Aisles of pillars stretch ahead, reached up to bear the weight of the viaduct above. It’s not all that much darker here beneath it, the slanted morning light strikes crumbled grass-choked pavement all about, and the embedded rail lines cross gleaming straight and true. The blocky hulks of warehouses closing in to either side ahead still steep in cooling shadows, and while out in the open the white siding of a double-wide trailer’s dazzled, the pallets offloaded beside it are still dimly uncertain, bundled panels of cyclone fencing, perhaps, Jersey barricades waiting to be deployed, and all the unhung signs leaned up against them in anticipation, Umpqua Bank, they say, and Crutchfield Evans, Sogge Enterprises, Hoyt Street Properties, Hoyt Yards, Coming Soon, Hoyt Yards.

The pillars, though. This one, here, one of the central file, flat grey face of it figured with a hermit in chalky white, a lantern held high in one hand, and calligraphed above, well out of reach, faded letters that say Diogenes the Greek Cynic Philosopher walking the Streets of Athens with a lantern looking for an honest man. He was born about the year 412 B.C. She reaches up to lightly brush the chalked rays of light stroked out from the lantern-shape, just above her head. Black curls hang loose in artless tangles about her shoulders. Her slender, knee-length gown of ivory satin, edged with lace the color of bone. One last tap at the pillar as she steps away, slowly, even regally, despite the hint of a limp. Her feet are bare, and filthy, stickily damp, glistening amidst the grime.

The deck of the viaduct slopes gently down and closer until some dozen yards ahead it declines much more sharply to end, of a sudden, in a blank flat concrete wall. She looks down, at the random assemblage of litter strewn about between the pillars here, the screwed-up twist of paper, an uncrimped can, Washington’s Viking Beer, it says, the crisp plastic wrap spilling soy sauce packets, a grimy yellow dish-glove, ripped half inside-out. She looks back along the length of the viaduct, the pillars. Shading her eyes against the rising light.

Her limp is more pronounced, crossing the sunstruck pavement. She leaves the most faintly glistening footprints.

Hitching up the skirt of her gown, she kneels by one of the smaller signs, a white placard that says Hoyt Yards in dark blue letters, and marks a number of organizations along the bottom as smaller sigils and logotypes in the same dark shade. She touches one, toward the right of the sign, Welund Barlowe & Lackland, it says. When she lifts her fingers away, smoke unspools from the spot where those names had been.

Scrape and clanking grind she drags that sign back with her, both hands held behind her, rattle and clack, head down curls swaying with the effort of it back toward the deepening shadow beneath the viaduct, back between the ranks and files of pillars, back to let it drop, clang, its own small island, cleared, clean, smooth, laid flat on the pavement there.

Pushing back all that tangled black hair, blowing out a resolute sigh. Bending down she sits herself tailor-fashion on the sign, tucking the one foot on top of the other knee, wincing as she wipes the grit from the edge and the sole of it. Settling her hands in her lap.

“All right,” says Ysabel Perry. “Here we go.”

He spritzes her hand with something, “Wait,” she says, “what?”

“Photo ID,” he says.

“No, with the hand,” she says.

“Photo ID,” he says, with a come-hither gesture, tucking the little spray bottle away on top of the hulking X-ray scanner.

“Thing about that,” she’s looking over her shoulder to Mrs. Upchurch, making her way past the row of metal lockers toward them, “hey,” she calls out to her, just loud enough to catch attention, “we, ah, there’s a problem,” as Mrs. Upchurch reaches into her jacket, “I have no idea what happened to my license since the, ah,” faltering, as Mrs. Upchurch pulls a card from a slender wallet and hands it to the guard, then holds up the opened wallet itself. He peers at what’s within, holds the card up to check Jo’s face against it, then returns it to Mrs. Upchurch. “Hand,” he says, and spritzes the back of Mrs. Upchurch’s hand. “Nothing blue, good,” he says. “Belt, jacket, keys. Shoes should be fine. Underwire?”

“What?” says Jo, as Mrs. Upchurch lays her folded jacket on the conveyor belt of the scanner. “Underwire,” says the guard. “In your bra.”

“We’re,” says Jo, “we’re good.”

“Down the hall,” he says, as she steps through the gate of the metal detector, “left at the end,” as Mrs. Upchurch collects her jacket. “Stay to the right of the line.”

Dim, long, the hall’s pitched down at a moderately steep angle, a dark line painted straight and true along the polished linoleum, leading the way. “Here,” says Mrs. Upchurch, handing the card to Jo, “you’ll want this.” Oregon, it says. Driver License. Her photo, expressionlessly surly, hair of her blond, cropped close, here and there a couple locks left long, dyed black. “Neat trick,” she says. “Cops had it, is that it? And you just, held onto it, till you could whip it out, all dramatic-like?”

“A wise man once said,” says Mrs. Upchurch, “magic is usually someone spending more time and effort on something than anyone might expect.”

