World of Trouble

1.

The way I figure it, if Cortez’s take on the spatial mechanics of the police station garage is correct, and that’s a thick wedge of concrete wiggled into that floor like a cork in a bottle, then they can’t have done it themselves. Someone was there after Nico and her gang went down, and presuming that everyone in the group descended together, then it was someone else—someone who was hired and paid for the gig, contracted to roll the seal across the tomb.

Thus I am aware of a concrete job that was recently performed in this area, and I am aware of a group of men who were out offering themselves for odd jobs generally, but specializing in concrete.

That’s enough. Away I go, rolling south on State Road 4 in the middle of the night.

“Twenty or thirty miles,” says Billy, “that’s where the Amish farms start to crop up, the fruit stands and that. You can’t miss it.” Houdini’s in the wagon and my fat Eveready is duct-taped between the handlebars, sending a joggling uneven light down the highway ahead of us.

As I pedal I can picture Detective Culverson chuckling at me and my rookie logic. I can see him, across our booth at the Somerset Diner, looking at me with quiet amusement, rolling his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other. I can hear him poking at the holes in my theory like a loose tooth.

He asks his pointed questions in his mild voice, rolls his eyes at Ruth-Ann, the waitress, who joins him in teasing good old Hank Palace before bustling off for more coffee.

But the Somerset Diner finally closed, and Culverson and Ruth-Ann are back in Concord, and I have no other direction to point myself but forward, so here I go, State Road 4 due south toward “down county.” I let myself sleep in an empty rest stop, sleeping bag rolled out under a YOU ARE HERE map of the state of Ohio, alarm on the Casio set for five hours.

When Sandy asked for a name I said “Naomi” without thinking—even though Alison Koechner is the girl I loved the longest and Trish McConnell is the one I left behind, I said “Naomi” right away.

I think about her in the quiet moments, the moments created by the absence of television and radio and the bustle of normal human company, the moments not filled by investigatory reasoning or by the low churn of fear.

I met Naomi Eddes on a case and tried to protect her and couldn’t. One night together was what we got, that’s pretty much what it was: dinner at Mr. Chow’s, jasmine tea and lo mein noodles, and then my house, and then that was it.

Sometimes, when I can’t help it, I imagine how things might otherwise have ended up for us. Possible futures surface like fish from deep water; like memories of things that never got to happen. We might one day have been one of those happy sitcom households, cheerfully chaotic, with the colorful alphabet magnets making bright nonsense words on the refrigerator, with the chores and yard work, getting the kids out the door in the morning. Murmuring conversations late at night, just the two of us left awake.

Not worth dwelling on.

It’s not just a person’s present that dies when they die, when they are murdered or drowned or a giant rock falls on their head. It’s the past, too, all the memories that belonged only to them, the things they thought and never said. And all those possible futures, all the ways that life might have turned out. Past and future and present all burn up together like a bundle of sticks.

Most likely scenario, though, all things being equal, had Maia never darkened the sky: I would have just ended up alone. Like Dectective Russel, clean desk, no pictures, notebook bent open, putting in the hours. Dutiful detective at forty, wise old department hand at sixty, docile old codger at eighty-five, still turning over cases that he worked years ago.

All the Amish roadside groceries look the same: creaking wooden bins, empty baskets. All of the fruits and vegetables, of course, are long gone; ditto all the cakes and pies; all the Amish honey and Amish cheese and Amish pretzels.

For ten miles or so there are what feel like dozens of these places, and at each I get off the bike and check carefully for concrete work. In one place, slim round posts holding up the wood roof; in another place a set of handsome rounded steps leading from the racks outside to the little store. Over and over again I slide my aching body off the bike and kickstand it and get down on all fours to scour an abandoned farm stand, looking for a red stamp that bears the single word JOY. Over and over Houdini heaves himself out of the wagon and roots around next to me as if he knows what we’re looking for—the two of us together pushing past empty wicker shopping baskets and wads of thin discarded receipt paper.

A day of this. Almost a whole day of nothing, finding nothing, and then it’s late afternoon, and each time I get back on the bike I think maybe that’s it, maybe I can’t go any farther, but I can’t go back, what if I go back with nothing? My body is aching, and I’m starving, the chicken meals are a distant memory, and all the faded signs for pie and pretzels are not helping in the least.

“Okay,” I say to Houdini, at the sixth or eighth or hundredth of these little abandoned useless roadside stands. “Okay, now what?” There’s Cortez, back in Rotary, waiting impatiently, sitting cross-legged atop the secret door: Well? There’s Detective Culverson, at the Somerset of blessed memory, puffing wryly on his cigar. I don’t want to say I told you so, Stretch.

Except then there it is—a quarter mile farther down State Road 4, with just enough daylight left to see it—there it is. Not stamped on a post in the dirt after all, or at the base of a step, but above my head, written on a billboard, right up there in red letters literally ten feet tall. JOY FARMS.

And then, below it, in slightly smaller letters: CLOSED AND DESERTED. And below that: JESUS = SALVATION.

There’s another of the farm stands just beneath the sign, and a few minutes of investigation reveals a narrow byroad leading perpendicularly off into the cornfields behind it. I pause, looking back and forth between the sign and the road, and then I just grin, grin until my cheeks tighten, just to feel what it feels like, just for a second. And then I aim the bike down the byroad.

After a quarter mile winding through rows of corn the byroad narrows into a path, and when it narrows more it becomes impassable for the wagon, so I dig out the Swiss Army knife and use the Allen wrench to uncouple it, and then I leave the wagon behind and keep riding, deeper into the fields. After ten or fifteen minutes the clouds open and begin to spill rain across my forehead. The bike wheels get slick and wobbly on the wet path. I squint and wipe my eyes, wipe them again, pedal more carefully, slow down. The narrow path winds through the corn until I am confronted by a crossroads, and then another. Arbitrarily I choose my route, feeling after more time has passed that I am lost in a tangle of dirt passages, the rain now pouring steadily, confusing my way. I stand up on the pedals and angle forward a little bit, trying to cover Houdini with my body—Houdini who has somehow managed to fall asleep. Deeper I go, down this gravelly one-lane path, and it’s harder going, the rain really coming down now, pouring down through my eyebrows and soaking my cheeks, and I look away for a minute at the sodden patches of corn, and when I turn my eyes back to the path there is a tall wide man in a black hat, seated on a horse, right in the center of the path just a few feet away, sheets of rain parting across his face, a hunting rifle raised and aimed.

“Hey,” I start, and he fires the rifle in the air.

My face jerks back from the noise and I pull the handlebars hard to the right, wheeling and angling the bike sharply and careening off the road and smashing into the bent cornstalks. I tumble off the bike, watch Houdini bounce out of the basket. I scrabble for cover with my hands over my head. Two more shots. Each of them a loud, distinct kaboom, like he’s shooting at me with a cannon.

“Hold on now,” I call out from the ground, clutching the sides of my head, shouting. “Please.” Crawling among the stalks and the sheets of rain. Heart pounding. The dog raises himself unsteadily, soaked by rain, looks around and barks.

The shooting has stopped. I’m on the ground. I’m unhit, unharmed, getting rained on, half hidden among the rows. I can see the horse hooves clopping toward me, splashing into puddles.

“Go,” calls the stranger.

“Wait,” I say.

“Go now.” I grab the white T-shirt the dog had been sitting on, pull it from the basket and wave it, signaling surrender, peace, hang on a damn second. The hooves are still coming toward me, faster, cutting through the rows—Houdini barks at the wondrous size of the horse.

“Wait—” I say again, and throw my hands up before my face as I realize what’s happening, but it’s too late—horse and rider are directly above me, and the huge front hoof arcs across the sky and slams into the side of my chest like an iron. For a second or two I feel nothing, and then suddenly everything, my whole body detonates with furious sparking pain, and I am in motion, flipping over like a pancake, rolling over fast, front to back.

My forehead lands in the dirt, facedown, like the girl in the clearing, that dead girl we found who turned out not to be dead.

