They return to the house. No luck. It’s really very frustrating.

After that it’s a matter of friends they might be visiting. Vicar Sebastian feels telephoning around is a bad idea, so there follows a nightmarish interval of visits to all the friends of the Keilbachers they know: finding they aren’t there, pausing to give the friends the news, driving on.

Lucy begins to feel more and more strongly that they should find them, it strikes her as terrible, somehow, that so many people should know and Emma and Martin still be unaware. They’re all getting frustrated, vexed, upset; it’s hard to agree on what to try next.

“Do you suppose they already heard from the police?” Sebastian asks.

Lucy shakes her head. “Abe came straight to me, there wouldn’t have been time, I don’t think.”

They track all the way to Seal Beach where the Jansens moved, then into Irvine, back to the house, over to the church, then to the Cinema 12 theaters down in Tustin.… No luck, they just aren’t to be found.

“Where are they?” Lucy demands angrily. Helena and the vicar, cowed by Lucy’s determination to find them, are out of ideas.

Defeated, Lucy can only drive back to their house, frustrated and mystified. Where in the world are they?

She parks on the street in front of the Keilbachers’ duplex. The three of them sit in the car and wait.

There isn’t much to say. The whole neighborhood is still. The streetlight overhead flickers. Street, gutter, curb, grass, sidewalk, grass, driveways, houses, they’re all flickering too, leeched of color by the mercury vapor’s blue glow: a gray world, flickering a little. It’s strange: like holding watch for some mysterious organization, or performing a new ritual that they don’t fully understand. So strange, Lucy thinks, the things life leads you into doing.

Headlights appear at the bottom of the street, and Lucy’s heart jumps in her, like a small child trapped inside, trying to escape. The car approaches slowly. Turns into the Keilbachers’ driveway.

“Oh, my God,” says Helena, and begins to cry.

The vicar begins to cry.