“Not good, Jacob. You burned most of the flesh away and the musculature and mechanics are gone. You’ll need prosthetics but chances are you won’t get them because you’re barely lucid and you’ve been violent.”

Jacob’s eyes drilled into Frank and his jaw clenched up, the cables under the skin tightening like a fist. “You’re certainly cheery.”

Frank thought about the bloody portrait and the screaming and panic and fear. “The doctor’s think that it’s Alzheimer’s,” he said flatly.

For a second there was flicker of black electricity in the dark behind Jacob’s eyes. “Yeah? Well, even the eggheads with the diplomas get it wrong, Little Brother.” The current hit the corners of his mouth and they twitched a few times, then went dead.

“Jacob, look, I don’t know how long you’re going to be—” he paused, searched his head for the right word, and settled on—“yourself. And we’ve got some problems. I need some answers.”

His eyes narrowed. “We? We, who?”

Frank knew the story of the two Jacobs from the beginning. He had been a spectator in the great Coleridge saga until he had packed up and left Montauk. He had gone missing, not letting anyone know where he was, and hadn’t heard from a soul until years later when his nephew had called and said he needed help kicking drugs. He was still having trouble equating the child he had known with the hard, armored man he had seen tonight. “Jakey’s back.”

Jacob’s face played around with various expressions of sadness before the life fell out of it. “He should have stayed away.”

“You’re his father. He couldn’t just leave you to the vultures.”

Jacob’s lips tightened up. “I don’t want him here. Make him leave. Make him go away. He can’t stay, Frank. He can’t stay in Montauk.” There was a tremor in his voice, a little flutter that was so subtle that it might have been imagined.

“Why not, Jacob?”

“Because it’ll come looking for him.”

Frank took a step toward his brother, put his hand on his leg. “Are you talking about the storm?”

Jacob’s voice came out a high-pitched screech, as if someone had taken a fishhook to his eardrums. “No, you idiot. I’m talking about him. If Jakey’s back, he’ll know.”

Frank tightened his grip on Jacob’s foot, trying to soothe him. “It’s okay, I’m here. I’ll look after Jakey.”

Jacob laughed—actually snorted with derision—and turned his face away. “You’re already dead. You’re just too stupid to know it.”

52

In a little over two hours they had captured nearly 1,800 more canvases. Jake held up a painting, Spencer snapped a photo, and Jake pitched it aside. The studio was piled up with a mountain of canvases that looked like preparations for an insurance fire. The building was not as solid as the house and the walls buffeted with the wind. Every now and then some part of the flashing or roof would be torn away in an angry bark.

Spencer stepped back from the camera. “I need two minutes to take a piss and have a drink.” He had to yell to be heard over the wind.

Jake looked at Spencer’s sweat-soaked shirt and tired expression. “We’re out of Coke in here. Let’s go to the house. I need a smoke.”

They left the camera and ran for the house, hammered by the gauntlet of rain and wind tearing in from the ocean. They jumped in through the door to the deck.

Any other time, there would have been swearing. As things stood, Jake went to the fridge and Spencer stretched his shoulders.

The world was a deep gray that pulsed with white stabs of lightning, and the ocean was slobbering in on great rolling swells that were close to being the worst Jake had ever seen. He stopped on the way to the kitchen for a second and tried to see the dim outline of the beach through the rain. The pool shuddered and thrashed with the storm and the lily pads had bunched up against the wall closest to the house, many of them sloshed over the side and thrown up against the window. And this was just the beginning.

“Jake, can I ask you something?” Spencer leaned against the piano, below the Marilyn. Off to his left, blocking the big slate fireplace that stretched up into the rafters like a fossilized tree, was the Oedipal Chuck Close, eyes slashed. Spencer looked at the painting for a second, blinked like an owl, and tried to focus on the damaged canvas.

Jake opened the fridge and pulled out two glass bottles of Coke. The lending library was gone; all that was left was the cold pizza from last night’s dinner, half a loaf of Wonder Bread, and an untouched bowl of tuna salad.

Spencer turned away from the painting. “What happened to you out there?”

Jake popped the caps with a stag-handled bottle opener and held one out to Spencer. “Out where?”

“Wherever you were.”

Jake took a long swallow off the bottle, and for some reason, it tasted good and he was surprised.

“We hung out at the yacht club, smoking weed and chasing city girls on the weekend.” Spencer’s voice changed as he went back in time. “I mean, it all seemed okay to me. One day you’re my best friend, the next you’re gone. There were rumors in town that your dad murdered you and buried you out in that fucking garage, man. Thirty years later you come back some kind of paranormal expert on the John Wayne Gacys of the world looking like Rob Zombie’s stylist.”

Jake paused in the middle of a second swallow and pulled the bottle away from his lips. He felt a headache coming on and thought about a few Tylenol. “I was going for the Tom Ford look.” And then it hit him. Again. Riding in on an image of his wife and son came a jolt in his chest that signaled piston failure. He put his hands on the counter’s edge, wrists turned out, fingers clamped around the worn formica that at any other time he would have noted as cold. Now it vibrated with a low-frequency hum that rattled his teeth and throbbed through his bones. Buried in all of this was the sound of Kay’s voice, laughing. And just below that, Jeremy was making dinosaur roars. There was radio interference and then his antenna lost the signal and their voices stuttered into squelch. Then hissing. And finally silence.

He looked up to see Spencer staring at him with a good dose of What-the-fuck? in his eyes. “Jake, what?”

Jake shook his head with a finality that said he wasn’t going to talk about it; if he did, he’d come apart. He couldn’t even think of her, and up until now he had done a pretty good job of it. Sort of. The trick was not to reach out to her in any way. And that was the hardest part.

Jake turned back to the conversation. “Where were we? Oh, yeah. The big Why? If I could do it over, I would make different decisions, but leaving’s not one of them.” He rummaged around the kitchen and found the Tylenol in one of the bags from the pharmacy that held essentials. He opened the childproof top, poured three of the pills into his hand, and chased them down with a mouthful of Coke. “Coming home?” He just let the question hang in the air. What else could be said?

The rain outside came straight in off the ocean and hammered the windows, rattling the plywood that filled in for the broken thermo pane. Water leaked through invisible gaps and was gathering on the floor in a slowly expanding puddle.

Jake finished his Coke and walked down into the living room. He looked around for something to sop up the water—or at least put down on the floor to stop it from spreading. He kicked some of the bundled newspapers into the puddle, newsprint sandbags to hold back the flood. They quickly turned gray. On the way back to the kitchen he stopped in the middle of the spot he had just cleared of litter, and froze.

Spencer saw the switches flip in his head. “What?”