“Detailing. Are you going to eat that?”

Duckworth glanced at the brown piece of fruit. “Uh, you want it?”

“I don’t think they fed me. I haven’t eaten for a long time.”

Duckworth picked up the banana and handed it to Gaffney, who took it gently in his hands, then shoved one end of it into his mouth without bothering to peel it. He bit hard so his teeth went through the skin. He chewed quickly, took another large bite, still with the peel on.

Still chewing, he said, “You know what detailing is?”

Duckworth, distracted by what he’d just seen, said, “Sorry?”

“Detailing.” He swallowed the last of the banana, washed it down with some coffee. “You know what it is?”

“No.”

“Like, instead of just getting your car washed, you get it detailed. Like a super- super-cleaning. I work at Albany Detailing.”

“So, that’s in Albany?”

The man shook his head. “No, here in Promise Falls. It’s a franchise thing.”

“Mr. Gaffney, the police found you wandering around downtown. When they brought you in, you said you wanted to talk to a detective.”

“That’s right.”

“So how can I help you?”

“I made a mistake,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

Gaffney surveyed the room for what had to be the tenth time, then whispered to Duckworth, “It’s not your jurisdiction.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I mean, what can you do?” Gaffney shrugged. “Arrest them?”

“Arrest who?”

“What day is this?”

“This is Wednesday.”

Gaffney gave that some thought. “So . . . two nights. I went out Monday night, and now it’s Wednesday, so two nights. Unless it’s, like, the next Wednesday, and it’s been nine days.”

Duckworth had put his pen down. “Two nights what?”

“That they had me.” He put down the mug, ran his hand over his chin, felt stubble. “It must be just two. If they had me nine days, I’d almost have a beard by now.”

Duckworth’s brow wrinkled. “What do you mean, they had you?”

“I think I was abducted,” Gaffney said, running his tongue over his lips. “You know about Betty and Barney Hill?”

Duckworth quickly wrote down the names. “They abducted you?”

Gaffney shook his head. “No, they were in a book. Real people. I’ve got an old paperback copy of it. The Interrupted Journey, by John G. Fuller. It happened to them, too.”

“What happened, Brian?”

“They were driving at night from Niagara Falls back to their home in New Hampshire on September twentieth, 1961. This part of the country, you know? They’d have passed within forty miles of Promise Falls.”

“Okay.”

“He was black, and she was white, although that really doesn’t have anything to do with what happened to them. Unless it did.”

“Go on.”

“So the Hills saw this bright light in the sky, and the next thing they knew, it was hours later, and they were on the road, almost home. There was all this time they couldn’t account for. So they went to a hypnotist.”