He went piece by piece, showing her the computer; the low-pressure hose that, he explained, attached to her buoyancy control device and allowed her to inflate or deflate it as necessary; and then BC itself. “There’s not a lot more too it,” he told her. “You just need to learn how to use it all.”

  “How long would it take?” Caddie asked him.

  “A couple of hours,” said Brian. “It’s not rocket science.”

  Caddie looked again at the gear. “Okay,” she said. “It might be fun.”

  “It will be fun,” Brian said, taking her hand and helping her stand up. “After all, you’re going to learn from the best.”

  “I thought Jacques Cousteau was dead,” Caddie said, trying to look confused.

  To her surprise, Brian kissed her. When he pulled back he said, “Still want to go with Jacques?”

  Caddie shook her head. “I’ll stick with you,” she said.

  “Good answer,” Brian said. “Now let’s get out of here.”

  “Where are we going?” asked Caddie as he led her toward the door.

  “My house,” Brian said. He stopped. “Is that okay?” he asked her.

  “Sure,” said Caddie. “That’s great.”

  As they walked through the aquarium and out to Brian’s car, she wondered exactly what he had in mind for the rest of the afternoon. He’d been so hesitant the night before that she didn’t know what to think.

  When they arrived at his place—a small, shabby house not all that much different from her father’s, but in worse shape—Brian pushed open the unlocked front door and Caddie walked in. The house was decorated in what Caddie thought of as Trash Night Eclectic, a phrase she’d coined to describe furnishings gleaned from the unwanted things set out on sidewalks the world over on the night before garbage pickup. Not that anything was dirty or broken, just mismatched and on the far side of being new, or even middle-aged.

  “I know, it looks like a frat house,” Brian said. “It all came with the place. The house is owned by some old guy who supports the aquarium. He lets summer workers live here free. I figured I’d rather stay here and pocket the money than spend a couple hundred bucks a month for someplace with better chairs.”

  Caddie couldn’t argue with that. “Besides,” she told him, “it’s not that bad.”

  “You hungry?” Brian called from the other room, where he’d disappeared a moment earlier.

  “A little,” Caddie answered. The pasta she’d downed before meeting him had been good, but now she found she wanted something more.

  Brian was gone another minute or two. When he came back he said, “I called for takeout. It should be here in twenty minutes.”

  “What’ll we do until then?” Caddie asked him.

  Brian put his arms around her waist. “Have I shown you the bedroom?” he asked.

  Caddie let him take her upstairs and into the bedroom that, in another house, was her father’s bedroom. She approached the bed—this one centered on the wall and unmade—and sat on it. Brian, putting his hand on her shoulders, pushed her gently back and straddled her. Then he leaned down and kissed her.

  This time his kiss was anything but tentative. His tongue explored Caddie’s mouth, probing and insistent. She kissed him back, her hands on his lower back, pulling him into her. She felt his hardness through his shorts and slid her hand down to meet him.

  The kiss went on without pause. Brian, grabbing her wrist, put her arm behind her head, then brought her other arm up. Pinning her, he rubbed himself against her in short thrusts, all the while looking into her eyes and holding his mouth just out of reach as she tried to kiss him. Then he sat up, releasing her wrists. His shirt came off, and Caddie ran her fingers down the tight planes of his torso. His skin was warm to the touch, the hair on his stomach soft as she followed it down to the waistband of his shorts.

  As she was reaching for the button holding him closed, the doorbell rang. Brian looked down at her. “Do you mind getting that?” he said. He glanced meaningfully at his crotch, which was tenting out significantly.

  He got up and fished in a pocket. “This should do it,” he said, handing her some crumpled bills. As she straightened her clothes he kissed her and cupped a breast. “Hurry back,” he said.

  The doorbell rang again as Caddie went down the stairs. “Coming!” she called out.

  She opened the door. Nick, gazing at her in surprise, stood there holding a pizza box.

  “Hey,” he said after a moment.

