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“Welcome to the lost farm,” she says cheerfully, carrying bags of groceries. “Whatever nobody else wants ends up here. Can you believe someone left these babies at the dump?”

“What will happen to them?”

“They’re ours.”

“You have a big heart, Megan.”

“I never had children, so I have animals. My neighbor once asked me to watch her llamas—she left to visit her sister and came back two years later.”

Two years? My bullshit detector has started to ping, but Megan is laughing. It’s a joke. Loosen up. Megan is loose, in baggy work pants and an oversized orange linen shirt. Following her through the door, I see that since I last saw her at the BLM corrals, she has put streaks of raspberry and crimson in her ropy gray hair.

Inside the farmhouse, the hot, dead air smells like the acres of clothes in the old bomb shelter, in the subbasement at Quantico, where we chose our costumes for the Bureau’s tireless mind games.

“You will be observed for signs of deceit that suggest you’re not who you say you are.”

Here, also, time has a smell, and the smell has accumulated in the mismatched cushions and Oriental rugs and curtains of gold lamé, and it is gripping me with vivid awareness.

I have penetrated someone’s inner world.

I revel in the treachery, experiencing the same satisfaction Darcy would have felt hacking into the biotech company’s computer system. Fact or fiction, I discover there is a tasty thrill in crossing the line. I am elated not to be who I say I am.

“Can I make you a cup of tea?”

“That would be lovely.”

Megan goes, and I want to twirl around the room, a treasure trove of clues, although you would need a team of investigators to comb the layers of cozy kitsch—ashtrays, lamps, Depression glass, doilies, tin trays, detective magazines—everything carefully arranged and dusted.

On the wall is an authentic DeKalb barn sign—the flying corn with the wings—the same deliberate symbol of the Midwest as on Dick Stone’s cap. Well, folks, we’ve already deciphered that one. On the wooden mantel is a collection of clocks, new and old, all of them accurate. Again, the scent and feel of time, bottled and corked—like their twenty-year outlaw run?

There is a gentle clicking sound. I look up from the broken-down sofa where I have sunk to my hips, surprised to see a stunning young woman enter through the swaying bones of bamboo.

She is the same rescuing angel I saw when I first came to the farm, yet the appearance of Sara Campbell from the same curtain through which Megan Tewksbury vanished, bearing the tea that Megan promised, seems a mocking transformation of the older woman; as if Megan, with her boozy sentiment and half-dyed dreadlocks, had been banished to the drudgery of the kitchen so this radiant being could emerge.

Not that the girl is scornful in any way. She is a barefoot geisha in blue jeans, back straight, kneeling gracefully to set the teacup down.

“Hi.” She smiles uncertainly.

“I’m Darcy. We met when I brought the ducks.”

“That’s right. The sick one died. It was awful.”

She has long, thin arms and legs, and blond hair so fine and cropped so short, it lays like a halo around her head.

She eases down, sitting cross-legged on the rug.

“Megan says you’re committed.”

“I am.”

“So am I.”

“That’s good.”

“We all are.”

“Who is?”

“Everyone who lives here.”

Sara’s face has become serious. Her grave composure clutches at your heart. Barely out of her teens, her impeccable beauty, like that of the wild horses, arises from genuine innocence. Looking up, her eyes are winsome and unself-conscious, and the curve of her temple is enough to make you want to pick up a pen and draw.

“And that would be?”

“Well, it’s me, Megan, Slammer, and Julius. And the animals.”

Take it slowly.

“Julius—he mainly takes care of the orchard?”

“The trees are his passion. I guess he’s the one who turned this place around.”

“You guess?”

“I’ve only been living here three months.”

“And Julius?”

“He and Megan have been together for a while. I’m not really sure.”