For its ten-block length, Jacaranda Avenue, which ran east from the boardwalk, was lined with ancient podocarpuses. The trees formed a canopy that cooled the street all day and shaded the streetlamps at night. Not one jacaranda grew along its namesake avenue.
Wisteria Lane boasted no wisteria. Palm Drive featured oaks and ficuses. Sterling Heights was the poorest neighborhood, and of all the streets in town, Ocean Avenue lay the farthest from the ocean.
Like most politicians, those in Magic Beach seemed to live in an alternate universe from the one in which real people existed.
Wet, rumpled, my shoes and jeans caked with sand, bleeding, and no doubt wild-eyed, I was grateful that the podocarpuses filtered the lamplight. In conspiracy with the fog, I traveled in shadows along Jacaranda Avenue and turned right on Pepper Tree Way.
Don’t ask.
Three guys were hunting me. With a population of fifteen thousand, Magic Beach was more than a wide place in the highway, but it did not offer a tide of humanity in which I could swim unnoticed.
Furthermore, in my current condition, if an alert policeman spotted me, he would be inclined to stop and chat. He would suspect I had been the target or the perpetrator of violence—or both.
I had no confidence in my ability to convince him that I clubbed myself over the head as punishment for a wrong decision I had made.
I did not want to file a report regarding the gunmen at the pier and the assault at the beach. That would take hours.
Already the three goons would be trying to determine who I was, describing me to people working in the commercial zone near the pier.
They might not get a lead. Having been in town little more than a month, having kept to myself as I waited to discover why I had been drawn there, I had remained a stranger to almost the entire populace.
Even an accurate description of me would not help them much. I am of average height, average weight. I have no distinguishing scars, birthmarks, tattoos, moles, warts, or facial mutations. I do not have a chin beard or yellow eyes. My teeth are not dissolving from meth addiction, but I also do not turn heads as would, say, Tom Cruise.
Except for the paranormal gifts with which I have been burdened, I was born to be a fry cook. Tire salesman. Shoe-store clerk. The guy who puts handbills under windshield wipers in the mall parking lot.
Give me an accurate and detailed description of at least one of the many fry cooks who has whipped up breakfast for you in a diner or coffee shop over the years, one tire salesman or shoe-store clerk who has served you. I know what comes to your mind: nada.
Don’t feel bad. Most fry cooks and tire salesmen and shoe clerks never want to be famous or widely recognized. We just want to get along. We want to live quietly, avoid hurting anyone, avoid being hurt, provide for ourselves and for those we love, and have some fun along the way. We keep the economy humming, and we fight wars when we have to, and we raise families if we get the chance, but we have no desire to see our pictures in the newspaper or to receive medals, and we don’t hope to hear our names as answers to questions on Jeopardy!
We are the water in the river of civilization, and those fellow citizens who desire attention, who ride the boats on the river and wave to admiring crowds along the shore…well, they interest us less than they amuse us. We don’t envy them their prominence. We embrace our anonymity and the quiet that comes with it.
The artist Andy Warhol said that in the future everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes, and he implied that they would hunger for that fame. He was right, but only about the kind of people he knew.
And as for the guys who put handbills under windshield wipers in the shopping-mall parking lot: Man, they have totally got the anonymity thing right; they are as invisible as the wind, as faceless as time.
As I made my way through shadows and fog, along back streets more than main streets, I worried that the yellow-eyed man might have more muscle on his team than just the pair of redheads and Flashlight Guy. Depending on his resources, he could have people searching not just for me but also for Annamaria.
She had known my name. She must know more than that about me. I didn’t think she would willingly give me up to the hulk; but he would break her like a ceramic bank to get at the coins of knowledge that she held.
I didn’t want her to be hurt, especially not because of me. I had to find her before he did.
NINE
BY AN ALLEY I ARRIVED AT THE BACK OF HUTCH Hutchison’s house. A gate beside the garage opened to a walkway that led to a brick patio.
Glazed terra-cotta urns and bowls held red and purple cyclamens, but the bleach of fog and the stain of night left the blooms as colorless as barnacle shells.
On a glass-topped wrought-iron table, I put down my wallet and the one I had taken off the agitated man with the flashlight.
