He’d been willing to acknowledge that lately he was in the firm grip of mania, which he’d once researched for a novel and which he understood to be unnatural fixation on some emotion or situation, accompanied by melancholy. His guilt about Emily, his enduring grief, the sudden hope represented by Maddison, the deep mystery of death, the impossibility of resurrection: All that had come together to unbalance him mentally. Yes, all right, mania. Mania came and went, like a hurricane wind; it seldom wrecked a man for life. But as he listened to his breathing grow more rapid and ragged, as his heart knocked against his rib cage, he thought also of lunacy and madness and the difference between them. Lunacy described what was insanely foolish, madness what was insanely desperate, and once a man surrendered to either condition, there might be no escape.

If he was being carried away from the shore of sanity on a tide of madness, there was one thing with which to moor himself and stop the drift. Maddison. Whoever she was, whatever the explanation for her existence, he loved her as he’d loved only one other, and she was in serious trouble. He dared not fail her as he’d failed Emily.

A wind came out of the northwest, and the stilled world around him rose into motion: the grass shivering, the vines lashing, a few feeding birds harried from the ground to roosts in distant trees. It was a cool wind. He faced into it, taking slow deep breaths, willing himself to overcome this fear of derangement.

At Folsom, eye to eye with Ronny Jessup, David had felt as if the killer’s intense stare were a psychic wire, transmitting his essence into his visitor. The overwhelming emotion of that encounter had evidently rattled David more than he’d realized, leading to this moment of crippling doubt.

Maddison needed him. Doubt had no place in a true love knot, and neither suspicion nor fear could untie it. He was a better man than he had been ten years earlier. He knew what a commitment meant and the price of not keeping it.

He quieted his heart, his breathing. Recovered his balance.

He made his way across the rolling land. In the last quarter hour of light, he ascended to the crown of a hill and looked down on the murder house.

| 72 |

He lay flat on the ground, glassing the house with binoculars that he took from his backpack. No one at a window. No movement but the wind and what it stirred.

Beyond the Santa Ynez Mountains in the west, behind the masking clouds, the hidden sun descended. The gray overcast drew lower and scudded southward as a storm marshaled its forces in the northwest.