And the Michelle Coltrane who’d been with the physicist had not been the woman who walked out on her family seven years earlier. She also was from elsewhere.

Evidently, the Ed from elsewhere was engaged in matchmaking or was trying to do one small good thing to atone for all the damage he had otherwise inflicted on multiple worlds. Or maybe his motive was something else altogether. Who knew how the hell the old guy’s mind worked? In Falkirk’s estimation, most geniuses were idiots with one special talent, and they made less sense than the people whom they thought less intelligent than themselves.

Regardless of his motivation, the Ed from elsewhere had been scouting out the Coltranes on this world and probably on others.

After being surprised by Falkirk and shooting him, Harkenbach and the bitch ported back where they came from. Most likely, they were shaken by what happened and would be hesitant to come here again anytime soon.

But there was no guarantee. They might already be back in this version of Suavidad Beach, trying to find Coltrane and his daughter.

That was not necessarily a bad thing. It meant that there were now two keys to everything in this timeline, the one possessed by Coltrane and the one used by the Ed from elsewhere.

Falkirk would be satisfied with either key. However, if by some stroke of luck, he wound up with two, with his adversaries dead to the last, all the trouble that he’d been through would be worth it twice over.

As they cruised along Forest Avenue, he placed a call to Lucas Blackridge, his SWAT specialist, and discussed the takedown of the Pellafino house.

77

No one knew how to act, really and truly, because this was a miracle, and miracles left you totally awestruck, gobsmacked. All they could do was hug and touch and be amazed. They knew what to say, but they couldn’t seem to find a way to say it, not at once. There weren’t just seven years to get caught up on; they needed to tell the stories of their lives to one another. Amity and her father maybe knew Michelle better than they knew anyone else in the world, and she maybe knew them better than she knew anyone, yet in a strange way she didn’t know them at all, and they didn’t know her. It was like freaking weird, but in a good way, a wonderful way. They knew what they felt, or at least knew most of what they felt, but the situation was without precedent, so they also had feelings they would need some time to understand.

Then there was death. Mother—this Michelle—had seen them dead, had overseen their burial, had grieved for them until her grief had eventually become a settled sorrow. Now here they were before her, alive again. Or alive still. If it was a miracle, then really and truly, from Mother’s perspective, it must have seemed a little spooky, too.

So while they were trying to figure out what to do and say, and how exactly to feel—other than happy and amazed—they set to work making breakfast, with Ed and Duke, which seemed kind of strange but felt entirely natural. Soon the five of them were sitting around the kitchen table, chowing down right in the middle of a miracle.

In the most secret room of Amity’s heart, of which not even Daddy knew the existence, she’d dwelt with the probability that the mother who walked out on them seven years earlier was dead. Long dead. If two private detectives hadn’t been able to find any trace of that Michelle, then something terrible must have happened to her; she never had a chance to follow her music and all, because soon after she set out on her new life, someone purely evil had taken her and done something horrible to her. Such grisly stories were in the news every week. Faces of the missing showed up on posters and true-crime TV programs. Later, bodies were found discarded like trash. This was that kind of world. In Mother’s case, no body was found. The lack of a body didn’t mean there might still be hope; it only meant that the killer buried the corpse well or was so seriously sick that he kept it in his basement as a memento. This was that kind of world, too, and even a girl of eleven knew about the dark side of human nature and all, so that such scenes evolved in her imagination, though Amity always forced herself not to dwell on them.

At first, as they ate, no one talked about what to do next or about the immediate threat, as if to do so would bring evil down on them the moment they spoke of it. The bad guys couldn’t know where they were. They were safe for now. They needed a breather, a short rest from all the craziness they had been through: just a typical breakfast in an ordinary kitchen, during one hour when life seemed normal. Maybe eating with people who were known to have died and now were alive would never seem entirely normal, but minute by minute, it seemed less bizarre.

78

When Phil Esterhaus returned from his dawn run on the beach, his wife, Ellen, was already off to their daughter’s house to help with the new grandbaby, Willy.

Now Esterhaus was in the shower, and John Falkirk relaxed in an armchair in the master bedroom, waiting for the opinionated chief of police to put in an appearance.

The draperies were drawn at the windows. One nightstand lamp with a pleated amber-silk shade provided minimal and restful light, and the prevalent shadows seemed to be a palliative purple instead of harsh black, as if the light and shadows conspired with the capsules of Vicodin to soothe a wounded man’s troubled mind.

The susurration of falling water was reminiscent of the sound the unborn hear in the womb, the rush of the mother’s blood, which lulls with a sweet promise of eternal safety and peace. A false promise. A damn lie. Not that Falkirk actually remembered what he had heard in the womb. The thought came to him as a consequence of having taken a double dose of the prescription painkiller on top of multiple caffeine tablets, as well as Zantac to deal with the acid produced by the excess of caffeine. He’d had some brandy as well, Esterhaus’s brandy, two shots that he’d mixed with part of a can of Coca-Cola, which he was drinking now as he sat in the wombchair, the armchair, waiting for good old Phil to appear with his hair wet and a towel around his waist and snarky quip on his tongue.

Anyway, Falkirk hated his mother, who died and left him to the mercy of a stepmother so greedy she probably ate money in secrecy. His real mother hadn’t dropped dead in every timeline, but what did that matter if she’d been thoughtless enough to die in this one? Somewhere there were John Falkirks who received their inheritances because there had been no stepmother to steal it from them. The existence of happy versions of himself did not please him. Indeed, he hated those other John Falkirks and would have liked to track them all down and kill them.

As the armchair cushioned him like an amniotic sac, as the shadowy bedroom snugged around him like a uterus, he felt no pain because even a quack of Dr. Nolan Burnside’s caliber could provide useful medication when you threatened to carve up his children.

Correction: He felt no physical pain, but he was in emotional pain for several reasons. The biggest reason was that he had been shot for the first time in his life, and it had been a close thing, and he could have died.

Maybe because of the painkiller and massive amounts of caffeine and the brandy, he was having thoughts he never had before, insights and realizations. Although, in his capacity as a federal agent, he had killed people—always for good reason, always because they were traitors or otherwise dangerous or annoyed him—he had not until now given any thought whatsoever to the possibility of his own death. On some level, he must have realized that he was mortal. However, he never proceeded with his life as if that were the case. Being shot in the thigh had changed everything.

Since childhood, he had known that no one could be trusted, not your mother who would die on you, not your father who would trade a son’s birthright for a hot bitch who would sex him to death, not the family lawyer who would strip you of your birthright for a piece of the fortune settled on your stepmother. Now he understood that he couldn’t even trust other versions of himself in other timelines, those who had received their inheritances when he had not, for if they knew of him and his bitter animosity, they would surely want to kill him before he could kill them. To be perfectly safe, to have a chance to use the key to everything to exploit the knowledge of the multiverse and make himself wealthier and more powerful than any emperor in history, he would have to secure this timeline as his base, rather than split for a better one, and then he would need to murder as many versions of himself as he could find on other worlds.