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I had died with her.
    I love life, love the beauty of the world, but without Stormy to share it, the world in all its wonder will for me be always incomplete.
    I will never commit suicide, however, or wittingly put myself in a position to be killed, because self-destruction would be the ultimate rejection of the gift of life, an unforgivable ingratitude.
    Because of the years that Stormy and I so enjoyed together, I cherish life. And it is my abiding hope that if I lead the rest of my days in such a way as to honor her, we eventually will be together again.
    Perhaps that is why I so readily agreed to protect Annamaria from enemies
still
unknown to me. With each life I save, I might besparing a person who is, to someone else, as precious as Stormy was to me.
    The dogs rolled their eyes at each other and then looked at me as if embarrassed that I was unable to withstand Annamaria’s stare.
    I found the nerve to meet her eyes again as she said, “The hours ahead may test your will and break your heart.”
    Although this woman inspired in me—and others—the desire to protect her, I sometimes thought that she might be the one offering protection. Petite and waiflike in spite of her third-trimester tummy, perhaps she had crafted an image of vulnerability to evoke sympathy and to bring me to her that she might keep me safely under her wing.
    She said, “Do you feel it rushing toward you, young man, an apocalypse, the apocalypse of Roseland?”
    Pressing the bell hard against my chest, I said, “Yes.”

Five

    If someone in Roseland was in great danger and desperately needed me, as Annamaria had said, perhaps it might be the son of the long-dead woman on the horse, though surely he could not be as young as the spirit imagined that he still was. But if it wasn’t her child, I nevertheless suspected that the endangered person must be somehow related to her. Intuition told me that her murder was the mystery that, if solved, would be the slip string with which I could loosen the knots of all the mysteries in Roseland. If her murderer still lived all these years later, the person who needed me might be his next intended victim.
    The two stables were not as vast or as ornate as the stables at the palace at Versailles, not so fabulously ostentatious as to inspire revolutionary multitudes to cease watching reruns of
Dancing with the Stars
and enthusiastically dismember all the occupants of Roseland, but they weren’t typical board-and-shingle structures, either. The two buff-brick buildings with dark slate roofs featured leaded-glass windows with carved-limestone surrounds, implying that only a better class of horse had been wanted here.
    No stalls opened directly to the outside. At each end of each buildingwas a large bronze door that rolled on recessed tracks into a pocket in the wall. The doors must have weighed two tons each, but they were so expertly balanced, their wheels so well lubricated, that little effort was required to open or to close them.
    Embossed on each door, three stylized Art Deco horses sprinted left to right. Under the horses was the word ROSELAND .
    The waist-high weeds grew shorter as I drew closer to the first stable. They withered away altogether ten feet from the building.
    I might not have perceived the
wrongness
in the scene if I’d been among the weeds instead of on bare earth. But something seemed incongruous, and I halted six feet short of the bronze door.
    Before the call of the not-loon had pierced my first night on this estate, before I’d seen the ghost horse and his comely rider, long before I’d seen the creatures of the yellow sky, Roseland struck me as a place that was and was not what it seemed to be. Grand, yes, but not noble. Luxurious but not comfortable. Elegant but, in its excess, not chaste.
    Every beautiful facade seemed to conceal rot and ruin that I could
almost
see. The estate and its people asserted the normality of Roseland, but in every corner and every encounter, I sensed