The view was as impressive as before, with the flanks of the San Andres rising up behind, and it was a cooler day, with a crisp touch of fall in the air. The driver pulled up in front of the house and yanked back on the parking brake. Corrie thanked him and

got out of the jeep.

“I’ll probably be a while,” she told the soldier.

“No problem, ma’am,” the private said. “I’ll be waiting on the porch.” He climbed the creaky steps, took a seat in a dusty old rocking chair, and opened a magazine he’d kept rolled as tight as a swagger stick, settling in for the long haul. Apparently being her chauffeur was his assigned duty for the day. The magazine, she noticed, was Boating—an odd choice, given the arid landscape that surrounded them.

Her pack was heavy with evidence-collection paraphernalia—most of it probably unnecessary—and she hefted it out of the back of the jeep and slung it over her shoulder. She then did a slow 360 of the Gower Ranch. She’d done her share of practice searches at Hogan’s Alley and elsewhere in Quantico, along with one real search—the archaeological dig site where she’d first met Nora Kelly—but this felt different to her. It might be the loneliness and desolation … but more likely, she thought, it was the strong possibility that she’d find nothing, that this was a waste of time. Despite how hard she’d fought to get here, Morwood’s objections had resonated in her head. Eighty years of abandonment was a long time. Gower had been kicked off the place three years before he died. And in the last eighty years, the house had gone through several incarnations, including bunkhouse for famous scientists, and, finally, an abandoned structure of minor historical interest. Anything of significance had probably been thrown away years ago or crumbled into dust.

In spite of all that, certain facts remained to create in her a lively feeling of suspicion, if not conspiracy. Gower had been lurking in this general area for a reason, caught by chance in the Trinity blast with an extremely valuable cross of gold. Where did he get it? Why was he carrying it? The man who’d found his corpse was now dead, under suspicious circumstances. The FBI had not been able to track down Rivers’s final visitor. There was no MP Bellingame on the roster at Fort Bliss, nor anywhere else in the army, it seemed. Hospital security cameras showed an African American man in a natty MP dress uniform, face obscured by a white MP officer’s cap. What revved up her suspicion even more was that the man seemed to be aware of the placement of the hospital’s security cameras. During his ingress and egress, he could be seen casually turning his head this way or that, or looking down at a clipboard in his hand, in such a way that all they got was a fuzzy image of the lower half of his face. Even Morwood found that significant and had lit a fire under the M.E.’s office to complete the autopsy ASAP—with full tox panels.

Her thoughts returned to the layout of the Gower Ranch and how she would methodize her search. She started with searching the corrals—but there was nothing there, not even historic horseshit. She moved on to the crumbling stone barn, dutifully taking out her FBI-issue camera and shooting a dozen photographs of the outside. Inside, it smelled of dust and hay. There were still some rusting tools hung on a back wall, a stack of crumbling bales of alfalfa, a few empty horse stalls. The floor was dirt, and she kicked at it here and there, finding nothing. Someone had used one of the walls for a dartboard; a couple of darts, so old they had real feathers for fletching, were still rusted into place. But there was nothing of interest.

Time for the house.

She walked over, climbed onto the porch, nodded to the private—at present ogling a twenty-four-foot Boston Whaler—opened the unlocked door, and stepped into the house. As she walked through the foyer into the living room, with the bare kitchen just beyond, she felt an almost overpowering sense of familiarity … and not because she’d been there just two days before. The place reminded her of the old double-wide she’d shared with her mother, growing up in Medicine Creek. There was the same atmosphere of loneliness, of lost hopes and dreams, of the long decline of opportunity, slipping away like sand between one’s fingers. As she stared past the living room into the kitchen, one ugly memory in particular returned to her: sneaking in late one night, hoping to creep past her drunken mother’s room without her hearing—in vain.

You think you can just live here for free, eat here for free, come and go as you please?...You don’t have any skills, what can you possibly be worth?...Don’t you walk away while I’m talking to you—!!

Her mother was out of her life now—probably for good. At least she’d reconnected with her father, Jack. He was living near the Delaware Water Gap, working a steady job. They were still rebuilding their relationship, one brick at a time. But already, that foundation felt solid beneath her feet.

She shook these memories away and examined the old ranch house. Was Gower trying to sneak back in here to get something? Had he been deterred, given it was an active bunkhouse for Trinity workers leading up to the test?

She decided to start in the back rooms and work her way to the front. Stepping into the kitchen, she walked around, opening cabinets and drawers. Most were empty beyond some cheap cutlery, a box of salt, and some rusted mousetraps. The enameled woodstove was empty, the floor beneath it thick with dust. There was no electricity, but she opened the refrigerator anyway: inside was an old bottle of milk, its contents reduced to a scaly film. With effort, she edged the refrigerator away from the wall: more dust. The floor was linoleum, faded and hideously patterned, edges curling up.