Free The Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian Page B

thousands of people who appear briefly in this desert city and then vanish. Eric and Helmut and Elizabeth will wonder at his absence. But not for long. Elizabeth will miss him, but he cannot bring her the happiness she deserves. He has too much history. His people have too much history. She will be much better off without him.
    He rolls onto his side. His last conscious thoughts are of Elizabeth and Karine, the living and the dead, and the cheekbones below the kind, gentle eyes of both women.
    E LIZABETH USES A match to light the oil lamp, a beautiful clay globe with a cork with a wick. It is painted the deep blue of an artist’s night sky, dotted with white stars and one perfect sickle moon. She pulls aside the curtain to her room and starts down the hallway, pausing briefly to notice the way the shadow of her nightgown resembles wings against the wall at the top of the stairs. The stone is cold against the soles of her feet. Then she descends the steps, passes the first-floor corridor to the line of rooms where the men are asleep—Mr. Martin, his assistant, David Hebert, and her father—and continues down the hallway to the kitchen. She finds the tin can into which the cook tossed the remnants of their dinner and brings it with her outside into the courtyard. There she places the lamp in the center of the black wrought iron table and sits on the ground with the can filled with scraps of gristle and bone. Then she waits, listening again for the yowl that initially awoke her.
    And she waits for easily ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. But she knows the cat is somewhere in the courtyard. She can sense him watching her. Earlier this week she saw him studying Armen and her from a corner behind a potted palm. He is an orange monster with matted fur and a face as round as the oil lamp. Finally she hearshim; he is atop the western wall, looking down at her, a Cheshire cat prepared to leap onto the tree branch that extends like a great gnarled finger above the stucco, and then disappear if need be. She makes kissing sounds with her lips. Slowly, so as not to scare him with a sudden movement, she presents the remains of the lamb like an offering, lining up the pieces on the ground beside her.
    Then she waits some more. Once he turns his head quizzically to his side, as if he is trying to understand why she would do this. Unless he is all fur—which she doubts—somehow this animal finds plenty of food. She has two cats at home in Boston. She always had cats growing up. She knows the species well.
    Finally, just when she is about to give up, he jumps down to the ground and crouches perhaps a dozen feet away. She takes one of the small pieces of fat and gently tosses it toward him. He sniffs it, takes it in his mouth, and disappears through a hole in the bottom of the wall. She gazes down at what could have been a feast for him, the bones from which he might have worked the last of the flesh. Sighing, she gathers up the scraps and drops them back into the can.
    To the east the sky is just beginning to lighten. The birds are starting to sing. Soon she will hear the muezzin beckoning the faithful to prayer. She sits back against the legs of a chair and thinks of Armen, and the way the air seems to grow charged whenever they are together. She thinks of the starving in the square and the sick in the hospital. Outside the walls of the courtyard she hears something else. Footsteps. She blows out the blue flame atop the wick and sits motionless, waiting.
    A RMEN NEARLY HAS to hop over the cat as the animal races around him, an orange streak that vanishes past his ankles, then across the street and down an alley. He reaches the American compound where Elizabeth and her father are staying and pauses with his hands on the bars of the wrought iron fencing beside the imposing double doors, a criminal in a cell in his mind, and peers intothe courtyard. He hadn’t planned on stopping here on his way out of town, but it was a detour of only a few