“Oh,” I said, and wanted to say more but couldn’t speak.

Wendy’s mother, Mary, is six years older than I am; when I was thirteen, my parents paid her to give me piano lessons, and I had a devastating crush on her. At that time, I was functioning under the delusion that I would one day play rock-’n’-roll piano as well as Jerry Lee Lewis, be a keyboard-banging maniac who could make those ivories smoke. Eventually my parents and Mary concluded—and persuaded me—that the likelihood of my becoming a competent pianist was immeasurably less than the likelihood of me levitating and flying like a bird.

“Wendy’s seven.” Bobby said. “Mary was taking her to school. Backed the car out of the driveway. Then realized she’d forgotten something in the house, went in to get it. When she came back two minutes later, the car was gone. With Wendy.”

“No one saw anything?”

Bobby chugged the Mountain Dew: enough sugar to induce in him a diabetic coma, enough caffeine to keep a long-haul trucker awake through a five-hundred-mile run. He was legally wiring himself for the ordeal ahead.

“No one saw or heard anything,” he confirmed. “Neighborhood of the blind and deaf. Sometimes I think there’s something going around more contagious than your mom’s bug. We’ve got an epidemic of the shut-up-hunker-down-see-hear-smell-speak-no-evil influenza. Anyway, the cops found Mary’s car abandoned in the service lane behind the Nine Palms Plaza.”

Nine Palms was a shopping center that lost all the tenants when Fort Wyvern closed and took with it the billion dollars a year that it had pumped into the county economy. These days the shop windows at Nine Palms are boarded over, weeds bristle from cracks in the blacktop parking lot, and six of the namesake palms are withered, brown, and so dead that they have been abandoned by tree rats.

The chamber of commerce likes to call Moonlight Bay the Jewel of the Central Coast. The town remains charming, graced with fine architecture and lovely tree-lined streets, but the economic scars of Wyvern’s closure are visible everywhere. The jewel is not as bright as it once was.

“They searched all the empty shops in Nine Palms,” Bobby said, “afraid they’d find Wendy’s body, but she wasn’t there.”

“She’s alive,” I said.

Bobby looked at me pityingly.

“They’re all alive,” I insisted. “They have to be.”

I wasn’t speaking from reason now. I was speaking from my belief in miracles.

“Another crow,” Bobby said. “Mary called it a blackbird. It was left on the car seat. In the drawing, the bird is diving for prey.”

“Message?”

“‘George Dulcinea will be my servant in Hell.’”

Mary’s husband was Frank Dulcinea. “Who the hell is George?”

“Frank’s grandfather. He’s dead now. Used to be a judge in the county court system.”

“Dead how long?”

“Fifteen years.”

I was baffled and frustrated. “If this abb is kidnapping for vengeance, what’s the point of nabbing Wendy to get even with a man who’s been dead fifteen years? Wendy’s great-grandfather was gone long before she was even born. He never knew her. How could you get satisfaction from taking vengeance on a dead man?”

“Maybe it makes perfect sense if you’re an abb,” Bobby said, “with a screwed-up brain.”

“I guess.”

“Or maybe this whole crow thing is just cover, to make everyone think these kids were snatched by your standard-issue pervert, when maybe they’re really being caged in a lab somewhere.”

“Maybe, maybe, you’re full of too damn many maybes,” I said.

He shrugged. “Don’t look to me for wisdom. I’m just a wave-thrashing boardhead. This killer you mentioned. The guy in the news. He leave crows like this?”

“Not that I’ve read.”

“Serial killers, don’t they sometimes leave things like this?”

“Yeah. They’re called signatures. Like a writer’s byline. Taking credit for the work.”

I checked my wristwatch. Sunset would arrive in about five hours. We would be ready to go back to Wyvern by then. And even if we were not ready, we would go.

TWO

NEVERLAND

18

With a second bottle of Mountain Dew in hand, Bobby sat on the cellist’s stool, but he didn’t pick up the bow.

In addition to all the instruments and the composition table, the former dining room contained a music system with a CD player and an antiquated audiotape deck. In fact, there were two decks, which allowed Sasha to duplicate tapes of her own recordings. I powered up the equipment, which added as much feeble illumination to the room as the dreary daylight that seeped in at the edges of the blinds.

