The morning of the twenty-first day. Wet red light on a lavender sky, one long scorching streak against the horizon, alive and fluid. The light seems drier somehow as it bleeds toward me through the trees, the dust and ash of dawn, an afterglow. And the trees themselves look black as burned skeletons.

Here in the woods, I never dream of fire.

Mac Parris climbed out on the gray side of sleep and waded toward his door, or rather toward the sound of knocking, the three short raps echoing again, but louder, from the vapors of his dream. By the time he reached his front door he was sufficiently awake to realize how dark the room was, so he switched on the living room light and squinted at the door in the sudden brightness, and now it seemed that the knocking had been a part of his dream and that he had been sleepwalking again. He rubbed his face one more time, pulling at his cheeks. It was then he heard the footsteps on his porch, and a moment later it dawned on him that somebody real had been knocking on his door.

He opened the door just in time to see a young woman heading back down off his porch steps. She turned at the sound of the wooden door coming open. Parris pushed open the storm door and put one foot onto the porch. "Oh," she said. "I didn't think you were home."

She was wearing a brown leather jacket and carrying a small brown attaché case. Her hair was long and brown and her eyes were brown and she appeared to be standing in relief against the flat background of sidewalk and street and neighborhood. What startled Parris most was that her hair seemed alive with tiny lights, it sparkled and glistened. Then he realized that a fine snow was falling and melting in her hair and that the drops of moisture reflected the sunset, the blazing red of an April afternoon.

"You'll have to give me a minute," Parris told her. "I just now woke up."

"Oh," she said again. "I didn't mean to wake you, I'm sorry."

"Is it really snowing," he asked, "or am I still dreaming?"

"It's really snowing."

"What time is it?"

She glanced at her wristwatch, a slender black leather band on a thin wrist. "It's 5:28."

"Just two hours ago it was 60 degrees," he said, "and now it's snowing. This is still April 27th, isn't it?"

"It still is." She smiled and shifted the attaché case to her other hand. "You are Mac Parris, aren't you?"

She looked too young to be a federal agent, as well as too guileless. Her smile seemed sincere and almost hopeful and there was no trace of the feral in it. Even so, he waited, giving her an opportunity to continue with, "otherwise known as." But she said nothing more. She stood very straight and made steady eye contact with him. The leather jacket and dark blue skirt -- stylish but inexpensive -- made him think she might be a sales rep of some kind, except that salespeople these days usually made their pitches via phone and fax lines, and this young woman lacked the nervous aggression of somebody who worked on commission.

"What can I do for you?" he asked.

"My name's Diana Westover. I came to talk to you about this." She balanced her attaché case on one knee and popped it open and took out a folded newspaper. Then she closed the case again and when she came onto the porch to hand the newspaper to Parris he saw that she was taller than he had thought, maybe five-six or seven. Her legs were slender but strong and she moved with the natural grace of a woman too preoccupied to be conscious of how she moved.

"Maybe you've seen it already," she said, and held the newspaper out to him. "This piece here." She pointed to a short article on page two slugged Human Leg Bone Found in Trash.

A portion of the left leg of an adolescent male Caucasian, Parris read, neatly sawed off at the knee joint and with the muscle and flesh in the initial stages of decomposition, had been found two days earlier in a dumpster near a playground in the center of town. The limb had sustained a compound fracture, but authorities could not yet speculate as to whether the fracture had preceded dismemberment or was a result of it. The condition of the tissue suggested that it had been previously frozen.

"Yesterday afternoon part of an arm was found in a landfill about ninety miles from here," she told him.

Parris lowered the paper. So she wasn't a sales rep after all. Her eyes were clear and bright and her gaze was made steady not by hardness but resolve. Her perfume smelled of sandalwood. "This is somebody you know?" he asked.

"Oh," she said. "I should have told you. I suspect that they belonged to..." She blinked once, a languid, heart-steadying blink. "I think it's my brother."

Parris drew in a slow deep breath and looked past her into his yard. The sunset had painted the opposite side of the street in a wash of pink, and the green of his yard was darkened to a shadow under a powder of snow. Beyond the edge of his porch everything was a watercolor, a Turneresque impression. But here beneath his porch roof the first smirking characters of a Bosch panorama were peeking around the corners. He had the dizzying sense of having only dreamed that he had awakened to answer the door to this young woman.

"I don't understand why you're showing this to me," he said.

"I'm looking for somebody to help me find out if this really is my brother. And if so, who did this to him."

"But why..." If this was a dream it was a new kind for him, not like the others, from which he awakened seared from the heat of imagined flames. "Look, I'm a filmmaker," he told her. "What you want is a private investigator."

"And as far as I can tell, there's not a single one living within a fifty mile radius of here."

"Even so, I don't understand why you came to me."

"I was told I should speak with you."

"Told by whom?"

"Henry Carlyle." Her smile broadened just a bit now, and he thought he detected on her cheeks the delicate suffusion of a blush. "I'm studying piano with him."

