“No, Thomas. It doesn’t sound dumb.”

He didn’t move out of her arms. He wanted to be hugged.

Cathy said, “You know, sometimes life is hard for everyone. Even for smart people. Even for the smartest of them all.”

With one hand he wiped at his damp eyes. “It is? Sometimes is it hard for you?”

“Sometimes. But I believe there’s a God, Thomas, and that he put us here for a reason, and that every hardship we have to face is a test, and that we’re better for enduring them.”

He raised his head to look at her. Such nice eyes. Good eyes. They were eyes that loved you. Like Julie’s eyes or Bobby’s.

Thomas said, “God made me dumb to test me?”

“You’re not dumb, Thomas. Not in some ways. I don’t like to hear you call yourself dumb. You’re not as smart as some, but that’s not your fault. You’re different, that’s all. Being ... different is your hardship, and you’re coping with it well.”

“I am?”

“Beautifully. Look at you. You’re not bitter. You’re not sullen. You reach out to people.”

“Being Sociable.”

She smiled, pulled a tissue from the box of Kleenex on the worktable, and wiped the tears from his face. “Of all the smart people in the world, Thomas, not a one of them handles hardship better than you do, and most not as well.”

He knew she meant what she said, and her words made him happy, even if he didn’t quite believe life was ever hard for smart people.

She stayed a while. Made sure he was okay. Then she left.

Derek was still snoring.

Thomas sat at the worktable. Tried to make more poem.

After a while he went to the window. Rain was coming down now. It trickled on the glass. The afternoon was almost gone. Night was soon coming down on top of the rain.

He put his hands against the glass. He reached into the rain, into the gray day, into the nothingness of the night that was slowly sneaking up on them.

The Bad Thing was still out there. He could feel it. A man but not a man. Something more than a man. Very bad. Ugly-nasty. He’d felt it for days, but he hadn’t TVed a warning to Bobby since last week because the Bad Thing wasn’t coming any closer. It was far away, right now Julie was safe, and if he TVed too many warnings to Bobby, then Bobby would stop paying attention to them, and when the Bad Thing finally showed up, Bobby wouldn’t believe in it any more, and then it would get to Julie because Bobby wouldn’t be paying attention.

What Thomas most feared was that the Bad Thing would take Julie to the Bad Place. Their mother went to the Bad Place when Thomas was two years old, so he’d never known her. Then their dad went to the Bad Place later, leaving Thomas with just Julie.

He didn’t mean Hell. He knew about Heaven and Hell. Heaven was God’s. The devil owned Hell. If there was a Heaven, he was sure his mom and dad went there. You wanted to go up to Heaven if you could. Things were better there. In Hell, the aides weren’t nice.

But, to Thomas, the Bad Place wasn’t just Hell. It was Death. Hell was a bad place, but Death was the Bad Place. Death was a word you couldn’t picture. Death meant everything stopped, went away, all your time ran out, over, done, kaput. How could you picture that? A thing wasn’t real if you couldn’t picture it. He couldn’t see Death, couldn’t get a picture of it in his head, not if he thought about it the way other people seemed to think about it. He was just too dumb, so he had to picture it in his head as a place. They said Death came to take you, and it had come to take his father one night, his heart had attacked him, but if it came to take you, then it had to take you to some place. And that was the Bad Place. It’s where you were taken and never allowed to come back. Thomas didn’t know what happened to a person there. Maybe nothing nasty. Except you weren’t allowed to come back and see people you loved, which made it nasty enough, no matter if the food was good over there. Maybe some people went on to Heaven, some to Hell, but you couldn’t come back from either one, so both were part of the Bad Place, just different rooms. And he wasn’t sure Heaven and Hell were real, so maybe all there was in the Bad Place was darkness and cold and so much empty space that when you went over there you couldn’t even find the people who’d gone ahead of you.

That scared him most of all. Not just losing Julie to the Bad Place, but not being able to find her when he went over there himself.

He was already afraid of the night. All that big empty. The lid off the world. So if just the night itself was so scary, the Bad Place would be lots worse. It was sure to be bigger than the night, and daylight never came in the Bad Place.

Outside, the sky got darker.

Wind blew the palms.

Rain ran down the glass.

The Bad Thing was far away.

But it would come closer. Soon.

