12

WHEN I WOKE MY HEAD was throbbing, and my mouth was so parched that it felt as if someone had left a hair-dryer blowing into it all night. I went into the bathroom and irrigated it, slapped a wet flannel over my face, took a couple of Tylenol, and retreated to bed again.

My watch said: 8:17. That made it after 11:00 in Ohio. I switched on my phone and rang Ruth’s number. There was no reply. My solar plexus tingled. Something had happened. It was a punishment to me for the way I’d treated her yesterday, my refusal to commit myself. And now life was denying me the opportunity to make it up to her.

Oh, for God’s sake, I told myself out loud. The hippies have softened your brain. She’s probably just taking a late shower. Or meeting a friend. Or out shopping.

In the bedside table I found a local phone directory. I looked up Shoma. Nothing. I tried Chess. There were two entries, one for Marianne and the other for G. R. The address for both of them was 14590 Wolf Bend Road, Gallico.

I dialed Marianne’s number. After five rings a female voice answered. “Yeah?”

“Is that Marianne Chess?”

A pause. “Who is this?”

She couldn’t be more than a young girl, to judge from her voice. She sounded bad-tempered and short of breath, as if I’d interrupted her in the middle of something important.

“I don’t know if I’ve got the right number,” I said. “I’m trying to reach Joe Chess’s mother.”

There was another pause. Then, abruptly, she put the phone down.

Odd. It would have been easy enough for her to say She doesn’t live here or I don’t know what you’re talking about. Or—if Marianne was Joe Chess’s mother—She’s not here right now.

I wrote the address down on a piece of hotel stationery. I stuck it in my wallet, resisted the temptation to try Ruth again so soon, and headed for the shower.

Breakfast was in a kind of enclosed terrace built out from the hillside. From my table in the window I had a glorious, vertiginous view over the stampede of trees plunging into the valley, and the woods and mountains on the other side. The forest fire was still some way off, but the smoke seemed blacker and denser than it had the day before, and tinged here and there with a rash of angry red. When the waitress came over, I nodded towards it and asked,

“Is it getting worse, do you think?”

She leaned down, so that her eyes were at the same level as mine. “Yep, could be.” She straightened up again. “What can I get you?”

I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I pointed at the menu.

“The Giant Stack o’Cakes?” she said.

“Yes. When it says giant, how many are we actually—?”

“It’s a lot of cakes. You won’t feel hungry for a while afterward that’s for sure.”

“Do you think I could just have a normal healthy adult stack?”

She gave a tight-lipped smile, as if she were indulging a faddish child. “OK, let me see what I can do for you.”

I looked round at the other guests. Most of them kept squinting surreptitiously out of the window at the blaze, as if they couldn’t quite decide whether it was just an awe-inspiring spectacle or something more dangerous, and one extra glance would finally settle the matter. Hypochondriacs, trying to convince themselves the mole is getting smaller. Ruth would have appreciated that, if she’d been here: laughing at it together would have helped us to sublimate our own anxiety.

I’m sorry. I miss you too. Please be OK.

After a couple of minutes a newcomer arrived: a tall, pale, flabby man, whose beige workaday shirt and slacks made him seem out of place among the tropical plumage of the vacationers. He scanned the room, saw me, studied his phone, checked me again, then settled at a table in the furthest corner. Unlike the rest of us, he didn’t seem particularly interested in the fire. But every time I looked in his direction, he dropped his eyes hastily, as if I’d caught him in the act of watching me.

After the waitress had brought my stack—even the scaled-down version would have fed a small family for a day—she went over to the man’s table to take his order. For a couple of seconds, as they were talking, I was able to get a good view of him. Forty-something, with—apart from his bulk, and a tangle of chestnut hair—nothing remarkable about him at all. Nonetheless, I was pretty certain that I’d remember if I’d ever met him. Perhaps he’d been one of the people at the party the night before that I hadn’t spoken to? I shut my eyes, re-ran the video of the circle in my head. No: the only person that tall had been male Denny.

The waitress brought him a coffee. We kept not-quite-catching each other’s eye until I’d finished eating. I pushed my plate away and walked quickly to the door. When I turned and looked back, he’d got up and was standing by his table, cup in hand, as if he wasn’t sure what to do next.

I locked myself in my room, switched on my phone. Thank God: a text from Ruth:

Sorry I missed ur call. Use this number. Rxxxx

I started to thumb it in, then stopped. Why not the number we’d agreed on? For a second I wondered if the message could be from someone else, pretending to be her. Then I realized: only she could have known I’d tried to reach her.

