“I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the car,” Officer Salter said, and things moved quickly after that—the charade of the drunk test, the application of the handcuffs, the ride to the police station, the humiliation of the booking and the way everybody there stared at him as if he were a leper and finally the phone call to the Alte Haus. His hands shook as he dialed the number and listened to the clicks over the line, the phone pinned under his chin, the haze of alcohol receding like an ebb tide and trying to suck his legs out from under him so that he had to fight to remain upright. The phone rang in a vacuum. It seemed to ring forever before somebody finally picked it up with a soft expectant “Hello?”

“Who is this?”

“Tommy.”

“It’s Fitz. I need help. Is Ken there? Or Charlie or anybody?”

A silence. “I don’t know.”

“Well go look, would you? Tell them”—and here he felt something go soft inside him, as if he were about to start blubbering like an infant—“it’s, it’s . . . I’m in jail, okay?”

“What do you mean, in jail?”

“Please,” he said, “please. Just get somebody.”

He was all but sober by the time Ken arrived to bail him out after a period during which he’d fallen into a deep crushing sleep in a cell occupied by a shoeless white-haired man in a pair of overalls who kept repeating, I did it, I did it, I confess, and if Ken was rigid with anger that was only to be expected—it was his car the police had impounded. Beyond that, on the tight-lipped drive back up Franklin in Charlie’s turquoise Chevrolet, Ken told him Tim was furious over the whole thing. “You of all people should know better. We don’t need this kind of negative attention, we really don’t—especially now, after Kesey and those jokers blew through town. And I’ll tell you another thing—you’re responsible for the towing charges and everything else, fines, whatever, you hear me?”

He murmured apologies all the way up the drive to the main house but Ken wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t stop. “And this Lori business, it’s sick, Fitz. Wake up. You should hear what people are saying behind your back, Fanchon even, Alice, Charlie, everybody. Get a grip, man. Really.”

The house loomed up to greet them, the fairy-tale house, the gingerbread castle, the home he’d come so far to find. He listened to the squeal of the brakes, the mechanical click of the handle as Ken swung open the door. “Can I just say one thing?”

“What?” Ken said, giving him a hard look.

“Fuck you. And fuck Fanchon too.”