"Right in there," she said. "Go ahead, there are towels and everything, and I'll bring you some clothes."

Then she went outa"hurried out, I thoughta"closing the door behind her.

I thought she was acting strange, but then the whole situation was so strange, I shrugged it off again. I went into the bathroom. It was pleasant and homey like the rest of the house. Big fluffy towels hanging on racks. A flowered shower curtain. White tiles on the walls with blue designs on them.

I got the shower going and started to unb.u.t.ton my shirt. It would be good to get out of my clothes, wet and dirty and b.l.o.o.d.y as they were. As I worked the b.u.t.tons, I turned without thinking to look in the mirror over the bathroom sink.

I stopped moving. I stood stock-still. My hand froze on one of the b.u.t.tons.

My face. The face staring back at me from the mirror. It was mea"I mean, I recognized myself, but . . . but I'd changed. A lot. My face was leaner, sharper, stronger-looking. And my beard . . . I looked like I hadn't shaved for a day or two, but instead of the patches of fuzz I usually got, my beard was coming in all over, heavy and full.

I stood there staring at my reflection and this thoughta"this impossible thoughta"came into my head.

I was older. I looked older, anyway. I looked older than I did when I went to bed at home last night.

The shower went on running as I stood there. Steam began to seep out from behind the shower curtain. Slowly the mirror began to fog over, the white mist moving in from the edges toward the center. I watched as the reflection of my face was covered until only the eyes were staring out at me. Then the eyes were gone too. I was just a shadow in the mist.

That broke the spell. I turned away from the mirror quickly. I hurried out of the bathroom, out into the other room with the sofa and the sewing table.

There was the easy chair. There was the newspaper on it. I went to the chair. I picked up the paper.

"Homeland Secretary to Meet with President on Terror."

Above the headline was the date. I could still remember the date from yesterday. A Wednesday in September.

An ordinary Wednesday. It ought to be Thursday now.

And it was. It was Thursday. Only it was October. I thought, Wow, a whole month has pa.s.sed!

Then my eyes traveled just a little farther, and I saw the rest.

It was October, but a year later. A year had pa.s.sed since I went to bed last night.

It was one full year since the last day I remembered.

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

Police

I stood in the shower. The hot water streamed down over me. It felt good, really good. The heat seeped into my aching muscles, soothing them. It stung on my cuts and bruises, but it was a good sting, a cleansing sting. The stream drove the dirt and blood off me. I stood with my head down, watching as the dark, gritty water swirled down the drain.

I stared and I thought: A year! How was it possible? A year of my life had vanished. My eighteenth birthday had come and gone and I couldn't even remember it.

I tried. I tried to remember. Something. Anything. I strained as hard as I could to bring any of it back. But there was nothing there. As far as my mind was concerned, I had gone to bed last night and woken up strapped to a chair. If a year had pa.s.sed in the meantime, it was lost to me completely. I had no memory of it at all.

I put my hands over my face. I rubbed my eyes. I tried again to make some sense out of the events of the day, sifting through them for any clue I could find. I thought back to that first moment, the moment I had woken up in the chair. What had happened before that? Wasn't there something? Anything?

I couldn't come up with it. I turned off the shower. I stepped out and grabbed one of the towels and began to dry myself off. And now there was . . . just a trace . . . a hint, a whisper of a memory coming back to me.

It had happened when I first woke up. When I first found myself strapped to that chair. Everything was confusion and fear and pain inside me. But there were voices. I remembered now. There were voices talking just outside the cell door. What did they say? I tried to remember. Maybe there was a clue therea"a clue to where a year of my life had gone.

I stepped out of the bathroom. Just as Mrs. Simmons had promised, she'd put some clothes on the sofa for me, a pair of jeans and a flannel work shirt. There were also some clean socks and a pair of old sneakers. There was even some underwear in a package that hadn't been opened yet.

I started to get dressed. All the while, I was thinking, trying to remember, trying to call back those voices I'd heard.

Homelander!

Yes. That was something. It came back to me now. Someone had said the word Homelander. Homelander Onea"as if there were more of them, a lot of Homelanders. What did it mean? I had no idea.

What else? My name. Yes. Someone had said my name.

West.

I closed my eyes as I dressed, trying to bring back the scene, trying to bring back the words.

Orton knows the bridge as well as West.

My head was beginning to throb. That was all I could come up with for now. I finished dressing. I sat on the sofa and put the old sneakers on. Everything fit pretty well. I was grateful to be clean and grateful for the feel of fresh clothing.

I opened the door to the back room and stepped out into the hallway.

"Mrs. Simmons?" I called.

There was no answer. It was odd. The house had an empty feel to it suddenly. I waited a second. Then I started down the hall, calling as I went.

"Mrs. Simmons? I'm done with my shower. Are the deputies here yet?"

I came out into the living room. It was a big room, two stories tall with a cathedral ceiling. There was a fireplace against one wall. Chairs: a rocking chair, a couple of armchairs. Another sofa. A wide-screen TV.

But it was empty here too. There was no one around.

I was about to call out againa"about to head into the kitchena"when I noticed something. There was this large picture window on one wall. It looked out at the front of the house, out at the quiet street and the forest across the way and the first dark of evening coming into the sky above the trees. The carport was around the side of the house out of sight, but you could see part of the driveway leading up to it. There were cars there now. Cars that hadn't been there before. I moved closer to the window and looked out. There was a blue Cadillac and a red-and-white sheriff 's department cruiser and another car in front of those that I couldn't make out, and two more cruisers parked at the curb down the street.

Good, they're here, I thought. But where? Where was Mrs. Simmons? Where were all the deputies from those cars? Where was everyone?

I turned around, starting to call, "Mrs. Simmons . . . !"

