17

The teeth felt colder than the shell casings. They were icy. Amity understood that they weren't in fact as cold as ice, that the iciness was perceived rather than real, a psychological reaction. If she'd been a tedious rescue-me kind of girl, she would have screamed as if her hair were on fire and would have run to Daddy, but she restrained herself for two reasons.

First, she wasn't that kind of girl. She would kick her own ass from here to Cucamunga if she ever found herself acting like such a dullard. Second, if she showed the teeth to him, Daddy would flash Amity and himself home to Earth Prime as fast as he could push a button, and they would never pay a visit to the Jamison house on Bastoncherry Lane in this world, where maybe her mother waited.

After tossing aside the additional shell casings that she'd found, she put the teeth in a pocket of her jeans and looked up at the storm-cloaked sky. She didn't expect a dragon. If something plunged out of the clouds, it would be far worse than a dragon with foot-long claws and bloody eyes and breath aflame. She didn't know what it might be, only that it would be worse.

Wiping the palm of her hand on her jeans, she looked out to sea. It was hard to tell where the sky met the water. Gray surf broke in a lace of dirty foam. She half expected dead bodies to start washing onto the shore.

She wasn't a pessimist and certainly not a depressive. Being raised without a mother sucked, and sometimes it was sad, but she was mostly happy, really and truly. Life was good—better than good, great—and every day she saw something beautiful that she had never seen before, and amazing things happened when she least expected them. She was too smart to be anything but an optimist. Until Earth 1.13. Now she wouldn't be surprised if the sea spewed out rotting corpses. The problem wasn't her; it was this weird place. Or maybe it was partly her. Although 1.13 was a sick and twisted world, maybe it wasn't half as bad as she thought. Some people just weren't good travelers. For them, no place could ever be as fine and right as home. Not Paris. Not London. Not Rio. Daddy was a homebody and a not-good traveler, and perhaps she shared his love of the familiar, of libraries where you felt welcome and parks where you didn't find biological debris maybe left over from a public mass execution.

She plucked the torn candy wrapper off the grass and peeled Snowball out of it. He clutched what might have been a chunk of nougat. She let him keep it and tucked him into a jacket pocket.

With a composure that made her proud, she returned to the bench and quietly gathered up the shell casings that she had placed there, for they would alarm her father almost as much as the teeth.

Enthralled by the book and oblivious of the little pile of brass, Daddy said, "Put your hand on my neck."

Quietly placing the shiny evidence of violence on the grass behind the bench, she said, "Why on your neck?"

"Just in case."

"In case what?"

"I'm going to push the SELECT button to see if I'm right about it. In case I'm wrong and we go flashing away somewhere, I think we have to be touching if we're to go together. Like we were touching, our hands clutching Snowball, in the kitchen when the little ratfink jumped onto this thing and set it off."

"It wasn't Snowball's fault. He's not a ratfink. Just curious."

"I meant ratfink in an affectionate way."

Growling engines on the coast highway drew Amity's attention. Three enormous, sinister-looking trucks cruised southward, one behind the other. They appeared to be armored, and she first thought they must be army vehicles, except that they were painted black with heavily tinted windows and bore no identifying insignia.

She put one hand on the back of her father's neck.

On the key to everything, he pushed the button labeled SELECT.

During an interminable two-second delay, Amity just knew she would never again see Justin Dakota, the boy at the end of the lane who had the potential to be shaped into husband material. Then the screen brightened with the words ENTER TIMELINE CATALOG NUMBER and provided a keypad.

"Just as I figured!" Daddy exclaimed.

He did not enter a number for a parallel world, but instead pressed CANCEL. For an instant Amity feared that in this case the word had a more ominous meaning than usual, that their entire existence would be canceled, as though they had never lived. Earth 1.13 was totally messing with her head. But the keyboard display vanished from the screen, the three buttons reappeared—HOME, RETURN, SELECT—and she and her father were still alive and whole, as was Snowball, who seemed to curl into a sphere in her pocket, as though he must be gripping the nougat in all four paws as he nibbled on it.

Being a mouse had its advantages. You were short-lived, yes, and fearfully vulnerable. On the other hand, your tiny brain didn't grasp how big and strange and dangerous the world was, so you never gave much thought to all the ways you could die and all the things that could be taken from you. For a mouse, the smallest pleasures were sources of great happiness: a peanut, a fluffy kernel of cheese popcorn, a bit of nougat, a warm pocket.

Having a mother might be like having nougat and a warm pocket. But once you lost her, finding her and getting her to come home again was a far bigger task than anything a mouse had to undertake.

Daddy rose from the bench with the Book of Ed and the key to everything. He frowned at the sky, at the sea, and then at Amity.

"Are you sure you really want to do this?" he said, meaning did she want to pay a visit to the house on Bastoncherry Lane.

"You promised we would."

"That's not what I asked, sweetheart."

She didn't dare look away from him. It was never a brilliant idea to break eye contact with her father when they were discussing something important. Even if there might be a thousand reasons she looked away, he unfailingly identified the right one. And then she couldn't hide anything from him. Sometimes this seemed really and truly supernatural, but because he never displayed other fantastic talents—like being able to fly or walk through walls—his ability to read her so clearly was evidently just an excellent parenting skill. With his Bakelite radios and Deco posters and love of the past and boyish enthusiasm, he was Jeffy to everyone, but when it mattered the most, he was always a Jeffrey.

"I want to do it," she said. "We have to do it. Maybe she's alone here. Maybe she's sad or in hideously dire circumstances."

"Hideously dire circumstances, huh?" He was reminding her not to be a drama queen.

"Sure. Why not? I mean, people often are in dire circumstances, not just in movies and books, but like for real. Maybe she needs help. Anyway, you and me—we don't walk out on people."

Instead of Amity breaking eye contact, her father broke it. He lowered his gaze to the right-hand pocket of her jeans, in which she had secreted the three teeth fixed in the fragment of jawbone, as though he could see through denim and knew what horror she had found in the grass.

She almost showed him the teeth, almost blurted out that this world was weirder and darker even than it seemed, that they had to rescue Michelle from a town where people were shot to pieces in a public park. But then she realized that she had unconsciously thrust her right hand into that pocket. The teeth were clenched tightly in her fist. This was what Daddy had noticed—her arm rigid, the fist bulging in her pocket. And—Merde!—her fist was twitching, bulging and twitching, her own stupid fist betraying her.

Letting go of the teeth, she withdrew her hand from the pocket. She was careful not to scrub her palm against her jeans because he'd know instantly that she'd been clutching some filthy object that disgusted her.

To have something to do with the traitorous hand, she pointed at the key to everything. "You sort of know how to use it now. If we get in any kind of trouble, you can flash us home."

He turned to gaze at Pacific Coast Highway, at the shops beyond, at the houses rising on the tiered hills.

Fortunately, no enormous armored trucks, flat black with darkly tinted windows, were passing at the moment.

Nevertheless, he said, "I don't like this place."

"I don't, either. Which is why we can't leave her here, Daddy. Not if maybe ... if maybe she needs us."

He met her eyes again.

Neither of them looked away from the other.

"All right," he said, pocketing the key to everything and plucking the book off the bench, "but let's be quick about it."