Withdrawing his smartphone from an inside jacket pocket, David said, “It was Marsha who mentioned your story to Sam Markham.”
“I knew Sam casually, but I’d never heard about him meeting Pat Corley on the beach near Rock Point, two years after Pat died.”
“And over four years before you saw Corley in Menlo Park.”
“Yes. Apparently, Sam wasn’t shy about telling his little ghost story about the twin who never was. Mr. Ross found him, and Harry referred him to Marsha and me.”
David rose from his chair and circled the small table and stooped beside Estella. He showed her the photo he had summoned on his phone. “Do you recognize this woman?”
“That’s her! The girl on the restaurant patio. The one who went away in the van with Pat.”
“You’re sure?”
“Who forgets a face that striking? Men dream of it and women envy.”
He smiled. “You’ve nothing to envy.”
She placed a hand on his arm. “You’re a gentleman, Mr. Thorne. Maybe I turned a few heads in my day, though year by year it seems less likely it ever happened. Who is she? What is this all about?”
“That’s what I want to know. I’m no less baffled than you.”
“It’s impossible Pat’s alive. Yet he’s out there somewhere. Which means he never died. And after all, the body was handled somewhat unconventionally, buried on the foundation grounds. And no memorial service.” She shook her head and sighed. “If ever you find the truth, you will share it with me?”
“You’ll be among the first I tell.”
She insisted on seeing him out rather than calling for the housekeeper to escort him. In the rotunda, when they reached a starburst of sapphire-blue quartzite inlaid in the limestone floor, she stopped and put a hand on his shoulder. “Sometimes, since last August, I wake in the middle of the night afraid.”
“Of what?”
“The Pat I saw in Menlo Park didn’t act like an old friend. He behaved like a man with something important to hide. People with something to hide, something as strange as this . . . Well, I wake in the night, expecting to find him in the house, not as a friend come to explain himself, but as my enemy here to make sure I never speak of it again. Do you think that’s a foolish fear, Mr. Thorne?”
He hesitated to answer, but he wouldn’t offer her reassurance that he knew to be without substance. “You have a security system?”
“Yes.”
“You might want to employ it religiously. And a gun?”
“Oh, yes. I practice at the shooting range.”
“I don’t mean to alarm you . . .”
She laughed softly. “Too late.”
“But I think you’re wise to take precautions. Whether or not this man you saw is your friend from the past or something else altogether, even if he means you no harm, there are plenty of others in the world who mean harm to anyone who doesn’t have his guard up.”
They continued across the rotunda. She opened the door and said, “Woman’s intuition tells me . . .”
After crossing the threshold, he turned to her. “Tells you?”
“It’s not the mystery of Pat Corley you’re chasing down. It’s that splendid-looking girl.”
“Both,” he acknowledged.
Her smile was as lovely as her eyes were admonitory. “I hope you find both, Mr. Thorne—and that nothing bites you before the hunt is over.”
| 35 |
The house in Montecito stood on five walled acres. The ten-foot-high bronze gates hung from square stone columns, decorative rails and scrollwork radiating from a central cartouche bearing the letter Z, evidently for Zabdi.
David braked at the call box, put down his window, looked into the camera lens, and pushed the button below it. Perhaps because Gilbert Gurion knew his face from book-jacket photos, he wasn’t asked to identify himself.
The massive gates swung open with dramatic grace and silence, as if in fact the Z stood for Zion, and David was, in error, being admitted to Heaven. He followed a two-lane cobblestone driveway past broad manicured lawns and ancient live oaks with great limbs of an elegance that proved Nature was the finest of all sculptors.
David’s father, the investment banker from whom he was long estranged, lived well, though by comparison to this property, the old man’s house was unremarkable. In his youth, David often had been uncomfortable with his family’s affluence, and he couldn’t imagine living on an estate this grand. Even if the cottage-style bungalow that he called home in Corona del Mar hadn’t been a shrine to Emily, rich with memories, he would have lived nowhere else in California.