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one. He had a dial-up AOL connection, so the text appeared first, flanking a square where a picture would soon appear.
    Cheyenne Fleming, he read, had been born in Hollywood in 1934, and had lived there all her life with her younger sister Rebecca. Both had gone to UCLA, Cheyenne with more distinction than Rebecca, and both had published books of poetry, though Rebecca’s had always been compared unfavorably with Cheyenne’s. The sisters apparently both loved and resented each other, and the article quoted several lines from the “To My Sister” sonnet – the version Christine had read to him over the phone, not the version in his copy of
More Poems.
Cheyenne Fleming had shot herself in 1969, reportedly because Rebecca had stolen away her fiancée. Rebecca became her literary executor.
    At last the picture appeared on the screen – it was black and white, but Sydney recognized the thin face with its narrow eyes and wide humorous mouth, and he knew that the disordered hair would be red in a color photograph.
    The tip of his finger was numb where he had touched her thumbprint.
    I’m Shy,
she had said. He had thought she was evading giving him her name. Shy for Cheyenne, of course. Pronounced Shy-Ann.
    He glanced fearfully at his front door – what if she was standing on the landing out there right now, in the dusk shadows? He realized, with a shudder that made him carry his glass back to the kitchen for a refill, that he would open the door if she was – yes, and invite her in, invite her across his threshold. I finally fall in love, he thought, and it’s with a dead woman. A suicide.
    A line of black ants had found the coffee cup he’d left unwashed this morning, but he couldn’t kill them right now.
    Once his glass was filled again, he went to the living room window instead of the door, and he pulled the curtains aside. A huge orange full moon hung in the darkening sky behind the old TV antennas on the opposite roof. He looked down, but didn’t see her among the shadowed trees and vines.
    And in a Windingsheet of Vineleaf wrapped,
    So bury me by some sweet Gardenside.
    He closed the curtain and fetched the bottle and the twelve-pack of Coors to set beside his chair, then settled down to lose himself in one of the P. G. Wodehouse novels until he should be drunk enough to stumble to bed and fall instantly asleep.

    As he trudged across Pershing Square from the parking structure on Hill Street toward the three imposing brown brick towers of the Biltmore Hotel, Sydney’s squinting gaze kept being drawn in the direction of the new bright-yellow building on the south side of the square. His eyes were watering in the morning sun-glare anyway, and he wondered irritably why somebody would paint a new building in that idiotic kindergarten color.
    He had awakened early, and his hangover seemed to be just a continuation of his disorientation from the day before. He had decided that he couldn’t sell the Fleming book. Even though he had met her two weeks before finding the book, he was certain that the book was somehow his link to her.
    Christine would be disappointed – part of the fun of bookselling was writing catalogue copy for extraordinary items, and she would have wanted to collaborate in the description of this item – but he couldn’t help that.
    His gaze was drawn again toward the yellow building, but now that he was closer to it he could see that it wasn’t the building that his eyes had been drawn toward, but a stairway and pool just this side of it. Two six-foot brown stone spheres were mounted on the pool coping.
    And he saw her sitting down there, on the shady side of one of the giant stone balls.
    He was smiling and stepping across the pavement in that direction even before he was sure it was her, and the memory, only momentarily delayed, of who she must be didn’t slow his pace.
    She was wearing the jeans and sweatshirt again, and she stood up and waved at him when he was still a hundred feet away, and