The deputies had rigged up the searchlights while we were stumbling through shrubs. The sudden light arcing through the night sky behind us startled me. I tripped on a fallen branch and landed in rotting leaves. At least if they sent dogs after us they wouldn’t find us by our smell.

When we reached the ditch by the side of Coverdale Lane, I cautiously poked my head through the shrubbery to survey the road. A squad car blocked the intersection of Coverdale with Dirksen, where I had left my Mustang. I couldn’t see clearly at this distance, but they had probably found the car, might be waiting next to it for me.

I sank back down into the ditch, close to screaming with fatigue and frustration. We were trapped. I fought back panic. Benji whispered, “How we are going to do?”

The only possibility was to cross Coverdale and fight our way through the hedge to Anodyne Park on the far side, taking a chance that they

wouldn’t see us in the road. If I had the wings of a dove or the shovel snout of a mole. A mole. If that culvert I’d stumbled on yesterday came this far … Under cover of sirens and of a helicopter that had arrived on the scene, I explained to Benji as best I could what I was looking for. I would explore east, toward my car, he would crawl along the ditch to the west.

“Let it open up here, on this side of the road,” I begged the whimsical ruler of the universe. “Let me find it, before they find me.”

I crawled along slowly, patting the embankment, praying for it to give way. About fifty feet from where the squad car stood, Benji tapped my shoulder with a soft, timid hand. He had found the entrance.

I crawled back after him. The opening was a black hole on the road side of the ditch, not high enough for me to stand upright but just wide enough for us to move side by side. It smelled of mold and animal droppings, and it was as dark as the entrance to death. We couldn’t afford to show a light. I grabbed Benji’s left hand with my right. He didn’t try to withdraw; indeed, he clung to me, trembling, as we squelched along the muddy floor.

It should have been a quarter mile, getting to the hedge, going under Powell Road, coming up in Anodyne Park, but the tunnel seemed to stretch endlessly in front of us. What if we weren’t under Powell Road at all, but were shuffling into the Deep Tunnel? We could wander for hours until we collapsed and died of hunger and thirst. No one would find our bones for years, if they ever came on them at all. Morrell, Lotty, everyone I loved who cared about me, they would forget me. Already they were so far away that they didn’t exist.

My breath rasped dry against my tonsils. My back ached from walking in a stoop, red darts flashed across my eyes. And then we were suddenly breathing fresh air, smelling the juniper berries, scrambling uphill, standing upright on asphalt.