This time a chuckle burst out of her, whole and clean. Good, she wasn’t as pissed at him. She cleared her throat. “I shouldn’t have done that, really. Maybe Bevlin does drink too much on occasion. I remember a get-together last year. Bevlin was ‘intensing’ everyone, as I think of it—you know, sitting in a corner pretending to brood and staring everyone down—until I realized he had a fifth of vodka behind him. I saw him turn a couple of times, sort of hunch over, and swig right out of the bottle.”

“When his parents came to the United States, where did they live?”

“New Hampshire. Bevlin always likes to say he’s from Croatia, first thing when he meets someone new—I think he believes it makes people think of Transylvania and vampires and things that go bump in the night—you know, it makes him sound like he’s steeped in otherworldly knowledge.”

“Even though Transylvania is in Romania.”

“I remember I said something smart-mouthed like that once to August.” She frowned.

“What?”

“August didn’t like that I’d said it, that I’d poked fun. Take a left at this first light, Cheney. Hey, would you look at all the tourists. They’ve got to be freezing.”

There were a good hundred out-of-towners huddled in jackets on the sidewalks of Sausalito, giving their custom to all the scores of clever tourist shops on either side of the street, ice cream cones and umbrellas in their hands.

“He didn’t like it? Why would he care?”

“You’ve got that bone in your mouth again. August felt I shouldn’t mock a man who might have much to offer the world sometime in the future.”

Cheney turned up Princess Street and began tacking his way up the hill.

“Do you think Bevlin Wagner has a lot to offer the world in the future, Julia?”

She stared out the window a moment, then slowly shook her head. “I don’t know, I really don’t. He has written one book on spirituality—To Watch Your Soul Take Flight, I have a copy, I’ll lend it to you. Read it. It—well, it helped me once.”

“All right, I will. But how can you not be a skeptic? I mean, finding lost children, maybe even forecasting disaster, but really, talking to dead people? Give me a break. It sounds absurd.”

“Everyone should be a skeptic, but keep an open mind. In the end, though, we all have to make up our own minds, Cheney.”

“Why should I really care one way or the other?”

“Because at various times in our lives we have need of something to help us make sense of things—of senseless tragedy, for example. I know that makes us more vulnerable to those who would deceive us—you bet it does. But if you’ve never felt ground under with despair or grief, if you’ve never been forced to focus inward rather than at your outward daily routine in the world, then I don’t think you should judge them or what they do because that inner eye of yours is closed to it, as they’d say.”

“Inner eye?”

“That’s their word for it. They speak of it as a door deep in our minds that cracks open occasionally, usually when we have need of spiritual comfort. Of course you can’t prove it with any sort of science or critical argument.”

“Is your inner eye open now?”

“No. That’s Bevlin’s house up there, perched right over the cliff.”

CHAPTER 29

Cheney parked the Audi on the narrow curb at the base of a dozen steps that led upward to an eagle’s-nest house.

They walked up the thick old wooden steps to Wagner’s house, skinny trees and brush pressing in on either side—it felt like a small wilderness, dense and wild.

The front door was ajar and so they walked into a small, dimly lit entrance hall. Cheney called out, “Is anyone here?”

“A moment,” a man’s shout came from upstairs. “Go into the living room, on the right.”

The small front room was all windows that looked toward the bay—the tip of Belvedere, Angel Island, even Alcatraz was in view. Beanbags, all of them bright red, were scattered throughout the room, some in small groupings, some alone. The walls were bare, no bookshelves, no photos, nothing but those dozen or so bright red beanbags.

In less than a minute, Bevlin Wagner walked into the living room, wearing only a thick white towel knotted below his waist.

“Hi, Bevlin,” Julia said, evidently finding nothing strange in this.

He walked up to her, leaned down, and kissed her mouth, then straightened to study her face. “You look beautiful, Julia. I was so worried about you yesterday, you were so pale, so frightened.”