Somehow Miriam found her way upstairs. She worked this out when she awakened sprawled on her bed, feet freezing and hot shivers chasing across her skin while a platoon of miners with pickaxes worked her head over. It was her bladder that woke her up and led her still half-asleep to the bathroom, where she turned on all the lights, shot the deadbolt on the door, used the toilet, and rummaged around for an Advil to help with the hangover symptoms. "What you need is a good shower," she told herself grimly, trying to ignore the pile of foul and stinking clothes on the floor that mingled with the towels she'd spilled everywhere the night before. Naked in a brightly lit pink and chromed bathroom, she spun the taps, sat on the edge of the bathtub, and tried to think her way past the haze of depression and pain.
"You're a big girl," she told the scalding hot waterfall as it gushed into the tub. "Big girls don't get bent out of shape by little things," she told herself. Like losing her job. "Big girls deal with divorces. Big girls deal with getting pregnant while they're at school, putting the baby up for adoption, finishing med school, and retraining for another career when they don't like the shitty options they get dealt. Big girls cope with marrying their boyfriends, then finding he's been sleeping with their best friends. Big girls make CEOs shit themselves when they come calling with a list of questions. They don't go crazy and think they're wandering around a rainy forest being shot at by armored knights with assault rifles." She sniffed, on the edge of tears.
A first rational thought intruded: I'm getting depressed and that's no good. Followed rapidly by a second one: Where's the bubble bath? Bubble bath was fun. Bubble bath was a good thought. Miriam didn't like wallowing in self-pity, although right now it was almost as tempting as a nice warm shower. She went and searched for the bubble bath, finally found the bottle in the trashcan—almost, but not entirely, empty. She held it under the tap and let the water rinse the last of the gel out, foaming and swirling around her feet.
Depression would be a perfectly reasonable response to losing my job, she told herself, if it was actually my fault. Which it wasn't. Lying back in the scented water and inhaling steam. But going nuts? I don't think so. She'd been through bad times. First the unplanned pregnancy with Ben, in her third year at college, too young and too early. She still couldn't fully articulate her reasons for not having an abortion; maybe if that bitch from the student counseling service hadn't simply assumed . . . but she'd never been one for doing what everyone expected her to do, and she'd been confident—maybe too confident—in her relationship with Ben. Hence the adoption. And then, a couple of years later when they got married, that hadn't been the smartest thing she'd ever done either. With twenty-twenty hindsight it had been a response to a relationship already on the rocks, the kind that could only end in tears. But she'd weathered it all without going crazy or even having a small breakdown. Iron control, that's me. But this new thing, the stumbling around the woods being shot at, seeing a knight, a guy in armor, with an M-16 or something—that was scary. Time to face the music. "Am I sane?" she asked the toilet duck.
Well, whatever this is, it ain't in DSM-IV. Miriam racked her memory for decade-old clinical lectures. No way was this schizophrenia. The symptoms were all wrong, and she wasn't hearing voices or feeling weird about people. It was just a single sharp incident, very vivid, realistic as—
She stared at her stained pants and turtleneck. "The chair," she muttered. "If the chair's missing, it was real. Or at least something happened."
Paradoxically, the thought of the missing chair gave her something concrete to hang on to. Dripping wet, she stumbled downstairs. Her den was as she'd left it, except that the chair was missing and there were muddy footprints by the french doors. She knelt to examine the floor behind her desk. She found a couple of books, dislodged from the shelf behind her chair when she fell, but otherwise no sign of anything unexpected. "So it was real!"
A sudden thought struck her and she whirled then ran upstairs to the bathroom, wincing. The locket!—
It was in the pocket of her pants. Pulling a face, she carefully placed it on the shelf above the sink where she could see it, then got into the bathtub. I'm not going nuts, she thought, relaxing in the hot water. It's real.
An hour later she emerged, feeling much improved. Hair washed and conditioned, nails carefully trimmed and stripped of the residue of yesterday's polish, legs itching with mild razor-burn, and skin rosy from an exfoliating scrub, she felt clean, as if she'd succeeded in stripping away all the layers of dirt and paranoia that had stuck to her the day before. It was still only lunchtime, so she dressed again: an old
T-shirt, jeans that had seen better days, and an old pair of sneakers.
The headache and chills subsided slowly, as did the lethargy. She headed downstairs slowly and dumped her dirty clothing in the washing machine. Then she poured herself a glass of orange juice and managed to force down one of the granola bars she kept for emergencies. This brought more thoughts to mind, and as soon as she'd finished eating she headed downstairs to poke around in the gloom of the basement.