Parris chuckled softly and shook his head. "The longer I talk with you, the more confused I become."

"Henry said that you might be available to help me. That you have the right instincts and the right equipment to do the job. He said that you're used to working odd hours, that you enjoy a challenge, and that you don't frighten easily. He also said that you're the only person young and angry and sober enough to get this job done for what little I'm able to pay."

"You and Henry must do a lot of talking. When do you have time for the piano?"

"He thinks very highly of you," she said.

"His opinion is hardly reliable."

"Just because a man has a drinking problem doesn't mean that he's a liar. Some men are more trustworthy when they drink."

"You've had a lot of experience with drinking men?" he asked.

"I've had my share."

So, Parris thought, and with unfocused eyes he regarded a point just above her left ear, her brown hair blurring nicely, softening, filling the frame of his vision. So. Early this morning he had completed the rough cut on his wolverine film and he had intended to deliver the video to Henry Carlyle this evening. During the next two weeks or so, while Henry extemporized a piano soundtrack for the film, Parris would consider himself on hiatus, at large, on holiday. He would sleep late and watch old movies on TV and read a few books and maybe give a thought or two to his next project. It was a kind of pupal stage for him, this respite before the final edit and then the circus of distribution and promotion. He rarely went about in public during these two weeks, he explored no new territories of the mind or the soul, he lay low, he courted a kind of emotional dormancy in which the past had never happened and the future was worth little more than a passing glance. He had always considered these periods a necessary time of recharging, of gathering the strength to see the current project through to its end and to prepare to tackle another one, another self-imposed purpose to his life, another temporary reason to keep on living.

But now there was a vague high-pitched whistling in his right ear and his heart was racing. The scent of sandalwood sharpened the air and the snow was pink and an image flashed through his mind of a boy reaching out for him through a curtain of fire. When he looked again at Diana Westover she had not moved but stood there waiting, waiting, neither smiling nor frowning now, her brown eyes steady with resolve but also warm and soft and he knew that one firm no from him and she would say Oh. Oh... well... in that case thank you for your time, I'm sorry if I disturbed you, and she would walk away to that car parked at the curb, that car he had just now noticed, a Chevette, powder blue, five, maybe six years old, the rusted dent in the front fender not much younger. The car was battered but waxed and clean -- a condition, he guessed, equally indicative of the owner.

He could tell her no and she would not argue or make him feel bad about it. She was a sturdy girl, this sister in search of her dismembered brother; not emotionless but practical. She would regroup, consider her problem from another angle, attack it from some other direction. So this one would be easy.

Yet he stood there for what seemed to him a long time trying to find the proper words of refusal. And in the end he merely turned and stepped back to the door and held it open for her, because it was April after all, and his house was empty, and in just-spring, when the goat-footed balloonman is whistling far and wee, and when a dreamboy has smiled back at you from within a womb of fire, reminding you, among other things, of old tragedies and errors... it is physically impossible at a time like that to say no to a girl with snowlights in her hair.

The details of Tony Jakowski's life and times, sketchy as they were, had an unsettling effect on Parris, an effect exacerbated by their delivery. Diana Westover was calm and methodical -- a cynic might even have called her cold. She sat very straight in the center of his sofa, sipping tea, her knees pressed tightly together, right foot hooked behind her left ankle. She took her Earl Grey straight, without lemon or sugar or cream -- just as, by all appearances, she took her life; undiluted.

A few days earlier Diana had been reading the local newspaper over breakfast when she came across the two-inch article about a human leg bone found in a dumpster. She paused, lowered her spoon into the cereal bowl, and exhaled slowly, filled with a certitude that the brother she had not heard from in two months was dead. She sat there at the table for a half-hour, breathing shallowly, hoping with the force of reason to dissuade herself. But the feeling could not be shaken loose, the knowledge would not be denied. Tony was dead.

She telephoned the state police and identified the leg bone as that of her brother. They were interested and kind and spoke to her at length, but in the end there was no proof that this body part belonged to Tony. There was no proof that Tony was dead. Nobody else had reported anyone by the name of Tony Jakowski missing, and since it was typical for Diana herself not to hear from him for weeks or even months at a time, he could not legitimately be listed as a missing person. Nor could the police check on his whereabouts, because there was no known address for him. Diana could only suggest that he probably lived somewhere between Pittsburgh and Buffalo. So it was impossible for the police to conduct a search. They agreed to keep her advised if other body parts turned up, but they were not encouraging as to an eventual identification.

All of this she had talked about with Henry Carlyle the next evening. Henry had sipped his bourbon in semi-darkness and then asked her to play the Berlioz piece for him. Afterward, as she sat with fingertips still poised lightly on the piano keys, she felt the lightest of kisses graze the top of her head. She had not even heard the old man pad up behind her. But he kissed her once and laid a warm but gnarled hand on her shoulder and that was when he said, "I have a friend whom you should meet."

Copyright © 2002 by Randall Silvis