He sat up in bed, a cry caught in his throat, heart hammering.
Maddison slept undisturbed.
When his breath returned to him, David lowered his head to the pillow.
Something about the nightmare was more disturbing than the presentiment of his death. He didn’t need long to understand what else unsettled him. His unconscious mind had called to his attention things that he had seen but not properly considered, had found a strange consistency of absences.
The kitchen-appliance clocks at Rock Point had in fact been flashing zeros, which he had attributed to a recent interruption of electrical power—and indeed there were no bedside clocks, a detail he had noticed almost subconsciously.
He’d been in the house half an hour or forty minutes, but after he hit the road and drove south, he was nearer to Los Angeles than he ought to have been, as if his visit had lasted but a minute. He thought he must have been exceeding the speed limit all the way from Rock Point Lane, while preoccupied by thoughts of what he found there. But was that the correct explanation?
The first night that he’d had dinner with Maddison, her only jewelry had been a simple string of pearls. No rings. No wristwatch.
Had she worn a watch on any subsequent occasion? He didn’t think so. As if she must be always intimately aware of the time.
But what did any of this mean, if it meant anything at all?
Although he remained awake for another half hour, he could puzzle no meaning from those curious facts.
| 50 |
After five hours of sleep, David woke. He was alone in bed.
He pulled on a robe and went in search of Maddison and found her in the kitchen, in a robe of her own, cleaning up from the previous night’s dinner.
“I’ll help you,” he said.
“Not a chance, Galahad. My gift to you was dinner and dealing with the wreckage.”
Putting his arms around her as she stood at the sink, he kissed the nape of her neck. “Your gift to me was far more than that.”
She said, “As gorgeous and sweet as you are, even cute with bed hair and beard stubble, not even you can spread a gloss of romance over congealed leftovers and a garbage disposal. I’ll attend to all this, you get your shower, and there’ll be hot coffee when you come back presentable.”
When he returned forty minutes later, the kitchen gleamed. Maddison kissed him on her way to the shower.
The easy domesticity between them soothed him and supported his conviction that the intuitive emotional commitment he’d made to her was the best of all possible options he could have chosen.
He carried a mug of coffee into his study and switched on his computer. He visited the law-enforcement site that offered a public-access police blotter for every community in the county.
When he felt a twinge of guilt, he reminded himself that this was no longer an investigation of Maddison, but an investigation on her behalf. To help her and to ensure their future, he needed to separate fantasy from reality and, one by one, resolve all of his unanswered questions.
There had been a gang shooting in Santa Ana, two dead, but the incident had occurred the previous evening when he and Maddison had been having dinner in the kitchen.
Among the missing-persons reports, a new name appeared: Lukas Eugene Ockland of Irvine, California. His wife had reported him missing at 11:10 p.m., and police protocols allowed for the posting of his name only now, Tuesday morning.
Sunday evening, following their afternoon together in Laguna Beach, Maddison had left David alone so that she could attend to some “terrible, depressing” business involving an “awful man of such wicked character.”
He googled Lukas Eugene Ockland, who turned out to be a twenty-eight-year-old mathematician, microbiologist, and entrepreneur of considerable accomplishment. He was a figure of some controversy and had been called everything from “a genius, one of the most profound thinkers of his time” to “a wicked piece of work.” There was a wife named Linette but no children. With a little effort, David located an address.
The water was still running in the shower.
He wrote a love note to Maddison. Beneath the lines of romance adapted from Shakespeare, he claimed a morning appointment with his lawyer and promised to return by noon.
He backed his car out of the garage and angled east in the alleyway serving the houses that abutted it on both sides. He drove to the end of the block and turned right into the street.
The morning was clear, sunny, and unknowable.
| 51 |
Irvine was one of the earliest planned communities, designed from end to end, nothing left to happenstance. The streets were wide and tree-lined, the shopping centers sized and placed to match the population density of each district, the residential neighborhoods graced with numerous parks and greenbelts, the houses in harmony with one another but generally avoiding a cookie-cutter sameness. Year after year, Irvine landed at or near the top of the list of America’s most desirable and safest cities. Advertisements for new tracts of homes there had often been headlined Another Perfect Day in Paradise, and some might think that Death took a holiday in Irvine, that no one died there—or went missing.