When a half-century old skeleton tumbles out of the wall in the midst of the renovation of Cloak and Dagger Bookstore renovation, Adrien turns to hot and handsome ex-lover Jake Riordan — now out-of-the closet and working as a private detective. Jake is only too happy to have reason to stay in close contact with Adrien, but there are more surprises in Adrien’s past than either one of them expects — and one of them may prove hazardous to Jake’s own heart.

*********************************

Chapter One

It began, as a lot of things do, in bed.

Or to be precise, on the living-room sofa where I was uncomfortably dozing.

Somewhere in the distance of a very weird dream about me and a certain ex-LAPD police lieutenant came a faint, persistent scratching. The scratching worked itself into my dream, and I deduced with the vague logic of the unconscious that the cat was sharpening his claws on the antique half-moon table in the hall. Again.

Except…that boneless ball of heat on my abdomen was the cat. And he was sound asleep…

I opened my eyes. It was dark, and it took me a second or two to place myself. Moonlight outlined the pirate bookends on the bookshelf. From where I lay, I could barely make out the motion of the draperies in the warm July breeze in the front room of the flat above Cloak and Dagger Books.

I was home.

There had been a time when I’d thought I would never see home again. But here I was. I had a furry heating pad on my belly, a crick in my neck, and — apparently — a midnight visitor.

My first thought was that Lisa had called Guy, my ex, to look in on me. That furtive scraping wasn’t the sound of a key; it was more like someone trying to…well, pick the lock.

I rolled off the sofa, dislodging the sleeping cat, and staggered to my feet, fighting the dizziness that had dogged me since my heart surgery three weeks earlier. I’d been staying at my mother’s home in the Chatsworth Hills, but I’d checked myself out of the lunatic asylum that afternoon.

If Guy had dropped by, he’d have turned on the light in the shop below. There was no band of light beneath the door. No, what there was, was the occasional flash of illumination as though someone was trying to balance a flashlight.

I wasn’t dreaming. Someone was trying to break in.

I felt my way across the darkened room to the entrance hall. My heart was already beating way too hard and too fast, and I felt a spark of anxiety — the anxiety that was getting to be familiar since my surgery. Was my healing heart up to this kind of strain? Even as I was calculating whether I could get to the Webley in the bedroom closet and load it before the intruder got the door open or whether my best bet was to lock myself in the bedroom and phone the cops, the decision was made for me.

The lock mechanism turned over, the door handle rotated, and the door silently inched out of the frame.

I reacted instinctively, grabbing the rush-bottomed chair in the hall and throwing it with all my strength. “Get the fuck out of here,” I yelled over the racket of the chair clattering into the door and hitting the floor.

And — surprisingly — the intruder did get the fuck out.

Not a dream. Not a misreading of the situation. Someone had tried to break in to my living quarters.

I heard the heavy thud of footsteps pounding down the staircase back to the shop, heard something crash below, heard another crash, and, as I tottered to the wall light switch, the slam of a distant door.

What door? Not the side entrance of the shop below, because I knew that particular bang very well, and certainly not the front door behind the security gate. No, it had to have been from the adjacent structure. The bookstore took up one half of a subdivided building that had originally, back in the thirties, housed a small hotel. The other half of the building had gone through a variety of commercial incarnations, none of which had survived more than a year or so, until I’d finally been in a position to buy it myself the previous spring. It was currently in the expensive and noisy process of being renovated, the two halves divided by a wall of thick plastic.

Not thick enough, clearly.

The contractor had assured me the perimeter doors were guarded by “construction locks,” and that it was as safe as it had ever been. Obviously he wasn’t familiar with my history, let alone the history of the building.

I leaned back against the wall, trying to catch my breath and listening. Somewhere down the street I heard an engine roaring into life. Not necessarily my intruder’s getaway car fleeing the scene. This was a nonresidential part of Pasadena, and at night it was very quiet and surprisingly isolated.

There was a time when I’d have intrepidly, Mr. Boy Detective, gone downstairs to see what the damage was. That that was four murder investigations, one shooting, and one heart surgery ago. Instead I got the gun from the bedroom closet, loaded it, returned to the front room, where the windows offered a better vantage point, and picked up the phone. The streetlamps cast leopard spots on the empty sidewalk, accentuated the deep shadows between the old buildings. Nothing moved. I recalled a line by Raymond Chandler: “The streets were dark with something more than night.”

Reaction hit me, and I slid down the wall and dialed 911.

I was having trouble catching my breath as I waited — and waited — for the 911 operator, and I hoped to hell I wasn’t having a heart attack. My heart had been damaged by rheumatic fever when I was sixteen. A recent bout of pneumonia had worsened my condition, and I’d been in line for surgery even before getting shot three weeks earlier. Everything was under control now, and according to my cardiologist, I was making terrific progress. The ironic thing about the surgery and the news that I was evidently going to make old bones after all was that I felt mortal in a way that I hadn’t for the last fifteen years.

Tomkins pussyfooted up to delicately head-butt me.

“Hi,” I said.

He blinked his wide, almond-shaped, green-gold eyes at me and meowed. He had a surprisingly quiet meow. Not as annoying as most cats. Not that I was an expert — nor did I plan on becoming one. I was only loaning a fellow bachelor my pad. The cat — kitten, really — was also convalescing. He’d been mauled by a dog three weeks ago. His bounce back was better than mine.

