The Straw Men

Palmerston is not a big town, nor one that can convincingly be said to be at the top of its game. It's just there, like a mark on the sidewalk. Like all towns, it has a past and once had a future, but in this case that future turned out to involve little but getting dustier and more sedate, nudged ever further from the through lines of history: a stiff old faucet at the end of an increasingly rusty pipe, that someday is going to leak so badly that no water makes it to the end at all.

The town sits on the Allegheny River, in the shade of muscular hills, and has more trees than you could shake a stick at unless you had a lot of time and were unusually demented. The railroad used to pass close by, just the other side of the river, but in the mid 70s the station was closed and most of the track lifted up. Little remains of it now apart from the memory and a half-hearted museum, which not even the schoolkids visit much any more. Every now and then a few tourists will wander in, peer with bemused indifference at grim photographs of the long-dead, and then elect to get back in the car and make time. Though it's been thirty years, long-term residents (and in Palmerston, they're all long-term, and vaguely proud of it) still feel the absence of the railroad, like an amputated limb that itches from time to time. For some there were petitions and town meetings, bumper stickers and fundraisers; for others the change came quietly, numbly accepted as part of history's entropic progress in some other direction. Were the town a little bigger and more boisterous, the overgrown track might make a good place to buy drugs or get mugged. In Palmerston it's used mainly by earnest parents to trek children down at weekends, for pointing at birds and trees; and equally earnestly, a few years down the line, for those same kids to get each other pregnant in order to exchange one style of confinement for another.

The town is built around a T junction, the shape of the letter obscured by side streets that seem unsure of their purpose. The upright is littered with gas stations, a car wash, a video store, two small motels and a minimart with a rack of cheap CDs of the Marshall Tucker Band's Greatest Hits. An old wooden church stands at the intersection with the cross stroke, paint peeling now, but still picturesque against a cold blue sky. The right fork takes you up into the hills towards New York State and the Great Lakes.

If you take a left, as you would if you were heading west on Route 6 to go look at the Allegheny reservoir — and. that's pretty much the only reason that you'd be passing through — you get onto Main Street. Here you find a few banks and stores, the windows of the former mirrored and anonymous; those of the latter in need of cleaning, and framing antiques of limited worth. Something about the desultory arrangement of the displays suggests that the objects will have plenty more time to accrue value in situ. There are two small movie houses, one of which tried to show art movies ten years ago and was rewarded by attendances so low that it closed in a fit of pique and never reopened; the other still steadfastly toeing the party line of popular culture, hawking unrealizable dreams to popcorn junkies. On the southern side of the street, in a large plot all by itself, sits a beautiful Victorian house. It has lain empty for some years, and though most of the windows are intact, it's peeling a good deal worse than the church and some of the boards are beginning to slip.

If you're hungry, chances are you'll find yourself in the McDonald's a little further up the street, just along from the Railway Museum. Most people do. Palmerston isn't a bad place. It's peaceful, and the people are friendly. It's a pleasant part of the world, low on crime and close by the Susquehannock State Forest. You could be born, raise kids, and die there, without feeling you'd been especially short-changed by fate.

There just isn't much to do in between.

At lunchtime on Wednesday, 30th October 1991, the McD's was crowded. Most of the tables were already occupied, and four lines straggled out from the counter. Two little girls, four and six years old and out for a treat with their mother, clamoured vehemently for Chicken McNuggets. Everyone else gazed at the menu boards with the reverence they deserved.

There were three non-locals present, a red-letter day for Palmerston's tourist industry. One was a middle-aged man wearing a suit, sitting by himself at a table in the corner. His name was Pete Harris, and he was driving back to Chicago after a long sales trip that had been largely disappointing. The Victorian house's Italianate tower was just visible from his seat and he was considering the house as he chewed, finding it astounding that no one had bothered to reclaim the property and fix it up.

The other two were a couple of English tourists, by coincidence sitting at the next table. Mark and Suzy Campbell had skipped breakfast to do a couple hundred miles in the morning and were more than ready for some food. They'd been hoping for a picturesque diner, but after a slow trawl through town they'd settled on the burger den by default. Munching their sandwiches in a defensive huddle, they were at first alarmed and then mildly pleased to find that they had sat next to a local who talked. His name was Trent, and he was tall, in his forties, and had a good deal of copper-coloured hair. On hearing that they were a few days into a coast-to-coast drive, he nodded with distant approval — as if being told of a practice he could understand but had no desire to undertake himself, like collecting matchbooks, or rockclimbing, or having a job. He was familiar with England as a concept, and gathered that it had a whole lot of history and a thriving rock music industry, both of which he was in favour of.

In the end the conversation petered out, running aground in the shallows of shared experience. Suzy was a little disappointed, having enjoyed the encounter. Mark was preoccupied, wanting to do some shopping. In the hotel they'd stayed at the night before, the bartender had spent some time trawling the radio waves in search of something to play very loudly. He'd accidentally wandered across a classical station, and for a brief, wonderful moment, a snatch of the Goldberg Variations had floated across the bar. Mark had pictured the radio station as just one guy holed up in the mountains someplace, the door barred against hordes armed to the teeth with Garth Brooks records. The Bach had remained in Mark's head through the following hours of syrupy ballads contrasting the fragility of marriage and the steadfastness of dogs, and he wanted to buy a CD and play it in the car. Palmerston didn't have a classical music store.

Trent was soon joined by a gaggle of floppy and unattractive teenage boys, and as Suzy eavesdropped it emerged that he was engaged in convincing the youths to help him move a huge pile of dirt outside his trailer, down by the old railroad line. It was never established why the dirt was there, nor why it now needed to be moved somewhere else. The boys were, not unnaturally, interested in some kind of payment for this work, and this was offered in the form of a case of beer. As none were within three years of legally being able to buy alcohol, the proposition was readily accepted. While they waited for Trent to finish wading through his burgers, they lurked like a crew of disreputable seagulls, trading the affectionate insults and unrealistic suggestions which are the key discourse of boys. During this it became clear that despite the surfing-related T-shirts in which most were clad, not a single one had ever surfed, most had not been out of state, and only one had even seen the sea.

Overhearing this, the Campbells realized how extraordinary it was that they were — on a whim conceived one drunken evening in a pub six thousand miles away — driving the entire breadth of someone else's vast country. They became both flushed with pride and utterly overawed with the magnitude of the undertaking, and sipped their coffees meditatively, taking perhaps five or six minutes longer than they normally would have allowed. Without this delay, they'd have been out the door by

12.50. Even with it, they'd have been on the road by 12.56 at the latest. By then Suzy would have been ready for a cigarette, which the signs on the walls forbade through curt, easy-to-read sentences and internationally recognizable iconography. Pete Harris was in no real hurry, and would have been there anyway: still gazing at the house on a plot by itself, wondering vaguely how much it might cost, knowing that even if he could rustle up the money, his wife would have earmarked it for something else.

At 12.53 a woman shouted in the middle of the restaurant.

It was a brief, emphatic utterance, conveying nothing except urgency. People moved unconsciously out of the way, creating a clearing in the central aisle. It became evident that two men — one in his late teens, the other mid-twenties, both wearing long coats — were the focus of the woman's concern. The older man had short fair hair, the younger's was darker and rather longer. It was soon also clear that they were carrying semi-automatic rifles.

The light in the room seemed suddenly very bright, sounds abnormally clear and dry, as if some cushioning ether had been swept away. When you're sitting in a McDonald's on a weekday lunchtime with your coffee just approaching a drinkable temperature, and you realize that night has fallen out of a clear blue sky, time slips into a slow moment of lucidity. Like the long second before the impact of a car crash, this hiatus is not there to help you. It's not an escape route, or a gift from God, and it is not enough to do anything in except take the chance to greet death and wonder what took it so long.

One of Trent's crew of slackers had just time to say 'Billy?' in a tone of goofy bafflement, and then the two men started shooting.

They stood in the central aisle and fired calmly and quickly, the stocks of the rifles securely anchored in their shoulders. As the first casualty jerked backward, an expression of wordless surprise on her face, the gunmen moved on: intently, earnestly, as if seeking to demonstrate to some higher authority that they were worthy of this task, and carrying it out to the best of their ability.

After about another second, and two more deaths, everyone in the restaurant suddenly fought their way up out of bewilderment. Time hit the ground running, and the screaming started. They tried to flee, or hide, or to pull other people in front of them. Some made a break for the doors, but the guns turned as one and took down the deserters efficiently. Their line of fire swept past the out-of-towners, and Mark Campbell took a direct shot in the back of the head at about the same instant his wife's face was spread over a spiderweb of cracks in the plate-glass window that halted both of the bullets' progress. Trent died furiously soon afterwards, halfway to his feet on a doomed mission to throw himself at the gunmen. Few were sufficiently self-possessed to even consider such positive action, and those that did died quickly. The two guns swivelled as if pulled on the same string, and the action heroes discovered that while passive smoking may be bad for you, passive bullet use will take you down quicker.

Most people just tried to run. To get away. The vice-president of Bedloe Insurance tried, as did his exasperatingly inefficient assistant. Twelve schoolchildren tried. They all tried together, and got in one another's way. Many found that their feet were tangled amidst the bodies of the injured, and died awkwardly, dislocating knees and hips as they fell. Those whose way was unobstructed were shot down as they fled, crashing into tables and walls and the serving counter, behind which the remaining living server was curled in a tight ball, all too aware that she lay in a pool of her own urine. From where she lay she could see the twitching feet of Duane Hillman, the young man with whom she'd most recently walked the line of the railroad. He had been sweet, and offered to use a condom. As she knew that he'd not only been shot but had fallen while holding a tray of hot oil, she wasn't inclined to look at him. She was hoping instead that if she looked at nothing at all, and made herself small, maybe everything would be all right. A stray bullet later cut directly through the counter and into her spine.

There were those who didn't even try to escape, but held their positions, eyes wide, souls already departed before shells tumbled through their lungs, groins and stomachs. At least one of them, recently diagnosed with the same cancer that had slowly killed her father, did not view this turn of events in an entirely negative light: although the fact of the matter is that the young doctor at the hospital, whom she did not trust largely because he looked a little like the villain on her favourite TV show, would have been able to save her had she lived and taken his advice.

The other statue people had no such reason for equanimity. They were simply unable to move until the choice was no longer theirs to make.

In a room full of victims, murderers look like gods. The men kept shooting, with occasional changes of direction, rifles turning together to rain fire on an unexpected corner of the room. They reloaded a number of times, though never at the same moment. They were very efficient. Neither said anything throughout the entire incident.

Of the fifty-nine people in the McDonald's that lunchtime, only thirty-one heard the deadened report of the final shot. Twelve of those were dead before dark, bringing the toll to forty. Among those who lived was the girl behind the counter, who never walked again and became an alcoholic before finding God and then losing him once more. One of the little girls also survived. She was fostered out to an aunt in Iowa, and went on to live a life of relative peace. One of Trent's friends made it, and four years later was a coast guard on Laguna Beach.

Pete Harris also survived. By rights he should have died early, in the first sweep of gunfire down the left side of the restaurant, but Suzy Campbell's body had crashed on top of him just as he tried to slip under his table. Her weight caused him to slew off his seat and crunch head-first to the ground. They were joined moments later by Suzy's husband, who was already dead. Neither of the Campbells' faces would have been recognizable from their passports (both carefully stowed in their jacket pockets, in case somebody broke into the car while they ate), but the clothes the couple were wearing — some carefully packed back in England, others frugally acquired at a Gap sale in Boston's Back Bay area — were virtually unblemished. Barely a brush-down would have been needed and they could have walked out the door, climbed back in their hire car, and driven on up the road. Perhaps in some better reality that was allowed to happen, and Mark found the Goldberg Variations by happy chance at a town up the way, and they drove the rest of the day along a long straight road between trees with leaves that seemed lit from within: riding the crests and dips of the highway as it took them into afternoon and then evening, never noticing that they rode alone.

In this world they merely saved the life of another human being, as Pete Harris lay frozen beneath them, stunned into immobility by the contact of his head with the tiled floor. All around him were limbs, and all he could see was chaos and death: all he could feel was the whistling of his cuts and a cold ache in his head that developed into a concussion so severe that some days he felt as if it never went away. A young staff nurse, who seemed to regard him with superstitious awe because he had survived when almost everyone else had died, spent the night in the hospital in Pipersville keeping him awake, when he would have much preferred to have slept.

But that was later, as was the heart attack in 1995 that achieved what the bullets had not. He never tried to find out if the Victorian house was for sale. He just worked until he dropped.

Above the measured snap of gunfire and the coughs and screams of the dying, the distant sound of approaching sirens became evident. The gunmen fired for perhaps another twenty seconds, clearing a small pocket by the counter where the mother and her girls had found temporary respite. Then they stopped.

They looked around the room, faces betraying no reaction to what they'd done. The younger of the two — the boy called Billy — took a step back, and shut his eyes. The other man shot him point-blank in the face. While Billy's body still languidly spasmed on the floor, the man squatted to wash his hands in the blood. He stood again to write something on the glass door, working calmly, in big dripping letters, then surveyed the room once more, calmly, at his ease. He didn't even glance at the cop cars hurtling up Main, far too late to influence an event that would finally put Palmerston back on the map.

Then, when he was good and ready, the man jumped through the shattered window behind the Campbells' bodies and disappeared: escaping, it was believed, along the track of the old railroad line. He was never apprehended. No one was ever able to give a clear description of his face, and in time it was as if he slipped out of the event and into shadow. The blame ended up being wholly Billy's: a young boy who had only been doing what he was told, by a man he'd thought was a new friend.

When he heard the sound of the police cars pulling up outside, Pete Harris tried to sit up, tried to gather the strength to push the Campbells' bodies off. He failed, but succeeded in raising his head far enough to see what had been written in blood on the doors.

The letters had dripped, and his eyesight was clouded by a white light in his head, but the words were clear enough. They said 'The Straw Men.' Eleven years passed.

Part 1

Of the hill, not on the hill… Frank Lloyd Wright, on the architecture of Taliesin

1

The funeral was a nice affair, in that it was well-attended and people dressed appropriately and nobody stood up at any point and said 'You realize this means they're dead.' It was held in a church on the edge of town. I had no idea what denomination it might be, still less why it should have been stipulated in the instructions left with Harold Davids. So far as I'd known, my parents had no religious views save a kind of amiable atheism and the unspoken belief that if God did exist he probably drove a nice car, most likely of American manufacture.

Organization for the event had been efficiently undertaken by Davids's office, leaving me with little to do except wait to turn up. I spent most of the two days in the lounge of the Best Western. I knew I should go up to the house, but I couldn't face it. I read most of a bad novel and leafed through a large number of hotel-style magazines, without learning anything except that you can pay an awful lot of money for a watch. Early each morning I left the hotel, intending to walk along the main street, but got no further than the parking lot. I knew what was on offer along the shopping drag of Dyersburg, Montana, and I was in the market for neither ski gear nor 'art'. I ate in the hotel restaurant in the evenings, had room-service sandwiches delivered to the bar at lunch. All meals were accompanied by fries whose texture suggested that a number of industrial processes had intervened between the soil and my plate. It was impossible not to have fries. I discussed the matter on two occasions with the waitresses, but relented in the face of mounting panic in their eyes.

After the preacher had explained to everyone why death was not the complete downer it might at first appear, we filed out of the church. I was sorry to leave. It had felt safe in there. Outside it was very cold, and the air was crisp and silent. Behind the graveyard rose the foothills of the Gallatin range, the peaks in the distance muted, as if painted on glass. Two side-by-side plots had been prepared. There were about fifteen people on hand to witness the burial. Davids was there, and someone who appeared to be his assistant. Mary stood close to me, white hair strictly pulled back in a bun, her lined face battered smooth with the cold. A couple of the others I thought I vaguely recognized.

More words were said by the priest, comforting lies in which to swaddle these events. Possibly they made a difference to some of the mourners. I could barely hear them, concentrating as I was on stopping my head from exploding. Then a couple of men — whose job it was, who did this kind of thing every week — efficiently lowered the coffins into the ground. Ropes were gently fed through their hands, and the coffins came to measured rest six feet below the flat plain on which the living still stood. A few more sentences of balm were offered, but muttered quickly now — as if the church recognized that the time to make its pitch was running out. You can't put people in wooden boxes under the ground without the audience realizing that something very amiss is afoot.

A final quiet pronouncement, and that was that. It was done. Nothing would ever happen to Donald and Beth Hopkins again. Nothing that bore thinking about, at least.

Some of the mourners lingered for a moment, aimless now. Then I was alone. I stood there as two people. One whose throat was locked into fiery stone, and who could not imagine ever moving again; another who was aware of his iconic stature beside the graves, and also that, a little distance away, people were driving past in cars and listening to the Dixie Chicks and worrying vaguely about money.

Both sides of me found the other ridiculous. I knew that I couldn't stand there for ever. They wouldn't expect me to. It would make no sense, would change nothing, and it really was very cold. When I finally looked up I saw Mary was also still present, standing only a few feet away. Her eyes were dry, harsh with a knowledge that such a fate would be hers before very long and that it was neither a laughing nor a crying matter. I pursed my lips, and she reached out and laid her hand on my arm. Neither of us said anything for a while.

When she'd called me, three days before, I had been sitting on the deck of a nice, small hotel on De la Vina in Santa Barbara. I was temporarily unemployed, or unemployed again, and using my scant savings on an undeserved vacation. I was sitting with a good bottle of local merlot in front of me, and efficiently making it go away. It wasn't the first of the evening, and so when my cellular rang I was inclined to let the message service pick it up. But when I glanced at the phone I saw who the caller was.

I hit the TALK button. 'Hey,' I said.

'Ward,' she replied. And then nothing.

Finally I heard a sound down the line. The noise was soft, glutinous. 'Mary?' I asked quickly. 'Are

you okay?'

'Oh, Ward,' she said, her voice sounding cracked and very old. I sat up straight in my seat then, in the vain hope that faux readiness, last-minute rigour, would somehow limit the weight with which this hammer

was going to fall.

'What is it?'

'Ward, you'd better come here.'

In the end I got her to tell me. A car crash in the centre of Dyersburg. Both dead on arrival.

I'd known immediately it would be something like that, I suppose. If it hadn't involved both of them then it wouldn't be Mary on the phone. But even now, as I stood with her in the graveyard looking down upon their coffins, I was unable to truly understand a sentence framing their death with its full weight. I also could not now return the call that my mother had left on my machine, a week before. I just hadn't gotten round to it. I hadn't expected them to be erased from the surface of the earth without warning, and put below it, down where they couldn't hear me.

Abruptly I realized that I didn't want to be standing near their bodies any more. I took a step back from the graves. Mary dug in the pocket of her coat and brought out something attached to a small cardboard label. A set of keys.

'I put out the trash this morning,' she said, 'and took a few things out of the refrigerator. Milk and such. Don't want them smelling it up. Everything else I just left.'

I nodded, staring at the keys. I didn't have any of my own. No need. They'd been in, on the few occasions I'd visited. I realized that this was the first time I'd ever seen Mary somewhere other than my parents' kitchen or living room. It was like that with my folks. You went to their house, not the other way round. They tended to form a centre. Had tended to.

'They spoke of you, you know. Often.'

