For a moment, I fancied that Pacifica looked a little like Gail. I moved to one side and, from this different perspective, the statue reminded me a little of my ex-wife. I used to come in late from work. Nancy would have fallen asleep hours earlier. I’d stare at her for a minute, then look in on Linney. As I adjusted her goose-down comforter so that it rested reassuringly on Linney’s shoulders, I would murmur soft words to her and go searching for Nancy’s features in my daughter’s face. Now I searched Pacifica’s face and found Linney there as well.

Was this the sorcery of the sculptor? Would any man find any woman in Pacifica’s face?

Her creator had placed her in a strange pose, arms bent straight up from her elbows, palms outward alongside her shoulders in a defenseless benediction. But it also looked as if she were trying to push away some flat stone that lay hard upon her, pressing against her, confining and smothering—

Unbearable.

I quickly turned away as the prayer curtain shivered horribly. I saw the view presented to Pacifica, and knew for certain that if she’d ever had eyes, they would now be closed forever, for the statue directly faced the Tower of the Sun. She would have seen Marie Prasquier fall.

A minute later, I was standing at the foot of the tower, near a large tarpaulin that covered a portion of the concrete where Marie had landed. There were probably still stains to be scrubbed away.

Stepping through one of the tower’s open entranceways, I saw a sign that indicated the next carillon concert would be at three P.M. It was now a few minutes after that, but the chimes were silent.

Some twenty or thirty stories up, I could see the carillon’s bells. A sinister web of cables and pulleys arced down from them to a curtained-off area on a balcony near the top of the tower. I guessed the keyboard that Gail played was up there.

There was almost no one inside the Tower of the Sun, since it had no gift shop, refreshment stand, displays, or dioramas. As it lacked an observation deck, there was really nothing for a tourist to do but look up and leave.

Still, I knew there had to be a way for the carillonist to get up to the keyboard. I saw a door marked NO ADMITTANCE and admitted myself.

I was in a closet-sized chamber built within the east wall of the tower. It seemed that the sole purpose of the enclosed space, whose ceiling was hundreds of feet above me, was to allow access to a narrow service elevator that could not have housed more than three people, and they would have had to like one another a lot. I called out Gail’s name, got no reply, and called it again, upward and louder.