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“I've always wanted one of these,” said Louise. “I see them in magazines and they make me think the people must have lots of friends.”

It was hot near the ceiling and Lyris wiped sweat from her cheek with the back of her hand. Louise wondered what reason on earth kept her from leaving this poor young couple be.

Albert leaned against the counter and watched them working. “I think I'll go out to a bar or something,” he said.

The women looked down on him. “I could kick you from here,” said Lyris.

“But would you?”

“No.”

When the rack was installed and level Albert helped them down from the island and they hung pots and pans and a big spoon and stood watching them turn slowly in the air.

“I can't believe this is really our kitchen,” said Lyris.

Albert and Louise carried the table in from the hallway, and Lyris brought the leaves that went with it. The table was well made and heavy, with stout spindle legs rarely found, and they would rest and lean on it now and then.

They put the table in the dining room, pulled the ends apart, laid the leaves on the rails, aligning pegs and holes, and pushed the table snugly back together.

“I love putting leaves in tables,” said Albert. “It's the only thing I used to like about holidays at home.”

He rounded up chairs and Lyris got a bottle of wine and poured three drinks and they sat at the table and raised their glasses.

“To Louise,” said Lyris.

“This is a big table,” said Albert. “We will need to have many children.”

“I don't know why you're being so nice to us,” said Lyris.

“No special reason,” said Louise. “That's what mothers do, isn't it?”

She closed her eyes and laughed softly.

“Jesus,” she said. “Where did that come from. I'm sorry. What friends do.”

Albert drank his wine. The yeti show played in the living room, a storm howling in the mountains.

“It's all right,” said Lyris. “I know what you mean.”

Louise covered her embarrassed smile with her hand and shook her head. “I think I will be going.”

She drove home in the Scout II, shifting gears harshly. She listened to the radio for a while, shut it off, and punched the dashboard.

What she said came out so easily. In that moment, when they were relaxed and together, she must have believed it.

At the farm, yellow leaves scratched and spun across the yard. The lights were on in the house, but she would not go in yet. She sat in the truck with her hands on her face, looking out over the tops of her fingers.

She was a mother, though who would remember? Her daughter died at birth sixteen years ago. Louise almost died too. If she had, she wondered, would she and the girl be together? In any way that they were aware of, she meant.

Sometimes she thought of Iris, imagined the life she would have had. Watching television, putting on Louise's makeup, riding in cars with reckless boys. Or playing soccer, running and kicking, hair flying in the wind.

Dan Norman had learned of Jack Snow's prison term, which would satisfy his clients' desire to discredit him in their daughter's eyes. He still wondered what Jack and Wendy were doing in the warehouse.

He staked it out, watching with binoculars from the trainyard. They worked bankers' hours, arriving in the red Mustang. Parcel trucks came and went. There was one visitor, a lady who went inside and left half an hour later.

Dan ran her license plates and found that she was a professor named Mildred at the community college in Stone City. He found her one day in her office, a small room musty with books at the end of a hallway in the Culture, Media and Sport Annex.

She was a tall woman, in her sixties, Dan guessed, with long brown hair and a gray felt hat with a black ribbon on the side.

“Mr. Snow put up a notice on a bulletin board looking for someone to appraise Celtic relics,” she said. “I was curious. And the truth is, I could use the money. Part-time college professors are not highly paid in this area.”

“You went, you talked to him,” said Dan.

“They're not real,” she said. “He's tried to make them look old, but I don't know who they would fool. They're not, they don't, no.”

“What does he do to them?”

“Tarnishing solutions, crude abrasives. I believe he wraps some of the larger items in blankets and hits them with a two-by-four.”

“So you say, Whoa, this stuff is no good.”

“Something like that. And he suggested that I could estimate what they'd be worth if they were real, and I said I didn't think that would be a very wise use of my time.”

“Good call,” said Dan.

“I was disappointed.”

“Where are these things from, Ireland?”

“Being copies, I suppose they could be from anywhere. The designs are most likely based on excavations in Europe, Britain, and Ireland. The Celts, you know, were not a single culture, and would not have referred to themselves as ‘Celts.' They were a lot of different people who spoke a similar language and lived all across central Europe at one time, from Ireland to the Balkans and as far east as Asia Minor.”

Mildred beamed, giving knowledge.

“I had no idea,” said Dan.

“Say, 200 B.C.E.,” she said. “The Greeks called them
Keltoi
. But then came the Romans and the Germans, and the Celtic speakers of Europe were mostly defeated. I mean, it didn't happen all at once. Over several centuries. The reason we think of Ireland is that Ireland evaded Romanization. So it was there that many of the stories were written.”

