Now, Frances wondered rotely if Happy Jaine had managed to avoid returning to Little-Munson before he died, even though it had been his home. As she steered the bicycle toward the yellow sand-hills, past Little-Munson’s broken warehouse and still-functioning waterworks, she tasted the salty-dust air, hearing behind her another yelp inside the long bunkerlike building, then the same voice resonating with laughter.

Local wisdom said folks in Little-Munson were divided about things and agitated by nature, while those in Munson were clear-sighted and straightforward. Yet some people—Nancy among them—said the reverse was actually true. Little-Munson once had had a robust police force, but at some point it had fallen apart; now any policing was done by Munson’s sheriffs. This intrusion caused tension in Little-Munson, though it could be argued that the town scarcely existed anymore. Were the people there truly unlucky? A few years ago, she learned that Happy’s had been a quick, unusual death from a combination of snake-bite and falling off a rock ledge, and this had not much surprised Frances.

She pedaled the bike onto an ocean road blocked at its far outlet by a wooden barrier that Munson had erected many years before. The local volcano was dangerous, signs on the barrier informed, and went on to say that Munson’s town council had reason to believe the sea-water touching the volcano’s base was dangerous, too. Though the beach barriers were in place, Munson folks needed no reminding; they stayed away. Over the years, the wooden barricade had fallen into disrepair, chewed by destructive insects or torn apart by teens.

Frances’ bicycle tires pressured the fine sand, and it sprayed upward, stinging her eyes. As she reached the beach barrier, she stopped the bike, sighing, tired. A movement in the bare brush caught her attention, and she looked up to see a fuzzy, mild-faced critter at some distance, which was actually a type of bear. The animal pushed out of the bushes and loped along the road, its heavy forearms swaying rather comically. Frances felt timid. She caught the critter’s watery, dark gaze for a moment, then sped off, retracing her route, impatient to reach Nancy. She headed for a certain path that dipped back briefly toward Little-Munson while also offering a series of sliverlike trails that led some distance away, skirting both towns, fading to nothing. The path also merged with a larger, more legitimate road altogether, and finding that route at last, she pedaled off.

It might be too dark now to visit Nancy, Frances realized with disappointment. Daytime would be best for that. At a bend in the road, through foliage overgrown with sodden tree-fluff, she turned off and crested a hill, pushing the bike tiredly until, in the distance, she saw a familiar cafe. The air hinted at rain. Frances saw a lone taxi buzzing toward Munson so quickly that the driver appeared faceless, his thin sleeve rippling in the wind.