From the outside it was beautiful. A Spanish-style villa built in the 1920s for a silent film star Dryden had never heard of, the home overlooked the Pacific from a high, windy bluff half a mile inland. Though its yard hadn’t been maintained in some time, the structure itself was holding up well enough: white stucco exterior, barrel-tiled roof, lots of wrought ironwork. To stare at the place was to experience a kind of ceaseless déjà vu; this house had probably served as a shooting location for any number of films and TV shows over the decades. He’d probably seen it on some episode of The A-Team when he was a kid. A living vestige of old Hollywood, way out here at the west end of Malibu.

That was the outside. The inside was a ruin. The house’s current owner was Layla Cray, the twenty-four-year-old lead singer of an indie rock group called Horse Latitudes. She had bought the house two and a half years ago, in immaculate condition, and a month later she’d left to go on tour in Europe. During the England leg of the tour she had begun dating the vice captain of Manchester United, then moved in with him when the tour ended and, as the realtor put it, pretty much forgot about this place.

At the very least, she’d neglected to keep in touch with the company she hired to maintain the property. Her original service contract with them had only covered the three-month period of the tour. The company had tried in vain to get a hold of her when the contract ended. So had various local housing authorities, when the lawn started growing wild, but somehow Layla Cray had remained happily unaware of the whole situation until about a month ago, by which time the house had sat vacant for over two years.