The basement was a great big rectangular space under the floor of the house. The furnace, bolted to one wall, roared eerily at her; Ben had left lots of stuff with her, her parents had passed on a lot of their stuff too, and now one wall was faced in industrial shelving units.
Here was a box stuffed with old clothing that she kept meaning to schlep to a charity shop: not her wedding dress—which had gone during the angry month she filed for divorce—but ordinary stuff, too unimportant to repudiate. There was an old bag full of golf clubs, their chromed heads dull and speckled with rust. Ben had toyed with the idea of doing golf, thinking of it as a way up the corporate ladder. There was a dead lawn mower, an ancient computer of Ben's—probably a museum piece by now—and a workbench with vice, saws, drill, and other woodworking equipment, and maybe the odd bloodstain from his failed attempts to be the man about the house. There on that high shelf was a shotgun and a box of shells. It had belonged to Morris, her father. She eyed it dubiously. Probably nobody had used it since Dad bought it decades ago, when he'd lived out west for a few years, and what she knew about shotguns could be written on one side of a postage stamp in very large letters, even though Morris had insisted on teaching her to use a handgun. Some wise words from the heavyweight course on industrial espionage techniques the Weatherman HR folks had paid for her to take two years ago came back: You're a journalist, and these other folks are investigators. You're none of you cops, none of you are doing anything worth risking your lives over, so you should avoid escalating confrontations. Guns turn any confrontation into a potentially lethal one. So keep them the hell out of your professional life! "Shotgun, no," she mused. "But. Hmm. Handgun." Must stop talking to myself, she resolved.
"Do I really expect them to follow me here?" she asked the broken chest freezer, which gaped incomprehendingly at her. "Did I just dream it all?"
Back upstairs, she swiped her leather-bound planner from the desk and poured another glass of orange juice. Time to worry about the real world, she told herself. She went back to the hall and hit the "play" button on the answering machine. It was backed up with messages from the day before.
"Miriam? Andy here. Listen, a little bird told me about what happened yesterday and I think it sucks. They didn't have any details, but I want you to know if you need some freelance commissions you should give me a call. Talk later? Bye."
Andy was a junior editor on a rival tech-trade sheet. He sounded stiff and stilted when he talked to the telephone robot, not like a real person at all. But it still gave her a shiver of happiness, almost a feeling of pure joy, to hear from him. Someone cared, someone who didn't buy the vicious lie Joe Dixon had put out. That bastard really got to me, Miriam wondered, relief replaced by a flash of anger at the way she'd been treated.
Another message, from Paulette. Miriam tensed. "Miriam, honey, let's talk. I don't want to rake over dead shit, but there's some stuff I need to get straight in my head. Can I come around?"
She hit the "pause" button. Paulette sounded severely messed up. It was like a bucket of ice water down her spine. I did this. I got us both fired, she began thinking, and her knees tried to turn to jelly. Then she thought, Hold on. I didn't fire anybody! That switched on the anger again, but left her feeling distinctly shaky. Sooner or later she'd have to talk to Paulie. Sooner or—
She hit the "next message" button again.
Heavy breathing, then: "Bitch. We know where you live. Heard about you from our mutual friend Joe. Keep your nose out of our business or you'll be fucking sorry"—click.
Wide-eyed, she turned and looked over her shoulder. But the yard was empty and the front door was locked. "Bastards," she spat. But there was no caller-ID on the message and probably not enough to get the police interested in it. Especially not if Joe's minions at The Weatherman started mud slinging with forged fire-wall logs: They could make her look like the next Unabomber if they wanted to. For a moment, outrage blurred her vision. She forced herself to stop panting and sit down again, next to the treacherous, venomous answering machine. "Threaten me in my own home, will you? Fuck."
The gravity of her situation was only just sinking in. "Better keep a gun under my pillow," she muttered under her breath. "Bastards." The opposite wall seemed to be pulsing slightly, a reaction to her fury. She felt her fingers clenching involuntarily. "Bastards." Kicking her out of her job and smearing her reputation wasn't enough for them, was it? She'd show them—
—Something.
After a minute she calmed down enough to face the remaining message on the answering machine. She had difficulty forcing herself to press the button. But the next message wasn't another threat—quite the opposite. "Miriam, this is Steve from The Herald. I heard the news. Get in touch."
