eight a.m., on San Clemente Island. Do you know where that is?”
“No.”
“It’s sixty-five miles west of San Diego. On the east side of this island, about south of the midway point of its length, you’ll find a crude shack painted red. Not inside, but outside that shack, everything will be made clear.”
“Everything will be made clear outside this shack?”
“On June twenty-seventh, at approximately eight in the morning.”
“Where again?”
“South of halfway up the east coast of San Clemente Island, sixty-five miles west of San Diego.”
Myron made a mental note of the details. Then he asked, “How do you know this?”
“I have an atlas.”
“No, sorry, I mean,” Myron said, “how do you know all will be revealed?”
“We have the Mason word and second sight. Things for to come we can foretell aright,” the grandmaster said.
“And this is not a trap?” Myron said.
“It is not. But you should go alone.”
Myron shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.
“If you would like to go, you might find it simpler to take the back way,” the grandmaster said. He indicated a small door behind a rosebush.
“It’s not that,” Myron said. “It’s just that it took me a long time to get here.”
The grandmaster nodded.
“Well, I guess I’d expected something else. There was a lot of buildup.”
The grandmaster was still gazing off at a point somewhere behind Myron. “Everything hidden will be revealed,” he repeated. And what more could Myron ask for? The back door was behind the rosebush, and Myron went over to take it. As he was about to go out, he looked behind him and saw what the grandmaster was looking at. Mounted on the wall behind the door Myron had entered through was a flat-screen TV, and a Woody Woodpecker cartoon.
3.
The red panda waited for Myron out front, but he took the back way out, so we lost him again.
And he spent another few weeks off on his own. Spenser had taught him how to survive in the woods and Gloria had taught him how to survive in the city, while I had taught him, I would like to think, how to survive, period. It was no wonder no one could locate him.
But word trickled through the underground stream, as it always does. Arcane whispers of San Diego, and San Clemente Island. And so, late one June night unseasonably cold and cut through with a bitter wind, the red panda, prowling a marina north of San Diego, saw Myron casting the rope off a tiny launch no bigger than a rowboat. She sped down the dock and made a great leap, forepaws stretched out, bushy tail trailing behind her, and landed flat in the launch as Myron pushed it adrift with an oar.
Myron ignored the creature, so she turned into his old friend Alice.
“Jinkies, it’s cold!” she cried.
Myron ignored her and awkwardly used the oar as a paddle to navigate his way out of the marina.
“How can it be so cold here, it’s June?”
Myron, she noticed, had a strange look about him. Not his usual strange look—his eyes were glassy and preoccupied. He was sweating. He was wearing a yellow raincoat, and a heavy sweater underneath, which must have been warm.
“Myron, do you remember me? I’m Alice, we met last year in a pickup truck. I know Arthur.”
Outside the shelter of the harbor, the wind really picked up. In the distance, flashes of lightning strobed in the sky.
“Myron, you should turn back—there’s a storm coming. Actually, do you know what you’re doing?” Ahead of them was nothing but the open sea.
“Kind of,” Myron said.
“It is really cold out here,” Alice said. “Do you have any spare clothes, a jacket or anything?”
“Nothing that would fit you,” Myron said. So Alice turned back into a red panda, which is at least naturally furry.
As the California coast drifted farther away, Myron checked a pocket compass and then moved to the back of the launch. There was a small motor there, and he fiddled with it for a long while before it started up. By this point the wind was blowing strong, and waves kept coming over the sides of the boat. The red panda tried to shake herself dry, like a dog. It got colder. But now that Myron, with the help of his compass, had oriented the boat properly, the wind was directly at their back and sped the little launch along.
Alice assumed the shape of a human and tried to warm herself in a life jacket. “Are we going to San Clemente Island?”