After he finished eating and rinsed the dishes and put them in the dishwasher, he poured the last of the cabernet and carried his glass and the photograph into his study. He emailed the picture to Isaac Eisenstein with a short message inquiring if he’d ever seen anything like the pendant, if it suggested a cult of any kind. He didn’t say where it had been hanging when he’d seen it.

Because he had drunk the bottle of wine over three and a half hours, he was only mildly inebriated. Maddison had not returned his calls, and he suspected that she was in all ways out of his life for an extended period. What if forever? He wasn’t usually a man who, when despondent, drank to excess, but he was that man tonight, for he knew he would not sleep, even to dream of her, if he didn’t have the assistance of cabernet.

He opened a second bottle, only for one last full glass. He sat at the kitchen table to drink, watching the candles gradually gutter in their crystal cups, their lambent glow lapping the velvet petals of the deep-red roses, which seemed to swell with pleasure at the gentle licking of the light.

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