Always, away from Hawaii, the world looked older and darker, in muted light under a lower sky, the landscape lumpier, and fenced, much of it gouged by plows. But the trees were taller, the houses bigger and more solid and severe than any in Hawaii. The road through the flat-topped hills was lined by blackish woods, and in some hollows they saw a white-painted house and what looked like a farm, planted fields or a tethered horse, a dog rushing to the perimeter fence when they slowed the car.

“Parts of the West Country look like this,” Olive said. “Devon. Dorset.”

Meadows, rivulets running through them, browsing cows. The woods were leafier and softer, the trees agitated by the breeze, and where the land was low-lying it was muddy. Yet it didn’t have a visible edge, as Hawaii did—you weren’t confined, you could keep driving.

“I’d die in a place with no water.”

“Voilà, there’s some water.” In the depth of a valley the shining folds and corrugations of a shallow river tumbling over water-smoothed boulders.

“How much farther?” Sharkey asked, then sagged and slept.

It was early evening when they reached Floristan, Sharkey coughing himself awake as the car stopped. They found the motel Olive had booked, and, too tired to eat, heavy with jet lag, they slept, waking before dawn, lying in each other’s arms.

Sharkey said, “What would I do without you?” in a whisper. “I’d be lost without you.”

She had no reply to this. She was too moved to speak, grateful for his acknowledgment.

“I’ve never said that to anyone.” He breathed it into her ear. “I’ve never felt it.”

“Lovey,” she said.

“My father used to tell his men, ‘Consider yourself already dead, and you’ll be fine.’”

He’d told her that before, numerous times, fixed in the trauma of his repeating-himself phase. She did not remind him. She kissed him; she said, “Buck up, mate, we’ll muddle through this.”

But over breakfast at a diner next door to the motel—“A real breakfast,” Olive said—he sat, looking futile once more. Olive took a sheet of paper from her folder and pushed it across the table to Sharkey, who was licking pancake syrup from his fingers.

“Read it to me,” he said.

She didn’t need to consult it, she knew what was written on it. She said, “We’re going to his school, to the town hall, to the registrar of deeds, to the police station—all the places that might have a record of him or his family.”

“We could have found records online, like that moke Stickney did.”

“Just bumf.”

“Bumf?”

“Bum fodder. Paperwork. You say you hate it and you’re probably right. We have to talk to people who might have known him—family, friends, anyone. We need to find out who he was.”

“Where do we go first?”