ABOUT thirty-three miles, depending on construction detours. I was out of the hospital two days later. There was no word on Garth or Marl Braxton. There was also no sign of Tommy Carling; I made it my business to check on his apartment in the staff quarters, and he was gone, the apartment stripped of his personal belongings. There seemed nothing more to be done in Rockland County, so I moved back into Garth's apartment in the city — which by now seemed as much my home as his. I called my parents every few days, even though there was nothing to tell them; they had not heard from Garth, either. As first the days, and then the weeks and months, went by, I tried to accustom myself to the strong possibility that my brother was dead, perhaps killed by Marl Braxton during one of the fallen D.I. A. operative's psychotic episodes. Then, on a bitterly cold afternoon in mid-fall, a Wednesday four months later, while I was standing in the express line in a Gristede's supermarket, I found a grainy picture of Garth staring back at me from the front page of one of the lurid, always ridiculous, tabloids sold at the checkout counter.
What do You think about The Cold Smell Of Sacred Stone?
