Sole Survivor

5

The Los Angeles Times booked more advertising than any newspaper in the United States, churning out fortunes for its owners even in an age when most print media were in decline. It was quartered downtown, in an entire high-rise, which it owned and which covered one city block.

Strictly speaking, the Los Angeles Post was not even in Los Angeles. It occupied an aging four-story building in Sun Valley, near the Burbank Airport, within the metroplex but not within the L.A. city limits.

Instead of a multiple-level underground garage, the Post provided an open lot surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with spirals of razor wire. Rather than a uniformed attendant with a name tag and a welcoming smile, a sullen young man, about nineteen, watched over the ungated entrance from a folding chair under a dirty café umbrella emblazoned with the Cinzano logo. He was listening to rap music on a radio. Head shaved, left nostril pierced by a gold ring, fingernails painted black, dressed in baggy black jeans with one carefully torn knee and a loose black T-shirt with the words FEAR NADA in red across his chest, he looked as if he were assessing the parts value of each arriving car to determine which would bring the most cash if stolen and delivered to a chop shop. In fact, he was checking for an employee sticker on the windshield, ready to direct visitors to on-street parking.

The stickers were replaced every two years, and Joe’s was still valid. Two months after the fall of Flight 353, he had tendered his resignation, but his editor, Caesar Santos, had refused to accept it and had put him on an unpaid leave of absence, guaranteeing him a job when he was ready to return.

He was not ready. He would never be ready. But right now he needed to use the newspaper’s computers and connections.

No money had been spent on the reception lounge: institutional-beige paint, steel chairs with blue vinyl pads, a steel-legged coffee table with a faux-granite Formica top, and two copies of that day’s edition of the Post.

On the walls were simple framed black-and-white photographs by Bill Hannett, the paper’s legendary prize-winning press photographer. Shots of riots, a city in flames, grinning looters running in the streets. Earthquake-cracked avenues, buildings in rubble. A young Hispanic woman jumping to her death from the sixth floor of a burning building. A brooding sky and a Pacific-facing mansion teetering on the edge of ruin on a rain-soaked, sliding hillside. In general, no journalistic enterprise, whether electronic or print, built its reputation or revenues on good news.

Behind the reception counter was Dewey Beemis, the combination receptionist and security guard, who had worked at the Post for over twenty years, since an insanely egotistical billionaire had founded it with the naive and hopeless intention of toppling the politically connected Times from its perch of power and prestige. Originally the paper had been quartered in a new building in Century City, with its public spaces conceived and furnished by the uberdesigner Steven Chase, at which time Dewey had been only one of several guards and not a receptionist. Even a megalomaniacal billionaire, determined to prevent the dehydration of his pride, grows weary of pouring away money with the tap open wide. Thus the grand offices were traded for more humble space in the valley. The staff had been pared down, and Dewey had hung on by virtue of being the only six-feet-four, bull-necked, plank-shouldered security guard who could type eighty words a minute and claim awesome computer skills.

With the passage of time, the Post had begun to break even. The brilliant and visionary Mr. Chase subsequently designed numerous striking interiors, which were celebrated in Architectural Digest and elsewhere, and then died in spite of his genius and talent, just as the billionaire would one day die in spite of his vast fortune, just as Dewey Beemis would die in spite of his commendable variety of skills and his infectious smile.

“Joe!” Dewey said, grinning, rising from his chair, a bearish presence, extending his big hand across the counter.

Joe shook hands. “How’re you doing, Dewey?”

“Carver and Martin both graduated summa cum laude from UCLA in June, one going to law school now, the other medical,” Dewey gushed, as if this news were only hours old and about to hit the front page of the next day’s Post. Unlike the billionaire who employed him, Dewey’s pride was not in his own accomplishments but in those of his children. “My Julie, she finished her second year on scholarship at Yale with a three-point-eight average, and this fall she takes over as editor of the student literary magazine, wants to be a novelist like this Annie Proulx she’s always reading over and over again—”

With the sudden memory of Flight 353 passing through his eyes as obviously as a dimming cloud across a bright moon, Dewey silenced himself, ashamed to have been boasting about his sons and daughter to a man whose children were lost forever.

“How’s Lena?” Joe asked, inquiring about Dewey’s wife.

“She’s good…she’s okay, yeah, doing okay.” Dewey smiled and nodded to cover his uneasiness, editing his natural enthusiasm for his family.

Joe hated this awkwardness in his friends, their pity. Even after an entire year, here it was. This was one reason he avoided everyone from his old life. The pity in their eyes was genuine compassion, but to Joe, although he knew that he was being unfair, they also seemed to be passing a sad judgment on him for being unable to put his life back together.

“I need to go upstairs, Dewey, put in a little time, do some research, if that’s okay.”

Dewey’s expression brightened. “You coming back, Joe?”

“Maybe,” Joe lied.

“Back on staff?”

“Thinking about it.”

“Mr. Santos would love to hear that.”

“Is he here today?”

“No. On vacation, actually, fishing up in Vancouver.”

Relieved that he wouldn’t have to lie to Caesar about his true motives, Joe said, “There’s just something I’ve gotten interested in, a quirky human interest story, not my usual thing. Thought I’d come do some background.”

“Mr. Santos would want you to feel like you’re home. You go on up.”

“Thanks, Dewey.”

Joe pushed through a swinging door into a long hallway with a worn and stained green carpet, age-mottled paint, and a discolored acoustic-tile ceiling. Following the abandonment of the fat-city trappings that had characterized the Post’s years in Century City, the preferred image was guerrilla journalism, hardscrabble but righteous.

To the left was an elevator alcove. The doors at both shafts were scraped and dented.

The ground floor — largely given over to file rooms, clerical offices, classified ad sales, and the circulation department — was full of Saturday silence. In the quiet, Joe felt like an intruder. He imagined that anyone he encountered would perceive at once that he had returned under false pretenses.

While he was waiting for an elevator to open, he was surprised by Dewey, who had hurried from the reception lounge to give him a sealed white envelope. “Almost forgot this. Lady came by few days ago, said she had some information on a story just right for you.”

“What story?”

“She didn’t say. Just that you’d understand this.”

Joe accepted the envelope as the elevator doors opened.

Dewey said, “Told her you hadn’t worked here ten months, and she wanted your phone number. Of course I said I couldn’t give it out. Or your address.”

Stepping into the elevator, Joe said, “Thanks, Dewey.”

“Told her I’d send it on or call you about it. Then I discovered you moved and got a new phone, unlisted, and we didn’t have it.”

“Can’t be important,” Joe assured him, indicating the envelope. After all, he was not actually returning to journalism.

As the elevator doors started to close, Dewey blocked them. Frowning, he said, “Wasn’t just personnel records not up to speed with you, Joe. Nobody here, none of your friends, knew how to reach you.”

“I know.”

Dewey hesitated before he said, “You’ve been way down, huh?”

“Pretty far,” Joe acknowledged. “But I’m climbing back up.”

“Friends can hold the ladder steady, make it easier.”

Touched, Joe nodded.

“Just remember,” Dewey said.

“Thanks.”

Dewey stepped back, and the doors closed.

The elevator rose, taking Joe with it.

The third floor was largely devoted to the newsroom, which had been subdivided into a maze of somewhat claustrophobic modular workstations, so that the entire space could not be seen at once. Every workstation had a computer, telephone, ergonomic chair, and other fundamentals of the trade.

This was very similar to the much larger newsroom at the Times. The only differences were that the furniture and the reconfigurable walls at the Times were newer and more stylish than those at the Post, the environment there was no doubt purged of the asbestos and formaldehyde that lent the air here its special astringent quality, and even on a Saturday afternoon the Times would be busier per square foot of floor space than the Post was now.

Twice over the years, Joe had been offered a job at the Times, but he had declined. Although the Gray Lady, as the competition was known in some circles, was a great newspaper, it was also the ad-fat voice of the status quo. He believed he’d be allowed and encouraged to do better and more aggressive reporting at the Post, which was like an asylum at times, but also heavy on ballsy attitude and gonzo style, with a reputation for never treating a politician’s handout as real news and for assuming that every public official was either corrupt or incompetent, sex crazed or power mad.

A few years ago, after the Northridge earthquake, seismologists had discovered unsuspected links between a fault that ran under the heart of L.A. and one that lay beneath a series of communities in the San Fernando Valley. A joke swept the newsroom regarding what losses the city would suffer if one temblor destroyed the Times downtown and the Post in Sun Valley. Without the Post, according to the joke, Angelenos wouldn’t know which politicians and other public servants were stealing them blind, accepting bribes from known drug dealers, and having sex with animals. The greater tragedy, however, would be the loss of the six-pound Sunday edition of the Times, without which no one would know what stores were conducting sales.

If the Post was as obstinate and relentless as a rat terrier crazed by the scent of rodents — which it was — it was redeemed, for Joe, by the nonpartisan nature of its fury. Furthermore, a high percentage of its targets were at least as corrupt as it wanted to believe they were.

Also, Michelle had been a featured columnist and editorial writer for the Post. He met her here, courted her here, and enjoyed their shared sense of being part of an underdog enterprise. She had carried their two babies in her belly through so many days of work in this place.

Now he found this building haunted by memories of her. In the unlikely event that he could eventually regain emotional stability and con himself into believing life had a purpose worth the struggle, the face of that one dear ghost would rock him every time he saw it. He would never be able to work at the Post again.

He went directly to his former workstation in the Metro section, grateful that no old friends saw him. His place had been assigned to Randy Colway, a good man, who wouldn’t feel invaded if he found Joe in his chair.

Tacked to the noteboard were photographs of Randy’s wife, their nine-year-old son, Ben, and six-year-old Lisbeth. Joe looked at them for a long moment — and then not again.

After switching on the computer, he reached into his pocket and withdrew the Department of Motor Vehicles envelope that he’d filched from the glove box of the white van at the cemetery. It contained the validated registration card. To his surprise, the registered owner wasn’t a government body or a law-enforcement agency; it was something called Medsped, Inc.

He had not been expecting a corporate operation, for God’s sake. Wallace Blick and his trigger-happy associates in the Hawaiian shirts didn’t seem entirely like cops or federal agents, but they smelled a lot more like the law than they did like any corporate executives Joe had ever encountered.

Next he accessed the Post’s vast file of digitized back issues. Included was every word of every edition the newspaper had published since its inception — minus only the cartoons, horoscopes, crossword puzzles, and the like. Photographs were included.

He initiated a search for Medsped and found six mentions. They were small items from the business pages. He read them complete.

Medsped, a New Jersey corporation, had begun as an air ambulance service in several major cities. Later, it had expanded to specialize in the nationwide express delivery of emergency medical supplies, refrigerated or otherwise delicately preserved blood and tissue samples, as well as expensive and frangible scientific instruments. The company even undertook to carry samples of highly contagious bacteria and viruses between cooperating research laboratories in both the public and the military sectors. For these tasks, it maintained a modest fleet of aircraft and helicopters.

Helicopters.

And unmarked white vans?

Eight years ago, Medsped had been bought by Teknologik, Inc., a Delaware corporation with a score of wholly owned subsidiaries in the medical and computer industry. Its computer-related holdings were all companies developing products, mostly software, for the medical and medical-research communities.

When Joe ran a search on Teknologik, he was rewarded with forty-one stories, mostly from the business pages. The first two articles were so dry, however, so full of investment and accounting jargon, that the reward quickly began to seem like punishment.

He ordered copies of the four longest articles for review later.

While those were sliding into the printer tray, he asked for a list of stories the Post had published about the crash of Nationwide Flight 353. A series of headlines, with accompanying dates, appeared on the screen.

Joe had to steel himself to scan this story file. He sat for a minute or two with his eyes closed, breathing deeply, trying to conjure, in his mind’s eye, an image of surf breaking on the beach at Santa Monica.

Finally, with teeth clenched so tightly that his jaw muscles twitched continuously, he called up story after story, scanning the contents. He wanted the one that, as a sidebar, would provide him with a complete passenger manifest.

He skipped quickly past photographs of the crash scene, which revealed debris chopped into such small chunks and tangled in such surreal shapes that the baffled eye could not begin to reconstruct the aircraft from its ruins. In the bleak dawn caught by these pictures, through the gray drizzle that had begun to fall about two hours after the disaster, National Transportation Safety Board investigators in biologically secure bodysuits with visored hoods prowled the blasted meadow. Looming in the background were scorched trees, gnarled black limbs clawing at the low sky.

He searched for and found the name of the NTSB Go-Team leader in charge of the investigation — Barbara Christman — and the fourteen specialists working under her.

A couple of the articles included photos of some of the crew and passengers. Not all of the three hundred and thirty souls aboard were pictured. The tendency was to focus on those victims who were Southern Californians returning home rather than on Easterners who had been coming to visit. Being part of the Post family, Michelle and the girls were prominently featured.

Eight months ago, upon moving into the apartment, in reaction to a morbid and obsessive preoccupation with family albums and loose snapshots, Joe had packed all the photos in a large cardboard box, reasoning that rubbing a wound retarded healing. He had taped the box shut and put it at the back of his only closet.

Now, in the course of his scanning, when their faces appeared on the screen, he was unable to breathe, though he had thought he would be prepared. Michelle’s publicity shot, taken by one of the Post’s staff photographers, captured her beauty but not her tenderness, not her intelligence, not her charm, not her laughter. A mere picture was so inadequate, but still it was Michelle. Still. Chrissie’s photo had been snapped at a Post Christmas party for children of the paper’s employees. She was caught in a grin, eyes shining. How they shone. And little Nina, who sometimes wanted it pronounced neen-ah and other times nine-ah, was smiling that slightly lopsided smile that seemed to say she knew magical secrets.

