By the light of the moon

my talent, it's yours,' she reminded him.
    'You learned how to fold.'
    'Yeah, started to learn, but I haven't learned this,' she said,
withdrawing her hand.
    Shepherd had risen from the rock bench. He put his right hand on
the bag of peanuts, on Dylan's hand. 'House.'
    'Yes, a house,' Dylan replied impatiently, his compulsion to act
growing more powerful by the second. He danced from foot to foot
like a child overcome by an urgent need to go to the bathroom. 'I
see a house.'
    'I see a house,' said Shep.
    'I see a big house overlooking the lake.'
    'I see a big house overlooking the lake,' said Shep.
    'What're you doing, buddy?'
    Instead of repeating What are you doing, buddy , as Dylan
expected, the kid said, 'I see a big house overlooking the
lake.'
    'Huh? You see a house? You see it, too?'
    'Cake?'
    'Peanuts, Shep, peanuts.'
    'Cake?'
    'You've got your hand on it, you're looking right at it, Shep.
You can see it's a bag of peanuts.'
    'Tahoe cake?'
    'Oh. Yeah, maybe. They probably have cake at this place in
Tahoe. Lots of cake. All kinds of cake. Chocolate cake, lemon cake,
spice cake, carrot cake—'
    'Shep doesn't like carrot cake.'
    'No, I didn't mean that, I was wrong about that, they don't have
any carrot cake, Shep, just every other kind of friggin' cake in
the world.'
    'Cake,' said Shepherd, and the New Mexico desert folded away as
a cool green place folded toward them.

46
    Great pines, both conical and spreading varieties,
many standing over two hundred feet tall, built sublimely scented
palaces on the slopes around the lake, green rooms of perpetual
Christmas ornamented with cones as small as apricots and others as
large as pineapples.
    The famous lake, seen through felicitous frames of time-worked
branches, fulfilled its reputation as the most colorful body of
water in the world. From a central depth greater than fifteen
hundred feet to shoreline shallows, it shimmered iridescently in
countless shades of green, blue, and purple.
    Folding from the magnificent barrenness of the desert to the
glory of Tahoe, Jilly exhaled the possibility of scorpions and
cactus moths, inhaled air stirred by butterflies and by brown
darting birds.
    Shepherd had conveyed them to a flagstone footpath that wound
through the forest, through a softness of feathery pine shadows and
woodland ferns. At the end of the path stood the house: Wrightian,
stone and silvered cedar, enormous yet in exquisite harmony with
its natural setting, featuring deeply cantilevered roofs and many
tall windows.
    'I know this house,' Jilly said.
    'You've been here?'
    'No. Never. But I've seen pictures of it somewhere. Probably in
a magazine.'
    'It's definitely an Architectural Digest sort of
place.'
    Broad flagstone steps led up to an entry terrace overhung by a
cedar-soffited, cantilevered roof.
    Ascending to the terrace between Dylan and Shepherd, Jilly said,
'This place is connected to Lincoln Proctor?'
    'Yeah. I don't know how, but from the spoor, I know he was here
at least once, maybe more than once, and it was an important place
to him.'
    'Could it be his house?'
    Dylan shook his head. 'I don't think so.'
    The front door and flanking sidelights doubled as sculpture: an
Art Deco geometric masterpiece half bronze and half stained
glass.
    'What if it's a trap?' she worried.
    'No one knows we're coming. It can't be a trap. Besides... it
doesn't feel that way.'
    'Maybe we should run a little surveillance on the joint for a
while, watch it from the trees, till we see who comes and
goes.'
    'My instinct says go for it. Hell, I don't have a choice. The
compulsion to keep moving is like... a thousand hands shoving on my
back. I've got to ring that doorbell.'
    He rang it.
    Although Jilly considered sprinting away through the trees, she
remained at Dylan's side. She in her changefulness no longer had
any refuge in the ordinary world where she could claim to belong,
and her only place, if she indeed had one at all, must be with the
O'Conner brothers, as their only place must be now with her.
    The man who opened the door was tall, handsome, with prematurely
snow-white hair and extraordinary gray eyes the shade of tarnished
silver. Those piercing eyes surely had the capacity to appear
steely and intimidating, but at the moment, they were as warm and
as without threat as the gray skeins of a gentle spring rain.
    His voice, which Jilly had always assumed must be electronically
enhanced during his broadcasts, possessed precisely the reverberant
timbre and the smoky