  Caddie leaned against the door frame. “Hey,” she said.

  “I didn’t know you lived here,” said Nick. “I’ve only ever seen that aquarium guy here.”

  “I don’t live here,” Caddie answered, letting him fill in the rest for himself. She wondered if he was smart enough to know what she was implying, and found herself hoping he was.

  Nick nodded. “Oh,” he said, his voice telling Caddie that he knew exactly what she meant.

  “How much is it?” she asked.

  Nick looked down and moved his lips, as if trying to calculate the cost of the pizza. “Fourteen seventy-five,” he said.

  Caddie looked at the bills in her hand. Brian had given her a five and a ten. She handed them to Nick, not even bothering to smooth them out. “Here,” she said, taking the box from his hands and going back in the house. She gave him one last look as she shut the door. “Keep the change.”

  CHAPTER 21

  “Have you found it yet?”

  Hudson opened his eyes. By the window, a shadowy figure stood looking out at the moon. As Hudson tried to get his sleep-heavy mind to begin working, the figure turned toward him. “Have you found it yet?” it asked again. It was a man’s voice, soft yet firm.

  Hudson shook himself awake, the realization that he was not alone in the room turning quickly from confusion to fear. He rubbed his face with his hands, as if trying to wipe the grime away from a dirty window.

  The man, still in shadow, took a seat in the armchair beside the window. He placed his hands on the arms, tapping his fingers restlessly as he crossed one leg over the other. There was something familiar in the gesture; a picture flashed across Hudson’s vision, disappeared almost as quickly. He smelled tobacco, rich and earthy. Then, as if the lid had been throw open on some inner trove of memories, he saw the glint of moonlight off the ring on the left hand, recognized without question the anxious shaking of the crossed foot.

  “Paul,” he whispered.

  “You haven’t answered my question,” the man replied. “Have you found it?”

  Hudson peered into the dim, trying to see the face hidden within it, but darkness swarmed like bees, obscuring everything. Only the hands, endlessly tapping, were illuminated.

  “No,” Hudson said, “I haven’t. But I think I’m close.”

  “You think, or you are?” asked the voice.

  “I am,” answered Hudson.

  Laughter, short and wistful, greeted his words. “Still doubting yourself, I see,” the man’s voice reproached him.

  The shadow rose and stepped forward, into the light. Hudson looked up into the handsome face of a man perhaps fifteen years his senior. His hair, short and neatly trimmed, reflected the silver of the moon. His eyes were dark, and his mouth curled in a smile both sweet and sad.

  “Paul.” Hudson repeated the name. “Why?”

  Paul reached out and touched Hudson’s face. His fingers moved gently down the younger man’s neck, tracing the gentle curve of his collarbone and coming to rest on his chest. Hudson felt his blood beat harder. He reached up with his own hand to touch Paul’s where it covered his heart.

  He awoke with a start. Panicked, he sat up and looked around the room. It was empty. No one stood at the window. No figure watched him from the chair. The air smelled only of the sea and the lemon trees. There was no odor of tobacco, no gentle scratching of fingers, no voice from the dark. He was alone.

  The sheet covering his body was damp with sweat. It clung to him in places with clammy fingers. Hudson pulled it down, letting the warm summer night stroke him with calming fingers. His heart, he realized, was indeed beating too quickly. That part had been no dream.

  He reached for the glass of water he’d placed on his nightstand. Warm now, it nonetheless slaked his thirst. The simple process of holding the glass, feeling the water go down his throat, proved to him that he was awake. The dream was gone.

  He drained the glass and sat it down again. Without it, he felt suddenly vulnerable, as if without it to anchor him to the real world he might slip back into the darkness. Quickly he reached over and turned on the light. A soft yellow circle surrounded him as the shadows retreated.

  Paul. He could say the name now without fear. No, he thought, it wasn’t fear he’d felt at Paul’s touch. It was longing. Still, longing was its own kind of haunting, worse perhaps because it went on forever unfulfilled. And no matter how much he might want it, Paul’s touch was gone from him forever.