I stroked him absently as he wriggled around and tried to bite my fingers. I guessed there was truth to the wisdom about petting a cat to lower your blood pressure, because I could feel my heart rate slowing, calming — which was pretty good, considering how pissed off I was getting at being kept on hold in the middle of an emergency.

Granted, it wasn’t much of an emergency at this point. My intruder was surely long gone.

I chewed my lip, listened once more to the message advising me to stay on the line and help would soon be with me. Assuming I’d still be alive to take that call.

I hung up and dialed another number. A number I had memorized long ago. A number that seemingly would require acid wash to remove from the memory cells of my brain.

As the phone rang on the other end, I glanced across at the clock on the bookshelf. Three oh three in the morning. Well, here was a test of true friendship.

“Riordan,” Jake managed in a voice like raked gravel.

“Uh…hey.”

“Hey.” I could feel him making the effort to push through the fog of sleep. He rasped, “How are you?”

Pretty civil given the fact that I hadn’t spoken to him for nearly two weeks and was choosing three in the morning to reopen the lines of communication.

I found myself instinctively straining to hear the silence behind him; was someone there with him? I couldn’t hear over the rustle of bed linens.

“I’m okay. Something happened just now. I think someone tried to break in.”

“You think?” And he was completely alert. I could hear the covers tossed back, the squeak of bedsprings.

“Someone did try to break in. He took off, but —”

“You’re back at the bookstore?”

“Yeah. I got home late this afternoon.”

“You’re there alone?”

Thank God he didn’t say it like everyone else had. Alone? As though it was out of the question. As though I was far too ill and helpless to be left to my own devices. Jake simply looked at it from a security perspective.

“Yeah.”

“Did the security alarm go off?”

“No.”

“Did you call it in?”

“I called nine-one-one. They put me on hold.”

“At three o’clock in the morning?” He was definitely on his feet and moving, dressing, it sounded like, and I felt a wave of guilty relief. Regardless of how complicated our relationship was — and it was pretty complicated — there was no one I knew who was better at dealing with this kind of thing. Whatever this kind of thing was.

Which I guessed said more than I realized right there.

Jake’s voice was crisp. “Hang up and call nine-one-one again. Stay on the line with them. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

I said gruffly, “Thanks, Jake.”

Just like that. I had called, and he was coming to the rescue. Unexpectedly, a wave of emotion — reaction — hit me. One of the weird aftereffects of my surgery. I struggled with it as he said, “I’m on my way,” and disconnected.

§ § § §

I went down to meet him, taking the stairs slowly, taking my time. From above, I had a bird’s-eye view of the book floor. The register looked undisturbed. I could see where the bargain-book table had been toppled. Otherwise everything looked pretty much as normal: same comfortable leather club chairs, same wooden fake fireplace, same tall matching walnut bookshelves — strictly mystery and crime novels — same secretive smiles on the pale faces of the Kabuki masks on the back wall.

I unlocked the door, pushed open the security gate, which he’d knelt to examine. “You didn’t have to come down. I’d have gone around to the s —” Jake broke off. He rose and said oddly, “Déjà vu.”

I didn’t get it for a second, and then I did. Echoes of the first time we’d met; although met was kind of a polite word for turning up as a suspect in someone’s murder investigation.

Uncombed, unshaven, I was even dressed the same: jeans and bare feet. I’d thrown a leather jacket on partly because, despite the warmth of a July night, I felt chilled, and partly because I didn’t want to treat him to the vision of the seam down the middle of my chest from open heart surgery. Not that Jake hadn’t seen it when he visited me in the hospital, but it looked different out of context. The bullet hole in my shoulder was ugly enough; the incision from the base of my collarbone down through my breastbone was shocking. I found it shocking, anyway.

I said awkwardly, “Thanks again for coming.”

He nodded.

We stared at each other. These last weeks couldn’t have been easy on Jake, and not because I’d asked him to give me a little time, a little space before we tried to figure out where we stood. He’d resigned from LAPD, come out to his family, and asked his wife for a divorce. But he looked unchanged. Reassuringly unchanged. I think I’d feared… Well, I’m not sure. That he’d be harrowed by regret. For his entire adult life he’d fought to defend that closet he inhabited. Been willing to sacrifice almost everything to protect it. I couldn’t help thinking he’d take to being out like a fish to desert sand.

He looked okay. No, be honest. He looked a lot better than okay. He looked…fine. Fine, as in get the Chiffons over here to sing a chorus. Big, blond, ruggedly handsome in a trial-by-fire way. He was very lean, all hard muscle and powerful bone. Maybe there was more silver at his temples, but there was a calm in his tawny eyes that I’d never seen before.

Under that light, steady gaze I felt unnervingly self-conscious. It was weird to think that for the first time in all the time I’d known him there was nothing to keep us from being together except the question of whether we both really wanted it.

He asked matter-of-factly, “Why didn’t the alarm go off?”

“It wasn’t set.”

A quick drawing of his dark brows. He opened his mouth. I beat him to it. “We haven’t been setting it while the construction has been going on next door.”

“Tell me you’re kidding.”

He already knew I wasn’t. “The city threatened to fine me because we had too many false alarms. The construction crew usually arrives before we open the shop, and they kept triggering it. So I thought…until the construction was completed…”

His silence said it all — good thing, because I was pretty sure if Jake got started, we’d be there all night.

