“A balloon?” Sean asked, puzzled.
David was looking out the window, as well. “No, I think it might be canvas, but it’s got some kind of an inner structure, wood or metal. Damn, that’s ugly.”
Katie kept driving. She could see that there was a line to get into the museum where Stella Martin had been killed and laid out.
Stella was still at the morgue.
And people would be thronging in to see where she had lain.
“Capitalism at its best,” Sean murmured.
“We do need to survive as a city,” Katie said.
She drove on, turning down her street and bringing the car into the drive. “Sean, should I back out and park in the street so that you can reach your car?”
“No. I’m going to bed. I could sleep for a week. If I go to sleep now, I may feel human again by tomorrow.”
She parked the car and they all got out. Sean headed toward the house and then looked back. He strode over to them with purpose. “All right, someone has been killed, and Fantasy Fest may be starting off with a bang, but there is a killer on the loose. Katie, if you two don’t come here for the night, you make sure that I know you’re staying out.”
He stared at David.
“Of course,” David told him.
“All right, all right, it’s a little bit weird, but I actually prefer it if you stay here at night,” he said.
Neither of them moved.
Sean waved a hand in the air and walked on into the house.
“I’m going to take a run down to the police station. Will you go in for a while and promise me that you’ll stay there?” David asked her.
She lifted the journal. “Sure. But you know, I work tomorrow night again.”
“Hey, I’m getting to just love karaoke,” he assured her.
She kissed his cheek and headed into the house. “Lock it!” he called to her, and then started walking.
Katie went on in and set the ledger on the dining-room table. She wished that she had the books from the library as well, but they were at David’s house.
She couldn’t read more than one at a time anyway, she told herself.
It had been hot outside. She ran upstairs, jumped into the shower and afterward slid into the coolest cotton dress she could find. The shower refreshed her, and she went back downstairs. She set the kettle on the range top to boil. Now that she was cooled down, she was in the mood for a cup of hot tea.
She turned away from the stove and went dead still.
Her heart thudded against her chest, and seemed to stop.
Danny Zigler was here.
She looked to the door, and saw that it remained locked.
She had seen him last night; it might have been a dream, or something like a dream, but she had already seen Danny, and she had thought that he was dead.
But now she knew.
How she had ever imagined that he might be flesh and blood, that he might have broken into the house, she didn’t know.
He began to fade even as she stared at him. He had his old baseball cap in his hands, and his hair seemed unkempt. His clothes looked mussed and dirty.
“Danny,” she said softly.
He faded away completely.
Then he reappeared. He pointed to the table.
She frowned, looking down.
He was pointing at the journal she had taken from the Beckett house.
“Danny, what is it? What am I looking for?” she asked.
He faded away again, his arm, hand and then fingers disappearing last.
Then, there was no one there at all.
13
Craig Beckett wrote a wonderful log. It was personal, but she assumed that he had gotten accustomed to keeping such a diary because he’d been a ship’s captain.
He had lived a long life, dying at the age of ninety-six in eighteen ninety-five. He painted a vivid picture of when Key West had been little more than a trading post with a hardy group of settlers working to turn it into a place that would boast, in the Victorian era, the highest per capita income in the United States.
It was the early pages she turned to first. He wrote about being a young sea captain in the navy and his decision to leave the navy and work for David Porter as a civilian.