Strangers

kitchen clock, to the mournful fluting of the wind at the windows, wondering if malignancies were even now sprouting within them.
        Finally, Ernie said, "Maybe we were contaminated, and maybe we're all slowly rotting inside, but I don't think so. After all, they test potential weapons at Shenkfield. And what use would a weapon be that didn't kill the enemy for years and years?"
        "Virtually no use at all," Dom acknowledged.
        "And," Ernie said, "how could chemical contamination explain that bizarre experience you had in Lomack's house in Reno?"
        "I've no idea," Dom said. "But now that we know they cordoned off this whole area using the excuse of a toxic spill - whether it was a real spill or not - my theory that we were brainwashed is a lot more credible. Because, see, before this I wasn't able to explain how someone could've rounded us up at will and held us long enough to make us forget the thing we saw. But the quarantine gave them the time they needed, and it also kept away prying eyes. So… at least now we have a good idea who we're up against. The United States Army, maybe acting in collusion with the government, maybe acting alone, has been trying to hide something that happened here, something it did but shouldn't have done. I don't know ' about you, but the thought of being up against an enemy that big and that potentially ruthless scares the hell out of me."
        "An old Leatherneck like me is bound to be scornful of the Army," Ernie said. "But they're not devils, you know. We can't leap to the conclusion we're victims of a wicked right-wing conspiracy. That crackpot stuff makes millions for paranoid novelists and for Hollywood, but in the real world, evil is more subtle, less identifiable. If Army and government officials are behind what happened to us, they don't necessarily have immoral motives. They probably think they did the only wise thing they could've done in the circumstances."
        "But whether or not it's wise," Faye said, "we've got to dig into this situation. If we don't, Ernie's nyctophobia will surely get worse. And your sleepwalking will also get worse, Dom. And what then?"
        They all knew "what then." "What then" was a shotgun barrel jammed in the mouth, the route to peace that Zebediah Lomack had taken.
        Dom looked down at the motel registry on the table before him. Four spaces above his own name, he saw another entry that electrified him. Dr. Ginger Weiss. Her address was in Boston.
        "Ginger," he said. "The fourth name on those moon posters."
        Furthermore, Cal Sharkle, the Blocks' trucker-friend from Chicago, the zombie-eyed subject of one of the Polaroid snapshots, had checked into the motel just before Dr. Weiss. The first guests to sign in that day were Mr. and Mrs. Alan Rykoff and daughter, of Las Vegas. Dom was willing to bet that they were the young family photographed in front of the door to Room 9. Zebediah Lomack's name was not in the registry, so he had probably just been unlucky enough to stop at the Grille for dinner that night, on his way between Reno and Elko. One of the other names might have been that of the young priest in the other Polaroid, but if so, he had signed without appending his title.
        "We'll have to talk to all these people," Dom said excitedly. "We can start calling them first thing tomorrow and see what they remember about those days in July."
        
        Chicago, Illinois.
        By allowing no slightest hairline crack to appear in his resolve, by showing no equivocation whatsoever, Brendan managed to obtain Father Wycazik's permission to go to Nevada alone on Monday, without Monsignor Janney trailing him in expectation of miracles.
        By ten-ten, he was in bed with the lights out, lying on his side in blackness, staring at the window, where the palest light glistered softly in the frost that skinned the pane. The window looked out upon the courtyard, where no lights burned at this hour, so Brendan knew that he was seeing indirect moonglow refracted by the thin layer of ice that had welded itself to the glass. It had to be indirect light because the moon was traversing the sky on a course that had made it visible from the study windows earlier in the evening, and the study was on the other side of the rectory; the moon could not now be over the courtyard unless it had made a sudden ninety-degree turn in the path it had previously been following, which was not