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First, a routine metastatic survey along with a thyroid scan. Then a tomogram — a barrage of X rays of the area section by section to determine more dimensionally where and how deep the problem might be.

At that point Dr. Bruno had come in on the case. He was an oncologist, a relatively new designation. His specialty: fighting the killer. By then everything that could be done to diagnose from the outside of Brydon had been done.

Bruno had zeroed in.

He knew the trouble was situated in the anterior compartment of the mediastinal area, the centermost area of Brydon's chest from lower throat to belly. There are several lymph nodes there at what is called the hilum of the lungs. Hopefully, what Brydon had was merely an inflammatory swelling of those nodes.

They had to go inside to see.

A far cry from bronchitis, thought Brydon, as he went under the anesthesia.

A small incision was made and a specially designed viewing device was inserted down through the soft tissued space behind Brydon's breast bone. That permitted visual examination of the nodes. They were enlarged. A tiny portion of them was cut away. For biopsy.

Positive.

Diagnosis: reticulum cell sarcoma, a form of lymphoma.

Chance of complete remission: slim, about 100 to 1.

Chance of survival beyond two years: not much better.

Treatment: radical cobalt therapy, tumoricidal doses and maintenance chemotherapy.

Since Brydon was told of his malignancy he had told no one. Actually there was no one to tell, and Brydon felt both fortunate and sad for that. No one close enough. No one he believed would honestly give a damn. The woman he had divorced eight years previously wouldn't want to hear about it.…

“I've got to get away.”

“Why?”

“From you.”

“I didn't realize you were so unhappy.”

He had known.

She knew he'd known.

“It's me,” she said, “not you, me.”

A true lie.

“Where will you go?”

Eyes to eyes for a long moment.

“Maybe you'll stop me.”

Swift amputating blade — from a proposed lifetime together to cut apart in less than half an afternoon. The familiar back of her head seen through the rear window of one of their cars, diminishing, going, last sight, out of sight down the road.

“Stop yourself.…”

Anyway, now she was far away with a new lease on everything. She wouldn't really want to know and he was almost sure he didn't want her to. Besides, Brydon reasoned, he had always equated strength with independence and it would have been weakness to cry out for help from anyone. Especially now when he was so helpless.

Over, done at forty-two. Christ.

His watch on the bedstand told him nine minutes to four. From that his attention went to the grayish green wall just beyond, and a single crack in the plaster there. Just a hairline crack, extremely fine, almost invisible, climbing erratically all the way up, zigzagging as though dodging something.

Symbolic of what?

Back before what seemed no more than a series of unrealistic flashes, that would have been merely a crack on a wall, another wall in a life involved with wall after wall and, of course, floors and ceilings. An oversimplified description of architect — but Brydon wasn't in the mood to argue with himself or get stuck on such a side issue.

More important was remembering how hot-shit confident he'd been. Particularly during the first ten professional years. So many offers from various firms he'd lost count — some from the largest, some from the best, some at salaries so ridiculously high it was obvious they were at least partially out to prove anyone was buyable. But Brydon managed, avoided attachments, gave his effort to maintaining his individuality rather than a position or office. He freelanced from his place on the beach near South Laguna, letting the work seek him out. And it did because he was dependable and talented.

Buildings.

How many had he done, nursed along, fought for, made do what they were intended to do in the most pleasing visual way? He could tell you. Exactly. Fifty-four.

His favorite was by no means the most imposing or the newest. It was an eight-room private residence completed in 1960. If anything, with some Mies Van Der Rohe in it. Clean, linear, framing itself, it was solidly situated, incorporated like a natural disparate outcropping of a huge granite boulder. In 1970 Brydon had driven to it, a few miles outside of Aspen, Colorado. Expecting it or himself or both to be considerably changed, he was delighted to find the house intact, still as he'd originally designed it, and for himself to still feel from every point of view it was fine. That supplied him with well-being enough to draw upon for he didn't know how many years.

He didn't know how many years.

He put on his watch, wound it a bit too tight.

