“Ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m a photographer for-”

“You’re early.”

Coltrane exchanged a puzzled look with Jennifer.

“Excuse me, ma’am?” he said to the intercom.

“You’re not supposed to be here until Saturday.”

“Saturday?”

“For our daughter’s wedding.”

“I’m afraid there’s been a misunderstanding.”

“My God, don’t tell me you can’t be here for the wedding!” the woman said.

“I don’t know anything about that. I work for Southern California Magazine and-”

“Magazine? But I don’t want any magazines.”

Jennifer started to giggle.

“Ma’am, I’m not selling magazines. What I want to do is take some photographs of a house across-”

“Photographs of our house? My husband will go insane. He hates anybody knowing anything about our private life. The last movie he produced was about Arab terrorists. He says, if they find out where we live, they’ll blow us up in our sleep.”

Jennifer bent over, trying to stifle her laughter.

“Ma’am, I have no intention of photographing your house. I want to photograph Rudolph Valentino’s house.”

“Rudolph Valentino? You’re not making sense! For all I know, you’re a terrorist. Young man, I can see you from the house. If you don’t leave right now, I’m calling the police!”

“Please, let me explain!”

The intercom had been making a slight buzzing sound. Now it went dead.

When Coltrane turned to Jennifer for moral support, he found her slumped on the curb, holding herself, laughing. “Only nineteen more houses to go,” she managed to say between guffaws. “At this rate, you’ll be done by next summer.”

“Maybe not,” a voice said.

4

JENNIFER STOPPED LAUGHING. They spun toward the gate, where an attractive, delicate-looking woman in her late twenties studied them. She was tall and slim, wearing tan slacks and a brown cardigan. Her arms were crossed. A kerchief covered her hair.

“Are you really from Southern California Magazine?”

Jennifer stood and showed her best winning smile, gesturing toward the logo on her sweatshirt. “Cross my heart.”

“Just a second.” The woman reached through the bars on the gate and pressed the intercom.

The tinny voice responded immediately. “Young man, I told you-”

“Mother, don’t call the police. These people seem all right. I’m going to let them in.”

“But-”

The woman took her finger off the intercom’s button, then pressed numbers on a keypad on the other side of the gate, freeing an electronic lock. “You’re serious about photographing a house across the canyon, Mr…”

“Mitch Coltrane. This is my editor, Jennifer Lane.”

“Diane Laramy.”

They shook hands and stepped through the gate.

“What’s this about Rudolph Valentino?”

Coltrane explained the assignment as they climbed a smooth slanted lawn, stopping with their backs to a lemon tree at the hill’s highest point.

“And there it is.” Jennifer sounded amazed. She showed Packard’s photograph to Diane, then pointed down toward a curving street of houses on an opposite but lower hill. One sprawling red-roofed structure stood slightly apart, perched on an eroded slope, solitary on a dead-end road. Its walls were still white. It still looked like a Spanish monastery. But there the similarity ended. The invasion that Packard’s photograph had predicted made Falcon Lair look besieged.

“I was beginning to think this project couldn’t be done,” Coltrane said.

“Eerie,” Diane said. “Looking at that photograph and then at the house, I feel as if I’m in the past and the present simultaneously.”

“That’s the idea,” Coltrane said.

He and Jennifer crisscrossed the hill, leaning this way and that, all the while comparing their view of Falcon Lair to the perspective in Packard’s photograph, trying to find the exact spot where Packard had set up his camera.

Scraping his back against the lemon tree, Coltrane smiled. “Well, I’ll be… Yes. Right here.”

“Let me see.” Jennifer hurried to Coltrane’s left.

Bemused, Diane joined Coltrane on his right. He raised the photo so that it obscured the view, then lowered it, the Falcon Lair from the 1920s replaced by the Falcon Lair of the present.

“It’s like a weird kind of double exposure,” Diane said. “This lemon tree wouldn’t have been here then.”

“Or the lawn,” Jennifer added. “And obviously not your house.”

“And none of these other houses.” Coltrane continued to raise and lower the photograph, the effect hypnotic.

“So many years ago. Someone stood exactly where I’m standing now and took that picture.”

“He died on Sunday,” Coltrane said.

Diane suddenly shivered.

“Is something wrong?” Coltrane asked.

“No. There’s just a chill in the air.”

But Coltrane couldn’t help wondering if Diane had shivered for another reason. Her delicate features began to trouble him. Her skin was so translucent that he could see the hint of blue veins in her cheeks. Her eyes seemed sunken, possibly because she had lost a lot of weight. Her slacks and cardigan hung on her. Her kerchief covered her head so completely that he didn’t see any of her hair.

“Well…” Coltrane felt awkward. “We’re taking up your time.”

“No problem,” Diane said. “I’m enjoying this.”

“Even so…” Coltrane studied the sky. “The light’s about as good as I can hope for. I’d better get started.”

5

WHEN HE AND JENNIFER WENT BACK TO THE CAR TO GET THE camera, the tripod, and the bags of equipment, Diane insisted on helping, out of breath even though she carried only a small camera bag to the crest of the hill. Coltrane didn’t have time to think about the implications. He had only about two hours of effective light remaining and needed to hurry.

It took almost fifteen minutes to get the heavy camera secured on the tripod. After that, he used a light meter, calculated the necessary shutter speed and aperture setting, chose a lens, poked his head beneath the black cloth at the rear of the camera, used the bellows to adjust the focus, and compared what he saw to Packard’s photograph. Getting everything lined up was more difficult than he had anticipated. After forty-five minutes of concentrating on an upside-down reversed image, he felt light-headed, as if he were upside down.

He made twelve exposures, but he wasn’t satisfied. Framing the image to make its perspective identical to that in Packard’s photograph wasn’t going to produce a brilliant photograph, he realized. The result would merely be a visual trick. He had to build on what Packard had done, to find a metaphor equivalent to the bird of prey hovering over Falcon Lair.

“Mitch?”

Coltrane rubbed the back of his neck.

“Mitch?”

“Huh?” He turned toward Jennifer.

“You haven’t moved in the last ten minutes. Are you all right?”

“Just thinking.”

“You’ve got only forty-five minutes of light,” Jennifer said.

“Forty-five?” Startled, Coltrane checked his watch. He had lost more time then he realized.

Yet again, he poked his head beneath the black cloth at the rear of the camera. Earlier, when he and Jennifer had driven toward the estate, Coltrane had wondered, not seriously, if Packard had been playing a practical joke on him by suggesting this project. Now that idea struck him as being very serious. With one foot in the grave, had Packard been determined to show Coltrane – typical of all would-be Packards – that Coltrane didn’t have a hope of competing with him? Was this project the old man’s way of proving one last time how superior he was?

“Mitch?”

Coltrane noticed slight movement on the focusing screen. He heard a far-off echoing whump-whump-whump and peered up from the camera to search the sky, seeing that the movement was a distant whirling speck: a helicopter. He inserted an eight-by-ten-inch negative and grabbed the shutter release. “Come on,” he whispered tensely. He held his breath as the chopper’s glinting blades crossed the horizon.