What was her name? Lily. Her name was Lily. No—it—wait—what was it—it’s dark out here. I taste dirt in my mouth. I’m losing consciousness. I can feel it. I grit my teeth and push back against darkness. I hear the dog barking, shouting, the rain splashing in sheets all around us.

The pain seizes me again and I scream, but the man on the horse can’t hear me—he’s way up there, Zeus in the saddle, and me all the way down here, my head all gummed up, one thick pulse of pain. I flip myself over, blink up at the dark storm-filled sky. The man with the black hat, he’s got the rifle in one hand, the horse’s reins in the other hand, he’s like a painting from a battle scene, cavalry charge, avenging horsemen. “My name is Palace,” I try to say, just moving my mouth, my tongue lolling free, and rain falls into my mouth and I think about those turkeys you hear of that die from drowning, staring idiotically, open-mouthed, up into the rain. The horse shuffles agitatedly to and fro, the man steadies him with the reins. My dog is dodging confusedly around the feet of the larger animal. Wild pinpricks of light are exploding across the black horizon of my vision, and my mouth gapes open, rain pouring in.

I fumble again for words and fail, can’t speak.

My assailant, the Amish man in the black hat, is saying “easy, girl, easy” to his horse, and then he slides down off the saddle and his boots land in front of my eyes in the dirt. I am staring at his boots. Feeling new tenderness in my side. A broken rib. Maybe a number of them.

“You must leave,” says the man, crouching down, his face filling my vision. Big eyes, thick black chinstrap beard streaked with gray.

“I just need to ask you a couple of questions,” I say—try to say—I don’t know if I say it or not. I gurgle.

The man pulls back, stands up straight. Along with the gun he carries a pitchfork on a strap across his back. A long wooden handle with three pointed tines, a simple, brutal implement. He towers over me Satanlike: the beard, the pitchfork, the glare. I just need to ask him a couple of questions. I open my mouth and my mouth fills with blood. Blood is washing down my face; my forehead must have split on a stone on the path. This is bad. This is a problem. Blood on my face from a cut in my head, blood choking up to drown me from my insides. Blood on the knives and in the sink.

The man takes the pitchfork down off his back, jabs me in the chest with one curving prong, like a cop rousting a drunk. It’s definitely more than one rib. I can feel them, clawing my insides like spiny fingers.

“You must leave,” he says again.

“Wait, though,” I manage, heaving breath, peering up at him. “Wait. I need to ask you a couple of questions.”

“No.” His brows darken. Rain drips down around the brim of his hat. “No.”

“I’m looking for a man or men who—”

“No. Stop.” He pushes at me again with the pitchfork, right in the chest, and the pain dances up my rib cage, into my brain, like a fork of lightning. I picture myself pinned to the road, wriggling, stuck into the ground like an insect. Still, I talk, I keep talking, I don’t know why.

“I’m looking for someone who did some concrete work.”

“You must leave.”

The man starts muttering to himself in a foreign language. Swedish? No. I try to remember what I know about Amish people. German? The man bows his head, clasps his hands together and keeps talking in the low, guttural stream of speech, and while he is doing that I struggle to my feet, get dizzy, fall down.

Blood covers my eyes now, and I wipe it away with my knuckles. I lean forward and heave awful breaths, my throat as dry as insulation, my stomach clenching and unclenching. I’m wondering where the Asian guys are, his employees or friends. I shake my head to try and clear it, and I am rewarded with a new pulse of pain and disorientation. “I’m looking for some men who did concrete work at a police station, up in Rotary.” I talk slowly, word by word, while blood dribbles out of the sides of my mouth, like I’m a monster who just ate something.

The Amish guy doesn’t answer, he keeps talking to his joined hands. He’s praying, or maybe he’s crazy, maybe he’s just talking to himself, channeling voices. He appears to be a man teetering on the edge of something. He’s tall and sturdily constructed, with a wide chest that looks as if built with broad wood beams. Thick beard, thick gray hair beneath the hat. Wide, strong neck. A face stern and lined, the face of the underground king in a scary tale for children.

The rain comes down in billowing curtains, blowing hard across his face. The pitchfork trembles in his clenched fist.

“Please,” I say, but then the man lowers the pitchfork and raises the rifle instead.

“Forgive me,” he says. “Jesus Christ, forgive me.”

I bury my chin in my chest, wriggle my head away from the nose of gun. Still—still I am afraid to die. Even now. I smell it, the rank smell of my own terror, billowing up around me like a fog.

“Jesus Christ, forgive me,” he says again, and I’m pretty sure he isn’t asking me to forgive him, he’s not saying “Jesus Christ” for emphasis. He’s asking Jesus Christ to forgive him, for whatever he’s done, for what he’s about to do.

“Sir,” I say, as quickly and clearly as I can manage. “My sister is missing. I have to find her. That’s all. I have to find her before the end of the world.”

The old eyes widen, and he crouches and puts his face right down next to mine. Lays down the rifle and gingerly wipes blood from around my eyes with his fingertips. “You mustn’t say those words.”

I’m confused. I cough blood. I look around for Houdini, and my eyes find him a little space away in the corn, stumbling and rising, stumbling and rising, shaking raindrops from his dirty coat.

The big man walks to the saddlebag, unbuttons it and takes out a small sack. He dumps out the contents, charcoal briquettes, and they fall with a series of horse-manure thuds onto the gravel path.

“Sir?”

He lifts the bag above me, and I flinch. It’s such an archaic word, saddlebag. When did I even learn that word? The world has become so strange.

“You mustn’t, mustn’t say those words,” he says, and then he pulls the bag down over my head and cinches it tight.

The big, thick-necked Amish man doesn’t kill me. I suffer a long terrible moment lying on the ground, my head encased in darkness inside the bag, waiting for him to kill me. Over the rush of the rain I hear him moving around, back and forth to his horse, boots on the road, muted clanks—he’s putting down his gun and pitchfork, he’s gathering things from the bags.

My arms are bound loosely behind me, wrist to wrist. His hands shove in under my armpits and lift me like a broken doll and set me on my feet. He pushes me in a direction, and we begin to walk. Through the rows, crunching over small slippery mounds of rotting husks, the brush of dead stalks against my legs and hands.

“Please,” says my captor, each time I slip or stumble, his strong hands shoving urgently at my back. “You will continue.”

I am trapped inside the thick stale odor of the briquettes, the canvas of the bag scratching at my face and scalp. The woven fabric is not enough to blind me completely. I get fleeting glimpses of the cornfield, flickers of moonlight peeking in through the material.

It might be the same man, the man that Sandy described, or it might not be. How many burly sixtysomething Amish men must there be, black beards flecked with gray, out here “down county,” guarding their farmsteads from strangers on the road? What are the odds that this is the right place—the right man—that he can answer my questions? What are the odds that he is about to shoot me and leave my body in an unsown field?

“Sir?” I begin, turning my head slightly, still walking. How even to ask? Where to begin?

But he makes a harsh Germanic shushing noise, like ech, repeats what he said before: “You will continue.”

I continue, I stumble forward through the cold rain in my mask of darkness.

I hear a sharp nervous yelp, just behind me at waist level. I hadn’t realized he was carrying the dog. I twist in my restraints, try to separate my wrists from each other inside the tight encircling rope.

“If—” I say, and my captor says, “Quiet.”

“If you shoot me,” I say, “then please—” I can’t say it. “Please take care of my dog. The dog is ill.”

He’s not listening. “Quiet,” he says. “You must be quiet.”

We walk for close to half an hour. I lose track of it. I am lost in the pain of my broken ribs, the pain of my cut forehead, lost in worry and darkness and confusion, tromping at gunpoint through the fields. I keep waiting for the Amish guy to stop walking and order me to kneel. I think of Nico, of Sandy and Billy, and then of McConnell and her kids back at Police House, working jigsaw puzzles, catching fish for dinner. I should have stayed with those guys. Should have stayed with Cortez at the police station; stayed with Naomi Eddes at Mr. Chow’s, flirting over greasy lo mein. A million places I should have stayed.

