As my gaze moved from screen to screen, I shook my head. "This can't be true. You said you know where my father and my brother are."

"No, I asked if you wanted to find them." Dan stretched his arms out wide across the back of the couch and looked pleased with himself. Now that they were hidden away in this—what did he call it? A bomb shelter? He appeared to be perfectly pleased with himself.

I tried to remember if that was true. "Well, where are they?" No sign of human life appeared on any of the screens. "Where is anyone?"

"Let's see what we can find." He pointed a remote in my direction and pushed a button. The image of the grocery store shifted to the parking lot. Near the top of the screen I could just make out the bakery. "Can you see inside there?"

Dan shrugged. "Sure." A new picture appeared—the lobby of the bakery, devoid of life, then it flickered and changed to the kitchen where Mindy was sitting at a counter sorting currency into little stacks of like bills.

At the sight of her, something inside me cracked and I flopped into the rickety wooden chair next to the table. Tears rolled down my cheeks, but I couldn't remember when I started crying. "I don't understand what's happening."

"Come on, think girl. You'll figure it out." He set the box aside and leaned forward with his elbows on his bony knees. "You've been on enough movie sets to know what when you see one."

He'd been the town crazy man all my life. Why would I expect anything other than craziness from him now. "This isn't a movie set. I grew up in this town. It's been here for two hundred years."

"Well, now, that depends on how you look at it. There's been a town here for nigh-on two hundred year, sure enough. This here shelter's been dug in the dirt longer 'an I been alive, but," he shrugged and leaned back. The springs in the couch squeaked in protest. "Things changed. Folks moved to the city. Farms went bust. Trains stopped running. Towns like this done went belly up all over the country."

I used the sleeve of my coat to mop my face. "You're crazy."

Gaps where teeth used to be showed when he grinned at me. "Mayhap. You ain't the first to say so, but let's talk about it, shall we? I ain't the one who saw blood where there was no blood, and I ain't the one who thought my dead daddy was living in an abandoned house, and I ain't the one running around town looking for my brother in a panic when you ain't got a shred of evidence anything bad happened to him."

Hot acid churned deep in my gut and a sheen of sweat broke out over my forehead. If I thought about it, even for a moment, I could feel my mother's body in my arms, like a bag of wet, sun-warmed sand. Her long lashed made dark shadows on her dreadfully pale cheeks. The blood on her lips blazed in contrast with her colorless skin. I blinked hard to push the image away. "I saw blood in the hall."

"Oh, I know. I saw it too. Look at this." He reached one long arm down and pulled a laptop computer from under the couch. For a minute or so, he tapped at the buttons and made faces at the machine. Then he turned it to face me and I watched myself on the screen.

I toed my boots off and left them on the rack to drip dry. With the mop in the pantry, I wiped my slushy footprints from the floor, making sure to get every trace of mud. After stashing the mop back in its place, I paused, looking out the window in the direction of the barn. Even before I noticed it, an astute observer could see the gore in the hallway beyond the kitchen. I turned and walked toward it. The moment I saw, my body went rigid.

Sitting in this strange place with an even stranger man my stomach once again rolled and I clenched my teeth against the sensation.

He's a killer, Jess. Don't leave him alone. Keep an eye on him, always

"I need to find my dad."

"I thought you wanted to find your brother."

"I want to find my brother more than anything in the world, but I need to find my dad."

"Your daddy's dead, girl. Ain't that what the cop told you?"

"I had dinner with him last night. I know he's not dead."

The madman's chuckle was soft and low. "You sure do put a lot of stock in personal experience."

"What kind of a thing is that to say? I—" I what? Why was I wasting time arguing with this lunatic? "I need to go. I have to find my dad."

"Where you going to look?"

Movement caught my eye and I watched Mindy rise from her stool in the kitchen and stash the money in a bag in the bottom of her purse. She turned and jogged up the stairs at the back of the store and the camera angle switched to show her entering her second-story apartment.

"Why is Mindy the only person we can see on these cameras?"

"I guess she's the only one in this scene."

He was crazy. He had always been crazy. "Will you take me back to my father's house?"

"I don't think it's a good idea to be leaving this here bunker for a few days at least."

"I have to find my dad."

He's a killer, Jess. Don't leave him alone. Keep an eye on him, always

Dan tossed me the keys to his car. "Knock yourself out, but I'll tell you this. What's being done in this town is nothing more than story-telling, and if you've ever read a real page-turner, you know things just keep getting worse for the determined heroine."

"Thanks for the info. You have anything more concrete?"

The sound of him sucking his teeth sent needles into my brain. "You ever watch a horror movie? Pretty girl goes chasing a monster, she gets killed every time." When I didn't answer, he kept talking. "If you're determined, then go. You're most likely to find a hidden space where the transition spots are—doorways between rooms, places where you have to turn down a hall to get from one space to another. The dark hidden places you think are safe, almost never are. Don't trust anybody in this town, but least of all your brother."

"My brother's the only person I ever trusted in my life."

"Time to re-evaluate." At the screen where he pointed, I saw the snow letting up. "Weather's easing up. They want you to come out."

They. Who are they? I couldn't afford to go any further down this rabbit hole with him. "Thanks for the car. I'll get it back to you as soon as I can."

"It's a piece of junk. Do me a favor and total it so I'll have to get a new one."

I climbed the stairs and emerged in Dan's toolshed, made my way around the house and got back into the Dart, this time on the driver's side. The snow had let up, but I had my wipers going to deal with the flakes blowing onto the windshield from the hood of the car. When I turned the corner, a man was snow blowing his driveway. He raised a mittened hand in greeting. Some figure in a bring orange suit and black helmet snow mobilized along the river bank. It looked like every snowy day of my childhood.

"I'm not crazy." I said it outloud to convince myself, before realizing that only crazy people said things like that.