Samantha said, “Reunions have a way of doing that.”

Parking in the back of the Sea View, Jennie shut off the Toyota’s engine. Daniel Pell didn’t get out. He felt numb and everything seemed surreal: the lights ghostly auras in the fog, the slow-motion sound of the waves piling up on Asilomar Beach.

An alternate world, out of some weird movie the cons would watch in Capitola and talk about for months afterward.

All because of the bizarre incident at the prosecutor’s house.

“Are you all right, sweetie?”

He said nothing.

“I don’t like it that you’re unhappy.” She rested a hand on his leg. “I’m sorry things didn’t work out for you.”

He was thinking of that instant eight years ago, at the Croyton trial, when he had turned his blue eyes, blue like ice, on prosecutor James Reynolds, to intimidate, to make him lose his concentration. But Reynolds had glanced his way and snickered. Then turned to the jury with a wink and a sour joke.

And they had laughed too.

All his efforts were wasted. The spell was broken. Pell had been convinced that he could will his way to an acquittal, to make the jury believe that Jimmy Newberg was the killer, that Pell was a victim too; all he’d done was act in self-defense.

Reynolds, laughing, like Pell was some kid making faces at adults.

Calling him the Son of Manson…

Controlling me!

That had been the unforgivable sin. Not prosecuting Pell—no, many people had done that. But controlling him. Jerking him about like a puppet to be laughed at.

And not long after that the jury foreman had read the verdict. He saw his precious mountaintop vanishing, his freedom, his independence, the Family. All gone. His whole life destroyed by a laugh.

And now Reynolds—a threat to Pell as serious as Kathryn Dance—would go underground, be far more difficult to find.

He shivered in rage.

“You okay, baby?”

Now, still feeling like he was in a different dimension, Pell told Jennie the story about Reynolds in court and the danger he represented—a story no one knew.

And, funny, she didn’t seem to think it was so odd.

“That’s terrible. My mother’d do that, laugh at me in front of other people. And she’d hit me too. I think the laughing was worse. A lot worse.”

He was actually moved by her sympathy.

“Hey, lovely?…You held fast tonight.”

She smiled and made fists—as if displaying the tattooed letters, H-O-L-D F-A-S-T.

“I’m proud of you. Come on, let’s go inside.”

But Jennie didn’t move. Her smile slipped away. “I was thinking about something.”

“What?”

“How did he figure it out?”

“Who?”

“The man tonight, Reynolds.”

“Saw me, I suppose. Recognized me.”

“No, I don’t think so. It sounded like the sirens were coming, you know, before you knocked on the door.”

“They were?”

“I think so.”

Kathryn… Eyes as green as mine are blue, short pink nails, red rubber band around her braid, pearl on her finger and a polished shell at her throat. Holes in her lobes but no earrings.