“Sir?” At last we stop walking and I try again: “Sir?”

The man doesn’t answer. From where he’s now standing, a few yards away, a new noise, a rattling chain. I squint, make out dim shapes through the sack.

He’s taken us to a building—a house? I stand in the rain, shivering, waiting. Then the distinct creak of a rusted door being pulled open. A massive door. Not a house. A barn.

He grabs me again beneath my armpits, firm but not rough, and lifts my body and thrusts me forward through the doorway. The smell of it is immediate and unmistakable: horse manure and warm stale hay. He lays my wounded, exhausted body on the ground and binds my legs as he has my wrists.

“Sir?” I say, jerking my head around, looking for his face through the burlap. He’s moving again. Back to the door. “I don’t want to take your farm, I don’t want food. Do you hear me? I’m not that kind of person. Sir?”

“Forgive me,” he says, quietly, almost whispering, and it’s the same as before: he’s not talking to me. It’s not my forgiveness that interests him. I stumble around in a circle, a frightened animal, blind and bound. I start to cough, and I taste my own spittle and the heat of the inside of the bag.

“Don’t leave me here,” I say. “Please don’t do that.”

“I will bring you food,” says the man. “If I can. I may not be able to.”

Hot panic now, panic and fear and confusion: I feel like a man trapped in a cave, in the rubble of a building collapse. If the old man leaves me here, then that’s it, my investigation ends right now and never will I know what happened to my sister. The asteroid will careen into the earth and catch me wasting away, hooded and hungry in a dilapidated barn.

The man comes over and kneels beside me, and I flinch as I feel something press against my head. It’s a knife blade—he’s cutting the sack away from my scalp, peeling it off like a caul. The world is revealed, only marginally more visible than when I was hooded. A moonlit barn, dark and cobwebbed and warm. The smell of horses and horse shit. I take three long gasping breaths and find the man’s face and stare him in the eye.

“You can’t leave me here.”

“It is four days only,” he says, pointing at the sky. “Only four days.”

He places the dog gently at my side. Houdini immediately begins to lap the dirty water of a puddle.

“Have mercy,” I say to the man. He draws his hand down along his face, surveys me lying in the dirt.

“This is mercy,” he says, and then he goes. The rattle of a chain, tying the barn door closed. The loud crunch of the Amish guy’s boots through the cornfields, quieter and quieter as he walks away.

2.

Country silence. Country darkness.

Don’t fall asleep, Henry. Don’t go to sleep.

That’s the first thing. The first thing is simply to stay awake. The second thing is to keep things in perspective. Surviving challenging circumstances, I have found, is very often a matter of keeping things in perspective. The last time I found myself in a situation like this, left high and dry like this, I hadn’t merely been kicked by a horse, I’d been shot. I’d taken a sniper’s bullet high in my right arm, which ruptured the brachial artery, and that was bad, that was definitely real bad. I was bleeding out in a tower watching the day fade to night, until my sister came to rescue me on a helicopter, of all things, the blades swicking against the sunset, the big loud thing lowering to get me.

This time she won’t come. Of course not—I’m supposed to be rescuing her.

The first step is easy. Now that I’m not being force-marched through a field in the rain, now that the mask has been pulled from my eyes and I can concentrate, it takes all of five minutes to pry my wrists far enough apart to access the knots with my long fingers and worry the knots open and free my hands. A couple of minutes more and my legs are free also, and I can get up and stagger about the barn.

Where’d they get it, I think suddenly. That helicopter. The troubling thought appears as it has on occasion before, floating to life unbidden like a laughing ghost… if they’re such hapless dimwits, Nico’s pals, if they’re deluded losers chasing their illusory asteroid-foiling scenario like children playing dress-up—then where’d they get a helicopter? Where, indeed, did they get the Internet access that Jordan allowed me the use of, that last night in Concord; the same night he stood, smug and taunting, telling me there was more to it than I could possibly know. More than Nico could possibly know…

Leave it. Come on, Palace, leave it. Stay focused. It doesn’t matter right now, obviously. Now I need to keep working. I need to get out of the barn.

I walk around, a couple of wobbly circuits, sniffing in the corners like an animal, getting a sense of the place. It’s a barn, is all, a barn like all barns. A big abandoned drafty room, maybe thirty feet by sixty feet, split into three sections: feeding stations on either end, where the animals were slopped or given their oats, and then in the middle the smaller area for hay storage. Walls constructed of wooden planks, old but sturdy, securely joined. Peaked roof. Racks on the wall where once the tools were hung. A ladder to a loft, six flat wooden rungs leading up. I stop and breathe, holding one hand over my nose. The fetid humidity of the place is like another person trapped in here with me, a dismal clinging presence tracking my steps.

Whatever animals once resided here, it can be presumed, have long ago been taken out for slaughter. Plenty of hay, though, piles of it, old and stale and cracking in bales and loose piles.

There is only one entrance, the big double barn door, which I know to be chained from the outside. And I can tell from here that the trio of tiny windows, letting in moonlight up on the loft level, are too small to accommodate a grown man—no matter how thin, no matter how desperate to squeeze through.

“What else, Detective?” My voice is tired, too, worn and gray. I clear my throat and try it again. “What else?”

There’s nothing else. Houdini has given in to sleep and lies curled into himself beside his small puddle. I try the door, just to try. I grab the handle and shake it, hear the mocking jangle of the chains on the other side.

I step away from the door. Under the thick odor of the barn I smell myself; days of sweat, of fear, faint stale whiffs of burnt chicken and charcoal.

There was a barn on the edge of my grandfather’s property when we were growing up, one of several outbuildings no longer in use. Some ancestral Palace, in the mists of New Hampshire history, had kept horses, but all that remained by the time my sister and I found the place—by the time it became one of her innumerable hideouts—all that was left was old hay, rusted instruments, the earthy odors of manure and sweating animals.

I found her out there once, drinking whiskey she had siphoned from Grandfather’s stash, the day she was supposed to be taking the SAT.

I smile to myself now, in the darkness of the Amish barn. One thing about Nico, she never apologized. Never lied.

“Aren’t you supposed to be taking the SAT?” I asked her.

“Yuppers.”

“So what are you doing?”

“Drinking whiskey in the barn. You want some?”

I did not want some. I dragged her home. Reregistered her for the test, drove her myself.

Hide-and-seek, our whole lives.

Houdini is up, rustling around in the hay, chasing after a mouse, batting helplessly at the ground. I watch the little mammal escape the clutches of my addled dog, watch it slip through the tiny gap beneath the bottom edge of the slat. I get down on all fours beside the dog, sniff at the hole. A whisper of cool air from outside; the smell of the grass of the farm. But it’s a mouse hole. A bare smudged circle in the ground.

I stare at the hole.

It would take a long time, but I could do it. Give me a month, maybe. Give me a year. Give me a year and give me a shovel and I could bust right on out of here, worm myself through and emerge gasping like a jailbreak prisoner on the other side. Just give me time.

I go back to the door and throw one shoulder against it and it does not give at all, just shudders and throws me backward and I land in the hay with my broken ribs screaming. I struggle up and try it again, and the pain is even worse—and again—and again. I imagine Cortez back in Rotary, working on the sealed floor, while I work on this chained barn door, the two of us pushing and pushing, and wouldn’t it be something if he was somehow on the opposite side of this door, and I’ll smash through just as he smashes through and we’ll tumble into each other like slapstick comedians.

I turn away from the door, hunched over and heaving breaths, my sweat dripping from my forehead into the dirt and the hay. Houdini meanwhile is utterly outclassed by the mouse. It runs right by his nose and he watches it, his wet eyes flickering as the thing scampers past.

I climb slowly, wincing with each step, my rib ends jabbing at tender spots in my lungs or intestines. Then I’m poking my head up over the lip of the loft and what’s up here is a private universe, the second hidden paradise I’ve stumbled upon in two days. Four bales of hay arranged into a semicircle around a three-legged wooden stool. Milking stool, some old part of my memory announces. That right there is a milking stool. I manage to wrestle my ungainly battered body the rest of the way up, to examine the small transistor radio seated on the stool. A plastic metal rectangle with a circular mesh face over the speaker, antenna like a stiffened tail, jutting up at a sharp angle.

