AWOKE feeling much better, even optimistic.  I had slept the night through for the first time in weeks.  I had no explanation for the change in my emotions, but I wasn’t going to poke and probe until I was miserable again.  I wasn’t in the mood for it.  I skipped my coffee and went out for a solitary walk along the shoreline.  The morning was bright and crisp, and I felt so renewed, so invigorated, that I broke into a run.  I hadn’t run far, though, before I came to an abrupt stop, and stood there, bent over, hands on my knees, breathing hard.  In the crisp morning air, the memory of a dream had returned to me, and it had staggered me.  In the dream, or at least in the memory of the dream, I was someone else, and now it all came rushing back to me, and I knew who I had been. 
   I ran to the hotel, ran upstairs, grabbed my microcassette recorder and began dictating: 
 

   I played it back.  I had intended to transcribe it immediately, but when I heard it I was ashamed of it.  I shut the recorder off and put it in my desk drawer. 
   Rockwell Kingman was a twisted mutation of Rocky King, the square-jawed sidekick of Larry Peters in the defunct series I’d written for so many years.  Now, I supposed, following the cancellation of the series he was out of a job, older, and angry.  I could see the cover of the book.  There would be a photograph of a window of a second-floor office in a seedy building.  A card in the window would read: 
 
 

   The title would be Murder While You Wait: The Memoirs of a Very Professional Killer.  The author would be Rockwell Kingman himself.  “Call me Rockwell.  Don’t call me Rocky.”  He might make us some money. 

“JEFFREY the realtor called to say that he’s bringing some prospects on Sunday,” Albertine said, “and he asked me whether we could do anything about the wildlife.” 
   “The wildlife?” 
   “Actually, he called it the weird life, the weird wildlife.  According to Jeffrey, it is definitely going to be a problem for these people, or one of them, anyway.” 
   On the other side of the island, at the farthest remove from the hotel, there was an ecosystem of the bizarre.  There were chinchilla rabbits, giant frogs, talking budgies, hamsters, minks, raccoons, parrots, turkeys, chickens, and a colony of feral Siamese cats.  The wildlife had been on the island longer than Albertine and I had.  Again and again, the previous owners of Small’s Island had tried to make the big money by breeding something that would sell, and time and again they had failed.  Their abandoned moneymakers had been breeding out there ever since, out on the far western extreme of the island, near the cove where I had my clam farm.  The wildlife was not friendly.  They were all jealous of the territories they claimed for themselves, and they considered all interlopers targeted personnel.  Most of them didn’t bother Albertine most of the time, excepting the cats.  For fifteen years, she had been waffling between “we’ve got to get rid of those damned cats” and “I feel so sorry for those poor cats,” depending on the weather and the number of cats in heat.  I had steadfastly maintained that the cats were the only thing that kept the island from being overrun by chickens. 
 
 

   “What have they got against wildlife?” I asked. 
   “Nothing at all.  Apparently that’s the problem.” 
   “I think we’ve fallen into one of those logical sinkholes that sometimes swallow cars whole.” 
   “It’s not the wildlife; it’s the need to eliminate the wildlife that’s a problem.  Not all the wildlife.  Jeffrey thinks it would be enough if we just got rid of the cats.” 
   “What have they got against cats?” 
   “Nothing—” 
   “And that’s the problem?” 
   “Yeah.  Apparently, one of them is a cat fancier, and Jeffrey thinks that she is just not going to want to have to deal with the problem of the cats.  Eliminating the cats.” 
   “Oh,” I said, since I understood at last.  “So we have to find some heartless bastard to get rid of the cats before the cat fancier sees them.” 
   “That’s pretty much the idea.” 
   “I’ll take care of it.” 
   It sounded like a job for Rockwell Kingman. 

THAT NIGHT I read “Photographic Proof,” episode eleven of Dead Air, to a sizable Friday-night crowd (sizable, that is, for the time of year).  We’ve learned not to expect much business after Labor Day.  However, we had a bigger night than we’d had on the corresponding Friday the year before, and I gave myself credit for it. 

a beguiling tale of hope, friendship, memories, and love

Leaving Small’s Hotel is published in paperback by Picador, a division of St. Martin's Press, at $14.00. 

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Leaving Small’s Hotel is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. 

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