I heard her speaking now, quietly. She was praying. I was nearly part of her in those moments when she prayed for forgiveness.

I knew I was dreaming despite what I thought, what I felt. I wanted to wake up but I couldn't.

The road disappeared. I was thrown forward hard, but then everything seemed to fade away. We were flying out into the fog, sailing high, then dropping toward the water.

I was aware of immense pain slamming through me, a tremendous pressure against my chest that didn't really hurt but was just there. Then it too was gone. There was just an eerie sense of calm, of finality. So easy, I thought, it was so very easy. I smiled at the gentleness of it, smiled even as everything simply went black, and I felt nothing at all.

The next morning the four of us stood together on the cliff, looking out over the water. It didn't take long. A man in scuba gear split the surface of the water and yelled, "She's down here!"

I'd known Jilly would be. In my dream I was down there with her.

Another man came up beside him. He called out, "There are two cars down there, next to each other. There's a white Porsche that looks like it's been there awhile and the one she's in looks like a rental car."

Epilogue

Washington, D.C. Three Months Later

Squawk." "Keep your feathers on, Nolan." I dumped a pile of sunflower seeds in my palm and reached inside his cage.

"Squawk."

"Here you go."

Grubster rubbed against my bare leg. "Yep, you're next, fella."

You'd look at Grubster and believe he'd eat anything that didn't move out of his path he was so big, but it wasn't true. Grubster ate only gourmet cat food. That had started the day we'd all moved into a new town house in Georgetown.

"He thinks he's upscale now," Laura had said. "It's his statement of self-worth."

I put a slice of bread into the toaster and got out the can opener. I forked out an entire can of salmon and rice into Grubster's big white bowl, with a smiling cat face on the bottom, petted his back, rubbed his ears, and listened to him purr as he chowed down.

"Squawk."

I waved a hot slice of toast until it cooled and broke off small pieces for Nolan.

"Everyone happy now?"

There was blessed silence.

It was Saturday morning, already warm and promising to be hot by noon, and Laura was still asleep. I was about to go back to bed to kiss her awake when the doorbell rang.

"Just a minute," I called out and went into the bedroom to pull on a pair of jeans.

"A registered letter. Are you Mr. MacDougal?"

I nodded. "Who is it from?"

"It's from Oregon, that's all I know."

I don't know what I expected, but this wasn't it. It was a short note from a lawyer in Salem, Oregon, telling me only that my sister wished this to be mailed to me exactly three months after her death had been confirmed.

My hand shook as I smoothed out the pages.

My dearest Ford:

I wonder if you will be with me tonight. If so, you will know what it is I have done. I am so sorry to cause you this pain, but I will be grateful if you are there with me.

How can I begin? At the beginning, I suppose. Paul and I had such great hopes for my brainchild. I managed to bond a neurotransmitter involved with memory to an opiate, and was surprised when the compound proved stable. We thought we would accomplish so much with it when it seemed not to be toxic and had such profound effects in our laboratory. We thought we'd found a key to how memory works, and maybe sexual drive too. But no matter what we tried, we couldn't control it or predict its effects well enough, and the bastards at VioTech pulled the plug on us.

Actually, Ford, they pulled the plug because both Paul and I had tried the drug ourselves, and they found out about it. It was the stupidest thing I've ever done. It was so wonderful at first. The sex was simply incredible. By the time we left VioTech, I was badly hooked. Paul was always afraid of it, even though he loved what it did to his sex drive, and so he kept his doses in check, and it saved him.

But we had to be able to make more of it by then, and I wanted to keep trying to alter the drug, or control it better. We approached Cotter Tarcher in Edgerton. Paul knew the vicious little bully well enough to think he'd be interested. After Cotter tried the drug, he was willing to help talk his parents into supporting us. Cotter thought he would get rich beyond his dreams. We didn't know his uncle, John Molinas, was a drug distributor, and that Cotter would tell him about us. Nor did we know that he 'd bring that big drug lord in on it- Del Cabrizo.