Nick Stone - Mr. Clarinet

The mural panels were capped and linked by angels, playing music or bringing down garlands to the scenes below, suggesting that Jesus's life, from beginning to rebirth, was one act.

He'd sometimes cracked cases after a solo brainstorm in a church; an hour or so sitting contemplating eyeless icons and stained-glass windows, breathing in stale candle fumes and feeling the weight of all that humbled silence around him. That had helped him get his head straight and his thoughts in line.

What now? Where was he going after this?

In the immediate future, there were the same old problems he was facing before he went away: he'd have to go back to the house and face all its happy memories massed behind the door, ready to engulf him the minute he walked in, a welcoming party of ghosts. He thought of Sandra again and sorrow mounted up in hot, damp pressure behind his eyes and his nose.

When he got back to Miami, his career as a private detective would be over; the end of everything he knew how to do and still, somehow, wanted to do-despite the things he'd seen, all the danger he'd been in; despite fearing that he wasn't that good anymore, that there were things here he might have missed.

What was he going to take away from Haiti? What was he going to gain? Not money, not the satisfaction of a job well done because-and for the very first time in his career-he hadn't solved the case. He was leaving unfinished business behind. The little boy's face would haunt him for the rest of his life. He was still really none the wiser about what had happened to him. It was all speculation, conjecture, rumor. Poor kid. A double innocent.

He'd helped bring down an international pedophile ring-or at least started the process of its collapse. He'd saved the lives of countless children and spared their parents a taste of death in life, of having to carry on with a loved one gone. But what of the children they'd find and free? Could they be healed? Could the process be reversed, could they put back what had been taken away? He'd have to wait and see.

Wait and see: that was the best and worst he could expect from his life now. The thought spooked and then depressed him.

He left the church an hour later, stopping a woman coming through the front door to ask her the name of the place.

"La Cathйdrale Sainte-Trinitй," came the reply.

Outside, the sun dazzled him and the heat and noise disoriented him for a while, as he walked through the streets, farther and farther from the cool, quiet, innate somberness of the church.

He got his bearings again and walked back to where he'd parked the car. It was gone. Shards of broken glass on the sidewalk told him what had happened.

He didn't mind. In fact, he really didn't care.

He retraced his steps and found the Iron Market. Opposite was a long row of parked tap-taps waiting for custom-1960s hearses, coupes, and sedans, and the voodoo-psychedelia of their painted exteriors. He asked the driver at the head of the queue if he was going to Pйtionville. The driver nodded and told him to get in.

They waited for a full forty minutes for the car to fill up with people coming in off the streets with baskets of vegetables, rice, and beans, live chickens, and dead wet fish. Max found himself wedged tightly in the corner, almost buried beneath the half a dozen bodies crammed in the back, a large woman sitting on his lap.

When the driver was good and ready, they left. He took the back streets out of the capital, where the only competing traffic were people and livestock. Inside the car it was lively, everyone seeming to know everyone else, everyone talking to one another-everyone, that is, except Max, who couldn't understand a damn word.

He packed his case and had dinner at a restaurant near La Coupole.

He ate rice, fish, and fried plantain, and left a good tip before walking out of the door with a wave and a smile to the pretty young girl who'd served him.

As he walked back home, he watched the children-bedraggled, skinny, bloated bellies, filthy, dressed in rags, many in tight packs, scavenging through rubbish heaps, some playing games, some hanging around on street corners, a few stumbling barefoot behind their parents. He wondered what he'd saved them from.

"I'M SORRY ABOUT your mother, Chantale," Max said as they drove to the airport. They were halfway there and they'd barely spoken.

"In a way I'm not," she said. "Her last days were really bad for her. She was in a lot of pain. No one should have to go through that kind of suffering. I really hope she's gone to a better place. All her life she believed in the one after this."

Max didn't have anything to say to that, anything that would sound sincere and comforting in its conviction. He'd gone through the same thing right after Sandra had died. Her death had felt final, a sudden, complete stop and nothing coming after. Life had felt utterly worthless to him.

"What are you going to do?" he asked her.

"I'll see. For now, Allain wants me to stay on and help him out. He's in charge of everything at the moment. I don't think he can cope. It hit him real hard."

"Yeah, I know. I appreciate you driving me here. You didn't have to."

"I couldn't let you leave without saying good-bye."

"It doesn't have to be 'good-bye,'" Max said. "It could be 'see you later' or 'see you soon.' Why don't you give me a call when you get back to Miami-" He started writing down his number, got past the area code, and then realized he'd forgotten it. "I'll have to call you."

She looked at him, met his eye, and let him stare right at her sadness, a pain so deep she'd lost sight of it, so intense it was on the verge of overwhelming her. He felt clumsy and stupid. Wrong move at the wrong time in the wrong place.

"I'm sorry."

She shook her head, whether in forgiveness or disbelief, he couldn't tell.

They pulled up opposite the airport.

Chantale took his arm.

"Max, don't call me. You're not ready. Not for me, not for anyone," she said, doing her best to smile with her quivering lips. "You know what you need to do when you get home? You need to bury your wife. Mourn her, cry, let it out, wash her ghost right out of your heart. Then you can move on."

Part 5

BACK IN MIAMI, back at the Kendall Radisson Hotel. They hadn't given him the same room that he had before, but they might as well have, because it was identical to the last one-two single beds with brown-and-yellow tartan bedspreads, a bedside table with a Gideon's Bible inside, a writing desk and chair with a hazy mirror that needed a more vigorous polish, a medium-sized TV, and an armchair and table by the window. The view wasn't any different either-Starbucks, Barnes amp; Noble, an ice cream parlor, a carpet warehouse, and a cheap Chinese eatery; beyond that, some of Kendall's quiet houses, set away from the road, drowned in trees and shrubbery. The weather was good, the sky a deep, liquid blue, the sun nowhere near as intense as he had become used to in Haiti.

When he'd got out of the airport, he hadn't even bothered trying to take the route home, just told the cabdriver to bring him straight here. He'd made the decision on the plane, right after takeoff, when the wheels had left the runway and his guts had dropped through his seat. He didn't want to spend Christmas or see 1997 in at his house, the memorial to his past life, his past happiness. He'd return there on January 2, when he was set to check out.

It wasn't over.

He couldn't get Charlie Carver out of his head.

Where was the kid?

What had happened to him?

He'd never left unfinished business for this very reason-it kept him up nights, it haunted him, it wouldn't let him be.