Smoke

thought of surprising her with a diamond, but in the end he couldn’t decide if that was just his impulse to control her, to give her what he thought she should have rather than what she wanted and needed.

“What’s it doing here?” she said, gazing at it. “Who would just leave this here?”

“Do you recognize it as something Lily wore?”

She shook her head. “Not that I noticed. And I think I would have noticed.”

He took it in his hand. “It doesn’t have any hardware on it that indicates it was part of a piece of jewelry.”

“No,” she said. “It has to be more than a carat. Unbelievable.” She took it from him, wrapped it in a tissue she took from her pocket, and placed it in her coat. She took a long look around the room.

“Do you think she was down here?” she asked, not really expecting an answer.

“I really hope not.”

They didn’t realize how bad the air had been inside until they were outside again, drawing the crisp cold night into their lungs. They hustled down the stairs and Dax was waiting in the Rover. They piled in, Jeffrey in the front, Lydia in back.

“Did you follow him?” asked Jeffrey, when Dax started the car.

“Yeah, I did,” he said, moving around the corner. “He was parked over here.”

Dax pointed as they passed a spot about a tenth of a mile from the empty house.

“He got into a large white van. It had a logo on it that I didn’t recognize, it looked like a sun with some kind of geometric design in its center. I followed him up this way.”

They wound up a dark road that edged the subway yard, where sleeping trains reflected the light from streetlamps off their silver roofs. A thin moon revealed itself as dark clouds drifted slowly in the night sky. They wound past opulent homes behind stone gates, through a small town center, and eventually to streets that bordered the Henry Hudson Parkway. Dax slowed down but didn’t stop as they passed a building that looked like a church. It was a brown clay structure with a vaulted roof and short stout bell tower containing no bell. Within the center of the triangular roof was a stained glass version of the logo Dax had described. Lydia could just make out the sign that hung above the door. It read: THE NEW DAY. Something about it sent a cold finger tracing down her spine.

“We could just walk up and knock on the door,” suggested Jeffrey. “Start asking questions about Lily and Mariah.”

“Or try to get in the back?” said Lydia, itching a little to get inside the brown building that tried hard to look like a church. Something about it felt like a dare to her.

Jeffrey shook his head. “Breaking and entering an abandoned building is one thing.”

“Breaking into an inhabited one takes research,” said Dax. They pulled away slowly, Lydia looking at the building until it was out of sight.

They’d headed back to Dax’s place. From the outside, Dax’s Riverdale home looked like a hundred other big Victorian houses in the tony suburb. But the inside was mostly bare of furniture, except for a big leather recliner parked in front of a giant flat-screen television that received about five million channels and a DVD player in the den. There was a giant wrought-iron four-poster bed in an upstairs room, with another flat-screen hanging on the wall.

His basement was a maze of rooms-one a weapons armory filled with enough fire power to equip an army; one with a cruel metal table, complete with five-point restraints; yet another adjacent to a second room connected by a two-way mirror. Lydia never tired of questioning him about these things, but he never gave her a straight answer. But she wasn’t interested in the mystery that was Dax tonight. She Googled.

“Welcome to The New Day,” said Lydia out loud. Dax and Jeffrey came to stand behind her where she stood at the kitchen counter tapping away on Dax’s laptop.

“Damn. I love the Internet,” said Dax.

The screen flashed with the icon they’d seen on the stained glass window of the church. Another image flashed, this one of smiling people, one white, one black, Arab, Asian, dressed in white tunic shirts and blue jeans, arms linked, feet bare. That faded and was replaced with an image of two men holding hands, then two women with their heads together and laughing eyes. A young Latina girl held a baby in her arms and wore an expression of joy. The gallery of images kept fading into one another.

“When did churches start acting like country clubs where only the elite among us are welcome?” Lydia read. “Jesus didn’t judge, nor did Buddha, nor did Allah. So why do our major religions today seem to create so much pain, so much violence? The Middle East, abortion clinic bombings, Catholic priests violating our children: these are all symptoms of institutions that are diseased at their core, institutions created to control, to alienate, to steal, and to ultimately divorce us from God rather than bring us home.

“But there is another way. A New Day has dawned.”

“I’m convinced,” said Dax. “Sign me up.”

“Me, too,” said Jeffrey.

“Don’t you find,” Lydia went on reading, “that no matter how much you accomplish, it always feels like something is missing? That you’re always looking on to the next thing you think will finally make you happy.”

“Well, no, not really,” said Dax.

“Yeah, no, not so much,” said Jeffrey.

“As you accrue your wealth, amass possessions, spend endless hours pursuing your career, obsessing over your physical appearance, isn’t there something deep within that nags at you? Isn’t there a voice that whispers: Is this all there is?”

“Wow. Other people are hearing voices?” said Dax. “I’m so relieved.”

“Dax, will you shut it? This is serious,” asked Lydia without turning to look at him. He made a face at her behind her back. Jeffrey rolled his eyes.

“Do you find that you hold onto grudges and pain year after year? Perhaps you’ve suffered a tragedy, a terrible loss, and you find you just can’t move on. Or do you find that your inner life is a broken record of angry and hateful thoughts, not just about others but about yourself. It’s not your fault. You have been programmed to think that way. From the day you were born, you have been socialized to be dissatisfied. Why? Because as long as you are dissatisfied with your life and yourself, divorced from your spiritual center, you will continue to consume. Because in this society, happiness is always one Mercedes, one face-lift, one diamond ring away.

“But there is another way. A New Day has dawned.”

The website gave the address of the building they’d visited and a phone number to call.

“We have open gatherings every Sunday at five in the evening. Come and listen. You may hear the first truthful words of your life.”

Lydia fell silent and they all stared at the screen for a minute.

“Sounds like we have ourselves a date,” said Dax, clapping his hands together.

“We can’t wait until Sunday,” said Lydia. “We have to find out what goes on there sooner.”

She turned to look at Dax. “Jeffrey and I are too high profile to just go strolling in there looking for our New Day.”

“That’s right. The duo that took ‘private’ out of private investigations,” said Dax. “What are you suggesting then?”

“Dax, darling,” she said, slipping an arm around his waist and looking up at him. “Isn’t there a voice that whispers: Is this all there is?”

Eight

The Samuels family lived well. They weren’t rich, exactly, not in the chauffeur-driven-car, private-jet kind of way. But they were clearly more than comfortable. A late-model black Audi TT and a navy Acura MDV nestled in the neatest and most organized three-car garage Lydia had ever seen. Beside the two vehicles a beautiful Harley Davidson Low Rider preened, parked at a three-quarter angle, so all the world could see its specialty paint job.