ledge. When we reached it, I turned to Andrea and smiled tightly.
“OK, lay it on me.”
She shrugged.
“I don’t know where to begin.”
“Try the beginning.”
“It’s … I mean, how do I know if I can trust you? Sam said that you were friends. You might tell him everything …”
I gestured impatiently.
“I won’t. You have my word on that. Besides, we’re not really friends. He’s just someone I knew years ago, at college. Like I told you, I’m leaving soon and I won’t be back. And the only regret I have about that is that I would like to have spent more time with you, Andrea.”
She pushed back her hair distractedly.
“Me? Why?”
I smiled at her.
“I thought women weren’t supposed to ask that. Anyway, I don’t know. I can only say that out of all the people here, you’re the only one who seems completely real.”
She narrowed her eyes, as though suspecting some trick.
“You mean you think the others are specters?”
I gave an expressive sigh.
“Please, Andrea! Don’t give me that crap.”
“You don’t believe in it?”
She seemed amazed.
“What’s to believe?” I demanded. “The gospel according to Billy Blake? You don’t buy into that, do you?”
A sea gull flew by, emitting sounds like a squeaky gate. Andrea swung around as though someone had touched her. She seemed to be getting more agitated by the moment.
“We all do,” she murmured. “We have to.”
“But supposing you don’t? Supposing you lose your faith, what happens then?”
She did not reply.
“Do you want to leave?” I suggested. “Is that what this is all about, Andrea?”
Her head shook in a spasm.
“You don’t understand!”
I turned and started to climb back up the rocks.
“Stop!”
It was a cry of desperation.
“You mustn’t go yet! Please come back!”
She looked so helpless I found myself taking pity on her. Maybe she really was crazy, I thought. If so, she was in good company. I climbed back down.
“You’re absolutely right!” I told her sharply. “I don’t understand a fucking thing. I don’t understand why you asked me to meet you. I don’t understand what you’re so afraid of. I don’t understand what you’re doing here in the first place.”
She sidled past me, putting herself between me and the bluff.
“It’s no use trying to cut off my escape,” I said. “If you want me to stay and listen to you, you’d better start talking sense. Fish or cut bait, Andrea.”
She looked up above my head, as though seeking inspiration.
“You know about Lisa, right?” she said.
“Sam’s wife, the one who drowned?”
“The one who drowned.”
She continued her circular movement, ending up back in her original position. I turned to face her.
“Lisa was a friend of mine. She invited-me here when she bought the place. There were a bunch of us. Most of them left. I stayed.”
A movement caught my attention. Behind Andrea and slightly to one side, someone had appeared on the rocky outcrop high up at the other side of the cove.
“Someone’s watching us,” I murmured.
I couldn’t make sense of the perspective at first. The figure seemed to be farther away than the rock it was standing on. Then I realized that it was not an adult but a child, dressed in the clothes I had discovered in my room earlier, the denim shirt and jeans. The outfit now looked strangely familiar.
Andrea had turned to look.
“I don’t see anyone,” she said with a puzzled frown.
I hardly heard. A terrible madness had gripped me, a senseless certainty I knew was impossible, but which I could not shake off.
“David!”
“There’s no one there,” said Andrea.
The child stood rigidly still. His face was expressionless.
“David! It’s me, your father!”
There was no reaction. I shoved my way past Andrea, sprinted across the cove and hurled myself at the rock face.
15
The day after the double slaying in Carson Street, Charlie Freeman came by Grady to check on the surviving white victim. It was a routine follow-up to a case which another detective had initiated, and in which he himself took no particular interest. Freeman was a good old boy of thirty-seven from a remote stretch of Wilkes County who had never pretended to take much serious interest in anything except fishing, hunting and his dog, Reb.
He parked his pickup in a gimp slot right in front of the main door of Grady and walked on in. After lingering a little longer than was strictly necessary with the receptionist, a bottle blond with buns of steel and alluring eyes, Freeman took the elevator up to the twelfth floor. The duty nurse on the ward he’d been directed to was one of those Germanic types, as broad as she was tall, and looked like she could plow the upper forty without the help of a mule any day. She told Freeman that the patient’s condition had improved somewhat, but that he was still critical and could not be questioned.
“You get a name, anything?” asked Freeman.
“He hasn’t opened his lips except to take a sip of water.”
Charlie Freeman looked around him vaguely.
“Stuff he had on him, where’s that?”
“His personal belongings will have been bagged and taken to the depository.”
Freeman rode down with an extended black clan, all of them in tears except for one man who was fixating on something far beyond the modest dimensions of the elevator. Down in the basement, Freeman traversed a grid of aggressively lit corridors. On the far side of a pair of open double doors, a woman was mopping an empty operating theater.
“Hey, that place’s so clean you could do major surgery in there!” Freeman shouted, barking a succession of abrupt laughs.
The woman shrugged and said something in Spanish. Freeman continued on his way, scowling. Reason the country was going down the tubes, you couldn’t share a joke no more. They either didn’t get it or they disapproved. Pretty soon you’d have to run every gag past a committee of previously battered lesbians of color or risk a lawsuit. Well, he didn’t give a rat’s ass. Live free or die.
The depository was presided over by a black guy tall enough to have been a basketball player maybe ten, twenty years ago. Charlie Freeman flashed his ID and asked for the belongings of Patient #4663981.
“You got a warrant?” the clerk asked.
