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  ABOUT THIS KINDLE EDITION

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  To Richard Pine and Kim Witherspoon

  and

  To Kim Witherspoon and Richard Pine

  who would have saved me

  from numerous stupidities

  if only they had come along sooner.

  So many worlds, so much to do

  . . . such things to be.

  —Alfred Lord Tennyson

  The Visitor in the Dead of Night

  Without need of a door and unconcerned about the security-system alarm that has been set, the library patron arrives at three o’clock in the morning, as quiet as any of the many ghosts who reside here—from those in the plays of Shakespeare to those in the stories of Russell Kirk. The aisles between the cliffs of books are deserted. Darkness enfolds the great room and all its alcoves. The staff is home sleeping, and the custodian finished his daily chores an hour earlier. The air smells of pine-scented cleanser and wood polish and aging paper.

  Although no watchman patrols this maze of valuable knowledge, the patron does not feel safe. Most would assume a library to be a haven in a world of tumult, but the patron knows better. He has seen numerous gruesome horrors and has much experience of terror. He no longer trusts any place to be an absolute refuge from danger.

  For one like him, who knows not just a single history but many, libraries are not infrequently places of death. Librarians and other champions of the written word have been shot and stabbed and burned alive and hauled off to concentration camps to be tortured or used as slave labor. Libraries are not safe places, for their shelves are filled with books, but also with ideas regarding freedom, justice, truth, faith, and much more, ideas that some find intolerable. Book burners of all political persuasions know where to find the fuel when they feel the hour has come for action.

  The postmidnight patron knows this town, Suavidad Beach, in all its manifestations, but he can’t be sure that this one offers what he needs. On arrival, fresh from another library, he switches on a flashlight. Hooding the beam with one hand, so that it won’t carry to the high-set windows, he makes his way to the computer alcove and sits at a workstation.

  Soon he’s on the internet, then to Facebook, where he finds the page he wants. There are amusing posts by Jeffrey Coltrane and by his eleven-year-old daughter, Amity, but none by his wife, Michelle. Indeed, there are as well photos of Jeffrey and Amity, although none of the girl’s mother, as if perhaps she died long ago. This prospect excites the patron.

  As the enormous library wall clock ticks softly with each passing minute, the patron searches the public records of Suavidad Beach, seeking a report of the woman’s demise. He doesn’t find it.

  What he does find, in the electronic files of the Suavidad Beach Municipal Court, is a petition filed by Jeffrey Coltrane to dissolve his marriage to Michelle. Jeffrey has neither seen nor heard from her in more than seven years, but he does not seek to have Michelle declared dead, only to be released from his marriage to her. He is not the kind of man who can stop hoping. His statement to the court is eloquent, profoundly sad, yet threaded through with a wistful optimism.

  Jeffrey’s hope is surely naive. The patron has much knowledge of murder and has often been present at scenes of savage slaughter. In this case, Michelle is no doubt dead. Her death is both a tragedy and a cause for celebration.

  The patron switches off the computer. He sits in darkness for a while, thinking about death and life and the risks of trying to foil fate.

  At 4:10 a.m., he leaves the library as he came, with no need of doors and without setting off the alarm.

  This is the eleventh day of April.

  1

  Sometimes on a cloudless night when the westering moon left a contrail of shimmering silver light on the otherwise dark sea, when the air was so clear that the distant stars seemed almost as bright as Venus, when the infinite galaxies floating overhead had a weight of wonder that enchanted him, Jeffy Coltrane became convinced that something incredible, something magical, might happen. Although he was a hard worker and in debt to no one, he was also something of a dreamer. On this splendid Wednesday evening, the eleventh day of April, wonder was center stage, but unexpected terror waited in the wings.

  After dinner in their favorite restaurant, realizing the tide was low, Jeffy and his eleven-year-old daughter, Amity, took off their sneakers and socks, rolled up their jeans, and waded out to the sea-smoothed rock formations slightly north of downtown Suavidad Beach, California. They sat side by side, their legs drawn up, arms around their knees, facing west toward the Far East, where Japan lay thousands of miles away in tomorrow afternoon.

  “We live on a kind of time machine,” Amity said.

  “How do you figure?”

  “Part of the planet’s a day in the future, part is a day in the past, and it’s like tomorrow afternoon in Japan.”

  “Maybe you should go live in Tokyo for a month and each day phone to tell me what horses will win at Santa Anita.”

  “Yeah,” she said, “but if it worked that way, then everybody would be crazy rich from scamming the races.”

  “Or there’d be no races because they were scammed into ruin, and all those poor horses would be out of work.”

  “So you know what that means,” she said.

  “Do I?”

  “Never scam. Doing the right thing is the easiest thing.”

  “You heard that somewhere, did you?”

  “I’ve been totally brainwashed.”

  “Fathers don’t brainwash their children.”

  “Bullsugar.”

  “No, really. We propagandize them.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Propaganda is gentler than brainwashing. You often don’t even know it’s happening.”