I lift the radio, feel the weight of batteries inside. Flick it on—nothing—it’s a paperweight. I switch it off. I set it back down.

I can see a little better up here; I’m closer to the row of tiny roof windows, and the moon is getting higher and brighter. On the hay-strewn floor of the loft, nestled facedown beside one of the bales, is a small handheld mirror. I lift it and examine my face in the smudged and cloudy glass: a haggard and gaunt old man, eyes red-rimmed and sunken. My mustache is overgrown, the rest of my beard coming in uneven, like wild grass on a cliff. I look crazy, lycanthropic. I lower the looking glass.

There are cigarette butts in a little wooden cup. Like a dice cup, from a board game. I tip the butts out into my palm. Store bought, generic, hand-rolled. Months old. Dried out by summer heat. Stale and crumbling.

I take a look back down at the main floor. Houdini is asleep. No sign of the mouse. I’m the only one left awake, way up high; surveying my domain—the suffering king of the spooky old barn.

I settle down on one of the bales of hay, fight fiercely against a fresh urge of tiredness. A dead radio, a bunch of old smokes, a smudged mirror. This was someone’s hideout, someone’s private place, sometime not too long ago. A young Amish girl by herself in the darkness of the barn, smoking secret cigarettes and listening to forbidden music from somewhere far away.

I can’t help it, I’m picturing this kid looking like Nico, like Nico as she was in high school, doing her own sneaking off, her own romantic dreaming, sipping Grandfather’s eye-watering spirits out in the barn. It’s like what Cortez said, about me, about the girl with the tiger problem, everything reminds you of your sister.

I have an idea, a terrible idea, but as soon as I think of it I know that it’s what I’m going to do. The only thing I can do, really, the only option available.

There was a fire in the jail. Creekbed Penitentiary. The quick unbearable story that Billy told me. The prisoners were getting restless and desperate because the world had abandoned them, left them trapped, waiting forgotten until the end.

My terrible idea is radiant and bright.

I cannot stay in here for three days, growing hungry and going mad with waiting. I cannot suffer four nights and three days and then still die not knowing where she is or why.

I have to do this next thing, and whatever happens as a result is just what happens, and that’s all there is to it.

“How did you light them, kiddo?” I ask the phantom of the girl in the hayloft. “How did you light your smokes?”

It doesn’t take long to find them. Black twisted stumps of matches like tiny little burned-down trees, surrounding the dirt beneath the bale. The rest of the matches are close by, two half-used-up books tucked together beneath one of the legs of the stool. The matchbooks are as old as the cigarettes, the sticks crumbling and breaking. But I try one, and it lights right away.

I stare at the dancing match light until it burns my fingers and I blow it out. Maybe this is rash. Maybe it’s all a hallucination, maybe I’ve dreamed up the whole thing: an issue in the prefrontal cortex, neurons firing wild. Nico is fine. I’m fine. I was given an early retirement from the Concord force, late last year, because I was succumbing to some genetic predisposition for mental illness, driving my department Impala up onto the sidewalk, screaming to strangers about an interstellar object the size of the one that killed the dinosaurs.

Not so, though. It isn’t so.

It’s out there. Closer, now. Closer than the sun; closer than Venus. Our nearest neighbor, the author of our destruction. Accelerating in accordance with Kepler’s third law: the closer it gets, the faster it comes. A ball player hurtling for home, a horse breaking into a gallop when it smells the barn.

I’ve got to get out of here.

I climb down the ladder and scoop Houdini up under my arm, carry the poor sick dog uncomplaining, struggle him up to the loft and lay him down. I kick out one of the small windows easily, one fake karate-chop kick with the strong side of my body. Before I can think about it too much I toss the dog out the window, and he barks as he falls end over end, his body catching as I had planned it on the bank of shrubs below. He scrabbles on the uneven surface of the hedgerow, tumbles forward and lands with a whomp in a patch of mud. Looks up at me, confused.

I toss a salute down to the dog, light another match from the matchbook, and set the hay on fire.

It happens a lot faster than I thought it would, old dry hay and wooden timbers, much faster than I in my rashness and desperation had really contemplated. One small fire touching off new small fires in all directions, small fires growing together and becoming large, dancing up, reaching for the rafters. I retreat, stumble backward, miss the ladder and roll down from the loft onto the hard dirt floor, landing flat, flipping over and moving as fast as I can away from the growing fire up there, my black shoes pulling through the barn-floor mud.

Immediately I regret my plan. I crouch in a corner staring up in horror, watching the burning embers float over the edge of the loft, float and then rain. The fire is literally raining down, sending sparks and small twirling pieces of hay over the edges of the loft. The black and gray of the midnight barn has erupted in red, and after all this was a mistake—better to starve and die in the barn than burn. I race to the door and pound on it hard, the heavy wooden beams thudding against my fist, while the floor of the barn turns to fire all around me, new gouts of flame, now it’s like hell’s floor, patches of burning ground on all sides.

The heat is crowding in, splinters tumbling down from the roof, the roof beginning to crack above me. If it’s going to work, if anyone is going to see it, they’ll see it now—it will get no brighter, I don’t see how. It’s a furnace in here, I’m here in a furnace. In the last instant, I grab like a maniac at the handle of the barn door, pulling, knowing it’s useless but pulling, and the pain on my hands is instant and intense and scalding, and I hear this weird distant screaming—a screech, a call, a cry. Is it me? Is that me screaming? I think that it is, I think I’m screaming.

3.

There is no strange swim back up from unconsciousness this time, no sneaky dreams of Nico. I’m just awake, looking from left to right in a small warm room. I’m on a bed. The room is beige, off-white. A wooden door. The bed has a quilt on it, lovely and plain.

The first thing I do is cough. Taste smoke and ash in my throat. I cough again, louder, violently, my body buckling upward, cough so hard and so loud that my stomach starts to ache. When I have recovered, managed to take three normal slow breaths, I realize that I am still dressed, T-shirt and shoes and long pants. Fully dressed under the covers like a little kid whose parents carried him, sleeping, in from the car.

I cough one more time, look around for a glass of water and find a pitcher and a cup. I pour myself a cup and drink it, then pour the rest and drink that, too. It’s a bedroom. Wooden bed frame and wooden nightstand and four undecorated walls. Plain white muslin curtains, pulled back from the single plain window and tied with twine. I can taste smoke inside my lungs, I feel heavy with it, like there was a fire inside my mouth and esophagus that was doused with thick wet foam. There is also a new nasty pain on the palms of my hands—I look down and see that both hands are thickly bandaged, mummy hands. Beneath the bandages, they burn and sting. I groan, try to roll my body slightly, one way and then the other, shift out of the discomfort. It feels like I should probably be dead by now.

When my grandfather said “Dig a hole” he was in hospice, at the very, very end, the absolute last thing he said before he died, the last event of his life. I was sitting beside him waiting, as we had been waiting for months, more or less. Grandfather’s breaths rolling in and out on rusty wheels, in and out, each one emerging with more difficulty than the last. His eyes staring straight up at the ceiling, his cheeks hollowed out, body twitching. Neither one of us were churchgoers, but I felt that as the responsible adult I needed to ask: did he want me to get someone? “Someone?” he said, even though he knew what I meant, but I pressed on, fulfilling my obligations, trying to get everything down according to procedure. “Someone,” I said. “A priest. To do last rites.” He laughed, with effort, a low, gasping chuckle. “Henry,” he said. “Dig a hole.”

I shift on the bed. It feels better now—marginally better. I can move.

There’s my sport jacket. Folded nicely at the foot of the bed. I stand up, waver a little, unfold the coat and slip it on. My little treasure trove is still in the inside pocket: The picture of young Nico. The butt of the American Spirit. The plastic fork. My notebook, nearly full. Only thing missing is the SIG. Everything else still in its place.

I pick up the jug and tilt it back and swallow the last drops of the water.

