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go, anyway?”
    Russell gave him a thoughtful look. “I ran into our waitress out in the hall,” he said. “She had a few things on her mind.”
    Deal’s mind flashed to the glimpse he’d had of Denise a few minutes before, headed down the hallway in the opposite direction from their rooms. Whose T-shirt had she been wearing? he found himself wondering. He looked more closely at Russell Straight. “Are you putting me on?”
    Russell stared at him, deadpan. “Put you on about what?”
    “Jesus,” Deal said. What had it been since Russell had disappeared, all of twenty minutes? “Did you say goodbye before she left?”
    Russell stared at Deal for a moment, then turned away. He used his nearly empty glass to point across the open bar, toward the stage in the far corner of the room. “That woman over there singing is good,” he said.
    Deal started to say something, then broke off. He hadn’t been interested in their waitress in the slightest, truly he hadn’t, but
still
…
    He gave up then, following Russell’s gaze across the room. “
The wind is in from Africa
,” he heard. An old Joni Mitchell song. Janice had been a major fan, had played that song—“Carey”—to death.
    There was something different about this cover of the piece, though. Slowed way down, stripped of the original’s perky beat. This was dark, almost dirgelike, nothing the piano player had dreamed up, that much was certain.
    “
…my fingernails are filthy, I got beach tar on my feet…
”
    Deal wondered if it was the right resort-town imagery for the cocktail crowd, but they seemed as rapt as ever over there. “You ever hear this song?” he asked Russell, who turned and stared at him with an eyebrow raised.
    “I didn’t say it was my
thing
,” Russell told him. “I was just saying she’s good.”
    “
…let’s have a round for these freaks,
” she sang, nodding at the audience in front of her, eliciting some chuckles, “
a round for these friends of mine
…”
    She turned to her accompanist with the next:
    “
…another round for the bright red devil who keeps me in this tourist town
…”
    It brought more chuckles from the crowd, but if the piano player in the lousy topper noticed, he didn’t let on. He seemed more concerned with holding himself back from bursting into a ragtime tempo.
    Something about the song had caught Deal by now, some nugget of sadness he’d never paid attention to when Janice had been in her Joni Mitchell phase. Maybe it was the arrangement, or maybe it was the circumstances of his life. Or maybe, like Russell Straight said, the woman doing the singing was just damned good.
    She’d moved out into the spotlight that had been centered on the piano, and Deal could see that her hair was lighter than he’d thought. A brunette, sure, but one who’d been spending some time in the sun, picking up the kinds of highlights they couldn’t quite manufacture in the salon. Sequins—just a few—on her clinging white sheath, its straps bright on her tanned shoulders, and more of a profile than he’d realized at first.
    “…
but let’s not talk about fare-thee-wells
,” she sang, “
…the night is a starry dome…
”
    Deal checked the view out the bank of windows beside him and discovered that the sky was indeed dark by now. He found himself thinking again of Janice, his estranged wife—off to some New Age retreat in Boulder, with a quick phone call to Deal as a fare-thee-well, their nine-year-old daughter, Isabel, parked for a week with Deal’s sainted neighbor, Mrs. Suarez.
    It seemed forever that he and Janice had been on the verge. And suddenly—though he couldn’t say why, not unless it was some combination of the song, the memories of that long-ago trip they’d taken, the very ions that drifted on a languid breeze through an island town in late summer—for whatever reason, he realized how much he had lost. Some part of him had become anesthetized to it, little by little over the years, he