  “Oh, I know it’s happening, all right,” she said. “’Cause it’s like always happening.”

  “You’re so terribly, terribly oppressed.”

  She sighed. “I endure.”

  Jeffy smiled and shook his head. The incredible, magical thing that he, a dreamer, sometimes anticipated had in fact happened a long time ago. Her name was Amity.

  A slight breeze issued off the ocean, scented faintly with salt and—he believed, he knew—with exotic fragrances of far nations so subtle the nose could suspect but not quite detect their existence.

  After a silence, Amity said, “So it was the right thing to wait seven years?”

  “To keep hope alive for seven years. Yeah. Remaining hopeful is always the right way to be.”

  “So then wouldn’t it be the right thing to wait another seven?”

  “I’ll never stop hoping, sweetheart. But eventually . . . we have to move on.”

  Seven years earlier, when Amity was four, Michelle walked out on them. She said that she felt empty, that nothing about her life was the way she had foreseen. She needed to get control of her destiny, and then she could come home to him and Amity.

  They’d never heard from her again.

  Like Jeffy, Michelle Jamison had been born and raised in sunny Suavidad Beach. Perhaps her sense that her life had gone wrong began when her mother died in childbirth.

  Twenty-two years later, just a day after Michelle gave birth to Amity, her beloved father, Jim Jamison, a crew supervisor employed by the power company, was electrocuted while overseeing maintenanc e on a transformer in a subterranean vault.

  Thereafter, Amity’s birthday inevitably reminded Michelle not only of her father’s death but also of the mother who had been lost to her on the day of her own birth. She wasn’t a pessimist, didn’t suffer from depression, was in fact a lively woman with a sparkling sense of humor and a love of life. But at times, she felt that her hometown was a haunted place, that the past would weigh too heavily on her as long as she lived there.

  She went away to find herself, and evidently she never did.

  Every attempt Jeffy made to locate her led nowhere. The private investigator whom he hired seven years earlier and the one he hired only a year ago failed. A determined woman could reinvent herself so effectively that anyone searching for her would need considerably more resources than Jeffy could tap. Never having known her mother, having lost her dad the day after she gave birth to Amity, beginning to lose her dream of success as a musician, she had been vulnerable. Jeffy blamed himself for failing to recognize the depth of her vulnerability. He wished he had never let her go.

  By law, Michelle had been missing long enough to be declared dead by a court, but Jeffy hadn’t taken that solemn step. He refused to think it could be true. If he believed that she was happy in a new life . . . well, then she must be. Belief was a powerful force. He proceeded with a legal action only to dissolve their marriage.

  This week, his petition had been approved.

  At thirty-four, he was not exactly starting over. He was completing his recuperation. He still wore his wedding ring.

  The slow, easy waves lapped against the low rock formation on which he and his daughter sat, and the gentle surf foamed on the beach in a chorus of murmurs, as if the sea were sharing secrets with the shore.

  “What if Mom comes home someday? Will you marry her again?”

  Having lived with this loss so long, they dwelt in neither sorrow nor resentment. For Michelle, they shared a sweet melancholy salted with nostalgia not about what had been but about what might have been. Indeed, time healed. The scar would always be tender, but touching it no longer hurt enough to pinch off their breath.

  “I don’t think your mom would want to marry me again, scout. I wasn’t what she needed.”

  “Well, she was wrong about you.”

  “Maybe not. She and I were dreamers, but with a difference. She dreamed of things that were possible—being a songwriter, recording her own songs, having a successful career. Me . . . I dream of living in the 1930s, seeing Benny Goodman playing live in the Manhattan Room of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. Or of worlds that never were and never can be, Tolkien to Heinlein. I’m all about big bands and hobbits, just a consumer of wonder. But your mom . . . she created wonder, beautiful music. I could appreciate her work, I loved it, but she needed a bigger audience than me.”

  “She was wrong about you,” Amity insisted, not with anger but with disarming conviction.

  What Michelle had been wrong about was that she could take a leave of absence from her daughter and find a greater meaning. Raising Amity provided sufficient meaning to make any life worth living. He didn’t say as much to Amity, because he knew her and knew himself well enough to foresee the consequence. They didn’t need to spoil the memory of a fine dinner and blur the stars and fade the sea with tears.

  “Show me the Big Dipper,” she said.

  “Otherwise known as Ursa Major.” He put an arm around her and searched the sky and found the handle of the Dipper and focused her attention and drew the constellation for her. “It’s been hanging there ever since it was used to scoop the other stars out of a starpool and scatter them across the sky.”

  Minutes later, they waded ashore and sat on a rock and put on their shoes.

  A half-hour walk would take them home. The night was young and warm, and for part of the way there were shop windows—some of them at art galleries—with contents at which to marvel. As a man who felt that he had been born too late, Jeffy was often amazed at what passed for high art in this low age.

