Inside, the telephone rang twice and stopped, which meant that it was someone they knew and that Frannie had picked it up. Her voice, with notes of sympathy and understanding, floated out to him, but he didn’t bother trying to make out any of the words. She had begun to have a somewhat thriving career of her own as a marriage and family therapist and often would wind up counseling her clients from home.

Hardy drifted, not off to anywhere, but into a kind of surrender of conscious thought. For a long moment he was simply there in the same way that his drink or his chair existed; or the light, or the breeze off the ocean a little over a mile west of where he sat. So that when the door opened behind him, he came back with a bit of a start.

Frannie put a hand on his shoulder and he brought his hand up to cover hers, half turning, seeing the look on her face. “What’s up?” he asked, his feet coming down off the railing. “Are the kids all right?” Always the first concern.

She nodded a yes to the second question, then answered the first. “That was Treya.” Treya was the wife of Hardy’s best friend, Abe Glitsky, the head of San Francisco ’s homicide department. Anguish in her eyes, Frannie held and released a breath. “It’s Zack,” she said, referring to Glitsky’s three-year-old son. “He’s had an accident.”

Accompanied by her five-year-old daughter, Rachel, Treya Glitsky opened the gate in the Hardys’ white picket fence. Dismas Hardy, in his living room watching out through the plantation shutters of his front window, called back to his wife in the kitchen that they were here, then walked over and opened his front door.

Treya turned away and, closing the gate, reached down for a small duffel bag. By the effort it took to lift, it might have weighed a hundred pounds. When she straightened up, her shoulders rose and fell, then she brought a hand to her forehead and stood completely still for another second or two. With her tiny hand Rachel held on to the front pocket of her mother’s jeans while she looked up at her face, her own lips pressed tight.