I nodded again, though I wasn't sure I believed her. For much of the last decade my parents hadn't even known where I was, and anything they had to say concerned a younger man, an only child who'd once grown up and lived with them in a different state. It wasn't that we hadn't loved each other. We had, in our ways. I just hadn't given them much to talk about, had checked none of the boxes that make parents prone to brag to friends and neighbours. No wife, no kids, no job to speak of. I realized Mary

was still holding her hand out, and I took the keys from her.

'How long will you stay?' she asked.

'It depends how long things take. Maybe a week. Possibly less.'

'You know where I am,' she said. 'You don't have to be a stranger, just because.'

'I won't,' I said quickly, smiling awkwardly. I wished I had a sibling who could have been having this

conversation for me. Someone responsible and socially skilled.

She smiled back, but distantly, as if she already knew this was not the way things worked.

'Goodbye, Ward,' she said, and then set off up the slope. At seventy she was a little older than my parents, and walked awkwardly. She was a lifelong Dyersburg resident, an ex-nurse, and more than that I didn't know.

I saw that Davids was standing by his car on the other side of the cemetery, killing time with his assistant but evidently waiting for me. He had the air of someone ready and willing to be brisk and efficient, to tidy loose ends.

I glanced back once more at the graves, and then walked heavily down the path to face the administrative tasks created by the loss of my entire family.

Davids had brought most of the paperwork in his car, and took me to lunch to deal with it. I don't know whether this ended up being any less unpleasant than doing it in his office would have been, but I appreciated the courtesy from a man who knew me barely at all. We ate in historical downtown Dyersburg, at a place called Auntie's Pantry. The interior had been slavishly designed to resemble a multilevel log cabin, the furniture hand-hewn by elves. The menu offered a chilling variety of organic soups and home-made breads, accompanied by salads largely predicated upon bean sprouts. I know I'm out of step, but I don't regard bean sprouts as food. They don't even look edible. They look like pallid, mutant grubs. The only worse thing is cous cous, of which there was also plenty on offer. I don't know of any aunt on this planet who eats that kind of shit, but both staff and patrons seemed about as happy as could be. Almost maniacally so.

After a brief and somewhat stilted wait we scored a seat by the front window. This annoyed a spruce young family behind us, who'd had their eye on the table and didn't understand how being first in line entitled you to certain benefits. The woman outlined her dissatisfaction to the waitress, loudly observing that the table had space for four people and we were only two. Normally this kind of thing brings out the very best in me, particularly if my foes are all wearing identical navy blue fleeces, but right then the well was dry. The husband was no competition, but the two children were blond and solemn and looked like a pair of judging angels. I didn't want to get on their bad side. The waitress, who was of the genus of tan, pretty but rather hefty young women who flock to places like Dyersburg for the winter sports, elected not to get involved, instead staring brightly at a patch of the floor approximately equidistant between the two sets of combatants.

Davids glanced briefly across at the matriarch. He's of my parents' age, tall and gaunt with a good-sized beak, and looks like the guy who God calls on when he really wants Hell to rain down. He opened his briefcase and drew out a lot of documents, making no effort to conceal the kind of event they pertained to. He laid them out in front of him in a businesslike way, picked up the menu, and started to read it. By the time I'd finished watching him do these things, the family was all studiously looking elsewhere. I picked up my own menu, and tried to imagine why what it said was of interest to me.

Davids was my parents' attorney, and had been since they'd met him after moving from Northern California. I'd spoken to him on a couple of previous occasions, Christmas or Thanksgiving drinks at their house, but in my mind he was now simply one of a number of people with whom my acquaintance was about to draw to an abrupt close. This bred a curious mixture of distance and a desire to prolong the contact, which I was unable to translate into much in the way of conversation.

Thankfully, Davids took the lead as soon as the bowls of butternut and lichen soup arrived. He recapped the circumstances of my parents' death, which in the absence of witnesses boiled down to a single fact. At approximately 11:05 on the previous Friday evening, after visiting friends to play bridge, their car had been involved in a head-on collision at the intersection of Benton and Ryle Streets. The other vehicle was a stationary car, parked by the side of the road. The post-mortem revealed blood-alcohol levels consistent with maybe half a bottle of wine in my father, who had been the passenger, and a lot of cranberry juice in my mother. The road had been icy, the junction wasn't too well lit, and another accident had taken place at the same spot just last year. That was that. It was just only of those things, unless I wanted to get involved in a fruitless civil litigation, which I didn't. There was nothing else to say.

Then Davids got down to business, which meant getting me to sign a large number of pieces of paper, thereby accepting ownership of the house and its contents, a few pieces of undeveloped land, and my father's stock portfolio. A legion of tax matters pertaining to all of this were efficiently explained to me and then dispatched with further signatures. The IRS stuff went in one ear and out the other, and I gave none of the papers more than a cursory glance. My father had evidently trusted Davids, and Hopkins Senior hadn't been a man to cast his respect around willy-nilly. Good enough for Dad was good enough for me.

I was listening with less than half of my attention by the end of it, and actually enjoying the soup — now that I'd improved the recipe by adding a good deal of salt and pepper. I was watching the spoonfuls as they came up toward my mouth, savouring the taste in a studious, considered way, encouraging the flavour to occupy as much of my mind as possible. I only resurfaced when Davids mentioned UnRealty.

He explained that my father's business, through which he had successfully sold high-priced real estate, was being shut down. The value of its remaining assets would be forwarded to any account I cared to nominate, just as soon as the process was complete.

'He wound up UnRealty?' I asked, lifting my head to look at the lawyer, 'When?'

'No.' Davids shook his head, wiping round his bowl with a piece of bread. 'He gave instructions that

this should take place upon his death.'

'Regardless of what I might have to say?'

He glanced out of the window, and rubbed his hands together in an economical little motion that

dislodged a few crumbs from his fingers. 'He was quite clear on the matter.'

My soup had suddenly gone cold, and tasted like liquidized pond weed. I pushed the bowl away. I understood now why Davids had insisted that we go through the papers today, rather than in the period before the funeral. I collected up my copies of the papers and shoved them into the envelope Davids had

provided.

'Is that it?' My voice was quiet and clipped.

'I think so. I'm sorry to have put you through this, Ward, but it's better to get it over with.'

He pulled a wallet from his jacket and glared at the check, as if not only distrusting the addition but

taking a dim view of the waitress's handwriting. His thumb hesitated over a charge card, pulled out some cash instead. I logged this as him electing not to allot the cost of lunch as a business expense.

'You've been very kind,' I said. Davids dismissed this with a flip of his hand, and tipped exactly ten percent.

We rose and left the restaurant, weaving between the tables of chatting tourists. I meant to look away as we passed the table occupied by the nuclear army in blue fleece, but then suddenly they were in front of me. Mother and father were bickering mildly about where to stay in Yellowstone; the little boy meanwhile was using his spoon and soup to approximate the effect of an asteroid landing in the Pacific. His sister was sitting with a plastic beaker clutched in both hands, contentedly staring at nothing in

particular. As I passed she looked up at me, and smiled as if seeing a large dog. It was probably a cute smile, but for a moment I felt like removing it.

Outside we stood together for a moment, watching well-heeled women roving up and down College Street in hungry packs, charge cards on stun.

Eventually Davids thrust his hands in the pockets of his coat. 'You'll be leaving soon, I imagine. If there's anything I can do in the meantime, please be in touch. I can't raise the dead, of course, but on other things I might be able to help.'

We shook hands, and he walked rather quickly away up the street, his face carefully blank. And only then did I realize, unforgivably late, that Davids had not just been my father's attorney, but had also become his friend, and that I might not have been the only person who'd found the morning difficult.

I walked back to the hotel with my hands clenched, and by nine I was very drunk. I had the first boilermaker in both hands before the hotel doors had shut behind me. I knew as I took the first swallow that it was a mistake. I knew it all the way home, had known it in the cemetery and from the moment I'd woken that morning. I wasn't falling off some painfully-scaled wagon, rejecting my higher power and committing myself to waking up in Geneva with two wives and the word 'Spatula' tattooed on my forehead. But getting drunk was like having a one-night stand because your partner had been unfaithful to you: an act that could achieve nothing except pain, meanwhile diminishing a moral high ground which, for once in your life, you were actually entitled to. The problem was, there didn't seem to be any other intelligent response to the situation.

At first I perched at the bar, but after a while I moved to one of the booths by the long window. A large pre-emptive tip had ensured that I didn't have to wait, or indeed move, in order to keep my glasses full. A beer, then a Scotch. A beer, then a Scotch. A solid and efficient way of getting drunk, and the smooth-faced barman kept them coming like I'd asked.

I pulled the documents out of Davids's manila envelope and spread them in front of me, my mind fixated on one point in particular.

In all the time I was growing up, I was aware of one thing about my father. He was a businessman. That was what he did and who he was. He was Homo sapiens businessmaniens. He got up in the morning and shoved off to do business, and he came back in the evening having by-God done some. My parents never talked about their early life, and rarely about anything of consequence, but I knew about UnRealty. He'd worked for a number of years at a local firm, then one night took my mother out for a fine dinner and told her he was going it alone. He actually used those words, apparently, as if appearing in an advertisement for bank loans. He had talked to a few people, made some contacts, engaged in all the textbook corporate heroics that entitled you some day to stand at the bar of a country club and say 'I did it my way'. It can't have been easy, but my father had a certain force of will. Car mechanics and plumbers, meter maids and check-in clerks, all took one look and elected not to fuck him around. When he walked into a restaurant, the word went round the staff that it was time to stand up straight and stop spitting in the soup. His company, and its history, was the most real thing I understood about him.

And yet, in his will, he had stipulated that UnRealty be wound up. Instead of leaving it to his son to make the decision, he had calmly imploded twenty years' work.

As soon as Davids had told me this, I knew it could only mean one thing. My parents hadn't wanted me to take over the business. In many ways this was explicable. I have sold many, many things, shifted many and varied commodities, but never an expensive house. I knew about them, however. Did I ever. I knew about Unique Homes magazine, about the DuPont Registry and Christie's Great Estates. I knew about conservation easements and dude ranches, was familiar with the value of old-world craftsmanship, views of the 15th fairway, end-of-the-road privacy where serenity abounds. I couldn't help but be. It had seeped into my blood. I even did two years of an architecture degree, before I sidestepped out of college via an unfortunate incident and into a different line of work. And yet he either hadn't wanted me, or hadn't trusted me, to take over the business. The more I thought about it, the more hurt I got.

I kept drinking, to see if things got any better. They didn't. I kept drinking anyway. The bar remained quiet throughout the early part of the evening. Then at ten o'clock there was a sudden influx of men and women in suits, sprung from some ball-breaking corporate flipchart-fest. They milled about in the centre of the bar, networking rabidly, excited as children at the prospect of going berserk and having a couple of Lite beers. By this stage my brain felt very heavy and cold. The noise started loud and got worse, as if I was surrounded by people shovelling pebbles.

I held my ground in my booth, glaring virulently at the invaders. A couple of the men rakishly removed their jackets. One fellow even loosened his tie. Underlings sidled up to their bosses and hung about like sandpipers, pecking for Brownie points. I'd cope. I'd weather the storm. These people might know how to run spreadsheets and asset-strip, but if it came to a bar endurance test, they were wearing water wings. I was confident. I was in the zone. I was also, in retrospect, even more drunk than I realized.

Three men came in the door. They stopped, looked around.

The next thing I knew there was screaming, and the suits were diving for cover. At first I felt frightened, and then I realized it was me they were running from.

I was swaying in the middle of the floor, clothes wet from upturned beer. I had a gun in my hands and was pointing it straight at the men in the doorway, barking a long, incoherent series of contradictory instructions at them. They looked scared out of their wits. This was probably because when a man points a gun at you, you want to do what he asks. But it's difficult when you can't make out what he's saying.

Eventually I stopped shouting. The men in the door briefly became six, then resolved into three again. The room was quiet around me, but my heart felt like it was going to melt down. Everybody waited for

things to either get better or worse.

'Sorry,' I muttered. 'Misunderstanding.'

I put the gun back in my jacket, swept the papers up off the table, and lurched out. I got halfway across the lobby before I fell over, taking a table, a large vase and a hundred bucks' worth of flowers down with me.

At three o'clock in the morning, frigid with iced water, I was lying on my back on the bed in my room.

I had been talked to by both the hotel management and the local police, who'd been understanding, while insisting I relinquish the gun for the duration of my stay. I let the funeral carry the day. I do have a licence to carry a concealed weapon, which surprised them. But they observed, reasonably enough, that the licence doesn't say I can wave it around in bars. The papers from Davids's office, the ones that announced I now had 1.8 million dollars cash, were carefully laid out on the heater to dry. I was no longer angry at anybody. The fact that my father's last will and testament now smelled of spilt beer seemed to effectively make his point.

After a while I rolled over, picked up the phone, and dialled a number. The phone rang six times, and then an answering machine kicked in. A voice I knew better than my own said that Mr and Mrs Hopkins were sorry they couldn't answer the phone, but that I should leave a message. They'd get back to me.

2

At ten o'clock the next morning I stood, pale and penitent, at the end of my parents' driveway. I was wearing a clean shirt. I had eaten some breakfast. I had apologized to everyone I could find in the hotel, right down to the guy who cleaned the pool. I was amazed that I hadn't spent the night in a cell. I felt like shit.

The house sat near the end of a narrow and hilly road on the mountainside of Dyersburg's main residential area. I'd been a little surprised by it when they moved. The lot was decent-sized, about half an acre, with a couple of old trees shading the side of the house. Properties of similar size bordered it, home to nice late Victorians, that no one looked too obsessed about painting. A neat hedge marked the edge of both sides of the property. Mary lived in the next house up, and she wasn't anything like wealthy. A college professor and his post-grad wife had recently moved in on the other side. I think my dad actually sold them the house. Again, decent people — but unlikely to bathe in champagne. The house itself was a two-storey, with a graceful wraparound porch, a workshop in the cellar and a garage round the back. It was, without question, a nice-looking and well-appointed house in a good neighbourhood. Someone wanted to set you up there, you wouldn't complain. But neither would Homes of the Rich and Famous be doing a showcase special anytime soon.

I waved across the fence in case Mary happened to be looking out the window, and walked slowly up the path. It felt as if I was approaching an impostor. My parents' real house, the one I'd grown up in, lay a long time in the past and a thousand miles west. I'd never been back to Hunter's Rock since they moved, but I could remember that house like the back of my hand. The arrangement of its rooms would probably always define my understanding of domestic space. The one in front of me was like a second wife, taken too late in life to have a relationship with the children that extended beyond distant cordiality.

A galvanized trashcan stood to one side of the door, the lid raised by the full bag inside. There were no newspapers on the porch. I assumed Davids had seen to that. The right thing to do, but it made the house look as if it already had a dust sheet over it. I pulled the unfamiliar keys from my pocket and unlocked the door.

It was so quiet inside that the house seemed to throb. I picked up the few pieces of mail, junk for the most part, and put them on the side table. Then I wandered for a while, walking from room to room, looking at things. The rooms felt like preview galleries for some strange yard sale, each object coming from a different home and priced well below its value. Even the things that went together — the books in my father's study, my mother's collection of 1930s English pottery, neatly arrayed on the antique pine dresser in the sitting room — seemed hermetically sealed from my touch and from time. I had no idea what to do with these things. Put them in boxes and store them somewhere to gather dust? Sell them, keep the money, or give it to some worthy cause? Live within this tableau, knowing that in the objects' minds I would never have anything more than a second-hand regard for them?

The only thing that seemed to make any kind of sense was leaving everything as it was, walking out of the house and never coming back. This wasn't my life. It wasn't anybody's, not any more. Apart from the single wedding picture in the hall, there weren't even any photographs. There never had been in our family.

In the end I wound up back in the sitting room. This faced down the garden toward the road, and had big, wide windows that transformed the cold light outside into warmth. There was a couch and armchair, in matching genteel prints. A compact little widescreen television, on a stand fronted with smoked glass. Also my father's chair, a battered warhorse in green fabric and dark wood, the only piece of furniture in the room that they'd brought from the previous house. A new biography of Frank Lloyd Wright was on the coffee table, my father's place marked with a receipt from Denford's Market. Eight days previously one of them had bought a variety of cold cuts, a carrot cake (fancy), five large bottles of mineral water, some low-fat milk and a bottle of vitamins. Most of these must have been amongst the fridge contents that Mary had thrown away. The mineral water was maybe still around, along with the vitamins. Perhaps I'd have some later.

In the meantime I sat in my father's chair. I ran my hands along the worn grain of the armrests, then laid them in my lap and looked down the garden.

And for a long time, in savage bursts, I cried.

Much later, I remembered an evening from long ago. I would have been seventeen, back when we lived in California. It was Friday night, and I was due to meet the guys at a bar out on a back road just outside town. Lazy Ed's was one of those shoebox-with-a-parking-lot beer dens that look like they've been designed by Mormons to make drinking seem not just un-Godly but drab and sad and dead-end hopeless. Ed realized that he wasn't in a position to be picky, and as we were never any trouble and kept feeding quarters into the pool table and juke box — Blondie, Bowie and good old Bruce Stringbean, back in the glory days of Molly Ringwald and Mondrian colours — our juvie custom was fine by him.

My mother was out, gone to a crony of hers to do whatever it is women do when there aren't any men around to clutter up the place and look bored and not listen with sufficient gravity to stories about people they've never met, and who anyway sound kind of dull, if their troubles are anything to judge by. At six o'clock Dad and I were sitting at the big table in the kitchen, eating some lasagne she'd left in the fridge, and avoiding the salad. My mind was on other things. I have no idea what. I can no more get back inside the head of my seventeen-year-old self than I could that of a tribesman in Borneo.

It was a while before I'd realized Dad had finished, and was watching me. I looked back at him. 'What?' I said, affably enough.

He pushed his plate back. 'Going out tonight?'

I nodded slowly, full of teenage bafflement, and got back to shovelling food into my head.

I should have understood right away what he was asking. But I didn't get it, in the same way I didn't get why there remained a small pile of salad on his otherwise spotless plate. I didn't want that green shit, so I didn't take any. He didn't want it either, but he took some — even though Mom wasn't there to see. I can understand now that the pile in the bowl had to get smaller, or when she got back she'd go on about how we weren't eating right. Simply dumping some of it straight in the trash would have seemed dishonest, whereas if it spent some time on a plate — went, in effect, via his meal — then it was okay. But back then, it seemed inexplicably stupid.

I finished up, and found that Dad was still sitting there. This was unlike him. Usually, once a food event was over, he was all business. Get the plates in the washer. Take the garbage out. Get the coffee on. Get on to the next thing. Chop fucking chop.

'So what are you going to do? Watch the tube?' I asked, making an effort. It felt very grown up.

He stood and took his plate over to the side. There was a pause, and then he said: 'I was wondering.'

This didn't sound very interesting. 'Wondering what?'

'Whether you'd play a couple of frames with an old guy.'

