1.

Caroline's car stalled half a dozen miles from Mycenae. Two miles from the closest house, they hit a puddle deep enough to swamp them.

"Just as well," Jack said. "Can't see anything in this rain anyway."

... missed Houston but ravaged the Beaumont-Port Arthur area in southeastern Texas yesterday, blowing down trees, knocking out power and interrupting refinery operations. The storm hit shore- Jack cut the engine, turning off the radio.

Now that the car wasn't moving, plowing through the rain as if parting billowing curtains, the wipers were useless.

"If you get chilly," Jack said, "I'll turn on the motor. Turn on the heat."

During the forty minutes they'd driven from the Berkshire Medical Center, they had both dried a little in the blowing heat from the vents.

For the first half hour out of Pittsfield, they had discussed what Jack had found on the computer: Jean Gaynor had checked into the Emergency Room complaining of headaches, muscle aches, fatigue, dizziness, ringing in the ears, irregular menstruation, irregular heartbeat, hallucinations, difficulty in concentration.

"She was a drug addict," Caroline said.

"That's what the doctor who looked at her figured," Jack said, leaning forward and peering as he plowed through the rain, going no faster than ten miles an hour.

"A lot of symptoms," Caroline said, also peering through the windshield. "There's a stop sign. So many symptoms," Caroline continued.

"She said it started when she moved," Jack said.

"To the place that was searched?" Caroline asked.

"Another address." Jack handed her a slip of paper from the hospital. On it he had scrawled: 17-41 Rostyn.

"Mycenae?"

Jack nodded.

"Where she was living when she went to the Emergency Room. At least, it was the address she gave. Said about three months after she moved there, she started feeling sick."

"So she moved out."

"To Galvin Avenue."

"Because she thought the place"-Caroline looked at the piece of paper again-"17-41 Rostyn was making her sick."

"That," Jack said as he hit the puddle that stalled them, "and the ghosts."

2.

About three in the morning, the rain let up.

"Hey, Five Spot," he said gently. "Time to wake up."

Caroline blinked. Turned her head, gazed at Jack.

"I'm the guy who's driving," Jack said. "Remember?"

"I fell asleep," Caroline said.

Ahead, the setting moon hung close to the horizon. Jack's window was open. The air smelled of soil, manure, cinnamon. The wet road hissed under their tires.

Before Caroline fell asleep, the rain drumming on the car roof, Jack had told her about the notation at the end of Jean's hospital record: Along with physical symptoms, Jean had complained about seeing a ghost. A little girl bouncing on a bed and running through the halls of 17-41 Rostyn.

"Coke hallucinations?" Caroline asked.

"The doctor wasn't about to get out a Ouija board," Jack said. "Wasn't about to do any more tests once he realized how much blow, God-knows-whatever stuff, Jean was doing. A real humanitarian."

3.

At Caroline's, dried off, the smell of fresh coffee from the kitchen, Jack watched while Caroline searched for Jean's symptoms on the Internet.

Caroline wore a blue terry cloth robe. Her hair was pinned up with a big red plastic clip.

"It sounds like she had serious neurological damage," Caroline said.

"Drugs'll do that," Jack said.

Caroline printed out the research. Each page crisply slid from her printer. Jack could smell the hot ink and paper.

"I was married," Caroline said, belatedly answering Jack's question from the car.

She collected the pages from the printer, not looking at Jack.

"For three years," Caroline said. "Until two years ago."

Jack sipped his coffee. It burned his lips. But he kept sipping.

"I still see him," Caroline said. "Occasionally."

"Do you still make love?" Jack asked.

"That's the question you want to ask?" Caroline said. "That's the question?"

Jack sipped the scalding coffee.

"Why do you want to know?" she asked. "You've got no reason to ask something like that."

As Jack stared at her over his coffee cup, the steam from the hot coffee made his eyes water.

"I was infertile," Caroline said. "Well, not at first. A tubal pregnancy. Four months. Sixteen weeks. How could I not know? But I didn't. I always was irregular. I always had lots of cramps. Lots of cramps. The tube burst. Internal bleeding. Very messy situation. The doctors took everything. Hollowed me out."

"That's why you left him?" Jack asked.

"He left me," Caroline said. "I needed time and assumed he'd understand. He didn't."

Jack sipped his coffee.

"I've had seven lovers," she abruptly said.

"Like Snow White?"

"Most were taller than five feet."

"Go figure," Jack said.

Part Two.

CAROLINE.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

1.

Outside, Jack walked toward the river. The sky was clear. The stars bright as pain.

Twenty years earlier, Jack met a woman with hair as red as fox fur and luminous green eyes that rarely blinked. She had freckled breasts. Pale skin. And long, almost prehensile toes, which she used to pick up dropped hair bands, quarters, socks. Penny Robartes.

"Find a Penny, pick it up," Penny said to Jack after they made love for the first time, "and all the day you'll have good luck."

A month after they met, they moved into a farmhouse in Vermont. South of Brattleboro. A broken-down two-story building with peeling 1950s wallpaper-large yellow and red and white blossoms in the dining room; a repeating blue-and-white design of pagodas that looked like electric towers in the living room; Jack and Jill with their water pails walking up and tumbling down a green hill, a pattern of repeated failure, in the bedroom.

On the second day after they took possession of the house, they hired a local handyman to mow the backyard and weed the overgrown gardens. The handyman arrived as the sun was rising. When he started work his breath in the chill billowed from his steam-engine mouth as he mechanically moved through the yard, ripping out weeds, hacking away roots. By midmorning, beads of sweat riveted his forehead. At two, he'd come to the front door; and, having lost his larynx to cancer, he'd hold a device to his throat and ask, robot voiced, for his wages.

Penny owned a mutt, Sweetie Pie, who was a crotch dog. To keep him from burying his snout between her legs in the morning-they slept on a mattress on the floor of a bedroom with a bricked-up fireplace-Penny would strip off her panties and throw them to the dog.

A week after the handyman had started working for them, Penny stripped off her panties as usual and wandered through the house looking for her pet. Figuring the dog had gone out, Penny stood, naked in the kitchen doorway, left hand holding open the screen, right hand waving her panties, as she called, "Sweetie Pie? Oh, Sweetie Pie, come and get it."

From the flower bed in the backyard, the handyman watched Penny calling and waving her panties-"Oh, Sweetie Pie, come and get it..."-and came around to the front door where, holding the device to his throat, he told Jack, "Your girlfriend needs help. I quit!"

When, after a year, Penny left him, Jack vowed he would never fall in love again.

And he didn't.

Until that night he left Caroline.

2.

The revolving police car light flickered on Jack's face red, blue, red ...

"What's it this time, Al?" Jack asked. "I drop a Mounds wrapper back there or something?"

"Or something," Sciortino said, leaning across the passenger side through the open window. "Want a lift?"

"Is no an option?" Jack asked.

Sciortino's face was in shadow. A strip of light illuminated his eyes like a mask. His pupils were big. He blinked.

"Not tonight, pal," Sciortino said.

The police car door handle was so cold Jack felt a ping in his right wrist. As he slid into the car, he rubbed his hands together.

"This official?" Jack asked.

"Are you in cuffs?"

"So unofficially what's up?"

"Seems to me, Jack, you've got enough on your plate. What the hell you doing back at the buffet?"