So now Annie was offering no further input. Let him do what he liked. A subject she’d not revisited was what he’d said three days earlier, that this town was where John now resided. She’d been waiting for that other shoe to drop, wondering whether he’d have more to say about where Dad was spending the afterlife. But it had not, so far, come up again, and she had decided it best not to push.

Annie had tucked those sketches she’d drawn a few days ago under the pad of paper and discreetly brought them out for another look. She hadn’t decided whether she wanted Charlie to see them. Maybe she was being too protective. He liked monsters as much as the next kid, but there was something about this new creation of hers that was particularly unsettling.

She took a fresh sheet, taped it to the slanted table, with the intention of taking another run at it. The first attempt had been done with her eyes looking elsewhere, so this would be a more serious effort. She’d never considered, until now, doing a dark graphic novel, something for a totally different audience than she’d appealed to in the past. Unless, she thought wryly, she turned Pierce into an avenging penguin on a campaign to slaughter all the corporate overlords who’d contributed to global warming and the shrinking of the polar ice caps.

For her own amusement, she dashed off a Pierce wielding a machine gun with a word bubble that read, “Take that, motherfucker.” She chuckled to herself, took a moment to enjoy it, then crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash.

Back to the rat-wolf.

She started with his head. Concentrated on details. The shape of his snout, the menacing look in his eyes. She did a few quick lines to suggest whiskers. She went back to the eyes, narrowed them to slits. Yeah, that added a new level of creepiness.

“Whatcha doing?” Charlie asked, flipping over onto his back and looking at his mother.

“Nothing much,” she said. “Just trying out all these new pencils and markers. Fin set me up very nicely here.”

“Do you feel like a snack?” he asked, which actually meant that he felt like a snack, and wanted his mother to get him one.

“Go down and have a look,” Annie said. “And could you bring me back a Coke?”

Charlie departed, allowing Annie a moment to sit back and have a look at what she’d done.

“We meet again,” she said, shaking her head in wonder. She might have put it out of her mind for years, but she’d not forgotten what she’d imagined seeing through her mental window. The face of that man in Penn Station. His smile. It had seemed so real at the time, but she was a child, with an overly active imagination.