“I don’t look guilty,” she objected.

“You look something. Okay, we’ll walk directly to the front door. Don’t hurry. Act relaxed. Be casual.”

“Can I whistle a tune?”

“Is that a joke?”

“I thought so.”

“It’s not a time for jokes.”

Together they moved toward the end of the aisle.

They halted when the man in black garb rounded the corner and blocked their way. He had an unfortunate porcine face and eyes that glittered with menace in the shadows of deep sockets. As he boldly regarded them, the nostrils of his fleshy nose flared as if he were on a truffle hunt.

“You find what you were looking for?” he asked, not in the helpful way of a library employee, but with sharp suspicion.

“Yes, sir, thank you,” Jeffy said brightly. “My daughter has this school project, she’s got to make a motorized model of the solar system, and we didn’t know which planets might have more than one moon or no moons at all. Now we know.”

The stranger appeared simultaneously ridiculous and threatening in his faux Ninja outfit. However, his manner and voice suggested that he possessed authority and was accustomed to being treated with respect. “The solar system, is it? Just how old are you, girl?”

Belatedly, Jeffy realized that building a motorized model of the solar system was too ambitious a project for a sixth grader, but Amity was quick to patch the hole in his story.

“I’m almost fourteen,” she lied. “So I’m kind of a runt, but I’m not always gonna be. I’m gonna have a growth spurt and be five feet eight, maybe five nine, and no one will tease me anymore, which will sure be, you know, great. Daddy can make the planets and moons rotate and revolve, and that’ll make me seem totally cool.”

Jeffy was pleased by how quick-witted Amity was, but at the same time, he was unsettled by the alacrity with which she lied and the convincing innocence with which she did it.

Proving himself a cynic, the guy in black said, “You think it’s cold in here? Why is your jacket buttoned to the neck? It’s not cold in here. You hiding something in your jacket, girl?”

Amity turned half away from the man and quickly undid only the top two buttons and produced Snowball from an exterior pocket while making it appear that he’d been inside her jacket. “Snowball is a good mouse. He goes everywhere with me, and he’s never a problem, never runs away. He’d never ever poop on a book or anything bad like that. I’m real sorry. I made a mistake bringing him here.”

The security man—or whatever he was—scowled. “That’s no right kind of pet.” He regarded Jeffy with contempt out of proportion to any perceived offense. “What kind of parent allows his child to keep a filthy rodent like that?”

In the California from which Jeffy and Amity had come, this kind of dressing-down from a man who looked like a background extra in a cheesy kung fu movie would have elicited a withering response. In this alternate state, however, such a man was a mystery that required caution.

“Yes, sir. You’re right, of course. I guess I indulge her too much. I’ve been guilty of that ever since her mom . . . since her mom passed away.”

Although he seemed to assume that he was privileged, although he was officious and rude in the manner of a petty bureaucrat, this costumed Gestapo wannabe still had a spoonful of the milk of human kindness. His expression softened slightly at the mention of a family tragedy. His stare shifted from Jeffy to Amity to Jeffy again. “All right, maybe you don’t need to take a parenting course. But get out of here with that dirty rodent. Buy the girl an approved animal, something that honors the genius of the state.”

“I will,” Jeffy assured him, though he had no idea what the guy meant. “Thanks for your understanding.”

Without looking back at their interrogator, he and Amity made their way out of the maze of stacks. As they crossed the receiving area toward the entrance, he saw the librarian with the shock of white hair. She moved briskly, pushing a cart bearing the books she’d earlier been inspecting. As she passed through an archway, out of sight, Jeffy again detected the smell of smoke. Although the odor was faint, he thought it was the scent of paper burning.

A shiver descended his spine as he opened the front door and as he and Amity stepped outside into a world not theirs.

16

Amity hoped maybe the storm wouldn’t spill out into the day. The swollen heavens promised rain, but hour by hour the promise wasn’t kept. In fact, the birds that had gone to shelter in anticipation of the downpour had again taken to the sky. Bright against the soiled clouds, white gulls looped high and then cried down the day. Having returned from their nests in whatever lagoons, brown pelicans glided effortlessly in formation, eternally silent, while shrieking crows darted from tree to tree, repeatedly exploding into flight as if invisible predators swarmed after them.

Amity and her father couldn’t take Ed Harkenbach’s book home to study it in their house on Shadow Canyon Lane, because in this crazy world, the house belonged to another Coltrane who might not be as kind as the father she loved. She didn’t think that any version of her dad could be outright evil; across even thousands and thousands of worlds, surely no Jeffy Coltrane was a killer like Hannibal Lecter, but maybe a few of them were humongously annoying. Anyway, she and her father didn’t know what, if anything, would happen when two Jeffys came face-to-face in a world that was meant to have only one. Most likely, neither of them would explode or otherwise cease to exist, though such a disaster couldn’t be ruled out.

Daddy wanted to go to a back booth in Harbison’s Diner and study the book over lunch. But in this world, the restaurant was called Steptoe’s Diner, and it didn’t look as clean as Harbison’s. This difference inspired Daddy to wonder if the cash in his wallet would pass for currency in this United States, or if maybe it would be so different from local money that the cashier would reject it and cause a scene.

Counting on the storm clouds to carry the rain miles farther south before spending it, they went to the seaside park at the center of town and settled on one of the benches on the grassy area that overlooked the white sand beach.

Taking its color from the sky, the ocean now appeared to be a lifeless swamp of ashes, as though all the cities and towns along its shores—except for this one—had burned down and shed their remains into the water. Low gray surf, like a soup of ruination, washed upon the beach, and with it came the faint iodine smell of rotting seaweed.

The choppy waves were too tame for surfers, and the threat of the storm left the strand deserted. The traffic on Pacific Coast Highway, a hundred yards behind them, was markedly less than it would have been in their world, as if people here either chose not to travel much or were somehow discouraged from doing so. Amity wasn’t car crazy, but it seemed to her that there were fewer makes and models than in her Suavidad Beach, and all appeared to be gray or brown or black. In spite of the saturated sky and the rolling ocean, the dismal day felt barren, arid—drained of color and energy.

Keeping one eye out for birds, she removed Snowball from her jacket pocket and put him on the ground, where he promptly toileted. The mouse then began exploring the territory around her feet, which was when she first noticed the shell casings scattered through the grass, dully gleaming cylinders, as if the park had recently been the scene of a gunfight.

The concrete bench was hard, but Harkenbach’s book was harder. Although he was supposed to be a genius, old Ed didn’t seem able to compose a short sentence without hundred-dollar words, so he might as well have been writing in Martian. Daddy slowly skimmed through the volume, reading passages aloud, most of which made no sense to Amity; only one seemed as though it might be helpful to them.

Spooky old, sad old Ed, homeless genius on the run, suggested that if a parallel world—which he also referred to as an “alternate timeline”—could be visited, its location could then be cataloged. So people traveling sideways through the infinite multiverse could return to a specific alternate timeline instead of always being flung across the spectrum of worlds willy-nilly, like tumbling dice.

According to Daddy, that explained the readout on the data bar at the bottom of the screen on the key to everything: ELSEWHERE 1.13—CATALOGED. “If we think of our world as Earth Prime, then all the other worlds, other timelines, they’re ‘Elsewhere.’ Doesn’t that make sense? I think it makes sense.”

In spite of their less than ideal situation, he was overcome with a boyish enthusiasm. He liked to learn things. He enjoyed mysteries and puzzles of all kinds, and solving them.