The man changed his expression and hung his head a little lower. Ira perceived a touch of sadness as the sandwich man stood up, said, “Goodbye,” and walked away with his eyes cast down to the gravel path.

“Goodbye,” Ira echoed as he watched the tall man disappear into the encircling trees.

A few seconds passed by before he heard the next sound that did not belong in this place – footsteps so light a cat might have made them. He turned slowly, not wanting to see it, unable to help himself.

Impossible. He sat down on the grass before his knees could buckle underneath him and tumble him to the ground.

It was Dr. Cass.

But she had been made whole again, washed clean of blood. He labored over this a moment more, and worked very hard at his school lessons in an effort to put stored pictures in chronological order.

Cass Shelley was dead. He had attended her funeral service. This was a fragment of early memory which followed the flying stones, the breakage and the blood, Cass’s eyes finally closing – closed. This woman before him could not be Dr. Cass.

“Who,” said Ira, without inflection. She walked toward him, and looked directly at him. In a sudden onslaught of new fear, the sense of the word escaped him. When he said it again, it was as meaningless as the language of the owl. “Who.”

The woman knelt down beside him, her hands rising, reaching out for him. She was going to touch him! He shrank back. No, no, this is too much! No! Don’t touch! Oh, please, no -

She held him firmly by the shoulders. His body went rigid and his eyes rolled up to solid whites. He wanted to scream. He was afraid of her eyes.

“I know you don’t like this,” she said so gently, so softly, it was almost music. “But I need you to pay attention, Ira. Focus. You did that for my mother, and now you have to do it for me.”

The words meant nothing. He was terrified. He wanted to look at her without being seen, and she allowed this, dropping her eyes of intense color. But his fear of her was still so great, it sent her shape into a swirl of bright light that threatened to overload his senses. The sun drenched her hair and set it on fire. Her lips of red jumped out at him, parting to show the perfect rows of her teeth.

She was talking again. “I know you heard the song on the record player, Ira.”

Song?

He listened to her voice on the level of music for a while, having no idea what she might be saying. But soon the meaning was forcing its way into his consciousness. Over and over again, the same music, “What did you see?”

He saw the words now, dancing vibrations in the air before his eyes. He watched the rocks fly into Dr. Cass’s face and the rocks that doubled her body over. He nodded his head and said, “What did you see.” Yes, he was there, he had seen it. “What did you see,” he said, nodding again. She released him. He stood up and began to pace in circles.

She walked behind him, golden shadow, thrumming with color, throbbing with energy. He looked up to the sky, because looking at her was unbearable now, too much intensity. She was an explosion of life. His hands began to flutter in circles. His breathing was rapid and shallow – he was suffocating.

“What did you see?”

“She was red!” he screamed, and watched his words burst into colors which made ripples in his perceptions. “No more noise – the dog cried.” This second phrase tumbled out in quieter tones of stone gray. “The letter was blue.” These last words were dull pebbles thudding on the dirt at her feet.

“The letter?”

“Blue.” He shook his head to say it was blue and nothing else; he knew nothing more.

“How many of them, Ira? The people who threw the rocks! How many?”

She said this many times, walking with him around the cemetery, fifty times around the angel, exactly fifty times, and she was always right behind him. “How many?” she asked without tiring, without any sign of ever stopping. His hands rolled one around the other, faster and faster.

“How many?”

“Twenty-seven people! Eighteen rocks!” His count was exact, he had only to look at the television set inside his head, which replayed everything, each rock in its own turn, each body in the crowd vibrating in a separate hue, and an overall aura of violent energy.

He walked to the statue of Dr. Cass’s angel and wrapped his arms around it. He beat his head against the stone, not feeling the pain, but wanting to. She pulled him away. Her soft hand went to the place on his head where the red flowed.

“She was all red,” he said, seeing Dr. Cass in vivid color.

“I know, Ira. I saw her, too. All red.”

She pulled back her hands and sat down in the grass. After a few moments, he sat down a safe distance away from her. In her hand was his own handkerchief, plucked from his pocket and stained with his blood. He never met her eyes but once and accidentally. She was crooning low music, an old lullaby; he remembered it well. He rocked himself, and she was rocking with him. This was so familiar, something beloved that he had carefully stored away.

He replayed the old pictures of a small girl humming his songs with him as she walked alongside him. She had been his only friend and the only child who had never tortured him.

His old playmate.

Rocking, rocking, calmer now, he leaned his head back and stared at the clouds. “Kathy.”

“Yes, Ira?”

“Kathy,” was all he said, and that was quite a lot. It was said with love.

CHAPTER 10

There were no curtains on any of the windows, yet Charles Butler wondered if he had been misinformed. Cass Shelley’s house should be vacant, but wasn’t the dog a sign of residency?

The black Labrador had come loping from behind the house, favoring one hind leg with a limp. Some of his front teeth were broken and others were missing. Hanging from his graying muzzle and his ears were tags of flesh on strings of skin grown awry in the aging process. The Lab didn’t look directly at Charles, but turned his head to the side to study his visitor with the eye that was not clouded by cataract.

Perhaps this was only a stray, or maybe it was Augusta Trebec’s idea of a guard dog.

Though Charles knew it was the conceit of humans to see their own emotions in other creatures, he perceived a great disappointment in the dog’s aspect and his one good eye. Had this poor beast been expecting someone else?

The animal lowered his large dark head, limped back to the house and disappeared in the bushes at the rear of the yard.

Henry Roth was nowhere in sight. Charles looked at his watch. It was still a quarter to the hour when the artist had agreed to meet him with the keys.

He stood back to admire the elaborate woodwork on the porch of the old Victorian building. The turret rooms on either side had rare barrel glass in the windows. Augusta might be slack with her own house, but she had spared no expense in keeping this one in good order, even to replacing the red shingles and applying a fresh coat of blue-gray paint to the walls.

Charles walked up the short flight of stairs to the front door and tried the knob. The house was unlocked. Henry Roth must have come early and left it open for him. He stepped into a foyer of hardwood floors calling out, “Hello? Mr. Roth?”

No answer.

He stood at the foot of the staircase and glanced at a set of doors which should open to a wide drawing room. If he correctly recalled the architecture of this period, he would find a narrower servant staircase at the other end of the hall, and that one would lead from the kitchen to the attic. He opened the last door off the hallway and entered an enclosed, airless space. A window at the second-floor landing provided a generous amount of light, and he climbed past it, heading toward the attic, hoping that door would also be unlocked.