There was no screen now, though, and lying a few feet away, overturned in the flower bed bordering Irene's back fence, was a st.u.r.dy plastic recycling bin Maxwell could easily have used as a stepstool. He came in through the bathroom window, chimed in that irrepressible, and often annoying, little jukebox in Pender's head.

Okay, this is the part where the retired old FBI guy calls the cops, he thought. You tell the nice policemen everything there is to tell, then you go home, pop a cold one, put your feet up on the ha.s.sock, and watch the ball game.

Because this is no longer your business, old man. From here on in, all you can do is screw up somebody else's crime scene. Or if Maxwell's still inside, get somebody killed.

Then he remembered where he was: The Last Home Town. Crime rate slightly lower than Vatican City. This would be the most exciting thing that had happened in Pacific Grove since Princess Topaz's dragon boat had nearly sunk a few years ago during the annual Feast of Lanterns pageant. One call to 911 and the locals would be swarming the scene, sirens screaming and roof lights blazing. And if Maxwell was inside-whichever version of him was currently playing in the multiplex of his mind-and it was a hostage situation....

Pender found himself picturing Irene wearing the filmy negligee she'd had on Monday night. Only now, in his mind's eye, he saw Maxwell standing behind her holding a knife to her throat. Her eyes were pleading for Pender to do something-anything.

Ah, f.u.c.k it, thought Pender, drawing the hickory-handled Colt from the flap pocket of his sport jacket. In for a dime, in for a dollar, he told himself, brushing off the m.u.f.fin and Danish crumbs and jacking a round into the firing chamber before returning the gun to his pocket.

2.

Perched on a wide flat boulder jutting out over the creek bank, bathed in the emerald light of the redwood forest, and serenaded by the babbling creek, Lyssy watched a dragonfly skimming lightly over the rippling water, its wings transparent and shimmering.

Lily joined him a few minutes later, wearing a Stanford sweatshirt-a red hoodie-over a dark-brown, V-neck T-shirt and a pair of Guess? jeans she'd borrowed from Dr. Irene's closet. Hours earlier, when they'd first arrived at her family's rustic retreat deep in the Lucia Mountains south of Big Sur, she'd hung a string bag bulging with items liberated from Dr. Irene's refrigerator-bottles of juice, sparkling Italian soda, a quart of 1 percent milk, and a pint of half-and-half-into the clear, cold running water from an eyebolt drilled into the underside of the rock. Now, kneeling and leaning out over the edge of the jutting boulder, she double-checked to be sure the bag was still there, still securely fastened. "Mother Nature's fridge, Grandma always used to call it."

"Cool," punned Lyssy, who was now wearing a faded orange S.F. Giants T-shirt over Dr. Al's b.u.t.ton-fly 501s. The two had spent the first part of the afternoon unloading the car, sweeping out the cabin, putting fresh sheets on the bed, and hauling firewood from the shed-all the ch.o.r.es she and her grandmother used to take care of while Grandpa fished for their supper. ("Only the very rich or the very poor can afford to live this simply," he used to tell Lily.) When the ch.o.r.es had been completed, Lily had selected a stout walking stick from her grandfather's collection for Lyssy to use, and they'd spent the rest of the afternoon exploring the five-hundred-acre parcel known as La Guarida: the narrow canyon, the slow-running Little Bear Creek, the millennium-old redwoods.

"So what do you think of our little hideaway?" Lily asked him, leaning back on her elbows-La Guarida meant den or hideout in Spanish.

"I am so absolutely, I don't know, knocked out." Lyssy gazed about him in wonderment. "All these years, I never knew, I never dreamed-It's so rich and full and busy, it's like there's all these worlds, all these realms. There's a realm down there, with the fish and the insects"-the creek-"and another realm up there"-the redwood canopy-"with the birds. And we're in the middle realm with the deer and the bushes and the flowers, and it's all so full of, of life, it makes the arboretum look like a parking lot or something."