At the bottom of the hall, that line right-angles left into a dimly empty lobby, a heavy sliding door lit by thick glass reinforced with chicken wire, and more chicken wire strung over the apertures of an unlit booth to one side, “IDs,” says a gruff voice within.

“But,” says Jo, as Mrs. Upchurch steps over the line, holding her wallet up to the wire for inspection. Jo, with a shrug, steps over the line, holding up her license. “Hands,” says the voice.

“But,” says Jo, as Mrs. Upchurch offers up her hand, “you were just, up there,” as a little buzzing wand’s waved over the back of Mrs. Upchurch’s hand, a patch there glowing a sickly indistinct blue-white. “You let us in.”

“Hand,” he says.

“You were the one who,” she says, offering up her own hand. He lights it up. “Wait for the door,” he says. “You’ll be shown to a room. They’re looking for him.”

“Protocol,” murmurs Mrs. Upchurch, leaned close as keys jangle. “They’re short-staffed.”

“I don’t want to be here,” says Jo.

“I know,” says Mrs. Upchurch.

The heavy door slowly, smoothly slides to one side, revealing another guard, taller, beefier, but the uniform’s the same, shirt a grey touched with lavender, trousers a black touched with grey, the same heavy gear hung below his paunch, same patch on his shoulder, Penitentiary, it says, Oregon Department of Corrections. He ushers them into a room immediately beyond the door, just big enough within for a small round table and three plastic chairs. “It’ll be a minute,” he says. “They’re looking for him.” Behind him, the space opens out, a common room filled with rows of picnic tables, men sat at them, paired over a checkerboard, alone, conversing, joking, discussing in small, muted groups, all of them dressed in another uniform of rough, ill-fitting denim.

Mrs. Upchurch directs Jo toward the chair across the table, then sits herself in the chair to the side. “He’s not gonna want his back to the door,” says Jo.

“Do you?” says Mrs. Upchurch. She pats the tabletop. “Go on, sit. I don’t imagine we’ll be here very long.”

Scrape of the chair against linoleum. Creak of plastic, taking her weight.

“Where were you?” says Mrs. Upchurch, after a moment.

“What?”

“You were, gone.” The nails of her, carefully shaped and polished to gleam in the harsh fluorescence. “Completely. Utterly. Until about eleven o’clock, yesterday morning, just over a hundred and fifty hours. Gone.” Her lips, the color of plum, widen in a welcoming smile. “Where?”

“You’re, tracking me,” says Jo. “Down to the hour.”

“There’s a lot riding on you, Miss Maguire,” but the door to the room’s pushed open, the guard leaning in to make room for a man in one of those denim uniforms, his black hair a greasy, spiky shock, and under his beak of a nose a pointed smile that sharpens in evident delight, “Bambi Jo!” he cries, with gusto. “I swear, you are just about the last person I ever would’ve expected to pay a visit to little old me.”

Mrs. Upchurch looks from him as he sits himself easily with his back to the door, to Jo, sat bolt upright, frozen until she manages, just, a whisper, “Dread,” she says, “Paladin.”

That grin folds itself into a look of some concern, somehow still sharp, “Aw, shit, girl, you shouldn’t ought to call me that, not no more. I hope,” he lays a hand on the denim over his breast, “you ain’t still mixed up in those wicked, evil games. They only lead to darkness. As you can plainly see.” His hand, set back on the table, the knuckles of the pinkie and the ring-finger not so much swollen as knobbled and twisted out of shape by some old incident, or accident. “But seeing as how the business of this place I’ve found myself is penitence, and I always take my business seriously,” and here he leans forward, across the table, Jo flinching violently, Mrs. Upchurch quickly shifting a hand toward her, but just as quickly holding it back, “I got to ask you, Bambi Jo,” he says, seemingly unawares, “have you sought forgiveness for what it is you did,” that crooked hand laid open, waiting to clasp the hand she isn’t lifting from her lap, “have you, girl, accepted the love and grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ into your heart?”

They sit together, unmoving, for some time, in the silent sedan, still in its stall in the parking lot, before Mrs. Upchurch says, “He’s been there the entire,” and Jo says, “I know.”

“So the Daniel Moody in town,” and “Yeah,” says Jo, “I know.”

“There was a home invasion last week. Wednesday. In St. Johns.”

“Bruno said. The, CO. Couple of his boys. Moody did that?”

“He was involved.”

“More names for my list.”

“You didn’t do it,” says Mrs. Upchurch, suddenly insistent, sitting forward to look across to Jo beside her. “The qlifot has begun to put things into the world, now, instead of taking them out. All you did was to suggest a form.”

“All I did,” says Jo. “A hundred and fifty hours, you said, we were gone. So. Tell me. In the hundred and fifty hours, those six days, or whatever, did anybody happen to see Mr. Danny Moody walking about the greater TriMet area?”

Mrs. Upchurch sits back, curls against the headrest. “I can’t say for certain,” she says.

“But as far as you know?”

A deep breath drawn in through her nostrils, blown out through her lips. “No,” says Mrs. Upchurch.

