“I love you,” she said, and hurried off the front porch.

After closing the door, he moved to a window and watched her follow the flagstones to the public sidewalk, where she turned right toward downtown Corona del Mar and the Pacific Coast Highway. He remained at the window until she was out of sight.

He wondered how Maddison had gotten his phone number. It wasn’t listed. He hadn’t given it to her, and he had certainly never used it as the phone number of a character in a novel.

“I love you, too,” he whispered, and wondered why he had not said that to her when she had been with him.

Whether rationally or irrationally, he was in love with her even though he didn’t know who she was.

| 30 |

After he showered and dressed, David made the bed and stood staring at it. For a decade, his love life, such as it was, had been exclusively in New York. This bed had remained his and Emily’s. Now his and Maddison’s. The passion that seemed so right the previous night began to feel like disloyalty if not infidelity, which made little sense, considering that Emily had been gone for ten years. Yet he felt a simmering mortification.

Moving briskly, he stripped the bed and then dressed it with fresh sheets and pillowcases, a new blanket. He returned the spread and smoothed it and made everything just right.

For a minute, two minutes, he could not stop staring at his handiwork.

Then, as if he were a hotel maid, he doubled back the spread, doubled it again, draped it on the footboard bench, and he folded back the sheets, as if turning the bed down for the night. He could have laid the sheets back at one side, but he laid them back at both, on the left and right.

It was 7:08 a.m., and he had much to do.

| 31 |

At his computer in the study, he visited the countywide law-enforcement site that offered a public-access police blotter for every community as well as for the territories in the sheriff’s jurisdiction.

The murder rate among the more than three and a half million residents of Orange County was low, averaging just six per month. The previous year, there had been seventy-one homicides.

If a murder—or call it an execution—had been committed in the past twenty-four hours, it had not been reported yet. But somewhere a body might be lying in coagulated gore, its former resident having been awakened from the dream of life. A door might at any moment be opened, a discovery made.

He didn’t bother to check the missing-persons report. Except in the cases involving children, those were usually not filed until the subject had been out of contact for a minimum of twenty-four hours.

Was that blood?

What—the dress? No, no, no. Wine. Just wine.