My boys.

Ebbans returned to a stack of discharge reports from a mental hospital in Higgins. Ten minutes later the door swung open and a man in blue jeans and a work shirt stood uneasily in the doorway. Ebbans frowned, trying to place him. It took a minute.

The red hat man, without the hat.

"Detective?"

"Come on in."

The man said, "What it is, I just thought you'd like to know. You asked me about those boys I seen the night that girl was killed. The boys by the pond? I was leaving the lake and just now one of them was back. He had his tackle but he wasn't fishing, he was just walking around, looking at things. Would he be the Moon Killer?"

Ebbans stood up and said, "He out there now?"

"Was when I left."

"Miller, come on, you and me're taking a ride."

So like what's the reason?

Why is this guy your friend?

Jano didn't have any answers. Philip was a freak. He was fat and had bad skin – not zits, which everybody had, even Steve Snelling, who could have any girl he wanted. It was more that Philip's skin was dirty. Behind his ear it was always gray. And his clothes were hardly ever clean. He smelled bad. And forget about sports. No way could he even play softball let along gymnastics. Jano remembered how his friend had strained to get up on the parallel bars and he had watched horrified as the wood rods sagged almost to breaking point under the weight.

Why were they friends?

This afternoon Jano was walking around Blackfoot Pond, holding the gray chipped tackle box and the rod and reel. Tracing steps, trying not to think about that terrible night of April 20. He felt bad. Not depressed but fearful, almost panicked. He felt as if a screaming Honon warrior in an invisible Dimensional cloak was racing toward him from behind, preparing to leap, closer closer closer, to tear him apart. Jano's heart galloped in his chest, heating his blood as it pumped and he felt terror spatter him like a spray of hot water. Like a spray of come.

He pictured the girl lying in the mud, her white fingers curled, her eyes mostly open, her bare feet with their long toes…

No no no! She's not an actress in a movie, thirty feet high on the screen in the mall. She is exactly what she is: pretty, heavy, smelling of mint, smelling of grass and spicy flowers. She is still. She does not breathe. She is dead.

Jano shuddered, feeling the Honon troops circling around him, and found he was staring at the crushed muddy blue flowers at his feet. He thought of Philip drowning the other girl, holding her down. And what was he, Jano, going to do now? Who could he talk to? Nobody… The panic crested and he sucked in air frantically.

Eventually he calmed.

Why is he your friend?

Well, he and Phathar did talk about sci fi a lot. And movies. And girls. For a guy who never dated, Philip was an expert on sex. A walking dictionary of terms that every fifteen-year-old should know. He told Jano how gay guys shoved their fists up each other's asses and how you could tell whether a girl was a virgin by the way she bent over to tie her shoes.

But Jano decided that their most common bond was how much they hated their fathers. Phathar was scared of his and that made plenty of sense because the old man was a total hatter. (One Halloween, Philip's dad had come into the yard, sneaking up behind trick-or-treaters, carrying bloody cow's intestines in his arms. He'd just stood staring at the totally freaked kids). But Jano's father was worse. He was like a Honon warrior hiding in a Dimensional cloak, passing through the house as if Jano didn't exist. Sneaking past, looking at his son oddly, then vanishing.

… The dimensional warp swelling out out out finally bursting into the now, the here, all that purple energy of the Naryan realm flooding onto the earth…

The movie had had a happy ending. Jano didn't think this life would. He climbed to the top of the dam and then dropped onto his knees. He leaned forward looking at his gray reflection in the still water. He didn't like water that was so still. It made him look like death. His thin face. He lowered his head to the water. He wondered what it was like to breathe water instead of air.

Look at that, Jano. You ever touched a girl there? You ever tasted a girl?

He stared at the water. He could smell its oily sourness.

You ever fucked a girl, Jano?

By lowering his head another two inches he could taste the water. He could lick it. The same way that Phathar gave him the opportunity to taste the girl's cold mouth, her tongue, her cunt. He could swallow the water, he could swallow her, hide in her forever. A princess -

"Excuse me, young man." The voice was like a chill downpour on his back. He leapt up. "I talk to you for a minute?" The deputy was tall and very thin.

Jano's mouth was dry as summer pavement. He swung his tongue back and forth between his sticky teeth and didn't say anything.

"What's your name?"

"I didn't do anything."

"I'd just like to talk to you." The deputy was smiling but Jano'd seen that smile before and didn't believe it. A lying smile. The same smile his father kept on his face. "I understand you and a friend were fishing here at night about ten days ago."

Jano couldn't speak. He found his skin was contracting with terror and he imagined that his bowl of thick hair was vibrating visibly. Other footsteps sounded behind him. He turned.

Lance Miller grinned and said to him, "Hey, how you doing?"

Jano didn't answer.

The other cop looked at Miller and said, "You know him?"

"Sure, T.T.," Miller said. "This's Bill Corde's son. Didn't you introduce yourself, Jamie?"

6

With panic in his voice Randy Sayles said, "I have a lecture."

"He said it's now'r never."

"A LECTURE!"

"Professor," the departmental secretary said, "I'm only reporting to you what he said."

"Shit."

"Professor. There's no need to be vulgar."

He sat at his desk at nine o'clock in the morning, gripping the telephone receiver in his hand as if he were trying to squeeze out an answer to the dilemma. Sayles's last lecture of the year was scheduled to begin in one hour. It was set against the centennial celebrations throughout the US in 1876. The climax was a spellbinding account (his students', not his, review) of the Ouster massacre. For him to miss this particular class was obscene. This fucko fund-raising crap had totally disrupted his teaching and he was torrid with rage.

He said, "Tell him to hold." He dialed the dean. Her secretary said she was out.

"Shit."

Yes, no, yes, no? Sayles said into the receiver. "Okay, I'll see him. Get Darby to take over for me."

"The students will be disappointed."

"You're the one who told me it was now or never!"

She said, "I was only -"

"Get Darby." Sayles banged the phone down and ran from his office, hurrying to his car. As he roared out of the professors' parking lot, he laid down two streaks of simmering rubber as if he were a sixteen-year-old in a stolen 'Vette.

He paced across the gold carpet, staring down at the stain made by the cola Sarah spilled the night Emily was murdered.

"Oh, Bill."

"It doesn't mean I'm fired. I still draw pay."

"What were these letters?"

"Who knows? We found ash. We found scraps."

He looked up at his wife. Before Diane did something she dreaded, her eyes grew very wide. Astonishingly wide and dark as night. This happened now.

Bill Corde waited a moment, as if taking his temperature. The sense of betrayal never arrived and he said finally, "I didn't take them."

"No."

He couldn't tell how she meant the word. Was she agreeing? Or disputing him?