Dan drove out to the warehouse that night, pried open a window in back, and climbed in. He did not mind breaking laws now that he was not in charge of keeping them. The transgression amounted to nothing against making out with Donna behind Louise's back.

He shined a flashlight down the long and narrow space. Metal shapes glinted on tables. The air smelled of sulfur.

One table held steel swords and scabbards, some new, some in degrees of decomposition. They were simple—broad tapered blades, with crossguards and without. Dan picked one up, tossed it hand to hand. The grip had spiral ridges, making it easy to hold. Dan ran a finger down the blade, drawing a bead of blood that he wiped on his sleeve.

And so he went through the warehouse, examining helmets, tiaras, crowns, stone and bronze figurines of people and animals with shapes softened as if by fire, a horse with a human face, countless pins and rings and C-shaped neck pieces, oval shields with carvings and eroded edges.

Snooping in the dark, he felt the magic going on here. It was a common magic, as in a gun shop or camera store where people gather around things that have been made and become excited. And why? he wondered. What would account for that. Maybe an ingrained love of tools, from caveman days. Things are not what they seem.

The workbenches were laid out with rasps and saws and ball-peen hammers and sealed plastic containers of many sizes. He opened one and clapped it shut because of the smell. In a clawfoot bathtub, a sword lay submerged in dark greenish liquid. Dan kicked the tub with his boot and a tremor ran the length of the sword.

“What a strange job,” he said.

Having spoken, Dan felt the presence of someone watching or listening. This did not concern him. He would have the upper hand.

There was a door in a corner of the warehouse, and Dan opened it and stepped into a small room with windows. There was an erasable board on the wall with the optimistic title “Shipping and Receiving.”

In a desk he found a cash box and a revolver. He removed the bullets from the gun and put them in his pocket and left, taking nothing else from the warehouse.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

M
ICAH ENTERED
Deep Rock Academy in the fall—Eamon went there, and the school was obliged to admit his stepbrother. Deep Rock stands on a hill north of Los Angeles, in Sun Terrace, west of Shadowland, built in the style of a Spanish castle. Round towers anchor the corners, and it was a tower that would get Micah in trouble.

All the students at Deep Rock must do something to care for the school. Micah disinfected the drinking fountains, a humble task but one that allowed him to wander the hallways and the upper floors, where the seniors lounged at their lockers, more handsome and worldly than the teachers.

Micah carried a bucket of cleaner and a sponge on a stick. One day, trying the door to the northeast tower, he found it unlocked and went up the spiral staircase, running his free hand over the gritty bricks. There could be a drinking fountain up there. It was not impossible.

Micah came out on top of the school, where the California flag flew. The bear on the flag trudged along, head down and mouth open, following a red star. The view was panoramic—cars on the freeway, dusty horse farms, low houses with yards of sand and tufted grass. He felt far from home.

Then the door opened, and the headmaster came up. Many rumors went around about the large and well-dressed Mr. Lyons. He'd been a psychiatrist, an oilman, an admiral in the Navy, a double agent. He knew secrets about the board of directors that would keep him headmaster for life. Joan claimed that he'd once put Eamon in a coffin for writing something on his desk.

The headmaster put on sunglasses and lit a cigar. “Who told you to come up here?”

“No one.”

“Go to the edge. Look down.”

Micah leaned into a notch in the wall and saw the ground far below, scrub grass and white rocks disappearing in shadow.

“What would happen if you fell?”

“I would die.”

“And how would that look?”

“If I was dead?”

“How would it look for the school?”

“Oh. Pretty bad.”

Mr. Lyons puffed on the cigar and looked at it as all cigar smokers must for some reason. “People would say, ‘See there? They can't even keep students from falling off the school.
'
”

“I wasn't planning on falling.”

“No one plans to fall till they do. Do you know what this tower is for?”

“Looks?”

“It's for me to smoke. Unless you want a cigar I don't see any reason for you to be here.”

“Cigars make me sick.”

“That passes. What's your name?”

“Micah Darling.”

“You just got your first detention, Micah Darling. Are you the one with the goat?”

Micah nodded.

“That means nothing to me.”

“I'll leave now.”

“What's your sport?”

“I don't have one.”

“Volleyball is your sport. Sign up now.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you have detention for the next three days. In this school I am king. Don't prize yourself above others. Stay out of the towers.”

