Melanie, coming to report the van loaded, reminded him that their cell numbers were on his auto-dialer. Ned came to attention and saluted. She laughed.

He watched them drive off. The two Veras were busy, upstairs and in the kitchen. He did read for a bit outside: a novel Larry had said was really scary. Reading supernatural horror didn’t have quite the same effect after last night. Ned wondered if Stephen King had ever encountered a figure with stag horns under a watchtower. Maybe he had. Maybe that was how he got his ideas.

Ned doubted it. He was too distracted to read, though. Kept looking up and watching the trees on the far side of the pool bending in the wind.

He went back in and checked his email. Nothing from home, but Kate had sent him her essay.

He read it over, decided it was perfect. Too perfect—she wrote way too well. Ned’s own schoolwork was okay, but he never took enough time to be that good.

He opened the attachment and spent some time dumbing it down a little so Mr. Drucker wouldn’t hear alarm bells going off in his bald head.

It was good to have something ordinary to think about. He stayed at the keyboard till he had the thing shortened and simplified enough to read like an essay Ned Marriner would do while on holiday in France. He added a couple of typos and misspelled some proper names.

Almost as much work, doing it this way, as it was writing a paper, he thought. Not quite, though. He was going to have to write the other two essays properly. He’d promised, and he personally doubted Kate Wenger would give him another essay without expecting something in return.

He wondered what that might be. She was cute, in that skinny, runner, ballet-student kind of way. Her being so geeky didn’t bug him as much over here, with the guys not around to needle him about it.

The guys were where Mr. Drucker was. Let them suffer.

He downloaded the Arles pictures and sent a couple with emails to Larry and Ken, pretending to feel sorry for them.

It was too windy to go in the pool. Below the house, away from the sheltering slope, he could see the mistral ruffling the water and swaying the cypresses. He checked his watch. Not even noon yet. Time to kill. He wasn’t due to meet Kate till after five.

His father’s weren’t the only plans changed, however. He would meet her, but they weren’t going up to those ruins. Not today.

He’d made that decision in Arles. It was one thing to be adventurous, another to be an idiot. He’d figure out something Kate would go for: they could tour that studio where they were meeting, then have pizza or Chinese in town. She could tell him all about Cézanne, she probably knew all about Cézanne.

He’d tell her about what had happened last night. Maybe.

A part of him was torn about that. Kate was in on this, had been from the beginning, but she hadn’t been around when the dogs attacked, and what he’d seen later with Aunt Kim by the tower was so outside whatever you wanted to call normal that Ned wasn’t sure how to talk about it.

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust her. Kate Wenger was a “trust me” kind of girl. He’d already decided that. But Ned was the one with the burden of whatever was going on inside himself, that strangeness near Sainte-Victoire, sensing people as an aura inside his head, knowing things he should never have known…

In a way it felt like some kind of honour demanded he keep silent about what he seemed to have found. Aunt Kim had talked that way about her own experiences, whatever they were. It wasn’t a word—honour—that you heard people use a lot any more.

There was also the considerable possibility that if he tried to talk about this with others, people would think he was flat-out nuts. That was B-movie stuff, of course. The guy who sees the aliens land, or the mutant giant killer spiders, and everyone thinks he’s drunk or stoned.

Kate Wenger wouldn’t think that way. Ned knew that much.

He just didn’t know for certain what, or how much, to say.

He’d play it by ear, he figured. Sometimes planning too hard messed you up. His father had had plans for today and had shifted them with a gust of wind. You needed to be able to do that, Ned thought. React, be on your toes.

He decided to go for a run. He was under orders from his coach to keep to his routine and log it, anyhow. He went up to change, kept his phone with him. Aunt Kim had told him to do that. She was someone that still needed figuring out.

She’d said her hair had gone white—the way it was now—when she was young. As much as anything she’d said or done, it was that hair, the absolute whiteness of it, that made Ned feel certain she’d really gone through whatever it was she’d hinted at. She was another “trust me” kind of person, he thought.

She hadn’t told him what it was she’d done back then. That had to do with the honour thing, he guessed. Partly being fair to his mother. He made another guess: it sounded like she’d told Ned’s mom, her sister, before going away to England. And everything in their relationship had gone to hell.

Maybe you got careful after that. Maybe you learned a lesson.

He clipped on a bottle of water, put some euros in his pocket, grabbed a couple of power bars, and waved goodbye to Veracook. At the end of the drive he pressed the gate code and went through. He did his stretches there, getting used to the wind, then started jogging down the slope of their road, loosening up.

Halfway down, where the trees on the left opened out to a long, flat meadow beside the road, Ned stopped.

There was a boar, a really big one, in the middle of that field.

Ned held his breath and wished he were better hidden. Not from fear—the animal wasn’t that close—but so he could watch it without scaring it away. They were morning and evening feeders, Veracook had said. They slept through the day. This one was a contrarian, it seemed.

On impulse, he reached out with his mind. He’d encountered a few animals lately that weren’t what they seemed. He sensed nothing, however. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected but it did seem as if what he was looking at here was just a really massive, grey-white boar, rooting for food in an open field in the middle of the day.

On the other hand, today wasn’t an ordinary day, if Ned understood anything of what he’d been learning. He’d become suspicious of coincidences. And while he was thinking this, standing quietly in the roadway, the animal lifted its head and looked at him.

Boars were supposed to be nearsighted, relying on smell and sound, but this one sure did seem to be staring at Ned. Neither of them moved for a long time. Ned thought he’d feel foolish, holding the gaze of an animal, but he didn’t.

Then the boar turned, not hurrying, but as if determined, purposeful, and went into the woods on the far side of the meadow.

Carrying a message? Had it been waiting here for him? Or was that way, way too paranoid a thought? Did everything have meaning today out here in the woods and fields, or would you go a little crazy—or a lot—if you let yourself think that way?

He shook his head. How could you sort out what had significance when you didn’t understand anything? The answer was: you couldn’t. And because of that, he told himself, you stayed out of it.

That was why he was going to tell Kate Wenger that they weren’t going up to the ruins of Entremont today. Not on Beltaine eve, when the Celts believed the gates between the living and the dead lay open after the sun went down.

An artist’s studio and a walk and wonton soup in town sounded just fine to Ned, thanks very much.

He watched the space at the edge of the woods where the boar had gone in, but there was nothing to see. He shrugged, and started jogging again. At the bottom of their road, without even thinking about it, he turned left and then right, heading towards Aix. There was traffic, it wasn’t nearly as pleasant a run, but he couldn’t handle Mont Sainte-Victoire to the east, and he was not going back up to the tower again.