By the time they reached the county route, the line of thunderstorms had passed to the east in the direction of Albany, and media helicopters were moving in, raking the valley with their searchlights—evidently hunting for the most photogenic bits of catastrophe they could find. Gurney could almost hear the breathlessly creative RAM-TV news report on “the panicky flight into the night from what some suspect may have been a terrorist attack.”

Once free of the temporary congestion, Gurney drove as fast as he dared, and then some. With the speedometer reading between fifty and a hundred most of the way, he made it to the Cooperstown ER in about forty-five minutes. Amazingly, along the way not one word was spoken. The harrowing combination of the excessive speed, Gurney’s aggressive approach to curves, and the barely muffled roar of the big V8 seemed to freeze out any possibility of conversation en route—no matter how large and urgent the open issues and unanswered questions.

Two hours later, the situation was quite different.

Hardwick had been examined, probed, scanned, needled, stitched, bandaged, and transfused; put on an IV drip of antibiotics, painkillers, and electrolytes; and admitted to the general hospital for further observation. Kyle had arrived unexpectedly and had joined Gurney and Madeleine in Hardwick’s room. The three of them were sitting in chairs by Hardwick’s bed.

Kyle filled everyone in on everything that had occurred from the arrival of the police at the house up to the removal of Klemper’s body and the abrupt suspension of the initial investigatory process when they, along with all other police and emergency personnel in a fifty-mile radius, had been called to the fairgrounds—leaving a large area outside the house taped off as a designated crime scene. At that point, having overheard enough of the police communications to have a sense of the disaster in progress, Kyle had replaced the flat on the car with the spare and headed for the fairgrounds himself. It was then that he checked his phone and found his father’s message about driving to the Cooperstown hospital.

When he finished his narrative, Madeleine let out a nervous laugh. “I guess you figured if a madman was blowing up the fair, that’s where your father would be?”

Kyle looked uncomfortable, glanced at Gurney, said nothing.

Madeleine smiled and shrugged. “I’d have made the same assumption.” Then she asked a question of no one in particular in a deceptively casual tone. “First it was Lex Bincher. Then Horace. Then Mick Klemper. Who was supposed to be next?”

Kyle looked again at his father.

Hardwick was lying back against a pile of pillows, restful but alert.

Gurney finally offered a reply so oblique, it was hardly a reply at all. “Well, the main thing, the important thing, the only thing that matters, is that it’s all over.”

Now they all stared at him—Kyle curious, Hardwick skeptical, Madeleine baffled.