By the light of the moon

ago,'
Dylan said, though he didn't know to what girl he referred or yet
grasp the nature of their search.
    Grief made way for surprise. 'How do you know these things?'
    'I said "girl," but she'd have been thirty-eight even then.'
    'Fifty now,' Tanner confirmed. For a moment he seemed to be more
amazed by the number of lost decades than by the knowledge that
Dylan had acquired by divination: 'Fifty. My God, where does a life
go?'
    Releasing the door handle, Dylan was drawn away from the Mercury
by an unknown but more powerful attractant, and once again he was
on the move. Almost as an afterthought, he called back to Tanner,
'This way,' as though he had a clue as to where he might be
going.
    Prudence no doubt counseled the old man to climb in his truck
and lock the doors, but his heart was involved now, and prudence
had little influence with him. Hurrying at Dylan's side, he said,
'We figured we'd find her sooner than later. Then we learned the
system was dead-set against us.'
    A swooping shadow, a thrum overhead. Dylan looked up in
time to see a desert bat snare a moth in midflight, the killing
silhouetted against a tall parking-lot lamp. This sight would not
have chilled him on another night, but chilled him now.
    An SUV in the street. Not a Suburban. But cruising past slowly.
Dylan watched until it passed out of sight.
    The bloodhound of intuition led him across the parking lot to a
ten-year-old Pontiac. He touched the driver's door, and every nerve
end in his hand received the psychic spoor.
    'You were twenty,' Dylan said, 'Emily just seventeen, when the
girl came along.'
    'We had no money, no prospects.'
    'Emily's parents had died young, and yours were... useless.'
    'You know what you can't know,' Tanner marveled. 'That's
exactly how it was. No family to back us up.'
    When the faintly fizzing trace on the driver's door did not
electrify Dylan, he moved around the Pontiac to the passenger's
side.
    At his heels, the old man said, 'Still, we'd have kept her no
matter how hard things got. But then in Emily's eighth
month—'
    'A snowy night,' Dylan said. 'You were in a pickup truck.'
    'No match for a semi.'
    'Both your legs were broken.'
    'Broke my back, too, and internal injuries.'
    'No health insurance.'
    'Not a dime. And I was a year gettin' back on my feet.'
    At the front door on the passenger's side, Dylan found an
imprint different from the one on the driver's door.
    'Broke our hearts to give that baby up, but we prayed it was the
best thing for her.'
    Dylan detected a sympathetic resonance between the psychic trace
of this unknown person and that of Ben Tanner.
    'By God, you're the true thing,' the old man said, abandoning
his skepticism more quickly than Dylan would have thought possible.
Songless for so long, hope – that feathered thing perched in
his soul – was singing again to Ben Tanner. 'You're
real.'
    No matter what might come, Dylan remained compelled to follow
this incident to its inevitable conclusion. He could no more easily
turn away than a rainstorm could reverse course and pour upward
from the puddled earth into the wrung-out thunderheads from which
it had fallen. Nevertheless, he was loath to raise the old man's
hopes, for he couldn't foresee the end point. He couldn't guarantee
that the father-and-child reunion that seemed miraculously in
process was, in fact, destined to occur this night – or
ever.
    'You're real,' Tanner repeated, this time with a disquieting
reverence.
    Dylan's hand tightened around the Pontiac door handle, and in
his mind a connection occurred with the solid ca-chunk of
railroad cars coupling. 'Dead man's trail,' he murmured, not sure
what he meant, but not thrilled by the sound of it. He turned from
the car toward the restaurant. 'There's an answer here, if you want
it.'
    Seizing Dylan by the arm, halting him, Tanner said, 'You mean
the girl? In there? Where I just was?'
    'I don't know, Ben. It doesn't work that way with me. No clear
visions. No final answers till I reach the end. It's like a chain,
and I go link by link, not knowing what the last link is until I've
got it.'
    Choosing to ignore the warning implicit in Dylan's words, the
old man said wonderingly, 'I wasn't actually looking for her here.
Not in this town, this place. Pulled off the road, came for dinner,
that's all.'
    'Ben, listen, I said there's an answer here, but I don't know if
the answer is the girl herself. Be prepared for that.'
    The old man had taken his first taste of hope not a minute ago,
and