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  “It wasn’t Snowball’s fault. He’s not a ratfink. Just curious.”

  “I meant ratfink in an affectionate way.”

  Growling engines on the coast highway drew Amity’s attention. Three enormous, sinister-looking trucks cruised southward, one behind the other. They appeared to be armored, and she first thought they must be army vehicles, except that they were painted black with heavily tinted windows and bore no identifying insignia.

  She put one hand on the back of her father’s neck.

  On the key to everything, he pushed the button labeled Select.

  During an interminable two-second delay, Amity just knew she would never again see Justin Dakota, the boy at the end of the lane who had the potential to be shaped into husband material. Then the screen brightened with the words Enter Timeline Catalog Number and provided a keypad.

  “Just as I figured!” Daddy exclaimed.

  He did not enter a number for a parallel world, but instead pressed Cancel. For an instant Amity feared that in this case the word had a more ominous meaning than usual, that their entire existence would be canceled, as though they had never lived. Earth 1.13 was totally messing with her head. But the keyboard display vanished from the screen, the three buttons reappeared—Home, Return, Select—and she and her father were still alive and whole, as was Snowball, who seemed to curl into a sphere in her pocket, as though he must be gripping the nougat in all four paws as he nibbled on it.

  Being a mouse had its advantages. You were short-lived, yes, and fearfully vulnerable. On the other hand, your tiny brain didn’t grasp how big and strange and dangerous the world was, so you never gave much thought to all the ways you could die and all the things that could be taken from you. For a mouse, the smallest pleasures were sources of great happiness: a peanut, a fluffy kernel of cheese popcorn, a bit of nougat, a warm pocket.

  Having a mother might be like having nougat and a warm pocket. But once you lost her, finding her and getting her to come home again was a far bigger task than anything a mouse had to undertake.

  Daddy rose from the bench with the Book of Ed and the key to everything. He frowned at the sky, at the sea, and then at Amity.

  “Are you sure you really want to do this?” he said, meaning did she want to pay a visit to the house on Bastoncherry Lane.

  “You promised we would.”

  “That’s not what I asked, sweetheart.”

  She didn’t dare look away from him. It was never a brilliant idea to break eye contact with her father when they were discussing something important. Even if there might be a thousand reasons she looked away, he unfailingly identified the right one. And then she couldn’t hide anything from him. Sometimes this seemed really and truly supernatural, but because he never displayed other fantastic talents—like being able to fly or walk through walls—his ability to read her so clearly was evidently just an excellent parenting skill. With his Bakelite radios and Deco posters and love of the past and boyish enthusiasm, he was Jeffy to everyone, but when it mattered the most, he was always a Jeffrey.

  “I want to do it,” she said. “We have to do it. Maybe she’s alone here. Maybe she’s sad or in hideously dire circumstances.”

  “Hideously dire circumstances, huh?” He was reminding her not to be a drama queen.

  “Sure. Why not? I mean, people often are in dire circumstances, not just in movies and books, but like for real. Maybe she needs help. Anyway, you and me—we don’t walk out on people.”

  Instead of Amity breaking eye contact, her father broke it. He lowered his gaze to the right-hand pocket of her jeans, in which she had secreted the three teeth fixed in the fragment of jawbone, as though he could see through denim and knew what horror she had found in the grass.

  She almost showed him the teeth, almost blurted out that this world was weirder and darker even than it seemed, that they had to rescue Michelle from a town where people were shot to pieces in a public park. But then she realized that she had unconsciously thrust her right hand into that pocket. The teeth were clenched tightly in her fist. This was what Daddy had noticed—her arm rigid, the fist bulging in her pocket. And—Merde!—her fist was twitching, bulging and twitching, her own stupid fist betraying her.

  Letting go of the teeth, she withdrew her hand from the pocket. She was careful not to scrub her palm against her jeans because he’d know instantly that she’d been clutching some filthy object that disgusted her.

  To have something to do with the traitorous hand, she pointed at the key to everything. “You sort of know how to use it now. If we get in any kind of trouble, you can flash us home.”

  He turned to gaze at Pacific Coast Highway, at the shops beyond, at the houses rising on the tiered hills.

  Fortunately, no enormous armored trucks, flat black with darkly tinted windows, were passing at the moment.

  Nevertheless, he said, “I don’t like this place.”

  “I don’t, either. Which is why we can’t leave her here, Daddy. Not if maybe . . . if maybe she needs us.”

  He met her eyes again.

  Neither of them looked away from the other.

  “All right,” he said, pocketing the key to everything and plucking the book off the bench, “but let’s be quick about it.”

  18

  Pacific Coast Highway descended from the north, led across the flat center of town, past the park and the public beach, and rose to the south. Block after block was lined with motels and hotels, shops and restaurants and art galleries, because this had long been one of Southern California’s primary vacation destinations. On this day and in this world, however, the dearth of tourists—sidewalks all but deserted—couldn’t be entirely explained by the threat of the storm, and the number of enterprises that had gone out of business meant the economy must be in decline, perhaps in a crisis.

