Lucy is so spooked by the sound of a human voice beside her that she lurches forward. Just for a moment, the voice sounded like Karen's, sweet and flat and very far away.

Kitty puts her arm around Lucy to steady her.

"You shouldn't be here anyway. You should be home waiting for Keith.

The question isn't whether or not he'll show up, it's how much you're going to yell at him when he does. And stop thinking about that dead woman."

"Who should I think about?" Lucy asks. "Julian Cash?"

"Are you serious?" Kitty says. "Listen, I can tell you anything you need to know about Julian."She fans herself with her hand, and the two silver bracelets on her wrist hit together and sound like bells. "Number one? Stay away from him."

"I'd like to," Lucy says. "But he's the one looking for Keith."

"Well, that's fine. He's good at that," Kitty says.

"Believe it or not, he once broke my Janey's heart, about a million years ago. After that we all thought he was going straight to h.e.l.l, but he went into the army instead."

Lucy promises Kitty that she'll go- home, where she'll force herself to eat some solid food, then lie on the couch with a damp cloth on her forehead.

But instead, she drives toward the intersection of West Main and Seventh, and she' lucky to get a s.p.a.ce right in front of the Cut n'

Curl.

"Lucy, I'm booked," Dee says when she sees her. "Take a number. I won't get to you until after lunch." She leaves her current client sitting in front of the mirror with a towel wrapped around her head.

"I heard about your son running away," Dee says mournfully. She takes a Kent Light out of her smock pocket and reaches for a pack of matches.

"I thank G.o.d my two boys are grown up and on their own. They can drive you crazy real easy, without even trying." Dee reaches up and takes a strand of Lucy's hair in her fingers so she can examine the color. "I still think you should tint this," she says. "Nothing permanent.

"You cut Karen Wright's hair, didn't you?" Lucy asks.

Dee inhales deeply and nods. "Can you believe it?" she says. "She was in here two weeks ago.

From now on, I'm double-locking my front door at night."

"Did she have a boyfriend or anyone she was really close to?" Lucy asks.

"That little girl of hers. That's who she was close to. That baby would sit right in her lap and not move an inch while I shampooed Karen.

I hate to think of where that little girl is right now.

"She didn't work?"

"Full-time mother," Dee says. "You say that to some people these days and it's like you're committing a crime. Dee stubs out her cigarette in an ashtray. "She wasn't a real big tipper," Dee admits. "Not that I held it against her. I think she was running low on cash. She never used a credit card or a personal check, which I appreciate. She paid cash. Whenever she was broke she used to joke about running up to Hartford Beach." When Lucy looks blank, Dee adds, "You've obviously never been broke.""Not yet," Lucy says.

"The p.a.w.nshop's up in Hartford Beach. A lot of engagement rings wind up there when the rent is due."

It takes Lucy fifteen minutes to get to Hartford Beach, in spite of the fact that her Mustang is starting to stall at red lights, and another fifteen minutes of circling around until she finds Hallet's p.a.w.nshop.

When she turns off the ignition the cooling system just gives out and the radiator tarts to boil over. Lucy jumps out and wrenches the hood open, then leaps backward to escape the hot spray of water. She knows that back in New York the azaleas and dogwoods are already blooming.

Here, in Hartford Beach, the wild lime trees that grow up through the cement are wilting in the heat, and they stink, like cheap after-shave.

When Lucy steps out into the street to look for a gas station, her shoes sink into the asphalt. To the right are the p.a.w.nshop, a McDonald's, and a Sun Bank. To the left is a Verity police cruiser so encrusted with dirt you'd have to look twice just to make certain it said "K9" along the side. Julian Cash gets out and leans up against the hood so he can stretch his back. He's got a warm can of c.o.ke in one hand, which he raises in a greeting. All the cruiser's windows are rolled down, so Loretta can stick her head out and get some air.

"Kind of makes you wonder how dogs can stand it in this heat, doesn't it?" Julian says as Lucy approaches him. "Seems like they'd just go crazy and attack the first person who pa.s.sed by."

