The turnoff she’d described led to an oak-shielded path barely wide enough for a golf cart. Branches scraped the Seville’s flanks. I backed out, left the car on the side of the road, and hiked.

The spot where Pierce Schwinn had died was half a mile in, a dry gully scooped out of a granite ledge and backed by mountainside. A sere corridor that would fill during rainy seasons and transform to a green, rushing stream. Now, it was bleached the color of old bones and littered with silt, rocks and boulders, leathery leaves, snarls of wind-snapped branches. The largest rocks tended toward ragged and knife-edged and glinted in the sun. Up against them, a man’s head wouldn’t fare well.

I walked to the edge and stared down into the arroyo and listened to the silence, wondering what had caused a well-trained horse to lose its footing.

Contemplation and the warmth of the day lulled me into something just short of torpor. Then something behind me skittered and my heart jumped and the tip of my shoe curled over into open space and I had to jump back to avoid pitching over.

I regained my bearings in time to see a sand-colored lizard scurry into the brush. Stepping back from the ledge, I cleared my head before turning and walking away. By the time I reached the car, my breathing had nearly returned to normal.

I drove back to the center of Ojai, cruised to Signal Street, past the fieldstone-lined drainage ditch, and parked in the same eucalyptus grove, where I peered through blue shaggy leaves at Bert Harrison’s house. Thinking about what I’d say to Bert if I found him. Thinking about Pierce Schwinn’s nightmares, the demons that had come back to haunt him during the days before his death.

Bert knew why. Bert had known all along.

No movement from the old man’s house. The station wagon was parked right where it had been. After a quarter hour I decided it was time to make my way to the front door and deal with whatever I found, or didn’t.

Just as I got out of the Seville, the door squeaked open and Bert stepped out onto his front porch in full purple regalia, cradling a large, brown, paper shopping bag in one arm. I grabbed the Seville’s door before it clicked shut, hurried back behind the trees, and followed the old man’s descent down the wooden staircase.