Blind Lake

“This was springtime, and Southern California gets big spring rainstorms some years. Well, it started to rain later that day. Not just a little rain, either. ‘Raindrops big as di

“Couldn’t you just ask the house server?”

“Houses weren’t as smart in those days.”

“So you went to look for her.”

“Yup. I probably shouldn’t have done that, either, but my dad was ready to call the police… and I had a feeling I knew where she’d gone.”

“You should have told your parents first.”

“I should have, but I didn’t want to let on I knew how to get down to the storm drain myself. But you’re right — it would have been braver to tell them.”

“You were only eleven.”

“I was only eleven and I didn’t always do the bravest thing, so I snuck out of the house and ran through the rain to the gap in the fence, and I pushed under it and started to look for Porry.”

“I think that was brave. Did you find her?”

“You know how this comes out.”

“I’m pretending I don’t.”

“Porry had taken a bucket and gone down to the culvert to collect her own tadpoles. She was halfway back up that steep embankment when she got scared. It was the kind of scared where you can’t go forward and you can’t back up, so you don’t do anything at all. She was crouched there, crying, and the water in the culvert was ru

“But you saved her.”

“Well, I climbed down and took her arm and helped her up. The embankment was pretty slippery in the rain. We were almost at the fence when she said, ‘My tadpoles!’ So I had to go back and get her bucket. Then we went home.”

“And you didn’t tell on her.”

“I said I’d found her playing in the neighbors’ yard. We hid the bucket in the garage…”

“And forgot about it!”

“And forgot about it, but those tadpoles did what tadpoles do — they started to turn into frogs. My dad opened up the garage a couple of days later and the floor was covered with little green frogs, frogs jumping up his legs, frogs all over the car. An avalanche of frogs. He yelled, and we all came ru

“But she wouldn’t say why.”

“She wouldn’t say why.”

“And you never told.”

“Anyone. Until now.”

Tess smiled contentedly. “Yeah. Were the frogs okay?”

“Mostly. They headed into the hedges and gardens all up and down our street. It was a noisy summer that year, all that croaking.”

“Yes.” Tess closed her eyes. “Thank you, Chris.”

“You don’t have to thank me. Think you can sleep?”

“Yeah.”

“I hope the sound of the wind doesn’t keep you up.”

“Could be worse,” Tess said, smiling for the first time today. “Could be frogs.”

Marguerite listened from the doorway to the first part of the story, then retreated to her office and switched on the wall screen. Not to work. Just to watch.

It was near dusk on the Subject’s small patch of UMa47/E. Subject traversed a low canyon parallel to the setting sun. Maybe it was the long light, but he looked especially unwell, Marguerite thought. He had been scavenging for food for a long time now, subsisting on the mossy substance that grew wherever there was water and shade. Marguerite suspected the moss was not terribly nutritious, perhaps not even enough to sustain him. His skin was creased and shrunken. You didn’t have to be a physicist to parse that equation. Too many calories spent, too few ingested.

As the sky darkened a few stars emerged. The brightest was not a star at all but a planet: one of the system’s two gas giants, UMa47/A, almost three times the size of Jupiter and big enough to show a perceptible disc at its nearest approach. Subject stopped and swiveled his head from side to side. Taking his bearings, perhaps, or even performing some kind of celestial navigation.

She heard Chris closing Tessa’s bedroom door. He leaned into the office and said, “Mind if I join you?”

“Pull up a chair. I’m not really working.”

“Getting dark,” he said, gesturing at the wall screen.

“He’ll sleep soon. I know it sounds dumb, Chris, but I’m worried about him. He’s a long way from — well, anywhere. Nothing seems to live in this place, not even the parasites that feed on him at night.”

“Isn’t that a good thing?”

“But, technically, they’re probably not parasites at all. There must be a benevolent symbiosis, or the cities wouldn’t be full of them.”

“New York is full of rats. That doesn’t mean they’re desirable.”

“It’s an open question. But he’s clearly not well.”

“He might not make it to Damascus.”

“Damascus?”

“I keep thinking he’s St. Paul on the road to Damascus. Waiting for a vision.”

“I suppose we’d never know if he found it. I was hoping for something more tangible.”

“Well, I’m no expert.”

“Who is?” She turned away from the display. “Thanks for helping Tess settle down. I hope you’re not sick of telling her stories.”

“Not at all.”

“She likes your — what does she call them? Porry stories. Actually, I’m a little jealous. You don’t talk much about your family.”

“Tessa’s an easy audience.”

“And I’m not?”

He smiled. “You’re not eleven.”

“Did Tess ever ask you what happened to Portia as a grown-up?”

“Thankfully, no.”

“How did she die?” Marguerite asked, then: “I’m sorry, Chris. I’m sure you don’t want to talk about it. Really, it’s none of my business.”

He was silent a moment. God, she thought, I’ve offended him.

Then he said, “Portia was always a little more headstrong than she was bright. She never had an easy time at school. She dropped out of college and got in with a bunch of people, part-time dopers…”

“Drugs,” Marguerite said.

“It wasn’t just the drugs. She could always handle the drugs, I guess because they didn’t appeal to her all that much. But she had bad judgment about people. She moved into a guy’s trailer outside of Seattle and we didn’t hear from her for a while. She claimed she loved him, but she wouldn’t even put him on the phone.”

“Not a good sign.”

“This happened when my book about Galliano had just been published. I was passing through Seattle on a tour, so I called Porry up and arranged to meet her. Not where she lived — she insisted on that. It had to be somewhere downtown. Just her, not her boyfriend. She was a little reluctant about the whole thing, but she named a restaurant and we got together there. She showed up in low-rent drag and a big pair of sunglasses. The kind you wear to hide a bruise or a black eye.”

“Oh, no.”

“Eventually she admitted things weren’t going too well between her and her friend. She’d just landed a job, she was saving money to get a place of her own. She said not to worry about her, she was sorting things out.”

“The guy was beating her?”

“Obviously. She begged me not to get involved. Not to pull any ‘big brother shit,’ as she put it. But I was busy saving the world from corruption. If I could expose Ted Galliano to public scrutiny, why should I put up with this kind of thing from some trailer-park cowboy? So I got Porry’s address out of the directory and drove out there while she was at work. The guy was home, of course. He really didn’t look like any kind of threat. He was five-nine, with a rose tattoo on his ski