His eyes had all the colors of the forest in them, even the golden glint of the sun peeking through the redwood canopy. Suddenly Lily experienced a funny, melting feeling inside, and had to look away. Spotting a white-barked twig the size and shape of a slightly warped pencil on the boulder, she tossed it into the water, just to watch it float downstream.

"You want to know what really bugs me about all this, though?"

"Sure." She followed the twig with her eyes as it began its downstream journey.

"The timing." The twig narrowly dodged a mean eddy, took a ducking but bobbed up again. "The stupid darn timing. It's like, like-Did you ever see that movie Time Bandits?"

"The one with the English kid and the midgets?" Lily asked him.

"Right. And there's this scene, this lovey-dovey couple in oldtimey clothes is standing on the deck of a big ocean liner holding hands. And you can tell how happy they are, how they're thinking about how much they love each other, and how they're going to spend the rest of their lives together. Then you see this life preserver hanging from the side of the ship, and then the camera gets closer so you can read the name of the ship on the life preserver: it says HMS t.i.tanic-they're on the t.i.tanic."

Lily couldn't think of anything to say. The twig had gotten itself hung up on an exposed root sticking out from the stream bank. She held her breath, watching it fight its way clear of the root, then shoot downstream and disappear around the last bend, bound for the ocean.

"Made it!" Lyssy exulted.

Somewhat startled to realize that their thoughts had been running in harness, that without saying anything, they'd both been rooting for the little twig, Lily turned to Lyssy, her dark eyes searching for rea.s.surance. "Did you ever think maybe they made it, too?" she said.

"Who?"

"Those two on the t.i.tanic. Maybe they made it to a lifeboat and survived-the movie never said they didn't."

Their eyes met. Lyssy reached up to touch Lily's hair, his fingers sifting gently through its dark silky heaviness. Lily noticed that funny melting feeling again; she wondered if he'd touched Lilith's hair like that. "Pretend I'm her," she whispered, over the sound of the rushing water.

"Who?"

"Lilith-I want to pretend I'm Lilith."

"But I already told you, I loved you first."

"Yeah, but you made love to her. And she wasn't afraid, and she didn't freeze up, she didn't see..." An impossibly swollen, purple-headed p.e.n.i.s forcing itself into her mouth, choking her; a flashbulb exploding into white glare. "Tell me about her. Tell me everything-what she was like, how she talked, how she moved, what she said, how she made love."

A fellow with some experience in these matters might have been more circ.u.mspect, but Lyssy took her at her word. He spoke uninterrupted for a good ten, fifteen minutes, for there was little about Lilith he hadn't hungrily memorized. When he was through, she leaned in close and whispered, "Kiss me. Kiss me like you kissed her."

His mouth was soft, softer than she'd imagined a man's mouth could be. And welcoming-instead of thrusting his tongue into her mouth, the sweet, gentle urgency of his kiss drew her tongue into his mouth. And here came that funny melting feeling, not so funny anymore. She felt herself tensing around it, her panic building. She broke off the kiss to whisper in his ear. "Talk to me," she said. "Talk to me like you were talking to her."

Her hair was disarranged; a strand had fallen damply across her eyes. "There was a little girl," Lyssy began, pushing it back gently, "who had a little curl, right in the middle of her forehead." He kissed her on the forehead, then again, softly, on each eye. "And when she was good, she was very, very good, and when she was bad, she was-"

"Lilith," she broke in. "When she was bad, she was Lilith." She kissed him again, more lasciviously, her mouth open, her lips soft and sloppy, her tongue expertly insistent, then broke it off. "Well," she said, panting for breath.

"Well, what?" He was breathing pretty hard himself.

"Who am I? Lily or Lilith?"

"Does...does it really matter?"

"h.e.l.l no," she replied, grabbing his head in both her hands and pulling it down to her breast.

3.

You're not breaking and entering, Pender reminded himself as he circled Irene Cogan's house, looking for a way in. You're just-what was it they used to say when they needed a warrant?-effectuating a surrept.i.tious entry.

He discovered an old wooden ladder lying on its side, next to a tarpaulin-covered stack of firewood by the side of the garage. It was in dubious condition, the mildew-splotched wood of the rails soft enough to dig his thumbnail into, but the rungs were dowels an inch in diameter, and appeared to be st.u.r.dy enough for the job at hand.

