As if in punishment for that pleasure, that night I dreamed.

I didn't have my usual bad dreams, which are about the knife drawing designs in my flesh, about the sound of men grunting like pigs.

I dreamed about Deedra Dean.

In my dream, I was next door, in the apartment building. It was dark. I was standing in the hall downstairs, looking up. There was a glow on the landing, and I knew somehow that it came from the open door of Deedra's apartment.

I didn't want to go up those stairs, but I knew I must. In my dream, I was light on my feet, moving soundlessly and without effort. I was up those stairs almost before I knew I was moving. There was no one in the building except whatever lay before me.

I was standing in the doorway of Deedra's apartment, looking in. She was sitting on the couch, and she was lit up with blue light from the flickering television screen. She was dressed, she was intact, she could move and talk. But she was not alive.

She made sure I was meeting her eyes. Then she held out the remote control, the one I'd seen her hold many, many times, a big one that operated both television and VCR. While I looked at her fingers on the remote control, she pressed the play button. I turned my head to the screen, but from where I stood I could only see an indistinct moving radiance. I looked back to Deedra. She patted the couch beside her with her free hand.

As I moved toward her, I knew that Deedra was dead and I should not get any closer to her. I knew that looking at the screen would cause something horrible to happen to me. Only dead people could watch this movie, in my dream. Live people would not be able to stand the viewing. And yet, such is the way of the subconscious; I had to walk around the coffee table and sit by Deedra. When I was close to her, I was not aware of any smell; but her skin was colorless and her eyes had no irises. She pointed again at the screen of the television. Knowing I couldn't, and yet having to, I looked at the screen.

It was so awful I woke up.

Gasping and straining for breath, I knew what I'd seen in a deathly X-ray vision. I'd seen Deedra's view. I'd seen the lid of a coffin, from the inside, and above that, the dirt of my grave.

Chapter Thirteen

I felt sullen and angry the next morning. I tried to trace the source of these unjustifiable feelings and discovered I was angry with Deedra. I didn't want to dream about her, didn't want to see her body again in any manifestation, dead visionary or live victim. Why was she bothering me so much?

Instead of going in to Body Time, I kicked and punched my own bag, hanging from its sturdy chain in the small room that was meant to be a second bedroom. The chain creaked and groaned as I worked out my own fears.

There'd been no semen in Deedra's body, no contusions or bruises in the genital area, only indications that she had sex at some time before she died. But in a way she'd been raped. I took a deep breath and pummeled the bag. Right, left, right, left. Then I kicked: one to the crotch, one to the head, with my right leg. One to the crotch, one to the head, with my left leg.

Okay. That was the reason, the source, of the burrowing misery that spread through me when I thought of Deedra. Whoever had jammed that bottle into her had treated her like a piece of offal, like flesh in a particular conformation with no personality attached, no soul involved.

"She wasn't much," I said to the empty room. "She wasn't much." I back-fisted the bag. I was getting tired. It hardly moved.

An empty-headed girlish woman whose sole talents had been an encyclopedic knowledge of makeup and an ability to deal efficiently with a video camera and related items, that was the sum of Deedra Dean.

I marched back to my tiny washing area and stuffed clothes in my washer. I felt something hard through the pocket of a pair of blue jeans. Still in a rotten mood, I thrust my hand into the pocket and pulled out two objects. I unfolded my fingers and stared. Keys. I labeled all keys, instantly; where'd this come from?

I shut my eyes and thought back through the week. I opened them and peered at the keys a little more. Well, one was to the apartment building doors; Becca had given it to me yesterday. The other? Then I saw another hand dropping the key into my palm, my own hand closing around it and sliding it into my pocket. Of course! This was the key to Deedra's apartment, the one she'd given to Marlon Schuster. Becca and I had made him give it up. Becca hadn't asked for it; that was unlike her. She was so careful about details. I would take it over to her.

Then I remembered I was supposed to go to the Drinkwaters' this morning instead of the next day, and I glanced at the clock. No time to stop by Becca's now. I thrust the key into the pocket of my clean blue jeans, the ones I'd pulled on for today, and I started the washer. I had to get moving if I was going to clear all my hurdles this morning.

As if to punish me for asking for a different day, Helen had left the house a particular mess. Normally, the Drinkwaters were clean and neat. The only disorder was caused by their grandchildren, who lived a few doors down and visited two or three times a week. But today, Helen hadn't had a chance (she explained in a note) to clean up the debris from the potted plant she'd dropped. And she'd left clean sheets on the bed so I'd change them, a job she usually performed since she was very particular about how her sheets were tucked. I gritted my teeth and dug into the job, reminding myself several times how important the Drinkwaters were to my financial existence.

I gave them extra time, since I didn't want Helen to be able to say I'd skimped in any way. I drove from the Drinkwaters' home directly to Albert Tanner's smaller house in a humbler part of Shakespeare.

Albert Tanner had retired on the day he turned sixty-five, and one month later his wife had dropped dead in Wal-Mart as the Tanners stood in the checkout line. He'd hired me within three weeks, and I'd watched him mourn deeply for perhaps five months. After that, his naturally sunny nature had struggled to rise to the surface of his life. Gradually, the wastebaskets had been less full of Kleenex, and he'd commented on how his phone bills had dropped when he called his out-of-town children once a week, rather than once a day. In time, the church women had stopped crowding his refrigerator with casseroles and Albert's freezer filled up with Healthy Choice microwave dinners and fish and deer he'd killed himself. Albert's laundry basket had gotten fuller as he showered and changed more often in response to his crowded social calendar. And I'd noticed that his bed didn't always need making.

As I let myself in that morning, Albert was getting ready to take his wife's best friend to an AARP luncheon.

"How does this look, Lily?" he asked me. He held out his arms and unselfconsciously offered himself up for inspection. Albert was very shaky on color coordination, a sartorial problem he'd left to his late wife, so I was often asked to give advice.

Today he'd worn a dark green golf shirt tucked into pleated khakis and dark green socks with cordovan loafers, so it was easy to nod approval. He needed a haircut, but I figured he knew that. I was only willing to give him so much monitoring. Carry it too far, it amounted to mothering. Or wifing.

In a few minutes he was gone, and I was going about my business in my usual way. I knew Albert was actually pleased I would be here when he had a solid reason to go out; he didn't like to see me work, felt uncomfortable with me moving about his house. It made him feel like a poor host.

As I was dusting the family room, where Albert spent most of his time when he was at home, I automatically began the familiar task of boxing his videos. Albert Tanner was a polite and pleasant man, and seldom made truly big messes, but he had never put a video back in its box in the months I'd worked for him. Like Deedra, he taped a lot of daytime television to watch at night. He rented movies, and he bought movies. It wasn't too hard to figure that if Albert was home, he was in front of the television.