| which shook as violently as if he had the DTs. What’s happening to me? he thought. But he knew that wasn‘t the right question to ask. “Why did you come?” That was the right question, the one Suparwita had asked him in his dream. From what he‘d read on the subject all the people in your dreams were aspects of yourself. This being so, he had been asking himself the question. Why had he returned to Bali? When he‘d left after Holly Marie‘s death he was certain that he‘d never return. And yet, here he was. Moira had hurt him, it was true, but what had happened with Holly had hurt him most of all. He ate a meal without tasting it, and by the time he had reached his destination, he could not have said what it was. His stomach felt neither full nor empty. Like the rest of him, it seemed to have ceased to exist. Holly Marie Moreau was buried in a small sema—cemetery—southwest of the village where she‘d been raised. As a rule, modern-day Balinese cremated their dead, but there were pockets of people—original Balinese like those in Tenganan, those who weren‘t Hindu—who did not. Balinese believed that seaward-west was the direction of hell, so sema were always built—when they were built at all—to the seaward-west of the village. Here, in the south of Bali, that was southwest. The Balinese were terrified of cemeteries, certain that the uncremated bodies were the undead, wandering around at night, being |
lenses the color of the professor‘s eyes. Hererra lived in the Santa Cruz barrio of Seville, in a beautiful threestory stucco house painted white and yellow, whose upper-story windows were guarded by magnificent wrought-iron balconies. Its facade formed one side of a small plaza in the center of which was an old well that had been turned into an octagonal fountain. Small haberdashery and crockery shops lined the other three sides, their quaint fronts shaded by palm and orange trees. The door opened at their knock, and when Tracy gave him their names a well-dressed young man escorted them into the high-ceilinged wood-and-marble entryway. There were fresh white and yellow flowers in a tall porcelain vase on a polished fruitwood table in the center, while on a marquetry sideboard an engraved silver bowl was filled to overflowing with fragrant oranges. A piano melody, soft and sinuous, came to them. They could see an Old World drawing room with a wall of ebony bookshelves illuminated by raking light from a line of French doors that led out onto an inner courtyard. There was an elegant escritoire, a matching pair of sofas of cinnamon-colored leather, a sideboard on which were arranged five delicate orchids, like girls at a beauty pageant. But the drawing room was dominated by an antique spinet piano behind which sat a large man with an enormous shock of luxuriant white hair brushed straight back off his wide, intelligent forehead. His body was bent in an attitude of exacting concentration |
