The perfect impossibility of that gave her a deep, uneasy feeling. Because it looked like that was exactly what had happened. Which made no sense.

She did a slow turn, looking for an answer. Her world was numbers, and numbers made sense. They didn’t lie. People might try to make them lie, but in the end they always told the truth.

As she completed the turn she noticed with a start that Donny had disappeared. Just like the trailers.

“Donny? Don—?”

“Coming,” he said as he trotted up the trail toward her, waving a tire iron.

“What’s that for?”

“It’s got to be a trick.”

He stopped before the stony expanse and hammered at it with the iron. It made just the kind of clank one would expect from steel striking solid stone. Moving back and forth he kept striking the stone until finally hurling the tire iron back down the trail with a frustrated howl.

“There’s got to be an answer!”

“Of course there is,” Hari said. “We just don’t know it. Yet. We get back in the car and inspect the road with a fine-tooth comb.”

“But the tracks clearly show heavy traffic turning in here.”

Hari started back toward the car. “We keep looking.”

And look they did, up and down the mountain road, but found nothing. Being on the east side of the hill, they lost the light early and were forced to call it quits.

As they headed back toward Albany, Donny said, “Didn’t Sherlock Holmes say something about eliminating the impossibles or the like?”

She knew that one. “You mean, ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth’? That one?”

“That’s the one. I feel we’ve eliminated the possible, so that leaves us with impossible.”

“‘Impossible,’ by definition cannot be, so what we’re really left with is the improbable.”

“Sounds like word games, but I’ll play. What’s the next step?”

“We find a hotel, eat, sleep, and get back to the industrial park first thing in the morning.”

“How do we know there’ll be another convoy?”

“Did you see the size of that warehouse? I’m guessing they’ve got a lot of whatever to move and I don’t see them wasting any time.”

He grinned. “Hotel, huh? How many rooms we renting?”

She had to laugh. “You’re kidding, right?”

A wider grin. “Well, one room would save Art some money.”

She pointed to the radio. “See if you can find a classic rock station. Maybe they’re playing Aerosmith.”

“Aero…?” His brow furrowed, then he laughed. “Oh, I get it. Dream On, right?”

“Riiiiight.”

At least he knew that one. But then, everybody knew Aerosmith.

BARBARA

I’m ashamed to admit that it took me a couple of hours to muster the courage to enter the passage. I spent much of the intervening time with my head under the arch, calling to Ellie. Apparently, in her panic, Bess had dropped her penlight and it remained on, lighting the end of the passage with a faint glow.