There’s no mirror in the room, no pictures, no paintings. The Casio says 5:45, but the information seems abstract; incomplete. Five forty-five when? How long have I been under? It’s an uncomfortable relationship you develop with sleep, at a time like this, it feels like every time you close your eyes you could wake up on the last day of the world.

I get up and out of the bed, relieved to find that I can walk with only a little difficulty. I cough again on the way to the door, try the handle and find it locked from the other side, as I had a feeling it would be—but as soon as I rattle it, someone cries out on the other side.

“He’s awake!” A woman’s voice, relieved, joyous even. “Praise God! The boy is awake.”

The boy. Is that me? A scrape of a chair, then another scrape. Two people out there, sitting in the hallway, waiting for me. A vigil. The second voice I recognize.

“Be still. Stay.” Old man, thick neck, beard. The creak of his boots approaching the door. I hear the lock click open, and I step back, my heart tightening. I remember his hands at my back in the cornfield, shoving me forward. The door sneaks open, letting in a sliver of light from the hallway. He is there, my assailant from the roadway, black coat, large body, just outside the door.

It’s the voice of the woman, though, that travels in. “Friend,” she begins. “We must ask. Are you ill?”

“I—” I stand in the quiet room, confused. Am I ill? Obviously, I am not well. I have been burned. There is smoke in my lungs. I have been kicked by a horse, and my forehead is split. I am hungry, and exhausted, and worn. But am I ill?

“Friend?” she says again, the voice of a woman in her early old age, firm and maternal and insistent. “You must tell us. We will know.”

I stare at my side of the door. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I don’t understand.”

“She means to ask whether you suffer from the plague.”

The old man’s words are slow and purposeful. He wants to make sure I get his meaning. But I don’t. I don’t think I do.

“Excuse me,” I say. “What?”

“Whether you are stricken like so many others.”

Stricken. A word from another time. Saddlebag. Milking stool. Stricken. I feel my cheeks with my mummy hands, half expecting to find boils or welts, some new biblical form of suffering written on my face. But it’s just my same face, thinned out by travel, mustache thick above my lip, wild stubble across my chin.

The man speaks again. “Here we keep ourselves isolated from the illness. We need to know whether you have been afflicted.”

Slowly I bring my hand down from my face, while my mind races, trying to work this through. Stricken—afflicted. I begin to nod, I begin to think I’ve got a line on the situation here, and I’m already trying to figure out how to navigate my way through, how to get what I need and get out.

I clear my throat. “No,” I say, and cough. “No, sir, no ma’am, I am not afflicted. Can I please come out of the room now?”

If there are any Amish people in the state of New Hampshire I’ve never come across one, and so my entire concept of Amishness is from culture, the cartoon version: black hats, black beards, horse-drawn buggies and candles and cows. Now she opens the door, an old woman in a faded purple dress and black bonnet, and beside her the old man, just as formidable a presence in daylight: tall and wide-bodied in a white shirt, black pants, and suspenders. Estimable chinstrap beard, black with streaks of gray. Broad forehead and large nose, eyes wary and staring above a carefully set mouth. The woman meanwhile has one hand clasped to her mouth in startled joy that I am alive, that I am well, like I am her own long-lost child.

“Come now,” she says warmly, beckoning me forward, “come on. Come along to everyone.”

I trail along behind her down a sunlit wood-floor hallway, and she is speaking quietly in English the whole way, thanking God and murmuring praise, but not the old man—he’s just a pace behind me, and when I glance at him he just looks back at me wordlessly and grave, his silence an unspoken warning. Quiet, boy. Hold your peace. The house smells like cinnamon and bread, warm and welcoming and calm. We pass three doors, two of them open to neat bedrooms like the one I was in, one closed tightly shut with a light on underneath.

Our destination is a vast sunlit kitchen, crowded with smiling people in plain dress, and as soon as I enter with the older couple everybody gasps.

“He’s okay!” shouts a little boy, no more than eight years old, and then the woman standing behind him bends and hugs him around the neck and says “Praise be to God,” and then the packed room explodes in celebration, everybody hooting and clapping their hands. “He’s alive!” they call, and clasp each other tightly. “Thank God!” Older men, younger men, girls and women, a legion of chattering children in long pants or long plain dresses, everyone embracing and gazing at me with excitement and frank fascination, their hands fluttering at their sides or raised high toward the rafters. Everybody singing out the happy news to each other, repeating the words “Alive!” and “Awake and well!” the news of my good health tossed joyfully about like rice at a wedding. The men seize my hand, one after another, young men and middle-aged men and one ancient doddering grandfather. The women don’t approach, but smile warmly, ducking their heads in murmured prayer.

I stand, quiet and confused, like an idiot savant, mute among the ruckus, unsure what I’m supposed to do. After a minute or so I raise one wrapped hand slowly, palm out, give a sort of awkward wave, and then lower it again. It’s strange, it’s so strange, there is an undeniable Twilight Zone quality to the whole thing, like here I am, a visiting god set down in an alien land.

“Sit now,” cries the old woman merrily, the one who first came to fetch me, raising her voice among the group, shooing the whole tribe into the adjacent dining room. “Let us eat.”

I let myself be guided through the bustle to a seat; I am smiling at everyone, playing up my exhaustion and confusion but paying careful attention—watching the old man, watching him watch me, my mind churning and rolling and popping. I am wondering about the pair of Asian men, the quiet immigrant laborers that Sandy described. They’re a secret is what I’m thinking, one of my new friend’s secrets. Wherever they are, they’re not invited to lunch.

Everyone arranges themselves around the circular tables in the long dining room adjacent to the kitchen. Napkins are spread on laps, and water is poured into cups from wooden pitchers. The women in their bonnets and shawls and ankle-length dresses, the men in plain white shirts without buttons, black shoes, beards. Everyone smiling at me, still, from all over the room, peering at me in my exhaustion and dishevelment.

Lunch is served: a sparse meal, loaves of bread and cooked vegetables and rabbit, but it’s food. I try to tabulate the people, sort out the relationships: the old man, my captor; three men in their late forties or fifties, who would be his sons or sons-in-law, a generation younger, same beards and coats, same stern faces, not yet grayed and lined. And women of that middle-aged set, the wives and sisters—five of them? Eight? Daughters and daughters-in-law, slipping in and out of the kitchen, carrying out platters and plates, pouring water from wooden pitchers, whispering smilingly to each other, straightening the bonnets and collars of a seemingly infinite number of small children. One bright-eyed six- or seven-year-old with big funny ears is gaping at me, and I turn and waggle one thickly bandaged hand and say “Hiya.” He smiles like crazy, turns away and rushes back over to his siblings and cousins.

Everyone at last is seated, and, suddenly, at no announcement or signal that is apparent to me, the room becomes silent and everyone closes their eyes and bows their heads.

We’re praying; we’re supposed to be praying. I keep my eyes open and look all around the room. I can see into the nearer corner of the kitchen, where there is a butter churn, wood-paneled and sturdy, the handle poking out of the basin, drops on the sides showing recent use. Eggs on the counter in a wooden bowl. It’s as if I found an escape hatch after all—you just have to travel back in time to a colonial village, where the death of our species is still four hundred years into the future.

One of the girls, I discover, is doing the same thing as me: a young teenager with red cheeks and strawberry blonde hair in simple braids, peering around the table with one eye open while everyone else prays. She catches me catching her, blushes, and looks at her food. I smile, too. You never really think of Amish people as being people, they’re this weird otherworldly category and you lump them all together in your mind, like penguins. And now here they are, these specific human people with their specific human faces.

The old man clears his throat, opens his eyes to say “Amen,” and the room comes to life again. Happy small conversations, the muted clink of silverware, the rustle of napkins. Though my body hurts, though I struggle to swallow, every bite is delicious, warm and savory. And then at last the old man settles his silverware carefully beside his plate and looks at me with unnerving frankness. “We thank the good Lord God for you, friend. We are glad you are here and you are welcome.” I mutter “Thank you,” nodding carefully. He left me to starve. He deposited me hooded and fearful into the barn and tied me up to die.