For that, she hit the "pause" button yet again, and this time frowned and scribbled a note to herself. Steve wasn't a chatty editor, like Andy; Steve treated words like dollar bills. And he wouldn't be getting in touch if it didn't involve work, even freelance work. A year ago he'd tried to head-hunt her, offering a big pay raise and a higher position. Taking stock of her options—and when they were due to mature—she'd turned him down. Now she had reason to regret it.
That was the end of her mailbox, and she hit the "erase" button hard enough to hurt her finger. Two editors talking about work, a former office mate wanting to chew over the corpse—and what sounded like a death threat. This isn't going to go away, she realized. I'm in it up to my neck now. A stab of guilt: So is Paulie. I'll have to talk to her. A ray of hope: For someone who's unemployed, I sure get a lot of business calls. A conclusion: Just as long as I stay sane I should be all right.
The living room was more hospitable right now than the chairless den, its huge french doors streaked with rain falling from a leaden sky. Miriam went through, considered building a fire in the hearth, and collapsed into the sofa instead. The combination of fear, anger, and tension had drained most of her energy. Opening her planner, she turned to a blank page and began writing:
I NEED WORK
Call Andy and Steve. Pass "Go." Collect freelance commissions. Collect two hundred dollars. Keep up the mortgage payments.
I AM GOING CRAZY
Well, no. This isn't schizophrenia. I'm not hearing voices, the walls aren't going soft, and nobody is beaming orbital mind control lasers at me. Everything's fine except I had a weird fugue moment, and the office chair is missing.
DID SOMEONE SLIP ME SOMETHING?
Don't be silly: Who? Iris? Maybe she and Morris tripped when they were younger, but she just wouldn't do that to me. Joe Dixon is a sleazebag with criminal connections, but he didn't offer me a drink. And who else have I seen in the past day? Anyway, that's not how hallucinogens work.
MAGIC
That's silly, too, but at least it's testable.
Miriam's eyes narrowed and she chewed the cap of her pen. This was going to take planning, but at least it was beginning to sound like she had her ducks lined up in a row. She began jotting down tasks:
1. Call Andy at The Globe. Try to sell him a feature or three.
2. Make appointment to see Steve at The Herald. See what he wants.
3. See Paulie. Check how she's doing. See if we can reconstruct the investigation without drawing attention. See if we can pitch it at Andy or Steve. Cover the angles. If we do this, they will turn nasty. Call FBI?
4. See if whatever I did last night is repeatable. Get evidence, then a witness. If it's me, seek help. If it's not me . . .
5. Get the story.
That afternoon Miriam went shopping. It was, she figured, retail therapy. Never mind the job-hunting, there'd be time for that when she knew for sure whether or not she was going insane in some obscurely nonstandard manner. It was October, a pretty time of year to go hiking, but fall had set in and things could turn nasty at the drop of a North Atlantic depression. Extensive preparations were therefore in order. She eventually staggered home under the weight of a load of camping equipment: tent, jacket, new boots, portable stove. Getting it all home on the T was a pain, but at least it told her that she could walk under the weight.
A couple of hours later she was ready. She checked her watch for the fourth time. She'd taken two ibuprofen tablets an hour ago and the propionic acid inhibitor should be doing its job by now.
She tightened the waist strap of her pack and stretched nervously. The garden shed was cramped and dark and there didn't seem to be room to turn around with her hiking gear and backpack on. Did I put the spare key back? she asked herself. A quick check proved that she had. Irrelevant thoughts were better than Am I nuts?—as long as they weren't an excuse for prevarication.
Okay, here goes nothing.
The locket. She held it in her left hand. With her right she patted her right hip pocket. The pistol was technically illegal—but as Ben had pointed out, he'd rather deal with an unlicensed firearms charge than his own funeral. The rattling memory of a voice snarling at her answering machine, the echo of rifle fire in the darkness, made her pause for a moment. "Do I really want to do this?" she asked herself. Life was complicated enough as it was.
Hell yes! Because either I'm mad, and it doesn't matter, or my birth-mother was involved in something huge. Something much bigger than a billion-dollar money-laundering scam through Proteome and Biphase. And if they killed her because of it— A sense of lingering injustice prodded her conscience. "Okay," she told herself. "Let's do it. I'm right behind myself." She chuckled grimly and flicked the locket open, half-expecting to see a photograph of a-woman, or a painting, or something else to tell her she needed help—
The knot tried to turn her eyes inside out, and then the hut wasn't there any more.
Miriam gasped. The air was cold, and her head throbbed—but not as badly as last time.
