"Arnie built a barbecue pit to the right of the back door. Only he never finished it. We could use that."

"Done."

Maxine took the papers outside, leaving Tammy to go through the cabinets collecting up other files that for one reason or another she didn't want people to see. She wasn't proud of what her overbearing tendencies had led her to do or say on occasion; this was the perfect time to clean up her past a little. It wasn't so much the thought of posterity that drove her to do this (although she was aware that she had become a part of a footnote to Hollywood history), rather it was the desire to keep these unflattering missives and notes out of the hands of the members of the Appreciation Society who would come in here after they'd gone to cast dice and divide the lots.

When she took the first armful out to the back yard she found that Maxine had made quite a healthy fire with the copies of her own letters.

"Is that all?"

"No, no," Tammy said, studying the fire. "There's a lot more." She kept staring. "You know that's what I used to think ghosts were like?" she said. "Flames in the sun. Invisible, but there."

Maxine took the files from Tammy, and proceeded to feed them to the flames.

"Are we ever going to set the record straight?" Tammy wondered aloud.

"Like how?"

"Write our own book."

"Lauper and Frizelle's Guide to the Afterlife?"

"Something like that."

"It'd just be another opinion," Maxine said, poking at the fire with the stick she'd picked up. "People would go on believing their favourite versions."

"You think?"

"For sure. You can't change people's opinion about stuff like that. It's imbedded. They believe what they believe."

"I'll go get some more stuff."

"Historians of the future are going to curse us for this, you know that?"

"Probably," Tammy said, catching a thin, black smut that was spiraling up from the fire like some bizarre insect. It crumbled in her hand. She brushed her palms together briskly, to clean it off. Then she went back inside for some more fuel for the fire.

Three or four trips out into the backyard and she'd done all she needed to do. She stood in the front bedroom, where she'd always kept her special treasures, and assessed the contents. She could only imagine how many fights there would be over the contents of this room: how much bitching and bargaining. Her gaze went to the back of the room, where-hidden out of sight behind several boxes of film stills-was the holy of holies: the box of photographs of Todd that she and she alone owned. The idea that these would become bargaining material like all the other bits and pieces they were leaving was repugnant. It was fine for the fans to have their petty arguments over crew-jackets and scraps of costuming, but not her precious photographs.

She carefully negotiated her way through the piles of bric-a-brac (her legs, still mending, were beginning to ache) to where her treasure lay hidden. Then she slipped her hand down into the hiding-place, and pulled the box out into view.

The rest could go to the fire or the fans, but this, and this alone, she would keep, she decided. She put it under her arm and went outside to see how her fire-stoker was doing.

"Is that the last of it?" Maxine said, looking at the box under Tammy's arm.

"No, I'm keeping this."

"Oh? Okay."

"It's just pictures of Todd."

The fire was still burning strongly; waves of heat rose up out of the half-finished pit, making the air undulate. While she stared at the fire Tammy opened the box of photographs, and as she did so some instinct-a kind of repugnance for the woman who had obsessed so often on these pictures-made her toss the box lid aside, and with one unpremeditated movement, pluck the pictures and the little roll of negatives out of the box and toss them into the middle of the fire.

"Changed your mind, huh?" Maxine said.

"Yep."

The flames were already curling around the first of the series, but Maxine could see him clearly enough.

"He was younger then."

"Yeah. They were taken on Life Lessons."

"Are those the negatives you're burning?"

"Don't ask."

"That must have cost you a small fortune. But he surely was a good-looking man."

The first of the photographs had been consumed. Now the second and the third.

"Are these the last of it, then?"

"I think so," Tammy said. "They can argue over the rest."

"Only I'm parched. Watching fires is thirsty work."

"You want me to get you a coke or a beer?"

"No. I want us to get back in the car and go home."

"Home," Tammy said, still looking at the fire. The sixth, seventh and eighth pictures were being consumed. The roll of negatives had already curled up into a little black ball.

"Yes, home," Maxine said.

She took Tammy's hand, and kissed the back of it. "Where you belong."

The last of the photographs had come into view, preserved from the heat of the flames on which it sat by the bottom of the box. This was always the picture she'd stared at most often, and most intensely; the one in which she'd often willed Todd's gaze to shift, just a few degrees, so he would look out at her. The fire had caught it now. In a few seconds it would be ashes.

Suddenly, just as impetuously as she'd delivered the pictures into the fire, she now reached down and plucked this one out. She blew on the flames, which only encouraged them.

"Here," Maxine said, and snatching the photograph from Tammy's hand dropped it to the ground and quickly stamped out the flames.

"You left it a bit late for a change of mind."

Tammy picked the picture up, nipping out the last orange worms of fire that crawled around its charred edges. Three-quarters of the image had been consumed, and the remaining portion was browned by the heat and dirt of Maxine's stamping, but Todd's face, shoulder and chest had survived. And his eyes, of course, just one second from meeting the gaze of the camera. Imminent, but permanently averted.

"You really want to keep that?"

"Yes. If you don't mind. We'll frame it and we'll find a place in the house where we can say hello to him once in a while."

"Done." She headed back to the house. "I'm going to call the airport. Find out when the next plane back to Los Angeles is. Are you ready to go?"

"Just say the word."

Tammy looked down at the picture in her hand. Maxine was right; she had left it a little late to salvage it. But there might come a time when she and Maxine needed the comfort of this face; when they were no longer young, and the imminence of his gaze would carry with it the promise of a reunion in another, kinder place.

She glanced up, to be sure Maxine had gone inside, then she gave the bitter-smelling scrap of photograph a quick kiss. Having done so she smiled at the man in the picture, and at herself for all her years of vain adoration. Well, she'd made her peace with it, at least. She slipped the photograph into her pocket and went inside, leaving the fire to burn itself out in Arnie's half-finished handiwork.

THREE

It is night in Coldheart Canyon, and the wind is off the desert.

The Santa Anas they call these winds. They blow off the Mojave, bringing sickness, on occasion, and the threat of fire.

But tonight the Santa Anas are not blisteringly hot. Tonight they are balmy as they pass through the Canyon. Their only freight is the sweet fragrance of flowers.

They make the young palms that are growing wild on the flanks of the Canyon sway, and the banks of bougainvillea churn. They raise dust along the road that winds up the Canyon.

Once in a while somebody will still make their way up that winding road, usually to look for some evidence of scandal or horror. But nature, abhorring a vacuum, has blanketed with green vine the deep pit that marked the location of Katya Lupi's house. So the visitors, coming here in the hope of finding bloodstains or Satanic markings scrawled into the sandstone, dig around for a while in the hot sun and then give up. There's nothing here that gives them goose-flesh: just flowers and dragonflies. Grumbling to one another that this was all a waste of time, they get back in their rental cars, arguing as to who suggested this fool's errand in the first place, and drive away to find something that will give them something morbid to talk about once they get back in to Tulsa or New Jersey.