When Joan learned of Micah's detention, she called a family meeting. Micah tried to talk her out of it, but once the idea had occurred to her she became fond of it.

And so they all gathered one evening in the library, a dark room with a chandelier that was a replica of a famous one in some opera house. The armchairs were large and leather-bound, and the family took their seats like actors in a play.

“We all need to be aware,” said Joan. “It shouldn't be Joan deals with Micah and Rob deals with Eamon. What we face, we face together.”

“Micah went into the tower, right?” said Rob.

“There was no sign,” said Joan. “The door was not locked.”

“Still, it seems reasonable. You can't go everywhere.”

“I knew I shouldn't,” said Micah.

“I don't trust Mr. Lyons,” said Joan. “He seems to have it in for our family. I thought the same thing when he put Eamon in a coffin for writing Charlotte's name on his desk.”

Micah sighed. Now this image that meant so much to her would be revealed as imaginary. Perhaps it recalled to her a scene from a vampire movie.

“It wasn't a coffin, Joan,” said Eamon. “It was a closet.”

Rob picked a bit of lint from his sweater and brushed the cloth with his fingers. “Joan may exaggerate, but I didn't like that closet business either.”

“I do not exaggerate,” said Joan. “I distinctly remember a coffin.”

“Why would there be a coffin at the school?” said Rob.

Micah prayed the family talk would end. By his presence he drew Joan into strange variations on motherly behavior. She'd found herself a good situation and he didn't want to be the one that messed it up.

“It
felt
like a coffin,” Eamon said helpfully.

The phone rang. Joan picked it up, went to a corner, talked while idly spinning a globe. Then she came back smiling her beautiful smile.

“I'm going to be in a movie,” she said.

They celebrated with brandy, happy for Joan and happier still that the family meeting was done.

The Powder Horn
would actually be her second film. She had played a hand-wringing wife in
Shovel Boys,
about boyhood friends who team up later in life to rig a race at Santa Anita. “What do you even
know
about horse racing?” had been her big line.

Detention amounted to sitting in study hall and doing homework with other kids in detention. It was no big thing, except that much of the homework baffled Micah, which was another problem.

Charlotte Mann picked him up on the last night. She wore camo riding pants and a thermal shirt of quilted purple. She hugged him, her legs taut as bowstrings. California girls must hug twenty times a day, Micah thought, their lives teeming with affection.

“I told Joan I'd come get you,” she said. “I owe her a favor.”

“For what?”

“She helped me one time I was passed out in the park.”

They walked to the parking lot and got into her yellow pickup. She put it in reverse, peering up at the school.

“This place is like a prison,” she said.

Micah rolled down the window and rested his arm on the door. “They forced me to play volleyball.”

“Where did you go before?”

“Boris-Chesley Regional Middle School. We had an English teacher one time, he said, ‘Cauliflower is just garbage with a college education.
'
”

“What did he mean by that?”

“Cabbage with a college education.”

“You should take me there sometime.”

“They wouldn't believe you.”

“That's all right,” said Charlotte. “I don't believe myself sometimes. You want to go straight home?”

“Not especially.”

So they drove out to Topanga to see her filly, which they didn't get to see last time because they got high and looked at helicopters.

The horse was a Dutch warmblood named Pallas Athena. In her stall Charlotte showed Micah how scratching Pallas at the base of her mane made her lift her head and move her lips strangely, as if talking to herself.

Charlotte tacked the horse with saddle and bridle, easing the bit in with cupped hand. She put on a plastic helmet and mounted up.

Micah had ridden three times, got thrown once. He found horses hard to read. Their thoughts might go back to the beginning of horse time, or they might be afraid of a candy wrapper on the ground. He was wary of anything that big that bit.

Charlotte rode the horse at a walk to the ring. Micah opened the gate and let the shadow of the horse pass by and latched the gate and stood leaning on the fence with his arms over the rail. The sun was down. Lights shone around the ring.

Horse and rider walked and trotted for a while and then picked up a canter. Charlotte pushed Pallas forward with her hips. Mane and braids rose and fell in rhythm. Pallas's hooves drummed on sand and her breath went huff, huff, huff.

Charlotte began to work the horse in figure eights the length of the ring, taking jumps with planters of flowers or small trees on either side. She leaned long over Pallas's neck, the horse rising as if levitated by her hands. They seemed to calculate together the steps before a jump, and when they landed their heads turned as one toward the next gate.