Pender carried the ladder around the side of the house and leaned it against the overhang of the flat, tar-papered roof above the office extension in back. He already knew the trick to hauling two hundred and eighty pounds up an old ladder: distribute your weight among all four limbs so that no single rung has to bear even half the load. Fortunately, the preponderance of Pender's avoirdupois had always been concentrated above the waist. His belly was the tipping point-once he dragged that over the eaves, the rest followed easily enough.

From the flat roof above the office, Pender boosted himself another four feet to the roof below Irene's rear bedroom window, which was closed. Balanced with difficulty on the slanting roof ap.r.o.n, he managed to get the merest fingertip purchase on the crossbar of the window sash, then let loose a prayer and leveraged upward with all the strength in his fingertips.

The window flew open, causing Pender to lose his hold on the sash, and with it his balance. Toppling backward, arms flailing, he managed to grab the windowsill; behind him, his Pebble Beach golf cap fluttered to the ground like a powder-blue autumn leaf.

Pender now found himself stretched out full-length on the sloping roof, hanging on to the windowsill with both hands, his Hush Puppied feet dangling in s.p.a.ce. Kicking, grunting, he finally got his feet under him again, then duckwalked up the slope until he was at eye level with the windowsill, breathing hard and sweating harder. As he squatted there, trying to catch his breath, he felt an unaccustomed breeze from behind, and realized that with his shorts dragged down and his jacket rucked up, he was showing more crack than an inner-city c.o.ke dealer.

After a hasty sartorial adjustment, and a quick peek to make sure the bedroom was empty, Pender climbed through the window feet first, then took the Colt out of his pocket again and flicked off the safety-no way Maxwell would be getting the drop on him again.

Irene's queen-size bed appeared slept in and unmade, but there were no bloodstains, no sign of a struggle. Pender flattened himself against the door jamb with the Colt held sideways against his chest, then peered into the hallway. Empty. With the gun in two-handed firing position he made his way down the hallway to the guest bedroom at the top of the stairs. Aside from a rumpled bedspread with a few coins strewn around it, the little room was in apple-pie order.

He started down the stairs, keeping to the wall side of the carpeted treads to avoid any potential creaking. The paintings lining the staircase-landscapes, still lifes, and a portrait of Irene Cogan in her midtwenties, looking a little like the young Greta Garbo-all bore the signature of Irene's late husband, Frank.

The stairway opened out onto the white-carpeted living room. No sign of trouble there, but in the tiny downstairs bathroom, the rectangular screen lay on the tiled floor beneath the open window, and the state of the kitchen suggested either a break-in or a hasty departure-the cabinet doors were ajar, the counters littered with cans and cartons, and the usually tidy pantry appeared to have been ransacked.

As he looked around, Pender caught a glimpse of himself in the gla.s.s front of Irene's china cabinet. Hatless, dark circles under his eyes after his nearly sleepless night, his shoulders slumped and his once-snappy madras jacket practically in rags, Lily's Uncle Pen was now a ringer for Uncle Fester from the Addams Family.

Satisfied? Pender asked the poor dejected SOB, as he dropped the gun back into his pocket. Are you good and satisfied now? Maxwell's gone, he's taken Lily and Irene with him, and however much of a head start he had, it's now half an hour longer thanks to you.

Pender turned away, hitched up his shorts, and crossed the kitchen. His intention-to call the police from Irene's wall phone-was a measure of his turmoil: he had the phone to his ear and his finger poised to call 911 before he caught himself on the verge of a cla.s.sic rookie cop error. Not even rookie-trainee: calling in the crime on the crime scene phone, thereby destroying not just potential fingerprints or saliva for DNA (not all that relevant in the current case, which wasn't exactly a whodunnit), but also the ability to call *69 and instantly recover the last number accessed.

