ashes he had found and mounted looked to be untouched. She'd even shifted the furniture, with every wooden foot resting to one side of its decade long dust shadow.
He raised an eyebrow of disapproval at her haphazard methods, and followed her to the library. There his eyebrow climbed again: The room was scrubbed clean and clear of dust-cloths; the rolled-up carpets were now more or less flat on the floor. On the low table across from the fireplace, between the two leather chairs, a rough fistful of flowers from the garden had been dropped into a graceful crystal vase. The chairs had been rubbed into a gleam, and a fire laid, but not lit; probably just as well, he was thinking when she noticed the direction of his gaze.
“I was going to warm it up in here, but then it occurred to me that I ought to have the chimneys looked to first. I wouldn't want to smoke up the place.”
“Or burn it down.”
She looked ill at the thought, although Holmes was beginning to wonder if it wouldn't be for the best: The polished chairs and laid fire, the child's gift of flowers, suggested that she was becoming more interested in re- creating her past than she was in recalling it. He held the door for her until, reluctantly, she pulled herself away from her father's laden desk and joined him in the hall-way. He helped her into her coat, handed her the hat and gloves from the stand, and waited while she locked the door behind them.
“You want to go to your Italian friend again, Holmes?”
“No, I've spent rather enough time there. I suggest we investigate the culinary exotica of Chinatown.”
Wordlessly, she turned towards Grant Avenue. They walked the evening pavements, out of the heights and across the busy thoroughfare of Van Ness, climbing again and then dropping down into the bright lights and lurid colours of the Chinese district, where the gathering mist pulled like gauze across the street-lamps and coloured lanterns.
All the way, she said not a word and kept her hands in the pockets of her coat, making no effort to take his arm. This in itself did not concern Holmes, but that she also kept her eyes on the pavement did. She appeared oblivious to threat, as if the shooting seventy-two hours earlier had happened to another woman in another place. With another person, he might have thought that she was leaving the necessities of defence to him, but she was not that person.
He felt like seizing her by the shoulders and shaking her.
Or like giving her a hard shock in a less physical manner. But he could not decide if the shock he had in mind would clarify matters for her, or only make them worse. As with any blow, once delivered it could not be retracted; and so he kept his silence, although his eyes never ceased from probing the dim, fog-soft streets around them.
Halfway down the bright cacophony of Grant Avenue, Holmes touched her elbow. “Mr Long appears both fully recovered and at his till,” he noted. “Shall we invite him to join us?”
They were, indeed, before the greengrocer's stand, with the door to Long's bookstore open to reveal the owner making change for a customer, moving his arm with no apparent distress. Without waiting for her approval, Holmes stepped around the displays of
“He'll join us in half an hour, we can have a drink while we wait.”
He led her down the street to a building whose entrance was encrusted with carved dragons highlighted in gilt. Just inside the door was a tiny old woman all in black holding a clutch of large red leather menus to her breast, braced foursquare as if to guard the virtue of a granddaughter. Holmes delivered the message that they were friends of Mr Tom Long, who would be joining them in half an hour. The glittering black eyes scowled up at them, and then she turned and stumped away into what proved to be a large, warm, comfortable-looking restaurant peopled entirely by Chinese. She seated them at a table that was not visible from the front windows yet in close proximity to both front and kitchen doors, dropped two of the menus on the table, and hurried back to her post. Holmes held Russell's chair, then took the one beside her. She opened the menu, glanced at its pages, and closed it again. It was in Chinese.
“Are you up to a cocktail,” he asked solicitously, “or would you prefer to stick to wine?”
“I'm fine,” she automatically protested. “A gin and tonic would be good.”
He ordered for them both. When their drinks were before them, she inflicted a dose of spirits onto her mistreated insides, then set down her glass sharply and announced, “I'm going down to the Lodge tomorrow.”
He arranged a look of mild surprise on his face. “Do you think that's a good idea?”
“I don't know, but I think it's necessary.”
“Do you wish me to come?”
“I telephoned to Flo this morning, and she'd like to go—her friend Donny will drive us. We'll be back on Wednesday; there's some museum opening Donny wants to attend.”
“Hm,” he grunted. “I'd have thought you'd want to drive yourself.” Russell disliked being driven anywhere.
“I'm sure he'll let me have the wheel part of the time,” she said, although Holmes, having seen the lad's pride in that gaudy motor, had his doubts.
“How many people know of your plans?”
She fixed him with a glare. “Holmes, I know you think I'm being particularly stupid lately, but give me some credit. Neither of them know precisely where the place is, although I had to tell them roughly where we were heading. And I asked them to keep it quiet—I said I didn't want anyone else to know, because they'd want to join us and make it more of a bash than I wanted.”
“‘Bash.'”
“You know what I mean.”
“Of course.”
“I hope you don't mind. That I'm abandoning you here,” she said, belatedly concerned for his welfare.
“Not in the least. I have plenty to keep me busy.”
“Your Paganini research?”
“Actually, it's proving quite intriguing. Do you know, there is a theory that Paganini was commissioned by the Duke of . . .” but between the alcohol and her own concerns, she soon stopped listening. Which was precisely what he had intended.
When the drink was half gone and her eyes had begun to glaze with boredom, he dropped the diversion and told her, “I believe I've identified your faceless man.” Then he corrected himself. “Not identified, perhaps, although I've got a lead on him.”
She stared, picked up the glass and gulped down the second half, coughed a while, then, eyes watering, asked,
“The faceless man of your second dream. I found an elderly woman who spent some time in the park following the earthquake, and remembered your family. She also gave me the tale of a man coming to the tent city the day the rains began, which was the Sunday, who'd had his facial hair scorched off and wore some white ointment on his skin. Probably zinc oxide,” Holmes noted.
“Ointment,” she repeated, and reached for her empty glass. Holmes raised a finger to the waiter for another.
“The chap was looking for your father. He went to your tent, and his appearance frightened you. Miss Adderley's informant remembered your shrieks.”
“My God.”
The shock—or reverence—of the phrase was tempered by the effects of alcohol on an empty stomach. She seemed scarcely to be listening as Holmes described the old lady and her establishment, the aged butler and his protective granddaughter. He did not tell her about the photograph in his breast pocket, judging that its introduction would drain any rationality from the remainder of the evening. Other than that omission, he piled every conceivable detail into the narrative, until the sheer complexity and the second drink allowed her to attain a degree of distance from his revelation.
She interrupted his description of the old lady's shoes. “So two of the dreams depict actual events. First the earthquake, then an event shortly afterward.”
“So it would appear.”
“That would suggest that the third also refers to a concrete event. That there is an actual hidden room
