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Page 17.
Chapter 13.
 A warm, sunny day. Jeff had eaten his English muffin with egg and bacon. He had had his juice. Now he was on his second cup of coffee. He had the New York Times strewn about on the patio and was about to unfurl the funnies when he noticed his dog lying on her back, legs in the air, rocking from side to side.
"Excuse me," he said swatting with the Help Wanted Column.
Her powerful chest heaved, and her tail swept about on the ground. Fleas, Jeff thought. He leaned over and roughed his fingertips through her chest hair. It occurred to him that he had subconsciously taken the excuse of Sunday to put himself on a one-day sabbatical. His move to Raritania had been, like all moves, abrupt and sundering. It had been a traumatic week, beginning with finding the dead woman in the clock and ending with his disturbing visions, or illusions, or whatever they were. In all of that turmoil, he thought, maybe it wasn't quite so out of character for a sane and stable person to have suicidal urges, see pink lights, and glimpse cars from the past.
"I guess," he told the dog, "I'm taking a sanity check today, that's what it is. I hope that away from that crazy city over there I'll start to feel normal again."
Yeh, yeh! Checky panted. She regarded him, over prayerfully folded front paws, with joyous eyes and steamy tongue.
He glanced around and sighed. It was so quiet here. His was a rented house, rent paid by World Anaconda. The house was on Golf Place, a cul-de-sac in a quiet suburban neighborhood, a later appendage whose atmosphere bespoke the fifties and sixties rather than the thirties. He had a pool, Jacuzzi, small grassy yard hidden in a smother of fence and grape vines, and five rooms.
He fed Checky, finished his paper, and went for a dip.
As he hovered under the surface (how many more days or weeks before the water would be too cold?) his sense of puzzlement returned. He was looking for a Louis (Beering? could one assume?) and Vince McCarthy was looking for a Tom Armaday. Let's indeed say, Jeff thought, that Louis's last name is Beering, given the resemblance between the photo in Beering's office, and the portrait of Beering in the museum. How odd, that the place to look this up, the Volume Two, was missing and there was no record of who had removed it. What, if anything, was the relationship between Louis Beering and this Tom Armaday, one of whom was presumably killing editors? Jeff thrashed about in the twenty foot pool, alternately diving, then surfacing in a great blow of water. What if...?
He felt something wet and slimy against his chest. He jumped back with a shout, trying to assume a combat stance, but stumbling instead and going back under. Then he surfaced and began to laugh. Checky was paddling in circles around him. Her brown eyes had a self-pleased look, and her tail wagged above the surface.
Soon, when Checky was rolling on the grass to dry, and he was poling the water with the net, and the sun was bronzing his muscular body, he stopped again to soak in the quiet, the silence, the peacefulness, as daylight sank into dusk.
As he stood by the pool, his gaze drifted toward the distant skyline of Raritania City. The clock towers stood like silent, hooded figures. Against that backdrop he had a disconcerting view of a face looking at him from what looked like underwater. It was a probing face, with pale skin, dark hair, and haunting eyes the color of blue stained glass: Lexa. It was not a supernatural vision, not a hallucination. It was a memory.
It was the memory of that parting look she had given him as she'd left the museum yesterday to meet her mother.
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