“Soon I will. I like the sign out there at the junction of 101 and 101A. The artist really got that brown color to look just like rich chocolate ice cream. Yeah, they were driving a Winnebago.”

“It’s brought us lots of folk, that sign. The state bureaucrats wanted us to take it down, but one of our locals—Gus Eisner—knew the governor’s cousin, and he fixed it. We pay the state three hundred dollars a year to keep the sign there. Amabel repaints it every year in July, sort of an anniversary, since that’s when we first opened. Purn Davies told her the chocolate paint she used for the ice cream was too dark, but we all ignored him. He wanted to marry Amabel after her husband died, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with him. He still isn’t over it. Pretty tacky, huh?”

“I’d say so,” Quinlan said.

“You tell Amabel that you think her chocolate is perfect. That’ll please her.”

Amabel, he thought. Amabel Perdy. She was her aunt.

The stocky gray-haired woman behind the counter cleared her throat. She smiled at him when he turned back to her.

“What did you say, Martha? Speak up. You know I can’t hear you.”

Like hell, James thought. The old relic probably heard everything within three miles of town.

“And stop fiddling with those pearls. You’ve already broken them more times than I can count.”

Martha’s pearls did look a bit ratty, he thought.

“Martha, what do you want?”

“I need to check Mr. Quinlan in, Thelma. And I’ve got to finish baking that chocolate decadence cake before I go to lunch with Mr. Drapper. But I want to get Mr. Quinlan settled first.”

“Well, do it, don’t just stand there wringing your hands. You watch yourself with Ed Drapper, Martha. He’s a fast one, that boy is. I noticed just yesterday that you’re getting liver spots, Martha. I heard you got liver spots if you’d had too much sex when you were younger. Yes, you watch what you do with Ed Drapper. Oh, yes, don’t forget to put walnuts in that chocolate decadence cake. I love walnuts.”

James turned to Martha, such a sweet-looking lady, with stiff gray hair and a buxom bosom and glasses perched on the end of her nose. She was tucking her hands in her pockets, hiding those liver spots.

James laughed and said, knowing the old lady was listening, “She’s a terror, isn’t she?”

“She’s more than a terror, Mr. Quinlan,” Martha said in a whisper. “She’s a lot more. Poor Ed Drapper is sixty-three years old.” She raised her voice. “No, Thelma, I won’t forget the walnuts.”

“A mere lad,” James said and smiled at Martha, who didn’t look as if she’d ever had any sex in her life. She was tugging on those pearls again.

When she left him in the tower room, which gave him a panoramic view of the ocean, he walked to the window and stared out, not at the ocean that gleamed like a brilliant blue jewel beneath the full afternoon sun but at the people below. Across the street, right in front of Purn Davies’s store, he saw four old geezers pull out chairs and arrange them around an oak barrel that had to be as old as James’s grandfather. One of the men pulled out a deck of cards. James had a feeling he was looking at a long-standing ritual. One of the men arranged his cards, then spat off the sidewalk. Another one hooked his gnarly old fingers beneath his suspenders and leaned back in the chair. Yes, James thought, a ritual of many years. He wondered if one of them was Purn Davies, the one who’d criticized Amabel’s chocolate because she’d refused to marry him. Was one of them Reverend Hal Vorhees? No, surely a reverend wouldn’t be sitting there spitting and playing cards.

It didn’t matter. He’d find out soon enough who everybody was. So there’d be no doubt in anybody’s mind about why he was here, he would talk to this group too about Harve and Marge Jensen. He’d talk to everyone he ran into. No one would suspect a thing.

He would bet his next paycheck that those old geezers saw just about everything that went on in this town, including a runaway woman who just happened to be the daughter of a big-time lawyer who had not only gotten himself murdered but who’d also been involved in some very bad business. A woman who also happened to be Amabel Perdy’s niece.

James wished Amory St. John hadn’t gotten himself knocked off, at least not until the FBI had finally nailed him for selling arms to terrorist nations.

He turned from the window and frowned. He realized he hadn’t cared at all about Harve and Marge Jensen until ancient Thelma Nettro, who’d been pronounced dead by Doc Spiver but had risen from the table and scared Ralph Keaton shitless, had lied to him.