"I can't believe you did this," Lucy says. "You followed me."

"You lied to me," Julian says. "You were never going to tell me your boy buried that shoe box, so I figure I don't owe you very much."

"Oh, really?" Lucy says. You owe it to me to be looking for my kid.

That's what you're supposed to be doing."

"I just wanted to make sure you didn't know where he was."

Julian finishes his c.o.ke, but Lucy knows that he's watching her carefully.

"I don't," she says.

"I know that now," Julian admits. "You're too busy looking for the dead girl."

"Woman," Lucy says.

"Around here we call each other boys and girls," Julian says. "Since growing up is such a tragedy."

Julian reaches for a cigarette and lights it, just so he'll shut up.

He has no idea why he's talking so much; it's as if someone has pushed a b.u.t.ton inside him and he's saying everything he never said before.Things he never even knew he thought.

"I'm sure Kitty Ba.s.s told you a whole lot about me. But you know that old joke about Kitty."

He really can't stop himself; he must have some kind of talking disease. "Bigmouth Ba.s.s," he says.

When Lucy eyes him coldly, he adds, "I didn't invent this joke, you understand. I'm just repeating it. Personally, I really respect Kitty."

"Are you going to continue following me?" Lucy asks. Her face is flushed and her dress is so wet it clings to her like a snake's skin.

"No," Julian says. "I'm going to call Marty Sharp's towing to come pick up your car while you go on and see what your neighbor p.a.w.ned.

Then I'm going back home to get my other dog.

Lucy gets a funny look on her face, as if she's holding everything deep inside, and if she lets go, even for a second, she'll wind up in tears, right here on the sidewalk.

"I was out for four hours this morning with Loretta, and we came up empty. This other dog of mine is an air dog. That means he's supersensitive." Julian is yakking so much his mouth hurts. He's begun to suspect that if they stand here much longer a catastrophic mistake might result, a month-of-May sort of mistake, the kind that can change your life forever.

"Go on," Julian says. "I'll call the tow truck."

Julian calls in to the station and has them contact Marty's towing; then he sits in the cruiser, where the temperature must be high enough to boil human blood. He keeps his eye on the window of Hallet's p.a.w.nshop; the green awning above the door hasn't been changed for years.

When Julian was thirteen he walked here from Verity and back, twelve miles each way, just so he could buy a bowie knife. He never thought about who the h.e.l.l had been so desperate he'd trade in a knife with a real bone handle for some spare change. Julian kept that knife for years, hidden behind some loose boards in Miss Giles's pantry; he used to clean the blade with rubbing alcohol and a soft flannel rag. He knows Lucy has discovered something as soon as she walks out of Hallet's door; she's got that hurried gait Loretta always has when she picks up a scent. Lucy goes to her car, circles it, then grudgingly walks over to the cruiser. When she gets into the pa.s.senger seat, Julian makes sure he's still watching Hallet's window.

"Well?" Julian says.

"If you could give me a ride home, I'd appreciate it," Lucy says.

"Otherwise, I'll call a taxi."

There's less than twenty inches between them in the front seat, so Julian leans up against the door. "I haven't mentioned to Walt Hannenthat it was your boy who called nine-one-one. But you and I know it was. I haven't even told him that alligator in the shoe box wasn't some kind of voodoo offering. I think you can tell me what she p.a.w.ned."

While Lucy considers this, Julian turns the key in the ignition, then pulls out and makes a Uturn.

"A sapphire necklace, less than three weeks ago, Lucy finally admits.

"She had money," Julian says.

"Had," Lucy says. "Before she got divorced."

She stares out the window as they drive east, toward Verity. "It wasn't as if he killed that alligator," she says finally. "He tried to feed it lettuce but it died anyway.

"I never said he killed it," Julian says.

"It just died in our bathtub."

"All right, it died. Did it happen to have two gold rings with it when it was interred or whatever the h.e.l.l you did with it?"

Lucy crosses her legs and moves so that her back is up against her door. "No," she admits.

"There weren't any rings."

"There you have it," Julian says.

