A thought came to him, as fleeting as the transient sunlight through the trees: not all of the lost memories would have been bad ones. That hadn’t occurred to him until now; he had been too preoccupied wondering what sort of nightmare he and Danica had experienced all those years ago. But they had been children, after all—there would have been nice moments they shared, in those few summer days. Maybe something good had happened right here in this little park. Something they both would have liked to remember.

Dryden stared at the swings a few seconds longer, but nothing more came to him. Danica turned and met his eyes.

“Keep moving, I guess,” she said softly.

Dryden nodded, and they continued on toward the nearest houses.

They moved south through adjoining yards, and across short inner streets that tied together the longer, arching ones. Here and there, a stretch of pavement or sidewalk showed through the layer of dead leaves.

They met FBI people in tight groups, moving fast from house to house. There had been no luck yet finding an underground access point.

They were getting closer to the southern edge of the woods—Dryden could see the trees thinning, maybe a hundred yards farther on—when they found something that made them stop: a pine tree with a yellow Ford Escort leaning against it. The car was pitched nose-up at forty-five degrees, its front bumper resting against the tree trunk, its back end braced on the ground.

Stranger still, the tree itself seemed to have been deformed by the weight of the car. Though the pine’s trunk was as thick as a telephone pole, its bottom curved sharply as if bowed under the mass of the Escort’s front end. Then, once it cleared the bumper, the trunk pointed straight upward as normal. The tree had simply grown that way.

“I might have thought the car was here first,” Danica said, “and the tree grew up afterward and lifted it, but … it doesn’t work like that. I mean, that’s not how a tree grows. It wouldn’t have done this.”

Dryden was nodding; she had it exactly right. A growing trunk didn’t push upward over time, like the magic beanstalk in the old story. A tree just kept adding new length at the top, while the lower parts of the trunk stayed put. A young tree that sprouted beneath this car would not have lifted it like this, even if it could have borne the weight. It would have grown out around it, seeking the light, or simply died for lack of it.

Dryden thought of those things, but only with a small part of his attention; all the rest was consumed by the same feeling he’d had at Echo House.

“I’ve seen this car,” he whispered.