"Yes, ma'am?" the clerk asked, pausing as if she had a million things to do and Rachel was holding her up.

The ring didn't belong to Rachel. It looked old and valu-able, and of sentimental value. Someone might miss it very much.

Then they could have phoned or written after it. If they were that careless, they didn't deserve to have it.

Rachel slipped the ring over her thumb. Without saying anything, she shook her head and walked away from the desk."I'll wait for the cab by the doors," she said.

The taxi took a while in coming; by the time Rachel reached North Hill, it was no longer raining. The air trem-bled with moisture; the house dripped with it. The damage looked worse on second inspection and she and the elderly driver traded sad, confused looks.

"Damn shame," the man said, and took her back to the hotel.

Where, she discovered, she'd been moved into a suite on the second floor.

"But I didn't request it," she insisted to the clerk.

The girl looked embarrassed. "I'm sorry, ma'am, but you did. When you asked for the cab. You walked back and asked me for a suite."

"That's ridiculous!"

"You stood by the doors for a while, then you came over here and said you were expecting someone, and to put you in a bigger room."

"I did not." Rachel leaned forward. The clerk's eyes wid-ened.

Immediately Rachel drew back. Sure enough, the scarf she'd wrapped around her neck had fallen open. The clerk had seen.

"I'm sorry. I'll put you back in your old room," the girl said quietly, and Rachel nodded once, stiffly.

She spent the afternoon calling carpenters and painters and house inspectors and everyone else she would need to repair the house on North Hill. She made dozens of appointments and decided to buy a cheap used car rather than spend a fortune on taxis or rentals.

The next day she bought the first one she saw, an '81 Dat-sun compact, and drove herself to the house.

It wasn't until she was standing in the parlor, soaking up the stinking water with a mop, that she realized what she'd done.

She'd decided to stay in Greystone Bay.

In Hartfield Croome Simpson's house.

"My house," she said with satisfaction, continuing to mop.

That night, Rachel heard herself whimpering. She woke up and found the ring on her thumb.

The tub was full of water. Footprints traced pathways back and forth and back again.

She had a fleeting vision of Annie and thought, that girl's trying to play tricks on me! I have a mind to complain about her in the morning.

But when morning came, and she saw Annie toiling in the kitchen, she kept silent. Poor kid, she'd been through enough.

Work proceeded on the house. She stayed in the SeaHarp; and after a week, when they moved her back into the suite, she flushed but said nothing. She fretted about Alzheimer's. This was how it started, didn't it? With periods of forgetful-ness? The prospect of sinking into senility terrified her. She would be taken to a home, where they would take care of her, feed her, bathe her She'd kill herself first. She'd drown in the bay the way poor old Hartfield Simpson had, before she'd let them do that.

But how else to explain the nightly tubfull of water and the footprints? It couldn't be Annie; Rachel now always checked the door before retiring. The chain was in place, and the lock, and the chair, which she began dragging against the door every night.No one came in the night to fill the tub, or parade around the room with wet feet. It had to be faced: she was doing it herself.

And with that fear came a new set of nightmares: she came to one night seated in water up to her breasts with a scrub brush in her hand, and she was rubbing her flesh raw, her poor, scarred flesh: Not just burned, but destroyed, splintered and fractured and shattered and blasted; plastic surgery might have helped, but she couldn't have endured the prodding, the staring, the horror on the faces of others.

There's a doctor in the hospital, young and sensitive and wonderful. He's treating her; she's only eighteen and she wants to die. He understands her agony. He gives her all the morphine she wants. The burns are the worst he's ever seen, he confesses to her. His nurse leaves the room to vomit in a bed pan.

A fire in a movie theater. Not an accident. No clues as to identity or motive of the perpetrator.

The doctor says Rachel has a lovely soul; that her beauty shines through.

He's seen her, damn him to hell, he's seen her lying there with those sores and the flesh that glistens and oozes worse than anything the monster movies can cook up with their spe-cial effects.

He's seen her; she trusts him, and him alone. And when she's released, he comes to her apartment to make love to her.

But he can't. He's too revolted. Even he, who knew.

She tries to kill herself after he flees, but she doesn't know they've turned off the gas for the day, to work on the streets or some such idiocy.

The scars started (ended? but there was no end to them) at her jaw line and traveled the entire length of her body.

They puckered her breasts-her nipples were rivulets of dark pink flesh-mottled her private parts. She had no pubic hair. They went inside her legs and down to her ankles; she never wore skirts after the hemlines went up. In the fifties and sixties she lost jobs over her slacks, but what did she care?

No husband, no children, no real friends. Rachel ached for those things, never recovered from being cheated of them. She never grew bitter, which might have been preferable to her loneliness.

And watching her North Hill mansion take shape again after its own terrible ordeal, she figured she might as well be lonely in Greystone Bay as back in Los Angeles.

Yet her Alzheimer's-or whatever it was-grew worse. Be-sides taking bams (and lying back in bed without drying off? Now the sheets were wet, too) and demanding a suite, she began to sleepwalk.

