"My God, that's too many suspects."

"Spread over thirty years? Sparse."

"Sparse!" I cried.

"They stood in lines on the beach."

"You didn't have to ask them in!"

"When they all shouted Rattigan!?"

"You didn't have to listen."

"What is this, a Baptist revival?"

“Sorry.”

"Well." She took the last swig in the bottle and winced. "Will you help find this son of a bitch, or two sons of bitches, if the Books of the Dead were sent by separate creeps?"

"I'm no detective, Constance."

"How come I remember you half-drowned in the canal with that psycho Shrank?"

"Well…"

"How come I saw you up on Notre Dame at Fenix Studios with the Hunchback? Please help Mama."

"Let me sleep on it."

"No sleep tonight. Hug these old bones. Now …"

She stood up with the two Books of the Dead and walked across the room to open the door on black rain and the surf eating the shore, and aimed the books. "Wait!" I cried. "If I'm going to help, I'll need those!"

"Atta boy." She shut the door. "Bed and hugs? But no phys ed."

"I wasn't planning, Constance," I said.

CHAPTER THREE

at two forty-five in the middle of the dark storm, a terrific lightning bolt rammed the earth behind my bungalow. Thunder erupted. Mice died in the walls.

Rattigan leaped upright in bed.

"Save me!" she yelled.

"Constance." I stared through the dark. "You talking to yourself, God, or me?"

"Whoever's listening!"

"We all are."

She lay in my arms.

The telephone rang at three A.M., the hour when all souls die if they need to die.

I lifted the receiver.

'"Who's in bed with you?" Maggie asked from some country with no rains and no storms.

I searched Constance's suntanned face, with the white skull lost under her summer flesh.