"What do you have?" Lucy demands.

"He stole those two rings." Julian glances over at Lucy when he should be looking at the road.

"We both know he did."

"So what does that prove?" Lucy says.

"Nothing," Julian says. "Except that he's a thief."

As they pa.s.s through the outskirts of Verity, where the alligator farms once stood, Julian knows that he has to get rid of her fast. He's talking like a maniac. If he's not careful, he'll be acting like one, too. "I never said he killed anyone."

"You just thought it," Lucy says icily.

"No," Julian says. "You're the one thinking it."

When he steals a look at her he can see that pulse in her throat again.

"Look, don't hit yourself over the head for it. You have a perfect right to be suspicious. This is a kid who's been looking for trouble.

Believe me. I know. I killed a man when I was seventeen."He can hear Lucy's breathing quicken and he knows just how far gone he is. If he doesn't stop soon, he's going to have to buy himself a muzzle.

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" Lucy says.

The light coming through the car windows is so clear and yellow Julian almost forgets what day this is. It's his birthday, the most horrible day of a horrible month, when there shouldn't be any light around him.

At least he has the satisfaction of not having blurted that out, because if she or anyone else felt pity for him he wouldn't be able to bear it. He would curl up right here, on the road that leads to Verity, and in all probability he would never be able to rise to his feet again.

The Angel lies on his back, beneath the tree, looking up through the branches at a Delta flight headed north to La Guardia Airport. He has been nineteen for a very long time, and although he can still climb to the top branches of the gumbolimbo tree in less time than it takes to blink an eye, and still wears the same white T-shirt and blue jeans as always, his presence has never been detected. He no longer leaves footprints on the ground.

Once he had been the most beautiful boy in Verity. His hair was as yellow as b.u.t.ter; he had rolled over in his crib and smiled at the age of two weeks. Everyone called him Bobby, except for his mother, who called him darling or sweetheart, as if his own name wasn't good enough for him. She adored him, and she had every right to, but her sister-in-law, Irene, was so jealous that she cursed the day he was born. When Bobby was two he noticed that his Aunt Irene was gelling much bigger, as if she had eaten a melon seed and it had taken root inside her stomach. But she was still as sour as a lemon; she fought with Karl at the diner over the price of a cup of coffee, she wandered through the aisles of the general store, weeping as she looked for mola.s.ses and canned soup. Her face swelled up, and in the end she gained so much weight she couldn't walk without a wooden cane. When she was thin again and had no baby to show for it, n.o.body asked any questions. But on deep, starry nights the grownups talked about her as they sat on their front porches, fanning away the mosquitoes and drinking iced tea, and that was how Bobby learned he had a cousin somewhere.

He thought quite a lot about the baby that had been given away, and as soon as Bobby turned nine and was allowed to wander off by himself, he set off to find him. The cousin, who was seven, lived with a woman old enough to be his grandmother. Every day he sat out on her front porch, collecting small red toads, waiting to be found. After they discovered each other, the boys played every day, secretly at first, and by the time they were eleven and thirteen they were inseparable. Nothing could have kept them apart. By then, Irene had disappeared, to Virginia or North Carolina, no one was sure, and most people had forgotten that the boys were cousins. The younger boy was the shadow of the older in all things, except for one. He had a bad streak; you could see it just by looking at him. When he was angry he'd make such a horrible noise people close by had to cover their ears. As he grew older he looked for trouble. He began to drink and, what was worse, to steal, even from his own cousin, whom he loved more than anyone in theworld. He couldn't seem to stop himself until he had stolen his cousin's girlfriend, although that was not what they fought about on the night of the accident.

It was the younger cousin's birthday, and he'd had too much to drink.

They were driving toward town in his Oldsmobile, a beat-up old thing with a huge engine, rebuilt time and time again, arguing about a comb the younger cousin had just stolen from the general store. They had never discussed the girl, and if Bobby knew he was being betrayed he didn't let on. For some reason, that just made the younger boy more intent on being bad; he wasn t even in love with the girl, but he kept on seeing her and making love to her, and each time he did he was more bitter than he had been the day before. That night they argued over that stolen silver comb, with a sharp rat tail you could use, if need be, in a fight. A worthless thing you could buy almost anywhere; still, the younger boy would be d.a.m.ned if he'd take it back and pay for it. He wasn't about to take orders from anyone, not even his cousin.

