He swung the pistol away from Amity, toward her father, but in the instant that he acted, so did she. The moment the muzzle of the gun was not in line with her, but before her father was at risk, she seized the ankle of the foot on her throat and shoved hard with both hands. Even as Amity reached for Falkirk’s ankle, Daddy stooped to retrieve the pistol he’d put on the floor. Staggering off balance, Falkirk fired one wild shot, and Daddy squeezed off two. Because a girl couldn’t hide from the hardness of the world forever, because she had to grow up sometime, and because Amity was going on twelve, she didn’t look away, but saw the head shot, the chest shot, and knew that what had happened was as terrible as it was right and good.

At the table, Duke raised his head and blinked and surveyed the trashed room. He looked confused and said, “What did I miss?”

Mother said, “The final climax, but not the denouement.”

Amity wanted to ask what that word meant, but she needed a few minutes to get her breath and to become accustomed to still being alive, like the spunky princess in A Dragon in New York.

97

In the blockaded street, where there were enough Suburbans in front of the Pellafino residence to stock a dealership, some of the gathered agents wanted to investigate the reason for all the gunfire in the house. Knowing better than anyone what drove their boss, what his intentions were, what gave him pleasure, and how much he hated underlings who thought for themselves, Louis Wong advised them to wait until Falkirk rang him to order the cleanup of the premises.

A high-pressure system of dry northern air had given them a rare meteorological condition called “severe clear,” a vaulting sky of piercing blue, without the least filigree of clouds. The air was mild, the light inspiring. Those who served by waiting in the street had thermoses of coffee and boxes of doughnuts, and they were just as well paid to stand around shooting the shit as they were when they were in the thick of the action.

98

According to Mom, denouement was French for unknotting and referred to the events following the final climax of the plot, when everything was neatly tied up, or as neatly as could be done without exceeding the patience of the reader.

Thanks to the Ed Harkenbach from Mother’s timeline, who loved her as he might his own child and worked so hard to reunite her with her husband and daughter, their denouement was flat-out amazing. It was really and truly humongously more satisfying than Amity would have believed it could possibly be when she was being swung around the kitchen by the maniac Falkirk.

They couldn’t go back to the bungalow in Amity’s and Daddy’s world, because even though Falkirk was dead there, a lot of other equally vicious creeps would be looking for them. They couldn’t go back to the bungalow in Mother’s world, because Amity and her father were dead in that timeline, and even in this crazy multiverse, the dead did not come back to life.

Ed had found an ideal timeline where neither Daddy nor Mother nor Amity had been born, so there were no other versions of themselves to run into while shopping for groceries.

When working on Everett Highways in his native timeline, Ed had realized that corrupt politicians and bureaucrats were siphoning off several billion dollars from the seventy-six billion in project funding. Surprise, surprise. Unlike the version of Ed who befriended Daddy, this Ed had enough street smarts—and a sense of an impending poopstorm—to line his own pockets with a hundred million, most of which he converted into gold bars, before blowing up the project and destroying all the keys to everything except his own.

Four months earlier, after finding a timeline that was perfect for Michelle, he ported again and again, conveying the gold to that parallel world, converting it into the local currency, establishing himself as an upstanding citizen.

Fabricating a life story and getting ID might have been a butt-busting job, but Edwin was assisted in this new world by yet another version of himself, Edgar Harkenbach. As you might expect, Edgar was a brilliant physicist and highly respected. However, he had been wise enough to realize that, although he could find a way to travel to parallel worlds, doing so would cause endless problems. He restrained himself. Sympathizing with Edwin’s predicament and all, Edgar proclaimed him a long-lost twin who had been sent home from the hospital with the wrong family, the way heirs to the throne in stories sometimes wind up being raised by peasants while the real peasant baby becomes king. With a lot of sly and shifty maneuvering and not a little outright hugger-muggery, they not only established Edwin in a new life, but gave him a daughter named Michelle and fabricated a background and ID for her husband and daughter. All this scheming and subterfuge had been completed before Edwin visited Michelle in her world for dinner on the evening of April twelfth, when he told her about the multiverse and convinced her that elsewhere Jeffy and Amity were alive and waiting for her.

So on that severe-clear day with the bluest sky that anyone could remember, the reunited Coltrane family and Charlie Pellafino ported from his house, where four men lay dead and the kitchen was a disgusting mess, and arrived in another timeline where a life had been prepared for everyone except Duke. More shifty maneuvering and hugger-muggery ensued, and an identity was provided for the big guy as well. Within a week, Frank and Imogene, Daddy’s parents, were likewise relocated.

They all lived in a compound of five lovely houses purchased by Edwin, on a hill overlooking the sea, in a Suavidad Beach that was even prettier and cleaner than the one in which Jeffy and Amity had lived before they ever heard about the multiverse. Snowball was with them, too, because Edwin, being somewhat of a showboater, ported back to the bungalow on Shadow Canyon Lane and extracted the mouse in the dead of night, right under the noses of the shadow state agents still infesting the place.

The first Edwin they ever met, the one who gave Jeffy the key to everything and told him eventually to seal it in a barrel of concrete and sink it in the sea, who had then disappeared forever, had said that his Project Everett Highways had visited 187 parallel worlds. The second Edwin, who had made it his mission to reunite Michelle with her lost family, had checked out 268 worlds, searching for the one in which she might be happiest. He was a different kind of Harkenbach, really and truly.

On the first anniversary of their move to a happier world, the extended family celebrated with an elaborate dinner on the patio at the Coltrane residence. Below them, the storied hills of the town glimmered with magical light, and the starlit sea waited for the moon to rise and play upon its waters. Over the patio were strung Japanese paper lanterns and strings of colored bulbs, and the table was a field of candles in amber-glass cups. The servant robots were efficient, cute, friendly, but not self-aware because artificial intelligence had been outlawed here.

At one point in the festivities, Mother kissed Edwin on his bald head and declared, “You did good, Dad.” She could call him Dad because he had adopted her and, of course, he had been as good to her as her late father had been. His head was still as smooth as an egg because he shaved it every day to avoid confusion about who was Edwin and who was Edgar.

He had for darn sure done good, finding them this world. There were, like, so many instances when history here branched away from history on the world where Amity actually had been born that she would have needed a hundred pages to stuff it all in a denouement. Some of the most important were that no one here ever took the work of Karl Marx or Friedrich Nietzsche or Sigmund Freud seriously. So there had been no Lenin, no Soviet Union, no communism or fascism; and two hundred million people who, elsewhere, had been killed by those regimes, had not been killed here. No one had ever heard of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. World War II was never fought, nor the Korean War nor any of the wars thereafter. In a world of lasting peace, much more money had been available for research into other than weapons systems, so that medicine and technology were greatly advanced over what Amity had known in her native timeline. In the US, equality between all races had been achieved in 1942.

Daddy was especially pleased that, without the interruption of World War II, the Art Deco period remained at a peak into the late 1950s, and from it had grown new schools of art and architecture so exciting that the soulless buildings of the Bauhaus movement and all that emanated from it were never inflicted on the world.

Although her father continued to collect Bakelite radios, he didn’t find the restoration of them fulfilling enough to make that his life’s work. Not after their little adventure. He began writing a fantasy novel.

As the years passed, Jeffrey Coltrane became a well-known name on bestseller lists. Although Michelle Jamison Coltrane chose not to become a performer, she achieved considerable renown as a songwriter in this world that was more disposed to her musical style than had been her native timeline. Duke had no further interest in hotel security; however, his experience investigating gang activities and homicides prepared him to be a tough but fair agent for Jeffrey’s books and Michelle’s songs, which he often played on his piano.