Your Heart Belongs to Me

love to hear that story, her kindness, what she did for you, put it in my Ismay-memory book.”
    “I’ll tell you sometime, Wanda June. I promise. But right now, I was hoping you might put me in touch with her sister, Ismena.”
    “Ismena misses Ismay so terrible, she would enjoy a polite young man like you with something good to say about the late lamented. I’ll give you her number.”
     

 
    FORTY-SIX

    I n the Mercedes sedan, on the return trip to the airport, George Zane drove, Cathy Sienna rode shotgun, and Ryan slouched in the back, slowly shuffling again and again through the photographs of the three women—Teresa, Lily, Ismay—each of them having been one half of a set of identical twins, each of them with a living sister.
    According to Samantha, good stories had deep texture. They acquired texture in numerous ways. The texture of character faults and virtues, of intentions contrasted with actions, of personal philosophy shaped by backstory, of mannerisms and habits, of contrasts and contradictions, of mundanities and eccentricities, of points of view and styles of speech. The texture of vivid visual images, of smells that came off the page, of sounds that resonated in the mind’s ear, of metaphor and simile. She could list dozens of sources for narrative texture. Ryan couldn’t remember them all.
    In the texture, you began to see patterns. Some were patterns of plot, which you could think of as like the center lines on a highway and the guardrails at its extremes, there to be sure that you got to your destination without getting lost in byways of meaningless event. Others were patterns of the obvious theme, to give the story purpose that made it meaningful, in part just as the rules of construction for a sonnet gave it meaning, in part just as the truth of human suffering in a blues song made it worth singing.
    The most difficult patterns of all to understand, the most intriguing, and usually the most ominous were those that arose from subtext, not from the surface theme but from the implicit meaning of the tale. The less you thought about those patterns, the more you understood them, for they were the patterns of primal truths, some of which the modern mind rejected on a conscious level.
    Studying the photos of the three dead women, brooding about their living sisters, Ryan suspected that this pattern of twins, though seemingly the key to the plot, rose more from subtext and that the more intently he focused on it, the farther he traveled from the revelation he sought.
    The yellow wind made pendulums of the traffic lights suspended over intersections, tore dead fronds off tall palm trees, harried tumbleweed out of vacant lots and along busy streets, buffeted the car, hissed at the windows, and in general made such an exhibition of its power that a pagan might have cast basketfuls of flower petals into it as an offering, to solicit exemption from the miseries of the coming storm.
    Returning the photographs to the envelope, he said, “George, Cathy, I’m flying out to Denver from here. I don’t know that I’ll really need anyone with me, but there’s a longshot that I may have a security issue. I’d feel a lot more comfortable with someone who had a license to carry.”
    “We’re both cool to carry in Colorado,” Zane said, “and Cathy has all the gun training that I have. Fact is, she may be the better shot.”
    “I’ll lay twenty to one on that,” she said.
    Ryan asked, “Are you up for Colorado, Cathy?”
    “I only brought one change of clothes in my overnight bag.”
    “That’s all you’ll need. We’ll be going back to California tomorrow.”
    In truth, it didn’t seem likely that Ismena Moon, a fifty-eight-year-old woman described as a sweetheart, would prove to be a threat to Ryan’s physical safety.
    He wanted someone with him more for company than protection. He had been something of a loner the past year, and solitude had taken its toll.
    Denver in particular seemed to be a dangerous place for him to be alone. On his previous visit, he had arrived confused, as he would be arriving this time, and he had departed confounded, in a condition close to despair.
    Besides, since he had first seen Cathy this afternoon in Spencer Barghest’s garage, Ryan had felt there was a question he wanted to ask her. Needed to ask her. A question of considerable importance. He just didn’t know what it might be. He sensed the question half-formed in the back of his mind. Perhaps it would