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cherrywood table. On a strip of white linen in the center was one of Gran D'Grou's carvings.
         The Screaming Woman.
        Abruptly, the election, Bob Cameron, and the nastiness were gone. In its place a reminder of the funeral, and he hugged himself absently as he realized it was almost twilight.
        A car horn blared in the distance. Another answered. A third buried them both.
        He backed away from the table.
        The figure was carved out of gray-and-black driftwood. It was fifteen inches high, a naked woman standing with her hands at her sides, her head tilted back slightly. At a distance she seemed to be singing; closer, and she could be screaming as her neck was encircled by what appeared to be a headless serpent growing up and out of the base of her spine. Her eyes were blank. Her legs merged at the knees into the body of a second, larger serpent that formed the statue's base.
         This not be snake here, it is tail. She is sea woman. Eye cut out? No, no, Colin, it is shadow. You put a light here, the eye come back. You want a big monster, you stick it in the closet; you want a beautiful woman, put it on the television.
         Jesus damn, Colin, you got no imagination.
        He switched on the lamp standing beside the table and hurried into the bedroom to get dressed.
        He didn't blame the island a bit for wanting Gran buried right away. During the last year he had changed, and for the worse. His role of benevolent despot had darkened, and no one had thought it amusing anymore. He snarled, except at the children and Lilla. He spent more time in the woods, more time at his shack, less time at the luncheonette unless he wanted to talk with the young ones. When he looked at passersby it was from the corner of his eye. When he spoke, his voice took on indecipherable insinuation.
        And he demonstrated suddenly an uncanny ability to make himself appear to be something he wasn't- instead of an embittered failure, an exile from his home, he was a mysterious figure from an exotic foreign land known for its cultivation of supernatural shadows; instead of a man who steadfastly refused the polishing of his raw artistic talents, he was a worker of dark miracles so convincing even Warren Harcourt thought his dead wife could be brought back.
        The dead birds hadn't helped at all.
        Lilla's singing was even worse.
        And tomorrow, Colin thought, they would look up at the sun and really feel silly about letting themselves be spooked-spooked by a drunk who didn't make sense even with his carvings.
        But that was tomorrow.
        There was still tonight to get through.
        

TWO
        
        The beach continued on for a half mile below the last jetty, to the sharp slope where the land rose and the sand gave way to boulders, barnacled and slick, providing throats for the breakers that shattered against them. Down by the beach there were gaps, for tide pools, children, the occasional lovers. Fifty yards more and the gaps closed, the boulders becoming jagged and massive. And at the southern tip they rose to hundred-foot cliffs fringed with wind-twisted trees and tenacious straggly shrubs.
        There were sand dunes as well. Two parallel rows spiked with sharp-edged sawgrass, broken and nearly leveled at several narrow places by wind or stormtide or the persistence of walkers.
        And there was Dunecrest Estates, the only homes outside town-larger, newer, bespeaking wealth and position in fieldstone and brick. There were fewer than two dozen, half of them facing the ocean, the rest fronting a woodland arm between them and Neptune Avenue, which itself ended where they did, at a street called Surf Court. The development was twelve years old, long enough for the townspeople to call it simply the Estates.
        And there was Gran D'Grou's shack.
        It stood on a raised spit of land where the dunes met the slope, hidden by dying shrubs,