Rebecca said, “Right. He was a funny little puppy. He was a runaway too. From up north, I think.”

“Good-looking. But he wasn’t all there.” Linda tapped her forehead.

A laugh from her comrade. “He’d been a stoner.”

“But he was a genius with his hands. Carpentry, electronics, everything. He was totally into computers, even wrote his own programs. He’d tell us about them and none of us could understand what he was talking about. He wanted to get some website going—remember, this was before everybody had one. I think he was actually pretty creative. I felt bad for him. Daniel didn’t like him that much. He’d lose patience with him. He wanted to kick him out, I think.”

“Besides, Daniel was a ladies’ man. He didn’t do well with other men around.”

Dance steered them back to the holiday.

“It was a pretty day,” Linda continued. “The sun was out. It was warm. We had music going. Jimmy’d put together a real good sound system.”

“Did you say grace?”

“No.”

“Even though it was Easter?”

Rebecca said, “I suggested it. But Pell said no.”

Linda said, “That’s right. He got upset.”

His father, Dance supposed.

“We played some games in the yard. Frisbee, badminton. Then I put dinner out.”

Rebecca said, “I’d boosted some good Cabernet and we girls and Jimmy had wine—Pell didn’t drink. Oh, I got pretty wasted. Sam did too.”

“And we ate a lot.” Linda gripped her belly.

Dance continued to probe. She was aware that Winston Kellogg had dropped out of the conversation. He might be the cult expert but he was deferring to her expertise now. She appreciated that.

Linda said, “After dinner we just hung out and talked. Sam and I sang. Jimmy was tinkering with his computer. Daniel was reading something.”

The recollections came more frequently now, a chain reaction.

“Drinking, talking, a family holiday.”

“Yeah.”

“You remember what you talked about?”

“Oh, just stuff, you know…” Linda fell silent. Then she said, “Wait. That reminds me of one thing you might want to know about.” She tilted her head slightly. It was a recognition response, though from the focus of her eyes—on a nearby vase filled with artificial amaryllis—the thought was not fully formed. Dance said nothing; you can often erase an elusive memory by asking someone about it directly.

The woman continued, “It wasn’t Easter. It was another dinner. But thinking about Easter reminded me. Daniel and I were in the kitchen. He was watching me cook. And there was a big crash from next door. The neighbors were fighting. He said he couldn’t wait to get out of Seaside. To his mountaintop.”

“Mountaintop?”

“Yeah.”

Kellogg asked, “His?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Did he own some property?”

“He never mentioned anything specific. Maybe he meant ‘his’ in the sense that it was something he wanted to have someday.”

Rebecca knew nothing about it.