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“What're you going to do now?”

Myra shrugged.

“Tell Pam?”

She tried to laugh, but it came out as more of a snort. “I've got this letter I wrote to her about two weeks ago, and I've been carrying it around in my backpack ever since. I keep thinking I'll give it to her at just the right time, but the right time never seems to come up.”

Myra said some other things, but Mick's mind had fastened to an idea. When it was quiet again, he said, “Would it be okay if I tell you something I've never told anybody else?”

Myra released a quick, somber laugh. “About Nora?”

“How'd you know that?”

She made an unhappy smile. “Sometimes people with secrets are good at sniffing out others of their species.”

“Okay, then,” Mick said. He cleared his throat and when he started to speak, the story about Nora came out in a long gushing stream—the e-mails from Alexander Selkirk, Nora's sneaking around, the link with Cruso, the sand in Cruso's gas tank, all of it.

When he was done, Myra said, “So the e-mails are on that disk you've got zipped up in your jacket pocket?”

“What?”

“You're always fiddling with that zipper. So when you were out on the deck and your jacket was inside, I couldn't help myself. I took a peek.”

Mick was a little shocked and his face must've shown it.

“Oh, I know,” she said. “Invasion of privacy.” Myra made a small smile—her face still didn't look quite normal to Mick yet— and said, “You just have to remember that I'm on your side, pal.” Then, “So what do you mean to do with the e-mails?”

Mick shrugged.

Myra waited a second or two. “Okay, let's try a different tack. Why exactly did Nora's behavior make you so angry?”

A familiar sullenness began to gather in Mick, but, suddenly, almost to his own surprise, he heard himself say, “Because it's so wrong! Because she's lying to everybody! Because she's betraying my dad!”

Myra was quiet for a time. The moon glimpsed down between clouds, then was lost again. In a gentle voice Myra said, “Maybe you weren't mad so much because she'd betrayed your dad as because she'd betrayed you.”

Part of Mick wanted to dispute this, but it was a small part. The bigger part of him guessed it was more or less true. When he'd left the house tonight, for example, he'd noticed that something must be wrong with Nora because she was wearing grungy jogging gear around the house and her hair was unwashed, but what he'd really noticed was that under her grungy sweatshirt she wasn't wearing a bra. “So what should I do now?”

Myra smiled. “Spend more time with Lisa Doyle. I call it displacement theory. Let Lisa push Nora right out of your wee little mind.”

Mick nodded. This sounded possible. But then, “What about my dad?”

Myra shrugged. “Your dad and Nora are big kids. They'll work this out for themselves.”

The wind had stiffened and, overhead, the sky was now nothing but black clouds. A sudden gust skidded one of the canvas-backed chairs a few inches forward on the patio. Myra said, “Either we've got ghosts or there's a storm coming.”

Watching her get out of the tub and towel dry still affected him. After she slipped back into the dress, he said, “Well, nothing you told me here tonight made you any less yowza-worthy.”

“Happy to hear it,” she said, and went off to jot a thank-you note to Kelso while Mick got dressed. After they'd locked up and turned off the lights, Mick rolled his bicycle alongside her until they reached her Civic. From the driver's seat she gave him a long look. “Good birthday?”

Mick nodded. “Best yet,” he said, and he meant it.

A first fat raindrop splattered on the Civic's windshield, then another.

“Sure you don't want me to drive you?”

There was no room for his bike in the Civic. “Naw,” he said. “Besides, it's all downhill from here.” Which was literally true.

The figurative sense, however, was another matter.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Maurice Steps Out

As the first raindrops fell, Maurice Gritz wheeled his Honda into Mrs. Kinderman's garage, quickly fed the two marmalade cats, and went to the pantry closet where he kept the set of dark clothes he used for these occasions. It had been simpler keeping the stuff at home, but Janice was the snoopy type, and besides, she might've done him a favor. This was safer. Nobody was going to get a search warrant for Lillian Kinderman's cottage.

When he was into the dark clothes with the big interior pockets, he added the finishing touches—black vinyl gloves, Shaq mask, black ski cap—and took a look in the mirror. Okay, then. He wasn't sure who he was, but he had to admit it, he liked what he saw. He grinned behind his mask.

He flipped off the lights, and then it came to him.

Shaqman, that's who he was.

Shaqman on a night stroll through Lilliput.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

Sleepwalking

Janice didn't feel that great. She lay in the dark listening to the watery gush build in the little gully outside Maurice's bungalow, listening to the rain tapping on Maurice's tin roof. “Tintinnabulation” came to mind. A vocabulary word. The tinkling or jingling of bells. A word she'd gotten right, back when she cared about vocabulary words. That was only three weeks before, or maybe four, but it seemed like such a long time ago.

Janice lay on top of the bed fully dressed and rested her feet on a doubled pillow. Harriet slept curled nearby, but Janice couldn't make herself comfortable. She'd been fitfully dozing, and when the chimes of Maurice's mantel clock struck, she awakened, counting.

Ten, eleven, twelve.

