Towering

right,” Mrs. Greenwood said.
    “I know. I’ll have to find the strength. We all will.”
    “You will.” Mrs. Greenwood stroked her hair.
    “I was just wondering . . . ?” Suzie said between sniffles.
    “If we knew where your dad was?” I asked.
    “Yeah. Is he alive still?”
    “Yes,” I said. “I saw him, just yesterday.”
    “Really?” she said. “So you can bring me there, to him?”
    “I can. Or we can,” I said, starting up the stairs again. I turned back to Mrs. Greenwood and put my arm around her. “And, after that, we can go home and play Battleship and watch Star Trek —all three of us.”
    All of us, Suzie first, then me and Mrs. Greenwood, with Rachel behind us, started up the stairs. It was a long walk, but considering what had been going on up until then, it wasn’t that difficult. When we reached the top of the stairs, we saw that it was daylight. I escorted Mrs. Greenwood to her own car, then, after I ascertained that she was okay to drive it, I took Rachel and Suzie to Josh’s old truck.
    We drove east, into the sunrise.

Wyatt
    In the week since Rachel destroyed the rhapsody and released the workers, a lot happened. That first day, we reunited Suzie and her father, with a lot of tears of happiness.
    And then, the police brought charges against Carl and Henry. They weren’t able to bring drug charges against them, because there was no evidence at all that the rhapsody had ever existed or that it was a drug, but they brought over a hundred kidnapping and false imprisonment charges against them, including mine.
    “I don’t think they’ll live much longer anyway,” Mrs. Greenwood said while we watched the news (which, conveniently, came right before Star Trek ). “They were eighty if they were a day, even when I was a young girl. Obviously, they derived some sort of power from the rhapsody. It prolonged their lives.”
    “And strength,” I said. “That old guy broke my arm.”
    “Now that it’s gone, I suspect they will be too.”
    I hoped so.
    “What I don’t understand,” I said, “is why I could communicate with Rachel. I mean, when she was in her tower. I heard her, and no one else could.” I remembered New Year’s Eve. Everyone else had been just as close to the tower as I was, but they were sure it was only a loon or maybe the wind. They didn’t hear anything.
    “I’d thought about that myself.” Mrs. Greenwood paused the television just as the starry background came onscreen, before the announcer said, Space: The final frontier . “And the only thing I could think was that it was Danielle.”
    “Danielle?” I said at the same time Rachel said, “My mother?”
    “Yes. Rachel, I told you I had seen Danielle in my dreams, just a few months ago. She came in a dream and spoke clear as day. She said that Wyatt should come here, that he could help Rachel to fulfill the prophecy. I brushed it off, but the next day, Emily Hill called me.”
    “She did?” I said.
    “Out of the blue. I mean, we’d exchanged Christmas cards, and once, she came up to visit. But I hadn’t heard her voice in years. But that day, she asked if Wyatt could come stay here.”
    “Did she know?” I asked. This was a big shock to me. I thought she’d just wanted to send me here to get me out of town.
    Mrs. Greenwood nodded. “Just yesterday, I asked her, and she said she had had the same dream. She just hadn’t told me about it because she thought I’d freak out.”
    “Good call,” I said.
    “And then, when you came, you saw Danielle yourself.”
    “Twice,” I said.
    “Twice?”
    Oops. I hadn’t told her about the second time. “So you think she, what, facilitated my communication with Rachel? Like a ghost or something?”
    “A ghost or maybe a vision. I think she loved Rachel and wanted to help her, somehow.”
    At this point, it wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that had happened. Not by a long shot. I said, “Do you think she’ll be coming back again?”
    Mrs. Greenwood shook her head. “I don’t think so.” And then, she un-paused the television, the announcer’s voice, blasting: These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise .
    The rest of the week, the town saw more action than it had probably seen in twenty years, as the police solved numerous missing persons cases, including finding Bryce Rosen, the guy on the Missing Person flier outside Hemingway’s. Dateline NBC was there and every news station in the country. Parents flocked to pick up their