Susannah held her brown hands up to her brown face and looked at them. “Then I guess he isn’t waiting for me,” she said.

“Yes,” Roland said, “he is.” And wondered, briefly, what color that other one was. Mia.

“We need a door,” Jake said.

“We need at least two,” Eddie said. “One to deal with Tower, sure. But before we can do that, we need one to go back to Susannah’s when. And I mean as close to when Roland took her as we can possibly get. It’d be a bummer to go back to 1977, get in touch with this guy Carver, and discover he had Odetta Holmes declared legally dead in 1971. That the whole estate had been turned over to relatives in Green Bay or San Berdoo.”

“Or to go back to 1968 and discover Mr. Carver was gone,” Jake said. “Funneled everything into his own accounts and retired to the Costa del Sol.”

Susannah was looking at him with a shocked oh-my-lands expression that would have been funny under other circumstances. “Pop Mose’d never do such a thing! Why, he’s my godfather!”

Jake looked embarrassed. “Sorry. I read lots of mystery novels—Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Ed McBain—and stuff like that happens in them all the time.”

“Besides,” Eddie said, “big money can do weird things to people.”

She gave him a cold and considering glance that looked strange, almost alien, on her face. Roland, who knew something Eddie and Jake didn’t, thought it a frog-squeezing look. “How would you know?” she asked. And then, almost at once, “Oh, sugar, I’m sorry. That was uncalled-for.”

“It’s okay,” Eddie said. He smiled. The smile looked stiff and unsure of itself. “Heat of the moment.” He reached out, took her hand, squeezed it. She squeezed back. The smile on Eddie’s face grew a little, started to look as if it belonged there.

“It’s just that I know Moses Carver. He’s as honest as the day is long.”

Eddie raised his hand—not signaling belief so much as an unwillingness to go any further down that path.

“Let me see if I understand your idea,” Roland said. “First, it depends upon our ability to go back to your world of New York at not just one point of when, but two.”

There was a pause while they parsed that, and then Eddie nodded. “Right. 1964, to start with. Susannah’s been gone a couple of months, but nobody’s given up hope or anything like that. She strolls in, everybody claps. Return of the prodigal daughter. We get the dough, which might take a little time—”

“The hard part’s apt to be getting Pop Mose to let go of it,” Susannah said. “When it comes to money in the bank, that man got a tight grip. And I’m pretty sure that in his heart, he still sees me as eight years old.”