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cluster of restaurants and other office buildings.   Five or ten minutes into the meeting, I noticed from my seat a man on the boardwalk peering in at us.
    He stood alone, leaning a bit against the railing that faced the water.   He was tall and stood out sharply, dressed, not in a business suit, or touristy apparel, but in denim overalls, his thumbs hooked beneath the shoulder straps.   His cotton shirt was checkered red and white, and his black cowboy hat was mashed on top, comically misshapen.
    He’s a farmer , I guessed.   But why is he here?   And why is he staring in at us?   And so intently ?
    I was about to point him out to the others when I sensed something familiar about him—though it wasn’t the farmer's face, half hidden by hat shade.
    Suddenly, I put it all together: the man’s build, his clothes, his hat—Especially that hat!—even his stance.   I’d seen it all before, in an old photograph of my father.   Of which there weren’t many.   For my father had disappeared decades earlier.
    I found myself rising from my seat and rapidly circling our horseshoe-shaped conference table, the group discussion wading by my ears without meaning.   I was consumed with chasing a ghost.
    I raced outside to the boardwalk.   The ghost fled, in a most conventional way, on foot, at a brisk walk, but I aimed to chase it down.   I aimed to until I heard a familiar voice barking at me from somewhere nearby, calling my name over and over again.
    My eyes located Henry Mercer, the vice president of my firm, standing at a newly opened window inside our conference room.   The others in the staff meeting were on their feet too, pressed to the glass, staring at me in wonder.
     
     
     
     
    Chapter 6
     
     
     
     
    For a long time, I just stood there, frozen on the boardwalk, with a dozen pairs of eyes gawking at me through the window, with the farmer—or ghost of my father—receding, receding.   I felt foolish.   I began to wonder how to explain my odd behavior once back inside.   And the moment began to feel much too like the first throes of my first psychosis, twenty-two years earlier, in the days before I’d stopped bothering to explain my odd behavior to others, before I’d stopped believing my odd behavior odd.
    I went back inside the building and told my employees that I’d seen the farmer groping a female passerby and that I’d raced outside to run him off.   I told myself a different falsehood—as it soon turned out—that a poor night’s sleep, mixed with anxiety over the attempted murder of one of my clients, had temporarily thrown my judgement out the window, so to speak.
    I did briefly consider phoning my psychiatrist, Doctor Shields.   And if I had, perhaps the worst of my story would never have happened.   But my recently rescheduled appointment with him was for the very next day anyway, so I simply went about my business . . .
    Jeremy Crane lived within a short commute of Helms Technology in Reston , Virginia .   I’d lived in Reston myself years earlier, back when I was still new to the Secret Service.   During winters, I’d often take my dates—including my first two wives—to an outdoor skating rink in the center of town, then thaw out in a cozy bar overlooking the ice.
    Minutes before sunset, I turned onto Jeremy’s cul-de-sac, locating his post-modern brick colonial by the presence of a Reston police cruiser parked in the driveway.   The pony-tailed cop sitting inside, idling her engine for air-conditioning, hopped out to greet me once I pulled to a stop behind her.
    “Nice wheels,” she said, shaking hands.   Her name—I had to look it up—was Pam Huntington, and she turned out to be a gear head and spent ten minutes admiring my Beemer.   I even had to pop the hood for her.   Meanwhile, it was muggy enough outside to make a flagpole go limp.   She whistled when I told her the sticker price and then said, “Okay, let’s break into the house.”
    At the front door,