  Don’t, he told himself. Don’t let yourself go there. He’s gone.

  He needed a distraction. Instinctively, he reached for a book, then remembered that he’d left it downstairs. Disinclined to leave the island of his bed to descend into the shadow world of the house, he looked again and saw the stack of papers. He took them up with relief, noticing as he did that the clock said half past three.

  The papers were copies, made for him by Helen Guerneyser from the materials he’d looked at the previous afternoon. Hudson had feared at first that the number of pages would be excessive, but the archivist had made no objection, sending him away from his first day of research with a thick stack of paper and an open invitation to come back whenever he liked.

  He pulled his knees up and leaned the papers against them. Mostly he had requested copies of Steinbeck’s journals. Seated in the reading room, he had been afraid to really look at them, as if he were being watched by some invisible monitor ready to revoke his privileges for any breach of scholarly protocol. Alone in his room, however, he read them with the same excitement with which he’d once read his sister’s diary, purloined from its not-so-secret hiding place beneath the sweaters in her dresser drawer and spirited to his own room for leisurely perusal.

  While his sister’s journal had been filled with adolescent despair over parents who didn’t understand her and boys who didn’t love her, Steinbeck’s were most notable for his observations of those around him. It was easy to get lost in the descriptions of characters who entered and exited his life like players in film. At some point, though, Hudson had begun to wonder how much of the writing—fine as it was—was meant as distraction. Almost as if Steinbeck had fully expected that one day his words would be pored over by those looking for insight into his work, the entries were engaging yet almost uniformly without reference to his personal feelings, at least apart from those having to do with his writing.

  However, there were moments of seemingly dull revelation hidden among the glittering stones, tiny chunks of unpolished ore that were easily overlooked. They were tucked into a paragraph here and there, almost as if they were afterthoughts to something more important and not worth the effort of elaboration. Noticing one, Hudson had begun to find others, in the same way that the sandy expanse of a beach could hide a multitude of beautiful shells, if only one could train the eye to see the bits of purple, or blue, or green beneath.

  Small, neat starbursts penned in red in the margins indicated potential lines of interest. Many pages—sometimes five, six, seven, or more in succession—bore no such indicators; most had only one or two. It was these that Hudson looked at now, recalling why he had found them worthy of notice.

  The first group of pages came from entries written in the weeks following the death of Ed Ricketts. Here Steinbeck had written with unusual candor about the loss of his friend. But even within such emotion Hudson detected a note of deception, not of fact, but of something deeper. Steinbeck’s grief seemed, if anything, too commonplace. It was the grief of someone unable to see the true extent of his loss, uncharacteristic of Steinbeck’s usually unflinching exploration of human feeling, whether his own or that of another.

  One line, though, buried amidst many others, had glimmered with a peculiar fluorescence of meaning. “With Ed’s death,” Steinbeck wrote, “the tides have changed. I feel myself retreating, becoming smaller, like a patch of beach that is swallowed up by the rising water.”

  He read the line again. “The tides have changed,” he said aloud. It was an unremarkable analogy, perfectly apt in its description of grief. But for Hudson it had another connection. He fumbled with the papers in his hands, looking for the copies he had brought with him from home.

  He found what he was looking for on page seventy-two of the typescript.

  The tide was retreating, pulling away from the shore like the cover being lifted from a bed and revealing the naked sleeping forms beneath it. Charlie thought again of that morning, of the still air of the room and the motes of dust floating in the sun like insects trapped forever in amber. He thought, too, of his hand on the quilt, his fingers tracing the lines of the squares and diamonds pieced together by unknown hands. And then of the other hand, the one beneath, the one tracing the same patterns on his naked flesh. Thinking of this, he grew smaller, his body shrinking even as the memory loomed larger and larger, until its great black mouth opened and he was swallowed up.

  “It’s a common metaphor,” Hudson said, speaking as if to someone else. “It doesn’t prove anything.”

