Ivan Petro remained slumped in the driver’s seat, however, and the dreamlike horror began to relent—until, as fire flared through the leaves around the Rover, she recognized something chilling about the angle of the dead man’s head. It was tipped slightly forward and toward his right shoulder. The posture of Petro, behind the wheel of the Rover, was similar to that of her Nick when she had found him sitting in the bathtub, dead by his own hand. No, not just similar. The same. The angle of the head, the bloody throat.

For a day after her beautiful Nick removed himself from this world, she had been in a state of shock. Before her muddled thinking cleared, before she grew certain he hadn’t been capable of suicide under any circumstances, those first twenty-four hours were like a century in Purgatory. In confusion and grief, she searched her heart for what guilt might be hers. What might she have done to turn him away from self-destruction? What could she have been for him that she had not been? Why hadn’t she recognized his precarious state of mind?

She had known him too well, however, to accept for long that he had taken his own life. They were not just lovers, not just husband and wife, not just creators of their lovely boy; their souls were so precisely configured to fit together that she and Nick were a two-piece puzzle, a puzzle solved when they took their marriage vows, the meaning of life made pellucid to them when they became as one.

Now the angle of Ivan Petro’s head and his gruesome throat wound put her back in Virginia on that terrible evening just days before Thanksgiving. For a moment, the world seemed so strange that she couldn’t hope ever to make her way through it to a place of peace—but only for a moment.

Part of Nick remained alive, their boy, and she could not fail Travis. To fail him would also be to fail Nick for real this time.

“Screw that,” she said.

She turned her back on Ivan Petro and sprinted across the glen, up the north slope, where thin strata of pale smoke moved west to east, layered ghosts swimming toward a different haunt. Shadow-robed trees loomed in solemn threat, like the unforgiving judges in some final court.

As she ascended, her eyes stung and her nostrils burned and her chest ached. When she drew near the crest, concussion waves trembled through her from the explosion of the Range Rover’s fuel tank, but she did not look back.

She broke from the trees into the field of weeds and ribbon grass, greedily inhaling clean air, blowing out the smell of smoke.

Passing the hammer that she had thrown at Petro, she plucked it off the ground. At the Explorer, she snatched up the screwdriver and the pieces of the shattered burner phone, threw everything onto the passenger seat.

When she went around to the driver’s door, she saw a dark and churning column just now emerging through the tree tops in the glen, a few tendrils of lighter smoke rising elsewhere.

She drove around the perimeter of the parking lot, toward the exit lane. It seemed that people at the truck stop had become aware of the fire in the woodlet only after the explosion and the sudden greater rush of smoke that followed it. As far as she could tell, no one associated her with those events.

Out of the truck stop, quick onto Interstate 5, southbound. Sirens in the distance. The wailing rose, rose higher, but then faded, and she never saw the sources or was able to deduce from where they came.

Fewer than ten minutes had passed in the glen. She was an hour north of Los Angeles, early enough to beat the rush-hour traffic that would clog every artery in and out of the city.

She thought of the dead man in the woods. The shakes took her.

Others might have hoped for good luck tomorrow in Indio and later in Borrego Valley, but in times as troubled as these, she placed no hope in the cruel gods of fortune. She trusted only in her own preparations and actions, in the power of love to inspire her to do the wisest thing to the best of her ability.

She pulled into a rest stop before the Tejon Pass, waited until she had the place to herself, located the transponder in the wheel well of her Explorer, and used her hammer to render it inoperative. The backplate of the device couldn’t be loosened from the epoxy that fixed it to the car. But when she examined the fragments that fell to the pavement, she was confident that the SUV was not trackable.

Once more racing south on I-5, she wanted music, a song written out of profound love. She chose pianist David Benoit playing “Kei’s Song,” which he’d written for his wife. She turned up the volume.

Piano chords and notes are known not only to her ears, but also are felt in her fingertips, weave through her heart, nourish her soul as milk makes strong the bones.

