6

“THE VAULT,” Daniel said when they came out.

“I know,” Coltrane said. “But there’s an easy way to fix the problem.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Rip the damned thing out. Restore the house to its original condition.”

“You sound as if…”

“I’ve made up my mind. I’m going to buy it.”

“Let me ask you something, and then I’ll shut up,” Jennifer said.

“Okay.”

“If you just happened to be driving along that street and the house had no association with Packard and you noticed it was for sale, would you have suddenly wanted to buy it?”

Coltrane thought a moment. “Probably not.”

“So you’re buying the place because Packard photographed the house and made it famous?”

Coltrane hesitated. “I don’t think so.”

“It’s because Packard owned the house? You want to identify with him that much?”

Coltrane didn’t answer.

7

“I’VE GOT SOMETHING ELSE I WANT TO SHOW YOU,” Coltrane said.

They looked puzzled as they got out of his car in his garage.

“But I confess I’m a little nervous about it. Lord, I hope you’re more enthusiastic.”

“About what?” Jennifer asked.

“You have to wait here until I get everything ready.”

They looked even more puzzled when he disappeared upstairs.

Two minutes later, Coltrane called down to the garage, “Okay, you can come up now.”

He had put on a CD of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue. He had glasses of chilled chardonnay ready when they reached the top of the stairs.

“What’s this all about?” Daniel asked.

“Well, I figured if I was going to have a showing, I might as well set the mood.”

“Showing?” As Jennifer sipped the wine, she peered into the living room and was momentarily frozen.

Coltrane didn’t need to explain. What he wanted to show them was obvious, everywhere, on the walls, the bookshelves, the furniture, any place he could hang them or set them: eight-by-ten-inch mounted photographs.

“My God, Mitch.”

“That’s why I didn’t want to go out to dinner last night,” Coltrane said. “I was working like crazy to finish the prints.”

“They’re…” Words failed her.

Coltrane’s updates of Packard’s photos were eerily suggestive of the originals. “Time warps,” he had called them as he worked on them. He had done his best to replicate the texture of Packard’s photographs, down to the slightest shadows and subtlest streaks of light. Juxtaposed, his images and Packard’s evoked powerful emotions within the viewer, creating the illusion of being in two time frames simultaneously.

Jennifer and Daniel seemed spellbound, moving from photograph to photograph, studying them while Coltrane didn’t say a word but merely sat on a stool at the entrance to the living room, sipping wine, studying them.

But the project was devoted to more than just Packard’s houses. Interspersed among the time warps were other mounted photographs, which – beginning with the heartbreaking depiction of Diane – recorded the emotional encounters Coltrane had experienced while retracing Packard’s steps.

Jennifer shook her head in wonder.

Daniel looked at Coltrane, as if seeing him with new eyes.

“This is the best stuff you’ve ever done,” Jennifer said. “I have a hunch you won’t mind talking about these pictures.”

“No,” Coltrane said, relief ebbing through him. “I won’t mind talking about them at all.”

“Well, I was wrong about one thing,” Jennifer said. “I thought this would be suitable for a feature in the magazine.”

“You’ve changed your mind?”

“Definitely. There’s too much here, and I don’t want to leave anything out. For the first time, there’s going to be a special issue.”

“… I don’t know what to say.”

“I do,” Daniel said. “Where’d you put the wine?”

Coltrane laughed.

Jennifer kissed him. “I’m so proud of you.”

As she and Daniel returned to the photographs, Coltrane noticed the red light blinking on his answering machine. He pressed the play button.

His stomach tightened when a chorus sang mournful classical music.

“Again?” Jennifer looked up from a photograph he had taken of the elderly black woman at the trailer court. “This is annoying.”

“I can think of less polite ways to put it,” Coltrane said. “I wish I had one of those machines that shows the number of whoever’s calling. Then I could phone the jerk back and play music to him – except I’d have trouble finding music as weird as this.”

“Verdi isn’t what I’d call weird.” Daniel didn’t glance away from the photo of the young black woman pushing a boy in a swing. Coltrane had juxtaposed it with the faded photo of his mother pushing him in the same swing twenty-four years earlier.

“Verdi?”

“You ought to get more culture. If you listened to something other than jazz, if you went to those classical concerts I invited you to… The music on your answering machine is by Verdi.”

“Italian. That’s why I can’t understand what they’re singing.”

“Well, in this case, what they’re singing isn’t Italian – it’s Latin. Let me hear the music again.”

Coltrane pressed the repeat button.

“No doubt about it,” Daniel said. “That’s from the Requiem.”

“The music for a funeral mass?” Jennifer asked.

“Hear what they’re singing? ‘Dies irae.’ ‘Day of wrath.’ That’s definitely from the Requiem.”

Coltrane gestured in frustration. “But why would anybody phone me every day and play music for a funeral?”

“A prankster with a sick sense of humor.”

“‘Dies irae.’ What’s that mean?”

“Something about a day,” Daniel said. “If you’re really curious, I can go next door and get my copy of the Requiem. The liner notes have a translation.”

It was a vinyl LP, Coltrane saw when Daniel returned. Daniel was fond of lecturing that vinyl had a richer, more lifelike sound than the CD format. “Bernstein conducting. Domingo soloing. This is one of the best-”

“Just tell us what the Latin means, Daniel.”

“Right.” Daniel looked mischievous, as if he knew he was making them impatient. “It should be…” He unfolded the double-platter album and ran his index finger down the translation on the inside. “Here. ‘Dies irae.’

Daniel lowered the album. “Well, I guess a little fear of the Lord is a good thing at a funeral. Keeps our priorities straight.”

“But there’s no hidden message that I can figure out,” Coltrane said. “What about you, Jennifer?”

“The only message I get out of it is that I’d better say my prayers more often. We were right the first time. It’s just a prankster with a weird sense of-”

The phone rang.

“Hello.”

Verdi’s Requiem blared at him again.