Her smile reminded Joe of a silly song he sometimes sang to her when he put her to bed. Before he realized what he was doing, he found his breath again and heard himself whispering the words: “Nine-ah, neen-ah, have you seen her? Neen-ah, nine-ah, no one finah.”

A breaking inside him threatened his self-control.

He clicked the mouse to get their images off the screen. But that didn’t take their faces out of his mind, clearer than he had seen them since packing their photos away.

Bending forward in the chair, covering his face, shuddering, he muffled his voice in his cold hands. “Oh, shit. Oh, shit.”

Surf breaking on a beach, now as before, tomorrow as today. Clocks and looms. Sunrises, sunsets, phases of the moon. Machines clicking, ticking. Eternal rhythms, meaningless motions.

The only sane response is indifference.

He lowered his hands from his face. Sat up straight again. Tried to focus on the computer screen.

He was concerned that he would draw attention to himself. If an old acquaintance looked into this three-walled cubicle to see what was wrong, Joe might have to explain what he was doing here, might even have to summon the strength to be sociable.

He found the passenger manifest for which he had been searching. The Post had saved him time and effort by listing separately those among the dead who had lived in Southern California. He printed out all their names, each of which was followed by the name of the town in which the deceased resided.

I’m not ready to talk to you yet, the photographer of graves had said to him, from which he had inferred that she would have things to tell him later.

Don’t despair. You’ll see, like the others.

See what? He had no idea.

What could she possibly tell him that would alleviate his despair? Nothing. Nothing.

…like the others. You’ll see, like the others.

What others?

Only one answer satisfied him: other people who had lost loved ones on Flight 353, who had been as desolate as he was, people to whom she had already spoken.

He wasn’t going to wait for her to return to him. With Wallace Blick and associates after her, she might not live long enough to pay him a visit and quench his curiosity.

When Joe finished sorting and stapling the printouts, he noticed the white envelope that Dewey Beemis had given him at the elevator downstairs. Joe had propped it against a box of Kleenex to the right of the computer and promptly forgotten about it.

As a crime reporter with a frequently seen byline, he had from time to time received story tips from newspaper readers who, to put it charitably, were not well glued together. They earnestly claimed to be the terrified victims of vicious harassment by a secret cult of Satanists operating in the city’s parks department, or to know of sinister tobacco-industry executives who were plotting to lace baby formula with nicotine, or to be living across the street from a nest of spider-like extraterrestrials trying to pass as a nice family of Korean immigrants.

Once, when cornered by a pinwheel-eyed man who insisted that the mayor of Los Angeles was not human but a robot controlled by the audioanimatronics department at Disneyland, Joe had lowered his voice and said, with nervous sincerity, “Yes, we’ve known about that for years. But if we print a word of it, the people at Disney will kill us all.” He had spoken with such conviction that the nutball had exploded backward and fled.

Consequently, he was expecting a crayon-scrawled message about evil psychic Martians living among us as Mormons — or the equivalent. He tore open the envelope. It contained a single sheet of white paper folded in thirds.

The three neatly typed sentences initially impressed him as a singularly cruel variation on the usual paranoid shriek: I have been trying to reach you, Joe. My life depends on your discretion. I was aboard Flight 353.

Everyone aboard the airliner had perished. He didn’t believe in ghost mail from the Other Side, which probably made him unique among his contemporaries in this New Age City of Angels.

At the bottom of the page was a name: Rose Tucker. Under the name was a phone number with a Los Angeles area code. No address was provided.

Lightly flushed by the same anger that had burned so hotly in him earlier, and which could easily become a blaze again, Joe almost snatched up the phone to call Ms. Tucker. He wanted to tell her what a disturbed and vicious piece of garbage she was, wallowing in her schizophrenic fantasies, psychic vampire sucking on the misery of others to feed some sick need of her own—

And then he heard, in memory, the words that Wallace Buck first said to him in the cemetery. Unaware that anyone was in the white van, Joe had leaned through the open passenger door and popped the glove box in search of a cellular phone. Blick, briefly mistaking him for one of the men in the Hawaiian shirts, had said, Did you get Rose?

Rose.

Because Joe had been frightened by the gunmen, afraid for the woman they were pursuing, and startled to discover someone in the van, the importance of what Blick said had failed to register with him. Everything happened so fast after that. He had forgotten Blick’s words until now.

Rose Tucker must have been the woman with the Polaroid camera, photographing the graves.

If she was nothing more than a whacked-out loser living in some schizophrenic fantasy, Medsped or Teknologik — or whoever the hell they were — wouldn’t be throwing so much manpower and money into a search for her.

He remembered the exceptional presence of the woman in the cemetery. Her directness. Her self-possession and preternatural calm. The power of her unwavering stare.

She hadn’t seemed like a flake. Quite the opposite.

I have been trying to reach you, Joe. My life depends on your discretion. I was aboard Flight 353.

Without realizing that he had gotten off the chair, Joe was standing, heart pounding, electrified. The sheet of paper rattled in his hands.

He stepped into the aisle behind the modular workstation and surveyed what he could see of the subdivided newsroom, seeking someone with whom he could share this development.

Look here. Read this, read it. Something’s terribly wrong, Jesus, all wrong, not what we were told. Somebody walked away from the crash, lived through it. We have to do something about this, find the truth. No survivors, they said, no survivors, catastrophic crash, total wipeout catastrophic crash. What else have they told us that isn’t true? How did the people on that plane really die? Why did they die? Why did they die?

Before anyone saw him standing there in furious distress, before he went in search of a familiar face, Joe had second thoughts about sharing anything he had learned. Rose Tucker’s note said that her life depended on his discretion.

Besides, he had the crazy notion, somehow more powerfully convincing because of its irrationality, that if he shared the note with others, it would prove to be blank, that if he pressed Blick’s driver’s license into their hands, it would turn out to be his own license, that if he took someone with him to the cemetery, there would be no spent cartridges in the grass and no skid marks from the tires of the white van and no one there who had ever seen the vehicle or heard the gunshots.

This was a mystery delivered to him, to no one else but him, and he suddenly perceived that pursuing answers was not merely his duty but his sacred duty. In the resolution of this mystery was his mission, his purpose, and perhaps an unknowable redemption.

He didn’t even understand precisely what he meant by any of that. He simply felt the truth of it bone-deep.

Trembling, he returned to the chair.

He wondered if he was entirely sane.

6

Joe called downstairs to the reception desk and asked Dewey Beemis about the woman who had left the envelope.

“Little bit of a lady,” said Dewey.

He was a giant, however, and even a six-foot-tall Amazon might seem petite to him.

“Would you say five six, shorter?” Joe asked.

“Maybe five one, five two. But mighty. One of those ladies looks like a girl all her life but been a mountain-mover since she graduated grade school.”

“Black woman?” Joe asked.

“Yeah, she was a sister.”

“How old?”

“Maybe early forties. Pretty. Hair like raven wings. You upset about something, Joe?”

“No. No, I’m okay.”

“You sound upset. This lady some kind of trouble?”

“No, she’s okay, she’s legit. Thanks, Dewey.”

Joe put down the phone.

The nape of his neck was acrawl with gooseflesh. He rubbed it with one hand.

His palms were clammy. He blotted them on his jeans.

Nervously, he picked up the printout of the passenger manifest from Flight 353. Using a ruler to keep his place, he went down the list of the deceased, line by line, until he came to Dr. Rose Marie Tucker.

Doctor.

She might be a doctor of medicine or of literature, biologist or sociologist, musicologist or dentist, but in Joe’s eyes, her credibility was enhanced by the mere fact that she had earned the honorific. The troubled people who believed the mayor to be a robot were more likely to be patients than doctors of any kind.

According to the manifest, Rose Tucker was forty-three years old, and her home was in Manassas, Virginia. Joe had never been in Manassas, but he had driven past it a few times, because it was an outer suburb of Washington, near the town where Michelle’s parents lived.

Swiveling to the computer once more, he scrolled through the crash stories, seeking the thirty or more photographs of passengers, hoping hers would be among them. It was not.

Judging by Dewey’s description, the woman who had written this note and the woman in the cemetery — whom Blick had called Rose—were the same person. If this Rose was truly Dr. Rose Marie Tucker of Manassas, Virginia — which couldn’t be confirmed without a photo — then she had indeed been aboard Flight 353.

And had survived.

Reluctantly, Joe returned to the two largest accident-scene photographs. The first was the eerie shot with the stormy sky, the scorched-black trees, the debris pulverized and twisted into surreal sculpture, where the NTSB investigators, faceless in biohazard suits and hoods, seemed to drift like praying monks or like ominous spirits in a cold and flameless chamber in some forgotten level of Hell. The second was an aerial shot revealing wreckage so shattered and so widely strewn that the term “catastrophic accident” was a woefully inadequate description.

No one could have survived this disaster.

Yet Rose Tucker, if she was the same Rose Tucker who had boarded the plane that night, had evidently not only survived but walked away under her own power. Without serious injury. She had not been scarred or crippled.

Impossible. Dropping four miles in the clutch of planetary gravity, four long miles, accelerating unchecked into hard earth and rock, the 747 had not just smashed but splattered like an egg thrown at a brick wall, and then exploded, and then tumbled in seething furies of flame. To escape unmarked from the God-rattled ruins of Gomorrah, to step as unburnt as Shadrach from the fiery furnace of Nebuchadnezzar, to arise like Lazarus after four days in the grave, would have been less miraculous than to walk away untouched from the fall of Flight 353.

If he genuinely believed it was impossible, however, his mind would not have been roiled with anger and anxiety, with a strange awe, and with urgent curiosity. In him was a crazy yearning to embrace incredibilities, walk with wonder.

He called directory assistance in Manassas, seeking a telephone number for Dr. Rose Marie Tucker. He expected to be told that there was no such listing or that her service had been disconnected. After all, officially she was dead.

Instead, he was given a number.

She could not have walked away from the crash and gone home and picked up her life without causing a sensation. Besides, dangerous people were hunting her. They would have found her if she had ever returned to Manassas.

Perhaps family still lived in the house. For whatever reasons, they might have kept the phone in her name.

Joe punched in the number.

The call was answered on the second ring. “Yes?”

“Is this the Tucker residence?” Joe asked.

The voice was that of a man, crisp and without a regional accent: “Yes, it is.”

“Could I speak to Dr. Tucker, please?”

“Who’s calling?”

Intuition advised Joe to guard his own name. “Wally Blick.”

“Excuse me. Who?”

“Wallace Blick.”

The man at the other end of the line was silent. Then: “What is this in regard to?” His voice had barely changed, but a new alertness colored it, a shade of wariness.

Sensing that he had been too clever for his own good, Joe put down the phone.

He blotted his palms on his jeans again.

A reporter, passing behind Joe, reviewing the scribblings on a note pad as he went, greeted him without looking up: “Yo, Randy.”

Consulting the typewritten message from Rose, Joe called the Los Angeles number that she had provided.

On the fifth ring, a woman answered. “Hello?”

“Could I speak to Rose Tucker, please?”

“Nobody here by that name,” she said in an accent out of the deep South. “You got yourself a wrong number.”

In spite of what she’d said, she didn’t hang up.

“She gave me this number herself,” Joe persisted.

“Sugar, let me guess — this was a lady you met at a party. She was just makin’ nice to get you out of her hair.”

“I don’t think she’d do that.”

“Oh, don’t mean you’re ugly, honey,” she said in a voice that brought to mind magnolia blossoms and mint juleps and humid nights heavy with the scent of jasmine. “Just means you weren’t the lady’s type. Happens to the best.”

“My name’s Joe Carpenter.”

“Nice name. Good solid name.”

“What’s your name?”

Teasingly, she said, “What kind of name do I sound like?”

“Sound like?”

“Maybe an Octavia or a Juliette?”

“More like a Demi.”

“Like in Demi Moore the movie star?” she said disbelievingly.

“You have that sexy, smoky quality in your voice.”

“Honey, my voice is pure grits and collard greens.”

“Under the grits and collard greens, there’s smoke.”

She had a wonderful fulsome laugh. “Mister Joe Carpenter, middle name ‘Slick.’ Okay, I like Demi.”

“Listen, Demi, I’d sure like to talk to Rose.”

“Forget this old Rose person. Don’t you pine away for her, Joe, not after she gives you a fake number. Big sea, lots of fish.”

Joe was certain that this woman knew Rose and that she had been expecting him to call. Considering the viciousness of the enemies pursuing the enigmatic Dr. Tucker, however, Demi’s circumspection was understandable.

She said, “What do you look like when you’re bein’ honest with yourself, sugar?”

“Six feet tall, brown hair, gray eyes.”

“Handsome?”

“Just presentable.”

“How old are you, Presentable Joe?”

“Older than you. Thirty-seven.”

“You have a sweet voice. You ever go on blind dates?”

Demi was going to set up a meeting, after all.

He said, “Blind dates? Nothing against them.”

“So how about with sexy-smoky little me?” she suggested with a laugh.

“Sure. When?”

“You free tomorrow evenin’?”

“I was hoping sooner.”

“Don’t be so eager, Presentable Joe. Takes time to set these things up right, so there’s a chance it’ll work, so no one gets hurt, so there’s no broken hearts.”

By Joe’s interpretation, Demi was telling him that she was going to make damned sure the meeting was put together carefully, that the site needed to be scouted and secured in order for Rose’s safety to be guaranteed. And maybe she couldn’t get in touch with Rose with less than a twenty-four-hour notice.

“Besides, sugar, a girl starts to wonder why you’re so pitiful desperate if you’re really presentable.”

“All right. Where tomorrow evening?”

