“You ought to dig out the kids” book,” she had said, startling him out of this reverie.

“What kids” book? I never-”

“Don’t you remember Pat the Detective Kitty-Cat?”

It took him a minute, but then he did. “Terry, that was just a little story I made up for your sister’s rugmonkey one night when he wouldn’t shut up and I thought she was going to have a nervous-”

“You liked it well enough to write it down, didn’t you?”

“I don’t remember,” he had said, remembering.

“You know you did, and you’ve got it somewhere because you never throw anything away.

Anal bastard! I always suspected you of saving your goddam boogers. In a Sucrets box, maybe, like fishing lures.”

“They’d probably make good fishing lures,” he had said, not thinking about what he was saying but wondering instead where that little story-eight or nine handwritten pages-might be. The Marinville Collection at Fordham? Possible. The house in Connecticut he and Terry had once shared, the one she was living in, talking to him from, at that very moment? Quite possible. At the time of the conversation, that house had been less than ten miles away.

“You ought to find that story,” she said. “It was good. You wrote it at a time when you were good in ways you didn’t even know about.” There was a pause. “You there?”

“Yeah.”

“I always know when I’m telling you stuff you don’t like,” she said brightly, “because it’s the only time you ever shut up. You get all broody.”

“I do not get broody.”

“Do so, do so.” And then she had said what might have been the most important thing of all. Over twenty million dollars in royalties had been generated by her casual memory of the story he had once made up to get his rotten nephew to go to sleep, and gazillions of books chronicling Pat’s silly adventures had been sold around the world, but the next thing out of her mouth had seemed more important than all the bucks and all the books. Had then, still did. He supposed she’d spoken in her perfectly ordinary tone of voice, but the words had struck into his heart like those of a prophetess standing in a delphic grove.

“You need to double back,” the woman who was now Terry Alvey had said.

“Huh?” he had asked when he’d caught his breath. He hadn’t wanted her to understand how her words had rocked him. Didn’t want her to know she still had that sort of power over him, even after all these years. What does that mean?”

“To the time when you felt good. Were good. I remember that guy. He was all right. Not perfect, but all right.”

“You can’t go home again, Terr. You must have been sick the week they took up Thomas Wolfe in American Lit.”

“Oh, spare me. We’ve known each other too long for Debate Society games. You were born in Connecticut, raised in Connecticut, a success in Connecticut, and a drunken, narcotized bum in Connecticut. You don’t need to go home, you need to leave home.”

“That’s not doubling back, that’s what us AA guys call a geographic cure. And it doesn’t work.”

“You need to double back in your head,” she replied-patient, as if speaking to a child. “And your body needs some new ground to walk on, I think. Besides, you” re not drinking anymore. Or drugging, either.” A slight pause. “Are you?”

“No,” he said. “Well, the heroin.”

“Ha-ha.”

“Where would you suggest I go?”

“The place you’d think of last,” she had replied without hesitation. “The unlikeliest pla ce on earth. Akron or Afghanistan, makes no difference.”

That call had made Terry rich, because he had shared his Kitty-Cat income with her, penny for penny. And that call had led him here. Not Akron but Wentworth, Ohio’s Good Cheer Community. A place he had never been before. He had picked the area in the first place by shutting his eyes and sticking a pushpin into a wall-map of the United States, and Terry had turned out to be right, Bill Harris’s horrified reaction notwithstanding. What he had originally regarded as a kind of sabbatical had-

Lost in his reverie, he walked straight into Jim Reed’s back. The boys had stopped on the edge of the path. Jim had raised the gun and was pointing it south, his face pale and grim.

“What’s-” Johnny be gan, and Dave Reed clapped a hand over his mouth before he could say anymore.

There was a gunshot, then a scream. As if the scream had been a signal, Marielle Soderson opened her eyes, arched her back, uttered a long, guttural sound that might have been words, and then began to shiver all over. Her feet rattled on the floor.

“Doc!” Cynthia cried, running to Marielle. “Doc!”

Gary came first. He stumbled in the kitchen doorway and would have knee-dropped on to his wife’s stomach if Cynthia hadn’t pushed him backward. The smell of cooking sherry hung around him in a sweet cloud.

“Wass happen?” Gary asked. “Wass wrong my wi?”

Marielle whipped her head from side to side. It thumped against the wall. The picture of Daisy, the Corgi who could count and add, fell off and landed on her chest. Mercifully, the glass in the frame didn’t break. Cynthia grabbed it and tossed it aside. As she did, she saw the gauze over the stump of the woman’s arm had turned red. The stitches-some of them, at least-had broken.

“Doc!” she screamed.

He came hurrying across from the door, where he had been standing and staring out, almost hypnotized by the changes which were still taking place. There were snarling sounds from the greenbelt out back, more screams, more gunshots. At least two. Gary looked in that direction, blinking owlishly. “Wass happen?” he asked again.

Marielle stopped shivering. Her fingers moved, as if she was trying to snap them, and then that stopped, too. Her eyes stared up blankly at the ceiling. A single tear trickled from the corner of the left one. Doc took her wrist and felt for a pulse. He stared at Cynthia with a kind of desperate intensity as he did. “I guess if you want to go on working downstreet, you’ll have to turn in that cashier’s duster for a dancehall dress,” he said. “The E-Z Stop’s a saloon now. The Lady Day.”

“Is she dead?” Cynthia asked.

“Yuh,” Old Doc said, lowering Marielle’s hand. “For whatever it’s worth, I think she ran out of chances fifteen minutes ago. She needed a trauma unit, not an old veterinarian with shaky hands.”

More screams. Shouts. Someone was crying out there, crying and shouting you should have stopped him, you should have stopped him. A sudden surety came to Cynthia: Steve, a guy she’d already come to like, was dead. The shooters were out there, and they’d killed him.

“Wass happen?” Gary asked for the third time. Neither the old man nor the girl answered him. Although he had been right there, kneeling in the kitchen doorway beside her when Billingsley pronounced his wife dead, Gary didn’t seem to realize what had happened until Old Doc pulled the brown corduroy cover off his couch and spread it over her. Then it got through to Gary, drunk or not. His face began to shiver. He groped under the couch cover, found his wife’s hand, brought it out, kissed it. Then he held it against his cheek and began to cry.

When Jim Reed saw rapidly approaching shapes coming up the path toward him, his excitement vanished. Terror filled the space where it had been. For the first time it occurred to him that coming out here might not have been a very intelligent idea.

If you see strangers in the woods, come right back. That was what his mom had said. But he couldn’t even move. He was frozen. Then there was a horrible growling sound in the undergrowth, the sound of an animal, and he panicked. He did not see Collie Entragian and Steve Ames when they burst into view; he saw killers who had left their vans to infiltrate the woods. He didn’t hear Johnny’s muffled yell, or see Johnny struggling to free himself from Dave’s clutching hands.