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the nearest Pizza Hut. He was self-conscious about having his own car, and he felt guilty about it, too. It was as though he had helped trick his mother into accepting it.
    “Why’d he show up now?” A.J. asked while they waited for their pizza. “Why after all this time?”
    Sylvia shook her head. “I have no idea, but one thing you can count on.”
    “What’s that?”
    “You can’t count on him. He paid for the insurance and gas three years in advance. That probably means you won’t see him again for at least that long.”
    “But I thought I could get to know him,” A.J. objected. “Find out about where he’s been all this time; find out what he’s been doing.”
    Sylvia shook her head. “I doubt that,” she said sadly. “James isn’t that kind of guy.”
    Her words proved prophetic. For over a year after that, A.J. saw and heard nothing from his father, not a single word. Then, the previous afternoon, when he got home from school, there had been a letter addressed to him, with no return address but postmarked Las Vegas, Nevada, waiting in the mailbox. The address on the envelope and the letter inside had been written in a tiny but legible cursive.
Dear A.J.,
Please burn this letter as soon as you read it. I’ll be leaving something for you. You’ll need a shovel to dig it up. Go up I-17. Just south of Camp Verde, take the exit to General Crook Trail. Instead of going east, go west. Just before the dead end, take the first left. It’ll be a dirt road, but the Camry should be fine. Follow that for six tenths of a mile. Exactly. Park there and then walk due north three hundred feet. You’ll see a boulder with a heart painted on it. Dig there, on the back side of it. You should probably make sure no one is following you when you go there.
Because you’re underage, you might need some help accessing the funds, but you’re a smart kid. You’ll figure it out. You deserve to spend time paying attention to your studies and having some fun instead of working at that crappy job at Walgreens. Don’t tell Maddy I said that.
Don’t thank me, and whatever you do, don’t tell your mother. She’ll try to make you give it back. If you’re cagey about it and only use the funds in dribs and drabs, no one will be the wiser, including your mother.
Have a great life.
    Your father,
    James Sanders
    A.J. stood with the letter in his hand for a long time, trying to figure out if it was real or if it was James’s idea of some kind of practical joke. And what about those last four words—“have a great life”? Did that mean A.J.’s father was out of his life forever, that he had seen James Sanders for the very last time?
    Eventually, before his mother came home, A.J. did what he’d been told to do. After memorizing the instructions, he took the letter out into the alley behind the house, burned it, and then ground the ashes into the dirt. As the match flared and the paper caught fire, he remembered that old Mission: Impossible mantra: “This tape will self-destruct in five seconds.”
    Now, driving north as he’d been told to do, A.J. couldn’t ditch the idea that he was doing something stupid, all because of a father who evidently wanted very little to do with him.
    “Dumb and dumber,” A.J. muttered to himself. “Like father, like son.”

3
    T he persistent ringing of a cell phone was what roused Gemma Ralston from a cocoon of blessed unconsciousness. At first she thought it was the doorbell—that was the last thing she remembered, going to answer the door in the entryway of her spacious Paradise Valley town home. She tried to remember who had been there when she answered the door, but her mind seemed shrouded in cotton candy. As she came to her senses, she realized it wasn’t her cell phone, it was someone else’s—ringing nearby but with no one answering.
    She turned her head, trying to locate the source of the sound. She was astonished to find herself lying flat on her back on the ground, staring up