Gurney accepted Jonah’s invitation immediately. They already had the Skype program. At the request of her sister in Ridgewood, Madeleine had installed it on their computer when they’d first moved to the mountains. As he hit SEND, he felt a little rush of adrenaline—a sense that something was about to change.

He needed to prepare. That eight a.m. conversation was less than twelve hours away. And then at nine he, Hardwick, and hopefully Esti would be getting together to bring one another up-to-date.

He went to the Cyberspace Cathedral website and immersed himself for the next forty-five minutes in the bland, smiley-positive philosophy of Jonah Spalter.

He was in the process of concluding that the man was a kind of saccharine genius—a Walt Disney of self-improvement—when Kyle called to him from the other room. “Hey, Dad? I think I’ve got this video stuff about as good as I can get it.”

Gurney went out to the dining table and sat next to his son. Kyle clicked on an icon, and an enhanced version of the cemetery sequence began—enlarged, sharpened, and slowed to half speed. Everything was as Gurney remembered it from his first viewing—just clearer and bigger. Carl was seated at the far right side of the first row of chairs. He rose and turned toward the podium at the other end of the grave. He took a step forward in front of Alyssa, began to take a second step, and lurched forward in the direction he’d been moving, coming to rest face-down just past the last seat at the far end of the row. Jonah, Alyssa, and the Elder Force ladies got to their feet. Paulette rushed forward. The pallbearers and undertaker came around the chairs.

Gurney leaned closer to the screen, asking Kyle to pause the video, trying to discern the expressions on the faces of Jonah and Alyssa, but the detail just wasn’t there. Similarly, even at this enlargement level, Carl’s face against the ground was little more than a generic profile. There was a dark speck along the hairline of the temple that might have been the bullet’s entry wound—or it could have been a bit of dirt, a tiny shadow, or an artifact of the software itself.

He asked Kyle to play the segment through again, hoping for some revelation to emerge.

None did. He asked for it a third time, peering intently at the side of Carl’s head as he turned toward the podium, took a step, began to take another, pitched forward into a rapidly staggering collapse. Either some breeze at the site or Carl’s own jerky movement had disarranged his hair, making it impossible to see that subtle little dark spot until his head hit the ground and stopped moving, just beyond Jonah’s feet.