I stared at his back. The tone of his inquiry was greatly at odds with his usual confidence, especially the mawkish attempt at self-deprecation. I found it hard to believe he thought I'd take the deception seriously. He wasn't old. He jogged. He whipped younger men at tennis and golf. He was, furthermore, the last person in the world I could imagine playing pool. He just didn't fit the type. If you drew a Venn diagram with circles for 'People who looked like they played pool', 'People who looked like they might' and 'People who looked like they wouldn't, but maybe did,' then he would have been on a different sheet of paper altogether. He was dressed that night, as he so often was, in a neatly pressed pair of sandy chinos and a fresh white linen shirt, neither of them from anywhere as mass-market as The Gap. He was tall and tan with silvering dark hair and had the kind of bone structure that makes people want to vote for you. He looked like he should be leaning on the rail of a good-length boat off Palm Beach or Jupiter Island, talking about art. Most likely about some art he was trying to sell you. I, on the other hand, was fair and skinny and wearing regulation black Levi's and a black T-shirt. Both looked like they'd been used to make fine adjustments to the insides of car engines. They probably smelled that way, too. Dad would have smelled the way he always did, which I wasn't aware of then but can summon up now as clearly as if he was standing behind me: a dry, clean, correct smell, like neatly stacked firewood.

'You want to come play pool?' I asked, checking that I hadn't lost my mind.

He shrugged. 'Your mother's out. There's nothing on the box.'

'You got nothing salted away on tape?' This was inconceivable. Dad had a relationship with the VCR like some fathers had with a favoured old hound, and racks of neatly labelled tapes on the shelves in his study. I'd do exactly the same now, of course, if I lived anywhere in particular. I'd have them stamped with bar codes if I had the time. But back then it was the thing about him that most strongly put me in mind of fascist police states.

He didn't answer. I cleared the scraps off my own plate, thoughtlessly making a good job of it because I was at an age when showing my love for my mother was difficult, and ensuring her precious dishwasher didn't get clogged with shit was something I could do without anyone realizing I was doing it, including myself. I didn't want Dad to come out to the bar. It was that simple. I had a routine for going out. I enjoyed the drive. It was me time. Plus the guys were going to find it weird. It was weird, for fuck's sake. My friend Dave would likely be stoned out of his gourd when he arrived, and might freak out there and then if he saw me standing with a representative of all that was authoritarian and straight-backed and wrinkly.

I looked across at him, wondering how to put this. The plates were stowed. The remaining salad was back in the fridge. He'd wiped the counter down. If a team of forensic scientists happened to swoop mid-evening and tried to find evidence of any food-eating activity, they'd be right out of luck. It annoyed the hell out of me. But when he folded the cloth and looped it over the handle, on the oven, I had my first ever intimation of what I would feel in earnest, nearly twenty years later, on the day I sat wet-faced in his chair in an empty house in Dyersburg. A realization that his presence was not unavoidable or a given; that one day there would be too much salad in the bowl and cloths that remained unfolded.

'Yeah, whatever,' I said.

I quickly started to freak about how the other guys were going to react, and hustled us out of the house forty minutes early. I figured this might give us as much as an hour before we had to deal with anyone else, as the other guys were always late.

We drove out to Ed's, Dad sitting in the passenger seat and not saying much. When I drew up outside the bar he peered out the windshield. 'This is where you go?'

I said it was, a little defensively. He grunted. On the way across the lot it occurred to me that turning up with my dad was going to bring into focus any doubts Ed might be entertaining about my age, but it was too late to turn back. It wasn't like we looked very similar. Maybe he'd think Dad was some older guy I knew. Like a senator, or something.

Inside was nearly empty. A couple old farts I didn't know were hunkered down over a table in the corner. The place never really stuttered into life until late, and it was a precarious form of vitality, the kind that two consecutive bad choices on the jukebox could kill stone dead. As we stood at the counter waiting for Ed to make his own good time out of the back, Dad leaned back against the bar and looked around. There wasn't a great deal to see. Battered stools, venerable dust, a pool table, interior twilight and neon. I didn't want him to like it. Ed came out eventually, grinned when he saw me. Usually I'd drink my first beer sitting gassing with him, and probably he was anticipating this was going to happen tonight.

But then he caught sight of Dad, and stopped. Not like he'd run into a wall or anything, but he hesitated, and his smile faded, to be replaced by an expression I couldn't interpret. Dad wasn't the usual kind of guy who spent time in that bar, and I guess Ed was wondering what kind of bizarre map-reading error had brought him there. Dad turned to look at him, and nodded. Ed nodded back.

I really wanted this over with. 'My dad,' I said.

Ed nodded once more, and another great male social interaction ground to a close.

I asked for two beers. As I waited I watched my father as he walked over to the pool table. As a kid I'd got used to the fact that people would come up to him in stores and start talking to him, assuming he was the manager and the only person who could sort out whatever trivia they were spiralling up into psychodrama. Being able to look equally at home in a scummy bar was kind of a trick, and I felt a flicker of respect for him. It was a very specific and limited type of regard, the kind you allow someone who displays a quality you think you might one day aspire to, but it was there all the same.

I joined him at the table, and after that the bonding session went rapidly downhill. I won all three games. They were long, slow games. It wasn't that he was so terrible, but every shot he played was five percent out, and I had the run of the table. We didn't talk much. We just leant down, took our shots, endured the misses. After the second game slouched to a conclusion he went and bought himself another beer while I racked the balls up. I'd been kind of hoping he'd stick at one, so I still had most of mine left. Then we played the last game, which was a little better, but still basically excruciating. At the end of it he put his cue back in the rack.

'That it?' I asked, trying to sound nonchalant. I was so relieved I took the risk of holding up another quarter.

He shook his head. 'Not giving you much of a challenge.'

'So — aren't you going to say 'Hey kid, you're good,' or something like that?'

'No,' he said, mildly. 'Because you're not.'

I stared at him, stricken as a five-year-old. 'Yeah, well,' I eventually managed. 'Thanks for the ego-boost.'

'It's a game.' He shrugged. 'What bothers me is not that you're no good. It's that it doesn't bother you.'

'What?' I said, incredulous. 'You read that in some motivational management textbook? Drop a zinger at the right moment and your kid ends up chairman of the board?'

Mildly: 'Ward, don't be an asshole.'

'You're the asshole,' I snarled. 'You assumed I'd be no good and you'd be able to come out here and beat me even though you can't play at all.'

He stood for a moment, hands in the pockets of his chinos, and looked at me. It was a strange look, cool and appraising, but not empty of love. Then he smiled.

'Whatever,' he said. And he left, and I guess he walked home.

I turned back to the table, grabbed my beer and drank the rest of it in one swallow. Then I tried to smack one of his remaining balls down the end pocket and missed by a mile. At that moment I really, really hated him.

I stormed over to the bar to find Ed already had a beer waiting for me. I reached for money, but he shook his head. He'd never done that before. I sat down on a stool, didn't say anything for a few minutes.

Gradually we started talking about other things: Ed's views on local politics and feminism — he was somewhat critical of both — and a hide he was thinking of lashing together out in the woods. I didn't see Ed ever having a huge impact on the first two subjects, or getting it together to build the hide, but I listened anyway. By the time Dave wandered in I could more or less pretend that it was just business as usual.

It was an okay night. We talked, we drank, we lied. We played pool not very well. At the end I walked out to the car, and stopped when I saw a note had been pushed under one of the wipers. It was in my father's handwriting, but much smaller than usual.

'If you can't read this the first time,' it said, 'get a ride. I'll drive you out here tomorrow to pick up the car.'

I screwed the note up and hurled it away, but I drove home carefully. When I got back Mom was in bed. There was a light in Dad's study but the door was shut, so I just went upstairs.

I got up once, in the late morning, and made a cup of instant coffee. Apart from that I sat until mid-afternoon, until the sun moved across the sky and started to come directly through the window and into my eyes. This broke the spell I'd been in, and I got out of the chair knowing I'd never sit there again. It wasn't comfortable, for a start. The cushion was threadbare and lumpy, and after a couple of straight hours on it, my ass hurt. I walked back to the kitchen, rinsed my cup out, left it upside down on the side to dry. Then I changed my mind, wiped it, and put it back in the cupboard. I folded the cloth and looped it over the handle on the oven.

I stood irresolute in the hallway, wondering what to do next. Part of me believed that the filial thing to do would be to check out of the hotel and come stay here for the night. The rest of me didn't want to. Really did not want to. I wanted bright lights and a burger, a beer, someone who'd talk to me about something other than death.

Suddenly irritable and sad, I stalked back into the sitting room to retrieve my phone from the coffee table. My lower back ached, probably from sitting in that lousy chair.

The chair. Maybe it was because the light was different; the sun had moved around the yard since the morning, creating new shadows. More likely, a few hours of tears had simply cleared my head a little. Either way, now that I was looking at it, the seat cushion looked a little odd. Slowly slipping the Nokia into my pocket, I frowned at the chair. The cushion, which was an integral part of it, definitely bulged up in the centre. I reached out experimentally, prodded it. It felt a little hard.

Maybe he'd had it reupholstered, or refilled with something. Rocks, perhaps. I straightened up, ready to forget it and leave the house. My hangover was beginning to bloom. Then something else caught my attention.

There's a proper way of placing objects in relation to each other, especially if those objects are large. Some people don't see this. They'll just throw the furniture down any old how, or all against the walls, or at right angles, or so everyone can see the TV. My father always made sure stuff was placed just so, and then got riled if anybody moved it. And my father's chair wasn't in the right place. It wasn't off by much, and I don't think anybody else would have noticed it. It was too square on to the other furniture, and seemed to stand too much out on its own. It just didn't look right.

I squatted down in front of it, examined the line where the cushion was attached to the body of the seat. A strip of braid covered the join. It was worn and frayed. I grabbed one end of it and pulled. It came away easily, revealing an opening that looked like it once had been stitched.

I slipped my hand inside. My fingers navigated through some kind of dry, squishy stuff, probably cut-up chunks of foam. In the middle they found a solid object. I pulled it out.

It was a book. A paperback novel, a new-looking copy of a blockbuster thriller, the kind of thing my mother might pick up on a whim at the checkout, and skim through in an afternoon. It didn't look read. The spine was unbent, and my mother was no stickler for keeping books in pristine condition. It didn't make any sense. It couldn't have gotten in the chair by accident.

I flicked through the pages. In the middle of the book there was a small piece of paper. I pulled it out. It was a note, just one line, written in my father's handwriting.

'Ward,' it said: 'We're not dead.'

3

A stream in southern Vermont, the water clear and cold, hurrying over a bed of pale boulders between the steep banks of a valley up in the Green Mountains. The sky seems to start a few bare feet above the trees, a sheet of spun sugar frozen grey in fading light. The leaves on the ground, broken bulbs of stained-glass colours, are covered with a patchy dusting of snow. On either side of the stream, connected by a pair of old stone bridges fifty yards apart, lies the small village of Pimonta. There are perhaps twenty houses all told, though nearly a dozen of these appear solely for summer use or abandoned altogether. Next to one squats the hulk of a very old Buick, its oxidized shell now the colour of a thundercloud. A few vehicles sit in other driveways, rugged types suggesting their owners are the owners of several children and at least one dog. It is very quiet, apart from the noise of the stream, which has been flowing for so long that its clamour is more of a colour than a sound. Smoke slips sluggishly out of a few chimneys, including those of the Pimonta Inn, a refined bed-and-breakfast that backs onto the river and which is almost full in this last week of the foliage season.

A man stands on one of the bridges, leaning against the wall and looking down at the tumbling water. His name is John Zandt. He is a little under six feet tall and wearing a thick coat against the cold. The coat accentuates his shape, which is compact and broad-shouldered. He looks like a man who could carry a pair of suitcases a long way or hit someone extremely hard. Both are true. His hair is short and dark, his features harsh but well-arranged. There is a two-day growth of stubble on his chin and cheeks. He has stayed for the last week at the Pimonta Inn, living in a suite consisting of a bedroom, a bathroom and a small sitting room with a wood fire, all of which is expensively comfortable in an unkempt country style. He has spent the days walking in the mountains and valleys in the area, avoiding the marked trails, with their straggles of brightly clad hikers fretting about bears. Sometimes he has found the vestiges of old homesteads, now little more than piles of dark wood strewn amongst the undergrowth. There are no echoes to be heard, no matter how long you stand and listen, and places that were once by a path have become uncharted again. The roads found different routes, turning some spots into destinations and leaving others as wilderness, perhaps for ever.

Zandt likes to sit in these places a while, considering how it might have been. Then he starts walking again, walking until he is tired and it is time to return to the inn. In the evenings he has sat in its cosy sitting area, politely avoiding conversation with other guests and the establishment's proprietors. The books in the small library speak of ossification and contentment. Perhaps forty people have nodded at him in the last couple of weeks, without learning his name or being able to describe him in any detail.

After the evening meal, which has generally been excellent if slow in coming, he has returned to his suite, built a fire, and stayed up as long as he can bear it. He has been dreaming a great deal recently. Sometimes the dreams are of Los Angeles, of a life that is gone for good and therefore cannot be escaped. In the past he has tried both alcohol and heroin, but found neither of much help even in great excess. These days he simply wakes and lies on his back, waiting for morning, thinking of emptiness. He has never tried to kill himself. It is not in his nature. If it was, he would already be dead.

Now, as he leans on the wall of the bridge in the fading light, he is considering what to do next. He has money, some of it the remnants of a summer of hard manual work. He thinks that it is perhaps time for him to get back in the saddle, and head to a city. Maybe somewhere down South, though he has found that he likes the cold and the dark forests. His motivation is hampered by the fact that he has no special need for more cash, or any desire to do anything with that he already has. Also that after a life spent amongst buildings, they have suddenly stopped having any meaning to him. Empty roads and unbounded spaces seem to have more resonance than whatever lies on either side.

He looks up when he hears the sound of a car approaching from along the road from the north. After a while its headlights, used earlier in the afternoon than is the local custom, peer up over the hill. Soon the car follows them down into the village, past the small general store and videotape library. It is a Lexus, very black and new. It stops smoothly outside the inn.

The car makes a ticking sound as the engine cools. Nobody gets out for a few moments. Zandt watches it until he is sure that the shapes inside are looking at him. His own car, something cheap and foreign he bought off a bleak lot in Nebraska, is sitting in front of the outbuilding that holds his room and several others. The keys to the car are in his pocket, but he cannot get to it without taking himself closer to the Lexus. He could turn, walk across the bridge and between the houses on the other side, head up into the hills, but he does not have a mind to. He should, he knows, have paid cash for his lodging. That is his usual practice. But when he arrived he had none, and it was late. Withdrawing some from an ATM in the nearest town would have left just as clear a sign. The time to avoid this confrontation, whatever it may hold, is two weeks past. He merely looks down again at the water below, and waits.

Over at the car, the passenger door opens and a woman climbs out. She has medium-length dark hair, wears a dark green suit, and is of average height. Her face is striking, meaning that you will either find her plain or beautiful. Most people put their money on the former, which is fine by her. Her silence on the journey has already irritated Agent Fielding, who first met her three hours previously — and who, had he not been tasked with driving her down to Pimonta, could have been home several hours by now. Fielding still has no idea why he has been dragged all this way, which is just as well, because it could only barely be classified as official business. He is simply doing what he is told, a much-underrated skill.

The woman closes the door with a soft clunk that she knows the man at the bridge can hear. He doesn't move, or even look up, until she has walked down past the inn, past the boarded-up premises of a defunct local potter, and onto the bridge.

She walks to within a few yards of him and then stops, feeling slightly absurd and rather cold.

'Hello, Nina,' he says, still without looking.

'Very cool,' she replies. 'I'm impressed.'

He turns. 'Nice suit. Very Dana Scully.'

'These days we all want to look that way. Even some of the guys.'

'Who's in the car?'

'Local agent. From Burlington. Nice man gave me a lift.'

'How did you find me?'

'Credit card.'

'Right,' he says. 'Long way to come.'

'You're worth it.'

He looks sceptically at a woman he had once thought striking, and now finds plain once more.

'So what do you want? It's cold. I'm getting hungry. I'd be surprised if we have anything to say to

each other.'

For just a moment she looks beautiful again, and hurt. Then, as if none of this meant anything to her, or ever had, 'It's happened again,' she says. 'Thought you'd want to know.'

She turns on her heel and walks back up toward the car. The engine is running before she opens the door, and within two minutes the valley is empty and quiet again, leaving just a man on a bridge, his mouth slightly open, his face pale.

He caught up with her twenty miles south, driving hard down narrow mountain roads and slinging the car around every bend. Southern Vermont isn't designed for speed, and the car twice started to plane on ice patches. Zandt noticed neither this nor the handful of local drivers who had just time to register his approach before he was behind them, gaining speed, leaving their cars rocking in his wake. At Wilmington he hit a junction. The Lexus wasn't visible in either direction. He reasoned that she'd be heading for the nearest place where she could get airlifted back to civilization, and took the left turn up Route 9 for Keene, just over the state line in New Hampshire.

He made better time on the wider road, and soon began to see the Lexus's distinctive tail lights in the distance ahead, flickering through trees on a kink in the road, or blinking off the other side of a dip. He eventually caught it on a straight patch just south of Hardsboro, where the road passed by a cold, flat lake that looked like a mirror reflecting a sky full of shadows.

He flashed his headlights. There was no response. He pulled closer, flashed again. This time the Lexus picked up a little speed. Zandt accelerated, pressing hard, and saw Nina turn and clock his face through the back window. She spoke to the driver, who didn't slow.

Zandt floored the pedal and pulled out from behind, roared forward until he was just ahead, then angled in and braked the car hard. He was out of the door before the engine had died, and so was Fielding, hand already coming back out of his jacket.

'Put it away,' Zandt suggested.

'Fuck you.' The agent held the gun in both hands. Meanwhile Nina climbed out of the other side of the

car, stepping carefully to avoid the mud. 'I'm telling you,' Fielding said evenly. 'Back off.'

'It's okay,' Nina said. 'Shit. There go the shoes.'

'Fuck it is. He tried to force us off the road.'

'He probably just wanted to talk. It can get lonely out here.'

'He can talk to my dick,' Fielding said. 'You — put your hands on the car.'

Zandt remained where he was until Nina made it round the front of the Lexus and onto the road.

'Are you sure it's him?' he said.

'You think I'd come all this way otherwise?'

'I never understood a single thing you did. At any stage. Just answer the question.'

'Will you just get your hands the fuck on the hood of the car?' Fielding shouted. There was the soft,

mechanical sound of a safety being flicked off.

Zandt and Nina turned to look at him. The agent was full-on furious. Nina glanced up the road, where a large white Ford that shrieked 'rental' was headed toward them, driving slowly so the inhabitants could

get a good view of the lake in what remained of the light.

'Easy,' she suggested. 'You want to explain a friendly-fire incident to your SAC?'

Fielding glanced over his shoulder. Saw the car pull over into a vantage point, about a hundred yards

away. He lowered the gun. 'You going to tell me what the hell is going on?'

Nina shook her head curtly, then turned back to Zandt. 'I'm sure, John.'

'So why are you here instead of there?'

She shrugged, a habitual motion. 'Actually, I don't know. Shouldn't be, and I most certainly shouldn't

be talking to you. You want to walk on me, or shall we go someplace and talk?'

