No mistaking it. This was no backfire. This was the real deal. The Loveland Frog was returning. Somewhere among these pine trees, he knew, he would find the black egg.

"Where are you, G.o.dd.a.m.n it?" he shouted. "Where are you?"

As if in reply, the air in front of him shimmered like ripples on a pond. DOOOOOOOOOFFF! The shock wave sent him backward, onto his a.s.s upon the cypress needles. He pushed himself up and looked. Ten feet away was the black egg.

Everett aimed the gun at the top of the egg.

It was a full five minutes before anything happened. In 1996, he had watched the Loveland Frog cut itself out of its s.p.a.ceship with that spark-wand. But he noticed right away that this time something was different. There was no crack that started in one spot and moved around its circ.u.mference. One moment there was no crack, the next there was a straight line completely encircling the object. It hissed loudly as air escaped into the world. Then the top popped off and swung back on deep-set hinges.

His heart stuttered in his chest and his head grew lighter. This is it, he thought. This is it. They'll have to believe me now. When I drag this thing into Paxton's they'll believe me.

A single black gooey hand slapped upon the lip of the lid. Then another. Slowly, the beast rose from the egg, high enough for its bulbous eyes to look upon Everett's soul in surprise.

"You killed my father," said Everett, clicking back the hammer.

The monster spat a ma.s.s of blackness onto the ground at Everett's feet. "Wait!" it said in a voice that was remarkably human.

Everett hesitated.

"Don't shoot!" pleaded the Loveland Frog.

"What the f.u.c.k are you?" Everett asked. He was steeling himself to squeeze the trigger and end this conversation. The alien was trying to trick him by using his native language, he realized. Very clever!

"My name is Tanner Neff," it said. "Don't shoot!"

Everett watched as the creature ripped away its black, oozing face. Underneath was something that appeared to be a man.

"What day is it?" it asked.

"What?"

"The day. What day is it?"

"October third?" said Everett.

"What year?"

"2012."

The humanoid smiled. "If you put the gun down and help me out of here, Everett, I promise I'll save your father after I save my own."

EPILOGUE.

He watched them come out of the Mansfield Memorial Museum from inside his parked car. They looked like half a happy family, the boy tugging on his father's hand, leaning into gravity, as they walked back to the yellow Beetle. He remembered this moment. It was the last really good memory he had of his father, their last fun day. Tanner remembered the excitement he had felt listening to the old curator's story, relayed through an aged electrolarynx voice box, like a robot himself. This was the night things began to change for the worse, forever.

"Ready?" asked Everett, sitting behind the wheel of his VW Rabbit.

"Yeah," said Tanner.

"Want me to come?"

"No. I should do this alone. I won't be long." Tanner took the cardboard box from the back seat and stepped outside.

By the time he was halfway to his father, David was aware of his presence. Though he hadn't been conscious of this when he was a boy, Tanner now realized that his father had always been cautious with him, alert for any dangers that might arise in the world. He saw the question in David's eyes as he turned to him: Are you a threat to my child?

Four-year-old Tanner had finished snapping himself into his car seat by the time forty-year-old Tanner was close enough for David to address him.

"h.e.l.lo?" David said.

"h.e.l.lo, David," said Tanner.

"I'm sorry, do I know you?"

"I'm not here to scare you, but I need you to listen to what I'm about to say. In a few minutes you were going to call your publisher to tell him you're going to write that last chapter for your new book. I want to ask you to not do that. Not yet."

David stood, stunned. A smile played at the corner of his mouth. "Who are you?" he asked teasingly. "What is this?"

Tanner handed his father the cardboard box.

"What's this?" asked David.

"It's an unfinished book. Or at least one without an appropriate epilogue."

David opened the box. "Look, I'm not supposed to read unsolicited ma.n.u.scripts," he began, but then he stopped talking when he saw the t.i.tle page. The Man from Primrose Lane, it read. "Did you write this?" he asked.

"No."

"Who did?"

"Give it a read," said Tanner. "It explains things better than I could. I'll be back in a month and we can talk some more. For now just give it a read. And do me a favor. Don't call your publisher tonight."

The four-year-old tapped on the window. He waved up at the stranger. "Hi, man!" he said.

"Hey, kiddo," said Tanner. He smiled at himself. This was a memory he did not have. This was something new. And wasn't that a sort of promise?

Before David could think of how to respond, Tanner walked away.

On October 8, 2012, Riley Trimble returned to his solitary room at the end of a hallway inside St. Sebastian's Home for the Criminally Insane and waited for the orderly to arrive with his c.o.c.ktail of pills.

Beezle had instructed him to wait here, in this sanitary h.e.l.l. Wait for him to return. It had been four years. He might as well have gone to prison. How long did he have to wait here for David to return?

"Good evening," said a man in a white uniform as he stepped inside Trimble's room and shut the door.

"Where's Sully?" asked Trimble.

"Sick," said the man in white.

"What's your name?"

"My name's Tanner," the man said.

