Matt checked his watch. “Rachel’s home from school and she said she’d fix dinner tonight. Maybe we could have lunch tomorrow?”

“I’d prefer tonight.” Pause. “I’m working shift hours, but how would it be if I stopped by on my way home?”

“How late?”

“Eleven, say. Eleven-thirty.”

“It’s important?”

“Yes.”

Not maybe or sort of, Matt thought. Flat yes. It made the small hairs on his neck stand up.

“Well, yeah,” he said. “I’ll be looking for you.”

“Good,” Jim said, and promptly hung up the phone.

He caught Annie as she headed out the door.

When he told her about the party Friday night, she smiled and said she’d be there. It was the familiar Annie Gates smile. She thanked him, touched his arm. He walked her to the parking lot.

By God, Matt thought, we may be on-again-off-again, but I do believe at the moment we are definitely on.

He was surprised by the pleasure he took from the thought.

She gave him a brief hug as she climbed into her Honda. The touch was therapeutic. It wasn’t good to be alone, Matt thought, when the world had taken such a curious turn.

In December 1843, when the explorer John Fremont was mapping what would become the state of Oregon, he descended in a single day from a howling snowstorm in the high Cascades to a lake surrounded by soft green grass—from winter into summer. Winter Rim, he called his starting point, and Summer Lake, where his party pitched camp for the night.

A century and a half later, the state was still defined by its geography. The Willamette Valley, heartland and breadbasket, ran between the Cascades and the Coast Range for 180 miles south of Portland. East of the Cascades was a parched, cold desert. West of the Coast Range was coastal Oregon, 280 x 25 miles of farmland, forest land, and isolated fishing villages.

Buchanan was the largest of the coastal towns, a forest port situated on a broad, shallow bay. It had grown with the Dunsmuir Pulp and Paper Mill (est. 1895) to a population approaching 40,000 at the end of the twentieth century. Its shipping docks handled a respectable Pacific Rim trade, and its fishing fleet was the largest south of Astoria.

Buchanan had begun to cross the demarcation point between town and city, with all the possibilities and problems that implied: diversity, employment, anonymity, crime. But the municipality still held its Fishing and Logging Festival every July, and the local radio station still broadcast tide tables and Salmon Bulletins between sessions of softcore C W.

Like every town on the Oregon coast, Buchanan was accustomed to rain. Each winter, the ocean seemed to infiltrate the air. There was not just rain, there was a complex palette of mist, drizzle, fog, woodsmoke, and low clouds. Winter was the slow season, the melancholy season.

But even Buchanan occasionally saw a blue sky, and this summer had been drier than most. Ever since Independence Day, the town had basked under a dome of clear Pacific air. Reservoirs were low and a fire watch had been declared in the deep coastal forests. Crickets ratcheted in the brown fingers of dry lawns.

Afternoons evolved into long summer evenings.

Matt Wheeler’s thoughts had turned to Brookside Cemetery that afternoon, lingered a moment and turned away. Tonight he sat down to a meal of pan-fried steak and pondered a more immediate problem: that troublesome phone call from Jim Bix. Brookside had fled his attention.

It lingered in the minds of others.

Miriam Flett, for one.

Beth Porter and Joey Commoner, for two more.

announced the headline in the Buchanan Observer.

Miriam Flett spread the front page across the kitchen table and attacked it with the pocket razor she had purchased this morning at Delisle’s Stationery in the Ferry Park Mall.

Miriam appreciated these disposable pocket cutters, a tongue of stainless steel that slid in and out of a round plastic sheath as you touched a button on the side. They were 590 each in a bin on the counter at Delisle’s, and they came in different colors. Miriam bought one every week. This week, she had chosen blue—a calming color.

The blade, not calming, was as bright and sharp as a claw.

Miriam attacked the newspaper. Four neat slashes separated SPEECH PROMISED from the lesser SHELLFISH POISONING SUSPECTED and LUMBER INDUSTRY FORESEES SLUMP.

She inspected the bottom-right corner of the article for a continued p. 6 or similar words—continueds were always annoying. But there was no such notice.

Good, Miriam thought. A good omen.

Miriam did not precisely understand the nature of the work she had undertaken, but she understood two things about it. One: It was important. And two: Neatness counts.

If Beth Porter and Joey Commoner had come roaring along Bellfountain Avenue on Joey’s Yamaha motorcycle—but they didn’t, not until later—they might have seen Miriam outlined in the window of her small bungalow, clipping newspapers as the sun eased down, a compact gray-haired shape hunched over a scarred kitchen table.

Miriam had lived all her fifty-six years in the town of Buchanan. For nearly half of those years she had presided over the reception desk in the principal’s office at the James Buchanan Public School. Last year Miriam had been reprimanded for handing out religious tracts to the children waiting to be scolded by Principal Clay. Principal Clay (whose first name was Marion, and heaven help him if the truth behind “M. Jonathan Clay” ever escaped into the playground) had hinted to Miriam that early retirement might be a wise option. Miriam Flett didn’t have to be told twice.

Once upon a time she might have held on to that job with both hands—gripped it until her fingernails tore free. Miriam was not fond of changes in her life. But she supposed the Miriam who couldn’t tolerate time and change had died last year, when the Eye of God appeared in the sky.

The message in that advent had seemed quite clear.

Places change. People pass on. Love dies. The world becomes, in time, almost uninhabitably strange.

Faith abides.

She seldom attended church. It was Miriam’s opinion that the local churches—even the Truth Baptist, which people thought of as a fundamentalist church—misrepresented the Bible. Miriam believed in God, but she did not have what the television evangelists called “a personal relationship” with Him. The very idea frightened her. The churches made much of redemption and forgiveness, but Miriam had read the Bible three times through without discovering much evidence in those pages of a loving God. Merciful—perhaps. On occasion. But Miriam believed most profoundly in the scary God of Abraham and Isaac, the God who demanded his sacrifices in flesh and blood; who swept aside humanity, when humanity displeased Him, the way a farmer might spray his crops with Malathion to eradicate a persistent infestation of beetles.

These thoughts were vaguely on her mind as Miriam directed her eyes to the clipping before her.