The building stood on Main Street with a view of the Kickaha River, and only the railroad tracks and a thin strip of lawn separated the street from the water. Stairs led down to a wooden dock with a couple of benches on it. From the dock, one could sit and look out on the river and the foothills of the mountains that began their northward climb from the far shore.

When they got back to the hotel, Lizzie and Siobhan took the stairs down and sat on one of the benches, neither of them ready quite yet to go inside the hotel and have to interact with other people. Siobhan was still quiet and Lizzie couldn’t really blame her. She’d actually experienced the whole weird business last night, and she could hardly get her head around it herself. And now there was this new mystery of Tommy being so deferential to Grey.

“What am I going to do?” she said when they’d been sitting there for awhile.

Siobhan shook her head. “I don’t know, Lizzie. Maybe you should just get your car this afternoon and hope it all goes away.”

Lizzie gave a slow nod. She sure didn’t want to run into those bogans again. And Grey hadn’t exactly been friendly. But Walker had. And then there was the whole mystery, the adventure of it all. The idea that this whole other world existed, side by side to this one, only hidden from it unless you happened to stray or were drawn into it.

“I don’t think I can forget about it,” she said.

“I’m still trying to understand it myself,” Siobhan told her. “It’s so unbelievable.”

“But you heard what Tommy said about the alternator and Grey.”

“I’m not saying I don’t believe it happened,” Siobhan said. “Not anymore, because obviously something did. But I’m still having trouble getting my head around it. I mean, from what you were telling me, there could be little fairy people all around us right now, and we’d never know.”

Lizzie shivered. “Don’t say that.”

“But there could, couldn’t there?”

Lizzie turned on the bench and studied the steep slope of the river bank on either side of them. The rushes and weeds were tall and brown, but thinned enough by the winter snows that a person couldn’t easily hide in them. But when she thought of how the bogans, not to mention Grey and Walker, were able to just appear and disappear, stepping to and from this between place Grey had mentioned . . .

“I guess,” she said.

“You said the deer man—”

“Walker.”

Siobhan nodded. “You said he told you if you called his name, he’d come, didn’t you?”

Lizzie saw where she was going.

“I couldn’t do that,” she said.

“But then we’d know for sure. And maybe he could explain what you’re supposed to do.”