Zandt looked away, across at the flat surface of the lake. Parts of it were black, others a frozen grey. On the other side was a little clearing and a wooden holiday home, with plenty of cords of wood stacked up against the side. The structure didn't look prepackaged or catalogue-bought: more like someone, or two someones, had sat for many evenings somewhere hectic and sketched it out on pads brought home from the office, desperate for some other story to be in. Not for the first time, Zandt wished he was someone else. Maybe the guy living in that house. Or one of the tourists up the way, who were now standing in a clump by the water and looking across at the trees, their brightly coloured anoraks making them look like a small herd of traffic lights.

Eventually he nodded. Nina walked across to Fielding, and spoke to him for a while. Within a minute, the agent's gun was back where it should be. By the time Zandt turned away from the lake Fielding was back in the car, face composed.

Nina waited for Zandt at his car, a large file under her arm. 'I told him I'd be going with you,' she said.

As Nina got in his car, Zandt stepped over to the Lexus. Fielding looked up at him through the window with an unreadable expression, and started the engine. Then he pressed a button and wound the

window down.

'Guess I'll let it go, this time,' he said.

Zandt smiled. It was a thin smile, and bore little resemblance to anything caused by merriment. 'There

is only this time.'

Fielding cocked his head. 'And that's supposed to mean what?'

'That if we meet again and you pull a gun on me, some pretty lake is going to have little scraps of Fed

floating in it. And I don't give a shit if it fucks up the ecosystem.'

Zandt turned away, leaving the agent open-mouthed.

Then Fielding reversed rapidly, kicking a shower of grit into the air. He gunned the engine and sped

past, pausing only to lean across to display the middle finger of his right hand.

When Zandt got into his car he saw Nina was sitting watching, arms folded and one eyebrow raised.

'Your people skills just keep on getting better,' she said. 'Maybe you should teach a course or

something. Write a book. I'm serious. It's a gift. Don't fight it, share it. Be everything you can be.' 'Nina, shut up.'

He drove in silence back up to Pimonta. Nina sat with the file on her lap. By the time they got back to the village it was dark, and a few more residents' cars had appeared. Lights were on in many of the windows. He parked up in front of the inn, turned off the engine. He made no move to open his door, so Nina stayed as she was.

'Do you still want to eat?' she asked, eventually.

The car was getting cold. Two couples had already wandered past the car, on their way to the main

building, their faces round with the contented prospect of food.

He stirred, as if returning from a long distance. 'Up to you.'

She tried for cheerful: 'I'm easy.'

'Not out here you're not. Supper's six-thirty until nine. We eat now or in the morning. Breakfast's

seven until eight. And small.' 'What — there's nowhere you can get a burger in between? Or this place can't lay on a sandwich a little later?'

Zandt turned his head, and this time his smile looked almost real. 'You're not from around here, are you?'

'No, thank God. Neither are you. Where we come from you can eat when you want. You hand over money and they give you food. It's modern and convenient. Or have you been in the country so long you've forgotten?'

He didn't answer. Abruptly she dropped the file in the foot well and opened the door. 'Wait here,' she said.

Zandt waited, watching out of the windshield as she marched purposefully toward the main building. The hunger he'd felt after the day's walking was long gone. He felt chilled, inside and out. He was unaccustomed to dealing with someone who knew him, and felt awkward, his thoughts and feelings out of sync. He had spent a long time on the move, as background texture: the man at the counter who was due for a refill; the guy who was working out the back for a couple days; someone at a wind-swept gas station, staring at nothing over the top of his car as he filled it up, and who then pulled back out onto the road and was soon gone. For long periods he had thought of almost nothing at all, aided by a complete absence of any hooks into his past existence. Nina's presence changed that. He wished he had moved on a day earlier, that she had arrived to find him gone. But Zandt knew more about her doggedness than most people, and knew she would have kept on going once she'd set her mind to find him.

He looked at the file lying in the foot well. It was thick. He felt no desire to touch it, still less to see what was inside. Most of it he knew too well already. The rest would be more of the same. The feelings it inspired were a rank mixture of numbness and horror, razor blades wrapped in cotton wool.

He heard the sound of a door closing, and looked up to see Nina walking back from the main part of the inn. She was carrying something in one hand. He got out of the car. It was much colder now, the sky leaden. Snow.

'Jesus,' she said, her breath clouding around her face. 'You weren't kidding. Food on a need-to-eat

basis only. I got this though.' She held up a bottle of Irish whiskey. 'Said it was needed in evidence.'

'I don't really drink any more,' he said.

'I do,' she said. 'You can sit and watch.' She opened the door and retrieved the file. Zandt caught her

checking its position on the floor, as if to see whether he'd taken a look in her absence.

'Nina, why are you here?'

'Come to save you,' she said. 'Welcome you back into the world.'

'And if I don't want to come back?'

'You're already back. You just don't know it yet.'

'What's that supposed to mean?'

'John, it's colder than a nun's pants out here. Let's get inside. I'm sure you can do your new

thousand-yard-stare just as effectively under a roof.'

He was surprised into a grunt of laughter. 'That's kind of rude, isn't it?'

She shrugged. 'You know the rules. You sleep with a woman, she's got the right to be superior to you

for the rest of your life.'

'Even if she started it? And ended it?'

'You fought tooth and nail on neither occasion, as I recall. Which of these rustic barns is your current

abode?'

He nodded toward his building and she marched off. After a moment in which he considered and rejected the notion of getting back in the car and driving away, he followed.

4

He built a fire while she sat in one of the threadbare armchairs, her feet on the coffee table. He was aware of her assaying the surroundings in the lamplight: the tastefully worn rugs, shabby chic furniture, paintings only a hotelier could love. The floorboards were painted creamy white, and a spray of local flowers sat perkily in a vase a few inches from Nina's feet.

'So what time's Martha Stewart dropping by?'

'Just as soon as you've gone,' he said, heading to the bathroom for glasses. 'Me and her, it's like an animal thing.'

Nina smiled, and watched the kindling in the grate. The fire clicked and crackled, pleased to be wakened, ready to consume. It seemed like a long time since she'd seen a real fire. It reminded her of childhood vacations, and made her shiver.

When Zandt returned she screwed the cap off the bottle and poured two measures. He stood a moment longer, as if still unwilling to commit himself to joining her, but then took the other chair. The room slowly began to warm.

She held the tooth glass up to her lips with both hands, and looked at him across it. 'So, John —

how've you been?'

He sat, staring straight ahead, and didn't look at her.

'Just tell me,' he said.

Three days previously, a girl called Sarah Becker had been sitting on a bench on 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, California. She was listening to a minidisc, on a player she'd received for her fourteenth birthday. She had printed out a neat little label on the computer at home, and her name and address were stuck to the back of the player, fixed with invisible tape to prevent the ink from wearing off. While she'd hated to compromise the machine's sleek brushed chrome, she disliked the idea of losing it even more. When the player was found, it emerged that the album she'd been listening to was Generation Terrorists, by a British band called the Manic Street Preachers. Except, as Sarah knew, you called them The Manics. The band wasn't big at her school, which was one of the reasons she listened to them. Everybody else mooned over feisty pop princesses and insipid boy bands, or else bobbed their heads while some hip-hop yahoo bellowed last year's slang over someone else's tune from the safety of a walled compound in Malibu. Sarah preferred music that sounded as if, somewhere down the line, someone had meant something by it. She supposed it was her age. At fourteen, you weren't a kid any more. Not these days, and not by a long shot. Not in LA. Not here in 2002. It was taking a while for her parents to come up to speed, but even they knew it was so. In their own ways they were getting used to the idea, like Neanderthals warily watching the first Cro-Magnons coming whistling over the rise.

At the end where she was sitting, by the fountain opposite the Barnes and Noble, the Promenade was pretty empty by this time in the evening. A few people came and went from the bookstore, and you could see others through the two-storey plate-glass window: leafing intently through magazines and books, geeking out over computer specs or scouring for magic spells in screen-writing manuals. Her family had gone on a two-week vacation to London, England, the year before, and she'd been baffled at the indigenous bookstores. They were utterly weird. They just had, like, books. No cafe, no magazines, no washrooms even. Just rows and rows of books. People picked them up, bought them, then went away again. Her mom had seemed to believe this was cool in some way, but Sarah thought it was one of the few things she'd seen about England that really sucked. Eventually they'd found a big new Borders, and she'd fallen upon it, discovering The Manics at one of the listening posts. British bands were cool. The Manics were especially cool. London was cool in general. That was that.

She sat, head nodding in approval as the singer loudly proclaimed himself a 'damned dog', and watched down the Promenade. Down the other end of the three-block pedestrianized zone was mainly restaurants. Her father had dropped her off twenty minutes before, and would be coming to pick her up at nine sharp — a once-monthly occurrence. She was supposed to be meeting her friend Sian at the Broadway Deli. They were ladies who dined. The supper club had been the brainchild of Sian's mom, who was adapting to her daughter's adolescence by throwing open all the doors she could find, for fear that leaving the wrong one closed might ruin their special relationship. Sarah's mother had gone along with it pretty easily: partly because everyone tended to go along with Monica Williams, but also because Zok Becker was sufficiently in contact with her younger self to realize how much she'd have liked to have done the same at her age. Sarah's father had occasional right of veto, however, and for a long, bad moment she thought he was going to exercise it. A few months prior there had been a spate of gang-related killings, part of the seasonal undertow of corporate restructuring in the crack industry. But eventually, after proposing and reaching agreement on a battery of precautionary measures — including dropping and picking her up at closely defined times and places, demonstration of a fully-charged cellular battery, and a recitation of the key common-sense means of avoiding the chaotic intrusion of the fates — he'd agreed. It was now part of the social calendar.

Problem was, when they'd pulled up this evening, Sian hadn't been standing on the corner. Michael Becker craned his neck, peering up and down the street.

'So where is the legendary Ms Williams?' he muttered, fingers drumming on the wheel. Something was bitched with the series he was developing on the Warner lot, and he was big-time stressed: heavy calm spiked with jumpiness. Sarah wasn't sure exactly what the problem was, but knew her father's credo that there were an infinite number of ways for things to go wrong in The Business, and only one way of them going right. She had seen proposals and drafts for the show's pilot episode, and he'd even picked her brains over a few things, gauging her reaction as part of the potential target audience. Actually, and to her slight surprise, Sarah had thought the series sounded pretty cool. Better than Buffy or Angel, in fact. She privately thought Buffy herself was kind of a pain, and that the older English guy didn't sound half as much like Hugh Grant as he seemed to think. Or look enough like him, either. The heroine in Dark Shift was more self-contained, less showy, and less prone to whining. She was also, though Sarah didn't realize this, loosely based on Michael Becker's daughter.

'There she is,' Sarah had said, pointing up the way.

Her father frowned. 'I don't see her.'

'Yeah, look — up under that streetlight, outside Hennessy and Ingels.'

At that moment some asshole blared his horn behind them, and her father swung his head to glare ominously out of the back windshield. He almost never got angry within the family, but he could sometimes lay it on the outside world. Sarah knew, having recently covered it in school, that this was a pecking order thing, hierarchy being established in the asphalt jungle — but she was privately nervous that one of these days her dad would choose to assert his will with the wrong naked ape. He didn't seem to realize that fathers could antagonize the fates, too, or that age made little difference to the vehemence of their retribution.

She opened the door and hopped out. 'I'll run over,' she said. 'It's fine.' Michael Becker watched tight-mouthed as the impatient guy in the LeBaron pulled out around them.

Then he turned, and his face changed. For a moment he didn't look like he had story arcs and demographics running behind his eyes, as if he saw the world through a grid of beat lists and foreign residuals. He just looked tired, in need of some hot caffeine, and like her dad.

'See you later,' Sarah said, with a wink. 'Have a heart attack on the way home.'

He looked at his watch. 'Haven't got the time. Maybe a little prostate trouble instead. Nine o'clock?'

'On the dot. I'm always early. It's you who's late.'

'As if. Nokkon, little lady.'

'Nokkon, Dad.' She shut the door and watched him pull back into traffic. He waved at her, a little salute, and then he was gone: swallowed back into an interior world, at the mercy of people who bought words by the yard and never knew what they wanted until it was already in syndication. As she watched him disappear, Sarah knew one thing for sure — The Business wasn't getting her for a sweetheart.

Sian hadn't been under the lamppost, of course. Sarah had only pretended, to help her father on his way, so he could get home and back to work. She continued to not be there for another ten minutes, and then Sarah's phone rang.

It was Sian. She was currently standing by her mom's car on Sunset, and just about annoyed enough to spit. Sarah could hear Sian's mother in the background, imperiously letting off steam at some hapless mechanic, who'd probably seen mother and daughter in distress and developed visions of his own real-life porno film. Sarah hoped he now realized that not only was this not going to happen, but if he didn't get the car fixed pronto he'd be a dead man.

Either way, Sian wasn't going to make it. Which left Sarah in a quandary. Her father wouldn't be home yet, and when he pulled into the drive he'd be a vortex of bullet points and plot fixes, maybe already on the phone to his partner, Charles Wang, conjuring ways to pull the project back into the comfort zone. There was some big deal breakfast meeting with the studio the next morning, a make-or-break powwow over decaf and cholesterol-free omelettes. She knew her father dreaded that kind of meeting most of all, because he never ate breakfast and hated having to pretend he did, toying with toast to avoid fiddling with the silverware. She didn't want him to get any more stressed than he already was, and her younger sister, Melanie, would be providing plenty of background noise by herself.

So then she realized — she didn't actually have to call at all. She had a little under two hours, and then he'd be back. The Promenade was wall-to-wall browsing opportunities, most of them still open for business. She could get a Frappuccino and just hang. Wander round Anthropologie, on the lookout for gift ideas. Check the listening posts in B&N, in case they'd finally racked up something new. Even go sit in the Deli, and have a Cobb salad by herself. Basically, bottom line, simply make sure she was at the right place at the right time, and then — depending on what kind of mood he was in — either reveal that Sian hadn't showed, or pretend everything had gone as usual.

She dialled Sian to make sure that this plan wouldn't be undermined by Mrs Williams calling her mom. She couldn't get through, which probably meant the car was up and running again and out of radio contact in a canyon. Sarah was confident that if her mother had been contacted then she'd know all about it already. Helicopters would be circling overhead, Bruce Willis being lowered down toward her on a rope.

She left a message for Sian, then walked over and went into Starbucks. It had occurred to her that if she did go to the Deli she could have whatever she wanted, rather than ordering the Cobb salad because that's what they always did, dieting twenty years before they needed to. She could have, of all things, a burger. A huge great big burger, rare, with cheese. And fries.

She was thinking that maybe this was what it was like to be a grown-up, and that it could work out kind of interesting.

She'd come to the end of her Frap, and The Manics had bellowed their last this time round, when she saw a tall guy come out of the bookstore. He ambled a few yards, then stopped and peered up at the

sky. It wasn't yet dark, but it was getting past twilight. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a pack of cigarettes and struggled to extricate one from the packet while juggling what was evidently a heavy bag of books. This went on for quite a few moments, the man completely unaware of Sarah's amused scrutiny. She was thinking that in his position she might try putting the bag down, but this obviously hadn't occurred to him.

Eventually, exasperated, he walked over to the fountain and stuck the bag down on the edge. Once he'd got the cigarette lit he put his hands on his hips, looking down the way, before glancing at her.

'Hello,' he said. His voice was soft and cheerful.

Now that he was closer she thought he was probably about forty, maybe a little less. She wasn't sure how she knew this, as there was a lamp behind his head and his face was slightly difficult to see. He just had that kind of older guy thing.

'Say that again.'

He said: 'Er, hello?'

She nodded sagely. 'You're English.'

'Oh God. Is it that obvious?'

'Well, like, you have an English accent.'

'Oh. Of course.' He took another drag of his cigarette, and then looked at the bench. 'Do you mind if

I join you?'

Sarah shrugged. Shrugging was good. It didn't say yes, it didn't say no. Whatever. The bench was plenty wide. She was salad-bound within seconds anyway. Or burger-bound. Still undecided.

The man sat. He was wearing a pair of corduroys, not especially new, but a light jacket that looked well-made. He had big, neat hands. His fair hair had been dyed a stronger blond, but expensively, and his face worked pretty well. Like a hip science teacher, or maybe social studies. The kind that probably

wouldn't sleep with a student, but could if he wanted.

'So are you an actor, or something?'

'Oh no. Nothing as grand as that. Just a tourist.'

'How long are you here for?'

'A couple of weeks.' He reached in his pocket and pulled out a small object, made of shiny chrome.

He flipped the top off and revealed it to be a small portable ashtray.

Sarah watched this with great interest. 'The English smoke a lot, don't they.'

'We do,' said the man, who wasn't English. He stubbed out his cigarette and slipped the ashtray back

in his pocket. 'We are not afraid.'

They chatted for a little while. Sarah reminisced about London. The man was able to join in convincingly, as he had returned from the country only two days before. He did not reveal that the Barnes and Noble bag he was carrying was full of books he had owned for some years, nor that he had spent a full hour in the bookstore sitting in the Politics and Economics section, his face averted from the other customers, watching out of the window for Sarah to arrive. He instead asked for suggestions for what else he should see in the city. He listed the parts of Los Angeles he had already visited, a selection of the usual tourist traps.

Sarah, who took her responsibilities seriously, suggested the La Brea tar pit, Rodeo Drive, and the Watts Tower, which she felt would give a good span of where LA had come from, and where it was going. Plus, she thought privately, on Rodeo he could replace his corduroys with something a little more bon marché, as Sian — who'd vacationed in Antibes last year — was fond of saying.

Then the man went quiet for a moment. Sarah was thinking that it was time for her to windowshop her way down to dinner. She was gathering herself to say good night, when he turned and looked at her.

'You're very pretty,' he said.

This might or might not be true — Sarah's opinion was currently fiercely divided on the subject — but

it was without question straight out of the 'Watch out, a wacko' box of conversational sallies.

'Thanks,' she said, bright-eyed with deflection. For a moment the evening seemed a little cooler, then steadied as she took control. 'Anyway, nice talking to you.'

'I'm sorry,' he said, quickly. 'That's rather an odd thing to say, I know. It's just that you remind me of

my own daughter. She's about your age.'

'Right,' Sarah said. 'Cool.'

'She's back in Blighty,' the man went on, as if he hadn't heard her. 'With her mother. Looking forward

to seeing them again, don't you know. Top hole. Gor blimey. Princess Di, God rest 'er soul.'

His eyes flicked away from her then, took a quick glance around. Sarah assumed he was embarrassed. In reality he was estimating that in about twenty seconds all paths would converge to convenience him, the lines of sight all elsewhere. He was good at judging this kind of thing, at telling when he would be in vision, of seeing the small steps that would take him back out of sight. It was one of his

special skills. He shifted a few inches closer to the girl, who stood up.

'Anyway,' Sarah said. 'I got to go.'

The man laughed, as he felt the lines fall into place. He grabbed Sarah's hand and tugged it with

surprising force. She squawked quietly and fell back onto the bench, too shocked to resist. 'Let go,' she said, fighting to stay calm. The ground seemed to be falling away, a vertiginous, fluid

feeling. She felt as if she had been caught cheating, or stealing.

'Pretty girl.' He gripped her hand more tightly. 'A keeper.'

'Please, let go of me.'

