they could hear and though I was only assuming that their intentions had been kind.
Above ground, outside the hangar, my bicycle was where I’d left it. The stars were where I’d left them, too.
I cycled back through the edge of Dead Town and toward Moonlight Bay, where the fog — and more — waited for me.
FIVE. NEAR DAWN
30
The Nantucket-style house, with dark wood-shingle siding and deep white porches, seems to have slid three thousand miles during an unnoticed tipping of the continent, coming to rest here in the California hills above the Pacific. Looking more suitable to the landscape than logic says it should, sitting toward the front of the one-acre lot, shaded by stone pines, the residence exudes the charm, grace, and warmth of the loving family that lives within its walls.
All the windows were dark, but before long, light would appear in a few of them. Rosalina Ramirez would rise early to prepare a lavish breakfast for her son, Manuel, who would soon return from a double shift of policework — assuming he wouldn’t be delayed by the extensive paperwork associated with Chief Stevenson’s immolation. As he was a better cook than his mother, Manuel would prefer to make his own breakfast, but he would eat what she gave him and praise it. Rosalina was still sleeping; she had the large bedroom that had once belonged to her son, a room he’d not used since his wife died giving birth to Toby.
Beyond a deep backyard, shingled to match the house and with windows flanked by white shutters, stands a small barn with a gambrel roof. Because the property is at the extreme southern end of town, it offers access to riding trails and the open hills; the original owner had stabled horses in the barn. Now the structure is a studio, where Toby Ramirez builds his life from glass.
Approaching through the fog, I saw the windows glowing. Toby often wakes long before dawn and comes out to the studio.
I propped the bike against the barn wall and went to the nearest window. Orson put his forepaws on the windowsill and stood beside me, peering inside.
When I pay a visit to watch Toby create, I usually don’t go into the studio. The fluorescent ceiling panels are far too bright. And because borosilicate glass is worked at temperatures exceeding twenty-two hundred degrees Fahrenheit, it emits significant amounts of intense light that can damage anyone’s eyes, not just mine. If Toby is between tasks, he may turn the lights off, and then we talk for a while.
Now, wearing a pair of goggles with didymium lenses, Toby was in his work chair at the glassblowing table, in front of the Fisher Multi-Flame burner. He had just finished forming a graceful pear-shaped vase with a long neck, which was still so hot that it was glowing gold and red; now he was annealing it.
When a piece of glassware is removed suddenly from a hot flame, it will usually cool too quickly, develop stresses — and crack. To preserve the item, it must be annealed — that is, cooled in careful stages.
The flame was fed by natural gas mixed with pure oxygen from a pressurized tank that was chained to the glassblowing table. During the annealing process, Toby would feather out the oxygen, gradually reducing the temperature, giving the glass molecules time to shift to more stable positions.
Because of the numerous dangers involved in glassblowing, some people in Moonlight Bay thought it was irresponsible of Manuel to allow his Down’s-afflicted son to practice this technically demanding art and craft. Fiery catastrophes were envisioned, predicted, and awaited with impatience in some quarters.
Initially, no one was more opposed to Toby’s dream than Manuel. For fifteen years, the barn had served as a studio for Carmelita’s older brother, Salvador, a first-rank glass artist. As a child, Toby had spent uncounted hours with his uncle Salvador, wearing goggles, watching the master at work, on rare occasion donning Kevlar mittens to transfer a vase or bowl to or from the annealing oven. While he’d appeared to many to be passing those hours in stupefaction, with a dull gaze and a witless smile, he had actually been learning without being directly taught. To cope, the intellectually disadvantaged often must have superhuman patience. Toby sat day after day, year after year, in his uncle’s studio, watching and slowly learning. When Salvador died two years ago, Toby — then only fourteen — asked his father if he might continue his uncle’s work. Manuel had not taken the request seriously, and he’d gently discouraged his son from dwelling on this impossible dream.
One morning before dawn, he found Toby in the studio. At the end of the worktable, standing on the fire- resistant Ceramfab top, was a family of simple blown-glass swans. Beside the swans stood a newly formed and annealed vase into which had been introduced a calculated mixture of compatible impurities that imparted to the glass mysterious midnight-blue swirls with a silvery glitter like stars. Manuel knew at once that this piece was equal to the finest vases that Salvador had ever produced; and Toby was at that very moment flame-annealing an equally striking piece of work.
The boy had absorbed the technical aspects of glass craft from his uncle, and in spite of his mild retardation, he obviously knew the proper procedures for avoiding injury. The magic of genetics was involved, too, for he possessed a striking talent that could not have been learned. He wasn’t merely a craftsman but an artist, and not merely an artist but perhaps an idiot savant to whom the inspiration of the artist and the techniques of the craftsman came with the ease of waves to the shore.
Gift shops in Moonlight Bay, Cambria, and as far north as Carmel sold all the glass Toby produced. In a few years, he might become self-supporting.
Sometimes, nature throws a bone to those she maims. Witness my own ability to compose sentences and paragraphs with some skill.
Now, in the studio, orange light flared and billowed from the large, bushy annealing flame. Toby took care to turn the pear-shaped vase so that it was bathed uniformly by the fire.
With a thick neck, rounded shoulders, and proportionately short arms and stocky legs, he might have been a storybook gnome before a watch fire deep in the earth. Brow sloped and heavy. Bridge of the nose flat. Ears set too low on a head slightly too small for his body. His soft features and the inner epicanthic folds of his eyes give him a perpetual dreamy expression.
Yet on his high work chair, turning the glass in the flame, adjusting the oxygen flow with intuitive precision, face shimmering with reflected light, eyes concealed behind didymium goggles, Toby did not in any way seem below average, did not in any way impress me as being diminished by his condition. To the contrary, observed in his element, in the act of creation, he appeared exalted.
Orson snorted with alarm. He dropped his forepaws from the window, turned away from the studio, and tightened into a wary crouch.
Turning as well, I saw a shadowy figure crossing the backyard, coming toward us. In spite of the darkness and fog, I recognized him at once because of the easy way that he carried himself. It was Manuel Ramirez: Toby’s dad, number two in the Moonlight Bay Police Department but now at least temporarily risen by succession to the top post, due to the fiery death of his boss.
I put both hands in my jacket pockets. I closed my right hand around the Glock.
Manuel and I were friends. I wouldn’t feel comfortable pointing a gun at him, and I certainly couldn’t shoot him. Unless he was not Manuel anymore. Unless, like Stevenson, he had become someone else.
He stopped eight or ten feet from us. In the annealing flame’s coruscating orange glow, which pierced the nearby window, I could see that Manuel was wearing his khaki uniform. His service pistol was holstered on his right hip. Although he stood with his thumbs hooked in his gun belt, he would be able to draw his weapon at least as quickly as I could pull the Glock from my jacket.
“Your shift over already?” I asked, although I knew it wasn’t.
Instead of answering me, he said, “I hope you’re not expecting beer, tamales, and Jackie Chan movies at this hour.”
