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Sinclair was standing in front of a cracked, white-painted door, bouncing a key up and down in her hand, a prey to massive doubt. She had been sitting in the car, parked on the Danforth near Logan, until almost midnight, waiting for Guy to emerge from the doorway between storefronts. When he appeared, she had set the timer button on her watch for fifteen minutes, eased herself out of the car, walked with quick confident steps past three grubby little shops redolent of failure and rats, and made her way up the shabby stairs to the second floor. That was the easy part. Now panic was chipping away at her reflexes. She should have waited to see what he was going to do. To make sure he was really leaving. What if he had noticed her sitting there, and was coming back to trap her? “Come on,” she murmured to herself, “pull yourself together. He’s not that subtle.” But what if his brother was home? She’d face that if it happened, and not before. No one else in this scruffy building was going to notice one female more or less wandering the halls. She took a deep breath and unlocked the door.
    It opened onto a long, steep staircase, bathed in faint eerie light from a yellow or orange bulb at the top. The Beaumont brothers went in for odd effects. She ran lightly up the stairs, two at a time.
    She looked up and down the long narrow hall. Somewhere in here was the piece of paper on which he had written down the name and address—and telephone number—of the dealer he had called from London. The one who was willing to buy it. She knew he had written down the number. For one thing, he was so terrified of forgetting things that he always kept notes. And the more he drank, the more frightened he had become of memory loss. And for the other, she had seen him look for the number in his sketch pad on that Tuesday when he had made all those transatlantic calls. He never moved without his current sketch pads, and always used them for jotting down things that he didn’t want her to see, in the innocent belief that they were safe there. She sighed. She had been so terrified in London that he would come in and find her packing, that she had spent no more than a minute or two looking for the address before the cab had come for her. And so here she was now. Even more terrified.
    The living room spread across the front of the building. The bay window on the north wall held a giant plant, with a tormented and eccentric stalk and long, spotted leaves, sitting on an octagonal table. Bookcases lined the west wall, a shabby brown chesterfield adorned the south, and various large chairs filled up the remaining spaces. She paused and sniffed the atmosphere. It smelled of paint, stale booze, stale air, and a kind of undefined, unwashed masculinity. Guy. His traces were everywhere. Books, papers, underwear on the floor, clothes on the chairs and spread over the chesterfield. She started to work.
    There were sketch pads all over. On the table, in the bookcase, in the closet. In every size and of every quality obtainable. His brother must be storing every page Guy Beaumont had ever scribbled on since he had sketched his first clown at age five. She made a pile of the ones that she thought had been in London with them and doggedly started to examine each one, checking every page as rapidly as she could. They contained hands, faces, letters, ears, necks, buildings, legs, breasts—everything but what she was looking for. She had only three more to look through when a piercing beep exploded from her wrist. She stopped, frozen. The timer. By now he would have given up waiting for her and would be on his way home. She could only count on five minutes at most.
    She flipped through the first pad so quickly she created a kaleidoscope of motion out of it. No writing whatsoever in it. The second was composed of stiffer paper, forcing her to move more slowly. Even so, she almost missed it. There it was, in the middle of the pad,