There was no defense against time and the toll it took, no turning back the clock and remaining twenty-five, not with the aid of Lukas Ockland and archaea and horizontal gene transfer any more than with expensive creams and lotions advertised on the lesser cable TV networks.

Maddison was Maddison. And yet she was impossibly Emily. If Emily had not died here, perhaps she had never died elsewhere, either. More than ever, the truth seemed to be a Gordian knot that could be neither untied nor severed with a blade.

David had nowhere to go now but to the house on Rock Point Lane. There were no answers anywhere but there. He had no future anywhere but Rock Point Lane. No hope anywhere but Rock Point Lane.

From the playroom, he retrieved the knife he’d thrown at Ulrich. He sheathed it as he had the large knife, one clean and the other tempered with blood. He carried the stepladder and backpack up to the kitchen.

Leaving the lights on behind him and the back door open, he went out into the chilly wind, which had grown in power as shrouded lightning pulsed through clouds to the northwest and distant thunder rolled. He walked the driveway to the county road, turned northeast. He hurried along the blacktop and then along the dirt track, at the end of which he’d left Estella Rosewater’s Ford Explorer Sport.

He opened the tailgate, slid the step stool into the back of the SUV. He shrugged out of the backpack and placed it in the Explorer and took the two kilos of plastic explosive from it and set them aside.

He hadn’t worn his sport coat to the Jessup house because it would have overhung the knives depending from his belt. Now he took it from the back of the Explorer and pulled it on.

After retrieving the explosives, he closed the tailgate. He got in behind the wheel and put the two kilos on the passenger seat.

He sped past Santa Ynez on State Route 154, bound for US Highway 101. As he drove through the San Marcos Pass and out of the Santa Ynez Mountains, the sky broke, and a heavy rain shattered through the night.

Even in torrential downpours, lightning rarely troubled the sky along the California coast. But the heavens were electrified on this occasion, and great blazing spears struck down to sizzle on the surface of the black and tossing sea.

Part 6

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Although the thunder and the hard rain drumming on the metal roof of the travel trailer would mask the sound of the Explorer, David nevertheless killed the engine and the headlights at the top of the hill and coasted at least two hundred yards, coming to a stop about twenty feet from the shitcan where Richard Mathers smoked his native, organic weed and made a girl named Kendra miserable and lived what he called a life.