Mira is adamant that the kid go back to school in the fall, and being as he is here illegally, she’s started the process of getting him a student visa. He’s now in residence in my spare bedroom, which has evicted Mira from her sanctuary. She says she doesn’t mind, but I’m currently trying to figure out how hard it would be to add another room onto the house.

Though she wasn’t consulted, Anna has made certain we know she loves having Estéban here. She always wanted a big brother (or jungle gym, and he serves as both). And he in turn seems rather fond of her. Coming from a huge family as he did, I’m willing to bet he misses some of the joyous chaos small children can generate. Enter Hurricane Annabelle, and problem solved.

Though I was fairly certain of the answer already, I did finally ask him about the blue Ford Escort.

He gave me only a puzzled look. “What Ford Escort?”

“The little blue car? Were you following me?”

He shook his head. “I have no car. I do not even know how to drive.”

“So how were you getting to work?”

He shrugged his lanky shoulders at me. “I was sleeping in the garden area of the Wal-Mart. I scaled the fence and hid behind the shrubs.” Well, that explained how he happened to catch me there.

So “teaching Estéban to drive” was added to my summer to-do list, and the blue car mystery continued.

It made me feel like a long-tailed cat in a room full of poisonous, radioactive, explosive rocking chairs. I keep a close watch on the traffic behind me now, and I have given up driving the back roads home from work. I’ve asked Mira to do the same. And call me sexist, but I’m kinda glad Estéban is at the house when I’m not there. Having a man (sort of) present makes everything okay, in some backward, male-dominated way. And I don’t believe this is done, not for a minute. We’ll call it hippie’s intuition.

Viljo managed to get Grapevine up and functional again in fairly short order. The hacking attacks disappeared along with Nelson Kidd and the blue Escort, so Ivan’s opinion is that the baseball player was responsible. I don’t believe it for a heartbeat. Kidd didn’t strike me as the computer whiz type, nor a man to attempt vehicular homicide. Thankfully, Viljo’s got enough paranoia for an entire covert ops group, and our secrets are safe behind the equivalent of cyber titanium—at least as he explained it to me, but what the hell do I know?

Before he left, Ivan made arrangements for Guy and Miguel’s territories to be split between me and the champion in San Francisco, one Avery Malcolm Vincent. Avery has a lot of work in Hollywood, with the starlets and rock stars. I get the businessmen and moguls from the East Coast here. Between the two of us, we’d manage the North and South, too.

I didn’t know Avery well. We’d met twice, at Ivan’s insistence. He was a clean-cut African American in his late thirties, more likely to show up to a casual dinner in slacks and a button down shirt than in my usual jeans and a T-shirt, and more likely to drink Perrier than beer. But after a brief phone conversation, we both agreed it would be better if we kept in closer contact from this point on, just to cover both our asses. I think I’ll get along with him all right.

Being on crutches earned me a week off at It, too. When I finally returned to work, I was greeted with a techno remix of the wicked witch’s theme from The Wizard of Oz, followed by AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.” Kristyn thought it was hilarious. The rest of the kids eyed me as if I’d just crawled out of my own grave to sell goth apparel to the unwashed masses. Apparently, I was officially a badass mo’fo for surviving a tornado head-on.

Kristyn was only mildly unamused when I told her I needed more days off in short order. I gave her some excuse about physical therapy, not wanting to explain why I was taking time to go hiking in the Canadian wilderness.

Ivan met me when I hobbled off the plane in Toronto, and after renting some gargantuan four-wheel-drive monstrosity, we headed north. Ivan seemed to know where he was going, so I rode in silence, the perfect passenger.

I don’t know what I expected to find. A log cabin, maybe? Somewhere they walked out into the forest and made their own syrup? Guy’s house was an average two-story home, probably enough for just him, on a rural road. I always pictured him as some kind of rustic hermit, living off the land, but his neighbors were within easy view with neatly kept lawns not too unlike my own neighborhood. We’d even passed a small grocery store a few miles back (well, kilometers, in Canada). It was bordering on suburbia.

Ivan picked the lock on the front door while I pretended not to notice and hoped Guy’s neighbors did the same. I had never been arrested in a foreign country, and I was hoping to keep it that way. “What are we looking for again?”

“Photos. Letters. Anything that might tell us who he valued.”

The house was abandoned, no doubt about that. There was no dust built up, no neglect visible, but it had that air, that cool, sterile emptiness that comes when no one lives there anymore. I took one look at the stairs, and volunteered Ivan to search the second floor. I’d graduated from the crutches to a cane, but I wasn’t going to push my luck. Ivan assented with a grunt and disappeared upstairs.

Guy had lived simply, without much adornment. His heavy wooden furniture had the occasional plain cushion, and the cabinets in his kitchen were as ordinary as could be. There were a few wood carvings on the fireplace mantel, and one clock made from a slice of tree trunk on the wall, but other than that, there was nothing to speak to who he had been. Most definitely, there were no pictures of loved ones.

I wondered whether he had been lonely. Had he sacrificed companionship for the sake of his duty as a champion? I’d never be able to ask him.

While Ivan rummaged upstairs, I wandered out the back door. Here, at least, I found something more like the Guy I remembered. A neat stack of firewood lay split and ready for use next to the steps, and on the far side of the yard, several large logs awaited the same fate. See? I knew he was a lumberjack. He’d even left his hatchet buried in one of the logs where it waited for his return.

It took me a few moments to realize why that was wrong. I’ll blame it on my largely being a city kid. The splitting maul, used to break the large logs into manageable chunks, leaned against the firewood beside me. Already, a thin coating of rust had started around the edges. One end of the neat stack had toppled over, weeds growing up between the logs. Someone who kept a house as neatly as Guy wouldn’t leave a tool out to rust in the elements, or a job half done like this. He’d been surprised here.

My cane and I walked across the yard to retrieve the small ax, seemingly balanced on one sharp point in its chosen log. It took a couple good tugs to free it of the wood, so deeply was it buried. I hefted it in my left hand, feeling the balance and how the padded grip fit my palm. I was already picturing how to move with it in combat. This was no tool; this was a weapon—Guy’s weapon.

“What are you to be having?” The wooden steps creaked under Ivan’s weight as he joined me in the backyard.

“I found his weapon.” I showed him the ax, and the old man frowned.

“Why would he to be having it delivered here, where there was no one to be finding it? I have given him instructions otherwise.”

I ran my thumb over the ax, testing the edge to find it razor sharp, and had to smile to myself. I knew why Guy had disobeyed Ivan. “Because he didn’t want anyone to get hurt, trying to avenge him. He was thinking of us.” It was something I would have done, if I were alone. And that realization made me regret, more than ever, that I had never known him.

Knowing that someone would eventually come and claim the abandoned property, Ivan took Guy’s computer when we left, preventing anyone else from accidentally (or purposely) connecting to Grapevine. I took his ax. I couldn’t leave the weapon of a fallen warrior to be claimed by some amateur, or worse yet, to rust away to nothing. I made plans to hang it in my den next to my Japanese silk print. I thought it a fitting place.