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flown out across the canal.
    Jimmy walked to the picture window and looked in. Dark drapes faded to green/gray stood open a foot. It was the living room. There were a few pieces of old furniture, what they used to call a divan, Look and Life magazines on the coffee table, a couple of Klee prints on the walls. It was like a museum of the mid-1970s. Untouched. The table lamps were tall and bulbous, glassy gold dripping over aquamarine. The carpet was white shag. The rotary phone was pink. Over the fake fireplace with its dead and dusty electric log “fire” was a pen and ink sketch of the Left Bank.
    Off a dark hallway, a staircase stepped up through deep angular shadows to the second flo or. If there were any kids in the neighborhood, maybe grandkids, they were sure to swap stories about ghosts. You wouldn’t think so, but there were houses like this all over L.A., left-behind houses, dead houses. Sometimes it was about uncollected taxes. Sometimes it was about crazy. Usually it was about bad blood running through the constricted veins of bitter heirs. If I can’t have it, you can’t have it.
    A spider stepped across the sill. Time meant nothing to it.
    Jimmy stepped back. There was music from somewhere close, Abba’s “Dancing Queen,” more of the past pushing into the present. It was coming from the house two doors down, out an open upstairs window. The song ended and another Abba song started. It was an album. Who listens to Abba albums?
    There was a sound from across the canal, a sound Jimmy was meant to hear, the sailboat man slapping the hose into coils on the dock. Jimmy looked over. The neighborhood watchman tested the valve again to make sure the water was off and then walked up the short walk into the house, stepped out of his Topsiders outside the door and went in. After a few seconds the white shutters in the upstairs window tipped open a crack.
    Jimmy suppressed the urge to wave.
    He walked down alongside the canal to the Abba house. A low stucco wall surrounded a small porch, a patio with Adirondack chairs and a little table for the drinks. He knocked on the door. He waited but nobody came. After a minute, the side ended. It was a record player. The needle lifted—you could hear it—and then a click.
    “She was there a minute ago.”
    A young workman with his shirt off was sanding the dock in front of the next house down. He had KROQ on the box, the Chili Peppers.
    “Try again.”
    “That’s all right,” Jimmy said.
    “She was there a minute ago. She likes the sun,” the workman said. He made it sound a little nasty.
    “Is there still a Yacht Club around here?” Jimmy said.
    The workman pointed down the walk.
    Jimmy walked away from 110 Rivo Alto Canal but it stayed with him. He couldn’t shake it. Instead of the sweet little walk under the trees beside the canal, he might just as well have been walking down that upstairs hallway toward that front room where it had happened, where the lightning had flashed.
    He was already inside.

FOUR
    Through the tinted glass of the tall windows of the bar Jimmy watched the Hunters and Catalinas and Ericsons motoring out toward the bight. He drank his beer and swiped a few olives from the tray.
    The bartender was on a cell phone to his girlfriend.
    “I know,” he said every once in a while.
    He was too young to know anything about the Kantkes. Star Wars was 1977. Hotel California. Elvis dying in August. Car Wash. Saturday Night Fever. Roots. Laverne & Shirley. Foreigner’s “Feels Like the First Time” and K.C. & the Sunshine Band’s “I’m Your Boogie Man.”
    And Abba.
    Jimmy got up, took his beer with him, and looked at the pictures along one wall, the Long Beach Yacht Club over the years. In the old days, what you had was Old Money enjoying itself. The men wore yachting caps with a straight face, only nobody had a straight face. Then New Money started elbowing in. There went the dress code. The fifties were very black and white and the sixties