another heart ripped out, another body spread-eagle on another road cut, and a secondary wave of panic in the L.A. basin. There wouldn’t be any more, but it was enough.

This time, the killing seemed to trigger suicides, a half-dozen of them. “Panic suicides,” the article in the Times called them. Maybe they’d happened before, in the first wave of killings, the real killings, but it hadn’t been reported.

There was another term they used, official psychologists, to describe what they were afraid of, if reason didn’t prevail.

Suicide contagion.

If reason didn’t prevail. As if reason ever prevails.

Jimmy moved the two of them up to a house at the edge of Angeles Forest, high in the rocks and woods above Altadena. A house with a pool. The owner was a Sailor friend of Angel’s; Jimmy didn’t know him. The owner called it a “cabin,” but it had three bedrooms and was behind gates, though the back of the property was open, open to the woods and the rocks behind it. It was all the way at the end of its own road. The view from the window over the kitchen sink was of Mount Baldy.

It helped. Mary felt better. Safer.

She assumed Jimmy didn’t believe her, didn’t believe that the Cut Killers could still be out there, looking in people’s windows. Or tying up loose ends, whatever it was that they were doing. Killing again. Maybe he did believe her. She didn’t know what he was thinking. She got up each morning and made a big breakfast, the kind of breakfast her mother used to make for her father, eggs and bacon and fresh orange juice and pancakes or waffles. She’d found a waffle iron in the cabinets. (There wasn’t a phone, but there was a waffle iron.) She’d eat everything she’d made. Jimmy had trouble keeping up with her. He’d make the runs down to the store. She would make the lists, apparently having decided to cook her way through every one of her mother’s recipes, as best she could remember them.

He came “home” one day, and she’d painted “Good Day Sunshine . . .” with clear red fingernail polish on the kitchen window.

Without ever deciding to, without ever talking about what should happen next, they stayed in “the cabin” like that for two weeks straight, Mary never leaving the house and grounds, and Jimmy only leaving to make the supply runs. And to make a few calls. There was no TV. What they had for entertainment was each other and a few board games, cards, and a beautiful old tube Zenith stereo with three-foot-high stained cherry speakers and a cabinet full of old LPs.

All day Mary played The White Album over and over.

She came out from the kitchen, the dinner dishes done.

“Honey, I’m home,” she said.

“That’s supposed be my line, Lucy,” Jimmy said.

“I’m more June, June Cleaver.” She crossed to him. He was in a chair, an old man’s recliner, reading. There was a cabinet of Popular Science magazines. From thirty years back.

“I was just reading about the future,” Jimmy said. “We’re all going to have personal helicopters by nineteen eighty.”

“Nineteen eighty! It sounds so futuristic . . . I was seven in 1980. I was born in 1973. When were you born?”

He had made a pitcher of martinis. He had found the glasses and everything behind a little bar, the kind covered in black pleat-and-tuck leatherette. He’d delivered one to her in the kitchen while she was cleaning up. Now she took a sip of his. First, she kissed him. He could smell the gin on her breath.

When were you born?

“I don’t think June and Ward Cleaver were drinkers,” he said, letting her question evaporate.

She plopped down into his lap. “Sure they were. The Beav drove them to it.”

He kissed her.

After a second, she said, “I love you,” and said it in a way that made him think she wasn’t used to saying it. He thought that, even after the voice in his head ridiculed him for it.

“I love you, too,” he said.

“I feel safe,” she said. “I feel safe.”

“Nobody knows we’re here. In the middle of nowhere.”

“It’s like we’re lost,” she said, against his neck. “Or is it saved? Can you be lost and saved at the same time?”

“I’ll ask Angel.”

She jumped up. “Check this out!”

She was like a girl again, more girlish than before. Than when they met. She went over to the stereo on the bookcase. She turned on the amp. The speakers thumped, then buzzed up to