And just to show him, just to show off, he stepped down on the gas, as hard as he could, on a patch of road that was slick with the pulp of strangler figs, on the third day in May.

At the moment of impact, the older cousin, who had smiled so surprisingly and sweetly at the age of two weeks, grabbed for the wheel, and turned it hard, so that the pa.s.senger side of the car slammed against the trunk of the gumbolimbo tree. The younger cousin, who refused to black out in spite of the pain, was left with nothing more than a gash in his forehead. The older one, Bobby Cash, has been waiting beneath the tree for the past twenty years, ever since the day he was killed.

The Angel knows very little of what happened next, that his cousin was sent off to the state school in Tallaha.s.see after a summer of self-destruction, that he broke up with the girl who meant so little to him, that he cannot, to this day, look in a mirror without the gla.s.s cracking. He doesn't know that his own mother was so consumed with grief she refused anything but water for thirteen days, or that on the first anniversary of his death his parents realized they could no longer live in Florida or that when they moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, they were soon followed by nearly every other member of the family. He can't know these things because he can't go past a two-foot circle around the tree. Years ago, the sap of gumbo-limbos was boiled into glue, then spread on the branches to trap songbirds, and now it is Bobby who can't escape. Most often he appears as nothing more than a wash of low-lying mist, or a black shadow in the shape of a bird's wing.

Except in May, when boys of nineteen sometimes see him as they're breaking the speed limit, and then he always makes certain to throw himself between their cars and the trunk of the tree.

For all these years, the Angel has been waiting to forgive his cousin, or so he has always believed.

At the instant when he did, they would both be released, and finally Bobby would no longer have to be nineteen. But his cousin has never returned, not once, and in the meantime, just two days ago, something quite amazing happened. Bobby fell in love. He was sitting in the same spot as always, his back up against the tree, when she walkedacross the parking lot, headed straight for him.

She was almost seventeen and her long hair was tinted black and pulled into a ponytail. When she sat down beside him, the Angel remained completely still, just as he did when hawks nested for the night.

Shannon opened a paper bag and took out a hamburger and a Diet c.o.ke, then carefully placed her lunch on the gra.s.s. She'd heard rumors about this tree all her life; she knew people who actually believed it was haunted. No one came here, and maybe that was why the gra.s.s was so soft; it hadn't been walked on for twenty years. All Shannon wanted was a place to be alone and some time to think. At this moment in her life she truly believed she might be going crazy. No one understood her.

No one noticed that something was utterly wrong.

For as long as she could remember, Shannon had been planning her future. All she had ever wanted was to get out of Verity, and she always believed her salvation would be a college scholarship. Now she had actually been accepted into a summer program at Mount Holyoke for advanced high school juniors, and she wasn't so certain that she cared.

Since September, she had been sabotaging herself, forgetting about papers due, leaving her books in her locker, staying up long past midnight to do nothing but stare out her window. All those extracurricular activities college recruiters so loved were going up in smoke. She hadn't yet dared to tell her mother, but she was so behind in her schoolwork that she'd been called down to the guidance office twice. She hadn't even bothered to try out for the next school play, although she was practically a.s.sured of the lead. She had boys all over her, that was part of the problem.

If she wasn't careful, she'd wind up preguant and married at eighteen the way her mother had, and then she'd be stuck in Verity forever.

She wished that her voice wasn't so breathy, as if she'd swallowed too much air, that her eyes, which tended to wander, didn't make her look slightly confused, maybe even dumb. She could be taking calculus at chool, if they offered it; instead she was wearing makeup and shorter skirts, and the future seemed more and more remote each day.

It was a relief to finally be alone. Here, beneath the gumbo-limbo tree, Shannon feels at peace.