'Oh shut up,' he muttered, all pretence of an English accent gone. 'You ludicrous little slut.' His fist

jack-hammered up in a compact, short-armed punch, smashing straight into her face.

Sarah's head jerked back, her eyes wide open and stunned. Oh no, she thought, the interior voice quiet and dismayed. Oh no.

'Take a look, Sarah,' the man said, his voice low and urgent. 'Look at all the lucky people. The people who aren't you.'

He nodded down the Promenade. Only a block down, the street was crowded. People going in and out of stores, taking exploratory looks at restaurant menus. Around Sarah and the man there was nobody to be seen.

'Once there was just bush here, do you realize that? Ragged coastline, rocks, shells. A few tracks in the sand. If you're quiet you can hear the way that it was, before any of this shit was here.'

Blinking against her watering eyes, Sarah tried to work out what he was getting at. Maybe there was something she could do, some unexpected final question in this test, some way of scraping a pass. 'But people don't see,' he continued. 'They don't even look. Blind. Wilfully blind. Trapped in the machine.'

He grabbed her hair, turned her face so she could see into the Barnes and Noble. There were plenty of people in there, too. Reading. Standing. Chatting. Why would you look outside, when you're in a bookstore at night? Even if you did, would you see more than a couple of dark figures on a bench? Why would that seem exceptional?

'I should do you here and now,' the man said, in a tone of quiet indignation. 'Just to show it could be done. That nobody really cares. When you're surrounded by people you don't know all the time, how can you tell what's wrong? In five square miles of disease, who cares what happens to one little virus?

Only me.'

Sarah realized there was going to be no get-out-of-this-free question, not now or ever, and gathered herself to scream. The man felt her chest expand, and his hand quickly looped over her face. Two fingers grabbed her upper lip from above, tugging it hard. The scream never made it out of her throat. Sarah tried to struggle, but the hand held her in position, coupled with the weight of his arm, pressing down on her head.

'Nobody watching,' the man assured her, with the same hateful calm. 'I made it this way. I can walk

where nobody sees.'

Indistinct noises came out of the girl's mouth, as she tried to say something. He seemed to understand.

'No they're not,' he said. 'They're not on their way. They're at home. Mommy's a Jackson Pollock in the kitchen. Daddy's in the garden, with little sister. Both naked. They make an interesting tableau. Some might even consider it obscene.'

In fact, Sarah's mom and Melanie were watching a Simpsons rerun at that moment. It was, as Zoë Becker would always remember, the episode where George Bush moves into Springfield. Michael Becker was typing furiously in his den, having found, he fervently hoped, a way of making everything all right. If he could just fix the opening ten minutes, and find a way of selling the idea that some of the characters had to be older than teenagers, then everything would be okay. Failing that, fuck it, he'd just make them all teenagers — and reinstate all the fucking pans down the front of the high school, the way Wang wanted it. A few miles away, Sian Williams had just picked up Sarah's message, and was feeling a little envious of her friend's Out Alone adventure.

'If you keep wriggling,' the man said, 'I'll pull your teeth out. I will. I promise. Not easy, but it's worth it. It's really a very unusual sound.' Sarah went completely still, and for a moment neither of them moved. The man seemed to take a pleasure in sitting that way, the girl's mouth pulled up to a point of screaming pain, as if they were sharing a private moment in the middle of a busy street.

Then he sighed, like a man reluctantly putting aside an absorbing magazine. He stood, pulling Sarah up with him. Her minidisc player slipped to the floor with a brittle clatter. The man glanced at it, and let it lie.

'Goodbye and good night, good people,' he said, in the general direction of the other end of the street. 'You'll all rot in hell, and I'd love to lead you there.' His right arm rotated around Sarah's head until his hand was clamped firmly over her mouth. With his other hand he picked up the bag of books. 'But I have a date, and we must go.'

Then, with quick, long strides, he dragged Sarah across the street and into an alley where his car was parked. She had no choice but to accompany him. He was tall and very strong.

He threw open the back door, then grabbed her hair again and peered closely into her face. The close presence of his face scared all useful thought out of her head.

'Come, my dear,' he said. 'Our carriage awaits.' Then he head-butted her just above the eyes.

As Sarah's knees buckled, her last thought was matter-of-fact. In her bedside table was a notebook in which she had written down many thoughts. Some of the most recent were about sex: breathless musings on a part of life she had not yet experienced, but knew was coming her way. Most were transcriptions of things Sian had told her, but she'd used her own imagination too, plus what she'd gleaned from TV and movies and a not-too-gross magazine she'd found under the Pier.

The notebook was hidden, but not very well. When she was dead, her mother and father would find it, and they would know she had brought this evening upon herself.

Nina was unaware of much of this, but this was the event she described. When she had told what she knew, she topped her glass up. Zandt's remained untouched.

'Four witnesses put Sarah Becker on the bench between 7.12 and 7.31. Their descriptions of the man with her range from 'Nondescript, maybe tall', to 'Shit, I don't know', via 'Well, he was, like, a guy'. We don't even have an age or colour that I'd take to the bank, though we got two hits with white and blond. Two say he was wearing a long coat, another said a sport jacket. Nobody saw them leave, despite the fact that the bench is within yards of a zillion people. If the man spent any time in the bookstore before accosting her, then nobody noticed him. Another witness describes seeing a car of undetermined colour and model in the nearest side street. It's possible that a trashcan may have been placed to obscure the number plate — which is pretty slick, though does require more confidence than God. Anybody could have just moved the can, and he was illegally parked. The car was gone by 8.15.

'The girl's father arrived at the south end of the Promenade at 9.07. He parked up in the usual place, waited. When neither his daughter nor Sian Williams appeared after a few minutes, he went into the restaurant. The staff told him they hadn't served a table who matched his description, though they did have a no-show in the name of Williams. He called the other girl's mother and found that the dinner had been cancelled at the last moment due to a problem with the Williamses' car. The car's been checked, but we can't get a firm opinion on whether it was tampered with.

'Michael Becker demanded to speak to the girl herself and was eventually told Sarah had left a message saying she didn't want to bother her dad, and that she was going to just kill time and wait for the usual pickup. He searched up and down the street without finding any sign of his daughter. Finally he made it up to the far end and after checking in the Barnes and Noble he spotted a Sony minidisc player lying partially obscured under the bench. His daughter's ownership of this device was certain, both through a label she had affixed and because he had bought it for her. The disc in the machine was some album by her favourite band. She has a poster of them on her bedroom wall. Becker then called the sheriff's department, the LAPD, and also his agent, somewhat bizarrely. He seems to have thought that she would have more pull with the cops than he did. He called his wife, and told her to stay where she was in case their daughter arrived home by cab.

'The whole area was searched. Nothing. There are no prints on the player apart from the girl's. There are about a hundred cigarette butts around the bench, but we don't even know if the perpetrator smoked. One of the witnesses said he thought he might have done, so some poor fucker in a lab is currently trying for DNA off a whole bag of them.'

'The father isn't a suspect.'

'Not in this universe. They were very close, in the right ways. Still, for a couple of days that's what people were wondering. But no. We don't think it's him, and the timings don't work at all. We've also

eliminated his partner, a Charles Wang. He was in New York.'

Zandt slowly raised his glass, emptied it, lowered it again. He knew there was more. 'And then?'

Nina pulled her feet off the table, reached over to pick the file up off the floor. Inside, in addition to a

large number of copied documents, was a thin package wrapped in brown paper. What she pulled out, however, was a photograph.

'This arrived at the Becker residence late the following afternoon. Some time between half past four and six o'clock. It was discovered lying on the path.' She handed it to Zandt.

The picture showed a girl's sweater, pale lilac, neatly folded into a square. What looked like ribbed ribbon had been tied around the sweater into a bow.

'It's been tied up with plaited hair. Sarah's was long enough for it to be hers, and it's the right colour. Forensics has taken samples off her hairbrush, and will have confirmation very soon.'

Zandt noticed that his glass had been refilled. He drank. The whiskey stung in the dryness of his mouth, and made him nauseous. His head felt as if it were a balloon, blown up slightly too much, floating a couple of inches above his neck.

'The Upright Man,' he said.

'Well,' Nina said, judiciously, 'we've checked with the families of the victims two and three years ago, and every officer who was involved in those investigations. We're pretty convinced that the nature of the parcels he left on those occasions has remained secret. It could still be a copycat. I doubt it. But I have an all-media scan in operation, including the Internet, for any use of the phrases 'Delivery Boy' or 'Upright

Man'.'

'The Internet?'

'Yeah, she said. Kind of a computer thing. It's all the rage.'

'It's him,' Zandt said. Only he was fully aware of the irony inherent in his confidence.

She looked at him, and then reached reluctantly back into the file. This time the photograph showed

the sweater after it had been carefully unwrapped and laid out flat. Sarah's name was embroidered on the front, not fancily, but in neat block letters.

'The hair used for the name is of a dark brown. It is much drier than the hair that we believe to be Sarah's, suggesting that it was cut some time ago.'

She stopped then, and waited while Zandt slowly reached into his pocket. He pulled out a pack of Marlboros and a matchbook. He had not smoked since they had been in the room. There was no ashtray. His hands, as he pulled a cigarette out, were almost steady. He did not look at her, but only at the match as he struck it: regarding it with fixed concentration, as if it were something unfamiliar to him, but whose purpose he had divined through intuition. It took three attempts before it flared, but the match could have been damp.

'I made sure the dark brown hair was tested first.' She took a deep breath. 'It's a match, John. It's Karen's hair.'

She left him alone for a while, went and stood outside in the cold and listened to the darkness. Muted laughter drifted across from the main building, and through the window she could see couples of varying ages, bundled up in sensible sweaters, plotting tomorrow's adventures in hiking. A door was open on the other side of the building and through it she could hear the clatter of plates being cleaned by someone who didn't own them. Something small rustled in the undergrowth on the other side of the road, but nothing came of it.

When she returned, Zandt was sitting exactly as she'd left him, though he had a new cigarette. He didn't look up at her.

She put a few more pieces of wood on the fire, inexpertly, unable to remember whether you piled them on top or placed them round the sides. She sat in the chair and poured herself another drink. Then sat up with him through the night.

5

By late afternoon I'd had conversations with the police and the hospital, and before that with my parents' neighbours on either side. Each of these had been carefully judged.

I called the cops from the house, and was put through to an Officer Spurling — thankfully not one of the men who'd interviewed me after the incident in the hotel bar. Spurling and his partner had been first on the scene of my parents' accident, alerted through a call from a passing motorist. Officers Spurling and McGregor remained on the scene until the ambulance and fire service arrived, and assisted in the removal of the bodies from the car. They followed the ambulance to the hospital, and Spurling had been present when Donald and Elizabeth Hopkins had been pronounced dead on arrival. The deceased had been identified by their driver's licenses, with subsequent confirmation from Harold Davids (attorney) and Mary Richards (neighbour) within two hours.

Officer Spurling was sympathetic to my desire to establish the circumstances of my parents' death. He provided me with the name of the relevant doctor at the hospital, and suggested I look into counselling. I took him to mean receiving some, rather than as a career. I thanked him for his time, and he wished me the very best. I ended the call hoping I didn't run into him when I went to the station to retrieve my gun, though chances were he already knew all about it. The counselling suggestion hadn't sounded entirely uninflected.

Tracking down the doctor was a good deal more difficult. She wasn't on duty when I called the hospital, and the length of time it took to elicit this information, via a succession of conversations with harried nurses and other disembodied and bad-tempered voices, suggested that I'd be lucky to get her on the phone when she arrived. The ER was there for the living. Once you were dead you were merely an unwelcome reminder, and out of their hands.

I drove over and spent a very quiet hour waiting there. Dr Michaels eventually deigned to come out of her bunker and talk to me. She was in her late twenties, studiously harassed, and awfully pleased with herself. After ruthlessly patronizing me for a few moments she confirmed what I'd already been told. Major head and upper body trauma. Dead as dead could be. If that was all, could I excuse her. She was very grown up now, and had patients to see. I was more than happy to relinquish her company, and tempted to help her along her way with a brisk shove.

I walked back out of the hospital. The light was gone, a fall evening come early. A few cars were parked randomly around the lot, made monochromatic and anonymous by high overhead lamps. A young woman stood smoking and crying quietly, some distance away.

I considered what to do next. After finding the note, I'd sat on the coffee table for quite some time. Neither the light-headedness nor the crawling sensation in my stomach went away. A search through the rest of the book showed that it was empty. There was no question that the note was in my father's handwriting.

'Ward,' it said, in writing that was in no way different from what I would expect, neither too large nor too small, not forced or noticeably faint: 'We're not dead.' My father had written this on a piece of paper, slipped it into a book, and then stashed it inside his old chair, taking care to replace the braid that covered the join. A note denying their death had been placed in a position where it would come to light only if they were dead. Why else would I be in the house alone? What would I be doing in his chair? The positioning of the note suggested that whoever had placed it believed that, in the circumstances that next led me to be in the house, I would sit in the old chair — despite knowing it was the least comfortable in the room. As it happened, they'd been right. I had sat there, and for some time. It made sense that I would do so if they were dead, or that I would at least look at it, maybe run my hand over the fabric for a moment. It was exactly the kind of thing a grieving son might be expected to do.

But, and this was the point that kept jabbing away at me, this implied that some time before their deaths one or both of them had spent time thinking about what would be likely to happen after they died. They had considered the situation in detail, and made judgments on my likely behaviour. Why? Why would they be thinking of death? It was bizarre. It made no sense.

Assuming they were actually dead.

The idea that the last few days had been a farce, that my parents weren't dead after all, was a difficult one to face head-on. Part of my heart leapt at the idea, the part that had awakened me at some stage in every night since the phone call from Mary. Even if I hadn't cared for them, and had only wished for a chance to bawl them out about UnRealty, I wanted my parents back. But when your flesh is damaged the body gets to work within seconds. White blood cells flood into the area, repairing and patching, throwing up every sandbag they have. The body protects itself, and the same happens in the mind. It occurs sluggishly and imperfectly, a bad job done by indifferent craftsmen, but within minutes an accretion of defence mechanisms starts to form around the trauma, blunting its edges, eventually sealing it away inside scar tissue. Like a sliver of glass buried deep in a cut, the event will never go away, and often a movement will cause it to nudge a nerve ending and burn like fire for a while. However much it hurts when that happens, the last thing you want to do is take a knife and reopen the wound.

I left the house, locking up carefully, and went next door to Mary's. She seemed both pleased and surprised to see me, and dealt coffee and cake in dangerous quantities. Feeling underhanded and unworthy of her kindness, I established in roundabout ways that my parents had seemed their normal selves in the days and weeks leading up to the accident, and that — as Officer Spurling later confirmed

— Mary had identified the bodies. I knew this already. She'd told me on the phone, as I sat bonelessly in Santa Barbara. I just needed to hear it again. I could have visited the bodies at the undertakers myself, of course, instead of sitting in the hotel for two days. I hadn't, which now made me feel ashamed. I'd told myself at the time that it was important to remember them as they had been, rather than as two lengths of damaged putty. There was truth in that. But also I had been afraid, bothered by the idea, and simply unwilling.

After I left Mary I went round to the other neighbours. A young woman opened the door almost instantly, startling me. She was confident and healthy-looking, and wearing generously paint-spattered clothes. The hallway behind her was half finished in a shade I considered ill-advised. I introduced myself and explained what had happened to their neighbours. She was already aware of events, as I'd known she would be. She expressed her condolences and we chatted for a moment. At no point did anything in her manner suggest that the accident hadn't come as a surprise, what with one or both of the Hopkins being evidently off their heads. That was that.

I called the cops, and then went to the hospital. As I stood in the parking lot after talking to the doctor, I decided that three confirmations were enough. My parents were dead. Only a fool would follow this line of inquiry any further. I could talk to Davids the next day if I wished — I'd missed him at his office, and left a message — but I knew anything he told me would lead to the same conclusion. The note wasn't what it purported to be. It wasn't a get-out-of-grief card. It didn't undo what had happened.

But there had to be a reason for it, even if that reason turned out to be only that one of them had not been completely sane. The note's existence meant something, and I found that I needed to know what that was.

I searched in the garage, and then my father's workshop in the cellar of the house. I felt I should be looking for something in particular, but didn't know what, so I just poked around. Drills, routers, other handyman kit of obscure purpose. Nails and screws in a wide variety of sizes, neatly sorted. Numerous scraps of wood, rendered purposeless and inexplicable by his death. Nothing seemed obviously out of place, all was arranged with the tidiness and rigour I would have expected. If external order can be taken as an index of state of mind, my father had been the same as ever.

I went back up into the house and did the downstairs first. The kitchen and utility room, the sitting room, my father's den, the dining room, and the section of the porch that at some time in the past had been glassed in and turned into a sunroom. Here I was more thorough. I looked beneath every cushion, under the rugs, and behind every piece of furniture. I looked inside the cabinet, under the television, and found nothing except technology and a couple of DVDs. I took everything out of the cupboards in the kitchen, looked in the oven and the larder. I picked up and shook every book I found, whether on the bookcases in the hallway, or filed, in my mother's idiosyncratic way, among the dried pasta. There were a lot of books. It took a long time. Especially my father's study, off the half-landing, which was where I looked first. I dug through the drawers of his desk, on every shelf, and dipped into each hanging file in the oak cabinet. I even turned on his computer and took a cursory trawl through a few files, though this felt unwelcome and invasive. I wouldn't want anyone who loved me sifting through the contents of my laptop. They'd be likely to dig me up and set fire to me. It soon became obvious that it would take far too long to read everything on the machine, and that it would very likely turn out to be nothing but invoices and workaday correspondence. I left the machine on, with the idea of coming back to it if all else failed, but my father wasn't a computer buff. I didn't think he'd leave a further message anywhere he couldn't touch with his hands.

Before long I was beginning to feel worn out. Not with the physical effort, which was negligible, but the emotional undertow. Thoroughly upending my parents' lives brought them back even more vehemently, especially the trivial things. A framed photocopy of the contract for the first house UnRealty had sold, capped by a logo that I now realized looked a little hand-drawn. By my mother, probably. A scrapbook of recipes for childhood meals, including a lasagne I could smell just by reading the ingredients.

I took a break and spent fifteen minutes sitting in the kitchen, drinking their mineral water. I tried once again to put myself in their position, to think what might be an obvious second step. Assuming they'd left the note in the chair to attract my attention, it made sense that any further note or clue would also be in a place that had resonance. I couldn't think where that would be. I'd turned everything over. There was nothing there.

The upstairs of the house proved just as much of a bust. I looked under the bed in their room, searched all the drawers. After a deep breath, I went through the contents of the wardrobes, paying special attention to those I recognized — my father's old jackets, my mother's battered ex-handbags. I found a few things — receipts, ticket stubs, a handful of loose change — nothing that seemed to mean anything. I lingered over a collection of old ties, neatly boxed in the back of my father's side of the closet. I'd never seen most of them.

I even looked under the roof, pulling myself up into it via a small trapdoor in the ceiling of the upstairs hallway. My father had got as far as stringing a light up, but no further. There was nothing in the attic space but dust and two empty suitcases.