“I think he must have come in from the side.” I turned to lead the way.

He followed me across the front of the tall aisles. I pointed out where an endcap had been knocked over. “Only the emergency lights were on, and he crashed into that.” I nodded to the fallen bargain table, the landslide of spilled books. “And there.”

We reached the clear plastic wall dividing Cloak and Dagger Books from the gutted other half of the building. Staring from one side to the other was like peering through murky water. I could barely make out the ladders and scaffolds like the ribs of a mythological beast. I directed Jake’s attention to the long five-foot slit through the plastic near the wall.

“Good call.” He sounded grim.

I’d have happily been wrong. “The contractor told me that that side of the building would be secured with special locks. Construction locks.”

He was already shaking his head. “Look at this.” He stooped, pushing through the slit in the plastic, and I followed him into the darkened other side of the building. It smelled chilly and weird on that side. A mixture of fresh plaster, new wood, and dust. We picked our way through the hurdles of drop cloths and wooden horses and cement mixers to the door on the far wall. It swung open at his touch.

“Great,” I said bitterly.

“Yep.” He showed me the core in the center of the exterior handle. I discerned that it was painted, though I couldn’t make out a color. “See that?”

I nodded.

“It’s a construction core. That’s a temporary lock used by contractors on construction sites. They’re all combinated the same, or mostly the same, which means that if someone gets hold of a key, they’ve got a key to pretty much every construction core in the city.”

“Better and better.”

He shut the door and relocked it. “As security goes, this is one step above leaving the door standing wide open.”

I swallowed. Nodded.

“Whoever broke in may have been watching the place and knew no one’s been here at night.”

I said, “It doesn’t look like they touched the register.”

“It might have been kids prowling around.” Jake didn’t sound convinced, and I knew why.

“Trying to break in to my flat was —”

“Pretty aggressive,” he agreed. “Again, I think that probably gets back to the mistaken belief that no one was home. No one has been staying here at night for three weeks, right? So it was a reasonable assumption.”

I absorbed that. “This might not have been the first time he was prowling around in here.”

“True.”

“I don’t know that Natalie would notice the slice in the plastic wall. Hell, if Warren were hanging around, I don’t know if she’d notice the Tasmanian Devil bursting through.”

Sort of unfair to Natalie; Jake snorted, grimly amused.

All at once I was exhausted. Mentally and physically and emotionally drained dry. I didn’t seem to have much in the way of physical resources these days, and this break-in felt like way more than I could begin to handle.

Jake opened his mouth but stopped. Through the dirty glass of the bay window, we watched a squad car pull up, lights flashing, though there was no siren.

Better late than never, I guess.

After a second or two, Jake looked at me. “You okay? You’re shaking.”

“Adrenaline.”

“And heart surgery.” He glanced back at the black-and-white. Drew a deep breath. “Why don’t you head upstairs? I’ll take care of this.”

There it was again. That weird new emotionalism. The smallest things seemed to choke me up. Like this. Jake offering to talk to the cops for me.

Except this wasn’t a small thing. Jake, who had hid his sexuality from his brother officers for nearly twenty years, who had been unwilling for people to even know we were friends, who had very nearly succumbed to blackmail and more to keep that secret, was offering to stand here in my place and talk to these cops — and let them think whatever they chose to about us and our relationship.

I’m not sure what was stranger: the fact that he was making the offer or that I was ready to start crying over it.

“I can handle it.”

He met my gaze. “I know you can. I’d like to do this for you.”

Hell. He did it again. It had to be that I was overtired and still shaken by the break-in. I worked to keep my face and voice from showing anything I was feeling, managing a brusque nod.

The cops, a man and a woman in uniform, were getting out of their car. I turned and started back through ladders and wooden horses and scaffolds.

§ § § §

I was sitting on the sofa sleeping with the cat on my lap when Jake let himself into the flat.

I must have been snoring, because the snick of the door shutting seemed to come like a clap of thunder in the wake of a windstorm. The cat sprang from my lap. I straighted, closed my mouth, wiped my eyes, and when I blearily opened them, Jake stood over me, looking unfairly alert for four in the morning.

“Was that a cat I saw running into your bedroom?”

I cleared my throat. “Was it?”

“It looked like it.” He sat down on the sofa next to me — all that size and heat and energy — and every muscle in my body immediately clenched tight in nervous reaction. I didn’t feel ready for…whatever this was liable to be.

I said lightly, “Maybe the building is haunted.”

“Could be.” He seemed to study my face with unusual attention. “Your burglary complaint is filed. Tomorrow, first thing, you need to tell that contractor to get real locks on those doors. In fact, I’d advise you to change all the locks on both sides of the building.”

I nodded wearily. “I’ve been trying to think what he was after.”

“The usual things.”

“Then why not break in to the cash register?”

“An empty cash register? Why?”

Good point. No point robbing the till after the day’s bank drop had been made. I must be more tired than I thought. Maybe Jake had the same idea, because he said, “I thought you’d be in bed by now.”

“I’m on my way. But I wanted to thank you…”

He said gravely, “Don’t mention it. I’m glad you called me. I’ve been wondering how you’re doing.”

My gaze fell. “I’m all right.” There was so much to say, and yet I couldn’t seem to think of anything. “I’m getting there. The worst part is being tired all the time.”

