And then a quiet night of mourning, Dad looking for answers to a long list of questions, Jack doing his best not to answer them. Dad didn’t need to know more than he already did and, despite what he’d been through, probably wouldn’t accept the truth as Jack understood it. So Jack told him only what he’d gleaned from Anya and let him assume that the rest of the answers had died with her. It never occurred to either of them to turn on the Monday night football game.

“Besides,” Dad was saying on this bright morning, “what am I doing down here while my sons and all my grandchildren are up north? It makes no sense. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

Maybe you weren’t thinking, Jack thought. Maybe you were being manipulated. Maybe everything that’s happened down here was part of a plan—a plan that, thanks to Anya, didn’t go quite the way it was supposed to.

And then again, maybe not.

But with the Otherness so obviously involved, Jack couldn’t help but think that his father had been scheduled to die last Tuesday morning.

“Maybe I’ll come south for just a month or two a year,” Dad went on, “say February and March. Statistics say that an American male who reaches age sixty-five can expect to live another sixteen years. That leaves me ten more. Makes no sense to spend them fifteen hundred miles from the most important people in my life.”

“You’re right. It doesn’t.”

Jack had a feeling he’d better watch over his father. He was sure the Otherness wasn’t through with him yet. Rasalom’s words kept haunting him:

…a strong man slowly battered into despair and hopelessness…that is a delicacy. In your case, it might even approach ecstasy…

How was this battering into despair and hopelessness going to happen? By destroying everyone he cared about?

He was glad his father would be closer to home, but right now he wanted to get back to Gia and Vicky. Worry for them was a knife point in his back, urging him home. And he had to get working on a way to become a citizen before March, when the baby was due.

Yesterday he’d overnighted the Ruger back to one of his mail drops. He’d pick it up after it was forwarded to another drop. All he had to do now was pack up his clothes and head for the airport.

The phone rang.

“That should be the sales office,” Dad said. “I phoned them first thing this morning about putting the place on the market.”

As he left, Jack reminded himself to check out Blagden & Sons once he got home. See if he could find out why they wanted that sand from the cenote. He had a feeling it wasn’t for mixing concrete for back porches.