“Well, a few months ago.”

“No, no, not ‘a few months.’ I need to know the exact date and time, as close as you can get, down to the second if you can!”

Oh, brother.“I’ll have to get back to you on that.”

“Do. Find out, as precisely as you can, and get back to me. Do you know exactly where she was when you saw her?”

“Yes, I do know that. She was upstairs, looking out the east windows.”

“Ahhh! Excellent! That’s half the battle right there. Was she solid or transparent?”

“I would say she was solid. I could have touched her. I could smell her hair.”

“Ohh!” He sounded as if he were having his own little Parmenter version of a fit. “All right, all right. Here’s what I need you to do …”

This was where a stable mental platform was necessary. Sometimes—like now—Dane felt he was playing the clueless, cooperative sidekick to Parmenter’s mad professor, shades of those old Back to the Futuremovies. He listened carefully, taking notes.

Date and time, date and time. Dane pored over the calendars on his kitchen wall, in his computer, in his cell phone, and on the wall in the loft, trying to remember. He saw her in the house right before he saw her running across his pasture, chased by the beat-up and mysterious Clarence. So when was that? Two weeks after Arnie took him to see Mandy—Eloise—perform at McCaffee’s and he walked out on her. That was November 7.

Hold on.Did the fire department keep logs?

He got the number from the phone book and spoke with the dispatcher, a cheerful lady named Maureen. Yes, they did keep logs. He told her somewhere around mid-November, she looked, and bingo! There it was: “Okay, we got the call from the McBride Ranch—Dane Collins is listed as the caller—at ten-forty A.M. on Monday, November twenty-second.”

“Bingo! That’s it!” Then it hit him. “Huh. That’s the date Kennedy was shot.”

“Well, I guess you’d know,” she said. “I wasn’t born yet.”

Right. Who was anymore?

So he called 911 at ten-forty; he called Shirley right before that, brought Mandy into the house before that, rescued her before that … saw her running in the pasture … right before that saw her standing at the window … couldn’t have been more than twenty minutes. Okay: November 22, 2010, (close to) 10:20 A.M. PST. He wrote it down.

Now to call Parmenter. Hmm—which phone do I use this time?

chapter

43

Mandy closed her three-week run at the Orpheus on Wednesday, February 16. The next day, she arrived at the Spokane airport, where Seamus met her.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t be there,” he said as they drove I-90 eastbound through the city.

“I’m all right.”

“You look like—”

“I said I’m all right.”

“Well, if you need to unwind a day or two, that’s no problem.”

“Are you gonna help me or not?”

“Peace, peace. I’ve talked to the head of maintenance at the fairgrounds. He’ll be there to let us in if that’s what you want to do.”

She let out a breath and tried to calm herself. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. What you’ve been through … I leave you for just a few days and …”

“Yeah, I know. So how’s the practice?”

“Oh, we’re current. I have some court dates next week, have to do some depositions tomorrow. Pamela’s helping me juggle everything, which reminds me: Vahidi and I talked yesterday and had a very nice conversation. They’re offering the big room.”

That news was as good as it was big and it did thrill her—to an extent. She had to crawl out from under her preoccupation to tell him, “That’s wonderful, Seamus, it really is. I’ll be more excited about it, I promise.”

“He wants to open next month, but I want a bigger budget than they’re offering. We’re going to need a whole new sound track, and with that bigger stage you’re going to need some stage extras and some movable sets, something eye-catching and classy.”

She winced. “Are we going to have enough time for all that? We don’t even have a show designed.”

“Don’t worry, your industrious manager is on it—but that’s all for another day. We have today’s business to think about.”

The Spokane County Fairgrounds were a different sight on a cloudy day in February: dead quiet, deserted, coated with snow and slush. Only a quarter of the parking lot was plowed clear and in use for the three-day Home Design Show in the main exhibit hall.

Mr. Talburton, the maintenance guy, let them in through a gate in the fence and gave them two security passes to wear on lanyards. Apparently he and Seamus had already discussed the agenda for the visit and any applicable fees. Talburton produced a map of the grounds and marked key sites: the carnival area, the food court, the Rabbits and Poultry Building, and the Camelid Barn. He scribbled a phone number along the top of the map. “Here’s my cell number if you have any questions.”

They set out, braving two inches of slush between patches of bare pavement wherever they could find it. Mandy took Seamus’s arm. “Thank you for doing this.”

“You’re very welcome. Try to talk to me. Tell me what you’re feeling.”

They were nearing the carnival area where Mandy, Joanie, and Angie overindulged on the stomach-turning rides. Except for the permanently built roller coaster and the shrouded carousel—Mandy could recall the music it played—there wasn’t a ride in sight. The game pavilions were boarded up. There was a flat, slushy expanse where rows of craft and souvenir booths had stood. Mandy indicated a general area. “I bought an anklet from an old Indian guy right about there, and …”—she peered through a grove of trees to another empty space in front of the livestock barns—“over there, that’s where the Great Marvellini was going to do his show at two. There was a stage and some bleachers …”

And now there was nothing. It was eerie, and brought back the same old fear she’d borne for months, that she was out of her mind, imagining things. Where she remembered carnival rides, there was nothing. The old Indian who sold her the anklet could have been a dream. The Great Marvellini? It was only her memory that placed a stage and bleachers in that spot.

“That would have been the North Stage,” said Seamus, pointing at the map.

Mandy studied the map. The North Stage was there, at least. “I’m so glad.”

“So there is a lot of fact here. There really is a fairgrounds, the locations are all the same.”

“Yes, at least now, in this time, they are.”

“But let me be sure now: what you’ve described so far took place … in 1970?”

She looked down at the snow, feeling so strange, so afraid.

“Come on, now, let’s just work it through. Just show it to me. Go through the process. The point is to get it right out on the table where you can see it, own it, take charge of it. If it’s yours, you can do what you want with it, but as long as you hide from it, it’ll keep chasing you.”

“It was September twelfth, 1970. Joanie and Angie and I were just about to start school again, our sophomore year at NIJC.”

“And this was the same Joanie you met last Friday night?”

“Yes. And she was real. She was forty years older and she remembered all the same things I remembered from when we were growing up, so she had to be the same Joanie I was with that day, so that day had to have happened, right? She was here with me, she and Angie. We were just having fun at the fair, you know? My dad was showing his llamas over in the … well, there’s a camelid building there now but it was another building then …”

They walked down a wide paved walkway spanning an empty field where rows of food booths on each side once formed a village of junk food eateries. “We didn’t want to eat any of the junky stuff, especially Angie …”

They came to the end of the walkway, where two permanent buildings stood in the shadow of the grandstand. “This one here used to be the Spokane Junior League Booth. I bought a basket of chicken here, but Joanie and Angie wanted to get something else, so we were going to meet …”