“I guess not. But Doctor Crowder may have been right. It could have been Toby’s window banging.”

“So you think I’m imagining things, too?”

“Honey, I don’t. I believe what you say. I heard the noises myself. It’s just that, well, a wooden man? It could have been a freak kind of reflection, you know. A trick of the light.”

Neil walked across to the other side of the kitchen, and stared for two or three minutes out of the window. He could see the grass waving on the opposite side of the fence, the grass where the man in the long white duster coat had been standing. Perhaps, after all, the man was nothing more than an optical illusion. Dave Conway hadn’t seen him in the bay, and Susan hadn’t seen him outside the yard. Perhaps he only existed inside Neil’s mind. And Toby’s, too, of course.

Neil said, “I think I’m going to go out for a few hours. I need to turn this thing over, get it straight in my head.”

Susan came over and put her arms around him. “I love you,” she said in a soft voice.

“I know,” he told her.

“What are you going to do about the wardrobe?” she asked.

“I’ll break it up when I get back. We’ll have a bonfire in the yard. Maybe we can bake some potatoes. It’s about time we tried to have ourselves a little fun.”

“You won’t be long, will you?”

He checked his watch. “It’s eleven-thirty now. I’ll be back in time to pick up Toby from school.”

He gave her a light kiss on the forehead, and then he took the pickup keys from their hook by the door, and left the house without another word. Susan watched him go. When the dust from the truck had drifted away, she went through to the living room and called her mother on the telephone. She had a feeling that what she had just felt was the first tremor of some kind of earthquake, and that before long she was going to need all the help she could find.

The phone rang and rang but her mother didn’t answer. She hoped that wasn’t a bad omen.

*

Neil drove through to Santa Rosa, over the winding rural road that took him through Sebastopol, and out onto 101 by the Shell gas station. Inland, it was sunny and hot, and he drove with what he always called his two-fifty air conditioning (two windows open at fifty miles an hour). He was sweating, and his shirt stuck to the vinyl seat, but he scarcely noticed the temperature. He turned left on 101 and headed north.

On the pickup’s radio, Warren Zevon was singing Werewolves of London. He wasn’t listening. He was looking for the turnoff to Petrified Forest Road, which would lead him over the redwood-forested Sonoma mountains to Calistoga.