"Wow." She carefully pushed the locket into her left pocket, then pulled out her pocket dictaphone. "Memo begins: Wednesday, October 16, 8 p.m. It's dark and the temperature's about ten degrees colder . . . here. Wherever the hell 'here' is." She turned around slowly. Trees, skeletal, stretched off in all directions. She was standing on a slope, not steep but steep enough to explain why she'd skidded. "No sign of people. I can either go look for the chair or not. Hmm. I think not."
She looked up. Wind-blown clouds scudded overhead, beneath a crescent moon. She didn't turn her flashlight on. No call for attracting attention, she reminded herself. Just look around, then go home . . .
"I'm an astronaut," she murmured into the dictaphone. She took a step forward, feeling her pack sway on her back, toward a big elm tree. Turning around, she paused, then knelt and carefully placed an old potsherd from the shed on the leafy humus where she'd been standing. "Neil and Buzz only spent eight hours on the moon on that first trip. Only about four hours on the surface, in two excursions. This is going to be my moonwalk." As long as I don't get my damn fool self shot, she reminded herself. Or stuck. She'd brought her sleeping bag and tent, and a first-aid kit, and Ben's pistol (just in case, and she felt wicked because of it). But this didn't feel like home. This felt like the wild woods—and Miriam wasn't at home in the woods. Especially when there were guys with guns who shot at her like it was hunting season and Jewish divorcées weren't on the protected list.
Miriam took ten paces up the hill, then stopped and held her breath, listening. The air was chilly and damp, as if a fog was coming in off the river. There was nothing to hear—no traffic noise, no distant rumble of trains or jets. A distant avian hooting might signify an owl hunting, but that was it. "It's really quiet," Miriam whispered into her mike. "I've never heard it so silent before."
She shivered and looked around. Then she took her small flashlight out and slashed a puddle of light across the trees, casting long sharp shadows. "There!" she exclaimed. Another five paces and she found her brown swivel chair lying on a pile of leaf mold. It was wet and thoroughly the worse for wear, and she hugged it like a long-lost lover as she lifted it upright and carefully put it down. "Yes!"
Her temples throbbed, but she was overjoyed. "I found it," she confided in her dictaphone. "I found the chair. So this is the same place." But the chair was pretty messed up. Almost ruined, in fact—it had been a secondhand retread to begin with, and a night out in the rainy woods hadn't helped any.
"It's real," she said quietly, with profound satisfaction. "I'm not going mad. Or if I'm confabulating, I'm doing it so damn consistently—" She shook her head. "My birth-mother came here. Or from here. Or something. And she was stabbed, and nobody knows why, or who did it." That brought her back to reality. It raised echoes of her own situation, hints of anonymous threatening phone calls, and other unfinished business. She sighed, then retraced her steps to the potsherd. Massaging her scalp, she sat down on the spot, with her back to the nearby elm tree.
She stopped talking abruptly, thrust the dictaphone into her hip pocket, pulled out the locket, and held her breath.
The crunch of a breaking branch carried a long way in the night. Spooked, she flicked the locket open, focused on its depths, and steeled herself to face the coming hangover: She really didn't want to be out in the woods at night—at least, not without a lot more preparation.
The next morning—after phoning Andy at The Globe and securing a commission for a business supplement feature on VC houses, good for half a month's income, with the promise of a regular weekly slot if her features were good enough—Miriam bit the bullet and phoned Paulette. She was nerving herself for an answering machine on the fifth ring when Paulette answered.
"Hello?" She sounded hesitant—unusual for Paulie.
"Hi, Paulie! It's me. Sorry I didn't get back to you yesterday, I had a migraine and a lot of, uh, issues to deal with. I'm just about getting my head back together. How are you doing? Are you okay?"
A brief silence. "About as well as you'd expect," Paulette said guardedly.
"Have you had any, uh, odd phone calls?"
"Sort of," Paulette replied.
Miriam tensed. What's she concealing?
"They sent me a reemployment offer," Paulie continued, guardedly.
"They did, did they?" asked Miriam. She waited a beat. "Are you going to take it?"
"Am I, like hell!" Miriam relaxed slightly. Paulette sounded furious. She hadn't expected Paulie to roll over, but it was good to get this confirmation.
"That bad, huh? Want to talk about it? You free?"
"My days are pretty open right now—listen, are you busy? How about I come over to your place?"
"Great," Miriam said briskly. "I was worried about you, Paulie. After I got past being worried about me, I guess."
