Cody had kept in touch with Angelica during these five months, and the two of them had cautiously agreed that there appeared to have been, so far, no legal or psychic or underworld repercussions from their arduous January. Cochran and Plumtree had heard nothing from Rosecrans Medical—possibly because, according to the newspapers, Dr. Armentrout had run off with a number of patient files before allegedly murdering intern Philip Muir at the borrowed house of an absent neurologist, and then disappearing for parts unknown—and Cody had anonymously, and grumblingly, sent money to the people whose purse and car she had stolen, as well as twenty dollars to the Frost Giant ice-cream shop and a hundred to Strubie the Clown; and Angelica was still safely doing underground-occult consulting work among the Long Beach poor, though she no longer corralled ghosts for clients, and nobody had come looking for Spider Joe, who would ideally rest in peace forever beneath the Solville back parking lot.
The newspapers had reported that Richard Paul Armentrout had apparently been a victim of childhood incest at the hands of his alcoholic single mother, and that he had been committed to a men’s psychiatric hospital and had undergone electroconvulsive therapy at the age of seventeen, after killing her.
That bit of news had obscurely upset Cody, and she had spent a good part of the afternoon sitting in the bone-strewn ruins of the backyard greenhouse, uncommunicatively drinking vodka; Cochran had eventually got her to come inside, and they had got stoically drunk together.
With the loss of his hand, Cochran had become unfitted for his cellar-and-vine-yard work, and now was working out of the office as a sales representative; the change had-been disorienting at first, but he had really had no choice, for along with his hand he had lost too his instinctive understanding of the soil and the vines and the slow pulse of the wines maturing in the casks.
Above him the path levelled out between the descending green slopes, and the trees were farther apart.
They had reached the clearing at the top of the hill, and Cochran could see his bride-to-be standing with Scott and Diana Crane on the far side of the little lake, talking with them and the Nardie Dinh woman and Mavranos’s widow, while a gang of children climbed around on the rocks. Cochran had seen Cody’s white skirted suit when she had got into the blue truck from Leucadia, but when he looked at her now, standing over there straight and slim and softly laughing, her blond hair in a long pageboy cut, he thought she looked even more beautiful than Diana Crane.
Scott Crane had seen the newcomers step up onto the level grass, and he held up one hand—and then walked down the shallow slope and waded several steps out into the lake, until the water was above his ankles. Fred barked at the spectacle, until Kootie shushed him.
With his beard and broad shoulders, Crane still seemed taller than everyone else. “This is a balanced place,” he said in his deep, rolling voice, “and we want to maintain that and not be showing up as a spike in anyone’s charts.” Diana and Mavranos’s widow seemed to be the only ones who knew what he was doing—Diana was looking away, down the grassy slope toward the surrounding lake, and Wendy was staring thoughtfully at Crane.
Crane went on, slowly, “When I came back, five months ago—through the self-sacrifice of my best friend—I accepted certain terms, the terms stated in that palindrome. I expect now to spend the January of every year in Erebus, as I did this winter—but with my lifeless body in Leucadia, and not requiring strenuous help to come back to life, each time. Three representatives of Death, two ghosts and one murderer who was shortly to die, brought me the requisite sacrament.”
He held up a lumpy little brown ball that seemed from this distance to be cracked. “A pomegranate,” he said, “which Nardie tells me was brought all the way from my own back garden…appropriately.” He broke it and let most of it fall into the water, but held up something tiny between a thumb and forefinger. “One seed,” he said. “Like what Persephone ate.” And he put it into his mouth, and swallowed.
The children had paid attention when he had walked out into the water, but had lost interest when he had paused to talk; Kootie had dropped Fred’s leash, and now the children and the dog were happily climbing around on the rocks in the dappled sunlight.
Scott Crane had seemed to go pale for a moment, but he inhaled deeply in the flower-scented air, and smiled toward the oblivious children. “This is a happy day,” he said, “all of us obedient to our proper places in the seasons. And,” he went on, looking into Cochran’s eyes for a moment, ‘summer is the season for weddings.”
He turned and walked back out of the lake, the cuffs of his pants flinging bright drops of water out onto the grass.
“Cody Plumtree,” said the king, holding out his left hand to her, “who wide unclasped the table of your thoughts, so that intercessors of one sort and another could help me through all the houses of the year.”
Cody stepped up to where he stood and took his hand with her right hand.
“And,” called the king, now holding out his right hand and looking across the lake, “Sid Cochran, who reached out your hand twice to save the old king, and selflessly held the god’s favor to give to me.”
Everyone, even the children and the dog, was looking at Cochran; and he was sweating and awkward and he wanted to put the stump of his right wrist into his pocket. This hilltop clearing and lake, with the ring of leaning old laurels and redwoods around the perimeter, looked oddly familiar to him. He thought he might have been here once before, a very long time ago … happily …?
“Go to your bride,” muttered Pete Sullivan, nudging him in the back.
And Cochran met Cody’s blue eyes across the lake, and she was smiling at him—and he smiled back at her, and walked straight toward her, down the bank and into the lake and striding through the clear, cleansing water all the way across while the children laughed delightedly and the dog barked, though the water rose to his waist in the middle of the lake and was cold down around his toes and ankles, striding finally up the far bank and stepping up onto the sunlit grass beside her and the king to take his vows, profoundly glad.