“Of course I was drawn to her at once. I figured she must be Russian. Daughter of a jailed oligarch, that sort of thing. No one but a Russian could afford to stay there and still have hair that bad. Janet thought she was just out of rehab and from the looks of it headed right back in. Either way we fell upon her like starving people.

“The approach was subtle. The trick was not setting off her alarms, which were all obviously set to a hair trigger. It was Janet, that mistress of seduction, who cracked her in the end—she planted herself in a public lounge and complained loudly about a rather involved computer issue. You could watch our Julia wrestle with herself, but it was a fait accompli.

“After that—well, you know how it is on those vacations. As soon as you learn another person’s name they become inescapable. We ran into each other everywhere. You wouldn’t think a place like that was her style, would you? But there she was, up to her neck in mud, with cucumber slices over her eyes. She was constantly plunging in and out of baths and things. Once Janet tried to go in a steam bath with her, but she’d turned it up so high everybody else had to flee. Probably she had them thrash her with birch twigs. It was like she was trying to rid herself of some stubborn taint.

“It came out that she had a weakness for cards, so we spent hours just drinking and playing three-handed bridge. Not talking. We didn’t know she was a magician, of course. How could we? But you could tell she was bursting with some terrible secret. And she had those things that one likes about magicians: she was disgustingly bright and rather sad and slightly askew. To tell you the truth I think one of the things we liked about her was that she reminded us of you.

“Well, you know how in the Poirot books he always goes on vacation to get away from it all, the mysteries and whatever else, only to have a murder committed on the very island he’s fled to for peace and quiet and some civilized gastronomy? It was exactly like that, except that we were fleeing magic. One night I wandered over to her bungalow around ten or eleven at night. Janet and I had had a fight, and I was looking for someone to complain about her to.

“When I passed Julia’s window I saw that she was building a fire. That was odd to begin with. The fireplaces were absolutely enormous in those bungalows, but it was the middle of summer and nobody in their right mind was using them. But Julia had a roaring blaze going. She was building it very methodically, placing the logs very carefully. She marked each log before she put it on—scraped away some of the bark with a little silver knife.

“And then as I watched . . . I don’t know how to describe it so you’ll understand. She kneeled down in front of the fire and began putting things in it. Some of the things were obviously valuable—a rare shell, an old book, a handful of gold dust. Some of them must just have been precious to her. A piece of costume jewelry. An old photograph. Each time she put one in she’d stop and wait a minute, but nothing happened, except that whatever it was burned or melted and gave off a nasty smell. I don’t know what she was waiting for, but whatever it was it never came. Meanwhile she got more and more agitated.