“I didn’t have much juice left in my phone. I had planned to charge it from the car. I hiked out to Liberty Hill Road and got part of a message off to you before it died. It was a long goddamn walk until somebody picked me up on the highway. I was just getting back when you called from the airplane.”

He watched her struggle with the rifle scope, then gripped the jittering barrel and held it level.

“Right. There you go.” He pointed across the stream again. “We hike across that hillside and up a canyon—you can just see it, the break in texture—where a little feeder joins this creek. A few hundred yards up that feeder is where the ground levels out into a meadow not much bigger than a baseball field. That’s where the place is. We’ll cross the feeder and bushwhack our approach high on the opposite side, away from the buildings, so we can stay out of sight. The whole trip is just about a quarter mile. Except it seems like two hundred years into the past.”

She tightened down the scope.

“Let’s move.”

CHAPTER 38

At Supercuts, the window glass surrenders with a bright chime. She snaps across the wreckage in her new pink flip-flops, shucks the Disney princess mask, towels off her hot face, and spends a minute inches from a mirror, plucking black hairs from her chin and upper lip.

Then she flings her bonnet away and hops into a chair. She tells him something in her strange language. Then she tries to make it English.

“Hurt me, many, not hamburger. He koam, I kill. Boam!”

She taps her sweat-damp dress between her breasts, concentrates on her words.

“Jailhouse. Safety.”

At her command, he uncoils her braid and with a pair of long sharp scissors he hacks it off. It falls like an old rope to the floor.

CHAPTER 39

A long time ago—long to Taylor Kick—in the days just after his and Dylan’s seventh birthday, but before the end of the school year had separated him from his special teacher, Miss Garland, Taylor had seen the first mean sign about his mother from the window of the school bus.

The sign was where the bus stopped on Ten Hollows Road to pick up Chad Mooney, in Taylor’s first-grade class. It was stuck into Chad Mooney’s yard, his mother waving nearby it with a baby on her hip. Miss Garland had been telling him, Read everything you can, all the time. Practice The world is full of words.