“Maybe not bears, sir. Just something.”

He swept the woods with his gaze again. Even with his hard but handsome face and steely eyes, he didn’t look as strong as before, because a tremor worked his mouth.

“You see any of them in broad daylight?”

“No, sir,” I lied.

“Night’s one thing, daylight’s a whole different ball game.” He focused on me once more. “You’re always picking at people, Thomas, always trying to get information out of them, picking and picking.”

“I’m just a curious guy, sir. I always have been.”

“Shut up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Nothing here is any of your damn business. Do you hear me, Thomas?”

“Yes, sir. I’m sorry. I’ve abused your hospitality.”

His scowl was even more impressive than his glare. “Are you being funny?”

“No, sir. If I say so myself, when I’m actually being funny, you’d find it hard not to laugh.”

“When I say shut up, I mean shut up. Shut up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Until you leave tomorrow, stay in the guest tower.”

In consideration of the shotgun, I nodded.

“Stay in the tower, lock the doors, lock the windows, draw the draperies, and wait until morning.”

I nodded.

Seeing my attention on the shotgun, he realized belatedly that he needed to explain it. “Thought I might do some skeet shooting.”

He pushed past me on the flagstone path, and I started toward the tower door.

He said, “One other thing.”

Turning to him, I was happy to see that the shotgun cradled in his arm was still pointed at the ground.

“There aren’t phones in your rooms, but you’ve probably got a cell phone. I want you to understand, there’s nothing here that the police would be interested in. You understand?”

I nodded. I didn’t have a cell phone because I never needed to play video games or surf the Net, or exchange nude photos with a congressman.

“I’m well connected with the local authorities,” Wolflaw said. “Better connected than you are with your own pecker. A couple of them were former security guards here. I’ve done a lot for them. I’ve done more for them than you could ever guess, and I can assure you that they won’t take kindly to some worthless drifter bad-mouthing me. Is that clear?”

I nodded.

“You suddenly a dumb mute or something?”

“I understand, sir. About the cops. Stay in the tower, lock the doors, lock the windows, draw the draperies, don’t call the cops or even the fire department if the place is burning down, but just wait until morning and then, come sunrise, keep on keepin’ on right out the front gate.”

He glared at me, his girly mouth puckered in contempt, and I figured that he might soon feel comfortable calling me Odd instead of Thomas, because he said, “You really are a shithead.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll tell Annamaria you said so.”

We stared at each other, plenty of animosity on his end, mere curiosity on my end, until at last he said, “Listen … I’d rather you didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“I’d rather you didn’t tell her. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. This is crazy. Does she have me hypnotized or something? Why the hell should I care if you tell her or don’t tell her that I called you a shithead?”

“Then I’ll tell her.”

“Don’t,” he said at once. “I don’t care what she thinks of me, she’s nothing to me, she’s as plain as a powdered doughnut without the powder. I don’t want to do anything with a woman like her, but I’d rather you didn’t tell her about my outburst.”

“Strange, the way she affects people,” I said.

“Extremely strange.”

“I won’t tell her.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

I watched him walk away through the eucalyptuses and up the vast sunlit lawn toward the main house. Even in the open, where nothing could sneak up on him, Wolflaw nervously looked left and right, and glanced back repeatedly. He was probably on guard for the mountain lion, listening for the cry of the loon, alert to the possibility that he might suddenly be confronted by the Jabberwock with eyes of flame and the frumious Bandersnatch.

Twenty

WHEN STORMY LLEWELLYN AND I WERE SIXTEEN, WE spent an evening at a carnival. In an arcade tent, we came across a fortune-telling machine the size of a phone booth, about seven feet tall. The lower three feet were enclosed, and in the glass case atop that base sat what a plaque claimed to be the mummified remains of a Gypsy woman, a dwarf who had been famous for her prognostications.

The withered, spooky figure—possibly a construct of plaster, paper, wax, and latex rather than a preserved corpse—was all tricked up in Gypsy gear. For a quarter she dispensed a small printed card in answer to your question. A quarter doesn’t seem like much to charge for a life-changing prediction, but the dead can work cheap because they don’t have to buy food or subscribe to cable TV.