“I’m goin’ to give you the address of a gourmet coffee shop in Westwood. We’ll meet out front at six, go in and have a cup, see do we like each other. If I think you really are presentable and you think I’m as sexy-smoky as my voice…why, then it could be a shinin’ night of golden memories. You have a pen and paper?”

“Yes,” he said, and he wrote down the name and address of the coffee shop as she gave it to him.

“Now do me one favor, sugar. You have a paper there with this phone number on. Tear it to bitty pieces and flush it down a john.” When Joe hesitated, Demi said, “Won’t be no good ever again, anyway,” and she hung up.

The three typed sentences would not prove that Dr. Tucker had survived Flight 353 or that something about the crash was not kosher. He could have composed them himself. Dr. Tucker’s name was typed as well, so there was no evidentiary signature.

Nevertheless, he was loath to dispose of the message. Although it would never prove anything to anyone else, it made these fantastic events seem more real to him.

He called Demi’s number again to see if she would answer it in spite of what she had said.

To his surprise, he got a recorded message from the telephone company informing him that the number he had called was no longer in service. He was advised to make sure that he had entered the number correctly and then to call 411 for directory assistance. He tried the number again, with the same result.

Neat trick. He wondered how it had been done. Demi clearly was more sophisticated than her grits-and-collard-greens voice.

As Joe returned the handset to the cradle, the telephone rang, startling him so much that he let go of it as if he had burned his fingers. Embarrassed by his edginess, he picked it up on the third ring. “Hello?”

“Los Angeles Post?” a man asked.

“Yes.”

“Is this Randy Colway’s direct line?”

“That’s right.”

“Are you Mr. Colway?”

Startlement and the interlude with Demi had left Joe slow on the uptake. Now he recognized the uninflected voice as that of the man who had answered the phone at Rose Marie Tucker’s house in Manassas, Virginia.

“Are you Mr. Colway?” the caller asked again.

“I’m Wallace Blick,” Joe said.

“Mr. Carpenter?”

Chills climbed the ladder of his spine, vertebra to vertebra, and Joe slammed down the phone.

They knew where he was.

The dozens of modular workstations no longer seemed like a series of comfortably anonymous nooks. They were a maze with too many blind corners.

Quickly he gathered the printouts and the message that Rose Tucker had left for him.

As he was getting up from the chair, the phone rang again. He didn’t answer it.

On his way out of the newsroom, he encountered Dan Shavers, who was returning from the photocopying center with a sheaf of papers in his left hand and his unlit pipe in the right. Shavers, utterly bald, with a luxuriant black beard, wore pleated black dress slacks, red-and-black checkered suspenders over a gray-and-white pinstriped shirt, and a yellow bow tie. His half-lens reading glasses dangled from his neck on a loop of black ribbon.

A reporter and columnist on the business desk, Shavers was as pompous and as awkward at small talk as he thought he was charming; however, he was benign in his self-delusion and touching in his mistaken conviction that he was a spellbinding raconteur. He said without preamble, “Joseph, dear boy, opened a case of ’74 Mondavi Cabernet last week, one of twenty I bought as an investment when it was first released, even though at the time I was in Napa not to scout the vintners but to shop for an antique clock, and let me tell you, this wine has matured so well that—” He broke off, realizing that Joe had not worked at the newspaper for the better part of a year. Fumblingly, he tried to offer his condolences regarding “that terrible thing, that awful thing, all those poor people, your wife and the children.”

Aware that Randy Colway’s telephone was ringing again farther back in the newsroom, Joe interrupted Shavers, intending to brush him off, but then he said, “Listen, Dan, do you know a company called Teknologik?”

“Do I know them?” Shavers wiggled his eyebrows. “Very amusing, Joseph.”

“You do know them? What’s the story, Dan? Are they a pretty large conglomerate? I mean, are they powerful?”

“Oh, very profitable, Joseph, absolutely uncanny at recognizing cutting-edge technology in start-up companies and then acquiring them — or backing entrepreneurs who need cash to develop their ideas. Generally medically related technology but not always. Their top executives are infamous self-aggrandizers, think of themselves as some kind of business royalty, but they are no better than us. They, too, answer to He Who Must Be Obeyed.”

Confused, Joe said, “He Who Must Be Obeyed?”

“As do we all, as do we all,” said Shavers, smiling and nodding, raising his pipe to bite the stem.

Colway’s phone stopped ringing. The silence made Joe more nervous than the insistent trilling tone had done.

They knew where he was.

“Got to go,” he said, walking away as Shavers began to tell him about the advantages of owning Teknologik corporate bonds.

He proceeded directly to the nearest men’s room. Fortunately, no one else was in the lavatory, no old acquaintances to delay him.

In one of the stalls, Joe tore Rose’s message into small pieces. He flushed it down the toilet, as Demi had requested, waiting to confirm that every scrap vanished, flushing a second time to be sure that nothing was caught in the drain.

Medsped. Teknologik. Corporations conducting what appeared to be a police operation. Their long reach, from Los Angeles to Manassas, and their unnerving omniscience, argued that these were corporations with powerful connections beyond the business world, perhaps to the military.

Nevertheless, regardless of the stakes, it made no sense for a corporation to protect its interests with hit men brazen enough to shoot at people in public places — or anywhere else, for that matter. Regardless of how profitable Teknologik might be, big black numbers at the bottom of the balance sheet did not exempt corporate officers and executives from the law, not even here in Los Angeles, where the lack of money was known to be the root of all evil.

Considering the impunity with which they seemed to think they could use guns, the men whom he had encountered must be military personnel or federal agents. Joe had too little information to allow him even to conjecture what role Medsped and Teknologik played in the operation.

All the way along the third-floor hall to the elevators, he expected someone to call his name and order him to stop. Perhaps one of the men in Hawaiian shirts. Or Wallace Blick. Or a police officer.

If the people seeking Rose Tucker were federal agents, they would be able to obtain help from local police. For the time being, Joe would have to regard every man in uniform as a potential enemy.

As the elevator doors opened, he tensed, half expecting to be apprehended here in the alcove. The cab was empty.

On the way down to the first floor, he waited for the power to be cut off. When the doors opened on the lower alcove, he was surprised to find it deserted.

In all his life, he had never previously been in the grip of paranoia such as this. He was overreacting to the events of the early afternoon and to what he had learned since arriving at the offices of the Post.

He wondered if his exaggerated reactions — spells of extreme rage, spiraling fear — were a response to the past year of emotional deprivation. He had allowed himself to feel nothing whatsoever but grief, self-pity, and the terrible hollowness of incomprehensible loss. In fact, he’d striven hard not to feel even that much. He had tried to shed his pain, to rise from the ashes like a drab phoenix with no hope except the cold peace of indifference. Now that events forced him to open himself to the world again, he was swamped by emotion as a novice surfer was overwhelmed by each cresting wave.

In the reception lounge, as Joe entered, Dewey Beemis was on the telephone. He was listening so intently that his usually smooth dark face was furrowed. He murmured, “Yes, uh-huh, uh-huh, yes.”

Heading toward the outer door, Joe waved good-bye.

Dewey said, “Joe, wait, wait a second.”

Joe stopped and turned.

Though Dewey was listening to the caller again, his eyes were on Joe.

To indicate that he was in a hurry, Joe tapped one finger against his wristwatch.

“Hold on,” Dewey said into the phone, and then to Joe, he said, “There’s a man here calling about you.”

Joe shook his head adamantly.

“Wants to talk to you,” Dewey said.

Joe started toward the door again.

“Wait, Joe, man says he’s FBI.”

At the door, Joe hesitated and looked back at Dewey. The FBI couldn’t be associated with the men in the Hawaiian shirts, not with men who shot at innocent people without bothering to ask questions, not with men like Wallace Buck. Could they? Wasn’t he letting his fear run away with him again, succumbing to paranoia? He might get answers and protection from the FBI.

Of course, the man on the phone could be lying. He might not be with the Bureau. Possibly he was hoping to delay Joe until Blick and his friends — or others aligned with them — could get here.

With a shake of his head, Joe turned away from Dewey. He pushed through the door and into the August heat.

Behind him, Dewey said, “Joe?”

Joe walked toward his car. He resisted the urge to break into a run.

At the far end of the parking lot, by the open gate, the young attendant with the shaved head and the gold nose ring was watching. In this city where sometimes money mattered more than fidelity or honor or merit, style mattered more than money; fashions came and went even more frequently than principles and convictions, leaving only the unchanging signal colors of youth gangs as a sartorial tradition. This kid’s look, punk-grunge-neopunk-whatever, was already as dated as spats, making him look less threatening than he thought and more pathetic than he would ever be able to comprehend. Yet under these circumstances, his interest in Joe seemed ominous.

Even at low volume, the hard beat of rap music thumped through the blistering air.

The interior of the Honda was hot but not intolerable. The side window, shattered by a bullet at the cemetery, provided just enough ventilation to prevent suffocation.

The attendant had probably noticed the broken-out window when Joe had driven in. Maybe he’d been thinking about it.

What does it matter if he has been thinking? It’s only a broken window.

He was certain the engine wouldn’t start, but it did.

As Joe backed out of the parking slot, Dewey Beemis opened the reception-lounge door and stepped outside onto the small concrete stoop under the awning that bore the logo of the Post. The big man looked not alarmed but puzzled.

Dewey wouldn’t try to stop him. They were friends, after all, or had once been friends, and the man on the phone was just a voice.

Joe shifted the Honda into Drive.

Coming down the steps, Dewey shouted something. He didn’t sound alarmed. He sounded confused, concerned.

Ignoring him nonetheless, Joe drove toward the exit.

Under the dirty Cinzano umbrella, the attendant rose from the folding chair. He was only two steps from the rolling gate that would close off the lot.

Atop the chain-link fence, the coils of razor wire flared with silver reflections of late-afternoon sunlight.

Joe glanced at the rearview mirror. Back there, Dewey was standing with his hands on his hips.

As Joe went past the Cinzano umbrella, the attendant didn’t even come forth out of the shade. Watching with heavy-lidded eyes, as expressionless as an iguana, he wiped sweat off his brow with one hand, black fingernails glistening.

Through the open gate and turning right into the street, Joe was driving too fast. The tires squealed and sucked wetly at the sun-softened blacktop, but he didn’t slow down.

He went west on Strathern Street and heard sirens by the time that he turned south on Lankershim Boulevard. Sirens were part of the music of the city, day and night; they didn’t necessarily have anything to do with him.

Nevertheless, all the way to the Ventura Freeway, under it, and then west on Moorpark, he repeatedly checked the rearview mirror for pursuing vehicles, either marked or unmarked.

He was not a criminal. He should have felt safe going to the authorities to report the men in the cemetery, to tell them about the message from Rose Marie Tucker, and to report his suspicions about Flight 353.

On the other hand, in spite of being on the run for her life, Rose apparently hadn’t sought protection from the cops, perhaps because there was no protection to be had. My life depends on your discretion.

He had been a crime reporter long enough to have seen more than a few cases in which the victim had been targeted not because of anything he had done, not because of money or other possessions that his assailant desired, but merely because of what he had known. A man with too much knowledge could be more dangerous than a man with a gun.

What knowledge Joe had about Flight 353 seemed, however, to be pathetically inadequate. If he was a target merely because he knew that Rose Tucker existed and that she claimed to have survived the crash, then the secrets she possessed must be so explosive that the power of them could be measured only in megatonnage.

As he drove west toward Studio City, he thought of the red letters emblazoned on the black T-shirt worn by the attendant at the Post parking lot: FEAR NADA. “Fear nothing” was a philosophy Joe could never embrace. He feared so much.

More than anything, he was tormented by the possibility that the crash had not been an accident, that Michelle and Chrissie and Nina died not at the whim of fate but by the hand of man. Although the National Transportation Safety Board hadn’t been able to settle on a probable cause, hydraulic control systems failure complicated by human error was one possible scenario — and one with which he had been able to live because it was so impersonal, as mechanical and cold as the universe itself. He would find it intolerable, however, if they had perished from a cowardly act of terrorism or because of some more personal crime, their lives sacrificed to human greed or envy or hatred.

He feared what such a discovery would do to him. He feared what he might become, his potential for savagery, the hideous ease with which he might embrace vengeance and call it justice.

7

In the current atmosphere of fierce competitiveness that marked their industry, California bankers were keeping their offices open on Saturdays, some as late as five o’clock. Joe arrived at the Studio City branch of his bank twenty minutes before the doors closed.

When he sold the house here, he had not bothered to switch his account to a branch nearer his one-room apartment in Laurel Canyon. Convenience wasn’t a consideration when time no longer mattered.

He went to a window where a woman named Heather was tending to paperwork as she waited for last-minute business. She had worked at this bank since Joe had first opened an account a decade ago.

“I need to make a cash withdrawal,” he said, after the requisite small talk, “but I don’t have my checkbook with me.”

“That’s no problem,” she assured him.

It became a small problem, however, when Joe asked for twenty thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills. Heather went to the other end of the bank and huddled in conversation with the head teller, who then consulted the assistant manager. This was a young man no less handsome than the current hottest movie hero; perhaps he was one of the legion of would-be stars who labored in the real world to survive while waiting for the fantasy of fame. They glanced at Joe as if his identity was now in doubt.

Taking in money, banks were like industrial vacuum cleaners. Giving it out, they were clogged faucets.

Heather returned with a guarded expression and the news that they were happy to accommodate him, though there were, of course, procedures that must be followed.

At the other end of the bank, the assistant manager was talking on his phone, and Joe suspected that he himself was the subject of the conversation. He knew he was letting his paranoia get the better of him again, but his mouth went dry, and his heartbeat increased.

The money was his. He needed it.