36

THE GRIEVING BOY, who'd taken most of the night to fall asleep, still slept and slept. The dogs needed to be toileted and fed, but leaving the boy alone seemed wrong. Cornell ought to do something—what?—to be prepared for when the mother came to collect her child.

Like Mr. Paul Simon had sung, The mother and child reunion is only a motion away.

This was more responsibility than Cornell usually shouldered. When he tried to sit near the boy and read, he couldn’t concentrate on the prose. He worried that he was going to do something—or fail to do something—that would endanger Travis.

Now he stood over the La-Z-Boy recliner again, watching the child. Travis breathed so softly, maybe he wasn’t breathing at all. Cornell wanted to touch him, see if he was alive, but dared not.

All night the German shepherds had patrolled the library, taking turns sleeping, sniffing Cornell, trying to induce him to pet them, which he couldn’t do, because it might be like touching a person.

Any place where another person touched him was a wound that didn’t bleed blood, that bled the very essence of him, his mind and soul. By a touch, another person could drain Cornell out of himself and leave his body a mindless husk.

This was a false fear related to his personality disorder. But knowing it was a false fear didn’t make him less fearful. Strange. Otherwise, he respected reason. But this streak of unreason was baked into him like a vein of cinnamon in a morning roll, though cinnamon was a good thing and unreason was not good.

The dogs were agitated. They needed to potty.

Cornell didn’t want the dogs to potty on his Persian carpets.

If he tried to put the dogs’ leashes on their collars, they might touch him. No good, no good, no good.

The dogs might be trained not to run away. But what if they did? The boy loved them. He’d be devastated if the dogs ran away.

Here was what responsibility meant. It meant making decisions that affected someone other than Cornell himself.

When the dogs started whining, he said, “All right, I’ll take you out. But don’t run away from me, please and thank you.”

Outside, the day was warm and bright, with none of the soft colors of the library lamplight that he loved so much.

The dogs ran a few yards from the door before they peed. Then they sniffed around for a minute, and finally both squatted to poop.

Cornell was embarrassed, watching the dogs toilet, but he was also fascinated because they seemed self-conscious, glancing at him sheepishly, maybe because he hadn’t watched them do this before.

When they had pooped, they stood staring at him expectantly, ears pricked forward. After a minute of confusion, he realized they expected him to pick up the poop in plastic bags, like people did.

He didn’t have plastic bags. Besides, except for the graveled area around the blue house, in which cacti and succulents were the only landscaping, the rest of this acreage, including that in the vicinity of the barn, was a mess of dead grass, sage, long-stemmed buckwheat, assorted weeds, and bare earth. Leaving poop wasn’t as offensive as it would have been on a golf course or a church lawn.

As Cornell moved toward the house, his hulking freak-show shadow preceding him, the dogs watched. When he called them, they glanced at the poop and regarded him with puzzlement, maybe wondering why he was so poorly trained. But at last they came to the house with him.

The large bag of kibble stood in the kitchen where the boy had said it would be. His suitcase of spare clothes and other items was in the smaller of the two bedrooms.

After locking the door, Cornell returned to the barn, carrying the kibble in one hand and the suitcase in the other.

“Come along, please and thank you,” he said to the dogs, and it delighted him that they trotted at his side, one to his left, one to his right, as if they cared for him the way they cared for the boy.

The electronic key in his pants pocket automatically unlocked what appeared to be a flimsy man-size barn door that was in fact steel behind its rotten-plank fa?ade. He and the dogs stepped into a white vestibule. He closed the door behind him. After a few seconds, its lock engaged with a hard clack. The electronic lock on the door before him responded to his hand on the knob and unlocked itself, so he could push through into the library.

To the left of the door through which Cornell entered, another door led to the bathroom. To the right lay the part of the fourth wall that wasn’t lined with books, but instead featured a kitchen counter, cabinets, a double sink, two large Sub-Zero refrigerators, two microwaves, and an oven.

The boy stood peering in one of the Sub-Zeros.

The dogs whined with pleasure and hurried to the boy.