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father—and Twyla was at first determined that Winny would not be raised in a home without a dad. Eventually she came to understand that in some rare cases, a broken home might be better for a boy than one in which his narcissistic old man showed up only occasionally and then merely to recuperate from touring and from marathon adultery, less engaged with his young son than with his little entourage of sycophantic buddies.
    Although she didn’t love Farrel anymore, didn’t even like him much, she didn’t hate him, either. When she finished “One Rainy Night in Memphis,” she would offer it to Farrel first because he would do the best job with it. Her songs supported her aging mother. They were Winny’s future. What was best for a song trumped settling old scores.
    When the rumble rose not from the storm-torn heavens but from the ground under the building, Twyla’s fingers froze on the frets and raised the plectrum from the strings. As the last chord faded, she felt tremors pass through the Pendleton. Her Grammy and Country Music Association awards rattled on the glass shelves in the display case behind her piano.
    In expectation of some impending disaster, she was still gazing through the tall window when barbed lashes of lightning flailed the sky, several great flashes that made the rain appear to descend haltingly, that flared as if with apocalyptic power and seemed to obliterate the other buildings flanking Shadow Street. As the tremors rising from the ground passed and as hard thunderclaps shook the afternoon, the lightning and rain conspired for a moment to make the four lanes of pavement seem to disappear. The city streets below vanished, the buildings and their lights. In the flickering celestial display there appeared to be nothing but a vast, empty landscape, the long hill and a terrible plain below it, something like a sea of tall grass stippled with clusters of black trees, their craggy limbs clawing at the gloom.
    This vision must have been a trick of storm light on rain-washed glass, nothing more, because when the pyrotechnics stopped, the city was there as before, the buildings and the parks. The busy traffic ascended and descended the long boulevard, the blacktop streaming with rain and with glimmering reflections of headlights, with slithering red rivulets of taillights.
    Twyla discovered that she’d gotten off the stool and had lowered her guitar to the carpet without being aware of either action. She stood at the window. What she had seen could have been nothing but an optical illusion. Yet her mouth went dry as she waited for another volley of lightning. In the next barrage, the city did not disappear, but held its ground. The unpopulated vastness, glimpsed before, did not reappear. A mirage. An illusion.
    She turned to look past the piano at the display case. None of the awards had fallen over, but the shuddering of the building had been real, not a trick of light and rain-blurred window.

Apartment 2-C
    B ailey turned on all the lamps and ceiling fixtures in the living room, dining room, kitchen, master bedroom, guest bedroom, and both baths. He left them blazing even when he found no one lurking anywhere in the apartment. He wasn’t frightened by what he had seen. More curious than anything. The brighter the light in the place, the likelier he was to get a better look at whatever—if anything—came next.
    He wasted no time considering the possibility that he might have hallucinated the entity in the swimming pool and the phantom that passed through a wall. He didn’t do drugs. He didn’t drink to excess. If he suffered from a brain tumor or another mortal condition, there had been no previous indication. In his experience, post-traumatic stress disorder, caused by the horrors of the battlefield, was chiefly the invention of psychiatrists bent upon stigmatizing the military.
    In the bedroom, he retrieved a pistol from the bottom drawer in his nightstand. The Beretta 9 mm featured a