In the end I went downstairs, and back to my father's chair. It was early evening. I had found nothing, and I was beginning to feel stupid. Perhaps I was just trying to flay a nonexistent order out of chaos. I sat in my father's chair, and read the note once again. It meant neither more nor less, however many times you read it.

As I raised my eyes, they fell once more on the television. The chair was aligned perfectly with it, and a thought occurred to me. If I'd been right in thinking that it looked a little out of place, then perhaps its position wasn't just to help draw my attention to the cushion — but to redirect my gaze to another area entirely.

I got up and opened the glass doors that hid the storage space underneath the television. I found exactly what I had previously. A VCR, a DVD player, and two DVDs: old movies. Nothing else.

No tapes. That was odd.

In the whole of the house I'd found no videotapes. There were two shelves of DVDs in the study, and a further one in the second bedroom. But not a single videotape.

My father was a semi-professional tube watcher. For as long as I could remember, there'd been tapes lying around the house. So where were they now?

I quickly strode back to his study. No tapes in there either, even though there was a second VCR stowed on a low shelf. I didn't bother to search the drawers or the cabinet again. There'd been none there. There had been none anywhere in the house or the shop or garage either. I tried to think back to the Thanksgiving before last, when I'd deigned to stop by for twenty-four hours. I couldn't specifically remember seeing tapes around. I couldn't remember not seeing them. I'd been pretty drunk most of the time.

It could be that my father had embraced DVD as the dawn of a long-awaited new age in home entertainment, declared the videotape dead, and held a bonfire in the garden. I didn't think so. Dyersburg doubtless had a dump somewhere, but I couldn't see that scenario either. Even if he'd found as the years went on that there was less and less he wanted to watch, he wasn't going to throw all the old favourites away. I started to wonder whether creating an absence of something unremarkable might be a subtle way of attracting the attention of someone who knew you well, who had an understanding of the things that should be in your environment.

Either that, or I was losing objectivity, running too far and fast with a meaningless ball. I'd already searched the house. It didn't matter that I now had an idea — however spurious — of what to look for. I already hadn't found it. I was getting hungry, and also angry. If there had been something they had thought I needed telling, why the subterfuge? Why not just tell me on the phone? Leave a letter with Davids? Send an email? It made no sense.

But I knew by then that when I left the house, it would be for good. It was better to be sure. You want that scar tissue as tough as it can be.

I turned the outside lights on and went and had a look around the porch. None of the boards in the decking was loose, and I couldn't see how there could be much of a crawl space underneath. There was a large wooden box around one side, but a tiring couple of minutes established it held nothing but firewood and spiders. I walked down the couple of steps to the yard, took a few paces back, and stared irritably up at the house.

Chimney, horizontal boards, windowpanes. The upper rooms. Their bedroom. The guest room.

I went back inside. As I passed my father's study, something caught the corner of my eye. I stopped, took a pace back, and looked in, not certain what I had seen. I got it after a second or two: the VCR.

Like an idiot, I hadn't actually looked inside either of the tape machines. I checked the one in the living room first. It was empty. Then I walked into the study, bent down and peered at the machine until I found the Eject button. I pressed it and there was an irritable whirring sound, but nothing happened. Then I realized this was because there was black duct tape across the slot.

As a warning not to put a tape in, or to prevent my father from doing so accidentally? Hardly — if the machine was screwed, he'd just replace it.

I tried pulling the tape off, but it was of a strength sufficient to bond planets together. I got my knife out of my jacket pocket. It has two blades. One is large and sharp and designed for cutting things. The other is a screwdriver. It's surprising how often you need one right after the other. I flipped the sharp blade out and sliced through the centre of the tape.

There was something inside the slot. I cut and pulled at the remaining obstruction until the Eject button

worked. The machine whirred aggressively, and popped its slot.

It ejected a videotape, a standard VHS. I took it out and stared at it for a long time.

As I was slowly straightening up, my father called from the stairs.

'Ward? Is that you?' he said.

After a moment of light-headed shock, my body tried to move quickly toward a safe place it evidently believed existed somewhere else. It wanted to be some other place altogether. It didn't know where. Perhaps Alabama. It tried every direction at once, to be on the safe side.

I leapt backward, dropping the tape and coming close to sprawling full-length on the floor. I snatched the tape up from the ground and stuffed it in my pocket, doing so barely consciously, feeling caught and guilty and in danger. Footsteps made their way up the last few stairs, paused for a moment, and then headed toward the study door. I didn't want to see who made them.

It hadn't been my father, of course. Just a voice that wasn't entirely dissimilar, coming out of nowhere in a quiet house. The person I saw on the landing was Harold Davids, looking old and nervous and bad-tempered.

'Goodness,' he said. 'You scared the life out of me.'

I breathed out like a cough. 'Tell me about it.'

Davids's eyes drifted down to my hands, and I realized that I was still holding my knife. I flipped the

blade back in, started to drop it in my pocket, realized the tape was there.

'What are you doing here?' I asked, trying to sound polite.

'I got your message from this afternoon,' he said, slowly raising his eyes back up to look at my face. 'I

called the hotel. You weren't in your room, so I wondered if you might be here.'

'I didn't hear the doorbell.'

'The front door was ajar,' he said, somewhat testily. 'I became concerned that someone might have

heard the house was unoccupied, and broken in.'

'No,' I said. 'It's just me.'

'So I see. I shall consider the crisis over.' He raised a good-humoured eyebrow, and my heartbeat

slowly returned to normal.

Back in the hall he asked why I'd called. I said it was nothing, a minor point in the will's legalese that I'd subsequently puzzled out for myself. He nodded distantly and wandered through into the sitting room.

'Such a lovely room,' he said, after a moment. 'I shall miss it. I'll stop by every now and then, if I may, for any residual mail.'

'Great.' I didn't bear him any ill will, but I didn't want to spend any more time in the house. I went back up to my father's study to turn off the computer. I'd noticed earlier that he had a ffiz! drive, and on impulse I dumped a backup onto the disk in the machine.

By the time I'd turned it all off and gone back out, Davids was standing at the front door, looking brisk once again.

I walked with him down the path. He seemed in no hurry to get back to his business, and asked about my plans for the house. I told him I didn't know whether I'd be keeping or selling it, and accepted the implied offer of his services in either event. We stood by his big black car for a further five minutes, talking about something or other. I think he might have been giving me restaurant recommendations. I wasn't feeling hungry any more.

In the end he lowered himself into the driver's seat and strapped in with the thoroughness of a man who had no intention of dying, ever. He took a last look up at the dark shape of the house, and then nodded gravely at me. I suspected that something between us had changed, and wondered whether Davids had filed for later consideration the question of what Don Hopkins's son might be doing with a

knife that was so clearly not ornamental. I waited until he was safely round the corner, and then ran to my car and drove the other way.

6

A small amount of money and only a little flattery got me a VCR in my room. Either the hotel was better than I'd thought, or my stunt in the bar had convinced the management that I was a guest whose needs were worth meeting. I waited with increasing impatience while a monumentally stupid youth made a mess of a very simple cabling job, and then shooed him out.

I took the tape from my pocket, and carefully inspected it. There was no writing on it anywhere. From the amount of videotape on the spool, it looked like it would run to about fifteen or twenty minutes, half an hour at the most.

I waited until my room-service coffee arrived. I wanted my environment just so. Eventually it came, still fairly warm. Miraculously, there were no fries with it.

I put the tape in the machine.

Four seconds of data hash, the white noise of null information.

Then the sound of wind, and a view of a high mountain pasture. In the distance, a postcard view of snow-covered peaks across a range — seen too briefly to identify. The foreground was a gentle slope covered in snow, cut off by a stern-looking building: no obvious coffee shop, or ski-wear emporium. There was no one around, no cars in the small lot. Out of season. The camera panned to show another administrative-looking structure, and severe grey clouds above. This view was held for a few seconds, the sound of a sleeve flapping in the wind discernible in the background.

Cut to an interior. The camera was held low, as if covertly, and the scene only lasted a few seconds. I rewound, paused the clearest image. It wasn't the world's best VCR, and the frozen picture jumped a little, but I could make out the public area of what looked like a ski lodge, with a cathedral ceiling. A long desk ran along one side, presumably the reception, but currently deserted. There was a large painting on the wall behind it, the usual easy nonsense by some overpaid and under-talented fraud. I could see the left-hand side of a towering fireplace, constructed out of river rock. An ornamental fire generated well-behaved ambience in the bottom. Nut-brown leather armchairs were carefully arranged around low coffee tables, each featuring a heavily varnished wooden sculpture celebrating the sentimentally revered wildlife of the old West: an eagle, a bear, a Native American — none of whom survived the old West in any great numbers.

I flipped the tape off pause and, on second viewing, saw that someone had been about to enter the area just before the scene cut. There was a shadow along the wall of a corridor leading off the top of the space, the sound of footsteps on stone.

Then a final exterior, back out in the parking lot. A little time must have passed since the first shot — assuming it had even been taken on the same day. The wind had dropped and the sky was a clear and savage blue. A medium shot of the stern building, which I assumed must have been the one we were just inside. A number of figures stood in the snow in front of it. There were perhaps seven or eight of them, though it was difficult to tell because they were all dressed in dark clothing, and standing close together, as if in conversation. No faces were visible, and all I could hear was the wind — except for right at the end, when whoever was holding the camera said something, a short sentence. I listened to it three times. It remained inaudible.

Then, as one of the figures seemed to start to turn toward the camera, the screen cut back to white noise.

I paused the tape, stared at the screen as it jumped and fretted. I didn't know what to make of what I'd seen. It wasn't what I'd expected. From the quality of the image, it looked like the footage had been obtained using a digital camcorder. I hadn't seen anything like that in the house. The video could have been shot pretty much anywhere in the mid- to Northern Rockies, Idaho, Utah, or Colorado: but it made sense for it to be somewhere in Montana, and probably nearby. I knew the kind of place it showed. Compounds for the rich, the country's most beautiful areas carved into private home-sites so the wealthy could slide down mountains without fear of bumping into anyone of average income. Some had gated security, most didn't even need it. Put one foot over the border and you knew whether you were welcome. Anyone thinking of burglary would slink right back out, stung to their very core.

My parents probably knew people in the area who'd got themselves a home with ski-in, ski-out convenience. My father might even have sold it to them. So what?

I restarted the tape.

Real noise. Music, shouting, loud conversation. A face, blurred and very close up, laughing uproariously. It fell across the frame to reveal a bar in the throes of a boisterous good time. A long counter ran down one side of the room, ranks of bottles and a mirror behind. Men and women stood in droves around it, bellowing at each other, at the barmen, up at the ceiling. Most looked young, others were clearly in middle age. Everybody seemed to be smoking, and the murky yellow lighting was hazed with clouds. The walls were plastered with posters in rainbow colours or stark black-and-white. A jukebox was working overtime in the background, cranked up so loud it was distorting out both its speakers and the microphone and I couldn't even tell what the song was.

It was obvious this scene was much older than the first on the tape. Not only did the video look like it had been converted from 8mm film, but the clothes the people were wearing — unless this had been some kind of laboriously authentic retro party — said this was an evening back in the early '70s. Terrible colours, terrible jeans, terrible hair. A look that said being 'tidy' had been judged and found wanting. My reaction was probably about the same as their parents' must have been: Who are these aliens? What do they want? And are they blind?

The camera swept and bobbed through the bar, with a verve that suggested the operator was either under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs or very drunk indeed. At one point the picture pitched forward alarmingly, as if he or she had nearly fallen over. This was followed by a loud and prolonged belch, which degenerated into a violent coughing fit, the camera meanwhile held down so that it showed a patch of beer-slicked floor. Then it whipped back upward, and careered off into the fray as if fixed to a bumper car. My eyebrows crawled slowly up my head in bemused embarrassment, as I tried to get my head round the idea that it might be my father operating the camera. A few people waved or hooted as it moved past them, but no one called out a name.

Then the camera swerved abruptly round a corner, revealing an extension to the main bar area with people standing and sitting all around the sides. In the middle was a pool table. Some guy was hunkered down on the other side to take a shot. He was large and had a big nose and his face was almost totally obscured with hair and moustache and sideburns. He looked like a bear with the mange. Behind him wobbled a blonde woman with long hair, leaning on a cue as if it was the only thing holding her up. She was trying very hard to focus on the game, a frown of concentration on her face, but it looked like the world was getting away from her. Her partner didn't seem like he was having a much easier time of it, and was taking a very long while lining up for his shot. Closer to the camera, on the near side of the table, was another couple, both holding pool cues. They had their backs to the camera and an arm round each other. Both had long brown hair. The girl wore a big white blouse and a long skirt in dark purples shot with green; the man sported bell-bottoms in tatty denim and an afghan waistcoat that looked only recently tamed.

The blonde girl looked up from the table and caught sight of the camera. She let out a whoop, and pointed at it with great vigour but extreme vagueness, as if she was selecting between three different images and kept forgetting which one she'd settled for. The pool player glanced up, rolled his eyes, got back to his shot. The brown-haired couple turned round, and I realized that my earlier embarrassment had been misplaced.

It wasn't my father running the camera. I could tell this because the brown-haired couple were my parents.

As I stared at the image open-mouthed, my father grinned a crooked grin and flipped his middle finger at the camera. My mother stuck her tongue out. The camera abruptly swept away from them to the pool player, as he finally made his shot. He missed by a country mile.

I paused, rewound.

My parents turned. My father grinned, and flipped the bird. My mother stuck her tongue out.

I paused again. I stared.

My mother never really got large, but she got comfortable, and moved with the sedate grace of a liner being pulled by a tug. The person I saw on screen weighed about one hundred twenty pounds, and they were distributed very well. Without even realizing what I was thinking, I knew that if I'd walked into a bar and saw her looking like that and standing with another guy, then a fight would have broken out. This was someone you'd turn caveman to stand next to. Not that my father looked incapable of holding his own: he was a little heavier than I remembered him ever being, but he moved easily and with great economy. He could have been an actor. The pair of them looked fit and healthy and lustrous. They looked like real, living people, a couple that had sex. Most of all they looked young. They looked so astonishingly young.

The scene lasted about another five minutes. Nothing in particular happened, except that I got to see my father playing pool, back when he'd have looked at me as I am now and seen an older man. And he could play. He could really play. When the bear man missed his shot and reeled back from the table, my father turned from the camera and bent over the green. He didn't bother to go round to find the easiest shot: he just took the one in front of him and fired it off. It went down. He started moving then, prowling round the table, glancing with the intent nonchalance you see in people who expect to pot the balls, who've come to the table with that in mind. The next shot went home, too, rolled a foot down a cushion, and the one after that — as if the ball had been snapped back into the pocket on a piece of elastic. My mother cheered and slapped my father on the ass. He made an ambitious reversed double into the centre pocket and then sunk the black from halfway down the table, turning away before it was even down. Game over, man.

He winked at the bearlike guy, who rolled his eyes again. Just as the bear was used to the camera wielder being an asshole, he was clearly also accustomed to being trashed by my father at pool. This was business as usual. These were people who knew each other very well.

Nothing in particular happened, except that my mother began dancing with the blonde girl. Then she started doing a kind of side-to-side ragdoll thing, arms and legs turning in different directions, fingers clicking. I'd seen this done in films, on television, by professional dancers. But I'd never really seen it properly until I saw my mother doing it, rattling along to the music, mouth half-open and eyes half-shut.

You go girl, I found myself thinking. You really did go.

Nothing in particular happened, except while the bear was laboriously resetting the table I saw my father sit back on a stool and slug back a few swallows of beer. My mother — still dancing — winked at him, and he winked back, and I realized they weren't quite as drunk as everyone else in the room. They were having a fine old time, but they had jobs and when Monday morning came they'd be able to do them. Come to think of it, my father must already have been a realtor, despite the weekend afghan and scraggy T-shirt. The extra few pounds actually kind of suited him. He had a breadth of shoulder that could accommodate the weight and look powerful rather than fat. Much more and he could have been heading for out-of-shape, but for the time being he merely looked like someone you'd be careful not to bang into if he was heading across the floor carrying a tray of beers. I could tell that the weight must have been a fairly recent acquisition, however, and that he wasn't comfortable with it. Every now and then he rolled his shoulders back, ostensibly out of a desire to remove kinks from leaning down to rocket balls around the table. But also, I suspected, to make sure his shoulders were held square. Later he'd discovered jogging, and the gym, and never looked this way again. But on the tape of that evening I saw him do something: it was trivial, and innocuous, but as I sat in the hotel room in Dyersburg and watched it a small sound escaped from my mouth, like I'd been gently punched in the stomach.

As he lit a cigarette — and I'd never known that he'd once smoked — he absently lifted the patch of T-shirt lying over his midriff, and let it fall again — so it hung a little better over what was only a pretty small belly. I rewound, played it again. And then again, leaning forward, squinting against the grain in the background of the video. The movement was unmistakable. I've done it myself. In all the time I knew my father, I don't think I ever saw him do something that naked, a thing so explicable and personal. It was the act of a man who was aware of his body, and a perceived flaw in it, even in the midst of a rocking evening. It was an adjustment he'd made before, but which was not yet habitual enough to be a tic. Even more than the T-shirt itself, the pitchers of beer and the vibrant good cheer, my mother's dancing and the fact that my father could evidently once wield a pool cue with the best of them, that little movement made it inconceivable that they were now dead. The table was finally set up for play again, and my father got up and prepared to break, squaring up like the cue ball was going to receive a whack it'd remember the rest of its spherical little life. The scene stopped abruptly right at that moment, as if a reel of film had run out.

Before I could hit pause again, it had cut directly to something else.

A different interior. A house. A living room. Dark, lit with candles. The picture quality was murky, the film stock not coping well with the low light. Music on quietly in the background, and this time I recognized it as coming from the soundtrack to Hair. A herd of wine bottles stood on the floor in varying states of emptiness, and there were several overflowing ashtrays.

My mother was half-reclining on a low couch, singing along, singing an early morning singing song.

The bear-guy's head was more or less on her lap, and he was rolling a joint on his chest.

'Put the sodomy one on again,' he slurred. 'Put it on.'

The camera panned smoothly to the side, showing another man lying facedown on the ground. The blonde girl was sitting behind him, tending a neat row of candles in saucers that had been laid on the guy's back. He had evidently been comatose long enough to count as furniture, and my guess was he was the man who'd been operating the camera in the bar. The girl was inclining slowly and unpredictably from the waist, staying upright by pure force of will. Now there was less going on around her, it was obvious she was older than she had at first appeared. Not in her teens, but late twenties, maybe even thirty — and a little old to be part of this scene. I realized that if I was watching the very early '70s, then my parents had to be around the same age.

Which meant that I'd already been born.

'Put it on,' the bear insisted, and the camera jerked back to him, swinging in close to his face. 'Put it on.'

'No,' said a voice very close to the microphone, laughing, confirming that it was now my father who was running the camera. He was making a better job of it than passed-out man had done. 'We've played that song like a million times.'

'That's cause it's cool,' the bear said, nodding vigorously. 'It's, like, what it says is… aw, shit.' The camera pulled back to show that he'd dropped the joint. He looked bereft. 'Shit. Now I got to start again. I been rolling that fucker all my life, man. I've been rolling it since before I was born. Fucking Thomas Jefferson started that fucker off, left it to me in his will. Said I could finish the joint or have Monticello. I said fuck the building, I want the spliff. All my life I've been rolling it, like a good and faithful servant. And now it's gone.'

