By the Light of the Moon

No strategy to avoid Ta

'Come down from Wyoming near a month ago,' Ta

Dylan reached past Ta

'Been rattlin' from one end of Arizona to the other, and now I'm on my way home, where maybe I should've stayed.'

In the psychic trace, Dylan felt again the geography of a burnt-out soul, that continent of ashes, that despondent world of soundless solitude he had encountered when, hand to door, he had left the restaurant.

Although he had not consciously framed the question, Dylan heard himself asking, 'How long has your wife been dead?'

The reappearance of the intimidating squint suggested that the old man still suspected a con, but the pertinence of the question lent Dylan some credibility. 'Emily's been gone eight years,' Ta

To have known by some form of clairvoyance that this stranger's wife was dead, to have known it rather than merely to have suspected it, to know intimately the devastation that this death had wrought in Ta

'You and Emily started looking for the girl twelve years 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,' Ta

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 Ta

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,' Ta

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 Ta

'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 Ta

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,' Ta

Dylan's hand tightened around the Pontiac door handle, and in his mind a co

Seizing Dylan by the arm, halting him, Ta

'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 di

'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 already he was drunk with it. 'Well, like you said, if this isn't the last link, you'll find the next one, and the one after that.'

'All the way to the last link,' Dylan agreed, recalling the relentlessness of the compulsion that had driven him to Eucalyptus Avenue. 'But-'

'You'll find my girl, I know you will, I know.' Ta

In truth, Dylan might have been at least mildly enthusiastic about playing hero twice in one night, but his enthusiasm curdled when he realized how devastated Ben Ta

Gently, he broke the old man's grip on his arm and continued toward the restaurant. Since there was no turning back, he wanted to finish this as quickly as possible and put an end to the suspense.

Jinking bats, now three in number, frolicked in their aerial feast, and the paper-fragile exoskeleton of each doomed moth made a faint but audible crunch when snapped in those rodent teeth: entire death a