fulfilling Joey's dream after Joey had abandoned it.
    P.J. was a critically acclaimed writer. Using his ceaseless rambles back and forth 
across the United States as material, he produced highly polished prose that had 
mysterious depths under a deceptively simple surface.
    Joey envied his brother-but not with any malice. P.J. earned every line of the praise 
that he received and every dollar of his fortune, and Joey was proud of him.
    Theirs had been an intense and special relationship when they were young, and it was 
still intense, though it was now conducted largely at great distances by phone, when P.J. 
called from Montana or Maine or Key West or a small dusty town on the high plains of 
Texas. They saw each other no more than once every three or four years, always when P.J. 
dropped in unannounced in the course of his travels-but even then he didn't stay long, 
never more than two days, usually one.
    No one had ever meant more to Joey than P.J., and no one ever would. His feelings for 
his brother were rich and complex, and he would never be able to explain them adequately 
to anyone.
    The rain hammered the lawn just beyond the ground-level windows of the basement. In a 
place so far above that it seemed to be another world, more thunder crashed.
    He had come to the cellar for a jar. But the room was utterly empty except for the 
movie posters.
    On the concrete floor near his shoe, a fat black spider seemed to materialize from 
thin air. It scurried past him.
    He didn't step on it but watched it race for cover until it disappeared into a crack 
along the baseboard.
    He switched off the light and went back into the furnace room, leaving the warped 
door open.
    Climbing the stairs, almost to the kitchen, Joey said, "Jar? What jar?"
    Puzzled, he stopped and looked down the steps to the cellar.
    A jar of something? A jar for something?
    He couldn't remember why he had needed a jar or what kind of jar he had been seeking.
    Another sign of dementia.
    He'd been too long without a drink.
    Plagued by the persistent uneasiness and disorientation that he'd felt since first 
entering Asherville the previous day, he went upstairs. He turned off the cellar lights 
behind him.
    His suitcase was packed and standing in the living room. He carried the bag onto the 
front porch, locked the door, and put the key back under the hemp mat where he had found 
it less than twenty-four hours ago.
    Something growled behind him, and he turned to confront a many, rain-soaked black dog 
on the porch steps. Its eyes were as fiercely yellow as sulfurous coal fires, and it 
bared its teeth at him.
    "Go away," he said, not threateningly but softly.
    The dog growled again, lowered its head, and tensed as if it might spring at him.
    "You don't belong here any more than I do," Joey said, standing his ground.
    The hound looked uncertain, shivered, licked its chops, and at last retreated.
    With his suitcase, Joey went to the head of the porch steps and watched the dog as it 
hunched away into the slanting sheets of gray rain, gradually fading as though it had 
been a mirage. When it moved around the corner and out of sight at the end of the block, 
he could easily have been convinced that it had been another hallucination.
    
    
    6
    
    THE LAWYER CONDUCTED BUSINESS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR OF A BRICK building on Main 
Street, above the Old Town Tavern. The barroom was closed on Sunday afternoons, but small 
neon signs for Rolling Rock and Pabst Blue Ribbon still glowed in its windows brightly 
enough to tint the rain green and blue as it fell past the glass.
    The law offices of Henry Kadinska occupied two rooms off a dimly lighted hallway that 
also served a real-estate office and a dentist. The door stood open to the reception room.
    Joey stepped inside and said, "Hello?"
    The inner door was ajar, and from beyond it a man responded. "Please come in, Joey."
    The second room was larger than the first, although still of modest proportions. Law 
books lined two walls; on another, a pair of diplomas hung crookedly. The windows were 
covered with wood-slat venetian blinds of a type that probably had not been manufactured 
in fifty years, revealing horizontal slices of the rainy day.
    Identical mahogany desks stood at opposite ends of the room. At one time Henry 
Kadinska had shared the space with his father, Lev, who had been the town's only lawyer 
before him. Lev had died when Joey was a senior in high school. Unused but well polished, 
the desk remained as a monument.
    Putting his pipe in a large cut-glass ashtray, Henry rose from his chair, reached 
across the desk, and shook Joey's hand. "I saw you at Mass, but I didn't want to intrude."
    "I didn't notice ... anyone," Joey said.
    "How're you doing?"
    "Okay. I'm okay."
    They stood awkwardly for a moment, not sure what to say. Then Joey sat in one of the 
two commodious armchairs that faced the desk.
    Kadinska settled back into his own chair and picked up his pipe. He was in his 
midfifties, slightly built, with a prominent Adam's apple. His head seemed somewhat too 
large for his body, and this disproportionateness was emphasized by a hairline that had 
receded four or five inches from his brow. Behind his thick glasses, his hazel eyes 
seemed to have a kindly aspect.
    "You found the house key where I told you?"
    Joey nodded.
    "The place hasn't changed all that much, has it?" Henry Kadinska asked.
    "Less than I expected. Not at all, really."
    "Most of his life, your dad didn't have any money to spend-and when he finally got 
some, he didn't know how to spend it." He touched a match to his pipe and drew on the 
mouthpiece. "Drove P.J. crazy that Dan wouldn't use much of what he gave him."
    Joey shifted uneasily in his chair. "Mr. Kadinska ... I don't understand why I'm 
here. Why did you need to see me?"
    "P.J. still doesn't know about your dad?"
    "I've left messages on the answering machine in his New York apartment. But he 
doesn't really live there. Only for a month or so each year."
    The pipe was fired up again. The air was redolent of cherry-scented tobacco.
    In spite of the diplomas and books, the room wasn't much like an average law office. 
It was a cozy place-shabby-genteel but cozy. Slumped in his chair, Henry Kadinska seemed 
to be as comfortable in his profession as he might have been in a pair of pajamas.
    "Sometimes," Joey said, "he doesn't call that number for days, even a week or two."
    "Funny way to live-nearly always on the road. But I guess it's right for him."
    "He seems to thrive on it."
    "And it results in those wonderful books," said Kadinska.