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She flung knife after knife into a mountain of wrecked cars. The prop master had knives to spare. Joan wondered if archaeologists would find the knives someday and deduce that people had fought over the cars.

At lunchtime she got an orange from the food tables and walked to the fringe of the salvage yard, where she could see the Los Angeles River and the skyline across the way.

She held the orange in her hands, tearing the rind with her teeth. A dark ribbon of water moved slowly down the trough of the riverbed. She thought she would soon be written out of the show.

The knife toss was Joan's last scene of the day. She drove home and made lunch for Micah, who was just getting up. He sat at the dining room table, head wet from the shower, scratching his arms.

“How were the horses?” said Joan.

“We didn't get to see them. We had to leave the farm because we were laughing too much.”

“Well, at least you had a good time.”

“Then we went to the ocean.”

“What did you think?”

Micah took a bite of the sandwich Joan had made. “It felt like I belonged there,” he said.

She came over and touched his wet hair. “Doesn't it? I know just what you mean. Though I worried when you were out so late.”

“You don't have to, Mom. I'm not seven anymore.”

“I know you're not,” said Joan.

It was true in some ways—she'd forgotten that he was alive all this time and not waiting for her to return to begin again.

“You don't know what it's like,” she said.

“Because you left?”

“It must have seemed selfish.”

“I thought you were in trouble,” said Micah. “I didn't think that it was something you did to someone.”

“To you,” said Joan. “That's who it was done to.”

“Sometimes I pretended you broke the law and didn't want to bring it down on us. Like you robbed a bank or something.”

Joan laughed. “I should have.”

“You wore a blue bandanna to hide your face and the newspapers called you the Blue Bandit. All the bank tellers were afraid that you might be heading their way.”

“Oh Micah,” said Joan. “I hope I haven't hurt you too much.”

She felt good to be reminded of the little boy he had been. He seemed real to her for the first time since she'd seen him again in the doorway of Tiny's house.

Joan went to North Hollywood to read for the role of the older Ann Flowers in
The Powder Horn
. Five men sat on one side of a table, and Joan stood on the other, with a brass bed and chair on her side of the room.

“We love what you're doing in
Mystic Forensic,
” said the director.

“
Forensic Mystic,
” said Joan.

“Of course.”

“Everyone does that.”

“We'd like to go over the scene in the cabin. Do you need a script?”

“I know the part.”

“Night. Crockett knocks, you rise, you open door. And the line is yours.”

“Good evening,” said Joan.

An associate producer read Davy Crockett's lines.

“Evening, miss.”

“Are you lost?”

“Yes, that sounds accurate. I crossed the New River in a storm. They said wait for the ferryman but I wouldn't listen.”

“The New River is two hundred miles from here.”

“It might be another time I'm thinking of.”

“David?”

“And you're Ann.”

“Come in, man. Get by the fire.”

“I could use whiskey if you got it.”

“This is as it was before.”

“You're hardly any older, Ann. I can still see those eyes under the rafters.”

“Why have you come?”

“I don't know. I thought that I would get out all right because, you know, that's what I do. But I'm nothing now.”

“You're here.”

“In a manner. Did you get married, Ann? Have a family and all?”

“I never did. I suppose I had my suitors. But that night, when you came to our place, you were so cold. Just a boy. It got into my heart somehow. And kind of stayed there.”

“That must be it.”

“Must be what?”

“Why here. Why you.”

“Hush, David. Drink your drink. We have all night for talking.”

Joan was in tears. She never had trouble finding the emotions in the words.

“I don't know what to say,” said the director.

“Now, there is some nudity,” said the associate producer.

“I know.”

“Could you undress?”

Joan stepped out of her shoes, unbuttoned her dress, slipped it off her shoulders, and let it fall. She raised her arms, hands cupped as if holding mourning doves that would fly away on violet wings.

They were writing notes. “Now Joan, if you could lie on the bed?”

Of course. The bed wasn't there for the fun of it. She crossed the room and lay down, closed her eyes, and pretended she heard rain on rooftops.

She hadn't worked her body into this shape to be ashamed before filmmakers. She was the dream that troubled their sleep, lying ageless as they grew older and older.

