the long row of alphabetized file boxes and skips to the Cs. Holy shit—he can’t believe his eyes, but there it is: Cadmus. A thick bundle of material in a brown cardboard legal folder. The word dossier flies through his head. Henry opens it up and finds a window envelope containing two freshly-minted DVDs, one labeled, Cadmus stats and the other, Cadmus pics. Beneath it is a recent eight-by-ten photograph of his mother—a professional-looking head-shot—and an envelope full of negatives.
As Henry sifts through the material beneath, he is swamped with confusion and shock, hands trembling as he turns page after page of legal and financial documents that all seem to have his mother’s signature and handwriting, but which reveal a degree of wealth that he never knew she had, nor would have imagined she was capable of either amassing or managing:
Loans for tens of thousands of dollars, mortgages, vast lines of credit, high-yield investment portfolios, insurance policies worth millions, with names of beneficiaries that he has never heard of before, mostly obscure charity foundations that smack of religion or extreme right-wing politics. The level of international finance savvy on display is far beyond anything his mother is capable of, Henry is sure, though at one time she did speak the languages—Greek, Italian, French, Portuguese. But he would have thought that after all these years she would be a little rusty. Certainly he has never known her to be so well-regarded by the slick gatekeepers of capitalism. In Henry’s experience, Vicki’s level of correspondence with such entities has always been limited to overdrafts and past-due notices—and there has never been any reason to suppose that old age has made her more competent. He is not the son of this steel-willed speculator, gambling with borrowed fortunes; the mother he knows is altogether more hapless. This creature in the paperwork with his mother’s name and handwriting is a stranger to him—Henry’s weird, involuntary stirring of pride in her accomplishment is an alien emotion to be stamped down, proof positive that this is all wrong. A phantom sensation like feelings in an amputated limb.
My mother is dead.
It’s not the first time in the past three months that this thought has occurred to him, but it is the first time that Henry knows it is true, beyond a shadow of a doubt.
They’ve killed her. They’ve killed my mother and stolen her identity.
And not just her; all these people’s identities—hundreds or thousands of lonely souls who died unremembered and unmourned, but whose fixed incomes live on. All of them existing now only in these files, in the form of paper and mail and electronic transactions, a whole population of ghosts haunting this island, where they can be put to good use.
They are farming them, just as Ruby joked—farming the dead, milking them like cattle. Better than cattle, for they use no resources, take up no space, leave no waste. Reaping these sad, fatted beings—who even alive were already relegated to a ghostly existence on the margins of society—for the economic lifelines that sustained and uselessly prolonged their empty, puttering existences. Plucking them off like so many suckling parasites to get at the nectar. Consolidating all their myriad separate dribbles of income which were just soaking into the ground; evaporating and making them all work together, supporting and reinforcing each other as a single grotesque tit of economic force. Henry is becoming enraged.
Evil, murdering bastards—
His first impression of the hollow building had been exactly right: It is a factory, a ghost-powered money-mill that grinds up living people and churns out wealth for…someone. But who? Who is gaining from this ultimate cost/benefit ratio? Who has killed his mother and stolen her identity and added it to the invisible population of golden ghouls? (And in the back of his mind: How can this be? Is she really dead, or is he just being hysterical, jumping to conclusions? But it is his childish, desperate need for this to be true that tells him it cannot be—the world as he knows it does not reward wishful thinking. And all his past experiences with this island only reinforce one grim conclusion.)
—murdering evil fucks—
Henry comes across a box of Shady Isle promotional materials and application forms. Amid the brochures is a stack of DVDs with labels that read, We’re Shady Isle. There is a TV and a DVD player set up; on impulse Henry loads one of the disks.
Accompanied by bouncy Caribbean steel drums, there is an aerial shot of Catalina Island, the