In the night room Page 0,49

right hand from her hip, held it out fingers extended, and swept it two decisive feet to her left, telling me to move backward. After I had taken two steps back, then another, April returned her hand to her hip and lifted her chin. She appeared to be gazing at the sky above my side of the street.

I looked up and saw a speck tumbling through the air. The speck got bigger as it fell. Far overhead, a dark little head peered down from the top of the nearest building. I staggered backward another couple of steps and yelled, “Look out!” Six feet away, the woman with the nose ring whirled around and opened her mouth to screech something at me. An object moving too fast to be identified cut through the air between us and smacked into the pavement with a hard, flat, ringing sound over a dull undertone faintly like cannon fire. Stony chips flew upward in a gritty haze.

“Fucking hell!” the woman yelled. “Are you kidding me?”

I looked across the street at the place where April had been, then up at the edge of the roof, where the dark little head was pulling back out of sight. On the sidewalk, a broken concrete block rested in the pothole it had made on impact. Cracks and fractures crazed the entire section of pavement where the block had fallen.

“Did you actually hear that?” the woman shouted at me.

I said nothing.

“Did you? Is that why you pushed me away?” For the first time I realized that she had an English accent.

“Something like that,” I said. People had started to crowd in, pointing at the sidewalk, pointing at the sky.

She pulled a cell phone from a zippered pocket. “I’m calling 911. We’d be dead now, if you didn’t have ears like a fucking bat.”

An hour later, a bored police lieutenant named McMenamin was telling me Jasper Dan Kohle had never served in the armed forces, never voted, never taken out a library card, never bought property or contracted to use the services of a telephone company. He had no passport or driver’s license. He didn’t have an address or any credit cards. He didn’t own a car. He’d never been arrested, or even fingerprinted. It also appeared that he had never been born. With that, Lieutenant McMenamin ordered me out of his station.

18

From Timothy Underhill’s journal

Yesterday I spent so much time on an entry about what happened after I left Ground Zero that I never got around to what I thought was going to be my principal topic, what’s happening with my work. Today I am determined to put some of this down on paper, because doing that should help me think about what I’m doing—really, what my protagonist is doing, and how I am handling it—but before I get to the main subject, I ought to describe my recent dealings with my brother.

My brother’s reaction to his son’s disappearance damn near drove me crazy. At the earliest possible moment, he gave up all hope. He resigned himself to the supposition that Mark was dead. In another person, that might have been realistic; for Philip, the murder of hope was self-protective. He couldn’t bear to live with anxiety and uncertainty, so he willingly embraced devastation, thereby killing his son in his own heart. I couldn’t take that, I hated it. It felt like a betrayal. Philip chose to give up on the boy, and I wasn’t sure I could ever forgive him for the sheer lazy selfishness of his choice. I certainly had no interest in talking to him or spending time with him during the months when my grief was at its peak. The two times he called me—amazingly, for I can’t remember his ever doing this before—instead of talking about anything personal, he wanted to tell me about certain errors and inconsistencies he had discovered in the bound galleys of my new book. Maybe for him that was personal.

Then came the news that in mid-September, he was going to marry a woman named China Beech, a born-again Christian behind whose previous job description of “exotic dancer” I was sure I discerned a stripper. In a way, it was touching. This tedious, pot-bellied, fifty-three-year-old man with thinning hair and a boring job had been so hypnotized by his tawdry girlfriend that he wanted to seize happiness with both hands and clasp it to his intoxicated breast. What erotic feats China Beech must have inspired in him, what unexplored territories must