When Tom got up, Rachel was seated at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in her hands. There were lingering smells of cooking.

"Aidan's already gone to school?"

Rachel nodded. "Scott, my boss, is good enough to let me come in at nine. I have time to see him off in the morning. I could have made breakfast for you but I thought you would appreciate the extra sleep more." She was going to say that he looked like he had not slept well but she guessed that his drinking might be taking a toll on his body and it would be tactless to bring that up. She smiled gently at Tom.

"I like it when you smile. You don't do it nearly often enough."

"I guess I don't. It's the stress of the change in lifestyle, I suppose. Aidan's made a good adjustment. He's a very mature, intelligent boy. I didn't spend as much time with him as I should have when he was younger. I was too busy pursuing my career. Journalism can swallow up your life. I suppose you understand that."

"I do. It's the same in my line of work."

"You know, it's good to have an adult to talk to. I think I've spent a lot of time talking to children lately."

Tom helped himself to coffee. It made him smile to think of Rachel making the effort to play the happy homemaker. He had noticed that the house was a little disheveled and could use some cleaning. Normally, Rachel probably paid more attention to her work than to housekeeping.

Sunlight streamed through the kitchen windows. Tom thought it was a delicate wintry light, from a sky of washed out blue. The light tinged the bare branches of the cherry trees in the yard and filtered through the curtains with their pattern of tiny yellow flowers. For a moment Tom was overwhelmed by the desire to do nothing but sit in comfortable homely surroundings, to go nowhere. To stay with Rachel. "This must be a very pleasant town to raise a child in," he said wistfully.

Rachel had a smile with an edge to it. "It's a wonderful town. Everyone's been very kind to me. I'm a little too well known for my liking. I work for the newspaper and people see me at public events. I'm something of an attention magnet, being a mysterious outsider and a single mother. Word gets around pretty quickly in this town. I'm sure it'll be noted that you stayed the night."

"Your neighbors take an interest in your love life, do they?"

"Oh, I'm sure my neighbors would like to see me hooked up with Scott. Scott's a great guy. I know that. I guess I've never given him a fair chance. You want to know why, right?" Tom nodded. Rachel sighed. "I don't like to mix work and my personal life. It compromises my position. I would have to quit. I know he won't stop being publisher. He gave up a career in New York City to return and take over his family's newspaper after his father died.

"It's more than that though. I don't know where to begin telling him about the past, Seattle and Samara and all that. He might think I was a lunatic. Or that I had a very nervous disposition. Anything but the truth of the matter. Yet I have to tell him to be in a position of trust."

"I guess we don't have that problem with each other."

"No, we don't." There was a little smirk playing at the corners of her mouth. Her expression quickly turned serious again. "You know how smokers carry the smell of smoke around with them? I sometimes feel that Aidan and I carry Samara's curse around with us. The smell of death, I guess you could call it."

Looking at Tom her face showed a sudden grave concern. "What do you plan to do?" She was thinking that it was day four but she did not want to mention it.

Tom looked down at the floor. "I was going to find out what I can about the staff at Eola. I still want to know who those men were. It seems pointless and foolish, I know."

"I'll go with you." She looked a little embarrassed. "I can tell Scott I'm working on a story out of town. I can get a neighbor to pick up Aidan from school."

"No, I'm sorry. I work alone." He added, "I'll come back." It was an automatic response from Tom. The odd idea crept into his mind that venturing away from Rachel was like leaving a circle of protection. He smiled inwardly for entertaining such a silly notion.

And how ridiculous did he look, flirting with Rachel? He was bouncing around her like a puppy dog. Still, he felt comfortable talking to her and there was no denying she enjoyed the attention.

He phoned Mrs. Carstairs with the bad news. There was nothing they could do for the girl. He mumbled something to her about staying a few more days to tie up loose ends. As expected, she accepted that he needed more time and would continue to pay for his services.

It was an hour-and-a-half drive up the coast, on the winding rural roads that skirted the foothills of the mountains. As the morning progressed the brightness of the morning sky was lost to streaks of cloud, until it was gradually covered with gray overcast. There was even the possibility of an approaching storm. Mile after mile on either side of the road was dense forest with trees dripping with moisture.

At times Tom's vision would become blurry, as if he was looking through mists. A light might pierce those mists and cause him stabbing pain, so he continued to wear sunglasses. The world around him was fading into a murky twilight. Tom felt a gnawing desire for alcohol to suppress his sense of alarm.

