PROLOGUE

In the dream he was there in time, before Teddy got to her that night, before the gun went off, but still, somehow -- the "somehow" that always happens in dreams -- when he turned around they were taking her away on the gurney, wrapped in the bloody sheets from the bed. He followed as they moved her down a dark tunnel to a bottomless hole in the earth, and the sheet unwound from her glowing body as she fell, fell, fell, and he was reaching down, trying to catch her slender arms, her bruised wrist, her white hand with the diamond gleaming on it, but she fell away from him, her burnished hair streaming up from her head, rippling like the flame of a candle, then dimming and floating downward, like golden seaweed sinking into the depths of the sea --

He opened his eyes in the dark and heard that the surf had grown louder since they went to bed. That storm out below Bermuda, probably, urging the surface of the ocean toward the South Carolina coast.

His heartbeat slowed, slowly.

He knew why he had dreamed of Anne. They were going to ask him The Question at the meeting tomorrow: "Is there anything we should know about your past that might become a problem in the campaign? Anything at all?"

Hell, yes, there was. It was unlikely to surface, but it was there. And he'd seen enough "no-one-will-ever-know" lies blow up in other people's faces -- not to mention shocked, unprepared political operations making ridiculous mistakes when confronted with sudden revelations. So if he was going to run for governor, he had to tell them.

Then, of course, he probably wouldn't be running for governor.

He turned on his side, toward the elegant, low-lying landscape of Philippa, her back to him in the dark. If he was going to let the committee know about Anne and Teddy tomorrow, Philippa would have to hear it first.

He rehearsed phrases of introduction to the subject in his mind, trying to decide on the words he would say after, "I have something to tell you...."

Do you remember that one-night stand I had when we were engaged? Well, she wasn't. A one-night stand, I mean."

or

"You met my pal Teddy from 20 years ago, didn't you? The blond guy? Well, he turned out to be --"

What? What did Teddy turn out to be? An untrustworthy, lying, exploitative bastard? That would make him -- gee -- just like John L. Hamilton, all-around Good Guy and rising political star, wouldn't it? Twins separated at birth.

Jack rolled off the damp, crumpled bed and stood up, feeling the tenseness of his joints and the chill hint of sweat on his upper lip. Everyone always said he was a cool customer, a smooth situation manager, the "go to" man in a crisis. Jack Hamilton never panicked -- or never seemed to, anyway.

But he thought maybe he was panicking now. Having a panic attack. Something seemed to be rising upward from his feet and inward from his hands toward his heart, and then his fingers began to tingle and sting. He couldn't catch his breath, and the dim room seemed to grow even darker.

"Fipps," he whispered, and then shut up, realizing with a restorative jolt that it wouldn't be a good idea to wake her, not now, not yet. She'd want to know what was wrong, she'd want to soothe and hover, and that would just make it worse. He couldn't tell her the truth now, in the middle of the night, with his heart thumping like this. He'd have to prepare himself, get his body and mind under control first.

The terrazzo floor was cold under his feet as he walked off the area rug on the way to the bathroom. The floor was heated from below in the winter, but during the summer its chill smoothness was one of the things Philippa didn't like about this house. "His" house. "Hers" was a brick pile in far West Ashley, over the rivers and through the woods, next door to a horse farm. It was a bit of a come-down from Summertides, her family's country home in England, but still -- as one of Jack's friends always said with pointed understatement -- not too shabby.

Philippa had never much liked the beach, except as a concept, a venue, a place to invite people. It was sandy and windy and the salt got into her creases. So after their original summer house had been wiped away by Hurricane Hugo twelve years ago, she'd been anxious to sell this property. The storm's American He-Man proportions had unnerved her badly, but Jack had insisted on rebuilding the house as a year-round residence that could withstand another major hurricane. So the flooring wasn't the only thing they'd disagreed about.

Yes. He was thinking about inconsequentials, but beneath the surface chatter of his mind was the image of his office safe, down the polished hall from the bedroom. Why he'd kept that copy of Anne's diary all these years was something he didn't ask himself any more. Around twenty years ago he'd read it, finally, a few weeks after his return from Greece, sitting in the Mildenhall office one late, bleak December afternoon.

Two days before his wedding.

Why he'd done that was another mystery. His original idea, he vaguely remembered, was that he could purge himself, cleanse his conscience, and close his emotional doors by putting the diary in the classified burn bag with those other secrets, the official ones, that were never supposed to be seen again. Even as he laid the photostatted pages of the diary on his desk that afternoon he told himself that he'd be a fool to read it. He was right. He'd suffered her alternately harsh and graceful words, her handwriting's familiar loops and flourishes, the internal presence of her voice...and it had demolished him.