“Yeah.” I could feel him watching me — seeing right through me.

“Jake…”

When I didn’t continue, he said, “I know. I know it’s a lot to ask. Probably too much, although I won’t pretend I’m not hoping.”

Forgiveness. That’s what he was talking about. Forgiveness for any number of things, I guessed. I was talking about something completely different.

I shook my head. “It isn’t — I don’t know how to explain this. It’s not you, though. It’s me.”

He waited with that new calm, that new certainty in his eyes. He was expecting me to drop the ax on him. I could see that. He had been expecting it since the last time we spoke in the hospital and I’d asked him to give me time. That’s what he had expected when he answered my cry for help tonight — what he still expected — but he had come anyway.

Was that love or guilt or civic responsibility? He was the best friend I’d ever had — and the worst.

I said, “This isn’t going to make sense to you, because it doesn’t make sense to me. I know how lucky I am. I do. I know I’m getting a second chance, and even though I feel like utter shit, I know I’m getting well and I’m going to be okay. Better than okay. That’s what my doctors keep telling me, and I know that I should be really happy and really relieved. But…I-I can’t seem to feel anything right now.”

Nothing from Jake. Not that I blamed him. What was he supposed to make of that speech?

I concluded lamely, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

“You feel what you feel. You’re allowed.”

It was getting harder to go on. I felt I had to be honest with him. “I was happy enough with Guy, but I don’t want Guy. I don’t want…anyone. Right now.”

There was another pause after he heard me out. He said, “Okay.”

It was that easy. I wasn’t sure if what I felt was relief or disappointment.

I heard myself say, awkwardly, “I felt like I should —”

“Got it.” Was there an edge to his tone? He still looked calm. Actually, he looked concerned. He said, “Why don’t you go to bed, Adrien? I’ve seen snowmen with more color in their faces. You need sleep. So do I. In fact, I’m going to spend what’s left of the night on your couch.”

I said, despite my instant relief, “You don’t have to do that.”

“I know, Greta. You vant to be alone. But unless your need for space prohibits a friend crashing on the sofa, that’s what I’m doing.”

I didn’t have the energy to argue with him — or myself. I nodded, pushed off the sofa, and headed for the bedroom. “There are blankets in the linen cupboard.”

“I remember.”

A thought occurred to me. I paused in the doorway, turning back to him.

“Jake?”

He was in the process of tugging off a boot. He glanced up. “Yeah?”

“Downstairs. With the cops. Was it okay?”

It seemed to take him a second to understand my concern. He smiled — the first real smile I’d seen from him in a very long time.

“Yes,” he said. “It was okay.”

The House of the Dead: a mortuary whose directors are drop dead gorgeous and terminally horny-and one of them up to mischief. Stanley and Tom try to separate the naturally dead from the murdered dead and find themselves awash with coffins-until they come to the one Stanley’s name on it.   Deadly Slumber indeed.

***************************

Chapter ONE

The House of the Dead.

He hadn’t known, when he made the appointment, how appropriate that old sobriquet would be before the day, before the hour, even, was out.

That’s what they had called Bartholomew’s Mortuary when David Solomon was growing up just a few blocks from here—never dreaming that one day he would be standing outside like this, looking up at the pseudo-Italian palazzo, and summoning his courage to go inside for a job interview.

“You’re going to work at the House of the Dead?” his sister Rose had asked, laughing.

“I hope. And live there too, if I get the internship.”

“Won’t you feel, you know, icky? All those dead people?”

“Dead people are just dead, Rosie. You want icky, I’ll take you to a gay dinner party or two. You’ll come to welcome a non-bitchy corpse.”

He’d been so used to seeing the building, though, that as anachronistic as it was here in San Francisco’s near-Mission, midst crumbling mansions and almost mansions, he had long since ceased to take any particular notice of it.

Today, however, perhaps because it had taken on a new significance in his life, or maybe it was only a trick of the early morning sunlight, but when he came around the corner from 17^th Street, he saw it with new eyes, the way you catch sight of a different you in a store window’s glass. Pausing outside to really look at the mortuary’s facade, he could suddenly fully appreciate it for the beautiful monstrosity that it was, in a way he’d never done before.

Built for a gold field millionaire whose fortune had vanished as quickly as it accrued—apparently before he’d spent so much as a single night in his new mansion—the palazzo looked, as wags sometimes put it, “about as Venetian as an amusement park funhouse.” It was generally said, though, with an affectionate scorn. It was bastard architecture, to be sure, but fascinating in its own way.

The millionaire who’d commissioned the building had quickly vanished into obscurity, and the palazzo’s subsequent history had been checkered: an expensive bordello, a brief and unsuccessful stint as a hotel (Victorian era guests apparently shied away from sleeping in a former bordello), a gambling casino, a speakeasy, a bordello again (“A whorehouse,” some insisted this time), and for a year or so a boarding house, after which it had sat empty for ten years or more before Percy Bartholomew Senior, looking about for a place to establish a business, had seen it and said, “There, that will be Bartholomew’s Mortuary.”

The building was enormous, and for years Bartholomew’s had needed only the first floor. The top three floors were used for storage and an apartment in which the thrifty Percy lived when he was not hard at work, which was seldom. It had been then a one-man operation, Percy serving as his own embalmer, funeral director, grief counselor, maintenance man, and accountant.

