trunk before they leafed out at the top, so they were like bare pillars down here where she walked. All the doors of the buildings were bolted and the gates were locked.
Jane knew where her steps were taking her. She heard herself say, “I don’t want to go there,” but as soon as she had said it, she was walking up the slight incline onto Ocean View Avenue. She walked directly to the apartment building at the end on the left. The last time she had been here, she had thought about what a good spot it had seemed to place a man like Harry—the street wasn’t one that any casual visitor would be likely to notice, because it didn’t connect with any of the long, straight ones that crossed the town. By the time she had come here for the first visit all that was to be seen of Harry was a big, dark bloodstain on the cheap yellow shag carpet in the living room.
In the logic of her dream, she felt relieved that old blood never really came out of carpets. The landlords would have replaced the carpet years ago, before they could rent the apartment to some unsuspecting tenant who’d arrived in town after the talk of the murder had subsided. The group memory about unpleasant events wasn’t very good in places like Santa Barbara anyway. The bad things happened to strangers—transients and tourists. The victims were assumed to have brought both the causes and the perpetrators with them into the quiet town, and when they were dead the trouble went with them.
Jane knew it wasn’t enough to walk past the building and say to herself, “This is the place where John Felker brought a knife across the throat of Harry Kemple and watched him bleed to death on the floor,” like some tour guide. She was not an outsider.
She felt her hand on the cold iron railing and listened as her feet touched each of the short slabs of roughened concrete that formed the steps. She remembered the way footsteps made the railing vibrate and hum a little.
She reached the door at the top and touched the handle. When it turned she released it, but it was too late. The door was open six inches and she knew she was supposed to go in. She stepped inside and closed the door.
She looked down at the place on the floor where Harry had died, but she could not see anything different about it, so she lost her certainty that it was the right place, and tried to line it up with the window she had looked through that night.
She watched Harry step into the space on the floor where the bright afternoon sunlight beamed in through the window and illuminated the tiny specks of dust floating in the air. He didn’t deflect them from their courses at all. He said, “I hate it here.” Then he added apologetically, “But I’m a troubled spirit.”
“The unquiet dead,” she said. “That’s you, Harry.”
He made his familiar gesture of tugging at his collar, and she could see the seam that the undertaker had sewn to close his neck. That was the reason. She realized that the wound was bleeding again, little droplets seeping out where the needle had not closed the skin, as though being here made the blood flow. Jane stared down at the carpet, to look away from it.
Harry touched the toe of his worn, scuffed shoe on the carpet. “This is where I died. Did you know that?”
“Of course I knew that,” she said impatiently, but seeing him staring down at it like this caused tears to blur her vision.
“I mean right here, where I’m standing now. They only replaced this little square—about five by five—and combed the shag over the seams so it would look the same.” He raised his eyes and stared at her intently. “It’s happening again, Janie.”
She was held by his eyes. “How can it be?”
“Nothing lasts, but nothing really changes. The replacement is what it replaces. The brothers still stalk each other, and then they fight to the death. Over and over.”
Jane waited, trying to understand.
Harry said, “They’re so good at it that for a long time they’ve been able to read each other’s minds. The Right-Handed Twin, the Creator, was born exactly as strong as the Left-Handed, the Destroyer. They both know it, but each one has a secret vulnerability, so he can’t help thinking about it. Hanegoategeh, the Destroyer, thinks the truth, but Hawenneyu, the good one, thinks a lie.” He paused. “Ever wonder why it isn’t the other way around?”
“Because it never was a game,” she said. “It’s a war.”
He nodded. “Anybody who doesn’t live by his wits, doesn’t live. Death is always a surprise.” He held her in his melancholy gaze for a moment, and she could tell he was letting her think about what had happened here. The way you cut a throat was by using the right hand to bring the blade edge across from behind. First you had to get him to turn his back by making him believe you were a friend.
She said, “It’s all going wrong, isn’t it? I missed something else.”
He said, “You know everything they know. And they know everything you know. You both know that, too.”
Jane awoke suddenly, shocked to be in the light. Her head jerked to the side to search for something familiar, because she couldn’t remember where she was. Her eyes settled on the clock radio beside the bed, and she read the digits: 5:55. She supposed the dream had been cut short by a sound. She heard a hotel maid moving her cart up the hallway.
She sat up and closed her eyes, trying to recapture the bits of the dream before they were dispersed by the sensory impressions that had come with consciousness. She was frustrated, because she kept catching herself thinking about Brian Vaughn. Then she realized that he wasn’t a distraction. Their secret vulnerability was Brian Vaughn. And now he was her vulnerability too. But then, why had they picked him? Because he was weak.
41
Jane carefully constructed her package. The videotape of Brian Vaughn and his apartment and his false identification she surrounded with crumpled newspaper before she put it into the box. The box was addressed to Alan Weems at Senior Rancho in Carlsbad, and she used the return address she had given the Rancho people for his daughter, Julia Kieler, so he would know it wasn’t a bomb.
She looked over her letter again. It began, “This is the tape of Brian Vaughn, the man you operated on. His address as of this date is 80183 Padre Street in Santa Barbara, and he calls himself Charles Langer. The other person I found who had been fooled by the people who killed Sarah Hoffman is Janet McAffee. She is living as Christine Manon at 9595 Timon Street in Cleveland, Ohio. If you hear of my death, or are caught, give both of them up to the police.”
The rest of the letter was more difficult. It was an attempt to put down everything she had learned about the face-changers in a logical, comprehensible way. As she read it over, it seemed to her that what she had described was a collection of three separate stories that had collided and begun to overlap very early. The face-changers seemed to have gone into business with Brian Vaughn, but hiding him had forced them to manipulate, and finally frame, Richard Dahlman. The face-changers had already taken on Christine Manon when Dahlman unexpectedly escaped from custody. They had to devote most of their time to searching for Dahlman, so they needed to put Christine in storage. They had made her wait in an apartment in Chicago while the boxes they had planned to ship to Brian Vaughn were still in the closet there. They had planned to move her to the apartment on Troost Avenue in Los Angeles, which was empty and new because they had undoubtedly just bought it with Brian Vaughn’s money. Everything had affected everything else in small, incidental ways. She could only hope that each part would help to corroborate the others.
When Jane was satisfied that she had included every detail that she knew, she folded the letter, addressed it to Dahlman, and placed it inside the box with the tape. She had decided that the information belonged to him. If all of this misery ever resulted in a trial, then the name of the trial was most likely to be
She drove to the municipal parking lot, walked to the big post office on Santa Barbara Street, and waited at the counter to send the package by express mail. Then she walked to State Street to do her shopping. At the first
