phone again, the clunker version, and dialed up the Los Angeles branch of Customs and Immigration, la migra, specifically the desk of an old flame, Anita Gonzales. Once upon a happy time, Anita and I had been great together—for seven lucky months, anyway. After that? Well. Love ain’t easy, that’s a fact, and for us, going our separate ways was about ten times the better part of valor.
The phone rang, and a female voice, clipped and harried, picked up. “Gonzales.”
“Anita! Hey, it’s Dale Quist.”
She hung up.
I drew a long breath, chuckled, and hit redial. Again, she picked up and said, “Gonzales.”
“Me again. Don’t tell me them government-issue phones don’t have caller I.D.”
She hung up.
Now I was pissed, so I called right back. “Anita,” I said, as soon as the line went live, “don’t hang up. I need your help.”
“We agreed,” she said, tight and tired. “You were not to call me, ever.”
“That was a long time ago, and I need a favor.”
“No, goodbye, don’t call back.”
“Wait! C’mon, it’s not for me. I’ve got a case, a client. All I need to know is if she’s been out of the country in the last, I don’t know, five years.”
Once in a while, even a bitter ex-girlfriend allows her heart to soften up just for a second or two, and I don’t mean for me. I mean because it’s the right thing to do.
“Dale,” she said, “I’ll make you a deal.”
My stomach fluttered. Deals from Anita Gonzales, a five-foot dynamo who thought smiling was a form of weakness, damn near never went my way.
Anita took my hesitation as an affirmative. “Tell me why we broke up,” she said. “You’ve got thirty seconds.”
“Why? ’Cos we lost the spark.”
“Wrong. Try again.”
“’Cos you threw me out.”
She made a guttural buzzer noise. “Wrong again.”
“’Cos you were jealous. Jealous of me out on the town at all hours, doing my job.”
“Dale, you are such an asshole.”
Damn the woman. I knew perfectly well what words she wanted, and she knew I knew.
“Fine,” I said. “I made a mistake.”
“A mistake! Dale, you broke the law.”
I don’t know when I’d risen to my feet, but I was stumbling around the library, dodging the fallen books, keeping my weight off my hurt foot and waving my free hand like Anita could see me, or like I was maybe conducting an orchestra loaded up with gremlins. “What I did was justice!” I hollered. “Who cares about the law?”
A pause. “I do,” she said, more quietly now. “It’s what I get paid to enforce. You, too, on a good day.”
“Nope, not anymore. I run a motel—cabins, really. Northern Michigan.”
“Then why are you calling me?”
“Because a bundle of trouble dropped in my lap, and I’m trying to help. Listen, I won’t ever call again.”
“You broke the law.”
She said it like I’d extinguished the sun. Which, in terms of our future together, maybe I had. Anita was a black-and-white kind of gal. There was right, there was wrong, and if she couldn’t figure out which was which, she was the type to fall back on the penal code and every law that congress ever drafted. A by-the-book girl, Anita Gonzales—which was why I wanted her help.
I said, “You win. I broke the law. But I’m not sorry. Now please. I need to know if a woman named Iris Buckhalter has been anywhere outside the U.S. these past few years, and where she went.”
Anita wanted Iris’s social, which I didn’t have, but I had her address, and I knew where she worked. Anita said that would likely do, and that she’d get back to me soon—maybe later that day. “Don’t call us,” she said. “We’ll call you.”
Strictly speaking, Anita was right. On this one case, way back when, I’d broken the law. I’d helped a teenager, a Nicaraguan national, skip town just before he would have been deported. With the money I gave him, he got over the border to Canada, where he had family waiting to keep him on the down-low. I’d been hired by his grandparents to roust him out of South Central, where he was hiding, and send him north. I liked the grandparents, and I liked the kid. My only regret was that I’d felt so proud—that for once I’d done some actual good in the world, helping put a family back together—that I’d told Anita, and Anita blew the world’s hottest gasket. Oh, well. It wasn’t the first law I’d broken, and I was damn sure it wouldn’t be the last.
I made my way back to the breakfast room. Iris was still bent over her borrowed laptop. No sign of Mariel or her husband, but somebody had found my crutches and left them leaning in a corner, waiting for me. I slipped one under each armpit and hobbled over to Renner, who was still snoozing on the table. He spasmed in his sleep, and one of his legs trembled in rhythm with his pulse. It was maddening, that’s what it was. While I’d been out like a light, Renner had had himself some sort of up-close-and-personal supernatural encounter—and by the looks of it, he was still having it. I couldn’t have been more jealous if he’d stumbled onto free day at a diamond mine.
What exactly had happened to him? And why in hell hadn’t it happened to me? How come, once again, Renner turned out to be the chosen one?
