I’d start with the one place I could identify, the missile silo. I’d had vague Dr. Strangelove images in mind, so the actual site was a letdown: no giant Atlas rockets thrust their noses skyward, no heavily armed soldiers patrolled the perimeter. In fact, I almost missed the turnoff, it was so unobtrusively marked—just an old metal sign on a fence post, with the U.S. Air Force logo and faded letters announcing the Kanwaka Missile Silo.

The county road wasn’t paved, just had a coating of gravel on it that had been dinging my car as I bumped along, but the access road to the silo was covered in tarmac. Newly surfaced, by the look of it, although the installation itself seemed run-down—everyone was tired of nuclear weapons, even the land around the old missile. A twelve-foot-high cyclone fence enclosed the land, but sections had fallen over.

Cady Perec had said how vulnerable it made kids feel when they saw it every day on their way to school. In my childhood we’d grown up with a vague fear of nuclear war, but a fully loaded Minuteman right by your school bus—that was the stuff of permanent nightmare.

I pulled over onto the verge and started to walk the perimeter. Although the fence had collapsed in places that would make it easy to enter the site, the front gates still stood padlocked.

The odd thing about the layout, at least to my urban mind, was the way the property was cut up. The missile had sat in a triangle, with the apex pointing at Doris McKinnon’s house. A barbed-wire fence ran along the same parallel as the triangle’s base, smack in the middle of a field. If I had worked out the maps properly, the land beyond the fence belonged to the fifteen acres the air force had seized from McKinnon back in 1983. The conveyancing reports didn’t show it as being redeeded to Sea-2-Sea.

When I walked along McKinnon’s side of the barbed wire, I saw medallions every twenty feet or so, labeling the land beyond as private property, no trespassing. The medallions were stamped with the Sea-2-Sea logo—wheat sheaves crossing a stylized map of the United States.

I wondered if McKinnon had marked her own land on the opposite side. When I bent over to look, my skin tingled and I jumped back: the fence was electrified. Curiouser and curiouser.

I returned to the silo and slipped inside through a place where the fence had come unmoored from its post, taking care not to touch the metal, in case Sea-2-Sea’s electrical circuits ran through the Kanwaka fence as well.

The resurfacing of the tarmac continued beyond the padlocked gates. The road, big enough for a double-wide, ended in the concrete wings of a loading bay. A narrower track branched out from there and led to an enormous concrete circle.