“I don’t know. I don’t even know if what you’re saying is right.” I turned onto his street, hoping I could see him safely inside and then manage the seven or eight miles out to Sabattus without falling asleep behind the wheel. But one other thing was on my mind, and I needed to say it. If only so he wouldn’t get his hopes up too high.

“The past is obdurate, Al. It doesn’t want to be changed.”

“I know. I told you. ”

“You did. But what I think now is that the resistance to change is proportional to how much the future might be altered by any given act.”

He looked at me. The patches beneath his eyes were darker than ever, and the eyes themselves shone with pain. “Could you give it to me in English?”

“Changing the Dunning family’s future was harder than changing Carolyn Poulin’s future, partly because there were more people involved, but mostly because the Poulin girl would have lived, either way. Doris Dunning and her kids all would have died . . . and one of them died anyway, although I intend to remedy that.”

A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “Good for you. Just make sure that next time you duck a little more. Save yourself from having to deal with an embarrassing scar where the hair may not grow back.”

I had ideas about that, but didn’t bother saying so. I nosed my car up his driveway. “What I’m saying is that I may not be able to stop Oswald. At least not the first time.” I laughed. “But what the hell, I flunked my driver’s test the first time, too.”

“So did I, but they didn’t make me wait five years to take it again.” He had a point there.

“What are you, Jake, thirty? Thirty-two?”

“Thirty-five.” And two months closer to thirty-six than I had been earlier this morning, but what was a couple of months between friends?

“If you screwed the pooch and had to start over, you’d be forty-five when the merry-go-round came back to the brass ring the second time. A lot can happen in ten years, especially if the past’s against you.”

“I know,” I said. “Look what happened to you.”

“I got lung cancer from smoking, that’s all.” He coughed as if to prove this, but I saw doubt as well as pain in his eyes.

“Probably that’s all it was. I hope that’s all it was. But it’s one more thing we don’t kn—” His front door banged open. A large young woman wearing a lime-green smock and white Nancy Nurse shoes came half-running down the driveway. She saw Al slumped in the passenger seat of my Toyota and yanked open the door. “Mr. Templeton, where have you been? I came in to give you your meds, and when I found the house empty, I thought—” He managed a smile. “I know what you thought, but I’m okay. Not beautiful, but okay.” She looked at me. “And you. What are you doing driving him around? Can’t you see how fragile he is?”

Of course I could. But since I could hardly tell her what we’d been doing, I kept my mouth shut and prepared to take my scolding like a man.

“We had an important matter to discuss,” Al said. “Okay? Got it?”

“Just the same—”

He opened the car door. “Help me inside, Doris. Jake’s got to get home.” Doris.

As in Dunning.

He didn’t notice the coincidence—and surely that was what it was, it’s a common enough name—but it clanged in my head just the same.

6

I made it home, and this time it was the Sunliner’s emergency brake I found myself reaching for. As I turned off the engine I thought about what a cramped, niggardly, basically unpleasant plastic-and-fiberglass shitbox my Toyota was compared to the car I’d gotten used to in Derry. I let myself in, started to feed my cat, and saw the food in his dish was still fresh and moist. Why wouldn’t it be? In 2011, it had been in the bowl for only an hour and a half.

“Eat that, Elmore,” I said. “There are cats starving in China who’d love a bowl of Friskies Choice Cuts.”

Elmore gave me the look that one deserved and oiled out through the cat door. I nuked a couple of Stouffer’s frozen dinners (thinking like Frankenstein’s monster learning to talk: microwave good, modern cars bad ). I ate everything, disposed of the trash, and went into the bedroom. I took off my plain white 1958 shirt (thanking God Al’s Doris had been too mad to notice the blood-spatters on it), sat on the side of the bed to unlace my sensible 1958 shoes, and then let myself fall backward. I’m pretty sure I fell asleep while I was still in midair.

7

I forgot all about setting the alarm and might have slept long past 5:00 P.M., but Elmore jumped on my chest at quarter past four and began to sniff at my face. That meant he’d cleaned his dish and was requesting a refill. I provided more food for the feline, splashed my face with cold water, then ate a bowl of Special K, thinking it would be days before I could get the proper order of my meals reestablished.

With my belly full, I went into the study and booted up my computer. The town library was my first cyber-stop. Al was right—they had the entire run of the Lisbon Weekly Enterprise in their database. I had to become a Friend of the Library before I could access the goodies, which cost ten dollars, but given the circumstances, that seemed a small price to pay.

The issue of the Enterprise I was looking for was dated November 7. On page 2, sandwiched between an item about a fatal car wreck and one concerning a case of suspected arson, was a story headlined LOCAL POLICE SEEK MYSTERY MAN. The mystery man was me . . . or rather my Eisenhower-era alter ego. The Sunliner convertible had been found, the bloodstains duly noted. Bill Titus identified the Ford as one he had sold to a Mr. George Amberson. The tone of the article touched my heart: simple concern for a missing (and possibly injured) man’s whereabouts. Gregory Dusen, my Hometown Trust banker, described me as “a well-spoken and polite fellow.” Eddie Baumer, proprietor of Baumer’s Barber Shop, said essentially the same thing. Not a single whiff of suspicion accrued to the Amberson name. Things might have been different if I’d been linked to a certain sensational case in Derry, but I hadn’t been.

Nor was I in the following week’s issue, where I had been reduced to a mere squib in the Police Beat: SEARCH FOR MISSING WISCONSIN MAN CONTINUES. In the issue following that, the Weekly Enterprise had gone gaga for the upcoming holiday season, and George Amberson disappeared from the paper entirely. But I had been there. Al carved his name on a tree. I’d found mine in the pages of an old newspaper. I’d expected it, but looking at the actual proof was still awe-inspiring.

I next went to the Derry Daily News website. It cost me considerably more to access their archives—$34.50—but within a matter of minutes I was looking at the front page of the issue for the first of November, 1958.

You would expect a sensational local crime to headline the front page of a local newspaper, but in Derry—the Peculiar Little City—they kept as quiet as possible about their atrocities. The big story that day had to do with Russia, Great Britain, and the United States meeting in Geneva to discuss a possible nuclear test-ban treaty. Below this was a story about a fourteen-year-old chess prodigy named Bobby Fischer. At the very bottom of the front page, on the lefthand side (where, media experts tell us, people are apt to look last, if at all), was a story headlined MURDEROUS