David anticipated the second shot and expected it to be well wide of him. If he ran or ducked or merely flinched, Mathers would feel triumphant, and what critters hadn’t been chased out of the brush by the gunshots would flee the snarky adolescent laughter. The crack of the gun echoed through the low hills, then again.

David suspected that, on some level, his courage might be less admirable, might be a capitulation to fate. If he misjudged Mathers and if the creep shot him in the back, maybe that was the overdue justice he had earned by his behavior ten years earlier, that he had been expecting ever since. He got into his car and pulled the door shut and started the engine and drove away from there.

| 40 |

From the high north, a slow avalanche of clouds slid down the tilted sky, smothering the sun. The Pacific gradually darkened as it rose out of the curve of the earth in menacing ranks and pounded the shore as if to break it.

At 1:04 p.m., on US Highway 101, north of Goleta and south of Gaviota, David parked at the familiar scenic viewpoint. Again, his was the only vehicle in a space that could accommodate four or five.

Across the meadow that sloped and rolled shoreward from the railing, the tall grass trembled as though Nature shared David’s anticipation of some wicked revelation.

Northwest, where the stubby peninsula thrust into the sea, on the headland stood the impressive stone house, which he now knew to be the former home of Patrick Michael Lynam Corley and the current quarters of the Corley Foundation.

Subsequent to Emily Carlino’s disappearance, authorities had interviewed the residents of the houses that were within sight of the viewpoint. Corley’s wife, Nanette, had died of cancer two years prior to that rainy night, and Patrick had lived alone since then. Like others in the area, he’d said that he’d seen nothing of Emily. Evidently because he was a well-known county resident of good reputation, the police had seen no reason to disbelieve him.

Three years later, Patrick had died of a heart attack. And seven years after his death, behind the wheel of a beige Ford van, he had driven Maddison Sutton to the cemetery in Newport Beach, where she had placed a bouquet of calla lilies on a certain grave.

David left the viewpoint and walked north along the graveled shoulder of the highway. Southbound traffic raced past on his right, the vehicle slipstreams tossing his hair and harrying him with waves and whirling funnels of dust. His state of mind was such that, although reputably dressed, he imagined that he resembled a wild-eyed vagrant, an itinerant Bible-thumper on a messianic mission, slouching door-to-door to announce the impending Apocalypse.