“Also,” Jake said apologetically, “we weren’t even really there, at least not the way you are when you go through one of the doors. They sensed us, but basically we were invisible.”

“Let’s take one thing at a time,” Susannah said. “As far as money goes, I have plenty. If we could get at it, that is.”

“How much?” Jake asked. “I know that’s sort of impolite—my mother’d faint if she heard me ask someone that, but—”

“We’ve come a little bit too far to worry about being polite,” Susannah said. “Truth is, honey, I don’t exactly know. My dad invented a couple of new dental processes that had to do with capping teeth, and he made the most of it. Started a company called Holmes Dental Industries and handled the financial side mostly by himself until 1959.”

“The year Mort pushed you in front of the subway train,” Eddie said.

She nodded. “That happened in August. About six weeks later, my father had a heart attack—the first of many. Some of it was probably stress over what happened to me, but I won’t own all of it. He was a hard driver, pure and simple.”

“You don’t have to own any of it,” Eddie said. “I mean, it’s not as if you jumped in front of that subway car, Suze.”

“I know. But how you feel and how long you feel it doesn’t always have a lot to do with objective truth. With Mama gone, it was my job to take care of him and I couldn’t handle it—I could never completely get the idea that it was my fault out of my head.”

“Gone days,” Roland said, and without much sympathy.

“Thanks, sug,” Susannah said dryly. “You have such a way of puttin things in perspective. In any case, my Dad turned over the financial side of the company to his accountant after that first heart attack—an old friend named Moses Carver. After my Dad passed, Pop Mose took care of things for me. I’d guess that when Roland yanked me out of New York and into this charming piece of nowhere, I might have been worth eight or ten million dollars. Would that be enough to buy Mr. Tower’s lot, always assuming he’d sell it to us?”

“He probably would sell it for deerskins, if Eddie’s right about the Beam,” Roland said. “I believe a deep part of Mr. Tower’s mind and spirit—the ka that made him hold onto the lot for so long in the first place—has been waiting for us.”

“Waiting for the cavalry,” Eddie said with a trace of a grin. “Like Fort Ord in the last ten minutes of a John Wayne movie.”

Roland looked at him, unsmiling. “He’s been waiting for the White.”