We reached our destination, but Patrick parked a good fifty feet from the location of the accident.

“Why so far away?” I asked.

“If Chewbacca lost some items in the impact, I wouldn’t want to run them over.” Without waiting for a response, Patrick slammed the door and marched toward the accident site.

When we caught up with him, he was standing in the depression left by the corpse. The grass had almost completely recovered, leaving only a slight contour where the dead alien had come to rest.

I pointed at the road. “Nothing on the pavement. And if Chewbacca was thrown to here, any gadgets would probably fly this way as well.”

We searched for half an hour, carefully parting the scrub grass, but came up empty.

“An item wouldn’t be invisible, right?” Natalie said.

“I doubt it. The invisibility comes from either the belt or one of the items on it,” I replied. “Everything became visible as soon as we took it off the corpse. I don’t see why some other random item would have its own invisibility generator.”

“Fair enough,” Patrick said. “Then Chewbacca didn’t drop anything. Here, anyway.” He looked around. “I guess we have to follow the body. Where’d you load it up again?”

I pointed, and we spent a few minutes checking that location.

“Still nothing,” Patrick said. “Next, the truck. You haven’t brought it into the shop yet, have you?”

“Not yet,” I replied. “Monday.”

“Then we need to get this done now.”

“Well, hell,” Patrick said. The three of us sat slouched in our favorite chairs in the barn. A search of the truck had turned up nothing. We’d even rechecked the corpse and had come up empty.

“It was a nice theory,” I said. “Now I guess we have to consider the harder—”

My cell phone rang mid-sentence. It was Mrs. Kirby again. I knew she would just keep calling until I picked up. So I answered the phone and treated my friends to half of a conversation.

“Hello … ? Yes, hi … No, not that I know of. What does it look like … ? Oh, actually, yes, that is mine. Can I come over and get it … ? Great, thanks. Bye.”

I hung up feeling slightly foolish and turned to the others with a smile on my face. “So, uh, Mrs. Kirby was just calling me to ask if I dropped something of mine when I was delivering her groceries. A beautiful metallic blue, she says. She thought it might be a cell phone.”

Patrick chuckled. Nat asked, “How did it end up at her place?”

I opened my arms, palms up, in an expansive gesture of helplessness and futility at the sadistic randomness of the universe. “Fell out of the burrito onto her delivery when I was loading in the corpse? Who knows? At this point, who cares?” I glared at Patrick. “Why aren’t you already starting the car?”