The Barker Street Regulars

on his face or the hair on his back. I couldn’t even see his face. His white tail wagged merrily in the air above an apparently nonexistent dog. He was pulling me toward someone or something near the gate to Ceci’s yard. There’d been no nuclear attack here, of course. There wouldn’t be now. And the murk was just that, a meteorological phenomenon, fog, neither toxic nor otherworldly. No one has succumbed to it or been wafted here enshrouded in its vapors.
     

Chapter Twenty-nine
     
    O N A DESERTED DEAD-END road on a dark, foggy night, men lurk in the shrubbery only yards from the scene of a recent murder. They are ready to spring at me. Rowdy approaches them. He approaches in the hope of a tummy rub. He threatens wet kisses. My deduction? “Silver Blaze.”
    Only one of the two men sprang out: Robert. He was far from glad to see me. In fact, his stage-whispered greeting was, believe it or not, “Go home! This is no place for the weaker sex.”
    Truly. But when I’m dealing with a person of Robert’s age, I always strive to take generational differences in attitude into account. Most of the time, there aren’t any. Now there were. “I’m sorry,” I answered at normal volume. “Kimi would have liked to come along, but I’m afraid we’ll just have to make do with a male.” Without pausing, I added, “Your message arrived ahead of schedule. If I deciphered it correctly, you did ask for help.”
    “You,” Robert whispered in disgust.
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “You have alarmed Althea. You should never have done that.”
    “I haven’t seen Althea since this morning. I don’t know how I’m supposed to have alarmed her. Wait! Yes, I do. You thought I’d have to take the message to her, didn’t you? You didn’t think I’d be able to figure it out for myself. Well, if I’d had to take it to her, then she really would’ve been alarmed, wouldn’t she? You should’ve—”
    From the bushes came a wordless injunction to be quiet. I heard the sound of a car engine. The beam of distant headlights glowed through the fog. Before I could decide whether to vanish into the shrubbery or resume my disguise as a dog walker, the lights faded as the car turned onto Upper Norwood. Popping out of the unpruned hedge by Ceci’s gate, Hugh took Robert and me to task so severely that Rowdy plunked his bottom on the ground and listened, too. Although Althea had largely disabused me of my newfound flirtation with the belief in thought transmission, I realized that Rowdy was watching me. It was too dark to see him. But I could feel his gaze. I reached down to rest a hand on his head.
    According to Hugh, Robert and I were making a mockery of a serious situation. He was, of course, right.
    “How serious is it?” I asked. “Do you have some reason to believe that something is going to happen tonight? Now?”
    “I warned you of this!” Robert told Hugh. “The cipher message was your idea, I remind you, and—” Ignoring Robert, Hugh informed me that after leaving the Gateway, the men had discussed the entire matter and decided to interrogate Ceci. In a phone conversation, they’d learned that she was eagerly expecting a reunion with Simon this very evening. Indeed, she’d been so thrilled by the prospect that they’d obtained only a little information from her about the events preceding Jonathan’s murder. It had been Jonathan, not Ceci, who had called Irene Wheeler to insist that she meet with him. On the phone, and later in person, Jonathan had demanded that Irene return every cent Ceci had ever paid her. According to Ceci, Jonathan had said terrible things to her and to Irene as well, but the men had been unable to discover exactly what the terrible things were.
    “When Robert challenged her on the point,” Hugh whispered indignantly, “she had the audacity to hang up on us.”
    “Ceci is afraid of ending up at the Gateway,” I ventured, “or in another nursing home.” It seemed to me, too, although I didn’t say it, that Irene and her confederate, the man with the bulbous forehead, might, after all, be guilty only of conning Ceci. Irene’s psychic powers might not be genuine, but her powers of persuasion were real. And the man who’d tried to drown poor Tracker had certainly conspired with Irene to create the credible illusion of Simon’s return. Moreover, Ceci depended exclusively on Irene for her sense of contact with Simon and for the wondrous prospect of earthly