If anyone had seen anything suspicious occurring here that long-ago night, he or she would have been a motorist or a trucker. After midnight, however, the volume of traffic would have been lighter, and the violence of the storm would have further discouraged travel.

Here in the state with the highest population among the fifty, with the bustling northern suburbs of the Los Angeles metroplex less than two hours to the south, this overlook on that rain-swept night would have been not merely lonely, but desolate.

He had been here twice before, a year after she vanished. He’d come just to see the place, first in daylight. He had returned that night, though there had been no rain.

In sunshine and in darkness, with the sea grumbling louder than it did today, he had spoken her name aloud. Not because he expected some miraculous response. Not because he thought she, in some realm of spirits, might hear him. He stood in this terrible place where she had surely known piercing terror, and he spoke her name to shame himself, for that was the least part of the penance he owed for not having been with her on that night.

Now he said her name just once and got in the car and continued south.

He soon passed Goleta, adjacent to Santa Barbara, where Maddison Sutton lived. But he had no street address for her, only the post office box on her driver’s license. Anyway, she was not there now, but in Newport Beach, pretending to be an assassin.

He drove fast and counted on the lighter traffic of a Saturday to get back to Orange County while an hour of daylight remained, because he still had tasks to which he must attend.

| 20 |

At 5:10 p.m., in Newport Beach, the shadows of the headstones yearned eastward across the gentle slopes and shallow vales of the cemetery, as if the spirits of those interred here had slept through death, only now to wake and wonder at their condition and strain to return to lives lost.

Unto this place David would bring her if ever her remains were found. The memorial park was expensive, and a portion even offered views of the distant ocean, to which it referred in its brochures.

Evidently, for some people, the sting of death might to some extent be ameliorated by the prospect of moldering to bones in a plot of high-end real estate. And why not? No one could make a fool of himself in dying, regardless of his delusions; life was the stage for fools, and no one earned mockery by going to his grave.

David had waited seven years before purchasing the plot. Seven years after disappearing without a trace, a person can by law be declared legally dead.