"You should've looked closer," he said. "They were Canadian coins some toll clerk stuck me with on my last trip to this state. Been waiting to return the favor ever since."

"How long ago was that?"

"A year," he said. "Or so."

Nimec drove on through. About fifteen miles beyond the toll he turned right at the Augusta exit, stopped for gas, then continued past some worn-looking strip malls and a couple of traffic circles onto Route 3, a hilly stretch of two-lane blacktop rolling eastward toward the coast.

Beside him, Megan looked out her window and fell back into preoccupied silence. The sky was a drab gray sheet of clouds, the wind becoming increasingly aggressive as they neared the coast. It sheered off the sides of the car, skirling into the interior through invisible spaces between its doors and frame, blowing across the dashboard in chill currents that slowly brought the heater into submission. In between long unvaried stretches of woods there were filling stations and junk dealers, and more filling stations and more junk dealers, few with any customers, the scenery rambling on with a kind of lowering, stagnant monotony that seemed endless. Meg could have easily believed the haphazard piles of reclaimed sinks and bicycles and Formica tabletops and dishes and garden rakes and knickknacks being hawked out of shacks or trailers along the road had been accumulating for decades and never went anywhere at all.

Shivering, she sank her chin deeper into her collar. She was wearing a black leather jacket, blue jeans, and black ankle boots. Her thick auburn hair was pulled back in a ponytail under a duckbilled Army field cap.

Nimec thought she looked uncharacteristically tired around the eyes.

"Wonder who'd buy those old throwaways," she said. "I don't know," he said. "You've got to keep in mind that everything in this part of the country has an afterlife, including inanimate objects."

"Sounds unholy."

He shrugged. "Some might call it Yankee frugality."

She gave him a wan smile, leaned forward, and turned on the radio, but the Boston all-news station she'd been able to pick up earlier in the ride had grown unintelligibly faint. After almost a minute of listening to static drift, she pushed the "Off" button and sat back.

"Nothing," she said.

"Probably better for you."

She glanced over at him. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"We saw the newspaper headlines at the airport, heard the updates on the radio driving out of Portland," Nimec said. "I'm no less anxious to hear about the Orion investigation than you or anyone else. But it gets to where you know there won't be any developments for a while and are just letting the media beat you over the head with information that's already been reported a thousand times over."

"I'm not prone to self-abuse, Pete."

"That wasn't my meaning. But I can't help thinking it might've been better for you to postpone this trip--"

"We had an agreement. You show me yours, I show you mine."