“Wow.” She carefully pushed the locket into her left pocket, then pulled out her pocket dictaphone. “Memo begins: Wednesday, October 16, 8 P.M. It’s dark and the temperature’s about ten degrees colder…here. Wherever the hell ‘here’ is.” She turned around slowly. Trees, skeletal, stretched off in all directions. She was standing on a slope, not steep but steep enough to explain why she’d skidded. “No sign of people. I can either go look for the chair or not. Hmm. I think not.”

She looked up. Wind-blown clouds scudded overhead, beneath a crescent moon. She didn’t turn her flashlight on. No call for attracting attention, she reminded herself. Just look around, then go home…

“I’m an astronaut,” she murmured into the dictaphone. She took a step forward, feeling her pack sway on her back, toward a big elm tree. Turning around, she paused, then knelt and carefully placed an old potsherd from the shed on the leafy humus where she’d been standing. “Neil and Buzz only spent eight hours on the moon on that first trip. Only about four hours on the surface, in two excursions. This is going to be my moonwalk.” As long as I don’t get my damn fool self shot, she reminded herself. Or stuck. She’d brought her sleeping bag and tent, and a first-aid kit, and Ben’s pistol (just in case, and she felt wicked because of it). But this didn’t feel like home. This felt like the wild woods—and Miriam wasn’t at home in the woods. Especially when there were guys with guns who shot at her like it was hunting season and Jewish divorcées weren’t on the protected list.

Miriam took ten paces up the hill, then stopped and held her breath, listening. The air was chilly and damp, as if a fog was coming in off the river. There was nothing to hear—no traffic noise, no distant rumble of trains or jets. A distant avian hooting might signify an owl hunting, but that was it. “It’s really quiet,” Miriam whispered into her mike. “I’ve never heard it so silent before.”

She shivered and looked around. Then she took her small flashlight out and slashed a puddle of light across the trees, casting long sharp shadows. “There!” she exclaimed. Another five paces and she found her brown swivel chair lying on a pile of leaf mold. It was wet and thoroughly the worse for wear, and she hugged it like a long-lost lover as she lifted it upright and carefully put it down. “Yes!”

Her temples throbbed, but she was overjoyed. “I found it,” she confided in her dictaphone. “I found the chair. So this is the same place.” But the chair was pretty messed up. Almost ruined, in fact—it had been a secondhand retread to begin with, and a night out in the rainy woods hadn’t helped any.