Joan opened her eyes. The men had gathered around the bed with anxious eyes as if visiting a sick friend.

“Thank you, Joan,” the director said. “I find myself still lost in your reading. We will be in touch.”

Joan put her clothes on, shook hands with everyone, and left a manila envelope with her résumé and head shot. She rode down in an elevator with cheap golden walls.

“I certainly hope I get that part,” she said.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

J
ACK SNOW
,
the
artifacts dealer Dan had been hired to investigate, first came to Grouse County in the winter, fresh out of the federal prison at Lons Ferry, North Dakota, where he'd served federal months for embezzling money from a credit union. He'd had gambling debts. They were not considered a mitigating factor.

FCI Lons Ferry was a cold stone fortress bound by rules, exercise, seniority, the call-out sheet. Prohibited acts ranged from killing to conference calls to kissing.

Jack didn't mind prison as much as he thought he would. You could wear your hair any way you wanted so long as you didn't carve words or figures into it. The barbershop was closed for maintenance on Mondays.

In prison Jack met a man known as Andy from Omaha, with whom he played chess on Wednesdays and Fridays in the yard or the library. Andy gave up knights for bishops any time and took oppressive command of the diagonals. He was serving a long stretch for buying and selling figurines and pottery stolen from excavations around the world.

“I've found the error in my practice,” he said one time.

“What's that?” said Jack.

“You take something, somebody will be looking for it. Whereas, a fake, see, nobody's looking for a fake.”

“They don't know there is one.”

Andy pinned Jack's rook to his king. “Bam,” he said.

Andy's work sounded exotic and lucrative compared with robbing the returns of retirees, and he gave Jack a number to call when Jack got out of Lons Ferry. The man who answered the phone told him to find some out-of-the-way place and rent a warehouse.

Having little money, Jack tried staying with people he knew in Stone City. The first turned him down after a few minutes of unfriendly conversation. He lived in a yellow ranch house on an empty hill west of the city—no grove, no outbuildings—and Jack was not disappointed when it didn't work out.

So then he stayed with the other friend, who had a small and neatly kept brick house on New Hampshire Street in town. That lasted till summer, when they argued over a canoe.

It belonged to the friend and one day Jack took it to a used sporting goods place and sold it.

“I figured you'd want it off your hands,” he explained when his friend came home. “It's not like you use it.”

“What I do with my canoe is my business.”

“It hangs behind the garage. That's what you do with it.”

“If I never so much as touch the motherfucker that doesn't give you the right to sell it.”

“Okay, okay,” said Jack. “I was going to take a commission, but you can have it all, if that's how you're going to be.”

Jack's friend counted the bills. “That was a nine-hundred-dollar canoe.”

“Not all bleached out it wasn't. Did you even look at it lately?”

“Get out.”

Jack took a room by the week in the Continental Hotel on the north end of Stone City. This was an ornate stone property built when the railroad came through and falling to ruin ever since. The people who stayed there seemed like ghosts, with unkempt hair and mismatched clothes.

Jack Snow met Wendy, daughter of the couple who would hire Dan, at a fair in the park, where she had set up a folding table to sell moccasins and billfolds.

“Beautiful hobbycraft,” said Jack.

Wendy had thick blond hair, small and nimble hands, and a skeptical expression that invited you to talk her out of it.

“When are you supposed to wear moccasins?” said Jack. “Are they bedroom slippers? Can you wear them on the street? Wouldn't the asphalt wear them down?”

“All shoes are damaged by asphalt,” said Wendy. “It may surprise you that moccasins hold up better than most. I myself wear them all the time.”

She turned sideways on her folding chair and crossed her legs. Jack knelt in the grass and slipped a moccasin from her foot, revealing toenails painted cobalt blue.

Wendy pressed her bare foot to his chest and gave a little shove, setting him back on his heels.

“You should get some for your girlfriend,” she said.

“Don't have one. I'm new in town.”

“Oh. I see.”

They slept together that night in the Continental Hotel. The atmosphere was eeriest at night but Jack found it entertaining in the company of Wendy. They lay in bed listening to the groan of the elevator moving floor to floor. Coughing and faint voices came from other rooms.