  No, he thought, it didn’t. At least not on its own. But with more, with something definite, he could argue a strong case. Even then, he supposed, there would be those who disbelieved. Probably someone would even accuse him of manufacturing the manuscript himself. It had been done before, he remembered. That woman at Wellesley had claimed to have found a poem by Christina Rossetti, supposedly a long-sought-after companion to “Goblin Market.” She had even gone so far as to write the fraudulent poem on paper from the correct era, although where she got it was anyone’s guess.

  It was the ink that was her undoing. She’d used a kind of German black that, although certainly employed by writers of Rossetti’s time, was known to break down over time in a very particular way that the more common cuttlefish ink did not. Although the woman had made a valiant attempt to make the manuscript appear aged, a simple laboratory test revealed the ink to be less than a year old, and the hoax was revealed to the not-insignificant satisfaction of skeptics, most of whom had spent their own lives in search of the same prize and were now free to believe that it still waited somewhere to be found.

  Hudson’s manuscript, while not nearly as old, was still nonetheless a matter for great debate. Typed instead of handwritten, it could have come out of one of a million different machines. The type was perfectly ordinary, no dropped “e” or off-center “r” to provide even a small physical clue to the pages’ origins. The paper, too, was common and undistinguished by either texture or watermark. It could, he knew, have been nearly anywhere by anyone.

  But it wasn’t. He was certain of it. Paul, the only other one to know the full story, had been certain of it. The thought stopped him. Once again, Paul’s ghost had entered the room. Hudson felt him, hovering in the corner, watching. He heard again the question—Have you found it yet?—and he pulled the sheet up against the chill that seemed now to seep under the closed door.

  Go away, he thought, closing his eyes. Please. Just go away. This is hard enough.

  He shook, fighting back fear and sorrow. Something in the room, something beyond his tight-closed eyelids, moved almost imperceptibly. He felt it as a breath of air, just for a moment across his cheek. Then it was gone. When he opened his eyes, he saw that the sky outside the window was touched with the first light of coming morning.

  He returned to the manuscript. Reading to make the dawn come faster, and not in search of clues, he turned to a random page and began.

  The dog, a mix of retriever and terrier with the less agreeable physical characteristics of both breeds, was sniffing, with great interest, the bottom two feet of the wall belonging to the Kingfisher Cannery’s loading platform. Several hundred pounds of sardines had recently occupied the dock above, and the bricks were stained with the proof of their temporary residency. The dog was licking the streaks of fish-scented water with the satisfaction of one whose last meal was far enough behind him so as to be forgotten, and consequently did not see the man behind him or hear the rock that was thrown by the man’s hand. Only when the missile struck him in the side did the dog turn from his dinner, giving a sharp cry and flattening his ears alongside his head.

  “Go on!” shouted the man. “Git!”

  The dog, not knowing what sin he had committed but sensing that it was a great one, nonetheless could not leave behind such a temptation as was presented to him by the fishy water. He attempted to get in one more lick. In hesitating, he doomed himself. The man, irritated beyond reason at being disobeyed by a dog, rushed forward. Swinging his leg back, he delivered a ferocious kick to the dog’s underside.

  “I said git!” he repeated, as if perhaps the dog had simply not heard him the first time.

  The dog, who had fallen to the ground, looked up at his attacker with uncomprehending eyes. He wagged his tail limply and gave a little whine, for which he was rewarded with another blow. Stunned, he tried to stand and run, but could only sway slightly from side to side. His tail continued its back-and-forth motion, as if he still believed he could save himself.

  As the man prepared to strike again Charlie, who had been watching the encounter from across the street, found himself running at great speed toward him. As he ran, he raised his fist, so that when it connected with the side of the man’s head, it did so with enormous force. The man, caught not only by surprise but off balance, flew into the wall, where his head met the brick with a dull thud. Like the dog, he attempted to stand, but without the benefit of a wagging tail he found the effort too great, and collapsed to the ground.