Unspeakable

green Burberry, like David's, and his fringe brushed forward the way that David's had been. And as she came closer, she could see that he was standing in front of the movie section.

She had seen David dead. She knew beyond any question at all that he was dead. Yet, why was she walking toward this man half- expecting him to be David, returned from the grave as if he hadn't driven under a flatbed trailer at more than seventy miles per hour?

She remembered him lying in his white silk-lined casket, his shirt collar fastened up much higher than he normally wore it because his head had been ripped off. The mortician said it was a blessing that he had looked away at the very last second before impact because otherwise they would have had to opt for a closed casket.

Holly came closer to the man and stood looking at him from only three feet away. She still couldn't be sure if he was David or not. But then the sun began to come out, and the light in the amber-and-yellow windows gradually grew brighter, and the man became aware that she was looking at him.

'Can I help you?' he said, and of course he wasn't David at all. He had shaving-brush eyebrows and close-set eyes and a little clipped mustache.

'I, uh-I was trying to find a book on James Dean.'

'I'm sorry, I don't work here. Maybe you should ask at the desk.'

'Oh. Yes. Sorry.'

He went back to his reading but Holly stayed close beside him. Eventually he looked up again and said, 'Thedesk. It's right by the front door.'

'Yes, I'm sorry. But do you mind if I ask you something?'

'Okay,' he said suspiciously.

'That Porsche parked outside-is that yours?'

'Porsche? I don't even own a car. I'm a dedicated cyclist.'

'Oh. Okay, sorry. I'll, uh, go to the desk.'

'Okay.'

A big bespectacled woman was sitting at the cluttered counter, sticking discounted price labels into a stack of encyclopedias. She wore a hand-knitted sweater in browns and purples, and her hair looked as if somebody had killed a struggling raccoon with knitting needles.

'Are you interested in something in particular, dear?' she asked. Holly could immediately detect that her accent wasn't Portland, more like Maryland or northern Virginia. It was the prissy, mannered way she saidpahtickle-uh.

'No, sorry. I wasn't looking for a book. I thought I saw someone I knew.'

The woman took off her spectacles and frowned at her. 'Are you allright?'she asked.

'I'm fine?. It's just that I saw that Porsche parked outside and it's kind of a rare car and someone I knew used to own one.'

The woman looked toward the door. The Porsche was gone. The only sign that it had been there at all was a dry rectangle on the street with streaks of rain running across it.

'Something's concerning you, isn't it, dear?' the woman said. 'My nose always tells me when folks are feeling disquieted,' and she tapped it by way of emphasis.

'I've had a difficult morning, that's all.'

'You're not alone, though. You do realize that?'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean exactly that. You're not alone. There's something following you, dear. Something behind you.'

Holly glanced around, but the woman touched her hand and said, 'Don't do that. The thing that's following you, it's bad fortune, and you never want to turn around and look bad fortune in the eye-never.'

'I really don't know what you're talking about.'

'You don't? I think that maybe you do. I come from a long line of mothers and daughters who could tell when trouble was afoot. There's blood on the moon, that's what my mother used to say. And I can see that with you. I can see that as surely as if a black shadow was standing close behind you.'

'Well, thank you for that,' said Holly, more sharply than she had meant to. 'Next time I'm feeling too cheerful, I'll know where to come.'

'I'm only saying what I see, dear. I'm only telling you what my nose tells me.'

The woman shrugged and placidly went back to her price labels. Holly stayed and watched her for a few moments. She was irritated by the woman's impertinence, but at the same time she was anxious to find out what she meant bybad fortune.What had George said about Raven?Raven is a scavenger who takes away people's luck, bit by bit.

After a while the man with the shaving-brush eyebrows came up to the desk carrying two books about George Stevens and David O. Selznick. He gave her a wary look and so she turned and left.

As she reached the door the woman looked up and said, 'You remember what I said, dear: Don't you go looking behind you, whatever you do.'

