Bernard, as always, was at his computer, his willowy torso curving up out of the strange, backless rocker he used, his shaven head glimmering in the dull light. He tapped away at the keyboard. He studied the screen. He had forced the computer on the business when he’d first started work here five years earlier. It had since become, in spite of Harper’s Luddite resistance, the Brain of the operation. To her, it remained inscrutable, vaguely threatening. Yet Bernard seemed able to command the device as easily as a sorceror making dead objects dance. A few runes stroked onto the keys and it would edit like a magic pencil, cut like a razor, paste like a wax mangier—and then fly off like Puck to put a girdle round the earth in search of potential copy from the international press.

Bernard raised his lovely, aesthetic face from the perplexing mechanism now. “A dowager in Lincolnshire is seeking to sell her alien rectal probe,” he remarked languidly.

“Is she, by God?” said Harper, round the stem of her pipe.

“ ‘I need the money for my poor cats,’ says Mrs. Huddlestone of Theddlethorpe-St.-Helen,” Bernard went on. “ ‘Though I hate to part with it, as it’s a souvenir of a very memorable experience,’ ”

“Ha-ha. I daresay,” said Harper. “Yes, I think so. ‘Notes from All Over.’ I think we really must.”

Resting a shoulder against one misshapen telamon, staring down morosely into the bluish gas fire, Storm snorted and shook his head.

And Harper watched him. She smoothed her gray schoolgirl skirt down over her swollen knees. Removed a matchstick from the pocket of her white schoolgirl blouse. She struck fire on her blackened thumbnail with what she hoped was regal negligence and held the flame to the crown of the meerschaum skull, drawing smoke. And she watched him.

How could she help but be reminded of the whirligig beetle? With its divided eye, half in the air, half in the water. It sees above and below the surface at the same time—and so she felt she was seeing now. But what was she seeing? Storm’s rugged western face, set and withdrawn. His lean figure in jeans and work shirt, relaxed and mopey. And under the surface of those images—what? Some great, roiling tempest of emotion? she wondered. Grief? Loss? Terror? She wasn’t sure.

“Did you really come here to hunt for ghosts?” she asked him from the midst of a pearly cloud. “Do you really expect to find one?”

He lifted a broad shoulder, still staring into the flames. “I don’t know,” he said. “A ghost. A voice from beyond. Something uncanny, you know. Anything. One lousy uncanny thing. You wouldn’t think it was so much to ask for.”

“Exclusive recent photographs of JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald show them laughing over the hoax that allowed them to consummate their love in secret,” drawled Bernard.