He patted through his pockets, took out his cell phone, realized he'd left it with the ringtone on. Another worse-than-rookie mistake: you're sneaking around looking for a perp who's sneaking around looking for you, somebody gives you a friendly ring-a-ding-ding on the old cell, next thing you know you're so full of holes they could read a newspaper through you.

He pulled the cell phone's antenna out as far as it would go, then pressed the green Call b.u.t.ton. But as he raised the phone to his ear to make sure he had a dial tone, he became aware of another sound, faint, sputtery, and intermittent, that he must have been picking up on subconsciously for at least a few seconds.

It was the sound of somebody snoring, and it seemed to be coming from Irene's office-the only room he hadn't searched, Pender reminded himself. Swapping the phone for the Colt, and borrowing a clean drinking gla.s.s from the cabinet, he hustled out of the kitchen and down the hallway, and pressed the rim of the gla.s.s to the office door, listening between snores until he was reasonably sure there was n.o.body in there but the snorer.

Pender set the gla.s.s down carefully on the hallway carpet, then turned the doork.n.o.b slowly with his left hand, while holding the unfamiliar Colt in his right with the safety off and a round up the spout. Probably should have dry-fired the thing earlier to accustom himself to the pull, thought Pender-but it was too late now. Just one more f.u.c.kup to add to the list, he told himself as he inched the door open.

4.

The sated lovers lay entwined atop a patchwork quilt worn silky with age, their naked bodies rosy in the soft glow of twilight. Everything in the one-room cabin was invested with a reddish glow from the setting sun; even Lily's dark, shoulder-length hair reflected auburn highlights.

"The first thing I remember noticing about you was your hair," Lyssy murmured sleepily, burying his face against her neck-he hadn't had a full night's sleep since Tuesday. "Like moonlight on a midnight lake, I told myself-I don't know whether that's from a poem or a song, or if I just made it up, but that is what I was thinking."

The gentle, insistent pressure and the ticklish warmth of his breath reminded Lily of the way her pony used to nuzzle her with its velvety soft nose, searching for treats she'd hidden on her person. "I always hated it," she said. "I wanted to be blond, like Sunny Lemontina."

The name sounded familiar, but Lyssy couldn't quite place it. "Who's that?"

Lily rolled onto her side, facing him, and sang "Frere Jacques." When she got to sonnez les matines he grinned sleepily. "Right, right."

"She was my imaginary playmate," she told him. "In the beginning, anyway."

"Tell me about it."

"It was a week or two after I moved in with my grandparents." Lily rolled over onto her other side and snuggled backward against Lyssy. "At first she was like this imaginary friend-only I don't know if other kids actually see their imaginary friends. I could, though-I can see her to this day. Physically, she was almost the opposite of me. Short blond hair instead of long dark hair, blue eyes instead of brown, and instead of my sort of round face, a sharp witchy one with a pointy little chin.

"So this one morning we're sitting next to each other on the parquet floor of my grandparents' parlor, playing with my new Barbie my grandma gave me. The sunlight's pouring in like melted b.u.t.ter, making a warm yellow spotlight on the shiny-waxed floorboards, only it keeps moving, shrinking and moving, so every few minutes we have to slide over a few inches, me and Sunny Lemontina, to keep both of us in that warm puddle of sunshine. And the more it shrinks, the closer we get to each other, until pretty soon there's only gonna be room for one of us.

"Then Sunny Lemontina looks at me with those blue, blue eyes, and she laughs this evil laugh and says, 'I know your secret.'

"I don't even have to ask which secret, because at this point in my life there's only one, and it's so big and so dark that I know if anybody ever finds out about it, I'll be the one who gets taken away and locked up forever and ever instead of my mommy and daddy.

"The next thing I know, I'm sort of floating outside my body, looking down at the little blond girl sitting alone in the puddle of sunshine, playing with my new Barbie.

"And the next next thing I know, I wake up in bed, it's night time, I can't remember anything that's happened since that morning in the parlor, and when I try to open the bedroom door, it's locked. I freak out, pounding on the door and screaming. Then the door opens, my grandmother's standing there looking down at me with this weird expression on her face, almost like she's afraid of me. She asks me if I'm ready to come out of my room yet.