That Heather had known Joe for years — in fact, attended the same Lutheran church where Michelle had taken Chrissie and Nina to Sunday school and services — did not obviate her need to see his driver’s license. The days of common trust and common sense were so far in America’s past that they seemed not merely to be ancient history but to be part of the history of another country altogether.

He remained patient. Everything he owned was on deposit here, including nearly sixty thousand dollars in equity from the sale of the house, so he could not be denied the money, which he would need for living expenses. With the same people seeking him who were searching for Rose Tucker, he could not go back to the apartment and would have to live out of motels for the duration.

The assistant manager had concluded his call. He was staring at a note pad on his desk, tapping it with a pencil.

Joe had considered using his few credit cards to pay for things, supplemented by small sums withdrawn as needed from automated teller machines. But authorities could track a suspect through credit-card use and ATM activity — and be ever on his heels. They could even have his plastic seized by any merchant at the point of purchase.

A phone rang on the assistant manager’s desk. He snatched it up, glanced at Joe, and turned away in his swivel chair, as if he worried that his lips might be read.

After procedures were followed and everyone was satisfied that Joe was neither his own evil twin nor a bold impersonator in a clever rubber mask, the assistant manager, his phone conversation concluded, slowly gathered the hundred-dollar bills from other tellers’ drawers and from the vault. He brought the required sum to Heather and, with a fixed and uneasy smile, watched as she counted it for Joe.

Perhaps it was imagination, but Joe felt they disapproved of his carrying so much money, not because it put him in danger but because these days people who dealt in cash were stigmatized. The government required banks to report cash transactions of five thousand dollars or more, ostensibly to hamper attempts by drug lords to launder funds through legitimate financial institutions. In reality, no drug lord was ever inconvenienced by this law, but the financial activities of average citizens were now more easily monitored.

Throughout history, cash or the equivalent — diamonds, gold coins — had been the best guarantor of freedom and mobility. Cash meant the same things to Joe and nothing more. Yet from Heather and her bosses, he continued to endure a surreptitious scrutiny that seemed to be based on the assumption that he was engaged in some criminal enterprise or, at best, was on his way for a few days of unspeakable debauchery in Las Vegas.

As Heather put the twenty thousand in a manila envelope, the phone rang on the assistant manager’s desk. Murmuring into the mouthpiece, he continued to find Joe of interest.

By the time Joe left the bank, five minutes past closing time, the last customer to depart, he was weak-kneed with apprehension.

The heat remained oppressive, and the five-o’clock sky was still cloudless and blue, although not the profound blue that it had been earlier. Now it was curiously depthless, a flat blue that reminded him of something he had seen before. The reference remained elusive until he had gotten into the car and started the engine — and then he recalled the dead-blue eyes of the last corpse that he had seen on a morgue gurney, the night he walked away from crime reporting forever.

When he drove out of the bank lot, he saw that the assistant manager was standing beyond the glass doors, all but hidden by the reflected bronze glare of the westering sun. Maybe he was storing away a description of the Honda and memorizing the license-plate number. Or maybe he was just locking the doors.

The metropolis shimmered under the blind blue stare of the dead sky.

Passing a small neighborhood shopping center, from across three lanes of traffic, Joe saw a woman with long auburn hair stepping out of a Ford Explorer. She was parked in front of a convenience store. From the passenger side jumped a little girl with a cap of tousled blond hair. Their faces were hidden from him.

Joe angled recklessly across traffic, nearly colliding with an elderly man in a gray Mercedes. At the intersection, as the light turned from yellow to red, he made an illegal U-turn.

He already regretted what he was about to do. But he could no more stop himself than he could hasten the day’s end by commanding the sun to set. He was in the grip of a bizarre compulsion.

Shaken by his lack of self-control, he parked near the woman’s Ford Explorer. He got out of the Honda. His legs were weak.

He stood staring at the convenience store. The woman and the child were in there, but he couldn’t see them for the posters and merchandise displays in the big windows.

He turned away from the store and leaned against the Honda, trying to compose himself.

After the crash in Colorado, Beth McKay had referred him to a group called The Compassionate Friends, a nationwide organization for people who had lost children. Beth was slowly finding her way to acceptance through Compassionate Friends in Virginia, so Joe went to a few meetings of a local chapter, but he soon stopped attending. In that regard, he was like most other men in his situation; bereaved mothers went to the meetings faithfully and found comfort in talking with others whose children had been taken, but nearly all the fathers turned inward and held their pain close. Joe wanted to be one of the few who could find salvation by reaching out, but male biology or psychology — or pure stubbornness or self-pity — kept him aloof, alone.

At least, from The Compassionate Friends, he had discovered that this bizarre compulsion, by which he was now seized, was not unique to him. It was so common they had a name for it: searching behavior.

Everybody who lost a loved one engaged in a degree of searching behavior, although it was more intense for those who lost children. Some grievers suffered it worse than others. Joe had it bad.

Intellectually, he could accept that the dead were gone forever. Emotionally, on a primal level, he remained convinced that he would see them again. At times he expected his wife and daughters to walk through a door or to be on the phone when it rang. Driving, he was occasionally overcome by the certainty that Chrissie and Nina were behind him in the car, and he turned, breathless with excitement, more shocked by the emptiness of the backseat than he would have been to find that the girls were indeed alive again and with him.

Sometimes he saw them on a street. On a playground. In a park. On the beach. They were always at a distance, walking away from him. Sometimes he let them go, but sometimes he was compelled to follow, to see their faces, to say, “Wait for me, wait, I’m coming with you.”

Now he turned away from the Honda. He went to the entrance of the convenience store.

Opening the door, he hesitated. He was torturing himself. The inevitable emotional implosion that would ensue when this woman and child proved not to be Michelle and Nina would be like taking a hammer to his own heart.

The events of the day — the encounter with Rose Tucker at the cemetery, her words to him, the shocking message waiting for him at the Post—had been so extraordinary that he discovered a gut-deep faith in uncanny possibilities that surprised him. If Rose could fall more than four miles, smash unchecked into Colorado rock, and walk away…Unreason overruled facts and logic. A brief, sweet madness stripped off the armor of indifference in which he’d clothed himself with so much struggle and determination, and into his heart surged something like hope.

He went into the store.

The cashier’s counter was to his left. A pretty Korean woman in her thirties was clipping packages of Slim Jim sausages to a wire display rack. She smiled and nodded.

A Korean man, perhaps her husband, was at the cash register. He greeted Joe with a comment about the heat.

Ignoring them, Joe passed the first of four aisles, then the second. He saw the auburn-haired woman and the child at the end of the third aisle.

They were standing at a cooler full of soft drinks, their backs to him. He stood for a moment at the head of the aisle, waiting for them to turn toward him.

The woman was in white ankle-tie sandals, white cotton slacks, and a lime-green blouse. Michelle had owned similar sandals, similar slacks. Not the blouse. Not the blouse, that he could recall.

The little girl, Nina’s age, Nina’s size, was in white sandals like her mother’s, pink shorts, and a white T-shirt. She stood with her head cocked to one side, swinging her slender arms, the way Nina sometimes stood.

Nine-ah, neen-ah, have you seen her?

Joe was halfway down the aisle before he realized that he was on the move.

He heard the little girl say, “Please, root beer, please?”

Then he heard himself say, “Nina,” because Nina’s favorite drink had been root beer. “Nina? Michelle?”

The woman and the child turned to him. They were not Nina and Michelle.

He had known they would not be the woman and the girl whom he had loved. He was operating not on reason but on a demented impulse of the heart. He had known, had known. Yet when he saw they were strangers, he felt as though he had been punched in the chest.

Stupidly, he said, “You…I thought…standing there…”

“Yes?” the woman said, puzzled and wary.

“Don’t…don’t let her go,” he told the mother, surprised by the hoarseness of his own voice. “Don’t let her go, out of your sight, on her own, they vanish, they’re gone, unless you keep them close.”

Alarm flickered across the woman’s face.

With the innocent honesty of a four-year-old, piping up in a concerned and helpful tone, the little girl said, “Mister, you need to buy some soap. You sure smell. The soap’s over that way, I’ll show you.”

The mother quickly took her daughter’s hand, pulled her close.

Joe realized that he must, indeed, smell. He had been on the beach in the sun for a couple of hours, and later in the cemetery, and more than once he’d broken into a sweat of fear. He’d had nothing to eat during the day, so his breath must be sour with the beer that he had drunk at the shore.

“Thank you, sweetheart,” he said. “You’re right. I smell. I better get some soap.”

Behind him, someone said, “Everything all right?”

Joe turned and saw the Korean proprietor. The man’s previously placid face was now carved by worry.

“I thought they were people I knew,” Joe explained. “People I knew…once.”

He realized that he had left the apartment this morning without shaving. Stubbled, greasy with stale sweat, rumpled, breath sour and beery, eyes wild with blasted hope, he must be a daunting sight. Now he better understood the attitude of the people at the bank.

“Everything all right?” the proprietor asked the woman.

She was uncertain. “I guess so.”

“I’m going,” Joe said. He felt as if his internal organs were slip-sliding into new positions, his stomach rising and his heart dropping down into the pit of him. “It’s okay, okay, just a mistake, I’m going.”

He stepped past the owner and went quickly to the front of the store.

As he headed past the cashier’s counter toward the door, the Korean woman worriedly said, “Everything all right?”

“Nothing, nothing,” Joe said, and he hurried outside into the sedimentary heat of the settling day.

When he got into the Honda, he saw the manila envelope on the passenger’s seat. He had left twenty thousand dollars unattended in an unlocked car. Although there had been no miracle in the convenience store, it was a miracle that the money was still here.

Tortured by severe stomach cramps, with a tightness in his chest that restricted his breathing, Joe wasn’t confident of his ability to drive with adequate attention to traffic. But he didn’t want the woman to think that he was waiting for her, stalking her. He started the Honda and left the shopping center.

Switching on the air conditioning, tilting the vents toward his face, he struggled for breath, as if his lungs had collapsed and he was striving to reinflate them with sheer willpower. What air he was able to inhale was heavy inside him, like a scalding liquid.

This was something else that he had learned from Compassionate Friends meetings: For most of those who lost children, not just for him, the pain was at times physical, stunning.

Wounded, he drove half hunched over the steering wheel, wheezing like an asthmatic.

He thought of the angry vow that he had made to destroy those who might be to blame for the fate of Flight 353, and he laughed briefly, sourly, at his foolishness, at the unlikely image of himself as an unstoppable engine of vengeance. He was walking wreckage. Dangerous to no one.

If he learned what had really happened to that 747, if treachery was indeed involved, and if he discovered who was responsible, the perpetrators would kill him before he could lift a hand against them. They were powerful, with apparently vast resources. He had no chance of bringing them to justice.

Nevertheless, he’d keep trying. The choice to turn away from the hunt was not his to make. Compulsion drove him. Searching behavior.

At a Kmart, Joe purchased an electric razor and a bottle of aftershave. He bought a toothbrush, toothpaste, and toiletries.

The glare of the fluorescent lights cut at his eyes. One wheel on his shopping cart wobbled noisily, louder in his imagination than in reality, exacerbating his headache.

Shopping quickly, he bought a suitcase, two pairs of blue jeans, a gray sports jacket — corduroy, because the fall lines were already on display in August — underwear, T-shirts, athletic socks, and a new pair of Nikes. He went strictly by the stated size, trying on nothing.

After leaving Kmart, he found a modest, clean motel in Malibu, on the ocean, where later he might be able to sleep to the rumble of the surf. He shaved, showered, and changed into clean clothes.

By seven-thirty, with an hour of sunlight left, he drove east to Culver City, where Thomas Lee Vadance’s widow lived. Thomas had been listed on the passenger manifest for Flight 353, and his wife, Nora, had been quoted by the Post.

At a McDonald’s, Joe bought two cheeseburgers and a cola. In the steel-tethered book at the restaurant’s public phone, he found a number and an address for Nora Vadance.

From his previous life as a reporter, he had a Thomas Brothers Guide, the indispensable book of Los Angeles County street maps, but he thought he knew Mrs. Vadance’s neighborhood.

While he drove, he ate both of the burgers and washed them down with the cola. He was surprised by his own sudden hunger.

The single-story house had a cedar-shingle roof, shingled walls, white trim, and white shutters. It was an odd mix of California ranch house and New England coastal cottage, but with its flagstone walkway and neatly tended beds of impatiens and agapanthus, it was charming.

The day was still warm. Heat shimmered off the flagstones.

With an orange-pink glow growing in the western sky and purple twilight just sliding into view in the east, Joe climbed two steps onto the porch and rang the bell.

The woman who answered the door was about thirty years old and pretty in a fresh-faced way. Although she was a brunette, she had the fair complexion of a redhead, with freckles and green eyes. She was in khaki shorts and a man’s threadbare white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her hair was in disarray and damp with sweat, and on her left cheek was a smudge of dirt.

She looked as if she had been doing housework. And crying.

“Mrs. Vadance?” Joe asked.

“Yes.”

Although he had always been smooth about ingratiating himself with an interviewee when he had been a reporter, he was awkward now. He felt too casually dressed for the serious questions that he had come to ask. His jeans were loose, the waistband gathered and cinched with a belt, and because the air was hot, he’d left the sports jacket in the Honda. He wished he’d bought a shirt instead of just T-shirts.

“Mrs. Vadance, I was wondering if I could speak with you—”

“I’m very busy right now—”

“My name’s Joe Carpenter. My wife died on the plane. And my two little girls.”

Her breath caught in her throat. Then: “One year ago.”

“Yes. Tonight.”

She stepped back from the door. “Come in.”

He followed her into a cheery, predominantly white and yellow living room with chintz drapes and pillows. A dozen Lladró porcelains stood in a lighted corner display case.

