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and then you’ll know what I am.”
    Occasionally she called me “young man,” though she was eighteen and I was nearly twenty-two. It should have sounded strange, but it didn’t.
    She said, “I’m safe in Roseland for now, but there’s someone here who’s in great danger and desperately needs you.”
    “Who?”
    “Trust in your talent to lead you.”
    “You remember the woman on the horse that I told you about. Last evening, I had a close encounter of the spooky kind with her. She was able to tell me that her son is here. Nine or ten years old. And in danger, though I don’t know what or how, or why. Is it him that I’m meant to help?”
    She shrugged. “I don’t know all things.”
    I finished my tea. “I don’t believe you ever lie, but somehow you never answer me directly, either.”
    “Staring at the sun too long can blind you.”
    “Another riddle.”
    “It’s not a riddle. It’s a metaphor. I speak truth to you by indirection, because to speak it directly would pierce you as the brightness of the sun can burn the retina.”
    I pushed my chair back from the table. “I sure hope you don’t turn out to be some New Age bubblehead.”
    She laughed softly, as musical a sound as I had ever heard.
    Because the beauty of her laughter made my comment seem rude by comparison, I said, “No offense intended.”
    “None taken. You always speak from your heart, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
    As I rose from my chair, the dogs began to thump their tails again, but neither moved to accompany me.
    Annamaria said, “And by the way, there is no need for you to be afraid of dying twice.”
    If she wasn’t referring to my nightmare of being in Auschwitz, the coincidence of her statement was uncanny.
    I said, “How can you know my dreams?”
    “Is dying twice a fear that haunts your dreams?” she asked, managing once more to avoid a direct answer. “If so, it shouldn’t.”
    “What does it even mean—dying twice?”
    “You’ll understand in time. But of all the people in Roseland, in this city, in this state and nation, you are perhaps the last who needs to be concerned about dying twice. You will die once and only once, and it will be the death that doesn’t matter.”
    “All death matters.”
    “Only to the living.”
    You see why I strive to keep my life simple? If I were, say, an accountant, my mind full of the details of my clients’ finances,
and
if I saw the spirits of the lingering dead,
and
had to try to make sense of Annamaria’s conversation, my head would probably explode.
    The pattern of the yellow-rose lamp petaled her face.
    “Only to the living,” she repeated.
    Sometimes, when I met her eyes, something made me look away, my heart quickening with fear. Not fear of her. Fear of … something that I couldn’t name. I felt a helpless sinking of the heart.
    My gaze shifted now from Annamaria to the dogs lounging on the sofa.
    “I’m safe for now,” she said, “but you are not. If you should doubt the justice of your actions, you could die in Roseland, die your one and only death.”
    Unconsciously, I had raised my right hand to my chest to feel the shape of the pendant bell beneath my sweater.
    When I had first met her on the pier in Magic Beach, Annamaria had worn an exquisitely crafted silver bell, the size of a thimble, on a silver chain around her neck. It had been the only bright thing in a sunless gray day.
    In a moment stranger than any other with this woman, four days before we came to Roseland, she had taken the bell from around her neck, had held it out to me, and had asked, “Will you die for me?”
    Stranger still, though I hardly knew her, I had said yes and had accepted the pendant.
    More than eighteen months before, in Pico Mundo, I would have given my life to save my girl, Stormy Llewellyn. Without hesitation I would have taken the bullets that she took, but Fate didn’t grant me the chance to make that sacrifice.
    Since then, I have often wished that