From some time past came a fragment of conversation — with her, or her, whoever. Names, intimacies, most as forgotten as meals. No doubt because of the way he had his life arranged, she nearly always got around to saying:

“Let me be with you.”

He would seem to be considering it.

“I mean for good,” she'd say.

He often replied and silenced her at the same time with a kiss on her mouth that could as well have gone to her forehead. There was no mistaking it, and it was better than saying no, no matter how softly or gratefully he might say it.

They came, used, were used and went elsewhere to put in for their emotional security.

However, there were several pretty fine ones who had gone along with Brydon for years. On his terms. Overnight stays at his beach place were the rule, weekends the limit. Longer holidays were reserved for favorites. One especially, a woman named Anne, young but not a girl, a woman whose departures were always as pleasant as her arrivals, and in the time between at most only a hint of permanent possession in her eyes. There had never been a moment of sadness between himself and Anne, so he decided no, he wouldn't tell even her.

He wondered, however, when it would become impossible for him to conceal it. He was naturally lean, had a tall, tight, well-kept body. His leanness had served, helped him appear younger, quicker, more desirable — although he'd always known it would eventually turn on him — in his old years when he went to jowls. But what about now? If he was due to waste away, there wasn't much to waste. Would his hazel eyes that were still so clear and alert become filmy dull and sunken? He had heard that people undergoing chemotherapy lost their hair, completely. He still had all his; thick, healthy, dark brown with a touch of interesting gray at the temples. He found it difficult to imagine himself slick bald. A different man.

That was something to ask Bruno. When would it start showing? When it did he would shut himself off, away from everyone. And was there any way he could finally avoid a hospital bed?

He snapped his thoughts out of it, not liking the way he had so easily slipped into hopelessness. Not proud of that. To prove he was far from done he stood quickly, practically jumped up, stretched, took in a deep painless breath. But then he glanced down at where he'd lain, noticing the impression the weight of him had made on the sheet. He imagined he was still there, invisible, passed over to another dimension. It made him consider all the spaces his body had occupied. When he moved from one place to another, one space to another, did he cause a disturbance in the atmosphere? Didn't the air rush in after him to fill and collide and eliminate any trace of his having been there no matter what he'd done?

He dressed, slung his raincoat by a finger over his left shoulder and went out to a desk where a black woman in baby blue with a silly kind of cap bobby-pinned perilously on her springy hair confirmed his next Monday-afternoon appointment. No one bothers with good-byes anymore, he thought, after saying it and pausing a moment to deliberately watch it go right through the woman, too busy. He had the urge to put his face down close, right at her, and say it again. She would probably have thought he was one of those angry advanced cases.

Up he went to the main floor and, approaching one of the exit doors, at the last second he decided to hell with the raincoat, just kept on going out and down the steps, not hurrying despite the rain. He experienced the rain, the drops striking his face. He enjoyed it so much he was laughing. Also, he was unusually aware of his stride, the sensation of it, his feet, his knees and hip sockets working. Ordinary and amazing, he thought all the way to the parking lot and his car, a last year's Jaguar XKE that he hadn't locked because he no longer feared having anything stolen.

Ten minutes later he turned onto the San Diego Freeway and soon had the Jag going twenty above the law. He'd always been a fast driver, good, not reckless, and he was almost always only one moving violation from having his license revoked. Once they had taken it away. For a year. But that hadn't stopped him. For six months he'd driven on luck and for the other six he'd managed to get a license from Nevada.

Now, doing an easy eighty, he frequently had to increase his grip on the steering wheel to offset the gusts of wind that splashed the car broadside. He came up behind a new Lincoln, its rear wheels spinning a lot of water up in under its fenders and throwing some arrogantly back at him. To make up for it Brydon floored the Jag, pulled out to the right and passed on the forbidden side. The sibilant sound of tires on wet pavement, the windshield wipers slaving.

Shitty weather.

Why not go someplace where there was surely sun, Brydon thought, some far-off new place? Splurge on some first-class comfort.

