for his ganglioglioma to swell that extra millimeter right there in Ms. Bertrand's bedroom, sending him into a grand mal seizure so the police could find him in his compromised state, establishing evidence for the insanity plea he knew he'd require during the trial he knew he'd have. Certainly the most logical approach for a clearheaded individual, don't you think? Well, happily, his elaborate plan paid off. Because he definitely fooled me. I've had the duty of trying over thirty murder cases in my career, and never and I mean never have I been more certain of a client's compromised sanity at the time of an incident than I am today.'
As Donnie continued, vehement and passionate, I felt a surge of affection, something even like love, for this man who had, for a fee, taken on my cause and argued it as his own. When he finished forty-five rousing minutes later, he sat, practically panting adrenaline, and marshaled his papers into the stretched maw of his briefcase.
After the jury filed out, I reached over, squeezed his neck, and said to him and Terry, 'Regardless of how this thing goes, I want you to know I appreciate what you did for me here.'
We clasped hands for a moment, all three of us.
The second verdict came back three hours and nineteen minutes later.
Chapter 4
The kitchen floor beneath my bare feet felt as cool as the stainless-steel handle of the chef's knife. Through the dark I stared at the blank slit in the knife block where the boning knife should have been. I'd closed the sliding glass door had I locked someone in with me? My heart revving, I looked through the doorway at the trail of marks I'd figured for footprints. The last few were visible on the carpet before it gave over to the flagstone entry.
Not dirt, as I'd thought.
Blood.
I had a moment's lapse into terror, genuine kid-in-the-dark terror, before I recalled that I was an adult and had no options except to outgrow my mood and handle business. Firming my grip on the chef's knife, I eased through the doorway into the entry. No one peering down at me from the upstairs railing that lined the catwalk from stairs to study to bedroom.
The footprints hadn't ceased at the foyer flagstone, though they were harder to make out against slate. But there, two steps up on the carpeted stairs, another bloody C. I gazed up, the staircase fading into the dark.
Tamping down my fear, I followed. Every other step bore the mark.
I reached the top of the stairs. The footprints continued straight into my bedroom. I moved forward, knife held upside down along my forearm, blade out, as I'd learned from an expert knife fighter while broadening Derek Chainer's repertoire. I reached the threshold. Bracing myself, I swept inside.
No one was there. But on the carpet at the foot of my bed, the boning knife gleamed. I moved forward, crouched over it. The skin of my right foot was smudged, just above the little toe and extending down my outstep. I reached down, noticing that the pads of my fingers also bore dark stains. Smears on the boning-knife handle. And on the blade's edge at the tip. My head swam a bit.
I raised my foot, noting the distinctive, if now faint, C mark left behind on the carpet.
My own blood. My own footprints.
I turned on the lights, set down the chef's knife, and returned to the boning knife on the floor. A jagged print of blood on my left thumb matched a mark left on the stainless handle. The blood on my fingers from, I assumed, touching the cut on my foot, also left predictable marks matching my grip.
My fingerprints. On my boning knife.
I washed my foot in the tub. For all the blood, it was a humble cut. A clean incision, no more than an inch long, about a thumb's width back from the base of the little toe. A Band-Aid took care of it.
My head still felt unusually foggy ganglioglioma, back for a holiday sequel? I tried to tease apart which concerns were reasonable and which weren't but found my perspective momentarily shot. Was someone running me through a rat maze? Either I was driving myself insane or someone had gone to a great deal of trouble to ensure that I would. I sat on the tub's edge, hugging my stomach and shuddering, until compulsion drove me around the house, flicking on light switches, searching for a body, an intruder, Allen Funt and his Candid Camera crew.
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
