sure as the sun rises every morning, he’ll come. And we’ll be ready for
“Will we?” she wondered.
“Very ready.”
“Remember what you said last night.”
He looked up from the pistol again and met her eyes. “What?”
“That maybe he’s not just an ordinary man, that he might have hitchhiked
back with you from… somewhere else.”
“I thought you dismissed that theory.”
“I did. I can’t believe it. But do you? Really?”
Instead of answering, he resumed cleaning the Browning.
She said, “If you believe it, even half believe it, put any credence in
it at all-then what good is a gun?”
He didn’t reply.
“How can bullets stop an evil spirit?” she pressed, feeling as if her
memory of waking up and taking Regina to school was just part of a
continuing dream, as if she was not caught in a real-life but in a
nightmare. “How can something from beyond the grave be stopped with
just a gun?”
“It’s all I have,” he said. Like many doctors, Jonas Nyebern did not
maintain office hours or perform surgery on Wednesday. However, he
never spent the afternoon golfing, sailing, or playing cards at the
country club. He used Wednesdays to catch up on paperwork, or to write
research papers and case studies related to the Resuscitation Medicine
Project at Orange County General.
That first Wednesday in May, he p to spend eight or ten busy hours in
the study of his house on Spyglass Hill, where he had lived for almost
two years, since the loss of his family. He hoped to finish writing a
paper that he was going to deliver at a conference in San Francisco on
the eighth of May.
The big windows in the teak-paneled room looked out on Corona Del Mar
and Newport Beach below. Across twenty-six miles of gray water veined
with green and blue, the dark ides of Santa Catalina Island rose against
the sky, but they were unable to make the vast c Ocean seem any less
immense or less humbling than if they had not been there.
He did not bother to draw the drab because the panorama never distracted
him. He had bought the property because he had hoped that the luxuries
of the house and the magnificence of the view would make life seem
beautiful and worth living in spite of great tragedy. But only his work
had managed to do that for him, and so he always went directly to it
with no more than a glance out of the windows.
That morning, he could not concentrate on the white words against the
blue background on his computer screen. His thoughts were not pulled
toward Pacific vistas, however, but toward his son, Jeremy.
On that overcast spring day two years ago, when he had come home to find
Marion and Stephanie stabbed so often and so brutally that they were
beyond revival, when he had found an unconscious Jeremy impaled on the
vise-held knife in the garage and rapidly bleeding to death, Jonas had
not blamed an unknown madman or burglars caught by surprise in the act.
He had known at once that the murderer was the teenage boy slumped
against the workbench with his life dripping onto the concrete floor.
Something had been wrong with Jeremy something in him-all his life, a
difference that had become more marked and frightening as the years
passed, though Jonas had tried for so long to convince himself the boy’s
attitudes and actions were manifestations of ordinary rebelliousness.
But the madness of Jonas’s father, having skipped one generation, had
appeared again in Jeremy’s corrupted genes.
The boy survived the extraction of the knife and the frantic ambulance
ride to Orange County General, which was only minutes away. But he died
on the stretcher as they were wheeling him along a hospital corridor.
Jonas had recently convinced the hospital to establish a special
resuscitation team. Instead of using the bypass machine to warm the
dead boy’s blood, they employed it to recirculate cooled blood into his
body, hastening to lower his body temperature drastically to delay cell
deterioration I and brain damage until surgery could be performed. The
air conditioner was set all the way down at fifty, bags of crushed ice