The Darkest Evening of the Year

might be called a simpleton’s intuition, she has developed this skill with which she fills the lonely hours.
    Now, from the clutter of seamstress tools on the desk, Moongirl selects a small pair of scissors with thin, sharply pointed blades. She uses them to snip at the finished embroidery on the doll’s dress. She works both sides of the cloth, and soon she has a small colorful pile of cut threads that she has pulled loose from the garment.
    Piggy wisely makes no comment about this destruction of her work. She gives no indication that she even sees what her mother is doing.
    “Sandwich good?” Moongirl asks.
    “Good,” says Piggy.
    If Moongirl really intends to set her daughter afire tomorrow night, this is one of the last opportunities she will have to torment the child. She will not waste it.
    “Have some potato salad,” she says.
    Piggy makes a wordless sound of agreement, but instead of prying the lid off the container, she takes another bite of the sandwich.
    Considering all the places Harrow might have been if he had made different choices, he is fortunate to be here, now, for this. He had once thought that only money mattered. But he has since discovered that money matters only because it can buy power, and power matters only if it is exercised with imagination and without conscience.
    More than anyone he has ever met, Moongirl understands power, the possibilities of it, the beauty of it, and the art with which it must be employed in order to achieve the most satisfying effects.
    She says, “It’s really good potato salad, Piggy.”
    Because the world turns and the world changes, the shutter-piercing blade of sunlight should have moved off the cut-glass vase by now, but still it inspires within the bevels a pattern of crimson thorns.
    “Piggy?”
    For the first time, Harrow notices that the prisms in the vase separate the blue and yellow wavelengths out of the sunshine and translate them to the ceiling. Above the girl, an auroral luminosity shimmers on the plaster.
    Moongirl is staring at her daughter with feral intensity. The veins are swollen in her temples.
    Tomorrow night, the fire, but now the fireworks.

 
    Chapter
31
    W hen he saw the man step out of the Quonset hut, a tiny figure nearly a quarter-mile away, Bobby Onions eased up on the accelerator and coasted forward.
    “Who is the guy?” he asked.
    Vern said, “He calls himself Eliot Rosewater.”
    “You don’t think that’s his name?”
    “No.”
    “What’s it say on the check?”
    “He pays cash.”
    Slowly the Land Rover rocked across a series of potholes.
    When Bobby consulted the rearview mirror, Vern knew what he would see. They had traveled little more than a quarter of a mile from the county road, but it looked like a long way back.
    Directly ahead, the board-flat plain began to rise to foothills about a thousand yards beyond the buildings. To the east, the land dwindled into a haze of dust, and far away to the west, it melted into the declining sun.
    Bobby asked, “Why’s the meet have to be in such a godforsaken place?”
    “The desert has its own stark beauty,” Vern said.
    “What’re you—pimping for the Mojave Chamber of Commerce?”
    “Come on, Bobby, pick up some speed. He’s waiting.”
    The land was as colorless as concrete, and most of the sun-parched vegetation bristled gray, except for swaths of struggling purple sage.
    “Too lonely,” Bobby said.
    “Will you relax? He doesn’t want to risk being seen with me. I committed a couple felonies for him today—remember? And since I’d rather not lose my PI license, discretion is fine with me, too.”
    In these last hours of the day, the desert light hammered down through the parched air as hard as it had done at noon. The gnarled and stunted mesquite resembled wrought-iron sculpture, and the curved profiles of the Quonsets had edges sharp enough to cut the sky.
    “Besides,” Vern said, “he’s not gonna leave his plane untended out here just so we can all meet in a cozy doughnut shop. I’ve dealt with him before. It’s all right.”
    “When before?”
    “Eight months ago. I searched this architect’s place for him.”
    “What architect?”
    “That’s already more than you need to know.”
    “Back then, the rally was here?”
    “The meet was here, yeah.”
    “You didn’t use me. Who’d you use for backup?”
    Vern sighed. “If you have to know, it was Dirk Cutter.”
    “For God’s sake, Vern, he’s brain-dead. You’d use Dirk