“It’s a deal. I’ve got plans tonight, but I’ll get started first thing in the morning. I’ll let you know how I make out.”

Logan hung up the phone and was about to turn away when he noticed that the small red message light on its base was blinking. He picked up the phone again and dialed voice mail.

There was a single message. “Jeremy? It’s Pam. Listen, I’m really looking forward to our dinner this evening. And, hey, I’ve been digging deeper into my great-grandfather’s papers, and you won’t believe what I’ve found.” A pause. “Just kidding! I haven’t found anything else. But I did find the business card of that creepo who showed up on my doorstep last winter. Turns out I hadn’t thrown it away after all. I’ll bring it with me. Anyway, the reservation for Sub Rosa is at nine thirty. I know it’s kind of late, but if I hadn’t been a local, we wouldn’t have gotten in at all. It’s a great place, you’ll love it. And after dinner, maybe we can have coffee at my place?” A shy laugh. “So why don’t you pick me up at quarter after, okay? I’ll see you then.” A click as the phone went dead.

As Logan hung up the phone a second time and rose from his desk, the world rocked briefly around him. He grabbed for the chair back in order to steady himself.

Over the past forty-eight hours, he’d been feeling steadily worse. The headaches were almost constant now, and strange new whisperings in his head — along with the demonic music — threatened at times to overwhelm him. Just the night before, he’d found himself sitting on the edge of his bed, playing with the penknife from his medicine kit — blade open — and unable to account for the last fifteen minutes.

Something would have to be done.

Taking a pillow from the bed, he placed it in the middle of the floor, then sat down carefully upon it in the kekkafuza, or full lotus, position of zazen.

In times of great agitation or emotional unrest, Logan relied on Zen meditation, along with his skill as an empath, to calm his mind. He had never needed it more than now.

He pulled out the amulet and looked at it briefly. Then he let it drop gently onto his chest and lowered his hands to his lap, palms up, right over the left, in the dhyāna gesture of meditation. He began breathing very slowly and deliberately: inhaling, exhaling, clearing his mind of all extraneous thought, focusing on nothing but the breaths themselves; imagining that, with each inspiration, he was taking in pure, cleansing air and that with each expiration he was ridding himself of physical and emotional poisons. At first, he counted the breaths; after several minutes, this was no longer necessary.

A sense of calm began to steal over him. The headache receded, along with the whisperings. But the music — the unsettling, devilish music — remained.

Now he tried isolating the music in his mind, compartmentalizing it, so that he could study it simply as a phenomenon, rather than as an intruder to be feared. With effort, he managed to slow it down until only one note sounded at a time. As each note sounded, he mentally introduced another, opposite note of his own creation. One at a time, as each new note intruded into his consciousness, he quite deliberately added another, attempting to cancel out the first.

Logan did this for perhaps ten minutes, trying as he did so to retain the sense of inner stillness at the heart of zazen. It was not a perfect process — he did not have the mental discipline for that — but when he rose again, his headache had temporarily receded; the whisperings were stilled, and — most mercifully — the music was quieter.

He tossed the pillow onto the bed; slipped the amulet back into his shirt; paused to take one more deep, cleansing breath — and then, picking up his satchel from the desk, opened the door and exited his rooms.

36

In the old, wood-timbered Victorian on Perry Street, Pamela Flood sat in the small upstairs space she liked to call her dressing room, self-conscious before a mirror, applying makeup. She rarely did this, and even tonight applied only the bare minimum, but it felt an effort worth making. She had no siblings, and after the death of her father she had the house — with its strange crooked corridors, its back stairs and somnolent rooms of obscure functionality — to herself. The benefit of this — perhaps the only benefit — was that she could assign any number of spaces to her personal whims: hence, the dressing room.

It was quarter to nine in the evening, just about her favorite hour, windows open to the cool night breeze and the sleepy residential street, quiet save the soft droning of insects. A glass of iced tea with a sprig of peppermint sat at her right elbow, and a Charles Mingus CD was playing.

She was looking forward to her date with Jeremy Logan, and to what would no doubt be a marvelous dinner. She was also looking forward — as she privately admitted with a faint tingle of anticipation — to what might happen afterward. It wasn’t easy, meeting people in a place like Newport. In a resort town, you always felt like a bug under glass. She wouldn’t allow herself to get mixed up with clients and, living here all her life as she’d done, she felt she knew all the eligible bachelors too well, as former schoolmates and current neighbors, to ever consider them romantic material. Tourists, or the dot-com billionaires who showed up to display their yachts and pretend to drop in on the Jazz Festival…? Forget it.

That left a pretty small field of opportunity.

…What was that noise? A rap at the front door, perhaps?

She stood up, turned down the CD, and made her way to the head of the stairs, listening. But there was nothing. She glanced at her watch: Jeremy wouldn’t be here for another twenty minutes, at least.

Look at her: nervous as a high schooler about to attend the junior prom. Even so, she had a habit of turning up music until it was just loud enough to miss the phone or the doorbell. Not good for somebody who relied on clients and referrals for her livelihood. She returned to the makeup table and turned up the volume again, just not quite so much this time.

As she sat down, she reminded herself not to forget to bring along the business card she’d promised Jeremy. After rediscovering it, she’d been careful to put it away where she’d remember it: the rambling house, with its piles of books, drafting paper, and architectural drawings, had a way of sucking things in and hiding them away.

As she began applying lipstick, her thoughts turned again to Logan. Funny how her first impressions of him had been so colored by suspicion and alarm. And then, after learning whom he was, she’d gone to the Blue Lobster, determined to meet but not to like him. That, she knew in retrospect, was probably a reaction to his high profile: her New England puritanism would never allow her to date somebody who’d been on the cover of People, especially given a profession so tailor-made for publicity as his. But despite everything, he’d won her over. Not that he’d tried — and maybe that was part of it. No: he’d come in with no attitude, friendly, modest, even self-deprecating, a little reserved when it came to discussing his own work. And he was entertaining, in a droll sort of way. The fact he was good-looking only helped wear down her natural defenses.

But it wasn’t until their dinner at Joe’s that she’d really begun to take him seriously. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it. He was clearly intellectual: you got the sense that, every time he spoke, a lot more thought had gone into his reply than you could glean from just the words. What you saw on the surface was just the tip of a very intriguing iceberg. But there was more than that: it was the way he looked at you when you spoke, almost as if he comprehended your feelings better than you did yourself — and as a result she had never felt judged that evening…only understood.