This night I found the driveway without pause. Even before I got to the circle I could see that, except for the solarium, the mansion was dark. The cold bleakness offered me an ominous greeting intensified by Fran’s Mercedes parked in the circle, its red shrillness smothered by the dark. I remembered the last time I was here, and instinctively looked for guards. No shadowy figures punctuated the night. Except for me. The only light was the dim glow from high above, the only sound the soft crunch of my own feet on the finely cut shells of the path through the rolling lawn.

I got to the entrance and almost rang the bell before I thought to try the door. It opened, and I stepped into the moonlit foyer. I stood dead still and waited for an alarm or servants, but all that met me was silence. I walked quietly through the ballroom until I got to the circular steps that led to the promise of light. I could hear voices but I couldn’t make out their words.

Halfway up the spiral I heard somebody scream and something shatter on the floor. Quietly I ran the rest of the way to the conservatory, then tiptoed behind one of the two white Roman pillars that braced the glass door archway.

Although rows of hanging plants obscured my view, I could see everyone reflected in the mirrored wall framed by greens and flowers.

Lena Hirsh was shrunk into the same wing chair she had been in at the party. Only now she wasn’t made up, so the thinness of her body was accentuated, her face pinched, her eyes staring at Hirsh with fear. Fran, sprawled on the floor in front of the pool table, looked bewildered but unharmed. A vase lay splintered on the rim of the table, its flowers strewn across the elegant white Chinese rug. Alex stood on the far side of a small glass and chrome desk holding a .22. He wasn’t pointing it, just looking at it.

“You come here to accuse me of unspeakable behavior and you bring a gun?” The door was open a couple of inches but it needn’t have been. It was easy to hear.

Fran picked herself slowly off the floor. Her eyes were red and puffy.

“Were you going to shoot me with this?” Alex sounded amazed.

“I don’t know what I was going to do with it.”

“This is very difficult to understand. Do you hear your daughter, Lena?”

Lena seemed beyond hearing. Her mouth open, she was breathing with shallow panting breaths. She looked from Hirsh to Fran and back again.

“That’s right, Father.” The word oozed off Fran’s tongue like foultasting oil. “Another thing you spent your life hiding, lying about. I’m not even your fucking daughter.”

Hirsh’s eyes narrowed and, for a moment, his hand trembled. “So you met him.”

“A while ago. And paid him. Up to the very end protecting my Daddy. Or maybe I was protecting Mom, or me, I don’t know. Only now I’m done protecting anyone. My sick dreams had to do with you, not me. Had to do with our midnight walks.

“I don’t know what’s more amazing—that I could forget or that I can remember. I even remember your forgetting game too, Daddy.” Her voice parodied a child’s tone as she accented “Daddy,” then the rage began to spill. “You bastard, you loved me all right”—tears started a silent journey down her face and I thought about rushing into the room, but I was rooted to my spot by the intensity of the moment and the horror in Fran’s voice. Hirsh stood rigid.

“You loved me so well that I couldn’t stay faithful for more than five minutes, despite marrying someone I adored. I had to debase and abuse myself. You loved me well.” Her tears had stopped and she stood breathing convulsively.

I was shocked to hear the raw hatred in Alex’s response.

“No, Fran, the whore that you are comes from the whore who birthed you. An apple doesn’t roll far from its tree. If you became a slut, thank her.” He nodded derisively toward Lena and lifted the gun. “The one you came to shoot is the one you should be thanking.” He leaned toward Fran and I prepared to rush in again, but he placed the gun on the desk and spat, “You should be on the damn ground kissing my feet with thanks. I took care of you even though you are the living reminder of the fool that bitch made of me.” He snarled his last words at Lena, but Lena didn’t notice, she had her eyes closed.

“I worked every minute of the day to make her life decent, while she whored with scum. Do you know how hard it is for someone to make all this from nothing? My parents didn’t help me, my mother hated that I was born.” He looked at Fran. “What have you ever begged for? Nothing!” His voice sank to a hoarse whisper. “And now you come here with this disgusting story about incest.”

Fran said in a flat monotone, “You really hate me. You always have. Every compliment was a lie. Every gift a smokescreen for what you really felt.

“And Mom, you must have known what he really felt. If not toward me, then toward you.” She shook her head and I could see the rush of truth wash over her. She shivered, despite the heat and humidity of the indoor Eden.

“You’re right about your mother. She deserves everything she got.” His contempt was palpable but just as quickly his distaste dissipated and he looked puzzled. His voice filled with wonder, his words a singsong. “Hate you, you don’t understand, I love you. You were my doll. It didn’t matter to me that you weren’t my child. I was free to love you more than if you were. You make my love into filth. You insult all my work, all my love. You were all I loved. I worked for you, Fran. For you.”

“And killed for yourself, Alex.” I opened the door the rest of the way and stepped into the room. Three pairs of eyes turned and stared at me. Only one pair was my concern.

I looked directly at Fran and tried to be as gentle as I could, though it made me nervous to take my eyes off Hirsh. “Gloria James asked me to find you. We are concerned for your safety. Alex has killed someone. I think you know who Joe Starring was.”

I heard a moan escape from Lena’s lips. She seemed so comatose I was startled she had a voice.

Fran said to me, “I’m surprised to see you here.” The words were automatic, and her eyes darted anxiously around the room while she struggled to compose herself. “How much of our conversation did you overhear?”

“I already knew everything.”

