No, no it wasn’t . . . everything was different now. She wasn’t high, not anymore, or not that she could feel, but she’d never had much of a sense of direction and with the way the wind was blowing she could hardly see a thing and her hands—her hands were freezing. The Alte Haus wasn’t more than a couple hundred yards from the Bowling Alley, a big turreted fairy-tale palace you could see from a mile away, which no one could miss, even in a storm like this. But where was it? Usually it was ablaze with light like a ship at sea, but everybody seemed to have gone to bed by now—the guests, all the white-robed guests—and the night just held there, uniform, every which way she looked. But this was ridiculous. She kept walking, the night held, the snow kept coming. She was thinking about Fitz and what he was forever saying to her about her sense of direction: Turn around and go in exactly the opposite way because you’re always 100 percent wrong—the correct data’s in there somewhere, but you’ve got a brain glitch. Trust me. Just go the opposite way.

But what was the opposite way? She was so turned around she didn’t know which way she’d come, and her tracks were filling as fast as she made them. And her hands were so cold. And her feet, her feet too. She backtracked, thinking to find the Bowling Alley again, just to orient herself. Problem was, she couldn’t find that either. She must have gone off on a tangent—toward the lake? Where was the lake? She didn’t have a clue. Everything was molded of snow. There was no moon. There were no stars. And the wind never stopped, not for an instant.

How much time went by she didn’t know. But she couldn’t feel her feet and she fell repeatedly so that the snow was worked up inside her sleeves and under the waistband of her jacket, which was wrong, and stupid, that too, and she’d forgotten about Corey now—or almost; she would deal with him in the morning—and she was so wrung out and exhausted all she could think was that she might just want to lie down in the snow for a bit, right here, just to catch her breath . . . when a sound came to her. It was sharp and sudden, a crack, a thump, a clatter, and then it repeated again, and again.