28

CANDY WAS having one of those days when he could not accept that his mother was dead. Every time he crossed a threshold or turned a comer, he expected to see her. He thought he heard her rocking in the parlor, humming softly to herself as she knitted a new afghan, but when he went in there to look, the rocking chair was filmed with dust and draped with a shawl of cobwebs. Once, he hurried into the kitchen, expecting to find her in a brightly flowered housedress overlaid with a ruffle-trimmed white apron, dropping neat spoonsful of cookie batter on baking sheets or perhaps mixing a cake, but, of course, she was not there. In a moment of acute emotional turmoil, Candy raced upstairs, certain that he would find his mother in bed, but when he burst into her room, he remembered that it was his room now, and that she was gone.

Eventually, to jar himself out of that strange and troubling mood, he went into the backyard and stood by her lonely grave in the northeast comer of the large property. He had buried her there, seven years ago, under a solemn winter sky similar to the one that currently hid the sun, with a hawk circling above just as one circled now. He had dug her grave, wrapped her in sheets scented with Chanel No. 5, and lowered her into the ground secretly, because interment on private property, not designated as a gravesite, was against the law. If he had allowed her to be buried elsewhere, he would have had to go live there with her, for he could not have endured being separated from her mortal remains for any great length of time.

Candy dropped to his knees.

Over the years the original mound of earth had settled, until her grave was marked by a shallow concavity. The grass was sparser there, the blades coarse, wiry, different from the rest of the lawn, though he did not know why; even in the months following her burial, the grass above her had not flourished. No headstone memorialized her passing; although the backyard was sheltered by the high hedge, he could not risk calling attention to her illegal resting place.

Staring at the ground before him, Candy wondered if a headstone would help him accept her death. If every day he saw her name and the date of her death deeply cut into a slab of marble, that sight should slowly but permanently engrave the loss upon his heart, sparing him days like this, when he was disturbed by a queer forgetfulness and by a hope that could never be fulfilled.

He stretched out on the grave, his head turned to one side with an ear against the earth, as if he half expected to hear her speaking to him from her subterranean bed. Pressing his body hard into the unyielding ground, he longed to feel the vitality that she had once radiated, the singular energy that had flowed from her like heat from the open door of a furnace, but he felt nothing. Though his mother had been a special woman, Candy knew it was absurd to expect her corpse, after seven years, to radiate even a ghost of the love that she had lavished upon him when she was alive; nevertheless, he was grievously disappointed when not even the faintest aura shimmered upward through the dirt from her sacred bones.

Hot tears burned in his eyes, and he tried to hold them back. But a faint rumble of thunder passed through the sky, and a few fat droplets of rain began to fall, and neither the storm nor his tears could be restrained.

She lay only five or six feet beneath him, and he was overcome by an urge to claw his way down to her. He knew her flesh would have deteriorated, that he would find only bones cradled in a vile muck of unthinkable origin, but he wanted to hold her and be held, even if he had to arrange her skeletal arms around himself in a staged embrace. He actually ripped at the grass and tore up a few handsful of topsoil. Soon, however, he was wracked by powerful sobs that swiftly exhausted him and left him too weak to struggle with reality any longer.

She was dead.

Gone.

Forever.

As the cold rain fell in greater volume, pounding on Candy’s back, it seemed to leech his hot grief from him and fill him, instead, with icy hatred. Frank had killed their mother; he must pay for that crime with his own life. Lying on a muddy grave and weeping like a child would not bring Candy one step closer to vengeance. Finally he got up and stood with his hands fisted at his sides, letting the storm sluice some of the mud and grief from him.

He promised his mother that he would be more relentless and diligent in his pursuit of her killer. The next time he got a lead on Frank, he would not lose him.

Looking up at the cloud-choked and streaming sky, addressing his mother in Heaven, he said, “I’ll find Frankie, kill him, crush him, I will. I’ll smash his skull open and cut his hateful brain into pieces and flush it down a toilet.”

The rain seemed to penetrate him, driving a chill deep into his marrow, and he shuddered.

“If I find anyone who lifted a hand to help him, I’ll cut their hands off. I’ll tear out the eyes of anyone who looked at Frankie with sympathy. I swear I will. And I’ll cut out the tongues of any bastards who spoke kind words to him.”

Suddenly the rain fell with greater force than before, hammering the grass flat, crackling through the leaves of a nearby oak, stirring a chorus of whispers from the Eugenias. It snapped against his face, making him squint, but he did not lower his eyes from Heaven.