“You got a tiger's eyes,” said Jack.

“Tiger sounds,” she said.

Wendy lived in a duplex by the water tower, and Jack soon moved in with her. He called her Wendell and said no one understood her the way he did, which may have been true.

He liked to watch her remove makeup with gauze pads, mouth open, eyes serious and dark in the mirror. Their sex was bereft and elemental and reminded Jack for some reason of the ranch house on the empty hill.

Wendy cut and sewed her leather pieces at home under a halogen lamp until one or two in the morning. She wore big glasses that made her especially sexy. Sometimes a sadness came over her, and she did not want to do anything, and Jack would feed her cherry ice cream from a spoon.

One summer evening as Jack Snow sat smoking in a nature preserve north of Stone City a man and his long-legged pointer came strolling along.

The dog bounded into the reeds as the man walked the trail, hands in pockets, eyes on the ground. Every once in a while he would whistle and the dog would leap above the weeds, now close, now far.

The man walked over and sat on the bench beside Jack. He called the dog and she came running and sat panting and looking at the man from the corners of her eyes.

“Are you from Omaha?” said Jack.

“Mmm, could be.”

“I hope you're happy with what you're getting.”

“Wouldn't be here otherwise. We need more of it.”

“What do you do with it?”

“Not your concern.”

“Who buys it?”

“Nobody.”

“I was told I would learn the trade,” said Jack.

“This is the trade.”

The man stood and the dog looked up. “How'd you get into the Celtic stuf
f
?”

“I had a girlfriend one time who was big on it,” said Jack. “Her name was Sandy.”

“Was she a Druid?”

“Something like that.”

Jack exaggerated—he lied—calling Sandy Zulma his girlfriend. They had been friends as children in the town of Mayall, Minnesota, where they'd played scenes from books of Irish and Welsh legends that she knew and taught to him.

Sometimes she would be Emer to his Cúchulainn, Hound of Ulster, flirting with the young warrior or dying of grief over his body finally brought to ground.

She liked to portray the tragic Deirdre who killed herself rather
than live without the betrayed Sons of Usna. They fought the endl
ess battle of the Hound and his old friend Ferdiad, who lost with grief on both sides. And they played chess, because the kings and warriors often did so in the downtime between battles and other adventures.

As teenagers Jack and Sandy went their separate ways. Sandy wanted to keep playing, or perhaps it was no longer play, and Jack fell in with a drinking crowd and gave up their games. When he saw Sandy on the street or in school he would act as if he hardly knew her. He regretted the unkindness.

Louise took the long route home and stopped to see her mother in Grafton. It was after ten but Mary Montrose stayed up late listening to radio shows about paranormal phenomena and the breakdown of society.

Mary's recliner stood in the center of the house on a thronelike platform with its back to the wall. The platform had been built by her friend Hans Cook. Mary had become nervous about storms in her old age—lightning, tornadoes, tree branches breaking through windows—and thought the elevated chair would help her see what was coming.

“Look what the wind carried in,” said Mary. “You coming from the junk store?”

“Yep,” said Louise, who had long since given up telling Mary it wasn't a junk store. “Have you eaten?”

“I was just about to put something on.”

“You lie. You need to eat, Ma.”

Mary went to the dining room table and took a seat, blinking in the light. Louise lit a burner on the stove and poured oil into a skillet, tipping it back and forth. She held a bag of frozen shrimp and vegetables and sawed it open with a butcher knife.

“Here, Louise, there's scissors
for that,” said Mary. “You look like somebody cleaning a fish.”

“I wouldn't clean a fish if my life depended on it.”

“I bet you would.”

“This is true.”

Louise slid the frozen block of food into the pan of hot oil, where it made the reassuring racket of frying.

“What's Dan think?” said Mary.

“About what?”

“You running around so late.”

“He's all right with it. Why? Did he say something?”

“They go crazy.”

“Who does?”

“Men. Get to a certain age. There was a lady on the radio the other night, her husband left her and moved to Phoenix. Baby of the family no more than seven years old.”

“What'd he do in Phoenix?