“He’s all right,” said Iris, quietly. “I’m keeping an eye on him.”
She had it wrong, of course; I wasn’t staring at the reverend ’cos I was worried about him. Hell, she’d been the one to say it: he was breathing just fine. His color was good, and someone, probably the Silvas’ pet doctor, had changed the dressings on his face. Concern wasn’t why I was hovering over him—was it?
Flushed and ashamed and confused, I wheeled away and plunked myself onto a stool. When I caught Iris looking at me, I sort of halfway snarled at her, and she went back to her screen. Reflections played over her bifocals, making her look like a real computer pro, some smarty-pants out of Ocean’s Eleven or Goldeneye. Which, I realized, dated me something awful.
On a whim, I pulled out my phone, the smart one, the one with Tina Wolving’s toast photos. I swiped my finger around the screen until I had the first picture loaded up. Toast with gibberish. Frowning, I willed the tiny chits of toast to rearrange themselves into something that made sense. No dice. So, I got up again and started rifling the drawers in search of paper and a pencil.
Iris watched me over the tops of her bifocals, and tried to pretend she wasn’t. She made a real point of not asking what I was up to. She kept right on saying nothing as I divided the paper into a grid and wrote out each toasted letter the toast had to offer in big, clear caps. Then I got scissors and cut the paper into squares, one letter per square. And then I did the same for toast photo number two. After I’d laid them out on the countertop, they looked like this:
?RECCU?B
B? WANIBU
US?GFOES
QUIST
A half hour later, I was still none the wiser. I’d separated the squares that spelled out Q-U-I-S-T and set them aside, but the rest? Nineteen letters remained plus four blanks, like Scrabble, the blanks standing in for the pieces Tim and Tina had eaten. No matter how I shuffled them around, they made no sense. I could spell out BARE CUSS FEES and GREEBS SAW NUBS and a whole ream of other total nonsense, but nothing I came up with made a lick of sense or used all the letters. Pretty soon I was drumming my fingers on the counter and sighing like I was fit to be tied and resting my chin on my hand and generally growling at the whole entire universe. If I’d had a six-pack, which would’ve been nice, it would’ve been more than half gone.
“May I ask…?” Iris began, but I cut her off.
“Investigating, that’s what I’m doing. Like what you said to do. In-ves-tigating”
“I see.”
“Exactly.”
“May I take a look?”
Feeling reckless, I gestured expansively toward the mixed-up letters. “Be my guest. Let’s get everybody in on the act.”
Iris joined me at the counter. With two hands, she pushed her bifocals more firmly up her nose. “Aha,” she said. “The code from your friends’ haunted toaster.”
“It’s relevant,” I said. “Trust me.”
“Believe it or not, I do trust you. Not because I feel moved to do so, you understand, but because of Renner. The fact that Renner trusts you, that speaks volumes. You have no idea.”
I opened my mouth, then shut it again. Saying “Thanks” sounded inadequate, maybe even foolish. And who cared what Renner thought, anyway?
Iris sighed. “That man. You really cannot conceive. He was a reclamation project from moment one. Fussy, pedantic, closed-minded—no, worse: corrosive. Corrosive to everyone he knew. But at the same time, he was driven, you understand? And with a heart as big as San Francisco Bay. You know that, don’t you? And he wouldn’t mind me saying all this. He knew perfectly well that we were his last chance. Starr King, I mean. Divinity School. His second try, I believe. Maybe third. I think he tried to be a Methodist, once. Can’t remember. My point is, he knew he was drowning, that who he was was insufficient, insufficient for his talents, his mind. He had to learn to let go, to trust, to love. Have you ever met his mother? No? That woman, dear God in Heaven. It’s a wonder Renner’s sane at all, it truly is.”
Now I really didn’t know what to say. Renner had failed out of divinity school? Twice?
“I don’t usually take credit,” Iris went on. “Not for my students. They stand or fall on their own. They have to. I don’t have the energy to be their den mother, not to each and every one. But with Renner, I made him. From the ground up. Or maybe, I gave him the chance to make himself. Now he’s off and running free, doing God’s work, or what he sees as God’s work, as if he’s got a personal mandate. But in all the years I’ve known him, he’s never made friends easily. Not because he isn’t friendly himself, but because he can see right through almost everyone he meets. He sees their weaknesses, their foibles. He knows what the rest of us spend half our lives denying: that most people aren’t worth knowing.”
She paused, and with slow deliberation, pressed one knuckled finger against my sternum. “Think about that,” she said. “He knows you, maybe better than you know yourself, but still he chooses to be your friend. Don’t take that lightly. It’s an honor.” She pushed off with her finger, and let her hand fall. Her gaze dropped, too. “And I’ve been remiss. I appreciate your…your rescue at my apartment.” She tilted her head so she could see my expression, to make sure I’d heard. “Thank you.”
