Strangers

and that day before Christmas, the drawer was more than half full. He didn't look at the return addresses but carried everything back to the car with the intention of reading his mail at breakfast.
        The Cottage, a popular restaurant for decades, was on the east side of Pacific Coast Highway, on the slope above the road. At that hour, the breakfast rush had passed, and the lunch crowd had not yet arrived. Dom was given a table by the window with the best view. He ordered two eggs, bacon, cottage fries, toast, and grapefruit juice.
        As he ate, he went through the mail. In addition to magazines and bills, there was a letter from Lennart Sane, the wonderful Swedish agent who handled translation rights in Scandinavia and Holland, and a padded envelope from Random House. As soon as he saw the publisher's address on the label, he knew what he had. Finally, his mind began to clear, the fuzziness partially dispelled by excitement. He put down the toast he had been eating and tore open the large envelope, and an advance copy of his first novel slid out. No man can know what a woman feels when taking her newborn child in her arms for the first time, but a novelist who holds the first copy of his first book must experience a joy similar to that of the mother who looks upon the face of her baby for the first time and feels its warmth through the swaddling clothes.
        Dom kept the book beside his plate and could barely look away from it. He had finished his meal and had ordered coffee by the time he was able to tear his attention from Twilight and examine what mail remained. Among other things, there was a plain white envelope with no return address, which contained a single page of white paper on which had been typewritten two sentences that rocked him: The sleepwalker would be well-advised to search the past for the source of his problem. That is where the secret is buried.
        He read the passage again, astonished. The sheet of paper rattled as a tremor passed through him. The back of his neck went cold.
        

    2.
        

    Boston, Massachusetts
        
        When Ginger got out of the cab, she was in front of a six-story, brick, Victorian Gothic building. A blustery wind slapped her, and the bare-limbed trees along Newbury Street rasped, clattered, and clicked: the sound of rattling bones. Huddling against the bitter wind, she scurried past a low iron fence and entered 127 Newbury, the former Hotel Agassiz, one of the city's finest historic landmarks, now converted into condominiums. She had come to see Pablo Jackson, about whom she knew only what she had read in yesterday's Boston Globe.
        She had left Baywatch after George departed for the hospital and after Rita went off to do some last-minute Christmas shopping, for she had been afraid they would try to stop her. In fact, the maid, Lavinia, had pleaded with her not to go out alone. Ginger had left a note, explaining her whereabouts, and she hoped they would not be too upset.
        When Pablo Jackson opened his door, Ginger was surprised. That he was a black man, that he was in his eighties those things were not surprising, for she had learned as much about him from the article in the Globe. However, she was not prepared for such a vital and vigorous octogenarian. He was about five-eight, slight, but age had not bowed his legs, bent his back, or rounded his shoulders. He stood militarily erect, in white shirt and sharply creased black trousers, and there was a sprightliness and youthfulness in his smile and in the way he waved her into the apartment. His thick kinky hair had not receded, but it had gone so white that it seemed to glow with a spectral light, giving him a curiously mystical aura. He escorted Ginger into the living room, moving with the stride of a man forty or fifty years his junior.
        The living room was a surprise, too, not what she expected either of a sedate old monument like the Hotel Agassiz or of Pablo Jackson, an elderly bachelor. The walls were cream-colored, and the contemporary sofas and chairs were upholstered in a matching fabric. An Edward Fields carpet of the same creamy shade provided relief from the dominant scheme by means of a deeply sculpted wave pattern. Color was provided by pastel accent pillows - yellow, peach, green, and blue - on the sofas, and from two large oil paintings, one a Picasso. The result was an airy, bright, warm, and modern decor.
        Ginger settled into one of