“There are a lot of scared, lonely, hungry ghosts hanging around in hospitals,” Angelica said, staring ahead. The boats had rounded the eastern end of the island, and were now buzzing irresolutely in the direction of a double-arched stone bridge.
Mavranos laughed weakly. “Keep your eyes on the course, by all means,” he said. “Lose control of this torpedo and we’re liable to plow right up onto the bank. What I mean is, I’m particularly vulnerable right now, aren’t I?”
Yes,” said Angelica. She gave Plumtree a haggard stare. “What did you mean, Janis, about a new tire?”
“Oh, I meant like a…relationship that’s been…fractured,” Plumtree said. “I wouldn’t try to patch it up, I’d just move on and meet somebody new, somebody who didn’t yet have any disappointments with me.”
“Or cobble up a new personality out of some of the unused lumber of your soul,” Cochran said tiredly, “one that hasn’t even met the other person yet. Fresh start all around.”
Plumtree nodded. “My father hath a power; inquire of him, and learn to make a body of a limb.”
That had sounded like Shakespeare. “Valorie?” Cochran asked.
“Janis,” Plumtree said, glancing at him impatiently. “I told you that, Sid.”
A lot of the tall oaks had fallen into the water on this side of the island, and the interior wood at the split stumps was raw and pale, and the leaves on the water-spanning branches were still green; clearly these trees had been felled in the storms that had battered the whole California coast two weeks ago, at dawn on New Year’s Day…when Scott Crane had been killed.
“Don’t say anything specific,” Plumtree said hastily, “about why we’re here, or you wil have Valorie in the boat with you. But even in what we were trying to do, I—I wanted him to be alive again, but I didn’t want his forgiveness. I didn’t want one bit more of his attention on me than would have been necessary! And even that, Valorie would have taken.” There were tears in her eyes, and she let Cochran put his arm around her.
“Not your flop,” he said.
She buried her face in the shoulder of his damp windbreaker, and when his hand slid down to her waist his palm was on her bare, cool skin where Nina’s sweater had hiked up away from her jeans; and he found himself remembering Tiffany’s hand caressing him half an hour earlier—and the steamy sweater smelled of Nina’s rose-scented perfume, blended once again here with the wild odors of pine sap and lake water, and for just a reflexive moment, before instant shame actually pulled his lips back from his teeth, he wondered if the rain had ruined the cassette in his shirt pocket.
None of them spoke as the boats buzzed quietly under the island-side arch of the old stone bridge. Cochran noticed one, then several, then dozens of black turtles perched motionless on the unnaturally horizontal branches of the felled trees—but as soon as he started to watch for them, all the dark ovals he focussed on proved to be pinecones.
He lifted his left arm from around Plumtree so that he could steer the boat with that hand; his right hand, with the ivy-leaf mark on the back of it, he stuffed into the pocket of his windbreaker.
To the left, beside the park road, a particularly big redwood tree had fallen this way across the lakeside footpath, and a segment as broad as the path had been sawed out of the six-foot-thick log so that strollers and bicyclists could pass unimpeded. Perhaps the tree was too heavy to move, and would stay there forever as a randomly placed wall, while its water-arching branches would eventually be overgrown by ivy and form a sort of new; hollow bank. After a while, like the cemetery construction on the yacht-club peninsula, it might look like part of the original plan.
With that thought Cochran looked ahead—and at last saw the carved stones of the Spanish monastery.
They were set low into the lakeside mud as an irregular segmented coping between the park grass and the water, each placed so that a broken-stone face was turned upward; only from this vantage point, low and out on the water, could the fretted and fluted carved sides be seen.
“Nina and I didn’t search from out in a boat,” he said wonderingly. When Angelica gave him a weary, questioning look, he went on, “There’s the stones from the old monastery—from here you can see what they are.”
Mavranos blinked ahead uncomprehendingly. “What are they?” He had still been unconscious when Cochran had mentioned them before.
“William Randolph Hearst bought a medieval Spanish monastery,” Cochran said, quoting what Nina had told him, “and he had it dismantled and shipped to America to reassemble over here—but the crates and plans burned up, and nobody knew how-to put the building back together again. And after a while the park maintenance guys began using the stones for…odd little landscaping projects, like that He pointed ahead, at the half-submerged bits of forgotten pillars and porticoes.
“And you said there are druid stones on the island,” said Pete Sullivan. “Maybe the monastery stones counter those, balance ‘em—net zero.”
“A monastery building would have been formally blessed,” Mavranos muttered, nodding. “Sanctified.”
“I’m glad you were along,” Angelica told Cochran. “This lake was a perfectly balanced place to shake off the ghost.”
“Not the job those stones thought they’d have,” Mavranos went on, “when they were carved up so pretty, I bet—just sitting here in the water, not even looking different from plain old fieldstones to anybody walking by ‘em. But there’s this purpose they can serve. Even broken. Because they’re broken.”
Again Cochran thought of walls made of chance-fallen trees, and stairs and benches and pavements made of scavenged pieces of derelict cemetery marble.
“There’s the dock,” said Pete, pointing ahead and to the right. “Our tour’s up. Where to now? Back to the Star Motel, see if Kootie’s waiting for us there?”
“Not yet,” said Angelica. “And not in the truck with Crane’s skeleton in it. We—”
Plumtree jumped in the seat beside Cochran. “His skeleton’s in the truck? How did he—” She blinked around. “What? What scared Janis?”
Cochran turned to her, wondering if he was about to summon Tiffany here, and if so, what he’d tell her. “Crane’s skeleton is in the truck, Cody.”
She blinked at him. Then, “Fuck me!” she said, and in spite of himself Cochran smiled at the idea that he might take the exclamation as evidence of Tiffany’s presence; but in fact he could see that this was still Cody. “I’m still on?” she said angrily. “How come I’m the one that gets to stay with all the horrible flops lately? His skeleton? Goddammit, Valorie’s supposed to take the intolerable stuff!”
“I guess you can tolerate more than you imagine,” said Cochran gently.
“They say that God won’t hit you with more than you can handle,” said Mavranos in a faint, shaky voice, possibly to himself. “Like, if He made you so you can just take a hundred pounds per square inch, He won’t give you a hundred and one.”
“We’re still too hot,” Angelica went on. “Magically, I mean. There’s been a lot of fresh—” Her breath caught in her throat. “—fresh blood spilled, this morning. I think plain compasses will point at us for a while after all this stuff—and we can’t be certain we haven’t been followed, either. On the drive down here, we were all looking ahead at the truck, not back. If Kootie is at the motel, he’ll wait for us, he’s got a key. And I guess he’s … the king, now. He’ll have the protections that come with the office.” She looked around among the trees at the anonymous pastel Hondas and Nissans that had begun to drive slowly past on the park road. “We should drive somewhere, aimless, watching behind, and just sit for an hour or so. Give ourselves time to fall back to our ground states.”