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‘Will you be seeing Mom when you get back?'

‘Oh, not until tomorrow, probably.'

‘You
will
give her my love, though, won't you?'

Sue, with her mouth full, looked at him narrowly.

‘Is something bothering you?' she asked him.

‘I don't know. Should it be?'

‘You mustn't get depressed, Greg, just because you have to stay here for a while. I've talked to Doctor Hamid and Doctor Connor, and they both have your very best interests at heart. And I'm sure you and Mrs Weston will get along fine.'

‘Well, you know her a whole lot better than I do.'

Sue swallowed and took a sip of lemon tea. ‘Excuse me? I don't know her at all.'

‘Oh. I got the impression that you did.'

‘What gave you that idea? I've never even met the woman. All I know is what Doctor Connor told me about her.'

‘Oh. And what was that?'

‘She used to be an English teacher – in Portland, I think it was. She had some kind of accident which was why she was brought here to Trinity-Shasta. Her partner was quite a lot older than she was, and he passed away not too long ago.'

‘I see.'

Michael thought:
Why did you just lie to me, and say that you had never even met her? I saw the two of you talking to each other like old friends.

However, he bit his lip, and said nothing.
I'm confused
, he thought.
My brain isn't firing on all eight cylinders
. Maybe he had simply misinterpreted what he had seen and heard. Maybe that
hadn't
been Isobel that he had seen with Sue – although, if it wasn't, who was it? What other woman did she know at Trinity-Shasta well enough to kiss and embrace and spend nearly five minutes chatting to?

Maybe his mother hadn't said, ‘
Look at that snow!
' He could easily have misheard her.

In any case, what was so sinister about Sue being friendly with Isobel, or his mother saying ‘Look at that snow!' Maybe it
had
snowed briefly in Oakland, without it settling.

Doctor Connor had warned him that post-traumatic amnesiacs often get feelings of paranoia. They have no memory of how things used to be, and so they have no concept of how things
ought
to be. Something that appears to them now as strange or threatening may be perfectly flush-centered and completely harmless, if only they could remember why.

As they were finishing their breakfast, Doctor Hamid made his way toward them between the commissary tables, with a smile on his face.

‘Good news, Gregory!' he announced. He opened the yellow Manila folder that he was carrying and said, ‘That CT scan you had yesterday morning shows me that your spine is in very much better shape now.'

‘That's wonderful,' said Sue, reaching across the table and taking his hand.

‘Oh, yes, surprisingly good improvement!' said Doctor Hamid. ‘There is now hardly any subluxation of the neck vertebrae and subsequently a great deal of pressure has been taken off your nerves. Physically, you are healing much more quickly than I had expected.'

He closed his folder and said, ‘You will of course need continuing spinal therapy for some months to come, and of course your psychological therapy, which is much more difficult to predict. However we think we can release you today, back into the big, bad outside world. Well – when I say “big, bad outside world”, I mean of course Trinity.'

‘So you're moving me in with Isobel Weston?'

Doctor Hamid smiled at Sue, and Michael was sure that some flicker of understanding passed between them. Nothing more than a twitch of the eye, but that could be enough to communicate something which they both already knew. Or again, maybe he was just being paranoid.

Before she left, Sue drove Michael around to Isobel's house, although he had only one overnight case to carry. She promised him that she would go round to his apartment on Pine Street and collect all his clothes for him, and bring them up to him next weekend. Maybe her husband Jimmy would come next time, as well as their two little girls, Felicity and Alyson.

‘Well, thanks for coming,' said Michael, as she pulled up behind Isobel's Jeep. ‘It's a hell of a drive just to see somebody who doesn't even remember who you are.'

Sue leaned across and kissed him. ‘I know who
you
are, Greg, and that's all that counts. You'll start to remember stuff before too long, I'm sure. You're in the best possible hands.'

At that moment, Isobel appeared at her front door and came down the driveway to greet them. Both Michael and Sue climbed down from the Lexus to shake hands with her.