I finished dialing.

“Hi.” I could hear her smile. “Robert.”

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah. Kind of. It’s weird being on my own again.”

“Ditto.”

“Aristotle doesn’t quite do it.”

“Why did you change the number? Has something happened?”

She hesitated. “No, not really.”

“I.e.—”

“I.e., some guy took a picture of me at the airport. Plus some other stuff. Seems like they know an awful lot about us.”

“Who does?”

“And I don’t want to make it any easier for them.” She paused, registering my question. “Whitrow Against Hate. But it’s not just them anymore. There’s Global Village communities involved. And a ton of stuff on Twitter.”

“Saying what?”

“You don’t want to know. Just ignore it. That’s what I’m trying to do. So tell me about last night. Did you get stoned, and end up in bed with a load of hippie women?”

“Pretty much.”

“OK. Better not say any more. Or it’ll be all over the internet.”

I laughed.

“I’m not kidding.”

For some seconds, neither of us spoke. The thought that there might be a third party to our conversation, waiting for one us to go on, made me feel as if someone had removed a layer of my skin. But was that actually possible? Might there be word recognition software that—if it encountered the name Evan Bone, say—would bring it to the attention of a human intelligence? Or was their ability to pinpoint where we were, combined with what they already knew about us from other sources, enough to tell them exactly what we were up to?

That was the problem with being a product of the technological dark ages: I had no idea.

“How about you?” said Ruth, finally. “Anyone taking photos of you who shouldn’t be?”

“No.”

“There’s a but there waiting to show its face.”

I walked over to the window and looked out. A nondescript red car was parked close to the main entrance of the hotel. It had tinted glass, but the driver’s window was open, and I could see a thick white slab of arm disappearing into a beige shirt sleeve.

“You mean they weren’t taking photos but they were doing something else?” she said.

“Given what you said, do you think we ought to talk about this on the phone?”

She was quiet for a moment. “Well, just tell me. Did you find out anything last night? That might, you know—”

“Not a lot.” I checked my watch. “But I’ve got an appointment in about forty minutes. With—”

“No, don’t say! Just in case.”

“Oh, sod it. Why don’t you just come back? It would be so much easier.”

She groaned. “God, I wish I could! But I have to go get my mom this afternoon. They’re still giving her a hard time. So she’s coming here. Where I’ll be able to keep an eye on her.”

“OK.”

“I’m sorry. Go buy another phone. Call me on this number. And then I’ll call you back on that number. And—”

“It’d be cheaper just to get an airline ticket.”

“Oh, I know! But—” She sighed. “This way, at least we can stay in touch. And don’t worry about the money. Just let me know how much it costs, and I’ll take care of it.” A long pause. I could sense something building, like a shift in barometric pressure. Finally she said: “I love you.”

I cleared my throat.

Oh, for Christ’s sake! You sound like a bank manager refusing an overdraft. You were just worrying you’d lost her . . .

“I love you too,” I said.

The red car was still in situ when I got outside, but the window was up, so I couldn’t see if there was anyone inside. I started down the road towards the town, watching the smoke from the forest fire graffiti-ing the sky. After two or three minutes, I was aware of an engine slowing behind me. I plodded on, fighting the urge to turn. The red car edged into view and drew up alongside me. The passenger door opened. The flabby man stuck his head out.

“Can I give you a ride someplace?”

“I’m fine, thank you.” I patted my stomach. “Good to get a bit of exercise, after a breakfast like that.”

He must have seen me eating my stack o’cakes, but he frowned, as if I’d answered him in a foreign language. “Anywhere you want to go, I’m happy to take you.”

“Honestly. It’s a kind offer, but—”

“OK.” From his baffled shrug, you’d have thought I’d refused a check for a million dollars. He pulled the door shut, then continued down the hill, taking the next bend too fast, and having to brake violently.

“My, Mr. Punctual,” said Breeze, as I walked into the shop. She was waiting just inside, holding an improvised sign written in big childish red letters, and ringed with little pictures of flowers: Re-opening at 10:30. She blutacked it to the glass, then locked the door behind me. “Doesn’t give us too long,” she said. “But there’s stuff you can look at when I’m not there. OK: let’s go on up.” She led me back through the shop, and up a narrow staircase that twisted gradually from darkness into light. At the top was a room that must have started life as a loft, but was now a large airy office, with a polished hardwood floor and big windows in the sloping roof. The far end was lined with filing cabinets. In front of them was a desk with a keyboard and a big black computer monitor. On the wall next to it hung a clock. The wooden surround was hand-painted to look like a scene from a fairy-tale: an elf sitting in a clearing, picking a toadstool.

