“Keep reading. Maybe the book tells you.”

“Well, it’s not a book about the key to everything. It doesn’t have diagrams. Ed hadn’t invented the damn thing when he wrote it. This is all about theory. I have to take the theory and extrapolate from it, think how it might be practically applied, and the strain is giving me a migraine.”

After a hesitation, she said, “Are we going to use the key again?”

He frowned. “No. No, no. Too dangerous.”

“But just maybe we will.”

“Never.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Then why do you need to know about the battery?”

“Just in case.”

“In case what?”

“In case . . .” He exhaled as much exasperation as air, and he inhaled resignation. “In case, in some kind of crisis, we have to use it again.”

“What crisis?”

He marked his place in the book with a jacket flap and set the volume aside.

Amity thought he was going to go totally adult on her and deliver a gentle lecture regarding an aspect of life about which he thought she was clueless. Most likely, she would already understand what he strove earnestly to explain to her. She would pretend to be gradually enlightened, until he was proud of her and felt that he had fulfilled his fatherly duty. He was such a good, sweet man that Amity found these sessions endearing rather than frustrating. And of course maybe 20 percent of the time she was clueless, and he did enlighten her, so it was always worth really and truly listening.

This time, however, she misjudged his intention.

After setting the book aside and taking a long pull on his beer, he stared at the key to everything, his brow furrowed, his face drawn with worry.

“What crisis?” Amity repeated.

“One crisis could be John Falkirk. From the National Security Agency. With his helicopters and fleet of Suburbans and armed search teams.”

“He didn’t find anything,” Amity said. “He went away.”

“Yeah, but someone is going to discover Good Boy’s body and call the police. It’s like right out of The Twilight Zone, a chimp-human hybrid in a bizarre uniform. Falkirk didn’t storm into town before first consulting with local authorities, and although they won’t know what this is about, they’ll have been told to call Falkirk if anything unusual happens.”

“Good Boy is kind of unusual,” she conceded.

“And maybe someone saw us running away from that house. Though even if no one saw us, Falkirk’s likely to come back here and seal off the street and interrogate everyone on Shadow Canyon Lane again. He seemed sure Ed Harkenbach would have entrusted his thingumabob to someone here.”

“We can fake him out again.”

“Can we? Not if he takes . . . extreme measures.”

Amity had read enough stories involving evil kings and vermin-infested dungeons to suspect what her father feared. “Torture.”

“They won’t go that far. Maybe some kind of drug cocktail that makes us tell the truth. Or they’ll arrest me and hold me without bail, as a national-security threat or something.”

“We’d be separated?”

He met her eyes and held her stare. “I won’t let that happen.”

Of course he meant what he said, but he was just one man. The government was millions.

Daddy picked up his beer once more.

Amity was of an age when solace was taken from sugar that had not been fermented. She swilled an unladylike quantity of Cherry Coke before she spoke. “You said ‘one crisis could be Falkirk.’ What’s another one?”

He turned the empty bottle in his hand, studying it as if it were an arcane object found among a wizard’s magical instruments, containing the answer to all mysteries. “It’s not a crisis as much as a moral dilemma. And it’s less of a moral dilemma than it is a problem of the heart.”

“Well, I guess I know what it is.”

“I guess you do,” he said.

“You still love her.”

“I always will.”

Amity pushed her empty Coke can aside. “Then let’s go get her.”

His stare was as piercing as it was tender with sympathy. “She wouldn’t be likely to leave her life there, sweetheart. Besides, she’s gone down a dark road. Someone broke her spirit. Maybe that husband of hers. She’s Michelle, but she’s not the same person. She would never understand this world or want to live in it.”

Amity nodded. “Yeah, okay, that’s the way she is in Good Boy’s weird universe. But there’s like a million billion others. More than that. Some of them must be as safe as ours. Lots are probably better places, safer. Somewhere she’s the right Michelle, and she’s alone, and she needs us.”

“We can’t spend our lives looking for the right Michelle. It would be living on wishes, and if we feed ourselves with nothing but wishes, we starve. You lost your mother once. Losing her again and again . . .” He shook his head. “Honey, you’re a strong girl, but nobody could endure a hundred losses like that—or even fifty, or twenty—without being changed for the worse, forever.” He shifted his attention to the key to everything. The sorrow in Daddy’s voice saddened Amity. “I know I couldn’t handle it, sweetheart. Hoping so hard only to have the hope dashed again and again. Anyway, it’s too dangerous. You already saw how dangerous it is.”

“Then why did you mention it?”

“Mention what?”

“The other crisis, moral dilemma, problem of the heart.”

“To help you understand. Now that we might soon be back on Falkirk’s radar, we have to keep the key nearby at all times, in case we’re cornered or in some kind of jam. It’s the ultimate method of escape. But at the same time, I have to be sure you won’t ever take it and use it yourself.”

“Go off to some crazy world on my own? Why would I?”

“To find a version of your mother who will love you and come here to live with us.”

“I wouldn’t.” She bristled a little, even though she knew the bristling was calculated. “I’m not stupid, you know.”

“You’re far from stupid.”

“Besides, I never disobey you about anything important.”

“No, you don’t. And you wouldn’t mean to disobey. But ‘the heart is deceitful above all things.’”

She felt herself on the verge of tears, which made no sense, unless on some deep level, below her conscious awareness, she had hoped to do just what he warned her against—use the key, by herself, to find a mother she was meant to have—and now mourned the loss of that hope. To fend off the grief that threatened her and to defend her image as being mature beyond her years, she repeated his words with a slight note of mockery, though the sound of her voice dismayed her. “‘The heart is deceitful above all things.’ What’s that mean, anyway?”

“The mind and the heart—intellect and emotions, facts and feelings. They’re both important. But to live well, we need to make decisions based on logic and reason modified by emotion. If we’re guided only or even largely by emotion . . . Well, the heart often wants what it doesn’t really need, and sometimes it wants what it shouldn’t have, something with the potential to ruin your life. It wants something so intensely that we find it easy to do what the heart wants even if we know it’s reckless.”

She realized that he had, after all, gone totally adult on her and delivered a gentle lecture. In this case, it concerned something that she’d never thought about, but she knew what he said was true as soon as she heard it.

She also understood that the truth of his advice might not be enough to ensure that she followed it. She could have lived with the emptiness of being without a mother. Once the possibility of finding Michelle became real, however, the emptiness deteriorated into an ache that wanted relief.

Nevertheless, she would try hard to remember that the heart was deceitful. She would make every effort to be smart about the risk associated with the key to everything and respectful of Daddy’s counsel.

When she found herself staring at the device as it lay there on the table, she realized that her father was watching her, that she would promise never to use the key, that he would both believe her and doubt her, that she would be ashamed of the heart’s yearning she couldn’t repress, that he would be aware of her shame and know it was perhaps insufficient to ensure her obedience.

The relationship between a father and daughter was humongously complex, as delicate as it was strong, in some ways as unsettling as it was wonderful.

She could only dimly imagine how complicated, how demanding and fulfilling, would be their relationship when they were not just a family of two, but a family of three, intact.

32