Then two kids came down from the barns, calling Charlotte's name in singsong voices. She brought Pallas down to a walk and spoke to the boys from the saddle as she went along the railing.

The boys turned to look at Micah, and he glanced away at the tall and shaggy trees across the ring. They came over and introduced themselves as Doc and Dalton.

“Are you going to be a doctor?” Micah said.

Doc shook his head. He had a narrow face and luminous green eyes and was a little scary in appearance, like he had handguns at home.

“I used to wear scrubs,” he said. “Somebody said I looked like a doctor, so that's how it got started.”

“I thought you started it,” said Dalton.

“What do
you
know?”

“That you gave yourself a nickname, which is a sad and lonely thing to do. Don't you agree, Micah?”

Pallas Athena was trotting formally, neck arched, nose down, knees high. “I wouldn't be the one to say,” said Micah.

Dalton carried a red and white cooler, from which he took bottles of beer and passed them around. He had long hair, a red beret, a wide and placid smile.

“So why are you here?” he said. “Do you have designs on Charlotte?”

“I'm watching.”

“How hard it is to wait for one's heart's desire,” said Doc.

“Who said that?” said Dalton.

“I think it was Babar.”

Dalton collared Micah's head with his arm. “Here's the thing about Charlotte. You might even want to write it down. Everyone wants her, but no one can have her.”

“Even when she's drunk,” said Doc.

“That's when she's most like an angel.”

“A falling angel.”

“Just be quiet,” said Micah.

“Are you Irish?”

“No.”

“You sound it.”

When Charlotte had finished her ride she brought Pallas to the gate and the boys swung it open.

“We were talking about you,” said Dalton.

“Who cares,” she said.

“Trying to get your friend to open up.”

“He's like a clam in a clamshell,” said Doc.

“No one can talk when you're talking.”

“That is kind of true. Listen, we're not going to wait around for the tedious unshackling of the horse. And you're coming, now, right?”

“I don't know.”

“Come on,” said Doc. “We said you were.”

“There is anticipation,” said Dalton. “You too, Irish. It's a party.”

Charlotte walked the horse around the barn and into an alley between stalls. She dismounted, loosened the girth and ran the stirrups up, exchanged the bridle for a green halter.

“Don't mind them,” she said.

“I don't.”

“Why'd they call you ‘Irish'?”

“My voice, I guess.”

“They're just thoughtless boys,” said Charlotte. “One time we were at somebody's house, and a dog got into Dalton's backpack and ate some pills. So everyone's going, ‘Oh no, this is terrible, should we call the vet?' And Dalton said, ‘No, it's fine. They're
for
dogs.
'
”

From the horse farm Charlotte and Micah went to a party on the roof of a loft building in the Toy District. They rode up in an elevator and, holding hands, made their way down a sandalwood walk lined with path lights and waxy plants.

There were many people, a luminous blue swimming pool, and a bar. The skyscrapers of Los Angeles bent overhead in bands of light. Doc and Dalton dangled their legs from atop a brick shed with silver ducts climbing the walls. Bartenders in white shirts and bow ties poured drinks from silver pitchers.

That Micah should not be here, that he was too young, that he knew no one—all these things did not matter. With Charlotte by his side, the world opened as he'd always dreamed it might.

They got drinks and settled into a sunken space with cushioned benches. The drinks had salt crusted on the rims.

“What are these?” said Micah.

“Margaritas,” said Charlotte.

After two drinks Micah could admit to himself that he loved Charlotte. She was not beholden to him but seemed to find something that interested her, God knows what, for he considered himself unaccomplished and lacking in basic skills.

She drank fast, watching the party, the people gathering and drifting apart in the darkness. Facets of the glass magnified her upper lip. She got half a glass ahead of him and they lost track of who was leading, who chasing. At some point she went away and didn't come back for a long time.

Micah thought it would be a good time for a smoke. He didn't smoke, but many people were doing so, and it seemed worth trying.

“Excuse me, I wonder if I could have a cigarette,” he said to a woman in a long red shirt that look soft and touchable.

She gave him a cigarette and lent him her lighter. He had trouble with it, so she took it back and lit his cigarette.

“Nice party,” he said.

He had decided recently that everything he said sounded artificial, and he would not fight it. He was acting. The woman gave him a dubious smile while putting the lighter away. She wore green velvet shoes of elvish design.

“How old are you?” she said.

“I will be fifteen in November.”

“What the hell, we've got fifteen-year-olds here?” she said.

Micah nudged her with his shoulder. “In
November
I'll be fifteen. And how old are you?”