“Someone’s been renewing it in his name every time it comes due. I don’t know who yet, but I’ll have more for you tomorrow.”

“What do you know about this Corley?”

“He was a contractor and property developer. Built houses in and around Goleta. His wife died five years before him. No children. More tomorrow. Now these photos you sent of Maddison Sutton—my God, she’s a looker. Breathtaking. Are you head over heels?”

Isaac knew nothing about Emily Carlino. David spoke of her to no one in his current life. Sorrow, the mystery of her fate, and shame kept him silent.

“It’s not about romance, Isaac. And only three of the shots were her. The other three are a different woman.”

“So you said, but you’re wrong about that. Forty-four-detail comparisons of facial-recognition scans say they’re one and the same person, and every photo of the same period.”

“No. Those shots were taken ten years apart.”

“Somebody’s pulling your leg, pal. Faces don’t stay the same for a decade. The most highly reliable recognition programs require base images of the subjects on file to be upgraded every seven or eight years. According to her driver’s license, she’s twenty-five, and the function of our scan that estimates age puts all these photos in her midtwenties.”

“But—”

“I haven’t been able to get anything on Maddison Sutton, where she works, family, education, anything at all. Such deep anonymity doesn’t make sense in Googleworld. We’ll dig further. I’ll have some follow-up for you tomorrow. And when I have more time, I’ve got to know what’s going on there. ‘It’s not about romance,’ huh? If it’s really not, then you’re either blind or stupid, and I know you’re neither. Now I’m off to Le Coucou.”

David hung up. He switched off the computer.

The quiet in the cottage was so deep that the place might have been drifting outside of time, displaced by some quirk of physics. The planet rotated, and on the wall, the ladder of sunshine and shadow skewed somewhat, and the bright bands dimmed. As the light seemed almost to simmer slowly away, steeping the room in mystery, David Thorne wondered what he ought to say to Maddison Sutton at dinner, how he might draw her out yet avoid seeming suspicious—and what he would feel in mind and heart when he touched her.

| 11 |

Upon the waters came a multideck party boat, a mere shell of spaces that could be used for banquet rooms and buffet lines and rental casinos and dance floors, bedecked with strings of tiny white lights, with guests of some well-catered event posed at the railings or glimpsed beyond the enormous windows in chambers festooned with cream-white bunting and enormous floral displays of white and yellow blooms. This massive confection of contrived elegance cruised past the windows of the restaurant, moving smoothly through harbor waters glimmering with the first golden light of sunset. It seemed to glide not by the power of its engines but to hydroplane on the music of its big band playing Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood.”