"You're wrong. And I'll prove it."

"Not now you won't. You've got some travelling to do."

"First, Jo-Beth," Tommy-Ray said, and made to move away from his father. But the Jaff's hand was on his shoulder before he'd moved more than a step. His touch made Tommy-Ray yelp.

"Shut the fuck up!"

"You're hurting me!"

"I meant to!"

"No...I mean really hurting. Stop it."

"You're the one death loves, right, son?"

Tommy-Ray could feel his legs start to give out beneath him. He began to leak from dick, nose and eyes.

"I don't think you 're half the man you say you are," the Jaff told him. "Not half."

"I'm sorry...don't hurt me any more, please..."

"I don't think men sniff after their sisters all the time. They find other women. And they don't talk about death like it was easy stuff then snivel if they start to hurt a little."

"OK! OK! I get the point! Just stop, will you? Stop!"

The Jaff released him. He fell to the ground.

"It's been a bad night for us both," his father said. "We've both had something taken from us...you, your sister...me, the satisfaction of destroying Fletcher. But there are fine times ahead. Trust me."

He reached down to pick Tommy-Ray up. The boy flinched, seeing the fingers at his shoulder. But this time the contact proved benign; even soothing.

"There's a place I want you to go for me," the Jaff said. "It's called the Mision de Santa Catrina..."

Howie hadn't realized until Fletcher had gone out of his life just how many questions he had left unanswered; problems only his father might have helped him solve. They didn't vex him through the night. He slept too soundly. It was only the next morning that he began to regret his refusal to learn from Fletcher. The only solution available to Jo-Beth and himself was to try to piece the story in which they clearly played such a vital role together from clues, and from the testimony of Jo-Beth's mother.

The previous night's invasion had brought about a change in Joyce McGuire. After years of attempting to hold the evil that had entered her house at bay, her failure, in the end, to do so had somehow freed her. The worst had happened: what more was there to fear? She had seen her personal hell created in front of her, and survived. God's agency—in the form of the Pastor—had been valueless. It had been Howie who had gone out in search of her daughter, and finally—both of them ragged, and bloodied—brought her back. She'd welcomed him into the house; even insisted he stay the night. The following morning she went about the house with the air of a woman who had been told a tumor in her body was benign, and she could expect a few more years of life.

When, in the early afternoon, all three of them sat down to talk, it took a little time to persuade her to unburden herself of the past, but the stories came, one by one. Sometimes, especially when she talked about Arleen, Carolyn and Trudi, she cried as she talked, but as the events she was describing became more tragic she told them more and more dispassionately. On occasion she'd go back to offer details she'd missed, or to praise somebody who'd helped her through the difficult years, when she was bringing up Jo-Beth and Tommy-Ray alone knowing she was talked about as the hussy who'd survived.

"The number of times I thought about leaving the Grove," she said. "Like Trudi."

"I don't think it saved her any pain," Howie said. "She was always unhappy."

"I remember her a different way. Always in love with somebody or other."

"Do you know...who she was in love with before she had me?"

"Are you asking me do I know who your father is?"

"Yes."

"I have a good idea. Your middle name was his first. Ralph Contreras. He was a gardener at the Lutheran Church. He used to watch us when we came home from school. Every day. Your mother was very pretty, you know. Not in a movie-star kind of way, like Arleen, but with dark eyes...you've got her eyes...a sort of liquid look in them. I think she was always the one Ralph loved. Not that he said very much. He had a terrible stammer."

Howie smiled at this.

"Then it was him. I inherited that."

"I don't hear it."

"I know, it's strange. It's gone. It's almost like meeting Fletcher took it out of me. Tell me, does Ralph still live in the Grove?"

"No. He left before you were even born. He probably thought there'd be a lynch-mob out after him. Your mother was a middle-class white girl, and he..."

She stopped, seeing the look on Howie's face.

"He?" Howie said.

"—was Hispanic."

Howie nodded. "You learn something new every day, right?" he said, playing lightly what clearly went deep.

"Anyway, that's why he left," Joyce went on. "If your mother had ever named him I'm sure he'd have been accused of rape. Which it wasn't. We were driven, all of us, by whatever the Devil had put inside us."

"It wasn't the Devil, Momma," Jo-Beth said.

"So you say," she replied, with a sigh. The energy suddenly seemed to go out of her, as the old vocabulary took its toll. "And maybe you're right. But I'm too old to change the way I think."

"Too old?" said Howie. "What are you talking about? What you did last night was extraordinary."

Joyce reached across and touched Howie's cheek. "You must leave me to believe what I believe. It's only words, Howard. The Jaff to you. The Devil to me."

"So what does that make Tommy-Ray and me, Momma?" Jo-Beth said. "The Jaff made us."

"I've wondered about that often," Joyce said. "When you were very young I used to watch you both all the time, waiting for the bad in you to show. It has in Tommy-Ray. His maker's taken him. Maybe my prayers have saved you, Jo-Beth. You went to church with me. You studied. You trusted in the Lord."

"So you think Tommy-Ray's lost?" Jo-Beth asked.

Momma didn't answer for a moment, though not, it was clear when the answer came, because she felt ambiguous on the subject.

"Yes," she said finally. "He's gone."

"I don't believe that," Jo-Beth said.

"Even after what he was up to last night?" Howie put in.

"He doesn't know what lie's doing. The Jaff's controlling him, Howie. I know him better than a brother—"

"Meaning?"

"He's my twin. I feel what he feels."

"There's evil in him," Momma said.

"Then there's evil in me too," Jo-Beth replied. She stood up. "Three days ago you loved him. Now you say he's gone. You've let the Jaff have him. I won't give up on him that way." So saying, she left the room.

"Maybe she's right," Joyce said softly.

"Tommy-Ray can be saved?" Howie said.

"No. Maybe the Devil's in her too."

Howie found Jo-Beth in the yard, face up to the sky, eyes closed. She glanced around at him.

"You think Momma's right," she said. "Tommy-Ray's beyond help."

"No, I don't. Not if you believe we can get to him. Bring him back."

"Don't just say that to please me, Howie. If you're not on my side in this I want you to tell me."

He put his hand on her shoulder. "Listen," he said, "if I'd believed what your mother said then I wouldn't have come back, would I? This is me remember? Mister Persistence. If you think we can break the Jaff's hold on Tommy-Ray then we'll damn well do it. Just don't ask me to like him."

She turned round fully, brushing her hair, which the breeze had caught, from her face.

"I never thought I'd be standing in your momma's backyard with my arms around you," Howie said.

"Miracles happen."

"No they don't," he said. "They're made. You're one, and I'm one, and the sun's one, and the three of us being out here together is the biggest of the lot."

Grillo's first call, after Tesla's departure, was to Abernethy. Whether to tell or not to tell was only one of the dilemmas with which he was presented. Now more than ever the real problem was how. He'd never had the instincts of a novelist. In his writing he'd sought a style that set the facts out as plainly as possible. No fancy footwork; no flights of vocabulary. His mentor in this was not a journalist at all but Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver s Travels, a man so concerned to communicate his satire with clarity that he'd reputedly read his works aloud to his servants to be certain his style did not confound his substance. Grillo kept that story as a touchstone. All of which was fine when reporting on the homeless in Los Angeles, or on the drug problem. The facts were plain enough.