“It was like any town. Entirely ordinary. Families, shops, houses, backyards. Just a town.”

“What year was that?”

“Year?”

“The year you visited?”

“ 1954.”

“That was the year it happened.”

“Yes.”

“And you’ve never come back? Till now?”

He shook his head. “No. I was passing through and I thought to myself, why not?”

“It must be kind of eerie for you.”

“Eerie? I would think it would be eerie for anybody. All ghost towns are.”

Yes, he was right. The soft wind whistling through the rusted steel sounded like the angry whispering of ghosts.

“A terrible thing happened here, didn’t it?” the man said. “You can still feel it.”

I reached for the pad and pen in my pocket. “Can I ask your name? You wouldn’t mind being quoted, would you? For my story.”

“I’m afraid I have nothing much to contribute. Just a flood buff, like you said.”

“But you were there.”

“Yes, I was here. So were a lot of people.”

“A lot of people don’t like talking about it. In Littleton, anyway. You don’t seem to mind.”

He looked down at his polished black shoes, both feet ramrod straight, making me wonder if he’d ever been in the military. “Okay,” he said, looking up. “My name’s Herman Wentworth.”

I scribbled it down. “May I ask, Herman, what you used to do?”

“I’m a doctor,” he said. “Of course, I don’t practice anymore.”

Funny, I thought. That uncomfortable feeling of being examined when I’d first said hello to him. It hadn’t been an accident.

“Were you in private practice?”

He shook his head. “I was an army doctor.”

So he had been in the military. “The army, really? Where were you stationed?”

“Oh, everywhere. At one time or another. Pretty much all over the world. I started out in Japan.”

“Japan, huh? When would that have been?”

“At the end of the war. Right after the surrender.”

“Tokyo?”

“No,” he said. “Different part of the country. I was with the 499th medical battalion.”

“Treating wounded soldiers?”

“Treating everybody. Japanese, too. The Hippocratic oath doesn’t delineate between friends and enemies, just those you can save and those you can’t.”

“So, at some point in 1954, you ended up here?”

“For a day.”

“Did you know someone in Littleton Flats?”

He shook his head. “No, I was passing through. Just like today.”

I wondered where someone needed to be going in order to pass through Littleton Flats. It wasn’t exactly the crossroads of the world. More like its dead end.

Then he answered for me.

“I was transferred to San Diego. I wanted to take in some desert scenery. I was born up north-Minneapolis. You don’t see a lot of desert up there.”

“And so you stopped here for one day?”

“That’s right. Just one day.”

“What time of year was it, do you remember?”

“Afraid I don’t.” He repeated the ritual of minutes before, pulling that handkerchief out of his pocket, removing his hat, and wiping the sweat off his brow.

The wooziness I’d felt before had worsened. A dull headache had settled in the middle of my forehead.

“Do you remember anything in particular?”

“About what?”

“The town?”

“It was a long time ago. I told you-it was just a town.”

“Where were you when you heard?”

“Heard?”

“About the flood?”

“Sorry,” he shrugged. “I don’t remember.”

“Okay,” I said. “Thanks. I appreciate you answering my questions.”

“I don’t see how I was any particular help.”

“You were there. It’s nice to meet someone who saw it before it all washed away.”

I put out my hand and he shook it, a surprisingly firm grip from someone eighty or so. He went to leave, then turned back around.

“I wouldn’t stay too long out here.” He tapped his forehead. “Sunstroke can be murder. Remember, I am a doctor.”

“Thank you; I won’t.”

I watched as he made his way back to his car. I heard the engine rev, then softly idle for a while, before he finally pulled out from behind the splintered steel column.

He drove off, leaving the place deathly quiet again.

My headache had reached DEFCON 3; I felt nauseated as I walked back to my car. I opened the front door and collapsed into the front seat.

It felt better than out there in the sun, but I was dizzy enough to close my eyes.

I put the seat back and thought it might be nice to rest for a few minutes.

After a while, I was walking around Littleton Flats again.

The town was alive with people. The water tower was right there on Main Street. The men all wore old-fashioned fedoras. I could smell the aroma of blueberry pancakes and maple syrup wafting over from the Littleton Flats Café.

When I walked inside, the pretty waitress, the one my father left us for-Lillian, her name was-smiled at me. I blushed when she brought me a fresh place mat with connect-the-dots on it.

I began drawing lines from one dot to another, and now and then I thought I could see a picture in there, but when I held it up to show my father, it was blank.

I felt this awful frustration, an excruciating embarrassment as I kept drawing and attempting to show my father and Lillian something in the dots, but every time I tried it would vanish. Poof. I could sense my father’s growing disappointment, Lillian’s boredom, and I finally drew my own picture, just ignored the dots entirely and drew a picture of a woman and child sitting on a bench.

When I opened my eyes again, it was dark and I was covered in cold sweat.

I wondered if the army doctor had been part of the dream.

TWENTY-FIVE

Marv was right.

My Miata did look like the Beverly Hillbillies’ jalopy. He’d hammered out the dents, but the metal was as wrinkled as used aluminum foil. He’d replaced my front bumper with one from another car-evidently not a Miata-that was lopsided and several inches too wide.

The engine seemed pretty much intact.

I was currently doing a respectable seventy miles an hour on the Pacific Coast Highway, on my way north to see John Wren.

He’d called me back a few days later.

He’d looked for his notes. Just as he’d alluded to, there were some interesting things in there. He’d weighed his distaste for me against his belief in the story. The story won. There was a catch: if I wanted his notes, I’d have to come get them. He didn’t own a fax machine, and the nearest one was a good forty miles away, as he’d retired to a deserted fishing camp on a remote lake.

My impression was he’d holed himself up somewhere, Anna had told me. Apparently, he’d turned recluse in earnest.

I told Hinch I was taking a few days off.

I didn’t tell him what I was really doing, because I was afraid he might laugh at me. Then fire me on the spot.

I suppose I could’ve taken a plane, but money was tight, and like Herman Wentworth, I was looking forward to a change in scenery.

When you drive the PCH North, you experience several of them.

The million-dollar beach cottages, ratty surfer motels, volleyball nets, and honky-tonk piers disappear. The coastline becomes steeper, craggier, and altogether more spectacular, as if California has been sanded down in a southerly direction. Past San Francisco, towering pines actually blot out the surf, but you can hear its steady roar even above the traffic.

I stopped only once, at a motel in Big Sur, where I was given a key to the last room available, the one closest to the road. It had its own natural stereo system-engines on one side, ocean on the other-an audio surf and turf that created a stereophonic balance capable of rocking me into a semblance of sleep. I had noisy dreams filled with vivid colors-none of which I remembered when I woke to a gray light filtering in through the loosely drawn blinds. The mattress was soaked through from the sea air.