Periodically, he glanced at the mirrored sliding doors on the closet and thought of the moment in the dream when he had seemed to come half-awake and had seen a reflection of himself lying abed. Patrick Corley sitting bedside. In the desk chair that David now occupied. Something in his hand. Something that when pressed against David’s forehead sent icy waves through his skull, dropping him back into the dream as it unfolded from Emily’s point of view.

Each time that he looked up from his current work and toward the mirror, he half expected to see himself in the bed and Corley in attendance. The past few days had felt like a long dream, sometimes blithe fantasy and sometimes a nightmare, cause and effect replaced by wild chance, every hour warped by surreal effects and unexpected juxtapositions, the dead alive again, the living lost in a maze of meaning.

At two o’clock, after a late lunch that would also be his dinner, he put his loaded backpack in the Terrain Denali, in which he’d left the stepladder the previous evening. Assuming that a tracking device had been fixed to the car, he drove to a church lot six blocks from the Rosewater house and abandoned the vehicle. Wearing the backpack, carrying the stepladder and the tote, he walked to Estella’s place by a roundabout route, alert for an observer. He saw no one suspicious.

The Ford Explorer Sport stood in the driveway, where she had promised he would find it. He opened the tailgate and put both the ladder and the backpack in the cargo hold. When he settled in the driver’s seat, he found the key in the cup holder.

At 2:40, he set out inland on State Route 154 to the Santa Ynez Valley. Past Lake Cachuma. Past the town of Santa Ynez. He turned northeast on a lonely stress-cracked two-lane blacktop, into the lower foothills of the San Rafael Mountains.

When he cruised by it at 3:55, the weathered old house with filth-clouded windows gazed down at the road as though aware of who passed, patiently awaiting the evening’s visitor. Seven huge crows stood on the ridgeline of the roof, as solemn and still as black-robed judges viewing everything below and beyond them with contempt.

David drove two miles farther, looking for a suitable turnoff, and found a rough dirt track to his right, which snaked between two hills and descended out of sight of the county road. It led between vine rows—some dead, others gone wild and producing only bitter fruit—and it ended at a half-collapsed barn that might have once stored the vineyardist’s equipment. Judging by appearances, no one had been here in a long time.