‘Oh – Isobel, this is my sister Sue,' said Michael. ‘Sue, this is Isobel, who I'll be lodging with for a couple of months, if she can put up with me for that long.'

He glanced quickly from one to the other as they shook hands, to see if either of them gave any indication that they knew each other already, but if they did they gave nothing away. Sue said, ‘I'm pleased to know you, Isobel. Doctor Connor told me all about you, and I'm sure you'll take real good care of Greg.'

‘I'll do my very best,' smiled Isobel. ‘So long as he likes my cooking, and doesn't mind watching
Two Broke Girls
.'

‘Don't you worry,' said Sue. ‘Even if
he
can't remember how easy-going he is, Greg is Mister Tolerant. Even when he was a little kid you couldn't rile him. You could drop caterpillars down the back of his neck and all he did was laugh and say that they tickled.'

Michael opened the hatchback and lifted out his case. ‘OK, Sue,' he told her. ‘Thank you for coming all of this way to see me, and maybe I'll see you again next week. Hopefully by then a few more pieces of the puzzle will have come together.'

Sue hugged him and kissed him, but there was still nothing familiar about the way she felt or the perfume she was wearing.

He and Isobel stood on the snowy sidewalk while Sue turned her SUV around and drove away. They both waved as she blew her horn and disappeared from sight around the bend in the road.

Isobel turned to Michael and said, ‘Well … welcome home, Greg. I really want you to feel that it
is
your home. Come along in. I made minestrone soup this morning, if you're hungry.'

Michael looked up through the naked branches of the trees at the piercing blue sky. Even the white peaks of Mount Shasta had no clouds around them. Home? He felt as if he didn't belong here at all. He felt so alone and such a stranger that a lump began to rise in his throat, and his eyes prickled with tears, and he had to give a noisy cough to control himself.

He followed Isobel inside. It was warm in the living room, and it smelled of soup.

‘Here,' she said, taking him across the hallway. ‘This is your room, at the front. It gets the sun first thing in the morning, and you can see Mount Shasta. I hope you like it.'

The room was plain, with pale green walls and a dark green carpet, with a shaggy sheepskin rug beside the double bed. There were two tired-looking armchairs, and a portable TV perched precariously on a stool. In front of the window there was a desk, with a clock on it, and a mug full of pencils, and a china figurine of a woman in a long dark green cloak.

Hanging on the wall beside the bed was a framed print of a wolf catching a wild turkey in its jaws. The wolf's eyes were bulging with greed.

‘This will do me just fine, Isobel,' said Michael, setting his suitcase down on the bed. ‘Much cozier than a room at the clinic, anyhow.'

Isobel touched his arm. ‘If there's anything you need, Greg, anything at all, don't hesitate to ask. Like I said, this is your home now. This is where you live.'

He woke up in the early hours of the morning. The clock on the desk in front of the window did not have a luminous dial, so that he was unable to tell what time it was until he switched on his bedside lamp. It was about seven minutes after three.

He switched his light back off and lay there in the darkness. The house was silent except for the soft, persistent rattling of the television antenna on the roof as it was shaken by the wind.

Maybe if I just lie here, and empty my mind altogether, some of my memories will rise to the surface. How can I have forgotten so completely who I am, and where I live, and what my job is? I'm supposed to be a marine engineer, but I know nothing at all about marine engineering. I don't even know what marine engineers actually do.

How can I have failed to remember my own sister, when she says that we were so close? How come I couldn't recognize my mother's voice? Worst of all, how come I don't really know who I am? Everybody else seems to be so sure that I'm Gregory Merrick, but I'm not sure at all.

He repeated the name
Gregory Merrick
,
Gregory Merrick
, over and over, but it still didn't sound like him.

As he lay there, he had another of those very brief flashes of recollection. That female voice saying
you shouldn't
– but in a blurry, stretched-out way, like a Doppler effect. And that elusive perfume.

He lifted up his head and sniffed the cold bedroom air, but the perfume had gone.

