“Now, what do you want to do?”

“Wait,” I repeated, and she groaned. I said, “We follow Simone when she goes somewhere ”

“If she goes somewhere.”

“Positive energy, please. When she goes somewhere, we follow, but we hang back first, see if we have company.”

“And if our company is already on to us? If they’re watching us right now as we speak, thinking the same thing? What then?”

I resisted the urge to turn around and look for other cars with two immobile occupants, staring in our direction. “We deal with it,” I said.

She frowned. “You always say that when you don’t have a clue.”

“Do not,” I said.

At seven-fifteen, things started happening.

Simone, wearing a navy blue sweatshirt over a white T-shirt, faded jeans, and generic sneakers the color of an oyster, walked out of the house with determination and opened her car the same way. I wondered if she did everything the same way with that set look on her face, that the-hell-with-you-if-you-can’t-keep-up air about her. Could people sleep that way?

She went straight up Merrimack, so we gave her a few blocks, waiting to see if we were the only interested party. It seemed to be the case, and if not, I wasn’t about to lose my only lead. We pulled out, and with one last look at my thirty-seven thousand dollars worth of automobile insurance company estimate, mind you we tailed her through Wickham. She went straight through the center of town and hopped on I-495. I was tired of being in the car and hoped like hell she didn’t have Jenna stowed away in Canada. Thankfully, that didn’t seem to be the case, because she got off the expressway a few miles later, turning off into Lansington.

If possible, Lansington is uglier than Wickham, but in imperceptible ways. In most respects, they’re identical. Lansington just feels dingier.

We were waiting at a traffic light near the center of town, but when the light turned green, Simone didn’t move. I felt two cold spades press together around my heart and Angie said, “Shit. Think she’s on to us?”

I said, “Use the horn.”

She did and Simone’s hand went up in apology as she realized the light had changed. It was the first undetermined thing she’d done since I’d seen her, and it felt like a jump start: we were close.

All around us were squat two-story clapboard buildings, circa the late 1800s. Trees were sparse and gnarled in hideous ways where we saw them. The traffic lights were old, still round, no Walk/Don’t Walk signals or neon pictures for those who couldn’t understand the Walk/Don’t Walk parts. The lights made clicking sounds when they changed, and as we drifted along the two-lane road, I felt that we could just as easily have been in rural Georgia or West Virginia.

Ahead of us, Simone’s left blinker went on, and a fraction of a second later, she pulled off the road into a small dirt parking lot filled with pickup trucks, a Winnebago, a couple of dusty American sports cars, and those wretched testaments to Detroit’s bad taste El Caminos. Two of them. A car that couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a truck; a truck that couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a car obscene, hybrid results.