Isabella had evidently been petite, her wrapped remains hardly more than five feet long. The shelf on which she rested was about seven feet from end to end.

Standing on the lowest catafalque, gripping the highest with his right hand to steady himself, David used his left hand to tug the body toward one end of the shelf. It moved more easily than he expected. If a flood of adrenaline could empower a mother to lift one end of a wrecked automobile off her trapped child, as had been recorded more than once, David’s feat of strength was unremarkable by comparison.

He climbed onto Isabella’s catafalque and eeled behind her and then dragged her back into place in front of him, she on her back, he on his left side. She crowded him into the shadows against the back wall. When he raised his head to look across her, he could see the lower half of the flight of steps that led down from the higher crypt.

| 82 |

Disturbing the mummified woman had stirred a stronger smell from her, and David lay in that suffusion. The astringent chemical stink remained dominant, but there was no longer a mere suggestion of an underlying organic odor; it was insistent. He would have been less unnerved if the smell had been profoundly foul, but it had a sweetness to it, an unappealing sweetness, cloying and spicy, that turned his stomach solely because of its strangeness.

He withdrew the large knife from its sheath. Held it in his right hand. Breathed through his mouth without gagging. Quiet now.

David didn’t know himself. Lying concealed behind the wrapped remains of Isabella Lopez, he’d never been more of a stranger to himself, not even when he had lied to Emily and spent two sordid days with the actress. The human heart might be, as they said, deceitful, but it seemed to him that it was no less stoic than deceitful, and glorious in its capacity for charity, devotion, friendship, tenderness, and love. One of his novels had explored three questions. What would you do for love? Would you die? Would you kill? He had thought that he’d found the limits of a man’s capacity for sacrifice in that story, but he realized that he had failed to plumb those questions adequately. His answers had been superficial. He knew now that a self-aware and self-critical man, grown past the callowness of youth, would do anything for the object of his love if he felt her to be good and worthy. Not merely die. Not merely kill. But kill and die and go to Hell for his actions, supposing Hell was real and his actions warranted damnation. Stuart Ulrich deserved death, and David would kill him, if he could, not for love, but for self-preservation and for the innocent girl whom Ulrich would eventually imprison. However, having discovered this capacity in himself, he knew that he was also capable of killing for Maddison, not merely to protect her from men like Ulrich, but to ensure her safety, her honor, her happiness. In a world long on hate and short on love, he would stake his soul on the defense of the latter, and though society limited capital punishment to murderers—and often even excused them—he would not. He scared himself, but he could live with whom he was becoming—if he could live at all.