He followed his beam toward the bulletin board. WELCOME CAMPERS, SUMMER 2014, the paper read, and beneath it, filling the page, a list of names—the usual Jacobs and Joshuas and Andrews, but also a Sacha and even an Akeem—each followed by the number of the cabin to which he’d been assigned. Wolgast had been a camper for three years, the last—the summer he’d turned twelve—working as a junior counselor, sleeping in a cabin with a group of younger boys, many of them beset by a homesickness so debilitating it was like an illness. Between the ones who cried all night and the midnight antics of their tormentors, Wolgast had barely slept a wink all summer. And yet he’d never been so happy; those days were, in many ways, the best of his boyhood, a golden hour. It was, in fact, the very next autumn that his parents had taken him to Texas and all their troubles began. The camp had been owned by a man named Mr. Hale—a high school biology teacher with the deep voice and barrel rib cage of a linebacker, which he once had been. He was a friend of Wolgast’s father, though he’d never acknowledged this friendship through any special treatment that Wolgast could recall.

Mr. Hale had lived upstairs during the summers with his wife, in some kind of apartment. That’s what Wolgast was looking for now. He stepped through a swinging door off the common area and found himself in the kitchen: rustic pine cabinets, a pegboard of oxidizing pots and saucepans, a sink with an old-fashioned pump, and a stove and refrigerator with its door half open, all surrounding a wide pine-plank table. Everything was coated with a heavy scrim of dust. The stove was an old commercial unit, white steel, with a clock on the faceplate, the hands frozen at six minutes after three. He turned one of the burner dials and heard a hiss of gas.

From the kitchen, a narrow stairway ascended to the second floor, a warren of tiny rooms tucked under the eaves. Most were empty, but in two he found a couple of cots, the mattresses turned over to face the walls. And something else: in one of the rooms, on a trestle table by the window, an apparatus of dials and switches that he took to be a shortwave radio.

He returned to the car. Amy was still sleeping, curled beneath the blanket. He shook her gently awake.

She rose and rubbed her eyes. “Where are we?”

“Home,” he told her.