Friends advised David to move on, and he tried, but he could not. He was haunted by what had been, what might have been, and what could never be. When writing, especially since the loss of Emily, he often became obsessed with the work to the exclusion of all else, so it seemed that if the atmosphere of Earth should suddenly evaporate, he would be sustained by the air of the fictional world he created. He had also become obsessed with one path by which he might find peace of mind: discover the truth of her fate, locate her remains, and bury her in the cemetery nearest to the cottage in Corona del Mar, where they had been so happy, where he would always be able to look after her, as he had failed to do in life. For this reason, for six years, he had been visiting Ronny Lee Jessup in Folsom.

At 2:10 p.m., the turboprop commuter flight began its descent into Orange County. The clouds of the north had withered away south of Santa Barbara. Sun sequined the sea. Vehicles glittered like miniature racers on freeways as undulant as slot-car tracks, and office towers rose to reflect distorted versions of one another in walls of dark glass. In less than four hours, David would have dinner with the impossible woman who could not be Emily Carlino but could not be anyone else.

| 10 |

In the Corona del Mar cottage, David switched on his computer and discovered that he already had a response from Isaac Eisenstein in New York. The message was simple: Call me on my personal cell.

Attachments included Maddison Sutton’s California driver’s license. She was twenty-five, as she claimed, which happened to be the age at which Emily disappeared. Her address was a post office box in Goleta, in Santa Barbara County, which was not far from where Emily’s broken-down Buick had been found abandoned on that long-ago night of hard rain.

Also attached, the DMV registration for the ivory-white vintage Mercedes 450 SL identified the owner as Patrick Michael Lynam Corley at the same post office box in Goleta.

The third and last attachment was a death certificate for the same Patrick Michael Lynam Corley, who had passed away on June 22, seven years earlier, at the age of fifty-nine.

David called Isaac’s private cell phone, was forwarded to voice mail, and left a message.

The two study windows were fitted with interior shutters. The half-open slats interleaved shadows with bands of sunlight that laddered up one wall.

When Isaac returned the call six minutes later, he said, “Pazia and I are going to dinner at Le Coucou. She’s been looking forward to this for a month, so if we’re not out the door in twelve minutes, I’ll have to eat dinner with an ice pack on my balls.”

“Then let’s get to it. How can a car be registered to a guy who’s been dead seven years?”