"h.e.l.lo, Tanner."

"h.e.l.lo, Riley."

The next morning, Cindy Nottingham ate a spartan breakfast while she read the Beacon Journal in the corner of her kitchen that got the most sunlight, fishing for something to blog about. Her eyes caught the story by Phil McIntyre that appeared below the fold: "Riley Trimble Dies in State Hospital."

An overdose, it said. Somehow he'd ingested an entire bottle of Rivertin.

She'd have to ask David about it. Not that he'd talk to her, of course. But it was a good excuse to drag his name out again.

There was a knock at her door.

Cindy, who seldom received company, and never at this early hour, jumped. She set the paper down and walked to the front door. A young man stood there in a white polo. She opened the door a crack.

"h.e.l.lo?" she asked.

"h.e.l.lo, Ms. Nottingham. My name is Everett Bleakney. I represent a man who would like to pay you for a freelance a.s.signment."

"For real?" she asked.

"For real," he said.

Cindy opened the door wider. "Who?"

"I can't say. An anonymous donor. Someone who enjoys your work but wishes it was applied in other areas."

"Such as?"

"Such as anywhere but here."

"I don't understand."

"To put it simply, miss, my employer is willing to pay you five hundred thousand dollars to move away from Akron and never come back. He wants you to write your blog someplace else."

On October 21, Detective Lieutenant Tom Sackett and Dan Larkey each, independently, received a manila envelope with a handwritten address.

Inside, they discovered three photographs. School pictures. One of Elaine O'Donnell, one of Katy Keenan, and one of a girl unfamiliar to them named Erin McNight. The upper right quadrant had been circled. A letter inside asked, Who is Dean Galt?

By the following afternoon, they had compiled enough circ.u.mstantial evidence to procure a search warrant for the photography studio and the Galt family home. They found the shrine to the redheaded girls. At the house, they discovered a trove of kiddie p.o.r.n and an earring Galt had taken from Elaine's body-a particularly d.a.m.ning token, as it was a piece of evidence police had never made public. In a box in the coat closet, they found a handgun that ballistics later matched to the bullet found in the body of the Man from Primrose Lane.

No one ever connected Elizabeth's death to the attempted murder of the Man from Primrose Lane. But Galt went to prison and never came out.

On October 19, forty-year-old Tanner and his father shared a fifth of Johnnie Walker Black on the patio behind the house on Palisades, as four-year-old Tanner snoozed in his bedroom.

"What I don't understand is, why didn't you just go back all the way to 2008 and stop Galt from ever shooting the Man from Primrose Lane, from ever killing your mother?" asked David. His words were not accusatory. "For that matter, why not go back far enough to stop him from taking Elaine?"

"I will," said Tanner.

David turned to look at his adult son.

"I read that book for the first time when I was thirteen," said Tanner. "Obsession is, apparently, in our genes. I spent my twenties studying advanced theoretical physics. By the time I was thirty, I was interning at Tesla's lab. I helped him develop and hone his machine. The important thing to me was always a reusable unit. Took an extra three years, but we did it."

"Reusable. Why?"

"I look at it this way. By coming back here, I've essentially doubled the number of alternate universes, right? In half of them, you're alive for my adolescence. In the others, you're murdered by Trimble. All these universes radiating out from that point my egg arrived, like millions of trees with infinite branches. That's just not enough for me. I wanted a reusable unit because now I'm going to go back to 2008, to save Mom. Save the Man from Primrose Lane. I get to see Galt arrested for his crimes again. I get to kill Trimble all over again. I can go back to when Trimble was five and strangle that cat in his sandbox. Think of all the realities that sp.a.w.n from that. Eventually those in which you're alive, in which we're a family, will far outnumber those in which we're not. To the point that it will almost not matter."

"But that doesn't change anything for you."

Tanner made a raspberry sound. "I can find ways to enjoy the ride. Eventually I'm going to end up in the sixties. Woodstock, right? And I'll have a gazillion dollars to play with. I'm going to live out my days on some island in the South Pacific, in the fifties. So don't worry about me." Tanner tried to smile, but David knew that he would find it very difficult to let go of his obsessions when the time came.

"I'm thinking about publishing the book that the other me wrote," David said. "Maybe clean up the language a bit. Add some internal commentary. Get into characters' thoughts a little. Make it read more like fiction than nonfiction. It'll have to be marketed as fiction, of course. Could be a good read. Of course, I'll need a good pseudonym."

"Will you dedicate it to me?"

"Sure," he said and laughed. He wanted to hold his boy. But Tanner was older. Older than himself. "When do you leave?"

"Whenever," he said. "Soon. I was thinking, if it was all right with you, I mean, I was thinking about staying a little bit. Maybe long enough to go fishing?"

"Absolutely."

"Play catch?"

"Definitely."

David poured another finger of scotch and sipped at it as they looked out at all the stars of the Milky Way above.

ALSO BY JAMES RENNER.

The Serial Killer's Apprentice.