‘Home,’ Shepherd echoed, but he seemed unsure of precisely the place to which the word referred.
Whoever had broken the window raked with some instrument at the remaining sharp shards in the frame, clearing the way for entrance.
‘Our house in California,’ Dylan said, ‘California – one hundred something thousand square miles—’
Shep raised his right hand as if to swear fealty to the state of California.
‘—population thirty something million something thousand—’
Whatever genetic cousin to a bull was charging the door charged it again, and the chair cracked, sagged.
Frowning as though still unsure of himself, Shepherd pinched the air between the thumb and forefinger of his raised hand.
‘—state tree,’ Dylan said, but then fumbled for the species.
‘The redwood!’ Jilly said.
The drapes billowed as one of the assassins began to climb in from outside.
‘State flower, the golden poppy,’ Dylan continued.
Persistence paid. On the fifth blow, the door shuddered inward and the bracing chair collapsed.
The first man across the threshold, kicking at the fragments of the chair, was wearing pale-yellow pants, a pink-and-yellow polo shirt, and a murderous expression. He had a pistol, and as he rushed forward, he raised it with the clear intention of squeezing off a shot.
‘Eureka,’ Shep said, and tweaked.
Dylan thanked God that he heard no gunfire as the motel room folded away from him, but he did hear his name – ‘O’Conner!’ – shouted by the would-be shooter.
This time while in kaleidoscopic transit, he had something entirely new to fear: that the thug in golf togs had gotten too near to them before they escaped the motel room, and that Shep had folded a well-armed killer with them to California.
32
Abundant slabs of shadow and a few shards of pale light unfolded through the receding motel bedroom, and one split second before Dylan recognized the new room that fell into place around him, he smelled the lingering savor of a cinnamon-pecan-raisin cake baked according to his mother’s cherished recipe, its delicious aroma unmistakable.
Shep, Jilly, and Dylan himself arrived unscathed, but the killer in the polo shirt didn’t have a ticket to ride, after all. Not even the echo of his shouted O’Conner! followed them out of Arizona.
In spite of the comforting aroma and the gladdening absence of a door-busting assassin, Dylan enjoyed no sense of relief. Something was wrong. He couldn’t at once identify the source of his current uneasiness, but he felt it too strongly to discount it as bad nerves.
The gloom in the kitchen of their California house was relieved only slightly by a soft butterscotch-yellow light seeping across the threshold of the open door to the dining room, and even less by the illuminated clock set into the belly of a smiling ceramic pig that hung on the wall to the right of the sink. On the counter under the clock, revealed by that timely light, a sheet-cake pan containing the fresh cinnamon-pecan-raisin delight cooled on a wire rack.
Vonetta Beesley – their once-a-week Harley-riding housekeeper – sometimes cooked for them, using their late mother’s best recipes. But as they weren’t scheduled to return from their art-festival tour until late October, she must have prepared this treat for herself.
Following the momentary disorientation of being folded, Dylan realized why a sense of wrongness could not be dispelled. They had departed eastern Arizona, which lay in the Mountain time zone, before one o’clock Saturday afternoon. In California, in the Pacific time zone, the day should have waned one hour less than it had back in Holbrook. Shortly before one o’clock in Holbrook translated to shortly before noon on the shores of the Pacific, yet the black of night pressed at the kitchen windows.
Darkness at noon?
‘Where are we?’ Jilly whispered.
‘Home,’ Dylan said.
He consulted the luminous hands of his wristwatch, which he had set to Mountain time days ago, before the arts festival in Tucson. The watch showed four minutes till one o’clock, about what he had expected and surely correct.
Here in the land of the golden poppy and the redwood tree, the time ought to be four minutes till noon, not four till midnight.
‘Why’s it dark?’ Jilly asked.