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Dragan Ilkovic had seemed the epitome of evil, but then Coltrane had encountered Tash Adler, her malignance existing on such an unimaginably primal level that it had shocked away the numbness created by what Ilkovic had done to him. He wept without warning. He couldn’t sleep for fear of nightmares. He needed all his concentration to explain repeatedly to the police and the fire investigators what had happened in his house that night and the events that had led up to it.

When you reach absolute bottom, Coltrane told himself, when you can’t possibly fall any further and deeper, you have to start climbing. In that way, Tash had done him a favor. By setting fire to the house that had once belonged to Rebecca Chance and Randolph Packard, she had destroyed part of a festering past that had taken possession of him.

Similarly, the money with which Coltrane had purchased the house was his only legacy from his hated father, and although Coltrane’s insurance company would reimburse him for the devastation of the property, he had the sense that the money had been cleansed, that the legacy, too, had been destroyed in the fire. He planned to give some of it to Greg’s widow and the rest to various charities. He refused to rebuild the house. He put the lot up for sale.

But there was one other element of the past that he had to deal with, and on a balmy day a month later, he drove to the trailer court in Glendale, where he steered down the lane past the dilapidated playground where his mother had once pushed him in a swing. He knocked on the door of the battered trailer where he and his mother had once lived and where his father had shot his mother and then committed suicide. He knocked several times, but the elderly black woman didn’t answer.

“Mister, she don’t live here no more,” a kid on a beat-up bicycle said.

“Do you know where she moved?”

“She don’t live anywhere. She dead.”

“Ah.” His spirit sank. “And who lives here now?”

“Nobody.”

He bought the trailer, had it towed away, and, without ever stepping into it again, watched as a huge metal press crumpled it, destroying it. He bought the best new trailer he could find, had it towed onto the trailer court, found the poorest family in the area, and arranged for them to live rent-free in the trailer. Then he paid for the old playground to be leveled and a shiny new one to take its place. It gave him tremendous satisfaction. He was cleaning house, he told himself, throwing out the past.

One aspect of the past that he was happy to retain, although he felt oddly distant from it, was the special edition of
Southern California Magazine
in which Randolph Packard’s classic series of photographs of L.A. houses in the twenties and thirties was mirrored by Coltrane’s updates of them, along with the photographs of people and places he had come in contact with during the odyssey of his assignment.

“They’re brilliant,” Jennifer said. “They’re going to give you a whole new direction for your career.”

“I feel as if someone else took them,” Coltrane said. “I’m a different person now.”

“Good. I wouldn’t want you to become too complacent.” Her tone was teasing.

“I know one thing. I’ll never take another photograph that doesn’t make me appreciate being alive and part of the world.”

“Like
this
photograph?”

“Especially.”

The photograph they were looking at showed a wistful, frightened, but determined young woman with wan cheeks, sunken eyes, and a scarf over her head that concealed the baldness that her chemotherapy treatments had caused. The setting sun toward which she peered was a metaphor for the declining days of her life, but the last moments of that setting sun made her face radiant. Her name was Diane Laramy, and Coltrane had taken that photograph on the day he and Jennifer had set out to find the first of the houses that Packard had photographed, Rudolph Valentino’s (who, although he hadn’t known it, had at the time himself been in the sunset of his life).

Coltrane and Jennifer had suspected that Diane was undergoing treatments for cancer, but they hadn’t been certain until Coltrane happened to see his photograph of her in the
Los Angeles Times
. Apparently no one had considered that the photograph might be copyrighted and not available for reproduction without Coltrane’s permission. Under the circumstances, it didn’t matter — because the photograph was on the obituary page. Diane was survived by her parents and her husband, whom she had married two months earlier. Donations could be made to the American Cancer Society. Coltrane did so.

“I remember something we said the day we met her,” Coltrane told Jennifer. They were in the living room of his town house, where he had decided to continue staying.

“What do you mean?”

“We said we admired the way, in the face of death, Diane planned to get married — to grasp at life.”

“Yes.” Jennifer sounded wistful. “To grasp at life.”

“I want to tell you something that I’ve never said to another woman. It’s something I should have told you long ago.”

“I’m not sure I can take being hurt again.”

“I’ve learned a lot in the last couple of weeks. About the difference between fool’s gold and the real thing.”

“I think you should be careful about what you say.”

“I love you.”

“Now listen to yourself.”

“How would you feel about . . .”

“What? A week in Hawaii?”

“No. Getting married.”

“. . . You keep surprising me.”

“Well,
you
wouldn’t surprise me if you said no. I can’t tell you how sorry I am for having been so stupid, for having hurt you. I’d like the chance to try again.”

“Getting married is more than a try,” Jennifer said. “I’ve been there, remember. My ex-husband had his own problems about commitment. Maybe we should just go on as we are for a while and see how things work out.”

“But a commitment is what I want to prove to you I’m making.”

“How do I know I won’t get hurt again?”

“I’d die before I’d ever hurt you again,” Coltrane said.

“If you died, that would be the worst hurt of all.”

“I made a terrible mistake.” Coltrane touched her cheek. “I’m afraid of losing you. I know I can’t change the past. But does that mean we should let it drag us backward? All my life I’ve let the past drag me backward. Can’t we learn from it and move forward?”

They gazed at each other.

“Then we’re the real thing?” Jennifer asked.

In answer, Coltrane put his arms around her.

And their kiss was indeed the real thing.

FICTION

First Blood
(1972)

Testament
(1975)

Last Reveille
(1977)

The Totem
(1979)

Blood Oath
(1982)

The Hundred-Year Christmas
(1983)*

The Brotherhood of the Rose
(1984)

The Fraternity of the Stone
(1985)

The League of Night and Fog
(1987)

The Fifth Profession
(1990)

The Covenant of the Flame
(1991)

Assumed Identity
(1993)

Desperate Measures
(1994)

The Totem (Complete and Unaltered)
(1994)*

Extreme Denial
(1996)

NONFICTION

John Barth: An Introduction
(1976)

Fireflies
(1988)

*Limited edition with illustrations. Donald M. Grant, Publisher, Hampton Falls, New Hampshire.