“I’ll soon be silent.”
“You’d be the last name in these pages of the dead?”
“Yep,” said Constance.
I went to turn the heat up and shivered.
“What an awful thing to do.”
“Awful.”
“Telephone books,” I murmured. “Maggie says I cry at them, but it all depends on what telephone books, when.”
“All depends. Now …”
From her purse she pulled out a second small black book.
“Open that.”
I opened it and read, “Constance Rattigan” and her address on the beach, and turned to the first page. It was all As.
“Abrams, Alexander, Alsop, Allen.”
I went on.
“Baldwin, Bradley, Benson, Burton, Buss …”
And felt a coldness take my fingers.
“These are all friends of yours? I know those names.”
“And …?”
“Not all, but most of them, buried out at Forest Lawn. But dug up tonight. A graveyard book,” I said.
“And worse than the one from 1900.”
“Why?”
“I gave this one away years ago. To the Hollywood Helpers. I didn’t have the heart to erase the names. The dead accumulated. A few live ones remained. But I gave the book away. Now it’s back. Found it when I came in tonight from the surf.”
“Jesus, you swim in this weather?”
“Rain or shine. And tonight I came back to find this lying like a tombstone in my yard.”
“No note?”
“By saying nothing, it says everything.”
“Christ.” I took the old directory in one hand, Rattigan’s small names and numbers book in the other.
“Two almost–Books of the Dead,” I said.
“Almost, yes,” said Constance. “Look here, and here, and also here.”
She showed me three names on three pages, each with a red ink circle around it and a crucifix.
“These names?” I said. “Special?”