In the meantime, I followed the map Jack had printed to Jasper’s uncle’s house—which was at the far end of the county, where most of the land was too swampy to farm and had been given over to raising pines for the pulp mills or just left alone. The directions were admirably precise, but every time I turned I found myself on a smaller road with the houses farther apart—if they were visible at all.

I finally found 14953 Whitetail Lane. Its mailbox stood beside another mailbox at the head of a dirt lane that led off into the deep woods. No name on the mailbox, only the number, but the lane’s other resident made up for 14953’s terseness by providing not just a number and a name on the mailbox—14955, Aubrey Hamilton—but two other signs. One, nicely painted, advertised the Prancing Poodle Kennels (A. Hamilton, proprietor), with what looked like a conga line of purple poodles against a pink background. The other, less professionally painted and unillustrated, proclaimed that the Belle Glade Bird Farm had canaries, parakeets, and cockatiels for sale. The bird farm sign looked brand new while the kennel sign was so weathered and faded that it looked as if the poodles had been prancing for decades. I deduced that Aubrey Hamilton had either recently added bird breeding to the longstanding kennel’s operation or perhaps had given up dogs for birds.

The dirt lane looked badly rutted and little used. I glanced back in my rearview mirror. Timmy was still asleep. Odds were he’d wake up once I left the road. Ah, well; at least I’d had half an hour’s respite. And it was getting hot out here in the sunshine—odds were it would be cooler in the woods.

I eased the car into the lane and lurched along at five miles an hour. It was like entering a green tunnel, as the dense woods closed around us. At first I could see the entrance, an arch of sunlight slowly shrinking in my rearview mirror. And then I went around a curve in the lane and the entrance disappeared.

“Truck!” Timmy exclaimed. I glanced in the rearview mirror. No truck visible behind me, but then I realized that Timmy was pointing to the right of the car. He had good eyes—there was, indeed, a truck by the side of the road, or at least the skeleton of a truck. It was so completely overgrown with vines that I hadn’t immediately spotted it, but now I could make out the shape. Probably a surplus army troop truck, to judge by the patchwork of olive drab paint and reddish brown rust on its frame and hood. Maybe even World War II surplus, by the shape of it.

“Truck,” I echoed.

To the left of the road I spotted another truck—this one a pickup, slightly newer and less decrepit than the first, and with a correspondingly less dense mat of vines concealing it.

“Truck!” Timmy said. He was bouncing up and down as well as he could in his car seat and pointing happily. “Tractor!”