“You know what I’m thinking?” he whispered, as if the other Jeffy Coltrane mowing the yard might hear.

“Oh, yeah. I know what you’re thinking,” she assured him.

“Crazy as it sounds, I’m thinking . . .”

“Parallel worlds.”

“Yeah. Parallel worlds.”

“That’s what I knew you were thinking.”

“It can’t be true.”

“But maybe it is.”

A significant number of big-brain physicists, maybe half, believed there were an infinite number of universes, in fact new ones springing into existence all the time. In this multiverse were other Earths—call our planet Earth Prime—where history had taken different turns from the history of our world. Some Earths would be almost identical to Earth Prime except for small things, like maybe no one ever invented hair spray and everyone looked windblown all the time; however, some were sure to be radically different.

One thing you could bet on: The greater the difference between Earth Prime and another Earth, the more dangerous a place it would be for Amity and her father. They had read a few fantasies set in parallel worlds, and the body count among the cast of characters tended to be higher than in those stories about witches and dragons and trolls who lived under bridges.

Like most people, Amity had now and then stood between two parallel mirrors and had seen infinite receding images of herself. Could there really and truly be an endless series of worlds with countless Amity Coltranes?

Stepping away from the window, Daddy stared at the key to everything. He said, “Shit.”

Her father didn’t often resort to such language. Amity wasn’t yet allowed to use that word; it was reserved for grown-ups, so they could sound more mature than children. But she figured that she’d soon be saying shit frequently, because current dire circumstances were going to require her to grow up fast.

“It seems obvious,” Daddy said, “that all we have to do to get back to where we belong is press the button marked HOME.”

“In stories,” Amity said, “you know what happens when the best thing to do seems obvious and so then the good guys do it.”

“They find themselves in even deeper shit.”

“Yeah. And the cast grows smaller.”

Her father’s face had gone ghastly pale under his tan, so that his complexion had turned a disturbing grayish brown. He glanced at the window, at the screen of the device, the window, the screen. “It would help us if we knew more about the guy who invented this damn thing, how he thought, what he might mean by home, select, return.”

“Spooky old Edwin Harkenbach. Google him.”

“Yeah. Google. We will. But maybe we better get out of here before I . . . before the other me finishes mowing the yard and comes inside for a nice glass of iced tea.”

The screen of the key to everything went dark.

“We’ll walk into town,” Daddy said. “We can use the computer at the library to search for Ed.”

The thought of going into this alternate version of Suavidad Beach excited Amity as much as it scared her, not solely or even primarily because it might be intriguingly different, an adventure. If Michelle Jamison still lived here, if she had never met and married Jeffy Coltrane in this world, if she hadn’t married anyone else, and if her dream of being a successful musician had never been fulfilled, she would be like thirty-three, and maybe ready for a change. Perhaps she could fall in love with Daddy and come with them to Suavidad Prime, where she would have a daughter who missed her and wanted to love her. She wouldn’t be the kind of Michelle who would walk out on them. That’s what Amity believed. If you believed hard enough, you could shape the future. Sometimes in the real world as in stories, there were happy endings, even improbable ones.

When the mower engine shut off, Daddy said, “Let’s go.”

Amity tucked Snowball in a pocket of her denim jacket.

In the hallway, he halted at a poster from 1935, a Deco image of the French Line ship Normandie, advertising its transatlantic service from Southampton, England, to New York.

“I sold this years ago,” he said.

“Not in this world,” Amity said.

Their eyes met, and in each other they saw an awareness of the profound strangeness of their situation, which had the effect of doubling their amazement and anxiety.

He hurried toward the front door, and she stayed at his heels, wondering if another Amity lived with her mother somewhere in town, and what would happen if she came face-to-face with that other self.

The thought induced a sharp if transient pain in her heart, as though some wicked voodooist somewhere had stuck a pin in an Amity doll.

Daddy took a lightweight jacket from the foyer closet and pocketed the key to everything.

Out the front door, across the porch, down the steps, onto Shadow Canyon Lane, left toward Oak Hollow Road and Suavidad Beach.

The heavens low and gray and mottled black. The air still and heavy, oppressed by the weight of the pending storm.

Crows wheeled across the sky, dozens of them in constantly shifting configurations that seemed to mean something, if only she had been a witch who could read the ephemeral script of birds in flight.

14

In this version of Suavidad Beach—where perhaps Ed Harkenbach had never been on the run from mysterious government agents and had never been homeless in the canyon and had never visited Jeffy on his front porch—the economy was evidently in a recession. Even for April, with rain-sodden clouds lowering toward release, few tourists were afoot on Forest Avenue or Pacific Coast Highway, where most of the shops and galleries were located. Some storefronts were without tenants, the windows papered over, while in the version of the town from which he and Amity had come, not enough retail space existed to satisfy the demand.

As they passed through town, Jeffy surveyed everything with more suspicion than curiosity, with more anxiety than suspicion.

Quantum physics, on which most technological advances had been based for decades, predicted the existence of an infinite number of parallel universes side by side, each invisible to the others and yet all subtly affecting one another, somehow sharing a destiny so complex and strange as to defy understanding. There might be worlds where the United States had never existed, where no European power settled this continent, perhaps where an Aztec culture of violent gods and slavery and human sacrifice flourished through the centuries, spreading northward.

Clearly, he and Amity were in a world much like the one they had left, but even such a place as this might harbor surprises more ominous than bad weather and an economic recession.

Was this version of America a stable democracy, or might it be teetering on the brink of tyranny? In less than ten minutes, he saw a man, a woman, and then another man dressed all in black fatigue-style garments made of soft pajama-like fabric. Each wore a black, knitted seaman’s cap. This outfit appeared too strange to be just a fashion trend. Although they didn’t travel in a group, they looked like members of a cult, one with fascist tendencies.

He wanted to be out of here. He wanted to be home.

“Stay close,” he advised Amity, and he took her hand, which seemed terribly small and fragile.

The day was cool, but the chills that raked through him had nothing to do with the air temperature.

Overhung by the massive crowns of mature phoenix palms, the library stood on Oleander Street, adjacent to the city hall. The handsome Spanish Revival building featured a roof of dark slate instead of orange barrel tiles. On the ridgeline perched thirteen large crows like the living totems of some clan of malicious wizards that had taken over the library for the storage of their ancient volumes of dark, forbidden knowledge. The birds craned their necks and worked their beaks without a shriek or caw, as if casting silent curses on all who dared enter the building under them.

Inside, the librarian at the main desk was a severe-looking woman with a shock of kinky white hair, vaguely reminiscent of Elsa Lanchester in The Bride of Frankenstein, although less appealing, her eyes squinted and her lips compressed as though she took offense at everything upon which her attention fell. Jeffy had never seen her in the library of his and Amity’s world. The woman didn’t greet them, didn’t seem aware of them. Grimly, she paged through one of the books in a tall stack, scowling as though searching for paper-devouring silverfish. Abruptly she slammed it shut, grunting with satisfaction, as if she found one of the critters and squashed it with pleasure.