A young couple who visited the machine ahead of us had asked if they would have a long and happy marriage. Although they gave Gypsy Mummy eight quarters, they never received an answer that seemed clear to them. Stormy and I heard the potential groom, Johnny, read all the answers to his girl, and although the fortune-teller’s responses were oblique, they were perfectly clear to us. One of them was this: The orchard of blighted trees produces poisonous fruit. The others were no more encouraging.

After Johnny and his bride-to-be left in a snit, we asked Gypsy Mummy the question that the other couple had posed. Into the brass tray slid a card that read YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER.

Stormy framed it behind glass and hung it above her bed, where it remained for a few years. Now it was in a smaller frame on the nightstand in my guest-tower bedroom.

When I lost Stormy, I never considered destroying the card in anger. I have no anger. I have never raged at man or God about what happened. Sorrow is my legacy from that terrible day, and as well a humbling awareness of my inadequacies, which are beyond counting.

To keep the sorrow from overwhelming me, I remain focused on the beauty of this world, which is everywhere to be seen in rich variety, from the smallest wildflowers and the iridescent hummingbird that feeds on them to the night sky diamonded with fiery stars.

And because I am able to see the lingering dead, I know that something lies outside of time, a place to which they belong and to which one day I will go. The prediction of Gypsy Mummy, therefore, has not proved finally wrong; it may yet be fulfilled, and I keep sorrow in check by anticipating the fulfillment of that much-desired destiny.

Since leaving Pico Mundo, I had taken the fortune-teller’s card with me when I traveled where my intuition propelled me. But for fear of losing it in some moment of desperate action, I didn’t carry it on my person all day, every day.

Recent events had led me to believe that the evil in Roseland was of an unprecedented nature. Annamaria was a help to me but not a shield, and my chances of surviving until morning didn’t seem to be good. I had no silly notion that as long as Gypsy Mummy’s seven words were in my possession, I would be invulnerable. But I felt, perhaps foolishly, that were I to die and step out of time, the powers that be on the Other Side would feel more obliged to lead me directly to Stormy if I carried with me evidence of the promised destiny.

I don’t mind being considered foolish. I’m as much a fool as anyone, more so than some, and keeping that truth always in mind prevents me from becoming cocky. Cockiness gets you killed.

I pried up the fasteners on the back of the frame, removed the rectangle of chipboard, and retrieved the card. I put it in one of the plastic windows in my wallet.

Otherwise, those windows were empty. I carried no photo of Stormy because I had no need of it. Her face, her smile, her form, the beauty of her graceful hands, her voice were all vivid in my mind, indelible. In memory, she lived and moved and laughed, but all that a photograph could offer was one frozen moment of a life.

Over my sweater, I put on a sports jacket that I had bought during my shopping trip to town. I wasn’t trying to spiff up my image. A sports jacket provided pockets and concealment.

As Noah Wolflaw had instructed, I locked the narrow, barred windows and drew shut the draperies. I turned on all the lamps so that much later, when nightfall came, the light leaking around the draperies would suggest that I was in residence.

After locking my suite of rooms, I climbed the winding stone stairs from the vestibule to the second floor. The knuckles of my right hand chased the door as it swung open before they could quite rap the wood.

Raphael, the golden retriever we’d rescued in Magic Beach, was lying on the floor, holding a Nylabone in his forepaws, gnawing it with gusto. He thumped his tail in greeting, but the Nylabone was at the moment of greater interest to him than any chest scratch or tummy rub he might get from me.

Boo was either elsewhere in the suite or had gone out to explore Roseland. As a spirit dog, he could walk through walls if he wished and do any of the usual ghosty things. But I had previously observed that, like any living dog, he had considerable curiosity and enjoyed exploring new places.

As before, the draperies were closed, and the only light came from two stained-glass lamps. Annamaria sat at the same small dining table. No mugs of tea stood steaming for either her or me.

Instead, on the table rested a shallow blue bowl eighteen inches in diameter, filled with water, in which floated three enormous white flowers. They were somewhat like magnolia blooms but larger, as big as cantaloupes, lusher, the petals so thick they seemed artificial, as if made of wax.

