In this work, at least initially, secrecy is the key to success.

So when Cass leans over the table in the spooky candlelight and asks if Curtis is an alien, and when Polly suggests that Old Yeller might be an alien as well, and when together the perspicacious twins say, “Dish us the dirt, ET,” Curtis meets the piercing blue eyes of one sister, gazes into the piercing blue eyes of the other, takes a swallow of nonalcoholic beer, reminds himself of all his mother’s teachings—which he didn’t learn from megadata downloading, but from ten years of daily instruction—takes a deep breath, and says, “Yes, I’m an alien,” and then he tells them the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

After all, his mom also taught that extraordinary circumstances arise in which any rule can wisely be broken. And she often said that from time to time someone so special comes along that upon meeting him or her, the direction of your life shifts unexpectedly, and you are therewith changed forever and for the better.

Gabby, the night caretaker of the restored ghost town in Utah, had manifestly not been such a force for positive change.

The Spelkenfelter twins, however, with their dazzling variety of mutual interests, with their great appetite for life, with their good hearts and with their tenderness, are absolutely the magical beings of whom his mother had spoken.

Their delight in his revelations thrills the motherless boy. A childlike wonder so overcomes them that he can see what they had been like and what they must have looked like when they were little girls in Indiana. Now, in a different way from Old Yeller, Castoria and Polluxia also have become his sisters.

Chapter 57

MAYBE PRESTON STOPPED to play blackjack in Hawthorne’s small casino, or maybe he found a good point of observation from which to study the spectacular panoply of stars that brightened the desert sky, hoping to spot a majestic extraterrestrial cruise ship on an aerial tour of jerkwater towns. Or maybe he took so long to return with dinner because he paused to kill some poor wretch who had ugly thumbs and therefore was fated to lead a life of substandard quality.

When at last he arrived, he brought paper bags from which arose ravishing aromas. Submarine sandwiches packed with meat and cheese and onions and peppers, drenched in dressing. Pints of fabulous potato salad, macaroni salad. Rice pudding, pineapple cheesecake.

For old Sinsemilla, her ever thoughtful husband had provided a tomato-and-zucchini sandwich, with bean paste and mustard, on a whole-wheat roll, a side order of pickled squash seasoned with sea salt, and carob-flavored tofu pudding.

Due to the long day on the highway, all the wicked scheming, the drugs snorted, the drugs smoked, the drugs eaten, and the chasers of tequila, dear Mater was unfortunately too unconscious to eat dinner with her family.

Valiant Preston proved himself to be as much of an athlete as he was an academic. He muscled the motherthing’s limp body off the galley floor and carried her into their bedroom at the back of the motor home, where she could more discreetly lie in a disreputable sprawl. As she was borne away, old Sinsemilla made no more sound and exhibited no more proof of life than would have a sack of cement.

Dr. Doom remained in their boudoir for a while, and although the door stood open, Leilani didn’t venture one step toward that ominous threshold to see what might be up. She assumed he would be turning down the bedclothes, lighting a stick of strawberry-kiwi incense, undressing his enchantingly comatose bride, and in general setting the stage for a session of connubial bliss utterly unlike anything that the late Dame Barbara Cartland, prolific writer of romance novels, had ever imagined in the more than one thousand love stories that she had produced.

Leilani took advantage of Preston’s absence to open the sofabed in the lounge, which was already fitted with sheets and a blanket, and to poke through the bags of sandwich-shop food, taking her fair share of the tastiest stuff. She retreated to her bed with dinner and with the novel about evil pigmen from another dimension, eating and pretending to read with great absorption in order to avoid having to sit with the pseudofather at the table.

Her worries about being forced to share a menacing little dinner for two with Preston Maddoc, alias Jordan Banks, possibly with black candles and a bleached skull on the table, proved to be unfounded. He opened a bottle of Guinness and settled down alone at the dinette, extending no invitation to join him.

He sat facing her, perhaps twelve feet away.

Relying on peripheral vision, Leilani knew that from time to time, he looked at her, perhaps even stared for extended periods; however, he said not a single word. In fact, he hadn’t spoken to her since lunch in the coffee shop west of Vegas. Because she had openly claimed that he killed her brother, Dr. Doom was pouting.

You might think that homicidal maniacs wouldn’t be thin-skinned. Considering their crimes against their fellow human beings, against humanity itself, you might suppose that they would expect to have their motives questioned and even to be insulted on occasion. Over the years, however, Leilani’s experience with Preston indicated that

homicidal maniacs had feelings more tender and more easily bruised than those of girls in early adolescence. She could almost feel the hurt and the sense of injustice radiating from him.