He had already considered doing that and a part of him was for it. But another part of him put up a good argument contending it was senseless for him to make discoveries now. Better not to experience or react too much. No need to increase the desire to live.

The Laguna exit was up ahead. He took it and continued over the San Joaquin Hills via Laguna Canyon for nine miles to the Pacific Coast Highway, famous California 1. After going south a couple of miles, there on the right was the Seaside Supermarket. It reminded Brydon that he had no beer at home, and he was sure this big place carried Carta Blanca, the Mexican brand he liked. He drove in to get some.

At 2:35 that morning the Steinway grand piano started rolling
—
across the bleached, hardwood floor that had a polyurethane finish, glossy, slick. The house it was in was built to jut as far out as possible, as high up as possible, on the hillside. Supporting the house were steel beams of an adequate gauge sunk deep enough into the ground to satisfy the Los Angeles County building codes
.

Actually, there wasn't much of a change. If anyone had been up at that hour they could have walked across the living room and never noticed the difference. The tilt was that slight. For that reason it took over four hours for the piano to move from its normal position across the length of the room to the wide floor-to-ceiling windows, to press and break through, shatter out and fall upon the muddy steep, smashing into rocks as it tumbled over and over, an awkward, lopsided, self-destroying plunge because of its shape and the steepness of the hill. All the way down a quarter mile or more to stop and sink in there where it was now. The grand. Even through the diffusing drizzle the black finish of it, blacker wet, was easily pointed out by the people up on the ridge road, and pieces of it that had broken loose, especially its keyboard, could also be seen
.

2

At four o'clock that afternoon Judith Ward and Marion Mercer were in 43, an upper room of the Holiday Inn at Corona Del Mar.

They had never stayed there before. They had never stayed together anyplace more than once. Once in San Juan Capistrano they'd had an awfully close call — at the Mission Bell Inn, a comparatively small Spanishlike place, peaceful, with porticos and wisteria-covered walls and walkways. It would have been good for them there, except Floyd Jensen also happened to be staying there that day. Never mind that the short, brittle-looking blonde with thin legs and a prominent bottom, looking so passively legitimate, was not Floyd's wife — he was well enough acquainted with Marion's husband, Len, to be a threat. It had been only a matter of luck and mere seconds that Marion and Judith hadn't run right into him. Too close for comfort and too bad because the Mission Bell was so conducive.

Of course, another thing about such places was the people who managed them. No doubt they had excellent memories and were not naive. To return and register at the same place for another afternoon in a room would be outright admission, embarrassing, Judith and Marion agreed. Fortunately, there were enough motels up and down the Coast Highway and all around Disneyland to last them for years. Although at the rate they'd been going, they had already used up the more convenient, better, predictably clean places.

Their relationship, as they alone referred to it, had been going on for nearly seven months. They had known one another longer than that — two years come next July Fourth. They met at a celebration and found a lot in common. Their husbands were the same sort of engineers employed by the same sort of electronics firms in Anaheim. They lived in homes of similar style and value at Dana Point, only about ten blocks apart. Each had a child, a daughter age six (eight now), attending the same school and some of the same classes.

From then on, gradually, Judith and Marion saw less of their previous friends. Quite early they both felt possessive, which seemed natural. They didn't recognize anything romantic in it at the time.

Judith and Marion. They believed they physically complemented one another. They enjoyed sharing mirrors.

Judith's straight dark hair was kept so it barely brushed her shoulders and it was cut with bangs that just hid her brows while helping her large brown eyes appear even larger. She had fine features, was fine boned, diminutive. It would have been perfect had she been graceful; however, although she was twenty-nine, there was a kind of adolescent gangliness about her, at times charming. And contradicting that was her voice, which didn't match her at all. Instead of the frail or sweet wispy voice her appearance led one to anticipate, she had a constant huskiness, as though she had been talking or shouting too much. Whenever the moment wanted, Judith could round out the sound of it into a mellifluousness that was, as she knew, as attractive as it was surprising.