The Crime Writer

Checking for signs of a break-in, I examined the security rod for dings and the track in which it sat for scrapes in the paint, but both were unmarred. I'd sleepwalked downstairs and opened it myself? Why would I have gone outside?

I returned upstairs and stared at my bed, dumbfounded. A few smears of blood on the sheets, the same sheets in which I'd just dreamed of Genevieve's house. A bizarrely vivid dream. During which I'd sleepwalked downstairs, retrieved the boning knife, returned to bed, and cut my foot? Why? Couldn't I find a more productive way to punish myself?

The dream flooded back, in all its significance, and I felt a jolt of excitement. I couldn't know if I'd gone temporarily insane, but I could verify something I might actually know. If Genevieve's sprinkler was in fact snapped and the saucer broken, then I wasn't completely hallucinating. At least I could determine whether I'd retrieved a fragment of the night Genevieve had been killed.

I got dressed and went downstairs. In my hybrid Guiltmobile, I checked the odometer, as if it could answer any of the riddles I was failing to work out. I started a mileage column on a pad in the glove box, so I'd know if I took my addled brain for a spin in the future.

Driving along Mulholland on a sliver of moonlight, I felt I was doing something illegal. I probably was.

I slalomed down Coldwater, slowing for the sharp turn past the bent street sign. And then there I was, in my dream, driving up the sharp grade. The streetlight, filtered through a wayward branch. The too-narrow street, laid out in the days before three-car households slopped spare SUVs to the curb. Sweat rose on my forehead, as if complying with the script. Maybe I was dreaming now. Maybe I'd created and was now re-creating this whole thing.

The hairpin came up fast, my tires giving their mandatory screech, and Genevieve's house looked down at me. From atop its perch, the house seemed daunting backed snugly to the hillside, stilts shoved disapprovingly into the earth as if my car were a rat, it a Great Dane sizing up the situation.

I climbed out, my door dinging. At the edge of the lawn, the crushed sprinkler stopped me short.

I want this not to be true. I want it not to have happened.

I had not known the sprinkler to be broken, except in my dream when my Highlander jumped the curb. Which meant that it had not been a dream.

God, oh, God, I was alone in that Highlander. I came up this walk alone. I found the key alone. There was me and only me.

I headed up the slope, the pavers loose under my shoes, rocking in their beds and freeing up trickles of dirt. I knew what I'd find, but I had to confirm it.

The boards creaked when I stepped onto the porch. The house was quiet and, I hoped, empty. What possible excuse could I stammer out if sister Adeline appeared at the door?

The split-leaf philodendron waved at me from its terra-cotta pot. I wiped my palms on my jeans and crouched, pushing back the spouts of leaves to peer under.

A zigzag crack marred the clay saucer, a lightning bolt almost reaching the lip.

Not a dream.

A piece of my missing past.

Chapter 5

Driving home in a stupor, I tried to process the ramifications of what I'd just discovered. If my dream was right, as the sprinkler and saucer seemed to indicate, then I'd arrived alone at Genevieve's house. That didn't look good for me. But the same questions remained. Why had I gone over there that night? Had watching someone else kill Genevieve tripped my brain-tumor blackout? The old frustration simmered below the surface. Why hadn't anyone the cops, the prosecutors, my own lawyers looked with serious doubt at anything except my sanity? Hadn't we all jumped in late in the plot?

I'd pored over the murder book that Homicide had turned over during discovery, but nothing in the investigative notes or police report pointed elsewhere none of the dead ends or dropped leads that compose the frayed edges around every reconstructed picture of a crime. It was too tidy an account, an investigation that had its mind made up from the outset. I also had my mind made up from the outset, though my argument had the advantage of no evidence and greater implausibility as I'd come to think of it, Occam's Hacksaw.

A glimmer of hope cut through my exhaustion. If I had recovered one memory from the night of Genevieve's death, then I could recover others. Which meant I could get at the truth, no matter how ugly it was shaping up to be.

My cell phone rang, startling me, and I screwed in the earpiece, wondering who would be calling at midnight.

Donnie's voice greeted me. "Where've you been? We've been trying you all night. Terry finally tracked down your cell-phone number."

"I'm okay," I said. "Just went for a drive."

"Sometimes the first night home can be tough."

I regarded my hands gripping the steering wheel. "Can't imagine why."

He picked up my tone and laughed. "Need some company? Terry and I could swing by."

"Thanks, but I think I'm okay."

"Well, if there's anything you need."