Sometimes, after composing a tune, Sasha is convinced that she has unwittingly plagiarized another songwriter. To satisfy herself that her work is original, she spends hours listening to cuts from which she suspects she has borrowed, until finally she’s willing to believe that her creation has, after all, sprung solely from her own talent.

Her music is the only thing about which Sasha exhibits more than a healthy measure of self-doubt. Her cooking, her literary opinions, her lovemaking, and all the other things she does so wonderfully are marked by a wholesome confidence and by no more than a useful amount of second-guessing. In her relationship to her music, however, she is sometimes a lost child; when she’s stricken by this vulnerability, I want more than ever to put my arm around her and to comfort her—though this is when she’s most likely to reject comforting and to rap me across the knuckles with her flute, her scaling ruler, or another handy music-room weapon.

I suppose every relationship can be enriched by a small measure of neurotic behavior. I certainly contribute a half cup of my own to our recipe.

Now I slipped the tape into the player. It was the cassette I’d found in the envelope beside Leland Delacroix’s reeking corpse in the bungalow kitchen in Dead Town.

I turned the chair away from the composition table and, sitting down, used the remote control to switch on the cassette player.

For half a minute, we heard only the hiss of unrecorded magnetic tape passing over the playback head. A soft click and a new hollow quality to the hiss marked the beginning of the recording, which at first consisted only of someone—I assumed it was Delacroix—taking deep, rhythmic breaths, as if engaged in some form of meditation or aromatherapy.

Bobby said, “I was hoping for revelation, not respiration.”

The sound was utterly mundane, with not the least inflection of fear or menace, or any other emotion. Yet the fine hairs stirred on the nape of my neck, as though these exhalations were actually coming from someone standing close behind me.

“He’s trying to get a grip on himself,” I said. “Deep, even breaths to get a grip on himself.”

A moment later, my interpretation proved true when the breathing suddenly grew ragged, then desperate. Delacroix broke down and began to weep, tried to get a grip on himself, but choked on his pain, and let loose with great trembling sobs punctuated by wordless cries of despair.

Although I’d never known this man, listening to him in such violent throes of misery was disturbing. Fortunately, it didn’t last long, because he switched off the recorder.

With another soft click, the recording began again, and though Delacroix’s self-control was tenuous, he managed to speak. His voice was so thick with emotion that sometimes his speech slurred, and when he seemed in danger of breaking down completely, he paused either to take deep breaths or to drink something, presumably whiskey.

“This is a warning. A testament. My testament. A warning to the world. I don’t know where to begin. Begin with the worst. They’re dead, and I killed them. But it was the only way to save them. The only way to save them. You have to understand…I killed them because I loved them. God help me. I couldn’t let them suffer, be used. Be used. God, I couldn’t let them be used that way. There was nothing else I could do….”

I remembered the snapshots arranged beside Delacroix’s corpse. The elfin, gap-toothed little girl. The boy in the blue suit and red bow tie. The pretty blonde with the appealing smile. I suspected that these were the people who, to be saved, were killed.

“We all developed these symptoms, just this afternoon, Sunday afternoon, and we were going to go to the doctor tomorrow, but we didn’t make it that far. Mild fever. Chills. And every once in a while this…fluttering…this odd fluttering in the chest…or sometimes the stomach, in the abdomen, but then the next time in the neck, along the spine…this fluttering like maybe a twitching nerve or maybe heart palpitations or…no, nothing like that. God, no, nothing I can explain…not severe…subtle…a subtle fluttering but so…disturbing…nausea…couldn’t eat much….”

Delacroix paused again. Got control of his breathing. Took a swallow of whatever he was drinking.

“Truth. Got to tell the truth. Wouldn’t have gone to the doctor tomorrow. Would’ve had to call Project Control. Let them know it isn’t over. Even more than two years later, it isn’t over. I knew. I knew somehow it wasn’t over. All of us feeling the same way, and not like anything we’d felt before. Jesus, I knew. I was too scared to face it, but I knew. I didn’t know what, but I knew something, knew it was Wyvern coming back to me somehow, some way, Jesus, Wyvern coming back to get me after all this time. Maureen was putting Lizzie to bed, tucking her in bed…and suddenly Lizzie started…she was…she started screaming….”

