She said, “They were in the grass. The park by the beach. You were on a bench, reading Harkenbach’s book. There were a lot of brass cartridges in the grass. I think maybe people were executed there. These teeth must’ve belonged to someone who was executed.”
Looking from the grisly relic to his daughter’s face, Jeffy realized that she had depths until now unknown to him. “Why didn’t you show me then?”
“I wanted to go to that house on Bastoncherry and meet my mother. I knew if you saw these, you’d take us straight back to Prime. I did wrong, I guess.”
“You guess, huh?”
“Yeah, well, I never want to go back to that world.” She flung the teeth away into the weeds. “But if we jump now to someplace new, just to get out of here, maybe it’ll be even worse than that crazy sewer of a world with its Good Boys and Justice Wolves.”
“Maybe right here is worse. It sure seems worse to me.”
Amity slowly turned her head, surveying the night as though she were equipped with bad-guy radar. “Whatever happened here was a major crap storm, but it’s done. It’s over.”
“We don’t know that it’s over,” he disagreed.
“With this much quiet, it had to be over long ago.”
“Quiet is always a lure, and then the trap springs.”
“Not in every scene of every story. ‘He who fears to take a risk will never know reward.’”
“We’re not going to stand here quoting our favorite heroes at each other.”
“Good,” she said. “Let’s go into town and find a place that’ll be safe when we jump back to Prime.”
His soft laughter was genuine, if bleak. He would protect her at any cost. He only wished he knew when the bill would come due.
“Okay, you win. But sometimes I worry that unwittingly I’m raising a lawyer.” He pressed Cancel on the screen, and the keypad vanished, and the device went dark, and he pocketed it.
“Before we go,” Amity said, “do you see that weird car in the driveway?”
He’d been peripherally aware of the vehicle, off to the right, but in the blanketing dark, he’d not discerned anything especially strange about it.
Stepping off the brick walk, making her way through the tall grass and weeds, Amity played the beam of her flashlight over the sedan.
Following her, Jeffy felt a frisson of fear quiver across his scalp and down his spine, not because anything about the car was overtly ominous, but because it was as anachronistic as would have been Alexander Graham Bell making the first telephone call with an Apple iPhone. The car revealed something about this timeline that was as important as it was at first impossible for him to compute.
49
Because Daddy liked old things—Chiparus sculptures, Clarice Cliff ceramics, Art Deco posters—he was naturally in love with really old cars like Cords and Tuckers and Auburns and Grahams, makes that went out of business decades ago, as well as ’36 Fords and ’40 Cadillacs and all that. He couldn’t afford to own an expensive collectible car, but he had shelves of books about them.
Now and then, his automotive magazines featured articles about car shows where companies revealed concept drawings and even mock-ups of the conveyances of the future, which always looked like you might be able to fly them to the moon. The vehicle in the Bonners’ driveway was one of those, but more so: low and sleek, but also curvy in a way cars had never managed to be both before. It appeared seamless, a single piece, not assembled from parts. No visible door handles. No drip molding. No gas-tank door. The windows seemed to be made of the same material as the body; Amity’s flashlight couldn’t penetrate them, though she assumed that if you were inside, you could see out.
She followed her father around to the front of the car, which had no grille, no vents of any kind. If there were headlights and signal lights, they were flush with the body and appeared to be made of the same material as the rest of the vehicle.
“No license plate,” he said.
She said, “No side mirrors.”
“There doesn’t seem to be a hood to open.”
“Maybe it’s not a car.”
He said, “It’s a car, all right.”
“It looks like it could levitate.”