He'd said he'd be back by eleven. Eleven-thirty at the latest. So where was he? She knew he'd had lots of girlfriends before— some Isabelle woman was always leaving messages for him, and she was pretty sure that little Latina sexpot from Lisa's crew was scheming after Maurice, too—but Maurice had told Janice he was the one-woman type, and she had wanted to believe him.

Harriet rose, stretched, jumped from the bed, and Janice soon heard the delicate crunching of kibbles. She switched on a light, went to the kitchen nook, and opened the refrigerator. Same old same old: nonfat cottage cheese, high-energy smoothies, Rolling Rock beer. And there in the back, as always, was the orange-juice carton that had held the Shaq mask. She didn't know whether it was still there or not. Janice hadn't touched the carton since. That was because, to her, the carton wasn't a carton. It was a peephole into a part of Maurice's life she never wanted to see.

Tonight, though, she kept staring at the carton, staring at it so long that it seemed to exert a pull and, almost as if hers were the hand of a sleepwalker, it began slowly to move toward the carton with outstretched fingers, pulled by the idea of just lifting it, testing its weight, learning whether the mask was there tonight or not, but then, abruptly, at its first touch, as if suddenly waking, she pulled back and closed the refrigerator tight.

In a cupboard, she found some gingersnaps, and ate seven, nibbling each one like a mouse.

Janice knew she ought to go home. She'd told her mother she was spending the night with Lisa, and how would she explain coming home in the middle of the night? Still, she knew she ought to go, but she also knew she wouldn't. She would wait until Maurice got back. Because she wanted to see him, and be with him.

Janice switched off the lights.

She lay back on the bed, closed her eyes, and fell asleep. When she would next awaken, it would be to the relentless shrieking of sirens.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

Illumination

Thunder awakened Mick in the middle of the night. The bedroom was dark. A wind blowing from the south made the window glass tremble. Outside, at a distance, a skittering flash of lightning. Mick counted to six before the thunder cracked—the lightning was just over a mile away. Foolish, who had jumped onto Mick's bed and coiled at his feet, now jumped down and slunk into the closet.

Another deep resonant roll of thunder. As it rumbled past, it was as if the whole house rolled slightly. Mick had gone to sleep thinking about Myra and now, awake, he was thinking of her again, of how happy she'd seemed during dinner, and then, in the steamy water, when she'd said what she'd said, how her face had stretched in that awful taffylike way before she'd begun to cry. And she was so nice. So how was that fair? That someone so nice should be so miserable? Isn't that where a good God would step in and do something?

A flash of lightning brightened the night for an instant, followed three, four, five seconds later by another crackling snap of thunder. It was getting closer. The rainbeat on the roof loudened. From the closet, Foolish made a tight, urgent-sounding whimper.

Mick got up, took his flashlight to the window, and pointed the light toward the gap in the chimney brick where the nest had been wedged. The nest was still there. The bird was still there. The small dark eyes of the phoebe peered out over the brim of her nest. She looked scared, but she still sat on her nest, keeping her five small white eggs warm and dry.

Mick switched off the beam and stared out through the watery glass. He yawned. He was ready to go back to sleep. But a few seconds later a broad bright flash of lightning illuminated the sky and Mick, looking down, was frozen in dumb wonder at what he saw.

There, standing in her bathrobe on the back lawn, was Nora.

She held an umbrella.

She was barefoot.

And then it was dark again.

Mick, stepping back a foot or two, kept his gaze fixed on the exact spot where Nora had been, but when the lightning next illuminated the yard, no one was there.

Mick listened for sounds of Nora coming into the house, maybe coming back upstairs, or maybe turning on the downstairs TV, but there was nothing but the dense thrum of rain and intermittent crashes of thunder. Mick took his flashlight and went downstairs. Nothing. He scanned the flashlight across the front yard, and then the back. Nothing.

The garage came to mind. Could she have driven away without his hearing it?

He ducked his head and dashed across the yard to the garage's side door. He inched it open and peered in. Her 320i was there. Mick stepped fully into the garage and ran the flashlight beam from dark corner to dark corner. Nothing. He heard something— the steady plink of water—and, scanning the beam of light, found not only a puddle on the floor from an overhead leak, but also something chilling. In the middle of the puddle, peering still with curious eyes, lay the head of Nora's little ceramic devil. The rest of the figurine lay in scattered pieces on the concrete floor. Mick flashed his light toward Nora's car. The dashboard was bare, and there was nobody in the front seat, but there, curled up on the backseat, was Nora.

Mick switched off the light. He wavered between going back in the house and going over to the car. He went over to the car. “You okay?” he said, but the windows were up. He opened the front door, which triggered the overhead lamp. He didn't ask if she was okay again. He could see she wasn't. Her eyes were blurry and her face was wet, either from the rain or from crying. She stared straight ahead.

Mick eased into the front seat and pulled the door closed so it was dark again. It was surprisingly quiet in the car—he could barely hear the rainbeat outside. For a few seconds he stared at the dark outlines of his stepmother. Then he said, “What happened to the little devil guy?”