“You seem to know more than everyone else,” Alex said, his voice calm and relaxed. I turned toward him and was relieved to find his hands empty. My presence relaxed him. Put him, once again, a man among men.

“No, Alex, you know as much as me. Except you don’t know how crazy you are.”

Fran interrupted. “How do you know he killed Joe?”

“Because Alex has a bigshot policeman working for him who, since this began, has done nothing but make certain Dr. James’ records would never be read again. And that included the person who’d already read them. Starring.”

“Starring didn’t show me any records when we met. He didn’t say anything about records.”

I was curious about her encounters with Starring. I wondered what her meeting with him felt like, but this was no time to press on raw hurts. “You were just the appetizer.” I wanted to cement Fran’s and my alliance. “How much did you give him?”

“Twenty-five thousand.” She didn’t sound angry about it. “He had information about my real father. The information was worth the cost. At least the financial cost.” She jerked her head toward Hirsh.

Alex intervened. The conversation between Fran and me had allowed him to regain some of his authority. “I really don’t know what you are doing here.” He looked pointedly from me to Fran. “Either of you.”

“Let me be clear, pervert.” My voice was a growl; I felt like hurting him. I started to use my words as if they were rocks. To wipe away his corporate smugness. “Starring blackmailed Fran about her parentage, then got hold of Gloria’s records and blackmailed you about your perversions. The kid was just smart and greedy enough to get himself killed. Abused himself, maybe it was easy for him to spot an abuser. And you are an abuser, aren’t you? Well, you killed the kid for nothing. Everyone is going to know just how sick you are.”

His eyes glittered with hatred and the mask dropped a little further. His voice trembled along with his upper body. “Who are you calling sick? I didn’t kill anyone. Why should I? I could buy off ten blackmailers. You are the sick one. You break into my house and eavesdrop on private conversations. You rub your face in the soiled underwear of peoples’ lives, smelling for the worst. Your own friends, no less.”

I moved slowly across the room, away from Fran. Alex rocked back and forth on his feet. It reminded me of old religious Jews in prayer.

“Goddamnit, don’t move!” he shouted. I stood still, about a foot away from a heavy mahogany chair. Illogically, I thought it looked out of place in a flower room. Alex’s hand gripped the side of the desk.

I kept badgering him. “How far would you have gone, Alex? Would you have killed Dr. James? You moved too quickly on that one, didn’t you? You or your bull. I think it was you, though, who had James beaten, the bull would have done a better job. The hack you hired was very sloppy. It’s not going to take long to trace the connection between you and the security firm, is it?”

Fran looked at Alex like he had just crawled out of the sewer. He was sweating so profusely I could smell him. The humidity was stifling even with the door open. I was sweating too. There was a wet shimmer to my vision.

Fran turned to me. “Did he really kill Joe and hurt Gloria?” There was little question in her tone, certainly no surprise. Nothing Hirsh did was unbelievable. She was past caring.

“Him or his hired hands.”

Hirsh exploded. “I killed no one, Jacob, no one. You little nobody, I wipe my ass with shits like you. You know nothing about me or my life or what it takes to be somebody.” The veneer was gone. Fran and I talking as if he weren’t there was the insult that pulled the plug on his kind of civilized. He turned to her. “You don’t know anything either, you take my love and sacrifice and turn them into a dirty word …”

I stayed on him like a tick. “How many people would Alex Hirsh kill to keep his good name intact? That’s all you killed for, your fucking reputation. Did you know that it wasn’t even Starring’s kid that you killed? It was Starring’s stepkid. What were you going to do when Fran finally remembered? Were you going to kill her too? Or maybe you hoped she would think that fooling with a five-year-old wasn’t slime but beauty, pageantry, ecstasy. You sick fuck.”

I finished my words in a rush as a torrent of hatred and anger blew out of me. When I wiped the water from my eyes I was looking into the mouth of his gun.

“She was a living timebomb for me.” Alex waved the gun in Fran’s direction. “Her very existence left me open to shame and humiliation, and I lived with it my whole life.” His eyes burned into mine. “Of course I was worried that she might remember. She had pigshit in her blood, her genes.” He wiped his sweaty face. “But I never hurt her, Matthew. Yes, I touched her. I wanted to kill her, to close a breathing wound, but instead I touched her. I was gentle, and I would whisper to her all the while, and the hatred would seep out of me when I held her. Seep out of me like this sweat.”

The surge of feeling in me made everything seem wet and slow. Hirsh looked like he was in a trance, and I went for my gun. I thought I heard a woman scream but it sounded far away. All I saw was Alex’s gun sneer, his trembling hand jerk, then felt the hot sear of a bullet snake across the top of my head.

The blood exploded in front of my eyes, and my slow wet world suddenly accelerated like a knife slash. While the red washed my eyes I felt myself fall forward and crack my head on the arm of the chair. I finally squeezed the metal trigger, heard the roar next to my ear, and squeezed again. I wiped blood from my face. Hirsh’s body wobbled but remained upright. At the same time I felt something pierce the top of my thigh. My leg was on fire, but I squeezed the trigger again. I tried to sit up and smashed my head on the leg of the chair.

The next time I opened my eyes I was on a rolling stretcher in the hall. I could see a crowd in the conservatory, but all I could hear was a roar in my head. I shut my eyes and concentrated on hearing the voices but I couldn’t get past the roar. I reopened my eyes but everything was starting to blur, when into my field of vision walked Washington Clifford. Staring right at me. I tried to scream but all I did was push myself back into a world peopled by everyone who had ever frightened me.