Blood on the Moon andOther Expressions

On the second occasion that the Portland Police Bureau had asked her to help them to lip-read a surveillance video, one of the suspects had used the phraseI wouldn't know him from Adam's housecat.

Holly's interest had been aroused, because she had only ever heard anybody sayI wouldn't know him from Adam.She had mentioned it to Dick Cass, a young English teacher she knew, and Dick had looked it up in the University of Portland library. It turned out thatAdam's housecatwas commonly used in southern states, while west of the Appalachians the saying changed intoI wouldn't know him from Adam's off-ox.

She realized then that she could not only identify people's regional origins from their accents but from the names they called everyday things, from old cars to rocking chairs to fried potatoes. In West Virginia they called a clap of thunderthe old bread wagonbecause rain made the crops grow. In Oregon they used the phrasecouple- threeto meanseveral.

Across the country she discovered that there were more than 176 different names for dust balls under the bed.

Some of the sayings were so locally specific that she could occasionally tell which county or even which town a suspect had been raised in. Pennsylvanians from the Manheim area still said that they 'spritzed' the lawn instead of sprinkled it. When Texans from Brownsville complained that somebody was 'admiring' them, they meant that they were being given the evil eye.

Down in certain parishes in Florida, people spoke of a place being 'creepified' instead of scary. 'That was a right boogerish place, that old house, real creepified.'

Holly had been right to guess that the woman in the bookstore came from Maryland or northern Virginia.Blood on the moonwas a Baltimore expression meaning a suspicious, menacing, or foreboding set of events.

A Black Painting

On an impulse she called Katie at the office and told her she was going to be half an hour late. She walked instead to Yamhill Street and went into the small, white-fronted Summers Gallery, which was owned and run by her older brother Tyrone. It was fashionably minimalist: The only painting displayed in the window was a naked man rendered in bright aqua-marine, entitledBlue Roger.

Inside, the gallery was cool and cream, with paintings spaced at tasteful intervals along the walls and several bronze and stone sculptures on stark white plinths. Tyrone was sitting at his desk at the rear of the gallery, talking on the phone. Apart from his phone/fax and the latest issue ofArchitectural Digest,there was nothing on his desk but a single yellow rose in a clear glass vase. A young man with scraggly bleached-blond hair and a faded denim jacket was sprawled on a tan leather armchair, idly tearing up a catalog of early American art, rolling it into little balls, and trying to toss them into Tyrone's discarded moccasins.

Tyrone himself looked strikingly like Holly, only very much taller. His hair was darker than hers, and his eyes were brown where hers were greenish-onyx. His nose was larger and sharper, but he had the same slightly fey quality, as if both of them might have been changelings. It was a look they had inherited from their Finnish forebears by way of their mother.

'Hi, Matthew,' said Holly, to the paper-tosser. 'You're not bored, by any chance?'

'Bored? Bored doesn't even comeclose. I am way beyond boredom, in a fourth dimension of total yawnation, where I am losing interest even inbreathing.'

Tyrone gave Holly a finger wave and said, 'Sorry, Holly, I won't be long. I'm trying to arrange a special exhibition.'

He listened, and nodded, and then he said, 'Tsimshian transformation masks. Very deep Native American stuff. Like, very,verydeep.' Then, into the phone: 'Yes, Ms. Spring Moon, Idounderstand their mystical significance. Yes, I know. Of course your shaman can supervise their hanging. We wouldn't want to upset any malevolent spirits, now, would we?'

As Tyrone talked, Matthew was mimicking his exaggerated hand gestures, so Tyrone threw the copy ofArchitectural Digestat him and hit him on the shoulder.

'Ow!'Matthew protested.

'I don't know why you don't find yourself something more challenging to do,' Holly suggested, taking off her raincoat and sitting down next to him.

'I don't think there's anything more challenging in the whole world than trying to bug Tyrone. Except-I don't know-maybe climbing the east face of Mount Hood in midwinter, totally naked.'

'Oh my God. So long as you don't expect me to watch you do it.'