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fault,” I whisper, and Cortez says, “What?”
    “It’s all my fault.”
    We’re too late. That’s the feverish understanding that’s burning its way up my neck and my face, standing here cradling this victim: whatever happened out here has already happened and we missed it and it’s my fault. We took too long to get here from Concord, made too many stops, always my decision, always my fault. A girl, ten miles outside of Seneca Falls, she came screaming out of the woods beside the roadway: she and her brother had been trying to free the animals from the local zoo, the poor beasts were trapped and starving, and now a tiger had cornered the brother and run him up a tree. All of this one long terrified rush of words, and Cortez said it was a trap and to keep driving the cart—we were in a golf cart, we found it at a country club in Syracuse—but I said I couldn’t do that, I said we have to help her and he asked why and I said “she reminds me of my sister.” Cortez laughed, opened his door with the sawed-off trained on the girl. “Everything reminds you of your sister.”
    The episode with the tiger cost us half a day, and there were more, too many more, red towns and gray towns. In Dunkirk wepulled a family from a burning apartment building in the fiery wreck of downtown but then we had nowhere to take them, no way to offer them assistance of any kind. We just left them on the firehouse steps.
    It’s spitting rain, ugly and cold. Late morning. The dog is moving in anxious circles among the trees, the dirt, the clumps of yellow leaves. I hold the sleeping girl close in my arms like a honeymooner, start the walk back to the police station. Cortez goes ahead of us, swinging the hatchet, clearing brush and branches from the path. Houdini limping along behind.

5.
    We called it Police House because that was the name the kids picked for it, a big isolated country house in western Massachusetts, near a dot on the map called Furman. A bunch of cops and retired cops and their kids and friends have banded together there to live out the last run of days in relative security, in the company of like-minded individuals. That’s where I was living, along with Trish McConnell and her kids, along with a handful of other old friends and new acquaintances, before I left to find my sister.
    Among those in residence at Police House, on the top floor, is a tough old bird with close-cropped gray hair named Elda Burdell, known as the Night Bird, or just the Bird. Officer Burdell retired at the rank of detective sergeant two years before I joined the force; at Police House she has eased into the roles of unofficial dean and resident sage. Not the leader, but the person who sits in the attic in her armchair drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon from a stack of casesshe showed up with, dispensing advice and wise counsel about everything. The kids ask her which berries are safe to eat. Officer Capshaw and Officer Katz had the Bird settle a bet about what the best lures are for catching trout out of the fast-moving stream a quarter mile from the house.
    Late on August 23, the day after my trip to Concord to visit Abigail, I took the long walk up the stairs to the attic to discuss a couple of matters related to my planned departure.
    The Night Bird offers me a Pabst, which I decline, and we speak quickly about the necessary arrangements, and then she gazes at me with a half smile while I linger at the doorway, one foot in, one foot out.
    “Something else on your mind, son?”
    “Well—” I hesitate, rubbing my mustache, feeling ridiculous. “I just wanted your take on something.”
    “Fire away.” She leans forward with her hands draped between her legs, and I launch in, I give it to her as briefly as I can: the rogue scientist formerly attached to Space Command, the supposed nuclear stockpile waiting somewhere in the United Kingdom, the standoff burst.
    The Night Bird holds up two fingers, takes a short sip from her beer can, and says,