“In case . . .” He exhaled as much exasperation as air, and he inhaled resignation. “In case, in some kind of crisis, we have to use it again.”
“What crisis?”
He marked his place in the book with a jacket flap and set the volume aside.
Amity thought he was going to go totally adult on her and deliver a gentle lecture regarding an aspect of life about which he thought she was clueless. Most likely, she would already understand what he strove earnestly to explain to her. She would pretend to be gradually enlightened, until he was proud of her and felt that he had fulfilled his fatherly duty. He was such a good, sweet man that Amity found these sessions endearing rather than frustrating. And of course maybe 20 percent of the time she was clueless, and he did enlighten her, so it was always worth really and truly listening.
This time, however, she misjudged his intention.
After setting the book aside and taking a long pull on his beer, he stared at the key to everything, his brow furrowed, his face drawn with worry.
“What crisis?” Amity repeated.
“One crisis could be John Falkirk. From the National Security Agency. With his helicopters and fleet of Suburbans and armed search teams.”
“He didn’t find anything,” Amity said. “He went away.”
“Yeah, but someone is going to discover Good Boy’s body and call the police. It’s like right out of The Twilight Zone, a chimp-human hybrid in a bizarre uniform. Falkirk didn’t storm into town before first consulting with local authorities, and although they won’t know what this is about, they’ll have been told to call Falkirk if anything unusual happens.”
“Good Boy is kind of unusual,” she conceded.
“And maybe someone saw us running away from that house. Though even if no one saw us, Falkirk’s likely to come back here and seal off the street and interrogate everyone on Shadow Canyon Lane again. He seemed sure Ed Harkenbach would have entrusted his thingumabob to someone here.”
“We can fake him out again.”
“Can we? Not if he takes . . . extreme measures.”
Amity had read enough stories involving evil kings and vermin-infested dungeons to suspect what her father feared. “Torture.”
“They won’t go that far. Maybe some kind of drug cocktail that makes us tell the truth. Or they’ll arrest me and hold me without bail, as a national-security threat or something.”
“We’d be separated?”
He met her eyes and held her stare. “I won’t let that happen.”
Of course he meant what he said, but he was just one man. The government was millions.
Daddy picked up his beer once more.
Amity was of an age when solace was taken from sugar that had not been fermented. She swilled an unladylike quantity of Cherry Coke before she spoke. “You said ‘one crisis could be Falkirk.’ What’s another one?”
He turned the empty bottle in his hand, studying it as if it were an arcane object found among a wizard’s magical instruments, containing the answer to all mysteries. “It’s not a crisis as much as a moral dilemma. And it’s less of a moral dilemma than it is a problem of the heart.”
“Well, I guess I know what it is.”
“I guess you do,” he said.
“You still love her.”
“I always will.”
Amity pushed her empty Coke can aside. “Then let’s go get her.”
His stare was as piercing as it was tender with sympathy. “She wouldn’t be likely to leave her life there, sweetheart. Besides, she’s gone down a dark road. Someone broke her spirit. Maybe that husband of hers. She’s Michelle, but she’s not the same person. She would never understand this world or want to live in it.”
Amity nodded. “Yeah, okay, that’s the way she is in Good Boy’s weird universe. But there’s like a million billion others. More than that. Some of them must be as safe as ours. Lots are probably better places, safer. Somewhere she’s the right Michelle, and she’s alone, and she needs us.”
“We can’t spend our lives looking for the right Michelle. It would be living on wishes, and if we feed ourselves with nothing but wishes, we starve. You lost your mother once. Losing her again and again . . .” He shook his head. “Honey, you’re a strong girl, but nobody could endure a hundred losses like that—or even fifty, or twenty—without being changed for the worse, forever.” He shifted his attention to the key to everything. The sorrow in Daddy’s voice saddened Amity. “I know I couldn’t handle it, sweetheart. Hoping so hard only to have the hope dashed again and again. Anyway, it’s too dangerous. You already saw how dangerous it is.”