And so Allison sat there, in the middle of this geriatric restaurant reeking of buttery foods, saying "Hello! Hello! Hello." Even though this woman was evil, she delivered the goods.

"Was there anything else added on to that?"

"Well - "

"Yes?" Fleeced or not, I was starved for connection.

"He says he misses you. He says he feels lost without you. He says he tries to speak to you, but he can't. He apologizes for having to speak through me."

My eyes were watering. I'd gotten what I wanted. Allison said to me, "I apologize for being hard to reach, but I have to do what I can to protect my channel into the afterworld."

"Yeah. Sure. Whatever."

"I'll be phoning you soon."

"I'm sure you will."

I didn't say thank you, and she didn't seem to expect it. She and her depressing pilled teal-fleece jacket left the restaurant. I threw some bills onto the table and followed her down the mall and out into the parking lot, where she got into her claptrap Cutlass. I took her license number, went home and called Lori, my mole. She gave me the name and address of one Cecilia Bateman, at an address in Lynn Valley, a 1960s subdivision that had been missed by every scourge of redevelopment since. I waited until dark and I went there. I parked a few houses down from Allison's, on one of the neighborhood's steeply sloping streets. The darkened trees, in silhouette, seemed as deep as lakes. Maybe at some point in its past, this neighborhood was sunny and scraped clean, but now it was a place where you could torture hitchhikers in complete freedom, the loudest of screams never getting past the rhododendron borders. I felt like I was fifteen again, spying with my old friend Kathy on the Farrells who, as teen legend had it, were highly sexed and given to orgies. The most we ever saw was handsome Mr. Farrell in his Y-fronts sucking beer and watching hockey, but to this day, Y-fronts get me going pretty quickly.

But back to Allison . . .

Or rather, back to Cecilia.

I walked up a driveway so steep as to feel dreamlike. From a real estate agent's point of view, chez Cecilia was a tear-down, but so is most of North and West Vancouver. This kind of 1963 house was so familiar to me that I didn't pause to acknowledge its ludicrous existence, at the top of a mountain where nobody should ever live, a yodel away from pristine wilderness, an existence made possible only through petroleum and some sort of human need for remaining remote while being relatively close to many others. Even in the dark, I could see that the house was stained a sun-drained blue, like bread mold, the same color as this Allison/Cecilia woman's car.

So yes, I saw her car in the garage - one car only. There were a number of lights on, and I could hear the dull glugging sounds of a TV in the background. I went through the garage, around to the back of the house. Nothing had been mowed in years, and my clothes were a magnet for leaves and cedar droppings and cobwebs.

Why was I even here? I didn't want to murder her, even though it would have been fairly easy to do so. I didn't want to confront her, because I didn't want to lose my connection to Jason. Cecilia's the only game in town.

I maneuvered closer to the back of the house and looked in the windows with impunity; there she was, rooting around in the freezer, removing a cardboard box containing a TV dinner. She put it on a butcher-block counter and removed the cardboard top. She read the French-language end of the carton, turned it around to the English end, then proceeded to timidly poke one, two, three holes in the dinner tray's plastic film. She opened her microwave's door, put the meal inside, punched some buttons and then - and then she just stood there for maybe three minutes, her arms across her chest, contemplating her existence. This is when I felt the chill. This is when I once more realized that Allison/Cecilia is basically me - an older version of me, but a woman marooned, manless and geographically remote, contemplating a life of iffy labor, a few thousand more microwaveable meals and then a coffin.

She had just removed her meal from the microwave when I heard a noise down in the carport, as did Allison. I could see headlights through the branches of various species of evergreen; Allison dropped (rather than put) her meal on the counter, reached into a drawer, found an amber-brown prescription container and removed one or more pills, which she swallowed without water. The headlights went out; I heard a door slam, and then watched as Allison stood in the center of her kitchen, the plastic membrane not yet removed from her meal's surface.

A youngish woman entered. Twenty-five? I couldn't make out what they were saying, but from my disastrous relationship with my own mother, the bingo zombie, I could tell that this young woman was Cecilia's daughter and that hurtful words were being hurled back and forth. God, how nice to be on the sidelines for this, and to not be the one hurling.

For a moment, my sympathies were with Allison, until I remembered that she was out to hose-clean my bank account while pin balling my emotions to the max.

In any event, they went off into the living room, which was on the second floor, up front, not visible from anywhere I could position myself. I circled the house a few times, decided it was time to quit the stalking and skulked down the driveway to my car. I forgot to brush all of the dead leaves and insects and webs from my outfit first, and discovered a spider crawling across my chest. I had a freakout, madly swiped the thing away from me, and when I got back in the car I was breathing like a dying coal miner as the car door's alarm went ding-ding-ding-ding-ding.

From there I drove to Reg's apartment. Reg was obviously surprised when I buzzed his intercom, but he said come on in. The building's lobby smelled of disinfectant, cooking and dust. The elevator dropped me off on the eighteenth floor, into a muggy, airless little hallway. Jason had once told me how claustrophobic and killingly dark Reg's place was, but it's hard to imagine it being as bad as all that. He was standing at the opened door. "Heather?"

Of course I blubbered, and Reg motioned me into his apartment. Even through the tears and the emotional funk, I could see it was not at all the way Jason had described it. I guess it was Scandinavian modern, interior decor not being something I usually notice. Reg could see my surprise above and beyond what was already on my face: "Ruth made me sell everything years ago. Jason told you it was a mausoleum in here, didn't he?"

I nodded.

"Well, it was. I think most of this stuff came from Dirndl or whatever those places are called. I kind of like it - the removal of excess things from our lives is always a blessing. Let me get you a drink."

"Water."

"Water then."

He brought back a glass of water, a bottle of white wine and some glasses. "Tell me what happened."

"It was her"

"I guessed as much. Go on."

"She's robbing me blind."

"How?"

"She's charging me five thousand bucks a message now."

Reg said nothing.

"And I'm paying it. She knows things that only ever went as far as our pillows. In tiny detail - things you couldn't guess at even if you knew Jason and me our entire lives."

"Go on."

"So I went to her house."

Reg flinched: "You didn't do anything rash, did you?"

"No. Nothing at all. She's a North Van widow living in a junker of a house in Lynn Valley . . . and she owns me."

"Have some wine. Calm down a minute."

He was right: I needed to level out, return to my normal stenographical demeanor so I could at least find some detachment. He changed the subject and we talked about small things, but I must have resembled a troll doll, covered with yard lint, my mascara running. A few minutes later he brought me a hot washcloth and a clothes brush; I scrubbed clean my face and removed the spiderwebs from my sweater. Reg then started the train of thought that has me here at four in the morning typing away.