He stares evenly back at me, challenging, calm—as if daring me to call him out: who would they believe?

“No one has used the south barn for many months, since the beginning of the trouble,” says someone from the far end of the table, a matronly middle-aged woman with dark hair, one of the daughters or daughters-in-law. “And Father has kept it locked.”

The black-bearded old man nods at the detail. The south barn, I’m thinking. The trouble, I’m thinking. They mean this illusory plague, they mean a different kind of trouble than everyone else. The title “Father,” I’m gathering, is as much honorific as literal. The man who shot at me on the path is the respected patriarch, the elder sage of this family or gathering of families. The others bow their heads slightly when he speaks, not as if in worship but as a mark of deference.

“You, friend,” he says now, turning to me, speaking slowly and evenly. “We wonder, did you climb up into the south barn through its window and light a match for a cigarette or for light and put the match down carelessly? Is that what happened?”

The same challenging expression, cold and clear.

I take a sip from my water glass, clear my throat. “Yes, sir,” I say, giving it back to him, striking a truce. “That’s what happened. I lit a match so I could see and put the match down carelessly.”

Father nods. A murmur passes across the table, the men whispering to each other, nodding. The children at their separate tables have mostly lost interest, they’re eating and chattering idly to one another. The only decoration in the room is a wall calendar, spread open to September, a line drawing of a mostly bare oak, the last leaves tumbling to Earth.

“And if we may ask, sir, you are fleeing from the pandemic?” This from one of the younger men, a sturdy character with a beard and face to match his father’s.

I answer him tentatively. “That’s right. Yes. I have traveled from my home to escape it.”

“God’s will,” he murmurs, and the rest of them say it too, look down at their plates, “God’s will.”

Father stands now, draws up to full height, and places his hand on the shoulders of one of the children. “It is through God’s grace that Ruth saw the fire from her bedroom window, way off in the distance, and awoke the house.”

All eyes turn to the girl whom I saw cheating during the prayer. Her cheeks go from rosy red to bright pink. A couple of the smaller children giggle.

“Thank you, young lady,” I tell her, and I mean it, but the girl doesn’t respond, she keeps her eyes trained on her plate of stewed vegetables. “Answer our guest, Ruthie,” says her grandmother gently, nodding to the girl. “Our guest said thank you.”

“Thanks be to God,” says Ruthie, and the others nod their approval, the men and the women and even the littlest kids, murmuring in uneven chorus, “Thanks be to God.” I have nailed down the number of people in the room at thirty-five: six adult men and seven women, plus twenty-two children ranging from toddler to late adolescence. They don’t know. I look at the old man, I look around the room at this silent happy family, and I know that they don’t know. These people don’t know about the asteroid at all.

You mustn’t say those words, he told me. When I said that I had to save my sister before the end of the world, he said you mustn’t say those words.

They don’t know and you can see it on their peaceful Amish faces, that bloom of happiness you just don’t see anymore. Because of course a pandemic would be an absolute calamity, some deadly virus stalking the land, and you would huddle up with your family and shut out the world until it ended, but then it would—it would have an ending. A pandemic runs its course and then the world recovers. These people in this room don’t know that the world will not be recovering, and I can see it, as they finish their lunch and say more prayers and rise, laughing, to clear the plates. I can feel it, a feeling I never had occasion to notice until it disappeared, the odorless colorless presence of the future.

“I would speak with our guest alone,” says the old man abruptly. “We will walk the property.”

“Atlee,” says his wife, the old woman. “He is tired. He is wounded. Let him eat and return to bed.”

“Thank you, ma’am, but I’m feeling just fine.”

That’s not true; I feel like I’ve been hit by a garbage truck. My side hurts each time I swallow or take a full breath, and my hands, within the last ten or fifteen minutes, have begun to burn again beneath their bandages. But I want information, and speaking alone with this man Atlee is the only way to get it. “Thank you, though, for supper, and for everything, Mrs. Joy.”

The old woman’s eyes pop open with surprise, and a bright wave of laughter ripples through the room.

“No, young man,” she says. “Our surname is Miller. Joy is—” She leans to the plain-faced daughter seated beside her, and they exchange whispers.

“Joy is an acronym,” says the daughter. “A way of living. You are to set your mind first to Jesus, then Others, and lastly to Yourself.”

“Ah,” I say. “Oh.”

Atlee takes me by the elbow. “Now,” he says quietly. “We will walk the property.”

4.

The butt of Atlee Miller’s pitchfork thunks in the gravel of the path as we walk away from the house. He is silent for a minute, two minutes. Just our shoes on the gravel, the rhythmic chunk-chunk of the pitchfork on the path.

I am about to say something, try something out, when he starts.

“You and I will walk abreast to where the path bends, just there,” he says. “It continues on there, about a quarter mile to the left, back down to the county road, to our old farm stand. At the bend I will turn to the right, go on along the property line, back around to the house. You will continue on.”

The same words he used when we were together in the rainstorm, when he was pushing me forward. You will continue on. Same steady tone, somber and uninflected. He doesn’t look at me while he’s speaking, just keeps moving, moving fast for as old as he is, long strides with the pitchfork, fast for an old man. As for me, I’m doing my best, hobbling a bit, wincing with my injuries, but I keep up as well as I can—noticing in the meantime, despite all my physical discomforts and the anxiousness of this situation, that the Amish farm in late-day rain-streaked sunlight is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen: green fields, white fences, yellow corn. A flock of healthy sheep gamboling in small circles in their penned lea.

“Your dog,” the man says gruffly, pointing, and there is Houdini, huddled like a phantom behind a shed, staring out. Poor confused sick dog. He sees me, and holds up his head to look me over with watery eyes. He starts to come and then scuttles back behind the little wooden building. I know how he feels. I’m not ready to go—I can’t.

“Mr. Miller, can I just ask you a couple of quick questions?”

He doesn’t answer. Walks faster. I nearly drop my blue notebook into the dirt as I fumble it out of my pocket. “Can you confirm that you did a construction job for a group of strangers, at the police station in Rotary?”

He keeps his eyes forward, but I can see it—a wave of surprise, of confirmation, rushing over his features and then away again.

I press on. “What did you do there, Mr. Miller? You did some concrete work up there?”

A sidelong glance and that’s it. We’re running out of road here. Running out of time.

“Mr. Miller?”

“I will tell my people you decided to return,” he says. “You are overcome with grief for those you love and have decided to take your chances with the plague.”

I scowl. I limp to keep up with him. No, I’m thinking. No. Whatever else is going on here, I have not come this far merely to continue on now, to limp back down to the vegetable stand and my abandoned bike, back where I started.

“I’ll tell them,” I say. “I’ll sneak back in and tell them.”

Now he answers—now he answers right away. “You won’t. You can’t.”

“Of course I can.”

“I’ve made it impossible.”

“How?”

He stops talking, just shakes his head, but this is good. This is what we need. All you need is a conversation. To work toward the information you need, to get what you want from a suspect or a witness—all you need is a conversation to begin, and then you shape it, push it.

“Mr. Miller? How are you doing it?”

Just a conversation. That’s police work, that’s half of it right there. I wheel back, change tack, try again. “How did it start?”

We’re at a line of fencing. I stop, lean back on a post, as if to catch my breath, and he stops too. “No more about concrete,” I say, raise my hands in mock surrender. “I promise.”

“It was a Sunday,” he says, and my heart glows. A conversation. That’s half of it, right there. He’s talking, I listen while he talks. “Church was at Zachary Weaver’s. One or two men will go early and help to prepare the service. The others come along later. I was there early, on this day. At the Weavers’ all was in an uproar. Someone had heard a radio broadcast. There was—lamentation. Distress.” He shakes his head and looks at the ground. “And I could tell, d’you see? I knew in the crack of an instant what I would need to do. I could see it in their eyes, these people, the change that would be wrought on them. It was already happening, d’you see?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer. I don’t interrupt.

