“Augusta says Owltown is dangerous at night, and the sheriff doesn’t think it’s safe to go walking there in the daylight.”

“Tonight, all the really dangerous people will be in church.”

They were approaching the cemetery when Charles stopped on the path. He was listening to the unaccompanied lyrics of a Puccini aria. The disembodied voice was so beautiful, so delicate in its perfect phrasing, glass-fragile in the highest notes. They rounded the trees and beheld Ira singing to the statue that so resembled Cass Shelley and her daughter.

The young man was all the sheriff had said he was, talented beyond reason. Carved cherubs poised over neighboring graves, wing and body frozen in flight, as though straining to catch each sweet note flowing by on the air as Ira sang to his audience of marble and granite, sandstone and common rock.

Charles well understood the isolation of the wildly gifted child. He had some personal sense of what Ira’s early years had been like. And he had sad professional knowledge of what lay in the future. Dr. Shelley’s notes had concurred: Ira would never develop subtle social skills, and so he would never understand the flirtations of a girl, for he would be unable to read any expression of tenderness or willingness. That sweet phase would pass him by.

But, according to Cass Shelley, Ira could play complex scores of music, note-perfect. He could follow the slow evolution of clouds with patience beyond a Buddhist master, and he was on intimate terms with the constellations, calling every star by name. The sheriff had said that Ira could sing with the angels. Cass Shelley’s journal said he was one, ‘with wings unseen by the vast majority of beings, who had only the one temporal, solid context for life on earth.’

The concert ended, and Charles found the silence unbearably sad, the loss of the music, the loss of heaven.

The two men watched as Ira folded his body inward and sank to the grass at the foot of the statue. He curled up like an exhausted kitten, pulling his broken hands into the protective circle of his body. After a time, they walked away and left him sleeping in the perfect peace of a winged shadow.

Roused from sleep, the dog opened his eyes to the bright light of day. One shaggy ear rose to attention. Was it an animal he sensed? It came toward him so stealthy, he could barely detect its movement – even with his muzzle pressed to the earth and sensitive to every vibration. Suspicious now, his weary head lifted, and he caught the scent.

Not an animal.

The elderly sentry rose to a stand, his fur coated with the dry smell of dirt. With some regret, he left his patch of shade and padded slowly across the yard and down to the narrow path leading away from the house, his paws kicking up small swirls of dust. His eyes were dry and sore, slow to focus on the figure in the road. He turned his head, the better to see with his good eye.

The stranger whistled to him, an old familiar ripple of music – one long high note and two short bursts – his secret name. It was not a stranger in the road, and neither was this the stuff of his dreams.

She had come home.

As she came closer, his heart beat faster. He moved a few steps into the road, his jaws hanging open in the dog’s way of a smile. Enormous waves of emotion pounded his heart, banging out blood to crash through the wreckage of ancient veins, and his mind was lost between shores of disbelief and joy. His steps were slow, but he believed he was running, bounding toward her.

At last, he stood before her, making low loving noises in his throat. He licked her hand, and then his legs betrayed him. He was falling, rolling into the dirt at her feet.

She knelt down to stroke his pelt, and then to hold him in her arms, pressing him close to her body. Her face was wet as she cradled him. One soft and gentle hand was probing that place where his heart was caged by ribs, and together they followed the weakening beats. His gaze was fixed on her face, backlit by the brilliant aureole of the midday sun.

He was shivering now, so very cold.

And then his eyes rolled back; his day was done; the darkness was absolute.

CHAPTER 11

Charles Butler walked on water. Or perhaps this was only the top of the natural water table. His shoes squished with each step across wet grass. The soaked earth was yet another piece of evidence in favor of Augusta’s invisible hill, for the land closer to the house had been dry.

“Augusta!” he shouted to the distant figure in the faded cotton dress. She stopped at the edge of the woods and turned to wave.

As he moved toward her, the water level was rising, his shoes were sinking and probably ruined. When he joined her by the trees, he noticed that she was barefoot – an elegant solution to the footwear problem.

She grinned. “Charles, you and I must have a talk about your wardrobe.”

He supposed it was ridiculous. The tailored suit and handmade shoes had been of no help blending in with the locals. Blue jeans abounded here. He had not owned a pair since the summer spent with Cousin Max. At home, his parents had always dressed him as a miniature adult on his way to a dress-code office job.

“I came to return the keys to the Shelley house.” He looked down at the small plastic bag in her hand. It was half filled with chicken wings. “Planning a picnic in the swamp?”

“No, but you take off your shoes, roll up those pantlegs, and I’ll show you a sight to remember.”

“You’re on.” When he was properly attired in naked feet and showing a bit of leg that had not seen the sun in years, he splashed after her into deeper water which now covered his toes.

“Stay close to me and don’t wander off the path.” She spoke to him over one shoulder, stern in her warning. “If you go into the bayou, you won’t find any purchase. Bottom’s real slippery.”

They had cleared the semisolid ground and passed into a watery, primeval forest of widely spaced cypress trees and small grassy islands. He could not immediately detect the path she mentioned. Then he saw the chunks of rock, more like man-made mortar, colored green with slime and moss. She was using them as stepping stones.

“These chunks came from the foundation of the original house.”

Augusta’s feet grasped the rocks like a second pair of hands. He fared less well, but with practice, his toes got the hang of it. Both his arms shot out as balancing beams until he stepped onto soggy but more solid ground, a small rise jutting over a sea of water hyacinth. A pondlike area had been cleared of the choking plant life covering the rest of the water. This must be the narrow tributary which ran alongside the road to Cass Shelley’s house.

“This is the tip of Finger Bayou.” Augusta’s lips curled inward as she sucked in air to make a sound like a child’s fingers rubbing the skin of a balloon. She pointed to a log floating toward them, though the dark glass surface of the bayou showed no trace of a current. Augusta made the strange sound again, and he realized that she was summoning the log.

And now Charles could see that it had large reptilian eyes. The beast hung in the water only four feet from his toes, and there was time to remember that this was not a zoo with bars to keep the wild things in their place. This thing went wherever it wanted. In this primordial habitat, Charles had slipped to a humbler notch on the food chain. “Don’t you worry about having a flesh eater in the neighborhood?”

“You’ve been listening to Betty Hale,” said Augusta. “Alligators prefer dead humans to live ones. But even if you were three days dead and real tasty, this one wouldn’t touch you. It’s his hibernation period. He only surfaces every two days. He knows when I’m coming with the chicken. Won’t eat but a few pieces, and sometimes nothing at all, but he’s gotten used to me over the years, and we never disappoint one another ”