"I say, 'Boy, am I!' Only now my grandfather's standing in the doorway behind her, he's like, 'I've already told you more times than I care to count: if you want to come out of your room, all you have to do is promise to stop the nonsense.'

"Now I have no idea what he's talking about, but by this point I'll promise anything. 'No more nonsense, cross my heart an' hope to die.'

"Grandma looks relieved, but Grandpa doesn't budge. 'What's your name? I want to hear you say it.'

"I'm still clueless-and getting scareder by the second. Doesn't he know? I'm thinking. 'Lily,' I say. 'It's Lily, Grandpa.' Then it's group hug time. Grandma's crying with relief and Grandpa's reaching around her patting my shoulder.

"All of a sudden I notice my head feels kind of strange-on the outside, I mean. Because it turns out I had spent the day chopping off most of my hair with the pinking shears, and Barbie's hair too, and tr.i.m.m.i.n.g the fringes off all the furniture in the house that had fringes, and when the maid caught me, I told her my name wasn't Lily, it was Sunny Lemontina, and when she went to fetch my grandmother, I told her, 'You're not my grandma, you can't tell me what to do.'

"Oh, and the cat wouldn't come near me for a month," she added. "I never did find out what that was all about."

Lyssy turned over onto his stomach, his chin resting on the windowsill just above mattress level. The window, like the other windows in the cabin, was unglazed, with the wooden shutters opening outward; the redwood walls were unadorned save for an enormous USGS topographical map mounted next to the fieldstone chimney. "One thing I don't understand," he said. "I thought everybody already knew about the abuse by then-wasn't that why they moved you in with your grandparents in the first place?"

"Mmm-hmm." A tight-lipped affirmative.

"Then what was the big dark secret n.o.body was supposed to know?"

Lily stretched out next to him; together they watched the tumbling, quicksilver water of the creek turning coppery in the failing light. "That it was all my fault that my parents were taken away. That I was a dirty, wicked, ungrateful little snitch who deserved everything bad that happened to her."

Lyssy felt his heart breaking for her-for both of them, really. "Oh, jeez," he said. "Didn't anybody ever tell you that all abused kids feel that way sometimes?" He rolled over onto his back and shifted into his Dr. Al imitation: "Let me, ah, tell you something you may find difficult to believe, my young friend. Of all the cruel things your parents did to you, the, ah, cruelest of all was making you feel you deserved it."

"Of course I know that now, silly. Dr. Irene said it was because we couldn't blame our parents-that would have meant they never loved us, and to a kid, that's even worse than...you know."

"I surely do." A humongous yawn took Lyssy by surprise; he wasn't sure how much longer he'd be able to stay awake. "But you and me, we don't have to worry about that now."

"Why not?"

"Because we have each other," he murmured sleepily. "To love each other, I mean-we don' need no steenkin' parents." His head lolled to the side and he was out, snoring lightly, a drop of clear saliva trickling down the corner of his mouth.

Lily, who'd never seen Treasure of the Sierra Madre, had no idea why he'd switched over to an exaggerated Mexican accent. Maybe he was embarra.s.sed about having used the L-word, however indirectly. And maybe he was just pretending to have fallen asleep so suddenly-but she didn't think so. Somebody might fake snoring, n.o.body'd fake drooling.

"Okay, well, I love you, too," she whispered experimentally; she'd never said it to a man before, not counting her grandfather. It felt a little funny-but good. As she smiled down at him, noticing how much younger he looked when he was sleeping, she gradually became aware of a distant noise, a popping, Little Engine That Could pocketapocketapocketa, slowly rising in volume over the human-sounding babble of the creek.

Fano's mule, she thought-c.r.a.p oh c.r.a.p oh c.r.a.p, how could I possibly have forgotten!

5.

Irene swam upward from a deep dreamless sleep, saw Pender's face floating above her like one of those giant balloons in the Thanksgiving Day parade. It took her eyes forever to bring him into focus. He looked so concerned, hovering there. "S'matter, Pen?" she mumbled.