He knew, of course, that he had killed Lukipela. He didn’t suffer from amnesia. He hadn’t murdered and buried Luki while in a fugue state. Yet he seemed to feel that Leilani had shown woefully bad manners by referring to this sad, gruesome business at lunch and in front of a stranger, and by calling into question his veracity in the matter of the extraterrestrial healers and their Luki-lifting levitation beam.

She was certain that if she looked up from her pigmen book and apologized, Preston would smile and say something like, Hey, that’s all right, pumpkin, everybody makes mistakes, which was too creepy to contemplate, although she couldn’t seem to stop contemplating it.

At this very moment, his inamorata awaited him, as slack as sludge, as aware and alert as a block of cheese. The sweet prospect of romance cheered him sufficiently that he didn’t sit brooding like a mad Russian over dinner. The doom doctor ate quickly and returned to the bedroom, closing the door behind him this time, leaving the dinette littered with bags, deli containers, and dirty plastic spoons, confident that Leilani would clean up after him.

Immediately, she hopped out of bed, fetched the TV remote, and switched on a humorless sitcom. She turned the sound up only as loud as she was permitted to have it at night; but the volume, although low, would be sufficient to screen any expressions of passion that she might otherwise be able to hear from the room at the far end of the motor home.

While the wizard-baby breeder lay insensate and while Preston remained preoccupied with unthinkable acts back there in the love nest of the damned, Leilani lifted the foot of her mattress, at the right-hand corner, pulled the two strips of tape off the ticking, and gingerly felt inside the hole. She located the small plastic bag in which, months ago, she’d stowed the knife to ensure that it wouldn’t gradually work deeper into the padding.

The package didn’t feel as it should. The size, the shape, and the weight were all wrong.

The plastic hag was clear. Extracting it from beneath the mattress, she saw at once that it contained not the knife that she had hidden, not a knife at all, but the penguin figurine that had belonged to Tetsy, that Preston had brought home because it reminded him of Luki, and that Leilani had left in the care of Geneva Davis.

Chapter 58

MIDNIGHT IN SACRAMENTO: Those three words would never be the title of a romance novel or a major Broadway musical.

Like every place, this city had its special beauty and its share of charm. But to a worried and weary traveler, arriving at a dismal hour, seeking only cheap lodgings, the state capital appeared to huddle miserably under a mantle of gloom.

A freeway ramp deposited Micky in an eerily deserted commercial zone: no one in sight, her Camaro the only car on the street. Acres of concrete, poured horizontal and vertical, oppressed her in spite of a brightness of garish electric signs. The hard lights honed sharp shadows, and the atmosphere was so oddly medieval that she mistook a cluster of brown leaves in a gutter for a pile of dead rats. She half expected to find that everyone here lay dead or dying of the plague.

In spite of the lonely streets, her uneasiness had no external cause, but only an inner source. During the long drive north, she’d had too much time to think about all the ways she might fail Leilani.

She located a motel within her budget, and the desk clerk was both alive and of this century. His T-shirt insisted LOVE is THE ANSWER! A small green heart formed the dot in the exclamation point.

She carried her suitcase and the picnic cooler to her ground-floor unit. She’d eaten an apple while driving, but nothing more.

The motel room was a flung palette of colors, a fashion seminar on the disorienting effects of clashing patterns, bleak in spite of its aggressive cheeriness. The place wasn’t entirely filthy: maybe just clean enough to ensure that the cockroaches would be polite.

She sat in bed with the cooler. The ice cubes in the Ziploc bags hadn’t half melted. The cans of Coke were still cold.

While she ate a chicken sandwich and a cookie, she watched TV, switching from one late-night talk show to another. The hosts were funny, but the cynicism that informed every joke soon depressed her, and under all the yuks, she perceived an unacknowledged despair.

Increasingly since the 1960s, being hip in America had meant being nihilistic. How strange this would seem to the jazz musicians of the 1920s and ’30s, who invented hip. Back then hipness had been a celebration of individual freedom; now it required surrendering to groupthink, and a belief in the meaninglessness of human life.

Between the freeway and the motel, Micky had passed a packaged-liquor store. Closing her eyes, she could see in memory the ranks of gleaming bottles on the shelves glimpsed through the windows.

