I looked up. A single, large painting was hanging over the bed. The painting was of a woman sitting alone in a train station. She was wearing a peasant’s clothing, shades of brown and gray. The shaft of light from the skylights skimmed over her head. I stepped forward, to the foot of the bed. It was a peasant’s setting, but not a peasant’s face.

“Am I wrong, Bobo?” Carter asked quietly. “Who is it?”

“My God,” I whispered.

“I knew it,” Carter said. “I knew it.”

The face of the woman in the painting was Amy Lourie’s.

On the drive back to Phoenicia, Carter explained that he had discovered the painting only a week earlier while doing a photographic inventory for insurance. At first, he believed the likeness between Amy and the woman in the painting was coincidental, a quaint deception of memory, but the face in the painting had haunted him and he had returned twice to study it.

“I found some old pictures, Bobo. From that summer. There was one of Amy by the swimming pool, a close-up, and one of you and Amy in Arch’s, and one of the three of us sitting on the porch of the Inn. Maybe you remember that one. It was a day or so before Amy left. Rene took it. Jesus, we were young. Babies, Bobo, babies. And innocent. I swear, I don’t think there’s ever been a generation as innocent.” He paused and shook his head over the memory. “Anyway, after looking at those pictures, I knew it had to be the same person, but it’s been so damn long. Yet, when you looked at it—Christ, you should have seen the expression on your face—I knew for certain. No doubt.”

I asked why he had not called me.

“I thought about it,” he said, “but what was I going to say? ‘Hey, Bobo, I found your old girlfriend.’ Come on, I know how things like that cut to the quick. Jesus, you’re worse about her than Avrum was about that old opera singer.”

“Why do you think that?” I said irritably. “We were kids. It was a summer thing.”

Carter snorted a laugh. He wagged his head and then glanced at me. “I was there, Bobo. Remember? And you’ve been coming back up here so damn long, looking for her, I get a fresh view of it every couple of years.”

“You bring her up, not me,” I argued.

“Only because you don’t have the guts, old friend.”