  Jeffy and Amity were nearing the end of the second block south of the park when, ahead and uphill on the far side of the highway, they saw a police car and an unmarked black van in front of Gifford Gallery.

  “I hope nobody robbed Erasmus,” Amity worried.

  “Not likely,” Jeffy said. “Nobody sticks up a gallery.”

  Suavidad Beach was home to many artists, with a thriving creative community of which Erasmus Gifford had long been a driving force. On the ground floor of his gallery, he sold paintings by contemporary artists, including locals whose work he’d nurtured and brought to national attention. On the second floor, he offered originals from classic California painters long deceased, as well as a small and carefully curated collection of original posters primarily from the Nouveau and Deco periods, fine and rare examples of which could sell for eight thousand, ten thousand, and even more.

  From time to time, Jeffy found a poster of such quality that he needed Gifford Gallery’s client base to get the right price for it, and they shared in the profit. Erasmus was honest, industrious, and passionate about his work. He and Jeffy had quickly bonded.

  Now concern for his friend halted Jeffy. As he was about to cross the street to see what was happening, Erasmus came out of the gallery in the custody of two police officers. His hands were cuffed behind his back. His mass of white hair was matted with blood, and his face was streaked with it, as though he had been clubbed.

  Erasmus was built like Pablo Picasso—stocky, broad-shouldered, strong. At sixty he appeared more imposing than most men half his age. In this moment, however, his shoulders were slumped, his head hung low, and he looked defeated, as Jeffy could never have imagined him.

  The shock of seeing Erasmus in this condition reminded Jeffy that the man in police custody was not exactly his friend but an alternate-world version of the man. He found it difficult to credit that anyone as good and reliable as Erasmus might, in another life of different experiences and pressures, have become someone of
lower character than he was on Earth Prime. But of course this might be the case. Nevertheless, he told Amity to stay close, and he took a step toward the curb, intending to cross the highway—until a man in black fatigues and a knitted black cap exited the gallery behind its owner and the two cops.

  “Another one,” Amity whispered, as if even the noise of passing traffic would not mask her voice from those on the far side of the street. “I don’t like these guys, and not just ’cause of the freaky way they dress. They’re like human cockroaches or something, the way they scuttle into sight when you least expect them.”

  This particular human cockroach was more formidable than the specimen who accosted them in the library. About six feet two. Maybe two hundred pounds. He carried a police baton, a modern version of a billy club, which perhaps he had used on Erasmus’s head. His broad, flat face might as well have had the word barbarian stamped on his forehead. Maybe it did, under the hem of the snugly fit knitted cap.

  The policemen didn’t conduct Erasmus into the patrol car. At the direction of the barbarian, who obviously outranked them, they frog-marched Erasmus to the back of the black van. Another human cockroach stepped out of that vehicle and roughly shoved Erasmus into it.

  “Daddy, he’s staring at us,” Amity warned.

  The barbarian with the club stood on the sidewalk, between the patrol car and the van, focusing intently on them as they watched the gallery owner being arrested. Maybe the social norms of this world required citizens to ignore scenes like this or face serious consequences if they couldn’t repress their curiosity. Not one driver among those in the passing traffic slowed to have a better look.

  “Head down,” Jeffy said, “as if there’s something fascinating on the sidewalk. Head down and keep moving to the corner.”

  Although this Erasmus Gifford was not, strictly speaking, the man he knew, Jeffy was embarrassed to turn away from him. With Amity to be concerned about, with mounting evidence that they had landed in an authoritarian or even totalitarian state, discretion was the best course, the only rational response. Yet rationality felt too much like cowardice.

  At the end of the block, they kept moving southward, crossed the intersection, and only then dared to glance back. The patrol car, its flashing lightbar flinging rhythmic redness through the drab day, pulled away from the curb, heading north, downhill, and the van followed it.

  “From now on, stay close by my side,” Jeffy said. “Don’t even think about getting more than an arm’s reach away from me.”

  19

  The birds that for a while braved the forbidding sky now returned once more to nests and roosts.

  The breeze withered away. The low heavens lowered farther. No clouds had ever before looked so heavy, as though they might shed lead pellets instead of rain.

  This residential neighborhood was eerily quiet, no one coming or going, no one attending to any chores, as if many of the houses might be empty.

  Jeffy felt as though he were moving through something thicker than air, the day resisting him like a hundred fathoms of water would resist a deep-sea diver making his way across an ocean floor.

  The house on Bastoncherry Lane wasn’t stucco like many houses in Suavidad Beach, wasn’t in any genre of Spanish architecture or in the craftsman style, or mid-century modern, or faux Tuscan, or of a soft contemporary design. For a Southern California beach town, the residence appeared unique: a two-story white-clapboard home with forest-green shutters flanking the windows, so traditional that it could have been the home of almost any family in any TV sitcom from the 1950s and ’60s. It was a house where you imagined there was much love and laughter, where the family’s few problems were small and resolved in thirty minutes between station breaks.