“What didn't he do is more like it. Bought a boat. Wrecked the boat. Got a nurse pregnant.”

“Jesus.”

“Married the nurse, divorced the nurse. Opened a restaurant, that went bust. Got hepatitis.”

Louise put oven mitts on and carried the skillet to the table. “What do you think?”

“I would give that one more minute.”

Louise went back to the stove and pushed the seared food around with a wooden spatula. “You shouldn't listen to that morbid junk.”

“It
is
morbid.”

“Supper is served,” said Louise, setting plates on the table.

After they ate, Louise did the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen, and they moved their little party to the living room. Louise made a Twister for herself and tea with brandy for Mary, and they sat looking out the picture window.

Every now and then a car would go around the corner, headlights glancing off the leaves of Mary's trees before pivoting toward the deserted downtown.

They didn't say much. Mary seemed to have talked herself out with the tale of the man who went to pieces in Phoenix. Louise sat on the davenport, one level below her stately mother, her mind floating with the ice in her drink. Around eleven-thirty, she closed the curtains and kissed her mother goodnight.

Mary took her hand. “I won't be here forever, Louise.”

“Yes, you will,” said Louise. “Your signs are all good. The doctor said. Why? Is something wrong?”

“Not at all. I just want you to know that when I do go? I'll be ready. And that will be why.”

“I won't be ready.”

“I know. But I wanted to tell you. So you won't have to feel bad.”

One afternoon in August Lyris Darling and her boss Don Gary rode out to Rose Hill south of Boris to look at a gravestone with a typographical error. Chrysanthemum bushes were taking over the burial ground, flinging stems and flowers over the long grass. Lyris liked cemeteries wild and abandoned.

They found the monument, on which the inscription was every bit as defective as had been reported by the family. The deceased was named Cynthia and the engravers had transposed the second and third letters of her name.

“This is sad,” said Don Gary.

“You want me to call Taber Brothers?” said Lyris.

Don Gary took his glasses off and cleaned them with a handkerchief. “Did we have it right?”

Lyris took their copy of the order from her purse and handed it to him.

“You get Tabers on the phone and you tell them Don Gary is pissed off,” he said.

“Okay.”

He ran his fingers along the top of the stone. “Actually, don't,” he said. “All I need is those fuckers mad at me.”

“I'll just say they owe us a new stone.”

“Good idea.”

They went back to Don Gary's Suburban and drove the perimeter of the cemetery. Don pointed out a memorial with a row of beer cans set carefully before it and observed that tributes evolve with the times and the industry must stay relevant.

As he spoke Lyris saw a black pickup rolling in, tiger-striped with dust. She slouched in her seat.

“It's my grandmother. Keep going.”

“I wouldn't think of it,” said Don Gary, always eager to meet someone who might someday die.

He stopped and called out the window, and Lyris's grandmother parked her truck beside his and leaned her heavy arm on the door.

“What do you want?” she said.

“I'm Don Gary of Gary Memorials in Stone City. Got somebody here I think you know. Look over here. It's Lyris.”

He leaned back, glancing from grandmother to granddaughter, beaming.

“You let her go now,” said Colette. She pushed the door of the truck open and it banged the side of the Suburban.

“No, no, no,” said Don Gary, his friendly, professional voice gone thin with alarm. “You misunderstand me.”

Colette stepped down from the truck with a crowbar in her hand. Lyris skirted the front of the Suburban and took the bar from her grandmother and led her down the space between the vehicles.

“Sorry, Grandma,” she said. “That's my boss. He's not kidnapping me. He just can't shut up sometimes.”

Colette looked at Don Gary, who was rubbing the side panel of the Suburban with a handkerchief.

“What are you doing in the graveyard?” said Colette.

“One of the headstones is messed up,” said Lyris.

“You tell that man not to yell at people he don't know.”

“Well, I did tell him that.”

“Maybe that's how they do it in Stone City but down here it's bad business.”

She unlatched the tailgate of the pickup and let it fall. A red wagon lay wheels up among flats of flowers on the truck bed. Lyris picked up the wagon, set it on the ground, and put the flowers in it.