That remained the case for years, and might have continued for the life of the mortuary, had it not been for one twist of fate: the AIDS epidemic.

“It’s an ill wind,” Percy had been fond of saying, though this wind did not blow until after his demise.

When the AIDS plague first struck, many mortuaries did not want to deal with the bodies of its victims. The families of many of those who died conspired with the funeral homes in ordering hasty cremations, often with no kind of service, often without even posted obituaries. People just disappeared. They were there and then they weren’t.

“No services,” was the order of the day.

Enter Bartholomew’s. Percy Bartholomew Junior, son of the now deceased founder, made a momentous decision, which he trumpeted throughout San Francisco’s gay community: “Bartholomew’s will provide full funerary services for AIDS victims, just as with any other deceased.” An announcement, as it happened, heard round the world.

The ill wind of AIDS had been the making of the mortuary’s fortunes. Additional slumber rooms, in the old fashioned terminology still in use at Bartholomew’s, were opened. A growing list of interns came here to work for little more than slave wages while they finished their schooling, and served their apprenticeships.

Even when an intern did not eventually join the firm, everyone knew that an internship at Bartholomew’s was worth its weight in gold at any mortuary anywhere in the country.

“Be gay,” was a sort of unofficial motto for those applying for internship. It was generally understood, though rarely discussed openly, that being gay was a bonus for an applicant. At the very least, one must be fully comfortable with gay clients. Being especially good looking, and gay oriented, was practically a call to apply.

David Solomon, having completed his first year in mortuary school, and blessed with the sort of good looks that made passersby stop on the street and stare after him, had heard the call.

§ § § § §

The first of the tour busses was just pulling up outside Mission Dolores, down the street. The early morning breeze was strengthening to a wind, tossing David’s dark curls, and making his blazer billow out behind him.

He pushed his way through the wrought iron gate, climbed the wide, shallow steps, and shoved open the elaborately carved front door. The vestibule in which he found himself, and that he had never seen before, was no less fantastic than the building’s exterior. Elaborately inlaid marble covered the floor in an intricate pattern of sand, ocher and umber. In the very middle of the space, an airy staircase of black wrought iron spiraled upward, and when he glanced up he saw, four floors above, a domed ceiling painted in garishly impressive frescoes.

He stood for a long moment, craning his neck to study with a guilty sense of pleasure what surely must have been inspired by the Sistine Chapel, if it had fallen well short of its inspiration. It reminded him of the cheap plastic replicas of Michelangelo’s David that one saw in the tawdrier souvenir shops at Fisherman’s Wharf, but on a much more grandiose scale. Kitschy, but not unlikable. Like the building itself, really.

Someone cleared his throat. David tore his attention from the artwork overhead, and looked to his right. A tall man, whose good looks were just beginning to fade, with pale blond hair so carefully arranged and with so bright a sheen that it might have been made of ceramic, came from behind an ornate teak counter.

“Mister Solomon?” he said.

“Yes.” David came forward, hand outstretched. “I’m David Solomon.”

“Cyril Bartholomew.” Cyril Bartholomew looked him up and down, seeming pleased with what he saw. “Jewish.”

“Yes. Non practicing.” And was immediately embarrassed to have said it. What did that have to do with anything? It was something entirely private, wasn’t it, whether or not he practiced his family’s religion?

“I don’t think we’ve had a Jewish director before. Our directors, of course, are chosen for qualities other than their religious practices. Or non practices, as it may. My Uncle Percy will be interviewing you this morning. He’s the managing director of the firm. Come with me, please.” He turned in the direction of the reception desk and the doors that opened behind and on either side of it, and hesitated.

“Normally,” he said, “we’d take the elevator or the stairs from the business wing. But, this being your first visit, perhaps you’d prefer the scenic route, through the public spaces?”

“I would, actually.”

Cyril nodded, as if in approval, and led the way to the curving stairs.

“What are they?” David asked.

The blond man paused with one foot on the first step. “I beg your pardon?”

“What are the qualities for which your directors are chosen?”

Cyril took a moment to look him over again, slowly, from head to toe, and back. He might have been smiling faintly, but his face was a mask. It was difficult to be sure. Certainly there was a gleam in his eye that came from something more than the gilded chandelier above them.

“You have the look,” he said, and started upward.

David followed, resisting the temptation to take another glimpse at that outrageous ceiling overhead, and kept his eyes instead on Cyril Bartholomew’s ramrod straight back. Cyril was ahead of him up the stairs, though, with the result that his buttocks were practically on a level with David’s eyes. David found himself looking at them, then, rather than Cyril’s back.

Nicely sculpted buttocks they were, too, as David was altogether aware, with lush curves like a ripe peach, a similarity enhanced by the tawny silk of the trousers encasing them. David could not help thinking that, like a peach, they invited one to sink one’s teeth into them. He was mesmerized by the play of muscles as their owner climbed upward, and found himself actually leaning toward them. He caught himself with a start.

What a way that would be to begin his experience at Bartholomew’s, he thought, laughing silently at himself—biting into the butt of one of the directors! He wasn’t altogether sure, though, whether that would be a bad thing for his career, or a good one. The invitation they offered did not seem entirely unintended. It appeared to him Cyril Bartholomew wore nothing between his flesh and the silk of his trousers.