“So,” said Breeze, “welcome to my little nook. This is where pretty much all the real stuff in my life gets done.”

“Fairly sizeable, for a nook,” I said.

She laughed. “Fairly sizeable. I don’t think anyone’s ever called it that before.”

She wheeled a second chair behind the desk. We sat down. The computer was already on, showing a desktop dotted with files. She moved the cursor to the top.

“We have a slideshow I put together,” she said. “But first there’s just a couple other little things I’d thought we’d look at. Kind of like home movies. There weren’t any video cameras back when we started, so there’s no sound.” She touched my arm, laughing. “I don’t know why I’m telling you. You knew that. But anyway, this’ll give you an idea what it was like.”

The screen filled with a fuzzy black-and-white image: a huddle of figures standing in a forest clearing. She clicked on the play arrow. The figures started to mill about, uncertainly, like cattle in a field.

“This is the first time we did the circle,” said Breeze. She laughed. “None of us knew what we were supposed to do. Except Many Rivers. You see him?”

She paused the film and pointed to a man at the edge of the group. He wore jeans and a dark shirt that hung over his belt. He had a square unsmiling face, framed by a pair of thick black braids tied at the bottom with leather thongs. In one hand he held a fan of feathers.

“So here he is explaining to us.” She pressed play again. Many Rivers sprang into action, tilting his head back, grimacing, karate-chopping the air with his feather-less hand to emphasize what he was saying.

“He’s praying to the grandfathers,” said Breeze. “Later on, some of us said, hey, why not the grandmothers, too? So we changed it. But back then, we didn’t know anything. We were just in awe of the guy.”

The figures started to assemble, as the group had at the party. Many Rivers looked heavenward, waved the fan over his shoulder, then joined them. The circle started to move.

“There’s Oak, right there,” said Breeze, pointing at a mass of hair. “Recognize him?”

I didn’t. But next to him was a lean, clean-shaven face that did look vaguely familiar, though I couldn’t quite place it.

“Who’s that?” I said.

“That guy? That’s Birch. Birch Ogren. You know? The actor. He used to hang out with us sometimes. When he just had to get away from all that fake Hollywood shit for a while.” She paused the film, moved the cursor to another file. “And now here’s your trick question, OK? You didn’t think I was just going to show you all this stuff, without you having to do anything, did you?”

She clicked. Another monochrome image exploded on to the screen. In the center was a pick-up truck laden with sacks. The hillside beyond was dotted with tree stumps and tipis. At one side, half out of view, were a couple of almost-finished little houses, their bare wooden planks gleaming white.

“Is that the Red Dragon?” I said.

“Very good. Yeah. The good old Red Dragon, back in her prime. But that’s not the trick question. That’s coming up right now.”

She started the video. After a moment, two girls appeared from the direction of the houses. They were both in their late teens or early twenties, with long dark hair wound around their heads and laced with leaves. They wore sandals and sawn-off denim shorts, and nothing else. When they realized they were being filmed they stopped and guyed for the camera, laughing and waggling their breasts. Then they each took a sack from the back of the Red Dragon and set off back towards the houses.

“So: who are those two lovely ladies?”

She was still just recognizable. With the other it was just a process of elimination.

“You and Denny?” I blushed.

“Good job! Course, Denny may still look like that, but I know I don’t.”

Before I could stop him, my unreconstructed inner sixteen-year-old grabbed the microphone.

“I’m sure you’re being modest.”

“Well, thank you, kind sir. I just figure that if you take good care of your body, it’ll take good care of you.”

Her fingers fluttered over the buttons of her shirt. I watched aghast. Could she? Would she?

“That certainly seems to have worked for you,” said the sixteen-year-old, proud of his grasp of grown-up cunning.

She nodded. “Anyway, that was just a bit of fun.” Her hand moved back to the mouse. “Let’s take a look at this slide-show. Any time you want me to pause it, let me know. And by the way: if there’s any you want to use for your book, that’s fine.”

She clicked again: Building a New Way to Live: The Coyote Fork Commune, 1972–2002.

She’d made a professional job of it, arranging the pictures in chronological order, and setting them against a musical sequence—mostly guitar and fiddle—like the soundtrack to an old Western. These people, it told you, unambiguously, were modern pioneers, heroically carving a new life out of the wilderness, with nothing but their vision of a better future to guide them.

