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might step forth, unclad, into the tableau of named and dateless stones.
    He sucked in his breath. His heart pulsed again.
    For as he watched, one of the goddesses, one of the forever-beautiful maidens, trembled with the night chill and shifted out into the moonlight.
    He could not tell if he was terrified or delighted. After all, it was late at night in this yard of the dead. But she? She was naked to the weather, or almost; a mist of silk covered her breasts and plumed around her waist as she drifted away from the other pale statues.
    She moved among the stones, silent as the marble she had been but now was not, until she stood before him with her dark hair tousled about her small ears and her great eyes the color of lilacs. She raised her hand tenderly and smiled.
    â€œYou,” he whispered. “What are you doing here?”
    She replied quietly, “Where else should I be?”
    She held out her hand and led him in silence out of the graveyard.
    Looking back he saw the abandoned puzzle of names and enigma of dates.
    Everyone born, he thought, but none has died. The stones are blank, waiting for someone to date their ghosts bound for Eternity.
    â€œYes?” someone said. But her lips had not moved.
    And you followed me, he thought, to stop me from reading the gravestones and asking questions. And what about the absent children, never coming home?
    And as if they glided on ice, on a vast sea of moonlight, they arrived where a crowd of sunflowers hardly stirred as they passed and their feet were soundless, moving up the path to the porch and across the porch, and up the stairs, one, two, three floors until they reached a tower room where the door stood wide to reveal a bed as bright as a glacier, its covers thrown back, all snow on a hot summer night.
    Yes, she said.
    He sleepwalked the rest of the way. Behind him, he saw his clothes, like the discards of a careless child, strewn on the parquetry. He stood by the snowbank bed and thought, One last question. The graveyard. Are there bodies beneath the stones? Is anyone there?
    But it was too late. Even as he opened his mouth to question, he tumbled into the snow.
    And he was drowning in whiteness, crying out as he inhaled the light and then out of the rushing storm, a warmness came; he was touched and held, but could not see what or who held him, and he relaxed, drowned.
    When next he woke, he was not swimming but floating. Somehow he had leaped from a cliff, and someone with him, unseen, as he soared up until lightning struck, tore at him in half terror, half joy, to fall and strike the bed with his entire body and his soul.
    When he awoke again, the storm over, and the flying gone, he found a small hand in his, and without opening his eyes he knew that she lay beside him, her breath keeping time with his. It was not yet dawn.
    She spoke.
    â€œWas there something you wanted to ask?”
    â€œTomorrow,” he whispered. “I’ll ask you then.”
    â€œYes,” she said quietly. “Then.”
    Then, for the first time, it seemed, her mouth touched his.

CHAPTER 13
    He awoke to the sun pouring in through the high attic window. Questions gathered behind his tongue.
    Beside him, the bed was empty.
    Gone.
    Afraid of the truth? he wondered.
    No, he thought, she will have left a note on the icebox door. Somehow he knew. Go look.
    The note was there.
    Â 
    Mr. Cardiff:
    Â 
    Many tourists arriving. I must welcome them. Questions at breakfast.
    Nef.
    Â 
    Far off, wasn’t there the merest wail of a locomotive whistle, the softest churn of some great engine?
    On the front porch, Cardiff listened, and again the faint locomotive cry stirred beyond the horizon.
    He glanced up at the top floor. Had she fled toward that sound? Had the boarders heard, too?
    He ran down to the rail station and stood in the middle of the blazing hot iron tracks, daring the whistle to sound again. But this time, silence.
    Separate trains bringing what? he wondered.
    I