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see? Or Charlotte’s is the Apple Place because apparently there’s like a dessert called apple Charlotte or something.”
    “Okay. I get it. That’s kind of...cool.”
    He grinned again. One of his teeth was chipped. “I never thought of it like that before, but yeah. It is. It’s her way of thinking around the holes in her mind.”
    “Like a step sideways.”
    “Just like that, yeah. She’s smart. You wouldn’t believe some of the things she’s done. You know the Jimi Hendrix song? Allegedly he wrote that for her.”
    “Wait? Gloria ?” said Blue. “I don’t think he wrote that one. It’s a cover.”
    Gabe frowned. “Huh. Still might have been written for her. She was everywhere back then. London, Paris, West Berlin. The rumor goes she even dated Keith Richards for like two weeks, but he thought she was too freaky even for him.”
    And now she was wandering in and out of stores and diners, thinking she was talking to women who had been dead for ten years. Blue folded her arms even tighter and tried not to shiver; the wind was cool now that she’d been standing still for a while, and she was conscious once again that she was wearing nothing under her robe. “Well, I should get back,” she said. “I have an early start.”
    “Yeah. Me, too.”
    “Are you taking the boat out?”
    “Bright and early,” he said.
    “Do you go out on the reefs and stuff?”
    He nodded and there was that snaggletooth grin again, the one she already liked. The one that said there were things in the world that he loved so much they lit him up inside. “About a mile out, yeah,” he said. “You ever seen a live coral reef? I’ll take you out there sometime if you want.”
    “I’d love that. Thank you.”
    “No worries. If you’re gonna dive, dive with me, because there are some shady operators around here. They’re not nearly as tight on safety as they need to be.”
    “Okay, thanks.” She glanced back up at the hotel, its long balcony rails gleaming bone white in the light of a bright, waning moon. “Well. Back to the sweatbox, I guess.”
    “Sure. It was nice talking to you.”
    “Yeah. You, too.”
    There was another stiff pause between them and he jumped in too quickly to fill it. “Listen,” he said. “And stop me if I’m way off base, but if you can’t handle the heat and the...well, you know, upstairs anytime, I can always put a cot in the boat shed for you.”
    “Oh no, really. I wouldn’t want to be any trouble.”
    “It’s no trouble, I promise. I can leave the key for you and you can come and go as you please. I mean, I’ll be in and out now and again...”
    “...cutting up bodies?”
    He looked puzzled for a moment and then laughed. “No,” he said. “Of course not. I never do them in the boat shed. You’d get DNA everywhere .”
    Not for the first time she wondered what he’d say if he knew what she had in her pocket. The childish impulse to one-up him was gone before the thought was even complete in her head; if she told him there would be questions. And with questions came the residue of that which the tide had just washed away, and the whole sad mess of who she was and who she had been.
    She liked herself so much better now that she was just a girl on a beach.

 
    3
     
    No such thing as a silent night around here.
    The nightsong chitters and chirps and croaks all through the dark and sometimes the only thing to do is make a noise right back at it. Yell, laugh, sing. Play back the old record player at it - Howling Wolf, I Ain’t Superstitious . Still works. Still good. They toss everything out before it’s even old these days. Poor cardboard Stacy’s boy has a new phone thing every six months it seems. Blue ones, red ones, black ones and a whole bunch of other colors the kid can’t even see.
    But I saw. Kept an eye on that child. Oh yes.
    Black cats, thirteens, don’t walk under ladders. Throw salt over your right shoulder to knock the devil off, should he be sitting there. I