The diary will be done, and that will be that.

It is what it is.

PART TWO

THIRTEEN

Harriet and Frankie

Maker's Bell, Pennsylvania.

A black Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera with Florida plates slides down the streets and alleys, the roads a drunken spider's web of cracks meeting at pothole junctures. The whole town calls to mind a lunarscape: gray, cratered, dust-blown. The car rumbles past house after house whose windows are half-lidded eyes, whose porches and doors are forever yawning. Many look empty. Others appear occupied, but only by the dying – or the living dead.

The car pulls up to a driveway of uneven limestone gravel. A wooden mailbox sits out front, the mallard duck it was shaped as now barely recognizable. The paint has flaked off. The wing – the mailbox's flag – swings limp and loose, squeaking in the wind. The duck sits crooked, like one day soon it will tumble off its roost, dead.

Three black numbers – iron, rimmed with rust – identify the house as 513.

The doors to the car open.

"This the place?" Frankie asks of his partner, Harriet.

"It is," she says, her voice flat.

They get out of the car.

The two figures are opposites of each other in many ways.

Frankie is a tall drink of water with a Droopy Dog face and a Sam the Eagle nose. Harriet barely cracks five-foot two and echoes Charlie Brown – pudgy, round face with small and deeply set eyes.

Frankie Gallo is Sicilian somewhere down the line. His skin is like greasy, cakey cinnamon. Harriet Adams is whiter than an untanned ass, bleached like ocean-soaked bone.

Frankie's hands are large, the knuckles bulbous; Harriet's hands are little mitts, wormy fingers connected to flat, fat palms. His eyebrows are two caterpillars lying dead; hers are auburn slashes penciled in above her pinprick stare.

And yet, despite these differences, the two share an aura of menace. They belong together. He in his dark suit, she in her wine-colored turtleneck.

"Jesus, fuck, I'm tired," Frankie says.

Harriet says nothing. She stands, staring, like a mannequin.

"What time is it?" he asks.

"It's 8.30," she answers without looking at her watch.

"It's early. We didn't eat breakfast. Want to go get some food first?"

Again, she says nothing. Frankie just nods. He knows the drill. Business before pleasure. And with her it's always business. He likes that about her, though he'd never say so.

The house in front of them has gone to shit. A blue Victorian with shuttered windows. Ivy has been pulling it apart with slow fingers for the last twenty or thirty years.

A chill wind kicks up, sweeping leaves off the porch and jangling tangled wind-chimes. Two gray cats, startled by the noise, dart down the steps and around the back of the house. Frankie makes his own noise in response.

"Ungh. She a cat lady?" he asks.

"I have no idea. Does it matter?"

"It matters." His eyes scan the house's face, and he spots what he doesn't want to find: an orange tabby peering out of a second-floor window, a tortoiseshell cat with a monkey-colored face hanging out on the porch roof by bent gutters, and a trio of white kittens peering out from under an out-of-control roseglow shrub.