Miriam looks down at the gloves on Harriet's hands.

"Guess we know how you die after all," Miriam says. It sounds like she's got a mouth full of rocks and molasses. She tries to laugh, but it pains her too much. She coughs. She's afraid her ribcage is going to come up her throat or out her ass. Every square inch of her body throbs.

She nudges Harriet, half-expecting Little Napoleon to lurch up and start biting at her Achilles' tendons, but the woman experiences no such miraculous resurrection.

Now: Louis.

Miriam doesn't really believe she can save him. But she knows she's there when it happens. The vision showed her that.

The question is: where?

No. Wait. The first question is: when?

Miriam bends over – ow, ow, ow – and finds Harriet's cell phone in the pocket of the dead woman's black pants.

4.30pm.

Louis dies in three hours.

Cell phone in hand, Miriam staggers through a moldering kitchen in 70s décor and out through a half-cocked screen door. Outside, gray skies pass above an endless vista of bent and meager pines, each a bleak needle, each a Charlie Brown Christmas tree.

A gravel drive circles the ramshackle cottage, cutting through the pines.

Nearby, on a crooked fencepost with no fence, a fat crow sits staring.

"I don't know where I am," she tells the bird. The crow takes to oily wing. "Thanks for the help."

All right, think, she thinks. The New Jersey Pine Barrens. That's like, what? Only about a million acres of scrubby pineland and sandy loam. And Louis dies in a lighthouse. New Jersey doesn't have too many of those – ohhhh, only maybe two dozen. I'm sure I can hit all of them in the next three hours, right after I make a beeline for civilization. Which is assuredly right around the corner, and by "right around the corner," I mean, "miles from this place."

This is an impossible task.

It can't be impossible! she thinks. I'm there. I somehow manage to show up. What fate wants, fate gets, and fate wants my ass in that lighthouse. Think!

But she can't think. Her brain hits a dull wall, a dead-end – and it keeps hitting it, like a bee against a windowpane. Maybe it's the pain that's blunting her brainpower. Maybe shock and trauma are merrily skipping in tandem to drag down her thought processes.

She's looking for a sign. If fate wants her to show up, fate will have to give her a ride.

The cell phone in her hand rings.

It vibrates, too, and it scares her so bad she almost throws it into the woods like a live hand grenade.

Luckily, she bites back that impulse. She looks at the phone.

Frankie.

Her heart seizes.

She answers the phone.

"What?" she asks, trying to mimic Harriet's matte tone. Her sore throat and swollen lip seem to help.

"How's the girl?" he asks. The signal's weak, but she can still hear him.