BACK AT THE HOUSE, I discovered the cassette had been crushed in the collision. Finding an unopened blank videocassette in the entertainment center, I transferred the tape from the smashed cassette to the new casing and, after a frustrating scuffle, managed to get the cassette closed and screwed back together.Inserting it into the VCR, I pressed “play” and stood back. The tape squealed and the video fluttered as the machine dragged the crumpled magnetic ribbon over the tape heads. Through the static and distortion, the silhouette of a woman quivered on the screen. Wobbly music with a heavy beat began to play and the woman seemed at first confused and embarrassed, but then began dancing and posing for the camera in what appeared to be some sort of amateur audition.I pressed “fast forward” and the jerky images scrolled by as the camera panned slightly to the right and zoomed in past the woman to a man hiding in the shadows. I stopped the tape an

SYDNEY GOT ME INTO THE CAR, drove me home, and helped me upstairs. I was bleeding from wounds over practically every inch of the front of my body, but the shotgun shells had been loaded with rock salt instead of lead shot. Although the injuries were not life threatening, they were painful.The house was still in disarray—“from the visitor,” I told her. “If you think this is bad, you ought to see what he did to the back of my head.”As we stumbled into the bathroom, she pushed my hair to the side, pulled off her sunglasses, and examined the lump and stitches. “Richard, you didn’t tell me it was this bad.”“You mean you didn’t notice it?”She lowered me onto the side of the tub. “No, I didn’t. You should have told me.”“You should have seen it Thursday.”She wet a cloth and touched it gently to my face. As she wiped away the blood and cleaned the sa

PRESSING THE THROTTLE FORWARD, I steered the open boat into the choppy waters of the Intracoastal Waterway and turned southward into the wind. The boat bounced hard across each wave and a light spray moistened my face making it feel as if the temperature had suddenly dropped another twenty degrees. I reached for the ski mask and pulled it over my head.The channel was no more than a hundred feet wide, but the waterway itself varied from a few hundred yards wide in places to a mile wide in other places. In the wider stretches, there were strings of islands and shallow grounds on either side of the marked channel. A mid-sized yacht with a dinghy dragging behind it approached from the south and cruised past me twenty yards to my left with a rolling wall of water streaming outward behind it. Cutting toward the wave, I slammed through it, slipped into the smooth draft behind the yacht, and resumed my southward trek.A fisherman in a workboat much like mine pulled at a net a

I WASN’T SURE I’D HEARD the waitress correctly. “She was here? You saw her?”“I was outside on break smoking a cigarette when she and the guy she was with pulled up.” She popped her gum again.“Are you sure it was the same girl?”She held the newspaper farther away and squinted. “I might not know it was her from that picture alone, but she had those hair beads.”“What kind of boat was it?”“It was small—just a workboat.” She pointed out the window. “Like that one down there.” She pointed to my rental and goose bumps broke out on my arms.“There was a man with her?”“I didn’t see him very well. He stayed in the boat. They were having motor trouble. Somebody else passing through was trying to help them.”“How old was he?”“The man? I don’t know. Young, I think.”

FROM THE MOMENT Ashleigh stepped out of that storm into my home, anything having to do with her seemed to happen in a Twilight Zone atmosphere. Things around her just did not look, act, or add up the same way they did in the normal world. It was as if some kind of spell had been cast on me.“Who? The old man?” I asked.“Both. Jackson and his wife.”I wanted to get the hell out of there. To go out and look for “Rachel’s Diamond.” To work on characters, blocking, and set designs. I wanted to run to my sister and scream.“Jesus!” I said still trying to comprehend what he’d said. “I can’t believe it.” He didn’t answer, or even look up. I drew a slow breath to calm myself as he reached for my notes. “We need to tell them all that stuff I found out today. They need to know it.”“Quiet. Richard. Please.”I touched his arm. “All we did w