hands behind his back like a captain of a ship.

But wait.

Was it Carey?

Lynne Goreck came into the room. She went to him at the window, went into his arms. They kissed. She stepped away. He turned again to look out at the Pacific, then followed her, moving out of view.

A minute passed. Jimmy heard an engine start. The white Porsche curled around the circle drive and sped away up to the coast road, Carey behind the wheel, alone now.

Jimmy looked back at the living room. The room was empty.

But then they were back, the man and Lynne Goreck.

The phone in Jimmy’s pocket rang.

It was Jean.

He listened for a long time.

“I’ll meet you there,” he said.

TWENTY

The back of the house at one-ten Rivo Alto Canal was blackened but not burned out. A fireman kneeled just inside the backdoor, beside the water heater.

“What was it?” Jimmy said.

The fireman looked the two of them over.

“I own the house,” Jean said.

“Oily rags under the water heater,” the fireman said.

“Was anybody—”

Jimmy pushed past him and headed upstairs.

“No. They got out,” the fireman told Jean.

Jean followed Jimmy. She slowed as she moved through the living room. It hadn’t been burned but the smoke had crawled across the ceiling and stained it. Her eyes went over the pictures on the walls, the coffee table, the divan. She’d never been back.

Jimmy was already at the door of the back bedroom upstairs. The door-frame was blackened and some of the dirty carpet had been burned over to the doorway.

Jean came up behind him.

“They said she got out.”

They stepped into the room together. The fire had burned the shades off the windows so there was light. The TV was melted, the recliner singed and blackened and its plastic melted, too.

A voice startled them. “You the owners?”

A fir e marshal, a handsome man in a perfectly white shirt with a badge on the pocket, stepped out of the second bathroom. He wore rubber gloves.

“I am,” Jean said.

“Who was she?”

Jean said, “No one. No one was supposed to be living here.”

“It was a woman. I guess a transient,” the fire marshal said. “Living here.” He looked around the room. “And six or seven cats. So far.”

Jean turned and walked out.

“It burned itself out up here,” the fire marshal said to Jimmy. “There’s not much structural damage. It came straight up from the water heater below, rode up the stack.”

“Was the backdoor locked when you got here?” Jimmy asked.

“Yeah, it was. Pulled tight.”

Jimmy looked into the bathroom. It was smoke-damaged but not burned. A yellowed shower curtain with flamingos on it still hung on its rings. The mirror above the sink over the years had lost most of its silvering. There was a splotchy black hole in its center where your face would be.

The fire marshal squatted next to the carcasses of two cats at the base of the bay window, trying to decide what to do with them.

“Her name was Rosemary Danko,” Jimmy said.

The fire marshal stood.

“You knew her?”

“I talked to her once.”

“You want to tell me why?”

Jimmy told him. Some of it.

Jean was in the car when he came down. He got in without saying anything, started the engine and pulled away.

He looked in the mirror. Vivian Goreck was standing with the other neighbors in the middle of the lane.

“Where are we going?” Jean said.

“She had another place,” Jimmy said.

And another fire.

A red L.A.F.D. Suburban was parked in front of the apartment building in Garden Grove Jimmy had followed her to, crossing town on a hot bus.

Jean stayed in the car.

Jimmy walked around the side of the building. On the service porch of the corner ground-floor unit another fire marshal stood beside another water heater.

“Who are you?”

“I knew the woman who lived here.”

“Where is she? We thought it was vacant.”

Every time Jimmy heard that word vacant, he thought of the look in Rosemary’s eyes.

He came in off of the service porch through the kitchen and into the living room. It was gutted, burned to the studs, and the cabinet that had been full of pictures was now a collapsed, empty box.

It would have been neater if there was a body in one of the two places—If I just could be sure—but whatever threat in her madness Rosemary Danko had been to them, it was gone, as gone as she was. They’d cut her out of the story. And the traces of her mother with her.

Five-foot-one.

Jimmy stood in the warm sun out front for a moment. It was good to breathe the