“Don’t listen to what I say; listen to what I mean, okay?”

“I get the picture. Dinner’s on you.”

After half an hour in the bathroom, Miriam felt human, if not entirely dry. She stopped in her bedroom for long enough to find some clean clothes, then headed downstairs in her bare feet.

Paulette had parked herself in the living room with a couple of mugs of coffee and an elegant-looking handbag. She raised an eyebrow at Miriam: “You look like you’ve been dry-cleaned. Was it that bad?”

“Yeah.” Miriam settled down on the sofa, then curled her legs up beneath her. She picked up one of the mugs and inhaled deeply. “Ah, that’s better.”

“Ready to tell me what the hell is going on?”

“In a moment.” Miriam closed her eyes, then gathered up the strands of still-damp hair sticking to her neck and wound them up, outside her collar. “That’s better. It happened right after they screwed us over, Paulie. I figured you’d think I’d gone off the deep end if I just told you about it, which is why I didn’t call you back the same day. Why I asked you to drive. Sorry about the surprise.”

“You should be: I spent an hour in the woods looking for you. I nearly called the police twice, but you’d said precisely when you’d be back and I thought they’d think I was the one who was nuts. ‘Sides, you’ve got a habit of dredging up weird shit and leaving me to pick up the pieces. Promise me there are no gangsters in this one?”

“I promise.” Miriam nodded. “Well, what do you think?”

“I think I’d like some lemon chicken. Sorry.” Paulette grinned impishly at Miriam’s frown. “Okay, I believe you’ve discovered something very weird indeed. I actually videoed you vanishing into thin air in front of the camera! And when you appeared again—no, I didn’t get it on tape, but I saw you out of the corner of my eye. Either we’re both crazy or this is for real.”

“Madness doesn’t come in this shape and size,” Miriam said soberly. She winced. “I need a painkiller.” She rubbed her feet, which were cold. “You know I’m adopted, right? My mother didn’t quite tell me everything until Monday. I went to see her after we were fired …”

For the next hour Miriam filled Paulette in on the events of the past week, leaving out nothing except her phone call to Andy. Paulette listened closely and asked the right questions. Miriam was satisfied that her friend didn’t think she was mad, wasn’t humouring her. “Anyway, I’ve now got tape of my vanishing, a shitload of photographs of this village, and dictated notes. See? It’s beginning to mount up.”

“Evidence,” said Paulette. “That would be useful if you want to go public.” Suddenly she looked thoughtful. “Big if there.”

“Hmm?” Miriam drank down what was left of her coffee.

“Well, this place you go to—it’s either in the past or the future, or somewhere else, right? I think we can probably rule out the past or future options. If it was the past, you wouldn’t have run across a village the way you described it; and as for the future, there’d still be some sign of Boston, wouldn’t there?”

“Depends how far in the future you go.” Miriam frowned. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. It’s funny; when I was a little girl I always figured the land of make-believe would be bright and colourful. Princesses in castles and princes to go around kissing them so they turned into frogs—and dragons to keep the royalty population under control. But in the middle ages there were about a thousand peasants living in sordid poverty for every lord of the manor, who actually had a sword, a horse, and a house with a separate bedroom to sleep in. A hundred peasants for every member of the nobility—the lords and their families—and the same for every member of the merchant or professional classes.”

“Sounds grimly real to me, babe. Forget Hollywood. Your map was accurate, wasn’t it?”

“What are you getting at? You’re thinking about… What was that show called: Sliders? Right?”

“Alternate earths. Like on TV.” Paulette nodded. “I only watched a couple of episodes, but… well. Suppose you are going sideways, to some other earth where there’s nobody but some medieval peasants. What if you, like, crossed over next door to a bank, walked into exactly where the vault would be in our world, waited for the headache to go away, then crossed back again?”

“I’d be inside the bank vault, wouldn’t I? Oh.”

“That, as they say, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Paulette commented dryly. “Listen, this is going to be a long session. I figure you haven’t thought all the angles through. What were you planning on doing with it?”

“I—I’m.” Miriam stopped. “I told you about the phone call.”

Paulette looked at her bleakly. “Yeah. Did I tell you—”

“You too?”

She nodded. ‘The evening after I told them to go fuck themselves. Don’t know who it was: I hung up on him and called the phone company, told them it was a nuisance call, but they couldn’t tell me anything.”

“Bastards.”

“Yes. Listen. When I was growing up in Providence, there were these guys … it wasn’t a rich neighbourhood, but they always had sharp suits. Momma told me never to cross them—or, even talk to them. Trouble is, when they talk to you—I think I need a drink. What do you say?”

“I say there’re a couple of bottles in the cabinet,” said Miriam, massaging her forehead. “Don’t mind if I join you.”

Coffee gave way to a couple of modest glasses of Southern Comfort. “It’s a mess,” said Paulette. “You, uh—we didn’t talk about Monday. Did we?”

“No,” Miriam admitted. “If you want to just drop it and forget the whole business, I’m not going to twist your arm.” She swallowed. She felt acutely uneasy, as if the whole comfortable middle-class professional existence she’d carved out for herself was under retreat. Like the months when she’d subliminally sensed her marriage decaying, never quite able to figure out exactly what was wrong until…

“ ‘Drop it?’” Paulette’s eyes flashed, a momentary spark of anger. “Are you crazy? These hard men, they’re really easy to understand. If you back down, they own you. It’s simple as that. That’s something I learned when I was a kid.”

“What happened—” Miriam stopped.

Paulie tensed, then breathed out, a long sigh. “My parents weren’t rich,” she said quietly. “Correction: They were poor as pigshit. Gramps was a Sicilian immigrant, and he hit the bottle. Dad stayed on the wagon but never figured out how to get out of debt. He held it together for Mom and us kids, but it wasn’t easy. Took me seven years to get through college, and I wanted a law degree so bad I could taste it. Because lawyers make lots of money, that’s numero uno. And for seconds, I’d be able to tell the guys Dad owed where to get off.”

Miriam leaned forward to top off her glass.

“My brother Joe didn’t listen to what Momma told us,” Paulette said slowly. “He got into gambling, maybe a bit of smack. It wasn’t the drugs, but one time he tried to argue with the bankers. They held him down and used a cordless drill on both his kneecaps.”

“Uh.” Miriam felt a little sick. “What happened?”

“I got as far as being a paralegal before I figured out there’s no point getting into a job where you hate the guts of everybody you have to work with, so I switched track and got a research gig. No journalism degree, see, so I figured I’d work my way up. Oh, you meant to Joe? He OD’d on heroin. It wasn’t an accident—it was the day after they told him he’d never walk again.” She said it with the callous disregard of long-dead news, but Miriam noticed her knuckles tighten on her glass. “That’s why I figure you don’t want to ever let those guys notice you. But if they do, you don’t ever back off.”

“That’s—I’m really sorry. I had no idea.”

“Don’t blame yourself.” Paulette managed an ironic smile. “I, uh, took a liberty with the files before I printed them.” She reached inside her handbag and flipped a CD-ROM at Miriam.