Each time that he looked up from his current work and toward the mirror, he half expected to see himself in the bed and Corley in attendance. The past few days had felt like a long dream, sometimes blithe fantasy and sometimes a nightmare, cause and effect replaced by wild chance, every hour warped by surreal effects and unexpected juxtapositions, the dead alive again, the living lost in a maze of meaning.
At two o’clock, after a late lunch that would also be his dinner, he put his loaded backpack in the Terrain Denali, in which he’d left the stepladder the previous evening. Assuming that a tracking device had been fixed to the car, he drove to a church lot six blocks from the Rosewater house and abandoned the vehicle. Wearing the backpack, carrying the stepladder and the tote, he walked to Estella’s place by a roundabout route, alert for an observer. He saw no one suspicious.
The Ford Explorer Sport stood in the driveway, where she had promised he would find it. He opened the tailgate and put both the ladder and the backpack in the cargo hold. When he settled in the driver’s seat, he found the key in the cup holder.
At 2:40, he set out inland on State Route 154 to the Santa Ynez Valley. Past Lake Cachuma. Past the town of Santa Ynez. He turned northeast on a lonely stress-cracked two-lane blacktop, into the lower foothills of the San Rafael Mountains.
When he cruised by it at 3:55, the weathered old house with filth-clouded windows gazed down at the road as though aware of who passed, patiently awaiting the evening’s visitor. Seven huge crows stood on the ridgeline of the roof, as solemn and still as black-robed judges viewing everything below and beyond them with contempt.
David drove two miles farther, looking for a suitable turnoff, and found a rough dirt track to his right, which snaked between two hills and descended out of sight of the county road. It led between vine rows—some dead, others gone wild and producing only bitter fruit—and it ended at a half-collapsed barn that might have once stored the vineyardist’s equipment. Judging by appearances, no one had been here in a long time.
Stuart Ulrich lived in Santa Ynez, about ten miles from the notorious residence. Now that the public’s interest in Ronny Lee and his crimes had faded in the wake of the countless other electrifying abominations born of the culture of self and sensation, few if any of the morbidly curious would prowl around the property. Ulrich had less reason to keep a close watch over the place. Nevertheless, if he happened past and saw a strange vehicle parked in front of the house or along the road in the immediate vicinity, he would be on the hunt for nonpaying trespassers.
Standing beside the Ford Explorer, David slipped his arms through the loops of the small backpack that contained the gear he needed. He cinched the strap across his chest. He tied the sheath with the larger chef’s knife to his belt and secured it with a cord that he knotted around his right thigh. The smaller knife depended from his belt on his left side and hung loose in its sheath. He retrieved the four-rung folding stepladder from the back seat.
When he returned, stealth wouldn’t be necessary. No need to come overland. His grisly task would have been completed. He could follow the county road and with flashlight make his way along the dirt track.
The bearded sky had blinded the sun. The once regimented fields of the abandoned vineyard were as brown and gray as they were green. Woody vines sprawled like uncoiled spools of concertina wire. Blue oat grass bristled. An early growth of mustard plant bloomed yellow.
The slopes of the foothills at first seemed to roll under his feet, so that he lurched a few times and staggered, the stepladder knocking against his side.
But the problem wasn’t the land or his sense of balance. The fault lay in his state of mind. Doubt troubled him, and he wondered if he had misjudged the degree of aberrant behavior to which recent events had driven him.
He halted, alarmed by his rapid breathing and the throb of blood in his temples. A tinnitus of terror hummed in his ears, and his heart quickened absurdly, considering that he was nowhere near his destination, with nothing yet at risk. He tried to calm himself.
He’d been willing to acknowledge that lately he was in the firm grip of mania, which he’d once researched for a novel and which he understood to be unnatural fixation on some emotion or situation, accompanied by melancholy. His guilt about Emily, his enduring grief, the sudden hope represented by Maddison, the deep mystery of death, the impossibility of resurrection: All that had come together to unbalance him mentally. Yes, all right, mania. Mania came and went, like a hurricane wind; it seldom wrecked a man for life. But as he listened to his breathing grow more rapid and ragged, as his heart knocked against his rib cage, he thought also of lunacy and madness and the difference between them. Lunacy described what was insanely foolish, madness what was insanely desperate, and once a man surrendered to either condition, there might be no escape.