Shadowfires. By: Dean R. Koontz

flashing red emergency beacons.

Speed would not help Eric now.

Herb said, “If you don’t want brandy, then perhaps coffee. Or just come

and sit with me for a while. I don’t think you should get behind a

wheel right away.”

Rachael touched his leathery cheek affectionately. He was a weekend

sailor, and his skin had been toughened and creased less by age than by

his time upon the sea.

“I appreciate your concern. I really do. But I’m fine. I’m almost

ashamed of how well I’m taking it. I mean…

I feel no grief at all.”

He held her hand. “Don’t be ashamed. He was my client, Rachael, so I’m

aware that he was . . . a difficult man.

“Yes.”

“He gave you no reason to grieve.”

“It still seems wrong to feel . . . so little. Nothing.”

“He wasn’t just a difficult man, Rachael. He was also a fool for not

recognizing what a jewel he had in you and for not doing whatever was

necessary to make you want to stay with him.”

“You’re a dear.”

“It’s true. If it weren’t very true, I wouldn’t speak of a client like

this, not even when he was . . . deceased.”

The van, bearing the corpse, pulled away from the accident scene.

Paradoxically, there was a cold, wintry quality to the way the summer

sun glimmered in the white paint and in the polished chrome bumpers,

making it appear as if Eric were being borne away in a vehicle carved

from ice.

Herb walked with her, through the gathered onlookers, past his office

building, to her red 560 SL. He said, “I could have someone drive

Eric’s car back to his house, put it in the garage, and leave the keys

at your place.”

“That would be helpful,” she said.

When Rachael was behind the wheel, belted in, Herb leaned down to the

window and said, “We’ll have to talk soon about the estate.”

“In a few days,” she said.

“And the company.”

“Things will run themselves for a few days, won’t they?”

“Certainly. It’s Monday, so shall we say you’ll come see me Friday

morning? That gives you four days to.

adjust.”

“All right.”

“Ten o’clock?”

“You sure you’re okay?”

“Yes,” she said, and she drove home without incident, though she felt as

though she were dreaming.

She lived in a quaint three-bedroom bungalow in Placentia. The

neighborhood was solidly middle-class and friendly, and the house had

loads of charm, French windows, window seats, coffered ceilings, a

used-brick fireplace, and more. She’d made the down payment and moved a

year ago, when she left Eric. Her house was far different from the

place in Villa Park, which was set on an acre of manicured grounds and

which boasted every luxury, however, she liked her cozy bungalow better

than his Spanish-modern mansion, not merely because the scale seemed

more human here but also because the Placentia house was not tainted by

countless bad memories as was the house in Villa Park.

She took off her bloodstained blue sundress. She washed her hands and

face, brushed her hair, and reapplied what little makeup she wore.

Gradually the mundane task of grooming herself had a calming effect.

Her hands stopped trembling. Although a hollow coldness remained at the

core of her, she stopped shivering.

After dressing in one of the few somber outfits she ownea charcoal-gray

suit with a pale gray blouse, slightly too heavy for a hot summer

day-she called Attison Brothers, a firm of prestigious morticians.

Having ascertained that they could see her immediately, she drove

directly to their imposing colonial-style funeral home in Yorba Linda.

She had never made funeral arrangements before, and she had never

imagined that there would be anything amusing about the experience.

But when she sat down with Paul Attison in his softly lighted, darkly

paneled, plushly carpeted, uncannily quiet office and listened to him

call himself a “grief counselor,” she saw dark humor in the situation.

The atmosphere was so meticulously somber and so self-consciously

reverent that it was stagy.

His proffered sympathy was oily yet ponderous, relentless and

calculated, but surprisingly she found herself playing along with him,

responding to his condolences and platitudes with cliche’s of her own.