He drew back the bedcover and sat up. He stayed there for a few moments, still trying to keep his mind empty.
Think of nothing. Think of the wall. Think of the darkness. Think of the snow outside.

He stood up and walked across to the window. The drapes were thick, dark green brocade, with patterns of leaves on them. He drew them back with a noisy scraping of brass rings and there was the snow-covered front yard, and the street beyond it. The moon was nearly full, and the sky was still completely clear, so that everything was lit up in a cold, bone-white light.

What Michael saw outside made his scalp and his wrists tingle, as if he had touched a bare wire. Although the street was silent, it was far from deserted. Standing on the sidewalks and scattered across the road were at least a hundred people, maybe even more. They were all staring back at him, with their arms by their sides, not moving.

Most of them were men, but he saw at least a dozen women. They were all wearing nightwear – a few of them in bathrobes, but the majority in pajamas and nightshirts and nightgowns. As far as Michael could tell, their ages ranged from their early twenties to sixty or seventy or even older.

But what the hell were they doing out there, in the middle of the night? The temperature couldn't be higher than minus five, and it probably felt colder with the wind-chill factor. Yet there they all stood, completely still, their pajamas and nightgowns rippling in the wind.

Michael stepped back from the window. In the darkness of his bedroom, he wasn't sure if they could see him or not. But even if they couldn't, they continued to stare in his direction, and not one of them showed any signs of moving.

He thought of waking up Isobel, but then he didn't want to frighten her. He was disturbed enough himself, even though it didn't look as if any of these people meant to do him any harm. They weren't armed, and they weren't making any moves toward the house. They were simply standing there, utterly silent.

No, he thought. The only thing to do was to go out there and ask them what the hell they were doing. After all, there was no way that he would be able to get back to sleep, knowing they were still gathered outside the house.

He opened his closet and took out his thick blue sweater and his khaki corduroy pants. He also sat on the bed and pulled on a pair of thick white socks.

As quietly as he could, he went out into the hallway and took down the navy blue overcoat which the clinic had given him, and put on his Timberland boots. He went right up close to the front door and peered through the hammered glass window in it, to make sure that none of the people were standing directly outside, but the glass was too bumpy and distorted for him to be able to see anything clearly.

Anyhow, even if somebody
were
standing right outside, and they went for him, he was sure that despite the fact that he was still convalescing, he was more than a match for some oddball in pajamas.

He opened the door. The wind that blew in was bitter, and made the glass chandelier in the hallway start jingling. He stepped outside, but he couldn't completely close the door behind him because he didn't have a key, and the last thing he wanted was to be stuck outside here in the freezing cold, surrounded by all of these people in their nightwear.

He turned around. The street was deserted. There was nobody in sight – not even a last straggler running around the corner.

Frowning, he made his way past Isobel's Jeep down to the sidewalk. He looked left, and then he looked right. Somehow, over a hundred people in their nightclothes had completely disappeared.

He walked out into the middle of the street. It had snowed only lightly since Sue had left, so he could still see her tire tracks and the footprints they had made when they had climbed out of her SUV to talk to Isobel. But there were no other footprints anywhere. The snow across the rest of the street was smooth and untouched, apart from the cross-stitches of a few bird tracks.

I must have dreamed those people. Either that, or I was hallucinating. Catherine warned that the meds she had prescribed for me might give me some strange ideas. She didn't tell me that I would imagine crowds of people standing outside my bedroom in the middle of the night, though.

He walked back up to the house. As he reached the porch, Isobel appeared in the doorway, clutching a silky pink bathrobe up to her neck.

‘Greg! Where have you been? You left the door wide open and it's
freezing
!'

‘I'm sorry, Isobel. I thought I saw somebody outside.'

‘Well, hurry up and come back in! You'll catch your death of cold.'

Michael came back into the house and Isobel closed the door behind him and bolted it. ‘You probably saw a deer,' she said. ‘They sometimes come down here, during the winter.'