And suddenly I was looking down the barrel of a large handgun, pressed close to my forehead.

"Freeze, West!" a man shouted in my face. "You move and I'll blow your head off!"

I froze. I gaped into the black bore of the gun barrel.

"Put your hands up! Put 'em up! Now! Now!"

I swallowed. I raised my hands. I was scareda"of course: someone points a gun at you and you get scared, that's just the way it is. But I wasn't as scared as you might think. I was really just startled mostly. I could see now that the man holding the gun was wearing a brown khaki uniform. He was a sheriff's deputy, a lawman, one of the good guys. I realized there must be some mistake.

"It's okay," I said, holding my hands in the air. "It's just me. I gave the gun to Mrs. . . ."

"Shut up! Put your hands behind your head!"

This was another voice. I turned to it. Another deputy was standing by the kitchen door. He had a gun, too, and it was also leveled at me.

"Do it! Do it now!"

Yet a third voice. A third deputy was coming out of the halla"where I'd just come from. Another gun was aimed my way.

"Okay, okay," I said. "Don't shoot. I'm the good guys." I put my hands behind my head.

And with breathtaking speed, the three deputies leapt at me.

"Hey!" I shouted.

They spun me around. One of them hit me in the back of the legs so that I dropped to my knees. Another one wrestled my hands down from my head and twisted them painfully behind my back. I felt a cold pinch of metal as he snapped handcuffs on my wrists.

"Ow! What're you doing?" I said.

"Shut up! On your feet, West!"

Even as he was shouting in my ear, he was dragging me up off my knees, onto my feet. It was hard to maneuver with my hands cuffed behind me.

One of the deputies was murmuring into the microphone clipped to his shoulder.

"All clear. We got him!"

Through the window, I could see more deputies coming into view, coming out from where they'd been hiding behind trees and against the wall of the house. They were all wearing bulletproof vests. A couple of them were carrying a.s.sault rifles. Who'd they think I was? Osama bin Laden?

Everything was happening fasta"so fast I couldn't think, couldn't figure out what was going on. The deputies were shoving me toward the door, shouting at me.

"Move! Come on! Move it! Go!"

They shoved me to the front door of the house. One of the deputies outside opened it. The others half shoved and half carried me through, outside into the evening.

There were deputies on every side of me. My eyes went from one to another, looking for someone who would explain, some friendly face.

"What're you doing?" I said. "What's the matter?"

"Shut up," someone answered.

Then I heard someone growl angrily, "You lousy punk . . ."

And suddenly a man was in front of me. Not a deputy. A broad-shouldered man about my height wearing a suit and tie. He had a square head like a cement block. He had little eyes and they were black with anger. He grabbed the front of my shirt, taking a handful of flesh with it.

"If I find out you laid one hand on my wife or my kid, you little punk, not even the cops'll be able to protect you." He was so close, I could feel his spit on my face as he talked. "I'll find you wherever you are, I'll . . . !"

"Harmon!" I heard a woman shout. She sounded as if she was crying. I tried to turn to her. It was hard with this guy grabbing me. But I caught a glimpse of some red hair off to my right. It was Mrs. Simmons.

The guy grabbing me shouted again. "You hear what I'm telling you, punk?"

"I didn'ta"" I started to say.

But before I could finish, a deputy took hold of the guy and pulled him off me. He had to work at it. The guy didn't want to let go. The deputy had to wrap one arm around his neck and use the other hand to pry the guy's fingers out of the fabric of my shirt. Finally, the guy released me and the deputy dragged him away.

I stumbled backward, but another deputy held me up.

And now, before I could think, yet another man was approaching me. This was a great big guy. He seemed almost to be bursting out of his khaki uniform. He towered over me. He had a huge belly that came on before him like a prow goes before a ship.

It was the sheriff himself. His badge said so. He was oldera"I figured about sixty or soa"with spa.r.s.e gray hair swept back over the dome of his egg-shaped head. He had a large, wrinkled face that looked like it smiled a lot. But it wasn't smiling now.

"Easy does it, Harmon," he said calmly. He was looking down at me, but he was talking to the other guy, the guy who'd grabbed me. "Your girls are fine. The boy didn't hurt them any."

"I didn't!" I said.

Wild-eyed, I looked to my right. The guya"Harmona"was standing there next to Mrs. Simmons. He had his arm wrapped protectively around her. She in turn had her arm around the little girl, Angeline, and was leaning her face against Harmon's jacket and crying. I guessed Harmon was her husband, the a.s.sistant district attorney. He was glaring at me with those small, furious black eyes. Sneering at me with his lips working as if he still had a lot he wanted to say.

I looked up at the sheriff. "What's going on?" I said. "I didn't do anything. What's going on?"

The sheriff had a calm, quiet voice. He sounded like a man who didn't get upset much. "I think you know what's going on, son, don't you?"

I shook my head. "I don't, I swear."

"You are Charlie West, right?" he asked me.

I nodded.

"Charlie West from Spring Hill."

"That's right."

He sort of c.o.c.ked his head to one side as if to say: That settles it then.

"Well, Charlie," he said slowly. "I'm Sheriff James. And you're done, that's all. You're going back to prison where you belong."

"Prison?" I said. My voice cracked as I said it. A million thoughts were racing through my mind. Was that where I'd escaped from? Had I been in prison when I woke up this morning? No! They don't strap you down to chairs and torture you in prisona"not in an American prison, anyway. These people around me weren't the same people who had chased me through the forest earlier. These were deputies. This was the law, the good guys. They were supposed to be on my side. "Why should I go to prison?" I asked him.

Sheriff James gave a little laugh. "That's where we generally send folks who've been convicted of murder."