And so they came by to speak with me. And they continue coming by.

Wisp has put me on leave. The noose tightens.

How much did Vole see? How much has he told?

They shadow me. Two inspectors. They dog my footsteps. But I will outmanoeuvre them. I have packed my essentials in a trunk small enough to carry by hand.

I will consign this memoir to the fire. Then slip away in the night, when my watchers have dropped their guard. Book passage on a steamer under an assumed name. America is a large country, large enough to get lost in. Once there I will cover my trail, change identities again. They’ll not find me.

And Kitty, dear Kitty, must wait. But not forever. I shall come back for her.

That was the final entry. Obviously, he had been unable to destroy the precious record of his crimes. Perhaps it was then that the name on the inside cover was blacked out, the early pages removed, to preserve some degree of anonymity. The diary would have gone into the trunk, to be carried across the Atlantic. And farther west, all the way to California, to this house. The House of Silence, which had kept the secret all these years.

She stood up. Her mind was working fast—running like a millrace, as the diarist put it. The man who filled these pages with his thoughts showed the classic symptoms of schizophrenia, the cyclical swings between lucidity and manic paranoia. In the acute phases he was hostile, violent, homicidal. He went out every night, came back late, paced the floor. Women shrank from his gaze. People feared him.

Like Richard. Richard, whose nocturnal footsteps disturbed the downstairs neighbors. Richard, who gave female tenants “the evil eye.” Richard, who was in the acute phase of his illness now.

The same pattern. If the diarist was Graham Silence, he had passed on his disease through the generations, to her father, and now to her brother.

Aldrich had killed himself. His rage had been turned inward.

And Richard? How was he channeling his violent impulses?

And what did he do when he went out at night?

twelve

She had it.

He was almost sure she did.

Someone like her would not be able to resist the temptation of such a prize.

And she would keep it to herself, the scheming bitch.

She might be reading it right now. Reading long into the night. Retracing the byways of old Jack’s thoughts. Reliving the momentous events of ’88 and later.

He himself had no need to read of such things. He already knew everything that mattered, knew by intuition, by inheritance, by blood.

He knew Jack.

Was Jack, he sometimes thought. Jack’s ghost, summoned forth from the underworld to animate a new body.

He did feel like a ghost, often enough, and more and more often these days.

Something not quite dead, not quite alive. Inhabiting the gray borderland between the quick and the dead. A dismal land.

A shadow land.

And he himself, a shadow among shadows.

No, he didn't need to read the book. But he wanted no one else to have it. For it to be scanned by unworthy eyes was sacrilege.

Her eyes. She was unworthy.

And in justice she might have to pay for her transgression.

He imagined her eyes, those undeserving eyes, wide open and unblinking, staring sightlessly. She would be a broken thing, a discarded toy, like one of old Jack’s victims, the flophouse floozies he slaughtered in back alleys.

But not cut up as they were. Not eviscerated. Unlike his predecessor, he had no need to soil his hands.

He knew the interior of the human body. He knew that it was blood and bile and shit.

We have this treasure in earthen vessels, said St. Paul. But St. Paul was wrong. There was no treasure. There was only filth and muck.

No need to disassemble them as old Jack did. Making them dead was accomplishment enough.

And now he might have to make her dead.

Possibly. He hoped it would not be necessary.

But it might be.

It just might.

thirteen

Jennifer woke shortly after sunrise, the residue of a nightmare already fading from memory. She’d been running through a maze of fogbound alleys, and a man with a knife was after her, and she slipped on the wet street and he was slashing at her, opening a long rip in her left arm, and she saw his face and it was Richard.

She needed to talk to him. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe just to convince herself that he wasn’t capable of the violence in her dream.

If she called, wouldn’t answer. She tossed on yesterday’s clothes and drove to Dogtown, parking outside the Oakwood Chateau. She took the stairs to the third story and rapped on his door.

“Richard, I know you’re in there. It’s Jennifer. Open up.”

She kept on banging until she was convinced he wasn’t home. He could be anywhere. But the manager said he often went to the cemetery in the morning. It wasn’t far.

She parked on a side street and walked through the gateway, past a sign half obscured by dripping foliage. Traffic hummed on the Santa Monica Freeway, immediately to the north. A homeless man wheeled a shopping cart past the mausoleum, his head bent low.

No one else was in sight. She spent a long moment looking in every direction, but saw no sign of Richard.

There wasn’t any reason to linger. Still, she made her way farther into the graveyard.

Woodlawn Cemetery dated to the early 1800s. Buried here was Venice’s founder, Abbot Kinney, a tobacco mogul who patterned the town after its namesake, complete with Italianate palazzos and sixteen miles of canals navigated by gondolas. “Venice-of-America” was meant to be a cultural showcase, but the public wanted carnivals, roller coasters, and sideshow attractions, and Venice became “the Coney Island of the Pacific.” In the Depression most of the canals were filled in and paved over. Only six were spared. Now they had been dredged and reclaimed, and with amazing speed Venice was being transformed into something close to what Kinney intended—a pleasure garden for a moneyed elite.

Jennifer went past rows of Gothic headstones into a section reserved for bronze plaques set in the earth. Two of the plaques marked the places where her mother and father lay.

Marjorie Ellen Silence. Aldrich Graham Silence.

She rarely came here. Now that she stood over the graves, she wasn’t sure what to do. Say a prayer? She didn’t know any. She contented herself with a whispered, “Rest in peace.” Not the most original sentiment, but she meant it. There had not been much peace for her parents. Aldrich was shattered by mental illness. His suicide left Marjorie an emotional wreck, prone to insomnia and crying jags. She could be a harsh disciplinarian. She and Richard quarreled constantly. Jennifer sometimes thought Marjorie saw too much of Aldrich in her son, and the recognition pained her. Or did it scare her?

Richard was too young to escape the House of Silence. Jennifer was not. She partied nightly. Venice in the early ’90s was still “the sewer by the sea,” as locals called it. No McMansions back then, only decaying buildings and dry canals lined with trash. Drugs were everywhere. At fifteen she was doing coke and speed. At sixteen she ran away from home—for good, she thought.

A girlfriend drove her to San Francisco. They were going to live in Haight-Ashbury in a shared apartment. Or so they assumed until they learned what the rent was like. Her friend ran out on her a few days later, taking the car. Jennifer was alone. She could call home, but she was too scared and too stubborn. She ate at a soup kitchen, cadged dollar bills in public parks. She found a place to live—the utility room in a shopping center, where she could sneak in and out without being seen by the custodial staff. Or perhaps they did see her, but let her stay out of pity. After two months of this, she was a ragged, dirty, emaciated mess.