There was a suffocating silence here. Tom tried rolling down the window in hopes of at least hearing the sounds of nature but the stillness was unbroken, even by the songs of birds. There was no traffic in either direction. Tom could have been the last human on earth for all he knew. The miles passed with no change, increasingly dreamlike. Tom was losing concentration and in danger of falling asleep at the wheel.

There on the road in front of him appeared the girl, spectral in her white gown. Somehow he was not surprised. For a moment he was staring at her mesmerized. She looked at him steadily. Then he swerved the car hard to the right. The tires screeched. He had to staighten the steering again to avoid crashing into the ditch. Tom slammed on the brakes. He put his head out the window and looked back. There was no sign of any body. He got out of the car and looked over the road. She had entirely vanished without leaving a trace.

He thought of the time when he went off the road and landed in a ditch. Cindy was in the infant car seat in the back and began bawling. That had prevented him from blacking out. The car was stuck in the ditch and he had to wait for the police to arrive. That incident had sort of closed the door between Amy and himself. She could usually contain her temper but she was never more than civil to him after that.

He realized there was this fatalistic streak in him. He could have fought for more time with Cindy but she was so young and it only seemed right that her mother should care for her. He knew he hadn't spent much time with her before. He could have raised objections to them moving to the west coast but he didn't want to be responsible for stalling Amy's career. It was easy enough to cast him as the monster. He didn't want to provide any more substance to that than he already had. He already felt they were lost. Maybe it was because his self esteem had been ground down over these last months. He thought it was for the best. Now he wondered if Cindy would even know him as a parent. He would visit and it would be a duty to her. It would be like when he visited his aunts and uncles in Vermont as a child. Would Amy make excuses and create delays? As Cindy got older would she be sent to summer camp? Would she be away visiting Amy's relatives? He realized that the less contact he had with her the easier it was to portray him as a negligent parent, that he simply didn't care about her. He never knew what to say to children. He had always felt awkward with them. Now he was afraid it would be the same when he saw her.

Thoughts of Cindy were never far from his mind but if he allowed himself to start thinking this way he knew he would spiral down into a morass of self pity. He had to pull himself out of it right now.

There was a road sign just ahead that indicated he was outside the town of Prestwick. He thought he had better make a stop there. It was a coastal town that still had a salmon fishing fleet moored at its docks. He pulled up at a gas station, more in the hope of learning something than for the gas. There was a white-haired man behind the counter. "Am I going the right way to get to Eola Psychiatric Hospital?" Tom asked.

"It's a couple of miles outside of town but, yeah, you're headed the right direction."

"It's an odd location for a hospital."

"Why do you say that?"

"I mean it's so remote."

"Seems to me people like it that way."

"Any interesting news coming from there recently?"

"What are you, a reporter?"

"Yes, I work for the Daily Astorian."

"Then maybe you should tell me." Tom shook his head. The old man regarded him steadily. "No news ever comes from Eola but there's always news about it. Not particularly pleasant news."

"Try me."

"Well, every few weeks lately we hear about a lawsuit being filed against the hospital, from Eola survivors, they call themselves. You'll have to look it up yourself if you want the details. I'd just as soon not know the details."

Tom knew that small town newspapers carried stories of local detail that the metropolitan dailies would never even hear about, much less assign a reporter to. He made his way to the library. He asked about recent stories on Eola Psychiatric. Within the last month there was an article about a man filing a legal action against the hospital. As the gas station attendant mentioned, this was one in a number of lawsuits that followed a state review into allegations of abuse at the institution. The report had been published the previous year. It found widespread sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of patients at Eola going back decades, as well as unexpected and uninvestigated deaths.

The man filing the suit, Bill McMaster, alleged that as a youth he had been sexually assaulted by staff at the hospital but had always been afraid to report it. He had been subjected to forcible immersion in tubs of ice cold water until he nearly drowned. He had been confined for long periods in isolation. It was, he claimed, a way to keep him under their control. Bill's lawsuit was aimed not only at Eola Psychiatric but at a short list of men who committed abuses or knew about them and did nothing. It had been over twenty years ago, about the time Samara Morgan was a patient there. Tom had set off that morning with the sense that it was futile to go to Eola. Even if he could find a way to access the personnel or patient records, there were far too many of both. This at least was a starting point.