We started at the beginning, with a wide view of Coyote Fork before work had begun: a rugged expanse of woodland, dotted with rocks, and here and there a broken-backed old building—the last remnants of an abandoned mine—staggering to its knees. Next came a series of shots of the advance party, Hambone and Jen: he a smiling, bare-chested Viking warrior, carelessly balancing an axe on his shoulder—she small and demure, wearing a long skirt, but naked from the waist up, like an Amish woman who couldn’t be bothered to finish dressing. And then we saw the gradual transformation of the landscape: trees felled; tents pitched; gardens dug; buildings begun—with, at every stage, new arrivals, Oak, the two Dennys, Breeze, others whose faces I recognized, a few I didn’t, all swelling the workforce.

“So how many people lived there altogether?” I said.

She shrugged. “Folks came and went. Take a look at this.” She paused on a photo of what appeared to be the whole group standing in front of a newly-completed house. Men in sweat-stained bandanas, clutching saws and hammers; couples with their arms round each other; a woman holding a sign in front of her breasts: We Did It! Everyone smiling.

“Check out those faces,” said Breeze. “That’s the Fork House. We’d just banged in the last nail. Look how happy we all were. How proud. The feeling of togetherness. You don’t see that too often these days, do you?”

She re-started the slideshow. More houses; a litter of piglets in a crudely-fenced sty; a laughing woman milking a goat; Hambone pointing at an enormous cockerel with a mock-horrified expression. Babies started to appear, cradled against breasts, or strapped into papooses. But there was a strange lack of older children—as if, once they could walk, they ceased to be of any interest. I kept hoping for a glimpse of the young Evan Bone; but, if he was there among the blobby featureless faces, he was too small to be recognizable.

And there was nothing, either, about the conflict between the different factions in the commune, or the fire that destroyed it. We ended with a collage of beaming Forkers, and then a shot of the sun setting behind a mountain, accompanied by a tremulous elegy played on the violin.

“So,” said Breeze. “What do you think? Make you wish you could get in a time machine and come back and join us?”

“Absolutely.”

“Yeah, I wish you could too. I’d go with you.”

“One thing, though,” I said. “There seemed to be hardly any kids. Older kids, I mean. Where were they all? Ripple, and Evan Bone, and—”

She made a noise that was meant to be a laugh. “Oh, my. I’m beginning to think you must be just a little bit star-struck. Evan Bone’s not the only thing came out of Coyote Fork, you know. He’s not the most important thing.”

“No, but—”

“It was a commune. The kids didn’t belong to anybody. We wanted them to grow up free. So they were usually off on their own someplace, doing their own thing.”

She glanced at the clock. “Anyway, I should be getting back to the store.” She got up and patted one of the filing cabinets. “But in here there’s a whole lot more you can look at. Files on pretty much everything. And everyone. We all get to decide what goes in our own file. But there are no secrets.” She laughed. “Well, you’ll see. Everyone just lets it all hang out. That’s what Coyote Fork was all about. Living with nothing to hide.” She started towards the stairs. “Anything you need, you know where to find me.”

After she’d gone, I pulled open the top drawer. It was full of old-fashioned hanging files, each with a title in a plastic holder: Hogs!; Goats Milk, Anyone?; The Fork House; Rooster Rick! I quickly flicked through them but found nothing about Beth McGregor or the commune’s final years. Ditto with the second drawer.

The third and fourth drawers held the files on individual members of the commune. There were no obvious gaps, but neither of them seemed quite as full as I’d expected. Evan Bone’s record consisted of a single sheet, giving his date of birth and the names of his parents. Again, there was no mention of Beth McGregor.

I counted the files: twenty-three. So how many people had lived there altogether? Breeze had evaded the question when I asked her, but surely, over the years, there must have been more than that?

I went through them, one by one. Everyone I’d met at the party was there—although Ripple’s record, like Evan Bone’s, contained only the barest information. There were also files for Jen Bone, Hambone, and most of the other people Breeze had mentioned. The only exceptions were Many Rivers and Birch Ogren. Perhaps they didn’t qualify as Forkers.

The computer was still on. I found the slideshow and speed-clicked my way through to the image that Breeze had stopped at. How many people were standing in front of that house?

The answer, it turned out, was twenty-six. And there was no guarantee that the picture included everyone who’d been part of the commune. So whose files were missing from the filing cabinet, and why? Short of asking Breeze—which would inevitably make her suspicious—I could think of no way to find out.

