According to Gilbert Gurion, the FBI had estimated that it would have taken a team of four to foil the security system, enter the house undetected, and overpower Ephraim and Renata. If Estella Rosewater was right about Patrick Corley, that his death had been faked somehow and that he was still alive, Corley might have been Maddison’s partner that bloody night. But then who were the other two? She hadn’t heretofore been seen with anyone else.
She’d lied about her father being a Microsoft executive, about her mother being a Seattle prosecutor. But if she was Emily, then her lies were quid pro quo, because he had lied more egregiously to her back in the day, before she had disappeared, and his lies had a greater consequence than hers. He couldn’t hold her to a standard that, when it counted most, he’d been unable to meet.
And if she wasn’t Emily . . . ? Consciously, he knew that she might not be—logically could not be—the woman he had loved and lost. However, what we perceive consciously is not the fullness of reality. On deeper levels, subconsciously and instinctively, he was convinced that Maddison must somehow be Emily. Down even deeper in the matrix of himself, his soul perceived with conviction what his mind alone could not entirely admit or understand: that she was Emily Carlino, the one and only, the same that he had loved.
And being Emily, she was incapable of killing anyone. Emily was gentle, loving, kind, wise to the ways of humanity but also faithful to the expectations of God. Whatever game she was playing with him, she was not really an assassin. She would not have been capable of committing the atrocities that Gilbert Gurion had described, would not have been able even to stand by and watch as others wielded the knives that disfigured and ultimately killed Ephraim and Renata. The Zabdi murders had nothing to do with Emily, with Emily pretending to be Maddison or with Maddison pretending to be Emily. The case was a distraction, a red herring, a blind alley, and David dismissed it from further consideration.
As surely as he understood the psychology of any character in one of his novels, he understood his own. His every action arose inevitably from two emotions that had trumped all others for more than ten years, that were the bedrock of his identity: grief that had become a terrible settled sorrow, and acidic guilt that grew more caustic year by year. There could be no relief from either sorrow or guilt if Emily was indeed dead. Maddison’s appearance in his life had given him the first hope that he’d known in a decade, and he couldn’t let go of it. One moment he admitted Maddison was not Emily, but the next moment insisted that she was. His heart wanted what it wanted, and his heart rejected what might confound its desire, rejected logic and reason.
He supposed he had gone somewhat mad, but a little madness was preferable to unending despair.
He released the emergency brake and put the car in gear and drove to his third interview of the day.
| 38 |
Lacking tires, jacked up on concrete blocks, sun-faded and dust-coated, the old travel trailer stood on scrubland beyond the city limits of Goleta. Neither a patio nor a lawn graced the place, but not far from the trailer door, a pair of outdoor chairs, the blue-vinyl webbing shaggy with wear, flanked a table formed from a large spool around which had once been wound a thousand feet of cable. A square of white melamine had been fixed to one end of the spool to serve as a tabletop, and it was crusted with a variety of substances that not even ants seemed to find appealing. Half a dozen crumpled beer cans were scattered across the dirt and the tramped-flat weeds in front of the table.
An air-conditioning unit, inexpertly fitted in a window at the back of the trailer, rattled against the frame and grumbled like some robot with low-level artificial intelligence that had gotten stuck while attempting burglary.
David rapped loudly on the door, was aware of curtains parting at a window to his right, and after half a minute rapped again.
Farther from an ocean influence than Estella Rosewater’s house or the Zabdi estate, this place was hotter, the sun glare conducive to a squint in the absence of tree shade.
The door creaked open, and a twentysomething guy peered down at David. His sandy-brown hair was tangled as though he’d awakened from a long, bad dream. He had a pleasant, beardless, boyish face, but his eyes seemed twice as old as his face, filled with suspicion so long entertained that his stare was toxic, suggesting a capacity for anger and meanness.
“What do you want?”
“Are you Richard Mathers?”
“Who wants to know?”
“I’m David Thorne. Recently you talked to a man, a private investigator, named Lew Ross—”