office was located.
“Sometimes, with the sensitive ones, a bad experience ruins any chance
for them. They refuse to try again. I’m afraid our Regina is one of
those.
She came in here determined to alienate you and wreck the interview, and
she succeeded in singular style.”
“It’s like somebody who’s been in prison all his life,” said Father
Jiminez, “gets paroled, is all excited at first, then finds he can’t
make it on the outside. So he commits a crime just to get back in.
The institution might be limiting, unsatisfying-but it’s known, it’s
safe.”
Salvatore Gujilio bustled around, relieving people of their empty
glasses. He was still an enormous man by any standard, but even with
Regina gone from the room, Gujilio no longer dominated it as he had done
before. He had been forever diminished by that single comparison with
the delicate, pert-nosed, gray-eyed child.
“I’m so sorry,” Sister Immaculata said, putting a consoling hand on
Lindsey’s shoulder. “We’ll try again, my dear. We’ll go back to square
one and match you up with another child, the perfect child this time.”
2
Lindsey and Hatch left Salvatore Gujilio’s office at ten past three that
Thursday afternoon. They had agreed not to talk about the interview
until dinner, giving themselves time to contemplate the encounter and
examine their reactions to it. Neither wanted to make a decision based
on emotion, or neuance the other to act on initial impression-then live
to regret it.
of course, they had never expected the meeting to progress remotely
along the lines it had gone. Lindsey was eager to talk about it. She
assumed that their decision was already made, had been made for them by
the girl, and that there was no point in further contemplation. But
they had agreed to wait, and Hatch did not seem disposed to violate that
agreement, so she kept her mouth shut as well.
She drove their new sporty-red Mitsubishi. Hatch sat in the passenger
seat with his shades on, one arm out his open window, tapping time
against the side of the car as he listened to golden oldie rock-‘n’-roll
on the radio. “Please Mister Postman” by the Marvelettes.
She passed the last of the giant date palms along Newport Center Drive
and turned left onto Pacific Coast Highway, past vinevered walls, and
headed south. The late-April day was warm but not hot, with one of
those intensely blue skies that, toward sunset, would acquire an
electric luminescence reminiscent of skies in Maxfield Parrish
paintings. Traffic was light on the Coast Highway, and the ocean
glimmered like a great swatch of silver- and gold-sequined cloth.
A quiet exuberance Bowed through Lindsey, as it had done for seven
weeks. It was exhilaration over just being alive, which was in every
child but which most adults lost during the process of growing up.
She’d lost it, too, without realizing. A close encounter with death was
just the thing to give you back the joie vivre of extreme youth.
More than two Boors below Hell, naked beneath a blanket on his stained
and sagging mattress, Vassago passed the daylight hours in sleep. His
slumber was usually filled with dreams of violated flesh and shattered
bone, blood and bile, vistas of human skulls. Sometimes he dreamed of
dying multitudes writhing in agony on barren ground beneath a black sky,
and he walked among them as a prince of Hell among the common rabble of
the damned.
The dreams that occupied him on that day, however, were strange and
remarkable for their ordinariness. A dark-haired, dark-eyed woman in a
cherry-red car, viewed from the perspective of an unseen man in the
passenger seat beside her. Palm trees. Red bougainvillea. The ocean
spangled with light.
Harrison’s Antiques was at the south end of Laguna Beach, on Pacific
Coast Highway. It was in a stylish two-story Art Deco building that
contrasted interestingly with the 18th- and 19th-century merchandise in
the big display windows.
Glenda Dockridge, Hatch’s assistant and the store manager, was helping
Lew Booner, their general handyman, with the dusting. In a large
antique store, dusting was akin to the painting of the Golden Gate
Bridge: once you reached the far end, it was time to come back to the