Lie stretched a finger and tentatively stroked its tail. The animal ignored him, closing its eyes once more and folding its paws upon its glossy breast. Around its neck someone had placed a collar, the sort of leather-and-rhinestone ornament old ladies deployed on poodles. Gingerly Lie turned it, until he found a small heart-shaped tab of metal.
KINKAJOU
My name is Valentine
764-0007
“Huh,” he said. “I’ll be damned. I bet it belongs to those girls next door.” Gram sniffed and collected the plates. Next to Lie’s coffee mug, the compartmented container holding a week’s worth of his medication was still full.
The animal did nothing but sleep and eat. Lie called a pet store in the City and learned that kinkajous ate insects and honey and bananas. He fed it Froot Loops, yogurt and granola, a moth he caught one evening in the bedroom. Tonight it slept once more, and he stroked it, murmuring to himself. He still hadn’t called the number on the collar.
From here he could just make out the cottage, a white blur through dark leaves and tangled brush. It was his cottage, really; a long time ago the estate gardener had lived there. The fashion designer had been friends with the present tenant in the City long ago. For the last fourteen years the place had been leased to Aurora Dawn. When he’d learned that, Lie Vagal had given a short laugh, one that the realtor had mistaken for displeasure.
“We could evict her,” she’d said anxiously. “Really, she’s no trouble, just the town drunk, but once you’d taken possession—”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.” Lie laughed again, shaking his head but not explaining. “Imagine, having Aurora Dawn for a neighbor again . . . ”
His accountant had suggested selling the cottage, it would be worth a small fortune now, or else turning it into a studio or guest house. But Lie knew that the truth was, his accountant didn’t want Lie to start hanging around with Aurora again. Trouble; all the survivors from those days were trouble.
That might have been why Lie didn’t call the number on the collar. He hadn’t seen Aurora in fifteen years, although he had often glimpsed the girls playing in the woods. More than once he’d started to go meet them, introduce himself, bring them back to the house. He was lonely here. The visitors who still showed up at Aurora’s door at four a.m. used to bang around Lie’s place in the City. But that was long ago, before what Lie thought of as The Crash and what Rolling Stone had termed “the long tragic slide into madness of the onetime force majeur of underground rock and roll.” And his agent and his lawyer wouldn’t think much of him luring children to his woodland lair.
He sighed. Sensing some shift in the summer air, his melancholy perhaps, the sleeping kinkajou sighed as well, and trembled where it lay curled between his thighs. Lie lifted his head to gaze out the open window.
Outside the night lay still and deep over woods and lawns and the little dreaming cottage. A Maxfield Parrish scene, stars spangled across an ultramarine sky, twinkling bit of moon, there at the edge of the grass a trio of cottontails feeding peacefully amidst the dandelions. He had first been drawn to the place because it looked like this, like one of the paintings he collected. “Kiddie stuff,” his agent sniffed; “fairy tale porn.” Parrish and Rackham and Nielsen and Clarke. Tenniel prints of Alice’s trial. The DuFevre painting of the Erl-King that had been the cover of Lie Vagal’s second, phenomenally successful album. For the first two weeks after moving he had done nothing but pace the labyrinthine hallways, planning where they all would hang, this picture by this window, that one near another. All day, all night he paced; and always alone.
Because he was afraid his agent or Gram or one of the doctors would find out the truth about Kingdom Come, the reason he had really bought the place. He had noticed it the first time the realtor had shown the house. She’d commented on the number of windows there were—
“South-facing, too, the place is a hundred years old but it really functions as passive solar with all these windows. That flagstone floor in the green room acts as a heat sink—”
She nattered on, but Lie said nothing. He couldn’t believe that she didn’t notice. No one did, not Gram or his agent or the small legion of