billion dollars a year that it had pumped into the county economy. These days the shop windows at Nine Palms are boarded over, weeds bristle from cracks in the blacktop parking lot, and six of the namesake palms are withered, brown, and so dead that they have been abandoned by tree rats.
The chamber of commerce likes to call Moonlight Bay the Jewel of the Central Coast. The town remains charming, graced with fine architecture and lovely tree-lined streets, but the economic scars of Wyvern’s closure are visible everywhere. The jewel is not as bright as it once was.
“They searched all the empty shops in Nine Palms,” Bobby said, “afraid they’d find Wendy’s body, but she wasn’t there.”
“She’s alive,” I said.
Bobby looked at me pityingly.
“They’re all alive,” I insisted. “They have to be.”
I wasn’t speaking from reason now. I was speaking from my belief in miracles.
“Another crow,” Bobby said. “Mary called it a blackbird. It was left on the car seat. In the drawing, the bird is diving for prey.”
“Message?”
“‘George Dulcinea will be my servant in Hell.’”
Mary’s husband was Frank Dulcinea. “Who the hell is George?”
“Frank’s grandfather. He’s dead now. Used to be a judge in the county court system.”
“Dead how long?”
“Fifteen years.”
I was baffled and frustrated. “If this abb is kidnapping for vengeance, what’s the point of nabbing Wendy to get even with a man who’s been dead fifteen years? Wendy’s great-grandfather was gone long before she was even born. He never knew her. How could you get satisfaction from taking vengeance on a dead man?”
“Maybe it makes perfect sense if you’re an abb,” Bobby said, “with a screwed-up brain.”
“I guess.”
“Or maybe this whole crow thing is just cover, to make everyone think these kids were snatched by your standard-issue pervert, when maybe they’re really being caged in a lab somewhere.”
“Maybe, maybe, you’re full of too damn many maybes,” I said.
He shrugged. “Don’t look to me for wisdom. I’m just a wave-thrashing boardhead. This killer you mentioned. The guy in the news. He leave crows like this?”
“Not that I’ve read.”
“Serial killers, don’t they sometimes leave things like this?”
“Yeah. They’re called
I checked my wristwatch. Sunset would arrive in about five hours. We would be ready to go back to Wyvern by then. And even if we were not ready, we would go.
TWO. NEVERLAND
18
With a second bottle of Mountain Dew in hand, Bobby sat on the cellist’s stool, but he didn’t pick up the bow.
In addition to all the instruments and the composition table, the former dining room contained a music system with a CD player and an antiquated audiotape deck. In fact, there were two decks, which allowed Sasha to duplicate tapes of her own recordings. I powered up the equipment, which added as much feeble illumination to the room as the dreary daylight that seeped in at the edges of the blinds.
Sometimes, after composing a tune, Sasha is convinced that she has unwittingly plagiarized another songwriter. To satisfy herself that her work is original, she spends hours listening to cuts from which she suspects she has borrowed, until finally she’s willing to believe that her creation has, after all, sprung solely from her own talent.
Her music is the only thing about which Sasha exhibits more than a healthy measure of self-doubt. Her cooking, her literary opinions, her lovemaking, and all the other things she does so wonderfully are marked by a wholesome confidence and by no more than a useful amount of second-guessing. In her relationship to her music, however, she is sometimes a lost child; when she’s stricken by this vulnerability, I want more than ever to put my arm around her and to comfort her — though this is when she’s most likely to reject comforting and to rap me across the knuckles with her flute, her scaling ruler, or another handy music-room weapon.
I suppose every relationship can be enriched by a small measure of neurotic behavior. I certainly contribute a half cup of my own to our recipe.
Now I slipped the tape into the player. It was the cassette I’d found in the envelope beside Leland Delacroix’s reeking corpse in the bungalow kitchen in Dead Town.
I turned the chair away from the composition table and, sitting down, used the remote control to switch on the cassette player.
For half a minute, we heard only the hiss of unrecorded magnetic tape passing over the playback head. A soft click and a new hollow quality to the hiss marked the beginning of the recording, which at first consisted only of someone — I assumed it was Delacroix — taking deep, rhythmic breaths, as if engaged in some form of meditation or aromatherapy.
Bobby said, “I was hoping for revelation, not respiration.”
The sound was utterly mundane, with not the least inflection of fear or menace, or any other emotion. Yet the fine hairs stirred on the nape of my neck, as though these exhalations were actually coming from someone standing close behind me.
“He’s trying to get a grip on himself,” I said. “Deep, even breaths to get a grip on himself.”
A moment later, my interpretation proved true when the breathing suddenly grew ragged, then desperate. Delacroix broke down and began to weep, tried to get a grip on himself, but choked on his pain, and let loose with great trembling sobs punctuated by wordless cries of despair.
Although I’d never known this man, listening to him in such violent throes of misery was disturbing. Fortunately, it didn’t last long, because he switched off the recorder.
With another soft click, the recording began again, and though Delacroix’s self-control was tenuous, he managed to speak. His voice was so thick with emotion that sometimes his speech slurred, and when he seemed in danger of breaking down completely, he paused either to take deep breaths or to drink something, presumably whiskey.
“This is a warning. A testament. My testament. A warning to the world. I don’t know where to begin. Begin with the worst. They’re dead, and I killed them. But it was the only way to save them. The only way to save them. You have to understand…I killed them because I loved them. God help me. I couldn’t let them suffer, be used. Be used. God, I couldn’t let them be used that way. There was nothing else I could do….”
I remembered the snapshots arranged beside Delacroix’s corpse. The elfin, gap-toothed little girl. The boy in the blue suit and red bow tie. The pretty blonde with the appealing smile. I suspected that these were the people who, to be saved, were killed.
“We all developed these symptoms, just this afternoon, Sunday afternoon, and we were going to go to the doctor tomorrow, but we didn’t make it that far. Mild fever. Chills. And every once in a while this…fluttering…this odd fluttering in the chest…or sometimes the stomach, in the abdomen, but then the next time in the neck, along
