Plumtree had taken a wobbling step back across the asphalt. “Did it work?” she asked. “Where’s Scott Crane?”
“Radioactive!” Mavranos seemed to say, loudly but in a slurred voice.
“No, Janis,” Cochran said. “I’m sorry, but it didn’t work.” It occurred to him that Plumtree was sounding like a concussion victim herself.
Look at me,” Angelica said to Mavranos.
“You’re upside-down,” Mavranos said in a high, nasal voice, “but I’ll look at you all you want.” To a tune that Cochran recognized as some old Elvis Costello song Mavranos sang, “You better listen to your radio.” But he slurred the last word, so that it seemed to be ray-joe.
Angelica had jerked back against the open door, her forehead wrinkled above the sunglasses. “You—your pupils are normal,” she said uncertainly. “But we’ve got to get you to a hospital, Arky, you’ve got a—”
“Bitch broke my nose!” Mavranos braced himself on his elbow and sat up, feeling his face. “Is my traitor sister here?” He blinked at Angelica. “Who the hell are you people? My nose isn’t broken! Am I—did I do it, am I the king?”
Angelica held out the white stone fragment. “This was a statue of a, a fat Buddha,” she said, and Cochran could tell that she was trying to keep her voice level. “Do you—recognize it?”
“Buddha,” said Mavranos in his new, high voice, “it’s not Buddha, it’s Tan Tai, gook god of prosperity. I gave her one like it once, when she was still my loyal half-sister.”
Angelica stepped slowly away from the truck, glancing worriedly at Cochran and Plumtree. “Look only at me please,” she said to them in a quiet, professional tone. “Pete? Eyes front. We won’t be going to a hospital after all, unless I see a deterioration in Arky’s vital signs.”
Cochran could feel goose bumps rasping the fabric of his damp shirtsleeves, and not because of the dawn chill. He understood now that a ghost had got punched into Mavranos’s head back there; and he wondered if it was one of the ones that had clustered ahead of the truck on the drive back from the ruins at the end of the yacht-club peninsula, or if it was one that Mavranos had been carrying with him all along, like an old intolerable photo in a sealed locket.
To Cochran, Angelica said, “You’re a local boy—where is there water nearby? Tamed water, contained water. With—we need to get Arky and me into a boat, very quick.”
“A boat?” echoed Cochran, trying not to wail in pure bewilderment. “Okay. Well! Golden Gate Park, I guess. Stow Lake. You can rent boats, I think.”
“Close by?” asked Angelica.
“Two or three miles back the way we came.”
“It’s not—famously haunted or anything, is it?”
Cochran rocked his head uncertainly. “There’s supposed to be druid stones on the island in the middle of the lake,” he said, “and I heard that there were stones from a ruined Spanish monastery around the shore; but my wife and I went looking for this stuff a couple of years ago, and couldn’t find any of it. Anyway, no, I’ve never heard of any hauntings or murders or anything.”
Remotely, as if from some previous life, he remembered the picnic he and Nina had unpacked on the Stow Lake island one sunny weekday morning, and how in the bough-shaded solitude at the top of the island hill they had soon forgotten the sandwiches and overturned the wine as they had rolled around on the dewy grass. They had made a sort of bed of their cast-off clothing, and when they had finally collapsed, spent, Nina had said that it had been as if they’d been trying to climb through each other.
And now he jumped, for Plumtree had slid her hand up the clinging seat of his jeans.
“Can we go?” she asked quietly. “Did they get the dead man back alive again?”
“No,” Cochran said, blinking away tears of exhaustion, “Tiffany. It failed. The dead man is—deader than he was before.”
Her hand was snatched away, but he didn’t look at her to see who she might be now; he just stepped to the side to block her view of Mavranos and said, rapidly, “Remember the little girls we saw on the roof of that clown’s house? I think we’re in the same sort of—situation now. Look only at Angelica. Do you follow me?”
“Mirrors can ricochet,” she said bleakly, in the voice he now recognized as Cody’s. “I’m looking no higher than the ground.”
Angelica gently pressed the truck door closed until it clicked, as if to keep from waking someone up. “You lead the way to this lake,” she told Cochran as she pulled open the truck’s back door to get in. “And when we get there, you walk ahead of us and buy the tickets or whatever.”
“Right.” Cochran turned back to the Granada, jerking his head at Plumtree to follow.
“What’s left for us?” Plumtree asked dreamily as she got in on the passenger side and Cochran started the engine again. “After this?” Perhaps she was talking to herself.
“Getting drunk,” he said anyway, clanking the shift lever into reverse. “What did you think?”
“Oh,” she said, nodding. “Right. Of course.”
“Boats first.”
“To the boats,” she said, emptily.
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CRESSIDA: …he is himself.
PANDARUS: Himself? Alas, poor Troilus, I would he were.
CRESSIDA: So he is.
PANDARUS: Condition, I had gone barefoot to India.
—William Shakespeare,
Troilus and Cressida
AT the corner of Stockton and Washington, Kootie had found only the Chinese I restaurant he remembered having passed at dawn, next door to the Jade Galore shop; the restaurant wasn’t open, and the old man who had been peering into a mirror propped against the restaurant wall was gone now, and the big old gilt-framed mirror too. Someone had even swept up the dead sparrows. Kootie had turned away toward the wet intersection, stepping to the curb and mentally cursing the Chinese woman who had given him the useless message, when he sensed a change in the light from behind him.
And when he turned around, the restaurant was gone.
In its place stood a three-story plaster-fronted building with narrow arched windows. At a wrought-iron gate to an enclosed patio garden, the woman in white stood staring out at him, and behind her he could see the big framed mirror, propped now against a knotty tree stump in the rainy garden. On a white sign over the gateway arch, plain black letters spelled out, PLEASANT BOARDING HOUSE.
Oh, this is magic, Kootie thought, his spine suddenly tingling with a chill that wasn’t from the cold rain. I should run away.
Run away to what place, he asked himself bitterly then, that hasn’t been conquered? To what people, that haven’t been defeated and probably killed?
His breath was hitching and catching in his throat.
The Chinese woman beckoned with constrained urgency, and touched a finger to her lips. Kootie noticed that though she was still draped in white, it was a frail linen robe she was wearing now, and the fabric appeared to be dry.
At least she’s offering shelter, he told himself as he shrugged and stepped back across the sidewalk from the edge of the curb. His sneakers squished on the pavement, and he could feel cold water spurting between his toes.
The woman tugged the gate open on hinges that made no sound over the clatter of the rain, and then pushed it closed again after Kootie had stepped through onto the round paving stones laid out across the patio mud. “What is this place?” he whispered to her.