The Signature of All Things

too. She found Ambrose’s notebook once more in the top drawer of his desk. She opened to a random page, and found a sample of the familiar, mystical drivel:
    Nothing exists but the MIND, and it is propelled by FORCE . . . To not darken the day, to not glitter in shift . . . Away with the outwardly, away with the outwardly!
    She closed the book and made a rude noise. She could not bear another word of it. Why could the man never be clear ?
    She went back to her study and pulled the valise from under the divan. This time she looked more methodically at the contents. It was not a pleasant task, but she felt she must do it. She dug around the edges of the valise, seeking a hidden compartment, or anything she may have missed on her first examination. She combed through the pockets of Ambrose’s timeworn jacket, but found only a pencil stub.
    Then she returned to the pictures again—the three adept drawings of plants, and the dozens of obscene drawings of the same beautiful young man. She wondered if, upon closer examination, she could arrive at some alternate conclusion, but no; the portraits were too blunt, too sensual, too intimate. There was no other interpretation for this. Alma turned over one of the nudes, and noticed something written on the back, in Ambrose’s lovely, graceful script. It was tucked into a corner, like a faint and modest signature. But it was not a signature. It was two words only, in lowercase letters: tomorrow morning.
    Alma turned over another nude and saw, in the same lower right-handcorner, the same two words: tomorrow morning. One by one, she turned over every drawing. Each one said the same thing, in the same elegant, familiar handwriting: tomorrow morning, tomorrow morning, tomorrow morning . . .
    What was this supposed to mean? Was everything a deuced code?
    She took up a piece of paper and picked apart the letters of “tomorrow morning ,” rearranging them into other words and phrases:
NO ROOM, TRIM WRONG
RING MOON, MR. ROOT
O GRIM—NO WORT, MORN!
    None of it made sense. Nor did translating the words into French, Dutch, Latin, Greek, or German bring edification. Nor did reading them backward, nor assigning them numbers corresponding to their places in the alphabet. Perhaps, then, it wasn’t a code. Perhaps it was a deferral. Perhaps something was always going to happen with this boy tomorrow morning , or at least according to Ambrose . Well, that was very much like Ambrose, in any case: mysterious and off-putting. Perhaps he was simply delaying consummation with his handsome native muse: “I shall not bugger you now, young man, but I shall get around to it first thing tomorrow morning !” Perhaps this was how he had kept himself pure, in the face of temptation. Perhaps he had never touched the boy . Then why draw him naked in the first place?
    Another thought occurred to Alma: Had these drawings been a commission? Had somebody—some other sodomite, perhaps, and a rich one—paid Ambrose to make pictures of this boy? But why would Ambrose have needed money, when Alma had seen to it that he was so well provided for? And why would he have accepted such a commission, when he was a person of such delicate sensibilities—or purported to be? If his morality was merely a pretense, then clearly he had kept up the performance even after leaving White Acre. His reputation in Tahiti had not been that of a degenerate, or else the Reverend Francis Welles would not have taken the trouble to eulogize Ambrose Pike as “a gentleman of highest morality and purest character.”
    Why, then? Why this boy? Why a nude and aroused boy? Why such ahandsome young companion with such a distinctive face? Why take so much effort to make so many pictures? Why not draw flowers instead? Ambrose had loved flowers, and Tahiti was overrun with flowers! Who was this muse? And why had Ambrose gone to his death constantly planning to do something with this boy—and to do it, forever and endlessly, tomorrow morning ?

Chapter Twenty
    H enry Whittaker was dying. He was a ninety-one-year-old man, so this ought not to have been shocking, but Henry was both shocked and enraged to find himself in such a reduced state. He had not walked in months and could scarcely draw a full breath anymore, but still he could not believe his fate. Trapped in his bed, weak and diminished, his eyes trawled the room wildly, as though seeking a means of escape. He looked as though he were trying to find someone to bully, bribe,