But if she’d removed any material, she must have put it somewhere. The other filing cabinets were all locked, so I rummaged in the desk, searching for the keys. All I found was the usual clutter: paper clips, pencils, a stapler.

At the very edge of my consciousness, I was aware I’d overlooked something. I couldn’t say what it was: just that there was a tiny flaw in the weave of the fabric. I went back to the first filing cabinet and opened the third drawer. This time it hit me instantly: Hambone’s file. It was thicker than any of the others, and less organized: a bulging mish-mash of paper, all stuffed in anyhow. He and Jen weren’t around, of course, to manage their own material. And—given her sense of grievance against them—Breeze probably wasn’t going to go to much trouble to present them in the best light. Perhaps there was still something about Beth McGregor in there that she’d neglected to remove.

I lifted out the file and opened it. Immediately I felt a sag of disappointment: most of the bulk was a bundle of old bills—for flour, nails, gasoline, animal feed—held together with a rubber band. I riffled through them a couple of times, but there were no hidden notes or messages interleaved with them.

I laid the bundle on the desk and looked at what was left in the file. Mostly letters—from the authorities, demanding that the commune pay tax; would-be members—Me and my old lady really dig what you’re doing; a couple from journalists interested in visiting the place. One was a short note from Birch Ogren: Thanks for the good times, man. Here’s something’ll take you to the moon, no rocket required. Birch. Intriguing—but not really helpful.

There were also a few photographs of the commune. With one exception, they could all have been also-ran candidates for the slideshow. The exception showed a group of people standing in front of Fork House. It must have been taken later than the We Did It! shot, because the building was already starting to look weathered. At the end of the front row stood a young woman I’d seen in none of the other shots, with high-colored cheeks and curly fair hair. She was scowling, as if the light were too bright for her. I was ninety-nine per cent certain she was Beth McGregor.

I scanned the other faces: Hambone, Oak, Breeze, Many Rivers. And then—immediately behind Beth—the unmistakable figure of Birch Ogren. He had one hand on her shoulder—holding it at an odd angle, like a bird claw, as if he wasn’t able to trust its entire weight to her—and a Mona Lisa smile I couldn’t read.

Again, interesting—but not particularly informative. I’d underrated Breeze’s thoroughness.

As I started to put everything back in the file, I noticed a tube of paper, no thicker than a sachet of sugar, stuck in the crease at the bottom. Probably an old credit card receipt, I thought. But when I took it out and unrolled it, I found, in large, careful handwriting, done in pencil:

I know what your tryin to do. That is our land you are on. Im tellin you my son is not goin anyplace.

No name. But it was obvious who must have written it. I saw Oak on the porch again, the contempt on his face as he said, If there’s anyone knows, I guess it would be Joe Chess’s mom.

I folded the note into a tiny square and put it into my wallet. Then I returned everything else to the filing cabinet and closed the drawer.

“Done already?” said Breeze, as I re-entered the shop.

“I’ve got another appointment, I’m afraid,” I said. “But I may be back later, if that’s OK.”

“OK.” She gave a little nod, urging me to go on and tell her who the appointment was with.

“And thanks so much for your help,” I said. “That’s all really fascinating stuff.”

“Any time.”

I hurried out into the street and looked around. The flabby man who’d offered me a lift was nowhere to be seen. There were a few other people about, but none of them paid me the slightest attention. I was a free agent again.

My first job was to find a car. I hadn’t noticed any hire companies, so I went into the post office, a few doors down from Milward Books, and joined the queue to speak to the harassed-looking woman behind the counter. There was something grim about the place—an overwhelming impression of steel and bulletproof glass, like the room in a jail where prisoners can speak to their loved ones through a screen once a week. After waiting for ten minutes, I had the bright idea of asking the elderly man ahead of me. He frowned at me through his glasses.

“Excuse me? Higher?”

“Sorry. Wrong word. Rental. Car rental.”

“Oh, oh, oh, now I get you. Well, we don’t have any of the big fellas here, Hertz or whatnot. You want one of them, you got to go down to Redding. But there’s Wreck City. Just over there, on Grape.” He pointed through the window, at a street leading off the main drag. “They ought to be able to help you.” He laughed. “If you don’t mind driving something probably belonged to me a few years back.”

