The Shimmer. Carsten Stroud

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      Jerry and Marilyn and Alyssa composed what had become the pro-Harwood faction. Since the trip from St. Louis covered just under a thousand miles their time on the road lasted several hours, which is a long time to be in a car listening to inspirational evangelical audiotapes; it was longer for some than for others.

      Which brings us to the anti-Harwood faction, the two older Walker daughters: Rebecca, seventeen, and Karen, sixteen, both very beautiful in that Midwestern corn-fed style, and both of them in many ways typical American teenage girls. And, as it turned out, in other ways, not at all typical.

      Rebecca and Karen were sitting at the very back of the truck, in the two fold-down seats, pressed up tight against the luggage stacks that crowded the rear deck, isolating themselves as much as they could from the pro-Harwood faction up front, because, after a few hundred miles, they were both totally sick unto eye-rolling, please-kill-me-now death of Ellison and Marietta Harwood.

      So it won’t come as a surprise to hear that, upon finally reaching their condo, a four-bedroom Italian-themed palazzo with a terrace overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, Rebecca and Karen had thrown their luggage onto the king-size bed in their shared bedroom, torn off their clothes, slipped into their strictly forbidden Tommy Bahama bikinis, censored by Ralph Lauren hoodies and baggy shorts, and bolted for the beach at a dead run.

      Where, around sunset, strolling north through the crystalline water toward Fernandina Beach, the surf rolling and booming and sparkling all around them, the echoes of Ellison Harwood’s well-oiled baritone gradually fading from memory, they saw a woman walking south toward them.

      She was alone. She was barefoot and tanned and wearing a one-piece suit in creamy white under a gauzy tourmaline beach wrap. She moved as if she were inside music, something rhythmic and Caribbean.

      Her face was partially hidden by a broad-brimmed white straw hat, secured around her neck with a scarlet ribbon. Her eyes were cast down, as if she were lost in thought. She was less than twenty feet away before she seemed to sense rather than see them, and then she stopped and lifted her face up and considered them, as if she knew them, as if she had been looking for them.

      Which, of course, she had.

      They stopped to talk, then walked and talked and found themselves gradually...enchanted. How old she was—thirty, forty, even fifty—it was impossible to tell, and, after a short while in her effervescent company, it didn’t seem to matter.

      Later, sitting by the palm-tree-shaded pool, sharing sips of her margarita with the girls when the waiter wasn’t looking, she told them her name was Diana Bowman, that she was a dealer in antique jewelry based in Palm Beach, that she was here on a much-needed vacation from her wealthy and demanding clientele, and that she loved meeting young people like Rebecca and Karen.

      They each felt that galvanic spark of instant rapport that is not an uncommon event when people go on vacation, and by the second round of margarita sharing they decided that they should be newfound friends together and have such great fun while they were all here at this beautiful resort.

      By now, thanks to the margarita factor, the girls had relaxed enough around their new friend that they had begun to open up to her about their trip down from St. Louis, and the Harwood-inflicted grinding hell it had managed to become.

      Diana Bowman was cautiously sympathetic.

      “Well, yes, I confess I do find certain types of religious practice to be, how to put it, so spiritually confining...but I sometimes feel that it is as much a sin to ignore the sensual pleasures that God has given us as it is to, what to say, overindulge in them?”

      Rebecca and Karen agreed, or thought they did, although her reference to sensual pleasures definitely touched them on a more primal than theoretical level. But Diana seemed to feel she had said too much.

      “You know, I have no doubt that your parents—they are here with you, yes?—oh, how nice—Jerry and Marilyn? And Alyssa, the youngest? That they are doing this out of love. I’m sure they just want you to be...happy and safe.”

      “Too safe,” said Karen, with some heat. “They never want us to have any fun—”

      “You’d think we were in jail,” Rebecca finished, caught up with the injustice of it all.

      Diana listened with every sign of sympathetic understanding as the girls raved on for a while about the unbearable oppression of patriarchal fascism disguised as parental kindness.

      Eventually they ran the subject down, realizing from Diana’s sleepy-eyed attention that perhaps they were boring their new friend. But what she said next surprised them.

      “I’m a Roman Catholic myself, on my mother’s side, and I do feel that the effect Jesus had on the world was, on the whole, a good one. You need only to look at the world these days to see how important His teachings were to Western Civilization.”

      Rebecca, the historian, brought up the Crusades and Diana, sipping at her margarita, agreed that the Crusades were simply awful, but that they had happened nine hundred years ago, and what Jesus had brought into the world, long before the Crusades, could be seen in the artifacts connected to Him.

      “Oh God,” said Karen, “don’t tell us about artifacts.”

      “Really?” said Diana.

      It turned out that Rebecca and Karen knew all about artifacts and relics, since Daddy never shut up about them—he had even brought a lockbox full of them along to classify or decipher or something—but by now their heads were dizzy with the surging sea and the margarita sipping so they missed the sudden sharpening of Diana Bowman’s attention.

      “So your father works with these artifacts?”

      “God yes. He brought them along, these...”

      “Artifacts,” Rebecca repeated with careful precision, feeling the tequila. “He lays them out on the dining room table and studies them for, like, hours. He has a microscope and all kinds of tools.”

      Diana was intrigued.

      “Truly? He sounds very dedicated. What sort of artifacts are they?”

      Rebecca made a hand-waving gesture of dismissal.

      “Creepy old dead stuff. From wherever Daddy has to work. All over the world. From New Orleans, this bunch anyway. They were moving graves after that stupid storm?”

      “Katrina?”

      “Yeah. That. It was like years ago, but now they’re doing something about flood protection, so the graveyards have to be built up. You know the way they bury people in New Orleans? In those concrete churchy-looking little stone houses?”

      “Crypts,” said Diana. “They have to be aboveground because the water table is so high.”

      “Daddy says they just stuff new bodies into the crypt and shove the old ones to the back of the...whatever...the...?”

      “The vault.”

      “Yeah, the vault, so that whoever was buried there a hundred years ago gets all crammed up with the new people and it’s all mixed up in a jumble.”

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