She asked Joe to have a seat. As he settled in an armchair, she went to a doorway and called, “Bob? Bob, we have a visitor.”

“I’m sorry to bother you on a Saturday night,” Joe said.

Returning from the doorway and perching on the sofa, the woman said, “Not at all. But I’m afraid I’m not the Mrs. Vadance you came to see. I’m not Nora. My name’s Clarise. It was my mother-in-law who lost her husband in the…in the accident.”

From the back of the house, a man entered the living room, and Clarise introduced him as her husband. He was perhaps two years older than his wife, tall, lanky, crew-cut, with a pleasant and self-confident manner. His handshake was firm and his smile easy, but under his tan was a paleness, in his blue eyes a sorrow.

As Bob Vadance sat on the sofa beside his wife, Clarise explained that Joe’s family had perished in the crash. To Joe, she said, “It was Bob’s dad we lost, coming back from a business trip.”

Of all the things that they might have said to one another, they established their bond by talking about how they had first heard the dreadful news out of Colorado.

Clarise and Bob, a fighter pilot assigned to Miramar Naval Air Station north of San Diego, had been out to dinner with two other pilots and their wives. They were at a cozy Italian restaurant and, after dinner, moved into the bar, where there was a television set. The baseball game was interrupted for a bulletin about Nationwide Flight 353. Bob had known his dad was flying that night from New York to L.A. and that he often traveled Nationwide, but he hadn’t known the flight number. Using a bar phone to call Nationwide at LAX, he was quickly connected with a public-relations officer who confirmed that Thomas Lee Vadance was on the passenger manifest. Bob and Clarise had driven from Miramar to Culver City in record time, arriving shortly after eleven o’clock. They didn’t call Nora, Bob’s mother, because they didn’t know if she had heard. If she was still unaware of the news, they wanted to tell her in person rather than over the phone. When they arrived just after midnight, the house was brightly lighted, the front door unlocked. Nora was in the kitchen, making corn chowder, a big pot of corn chowder, because Tom loved her corn chowder, and she was baking chocolate-chip cookies with pecans because Bob loved those cookies too. She knew about the crash, knew that he was dead out there just east of the Rockies, but she needed to be doing something for him. They had been married when Nora was eighteen and Tom was twenty, had been married for thirty-five years, and she had needed to be doing something for him.

“In my case, I didn’t know until I got to the airport to pick them up,” Joe said. “They’d been to Virginia to visit Michelle’s folks, and then three days in New York so the girls could meet their aunt Delia for the first time. I arrived early, of course, and first thing when I went into the terminal, I checked the monitors to see if their flight was on time. It was still shown as on time, but when I went up to the gate where it was supposed to arrive, airline personnel were greeting people as they approached the area, talking to them in low voices, leading some of them away to a private lounge. This young man came up to me, and before he opened his mouth, I knew what he was going to say. I wouldn’t let him talk. I said, ‘No, don’t say it, don’t you dare say it.’ When he tried to speak anyway, I turned away from him, and when he put a hand on my arm, I knocked it off. I might have punched him to keep him from talking, except by then there were three of them, him and two women, around me, close around me. It was as if I didn’t want to be told because being told was what made it real, that it wouldn’t be real, you know, wouldn’t actually have happened, if they didn’t say it.”

They were all silent, listening to the remembered voices of last year, the voices of strangers with terrible news.

“Mom took it so hard for a long time,” Clarise said at last, speaking of her mother-in-law as fondly as if Nora had been her own mother. “She was only fifty-three, but she really didn’t want to go on without Tom. They were—”

“—so close,” Bob finished. “But then last week when we came to visit, she was way up, so much better. She’d been so bitter, depressed and bitter, but now she was full of life again. She’d always been cheerful before the crash, a real—”

“—people person, so outgoing,” Clarise continued for him, as if their thoughts ran always on precisely the same track. “And suddenly here again last week was the woman we’d always known…and missed for the past year.”

Dread washed through Joe when he realized they were speaking of Nora Vadance as one speaks of the dead. “What’s happened?”

From a pocket of her khaki shorts, Clarise had taken a Kleenex. She was blotting her eyes. “Last week she said she knew now that Tom wasn’t gone forever, that no one was ever gone forever. She seemed so happy. She was—”

“—radiant,” Bob said, taking his wife’s hand in his. “Joe, we don’t know why really, with the depression gone and her being so full of plans for the first time in a year…but four days ago, my mom…she committed suicide.”

The funeral had been held the previous day. Bob and Clarise didn’t live here. They were staying only through Tuesday, packing Nora’s clothes and personal effects for distribution to relatives and the Salvation Army Thrift Shop.

“It’s so hard,” Clarise said, unrolling and then rerolling the right sleeve on her white shirt as she talked. “She was such a sweet person.”

“I shouldn’t be here right now,” Joe said, getting up from the armchair. “This isn’t a good time.”

Rising quickly, extending one hand almost pleadingly, Bob Vadance said, “No, please, sit down. Please. We need a break from the sorting…the packing. Talking to you…well…” He shrugged. He was all long arms and legs, graceful before but not now. “We all know what it’s like. It’s easier because—”

“—because we all know what it’s like,” Clarise finished.

After a hesitation, Joe sat in the armchair again. “I only have a few questions…and maybe only your mother could’ve answered them.”

Having readjusted her right sleeve, Clarise unrolled and then rerolled the left. She needed to be doing something while she talked. Maybe she was afraid that her unoccupied hands would encourage her to express the grief that she was striving to control — perhaps by covering her face, by twisting and pulling her hair, or by curling into fists and striking something. “Joe…this heat…would you like something cold to drink?”

“No, thanks. Quick is better, and I’ll go. What I wanted to ask your mother was if she’d been visited by anyone recently. By a woman who calls herself Rose.”

Bob and Clarise exchanged a glance, and Bob said, “Would this be a black woman?”

A quiver passed through Joe. “Yes. Small, about five two, but with…real presence.”

“Mom wouldn’t say much about her,” Clarise said, “but this Rose came once, and they talked, and it seemed as if something she told Mom was what made all the difference. We got the idea she was some sort of—”

“—spiritual adviser or something,” Bob finished. “At first we didn’t like the sound of it, thought it might be someone taking advantage of Mom, her being so down and vulnerable. We thought maybe this was some New Age crazy or—”

“—a con artist,” Clarise continued, now leaning forward from the sofa to straighten the silk flowers in an arrangement on the coffee table. “Someone trying to rip her off or just mess with her mind.”

“But when she talked about Rose, she was so—”

“—full of peace. It didn’t seem this could be bad, not when it made Mom feel so much better. Anyway—”

“—she said this woman wasn’t coming back,” Bob finished. “Mom said, thanks to Rose, she knew Dad was somewhere safe. He hadn’t just died and that was the end. He was somewhere safe and fine.”

“She wouldn’t tell us how she’d come around to this faith, when she’d never even been a churchgoer before,” Clarise added. “Wouldn’t say who Rose was or what Rose had told her.”

“Wouldn’t tell us much at all about the woman,” Bob confirmed. “Just that it had to be a secret now, for a little while, but that eventually—”

“—everyone would know.”

“Eventually everyone would know what?” Joe asked.

“That Dad was somewhere safe, I guess, somewhere safe and fine.”

“No,” Clarise said, finishing with the silk flowers, sitting back on the sofa, clasping her hands in her lap. “I think she meant more than that. I think she meant eventually everyone would know that none of us ever just dies, that we…go on somewhere safe.”

Bob sighed. “I’ll be frank with you, Joe. It made us a little nervous, hearing this superstitious stuff coming from my mother, who was always so down-to-earth. But it made her happy, and after the awfulness of the past year—”

“—we didn’t see what harm it could do.”

Spiritualism was not what Joe had expected. He was uneasy if not downright disappointed. He had thought that Dr. Rose Tucker knew what had really happened to Flight 353 and was prepared to finger those responsible. He had never imagined that what she had to offer was merely mysticism, spiritual counseling.

“Do you think she had an address for this Rose, a telephone number?”

Clarise said, “No. I don’t think so. Mom was…mysterious about it.” To her husband, she said, “Show him the picture.”

“It’s still in her bedroom,” Bob said, rising from the sofa. “I’ll get it.”

“What picture?” Joe asked Clarise as Bob left the living room.

“Strange. It’s one this Rose brought to Nora. It’s kind of creepy, but Mom took comfort from it. It’s a photo of Tom’s grave.”

The photograph was a standard color print taken with a Polaroid camera. The shot showed the headstone at Thomas Lee Vadance’s grave: his name, the dates of his birth and death, the words “cherished husband and beloved father.”

In memory, Joe could see Rose Marie Tucker in the cemetery: I’m not ready to talk to you yet.

Clarise said, “Mom went out and bought the frame. She wanted to keep the picture behind glass. It was important to her that it not get damaged.”

“While we were staying here last week, three full days, she carried it with her everywhere,” Bob said. “Cooking in the kitchen, sitting in the family room watching TV, outside on the patio when we were barbecuing, always with her.”

“Even when we went out to dinner,” Clarise said. “She put it in her purse.”

“It’s just a photograph,” Joe said, puzzled.

“Just a photograph,” Bob Vadance agreed. “She could’ve taken it herself — but for some reason it meant more to her because this Rose woman had taken it.”

Joe slid a finger down the smooth silver-plated frame and across the glass, as if he were clairvoyant and able to read the meaning of the photograph by absorbing a lingering psychic energy from it.

“When she first showed it to us,” said Clarise, “she watched us with such…expectation. As if she thought—”

“—we would have a bigger reaction to it,” Bob concluded.

Putting the photograph on the coffee table, Joe frowned. “Bigger reaction? Like how?”

“We couldn’t understand,” Clarise said. She picked up the photo and began to polish the frame and glass on her shirttail. “When we didn’t respond to it the way she hoped, then she asked us what we saw when we looked at it.”

“A gravestone,” Joe said.

“Dad’s grave,” Bob agreed.

Clarise shook her head. “Mom seemed to see more.”

“More? Like what?”

“She wouldn’t say, but she—”

“—told us the day would come when we would see it different,” Bob finished.

In memory, Rose in the graveyard, clutching the camera in two hands, looking up at Joe: You’ll see, like the others.

“Do you know who this Rose is? Why did you ask us about her?” Clarise wondered.

Joe told them about meeting the woman at the cemetery, but he said nothing about the men in the white van. In his edited version, Rose had left in a car, and he had been unable to detain her.

“But from what she said to me…I thought she might have visited the families of some other crash victims. She told me not to despair, told me that I’d see, like the others had seen, but she wasn’t ready to talk yet. The trouble is, I couldn’t wait for her to be ready. If she’s talked to others, I want to know what she told them, what she helped them to see.”

“Whatever it was,” Clarise said, “it made Mom feel better.”

“Or did it?” Bob wondered.

“For a week, it did,” Clarise said. “For a week she was happy.”

“But it led to this,” Bob said.

If Joe hadn’t been a reporter with so many years of experience asking hard questions of victims and their families, he might have found it difficult to push Bob and Clarise to contemplate another grim possibility that would expose them to fresh anguish. But when the events of this extraordinary day were considered, the question had to be asked: “Are you absolutely sure that it was suicide?”

Bob started to speak, faltered, and turned his head away to blink back tears.

Taking her husband’s hand, Clarise said to Joe, “There’s no question. Nora killed herself.”

“Did she leave a note?”

“No,” Clarise said. “Nothing to help us understand.”

“She was so happy, you said. Radiant. If—”

“She left a videotape,” Clarise said.

“You mean, saying good-bye?”

“No. It’s this strange…this terrible…” She shook her head, face twisting with distaste, at a loss for words to describe the video. Then: “It’s this thing.”

Bob let go of his wife’s hand and got to his feet. “I’m not much of a drinking man, Joe, but I need a drink for this.”

Dismayed, Joe said, “I don’t want to add to your suffering—”

“No, it’s all right,” Bob assured him. “We’re all of us out of that crash together, survivors together, family of a sort, and there shouldn’t be anything you can’t talk about with family. You want a drink?”

“Sure.”

“Clarise, don’t tell him about the video until I’m back. I know you think it’ll be easier on me if you talk about it when I’m not in the room, but it won’t.”

Bob Vadance regarded his wife with great tenderness, and when she replied, “I’ll wait,” her love for him was so evident that Joe had to look away. He was too sharply reminded of what he had lost.

When Bob was out of the room, Clarise started to adjust the arrangement of silk flowers again. Then she sat with her elbows on her bare knees, her face buried in her hands.

When finally she looked up at Joe, she said, “He’s a good man.”

“I like him.”

“Good husband, good son. People don’t know him — they see the fighter pilot, served in the Gulf War, tough guy. But he’s gentle too. Sentimental streak a mile wide, like his dad.”

Joe waited for what she really wanted to tell him.

After a pause, she said, “We’ve been slow to have children. I’m thirty, Bob’s thirty-two. There seemed to be so much time, so much to do first. But now our kids will grow up without ever knowing Bob’s dad or mom, and they were such good people.”

“It’s not your fault,” Joe said. “It’s all out of our hands. We’re just passengers on this train, we don’t drive it, no matter how much we like to think we do.”

“Have you really reached that level of acceptance?”

“Trying.”

“Are you even close?”

“Shit, no.”

She laughed softly.

Joe hadn’t made anyone laugh in a year — except Rose’s friend on the phone earlier. Although pain and irony colored Clarise’s brief laughter, there was also relief in it. Having affected her this way, Joe felt a connection with life that had eluded him for so long.

After a silence, Clarise said, “Joe, could this Rose be an evil person?”

“No. Just the opposite.”

Her freckled face, so open and trusting by nature, now clouded with doubt. “You sound so sure.”

