'Where?' Jilly demanded of Dylan. 'Where?'

Battered again, the door boomed a timpani note, and something in the structure of the chair cracked, but held.

In transit from the women's restroom, he had imagined numerous unintended destinations that would have proved disastrous, but now he could not think of a single place in this world where they might wisely seek sanctuary.

The crash of determined meat against resistant wood came again, and the meat grunted not with pain or anger, but as if a perverse pleasure had been taken from this punishment.

Immediately following the grunt came another crash, but this time it was the brittle percussion of shattering glass. The closed drapes stirred at one of the windows as fragments of the broken pane rapped off the back of the fabric.

'Home,' Dylan told Shepherd. 'Take us home, Shep. Take us home real quick.'

'Home,' Shepherd echoed, but he seemed unsure of precisely the place to which the word referred.

Whoever had broken the window raked with some instrument at the remaining sharp shards in the frame, clearing the way for entrance.

'Our house in California,' Dylan said, 'California – one hundred something thousand square miles-'

Shep raised his right hand as if to swear fealty to the state of California.

'-population thirty something million something thousand-'

Whatever genetic cousin to a bull was charging the door charged it again, and the chair cracked, sagged.

Frowning as though still unsure of himself, Shepherd pinched the air between the thumb and forefinger of his raised hand.

'-state tree,' Dylan said, but then fumbled for the species.

'The redwood!' Jilly said.

The drapes billowed as one of the assassins began to climb in from outside.

'State flower, the golden poppy,' Dylan continued.

Persistence paid. On the fifth blow, the door shuddered inward and the bracing chair collapsed.

The first man across the threshold, kicking at the fragments of the chair, was wearing pale-yellow pants, a pink-and-yellow polo shirt, and a murderous expression. He had a pistol, and as he rushed forward, he raised it with the clear intention of squeezing off a shot.

'Eureka,' Shep said, and tweaked.

Dylan thanked God that he heard no gunfire as the motel room folded away from him, but he did hear his name – 'O'Conner!' – shouted by the would-be shooter.

This time while in kaleidoscopic transit, he had something entirely new to fear: that the thug in golf togs had gotten too near to them before they escaped the motel room, and that Shep had folded a well-armed killer with them to California.

Abundant slabs of shadow and a few shards of pale light unfolded through the receding motel bedroom, and one split second before Dylan recognized the new room that fell into place around him, he smelled the lingering savor of a cinnamon-pecan-raisin cake baked according to his mother's cherished recipe, its delicious aroma unmistakable.

Shep, Jilly, and Dylan himself arrived unscathed, but the killer in the polo shirt didn't have a ticket to ride, after all. Not even the echo of his shouted O'Conner! followed them out of Arizona.

In spite of the comforting aroma and the gladdening absence of a door-busting assassin, Dylan enjoyed no sense of relief. Something was wrong. He couldn't at once identify the source of his current uneasiness, but he felt it too strongly to discount it as bad nerves.

The gloom in the kitchen of their California house was relieved only slightly by a soft butterscotch-yellow light seeping across the threshold of the open door to the dining room, and even less by the illuminated clock set into the belly of a smiling ceramic pig that hung on the wall to the right of the sink. On the counter under the clock, revealed by that timely light, a sheet-cake pan containing the fresh cinnamon-pecan-raisin delight cooled on a wire rack.

Vonetta Beesley – their once-a-week Harley-riding housekeeper – sometimes cooked for them, using their late mother's best recipes. But as they weren't scheduled to return from their art-festival tour until late October, she must have prepared this treat for herself.

Following the momentary disorientation of being folded, Dylan realized why a sense of wrongness could not be dispelled. They had departed eastern Arizona, which lay in the Mountain time zone, before one o'clock Saturday afternoon. In California, in the Pacific time zone, the day should have waned one hour less than it had back in Holbrook. Shortly before one o'clock in Holbrook translated to shortly before noon on the shores of the Pacific, yet the black of night pressed at the kitchen windows.

Darkness at noon?

'Where are we?' Jilly whispered.

'Home,' Dylan said.

He consulted the luminous hands of his wristwatch, which he had set to Mountain time days ago, before the arts festival in Tucson. The watch showed four minutes till one o'clock, about what he had expected and surely correct.

Here in the land of the golden poppy and the redwood tree, the time ought to be four minutes till noon, not four till midnight.

'Why's it dark?' Jilly asked.

In the belly of the pig, the illuminated clock showed 9:26.

During the previous trips via folding, either no time elapsed in transit – or at most a few seconds. Dylan had not been aware of any significant period of time passing on this occasion, either.

If they truly had arrived at 9:26 in the evening, Vonetta should have left hours ago. She worked from nine o'clock until five. If she had gone, however, she would have taken the cake with her.

Likewise, she wouldn't have forgotten to turn off the light in the dining room. Vonetta Beesley had always been as reliable as the atomic clock at Greenwich, by which all the nations of the world set their timepieces.

The house stood in a funereal condition, hung with cerements of silence, draped in shrouds of stillness.

The wrongness involved something more than the darkness peering in at the windows, involved the house itself and something within the house. He could hear no evil breathing, no demon on the prowl, but he sensed that nothing here was right.

Jilly must have been alarmed by the same queer perception. She stood precisely on the spot where she had been unfolded, as though afraid to move, and her body language was so clearly written that her tension could easily be read even in these shadows.

The quality of light issuing from the dining room wasn't as it should be. The chandelier over the table, which Dylan couldn't see from this angle, was controlled by a switch with a dimming feature, but even at this low level of brightness, the glow had far too rich a butterscotch color and too moody an aspect to have been thrown off by the brass-and-crystal fixture. Besides, the light didn't originate from chandelier height; the ceiling in the next room was troweled in shadow, and the light appeared to fall to the floor from a point not far above the top of the table.

'Shep, buddy, what's happening here?' Dylan whispered.

Having been promised cake, Shep might have been expected to go directly to the cinnamon glory cooling in a pan under the clock, for it was his nature to be single-minded in all things, and not least of all in the matter of cake. Instead, he took one step toward the door to the dining room, hesitated, and said, 'Shep is brave,' although he sounded more fearful than Dylan had ever before heard him.

Dylan wanted to avoid venturing deeper into the house until he gained a better sense of their situation. He needed a good weapon, as well. The knife drawer offered a trove of wicked cutlery; but he'd had enough of knives lately. He longed for a baseball bat.