71

At Ed's direction, Michelle quickly hacked off his glorious white mane with scissors and shaved the stubble with her electric razor until his noggin was as smooth as her legs. Strangely, his bald head seemed half again as large as when he'd had hair, so he resembled a 1950s sci-fi movie's idea of what an evolved human being of immense intelligence would look like if he traveled back in time from ten thousand years in the future.

He took off his bow tie and adjusted his shirt collar. "There. My own mother wouldn't recognize me."

"Well, I guess if she was blind," Michelle said.

"Trust me, during my time as a fugitive, I've learned that the best disguises require not an entire makeover but merely one or two strategic changes."

Ed oversaw Michelle's makeover by having her tie her hair in a ponytail and wear a baseball cap. He also insisted that she change out of her pullover sweater into a baggier blue sweatshirt that had belonged to Jeffy. She'd saved it all these years because she had given it to him as a birthday gift and he'd especially liked the words imprinted on the chest—FRODO LIVES! The sleeves extended past her fingertips, and even after she rolled them up, she looked like a lost waif searching for her mom, rather than a woman in search of her lost daughter.

"My own mother wouldn't recognize you," Ed declared.

"Your mother never knew me."

"Exactly."

With Ed in the front passenger seat, whistling a tune that he identified as from Mozart's concerto K. 453, Michelle drove her Ford Explorer into town and slotted it in an automated two-story parking structure a block off Pacific Coast Highway. She fed a few dollar bills into the permit machine and placed the printout prominently on the dashboard. If when they ported back to this timeline they needed to make a quick getaway, she didn't want to discover that her SUV had been towed.

In an alleyway alongside the building, Ed dared to take the key to everything from his coat and activate it. This early in the day, when most people would not head to work for another hour or two and when tourists were still sleeping off the previous night's excesses, the chance was slim that someone would happen on them in the instant when they vanished from this sad timeline where Jeffy and Amity had died seven years ago.

The onshore flow was scented with cinnamon and warm pastry dough from a bakery just opening for the day. The breeze chased scraps of litter along the alley and rolled before it a ball of red yarn. Such was Michelle's state of mind that the unraveling scarlet filament, so vivid against the blacktop, seemed to be an ominous symbol, a thin spill of blood or a lit fuse burning toward her.

"Where do we go when we get there?" she asked.

"Are there people in town who were friends with you and Jeffy back in the day, people that he might have remained friends with in that world, after you walked out on him and Amity?"

"Not me. I never did. That was the other Michelle. Yeah, I can think of a few friends from then who're still in this town and maybe still in the one we're going to. Jeffy was true blue. He never gave up on anyone."

"Then we'll check them out and hope that he and your girl have gone into hiding at one of their houses."

He pressed RETURN, and after passing through a blizzard of light, they arrived in the world where there was hope, however fragile, of a family reunion.