I thanked him. Grape Street was a little ghetto of small businesses: the Patio Lounge Bar; a 7/11 store; a funeral parlor. Wreck City was at the far end, sprawling the length of an entire block. The forecourt was lined with vehicles, most of them a few years old, but sprucely turned-out, like a group of pensioners dolled up for a trip to the “theater,” if you want everything Americanised. A sign next to the entrance said, Cars! Cars! Cars! Repairs. For Sale. To Rent. Best Rates.

I crossed the road and went in. Immediately ahead was a workshop, where a man in overalls was lying under a ramp, doing something to a pickup truck’s exhaust. Next to it, carved out of a corner of the showroom, was the office. I opened the door. A blond man sat behind the desk, talking on the phone.

“I’ll call you right back, OK?” he said, when he saw me. He slammed the receiver down. “May I help you?”

“I’d like to rent a car for a couple of days. Maybe longer.”

“Well, that’s good. You came to the right place. For a moment there I thought you were going to tell me you wanted a pizza, and I’d have had to say, Yoda no do that can.” He laughed. “But a car? No problem. What you have in mind?”

“Just something to get me around.”

“OK.” He tapped the desk with a pen. “But why not think a bit bigger? Something that’ll get you around in style? I got a real beauty just came in.” He tilted his head on one side, studied me appraisingly. “Just looking at you, I think you and her were made for each other. Want to take a peek?”

“OK.”

He led me outside, and along the row of cars in the forecourt.

“This is the lady,” he said, stopping by a bulbous blue brute that had been built when oil and steel were plentiful, and the words global warming hadn’t yet entered our vocabulary. He stroked one shiny haunch as if it were an animal. “A real babe, huh?”

“What is it?” I said.

“A Sable. There’s quite a story to her. Belonged to a drug dealer down in the Bay Area. Guy loved her more than his own kids. Nothing was too good for her. Tinted windows, like you can see.” He laughed. “That way, the cops don’t know it’s you in there, right?” He opened the door with a heavy, satisfying clunk. “Inside, all-leather seats. Best sound system money can buy. The works. You could take a ride down to Redding, rent some brand-new little Japanese box don’t want to admit it’s a car. Or you can have this, for half the price. A real piece of class, that ain’t afraid to show it has tits and an ass.”

“I’ll take it,” I said.

“Man like you, I’m guessing likes his steak rare, you’d be crazy not to.”

In the event, by the time I’d paid for insurance and Collision Damage Waiver, it didn’t work out much cheaper than the brand-new little box. But it did look a lot more fun to drive.

“So where you headed?” he said, as he handed me back the paperwork. “Give you directions any place?”

“Gallico.”

He raised his eyebrows. They were so pale you could only see them when the sun caught them. “Gallico? What’s out at Gallico? Except a big fire?”

“Is that where the fire is?”

He nodded. “And take my word, there’s nothing else to see. You can’t even get a cell signal out there. You’re looking for a good day out, now, what I’d do is, I’d head to Rib Lake. Water rides like you wouldn’t believe. Plus the best ice cream in the world.”

“So how close is it? The fire, I mean? To Gallico?”

My stubbornness exasperated him. He glanced at his watch. “We got a guy lives out that way. But he finishes pretty soon.” He walked to the door, opened it, and yelled into the workshop,

“Hey! Gerald! Come here a minute!”

The man under the ramp slithered out and stood up, wiping his hands on his overalls.

“This guy wants to go to Gallico. You reckon he’ll make it?”

“I don’t know,” said the mechanic. He was black-haired and dark-skinned, with watchful eyes. “It was pretty close this morning.”

“That’s what I figured,” said the blond man. “OK, I have to call the hospital back. But trust me. Place you want to go is Rib Lake.” He handed me the car keys. “Enjoy.” He turned, then looked back and nodded at the mechanic. “And don’t let this guy bust your balls. Give him half a chance, he’ll tell you the fire’s all our fault.” He laughed. “Right, Gerald?”

The mechanic didn’t respond. The blond man went in and shut the door. The mechanic squinted at me.

“You looking for someone particular out in Gallico?”

“Marianne Chess. Do you know her?”

“Yeah, I know her.” He took a rag from his pocket and worked at the grease on his fingers. “Last I heard, she was getting ready to evacuate. And anyways, she’s not too much of a talker.”

“So what, you think I’m wasting my time?”

“Could be rough out there.” He shrugged, then turned and walked back to the workshop. I looked through the office window. The blond man was bellowing into the phone. I waved to him, then went and took possession of the Sable.

It needed less than a minute for me to see the drug dealer’s point. Neat, efficient, nimble, the car wasn’t. But for lazy tigerish power, I’d never driven anything like it.