She searched the cooler for the special treat that Geneva had mentioned. The one-pint Mason jar, with a green cast to the glass, was sealed airtight by a clamp and a rubber gasket.

The treat was a roll of ten- and twenty-dollar bills wrapped with a rubber band. Aunt Gen had hidden the money at the bottom of the cooler and had mentioned the jar at the last minute, calculating that Micky wouldn’t have accepted it if it had been offered directly.

Four hundred thirty bucks. This was more than Gen could afford to contribute to the cause.

After counting the cash, Micky rolled it tightly and sealed it in the Mason jar once more. She put the cooler on the dresser.

This gift came as no surprise. Aunt Gen gave as reliably as she breathed.

In the bathroom, washing her face, Micky thought of another gift that had come in the form of a riddle, when she’d been six: What will you find behind the door that is one door away from Heaven?

The door to Hell, Micky had replied, but Aunt Gen had said that her response was incorrect. Although the answer seemed logical and right to young Micky, this was, after all, Gen’s riddle.

Death, that long-ago Micky had said. Death is behind the door because you have to die before you can to go heaven. Dead people… they’re all cold and smell funny, so I leaven must be gross.

Bodies don’t go to Heaven, Geneva explained. Only souls go, and souls don’t rot.

After a few more wrong answers, a day or two later, Micky had said, What Yd find behind the door is someone waiting to stop me from getting to the next door, someone to keep me out of Heaven.

What a peculiar thing to say, little mouse. Who would want to keep an angel like you out of Heaven?

Lots of people.

Like who?

They keep you out by making you do bad things.

Well, they’d fail. Because you couldn’t be bad if you tried.

I can be bad, Micky had assured her, / can be real bad.

This claim had struck Aunt Gen as adorable, the tough posing of a pure-hearted innocent. Well, dear, I’ll admit I haven’t checked the FBI’s most-wanted list recently, but I suspect you’re not on it. Tell me one thing you’ve done that would keep you out of Heaven.

This request had at once reduced Micky to tears. If I tell, then you won’t like me anymore.

Little mouse, hush now, hush, come here, give Aunt Gen a hug. Easy now, little mouse, I’m always going to love you, always, always.

Tears had led to cuddling, cuddling had led to baking, and by the time the cookies were ready, that potentially revealing train of conversation had been derailed and had remained derailed for twenty-two years, until two nights ago, when Micky had finally spoken of her mother’s romantic preference for bad boys.

What will you find behind the door that is one door away from Heaven?

Aunt Gen’s revelation of the correct answer made the question less of a riddle than it was the prelude to a statement of faith.

Here, now, as she finished brushing her teeth and studied her face in the bathroom mirror, Micky recalled the correct answer—and wondered if she could ever believe it as her aunt seemed genuinely to believe it.

She returned to bed. Switched off the lamp. Seattle tomorrow. Nun’s Lake on Sunday.

And if Preston Maddoc never showed up?

She was so exhausted that even with all her worries, she slept— and dreamed. Of prison bars. Of mournfully whistling trains in the night. A deserted station, strangely lighted. Maddoc waiting with a wheelchair. Quadriplegic, helpless, she watched him take custody of her, unable to resist. We’ll harvest most of your organs to give to more-deserving people, he said, but one thing is mine. I’ll open your chest and eat your heart while you ‘re still alive.

Chapter 59

UPON FINDING THE PENGUIN in place of the paring knife, Leilani shot to her feet faster than her cumbersome leg brace had previously allowed. Suddenly, Preston seemed to be all-seeing, all-knowing. She looked toward the galley, half expecting to discover him there, to see him smiling as if to say boo.

The TV-sitcom characters became instant mimes, and no less funny, when Leilani pressed the MUTE button on the remote control.

A suspicious silence welled from the bedroom, as though Preston might be biding his time, trying to judge the moment when he would be most likely to catch her in the discovery of the penguin— not with a confrontation in mind, but strictly for the amusement value.

Leilani moved to the transition point between the lounge and the galley. She peered warily toward the back of the motor home.

The door to the bathroom-laundry stood open. Beyond that shadowy space was the bedroom door: closed.

A thin warm luminous amber line defined the narrow gap between the door and the threshold. And that was wrong. The amorous side of Preston Maddoc took no inspiration from the romantic glow of a silk-shaded lamp or from the sinuous throb of candle flames. Sometimes he wanted darkness for the deed, perhaps the better to imagine that the bedroom was a mortuary, the bed a casket. At other times—