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The elderly couple swung their eyes at us so quickly and so simultaneously I almost burst out laughing.

"Is that all right with you?" Thatcher pursued.

"Yes," I said quickly, giving him a hot look of reprimand that only widened his smirk.

The couple exchanged looks and pulled closer to each other and farther away from us. When the doors opened. Thatcher stepped aside to let them go first, and they practically charged out through the lobby.

"That was very sneaky of you." I said.

"I can't help enjoying being a little outrageous, especially in front of obviously snobby people, people who take themselves too seriously."

"Wasn't that your complaint about Mai Stone?" I countered like a courtroom attorney myself.

He wasn't easily thrown off balance. It probably came from all his negotiating and trial experience. Without hesitation, he shook his head.

"Mai enjoyed being outrageous in front of anybody, snobby or not. She was playing on her own stage. Besides," he said, turning at the front entrance. "let's keep to the promise we made to each other last night."

"What?"

"No more historical revelations. No more personal questions, remember? Let's just have a good time in the here and now. The past. like the future, will take care of itself."

Last night. I'd thought I had more reason to want that than he did. Tonight, I wasn't so sure.

The gallery was already quite crowded by the time we arrived. Almost everyone there knew Thatcher. He introduced me as Isabel Amou and simply told people I was visiting Palm Beach. Very few fried to find out much more about me once they heard I was from South Carolina and not from a particularly wealthy family. Thatcher said I was a former college acquaintance.

"Ste how easy it is to create fictions here that people will willingly accept?" he whispered.

We wandered through the gallery, sipping wine. After a while, he turned me into a side room to show me Linden's work.

There were only three pictures, each darker and more eerie than the last. In the first, a young man, not unlike Linden. was lying on the beach, turned on his side and leaning on his elbow to talk to someone beside him, only that someone was a skeleton on its back. Everything else in the picture was realistic, almost photorealistic, but in strikingly vibrant colors. the colors you might see in a nightmare.

"He's interesting in a way." Thatcher admitted. "Inserting some horrific or surrealistic element into the realistic setting. Don't you think?"

"Yes." I said. moving to the next, which showed a woman walking along the beach holding the hand of a little boy who was literally sinking into the sand. Though he was half buried. the woman seemed unaware of it. The ocean had a crimson, almost bloody tint beneath a setting sun.

In the third picture, a small gathering of happylooking young people stood at the shore. some eating, some drinking, all laughing and smiling, while in front of them, an older woman who resembled my mother was caught in a wave, her arms stretched toward them in desperation.

"Not hard to read the meaning of this one. I suppose," Thatcher observed.

"There's a great deal of anger in all these pictures," I said "It makes you feel sorry for him."

"Pity is not something people here have time or an inclination to express." Thatcher said. "It won't sell the pictures." He took one look at my face a

nd added. "Let's get out of here. I'm sorry I showed you these. I didn't mean to depress you. You're looking too beautiful for that."

I flashed him a smile and turned away so he wouldn't see the sadness in my eyes. Did my mother share this terrible agony? What was their world like, their everyday lives in that beach house? Did I really want to enter it?

It took us nearly twenty minutes to make our way back through the crowd. So many people stopped Thatcher to ask him questions about cases he had completed or was involved with now. Some of the younger women looked for any possible excuse to get him to pause and speak with them. He was polite with everyone but clung tightly to my hand and worked relentlessly to get us through.

When we broke out into the street, he apologized. "I'm sure you would have liked to stay and talk to more people to gather information for your project. but I'm being selfish tonight. I'm not sharing you."

"It's all right." I said. It wasn't exactly the setting I wanted, Too many distractions. and I don't think those people would have been forthcoming."

"Then maybe my mother is right: you would do better using Jaya del Mar and permitting her to invite people to meet you. There you could ensnare them with your questions and twist the truth out of them."

"Yes," I said. laughing. "Maybe.-.

We drove out of Palm Beach to a place called Singer Island, where he took me to a restaurant that had a patio facing the ocean, not more than forty feet away. Against the horizon, the stars looked as if they were falling into the sea.