First port of call was a drugstore, where—as Ruth had suggested—I bought a new phone. I sent her a quick text, to give her the number and let her know that I might be hard to reach for the rest of the day. Then I located Gallico on the map and pointed the Sable towards it.

It was easy enough to get there: all I had to do was follow the smoke for thirty miles. But finding Marianne Chess’s house, once I’d arrived, was a different matter. As the blond man had warned me, there wasn’t a lot to Gallico—a few houses, a church, a service station with a small general store attached—and today it looked like a ghost town. A big sign in front of the service station and the store read: Closed Till Further Notice Due to Fire. On the wall next to it, in orange paint, someone had scrawled: Only One Planet. And under that: Lost: 10 billion gallons of water. Please return to Mother Earth. Most of the houses were boarded-up. There wasn’t a car or a person or a cat or a dog to be seen anywhere.

I stopped the Sable and lowered the window. The air outside was warm and smoky. The blaze was clearly visible on the hillside ahead: an intense orange-red cancer, lunging from tree to tree, spreading along the branches, then reaching down the trunk and sucking the whole thing up into itself.

As I watched, a helicopter flew in low over the flames, jetting them with water. So the fire wasn’t just being left to its own devices. And—though it was hard to judge distances—I calculated that it was still a few miles away.

I put the window up and drove on through Gallico. There were a couple of turnings off the main street, but neither was Wolf Bend Road. I kept going. Half a mile or so outside the town was another turning that wound up a rocky hill for a few hundred yards before disappearing from view. I couldn’t see a street sign. I assumed that meant it was just the entrance to a private property, so I went on.

But there was more and more smoke, blowing across the road in furious little eddies, like the advance shock troops of an invading army. And then, looming up out of the haze, I saw the black shape of a roadblock. Next to it stood a man in uniform. He made a circling motion with his finger. I turned the car and started back towards Gallico.

When I got to the unnamed road I stopped. This was my last chance. It might just be Wolf Bend. If it wasn’t, all I stood to lose was the ten or fifteen minutes it took me to find out.

I eased the Sable through the narrow opening. It wasn’t much wider than the car, and every time we came to a corner I gave a warning blast of the horn, but there was never anything approaching from the other direction. The road followed a valley through a landscape of woods and fields, broken here and there by tumbles of rocks overgrown with scrub. Everything looked parched: if the fire got this far, it would engulf the whole area in minutes. Every so often a driveway led to a modern house perched on the hillside. None of them showed any sign of life. And none of them had 14590 in front of it.

I kept expecting to round a bend or come over the brow of a hill and find I’d reached somewhere. But for eight or nine miles there was only more of the same, like an endlessly replayed loop of video. It was only when the road finally dwindled away to a stony track that I was forced to accept that perhaps there was nowhere to reach.

There was also nowhere to turn. The nearest passing place, which might just give the Sable the elbow-room it needed, was a few hundred yards back. I reversed down towards it. As I pulled off the road, I felt a jolt. There was a screech, then a loud pop, followed by a vicious hiss.

I got out, cursing. There was a long rip in the edge of the nearside rear tire. Just beyond it was a wall of bare rock, studded with sharp points, and smeared with a black streak of rubber.

I opened the boot. The spare tire and tool kit were in the usual place under the lining. It was decades since I’d changed a wheel, but I thought I could still remember how to do it. I edged the car forward on to level ground, then jacked it up and removed the hubcap. The nut spanner was huge, with a handle like the shaft of an axe. Even with all that leverage, it took all my strength to loosen the first two nuts.

But the third simply wouldn’t budge. The rust was so thick that it had fused it to the bolt. I rooted around, looking for a can of oil. There wasn’t one. I tried the nut again. I couldn’t move it.

Given the proximity of the fire, this must qualify as an emergency. I switched on my new phone.

The blond man at the garage had been right: there was no signal out here.

I pinched the damaged tire. It was already flaccid. If I didn’t change it, how far would I get before the wheel buckled completely and made the car completely undriveable? Nothing like far enough.

I looked back the way I had come. From this distance it was hard to judge, but-from the line of red on the horizon—the fire seemed to have moved closer to Gallico. That meant that if I retraced my steps on foot, I’d be heading into danger. The nearest house was probably only two miles away, but—like all the others—it had looked deserted. To walk there and back would take me over an hour. In that time, somebody might pass this way. Unlikely though it seemed, that had to be my best hope.

