As he stood in the bedroom, the ringtone broke the sepulchral silence and brought him to life. He withdrew his smartphone from a jacket pocket, his link to life renewed, certain that the caller must be Maddison. However, his editor in New York, Constance, was calling to report that first-pass proofs of his next novel had just been emailed to him and that he had two weeks to read them and correct any errors that had occurred in typesetting.

He forced himself to sit on the edge of the bed and gossip for fifteen minutes, as he and Connie often did. Either he didn’t sound as despondent as he felt or she failed to hear the deep current of discouragement beneath his bright chatter.

When they disconnected, David entered the phone number that Maddison had given him. He was sent directly to voice mail and left a message. “I’m confused. I don’t understand. Call me.”

In the kitchen once more, he read the note she had left, read it a third time. He wasn’t concerned about her warning of danger to him. What obsessed him was the implication that she must be under the thumb of some cruel master, Corley or others whom Corley served, being used in one way or another.

I must persuade them, negotiate.

His heart felt compressed by his breastbone, as though the sense of inadequacy that settled on him had real, crushing weight.

He phoned her again and was sent to voice mail. “Confused was the wrong word, Maddison. I’m bereft, I feel lost, and I’m afraid for you. I love you. Whatever your situation is, I know I can help. Give me a chance to help. Please, please, call me.”

For more than an hour, he restlessly toured the house, as though he would come across something else she’d left behind, other than the note, some cryptic clue that, with sufficient study, would reveal more about the truth of her than he had yet uncovered. He stood at one window after another, gazing out at the day, but the day offered him nothing, not even the comfort of familiarity. The street and the neighboring residences and the courtyard between his house and garage appeared shot through with a subtle but disturbing strangeness. One by one, he took books from the shelves in his study and focused intently on a page of this, a paragraph of that, and put them back without remembering a word of what he’d read.