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time,” it said, “get a ride. I’ll drive you out here tomorrow to pick up the car.”
    I screwed the note up and hurled it away, but I drove home carefully. When I got back Mom was in bed. There was a light in Dad’s study but the door was shut, so I just went upstairs.
     
    I GOT UP ONCE , in the late morning, and made a cup of instant coffee. Apart from that I sat until midafternoon, until the sun moved across the sky and started to come directly through the window and into my eyes. This broke the spell I’d been in, and I got out of the chair knowing I’d never sit there again. It wasn’t comfortable, for a start. The cushion was threadbare and lumpy, and after a couple of straight hours on it, my ass hurt. I walked back to the kitchen, rinsed my cup out, left it upside down on the side to dry. Then I changed my mind, wiped it, and put it back in the cupboard.
    I stood irresolute in the hallway, wondering what to do next. Part of me believed that the filial thing to do would be to check out of the hotel and come stay here for the night. The rest of me didn’t want to. Really did not want to. I wanted bright lights and a burger, a beer, someone who’d talk to me about something other than death.
    Suddenly irritable and sad, I stalked back into the sitting room to retrieve my phone from the coffee table. My lower back ached, probably from sitting in that lousy chair.
    The chair. Maybe it was because the light was different; the sun had moved around the yard since the morning, creating new shadows. More likely, a few hours of tears had simply cleared my head a little. Either way, now thatI was looking at it, the seat cushion looked a little odd. Slowly slipping the Nokia into my pocket, I frowned at the chair. The cushion, which was an integral part of the chair, definitely bulged up in the center. I reached out experimentally, prodded it. It felt a little hard.
    Maybe he’d had it reupholstered, or refilled with something. Rocks, perhaps. I straightened up, ready to forget it and leave the house. My hangover was beginning to bloom. Then something else caught my attention.
    There’s a proper way of placing objects in relation to each other, especially if those objects are large. Some people don’t see this. They’ll just throw the furniture down any old how, or all against the walls, or at right angles, or so everyone can see the TV. My father always made sure stuff was placed just so, and then got riled if anybody moved it. And my father’s chair wasn’t in the right place. It wasn’t off by much, and I don’t think anybody else would have noticed it. It was too square on to the other furniture, and seemed to stand too much out on its own. It just didn’t look right.
    I squatted down in front of it, examined the line where the cushion was attached to the body of the seat. A strip of braid covered the join. It was worn and frayed. I grabbed one end of it and pulled. It came away easily, revealing an opening that looked like it once had been stitched.
    I slipped my hand inside. My fingers navigated through some kind of dry, squishy stuff, probably cut-up chunks of foam. In the middle they found a solid object. I pulled it out.
    It was a book. A paperback novel, a new-looking copy of a blockbuster thriller, the kind of thing my mother might pick up on a whim at the checkout, and skim through in an afternoon. It didn’t look read. The spine was unbent, and my mother was no stickler for keeping books in pristine condition. It didn’t make any sense. It couldn’t have gotten in the chair by accident.
    I flicked through the pages. In the middle of the book there was a small piece of paper. I pulled it out. It was a note, just one line, written in my father’s handwriting.
    “Ward,” it read, “We’re not dead.”

C HAPTER THREE
    A STREAM IN SOUTHERN Vermont, the water clear and cold, hurrying over a bed of pale boulders between the steep banks of a valley up in the Green Mountains. The sky seems to start