Green signs sail by overhead, indicating exits, distances, Kuebler Blvd., Delaney Rd., Albany 19, Springfield 62, Grants Pass 198, and blue signs off to the side, State Police Exit 252, and Food, a sequence of logos, Chick Fil-A, Carl’s Jr., McDonald’s, Applebee, presumably hidden away behind the trees grown lushly green to either side, behind the immediate berms of turf, and the evidence of the mowing of it, brightly green, and the signs, the endless stretch of dull grey pavement, the rush and flow of traffic up this way, down that, the only signs of habitation here about, those, and the occasional glimpse of a parking lot, of a concrete wall, of a red tin roof, snatched from among the whipping greenery.

Another, different sign juts from the trees off to the left, over a glimpse of parked cars, atop a pole, a white suggestion of crenelated wall, towers to either side with conical caps red and yellow, and an egg sat atop in a red top hat, waving to the freeway below. Enchanted Forest, it says. Next Exit. Jo swivels in the passenger seat, looking past Mrs. Upchurch at the wheel to watch it go by, ducking to peer back through the inconveniently small rear window, the other side of the sign much the same, castle wall, towers, that smiling egg who’s somehow turned about to wave its other hand to everyone else as it recedes. Another of those green signs floats by, alerting those headed the other way, Salem 8, it says. Portland 53.

Trees dwindle as the rolling flattens into seemingly empty farmland, and now and then a stretch of frontage road, a pocket of low commercial buildings, a motel, a strip mall, an entire subdivision of blankly grey townhouses crowded cheek by jowl behind a high thick wall, and only here and there a tiny darkling window to look out over it, and gone, behind them. A green field dotted with unconcerned sheep, and in the tall grass along it another green sign, 34, it says, Lebanon, Corvallis, 1 Mile, and the sedan gathers itself, surging past the semi to the right to close on the pickup ahead, signaling quickly, neatly slipping from behind the one truck ahead of the other, and then, as an overpass approaches, angling for the off-ramp.

This highway’s scaled down, four lanes but without a median strip, the pavement of it older, so many cracks blackly repaired with ragged strips of tar. The traffic about’s not so thick or all-enveloping, and the sedan seems to relish the chance to let loose and glide, past more farmland, garages and anonymous warehouses, more blank walls around townhouses clustered so closely together despite all the emptiness about. A tensely tuned harp and a lonely saxophone trade breathless passages over sauntering bass, shaking bells, a haphazard sitar, and Jo closes her eyes. Mrs. Upchurch signals a lane change.

The trees close in again, and climbing rise as hazes up ahead, under a high hazed sky. The road narrows from four lanes to two. A sign that says Philomath. A sign that says Noon. A sign that says Cardwell Hill Cellars. Those hazily rising trees become hills around about and above, the road curling as it climbs to find its best way among the slopes and rounded peaks and down. Toledo, says the sign approaching, pointing off to the left. Newport, it says, and points away ahead. The distant blur of slopes ahead has fallen away behind the onrushing trees, and now an emptiness seems to grow there, patiently.

Guardrails appear, those trees thin, off to the left that emptiness appears within, behind, beyond, a deeper, weightier blue out under the unfocused sky. The tenor of the traffic’s changing, slowing, intermittently dispersing, as turn-offs proliferate, as intersections assemble themselves about thickening blocks of houses, of storefronts, a gas station, a lot lined with tractors and cherry-pickers, a lumberyard, and that vast emptiness looms somehow behind it all, around them, now. The largest intersection yet ahead, arrays of stoplights to regulate various flows of traffic. The sedan slips into the rightmost lane, signaling a turn, taking it against the light. Thriftway, Momiji Sushi Bar, Rodeway Inn, Free Wifi, and off to the left, between low roofs and scrubby tangles of trees, there, you can just catch sight of the ocean, so enormously far, so very coldly blue.

The sedan turns right into a small and nearly empty lot, Sea Breeze Budget Motel, says the short sign planted in the dead grass on the corner, the office and the low one-storey wing of rooms painted a sea-foam green, the trim about the windows more of a forest, and across a side street a two-storey block of rooms in those selfsame colors. The sedan stops, brake lights shining. The passenger door, after a moment, pops open, and Jo climbs out. Watches as the sedan neatly wheels itself about, slows briefly to gauge the traffic, pulls smoothly out of the lot, turning left, away.

Dim within, the office shaded, cramped, a low voice muttering somewhere, a radio, an unseen television, this is what I’m talking about, this is what we have to watch out for, we must be vigilant, there’s no excuse, no one else to be seen, behind the counter, sat in the one lone vinyl chair, looking over the rack of brochures and cards under a curved sign that says Sightseeing. “Hello?” says Jo.

An older woman looks around the doorway to one side of the counter, her expression of expectant concern becoming something, something else, as she takes in the figure stood there, the colorless hair, those thin lips, that nose, the muddy, wary eyes.

“Hey, Mom,” says Jo Maguire. “I’m back.”