The phone that was ringing was an older touch-screen model. Diane picked it up. Definitely empty cardboard, and the display was a faded sticker. She pushed on the sticker where she would push to answer a cell phone, and then held the cardboard phone to her ear.

“Hello?”

“Stop being so obvious about yourselves,” said a man’s voice, one that she was familiar with although she could not place it.

“Obvious about ourselves?”

“Everyone knows you’re here. It’s not safe.” Diane pulled the cardboard phone away from her ear. Printed on the fake phone’s fake cardboard screen was a familiar-looking name.

“Evan?”

“No, it’s Evan.”

“That’s what I said. Evan.”

“Meet me at City Hall. Head straight back. Ignore what anyone tells you and ignore any signs. Just go down the hall from the front door and turn left when you see a door marked MAYOR. I’ll be waiting for you there.”

There was a click. She guessed he had hung up, but she didn’t know how he had called a cardboard phone in the first place.

“Evan,” she said to Jackie. “He asked us to meet him in the mayor’s office at City Hall.”

“Please. I don’t want to know what any of that was about,” said the woman. Her face was a grimace and her shivering arms were crossed over her chest. “Please just leave.”

“What is this town, really?” Jackie said tenderly, hoping to coax a memory out of her.

The woman relaxed and exhaled. Jackie felt a breakthrough, a confession or revelation coming, but there was only another, weaker “Please leave.” The woman’s face tightened back into sweat-drenched angst.

“I’m sorry,” said Diane. “Can you just tell me which direction down Pleasant Street to get to City Hall?”

The woman grunted and ran through a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, slamming and locking it behind her. Her voice came muffled through the closed door: “We don’t even have a mayor. We haven’t had one in years.”

“So. City Hall?” Jackie said, once they were outside.

“That’s where he is, I guess,” said Diane. She shielded her eyes and looked down Pleasant Street. “Let’s just start walking this way and see if we can find it.”

“It shouldn’t be hard to find. City halls are always huge and ornate and topped with ancient volcanic stone towers. Or, I mean, the only city hall we’ve ever seen is like that.”

There was nothing that looked remotely like that. There was a Safeway that was boarded up. CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS, said a sign hung crookedly on the boards, and then someone had crossed out RENOVATIONS with a paint pen and written in GOOD.

There was only one building left. It was low and small, with curtained windows, like a storefront church or a campaign office.

“I don’t suppose that could be City Hall,” said Diane. She started to move to it.