Jack saw a stop sign ahead. He slowed the car to a stop a dozen feet before the intersection. The crossing road was unmarked. Jack took the map from Anya and stared at the intersection he’d circled.

“How do we know this is the place?”

“It is,” Anya said.

“But nothing says that’s South Road.”

“Trust me, kiddo. It is.”

Jack looked at the map again. Not too many crossroads out here. This had to be it.

Leaving the engine running to keep the AC going, he got out and walked to the stop sign. It sported a couple of bullet holes—.45 caliber, maybe—but the rime of rust along their ragged edges said they were old. A sour breeze limped from the west. He stepped into the intersection and looked left and right. He checked the ground. Little pieces of glass glittered in the dust. This was where it had happened.

“What are you hoping to find?”

He turned and found Anya approaching. Oyv trotted behind her, weaving back and forth as he sniffed the ground.

“Don’t know,” he said. “It’s just that a lot of things don’t add up, especially with the timing and the assumption that my father ran a stop sign.”

“I imagine a lot of people do that out here. Look around. Here we are, midmorning on a Thursday and not a car in sight. You think maybe there were more in the early A.M. Tuesday?”

“No. I guess not. But he was—is—such a by-the-book guy, and not a risk taker, that I can’t see him doing it. And I can’t see what he was doing out here in the first place.”

“Oh, I can tell you that: He was driving.”

Jack tried not to show his irritation. “I know he was driving. But where to?”

“To nowhere. Many nights he had trouble sleeping, so he’d go out for a drive.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me. Asked me if I wanted to come along some night. I said he should include me out. I don’t know from insomnia. Like the dead I sleep.”

So I noticed, Jack thought.

“Where did he go?”

“Out here. He said he always took the same route. He’d drive with his windows open. He said he liked the silence, liked to stop and look at the stars—you can see so many out here—or watch an approaching storm. That would have been back when we had storms, of course.” She sighed. “Such a long while since we’ve heard thunder around here.”

“All right. So he’s out here on his nightly drive and—”

“Not nightly. Two, maybe three times a week.”

“Okay, so Monday night or early Tuesday morning, he’s out here and somehow he winds up in the middle of an intersection when something else is coming along. Something big enough to total his car and keep on rolling.”