They drove through Monta Clare, and she did not ask where they were headed. Saint rolled down her window and rain fell for a while in tides through still trees till the streets made mirrors. He drove well enough, and she wondered how many times he had stolen the old car in the dead of night.
For a long time she risked glances at him and tried to see the difference but could not, not outwardly.
It was only at Eleven Valley Road as he turned down an unmarked track and eased the car onto mats of deadened pine needles that her breath shallowed as she realized where they were and what stood before them.
“Are we—”
“You can wait in the car,” he said.
They climbed out together and she silently followed past stirs of poison oak and the tight knit of common juniper. He picked dark blue cones but stopped deadly still beside her as they stared down at Lake White Rock.
“Monta Clare might as well be our world, right?” she said.
Mountain rivers fed it with turgid darks that rippled.
In silence they made it to the burned remains of Eli Aaron’s house. Police tape still hung but the cops had long departed. The dogs had traced near a hundred acres along with a specialist team that pulled three bodies from their fitful rest.
He stood small on the charr, the structure broken down, coarser, erodible, and repellent to the water it would need to recover. Saint was glad there would be no life at all there again.
“To find Grace, we need to find out how he chose her. And how he chose Misty. And the others,” Patch said.
He pulled paper from his bag and held it up.
Saint stared at it.
“This is a picture of the rosary beads,” he said. He had stolen it when he cleaned the police station.
She looked at the fine detail. The metal blues, the pardon crucifix. The beads larger at intervals, the marbling flowers so beautiful she knew they had been hand painted. She squinted but could not make out the exact saint or the engraving.
“Can I keep it?” she said.
She would later take it to the library and trawl archives and find nothing.
The house was gone. The barns still stood in a crescent of growth untouched, and Saint did not want to follow but did not want to leave him.
“I didn’t say thank you,” he said.
“You didn’t have to.”
He stuck his head through a tear in lofting panels and saw nothing at all because the cops had removed near everything.
He climbed through and she followed, and soot marked her pants.
They scooped through debris.
Saint knelt and saw the rotting papers, the ink bleeding from rainfall and the fire hoses. The pages of books, the spines still intact. She made out odd words. History. Art. Guide.
“You think Eli Aaron is alive?” Saint said.
“Yes. Otherwise, Grace would have found me by now.”