At night, when Packer and Evelyn hold each other, under some bridge or on cardboard laid across a steaming, warm manhole cover, his hands inside her clothing, bringing her to climax as strangers walk past, the two have never been so in love.

But Inky's right. It can't last forever. The end comes so fast, no one's sure what happened until it's in the newspaper the next day.

They're asleep in the doorway of some warehouse, feeling more at home than they ever have in Banff or Hong Kong. By now their blankets smell like each other. Their clothes—their bodies—feel like a house. Just Packer's arms around his wife could be a duplex on Park Avenue. A villa in Crete.

It's that night a black town car hits the curb, brakes squealing and one tire bumping up onto the sidewalk. The headlights, two circles of bright high-beams, shine right on Mr. and Mrs. Keyes, waking them up. The back door falls open and screams spill out from the back seat. Headfirst, her hands and arms flying, a girl falls out onto the sidewalk. Her long dark hair hiding her face, she's naked and scrambling on hands and knees away from the car.

Packer and Evelyn, buried in their house of old rags and damp blankets, the naked girl is scrambling toward them.

Behind her, a man's black shoe steps out of the car's open door. A dark pant leg follows. A man wearing black leather gloves climbs out of the car's back seat while the girl gets to her feet, screaming. Screaming, Please. Screaming for help. So close you can see one, two, three gold hoops pierced through one of her ears. Her other ear is gone.

What looks like a long braid of dark hair is really blood running down the side of her neck. Where the ear was, you see just a jagged ridge of flesh.

The girl gets to the Keyeses, just their eyes showing from under the blankets.

As the man grabs her by the hair, the girl grabs at their rags. As the man lifts her, kicking and weeping, into the car, the girl tugs the blankets, showing them here, still half asleep, blinking in the car's bright headlights.

The man has to see them. Anyone driving the car must see.

The girl screams, “Please.” She screams, “The license plate . . . ,” and she's pulled back inside. The car door slams shut and the tires squeal, leaving just the girl's blood and skidmarks of black rubber. In the gutter with the fast-food paper cups, dropped or knocked out in the struggle, a torn, pale ear sparkles with two gold hoop earrings still looped through it.

It's over breakfast, a room-service omelet of greasy mushrooms, English muffins, lukewarm coffee, and cold bacon in their suite at the Sheraton, it's there they see the newspaper. In local news, a Brazilian oil heiress was kidnapped. The picture of her is the naked girl with long dark hair from the night before, but smiling and holding a trophy with a little gold tennis player on top.

According to the newspaper, the police haven't a single witness.

Of course, the Keyeses could send a note, but they really didn't see anyone's face. They didn't see the license plate. All they saw was the girl. The blood. Packer and Evelyn, they can't offer any real help. Going to the police, all they could do is humiliate themselves. Already, you could imagine the headlines:

“Society Couple Goes Slumming for Kicks”

Or: “Billionaires Playing Poor”

God forbid if they told about Inky and Scout, Skinny and Shoe and Bones.

Packer and Evelyn putting themselves up for public ridicule was not going to save this poor girl. Their suffering wouldn't lessen a moment of hers.

In the newspaper the next week, the kidnapped heiress was found dead.

Still, Inky wasn't worried. Poor, dirty people have nothing to worry about on the street. The girl who got killed was young. She looked clean and pretty and rich. “Having nothing to lose,” Inky said, “is the new wealth.”

And Packer said, “Lather, rinse, and repeat.”

No, Inky wasn't about to give up her happiness and go back to being rich and famous. And more and more, those nights, Packer went with her. To protect her, he said.

One of those nights, Evelyn's at the Charity Dinner Dance Against Colon Cancer when her cell phone rings. It's Inky, and in the background a man is shouting. Packer's voice. In the phone, Inky is breathing hard, saying, “Muffy, please. Muffy, please, we're lost and someone is chasing us.” She says, “We've tried the police, but . . .” And the call cuts off.

As if she's run into a tunnel. Under an overpass.

The headline in the next day's newspaper says:

“Publisher and Textile CEO Found Stabbed to Death”

Now, almost every morning, there's a new headline to avoid:

“Bag Lady Found Butchered”

Or: “Killer Continues to Stalk the Homeless”

Somewhere, every night, that black town car is looking for Mrs. Keyes, the only witness to a crime. Someone is killing anyone on the street who might be her. Anyone dressed in rags and asleep under a pile of blankets.

It's after that Evelyn goes cold turkey. She cancels the newspaper. To replace the television, she buys the glass tank with a lizard that changes color to match any paint scheme.

Nowadays, Mrs. Keyes, she's the opposite of homeless. She has too much home. She's burdened with home. Buried in home. She reads her catalogues. Looking at the glossy pictures of garden ornaments. Diamond jewelry made from the cremains of your dead loved ones.

Of course, she still misses her friends. Her husband. But it's like Inky would say: Being absent is the new being present.

And she still buys tickets for the charity events. The silent auctions and dance recitals. It's important to know she's doing something to make the world a little bit better. Next, she'd like to go swimming with endangered gray whales.

Sleep in the canopy of some dwindling rain forest.

Photograph some vanishing zebras. Eco-slumming.

It's important to be aware. She still wants to make a difference.

5

That summer at the Villa Diodati, Mrs. Clark tells us, it was just five people:

The poet, Lord Byron.

Percy Bysshe Shelley and his lover, Mary Godwin.

Mary's half-sister, Claire Claremont, who was pregnant by Byron.

And Byron's doctor, John Polidori.

Listening, we're sitting around the electric fireplace in the second-balcony smoking room. The Gothic smoking room. Each of us pulled up in a yellow leather wing chair or a needlepoint sofa or tapestry loveseat we'd dragged from somewhere, the carved, pointed legs leaving ruffled trails in the dusty, matted carpets.

All of us, here, except for Lady Baglady, who went to bed early. And Miss America, off picking locks.

The electric fireplace is just a rotating light under a bed of red and yellow glass chunks glued together. Light without heat. All our hanging crystal trees turned off, and the red-and-yellow light dancing across our faces, shapes of red-and-yellow light move across the wood paneling and the floor of flat stones fit together.

Just those five people, Mrs. Clark says, bored and trapped indoors by the rain. Shelley and company. They took turns reading to each other from a collection of German ghost stories called Fantasmagoriana.

“Lord Byron,” Mrs. Clark says, “couldn't stand the book.”

Byron said there was more talent in the room than in the book they were reading. He said they could each write a better horror story. They should, each of them. Write a story.

This was almost a century before Bram Stoker's Dracula, but out of that summer came Dr. John Polidori's book The Vampyre, and our modern idea of a bloodsucking demon.

On one of those rainy nights, with the thunder and lightning over Lake Geneva, eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin had the dream which would become the Frankenstein legend. Both monsters the basis for countless books and movies that followed.