He made a mental note to observe if this state of dress was unique to Cyril alone, or indicated a style suggestion for staff members. After all, he very much wanted to fit in—if he got the job. And, he thought his own buttocks were rather nicely shaped. They’d look just fine, he felt sure, in tightly fitted silk, without the hindrance of underthings. He wished in fact that he’d thought of that beforehand. Everyone in the industry understood looks mattered when it came to Bartholomew’s, and he had a notion that his own butt was one of his best features.

Once, Cyril looked back over his shoulder and smiled, and David had the impression that he was not at all unaware of the sight he was presenting to the young man following him up the stairs.

They reached the second floor. David had a glimpse of a chapel, filled with flowers, the perfume of roses and lilies and chrysanthemums seeming to flow out the open door like a fog of scent.

“Our original slumber rooms are on the ground floor. Of course, everyone wants them. The selection room is there as well, and the embalming room. I’ll skip that for today. The newer parlors are here, on second,” Cyril said, waving a hand at the second floor corridor. “They’re a bit smaller, but also more up to date. Depending upon your interview, we can look at those later. The offices and the staff rooms are on the next level, along with a small kitchenette and cafeteria for our employees, and a quite good coffee shop for our guests.” He started up another flight of stairs. “The top floor, that would be the fourth, is the dormitory for our interns.”

David was suddenly aware of the silence that surrounded them. It seemed total. The thick carpet on the stairs swallowed up their footsteps, and when Cyril spoke, it was in little more than a whisper, though it had the effect almost of a shout. No breeze stirred the thick forest green brocade of the draperies. The air was not just still, it seemed gelid, as if they moved through it only with effort.

His mother would have said his imagination was running away with him. The atmosphere here was supposed to be hushed. Except in ghost stories, the dead weren’t given to clatter.

They reached the third floor and went down a long corridor, past an open door where two or three well-dressed and handsome men were having coffee. They glanced at David with some interest as he went by but no one spoke, and Cyril did not pause for introductions.

He knocked at a tall mahogany door at the corridor’s far end, waited for a respectful moment, then knocked again, a little louder. Finally, he pushed a door open, tentatively.

“Uncle Percy?” he said, stepping into the room, and then, in a sibilant whisper, “Oh, Jesus!”

Crowding in behind him, David first saw the enormous desk centered before the two green draped windows, the morning sunlight streaming in so boldly that for a few seconds he was all but blinded. It was another moment before he followed the direction of Cyril’s wide-eyed gaze, and saw the man stretched out on the roan leather sofa against one wall.

He was dead. Even with only a year of training at the San Francisco Mortuary College, David could tell that at a glance. Eyes were open but unseeing, and a small trail of vomit had trickled from his mouth, staining one cheek. His shoes were on the floor beside the sofa, and near them, a large liquor bottle, on its side; a smaller bottle also, with a prescription label on it, too small to read at this distance, an empty glass and—tellingly—a syringe.

Cyril Bartholomew stepped to the corpse. One hand clutched a sheet of paper. Cyril took it from the lifeless fingers and, unfolding it, glanced at it briefly before folding it again and slipping it into the pocket of his suit jacket.

“Suicide?” David said.

“Obviously,” was the answer. “You’d better go down to the reception desk. Take that elevator there, it’ll be quicker. Matt’s office is just behind reception. Tell him to come here. And stay there yourself, to welcome any guests. Mister and Mrs. Bunderson are due shortly. Escort them into the front parlor, the Rose Room, and make them comfortable. There’s a bell pull there. If you need anything, coffee or whatever, ring for Armando. He’ll take care of it.”

David knew then that he had gotten the job.

A painful past. A mysterious stranger. Footsteps vanishing in the fog. All Stanley wants is just to hear Tom say, “I love you.” All Tom wants is Stanley safe. And the stranger? Ah, there’s the rub–what exactly is it that he wants? Be careful what you wish for, fellows. You may get it. Dreams can be deadly.

****************************

Prologue

“Gone?” Her voice went up on an ascending scale, like an opera diva’s in full song. “What do you mean, gone? They took him?”

He shook his head, trying to get his mind clear. Too much pot, and he was pretty sure the last joint had been laced with something, PCP maybe. His thoughts refused to settle, drifting like the acrid clouds of smoke that swirled in the room’s cold drafts.

“It must have been them. The baby was right there when I went into the john.” He pointed at the crib. You could see, or certainly imagine, the indentation where the baby had been. “And when I came back, they were gone, and the baby too. I ran outside but their taillights were clear down to the crossing, and then they disappeared. Just…” he shrugged, and finished lamely, “gone.”

She stared at the crib, empty now of even the blankets the child had been wrapped in, and lifted a hand to the bottom of her throat, as if choking off the anguish rising up in her. “The woman,” she said. “Delia, her name was. She said what a sweet baby he was.”

§ § § § §

“Such a sweet baby,” Delia said, while they were in the kitchen, getting beers. While the men talked man-business. Drug business.

“Yes. He’s very quiet.” Preoccupied. Wishing she were in the other room, wanting to be sure things were handled rightly. She couldn’t completely trust him, not when he was smoking.

“I lost mine.” Delia said it flatly. “No more than two weeks old.”

“Oh, I’m so very sorry. That must have been horrible.”

“Yes.” Her voice, her look, was vague, distant.