Toe to heel, I pried off my sand-caked sneakers. I stripped off my socks and then my blue jeans, which were crusted with enough sand to fill a large hourglass. With a garden hose, I washed my feet.
Mrs. Nicely came three days a week to clean, as well as to do the laundry and ironing. Her surname suited her even better than my first name suited me, and I did not want to cause her extra work.
The back door was locked. Among the cyclamens in the nearest bowl, in a Ziploc pill bag, Hutch kept a spare key. After retrieving the two wallets, I let myself into the house.
Fragrant with the cinnamony aroma of chocolate-pumpkin cookies that I had baked earlier in the afternoon, brightened only by the golden glow of string lights hidden in the recessed toe kick of the cabinets, the kitchen waited warm and welcoming.
I am no theologian. I would not be surprised, however, if Heaven proved to be a cozy kitchen, where delicious treats appeared in the oven and in the refrigerator whenever you wanted them, and where the cupboards were full of good books.
After blotting my wet feet on the small rug, I snatched a cookie from the plate that stood on the center island, and I headed for the door to the downstairs hall.
I intended to go upstairs with the stealth of a Ninja assassin, quickly shower, dress my head wound if it didn’t need stitches, and put on fresh clothes.
When I was halfway across the kitchen, the swinging door opened. Hutch switched on the overhead lights, stork-walked into the room, and said, “I just saw a tsunami many hundreds of feet high.”
“Really?” I asked. “Just now?”
“It was in a movie.”
“That’s a relief, sir.”
“Uncommonly beautiful.”
“Really?”
“Not the wave, the woman.”
“Woman, sir?”
“Téa Leoni. She was in the movie.”
He stilted to the island and took a cookie from the plate.
“Son, did you know there’s an asteroid on a collision course with the earth?”
“It’s always something,” I said.
“If a large asteroid strikes land”—he took a bite of the cookie—“millions could die.”
“Makes you wish the world was nothing but an ocean.”
“Ah, but if it lands in the ocean, you get a tsunami perhaps a thousand feet high. Millions dead that way, too.”
I said, “Rock and a hard place.”
Smiling, nodding, he said, “Absolutely wonderful.”
“Millions dead, sir?”
“What? No, of course not. The cookie. Quite wonderful.”
“Thank you, sir.” I raised the wrong hand to my mouth and almost bit into the two wallets.
He said, “Soberingly profound.”
“It’s just a cookie, sir,” I said, and took a bite of mine.
“The possibility all of humanity could be exterminated in a single cataclysmic event.”
“That would put a lot of search-and-rescue dogs out of work.”
He lifted his chin, creased his brow, and drew his noble face into the expression of a man always focused on tomorrow. “I was a scientist once.”
“What field of science, s
ir?”
“Contagious disease.”
Hutch put down his half-eaten cookie, fished a bottle of Purell from a pocket, and squeezed a large dollop of the glistening gel into the cupped palm of his left hand.
“A terrible new strain of pneumonic plague would have wiped out civilization if not for me, Walter Pidgeon, and Marilyn Monroe.”
“I haven’t seen that one, sir.”
“She was marvelous as an unwitting pneumonic-plague carrier.”
His gaze refocused from the future of science and mankind to the glob of germ-killing goop on his palm.
“She certainly had the lungs for the role,” he said.
Vigorously, he rubbed his long-fingered hands together, and the sanitizing gel made squishy sounds.
“Well,” I said, “I was headed up to my room.”
“Did you have a nice walk?”
“Yes, sir. Very nice.”
“A ‘constitutional’ we used to call them.”
“That was before my time.”
“That was before everyone’s time. My God, I am old.”
“Not that old, sir.”
“Compared to a redwood tree, I suppose not.”
I hesitated to leave the kitchen, out of concern that when I started to move, he would notice that I was without shoes and pants.
“Mr. Hutchison—”
“Call me Hutch. Everyone calls me Hutch.”
“Yes, sir. If anyone comes around this evening looking for me, tell them I came back from my walk very agitated, packed my things, and split.”
The gel had evaporated; his hands were germ-free. He picked up his half-eaten cookie.