“I went out on the porch and I saw my family walking to the house from our house and I made this decision in the crack of a moment, just like that. I just—I waved with my hand—like this—I waved—” He stops on the path and raises a hand, pushing at the air: go back, stop, turn around. “I walked out of Zachary Weaver’s and I walked my family back to our home and I gave them all of that. The story you’ve heard.”

“The illness,” I say. “Pandemic.”

“Yes.”

He says it low, the one word yes, down into his beard, and for the first time since we’ve met I can read something other than grave self-seriousness on his face—a wash of grief and self-recrimination.

“The plague. The illness astride the land.” His face darkens further. He hates his lie. It eats at him, I can see it. “I gathered my people to me and I told them that the situation was severe and that we must remain isolated, even from our friends and from our church. And I said it will be a hard time, but we have God and with God’s grace we will survive.”

And on he goes, off and running, a steady stream of low syllables. As if now that he’s given himself leave to tell me some part of his story he feels compelled to tell all of it. As if part of him has been waiting lo these many months for someone to tell this story to, someone to share the burden of his accomplishments. He has been on a desert island alone with his desperate act of conscience, wrestling with his awful decision and the work it has required of him, in exile in his own home, alone through the hard months. The only people he has had to speak with don’t speak English.

He recounts gathering his people all around the family table, asking for and receiving solemn promises from everyone, from the eldest to the very young, to remain within the safety of their own land until the sickness should pass. He describes how God provided him assistance, in the form of a ragged starving troop of CIs, who had made it somehow from their Asian homelands to Newfoundland, and from Newfoundland down to this pocket of midwestern America. They understood each other well enough to make arrangements, a trade—Atlee provides shelter in tents and lean-tos in a barren field on the far side of State Road 4, and in exchange they provide labor and loyalty and discretion. They work under him, they share in the spoils, they walk the perimeter of Joy Farms at night, unseen guardians.

It is a precarious arrangement. He knows that. Eventually, one of his children or one of his children’s children will break the promise, wander off the farm and discover the truth. Or someone from the outside world, a burglar or a madman or a refugee, will smash through the fencing into the private world.

“It cannot last forever,” Atlee says. “But it does not have to. Just a few more days.”

We’re getting close now, close to that bend in the road. The sun is halfway along its slow tumble down from noon to night, another day being burned down, sloughed away.

“These are hard times, sir,” I say. “We’ve all had to make hard choices. God will forgive you.”

He stares hard at the ground for a cold second and when he looks up I am expecting anger—how dare I speak for God, how can I?—but instead he is crying, his old lined face dissolved into childlike grief. And he says in a hollow voice, “Do you think so?” Steps toward me and grabs at my shirt front. “Do you think that it’s true?”

“Yes,” I say, “of course,” and he envelops me in his grip and weeps into my shoulder. I don’t know how to handle this, I really don’t.

“Because I feel that it must be true, that God meant for it to be me. I was at the Weavers’ before church, but it might have been one of the children at the school. It might have been one of the little ones who came back from town with this awful information. But it fell to me, to know, because I was the one who could keep them from it, to keep them in grace.”

He pulls away from me, looks urgently into my eyes. “You understand that we don’t drive automobiles because they might bring us closer to sin. No cars, no computers, no phones. Distractions from the faith! But this thing—this thing that comes across the sky. It would have happened like that.” He snaps his fingers. “We would have fallen into grief, and from grief into sin. All of us. All of them.”

He shakes his pitchfork back toward the farmhouse, his family, his charge.

“The danger to this world is not what matters, do you see that? Do you see? This world is temporary—it has always been temporary.” He is reaching some sort of pitch, shaking with righteousness and pain. “God meant for me to protect them. For all the sin to be my sin. Don’t you see that He meant it for me?” Again, with fervor: “Don’t you think that’s what He meant?”

He is not speaking rhetorically, he needs an answer, and I bite back my first impulse, which is to say I have no idea what God meant, any more than you do, and then to go on, to point out the narcissism skulking in the shadows of his revelation, in this performance of humility: I did what I did because I am burdened with understanding the intentions of the unseen hand.

I don’t say any of this. There would be no reason to do so, from the perspective of my ongoing investigation, no reason to upset the apple cart of this man’s intricate belief system, to pull away at the world that he has built. I step closer and pat him on the back, sort of, feeling nothing through my bandaged hand and the rough thickness of his broadcloth coat. I wait for my galloping mind to find the smart thing to say. We’ve come now to the bend in the road, and it is the old man’s intention now that I continue on, and if I do I leave behind my last chance of finding her, of laying eyes on Nico before the end.

“I’m sorry, my friend,” he says. “I am sorry.” His affect has changed again, he is chastened now, becalmed, tilting his head down toward the dirt. “You would not go, you wouldn’t leave, and I felt I had no other choice.”

“It’s all right.” I take his hands. I hold them between my own. “I was safe all along. I was not in danger.”

Miller wipes his eyes with his big knuckles, pulls himself up to full height. “What do you mean?”

I feel, deep down beneath my injuries and exhaustion, a quicksilver glinting of joy. I’ve got him. I push it. I keep going. “I was meant to escape from that barn. God wanted me to have your help in finding my sister. I have traveled the country cloaked in his protection. I was never in danger.”

He looks down for a moment, closes his eyes and murmurs. More prayer. So much prayer. Then he looks up at me. “Do you have a picture of her?”

She was there. In Rotary, at the police station. This was four days ago. Wednesday, September 26; Wednesday, the day before Cortez and I arrived. My stomach tightens. I need to know he’s sure of the date, and he is, Mr. Miller has been keeping careful track of the time—careful track of each of his odd-job employments and the goods he receives for them—careful track of everything. He remembers the work at the Rotary PD, and he recognizes Nico’s face right away.

I ask him to slow down. I ask him to start at the beginning. I take out my notebook and I tell him I need the whole day—would he mind going slowly and giving me the entire day?

Atlee had gone out that morning as he goes out every day, leaving his people with their usual strict admonitions to remain on the property. In Pike, between here and Rotary, he met a young man with a long face and a nervous expression, who gave his name simply as “Tick.” The man promised him a crate of packaged meals in exchange for a small job of work at the Rotary police station.

“What do you mean, packaged meals?”

“Army food,” says Atlee. “He called it something.”

“MREs?” I say.

He nods. “That sounds right. Yes, MREs.”

I write it down, army surplus rations… Army?… long-faced man, “Tick”?… and motion for him to go on. Atlee agreed to take the job and he and Tick traveled together to the Rotary station, arriving at approximately 2:30. He went alone because it was a simple job that Tick described: sealing a stairhead with a slab of concrete that had been custom-built for the purpose.

When they got to Rotary, Tick told Atlee to wait, said it shouldn’t be more than fifteen or twenty minutes, and Atlee said that sounded okay, although he wasn’t terribly pleased about standing around. He had other things he needed to be doing, there are always other things to do. But he waited, stood with crossed arms just inside the door of the police station, trying to stay out of the rain, and out of the way of a group of young men and women moving boxes and bags from the lawn down a flight of metal stairs into a basement.

Besides Tick, Atlee communicated directly with only one of them, a man who appeared to be the leader: a short stocky man, older than the others, with bushy hair and dark brown eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses.

“Did you get this man’s name?”

“Astronaut.”

“His name was Astronaut?”

“I might guess it wasn’t. But that’s what they called him.”

I write it down. Astronaut. Two circles around it and a question mark.

This man Astronaut was quietly but unquestionably in charge, Atlee says, giving the orders and keeping the group on task as they rolled up sleeping bags and zipped up duffels, stacked boxes of food and jugs of water and tromped up and down the staircase. There were boxes, too, big square shipping crates that looked heavy, that had to be carried by two people moving slowly as they descended the steps.

The contents of the boxes, Atlee doesn’t know. My mind flies out in all directions. A machine saw—guns, ammunition—fuel—computer equipment—building materials—

I have arrived at the penultimate page of my slim blue notebook. I steady my hands. I am picturing these people: nervous, strange-looking Tick, Astronaut with the eyeglasses and the bushy hair. The kids, college-age kids like Nico, marching up and down the metal stairs like ants, hauling their food and their water and whatever was in those crates.

