“No. After Nanette died, Pat formed this charitable foundation that would inherit his entire estate. I never really understood its mission. Anyway, five years later, when he died, he was buried on the grounds of the foundation, out there somewhere on Rock Point Lane. If there was a ceremony, no one was invited. Nanette is buried here in Santa Barbara. None of us who knew those two can understand why he wasn’t buried beside her. Surely he wanted that.”

In his mind’s eye, David saw the double-plot gravestone in the cemetery in Newport Beach. He wondered if he was destined to come to rest there alone, with no name on the other half of the polished granite marker—and if he might be consigned to the earth sooner than later.

“Have you ever met Maddison Sutton?” he asked.

Estella frowned. “Who?”

“She’s the primary director of Patrick Corley’s foundation.”

Estella shook her head. “I never heard of her. Whoever they are out there at Rock Point, they’re standoffish. I don’t know anyone who’s met any of them.”

They had come to the purpose of his visit, to a discussion of the impossible. He would once have found the subject risible, but his life seemed to be sliding sideways from a world of pure reason into a dimension where what had once been fantastic became more credible day by day.

“Long after his death, you encountered Patrick Corley.”

“My one X-Files moment.”

“When was this?”

“Ten months ago, the eighteenth of August. I’d lost Haskell the previous April, and I was hurting. I went up to Menlo Park to stay with my daughter and her family for a few weeks.”

Menlo Park lay more than three hundred miles north of Santa Barbara, south of San Francisco, near the southern end of the bay. It was one of those towns where cutting-edge technology firms were booming and, in the process of raking in historic profits, were also fast changing the world.

Estella’s arms remained on the arms of the chair, but her hands were no longer relaxed. Her fingers clenched the upholstery as if she were aboard a jet and afraid of flying.

| 34 |

The creeping sun had found the tall western windows of Estella Rosewater’s study, slowly extending grid patterns of glass light and muntin shadow across the gleaming mahogany floor and Persian carpet.

Her voice remained soft and steady, and she avoided dramatics as she spoke of the remarkable encounter on the eighteenth day of the previous August.

She had been in the second week of a visit to her daughter, Rachel, and for the first day since arriving in Menlo Park, she’d been on her own. Rachel had a prior obligation. Her husband was at work. Estella decided to treat herself to lunch at La Convenable, a restaurant at which they had enjoyed dinner a few nights earlier.