I had seen these flowers before, on an immense tree that grew outside the place where she had lived for a while in Magic Beach. We had eaten a meal together at a table where three blooms floated in a large shallow bowl like this one.

Knowing the names of things is a way of paying respect to the beauty of the world that sustains me and keeps my sorrow in check. I know the names of many trees, but not the name of the one from which these flowers came.

Approaching the table, I said, “Where did you get these?”

The lamp glow fell upon the flowers, the waxy petals bounced it softly to Annamaria, and this indirection played a trick on the eye, so that it seemed the light on her face shone from within her.

She smiled and said, “I took them from the tree.”

“The tree is back in Magic Beach.”

“The tree is here, Oddie.”

I had only ever seen one tree with these blooms, the nameless one in Magic Beach, with its great spreading black branches and its eight-lobed leaves.

“Here in Roseland? I’ve been all over the estate. I haven’t seen anything with these flowers.”

“Well, it’s here as surely as you are.”

Less than a week earlier, she had performed a trick with one of these white flowers. A friend of mine, a woman named Blossom, her only audience, had been wonderstruck by it. Now it seemed that she likewise impressed Noah Wolflaw, although the illusion apparently disturbed him in a way it didn’t disturb Blossom.

“In Magic Beach, you promised to show me something with a flower like this.”

“And indeed I will. Something that you will remember always.”

I pulled out the chair in which I had been sitting earlier.

Before I could settle, she raised a hand to stop me. “Not now.”

“When?”

“All things in their time, odd one.”

“That’s what you said before.”

“And it’s what I say again. You have a pressing matter to attend to, I believe.”

“Yeah. I found the one who needs me. A boy who won’t tell me his name. I think he really might be her son … if that makes any sense.”

Reflections of the blooms in the bowl flowered in her big dark eyes. “You have no time for an explanation, and I don’t need one. Do what you must.”

Something nuzzled my hand, and I looked down to see that Boo had materialized. He felt as solid to me as any real dog, as all spirits felt to me. His tongue was warm as he licked my fingers, but my hand did not become wet.

Annamaria said, “And remember what I told you earlier. If you should doubt the justice of your actions, you could die in Roseland. Do not doubt the beauty of your heart.”

I understood why she counseled me with those words. Mere days earlier, in Magic Beach, I had been caught up in a series of events that required me to kill five people involved in a terrorist plot, one of them a lovely young woman with large pellucid blue eyes. They would have murdered hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, if I had not killed them, and they would have murdered me. But the killing, especially of the woman, even though in self-defense, had left me dark inside and sick of myself.

That is why I told you at the start that I had recently been in a mood, not as buoyant and quick to find the humor in any moment as I have usually been. That was surely why I dreamed of Auschwitz, too, and worried about dying twice.

“The boy needs you,” she said.

After looking one last time at the flowers in the bowl, I went to the door.

“Young man.” When I glanced at her, she said, “Trust the justice of your actions and come back to me. You are my one protector.”

The retriever and the white shepherd were staring at me. Neither wagged his tail. Henry Ward Beecher once said, “The dog was created especially for children. He is the god of frolic.” I agree with that sentiment. But dogs can sometimes give you the most solemn look you will ever see on a human or an animal face, as if occasionally they are able to foretell, as if they see something in your future that they dread on your behalf.

I stepped out of Annamaria’s suite, pulled the door shut, fished the key from my pocket, and locked her safely inside.

Twenty-one

LEAVING THE GUEST TOWER, I REALIZED THAT AMONG the eucalyptuses, as in the oak grove around the Enceladus lawn, no leaves lay on the ground either where the earth was bare or where a sparse grass grew, or on the flagstone path.

Brooding on that and a great deal more, I made my way to the groundskeeper’s building by a roundabout route that prevented me from being seen by anyone who might be at a window in the main house. By lawns, by wild fields, by the cover of trees, I circled to the north end of the huge estate, always watchful for the mysterious pigs, if pigs they were, as well as for the stallion and his rider.

The swine scared me, but at least the only horse in Roseland was a spirit. I find horses beautiful and noble and all that, but … One night years earlier, three women on horseback hunted me through the desert around Pico Mundo. They wanted to carve open my skull and take my brain. And their steeds were no less scary than the women.