Chelsea pulled himself free of Winder's grip and said: "It was probably just a typo, Joe. Hell, the man was terribly depressed and upset. Who proofreads their own damn suicide note?"

Pressing his knuckles to his forehead, Winder said, "A typo? With a Magic Marker, Charlie? I sorry is not a bummed-out scientist making a mistake; it's an illiterate moron trying to fake a suicide note."

"I've heard just about enough." Chelsea circled the desk and made for the door. He stepped around Winder as if he were a rattlesnake.

Chelsea didn't leave the office. He held the door open for Joe Winder, and waited.

"I see," said Winder. On his way out, he stopped to smooth the shoulders of Chelsea's shirt, where he had grabbed him.

"No more talk of murder," Charles Chelsea said. "I want you to promise me."

"All right, but on the more acceptable subject of suicide – who was the dead guy hanging from the Card Sound Bridge?"

"I've no idea, Joe. It doesn't concern us."

"It concerns me."

"Look, I'm starting to worry. First you threaten me with physical harm, now you're blabbing all these crazy theories. It's alarming, Joe. I hope I didn't misjudge your stability."

"I suspect you did."

Warily, Chelsea put a hand on Winder's arm. "We've got a tough week ahead. I'd like to be able to count on you."

"I'm a pro, Charlie."

"That's my boy. So you'll give me Orky by four o'clock?"

"No sweat," Winder said. "Three hundred words."

"Max," reminded Charles Chelsea, "and keep it low key."

"My middle name," said Joe Winder.

In the first draft of the press release, he wrote:

Orky the killer whale, a popular but unpredictable performer at the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, died suddenly last night after asphyxiating on a foreign object.

Chelsea sent the press release back, marked energetically in red ink.

In the second draft, Joe Winder wrote:

Orky the whale, one of the most colorful animal stars at the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, passed away last night of sudden respiratory complications.

Chelsea returned it with a few editing suggestions in blue ink.

In the third draft, Winder began:

Lovable Orky the whale, one of the most colorful and free-spirited animal stars at the Amazing Kingdom of Thrills, was found dead in his tank this morning. While pathologists conducted tests to determine the cause of death, Francis X. Kingsbury, founder of the popular family theme park, expressed deep sorrow over the sudden loss of this majestic creature.

"We had come to love and admire Orky," Kingsbury said. "He was as much a part of our family as Robbie Raccoon or Petey Possum."

Joe Winder sent the press release up to Charles Chelsea's office and decided not to wait for more revisions. He announced that he was going home early to have his testicles reattached.

Before leaving the park, Winder stopped at a pay phone near the Magic Mansion and made a few calls. One of the calls was to an old newspaper source who worked at the Dade County Medical Examiner's Office. Another call was to the home of Mrs. Will Koocher, where a friend said she'd already gone back to Ithaca to await her husband's coffin. A third phone call went to Nina at home, who listened to Joe Winder's sad story of the dead vole doctor, and said: "So the new job isn't working out, is that what you're saying?"

"In a nutshell, yes."

"If you ask me, your attitude is contributing to the problem."

Joe Winder spotted the acne-speckled face of Pedro Luz, peering suspiciously from behind a Snappy-the-Troll photo gazebo, where tourists were lined up to buy Japanese film and cameras. Pedro Luz was again sucking on the business end of an intravenous tube; the tube snaked up to a bottle that hung from a movable metal sling. Whenever Pedro Luz took a step, the IV rig would roll after him. The liquid dripping from the bottle was the color of weak chicken soup.

Joe Winder said to Nina: "My attitude is not a factor."

"Joe, you sound..."

"Yes?"

"Different. You sound different."

"Charlie made me lie in the press release."

"And this comes as a shock? Joe, it's a whole different business from before. We talked about this at length when you took the job."

"I can fudge the attendance figures and not lose a minute of sleep. Covering up a murder is something else."

On Nina's end he heard the rustling of paper. "I want to read you something," she said.

"Not now, please."

"Joe, it's the best thing I've ever done."

Winder glanced over toward the Snappy photo gazebo, but Pedro Luz had slipped out of sight.

Nina began to read:

Last night I dreamed I fell asleep on a diving board; the highest one, fifty meters. It was a hot steamy day, so I took my top off and lay down. I was so high up that no one but the sea gulls could see me. The sun felt wonderful. I closed my eyes and drifted off to sleep —

"Not 'meters,' " Winder cut in. " 'Meters' is not a sexy word."

Nina kept going:

When I awoke, you were standing over me, naked and brown from the sun. I tried to move but I couldn't – you had used the top of my bikini to tie my hands to the board. I was helpless, yet afraid to struggle...we were up so high. But then you knelt between my legs and told me not to worry. Before long, I forgot where we were....

"Not bad." Joe Winder tried to sound encouraging, but the thought of trying to have sex on a high diving board made his stomach pitch.

Nina said: "I want to leave something to the imagination. Not like Miriam, she's unbelievable. I took chew in my mouth and sock like a typhoon."

Winder conceded that this was truly dreadful.

"I've got to listen to that pulp all night long," Nina said. "While she's clipping her toenails!"

"And I thought I had problems."

She said, "Was that sarcasm? Because if it was – "

The telephone receiver was getting heavy in Joe Winder's hand. He wedged it in the crook of his shoulder and said, "Can I tell you what I was thinking just now? I was thinking about the gastric secretions inside a killer whale's stomach. I was thinking how unbelievably powerful the digestive juices must be in order for a whale to be able to eat swordfish beaks and seal bones and giant squid gizzards and the like."

In a flat voice, Nina said, "I have to go now, Joe. You're getting morbid again."

"I guess I am."

The click on the other end seemed an appropriate punctuation.

On the way home he decided to stop and try some bonefishing at his secret spot. He turned off County Road 905 and came to the familiar gravel path that led through the hardwoods to the mangrove shore.

Except the woods were gone. The buttonwoods, the mahogany, the gumbo-limbos – all obliterated. So were the mangroves.

Joe Winder got out of his car and stared. The hammock had been flattened; he could see all the way to the water. It looked as if a twenty-megaton bomb had gone off. Bulldozers had piled the dead trees in mountainous tangles at each corner of the property.

Several hundred yards from Joe Winder's car, in the center of what was now a vast tundra of scrabbled dirt, a plywood stage had been erected. The stage was filled with men and women, all dressed up in the dead of summer. A small crowd sat in folding chairs laid out in rows in front of the stage. Joe Winder could hear the brassy strains of "America the Beautiful" being played by a high-school band, its lone tuba glinting in the afternoon sun. The song was followed by uneven applause. Then a man stood up at a microphone and began to speak, but Joe Winder was too far away to hear what was being said.