From the footwell in front of the passenger seat, he extracted the leather tote bag that he had bought in Santa Barbara earlier in the day and on which he had worked in his motel room. He powered his seat back as far as it would go and put the bag between his legs. He placed the two kilos of explosives in the bag, next to the travel clock, from which he had removed the plastic casing. The clock was powered by two rectangular Duracell D batteries.
A length of insulated wire trailed from the exposed guts of the clock. The rubber coating had been stripped from the end of it to reveal braided copper wires, which he now pressed deeply into one of the bricks of explosive.
He zippered shut the tote bag and returned it to the passenger seat.
He had no rain gear, only the damp sport coat. Even if he’d been attired for the weather, he wouldn’t have walked to the end of Rock Point Lane, as before. The strangeness of the house convinced him that no matter how stealthily he approached, Maddison’s keepers would know that he had come.
He drove south on 101, crossed over, drove north, crossed to the southbound lanes once more, and turned right onto Rock Point Lane. At the gate between the stacked-stone posts, he put down his window and pressed the button to announce himself.
Expecting to be asked his name and purpose, he intended to say that he had come to see Maddison. But no voice issued from the call-box speaker, and the gate swung open before him.
The Monterey pines shuddered in the wind, and the flailing branches flicked browning needles onto the windshield. He passed under the trees and came to the house and parked as near to the front stoop as the driveway allowed.
Lights glowed throughout both floors of the residence, as if a party must be underway, but draperies and sheers prevented him from seeing who might be inside.
He picked up the pistol from the passenger seat. Six rounds remained in the magazine.
A slack length of dental floss, connected to the travel clock, came out of a hole in the left side of the tote. It was taped to one of the two handles. He picked up the bag, closing his hand over the tape, and got out of the Explorer.
He tucked the gun under his belt, in the small of his back. The sport coat concealed it.
The bomb didn’t in the least wear on his nerves. He had nothing to lose. If Emily was dead, if his hopes had been raised only to be dashed, and if he could not learn the truth of Maddison, then he had no life to which he could return. No life worth living. His mania had progressed beyond obsession, to a desperate and mad compulsion.
A bleak future was guaranteed not just by loneliness but by the fact that he wasn’t going to be able to write anymore and would have no purpose. The quality of his work had declined after the loss of Emily, and he had no doubt that it would plummet if he lost her—or Maddison—again, if he didn’t learn the truth of what lay behind the events of the past week. He was living a story, and stories had to have satisfying endings. If they didn’t have satisfying endings, what was the purpose of stories? Since childhood, reading stories had taught him how to reason, how to live, how to hope, how to be. Doing research for the stories that he’d written had taught him far more than he had learned in college—not least of all including how to construct a bomb, how to defend himself with a knife. He had killed a man. Yes, all right, he’d acted in self-defense, and Stuart Ulrich had been evil, but he had killed a man. That was a radical plot twist, considering that he was a character with zero experience of killing, and if he lost his girl again, if he failed her again, that killing would have availed him nothing; his story, the story of David Thorne, would be finished, and it would have meant nothing.
He hurried through the rain to the stoop and sheltered under its roof and thumbed the doorbell. Through the oak-and-bronze door, he heard chimes announcing a visitor.
No one responded.
He pressed his thumb to the bell again, again, again.
They knew he was here. They had to know he would not go away. Perhaps they didn’t answer because they knew he would get in one way or another, because they knew they couldn’t keep him out, in which case maybe they wouldn’t even bother to lock the door. He tried it, and it opened.
He stood staring into the foyer, which featured a Tiffany-style chandelier in a wisteria pattern, cascading glass petals in rich shades of blue. Past the foyer, a hallway led to the back of the residence.
No one appeared.
The wind shifted direction, bulleting a barrage of rain against David’s back. He stepped across the threshold.
Drawn by the wind, the door crashed shut behind him.
In any other circumstances, he would have called out, would have asked if anyone was at home. But clearly someone waited here for him and knew that he had ventured inside.