He crossed to the walk-in closet on the far wall, stepped in and disappeared beyond the doorframe. Danica heard him moving something around. Cardboard boxes, it sounded like.

She went to the doorway and leaned in. Carl knelt at the back wall of the closet. He had shoved aside a stack of file boxes, revealing the tall steel door of the built-in gun safe that had been there as long as Danica could recall.

He worked the combo with practiced speed and disengaged the lock with a heavy thud. He pulled the door open.

There were three long guns leaning upright in racks. Two shotguns and a rifle, if they were the same ones she remembered. Farther down was a handgun and several loaded magazines.

Carl ignored all the guns. He reached for a shelf at the very bottom of the safe—a shallow space stacked with documents. Probably legal papers that would be hard to replace in the event of a fire.

He took hold of a thick yellow envelope near the bottom of the stack, and pulled it free. It was nine by twelve inches, stuffed with pages to a thickness of an inch or better. He stood upright and held it out to Danica.

“This was your mother’s,” he said. “Your father gave it to her. It’s information about … what happened.”

Danica stared at it. It hovered there in front of her, a manifestation of the whole surreal episode.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “What did happen?”

“She made me promise to never show you this,” Carl said. “Before she died. She worried you’d dig into it yourself, and touch some kind of nerve. That you’d wake up sleeping dogs, I guess. People who might want to find you, even all this time later. If they’re after you now anyway, you might as well know.”

Danica’s eyes went to the ends of the pages sticking out of the envelope. Their edges had curled and yellowed. They had to be decades old.

“Carl, what is this? Tell me.”

A sound cut him off before he could answer: a high-powered engine, racing hard, then downshifting fast. Then a quick chirp of tires braking on concrete.

Danica stepped from the closet and crossed to the window that faced the front yard.

A police cruiser had nosed into the driveway at an angle, right behind her car. It had VENTURA COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT on the side, and all its LED flashers were strobing.