As she, too, had not been born for solitude.

“This is only a demonstration,” Ed said. “This Jeffrey isn’t the one I’ve found for you. He has cancer and expected to have at most a year to live. And there’s no Amity here, as there is elsewhere.”

On the return trip through the house, Ed extinguished the lights behind them. In the dark of the kitchen, he activated his device and pushed a button labeled RETURN.

The rushing whiteness of purest light inspired in Michelle an awe in which were twined apprehension and hope.

Then she and Ed were once more in her kitchen, her house, where she had passed more than two thousand days haunted by the memory of her dead husband and child.

43

As the universe relentlessly expanded, the stars moved ever farther from Earth, until in a distant time after the end of the human era, maybe the night sky would no longer be richly diamonded, but would offer blackness relieved solely by the moon that reflected the light of the only star that would ever matter, the sun in its thermonuclear decline.

Sometimes the vastness of creation filled Jeffy less with a sense of wonder than with reverent dread, for he felt small and doubted his ability to protect his child.

Because it was just beyond the town limits, Shadow Canyon Lane had no streetlamps. Sitting sideways on the cushioned bench of a bay window, his legs stretched out and his back against the niche wall, Jeffy alternately studied the sky and peered down at the moonlit two-lane blacktop. The night was so still that the scene seemed to be a diorama enclosed in glass, and no leaf so much as trembled on the majestic live oaks.

Beside him on the bench lay the only pistol he owned, a double-action 9 mm Smith & Wesson model 5946 with a ten-round magazine, a four-inch barrel, and Novak LoMount Carry sights. A spare magazine nestled in a jacket pocket.

He hoped not to have to use either the gun or Ed Harkenbach’s key to everything that was tucked into another pocket of the jacket.

In retrospect, he should have stopped at the bank on the way home to withdraw a few thousand dollars. He’d kept some money in a cash box, a little over five hundred. That wouldn’t get them far if they had to go on the run or hide out for a while.

He couldn’t believe it had come to this, the world turned upside down. A part of him clung to the hope that all would be well.

His mom and dad lived a few towns up the coast, in Huntington Beach, but he dared not call them for help of any kind. If he was still under suspicion, his folks were likely being monitored.

From the bed, where she lay fully clothed in the dark, Amity said, “You’re sure the extra food and water we left for Snowball will be enough?”

“More than enough, sweetheart.”

“I wish I had him with me. We should go back for him.”

“He’s safer in his cage.”

“It’s not right to leave people behind.”

“We haven’t left him behind forever. We’ll get him later.”

“I love him.”

“I know. And he knows. Now try to sleep.”

“Are you going to sleep?”

“Not if I can stay awake. And I will.”

Shadow Canyon Lane, a dead-end street with only seven houses, was a few minutes from the bustling coast where tourists flocked from spring through autumn, and yet it felt like a country road, shielded from the curious by live oaks, quiet and little trafficked.

The day’s adventures had taken such a toll on Amity that she soon slept, snoring softly.

Hour by hour, the moon sailed across the sky on a westward course, like a luminous galleon. In time it passed below the highest branches of the live oaks, its light snared in the leafy boughs as if it were a magic egg swaddled in a nest, waiting for its mystery to hatch, and the night grew yet darker.

The twelfth of April melted into the thirteenth.

They must have been here much earlier, must have been watching perhaps since well before midnight. They had come on foot and with great stealth, stealing closer through the oak groves to take up sentinel positions. A few minutes before one o’clock in the morning, as choreographed as dancers in a dance, they seemed to materialize out of nothing, shadows rising from shadows, hooded and masked and dressed in black. From the second-story window of Marty and Doris Bonner’s residence, which he’d been caring for while they were on vacation, Jeffy had a clear view of his bungalow, diagonally across the street, when suddenly it was besieged by phantoms. They swarmed the house, coming along the lane from the east and west—and no doubt from Oak Hollow Road to the north—at least twelve of them.

The sole sound he heard was the sudden hard knocking of his heart as he slid off the window seat and got to his feet. He stepped back from the glass, removing himself from what meager moonglow might pass through the panes and paint paleness on his face.

They apparently didn’t break down any doors, but entered his house silently, using some quick-acting lock-defeating technology. He had an alarm system, and it was set; but evidently they defeated it with a radio-wave jammer or some other device, because no siren announced an intruder. Light bloomed in every window simultaneously.

The sudden invasion of the bungalow was conducted so furtively that no neighbors farther along Shadow Canyon Lane seemed to have been awakened. Their lights remained off, their houses quiet.

Jeffy hesitated to disturb Amity. There might be no need to wake her. Falkirk and his strike force would likely believe that father and daughter had fled not only their home but also from Suavidad Beach, because immediately after dinner he had moved his Explorer into the Bonners’ garage.

He hadn’t wanted to leave in the SUV if it wasn’t necessary. In the event that his concern proved to be overblown. Besides, a vehicle registered to him would be quickly found if indeed Falkirk wanted to get his hands on them; they couldn’t drive to any lasting safety, not with their meager resources, not when using credit cards would leave a trail that deep-state agents, with their technology, could follow as easily as rats following the Pied Piper’s music out of Hamelin.

The Bonner house was a just-in-case place, where they could wait and watch and, if necessary, use the key to everything to effectuate the only escape that would foil Falkirk.

44

In Coltrane’s home workshop, where restored Bakelite radios were displayed on shelves, where a Deco poster for a travel agency depicted a streamlined train racing out of a tunnel in the Alps, John Falkirk stripped off his mask and slid his hood back. He warned himself to keep his cool, to remain calm and give no indication that the emptiness of the house concerned him; he couldn’t tolerate his inferiors seeing him frustrated and perhaps being amused by his pique.

The house swarmed with spectral figures, like spirits that had manifested in other than their usual white ectoplasm, haunting every room in search of a clue as to the Coltranes’ current whereabouts. One by one they came to him with nothing to report, nothing but the presence of a mouse frantically spinning its exercise wheel in a cage—and the absence of a vehicle in the garage.

Falkirk was certain that Coltrane had the key to everything and that if only he had been able to assemble his team and move faster, the transport device would now be in his possession.

He went onto the front porch and stood looking at the pair of rocking chairs. One of the vagrants tenting in the wilds farther up the canyon, whom they had arrested and interrogated earlier in the day, reported seeing Harkenbach in one of these rocking chairs, Coltrane in the other, on two or three occasions. Falkirk hadn’t acted on that testimony at once because the same vagrant claimed to have seen four-foot-tall gray-skinned extraterrestrials from another galaxy and, on another occasion, Jesus walking down the sky on a golden staircase. He should have remembered that, like a broken watch, even a drug-addled hobo could be right twice a day.

As his men waited for instructions, Falkirk’s attention was drawn to the shadow of a moth, swelling and shrinking across the floor, and then to the moth itself, which abruptly abandoned its adoration of a porch light and winged out into the night. His gaze took flight with the moth just long enough for him to see the Bonner house on the far side of the street and recall that its owners were on vacation.

45