She was waiting for me there. She stood unmoving, masked by bushes and trees that hid her body from me, her face now obscured by the shadows of branches, now clear again. Her eyes were full of blood and the thick black thread wove back and forth across her face like the crudely constructed mouth of an old cloth doll. She stood there unspeaking, watching me from the woods, and behind her the smaller figure danced and skipped in the undergrowth.

I closed my eyes and concentrated, trying to wake myself, but the cold in my feet was real, and the throbbing pain in my head, and the sound of the child's laughter carrying on the wind.

I felt movement behind me and something touched me on the shoulder. I almost turned, but the pressure on my shoulder increased and I knew that I must not turn, that I was not meant to see what stood at my back. I looked to my left, to the point of pressure, and I could not restrain the shudder that ran through my body. I closed my eyes instantly but what I had seen was imprinted on my mind like an image seen against bright sunlight.

The hand was soft and white and delicate, with long, tapering fingers. A wedding band gleamed in the strange, predawn light.

bird

How many times had I heard that voice whisper to me in the darkness, a prelude to the soft caress of a warm hand, the feel of her breath against my cheek, my lips, her small breasts hard against my body, her legs like ivy curling around me? I had heard it in times of love and passion when we were happy together, in moments of anger and rage and sadness as our marriage fell apart. And I had heard it since in the rustling of leaves on the grass and the sound of branches rubbing against one another in the autumn breezes, a voice that carried from far away and called to me from the shadows.

Susan, my Susan.

bird

The voice was close now, almost beside my ear. It had the sound of earth in it, as if dirt had caught in her throat.

help her

In the woods beyond, the woman watched me, her red eyes wide and unblinking.

How?

find him

Find who? Billy?

The fingers tightened their grip.

yes

He's not my responsibility.

they are all your responsibility

And in the patches of moonlight beneath the trees, shapes twisted and turned, suspended above the earth, their feet not touching the ground, and their ruined stomachs shone dark and wet. All of them, my responsibility.

Then the pressure on my shoulder eased and I sensed her moving away. Ahead of me came a sound from the undergrowth and the woman who had been Rita Ferris receded into the trees. I caught a final glimpse of purple moving swiftly beyond the line of trees, laughter like music carrying back to me.

And I saw something else.

I saw a small girl with long blond hair who looked back at me with something like love before she followed her playmate into the darkness.

CHAPTER NINE

I woke to a bright room, winter sunlight spearing through a gap in the drapes. My head ached and my jaw felt stiff and sore where I had gritted my teeth as the shocks hit my body. It was only when I sat up and the pain in my head increased that I remembered my dream from the night before, if a dream was what it was.

There were leaves in my bed, and I had mud on my feet.

I had some homeopathic remedies that Louis had recommended to me, so I took them with a glass of water while I waited for the shower to heat up. I downed a combination of phosphorus, to combat nausea, and hypericum, which was supposed to act as a natural painkiller. Frankly, I felt like a flake taking the stuff but there was no one around to see me do it, so that made it okay.

I started a pot of coffee, poured a cup and watched it grow cold on the kitchen table. I felt pretty low and was considering taking up a different profession-gardening, maybe, or lobster fishing. After the coffee had developed a nice film, I called Ellis Howard. I figured that, in the absence of his lieutenant and given the federal angle, Ellis was taking a hands-on approach to the case. It took a while for him to come to the phone. He was probably still sore over the Biggs affair.

"You're awake early," were his first words when he got to the phone. I could hear him sigh as he eased his bulk into a chair. I could even hear the chair squeaking in protest. If Ellis had sat on me, I'd have squeaked too.

"I could say the same about you," I said. "You sound like you slept as well as I did."

"Yeah, like the bed was made of broken glass. You aware that Tony Celli turned up in town yesterday?"

"Yeah. Bad news travels fast." Particularly when it's being passed into your jaw in the form of an electric current.

"He blew out again this morning. Looks like he's gone to ground."

"It's a shame. I thought he was going to move here and open a florist's."

At the other end of the phone there was the sound of the receiver being covered, a muffled exchange and then the rustling of papers. Then: "So what do you want, Bird?"

"I wanted to know if there was any movement on Rita Ferris, or Billy Purdue, or on that Coupe De Ville."

Ellis laughed dully. "Ixnay on the first two, but the third one is interesting. Turns out the Coupe De Ville is a company car, registered to one Leo Voss, a lawyer in Boston." There was a pause on the other end of the line. I waited until I realized that, once again, I was supposed to be playing the role of straight man in a conversation.

"But…?" I said at last.

"But," said Ellis, "Leo Voss is no longer with us. He's dead, died earlier this week."

"Damn, a dead lawyer. Only another million to go."

"We live in hope," said Ellis.

"Did he fall, or was he pushed?"

"That's the interesting part. His secretary found him and called the cops. He was sitting behind his desk still dressed in his running outfit-sneakers, socks, T-shirt, sweatpants-with an opened bottle of water in front of him. Their first impression was that he'd had a heart attack. According to the secretary, he'd been feeling ill for a couple of days. He thought it might be flu.

"But when he was autopsied, there was evidence of inflammation of the nerves in the hands and feet. He'd also lost some hair, probably only in the previous day or two. Tests on a hair sample turned up traces of thallium. You know what thallium is?"

"Uh-huh." My grandfather had used it as rat bait, until its sale was restricted. It was a metallic element, similar to lead or mercury, but far more poisonous. Its salts were soluble in water, almost tasteless and produced symptoms similar to influenza, meningitis or encephalitis. A lethal dose of thallium sulfate, maybe eight hundred milligrams or more, could kill in anything from twenty-four to forty hours.

"So what sort of work did this Leo Voss do?" I asked.

"Fairly straightforward stuff, mainly corporate, although what he did must have been pretty lucrative. He had a house in Beacon Hill, a summer place in the Vineyard, and still had some money in the bank, probably because he was single and there was no one putting fur coats on his credit card."

Doreen, I thought. If Ellis could have afforded it, he'd have pasted pictures of her outside churches as a warning to bridegrooms.

"They're still going through his files, but he seems to have been squeaky clean," concluded Ellis.

"Which probably means that he wasn't."

Ellis tut-tutted. "Such cynicism in one so young. Now I've got something for you: I hear you were talking to Willeford."

"That's right. Is that a problem?"

"Could be. He's gone, and I'm starting to resent arriving in places to find that you've already been there. It's making me feel inadequate, and I get enough of that at home."

I felt my grip tighten on the phone. "Last I saw of him, he was sitting in the Sail Loft nursing a drink."