“It looks like someone tried to make it appear as if the fire was caused by careless disposal of smoking materials. So we’d find the cigarette butts and stop looking for what really fueled the fire.”

“Which was?”

“Good old-fashioned kerosene.” Tyler gave her a long, somber look.

Arson. Deirdre dropped into the chair opposite his desk. It wasn’t unexpected, but still the certainty of the verdict knocked the air out of her. Someone had set fire to her father’s garage. Someone had killed her father. “Who? Why?”

“Those are questions for the police.”

Deirdre tried to put it together. Cigarette butts stuck into kerosene-laced potting mix that her mother never would have purchased. Whoever did that knew her father was a smoker who stubbed out his cigarettes wherever happened to be convenient. “Could it have been set up in advance?” she asked.

“Probably was. It would be simple. Lace the mix with kerosene. Wait till there’s no one around, sneak in, and put the bag in the garage. Poke a few burning cigarettes into it and let nature take its course. Might have taken a few minutes or a few hours to really get going, but it was a pretty sure bet that eventually it would.”

Only whoever it was had miscalculated. The house might have been empty, but their mother was in the garage’s second-floor office. While Deirdre was pulling the alarm, Gloria must have bolted and then tried to hide the fact that she’d been there. Deirdre never would have known if she hadn’t found the prayer beads.

“So there’s no way it could have been an accident?” Deirdre said. She knew she was grasping at straws.

“An accidental kerosene spill at just the right moment? How likely is that?” Tyler paused. “You can be sure that the insurance company will bring in a professional investigator to see if the fire was set for financial gain.”

Deirdre groaned. “Here we go. They’ll think one of us did it.”

“Maybe. But fire damage doesn’t add value to a property you’re about to sell. So what would you have stood to gain?”

Deirdre thought about it. If the fire wasn’t set for financial gain, then why? Pure malice? Why target just the garage? Unless that was the point, maybe to destroy what was in the garage, including whatever her mother was up there trying to keep Deirdre and Henry from finding.

“Well, thank you for telling me,” Deirdre said. She started to get up.

“Deirdre, there’s more. I found your accident report.” Tyler’s solemn tone and grave expression dropped her back into the chair. She swallowed hard and waited for him to go on.

“The records from 1963 are all on microfiche, so it should have been easy to find. And it would have been . . . if the accident had been in Beverly Hills. But it wasn’t.”

Not in Beverly Hills. That meant that her father hadn’t been driving her home from Joelen’s house. He’d been driving . . . where? Deirdre sat back and took a deep, shuddering breath.

“Once I was sure the report wasn’t in our records, I called a buddy over at the LAPD. They’ve got a huge repository. Good thing there’s not many Austin-Healey convertibles out there to get into traffic accidents. He found it and sent me a copy.” He opened his desk drawer, drew out two grainy faxes, and laid them on the desk in front of Deirdre.

She leaned forward. Across the top in capital letters were the words POLICE INCIDENT REPORT. Below that:

Crash investigator: TROOPER MITCHELL

Vehicle # [1] Year [1957] Make [AUHE] Model [CV]

Deirdre ran her fingers across the letters. This was the footprint she’d been sure she’d never find.

Then she read the next line.

Driver [DEIRDRE UNGER] [F] [15] of [BEVERLY HILLS, CA]

It felt as if the floor had opened up under her and she was in free fall. There had to be some mistake. “This has my name as the driver.” When Tyler just nodded, she said, “But how could that be? I remember riding in the passenger seat. The top was down. I was thrown from the car. It was cold. I . . . I can remember all kinds of details.”

“You thought you were in Beverly Hills.”

“I did . . . and I didn’t. I wanted to believe that, but it never made any sense. Even with a detour in the wrong direction, it just wasn’t right. But this? This is completely insane.”

“I’m sorry. I know it’s not what you expected.”

Deirdre gripped the arm of the chair. She’d driven the car off the road. Not her father. “I’m just trying to understand.”

For a minute, Tyler didn’t say anything, giving her time to absorb the shock. Then he said, “You wanted to know where it happened.” He turned to the second stapled sheet and pointed to a paragraph in the middle of the page.

Deirdre pulled the faxed sheets closer and read.

Narrative: V1 driver was driving east on Mulholland. V1 crashed into a guardrail located at approximately 10536 Mulholland Drive. Driver ejected from the car. Driver transported to Northridge Hospital. The crash remains under investigation and charges are pending.

Deirdre shook her head, and then shook it again. Mulholland Drive? It was at least five miles from the Nichols’ house, and in the opposite direction from home.

Tyler went over to the map on the wall. He stuck a white pushpin at a curve on a road highlighted in yellow, a road that snaked along the crest of the finely drawn, crenellated landscape that was the Santa Monica Mountains. “You’re not the only one who’s wiped out there. There’s a reason they call that spot Suicide Bend.”

Deirdre read aloud the final line of the report. “ ‘The crash remains under investigation and charges are pending.’ What does that mean?”

“You were never charged?”

“I don’t remembering being charged. But I don’t remember driving, either.” Maybe this was what Sy had meant when he said he’d kept her out of trouble then. No charges.

She walked up to the map and stared at the white pushpin. She hadn’t driven that stretch in many years, but she knew it well. After she’d mastered driving in the flats between Santa Monica and Sunset, her father had taken her into the canyons for serious driving lessons. There, she’d learned to start from a dead stop on a steep incline without rolling backward. To take curves, downshifting first, judging how well the road was banked to determine how much to decelerate going in and how fast she could accelerate coming out. Always, always, her father reminded her, stay in control and stay in your goddamned lane.

Driving Mulholland was the ultimate test. In her mind’s eye Deirdre could run the curves and straightaways of the infamous road that was known as “the snake,” catching glimpses of the vast and usually smog-skimmed San Fernando Valley unfurling to the northwest.

With her finger she traced the yellow-highlighted road. She tried to envision the spot, right at a sharp elbow. Was this where her father had always cautioned her to respect the signage and slow the hell down? Where he’d once made her pull over and hike twenty minutes down a steep embankment until they reached a Dodge Dart lying in the scrub, its blue paint nearly rusted away? Nearby, in a dry streambed, a red Porsche had lain on its back, looking like the empty carapace of a stranded beetle. Deirdre had peered into the car through the broken windshield, fully expecting to find a skeleton sitting at the wheel. But the car’s interior had been stripped, filled only with a tangle of vines and what she later realized was poison oak. Surely her father had been trying to convey a lesson about the dire consequences of reckless driving, but what stayed with Deirdre, even now, was the brutal beauty of the landscape and the power of time.

Maybe she’d been going too fast that night. Maybe she’d been blinded by oncoming headlights. Swerved to avoid another driver? Skidded on a gravel spill?

But why had she been there at all, and where on earth had she thought she was going?