An altar was set up before the valentine, littered with Veuve Clicquot carcasses and champagne flutes abandoned half full or never used. Little lights had been strung up across the Douglases and the celebratory spotlights swayed over the lawn. I swiped one of the half-finished glasses in passing and downed it, then came up sputtering. Not champagne. Vodka, warm.

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a quick flare of fuchsia, a tittering giggle—“Oh, Joel, you’re incorrigible!”—and I couldn’t help myself. I turned and barked, “Ellen!”

Something pink and fluttering cackled off into the dusk.

I jogged after her until I caught sight of warm light spilling out of the wall of mausoleums lining the perimeter of the cemetery. That’d be Ellen, all right. Looking to make a scene.

Inside the opened tomb, a woman plunked at an old wood baby grand that hadn’t been tuned in fifty years, and a man leaned heavily against the side of the piano, trying to explain something to her. Behind them, two stupefied revelers swigged straight from their own bottles of vodka. I recognized one, glazed expression and gold sequins, as the birthday girl, although she looked different without a knife for a nose. As I passed by, I heard the man against the piano say, “You’re flat, Cara, if I’ve told you once, then I’ve told you—”

All around us, enmarbled bodies. The acoustics in the place were perfect. The audience was even better. I shivered.

“A twenty-eighth birthday party in a cemetery,” I said to no one in particular. “What a world you people live in.”

No one said anything—I didn’t think they’d even heard me—until the birthday girl said, voice slow as molasses, “As above, so below.”

She stared up at me, gaze unfocused. I thought it was unlikely that she had ever said one word to Ellen. I was starting to feel the vodka already, slick and fizzy in my veins—no dinner planned until I met with Lou. (Oh God, I hadn’t thought about Lou in hours. What was I going to tell her, what excuse for my lateness? Jackal tied me to his bed, then went to Burbank for a sandwich?)

Behind her chair stood Wexler, peacockless. He glanced at me and grinned. His teeth were so white they were practically blue. I decided I preferred the actors in the ground. “Where’d your catering platter run off to?” He made a big show of looking around. “Don’t tell me—you’re here to . . . showcase your various talents for the old man.”

“Am I that easy to read?” I licked my lips and tried to surreptitiously crane my neck, seeking out Ellen’s bright dress in the mausoleum darkness.