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.

About The Author

DAVID MORRELL is one of America ’s most popular and critically acclaimed storytellers, with more than fifteen million copies of his novels in print. To give his stories a realistic edge, he has been trained in wilderness survival, hostage negotiation, executive protection, antiterrorist driving, assuming identities, electronic surveillance, and weapons. A former professor of American literature at the University of Iowa, Morrell now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.