I waved her off. “Aw, don’t sweat it.”
“Oh, I won’t. I don’t dwell. Except, perhaps, on Bonesy—and I’m beginning to think that wasn’t my fault. Now then. Four letters unknown. Wild cards, I assume?”
“Somethin’ like that.” Iris’s descent into confessional mode was clearly over, and I wasn’t about to explain how the missing letters had long since passed through Tim or Tina Wolving’s colon and vanished into Traverse City’s wastewater reclamation systems.
“Tricky,” said Iris, with both hands still clutching the arms of her bifocals. Her eyes pressed forward and the arteries in her neck started throbbing. I swear, if she’d been concentrating any harder, she’d have had a stroke.
All at once, her left hand shot out and shifted a letter. Then her right joined her left, and the papers were zooming around the countertop like nobody’s business. It was like being at a casino and watching a real good blackjack dealer.
“Quist,” she said, and when I answered, she said, “No, your name. Here, on the papers. You’re sure that’s right?”
“I don’t know. Tina said so.”
“Tina.”
Her hands never stopped, and words formed and snapped with every motion she made. And then, all at once, just when I thought she was only blowing smoke, there it was. A message. A message I did not in the least understand:
QUIST ? ? ? ? ING BEWARE OF SUCCUBUS
Or, after a final rearrangement:
? ? ? ? ING QUIST BEWARE OF SUCCUBUS
Iris let go of her bifocals, and said, as if I’d just told her I’d been raised by Martians, “You think that is relevant?”
“I don’t understand.”
“The missing letters are W-A-R-N. Warning: Quist Beware Of Succubus. The toaster didn’t bother with the punctuation.”
I flung up my hands, feeling more frustrated by the moment. “Okay, but what’s a suck-you whatever you call it?”
“A succubus,” said Iris, charging off into a full-bore lecture, “is a kind of legendary demon. Real Dark Ages stuff. The demon takes the form of a sexually desirable woman. She attracts a mate—a man—and then, by seducing him, repeatedly, she slowly sucks away his soul. His life force, if you will. She enervates him. It’s not so far removed from vampirism, really, but with semen standing in for blood. I imagine it was quite the proscriptive, in its day. Imagine: instead of counseling little boys that abstinence will protect them from AIDS or chlamydia, you’d say, ‘Beware, young Johnny, or you, too, may be loved to death by a green-eyed succubus.’”
She took a minute to look me over, like she was expecting me to say something, and when I didn’t, she sighed, like she was disappointed.
“How in hell,” I managed, “did you do that so fast?”
“Don’t know,” she said, and she walked back to her corner. “I do play a lot of Bananagrams.” She slid into her seat, tapped at the computer, adjusted her bifocals again, and said, “But I still don’t see how it’s relevant. Bonesy may be many things, but sexually, she is unappealing—even, I would think, to you. If she’s a succubus, then I’m Casper the Friendly Ghost.”
One thing I know is when I’m being insulted. What I didn’t have was a decent retort. I started to say, “Like you’re so smart,” and then I tried, “I don’t need you to tell me nothin’,” but that sounded even worse, and as for, “Yeah? You and whose army?” well. I gave up and grabbed my crutches. In three hops I’d swung myself out the door, headed back to the library. When I arrived, there was the same cleaning girl, scooping up books; she took one look at me, let out a popping sort of gulp, and fled. Fine by me. I was all set to throw myself into one of the armchairs when my cell phone rang. Jill, I was sure, but no. The number wasn’t recognized.
“Hello?” I said, turning it into something more like “Get lost.”
“Dale?” said a voice. “I’m glad I found you. It’s Dr. Green.”
And that’s when it hit me. Holy Hannah. Dr. Green.
“Dale?” she said “Are you still there? It’s me, Sienna. Listen, I was worried about you. Skipping town in your condition might not have been the wisest move, so I drove out to your cabins, and I’m here with your assistant. She’s very sweet, by the way. She made me lemonade, can you imagine? You do realize you’re lucky to have her—oh, and she’s the one who gave me your number. She said she’d been worried, too, but you were on some sort of case? Is that the right word for what you do? You’re on a case?”
She paused, and I didn’t say a thing. It was all I could do to keep hold of the phone and stare straight ahead, out into the bright foggy nothingness of the world outside. I think I’d stopped breathing; in fact, I think I’d stopped the moment she said she was with Jill.
“Dale, listen to me. Have you got your medication? Have you been taking it? It’s important that you do, and Jill says the same. Doctor’s orders, okay?”
The door to the library flew open, the one that led in the direction of the breakfast room. Iris burst in, flustered.
“Hurry,” she said. “He’s waking up.”