“You would be too, if you met her.”

Bob Vadance returned with three glasses, a bowl of cracked ice, a liter of 7UP, and a bottle of Seagram’s 7 Crown. “I’m afraid there’s no real choice to offer,” he apologized. “Nobody in this family’s much of a drinker — but when we do take a touch, we like it simple.”

“This is fine,” Joe said, and accepted his 7-and-7 when it was ready.

They tasted their drinks — Bob had mixed them strong — and for a moment the only sound was the clinking of ice.

Clarise said, “We know it was suicide, because she taped it.”

Certain that he had misunderstood, Joe said, “Who taped it?”

“Nora, Bob’s mother,” Clarise said. “She videotaped her own suicide.”

Twilight evaporated in a steam of crimson and purple light, and out of that neon vapor, night coalesced against the windows of the yellow and white living room.

Quickly and succinctly, with commendable self-control, Clarise revealed what she knew of her mother-in-law’s horrible death. She spoke in a low voice, yet every word was bell-note clear and seemed to reverberate through Joe until he gradually began to tremble with the cumulative vibrations.

Bob Vadance finished none of his wife’s sentences. He remained silent throughout, looking at neither Clarise nor Joe. He stared at his drink, to which he resorted frequently.

The compact Sanyo 8mm camcorder that had captured the death was Tom Vadance’s toy. It had been stored in the closet in his study since before his death aboard Flight 353.

The camera was easy to use. Fuzzy-logic technology automatically adjusted the shutter speed and white balance. Though Nora had never had much experience with it, she could have learned the essentials of its operation in a few minutes.

The nicad battery had not contained much juice after a year in the closet. Therefore, Nora Vadance had taken time to recharge it, indicating a chilling degree of premeditation. The police found the AC adaptor and the battery charger plugged into an outlet on the kitchen counter.

Tuesday morning of this week, Nora went outside to the back of the house and set the camcorder on a patio table. She used two paperback books as shims to tilt the camera to the desired angle, and then she switched it on.

With the videotape rolling, she positioned a vinyl-strap patio chair ten feet from the lens. She revisited the camcorder to peer through the viewfinder, to be sure that the chair was in the center of the frame.

After returning to the chair and slightly repositioning it, she completely disrobed in view of the camcorder, neither in the manner of a performer nor with any hesitancy but simply as though she were getting ready for a bath. She neatly folded her blouse, her slacks, and her underwear, and she put them aside on the flagstone floor of the patio.

Naked, she walked out of camera range, apparently going into the house, to the kitchen. In forty seconds, when she returned, she was carrying a butcher knife. She sat in the chair, facing the camcorder.

According to the medical examiner’s preliminary report, at approximately ten minutes past eight o’clock, Tuesday morning, Nora Vadance, in good health and previously thought to be of sound mind, having recently rebounded from depression over her husband’s death, took her own life. Gripping the handle of the butcher knife in both hands, with savage force, she drove the blade deep into her abdomen. She extracted it and stabbed herself again. The third time, she pulled the blade left to right, eviscerating herself. Dropping the knife, she slumped in the chair, where she bled to death in less than one minute.

The camcorder continued to record the corpse to the end of the twenty-minute 8mm cassette.

Two hours later, at ten-thirty, Takashi Mishima, a sixty-six-year-old gardener on his scheduled rounds, discovered the body and immediately called the police.

When Clarise finished, Joe could say only, “Jesus.”

Bob added whiskey to their drinks. His hands were shaking, and the bottle rattled against each glass.

Finally Joe said, “I gather the police have the tape.”

“Yeah,” Bob said. “Until the hearing or inquest or whatever it is they have to hold.”

“So I hope this video is secondhand knowledge to you. I hope neither of you had to see it.”

“I haven’t,” Bob said. “But Clarise did.”

She was staring into her drink. “They told us what was in it…but neither Bob nor I could believe it, even though they were the police, even though they had no reason to lie to us. So I went into the station on Friday morning, before the funeral, and watched it. We had to know. And now we do. When they give us the tape back, I’ll destroy it. Bob should never see it. Never.”

Though Joe’s respect for this woman was already high, she rose dramatically in his esteem.

“There are some things I’m wondering about,” he said. “If you don’t mind some questions.”

“Go ahead,” Bob said. “We have a lot of questions about it too, a thousand damn questions.”

“First…it doesn’t sound like there could be any possibility of duress.”

Clarise shook her head. “It’s not something you could force anyone to do to herself, is it? Not just with psychological pressure or threats. Besides, there wasn’t anyone else in camera range — and no shadows of anyone. Her eyes didn’t focus on anyone off camera. She was alone.”

“When you described the tape, Clarise, it sounded as if Nora was going through this like a machine.”

“That was the way she looked during most of it. No expression, her face just…slack.”

“During most of it? So there was a moment she showed emotion?”

“Twice. After she’d almost completely undressed, she hesitated before taking off… her panties. She was a modest woman, Joe. That’s one more weird thing about all of this.”

Eyes closed, holding his cold glass of 7-and-7 against his forehead, Bob said, “Even if…even if we accept that she was so mentally disturbed she could do this to herself, it’s hard to picture her videotaping herself naked…or wanting to be found that way.”

Clarise said, “There’s a high fence around the backyard. Thick bougainvillea on it. The neighbors couldn’t have seen her. But Bob’s right…she wouldn’t want to be found like that. Anyway, as she was about to take off the panties, she hesitated. Finally that dead, slack look dissolved. Just for an instant, this terrible expression came across her face.”

“Terrible how?” Joe asked.

Grimacing as she conjured the grisly video in her mind, Clarise described the moment as if she were seeing it again: “Her eyes are flat, blank, the lids a little heavy…then all of a sudden they go wide and there’s depth to them, like normal eyes. Her face wrenches. First so expressionless but now torn with emotion. Shock. She looks so shocked, terrified. A lost expression that breaks your heart. But it lasts only a second or two, maybe three seconds, and now she shudders, and the look is gone, gone, and she’s as calm as a machine again. She takes off her panties, folds them, and puts them aside.”

“Was she on any medication?” Joe asked. “Any reason to believe she might have overdosed on something that induced a fugue state or a severe personality change?”

Clarise said, “Her doctor tells us he hadn’t prescribed any medication for her. But because of her demeanor on the video, the police suspect drugs. The medical examiner is running toxicological tests.”

“Which is ridiculous,” Bob said forcefully. “My mother would never take illegal drugs. She didn’t even like to take aspirin. She was such an innocent person, Joe, as if she wasn’t even aware of all the changes for the worse in the world over the last thirty years, as if she was living decades behind the rest of us and happy to be there.”

“There was an autopsy,” Clarise said. “No brain tumor, brain lesions, no medical condition that might explain what she did.”

“You mentioned a second time when she showed some emotion.”

“Just before she…before she stabbed herself. It was just a flicker, even briefer than the first. Like a spasm. Her whole face wrenched as if she were going to scream. Then it was gone, and she remained expressionless to the end.”

Jolted by a realization he had failed to reach when Clarise had first described the video, Joe said, “You mean she never screamed, cried out?”

“No. Never.”

“But that’s impossible.”

“Right at the end, when she drops the knife…there’s a soft sound that may be from her, hardly more than a sigh.”

“The pain…” Joe couldn’t bring himself to say that Nora Vadance’s pain must have been excruciating.

“But she never screamed,” Clarise insisted.

“Even involuntary response would have—”

“Silent. She was silent.”

“The microphone was working?”

“Built-in, omnidirectional mike,” Bob said.

“On the video,” Clarise said, “you can hear other sounds. The scrape of the patio chair on the concrete when she repositions it. Bird songs. One sad-sounding dog barking in the distance. But nothing from her.”

Stepping out of the front door, Joe searched the night, half expecting to see a white van or another suspicious-looking vehicle parked on the street in front of the Vadance place. From the house next door came the faint strains of Beethoven. The air was warm, but a soft breeze had sprung up from the west, bringing with it the fragrance of night-blooming jasmine. As far as Joe could discern, there was nothing menacing in this gracious night.

As Clarise and Bob followed him onto the porch, Joe said, “When they found Nora, was the photograph of Tom’s grave with her?”

Bob said, “No. It was on the kitchen table. At the very end, she didn’t carry it with her.”

“We found it on the table when we arrived from San Diego,” Clarise recalled. “Beside her breakfast plate.”

Joe was surprised. “She’d eaten breakfast?”

“I know what you’re thinking,” Clarise said. “If she was going to kill herself, why bother with breakfast? It’s even weirder than that, Joe. She’d made an omelet with Cheddar and chopped scallions and ham. Toast on the side. A glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice. She was halfway through eating it when she got up and went outside with the camcorder.”

“The woman you described on the video was deeply depressed or in an altered state of some kind. How could she have had the mental clarity or the patience to make such a complicated breakfast?”

Clarise said, “And consider this — the Los Angeles Times was open beside her plate—”

“—and she was reading the comics,” Bob finished.

For a moment they were silent, pondering the imponderable.

Then Bob said, “You see what I meant earlier when I said we have a thousand questions of our own.”

As though they were friends of long acquaintance, Clarise put her arms around Joe and hugged him. “I hope this Rose is a good person, like you think. I hope you find her. And whatever she has to tell you, I hope it brings you some peace, Joe.”

Moved, he returned her embrace. “Thanks, Clarise.”

Bob had written their Miramar address and telephone number on a page from a note pad. He gave the folded slip of paper to Joe. “In case you have any more questions…or if you learn anything that might help us understand.”

They shook hands. The handshake became a brotherly hug.

Clarise said, “What’ll you do now, Joe?”

He checked the luminous dial of his watch. “It’s only a few minutes past nine. I’m going to try to see another of the families tonight.”

“Be careful,” she said.

“I will.”

“Something’s wrong, Joe. Something’s wrong big time.”

“I know.”

Bob and Clarise were still standing on the porch, side by side, watching Joe as he drove away.

Although he’d finished more than half of his second drink, Joe felt no effect from the 7-and-7. He had never seen a picture of Nora Vadance; nevertheless, the mental image he held of a faceless woman in a patio chair with a butcher knife was sufficiently sobering to counter twice the amount of whiskey that he had drunk.

The metropolis glowed, a luminous fungus festering along the coast. Like spore clouds, the sour-yellow radiance rose and smeared the sky. Only a few stars were visible: icy, distant light.

A minute ago, the night had seemed gracious, and he had seen nothing to fear in it. Now it loomed, and he repeatedly checked his rearview mirror.

8

Charles and Georgine Delmann lived in an enormous Georgian house on a half-acre lot in Hancock Park. A pair of magnolia trees framed the entrance to the front walk, which was flanked by knee-high box hedges so neatly groomed that they appeared to have been trimmed by legions of gardeners with cuticle scissors. The extremely rigid geometry of the house and grounds revealed a need for order, a faith in the superiority of human arrangement over the riot of nature.

The Delmanns were physicians. He was an internist specializing in cardiology, and she was both internist and ophthalmologist. They were prominent in the community, because in addition to their regular medical practices, they had founded and continued to oversee a free clinic for children in East Los Angeles and another in South Central.

When the 747–400 fell, the Delmanns lost their eighteen-year-old daughter, Angela, who had been returning from an invitation-only, six-week watercolor workshop at a university in New York, to prepare for her first year at art school in San Francisco. Apparently, she had been a talented painter with considerable promise.

Georgine Delmann herself answered the door. Joe recognized her from her photo in one of the Post articles about the crash. She was in her late forties, tall and slim, with richly glowing dusky skin, masses of curly dark hair, and lively eyes as purple-black as plums. Hers was a wild beauty, and she assiduously tamed it with steel-frame eyeglasses instead of contacts, no makeup, and gray slacks and white blouse that were manly in style.

When Joe told her his name, before he could say that his family had been on Flight 353, she exclaimed, to his surprise, “My God, we were just talking about you!”

“Me?”

Grabbing his hand, pulling him across the threshold into the marble-floored foyer, pushing the door shut with her hip, she didn’t take her astonished gaze from him. “Lisa was telling us about your wife and daughters, about how you just dropped out, went away. But now here you are, here you are.”

“Lisa?” he said, perplexed.

This night, at least, the sober-physician disguise of her severe clothes and steel-rimmed spectacles could not conceal the sparkling depths of Georgine Delmann’s natural ebullience. She threw her arms around Joe and kissed him on the cheek so hard that he was rocked back on his heels. Then face-to-face with him, searching his eyes, she said excitedly, “She’s been to see you too, hasn’t she?”

“Lisa?”

“No, no, not Lisa. Rose.”

An inexplicable hope skipped like a thrown stone across the lake-dark surface of his heart. “Yes. But—”

“Come, come with me.” Clutching his hand again, pulling him out of the foyer and along a hall toward the back of the house, she said, “We’re back here, at the kitchen table — me and Charlie and Lisa.”

At meetings of The Compassionate Friends, Joe had never seen any bereaved parent capable of this effervescence. He’d never heard of such a creature, either. Parents who lost young children spent five or six years — sometimes a decade or even more — striving, often fruitlessly, merely to overcome the conviction that they themselves should be dead instead of their offspring, that outliving their children was sinful or selfish — or even monstrously wicked. It wasn’t much different for those who, like the Delmanns, had lost an eighteen-year-old. In fact, it was no different for a sixty-year-old parent who lost a thirty-year-old child. Age had nothing to do with it. The loss of a child at any stage of life is unnatural, so wrong that purpose is difficult to rediscover. Even when acceptance is achieved and a degree of happiness attained, joy often remains elusive forever, like a promise of water in a dry well once brimming but now holding only the deep, damp smell of past sustenance.

