Ten years had passed between that visit and the next. As a boy of nineteen, he had noticed one change immediately. She had taken the portrait of Max off the wall of the front room and replaced it with a good hunting print. But for that one change, Edith had kept to the original integrity of the rooms. The same museum-worthy figurines, silver dishes and ashtrays appeared on table surfaces. The same clutter of photographs and candles sat on the mantelpiece. Doilies graced the tables, and antimacassars protected the brocade of the chairs. The telephone was circa 1910. The late twentieth century was hidden away in a back room where Edith kept her computer.

He walked down the hall and entered the room which, in smaller proportions, replicated the library of the Gramercy Park house. He had not had occasion to be in this room since he was a small boy. Later visits with Edith, in his adult years, had always been confined to tea and sandwiches in the front room. But this library was the room he had loved best. The shelves were filled with tomes on magic. Most of the volumes were collectors' items, some dating back two centuries. The fireplace with the ornate mantelpiece held the memories of Max's repertoire of ghost stories told on chill nights with marshmal-lows to toast on the fire, making white stringy goo on long sticks while Max terrified him and then made him laugh.

Charles stared at the mantelpiece. Something did not square with the child's memory. He picked up a photograph and admired the ornate silver frame. It was a good match to the other two frames which kept it company. None of them were here when he was a boy. And now he realized another oddity. The only picture of Cousin Max in the entire apartment was this newsprint photo which accompanied his obituary. No, on closer inspection, it was not an obituary. It was an article on Edith Candle, the famed medium who had predicted her husband's death.

This must be the same article Mallory had seen. According to the text, neighbors had confirmed the death prediction from the appearance of writing scrawled on the walls of the couple's Soho apartment.

The next newsprint photo, encased in a similar frame, was a portrait of a destroyed child. Large eyes, desolate and bewildered, peered out of a face not quite sixteen years old. This was the account of a boy's suicide. Edith's name appeared throughout the text. In the third companion frame was the posed and professionally photographed engagement portrait of a happy young woman. According to the article below the photograph, she had died in violence on the eve of her wedding.

"Charles?"

Edith was standing in the doorway, holding onto a tray of teapot and cups, condiments, sandwiches and silverware.

He took the heavy tray from her hands. "Let's have lunch in here, shall we? You know, I haven't been in this room since I was a boy. Has Kathleen ever been back here?" He set the tray down on the octagonal game table surrounded by leather armchairs.

"Yes, I believe I gave her a complete tour of the apartment."

He noted the slight distraction in her eyes and an agitation to her movements as she sat down at the table and began to pour out the tea. "What's troubling you, Edith?"

"It's Kathy. I'm very worried about that child."

"She's no child, and she's frighteningly capable."

"I don't believe she understands what she's up against. I can feel the evil, Charles. I can put out my fingers and feel it."

He looked to the photographs on the mantel. "I expect you've had these feelings before."

"I have. And the sad thing is, I was never able to avert tragedy. Perhaps it's true that destiny is writ and cannot be undone."

He walked over to the mantel and picked up the photo of the young suicide. "A case in point?"

She looked up see what he was holding, eyes refocussing through the thick lenses, and then she looked quickly away, back to the business of pouring, a task she took exaggerated pains with. Finally done with the ritual of one lump or two, she said, "That boy's been on my conscience for years. It was a terrible tragedy. Max and I were doing a head act then. We were on the tent-show circuit in the Midwest. Oh, that was a time. A different town every night, pitching the tent in hayfields and empty lots."

She reached out for the silver frame, and Charles put it into her hand.

"It was this boy who brought out my true gift. I had the sense of him close by, I could feel him. That night I took off my blindfold and looked hard at the boy. I foresaw his death. He was unkempt, he hung his head, hiding something. "You must tell the police what you have done," I told him. I thought if he confessed, he might be spared. The boy ran out. Later, a missing little girl was found in a shallow grave in the lot behind his shack. Later still, the boy was found hanged in his jail cell."

"Was there any warning about the boy's death? Automatic writing? Anything like that?"

"No, that came later, much later."

"And it's happened again? Recently? What did Martin see written on the walls?"

She wouldn't meet his eyes. Her gnarled hands worked in her lap as she examined a lace doily with keen interest. "I didn't want him to see it. You know how sensitive Martin is. I was trying to clean it off when he walked into the kitchen. I hadn't even heard the front door open."

He could only imagine what patience it must have taken for her to build a relationship with Martin.

"The writing, what did it say?"

"It said, "Blood on the walls and in the halls, rivers and oceans of blood"."

The thrift-store clerk was working alone. His co-workers were having an affair on the lunch hour, and he was being a good sport. Pity they weren't here now, because John and Peter would never believe this. He hardly believed it himself. The learning-disabled shoplifter had covertly deposited a load of silverware in the box for utensils.

She was moving quickly to the door with her empty towel, and then, as though she had just remembered something, she spun around on her heel and returned to the box. She picked up a knife and polished it with her towel, and then another, and another. Now she was lifting the box and setting it on the floor. She sat down beside it and spilled all the utensils out on the threadbare carpet. A middle-aged woman with iron-gray hair and the attitude of an amateur social worker was standing over the girl, speaking to her in soft words that did not carry across the room. The girl in the dirty and torn red dress only stared at the knife in front of her eyes, blind and deaf to everything else, concentrating on her work, polishing each piece of silverware. No, he realized now, it was not each piece. The girl seemed to favor the knives. She began to hum to herself as she polished them with her dirty towel.

The iron-gray woman walked up to his counter, and together, in tense but companionable silence, they watched the girl working away at each blade, polishing and polishing.

The woman turned to him with fire alarms in her eyes and in her voice. "Shouldn't you call someone?"

"No reason. She's not violent."

"Seriously, you don't think that's crazy?"

"This is New York City, lady. Crazy isn't good enough.

If she wants a room in Bellevue Hospital, she's gotta kill somebody to get it."

Charles set the photograph back on the mantelpiece. In the time it took to cross the small room, he had come to a few alarming conclusions about these photographs, and now he turned his mind back to the main event.

Redwing had strong powers, by Edith's estimation, and she was also dangerous, reeking of Santeria, that mix of Catholic rites and voodoo, sympathetic magic and animal sacrifice. Now he multiplied the dangers to Mallory.