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By Root 1139 0

were again. Robby shrugged and tried to smile sincerely as he pulled his eyes away from my face. “Okay, I guess.” Sarah was, luckily, lost in her meds and had trouble pulling on a sweater. Marta would take the kids to school—regardless of last night, they needed the return of routine—and bring them back to the hotel late that afternoon. Marta said this firmly, as if she expected disagreement, but since Jayne had made this demand there was nothing I could do to alter it. Both Sarah and Robby wanted to visit Victor in the kennel before heading to Buckley, and Marta assured them they could. I wanted Marta to deal with the kids since I was clearly in no shape to do so. My assumption was that the longer they stayed away from me, the better off they were. After everyone left I got up the nerve to look at my face in a mirror. I gasped.

The Dorseah Diner in Pearce sat off a bleak section of the interstate where the surrounding land was dead and flat—except for the huge eucalyptus trees that had burst up from the ground—trees that I was positive hadn’t existed the day before. (I estimated the diner was about five miles from the field where the doll had been discarded and killed the horse.) The diner was small and had a gravel parking lot consisting of maybe twelve spaces that were empty at ten o’clock on the sixth of November. Only six booths lined the plate-glass windows, with twelve blue and white stools rimming the counter, where the only customer sat: an old man in a raincoat, reading the local paper. I fell into a booth that seemed the farthest away from everything and ordered a cup of coffee, ignoring the frayed menu the waitress placed in front of me. I was wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap I had picked up at the gift shop in the hotel lobby, and sweatpants and the stained T-shirt under a Kenneth Cole leather jacket. The side of my face ached from the bruise, and I had to be careful about my lip since it felt like it was on the verge of splitting. I was hungover, and my body was sore and battered, and I kept chewing Klonopin in the hope it would take effect. I glanced back at the field because it was watching me, and in the distance I noticed haystacks and beyond the haystacks a line of palm trees swayed.

A beige van swung into the deserted lot and parked next to the Range Rover. Robert Miller appeared, belly first, dressed in faded jeans and a matching jacket and a turquoise shirt: a large man in his midfifties with a mustache and long graying hair tied back in a ponytail. Tired and drawn, he glanced at his watch, which moved me instinctively to clutch my wrist (it was numb). He walked into the diner holding a notepad, and at first I had no idea who this was. The man seemed to recognize me, though, as he hitched his pants up and hauled his way over to the booth I sat shivering in. When I looked up I saw a grizzled, wounded face that had experienced a lot.

“Are you Mr. Ellis?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Robert Miller.”

I just stared at him.

He wasn’t sure that his introduction had received the desired response.

“You contacted me early this morning? We spoke on the phone?”

“Yes, of course.” I stood shakily and offered my hand.

He took it in a businesslike fashion—he had a hard, callused grip, unlike the damp, soft, smooth hand of a writer—and after letting go of it he slid into the booth across from me. He calmly motioned to the lone waitress and ordered a cup of coffee and a glass of water and then he placed the notepad on the table. There was information about me on the notepad: the date of my birth, the titles of my books, the address of the house on Elsinore Lane.

I took a moment to arrange my thoughts. I had somewhat prepared myself in the fifteen minutes it took to drive to Pearce, and I thought the writer and I had constructed a fairly coherent story that would move Miller to help me. But now that I was actually here in front of him, I was embarrassed and I started stammering as soon as I opened my mouth. I began explaining what was happening in the house in a calm and linear fashion, but soon I was grabbing at everything