The early winter nightfall had closed in while he was reading the diary, and he remembered watching his own scorched, empty eyes in the dark reflective surfaces of the office windows as he lowered the blinds. He'd turned to look again at the carefully squared pile of her words on his desk, and then he had literally doubled over in an agony of grief, his throat and shoulders as fiercely, painfully clenched as they had been when he stood over her battered body in the emergency room.

Tonight his dream had conducted some of that moment's terrible, electric clarity to him through the insulation of time, so he left the light off in the bathroom, not wanting to see his face. Not in a wall-to-wall mirror, not against a backdrop of green marble tiles.

He'd walked through his wedding like that: shell-shocked, bombed-out, emotionally skeletal. The photographs that had been taken of the fantastically elaborate ceremony and endless reception showed him with his mouth stretched appropriately open over his teeth, but it wasn't really a smile.

Most people had taken his numbness for a case of nuptial nerves, and in a way it was. Still, below it all, in the sub-basement of his mourning, he knew that he would recover. He recognized even then what was still true today: Philippa was beautiful, accomplished, and desirable. Life with her had not been the series of impossible plunges from crisis to crisis that it would have been with Anne. In any case, irreparable events happened, choices added up, and responsibilities couldn't be avoided. So he went on. Real life had to be lived, dream worlds had to be abandoned.

Time had healed him, of course, as he had somehow known it would. Anne had gradually disappeared from his consciousness, Philippa had gotten pregnant, and in spite of all the cultural pieties about money not buying happiness, his financial success over the years had softened most of his regrets. The private security company he'd started had done well enough that he'd been able to buy out Philippa's father's investment eight years ago.

That reminded him. Kavanaugh, his partner in the firm, knew all about Anne and Teddy, because he had been involved in the case twenty years ago. It was how he and Jack had met in the first place. But their personal and business relationship meant that Kavanaugh was unlikely to talk to the press about it. It was the other people who'd been involved who presented the real threat of exposure.

As he made his way down the dark hallway leading out of the bedroom, Jack was like a rabbit in a lightless burrow, placing himself only by memory and subtle vibrations from the cool floor and the narrow, walled-in air. When he opened his office door his dark-adjusted eyes could make out the shape of the brass lamp on his desk just by the dim sea-glow that came in through the French doors onto the deck. Even on the darkest nights the sky on the ocean side of the house always looked paler and higher, because the horizon of water reflected and reinforced the slightest ambient light.

When he turned on the desk lamp, the small oval of bright downward light instantly darkened the windows and seemed to draw the margins of the room inward to no more than the dimensions of the leather blotter. The safe was in the bookshelf behind the desk. He didn't use it much, because he seldom brought important papers or financial records out to this house. More often, but still infrequently, he used it for overnight storage of Philippa's jewelry when they came out here directly from some formal occasion.

The only thing in the safe now was a taped-tied British briefing folder that held the loose pages of Anne's diary, and he thought as he turned the dial...right...left...hat this would be a good time to burn the whole accusatory stack of paper, this insane artifact that he had so inexplicably carried from place to place for all these years. There was a gas grill on the deck. All he'd have to do would be to step out of the office and fire it up.

And he would. In a minute.

After he took the diary out of the narrow cardboard file, he sat with it between his hands in the curved pool of light on the desk. The last page was at the top -- just as he had left it nearly two decades ago -- and almost against his will his eyes trailed over it, catching half-remembered phrases, shifting away, settling back, seeing the words he didn't really want to see:

I'm pretty sure they're keeping an eye on me...

I wish Jack was here...

He felt again the desperation of his dream, and then a sudden echo in his stomach of that hideous, clutching moment of grief he'd felt after reading this... indictment... the first time.

But I guess he figures I'm safe enough now....

He stood up abruptly and shoved his desk chair aside, turning his back on her words, the darkened panes of glass in the French doors, the whole well-appointed room. He faced the bookshelf and the open safe without at first seeing them.

Part of him rebelled against any sense of guilt. Anne was an adult woman. She was what she was, did what she did on her own recognizance. Even she had admitted that. Teddy was evil and violent, but she had ignored the warning signs, and even Jack's own repeated cautions. She knew what they were doing was wrong and dangerous just as much as Jack did, but she went ahead with it anyway. And she didn't just drift along passively, either, even though that would have been bad enough. Oh no. There were times when she actively incited and instigated it all.

