I heard a noise above me and cringed. “Molly?” I called.

I waited. Nothing.

Brutus came closer to me, his nails clicking along the cement floor.

Slowly, I turned around.

I saw the wide piece of tape first. It covered her mouth. She was bound to a large pipe against the back wall. Even in the faint light, I knew she was dead.

The trap door slammed shut above me.

I WAS STILL SCREAMING my head off when it opened again, not more than a few seconds later. Molly, red-faced, was leaning over the opening, saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Brutus, unhappy with both of us, shot up past me and out of the basement. I gained a modicum of control over myself and did the same.

“I thought I heard you call to me,” she said, only slightly less upset than I was. “It’s so darned dark in this hallway, I accidentally knocked the door shut. I’m so sorry, honey, I know I scared the bejesus out of you. Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

As soon as we were out of the house, she said, “So there wasn’t anybody down there after all?”

The optimist.

“I wish I could say there wasn’t.”

She stared at me a moment, the color draining from her face. “She’s dead?”

I nodded, then put an arm around her big shoulders and walked out to the front yard with her, leaving the gate open. I stayed there; she kept walking, her eyes on Brutus, who waited in her own front yard.

I used the cellular phone to call Frank’s pager and left a message on his voice mail, asking him to meet me at the address on Sleeping Oak. I dialed the City Desk next. Let John bitch about the order of the calls, I thought. Lydia answered on the fourth ring. I stood in the ankle-deep grass, watching Molly walk back to her house, looking twice as old as she had just moments before. I told Lydia to call the police, but to mention to them that I had already called Frank’s pager. I told her I would be waiting in front of the house. I heard John yelling, “Is that Kelly?” in the background, told Lydia I didn’t want to run up the bill, and hung up.

The phone rang almost immediately. I thought it might be John, but it was Frank.

“I’m on my way,” he said. “I’m not too far from you.”

“Hurry,” I said, looking through the gate, suddenly noticing that there were long leafy stems growing out of a place at the far corner of the yard. The stump of an oak tree.

“You think she might still be alive?” he asked.

At my feet, another trail of ants.

“No. But hurry.”

BY THE TIME I finished writing my contribution to the story on Rosie Thayer, I was fighting off a serious case of the megrims. The story itself made me feel down, but that wasn’t all that was getting to me. The general atmosphere at the paper was tense. I learned that Lt. Carlson had argued with Wrigley and others over a new issue: whether or not the police should be allowed to put a wiretap on my phone line. So far, Carlson was being forced to live with the paper’s refusal.

I felt restless and decided to get some fresh air. Let the chronicling of cruelty be left to others for a while. I put on my coat and stepped outside.

Holiday decorations lined the street, as they had since Thanksgiving. I walked aimlessly, listening to the sounds of the downtown streets – the rumble of passing traffic, snippets of pedestrians’ conversations, horns echoing off tall buildings, the sharp staccato of a jackhammer at work in the shell of an old building. I heard a street musician playing “Fever” on a flute. The same guy played this same song every day, so that by now “Fever” seemed to be the anthem of this block on Broadway. He was getting better at it. Some days I noticed the improvement, heard the notes one by one; some days the flute’s song was nothing more to me than all the other sounds of the street. As I walked that afternoon, whenever I thought of Rosie Thayer, I tried to listen for the flute again. It worked for a little while. I turned up the collar of my coat against the chilly air and kept moving.

I walked east a couple of short blocks to Las Piernas Boulevard, and then south a couple more, past the old post office and bank buildings and found myself standing in front of Austin Woods & Grandson Books, a used bookstore not far from the paper. I know a remedy when I see one, so I pushed the front door open and stepped inside.

The bookstore occupies a huge brick building that has withstood both earthquakes and city redevelopment plans over the last century. I’ve been told that it was once home to a market, then a car dealership, and later a machinery warehouse, but I’ve only known it in its present incarnation.

Once inside, I stood still for a moment, letting the store’s warmth and cathedral quiet welcome me. Skylights in the high, arching ceilings overhead brought softened sunlight into the cavernous rooms. Around me, wooden crates were nailed together to form walls of bookcases. Ten feet high or higher they stretched, holding row upon towering row of musty tomes. Each cover and spine seemed to long to be held again, the way a widower might long for his late wife’s embrace.

I took a deep breath, inhaling the distinctive old-book fragrance of yellowed paper and aged binding glue. Images of dark basements and bloodstained offices faded. I walked down the aisles, reading titles, and eventually began smiling to myself. You can find just about any book in this store, provided you aren’t really looking for it.

The shelving system was designed by Austin Woods, who has a mind that apparently views the universe of printed matter in a unique way. Books should not be subjected to silly things like alphabetical order or genres; even a division between fiction and nonfiction was unnecessary, since the latter might have less to do with the truth than the former. This whimsical approach was not to his only son’s liking; Louis Woods refused to work in the store and went on to start one of Las Piernas’s oldest accounting firms.

In one of those twists of fate that have long caused parents to go gray and balding, Louis’ own son, Bill, rebelled against the accountant’s orderliness. Bill spent most of his childhood helping his grandfather; Austin rewarded this loyalty by giving him half-ownership and adding the “ & Grandson” to the name of the store.

O’Connor had introduced me to the place, and taught me that the best strategy was to relax and browse and let something intrigue you on its own; if you really wanted a specific title, just ask one of the Woods and they’d miraculously make a beeline for it. O’Connor sometimes asked for a certain title just to watch Austin or Bill do this; he figured the entertainment value was worth the price of a book.

Austin is a dried apple of a man, with a face that can hardly be found among his wrinkles. At ninety-six, he spends most of his time sleeping at an old desk in a cluttered back office, glasses atop his head and buried in wisps of thin white hair, some favorite tome opened and serving as a pillow beneath him. Bill, his wife Linda, and his daughter Katy carry on the business, which has attracted a faithful clientele over the years.

I browsed for a while, then made my way over to the counter, where the fourth generation was at work. Katy Woods looked up from a beautifully bound volume of The Master of Ballantrae. She’s about nineteen, very pretty, but shy. “Hi, Irene,” she greeted me. “I didn’t think I’d see you until Christmas Eve. Are you doing some early Christmas shopping?”

I laughed. “I suppose I should, Katy. In fact, you’ve just given me an inspiration. I’d like to purchase one of Stevenson’s other works to give to my former brother-in-law.”

“The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?”

“You know me too well.”