Yet here was Georgine Delmann, flushed and sparkling, girlishly excited, as she pulled Joe to the end of the hallway and through a swinging door. She seemed not merely to have recovered from the loss of her daughter in one short year but to have transcended it.

Joe’s brief hope faded, for it seemed to him that Georgine Delmann must be either out of her mind or incomprehensibly shallow. Her apparent joy shocked him.

The lights were dimmed in the kitchen, but he could see that the space was cozy in spite of being large, with a maple floor, maple cabinetry, and sugar-brown granite counters. From overhead racks, in the low amber light, gleaming copper pots and pans and utensils dangled like festoons of temple bells waiting for the vespers hour.

Leading Joe across the kitchen to a breakfast table in a bay-window alcove, Georgine Delmann said, “Charlie, Lisa, look who’s here! It’s almost a miracle, isn’t it?”

Beyond the beveled-glass windows was a backyard and pool, which outdoor lighting had transformed into a storybook scene full of sparkle and glister. On the oval table this side of the window were three decorative glass oil lamps with flames adance on floating wicks.

Beside the table stood a tall, good-looking man with thick silver hair: Dr. Charles Delmann.

As Georgine approached with Joe in tow, she said, “Charlie, it’s Joe Carpenter. The Joe Carpenter.”

Staring at Joe with something like wonder, Charlie Delmann came forward and vigorously shook his hand. “What’s happening here, son?”

“I wish I knew,” Joe said.

“Something strange and wonderful is happening,” Delmann said, as transported by emotion as was his wife.

Rising from a chair at the table, blond hair further gilded by the lambent light of the oil lamps, was the Lisa to whom Georgine had referred. She was in her forties, with the smooth face of a college girl and faded-denim eyes that had seen more than one level of Hell.

Joe knew her well. Lisa Peccatone. She worked for the Post. A former colleague. An investigative reporter specializing in stories about particularly heinous criminals — serial killers, child abusers, rapists who mutilated their victims — she was driven by an obsession that Joe had never fully understood, prowling the bleakest chambers of the human heart, compelled to immerse herself in stories of blood and madness, seeking meaning in the most meaningless acts of human savagery. He sensed that a long time ago she had endured unspeakable offenses, had come out of childhood with a beast on her back, and could not shrive herself of the demon memory other than by struggling to understand what could never be understood. She was one of the kindest people he had ever known and one of the angriest, brilliant and deeply troubled, fearless but haunted, able to write prose so fine that it could lift the hearts of angels or strike terror into the hollow chests of devils. Joe admired the hell out of her. She was one of his best friends, yet he had abandoned her with all of his other friends when he had followed his lost family into a graveyard of the heart.

“Joey,” she said, “you worthless sonofabitch, are you back on the job or are you here just because you’re part of the story?”

“I’m on the job because I’m part of the story. But I’m not writing again. Don’t have much faith in the power of words anymore.”

“I don’t have much faith in anything else.”

“What’re you doing here?” he asked.

“We called her just a few hours ago,” said Georgine. “We asked her to come.”

“No offense,” Charlie said, clapping a hand on Joe’s shoulder, “but Lisa’s the only reporter we ever knew that we have a lot of respect for.”

“Almost a decade now,” Georgine said, “she’s been doing eight hours a week of volunteer work at one of the free clinics we operate for disadvantaged kids.”

Joe hadn’t known this about Lisa and wouldn’t have suspected it.

She could not repress a crooked, embarrassed smile. “Yeah, Joey, I’m a regular Mother Teresa. But listen, you shithead, don’t you ruin my reputation by telling people at the Post.”

“I want some wine. Who wants wine? A good Chardonnay, maybe a Cakebread or a Grgich Hills,” Charlie enthused. He was infected with his wife’s inappropriate good cheer, as if they were gathered on this solemn night of nights to celebrate the crash of Flight 353.

“Not for me,” Joe said, increasingly disoriented.

“I’ll have some,” Lisa said.

“Me too,” Georgine said. “I’ll get the glasses.”

“No, honey, sit, you sit here with Joe and Lisa,” Charlie said. “I’ll take care of everything.”

As Joe and the women settled into chairs around the table, Charlie went to the far end of the kitchen.

Georgine’s face was aglow with light from the oil lamps. “This is incredible, just incredible. Rose has been to see him too, Lisa.”

Lisa Peccatone’s face was half in lamplight but half in shadow. “When, Joe?”

“Today in the cemetery. Taking photographs of Michelle’s and the girls’ graves. She said she wasn’t ready to talk to me yet…and went away.”

Joe decided to reserve the rest of his story until he heard theirs, both in the interest of hastening their revelations and to ensure that their recitations were not colored too much by what he revealed.

“It can’t have been her,” Lisa said. “She died in the crash.”

“That’s the official story.”

“Describe her,” Lisa requested.

Joe went through the standard catalogue of physical details, but he spent as much time trying to convey the black woman’s singular presence, the magnetism that almost seemed to bend her surroundings to her personal lines of force.

The eye in the shadowed side of Lisa’s smooth face was dark and enigmatic, but the eye in the lamplit half revealed emotional turmoil as she responded to the description that Joe gave her. “Rosie always was charismatic, even in college.”

Surprised, Joe said, “You know her?”

“We went to UCLA together too long ago to think about. We were roomies. We stayed reasonably close over the years.”

“That’s why Charlie and I decided to call Lisa a little while ago,” said Georgine. “We knew she’d had a friend on Flight 353. But it was in the middle of the night, hours after Rose left here, that Charlie remembered Lisa’s friend was also named Rose. We knew they must be one and the same, and we’ve been trying all day to decide what to do about Lisa.”

“When was Rose here?” Joe asked.

“Yesterday evening,” Georgine said. “She showed up just as we were on our way out to dinner. Made us promise to tell no one what she told us…not until she’d had a chance to see a few more of the victims’ families here in L.A. But Lisa had been so depressed last year, with the news, and since she and Rose were such friends, we didn’t see what harm it could do.”

“I’m not here as a reporter,” Lisa told Joe.

“You’re always a reporter.”

Georgine said, “Rose gave us this.”

From her shirt pocket she withdrew a photograph and put it on the table. It was a shot of Angela Delmann’s gravestone.

Eyes shining expectantly, Georgine said, “What do you see there, Joe?”

“I think the real question is what you see.”

Elsewhere in the kitchen, Charlie Delmann opened drawers and sorted through the clattering contents, evidently searching for a corkscrew.

“We’ve already told Lisa.” Georgine glanced across the room. “I’ll wait until Charlie’s here to tell you, Joe.”

Lisa said, “It’s damned weird, Joey, and I’m not sure what to make of what they’ve said. All I know is it scares the crap out of me.”

“Scares you?” Georgine was astonished. “Lisa, dear, how on earth could it scare you?”

“You’ll see,” Lisa told Joe. This woman, usually blessed with the strength of stones, shivered like a reed. “But I guarantee you, Charlie and Georgine are two of the most level-headed people I know. Which you’re sure going to need to keep in mind when they get started.”

Picking up the Polaroid snapshot, Georgine gazed needfully at it, as though she wished not merely to burn it into her memory but to absorb the image and make it a physical part of her, leaving the film blank.

With a sigh, Lisa launched into a revelation: “I have my own weird piece to add to the puzzle, Joey. A year ago tonight, I was at LAX, waiting for Rosie’s plane to land.”

Georgine looked up from the photo. “You didn’t tell us that.”

“I was about to,” Lisa said, “when Joey rang the doorbell.”

At the far end of the kitchen, with a soft pop, a stubborn cork came free from a wine bottle, and Charlie Delmann grunted with satisfaction.

“I didn’t see you at the airport that night, Lisa,” Joe said.

“I was keeping a low profile. Torn up about Rosie but also…flat out scared.”

“You were there to pick her up?”

“Rosie called me from New York and asked me to be at LAX with Bill Hannett.”

Hannett was the photographer whose images of natural and man-made disasters hung on the walls of the reception lounge at the Post.

The pale-blue fabric of Lisa’s eyes was worn now with worry. “Rosie desperately needed to talk to a reporter, and I was the only one she knew she could trust.”

“Charlie,” Georgine said, “you’ve got to come hear this.”

“I can hear, I can hear,” Charlie assured her. “Just pouring now. A minute.”

“Rosie also gave me a list — six other people she wanted there,” Lisa said. “Friends from years back. I managed to locate five of them on short notice and bring them with me that night. They were to be witnesses.”

Rapt, Joe said, “Witnesses to what?”

“I don’t know. She was so guarded. Excited, really excited about something, but also frightened. She said she was going to be getting off that plane with something that would change all of us forever, change the world.”

“Change the world?” Joe said. “Every politician with a scheme and every actor with a rare thought thinks he can change the world these days.”

“Oh, but in this case, Rose was right,” Georgine said. Barely contained tears of excitement or joy shone in her eyes as she showed him the gravestone photo once more. “It’s wonderful.”

If he had fallen down the White Rabbit’s hole, Joe didn’t notice the plunge, but the territory in which he now found himself was increasingly surrealistic.

The flames in the oil lamps, which had been steady, flared and writhed in the tall glass chimneys, drawn upward by a draft that Joe could not feel.

Salamanders of yellow light wriggled across the previously dark side of Lisa’s face. When she looked at the lamps, her eyes were as yellow as moons low on the horizon.

Quickly the flames subsided, and Lisa said, “Yeah, sure, it sounded melodramatic. But Rosie is no bullshit artist. And she has been working on something of enormous importance for six or seven years. I believed her.”

Between the kitchen and the downstairs hall, the swinging door made its distinctive sound. Charlie Delmann had left the room without explanation.

“Charlie?” Georgine rose from her chair. “Now where’s he gone? I can’t believe he’s missing this.”

To Joe, Lisa said, “When I spoke to her on the phone a few hours before she boarded Flight 353, Rosie told me they were looking for her. She didn’t think they would expect her to show up in L.A. But just in case they figured out what flight she was on, in case they were waiting for her, Rosie wanted us there too, so we could surround her the minute she got off the plane and prevent them from silencing her. She was going to give me the whole story right there at the debarkation gate.”

“They?” Joe asked.

Georgine had started after Charlie to see where he’d gone, but interest in Lisa’s story got the better of her, and she returned to her chair.

Lisa said, “Rosie was talking about the people she works for.”

“Teknologik.”

“You’ve been busy today, Joey.”

“Busy trying to understand,” he said, his mind now swimming through a swamp of hideous possibilities.

“You and me and Rosie all connected. Small world, huh?”

Sickened to think there were people murderous enough to kill three hundred and twenty-nine innocent bystanders merely to get at their true target, Joe said, “Lisa, dear God, tell me you don’t think that plane was brought down just because Rose Tucker was on it.”

Staring out at the shimmering blue light of the pool, Lisa thought about her answer before giving it. “That night I was sure of it. But then…the investigation showed no sign of a bomb. No probable cause really fixed. If anything, it was a combination of a minor mechanical error and human error on the part of the pilots.”

“At least that’s what we’ve been told.”

“I spent time quietly looking into the National Transportation Safety Board, not on this crash so much as in general. They have an impeccable record, Joey. They’re good people. No corruption. They’re even pretty much above politics.”

Georgine said, “But I believe Rose thinks she was responsible for what happened. She’s convinced that her being there was the cause of it.”

“But if she’s even indirectly responsible for the death of your daughter,” Joe said, “why do you find her so wonderful?”

Georgine’s smile was surely no different from the one with which she had greeted — and charmed — him at the front door. To Joe, however, in his growing disorientation, her expression seemed to be as strange and unsettling as might be the smile on a clown encountered in a fog-threaded alley after midnight, alarming because it was so profoundly out of place. Through her disturbing smile, she said, “You want to know why, Joe? Because this is the end of the world as we know it.”

To Lisa, Joe said exasperatedly, “Who is Rose Tucker, what does she do for Teknologik?”

“She’s a geneticist, and a brilliant one.”

“Specializing in recombinant DNA research.” Georgine held up the Polaroid again, as if Joe should be able to grasp at once how the photo of a gravestone and genetic engineering were related.

“Exactly what she was doing for Teknologik,” Lisa said, “I never knew. That’s what she was going to tell me when she landed at LAX a year ago tonight. Now, because of what she told Georgine and Charlie yesterday…I can pretty much figure it out. I just don’t know how to believe it.”

Joe wondered about her odd locution: not whether to believe it, but how to believe it.

“What is Teknologik — besides what it appears to be?” he asked.

Lisa smiled thinly. “You have a good nose, Joe. A year off hasn’t dulled your sense of smell. From things Rosie said over the years, vague references, I think you’re looking at a singularity in a capitalist world — a company that can’t fail.”

“Can’t fail?” Georgine asked.

“Because behind it there’s a generous partner that covers all the losses.”

“The military?” Joe wondered.

“Or some branch of government. Some organization with deeper pockets than any individual in the world. I got the sense, from Rosie, that this project wasn’t funded with just a hundred million of research and development funds. We’re talking major capital on the line here. There were billions behind this.”

From upstairs came the boom of a gunshot.

Even muffled by intervening rooms, the nature of the sound was unmistakable.

The three of them came to their feet as one, and Georgine said, “Charlie?”

Perhaps because he had so recently sat with Bob and Clarise in that cheery yellow living room in Culver City, Joe immediately thought of Nora Vadance naked in the patio chair, the butcher knife grasped in both hands with the point toward her abdomen.

In the wake of the gunshot’s echo, the silence settling down through the house seemed as deadly as the invisible and weightless rain of atomic radiation in the sepulchral stillness following nuclear thunder.

Alarm growing, Georgine shouted, “Charlie!”