Atlee guesses there were fourteen people in this group: eight women and six men. I ask him what they looked like and he shrugs and says “they looked like people,” and it occurs to me that it may be the same for Amish people looking at us as us at them: do we in our nonblack clothes and our ungodly accessories and haircuts, do we all look the same? I press him, though, get what details he recalls. There was a kid with bright blue sneakers, he remembers that, a tall kid, heavyset. One woman he remembers particularly, African American, unusually thin. I describe the sleeping girl, Lily, and he doesn’t remember seeing any Asian women, but he can’t say for sure. I describe Jordan, Nico’s pal from UNH. Just describing him brings up a boiling of anger in my gut; I picture him, sneering, a shape-shifter, hiding layers of secrets beneath sunglasses and a smirk.

But Atlee doesn’t recognize the description; no one he recalls as particularly short, no one in sunglasses.

But one person—one person he remembers distinctly. I still have the picture out—the ratty black T-shirt, stubborn expression, the studiedly unhip glasses—and I ask him to look again and he does, he looks again, nods again.

“Yes.”

“You’re absolutely sure?”

“Yes.”

“This woman, she was in the group?”

“I saw her,” says Atlee, “and I heard her speak.”

After he had waited for over an hour for the group to be done with their packing and moving, Atlee was becoming increasingly impatient to do his job and be done with it. On the way there, he had noted a barn on Police Station Road, between the station and the town, and he was intending to stop there on his way home and sift it for what might be useful—animal feed, maybe, or tools, or propane. But now it was approaching four o’clock and his slowpoke clients were still moving their things up and down the stairs, and he was running out of daylight.

So Atlee goes to ask Astronaut how much longer and finds him, in a hallway outside the garage, talking to a girl.

“It was her,” he tells me, pointing to the picture. “Your girl.”

They were speaking, Nico and Astronaut, in hushed voices, at the end of the long hallway that cuts through the police station. Both of them were smoking cigarettes and they were arguing.

“Wait,” I manage. “Arguing about what?”

“I do not know.”

“How do you know it was an argument?”

Atlee smiles slightly. “We are a gentle people. But I do know what an argument sounds like.”

“What were they arguing about?” I can barely hear my own words, my heart is beating so loud; blood is rushing into my head like cold water in a cavern. I feel like I am there—coming upon them, huddled together in conversation in that narrow corridor. Was it already stained with blood, with two overlapping trails leading into and out of the kitchenette?

“I cannot say what their subject was, but I could tell that the girl was the angrier of the two. Shaking her head. Poking the man in the chest, like this, with one finger. The man Astronaut, he says that the situation is what the situation is. The girl says, I disagree.”

I let out a gasp of laughter. Atlee looks at me, perplexed. Of course she said that. That’s my sister, that’s Nico, stubbornly rejecting the most uncontroversial statement of plain truth—The situation is what the situation is. I disagree.—that’s Nico, up and down and all around the town. I can see her saying that. I can hear her. I’m so close to her right now. I feel so close.

“And—okay. Okay, what else did they say?”

Nothing, says Atlee, and shakes his head. “I cleared my throat so they would see me standing there. I had been told half an hour, and now had been waiting three times as long. The man apologized. He was very polite. Very soft in his manner. He asked if I could come back at five thirty. He assured me that by that time they would have completed their move down below, and the concrete piece would be waiting for me to shift into place.”

“And that’s what happened?”

“Yes. I went and searched that barn as I had intended, and returned at the appointed time.”

“At half past five.”

“Yes.”

“And they were all gone and the concrete floor piece was waiting?”

“Yes. Along with the food I had been promised. What you called them.”

“MREs,” I say absently, and chew for a moment on my lip.

“You didn’t pour the concrete?”

“No,” he says. “It was built when I got there.”

I don’t write any of this down, I have run out of paper, but I think I will remember. The timelines, the details. I’ll remember. “And so by five thirty all of them were gone?”

“Yes.”

“They had gone under?”

“Well. I don’t know. But they were gone.”

And that’s it, end of story, end of the day of September 26. Atlee and I stand together in thoughtful silence, leaning on a fence in the darkness at the far edge of Joy Farms.

After a last moment of standing side by side, Atlee turns away from the fence and wordlessly hands me the one thing that was missing from my pockets, my department-issue pistol. He has no more information to give me, but there is one thing I still need. I describe my request and he readily accedes—tells me where I have to go and whom to talk to. He takes my notebook and writes on the back of it. I bend my head gratefully. I feel genuine sadness for this old man, the mantle he has laid on himself, the Herculean task of making believe that the world is still more or less what it has been. He has acted like a Secret Service agent leaping in slow motion, hurling himself in the path of the information.

As I step at last off the fence and begin to say goodbye, Atlee Miller cuts me off, holds up his pitchfork at shoulder level.

“You said, I think, that this girl is your sister.”

“Yes.”

He looks me over again, seeming to decide something. “The man, Astronaut. Mild, as I said. Polite. But on his belt, a workingman’s belt, he wore a long-barrel pistol, and a sawtooth buck knife, and a claw hammer.”

Atlee’s expression is set and somber. A chill drifts down over me like snow.

“He never took off the belt, never used it. But there it was. This is what I noticed about him, this man, the leader of this group,” he says. “A quiet man, but with one hand always on this belt.”

I see Houdini on my way out, still in that muddy spot he picked out behind the shed. Wallowing, practically inert, head tilted, asleep. A couple of the Amish kids are nearby, playing jacks on a patch of hard dirt. Houdini will like that, when he wakes up, he’ll like to hear them laughing. It happens the same way Atlee described it, in the crack of a moment—I don’t call to the dog. I don’t even get close enough to wake him. I move quietly past with my head down, looking back once and then moving on.

It isn’t easy, because he’s a good dog and he has been good to me and I love him, but I leave him behind in this big green place that smells like animals and grass, among these people who will take care of him into a good old age, at least as far as either party knows.

“Wait, please.”

A girl’s voice, just loud enough to be heard. I stop and turn around and there’s Ruthie, the one I caught cheating on the blessing, with the big blue eyes and the plaited strawberry blonde hair. One of the oldest of the giggling Amish girls, but she’s not giggling now. Grave-faced, cheeks flushed from running, her plain black dress dusty at the hem. She has caught me at the crook in the path, where the farm turns into the road. Staring at me, intent, her anxious fingers reaching for my sleeve.

“Please. I have to ask you.” She glances once nervously back at the house. I almost say “Ask me what?” but it would just be buying time. I know exactly what she means as soon as she says it.

The radio, up there in the barn. An innocent child alone in the moontime darkness of the loft, listening to forbidden music and enjoying a rare breath of independence, a respite from chores and sibling responsibilities, when she hears the baffling news, and at first she is confused, and then it slowly sinks in, what it means, what all of it means.

Pretending since then. Putting it on. Poor young Ruthie knows about Maia, just like her grandfather she knows, but she has not told him. Not wanting him to know that she knows, not wanting him to know that she knows that he knows. Hide-and-seek at the end of the world.

But here she is. Standing and waiting for me. Her fingers clutching at me. “How much longer?”

“Ruth,” I say. “I’m sorry.”

She tightens her grip on my sleeve. “How much longer?”

I could give her a reprieve: there’s a plan in motion, actually. Department of Defense Space Command, they figured something out. A standoff burst, a nuclear detonation at one object radius from the asteroid, releasing sufficient high-energy X-rays to vaporize some portion of its surface… everything is going to be fine.

But I can’t do that, so I just say it as quickly as I can, tearing off the Band-Aid, “Three days,” and she breathes sharply and nods bravely but stumbles forward into my arms. I catch her and hold her small body to my chest and kiss her gently on the top of the head.

The voice of Cortez, singsong in my ear. Everything reminds you of your sister.

“I’m so sorry,” I tell her. “I’m really, really sorry.”

It’s just words, though. Just a bunch of tiny little words.