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puzzlement? Perhaps. But that would not be the only coincidence of the day. An uncanny article in a newspaper that I usually never rested my eyes upon published a list of other minor coincidences stitched together by a snoopy newspaperman, fedora and cigarettes and all, I imagine. He wrote, and I quote from the article headlined as “The Eerie Coincidences Leading to New York Society’s Sink of the Decade,” that the skipper of the lobster boat was aged thirty-nine, the ninth child of a Great Neck Catholic clan. He had nine children of his own, and it was the ninth anniversary of his marriage (a prolific lobsterman) to one of twin sisters, who each had only nine toes. The accident took place on the ninth of the ninth month, exactly nine minutes after seven—a clock on board had stopped in the moment of the accident.
    These might all sound like mindless rhyme concocted by a desperate newspaperman. Maybe the coincidences weren’t so coincidental after all. Let the preponderance of evidence paint itself: that portrait of a cunning criminal, my Annabelle-under-the-quilt.
    Nine, the royal digit of the Chinese emperor, was Annabelle’s favorite number. She had professed to wanting to havenine children, with the little runt, a curly girlie, to be named Nina. She believed in the cycle of nine lives, each one a reflection of the previous. “Which one are you living now?” she used to ask me. She yearned to soar up to the ninth heaven where the pears of immortality and the peaches of longevity were grown. Harmless it might seem, but in the end, nine were injured, including the curator and Parisian girl: the former lost his voice, his Adam’s apple slashed, rendering him a permanent mute—he, I gathered, was to talk me out of going to China—the latter lost an eye, making her a one-eyed beauty, and clipped her lip, popular not even in the eccentric city of Paris, making it an utter impossibility to be matched with anyone. In one act of genius, all paths to perdition were cleared of my Annabelle’s foes. No one, I mean no one, but the devil could have done it except for my sweet darling girl.
    So there you have it. I had thought of doing in my folks, but in the end it was the ghost who took the charge with the cobweb of nines. There are no laws or tenets prohibiting her from such deadly vengeance: she is dead. No hanging or beheading could hurt her anymore. My conscience was utterly clean—no bloody fingers or smoking gun. Just a snugly hidden ghost doing what might very well have been my own intended deeds.
    There were moments, many moments as I roamed in my dark world, when I felt as if I was the only seeing soul among the blind multitude. I was the clear-eyed chosen one who had crossed over to the dark side, secretly privy to the underbelly of a busy loom that wove the fabric of coincidences,making them seem so conveniently and banally coincidental. Nothing happens randomly. Every occurrence is the result of much nail-biting premeditation in the mammoth cosmic game of chess played by angelic go-betweens, those butterflies of which my Annabelle is one, as the following chain of miraculous events will attest.

9
    I wasn’t the only one on earth dreaming up little angelic ghosts as colorful butterflies. At the close of the previous chapter, on the point of my comparing all ghosts to butterflies, In-In, my presumed illiterate ink boy, tugged at my sleeve, picked up his little brush, and proceeded to draw a butterfly with the simplest of strokes, yet affecting such vividness, as if the little creatures in flight were futilely barred behind the red lines on our draft paper.
    “You are an accomplished painter,” I complimented him.
    “Baba painted paper lanterns, and I apprenticed at his shop, painting little creatures on the bottom,” he replied shyly.
    When I asked him why he had painted me such a lively gift, he told me dead people soar up to become butterflies in China. I pinched his rosy cheek with affection and awarded