He’d been hired to find the husband, an ex-writer supposedly taking some kind of dipso cure at a dilapidated ranch, and William Fitzgerald had done it, watched the light drain back into his eyes as the opiates let go, but he wasn’t happy about it; hopheads gave him the itch. The reunion went as expected, back on the bottle as soon as he walked in, the wife’s long hair not quite covering the week-old bruise on her face, William Fitzgerald an unnoticed grotesque against the faded yellow wallpaper.

They pay him off before the screaming starts in earnest and he’s gone.

Two weeks later he reads with bored disinterest of the husband’s death by suicide and the wife’s disappearance, a lot of tumult for a rich artist’s colony, and the second in as many months. One of their neighbors along the beach had beaten his wife to death and fled the country, killed himself or been killed in a town on the west coast of Mexico. The only thing that summons a flicker of attention, for the novelty, if nothing else, is the sidebar about the matriarchal societies that still flourish in the area. William Fitzgerald has an ophidian sense of sociology at most, but somehow he doubts he’d be much appreciated in a matriarchy.