Pink glow in the east, quickly intensifying to coral.
The first morning color in the sky was a symbol of hope, a reminder that in spite of the evil that worked relentlessly from pole to pole, the world spent the night turning inexorably toward light.
That was something Jeffy told her when one day it seemed to Michelle that her music career had been stillborn long before she realized it wasn’t breathing. That had been nine years earlier, when he and Amity still had two years to live before they would be taken out by a drunk in an Escalade. She’d mocked his optimism by calling him Pollyanna’s more cheerful brother, and by noting that during the day, the world turned inexorably toward darkness.
She wanted to believe—she did believe—that in spite of such moments of contention, she was different enough from the other self-absorbed version of herself that she would never have walked out on them in this world, had they lived. In this timeline as in that one, she was more ambitious than Jeffy; or she’d thought so until, during the years after the loss of him and Amity, she came to understand that he was no less ambitious than she, that their dreams were just not of the same variety. She strove for fame and wealth, certain they would bring happiness. Jeffy strove for happiness directly and found it in whatever the world brought him to his liking—Bakelite radios, Art Deco posters, fantasy novels, a wife, a child.
Now as the sky brimmed with color, as the world began again its long turn toward another night, she was filled with the wonder of a multiverse in which every time someone went off the rails to ruin, there was a reality in which she remained on the tracks. Tragedy was not the end
of hope, but the birthing ground of a new hope, and you didn’t have to be Pollyanna’s more cheerful sister to grasp that truth and be inspired by it.
“We have to help them,” she declared, thrusting up from the rocking chair.
“Help whom,” Ed asked, pretending ignorance but smiling slyly.
“They can’t live in that world anymore, not when the
government—the shadow state—will be hunting them forever. We have to find them and bring them back here.”
Ed got to his feet. “That’s not exactly what I had in mind.”
“What did you have in mind, Mr. Einstein without the big white mustache?”
“Well,” he said, “it’s moot if we can’t rescue them from that world. First things first.”
“Let’s go, then.” She grabbed him by the arm. “Take us back there. Take us now.”
“Patience, dear. Falkirk is dead in that world, but the agents with him on the operation are alive and spoiling for a fight. We need to take a few minutes to modify our appearance. Then we don’t dare port from this bungalow to that one and right into their arms. You’ll drive us into town, we’ll port from someplace there and see what we can find, what we can do.”
“But if Falkirk and all his men can’t find them in that world, how can we?”
“I don’t know yet,” he said as he opened her front door and motioned her inside, “but trust in the Ed factor.”
“What’s the Ed factor?”
“Things tend to happen around me.”
70
After Duke Pellafino’s shift ended, his subordinate, Andy Taylor, took over the hotel’s morning security operations, which included finding the vagrant who had invaded the hotel and spray-painted some hallway cameras and then apparently squirreled himself away somewhere.
Alone in his basement office, before leaving for the day, Duke picked up the phone and called Phil Esterhaus, chief of the Suavidad Beach Police Department. Phil was a current cop whose nickname was “Clint” because he resembled Eastwood from the Dirty Harry films, and Duke was a former cop. They both liked dogs, baseball, and jazz, so their friendship had been pretty much inevitable. Phil rose early to go for a long run shortly after first light every morning, and Duke often joined him.
“I just tied on my running shoes,” Phil said. “Meet you on the beach?”
“Not this morning, amigo. I’ve got a tough question for you that maybe you can’t answer.”
“Hey, I’m so good at tough questions I could win a fortune on Jeopardy. Hit me with it.”
“The thing is, maybe you can’t answer it for jurisdictional reasons or maybe an unofficial gag order.”
“Try me anyway.”
“There’s a fed in town named John Falkirk.”
“That egg-sucking snake.”
“So you’re not enjoined from talking about him.”