The lane was a private street, serving only Corley’s five acres. Although the property wasn’t fenced or walled, a low steel-pipe gate between two stone columns barred entrance to what was in essence a long driveway. A sign on the gate made no reference to the Corley Foundation but promised that trespassers would be prosecuted. A call box with speaker invited visitors to announce themselves.
David walked around the gate and followed the blacktop toward the house on the headland.
The two-story residence and four-car garage featured walls of native stone under a slate roof. The lawn was mown, the building well maintained.
He went directly to the front door, an artful work of oak and bronze, and he rang the bell. He could hear chimes echo through the interior stillness. He waited. Rang again. No response.
Maddison was in Newport Beach. Patrick Corley—alive or dead, a twin or a miraculous resurrection—must be there as well.
David went around to the back of the house, which stood about seventy feet from the rocky bluff and fifty feet above the sea. Two clusters of Chinese fan palms added interest to the yard, rustling in the softly hissing wind.
The big back porch was furnished with only two rocking chairs and a table that stood between. The chairs and the wrought-iron glass-topped table were identical to those on David’s smaller porch in Corona del Mar.
For a long moment, he stood staring at the tableau. In the wind, the chairs moved back and forth in shallow arcs, as though occupied by people he could not see.
He turned one of the rockers upside down and found the key box fastened to the frame, where he’d known it would be. He clicked the lid of the box, which fell open, and the key dropped into the palm of his right hand.
The feeling that overcame him was eerier than déjà vu. He felt as if he were living through a novel that he had read years before and only half remembered, a work of fiction to which reality was in the process of conforming.
He knew that he should return the key to the box and latch the lid and walk away, that he was being manipulated, to what end he could not guess. Nothing good was likely to come of this.
However, he was incapable of heeding that warning voice that whispered from a place deeper than the mere subconscious, from the marrowed cavities of his bones and from the iron-rich cells of his blood, where a thousand generations of human experience had inlaid instinct. For ten years, he had lived with the mystery of Emily Carlino’s fate. Answers—however strange they might be—seemed at last within his reach. He could no more retreat than he could undo the error of his ways that resulted in Emily being alone on that night ten years previously. Instinct be damned. Whatever peril might lie ahead, he had earned it and the understanding that might come with it.
The key fit the lock. The deadbolt turned. He opened the back door to the house.
| 41 |
The kitchen appliances weren’t of the most recent vintage, yet everything looked as though it had been installed only yesterday. The limestone floor appeared spotless, the polished granite counters as timeless as the planet from which they had been quarried.
The contents of the cabinets, the refrigerator, and the pantry were as ordered and aligned as if they had been stocked by a robot that, by sight alone, could measure precisely to a sixteenth of an inch. The dishwasher and trash compacter were empty.
Evidently there had been a recent power outage. The digital clocks—on the double ovens, on the microwave—were blinking zeros.
In the adjacent breakfast room stood a table with four chairs and a sideboard. Three large, spectacular light-filled nature paintings were in the style of Albert Bierstadt.
This was the room where, eighteen months earlier, Richard Mathers had broken a window to gain entrance—and a short while later supposedly had broken the same window to escape. He claimed that all the furniture had been removed between his arrival and departure. The table was a heavy disc of pine on a solid central plinth, the captain’s chairs substantial, the sideboard eight feet long. The room could not have been quickly or silently emptied.
The laundry room, the casual family room, the formal dining room, the living room, the large study, the closets, the half bath—nothing on the ground floor seemed in any way odd or suspicious, nor suggested supernatural presences.
Everywhere were exquisite stained-glass lamps of which Tiffany would have been proud. Three walls of the study were lined with books, nearly all science fiction—Bradbury, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Dick, Zelazny, Delaney, Scalzi, Gibson—and the entire fourth wall featured a backlighted stained-glass triptych of flowering trees framing a view of golden meadows beyond, obviously crafted by Nanette Corley.