“How did you get along with Virginia Kreeper?” asked Mary a few minutes later.

“Like two peas in a pod,” replied Jack sullenly, sitting down heavily on his chair, unable to shift thoughts of clean platters, beanstalks and Madeleine from his head.

“So she’s going to give you a clean bill of health?”

“Not exactly. I’ve got to visit Dorian Gray again. Did you speak to the officer investigating Stanley Cripps’s death?”

“Yes,” she replied, “I told him about Goldilocks and the ‘It’s full of holes’ message, and he was very interested. Goldilocks hadn’t come forward after the blast, and he would be wanting to speak to her once we find her.”

“It won’t be the first time a reporter has committed the sin of omission,” mused Jack, dialing Dorian’s number only to receive the “disconnected” tone.

“I’ve found several links between these explosions,” said Ashley, waving the folder.

“You have?” said Jack excitedly. “What are they?”

“They all happened to humans—except the one in the Nullarbor Plain, which happened to sand.”

“Inspired. Anything else?”

“They all occurred on the planet Earth, the addresses all had an A in them, they all happened during the day except Obscurity, none of them occurred in Antarctica, each was within a thousand miles of human habitation, all of them—”

“Any useful links? Like something Katzenberg, Prong and Cripps had in common.”

“Aside from them all being killed in unexplained explosions?”

“Yes.”

Ashley consulted his list for a moment. “No. Not a single one. By the way,” he continued, “I’m still waiting for Bart-Mart to get back to me, and Goldy’s car hasn’t been reported abandoned or anything.”

“Thanks.”

“And Agatha Diesel dropped in to say hello while you were both out.”

“Did she?” said Jack, making a face. “What did she want?”

“It was most odd,” said Ashley thoughtfully. “She said she wanted to talk to you about a charity benefit in aid of distressed gentlefolk she was planning, but I think she just wants you to put your—” He stopped, looked at Mary, gave a shrug and then placed a single sucker digit on Jack’s forehead.

“Yes, you’re probably right,” agreed Jack after a moment, “and most graphically realized, too.” He pushed away Ashley’s digit, which detached with a faint pop. “And please, don’t do that mind-merging stuff on me, okay?”

“Sorry. Do you find it intrusive?”

“Not at all—it’s just that I can see what you’re thinking in the background.”

“Oops,” gulped Ashley, flicking a look toward Mary, who thankfully wasn’t paying much attention. “Right you are, then.”

The phone rang.

“Spratt, NCD…”

It was Briggs, so Jack just carried on talking.

“…isn’t in right now, but if you’d like to leave a message when you hear the tone, please do so…. Beeeeep.”

“That old pretending-to-be-an-answering-machine stuff doesn’t fool me, Spratt,” said Briggs angrily.

“Sorry, sir.”

“What are you doing in the office?”

“I was with the quack for my psychiatric evaluation, sir. I just popped in to brief Mary about the Rumpelstiltskin parole hearing.”

“Hmm. Well, put her on.”

He handed the phone to Mary, who listened for a moment and then said, “Yes, sir, I was very impressed you didn’t fall for the answering-machine gag.”

She looked up at Jack, who made a sign for her to call him and then crept out the door. Briggs had been known to walk around the building on a cell phone pretending he was in his office, and Jack had just about had his fill of threshold guardians for the day.

Jack walked down to his car and noticed that the door mirror had mended itself in his absence. He drove out of the garage, meaning to visit Dorian Gray and have a word with him in person. He’d called him several times, but had continued to get the “number disconnected” tone.

A few miles down the road, and after the brief annoyance of a military checkpoint looking for the Gingerbreadman, Jack’s cell phone rang.

“I’m going home to watch Columbo, sir,” he said without waiting to hear who it was. “Oh, sorry, Mary—what’s up?”

He slowed the car as he listened, then pulled into a lay-by.

“Excellent,” he said at last. “I’ll meet you at the northern entrance in twenty minutes.”

He tossed his phone onto the passenger seat, signaled and pulled out into the afternoon traffic, heading rapidly off in the direction of Andersen’s Wood. As he did so, he noticed for the first time that the odometer on the Allegro was going backward—and the fuel gauge was still on the three-quarters mark. He shrugged. Clearly a glitch of some sort.

15. Three Bears

Andersen’s Wood was remarkable not only for its mature hardwood but for its isolation. Apart from one narrow asphalt road running north to south there were no roads at all, just unmarked logging tracks meandering around the ancient woodland. It wasn’t unusual for people to become lost while walking through its leafy trails, and there were even rumors of a dilapidated and forgotten castle hidden somewhere within its heavy canopy, protected by an almost impenetrable wall of brambles.

Mary was waiting for Jack when he arrived outside the northern entrance to the wood, and she jumped into his car as soon as he pulled up.

“So what have we got?” he asked.

“Cell phone records,” she replied. “She had a ‘number blocked’ call at 6:04 A.M. on Saturday morning that she answered. There was another one at 9:56 that she didn’t, and several of the same all through the afternoon. Josh Hatchett’s home number calls her that evening and at regular intervals throughout the next five days. Seventy-six calls in total and about half with number withheld. None of them were answered.”

“Quite a few people withhold their numbers,” mused Jack,

“but her last answered call was the Saturday 6:04 one?”

“Yup. From there we can track her cell phone as it began to move a half hour later. It crossed eight coverage cells until it stopped in Andersen’s Wood at 7:32. The signal faded three days later, probably as a result of a dead battery.”

“That doesn’t really help us,” murmured Jack. “Towers are few and far between in the country, and cells can get pretty big—it will be like looking for the proverbial needle.”

“We got lucky,” said Mary. “In the three days Goldy’s phone was doing nothing but firing off the occasional ident, it switched to another cell and back again six times.”

“It was moved?”

“I don’t think so.”

She showed Jack a local map that had been faxed from Goldilocks’s phone company with two intersecting polygons sketched upon it.

“Goldy’s phone was at the boundary of a cell, and the ident was bounced back and forth between two masts; by looking at where the cells potentially share coverage, we can get a vague idea of where her phone is.”

She showed him the approximate overlap of the two irregular cells and pointed to an area less than eight hundred yards wide and about three hundred deep that fell in a sector on the western side of the wood.