Or day walk, or whatever one might call it. She roamed the streets of Greystone Bay in a stupor, meeting people she didn't remember later, buying things she couldn't afford and had no use for-perfumes, chocolates, bouquets of tea roses and a crystal vase to put them in.

Worse yet, she told everyone in the hotel her husband had sent them to her.

And worst of all, they acted as if they believed her. In fact, occasionally someone would inquire as to when Mr.

Unger was planning to arrive.

At first she had no answer for them, but quickly she de-vised a set of pat excuses for his delay: it was taking longer than he'd planned to finish his business; he had to sell the house in Los Angeles. She thought it would be a small matter to deflect their inquiries since they couldn't really care about the matter. But Rachel hadn't counted on the appetite of a small town for gossip with little else to do besides trudge around in the unending rain.

Particularly the appetites of the owners of the hotel: Vic-tor, Frederick, and Noreen Montgomery.

Two brothers and a sister, they were handsome people, of the same dark-haired, fair-skinned cast as many of the inhab-itants of Greystone Bay. Tall, and a little too thin, and with an abstracted air that Rachel supposed came from having to manage a hotel, they loved to chat with their guests. Of the three, Noreen had the most time for quizzing Rachel, who had avoided attention ever since the fire, found herself blooming, late in life, into a stupendous liar for the amuse-ment-and approval-of Noreen Montgomery.

For Miss Montgomery would sit perched for hours on one of the chairs Rachel found so uncomfortable, dressed inbe-coming grey cashmere, and ask question after question: his birthday, his astrology sign, what cologne he wore.

Rachel manufactured an answer for each question, pausing, weaving, deceiving. She told Miss Montgomery how tall he was; and how handsome-maybe not as good-looking now as when he was young; and certainly not as attractive as Miss Montgom-ery's own two brothers; but still, quite a good-looking man. She used her cruel doctor-lover as her pattern, which she embellished whenever it seemed necessary: he smoked a pipe; he hated the traffic in Los Angeles; he was eager to get to Greystone Bay. Of course he missed her. He was bringing their cat, Maxie.

Occasionally, Miss Montgomery would flop back in her chair and say, "Ah!" as if Rachel had provided her with some kind of inspiration, or clue; as if bit by bit, Miss Mont-gomery were piecing together a picture of Rachel's beloved Brian. (And that was, had been, his name. Brian Covey, M.D.) Bordering this almost pathological interest, Annie often hovered on the outskirts of their conversations like a fretful lapdog, benignly ignored like same. Once she encountered Rachel in the hall on the way to her suite. She was carrying a covered dish that smelled like sea water. She cried out, then stood aside to let Rachel pass.

"Good evening, Annie," Rachel said kindly.

"I didn't know you were married," Annie retorted, mak-ing it sound like a challenge.

"Well, I am." Rachel frowned at her, then remembered her promise to be nice to the girl.

"You don't wear a ring."

Rachel paled. The ring! Maybe it belonged to Annie, and she wanted it back. Perhaps she'd left it on the nightstand herself. It had come off a chain around her neck while she was fluffing up the pillows that first night- Rachel clamped her hand around the ring, which she al-ways carried in her pocket.

"I lost a lot of weight." Rachel licked her lips. "It's too big and I haven't had it made smaller."

Annie nodded unhappily.

Just then the elevator operator came around the same corner. He was tucking his shirt into his trousers; when he saw Rachel and Annie he flushed and said, "Good evening, Mrs. Unger. Um, hi, Annie."

Annie blushed and looked guiltily down at her covered dish.

Oh, they've been fooling around, Rachel thought, and was pleased for Annie's sake.

"Good evening," Rachel replied, and went into her suite. Where she was overcome by grief; wave upon wave, like the bay that surged in a big, ugly mass across the street.

For of course there was no Mr. Unger on his way; no handsome Taurus with a pipe and a twenty-year-old London Fog raincoat. There wasn't even a cat, for the love of God; no one, no one at all was coming for her. No handsome young man tucking in his shirt; no one to make her blush and stammer like a girl. She was alone in the world; and the stories she'd been telling could only serve to isolate her further. When she moved into her house and no Mr. Unger ever showed, wouldn't tongues wag! They'd say he'd run off, or died, and they'd speculate and gossip and stare; and sooner or later, someone would see part of her she didn't want them to see-So she cried and cried at the stupidity that was overtaking her, this awful Alzheimer's-whatever that made her act so foolish and say the dumbest things. What was wrong with her? She should move back to Los Angeles before it was too late.

She had her nightmare again, only this time there was someone in the fire with her. A man's hand, around her thigh; man's breath on her cheek. Everywhere the scent of man and then- -of the underbelly of the sea, thick and viscous and suffocating. A smell like smothered smoke; like garbage; like death.

When she woke up, her first thought was, That was An-nie's head in that vase.

She put the ring on her thumb, and went back to sleep.

Rachel stayed in the SeaHarp for almost three months.