She didn't answer and he said, “What happened to Beelzebub?”

A few seconds passed and in a dull voice she said, “I guess he broke.”

Mick stared at her through the darkness. “What's going on, Nora?”

She hesitated, and said, “Oh, it's just the thunderstorm.” Words that might've been reassuring if her voice weren't so small and broken.

“Didn't know you didn't like thunderstorms.”

Nora gave a snuffly laugh. “Me, either.” There was a silence, and a roll of thunder, muffled-seeming now, passed by. Quietly Nora said, “My father wasn't around when I was little, so it was just my mother bringing us up. She was so strong. . . . Nobody intimidated her—not the landlord, not her boss, not the nosy neighbors—nobody.”

She waited. “But you know what scared the pants off her? Thunderstorms. Whenever one hit, she'd grab blankets and rush my sister and me out to the garage and put us in this old Lincoln that was parked out there but didn't run, and that's where we slept.”

Mick said, “Doesn't sound too comfortable.”

“It's funny. We always loved sleeping in the Lincoln. We'd all say the Lord's Prayer together, which was kind of funny in itself, because my mother wasn't religious, and then we'd fall into the snuggest, deepest sleep.”

Another silence, then Mick said, “But we've had lots of thunderstorms and you've—”

“—never ridden them out in the garage?”

“Yeah.”

“I don't know, Mick.” A pause. “It's just that tonight I felt so . . . small.”

Mick waited. Then, quietly, “How come?”

Nora's voice was low and seemed to flow from regret. “I think you know how come.”

Mick didn't say anything.

In her low, broken voice Nora said one word: “Cruso.”

When Mick still didn't say anything, she said, “I think I knew you knew for a long time, but pretended you didn't.”

Mick blurted a question he'd been carrying around a long time without really knowing it. “Why did you marry my dad if you were just going to cheat on him?”

A few seconds passed before Nora spoke. “I married your father because he's the kindest, gentlest, handsomest man I've ever known. I married him because he made me feel good, and safe. I married him because I loved him, Mick.” A pause and her small voice became smaller. “I still do.”

Mick sat silent.

He looked at the empty dashboard where the little hand-me-down devil had been and thought, Cruso gave it to her.

She said, “It's over, you know. Been over. Was nearly over when you told your dad about him and that Myra girl. He'd used that line on me, by the way.
Strangely vivifying.
” Nora shook her head as if in disbelief. “The same line he was using on teenaged girls is the one that worked on me.” She turned toward Mick in the darkness and her voice was low and regretful. “ ‘The heart is the tyrant who spares no one.' ”

Mick said, “But I thought adults knew how to . . . you know, resist that kind of stuff. I thought that was what adults are supposed to do.”

A few seconds passed and she said, “Adults are like everybody else, Mick. Usually they do what they're supposed to do. Sometimes they don't.”

Another silence.

She said, “So how'd you find out?”

“The e-mails. You saved some of them to a regular file and then you threw the file out. Then you didn't properly empty your trash.”

Nora made a small, unhappy laugh. “ ‘She didn't properly empty her trash.' When they write my book, that'll be the epigraph.”

“But why'd you save them in the first place?”

Another stony laugh. “I wanted to reread them, I'm embarrassed to say, and it seemed safer to take them off e-mail. But then I wanted to get rid of them, so I put them in the trash and thought that was that. I didn't know I had to empty it, too.” A silence stretched out, and she said, “You haven't mentioned the e-mails to your father.”

It was more a statement than a question, but Mick said, “No.”

“Any plans to?”

Mick felt for the interior pocket of his jacket. He considered unzipping it and handing Nora the green disk, but he didn't. “I don't know,” he said.

“But you're still angry.”

“I guess so, yeah.”

After a little while Nora said, “I would be, too. If it was my dad.”

Mick thought about the conversation he'd had with Myra. “It was that, all right,” he said. He paused, and then he said, “But it might've also been more than that.”

In a gentle voice Nora said, “You'll outgrow those particular feelings.”

Another roll of thunder, but from here, in the BMW, it seemed far away, as if it were somebody else's storm. Quietly Nora said, “You know, Mick, it's true that lots of people get stuck in bad patterns, but it's also true that lots of good people outgrow the bad things they've done.”

Mick thought about that for a while. He thought it might be true. Anyhow, he wished it was. Finally he said, “I guess I'll go back to bed now.” He peered in her direction through the darkness. “You going to stay here?”

“For a little while.”

Mick reached for the door handle, but stopped before he triggered the overhead light. He said, “You know, I kept trying to get into your e-mails to see what more was going on. I'm not proud of it, but that's what I did. But I could never figure out the password.”

He expected her to say he shouldn't've done that, but she didn't. She said, “Those e-mails stopped a long time ago, Mick. But if you want to check it out for yourself, you're more than welcome.”

Mick waited.

“ ‘Foolish,' ” Nora said. “The password is ‘foolish.' ”

The rain had slackened when Mick stepped out of the garage, and from somewhere far away he heard the faint sounds of sirens.