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Dallas, Texas, was the site of the annual stockholders’ meeting for Immunicate. It was in October, a week before Halloween. Max Leonard knew he had to be there. He was now obsessed with Sam Mueller and felt this was one more chance to hear him speak and, possibly, put a plan in place. He was going to drive to Texas and asked Kathy if she wanted to come.

Kathy had never brought up the wall in Max’s bedroom, but before she could drive to another Sam Mueller event she felt it was imperative. She decided to pay Max another surprise visit. She spoke to him early in the afternoon and he said he was working at home but would love to have dinner, so she waited a few hours and drove to his house at four o’clock. She would tell him she was starving and ask him if he wanted to go early.

When she arrived, she was tempted to walk around to the back to see if she could look through the window again, but she decided against it. She rang the doorbell. He answered, and he was in a very good frame of mind. “Hey, what are you doing here?”

“I was out doing errands and was really hungry. Do you want to have an early bite?”

Max looked at the clock. “You want to eat at four? Seriously?”

“Well, not at four, but maybe in an hour.”

This was the moment she had been dreading. There she was, twenty feet from the bedroom. What would he do? How could he force her to leave? It would be so rude. Then Max said, “I don’t mind eating early. Let me get a coat.” Kathy walked in and looked at the living room.

“Your place is so clean.”

“Yeah. The woman was here yesterday. My sink was smelling something awful.” Kathy saw that his bedroom door was open a crack and decided to just get it over with. She walked toward the room; Max made no attempt to stop her. Kathy opened the door and there it was. Nothing. A clean room with clean walls and fresh sheets on the bed and a vacuumed carpet. It even smelled of a scented candle that was unlit on the nightstand.

Kathy thought she was going crazy for a minute. She knew what she had seen, but it wasn’t there. Should she just ask him what had happened? But that would lead to a discussion of why she was snooping around his house in the first place, and what good could come of that? So she said nothing. In her mind she tried to spin this as a positive. Perhaps what she took as a dangerous obsession was no more than an old-fashioned way of doing research. Compile all the information you can, put it up on a board, and stand back and look at it. The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. It was temporary. It was nothing. As a matter of fact, she used to do something similar in high school when she was trying to learn where all the African countries were. As she was standing there lost in her own rationalization, Max touched her shoulder.

“Come on. If you’re hungry, let’s go. I don’t care if it’s early.”

And then Kathy really felt stupid. Not only had she misjudged him but now she, a person who always thought she would be happier living in Spain where they ate at midnight, had to have dinner at four-thirty. It served her right, she thought; this was what she got for being paranoid about someone she loved.

* * *

As Brad Miller was eating his lunch, an administrator of the Pasadena facility asked him if he would come to the office when he was through. Brad had given up on trying to get his money, so he felt as if he was going to be reprimanded for something, that maybe there was some kind of problem. He finished his egg salad sandwich, which tasted as if it had been made a year ago, then got up from the table, left the tent, and walked the three hundred yards to the office complex. He went upstairs and sat down in a waiting area until someone called his name, then he walked down the same drab gray hallway, which still had no pictures on the walls, and into the same cubicle he had been in before. Except this time there was a woman there. “Please sit down, Mr. Miller. I’m Mrs. Yellin.”

“You’re new here?”

“I’m new to Pasadena. I have been working in Lancaster at another facility.”

“Where’s the fellow that