  The first of seven houses on Shadow Canyon Lane, which branched off Oak Hollow Road, was a wedding-cake Victorian with two turrets and steep roofs and dormer windows, exuberantly decorated with millwork, flanked by proud oaks. It belonged to Marty and Doris Bonner, who were nice people, not a fraction as fussy as their residence. They were on vacation, having left a key with Jeffy.

  His and Amity’s place was a single-story house. Slate roof. Local sandstone walls. Jeffy had done the masonry, taught by his mason father. Amber bulbs in the crackle-glass lamps cast a warm, vaguely patterned light across the porch, and the gentle breeze whispered in the moon-kissed crowns of the tall palm trees.

  One of the two rocking chairs on the porch was occupied.

  Amity said, “It’s Mr. Spooky.”

  2

  The man whom Amity called Mr. Spooky referred to himself as Ed and never mentioned a surname. He was one of the homeless who lived in isolated encampments deeper in the canyon, well beyond where the blacktop lane dead-ended. Having been in the vicinity for about a year, he came to visit at least twice a month, uninvited.

  Jeffy wasn’t afraid of Ed. For one thing, Jeffy was thirty-four years old, six feet two, lean and fit, while Ed was perhaps thirty years older and six inches shorter, as out of shape as a moldering squash. The old man was eccentric, although not outright crazy, and he never exhibited the slightest tendency to aggression.

  Nevertheless, after saying, “Good evening, Ed,” Jeffy let Amity into the house, and he waited until she locked the door and turned on some lights before he settled in one of the rocking chairs on the porch, which their visitor had rearranged to face each other more directly. These days, Jeffy never left Amity home alone, and they went everywhere together, not just because—in fact, not at all because—of Ed.

  In its current decline, California was home to an ever-growing throng of the homeless, many of them severely disturbed and with addictions. The politicians governing the state cared only about ideology and power and graft, not about the citizenry. They spent billions on the problem, with no effect other than to greatly enrich their friends and create more homeless people.

  When too many of these wounded souls pitched their camps in the same place, the authorities finally moved to evict them, for reasons of public health and safety. Consequently, those who lived in tents or in sleeping bags on the fringes of Suavidad Beach had recently taken to camping in the woods and brushland, each at a distance from the other, to draw less attention to themselves.

  Although rumpled and unshaven, Ed was in fundamental ways much different from most single men in his circumstances. His teeth were white, and he smelled clean, perhaps because he walked into town daily to avail himself of the showers and other services offered by some public and church-operated facilities. Instead of shapeless exercise suits or baggy jeans and hoodies, he favored slacks with his shirt tucked in, a sport coat, and always a bow tie. This night, he wore a polka-dot tie with a bold plaid shirt, but he wasn’t likely to encounter people who, steeped in style, would arch their eyebrows and mock him surreptitiously.

  According to Ed, no alcoholic beverages had ever passed his lips, other than fine cabernet sauvignon, and far less of that than he would have liked because he had a taste only for the best, which he’d not often been able to afford. He also said that he had never done drugs stronger than aspirin.

  Jeffy believed Ed’s denial of those vices, largely because the old man never lamented his homelessness or made excuses for it—or explained it. His situation was simply his situation, as if he had been born a hobo, as caste bound as any Hindu from another century.

  He visited from time to time, in part to discuss the creatures of nature that shared the wooded canyon. He had a deep knowledge of history, too, and liked to speculate about how the present-day world might have been i f certain pivot points in human events had resulted in a different resolution from the one that occurred. He also had an interest in poetry, which he could quote at length, everything from Shakespeare to Poe to the Japanese masters of haiku. He never stayed long, certainly never overstayed his welcome, perhaps because his restless mind made him an impatient conversationalist—or because Jeffy was an uninspiring intellectual companion.

  “How have you been, Ed?”

  “I’ve been dying since I was born, just like you. And now I’m nearly out of time.”

  A dour mood was as much a part of Ed as the furry tangles of bushy white eyebrows that he never trimmed.

  “You seem fit enough,” Jeffy said. “I hope you’re not ill.”

  “No, no, Jeffrey. Not ill, but hunted.”

  A few teachers in elementary school had insisted on calling him Jeffrey, but no one since then, until Ed. In spite of Jeffy’s height and reasonably imposing physique, he possessed some curious quality that caused others to think of him as, in part, a perpetual boy, and thus as Jeffy, which was his mother’s pet name for him. He took no offense at this. He liked who he was well enough; and he could be no one different. If being called Jeffy was necessary for him to remain the man who he had always been, then “Jeffy” would suit him for his gravestone and for all the days between now and that final rest.

  “Hunted? Hunted by whom?” Jeffy asked.

  Ed’s scowl knitted his extravagant eyebrows into one long albino caterpillar, and his deep-set eyes receded into the shadows of their sockets. “Better you don’t know. It’s the incessant need to know more and more and yet still more, to know everything, that is the fast track to destruction. Knowledge is a good thing, Jeffrey, but the arrogance that so often comes with knowledge is ultimately our undoing. Don’t be undone, Jeffrey. Do not be undone by pride in your knowledge.”