Eola Psychiatric Hospital was a thick-walled concrete bunker of a building, painted a cream color on the exterior. The regularly spaced windows were small, deep set and barred on the inside. Tom knew that he would get no cooperation from staff. He could have tried to break into the basement as Noah had, but there was the chance that they had improved security because of that incident.

Tom approached the front desk and told the receptionist that he was a reporter for the Daily Astorian and he was there to do a story about the lawsuits filed against the hospital. He asked to be able to look at the personnel records going back thirty years. The receptionist was surprised at his forwardness but she was clearly well practiced at giving the correct response. She told him that any requests for information needed to be submitted to the State Department of Health. He could expect a response in a month or so.

"That's very disappointing to hear," Tom said blandly. On his way out he made a turn towards the men's room he spotted down a corridor to one side.

Tom paused to look at himself in the mirror. He remembered telling Max that he would avoid looking into mirrors. He grimaced. So this was what Rachel had to look at, he thought. He took out the metal flask of brandy he had in his coat pocket and poured some down his throat. He couldn't help but think of how his hairline was receding. In the center there was a sort of triangle of hair that remained, like a rocky cape that resisted the erosion of waves. Odd that he should think of this now. He was worried about hair loss when he was supposed to die in a few days.

Tom opened the door, saw that no one was observing him, and headed for the stairwell at the end of the corridor. It was an old building and Tom saw that the door at the basement level was not alarmed. He had concealed a crate-opening tool in his coat. He used this to pry open the door.

In the basement ranks of file cabinets were gathering dust. Tom switched on a tiny flashlight and began searching the personnel records. Some of the men he looked up couldn't be eliminated from suspicion but there was nothing out of the ordinary in their records. In the file of an orderly named Vincent Hardwick he was excited to find a disciplinary report. Hardwick and two other men were accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with a female patient. They had all been suspended without pay. Tom noted that the patient was discharged and did not press charges. The men were reinstated. Checking the dates, Tom concluded that these men were working at the time of Samara's stay. All had left years ago. There was no current information on them in the records.

Tom drove north. He took a table at a diner and ordered the pot roast with mashed potatoes. He plugged in his laptop and set to work. Tom knew of databases that the general public could not access but he had IDs and passwords that would work. Finding these men, if they were still in the state, would be routine. There was something arbitrary about narrowing the hunt down to these men, Tom knew, but this was what his mind had focused on.

Tom suddenly felt very conscious of being alone. He couldn't help thinking of Rachel sitting on the other side of the table. He imagined saying witty things to her. All of his actions seemed mechanical and dead without her. He wondered if it was only the thought of returning to her that kept him going.

Tom drove to Tacoma, south of Seattle. He had the address of one of the suspects on his list. He came to a white-stuccoed bungalow. The woman who answered the doorbell was in her mid-thirties, with frizzled red hair. She wore a sweatshirt and track pants. She had a strong smell of cigarette smoke. "Can I help you?" she asked, not sounding helpful.

"I'm looking for Vincent Hardwick."

Her face hardened even more. "Well, you're ten days too late. My father died then. What are you, one of those reporters hounding him? Is it about the lawsuit?"

"Yes, I'm afraid it is." Tom peered beside the woman to get a view of the interior. Suddenly, like an electric shock surging through his entire body, Tom saw a vision of the darkened living room of the house. The heavy-set body of a man was dangling lifeless from the ceiling. The body swung slowly backwards and forwards, describing the figure eight symbol for infinity. The only light came through a window behind the body so that Tom could not see the face. The rope around his neck seemed to be black, braided hair. The vision passed and Tom grunted, lurching forward as if he had escaped someone's grip.

"Are you all right?"

"Yes, I'll be fine," Tom gasped weakly. "I just wanted to hear your father's side of the story."

"Well, you're too late for that."

"Did he commit suicide?"

"Yes," the woman answered uncertainly. "Now clear off before I call the cops."

Tom turned meekly to leave, barely able to hold his head upright. He paused. "Maybe you can save me some time and trouble, ma'am. Do you know these other men?" He handed her the list.

"Tom Aspinall. Herbert Gray. They're men that my father worked with at Eola. They were named in the lawsuit too. " She added grimly. "My father went to Tom Aspinall's funeral three weeks ago. They didn't say how he died. Herbert Gray, my father hasn't seen in years."

The overcast that had darkened with the declining day broke at the horizon. A pale late afternoon light raked over the lawn. Tom noticed lying there a metal toy car and a garishly colored cartoon character in soft plastic. "Your son's?" he asked. She nodded.