David braked at the call box, put down his window, looked into the camera lens, and pushed the button below it. Perhaps because Gilbert Gurion knew his face from book-jacket photos, he wasn’t asked to identify himself.

The massive gates swung open with dramatic grace and silence, as if in fact the Z stood for Zion, and David was, in error, being admitted to Heaven. He followed a two-lane cobblestone driveway past broad manicured lawns and ancient live oaks with great limbs of an elegance that proved Nature was the finest of all sculptors.

David’s father, the investment banker from whom he was long estranged, lived well, though by comparison to this property, the old man’s house was unremarkable. In his youth, David often had been uncomfortable with his family’s affluence, and he couldn’t imagine living on an estate this grand. Even if the cottage-style bungalow that he called home in Corona del Mar hadn’t been a shrine to Emily, rich with memories, he would have lived nowhere else in California.

The driveway ended in a circle that surrounded a fountain. He parked behind a Lexus SUV.

Clad in limestone, the Beaux Arts mansion combined elements of Georgian and French Renaissance styles. Broad steps led up to a portico, where a man in a dark suit waited.

With thinning gray hair, the pink face of an aging cupid, and pale-blue eyes, Gilbert Gurion might have passed for a volunteer with the local historical society, a docent waiting to conduct an informed tour of this storied residence. His handshake was firm but not aggressive.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Thorne. I genuinely am an admirer of your writing.”

“Thank you, Mr. Gurion. However, considering that pounding out stories is the only thing that I can do at all, I think I should be able to do it better. And please call me David.”

“I’m Gilbert. Gil to friends.” His tentative smile and a subtle beseeching quality in his stare suggested that in his youth he had been shy, perhaps painfully so, and had worked hard to overcome a natural reserve. “Whatever your intent—and I’m not asking you to spell it out—I hope you might indeed write about Ephraim and dear Renata. They were kind and gentle and blindingly intelligent. It’s terrible, what happened here. They were only forty-four. High school sweethearts married twenty-four years, born poor and made their way to the top with sheer brainpower.”

David knew only what little he’d read on the internet, but he didn’t want Gurion to think his interest was related to anything other than the tragic story of the Zabdis. “I never know that I’m committed to a subject until interest becomes obsession. But the material in this case is undeniably gripping and the Zabdis are the most sympathetic of figures.” He admired the magnificent facade of the house. “You said on the phone that the place is as they left it, as it was when they . . . died.”