It didn't diminish Teddy's crimes -- or his own -- to acknowledge that Anne was not an innocent victim.

Still...

His eyes came into focus and wandered over the shelves, looking for the book Anne had given him, a copy of T.S. Eliot's collected poems. There it was. He slid it out of its place and took it down. He'd held on to it because it was a book, it was Eliot, and it marked in his mind an incident that had seemed to be a kind of redemption at the time.

There had been no risk in keeping it. Philippa wasn't fond of poetry, and even if she had opened it up one day, Anne's inscription on the inside of the cover wouldn't have incriminated him. it consisted only of two lines from "Burnt Norton," the first of the Four Quartets:

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.

and then there was her sign-off "chop" as he had seen it on so many routed documents back then, her circled initials in that swift-sloping, familiar hand:

He sat down again.

He'd have to burn this, too, to really do the job right. Whatever "the job" was at this point. Burning a book, especially such a good one, was serious business. Was he getting rid of incriminating evidence, or trying to somehow erase tonight's nightmare? It didn't matter. It would make him feel better.

He stuffed Anne's diary back into the flimsy cardboard folder and picked up the book. When he opened the door to the deck, the air streaming toward him from the ocean was wet and heavily scented with salt. He waited for a moment, listening to the surf as it thrashed on the beach and withdrew with a swift whisper, dying away to a half-moment of silence before the next wave fell.

The motion-sensor floodlights went on as he stepped out, illuminating the glass table, the wrought-iron chairs, the chaises, and -- out beyond the deck rail -- the pale waving tops of the sea oats on the sand dune in front of the house. He opened the cover of the stainless-steel grill ("You take better care of that thing than you do of your son," Philippa always said) and put the book and the folder down on the grate. Then, as he was reaching to open the valve on the grill's gas tank, he paused again, looking out toward the water and the lightening horizon.

The dream imagery, of Anne's flame of hair floating over her head as she sank into an unnamed sea, superimposed itself on the gray swell of the water before him, and his mind's eye also suddenly saw the shingle beach at Brighton, Anne's body in her bathing suit, and Teddy's mirrored sunglasses.

There was something about the ocean that always got to him if he stopped and let himself feel it. The elemental scent, the rhythm, the heaving, ceaseless movement from edge to edge of the world always seemd to remind him of things. Vast, inexpressible, amorphous things. It was a kind of love, he thought, a wordless yearning for some huge fulfillment or surprise or feeling....He didn't know what it was that his mind leaned toward in those moments, but it was...high, somehow...and wide....

He lifted the book off the cold grate and took it with him to sit in one of the deck chairs under the glare of the floodlight. Eliot's poetry had made him feel like that, too, he remembered now. A couple of times. Once under the spell of Anne's voice reading aloud in a hotel room, quietly evoking all the circling echoes and footfalls of "Little Gidding," and the other time...well, he always came back to earth, didn't he?

He turned through some of the pages, recognizing many familiar lines, and letting that internal ocean swell diminish again in activity and routine literary memory. It was going to be all right, he thought, wondering at the same time why he had been thinking -- feeling? -- that there was something he was missing or forgetting.

The book fell open naturally at "Little Gidding" -- he could almost see Anne's hands holding the pages apart just there -- and he found himself reading words he didn't quite remember.

Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.

He sat motionless for so long then that the floodlights went out above him, and he went on sitting quietly in the dark, with his head against the back of the chair and his finger inside the closed book.

All right.

What had called to him from the ocean, that primordial, unknown thing, wasn't Anne, exactly, but she was like a faint echo of it, a trail of atoms that lingered on the air behind it. It was consciousness, he thought. A momentary awareness of Truth with a capital T. The full perception of reality.

No wonder it was always such a brief pause in the wash and thunder of his mind, and why it kept slipping away like a supple, shining fish before he could quite put his hands on it.

He got up and pulled Anne's diary off the grate and closed the hood of the grill. The sky in front of him had turned lavender, and he looked at it for a while with the book and the diary under his arm. The edge of the sun would break above the horizon soon, and paint a path of light toward the beach.

He had two houses and an exquisite wife. He had a son he could be proud of. He had a successful, interesting business, and now there was the prospect of a much more powerful political career. Some people would kill for what he had.

Yet the only thing he really wanted now, he realized, was to be innocent.