1

Sometimes on a cloudless night when the westering moon left a contrail of shimmering silver light on the otherwise dark sea, when the air was so clear that the distant stars seemed almost as bright as Venus, when the infinite galaxies floating overhead had a weight of wonder that enchanted him, Jeffy Coltrane became convinced that something incredible, something magical, might happen. Although he was a hard worker and in debt to no one, he was also something of a dreamer. On this splendid Wednesday evening, the eleventh day of April, wonder was center stage, but unexpected terror waited in the wings.

After dinner in their favorite restaurant, realizing the tide was low, Jeffy and his eleven-year-old daughter, Amity, took off their sneakers and socks, rolled up their jeans, and waded out to the sea-smoothed rock formations slightly north of downtown Suavidad Beach, California. They sat side by side, their legs drawn up, arms around their knees, facing west toward the Far East, where Japan lay thousands of miles away in tomorrow afternoon.

"We live on a kind of time machine," Amity said.

"How do you figure?"

"Part of the planet's a day in the future, part is a day in the past, and it's like tomorrow afternoon in Japan."

"Maybe you should go live in Tokyo for a month and each day phone to tell me what horses will win at Santa Anita."

"Yeah," she said, "but if it worked that way, then everybody would be crazy rich from scamming the races."

"Or there'd be no races because they were scammed into ruin, and all those poor horses would be out of work."

"So you know what that means," she said.

"Do I?"

"Never scam. Doing the right thing is the easiest thing."

"You heard that somewhere, did you?"

"I've been totally brainwashed."

"Fathers don't brainwash their children."

"Bullsugar."

"No, really. We propagandize them."

"What's the difference?"

"Propaganda is gentler than brainwashing. You often don't even know it's happening."

"Oh, I know it's happening, all right," she said. "'Cause it's like always happening."

"You're so terribly, terribly oppressed."

She sighed. "I endure."

Jeffy smiled and shook his head. The incredible, magical thing that he, a dreamer, sometimes anticipated had in fact happened a long time ago. Her name was Amity.

A slight breeze issued off the ocean, scented faintly with salt and—he believed, he knew—with exotic fragrances of far nations so subtle the nose could suspect but not quite detect their existence.

After a silence, Amity said, "So it was the right thing to wait seven years?"

"To keep hope alive for seven years. Yeah. Remaining hopeful is always the right way to be."

"So then wouldn't it be the right thing to wait another seven?"

"I'll never stop hoping, sweetheart. But eventually ... we have to move on."

Seven years earlier, when Amity was four, Michelle walked out on them. She said that she felt empty, that nothing about her life was the way she had foreseen. She needed to get control of her destiny, and then she could come home to him and Amity.

They'd never heard from her again.

Like Jeffy, Michelle Jamison had been born and raised in sunny Suavidad Beach. Perhaps her sense that her life had gone wrong began when her mother died in childbirth.

Twenty-two years later, just a day after Michelle gave birth to Amity, her beloved father, Jim Jamison, a crew supervisor employed by the power company, was electrocuted while overseeing maintenance on a transformer in a subterranean vault.

Thereafter, Amity's birthday inevitably reminded Michelle not only of her father's death but also of the mother who had been lost to her on the day of her own birth. She wasn't a pessimist, didn't suffer from depression, was in fact a lively woman with a sparkling sense of humor and a love of life. But at times, she felt that her hometown was a haunted place, that the past would weigh too heavily on her as long as she lived there.

She went away to find herself, and evidently she never did.

Every attempt Jeffy made to locate her led nowhere. The private investigator whom he hired seven years earlier and the one he hired only a year ago failed. A determined woman could reinvent herself so effectively that anyone searching for her would need considerably more resources than Jeffy could tap. Never having known her mother, having lost her dad the day after she gave birth to Amity, beginning to lose her dream of success as a musician, she had been vulnerable. Jeffy blamed himself for failing to recognize the depth of her vulnerability. He wished he had never let her go.

By law, Michelle had been missing long enough to be declared dead by a court, but Jeffy hadn't taken that solemn step. He refused to think it could be true. If he believed that she was happy in a new life ... well, then she must be. Belief was a powerful force. He proceeded with a legal action only to dissolve their marriage.

This week, his petition had been approved.

At thirty-four, he was not exactly starting over. He was completing his recuperation. He still wore his wedding ring.

The slow, easy waves lapped against the low rock formation on which he and his daughter sat, and the gentle surf foamed on the beach in a chorus of murmurs, as if the sea were sharing secrets with the shore.

"What if Mom comes home someday? Will you marry her again?"

Having lived with this loss so long, they dwelt in neither sorrow nor resentment. For Michelle, they shared a sweet melancholy salted with nostalgia not about what had been but about what might have been. Indeed, time healed. The scar would always be tender, but touching it no longer hurt enough to pinch off their breath.

"I don't think your mom would want to marry me again, scout. I wasn't what she needed."

"Well, she was wrong about you."

"Maybe not. She and I were dreamers, but with a difference. She dreamed of things that were possible—being a songwriter, recording her own songs, having a successful career. Me ... I dream of living in the 1930s, seeing Benny Goodman playing live in the Manhattan Room of the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York. Or of worlds that never were and never can be, Tolkien to Heinlein. I'm all about big bands and hobbits, just a consumer of wonder. But your mom ... she created wonder, beautiful music. I could appreciate her work, I loved it, but she needed a bigger audience than me."

"She was wrong about you," Amity insisted, not with anger but with disarming conviction.

What Michelle had been wrong about was that she could take a leave of absence from her daughter and find a greater meaning. Raising Amity provided sufficient meaning to make any life worth living. He didn't say as much to Amity, because he knew her and knew himself well enough to foresee the consequence. They didn't need to spoil the memory of a fine dinner and blur the stars and fade the sea with tears.

"Show me the Big Dipper," she said.

"Otherwise known as Ursa Major." He put an arm around her and searched the sky and found the handle of the Dipper and focused her attention and drew the constellation for her. "It's been hanging there ever since it was used to scoop the other stars out of a starpool and scatter them across the sky."

Minutes later, they waded ashore and sat on a rock and put on their shoes.

A half-hour walk would take them home. The night was young and warm, and for part of the way there were shop windows—some of them at art galleries—with contents at which to marvel. As a man who felt that he had been born too late, Jeffy was often amazed at what passed for high art in this low age.

The first of seven houses on Shadow Canyon Lane, which branched off Oak Hollow Road, was a wedding-cake Victorian with two turrets and steep roofs and dormer windows, exuberantly decorated with millwork, flanked by proud oaks. It belonged to Marty and Doris Bonner, who were nice people, not a fraction as fussy as their residence. They were on vacation, having left a key with Jeffy.

His and Amity's place was a single-story house. Slate roof. Local sandstone walls. Jeffy had done the masonry, taught by his mason father. Amber bulbs in the crackle-glass lamps cast a warm, vaguely patterned light across the porch, and the gentle breeze whispered in the moon-kissed crowns of the tall palm trees.

One of the two rocking chairs on the porch was occupied.

Amity said, "It's Mr. Spooky."