As Georgine started away from the table, Joe restrained her. “No, wait, wait. I’ll go. Call 911, and I’ll go.”

Lisa said, “Joey—”

“I know what this is,” he said, sharply enough to forestall further discussion.

He hoped that he was wrong, that he didn’t know what was happening here, that it had nothing to do with what Nora Vadance had done to herself. But if he was right, then he couldn’t allow Georgine to be the first on the scene. In fact, she shouldn’t have to see the aftermath at all, not now or later.

“I know what this is. Call 911,” Joe repeated as he crossed the kitchen and pushed through the swinging door into the downstairs hall.

In the foyer, the chandelier dimmed and brightened, dimmed and brightened, like the flickering lights in one of those old prison movies when the governor’s call came too late and the condemned man was fried in the electric chair.

Joe ran to the foot of the stairs but then was slowed by dread as he ascended toward the second floor, terrified that he would find what he expected.

A plague of suicide was as irrational a concept as any brewed in the stew-pot minds of those people who thought that the mayor was a robot and that evil aliens were watching them every moment of the day. Joe couldn’t comprehend how Charlie Delmann could have gone from near euphoria to despair in the space of two minutes — as Nora Vadance had gone from a pleasant breakfast and the newspaper comics pages to self-evisceration without even pausing to leave a note of explanation.

If Joe was right about the meaning of the shot, however, there was a slim chance that the doctor was still alive. Maybe he hadn’t done himself in with only one round. Maybe he could still be saved.

The prospect of saving a life, after so many had slipped like water through his hands, pushed Joe forward in spite of his dread. He climbed the rest of the stairs two at a time.

On the second floor, with barely a glance, he passed unlighted rooms and closed doors. At the end of the hallway, from behind a half-open door, came ruddy light.

The master suite was entered through a small foyer of its own. Beyond lay the bedroom, furnished with bone-colored contemporary upholstery. The graceful pale-green curves of Sung Dynasty pottery, displayed on glass shelves, imposed serenity on the chamber.

Dr. Charles Delmann was sprawled on a Chinese sleigh bed. Across him lay a Mossberg 12-gauge, pump-action, pistol-grip shotgun. Because of the short barrel, he had been able to put the muzzle between his teeth and easily reach the trigger. Even in the poor light, Joe could see there was no reason to check for a pulse.

The celadon lamp on the farther of the two nightstands provided the only illumination. The glow was ruddy because the shade was splashed with blood.

On a Saturday night ten months ago, in the course of covering a story, Joe had visited the city morgue, where the bagged bodies on the gurneys and the naked bodies on the autopsy tables waited for the attention of overworked pathologists. Abruptly he was gripped by the irrational conviction that the cadavers surrounding him were those of his wife and children; all of them were Michelle and the girls, as though Joe had wandered into a scene in a science fiction movie about clones. And from within the body-size drawers of the stainless-steel coolers, where more of the dead rested between destinations, arose the muffled voices of Michelle, Chrissie, little Nina, pleading with him to release them to the world of the living. Beside him, a coroner’s assistant zipped open a body bag, and Joe looked down into the winter-white face of a dead woman, her painted mouth like a poinsettia leaf crumpled on snow, and he saw Michelle, Chrissie, Nina. The dead woman’s blind blue eyes were mirrors of his own soaring madness. He had walked out of the morgue and submitted his resignation to Caesar Santos, his editor.

Now, he quickly turned away from the bed before any beloved faces materialized over that of the dead physician.

An eerie wheezing came to his attention, and for an instant he thought that Delmann was straining to draw breath through his shattered face. Then he realized that he was listening to his own ragged breathing.

On the nearer nightstand, the lighted green numbers on a digital clock were flashing. Time changes were occurring at a frantic pace: ten minutes with every flash, the hours reversing through the early evening and backward into the afternoon.

Joe had the crazy thought that the malfunctioning clock — which must have been hit by a stray shotgun pellet — might magically undo all that had happened, that Delmann might rise from death as the pellets rattled backward into the barrel and torn flesh reknit, that in a moment Joe himself might be on the Santa Monica beach once more, in the sun, and then back in his one-room apartment in the moon-deep night, on the telephone with Beth in Virginia, and backward, still backward, until Flight 353 had not yet gone down in Colorado.

From downstairs came a scream, imploding his desperate fantasy. Then another scream.

He thought it was Lisa. As tough as she was, she had probably never before screamed in her life, yet this was a cry of sheerest child-like terror.

He had been gone from the kitchen for at most a minute. What could have happened in a minute, so fast?

He reached toward the shotgun, intending to pluck it off the corpse. The magazine might contain other rounds.

No. Now it’s a suicide scene. Move the weapon, and it looks like a murder scene. With me as the suspect.

He left the gun untouched.

Out of the thin blood-filtered light, into the hallway where a funerary stillness of shadows stood sentinel, toward the enormous chandelier that hung in a perpetual crystal rain above the foyer staircase, he ran.

The shotgun was useless. He wasn’t capable of firing it at anyone. Besides, who was in the house but Georgine and Lisa? No one. No one.

Down the stairs two at a time, three at a time, under the crystal cascade of beveled teardrops, he grabbed at the banister to keep his balance. His palm, slick with cold sweat, slid across the mahogany.

Along the lower hall in a thunder of footsteps, he heard jangly music, and as he slammed through the swinging door, he saw pendulous copper pots and pans swinging on the racks overhead, gently clinking together.

The kitchen was as softly lit as it had been when he left. The overhead halogen downlights were dimmed so low as to be all but extinguished.

At the far end of the room, backlit by the quivering glow of the three decorative oil lamps on the table, Lisa stood with her fists pressed to her temples, as if struggling to contain a skull-cracking pressure. No longer screaming, she sobbed, groaned, shuddered out whispery words that might have been Oh God, oh God.

Georgine was not in sight.

As the copper chimes subsided like the soft dissonant music in a dream of trolls, Joe hurried toward Lisa, and from the corner of his eye, he glimpsed the open wine bottle where Charlie Delmann had left it on the island counter. Beside the bottle were three glasses of Chardonnay. The tremulous surface of each serving glimmered jewel-like, and Joe wondered fleetingly if something had been in the wine — poison, chemical, drug.

When Lisa saw Joe approaching, she lowered her hands from her temples and opened her fists, wet and red, rose-petal fingers adrip with dew. A stinging salt of sounds shook from her, pure animal emotion, more raw with grief and burning hotter with terror than any words could have.

At the end of the center island, on the floor in front of Lisa, Georgine Delmann was on her side in the fetal position, curled not in an unborn’s anticipation of life but in an embrace of death, both hands still impossibly clenched on the handle of the knife that was her cold umbilical. Her mouth was twisted in a scream never voiced. Her eyes were wide, welling with terminal tears, but without depth.

The stink of evisceration hit Joe hard enough to knock him to the edge of an anxiety attack: the familiar sense of falling, falling as from a great height. If he succumbed to it, he would be of no use to anyone, no help to Lisa or to himself.

With little effort, he looked away from the horror on the floor. With a much greater effort, he willed himself back from the brink of emotional dissolution.

He turned toward Lisa to hold her, to comfort her, to move her away from the sight of her dead friend, but her back was now toward him.

Glass shattered, and Joe flinched. He thought wildly that some murderous adversary was breaking into the kitchen through the windows.

The breaking was not windows but glass oil lamps, which Lisa had grasped like bottles, by their tall chimneys. She had smashed the bulbous bases together, and a viscous spray of oil had burst from them.

Bright points of flame irised wider on the tabletop, became glaring pools of fire.

Joe grabbed her and tried to pull her away from the spreading blaze, but without a word, she wrenched loose of him and seized the third lamp.

“Lisa!”

Granite and bronze ignited in the Polaroid of Angela Delmann’s grave, image and medium curling like a black burnt leaf.

Lisa tipped the third lamp, pouring the oil and the floating wick across the front of her dress.

For an instant Joe was immobilized by shock.

The oil washed Lisa, but somehow the slithering spot of flame slipped along the bodice and waist of her dress and was extinguished in the skirt.

On the table, the blazing pools overlapped, and molten streams flowed to all edges. Incandescent drizzle sizzled to the floor.

Joe reached for her again, but as if dipping into a wash basin, she scooped handfuls of flames off the table, splashing them against her breast. As Lisa’s oil-soaked clothes exploded with fire, Joe snatched his hand back from her and cried, “No!”

Without a scream, which at least she had managed in reaction to Georgine’s suicide, without a groan or even as much as a whimper, she raised her hands, in which balls of flame roiled. She stood briefly like the ancient goddess Diana with fiery moons balanced on her palms, and she brought her hands to her face, to her hair.

Joe reeled backward from the burning woman, from the sight that scorched his heart, from the hideous stench that withered him, from an insoluble mystery that left him empty of hope. He collided with cabinetry.

Remaining miraculously on her feet, as calm as though standing only in a cool rain, reflected in every angle of the big bay window, Lisa turned as if to look at Joe through her fuming veil. Mercifully, he could see nothing of her face.

Paralyzed by horror, he realized he was going to die next, not from the flames that licked the maple flooring around his shoes but by his own hand, in some fashion as monstrous as a self-inflicted shotgun wound, self-evisceration, self-immolation. The plague of suicide had not yet infected him, but it would claim him the moment that Lisa, entirely dead, crumpled in a heap on the floor — and yet he could not move.

Wrapped in a whirlwind of tempestuous flames, she flung off phantoms of light and ghosts of shadow, which crawled up the walls and swarmed across the ceiling, and some shadows were shadows, but some were unspooling ribbons of soot.

The bone-piercing shriek of the kitchen smoke alarm cracked the ice in Joe’s marrow. He was jarred out of his trance.

He ran with the phantoms and the ghosts, out of that hell, past suspended copper pots like bright blank faces in a forge light, past three glasses of Chardonnay sparkling with images of flames and now the color of claret.

Through the swinging door, along the hallway, across the foyer, Joe felt closely pursued by something more than the blatting of the smoke alarm, as though a killer had been in the kitchen, after all, standing so still in a darkish corner that he had watched unnoticed. At the front door, as Joe grasped the knob, he expected a hand to drop upon his shoulder, expected to be spun around and confronted by a smiling assassin.

From behind him came not a hand and not, as he might have expected, a blast of heat, but a hissing cold that first prickled the nape of his neck and then seemed to drill into the summit of his spine, through the base of his skull. He was so panicked that he did not remember opening the door or leaving the house, but found himself crossing the porch, casting off the chill.

He hurried along the brick walk between the perfect box hedges. When he reached the pair of matched magnolias, where large flowers like the white faces of monkeys peered from among the glossy leaves, he glanced back. He was not, after all, being pursued by anyone.

The residential street was quiet but for the muffled blaring of the smoke alarms in the Delmann house: no traffic at the moment, no one out for a walk in the warm August night. On nearby porches and lawns, no one had yet been drawn outside by the commotion. Here the properties were so large and the stately houses so solidly built, with thick walls, that the screams might not have penetrated to the attention of the neighbors, and even the single gunshot might have been apprehended only as a car door slamming or a truck backfiring.

He considered waiting for the firemen and police, but he could not imagine how he would convincingly describe what had transpired in that house in a mere three or four hellish minutes. As he had lived those feverish events, they had seemed hallucinatory, from the sound of the shotgun to the moment when Lisa swathed herself in flames; and now they were like fragments of a deeper dream in the ongoing nightmare of his life.

The fire would destroy much of the evidence of suicide, and the police would detain him for questioning — then possibly on suspicion of murder. They would see a deeply troubled man who had lost his way after losing his family, who held no job, who lived in one room above a garage, who was gaunt from weight loss, whose eyes were haunted, who kept twenty thousand dollars in cash in the spare-tire well in the trunk of his car. His circumstances and his psychological profile would not dispose them to believe him even if his story had not been so far beyond the bounds of reason.

Before Joe could win his freedom, Teknologik and its associates would find him. They had tried to shoot him down merely because Rose might have told him something they didn’t want known — and now he knew more than he’d known then, even if he didn’t have any idea what the hell to make of it. Considering Teknologik’s suspected connections to political and military power grids, Joe more likely than not would be killed in jail during a meticulously planned altercation with other prisoners well paid to waste him. If he survived jail, he would be followed on his release and eliminated at the first opportunity.

Trying not to break into a run and thereby draw attention to himself, he walked to the Honda across the street.

At the Delmann house, kitchen windows exploded. Following the brief ringing of falling glass, the shriek of the smoke alarm was considerably more audible than previously.

Joe glanced back and saw fire writhing out of the back of the house. The lamp oil served as an accelerant: Just inside the front door, which he had left standing open, tongues of fire already licked the walls of the downstairs hallway.

He got in the car. Pulled the door shut.

He had blood on his right hand. Not his own blood.

Shuddering, he popped open the console between the seats and tore a handful of tissues from a box of Kleenex. He scrubbed at his hand.

He stuffed the wadded tissues into the bag that had contained the burgers from McDonald’s.

Evidence, he thought, although he was guilty of no crime.

The world had turned upside down. Lies were truth, truth was a lie, facts were fiction, the impossible was possible, and innocence was guilt.

He dug in his pockets for keys. Started the engine.

Through the broken-out window in the backseat, he heard not only the smoke alarms, several of them now, but neighbors shouting at one another, cries of fright in the summer night.

Trusting that their attention would be on the Delmann place and that they would not even notice him departing, Joe switched on the headlights. He swung the Honda into the street.

The lovely old Georgian house was now the domicile of dragons, where bright presences with incendiary breath prowled from room to room. While the dead lay in shrouds of fire, multiple sirens rose like lamentations in the distance.

Joe drove away into a night grown too strange to comprehend, into a world that no longer seemed to be the one into which he had been born.