  The front walk of herringbone-pattern brick led to brick steps and a brick-floored porch added during a remodel, years after the house was built, replacing a concrete walk and stoop. No other brickwork than this could have inspired such intense sentimental memories in Jeffy. In the world from which he’d come—evidently in this world as well—his dad had been the masonry contractor on the job, and Jeffy had worked with him that summer. He’d been sixteen. He had first seen Michelle Jamison while on that project. She was fifteen, and he adored her, although in secret. He was shy, she vivacious. He was enchanted with the world as it had been decades earlier; she cared little for the past, was versed in all the latest music and movies, wrote songs, and had a plan to shape the future to her desires. Nonetheless, in retrospect, he could not justify to himself why he’d taken more than four years to ask her for a date.

  With Amity at his side, he climbed the brick steps and went to the front door and hesitated, heart quickening with the prospect of love reborn, and then he rang the bell.

  Amity took his hand and squeezed it. “Her name’s still Jamison. She never married.”

  “Maybe she didn’t. Maybe she did. We don’t know anything about her life in this world.”

  “I look a little like her. If she sees herself in me, maybe she’ll believe our story, believe there’s a better world than this. Then she’ll come with us.”

  “Don’t wish so hard,” he advised. “Soft wishes are more likely to come true.”

  She let go of his hand and blotted her palms on her jeans.

  The door opened, and Michelle Jamison stood before them, as lovely as ever. The seven years since he’d last seen her had taken more of a toll than Jeffy expected: a new leanness in her features that suggested hardship; fans of small lines at the corners of her eyes; and something in the eyes themselves that hadn’t been there before, perhaps a weary resignation.

  She frowned at Amity, as if in fact a quality in the girl’s countenance affected her. After that fleeting look of puzzlement, when she turned her attention to Jeffy, she evinced no recognition. “Can I help you?”

  For a moment, words failed him. Seven years of yearning, of aching loss and regret were an impediment to speech. He had never forgotten that he loved her, but time had faded his memory of the intensity of that love, which possessed him now as fully as ever before. He wanted to take her in his arms, but he could do no such thing, not in this timeline where they had never made love, never married, never conceived a daughter.

  His voice sounded strange to him when he said, “You won’t remember me. I’m Jeffy Coltrane. I worked with my dad and his crew the summer when we laid the brick for your walkways and porch and back patio. I was sixteen then, eighteen years ago.”

  Shadows pooled in the room behind her, and from them emerged a pale-faced raven-haired boy of about Amity’s age. “Mother?” Standing at Michelle’s side, he didn’t resemble her at all. His posture and expression suggested a treasured sense of superiority; he regarded their visitors with thin-lipped contempt.

  The boy wore brown shoes, khaki pants, and a matching shirt. The breast pocket of the shirt featured the face of a wolf with glaring yellow eyes, and there were epaulets on the shoulders. It appeared to be a uniform.

  “Mother, who’re they?”

  “This man says he did the masonry here a long time ago. He hasn’t told me why he’s come around.”

  “I’m Amity.” A tremor in the girl’s voice revealed turbulent emotion that, to this woman and boy, would sound inappropriate in these circumstances. “I’m Amity,” she repeated, “and all I want to know is—”

  “Amity,” Jeffy cautioned.

  But she was face-to-face with her mother, or seemed to be, and seven years of pent-up longing propelled her to finish: “—are you happy here, is everything all right here?”

  The boy cocked his head. “Is something wrong with you? What’s wrong with you?”

  “Rudy, be nice,” his mother said.

  Another presence loomed out of the shadows behind Michelle, a stranger of about Jeffy’s age.

 
Rudy ignored his mother’s admonition and regarded Amity with suspicion. “You’re old enough to join the Wolves. They even take girls now. Why haven’t you joined?”

  “What wolves?”

  “The Justice Wolves. What other wolves are there? You should’ve joined.”

  The man behind Michelle said, “What’s happening?”

  “Dennis, this is Mr. Coltrane,” Michelle said. “He tells me that he and his father did all the masonry here when Dad remodeled back in the day.”

  “Yeah, I know who he is,” Dennis said. “He’s Frank Coltrane’s son. I know the face.”

  With every exchange, a web was being spun that would ensnare Jeffy if he said the wrong thing. He suspected that he shouldn’t stand silent, should explain himself. “I just . . . I wanted Amity to see some of my father’s work. We shouldn’t have disturbed you. I just thought maybe . . .” He didn’t know how to finish the sentence.

  “Something’s wrong with them,” Rudy declared.

  “You’re like my half brother or something,” Amity told him, perhaps seeking his approval to ensure that of his mother.

  Rudy sneered. “Brother? My name’s Starkman. Yours ain’t.”

  Dennis Starkman said, “Get inside, Michelle. Rudy, you, too.”

  When the woman and boy retreated, Starkman came out of the shadows and onto the threshold, revealing that he was dressed in soft black fatigues and black boots, although not in a knitted cap. He wore a gun belt and carried a pistol on his right hip.

  His round face was shaped for warm smiles and expressions of kindness. Even scowling as now, he didn’t appear to be the work of darkness that he really was.