§ § § § §

“Delia, her name was. She just lost a baby. A month ago. She told me that in the kitchen, when we were getting the beers.”

He moved toward the telephone, lifted the receiver from the cradle. She crossed to him in three long strides, snatched the phone from his hand and slammed it back on the base.

“What on earth are you doing?” Her eyes wide.

“Calling the police. We’ve got to…”

“The police? Are you crazy? Do you know how much pot you’ve got there?” She jerked her head in the direction of the black plastic bags sitting on the floor. “You want the police to see that?”

“We’ll… well, we’ll hide it. We’ll put it in the trunk of the car, and…”

“And tell the police what? Tell them we had a trio of Cubans, probably illegals, over for the evening? Big time drug suppliers, from Miami? How do we explain who they were, or what they were, or what they were doing here?”

His face screwed up with the effort of thinking. “We could tell them, we could say, they were friends. Or, like, friends of friends, just passing through. We don’t have to mention drugs.”

“Great. And if the police find them, find them with our baby? What do you suppose was in that car of theirs, that big shiny Caddy they were so proud of? You think they came all this way to deliver dope to you and nobody else. I’m betting the trunk was full of goodies. A lot more than grass, I’d guess. Anyway, what kind of people do you think those men are? Use your head. Those were some bad honchos. You send the police after them, you think they’re not going to come back at us? Them, or their friends?”

He sagged—face, shoulders, everything drooping, like wet laundry. “Don’t you care, they’ve stolen our baby?”

“Care? Don’t talk crazy. Of course I care. I care a lot.” She paused, swallowed hard, looked again at the crib where her baby should have been sleeping, and back at him. “But I care about staying alive, too. And we won’t, if you call the police.” She went to one of the chairs, sank heavily into it, taking tight hold of the arms as if it might try to shake her loose, like a bucking horse, like her thoughts were bucking. “We’ve got to think this out carefully.”

“And, do what? We just let them do it, get away with it? With stealing our baby?”

She thought for a long moment. “Christ. I don’t see what else we can do. Even for the baby.” Thought for a moment more, looked again, hard, at the crib. “Besides, think about it, they took the blankets. They must mean to take care of him, they wouldn’t have taken the blankets if they didn’t. That woman, that Delia, who’s to say she wouldn’t take good care of him? Better than we could, anyway, if we were dead.”

He went and sat on the stool next to the coal stove, fighting back the tears that threatened, and shivered despite his proximity to the heat. The glow from the stove gave his tortured face a hellish look. “People will know. People will ask, where’s the baby?”

“Who? Your mother? She hasn’t set foot in this house since the baby was born. You know how she feels about the drugs. I’m surprised she hasn’t turned us in before now. Probably for the baby’s sake. If she knew he was gone, you can bet she wouldn’t hesitate for a minute.”

“What about, well,… your Mom?”

She gave him a look of withering scorn. Her mother had never been here, inside this house. Only once since her marriage had she been to her mother’s home, and that only to confirm what she already knew in her heart—she was glad to have escaped. It was not just the poverty. Her mother lived no leaner than they did, probably she was better off, if only marginally; the difference was, her mother could never deal with the reality of her life, never would. She was the sort of woman who lived her life through the men in it. Now she was widowed, her beloved son dead in an incomprehensible Mid-East skirmish; what could her daughter be but a disappointment to her?

Which, she was painfully aware, was all she had been, while her mother wrapped herself in homilies, carefully stored up like the jars of green beans in the dusty cellar: “Darkest before the dawn.” “God never goes out but what he comes back in.” “His eye is on the sparrow.”

Drowning in artificial sweetness. It had driven her away. Better present misery than a pretense of happiness. Her mom had been just as happy to see her go away. And stay. She didn’t need a daughter to remind her of the lack of male presence in her life.

§ § § § §

She stood up as abruptly as she had sat down, began to pace the small, smoke filled room, in and out of the pale light from the bare bulb overhead. He watched her face darken, glow, darken. With each pass, she looked at the empty crib. A freight train mourned in the distance, where the tracks cleaved the town, the “haves” on one side, with their grassy lawns and tree lined streets; “have-nots” on the other, with… she looked around the room. With… she glowered at the table, at the boxes shoved against the wall, at the uncovered pine floor… with this.

They were like a cancer, those tracks, they ate at her, weighted her soul, always had. If she didn’t have them to remind her who they were, what they were… life might be something different, then, mightn’t it? If she were only shed of those damned tracks. Of living a life on this side, and not the other.

A chunk of coal popped in the stove, an exclamation mark to her thoughts. Like a snap of fingers, it brought her to a sudden standstill.

“We’ll leave,” she said, decision made in the instant, no doubts or confusion. “We’ll just disappear. Go somewhere. Florida, maybe. Or California, that’s further still. Not one of the big cities, some place smaller. Your mom’ll never find us. She’s not that sharp. And it takes money to look for people, especially if they’re a long ways away, if they don’t want to be found. What’s she going to do, come looking for us? California’s a big state.”

“California?” Something that might have been excitement penetrated the fog in his brain, made the incipient tears in his eyes glitter. “I always wanted to go to California.”