Delacroix swallowed more of his drink. He banged the glass down as though it was empty.

“I was in the kitchen, and I heard my Lizzie…my little Lizzie so scared, so…screaming. I ran…ran in there, into the bedroom. And she was…she…convulsions…thrashing…thrashing and kicking…flailing with her little fists. Maureen couldn’t control her. I thought…convulsions…afraid she was biting her tongue. I held her…held her down. While I got her mouth open, Maureen folded a sock…going to use it…a pad to keep Lizzie from biting herself. But there was something…something in her mouth…not her tongue, something in her throat…this thing coming up her throat, something alive in her throat. And…and then…then she had her eyes tight shut…but then…but she opened them…and her left eye was bright red…bloodshot…and something was alive in her eye, too, some damn wriggling thing in her eye….”

Sobbing, Delacroix switched off the recorder. God knows how long the poor man required to get control of himself. Of course, there was no lengthy blank section of tape, just another soft click as Delacroix hit the record button and continued:

“I run to our bedroom, to get…get my revolver…and coming back, passing Freddie’s room, I see him…he’s standing by his bed. Freddie…eyes wide…afraid. So I tell him…tell him, get in bed and wait for me. In Lizzie’s room…Maureen has her back against the wall, hands pressed to her temples. Lizzie…she’s still…oh, she’s thrashing…her face…her face all swollen…twisted…the whole bone structure…not even Lizzie anymore…. There’s no hope now. This was that damn place, the other side, coming through, like Lizzie was a doorway. Coming through. Oh, Jesus, I hate myself. I hate myself. I was part of it, I opened the door, opened the door between here and that place, helped make it possible. I opened the door. And now here is Lizzie…so I have to…so I…I shot…shot her…shot her twice. And she’s dead, and so still on the bed, so small and still…but I don’t know if something is alive in her, alive in her though she isn’t anymore. And Maureen, she has…she has both hands to her head…and she says, ‘The fluttering,’ and I know she means it’s inside her head now, because I feel it, too, a fluttering along my spine…fluttering in sympathy with…with whatever was in Lizzie, is in Lizzie. And Maureen says…the most amazing…she says the most amazing thing…she says, ‘I love you,’ because she knows what’s happening, I’ve told her about the other side, the mission, and now she knows somehow I’ve been infected all along, everything dormant for more than two years, but I’m infected, and now them, too, I’ve ruined us all, damned us all, and she knows. She knows what I…what I’ve done to them…and now what I have to do…so she says, ‘I love you,’ which is giving me permission, and I tell her I love her, too, so much, love her so much, and I’m sorry, and she’s crying, and then I shoot her once…once, quick, my sweet Maureen, don’t let her suffer. Then I…oh, I go…I go back down the hall…I go to Freddie’s room. He’s on his back in bed, sweating, hair soaked with sweat, and holding his belly with both hands. I know he feels the fluttering…fluttering in his tummy…because I feel it now in my chest and in my left biceps, like in a vein, and of all places in my testicles, and now along my spine again. I tell him I love him, and I tell him to close his eyes…close his…close his eyes…so I can make him feel better…and then I don’t think I can do it, but I do it. My son. My boy. Brave boy. I make him feel better, and when I fire the shot, all the fluttering in me stops, just stops completely. But I know it’s not over. I’m not alone…not alone in my body. I feel…passengers…something…a heaviness in me…a presence. Quiet. It’s quiet but not for long. Not for long. I’ve reloaded the revolver.”

Delacroix switched off the recorder, pausing to get a grip on his emotions.

With the remote control, I stopped the tape. The late Leland Delacroix wasn’t the only one who needed to compose himself.

Without comment, Bobby got up from the cellist’s stool and went into the kitchen.

After a moment, I followed him.

He was emptying his unfinished bottle of Mountain Dew into the sink, flushing it away with cold water.

“Don’t turn it off,” I said.

While Bobby threw the empty soda bottle in the trash can and opened the refrigerator, I went to the sink. I cupped my hands under the faucet, and for at least a minute, I splashed cold water on my face.

After I dried my face on a couple of paper towels, Bobby handed a bottle of beer to me. He had one, too.

I wanted to have a clear head when we returned to Wyvern. But after what I’d heard on the tape, and considering what else remained to be heard, I could probably have downed a six-pack without effect.