That was something Jeffy told her when one day it seemed to Michelle that her music career had been stillborn long before she realized it wasn’t breathing. That had been nine years earlier, when he and Amity still had two years to live before they would be taken out by a drunk in an Escalade. She’d mocked his optimism by calling him Pollyanna’s more cheerful brother, and by noting that during the day, the world turned inexorably toward darkness.

She wanted to believe—she did believe—that in spite of such moments of contention, she was different enough from the other self-absorbed version of herself that she would never have walked out on them in this world, had they lived. In this timeline as in that one, she was more ambitious than Jeffy; or she’d thought so until, during the years after the loss of him and Amity, she came to understand that he was no less ambitious than she, that their dreams were just not of the same variety. She strove for fame and wealth, certain they would bring happiness. Jeffy strove for happiness directly and found it in whatever the world brought him to his liking—Bakelite radios, Art Deco posters, fantasy novels, a wife, a child.

Now as the sky brimmed with color, as the world began again its long turn toward another night, she was filled with the wonder of a multiverse in which every time someone went off the rails to ruin, there was a reality in which she remained on the tracks. Tragedy was not the end of hope, but the birthing ground of a new hope, and you didn’t have to be Pollyanna’s more cheerful sister to grasp that truth and be inspired by it.

“We have to help them,” she declared, thrusting up from the rocking chair.

“Help whom,” Ed asked, pretending ignorance but smiling slyly.

“They can’t live in that world anymore, not when the

government—the shadow state—will be hunting them forever. We have to find them and bring them back here.”

Ed got to his feet. “That’s not exactly what I had in mind.”

“What did you have in mind, Mr. Einstein without the big white mustache?”

“Well,” he said, “it’s moot if we can’t rescue them from that world. First things first.”

“Let’s go, then.” She grabbed him by the arm. “Take us back there. Take us now.”

“Patience, dear. Falkirk is dead in that world, but the agents with him on the operation are alive and spoiling for a fight. We need to take a few minutes to modify our appearance. Then we don’t dare port from this bungalow to that one and right into their arms. You’ll drive us into town, we’ll port from someplace there and see what we can find, what we can do.”

“But if Falkirk and all his men can’t find them in that world, how can we?”

“I don’t know yet,” he said as he opened her front door and motioned her inside, “but trust in the Ed factor.”

“What’s the Ed factor?”

“Things tend to happen around me.”

70

After Duke Pellafino’s shift ended, his subordinate, Andy Taylor, took over the hotel’s morning security operations, which included finding the vagrant who had invaded the hotel and spray-painted some hallway cameras and then apparently squirreled himself away somewhere.

Alone in his basement office, before leaving for the day, Duke picked up the phone and called Phil Esterhaus, chief of the Suavidad Beach Police Department. Phil was a current cop whose nickname was “Clint” because he resembled Eastwood from the Dirty Harry films, and Duke was a former cop. They both liked dogs, baseball, and jazz, so their friendship had been pretty much inevitable. Phil rose early to go for a long run shortly after first light every morning, and Duke often joined him.

“I just tied on my running shoes,” Phil said. “Meet you on the beach?”

“Not this morning, amigo. I’ve got a tough question for you that maybe you can’t answer.”

“Hey, I’m so good at tough questions I could win a fortune on Jeopardy. Hit me with it.”

“The thing is, maybe you can’t answer it for jurisdictional reasons or maybe an unofficial gag order.”

“Try me anyway.”

“There’s a fed in town named John Falkirk.”

“That egg-sucking snake.”

“So you’re not enjoined from talking about him.”

“I wouldn’t care if I was, that arrogant piece of shit.”

“Listen, I don’t want to get you in trouble.”

“What’re they going to do to me—undercut me when the president nominates me for attorney general? Hell, I’m a small-town cop, all I want to be is a small-town cop, and I’ll be reelected until I’m senile because the people here love me.”

“And why shouldn’t they?”

“Exactly. I’m adorable.”

Duke said, “Falkirk is in town with a team.”