“We’ll leave tonight.” Talking quickly now, determined, everything settled. “Just take what we can carry in the car. Who cares about any of this junk?” A sweep of her hand took in all the shabby drug-man’s furnishings—wooden crates for tables, beat up unmatched chairs, wooden boards on bricks to make a bookcase, bed sheets for curtains. “We’ll write her a note, leave it in her mailbox, say you got a job offer somewhere. Not California, we’ll throw her off. New York City, say, or Detroit. Yes, Detroit, that sounds right. Tell her we’ll be in touch. By the time she gets suspicious, starts wondering, the trail will be stone cold.”

“I guess,” he said, torn. “It’s just… my baby. My son. Don’t you care?” he asked again, his tone plaintive.

“Don’t say that,” she snapped. She came to stand over him. For a moment, he thought she meant to hit him and he shrank away from her. “It pisses me off, when you say it like that. I’m trying to think for both of us, damn it.”

She took a deep breath and turned away, pacing again. “Listen to me. The baby is safe with them. They won’t kill him. They wouldn’t have taken him to kill him. Why would they? It’s the woman. She wanted a replacement for the baby she lost. Probably, he’ll be just fine with her, maybe better than he’d have been with us. They’ve got money, plenty of it. The Caddy, and the clothes they were wearing. And that what’s-his-name, Julio, did you see that ring of his? Biggest diamond I ever saw.” She came back to kneel on the floor in front of him, put her arms around him.

She’d always been the stronger one. He’d always deferred to her. He moved into her embrace, lowered his head to her shoulders. “You’re right, I know it. But, fuck, my son, though.”

“We’ll have others.” She paused, thoughtfully, and added, “Maybe sooner than you think.”

It took a moment for her meaning to sink in. He pulled back, looking into her face. “You saying…?”

She gave him a sly smile. “I think so. I’m pretty sure, actually. Which means we have to think about him, too, don’t we? We need to keep him alive. He’s got to come first now. This is best, you’ll see.”

He sighed, managed to give her a watery smile. “You’re right,” he said with more conviction.

“‘Course I am. Come on, let’s get packed up, get out of here, tonight.”

“What about the pot?”

She glowered at the plastic bags. “‘We can’t leave it here. And we can’t take it with us. Too risky. If we got stopped for something… that taillight’s still not working. If they pulled us over, searched the car…”

“We have to dump it?”

She thought about that, shook her head reluctantly. It would have been nice to have it for a nest egg, wherever they were going; but, no, it was just too dangerous. If they were going to do this, they had to disappear, completely. Getting stopped by some fool highway patrolman in Nebraska, or wherever you went through to get to California. And them without the baby. They’d call his mom, most likely. She’d say something about the baby. The fool woman never could keep her mouth shut. Then there’d be an investigation. No, it was too dangerous.

“Yes. We’ll have to dump it. We’ll go along the ridge road on our way out of town, toss it in the gully. There’s lots of dopers out that way. One of them will find it, probably, think he’s died and gone to doper heaven. Come on now, help me get our shit in the car. We’ve got to be out of here by morning.”

He grinned, happy to let her take charge, excited despite himself by the prospect of hitting the road. He loved going, going anywhere, just for the sake of movement. Itchy feet. She’d always said he had itchy feet. And California—he’d dreamed all his life of California.

“And goodbye Iowa,” he said, smiling at her, tears gone, the crib with its silent accusation all but vanished from his mind.

“Forever.” She smiled back at him with a kind of tender scorn. He was such a baby. Men were. Thank God she’d gotten him settled down before he did something really tragic. The police? We’d be dead before Christmas.

Despite everything she’d said, she hadn’t quite forgotten the empty crib herself. She glanced at it past his shoulder. She’d thought, in their brief conversation, that Delia was a little round the bend, but that could have been just the loss of her baby. It occurred to her that Delia had not said how she lost the baby. She frowned, and quickly pushed that thought aside. Women did lose their babies. It didn’t say anything about them. It didn’t mean she couldn’t be a good mother.

Anyway, what could she do about that, about any of it? Nothing was what. She had them to think about now. Them, and the baby they’d have in time. It hadn’t been quite a lie she had told him. Anyways, it was easy enough to make it true. Maybe even by the time they got to California. It would be another boy. To make up for the son he’d lost. In time, he’d forget all about the other one. It would be as if that child had never been, just one of his pot dreams.

She wouldn’t forget, she couldn’t, but she could live with it. Women were stronger that way. You did what you had to do. That’s what life was. Life had to be lived. The only question was how.

Later, there’d be time enough to cry. She could feel the tears inside her, wanting to come out, but she took them in a fierce grip and put them away, for a time when they could be wept in private. It was better that way. Someone had to be strong.

“Come on,” she said, “get those boxes off the back porch, start putting stuff in them.”

§ § § § §

“For Christ’s sake,” Julio said, taking a curve at high speed, the tires squealing. Putting distance behind them as fast as he could. What if that fool came after them, looking for his baby? Julio hadn’t seen a car parked by the house, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one, in back maybe. “Why’d you have to take their…?”

“My baby.” She hugged the little blanket wrapped bundle to her bosom, patting him tenderly. “He’s my baby.”

“He’s not—”

“He’s my son.” She said it ferociously, her eyes flashing dementedly in the silver blue glare of the dashboard lights. “My son.”

He bit back a retort, glanced in the mirror at the still unpenetrated darkness behind them.

He thought, not for the first time, that she was probably crazy.

Women. Christ. And now a baby, to get in the way. To hold him back.

It wasn’t good for a man to be burdened.