I leaned against the front of the Sable, from where I had a view in both directions. It was still daylight, but the smoke had created a kind of false dusk that was deepening by the minute. Now there was nothing for me to do but wait, I was suddenly defenseless against my own rage. How the hell had I been so stupid? The blond man had advised me not to come to Gallico. Even the phlegmatic mechanic had said it could be rough. But I’d blithely ignored them. And now here I was, with nothing more to help me survive than a bottle of water.

A phrase started to unfurl itself in my head. There’s only a graphene-thin membrane between normal life and disaster. And I seemed to have fatally underestimated how easily it could be ruptured.

Crazy. How could I even think of writing, when I might be dead in a few hours? I suddenly saw the Forest Rangers, hands held over their faces against the smell, stumbling on my charred body in the burned-out car. A headline: British journalist among eight dead. The funeral, sobbing Anne bringing up the rear, alone with her thoughts of what might have been . . .

Not Anne, for God’s sake! She’s dead herself. You’re losing your mind. Stop panicking. Someone’s bound to happen along sooner or later.

Yes, unless the fire gets so close that they can’t.

In which case the police would have to come and warn residents.

Perhaps they’ve done that already. Hence the abandoned houses. Didn’t the mechanic say Marianne Chess was getting ready to evacuate?

You’re just over-reacting. You’re going to wake up tomorrow and wonder how you could have been so melodramatic.

British journalist among eight dead. Ten dead. Twenty dead. Gallico destroyed. Worst disaster in state history . . .

I was trapped in a civil war, between sunshine and shadow, waking and dreaming. God knows how long it went on. The false dusk gave way to the real dusk, and then to a false dawn, as the glow of the fire lit up the sky. No doubt about it: it was coming closer.

Someone’ll realize you’re missing and send out a search party.

Who? I’ve spent the entire last couple of weeks trying to ensure no one knew where I was.

They probably know anyway. Perhaps there’s something to be said for Global Village after all . . .

If Global Village knows, it’ll just leave me to my fate . . .

I started to get cold. I retrieved my jacket from the car, then retreated to the car itself. Unbelievable as it may seem, I slept briefly. When I came to, it was completely dark, except for the wild war-dance on the horizon, like a newsreel film of the Blitz.

OK, Anne. I’m only here because of you. If it was you I saw you in the car park, now is the moment. Tell me. Is this really what you had in mind?

No answer.

And then I saw a light. It was moving slowly up the road from the direction of Gallico. I stumbled out of the Sable and waved my arms. I could hear the sound of the engine now. As it came round the corner below me, I was dazzled by the glare of headlamps. The engine slowed. A door opened. I heard footsteps. But my eyes couldn’t adjust quickly enough to see who it was.

“What’s going on?” I recognized that voice: deep, with not-quite-normal American intonation. “Oh, you’re the guy with the Sable.”

I could make out his shape now, see his dark skin and hair in the lights from his own car.

“I’m afraid I had a puncture,” I said. “And I couldn’t shift one of the nuts.”

“OK.” No surprise, no told-you-so: just completely as if it were a matter of course.

He walked back to his car, took a torch out of the boot and carried it over to the Sable. He squatted down to examine the obdurate nut, then slotted the spanner on to it and leaned his full weight on the handle. I heard a series of ughs. And then, suddenly, the nut was free.

“God,” I said. “Thank you. I honestly think you probably saved my life.”

He said nothing, but finished removing the wheel, fixed the spare on in its place and banged the hubcap into position with the heel of his hand.

“There you go,” he said, standing up. He squinted in the beam from his car. “You get to see my auntie?”

“Marianne Chess?”

He nodded.

“No. I couldn’t find her house.”

“Well, like I said, she’s not much of a talker.”

He turned and started back to his car. I followed him, feeling for my wallet. “I really don’t know how to thank you,” I said.

He twitched, as if I was embarrassing or irritating him. I let the wallet slip back into my pocket. He opened the driver’s door and got in. I held it with one hand and leaned in after him. From inside the car I caught a strong whiff of fresh paint.

“Well, I’ll see you when I return the Sable,” I said.

“Could be.”

There was a sudden movement beyond him. A woman was sitting in the passenger seat. As I’d put my head in, she’d shrunk back into the shadows, out of reach of the courtesy light. But in the fraction of a second that I glimpsed her, I was almost certain that I knew her: Corinne Ramirez.

“Well,” said the mechanic, glancing back at the fire. “You don’t want to hang around out here. It’s not safe.”

He closed his door and continued up the road and on to the stony track.