Last night was the first time that she’d been in his house. He dared to believe that only Emily could have had these photographs, that Maddison’s possession of them suggested—proved—that she was in fact Emily.

One other object had caught his attention: A fine gold chain hung from a nail in the wall above the bed. At the end of the chain was a glass ampule containing perhaps an ounce of what appeared to be a red fluid. He leaned over the bed, reached to the ampule, held it in his hand to take a closer look. He was all but certain that it contained blood.

He released the ampule and watched it swing like a pendulum until it became still. He used his smartphone to photograph it.

Whose blood? What did it mean to her? What did it represent?

David surveyed the photographs again. He didn’t know what he should think of this collection. He didn’t want to think of it at all. He yearned to be with Emily, a desire that could perhaps never be fulfilled. And in the enduring absence of Emily, he wanted to be with Maddison, Emily’s uncanny duplicate—who might be Emily herself under a new name—to be with her 24/7, now and forever, until they were old and wizened and white haired, to be with her in a condition of total acceptance, without any suspicion, without reason for suspicion, without being consumed by the puzzle of her existence.

Of course this Gordian knot of mysteries was so extraordinary that denial was impossible. He had no viable option other than to continue his investigation. And his only hope of happiness was to resolve every hitch in this tangle of enigmas and discover, at the end of all discoveries, that Maddison was an innocent rather than a villain, that she was somehow Emily returned or reborn.

He searched the closet and the bathroom, but discovered nothing further of interest in either.

In the study on the ground floor, he looked for records of the Corley Foundation, but he found none.

And then he went into the garage.

| 43 |

Fluorescent tubes casting bleak light through frosted plastic panels. Cold rising off the concrete floor and off poured-in-place concrete walls painted white and mottled with water stains that vaguely resembled enormous crawling insects.

The immaculate condition of the house did not extend to the garage. Although the two double-wide roll-up doors were closed, in-blown debris littered the floor: dead leaves; loose feathers; the fragile skeletons of perhaps twenty birds, the flesh long stripped from their bones and eyeless skulls. Improbably elaborate spiderwebs, their creators dead or gone to other hunting grounds, trailed in tatters from the rafters, as if fragments of ghosts had snagged on the splintered edges of the beams and the exposed nail heads.