The town of Serena Station appeared beyond a bend in the two-lane road, with a street sign indicating that it was now called Land’s End Road. The street ran in a straight line for three blocks and ended abruptly at a locked gate. Beyond the gate, the road wound up a low hill, but it didn’t look like anyone had traveled it for quite some time. There were numerous cars parked in town-in driveways, along the streets, behind the general store-but nothing seemed to move except the wind. A few houses were boarded up, their exteriors bereft of color. In front of one, the paint on the white picket fence had been stripped to the wood, and portions of it sagged. In the small patchy lawns, what little grass remained was dry, and the ground looked hard and unforgiving. In one yard, a camper shell sat under an overhang of corrugated green plastic sheets. There were tree stumps and a tumble of firewood. What had once been the automobile-repair shop stood open to the elements. A tall, dark palm tree towered above a length of chain-link fence that extended across the rear. A stack of fifty-five-gallon oil drums had been left behind. Weeds grew in dry-looking puffs that, in time, the wind would blow free, sending them rolling down the middle of the road. A hound trotted along a side street on a doggie mission of some kind.

Behind the town the hills rose sharply, not mountains by any stretch. They were rugged, without trees, hospitable to wildlife but uninviting to hikers. I could see power lines looping from house to house, and a series of telephone poles stretched away from me like hatch marks on a pencil drawing. We parked and got out, ambling down the middle of the cracked blacktop road. There were no sidewalks and no streetlights. There was no traffic and, therefore, no traffic lights. “Not exactly bustling,” I remarked. “I take it the auto-repair shop went belly-up.”

“That belonged to Tannie’s brother, Steve. Actually, he moved his operation into Santa Maria, figuring if someone’s car broke down, the owner would never manage to get it out here. He wasn’t about to offer to go get them. At the time, he only had one tow truck and that was usually out of commission.”

“Not much of an advertisement for auto repair.”

“Yeah, well he was bad at it anyway. Once he moved, he hired a couple of mechanics and now he’s doing great.”

Daisy pointed out the house where Chet Cramer lived with his current wife. “The Cramers were the only family with any sizeable income. They had the first television set anybody’d ever seen. If you played your cards right, you could watch Howdy Doody or Your Show of Shows. Liza took me over there once, but Kathy didn’t like me so I wasn’t invited back.”