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scream at me.’

    I started to laugh.

    ‘I’m thinking, “Man, I must really look like a cop.” ’

    ‘You didn’t,’ I said. ‘That was the problem.’

    ‘Really.’

    ‘Well, if you were wearing then what you are now I’d have definitely known you were a cop.’

    Krull looked down at his clothes.

    ‘That came out wrong.’

    ‘This tie has been in my family for years.’

    ‘I’m sorry, I—’

    ‘Kidding.’

    ‘Detective Krull,’ I said, ‘can I just apologize now for an">Ize now ything I may say or scream in the future?’

    Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nancy holding out her valentine and asking for Buster the Safety Dog’s autograph. Officer Ricky clamped a pen between Buster’s wooden paws, and, holding them together, skillfully ‘helped’ the dog to sign.

    ‘There you go, princess,’ he said, handing it back to her. My stomach seized up.

    ‘You okay?’ Krull said. ‘You look a little pale.’

    ‘Yeah, I’m fine. I just . . . remembered something.’

    I didn’t feel like going home between jobs, so I had a long lunch at the University Diner consisting of an egg-salad sandwich, five cups of coffee and the Village Voice , which I tried to read cover to cover.

    Actually, I was just staring at the print, trying to figure out why I’d gotten Dead Man’s Fingers. My classroom hadn’t been robbed, none of the kids had hurt themselves, even the cops had been personable.

    Maybe the Fingers were a premonition of something that hadn’t happened yet - a hostile customer at the box office, for instance. Or maybe I’d get mugged on the walk home. I looked at my sandwich. Maybe this egg salad would turn out to be bad. ‘ Keinahora ,’ I whispered.

    I opened my shoulder bag, took out Sydney’s valentine, and reread her hand-written message: Have fun, Samantha. Please.

    The red ink was deep; she’d practically pushed the pen through the card.

     
    Something happened at the box office. It wasn’t horrible, but it was so completely out of sync with the reality I’d come to know, I found new justification for believing in Dead Man’s Fingers - even if I was forced to rethink their meaning. What happened was this: Hermyn told a joke.

    I had known the woman for three years and even before the vow of silence, she didn’t have much to say. But things change, which Hermyn proved when she breezed into the box office half an hour late, threw off her heavy camouflage jacket and black watch cap, ran both hands through her spiky brown hair and said - in a voice loud enough and cheerful enough to rival Officer Ricky’s - ‘What’s purple and goes slam, slam, slam, slam?’

    When no one responded, she said, ‘A four-door grape!’

    Hermyn’s laughter was hearty to the point of operatic - laughter saved up over a three-year period and released from the coddled lungs of a performance artist in the cramped subscription room of an old theater box office.

    Everyone in the room was silenced - even Yale, who had bet Argent Devereaux and me five dollars apiece that he could make it all the way through ‘I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General’ without breathing. Yale loved Gilbert and Sullivan almost as mappn almosuch as he loved the sound of his own singing voice, but with Hermyn’s laughter lacing the air like a gas leak, he stopped dead in the middle of ‘animal and vegetable and mineral’ and asked, ‘What’s wrong?’

    Hermyn stopped laughing and smiled at us. Her left front tooth was adorned with a tiny, gold butterfly. ‘I’m happy,’ she said. ‘I’m in love.’

     
    ‘Tell me it isn’t true. I can’t believe it. Can you believe it? I mean, look at her! I can’t believe it, can you?’ Shell Clarion, who spoke quickly to begin with, tended to talk even faster when she got emotional. Now she sounded like an auctioneer on Ritalin.

    I was in the small stone courtyard outside the box office, not smoking between her and Yale. Shell was talking only to me.