When she moved out, it was June, and she felt a blessed relief and an intense confusion that her bills were paid, both at the SeaHarp and for the restoration of the North Hill house. How could she have managed it all on her secretary's pen-sion? But Noreen (they were "Noreen" and "Rachel" by then) assured her that she was square at the hotel; and all the carpenters and painters left her employ with good, signed checks.With great joy, she moved a surplus four-poster and dresser from the hotel (Noreen was so generous) into the house. Much of the original furniture could be restored, but that would have to wait until she saved some more cash.

And she certainly wouldn't pay good money to ship her old junk all the way across the United States.

Annie wept the day Rachel left the SeaHarp. Rachel was touched and told her she could visit her at her new home any time she liked. The charming young man hovered around her, but Rachel wasn't sure Annie liked him any more.

She was nervous and furtive whenever he was near; she rarely looked at him. Perhaps the Montgomerys forbade fraterni-zation among their employees, and they were keeping their romance a secret.

Rachel dismissed thoughts of Annie as she stood in the middle of her white-and-blue kitchen as her first summer fog seeped in around her; and unbidden the thought came: Here I am, in the belly of the beast.

That was an odd remark. She set the kettle on to boil and opened the door to the thick summer air. It was heavy with summer thunderstorms and the chirping of crickets.

"Maxie," she called, then shuddered and shut the door.

Because she didn't own a cat named Maxie. She never had.

If the SeaHarp was a sea-serpent, Rachel's house was a jellyfish, floating atop the crest of North Hill. Surrounded by elder trees, it billowed in the night fog, cresting and riding the breezes, a sparkling white membrane.

In the night, as she walked along the shore of the bay and smiled up at the lights, she imagined she saw the house ex-pand and contract as if it were breathing. She knew she was right to stay; a house like that needed life inside it.

Her eyes filled with tears, and the yearning that had been with her since she was eighteen surged inside her. She wrapped her nightgown around herself to hide the scars and looked down at her bare feet, cut by fragments of shells and the edges of sharp rocks; and thought: What the hell am I doing here in the middle of the night?

She'd wandered so far she'd reached the outcropping of the pier where the old men and boys fished. She ran the length of the beach, pausing before the SeaHarp, poised and ready to strike. The lights were off, save for a bubbling glow above the entrance and a light in the reception area.

So it could have been her imagination that she saw Annie in the window of her old room, 303, dressed in a long, green dress, her hair rippling behind her as if suspended from doz-ens of wires- -as if she floated underwater; it was her head in the vase, it was She was playing a harp. The young man stood behind her, naked, caressing her breasts through her dress.

Rachel gasped and blinked.

No Annie. No boy. No harp. Just a hotel, with everyone sensibly tucked in bed.

Rachel's heart thrummed against her ribs. She panicked. Heart attack! Clenching and unclenching her fists, she took deep breaths, trying to relax.

After she grew calmer, she kept to the small sidestreets and snuck home. God, if anyone should see her, tripping through town in her nightgown like some senile old bat. She would die. Simply die.

She let herself in through the kitchen and slammed the door, leaning against it. Hastily she pulled away when she realized she was soaking wet. No doubt it was the moisture in the ocean air.

But no, the walls of the kitchen were glistening. The tile was slick.

And in the living room, the new parquet floors pooled with water.

And a strange odor wafted through the house.

"Mildew!" Rachel said disgustedly. So that was why the repairs on the house cost so little: none of the workmen had known what he was doing!

She walked through the house, touching all the walls. Wet clean through.The bathtub was full of water.

And Rachel thought she heard the lyrical music of a harp, far away in the night breeze, undersea.

Before Rachel could call the workmen the next day, the walls dried. The pools of water evaporated. They seemed to leave no damage, but she worried about seepage and told the carpenter so, who promised to have a look as soon as he could get out there.

During the first two weeks in the house, Noreen was Ra-chel's only visitor. She came for coffee and admired the re-pairs Rachel had effected.

"It's even better than when Harry Simpson lived here," Noreen said, and Rachel sat tall with pride.

"I've never owned my own home before. I still can't figure out why he willed it to me."

"He was an odd one." Noreen trailed her hand along the balustrade as if she were caressing the arm of a lover.

"Mr. Mordicott said he was rather reclusive."

"Oh, he got around." Noreen threw back her head and laughed. She was striking, in her white-dark way, with strong features and deepset brown eyes. "He was friends with my brothers and me. Good friends."

"Oh? I didn't know." Rachel poured more coffee. "Please, tell me what he was like. I don't know a thing about him, really. For the life of me, I don't know why-"

"Fierce. Very fierce" Noreen moved her shoulders. "A temper. Moody." She tilted her head. "Arrogant. A great one for secrets."

Noreen turned her gaze on Rachel. "He never told me about you. Giving you the house, I mean. Do you know our father left the hotel to my little brother. Cut Frederick and me out entirely. We work for Victor."

"Oh?" Rachel drew up slightly, surprised and a trifle pleased that Noreen should confide something so personal to her.