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against the wall, and slid down to sit on the floor. He was in three places simultaneously: this present hallway, this hallway on the murder night, and another house in a distant city twenty years in the past.
    Because his father and mother had been artists and art teachers, he had perpetual access to a memory museum of renowned images. Now, before his mind’s eye rose a painting by Goya, the chilling and despair-filled Saturn Devouring His Children .
    John had to sit in silence for a while, letting time past wash out of time present. The horrors of the past and of the present were unredeemable, but he held fast to a hope—wild and unreasoned in its character, but ardent—that the future could be shaped so that it would never need redemption.
    Although he would have preferred to switch off the lights in Celine’s room and retreat from the house, he eventually got to his feet and crossed her threshold once more. He did not, however, look again at the dead girl’s bed.
    Across her desk spilled glossy magazines published for teenagers and, by way of implausible contrast, a paperback of The Everlasting Man , by G. K. Chesterton.
    Display shelves held an eclectic collection of things pleasing to Celine. Twenty ceramic mice, the largest no more than two inches tall. Seashells. Glass paperweights. A snow globe containing a quaint cottage.
    Bells. Behind the mice, between two plush-toy bunnies in white bonnets and gingham dresses, on a green box in which they evidently had come, lay three miniature silver calla lilies all sprouting from one silver stem. The spathes were exquisitely shaped, but instead of a yellow spike, each enclosed a tiny silver clapper.
    The stem, by which the bells could be rung, was dark with dried blood and with tarnish the blood encouraged. If the criminalists had noticed the bells, they would have bagged and taken them.
    From a box of Kleenex on the desk, John plucked a tissue. He folded it into a pad and gripped the silver stem, not to preserve evidence—too late for that—but to avoid touching the blood.
    On the lid of the green box under the calla lilies, in silver script, were the words Piper’s Gallery .
    Shaken, the bells produced the crisp, cold ringing that he had heard three times since entering the house.
    Unable to suppress a tremor in his hands, he placed the bells and the Kleenex in the box, tucked the box in a sport-coat pocket.
    Back in the day, Alton Turner Blackwood had carried with him three silver bells, each the size of a thimble, clustered at the end of a handle. They were not shaped like flowers and were not as finely made as those on Celine’s shelf of small treasures.
    Blackwood had been a psychopathic ritualist with an elaborate post-homicide ceremony that suggested both a strange belief system and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. When everyone in his target family was dead, he returned to the victims in the order the killings occurred and arranged them on their backs. With a drop of epoxy, he glued coins on the cadaver’s eyes: quarters that he’d painted black, always with the eagle facing up. In the mouth, on the tongue, he placed a brown disc that the crime lab identified as dried excrement.
    Then the killer folded the corpse’s hands at the groin, around a chicken egg. To be sure the hands would not release the egg, he tied thumb to thumb and little finger to little finger with string.
    Days prior to a slaughter, he prepared the eggs by drilling two tiny holes in each to drain the contents. Then he inserted a tightly rolled slip of paper through a hole into the well-dried, hollow shell. If the body was male, the paper carried the hand-printed word servus ; if female, serva . They were the masculine and feminine forms of the Latin noun that meant “slave.”
    After the cadavers had been accessorized to suit him, Blackwood had stood over each, ringing his triune bells.
    Billy Lucas had not rearranged his four victims but had left themlying as they died. He didn’t