“Twenty other domestic black-op assholes with a collective IQ of eighty, National Security Agency credentials, but if they’re the best the NSA has to offer, even Belgium could take us in like a one-week war. Twenty! Plus choppers and drones and military ordnance out the ass.”

“They’re after a guy named Harkenbach.”

“What—are these goons staying at your hotel and bragging at the bar each night?”

“I have my sources. I’ll tell you later. I don’t want to hold you up from your Chariots of Fire moment on the beach.”

“This Harkenbach guy is some kind of rogue scientist.”

“There can be such a thing as a rogue scientist?” Duke asked.

“Falkirk says Harkenbach sold national security secrets to a foreign power. But that sleazeball lies even when he doesn’t say anything.”

“You think Harkenbach is really in town?”

“Maybe not now. But seems he was hiding out, doing a hobo thing at the deep end of Shadow Canyon. Falkirk and his clown posse are running some kind of operation up there—we don’t know what. We’re told to stay out, so we stay out, because after all we’re just one step up from mall cops and we have great respect for our brothers and sisters in all the fabulous bureaus of federal law enforcement.”

“You are damn confident of reelection.”

“Ellen and I are grooming Phil Junior to run for mayor on the illustrious Esterhaus name like thirty years from now. So tell me, why’re you interested in Falkirk and Harkenbach?”

“I have some friends who’ve gotten caught up in this through no fault of their own. They live on Shadow Canyon Lane, and Falkirk has some stupid idea that they befriended this Harkenbach.”

“Is there something I can do?”

“Maybe, maybe not, I’m thinking about it. Listen, let’s you, Ellen, and me have dinner tomorrow night. We’ll discuss it then.”

“Who’s paying?”

“Do you ever pay?”

“Neither do you when it’s at the hotel.”

“Every job has its perks. You get to wear that cool trooper hat,” Duke said, and he hung up.

71

At Ed’s direction, Michelle quickly hacked off his glorious white mane with scissors and shaved the stubble with her electric razor until his noggin was as smooth as her legs. Strangely, his bald head seemed half again as large as when he’d had hair, so he resembled a 1950s sci-fi movie’s idea of what an evolved human being of immense intelligence would look like if he traveled back in time from ten thousand years in the future.

He took off his bow tie and adjusted his shirt collar. “There. My own mother wouldn’t recognize me.”

“Well, I guess if she was blind,” Michelle said.

“Trust me, during my time as a fugitive, I’ve learned that the best disguises require not an entire makeover but merely one or two strategic changes.”

Ed oversaw Michelle’s makeover by having her tie her hair in a ponytail and wear a baseball cap. He also insisted that she change out of her pullover sweater into a baggier blue sweatshirt that had belonged to Jeffy. She’d saved it all these years because she had given it to him as a birthday gift and he’d especially liked the words imprinted on the chest—FRODO LIVES! The sleeves extended past her fingertips, and even after she rolled them up, she looked like a lost waif searching for her mom, rather than a woman in search of her lost daughter.

“My own mother wouldn’t recognize you,” Ed declared.

“Your mother never knew me.”

“Exactly.”

With Ed in the front passenger seat, whistling a tune that he identified as from Mozart’s concerto K. 453, Michelle drove her Ford Explorer into town and slotted it in an automated two-story parking structure a block off Pacific Coast Highway. She fed a few dollar bills into the permit machine and placed the printout prominently on the dashboard. If when they ported back to this timeline they needed to make a quick getaway, she didn’t want to discover that her SUV had been towed.

In an alleyway alongside the building, Ed dared to take the key to everything from his coat and activate it. This early in the day, when most people would not head to work for another hour or two and when tourists were still sleeping off the previous night’s excesses, the chance was slim that someone would happen on them in the instant when they vanished from this sad timeline where Jeffy and Amity had died seven years ago.

The onshore flow was scented with cinnamon and warm pastry dough from a bakery just opening for the day. The breeze chased scraps of litter along the alley and rolled before it a ball of red yarn. Such was Michelle’s state of mind that the unraveling scarlet filament, so vivid against the blacktop, seemed to be an ominous symbol, a thin spill of blood or a lit fuse burning toward her.