In the closet, Ryan pressed a hidden switch. A panel slid aside, revealing the eighteen-inch-square steel face of the wall safe.

Using the lighted keypad, he hurriedly entered the lock code. When the liquid-crystal display announced ACCESS, he opened the safe, snatched up the 9-millimeter pistol, closed the door, and stood for a moment thinking, the weapon gripped in both hands, muzzle pointed at the ceiling.

The checked grip felt rough against his palm. The weapon seemed too light for an instrument of mortal consequences.

He did not want to kill anyone, but he had not survived this far to die easily.

Barefoot, in pajamas, he left the closet, crossed the bedroom, and entered the retreat. He flipped up the light switch with one elbow as he crossed the threshold.

The amboina-wood Art Deco desk. Bookshelves. Entertainment center. Small bar with an under-counter refrigerator.

At the door to the first deck, he found the blind deadbolt still engaged from the inside. No one had left by this exit.

Two windows provided a view of the deck. He drew up the pleated shades on the first, then on the second, half expecting a pale and hooded face at the glass, a milky-eyed stare, a wicked grin, whoever had been circling toward him around the black lake. No presence awaited him, and both windows were locked from inside.

Off the retreat lay a windowless half bath. No one in there. His reflection in the mirror, his mouth pressed in a flat grim line, his eyes wild. The gun so huge.

Returning to the bedroom, at the door to the second deck, he found the blind deadbolt engaged. No one had departed by this exit, either.

Three windows, one inoperable. The other two locked. A gust of wind, a shatter of rain against the glass caused his heart to jump.

Nowhere to hide except under the bed. Although no one but an anorexic model could slip under a low-profile king-size job with sideboards, Ryan dropped to his knees anyway and peered into that space, where because of the superb housecleaning he found not even a ball of dust.

The foyer. The main door. Blind deadbolt locked.

Bathroom. A large open space. The marble floor cold under his bare feet. Nothing moved but Ryan’s nervous reflections. A door led to a water closet, another to a walk-in linen storage. No one in either space.

His expansive personal closet had no open shelves, only drawers for folded items. Hanging clothes were behind cabinet doors.

By pushing the suits and shirts aside on the rods, a grown man could have hidden in any of a dozen different compartments. Ryan opened all the doors but confronted no intruder.

To have left the pendant on the pillow after Ryan had locked himself in the suite for the night, someone must have been in there with him. Yet no one remained; and no exit had been opened.

He returned to his bed, holding the pistol at his side, and stood staring at the pendant.

A patter like a pack of scurrying rats in the attic. He looked up. Not rats, rain. On the slate roof, rain.

If anyone had come into the suite from a deck, through a door or a window, they would have dripped on the carpet. Ryan would have felt the moisture under his bare feet.

No one had been here. Someone had been here. Unreason.

As if the pendant were bewitched and to touch it would ensure the transmission of a curse, Ryan hesitated to pick it up. But curiosity kills more than cats.

As it lay on the pillow, the gold heart revealed a single side, softly burnished. In his hand, dangling from the chain, the other side came into view. Two words, engraved: BE MINE.

The pendant was not a locket. He was relieved that it was not a locket. If it had been a locket, it would have contained something that he would not have wanted to see.

BE MINE.

As he wondered at those words, recalling the tiny candy hearts, a memory troubled him: the open wall safe as, in the grip of fear, he had snatched up the pistol.

Belatedly, what Ryan had seen in the safe registered with him. He stood listening to the rain rats and felt Fate gnawing at his bones.

If what he recalled was true, the normalcy of the past year was a trapdoor with a corroded spring, and the coils of the spring just now abruptly cracked and failed.

In denial of the memory, dropping the pendant on the nightstand, clutching the pistol, he returned to the closet, not hurriedly but at a death-row pace.

The sliding panel remained open, the safe revealed. When he slammed the door after grabbing the gun, the lock had automatically engaged. On the status display glowed the word SECURE.

Under the circumstances, that assurance seemed to mock him.

When he entered the lock code in the illuminated keypad, SECURE changed to ACCESS. After a hesitation, he opened the foot-square steel door.

The safe had contained four thousand dollars in cash, to be used in an emergency, two expensive watches, and a pair of diamond links for French cuffs, which he never wore. None of those items had been touched.

Also in the safe had been a small, hinged jewelry-display box containing the $85,000 engagement ring, already sized to Samantha’s hand, that he had not been able to persuade her to accept. The box remained, and when Ryan opened it, the ring sparkled.

The previous night, he had also stowed the candy hearts in this safe. The ribbon-tied cellophane bag and all that it contained were gone.

This he had seen but not registered when, minutes before, he had been frantic to retrieve the pistol.

What he had not noticed earlier, but now discovered, was that the box of 9-mm cartridges had also been taken. He did not need to sort through the contents of the small compartment. The box could not be buried under the other items: They were follies and small; the box was full of mortality, big and heavy.

Ryan could not at first understand why an intruder, finding the safe, would take the bullets but not the delivery system, leaving him with ten rounds for defense.

Yes. Well. Of course.

He ejected the magazine from the pistol. The ten cartridges had been removed from it, as well.

Believing as he did in the necessity of action, Ryan had plunged into a search for an intruder, racing from room to room, tearing open doors, armed with a useless weapon, discovering no one to shoot, but now he had been pride-shot and humiliated by the metaphoric bullet of his adversary’s mockery.

A seven-digit access number opened the safe’s programming to Ryan. He deleted his former lock combination and entered a new one based on a date important to him but meaningless to anyone else.

He suspected this was wasted effort. He alone had possessed the previous code, but someone had violated the safe anyway.

To open the panel that concealed the safe, he had used a hidden switch incorporated into the rheostat that controlled the closet lighting.

Although the trim plate that covered the junction box appeared to be fixed to the wall with two screws, they were only screw heads. They had no function except deception.

The control stick slid up for brighter, down for dimmer. When the stick was all the way at the top of the slot, you could press up on the trim plate, moving it one click at a time on the hidden track to which it was attached. The combination that caused the panel to slide open, revealing the safe, was three clicks up, two clicks back, and two clicks up.

The pressure required to move the trim plate was sufficient that this secret function could not be accidentally discovered by a maid cleaning the closet.

A local alarm company, vetted and recommended by Wilson Mott, had installed both this small safe and a concealed walk-in model on the ground floor. They were bonded, with a long history of reliable service, and Ryan doubted that one of their employees was tormenting him.