"Well. Should I bring a pizza?"
"Phew . . ." Miriam took stock. Just a bitch session together? Or something more going on? "Yeah, let's do that. I'll lay on the coffee right away."
"That'd be wonderful," Paulette said gratefully.
After she'd put the phone down, Miriam pondered her motives. She and Paulette had worked together for three years and had hung out together in their off-hours. Some people you met at work, socialized with, then lost contact after moving on; but a few turned into friends for life. Miriam wasn't sure which Paulie was going to turn out to be. Why did she turn the reemployment offer down? Miriam wondered. Despite being shell-shocked from the crazy business with the locket, she kept circling back to the Monday morning disaster with a rankling sense of injustice. The sooner they blew the lid off it in public, the sooner she could go back to living a normal life. But then the locket kept coming back up. I need a sanity check, Miriam decided. Why not Paulie? Better to have her think she'd gone nuts than someone whose friendship went back a long way and who knew Iris. Or was it?
An hour later the doorbell rang. Miriam stood up and went to answer it, trying to suppress her worries about how Paulette might be coming. She was waiting on the doorstep, impatiently tapping one heel, with a large shopping bag in hand. "Miriam!" Paulette beamed at her.
"Come in, come in." Miriam retreated. "Hey, what's that? Have you been all right?"
"I've been worse." Paulie bounced inside and shut the door behind her, then glanced around curiously. "Hey, neat. I was worried about you, after I got home. You didn't look real happy, you know?"
"Yeah. Well, I wasn't." Miriam relieved her of her coat and led her into the living room. "I'm really glad you're taking it so calmly. For me, I put in three years and nothing to show for it but hard work and junk bonds—then some asshole phoned me and warned me off. How about you? Have you had any trouble?"
Paulette peered at her curiously. "What kind of warning?"
"Oh, he kind of intimated that he was a friend of Joe's, and I'd regret it if I stuck my nose in any deeper. Playing at goodfellas, okay? I'd been worrying about you . . . What's this about a job offer?"
"I, uh—" Paulette paused. "They offered me my job back with strings attached," she said guardedly. "Assholes. I was going to accept till they faxed through the contract."
"So why didn't you sign?" Miriam asked, pouring a mug of coffee while Paulette opened the pizza boxes.
"I've seen nondisclosure agreements, Miriam. I used to be a paralegal till I got sick of lawyers, remember? This wasn't a nondisclosure agreement; it was a fucking straitjacket. If I'd signed it, I wouldn't even own the contents of my own head—before and after working for them. Guess they figured you were the ringleader, right?"
"Hah." There was a bitter taste in Miriam's mouth, and it wasn't from the coffee. "So. Found any work?"
"Got no offers yet." Paulette took a bite of pizza to cover her disquiet. "Emphasis on the yet. You?"
"I landed a freelance feature already. It's not going to cover the salary, but it goes a hell of a way. I was wondering—"
"You want to carry on working the investigation."
It wasn't a question. Miriam nodded. "Yeah. I want to get the sons of bitches, now more than ever. But something tells me moving too fast is going to be a seriously bad idea. I mean, there's a lot of money involved. If we can redo the investigative steps we've got so far, I figure this time we ought to go to the FBI first—and then pick a paper. I think I could probably auction the story, but I'd rather wait until the feds are ready to start arresting people. And I'd like to disappear for a bit while they're doing that." A sudden bolt of realization struck Miriam, so that she almost missed Paulette's reply: The locket! That's one place they won't be able to follow me! If—
"Sounds possible." Paulie looked dubious. "It's not going to be easy duplicating the research—especially now that they know we stumbled across them. Do you really think it's that dangerous?"
"If it's drugs money, you can get somebody shot for a couple of thousand bucks. This is way bigger than that, and thanks to our friend Joe, they now know where we live. I don't want to screw up again. You with me?"
After a moment, Paulette nodded. "I want them too." A flash of anger. "The bastards don't think I matter enough to worry about."
"But first there's something I need to find out. I need to vanish for a weekend," Miriam said slowly, a fully formed plan moving into focus in her mind—one that would hopefully answer several questions. Like whether someone else could see her vanish and reappear, and whether she'd have somewhere to hole up if the anonymous threats turned real—and maybe even a chance to learn more about her enigmatic birth-mother than Iris could tell her.
"Oh?" Paulette perked up. "Going to think things over? Or is there a male person in play?" Male persons in play were guaranteed to get Paulie's notice: Like Miriam, she was a member of the early thirties divorcée club.