'Gone,' intoned the blonde girl. She started giggling.

Without missing a beat of 'Good Morning Starshine', my mother reached forward and took the gear from the bear's fumbling paws. She held the paper expertly in one hand, levelled the tobacco with an index finger, reached for the dope.

'Roll 'em, Beth,' crowed the bear, much cheered by this turn of events. 'Roll 'em, roll 'em, roll 'em.' The camera zoomed in on the joint, then back out again. It was already nearly done.

By this stage my eyebrows were raised so high they were hovering over my head. My mother had just rolled a joint.

'Put it on,' the bear wheedled. 'Put on the sodomy song. Come on Don, big Don man the Don, put it on Don, put it on.' In the background my mother kept singing.

The camera swerved and started walking out of the room, and into a hallway. A pile of coats lay on the floor where they'd been dropped. I saw that there was a kitchen off to the left, and a flight of stairs on the right. It was our old house, the one in Hunter's Rock. Every aspect of the furnishing and decor was different from the way I remembered it, but the spaces were the same.

I watched, wide-eyed, as the camera walked across the hall and then started up the stairs. For a moment there was little more than swirling darkness, and from downstairs the muffled sound of bear-guy bellowing. 'Sodomy… fellatio… cunnilingus… pederasty…' without any attempt to approximate a tune.

My father made it to the upper landing, paused a moment, muttered something under his breath. Then started forward again, and I realized with a lurch where he was going. It was quiet below now, and all I could hear was his breathing and the quiet swish of his feet on the carpet as he pushed open the door to my room.

At first it was dark, but gradually enough light seeped in from the landing to show my bed against the wall, and me sleeping in it. I must have been about five. All you could see was the top of my head, a patch of cheek where the light struck it. A little of one shoulder, in dark pyjamas. The wall was a kind of mottled green colour, and the carpet brown, as they always had been.

He stood there a full two minutes, not saying or doing anything. Just holding the camera, and watching

me sleep.

I sat and watched, too, barely breathing.

The quality of the ambient sound on the tape changed after a while, as if a different song had started downstairs. Then there was a soft noise, could have been footsteps on carpet. They stopped, and I knew, knew without seeing or hearing anything to confirm it, that my mother was now standing next to my father.

The camera stayed on the boy in the bed, on me, for a few moments longer. Then it moved, slowly, panning round to the left. At first I assumed they were leaving, but then I realized the camera was being pivoted, turned to face the other way.

It turned a hundred and eighty degrees, and stopped.

My parents were looking directly into the lens. Their faces filled the frame: not crowded together, just side by side. Neither looked drunk or stoned. They seemed to be looking right at me.

'Hello, Ward,' my mother said, softly. 'I wonder how old you are now.'

She glanced over the camera, presumably at the sleeping shape in the bed. 'I wonder how old you are,' she repeated, and there was something in her voice that was sad and off-key.

My father was still looking into the camera. He was maybe five, six years younger than I am now. He, too, spoke quietly, but without a great deal of affection in his eyes.

'And I wonder what you've become.'

White noise. Someone clanked past my hotel room with a trolley. I didn't pause the tape. I couldn't move.

The last scene was from 8mm, too, but the colours were more faded, washed out, pale surfaces bleached to pure light. Dark hairlines and spots popped and flickered all over the screen, making movements behind them feel measured and distanced.

A blaze of hazy yellow sunshine through a big window. Outside, trees rushing past, leaves blurred into sound. The steady beat of a train, and some other quiet noise I couldn't place.

My mother's face, younger still. Hair shorter, and black with lacquer. Looking out of the window at the passing countryside. She turned her head, looked at the camera. Her eyes seemed far away. She smiled faintly. The camera was slowly lowered.

Abrupt cut to a wide city street. I couldn't tell where it might be, and my attention was caught by the shapes and colours of the cars parked by the sides of the road, and the clothes worn by the few passers-by. The cars had panache, the suits didn't, the dresses were on the short side. I didn't know enough about such things to date it on the dime, but I guessed we were now back in the late '60s.

The camera moved forward at an even walking pace. Every now and then the back of my mother's head wandered into the left side of the frame, as if my father was slightly behind her and to the right. It wasn't obvious what he was supposed to be recording. It wasn't an especially interesting street. There was what looked like a department store on the right, and a small square on the left. There were leaves on the trees, but they looked tired. He kept the camera high, panning neither up nor down nor to the sides. They made no attempt to point anything out, or to communicate with each other. After a while they crossed a road and then turned off down a cross street.

Cut to a different street again. This was a little narrower, as if further from the centre of town. They seemed to be walking up a steep hill. My mother was in front of the camera, seen from the shoulders up. She stopped.

'What about here?' she said, turning. She was wearing sunglasses now, businesslike. The camera hesitated for a moment, and wobbled, as if my father had taken his eye from the lens to look around him.

His voice: 'A little further.'

Onwards they walked, for perhaps another minute. Then stopped again. The camera panned round, giving a tantalizingly quick panorama of what seemed to be the top of a rise in the middle of a hilly city, tall buildings either side of the street. Signs at ground level declared the presence of grocery stores and cheap restaurants, but the windows above looked like those of apartments. People stood outside the stores, assaying produce, wearing hats; others walked in and out of the stores. A busy neighbourhood, coming up for lunchtime.

Mother looked back at the camera and nodded. It was her call. She made it, reluctantly.

Cut to later in the day. A slightly different view, but the top of the same hill. Where before it had been morning light, now the shadows were longer. Late afternoon, and the streets were nearly empty. My mother was standing with her arms down by her sides. An odd gurgling sound came from somewhere out of shot, and I realized it was similar to the noise I'd heard on the train.

There was a little movement of the camera, as if my father had reached out to touch something. Then

my mother moved forward a little way, or he stepped back. A harsh release of breath from my father.

And then, thirty-five years later, from me.

My mother was holding the hands of two very young children, one on either side. They looked to be

the same age, and were dressed to match, though one wore a blue top, the other yellow. They appeared little more than a year old, perhaps eighteen months, and tottered unsteadily on their feet.

The camera zoomed in on them. One's hair was cut short, the other slightly longer. The faces were identical.

The camera pulled back out. My mother let go of the hand of one of the children. The one with the longer hair and yellow top, a little green satchel. She squatted next to the other child.

'Say goodbye,' she said. The child in blue looked at her dubiously, uncomprehending. 'Say goodbye, Ward.'

The two children looked at one another. Then the one with the short hair, the child that must have been me, glanced back at his mother for reassurance. She took my hand, and lifted it up.

'Say goodbye.'

She made my hand wave, then took me in her arms and stood up. The other child looked up at my mother then, smiled, held his or her arms to be lifted, too. I couldn't tell, not for sure, what sex it might be.

My mother started walking down the street.

She walked at an even pace, not hurrying, but not looking back. The camera stayed on the other child, even as my father walked away after my mother down the hill. They left it standing there.

The child got further and further away, silent at the crest of the rise. It never even cried: at least, not until we were too far away for the sound to be heard.

Then the camera turned a corner and it was gone.

The image cut back to white noise, and this time nothing came afterwards. Within a minute the tape turned itself off, leaving me staring at my reflection in the screen.

I fumbled for the remote, rewound, paused. Stared at the frozen image of a child, left standing at the top of a hill, my hands held up over my mouth.

7

The slot opened. A dim light shone down from above. 'Hello, my dear,' the man said. 'I'm back.'

Sarah could not see his face. From the sound of his voice, it appeared he was sitting on the floor just behind her head.

'Hello,' she said, her voice as steady as she could make it. She wanted to shrink away from him, put just an extra inch of distance between them, but couldn't move even that much. She fought to remain calm, to keep to her plan of sounding as if she didn't care. 'How are you today? Still insane, I guess.'

The man laughed quietly. 'You're not going to make me angry.'

'Who wants you angry?'

'So why do you say these things?'

'My mom and dad are going to be worried sick. I'm scared. I may not be that polite.'

'I understand.'

He was silent then, for a long time. Sarah waited.

Perhaps five minutes later, she saw a hand reaching out over her face. It held a glass of water. Without warning, he slowly tipped it. She got her mouth open in time, and drank as much as she could. The hand disappeared again.

'Is that it?' she said. Her mouth felt strange, clean and wet. The water had tasted the way she had always expected wine to, from the way grown-ups made such a big deal of it and rolled it around in their mouths like it was the best thing they had ever tasted. In fact, in her experience, wine generally tasted like something was wrong with it.

'What else were you expecting?'

'You want me to stay alive, then you're going to have to give me something more than water.'

'Why do you think I want you alive?'

'Because otherwise you would have killed me right off and have me sitting naked someplace where

you could look at me and jack off.'

'That's not a very nice thing to say.'

'I refer you to my earlier comments. I'm not feeling very nice, and you're a sicko, so I don't have to

be.'

'I'm not a sicko, Sarah.'

'No? How would you define yourself? Unusual?'

He laughed again, delightedly. 'Oh certainly.'

'Unusual like Ted fucking Bundy.'

'Ted Bundy was an idiot,' the man said. All humour had vanished from his voice. 'A grandstanding

fool and a fake.' 'Okay,' she said, trying to placate him, though privately she thought he now sounded pompous as well

as insane. 'I'm sorry. I'm not a big fan of his either. You're much better. So do I get some food or what?'

'Later, perhaps.'

'Great. I'll look forward to it. Cut it up small, so I can catch it.'

'Good night, Sarah.'

When she heard him standing, her pretend calm fled. The plan hadn't worked. At all. He knew she

was frightened.

'Please don't put the lid back on. I can't move anyway.'

'I'm afraid I have to,' the man said.

'Please…'

It was replaced, and Sarah was in darkness again.

She heard his footsteps receding, a door shutting quietly, and then all was silent once more.

She licked frantically around her mouth, collecting as much of the remaining moisture as she could. Now that the initial shock of it was gone, she realized the water tasted different from the stuff she was used to at home. It must be from a different supply, which meant she had to be a long way from home. Like when you went on vacation. That was something, at least, something that she knew. The more she knew, the better.

Then she realized that maybe it was mineral water, something from a bottle, in which case the taste didn't mean anything. It could just be a different brand. That didn't matter. It was still worth thinking about. The more ideas she had, the better. Like the fact that when she'd mentioned her parents, the man hadn't said again how he'd killed them. When he'd captured her he'd been very keen to talk about what he'd done to them. Maybe it meant something. Hopefully it meant that they were still alive, and he'd only said the other things to frighten her.

Maybe not. Sarah lay in the darkness, her hands clenched into fists, and tried not to scream.

Part 2

Few people can be happy unless they hate some other person, nation or creed. Bertrand

Russell

8

The flight got in to Los Angeles at 22.05. Nina had nothing except her handbag and the file, and Zandt could carry all he owned with one hand and not look lopsided. There was a car waiting for them. Nothing sleek and official. Just a cab Nina had booked from the plane, to drop him in Santa Monica and then take her home.

Lights and signs in the darkness, half-seen faces, the rustle and honk of life on just another of those evenings in a city whose heart never seems to be quite where you are, but is always round a corner, or down that street, or the other side of hulking buildings in some new club whose glory nights will be over before you've even heard of it. Between there and here are a clutch of cheap hotels, dusty liquor stores, car lots selling vehicles of dubious provenance. A tatty herd of people waiting on street corners with nothing very positive in mind, in a veldt of concrete bunkers housing businesses that will swallow countless hollow lives without ever being quoted on NASDAQ. Gradually the change to residential streets, and then into Venice. From the outside, on the right streets, Venice can look like it's trying to claw itself back upmarket. Some of the property is expensive, in a crappy International style. Every now and then you'll see a tattered piece of 1950s signage, something exuberant that harks back to flash bulbs and frozen glamour. Most have been torn down now, replaced by brutal information boards stamped out in Helvetica, the official typeface of purgatory. Helvetica isn't designed to make you feel anything good, to promise adventure or gladden the heart. Helvetica is for telling you that profits are down, that the photocopier needs servicing and by the way, you've been fired. Finally, Santa Monica. Nicer houses, small offices, places to get Japanese food and the London Times. The sea, with a pier that was born in sepia but knows those days are over. The Palisades up above, busy Ocean Avenue, then the first line of hotels and restaurants. The sense, from somewhere, that this suburb had once been a town. Perhaps it's the sea that makes it feel that way, that gives an impression that this community is here for a reason. In places it still is, still feels as if it has a relationship to its environment that goes beyond simply having flattened it. Stores and cafes and places to be, places to walk into and to buy from. You could live there and understand where you were, as the Becker family had until recently. It's not a real place, but then so little of Los Angeles is real, and the parts that are real are the places you don't want to be. Real is for people with guns and hangovers. Real is what you want to avoid. LA believes itself full of magic, and sometimes can even feel that way, but much of this is a mutually agreed upon sleight of hand. You can stand in one place and believe that one day you'll be a movie star — stand somewhere else, and you'll believe that you'll soon be dead. You know that what you see is a trick, but still you want to believe. You can buy maps that tell you where the stars live, but not where to stand to become one: all you can do is walk the lots and prop up the bars, hoping that luck will come find you. LA is a city that has taken Fate to its heart, has bought her many drinks and scribbled her phone number down after long evenings making eyes: but to call Fate a harsh mistress is giving her the benefit of very many doubts. Fate is more like a malevolent little starlet on a downhill cocaine slide, doing a slightly good deed once a week just in case someone important is watching. Fate doesn't always have your best interests in mind. Fate just doesn't give a shit.

'Good to be back?' Nina asked. Zandt grunted.

The cab dropped him at The Fountain, a ten-storey tower of faded yellow stucco on Ocean, standing between the junctions where Wilshire and Santa Monica deliver people to the sea. The building has an Art Deco mien that makes it look a little classier than it is. Originally expensive apartments, it spent a while as a hotel before being converted back to short-term rentals again. The pool around the back was filled in, creating a large and somehow pointless seating area that is seldom used: despite the lanai, the plants, and the shaded chairs, it's too obvious that something's missing. The lobby was familiar to Zandt from a homicide he had worked back in 1993: a minor European actor and a young prostitute, a roleplay that got out of hand. The actor walked, of course. Zandt couldn't remember which room it had been. It certainly wasn't the suite he was given, which was large and well-furnished and had a good view of the sea. He dropped his bag in the living area, looked quietly around at the kitchenette. Empty cupboards, very little dust. He wasn't hungry, and found it hard to imagine cooking anything. The Fountain didn't have a bar or restaurant or room service. It wasn't a destination, which is why he had chosen it as a place to stay. That, and its position.

He left the suite and went back down in the elevator, stood outside the building for a while. Nina had been taken off in the cab, and they were due to meet late the next morning. She'd already called the Bureau's Westwood branch from the plane, and previously from Pimonta, but presumably she had to show her face in the office once in a while. Something made him wait a moment, however, watching the cars parked along the street. He wouldn't put it past Nina to have gone round the block, then come back to watch what he did. Not because he was any kind of expert. Just so she knew. Nina liked knowing things.

After five minutes he walked along to the corner, hung a right onto Arizona, and walked the couple of blocks to 3rd Street Promenade. Arizona Avenue was the street on which Michael Becker had dropped his daughter the night she had disappeared.

He turned left and walked up the west side of the Promenade, heading up to the end where Sarah Becker had last been seen. It was coming up for eleven, much later than the time the girl had been abducted. Virtually all of the stores were shut. The street performers and musicians had long packed up for the night, even the Frank Sinatra impersonator who put in longer hours than most. That didn't matter. Without the presence of the abductor and the victim, the circumstances are irreproducible.

He kept half an eye on the other people walking up and down. Killers often come back, especially those for whom murder is something more than a momentary expedience. They revisit and rewind so they can watch the memory one more time. He didn't expect to notice anyone in particular, but he kept watch anyway. When he passed the side street Nina had mentioned in her description, the place where a car had been seen parked illegally, he stood and looked down it for a while. Not trying to see anything. Just being there.

'Waiting for someone?'

Zandt turned to see a young man, slim and pretty. Mid-teens, eighteen at the most. 'No,' he said.

The boy smiled. 'You sure? I think you are. I wonder if you're waiting for me.'

'I'm not,' Zandt said. 'But someone will be. Not tonight, not here, but somewhere along the line.'

The smile faded. 'You a cop?'

'No. Just telling you the way it is. Go find yourself a date someplace light.'

He went into Starbucks and bought a coffee. He got it to go and went back out to sit on the bench from which Sarah had been abducted. The boy had gone.

You might think that such an event would leave a resonance. It doesn't. The human mind is organized to recognize faces. Its understanding of space is more tenuous. With appearance, it's simple: the more people who know your face, the more famous you are. We don't have to search for credentials. You're not a stranger, but instead part of our extended family: strong brothers and pretty sisters, kind parents, fake relatives to help us forget that our social groups have contracted down to nothing. With places, it's a case of knowing what events this space has played a stage to. But when that's stripped aside, when you've sat for long enough, you don't feel anything at all. You go back to the place as it was before anything happened there, to the way it was on that night. This is as near as you can come to going back in time, to before, to being able to hold a knife as it was when it came from the kitchen drawer, before it had been slicked with blood; when potential was all it had.

He sat on the bench until it was just any place, and then he sat there some more.

In his time as a homicide detective, Zandt had dealt with an unusual number of serial killers. As a rule such matters are handled by the FBI. They have the Behavioral Science lab in Quantico, their Profiling Procedures, the Jodie Fosters and David Duchovnys with the suits and neat haircuts. Like the killers themselves, the Feds seem a cut above the usual. But in eight years Zandt, a lowly mortal, a homicide cop, had found himself involved in several sets of killings that had eventually turned out to be the handiwork of someone who might be termed a serial killer. Two of those men had been apprehended, and Zandt had played a significant role in both cases. He had a feel for it, and this was recognized. The first case concerned a man from Venice Beach responsible for the murder of four elderly women, and Zandt's involvement had been accidental. On the second investigation he was working from the start with the FBI, which is how he had met Nina Baynam.

Over the summer of 1995 the remains of four young black boys were found half-buried in different areas of the city. The method of dismemberment, along with the leaving of a videotape with each victim, was enough to declare the killings the work of the same person. Each of the victims had been abducted from junk zips, and three were already acquainted with drugs and street prostitution. The first two deaths were largely ignored by the general population, dismissed as part of society's tidal culling of the underclass. It was only with repetition that the murders began to fight their way up out of random noise into story. The videotapes left with the bodies contained between one and two hours of roughly edited camcorder footage that made it clear how unpleasant the victims' last days had been. Each tape had a cover that featured a picture of the boy, his name, and the word 'Showreel'.

The papers dubbed the killer 'The Casting Agent', which everyone agreed was very droll. Everyone apart from the parents, that is, but as their grief was embarrassing evidence of the underlying reality of these theatrical events, it was ignored except when required to hype public interest. The relatives were merely the audience to these deeds, not actors, and it's the actor we like best. Someone we can get to know, a face back-lit through the papers and television. We want a personality. A star.