“If he’s found anyone to care about, anyone at all, I’ll take them away from him like he took you from me. I’ll break them open, get the blood out of them, and throw them away like garbage.”

He had made these same promises many times during the past seven years, but he made them now with no less passion than he had before.

“Like garbage,” he repeated through clenched teeth.

His need for vengeance was no less fierce now than it had been on the day of her murder seven years ago. His hatred of Frank was, if anything, harder and sharper than ever.

“Like garbage. ”

An ax of lightning cleaved the contusive sky. Briefly a long, jagged laceration gaped open in the dark clouds, which for a moment seemed to him not like clouds at all but like the infinitely strange and throbbing body of some godlike being, and through the lightning-rent flesh he thought he glimpsed the shining mystery beyond.

29

CLINT DREADED the rainy season in southern California. Most of the year was dry, and in the on-again-off-again drought of the past decade, some winters were marked by only a few storms. When rain finally fell, the natives seemed to have forgotten how to drive in it. As gutters overflowed, the streets clogged with traffic. The freeways were worse; they looked like infinitely long car washes in which the conveyors had broken down.

While the gray light slowly faded out of that Monday afternoon, he drove first to Palomar Laboratories in Costa Mesa. It was a large, single-story concrete-block building one block west of Bristol Avenue. Their medical-lab division analyzed blood samples, Pap smears, and biopsies, among other things, but they also performed industrial- and geological-sample analyses of all kinds.

He parked his Chevy in the adjoining lot. Carrying a plastic bag from Von’s supermarket, he sloshed through the deep puddles, head bent against the driving rain, and went into the small reception lounge, dripping copiously.

An attractive young blonde sat on a stool behind the counter at the reception window. She was wearing a white uniform and a purple cardigan. She said, “You should have an umbrella.”

Clint nodded, put the supermarket bag on the counter, and began to untie the knot in the straps, to open it.

“At least a raincoat,” she said.

From an inside jacket pocket, he withdrew a Dakota & Dakota card, passed it to her.

“Is this who you want billed?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Have you used our service before?”

“Yeah.”

“You have an account?”

“Yeah.”

“I haven’t seen you in here before.”

“No.”

“My name’s Lisa. I’ve only been here about a week. Never had a private eye come in before, least since I’ve started.”

From the large white sack he withdrew three smaller, clear, Ziploc bags and lined them up side by side.

“You got a name?” she asked, cocking her head, smiling at him.

“Clint.”

“You go around without an umbrella or raincoat in this weather, Clint, you’ll catch your death, even as sturdy as you look.”

“First, the shirt,” Clint said, pushing that bag forward. “We want the bloodstains analyzed. Not just typed. We want the whole nine yards. A complete genetic workup too. Take samples from four different parts of the shirt, because there might be more than one person’s blood on it. If so, do a workup on both.”

Lisa frowned at Clint, then at the shirt in the bag. She began filling out an analysis order.

“Same program on this one,” he said, pushing forward the second bag. It contained a folded sheet of Dakota & Dakota stationery that was mottled with several spots of blood. Back at the office, Julie had sterilized a pin in a match flame, stuck Frank Pollard’s thumb, and squeezed the crimson samples onto the paper. “We want to know if any of the blood on the shirt matches what’s on this stationery.”

The third bag contained the black sand.

“Is this a biological substance?” Lisa asked.

“I don’t know. Looks like sand.”

“Because if it’s a biological substance, it should go to our medical division, but if it’s not biological it should go to the industrial lab.”

“Send a little to both. And put a rush on it.”

“Costs more.”

“Whatever.”

As she filled out the third form, she said, “There’s a few beaches in Hawaii with black sand, you ever been there?”

“No.”

“Kaimu. That’s the name of one of the black beaches. Comes from a volcano, somehow. The sand, I mean. You like beaches?”

“Yeah.”

She looked up, her pen poised over the form, and gave him a big smile. Her lips were full. Her teeth were very white. “I love the beach. Nothing I like better than putting on a bikini and soaking up some sun, really just baking in the sun, and I don’t care what they say about a tan being bad for you. Life’s short anyway, you know? Might as well look good while we’re here. Besides, being in the sun makes me feel ... oh, not lazy exactly, because I don’t mean it saps my energy, just the opposite, it makes me feel full of energy, but a lazy energy, sort of the way a lioness walks—you know?—strong—looking but easy. The sun makes me feel like a lioness.”