The two women made Jessica lie back down on the couch. Hawthorne could barely make out their voices. Alice again covered her with a blanket as Kate stroked her hair.

Hawthorne looked up at the windows above him. They were empty but he still had the sense that something was there.

Then, gradually, a shape materialized in a third-floor window—the dark coat, white hair, and thin white beard outlining the jaw. Ambrose Stark again stared down at him. But this time it was different. A great malicious smirk distorted the lower half of his face. The lips were bright red. Hawthorne dug his fingernails into his palms. He stared back at the specter above him, forcing himself not to turn away. He told himself it was a portrait that someone was holding up at the window. But that grin—surely that wasn’t on any portrait. Stark’s eyes were bright with malevolent humor.

“What are you staring at?” Kate was coming back out to the terrace.

Hawthorne looked up toward the third floor. The image of Ambrose Stark was gone. He tried to calm his breathing. “Nothing,” he said.

“You look awful.” Kate joined him, then looked up at the empty windows.

“It’s nothing. How’s Jessica?”

“She’s better. Alice will take her over to the infirmary. What did you see up there?”

“Nothing. Just shadows.”

“How spooky those gargoyles look in the moonlight.”

“Yes,” said Hawthorne.

Alice joined them on the terrace with Jessica, who had a blanket wrapped around her shoulders.

“When you walked over here,” Hawthorne asked Alice, “did you see anyone?”

“I don’t think so. Well, I think I saw the night watchman.”

“Think?” said Hawthorne.

“I didn’t see his face and he wasn’t nearby.”

Then, strangely, came the liquid notes of a clarinet. They all stood unmoving, struck by the oddness of hearing the single instrument.

“Do you hear that?” asked Hawthorne, almost fearing that they didn’t.

“Of course,” said Kate. “How pretty it is.”

It was a jazz tune of almost unbearable sweetness. The music seemed to be coming from someplace above them.

Jessica raised her head. “I could dance to this,” she said. “Really, let me try.”

Alice gripped the girl’s arm to keep her from throwing off the blanket. “What is it?” she asked. “I know I’ve heard that song before.”

Hawthorne was afraid he wouldn’t be able to keep his voice steady. “Someone is playing ‘Satin Doll,’” he said.

Seven

Detective Leo Flynn was sucking on a big Dominican cigar, inhaling so deeply that he could feel the smoke banging against his lungs’ air sacs and infundibula—as the medical examiner liked to say. The smoke felt good. Even the fact that it was bad for him felt good. Flynn was sitting on the bench of a picnic table behind a small house on the outskirts of Portsmouth. It was early Monday afternoon and raining but Flynn was sitting under an umbrella poked up through a round hole in the redwood table, and only a few drops blew against his face. The umbrella had green and white stripes. Through an L-shaped tear in one green panel a stream of water cascaded into a blue coffee cup with the words “Irving’s Caddy Shack” in white letters around the side. Seated across from Flynn, Irving Porter, a detective with the Portsmouth police department and the owner of the house, also sucked on a cigar. In fact, the cigars had come from Porter and the backyard was the only place where Porter’s wife would let him smoke. She didn’t even like him smoking in the garage because she said the smoke snuck into the cars. Flynn didn’t know anything about that. He was glad to have a good cigar, even though it was cold and the trees were bare. And he liked Porter, who was a man about his own age and who shared his own bad habits.

Beyond that, they were talking about floaters and bodies that washed up on shore, because Porter had a body that had been tagged a simple drowning till Flynn nagged and nagged, calling twice a day from Boston—a car mechanic named Mike Ritchie who’d been pulled out of the bay in June. So Porter had the body exhumed and it turned out the guy had been killed just like Buddy Roussel and Sal Procopio: an ice pick jammed into the brain. By now Flynn had no doubt he was looking for a Canuck named Frank, a guy in his late twenties with dark brown hair and a thin face like somebody had given it a squeeze. And Frank was a joker, or at least he told jokes. Flynn even had one repeated to him. What’s the sign say over the urinals in the Canuck bar? Please don’t eat the big mints.

“Sure you don’t want a Bud?” asked Porter, blowing a cloud of smoke up into the umbrella.

“Too early for me. I’d hafta take a nap later. I’ll come back after I talk to a couple of people.”

“You want lunch?” Porter was wearing a heavy overcoat and a red hunting cap with the flaps pulled down over his ears, which made him look like an old hound.

“The cigar’s enough.”

“You ever smoke any Cubans?” Porter’s voice had grown wistful.

“Sometimes. I mean, if they get confiscated.”

“Never see any Cubans up here. Had one in Mexico once. Least they said it was a Cuban.” Porter poked at the ash on his cigar with a fingernail. “You know, I never felt good about Ritchie turning up in the bay. The guy didn’t fish, didn’t swim. I must of asked myself a thousand times what he was doing there.”

“Now you know.”

“Fuckin’ ice pick—only an autopsy would pick it up after that time in the water. I figure the tide carried him a ways. Shit, he could of been dumped off a dock right here in town. My kid brother was in high school with him. Even went to his funeral.”

“What kind of guy was he?”

“Ritchie? Shortcuts, he was a great believer in shortcuts. It never works.”

“Quick money,” said Flynn. Then he thought, What the fuck do I know about it?

“Ritchie wasn’t greedy. He was just trying to get by. But he was sloppy, drank too much, made a lot of mistakes. He kept trying to figure the angle, like the right number, the right piece of information would solve his problems. I figure somebody got tired of dealing with him and decided to clear the decks. A guy like Ritchie, who drinks like he did, you can’t trust his mouth.”

“Why didn’t you do an autopsy back in June?”

Porter looked off across his wet backyard as if unhappy with the question. “No marks. No sign of foul play. He could have been drunk and taken a tumble. And maybe we had a full plate at the time, I don’t recall.”

Flynn sucked on his cigar and looked out at the wet brown grass. It wasn’t much of a yard except for the picnic table. A seagull was flapping along above the rooflines. Flynn watched it for a moment and wondered what it was like to have no thoughts, no morality, no worries, just belly rumblings.

Flynn pushed himself to his feet. His head bumped the umbrella and a thin stream of water trickled down his neck, causing him to bite deeply into the cigar. Then he took it out of his mouth and spat into the dead grass.

“I’ll go talk to the girlfriend,” said Flynn. “Thanks for the smoke.”

“Not too many people to share it with anymore. The wife won’t even let me smoke in the car. I mean regular cigarettes. Filters, even. Makes me feel like a crook.”

Flynn walked around the side of the house. Pausing, he bent over to pick up a twig, wiped the twig on the sleeve of his raincoat, and popped off the smoldering tip of the cigar. There was almost enough left to last him down to Boston that afternoon. The department’s unmarked Dodge was parked in Porter’s driveway. Flynn unlocked the door, started it up, then drove across town.

The woman’s name was Letta Smothers and she worked afternoons at Shaw’s supermarket as a cashier. She was single with two kids, neither of whom were Ritchie’s. Irving had drawn him a map to where she lived, but still Flynn missed the apartment twice and had to double back. He kept thinking of what he knew about Frank the Ice Pick Man. Not a lot. On the other hand, everything he knew was in the computer and Flynn had no doubt that Frank’s full name would turn up in Manchester or Concord. Surely the guy had a record and when Flynn popped in one or two more pieces of information—even Frank’s shoe size, for crying out loud—then the whole story would fall into his lap. Chapter and verse.