"Neither." Miriam considered her next words carefully. "I ran across something odd on Monday night. Probably nothing to do with our story, but I'm planning on investigating it and I'll be away for a couple of days. Out of town."
"Tell me more!"
"I, um, can't. Yet." Miriam had worked it through. The whole story was just too weird to lay on Paulie without some kind of proof to get her attention. "However, you can do me a big favor, okay? I need to get to a rest area just off a road near Amesbury with some hiking gear. Yeah, I know that sounds weird, but it's the best way to make sure nobody's following me. If you could ride out with me and drive my car home, then put it back there two days later, that would be really good."
"That's . . . odd." Paulette looked puzzled. "What's with the magical mystery tour?"
Miriam improvised fast. "I could tell you, but then I'd have to get you to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would make anything The Weatherman offered you look liberal. And the whole thing is supersecret; my source might spike the whole deal if I let someone in on it without prior permission. I'll be able to tell you when you pick me up afterward, though." If things went right, she'd be able to tell a more-than-somewhat-freaked Paulie why she'd vanished right in front of her eyes and then reappeared in front of them. "And I want you to promise to tell nobody about it until you pick me up again, okay?"
"Well, okay. It's not as if I don't have time on my hands." Paulette frowned. "When are you planning on doing your disappearing act? And when do you want picking up?"
"I was—they're picking me up tomorrow at 2 p.m. precisely," said Miriam. "And I'll be showing up exactly forty-eight hours later." She grinned. "If you lie in wait—pretend to be eating your lunch or something—you can watch them pick me up."
Friday morning dawned cold but clear, and Miriam showered then packed her camping equipment again. The doorbell rang just after noon. It was Paulette, wearing a formal black suit. "My God, is it a funeral?"
"Had a job interview this morning." Paulette pulled a face. "I got sick of sitting at home thinking about those bastards shafting us and decided to do something for number one in the meantime."
"Well, good for you." Miriam picked up her backpack and led Paulie out the front door, then locked up behind her. She opened her car, put the pack in, then opened the front doors. "Did it go well?" she asked, pulling her seat belt on.
"It went like—" Paulette pulled another face. "Listen, I'm a business researcher, right? Just because I used to be a paralegal doesn't mean that I want to go back there."
"Lawyers," Miriam said as she started the engine. "Lots of work in that field, I guarantee you."
"Oh yeah," Paulette agreed. She pulled the sun visor down and looked at herself in the mirror. "Fuck, do I really look like that? I'm turning into my first ex-boss."
"Yes indeed, you look just like—naah." Miriam thought better of it and rephrased: "Congresswoman Paulette Milan, from Cambridge. You have the floor, ma'am."
"The first ex-boss is in politics now," Paulie observed gloomily. "A real dragon."
"Bitch."
"You didn't know her."
They drove on in amiable silence for the best part of an hour, out into the wilds of Massachusetts. Up the coast, past Salem, out toward Amesbury, off Interstate 95 and on to a four-lane highway, then finally a side road. Miriam had been here before, years ago, with Ben, when things had been going okay. There was a rest area up on a low hill overlooking Browns Point, capped by a powder of trees, gaunt skeletons hazed in red and auburn foliage at this time of year. Miriam pulled up at the side of the road just next to the rest area and parked. "Okay, this is it," she said. There were butterflies in her stomach again: I'm going to go through with it, she realized to her surprise.
"This?" Paulette looked around, surprised. "But this is nowhere!"
"Yeah, that's right. Best place to do this." Miriam opened the glove locker. "Look, I brought my old camcorder. No time for explanations. I'm going to get out of the car, grab my pack, and walk over there. I want you to film me. In ten minutes either I'll tell you why I asked you to do this and you can call me rude names—or you'll know to take the car home and come back the day after tomorrow to pick me up. Okay?"
"Miriam, this is nuts—"
She got out in a hurry and collected her pack from the trunk. Then, without waiting to see what Paulette did, she walked over to the middle of the parking lot. Breathing deeply, she hiked the pack up onto her back and fastened the chest strap—then pulled the locket out of the outer pocket where she'd stashed it.
Feeling acutely self-conscious, she flicked it open and turned her back on the parked car. Raised it to her face and stared into the enameled knot painted inside it. This is stupid, a little voice told her. And you're going to have your work cut out convincing Paulie you don't need to see a shrink.
Someone was calling her name sharply. She screened it out. Something seemed to move inside the knot—