Zandt worked the case of the first boy, and after the second victim the FBI became involved. Nina was a young agent with experience, having worked a long bad case in Texas and Louisiana the year before. Between them, through a combination of Zandt's intuition and legwork, Nina's analysis of the placings of the bodies, and a break relating to the fact that the perpetrator had registered the camcorder used to make the videos, the killer was found. He was a thirty-one-year-old white male, employed as a graphic designer on the fringes of the music video industry, previously a child extra in long-forgotten movies. In a series of interviews with Zandt he admitted the crimes, providing corollary information and revealing the whereabouts of his talismans, the right hand of each of the victims — which had been squeezed into jars previously holding the product of a prominent instant coffee manufacturer. He eventually led the police to the bodies of two earlier victims, experiments in killing during which he had developed his technique. He placed the blame for his behaviour on having been molested on set as a child, an allegation which fit nicely with the public's desire for a beginning and a middle for every tale. The truth of the claim proved impossible to establish, and the end of the story was provided when the killer was sliced across the throat with a sharpened spoon by another inmate while awaiting trial. The food chain has victims at both ends: even rapists and murderers need someone to look down on, and kid killers will do nicely. Ultimately The Casting Agent's story became immortal and endless, celebrated in one moderately successful hack book and innumerable Web sites. A piece of buggy video editing shareware called CastingAgent enjoyed a brief notoriety, as did a store in Atlanta that offered a couch, in a deep splotchy red, which it called The Casting Couch.

The investigation lasted thirteen weeks. For the last eight of those, John and Nina were sleeping with each other. The affair ended soon after the apprehension of the suspect. Nina had done much of the initial encouragement. Then she stopped doing so, and it came to an end. Zandt never spoke of it to his wife, with whom he had a relationship that was in general cordial and successful, but that had been going through an arid patch. He wanted to lose neither her nor their daughter, and was largely relieved when the affair ended.

He and Nina met occasionally for lunch over the next five years, while Zandt worked the usual slate of gang slayings, family feuds, and bullet-holed John Does found in alleyways gasping like landed fish and pronounced DOA to general apathy. Some he solved; some he didn't. So it goes. Nina worked a well-publicized double murder in Yellowstone, a series of disappearances upstate and one more in Oregon, all of which remained unsolved and ongoing. Out in the real world, beyond the curtain of death and misdemeanour that law enforcers live behind, business continued as usual. Bosnia imploded; the President got in trouble with his cigars; we discovered the joys of email and Frasier, of PlayStations and Sheryl Crow.

Then, on December 12th 1999, a teenage girl disappeared in Los Angeles. Josie Ferris, age sixteen, had been celebrating a friend's birthday over a burger at the Hard Rock Cafe on Beverly Boulevard. At

9.45 p.m., having said goodbye on the pavement outside the restaurant, she walked alone down toward Ma Maison. She was intending to catch a cab from outside the hotel. Beverly Boulevard is not a back road or an alley. It is a wide and well-travelled street, and on this evening both the forecourt of the hotel and the foyer of the Beverly Center Mall opposite were busy. Nonetheless, somewhere along that three-hundred-yard stretch, she vanished.

Josie's failure to return home was reported to the police by 12.50 a.m. On receiving what they considered to be a response of insufficient alacrity, her parents turned up in person to fill out the forms. Mr and Mrs Ferris were possessed of forceful demeanours, and the police were soon taking the incident more seriously, at least while the parents were within earshot. Sadly this made no difference. Their daughter was never seen alive again.

Two days later a sweater was left outside their house. The name Josie had been stitched into the front, using what was subsequently demonstrated to be the girl's own hair. The sweater had been a sixteenth birthday present from the girl's best friend, who had sewn the letters 'FFE' onto the sleeve: Friends For Ever. They had been. Eternity had merely turned out to be short. There was no demand for money with the garment. The police started taking the situation very seriously indeed, regardless of who was around to overhear. A task force was set up, coordinated through the FBI's local SAC, Charles Monroe. The news of the garment's delivery was eventually released to the press, but not the way in which it had been altered. A month later, no headway of any kind had been made in tracing the missing teenager.

In late January and early March of 2000, two other girls went missing. Elyse LeBlanc and Annette Mattison failed to return from the cinema and a friend's house respectively. Both resembled Josie Ferris in trivial ways — they were of a similar age (fifteen and sixteen) and wore their hair long. The LeBlancs and Mattisons were comfortably well-off, and their daughters were attractive and of above-average intelligence. This was not enough to suggest a firm link between the three disappearances, occurring as they did in widely spread parts of the city.

The arrival of two more sweaters was, however. Again, they were delivered to the family homes, in broad daylight, and again they featured the girl's name embroidered on the front with their own hair. No further communication was received. The seriousness of the situation led the FBI to keep the second and third disappearances quiet. Most serial kidnappers sought to hide the fact of their abductions. The selection of girls whose absence would be spotted immediately, and the further highlighting of the event through the delivery of the parcels, suggested they were dealing with an unusual individual. One who wanted attention right now.

They denied him it.

A week after the disappearance of Annette Mattison, the clothed body of a young woman was found by picnickers in Griffith Park. Though bald, badly burned and deteriorated through the activities of local wildlife, the body was quickly identified through recent dental work and a distinctive piece of jewellery. It was Elyse LeBlanc. It was estimated that she had been dead for approximately half of the period since her abduction, though only recently moved to the location at which she was found. She was discovered to have suffered a number of minor head traumas prior to death, though none had led to her demise. Although the body was immediately forwarded to the federal-lab in Washington, no physical evidence of the killer was gained from her clothes or remains. A search of the remainder of the park by local police and the FBI evidence team from Sacramento failed to discover either Josie Ferris's or Annette Mattison's body in whole or in part.

The press embargo was dropped. A call for witnesses garnered nothing more than the usual hoaxes, lunatics, and misinformation. Parents arranged for their teenage daughters to travel in groups.

Josie's body turned up ten days later. It was found lying in bushes by the side of a road in Laurel Canyon, in a similar state to that of the LeBlanc girl. Unlike the previous victim, there was evidence of a period of gross sexual abuse.

By then the killer had a nickname. The media called him The Delivery Boy. This had been suggested unofficially by Special Agent Monroe, who believed that by minimizing him in this way, reducing his status by using the word 'boy', some kind of investigative advantage might be gained. That someone who had managed to snatch three bright and worldly young women from busy streets, murder them, and dump their bodies in public places, all without being seen or leaving a single piece of evidence, would be somehow thrown by this taunt.

That he might get all offended, and just go right to pieces.

Nina had disagreed. For this and other reasons she had been discussing the case with John Zandt, despite the fact that he was not involved in the official investigation. They'd worked together well on The Casting Agent case. She wanted to know what he thought.

Zandt proffered his views, but without much enthusiasm. Nina worked these cases with an intensity and zeal that he found he could no longer match. His marriage was back on firm ground, and his daughter had grown, transforming from a child into a young person, consolidating their family. She had her mother's hair, a rich, almost auburn, dark brown — but her father's eyes, brown flecked with green. She played music too loud her room was a mess and she spent too long on the Net and smelled of cigarette smoke every now and then. There were arguments. But she went grocery shopping with her mother, even thought it was super-boring, because she knew Jennifer enjoyed having her along. She would mainly listen to her father when he talked, and stifle any yawn that came. Her parents didn't know she had smoked dope on several occasions, tried coke, and once stolen a pair of quite expensive earrings. If they had, they'd have grounded her ass to kingdom come but otherwise wouldn't have been too worried. All of this was within the acceptable range of errant behaviour in her place and time.

As much as anything, Zandt had simply grown a little older, and wanted to spend no longer than necessary thinking about the dark things the world could bring into being. He got on with his job, and then he went home and got on with his life. After two earlier investigations into the deeds of multiple murderers, he'd lost interest in the workings of their minds. It was something you could only take so much of before you started feeling sick inside.

Once you got behind the glamour of their celebrity, Zandt knew that serial killers were not the way they were portrayed in the movies: charming geniuses, slick with evil, charismatic crusaders of a bloody art. They were more like drunkards or the slightly mad. Impossible to talk to, or to get sense out of, sealed off from the world behind a viewpoint that could never be expressed or made accessible to those who lived outside it. They came in all shapes, sizes, and types. Some were monstrous, others were fairly decent individuals — aside, that is, from the propensity to kill other people and ruin the lives of those who had loved them. Jeffrey Dahmer had initially made every effort not to yield to urges that he knew placed his desires well outside normal life. He failed, big-time. He did not ask for clemency when caught, did not play games with the police, did nothing except admit his guilt and express sorrow at what he had done. Within the confines of being a murderous sociopath, he behaved as well as he could. The fact remained that he had ended the lives of at least sixteen young men in circumstances almost too horrendous to believe.

Other killers basked in their notoriety, bartered for publicity or privileges through manipulation of the media and police, toying with the grief of the people from whom they had amputated something irreplaceable. They revelled in what they had done, in their rich secrets. They devoured the newspaper coverage of their trials, profoundly content that they had finally achieved the attention they had always felt they deserved. This did not necessarily make them worse. It simply made them different. Ted Bundy. The Casting Agent. John Wayne Gacy. Philippe Gomez. The Yorkshire Ripper. Andrei Chikatilo. Some were better looking, some were more efficient; some intelligent, some border-line or even demonstrably subnormal. Some came across like regular guys; others you would have thought could have been spotted as wackos from across a busy street. None were special humans or touched with evil except in the most superficial sense. All were simply men with a craving to take the lives of other people, to augment their sexual experience with the torture and degradation of others. They were not demons. They were just men

— and women, very occasionally — who did unacceptable things, as a factor of neurotic obsession. It was not a binary of good or evil, but a spectrum also inhabited by people who had to check their locks ten times at night, or who could not rest until the kitchen was tidy after each meal. Serial killers were not chilling in and of themselves. The chill was in the realization that it is possible to be human without feeling as other humans do. Zandt knew the factors that could produce a serial killer. A violent and domineering mother, an abusive or weak father. Early and conflictive sexual experience, especially with parents, siblings, or animals. Being a native of America, the former Soviet Union, or Germany, areas that produce multiple murderers out of all proportion to their populations. Exposure to dead bodies at a formative age. Head injuries, or juvenile heavy metal poisoning — the elements, not the music. A trigger event, something that caused the potential to be actualized. None were necessary or sufficient conditions, merely part of a syndrome that sometimes provided a soil dark enough to yield a sickly flower of urges: an anxious, neurotic and violent individual who could not live as others did. The shadow in our streets. The bogeyman.

He'd seen enough of them. He didn't want to know any more. In his private thoughts, he always referred to The Casting Agent as just that: The Casting Agent. He went to some trouble not to think of him by his real name, but to assign to him the same cartoonish unreality that the killer had evidently believed his victims to possess. If he had been unable to credit the six young boys with the dignity of their individuality, then Zandt felt it was the least he could do to consign The Casting Agent to the same fate.

In the meantime he worked the usual drug-, love-, and profit-related murders. He drank with colleagues, listened to Nina talk about her attempts to connect Josie Ferris, Elyse LeBlanc, and Annette Mattison's disappearances. He had dinner with his wife, drove his daughter places, went to the gym.

On May 15th 2000, Karen Zandt left school at the end of the day. She didn't come home.

At first her parents assumed the best. Then the worst. A sweater was delivered three endless weeks later.

Zandt called Nina. She arrived very quickly with two colleagues. The parcel was unwrapped. This time there was no name embroidered on the sweater inside, and it was not Karen's sweater. Hers had been peach in colour; this was black.

There was a note tucked into it, laser-printed in Courier on a paper stock used in offices and homes across the country.

Mr Zandt,

A 'delivery'. You'll have to wait for the rest.

I have seen thy affliction and the work of thine hands, and rebuked thee.

The Upright Man

A month after that, the body of Annette Mattison was found in a canyon in the Hollywood Hills. Same condition as Elyse LeBlanc, same lack of forensic evidence. No other girls were abducted, at least none whose disappearance was subsequently marked by the delivery of a garment. No other bodies were ever found.

After two hours the Promenade was nearly deserted. Barnes and Noble and Starbucks were shut. People shuffled past the bench periodically, winos on their way to the Palisades for the night, pulling neat little trolleys with their belongings. They saw a man who sat with his hands lying open by his sides, eyes staring straight down the street. No one pulled over to ask for money. They steered clear.

Eventually Zandt stood up and dropped his empty cup in the trash. He realized that he could have gone into the bookstore and established what points within it could have given The Upright Man a vantage from which to watch for Sarah Becker. Though there was no physical evidence for this, Zandt believed he staked out his victims carefully before striking. A few didn't, most did. It could have been that Karen had been a special case; The Upright Man making a point. Zandt didn't think so. The girls were too similar, the disappearances too immaculately wrought.

Barnes and Noble could wait, possibly for ever. He had allowed Nina to convince him to come back. He had wanted to believe that this time it would be different, that he would be able to do more than run around the city, chasing his tail, shouting in the night, never finding the man who had taken his daughter from him. Who had taken Zandt's life in the palm of his hidden, rabid hand, and crushed it to death. Tonight he didn't believe it any more.

He walked back to The Fountain, picking up a few groceries on the way. The lobby of the apartment building was empty, with nobody behind the desk. There was no Muzak, and little reason to believe that there was anyone apart from him inside. The elevator ascended slowly and fitfully, letting him know that its was a difficult task.

While he waited for water to boil he stood and watched the television, as CNN did its best to reduce the world's complexity to bullet points a businessman could parrot over lunch. After a few minutes it cut back to a breaking story. A middle-aged man had walked down the high street of a small town in England, late in the morning. He'd had a rifle, with which he'd killed eight adults and wounded fourteen others.

Nobody knew why.

9

I was sitting in the passenger seat of my car with the door open. It was just after eight in the morning. I had a latte in one hand, and a cigarette in the other. My eyes were wide and dry and I was already regretting the cigarette. I used to smoke. I smoked a lot, for a long time. Then I gave it up. But during the night, which I had spent driving slowly and aimlessly down unlit roads as if trying to find the exit from an endless system of tunnels, I'd come to believe that smoking was the only thing that was going to help. Once you've smoked for a while, there are situations where you're always going to feel something's missing if you don't have a tube of burning leaves in your hand. Without a cigarette you feel friendless and clueless and alone.

I was parked on the main street of Red Lodge, a small town maybe a hundred and twenty miles southeast of Dyersburg. I was sitting in the car because the shop where I'd bought the coffee — a spick-and-span little place where the staff wore aprons and dimply little smiles — was adamant in its resistance to the tobacco arts. The quality of coffee a place sells these days is in inverse proportion to the likelihood of them letting you have a cigarette while you're drinking it. The latte was extremely good: they had smokers' heads stuffed and hung on the wall. I'd bad-temperedly taken my coffee to go, and watched through the windshield as Red Lodge gradually came to life. People walked to and fro, opened up little stores selling stuff you buy to prove you've been on vacation. Some guys arrived with pots of paint and started making a house on the other side of the street look more lovely. A few tourists appeared, bundled up in ski wear to the point where they were almost spherical.

I got halfway through a second cigarette, winced, and threw it outside on the ground. It wasn't helping. It was just something to feel guilty about. Plus I gather it's bad for you. Knowing that my willpower is about as weak as the light from the farthest star on a cloudy night, I grabbed the pack off the dash and tossed it toward a trashcan, which was nailed to a nearby pole and emblazoned with wholesome civic slogans. The pack went in without even touching the rim. No one was there to see it. They never are. It must be weird, being a professional basketball player. People are there to see it when you get them in.

I hadn't checked out of the hotel. I'd just taken the video out of the machine and left the room. I was

probably thinking of going to the bar, but this time even my withered sense of propriety had deemed this an inappropriate response. Instead I'd found myself walking outside to the car, getting in, and driving away. I drove slowly around Dyersburg, twice crossing the place where my parents' car had been totalled. The video sat on the passenger seat beside me. The second time I went over the crossing I glanced at it, as if this would help in some way. It didn't, and only made me shiver, a frigid little spasm too small for anyone else to see.

After a while I achieved escape velocity and left town. I wasn't working from the map, merely following the roads and making turns when it occurred to me to do so.

I eventually found my way onto I 90 as the sky was beginning to lighten. I realized I needed coffee, or something, and took the turn that led me to Red Lodge at about the time things were beginning to open up.

I felt hollow and light-headed. Hungry, perhaps, though it was difficult to tell. My mind was worn smooth, as if it had thrashed for too long and too hard in the wrong gear.

There was no question that it was my parents in the oldest two passages on the tape. There seemed little reason to doubt that it had been my father holding the camera in the first, most recent, section. The three scenes, either individually or together, were evidently supposed to convey meaning. Why else put them on the tape? I found it difficult to even think about the last scene, the one in which it appeared that a child had been abandoned on a city street. My first overwhelming sense, that the child was an unknown sibling of the same age, was still my holding position. Everything about my mother's body language, and the way we'd been dressed, had implied it. Either the child was my twin, or they wanted me to believe that this had been the case. The latter seemed ridiculous. But was I really to credit that I once had a sister or brother, and that he or she had been abandoned somewhere? That we, as a family, had travelled away from home — a point I believed to have been deliberately made through the snippet of a train journey at the beginning of the scene and left the child somewhere? And that my father had filmed the scene? There could only have been one reason for this: an awareness that one day they might want me to know what had happened, and a realization that nothing short of film would convince me. I had rerun the segment in my mind throughout the night, trying to read it differently. I couldn't and in the end what stuck with me most was the matter-of-factness of the event. They had looked for the right place to leave the child, rejecting one, and then moving a little further up the street. They had chosen somewhere that looked well-populated, where the businesses and homes on the other side of the street suggested that the child would not remain unnoticed for long. Somehow this made it worse, not better. It made it seem more considered, more deliberate, more real. They hadn't been killing the child. Just getting rid of it. They'd planned how they'd do it, and then gone ahead and done it.

The middle scene was less extraordinary. Once you got past the strangeness of the glimpse it yielded into the pasts of people I now realized I had never really understood, for the most part it recorded what was merely a social evening. I hadn't recognized any of the other people in the film, but that wasn't surprising. Your group of friends alters as you get older. You change, you move. People who once seemed indispensable gradually become first less crucial and then merely names on a Christmas-card list. Finally one year you grumpily observe that you haven't seen such and such in over a decade, the cards stop, and the friendship is severed except in memory, a few catchphrases and a handful of half-forgotten shared experiences. It lies dormant until the very end, when you wish that you had kept in touch, if for no other reason than it would just be nice to hear a voice whose owner knew you when you were young, who understands that your coffin-ready wilt is a joke of recent vintage and not everything you have ever been.

The kicker was the way they had addressed the camera. The things they had said. As if they'd known or believed that I'd watch it someday. If I'd been in their position, I'd have striven for a perkier tone. 'Hi, son, how're you doing? Love from us, way back when.' My mother hadn't sounded this way at all. She'd sounded sad, resigned. The last line of my father's chimed most sharply in my head: 'I wonder what you've become.' What kind of thing was that to say, when the person you were talking to was only five or six years old, and sleeping at the time in the same room? This seemed to fit in some way with the closing down of UnRealty: a profound distrust of someone who was their son. I'm not especially proud of my life, but regardless of what I may or may not have become, I have not yet abandoned a baby on a city street, and filmed the event for posterity.