The Glade was not the only excellent thing here. There was also Becker and Tolland Books, which had opened its doors in 1921 and continued to thrive in a community that had a varied and keen taste for reading matter.

Two doors down from the BT was the Redwoods Café, which served coffees, teas, baked goods, and sandwiches. Small-town America, deep home, and deeply at peace. So nobody in Willoughby paid attention to the twenty-year-old Buick that came along State Road 16 in the path of the van of the church choir that had been around for the past couple of days, and certainly nobody understood that the four nondescript people in the car were tracking the van, or even interested in it.

The Buick passed the same farm that Mark and his team had passed, only now the tractor stood alone in the field, its engine ticking gently in the sweet noon wind, the lip of its exhaust stack slow-dancing on idle.

A horse ran, snorting and bucking, as if it were trying to throw an invisible rider. In a window of the farmhouse there stood a figure, male, wearing a shirt much too small for him and carrying what appeared to be a clutch of hair in his fist. The figure watched the car pass, then disappeared into the house. There were screams, but nobody to hear them except the horse, which tossed its head, then, when the following silence extended, bent down to graze.

The Buick did not stop as it passed the Sixteen Mo-Tel, nor did any of its occupants speak or even turn toward the low building with the faded western theme. Every one of them knew, to the millimeter, just how far they were from Mark Bryan, and every one of them reflected a growing anger at him. Something was wrong with him. He needed attention.

This is a complex universe we live in, full of many realities that we do not recognize or accept, vibrating lines of good and evil that free the world and trap the world, and along one of these living wires a dangerous tremor ran, causing Mark to sit up in his narrow bed and go to the window, and watch, uneasy. By that time, though, the Buick was just disappearing from view, and the thread of awareness snapped as the crucial information fell away.

The town reminded him of where he’d grown up outside Palo Alto. The quiet, sun-mottled street, the slowly passing cars, combined to draw his mind back to those days, and to the only people who had come close to being parents to him, the Walkers. Sergeant Walker had instilled a burning ambition in Mark to become a career soldier. So, as soon as his degree—history—was safely tucked away, he had joined up.