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“I’m just goofing around, is all,” Annie said. “Trying something different while I figure out whether to go back to Pierce. When did you see it?”

“When you went to the bathroom I had a look. I could tell you didn’t want me to see what you were working on. Are you mad?”

“I’m not mad. I guess I was worried it might upset you.”

He shook his head, licked his ice cream. “Nope.”

And that was the end of it.

Within minutes of getting back on the road, Charlie nodded off in the backseat. At least, Annie thought, she didn’t have to hide what she was working on from him any longer. That was something of a relief, and their outing had managed to push her various anxieties to the back of her mind.

She’d had only fleeting thoughts about the night before, and hadconvinced herself she had not seen what she’d thought she’d seen. A brief delusion triggered by stress, she told herself. She’d been in a panic about finding Charlie. Her mind was going places it shouldn’t. And when she found him, her relief so overwhelmed her that her brain short-circuited.

Okay, maybe that was something of an oversimplification. Her therapist, whom Annie had yet to hear back from, would have a more clinical analysis, of that Annie was sure. But as she headed home, she wondered whether she even needed to have a session. She felt better. She and Charlie had had a good day.

He woke up when she stopped the car in front of the house. “I think I fell asleep,” he said.

“Just a bit.”

Charlie unbuckled his seat belt, opened the back door, and slid out. His bike was right there, and he swung his leg over the seat.

“I think I’m going to ride around for a while,” he said.

“Okay,” Annie said. “But you stay on the property?”

“I will.”

She aimed a menacing finger at him. “No riding up the road. Understood?”

“Okay.”

“Good. I’m going to do a bit of work.”

He pedaled off as Annie mounted the steps to the house, key in hand. Once inside, she looked on the back side of the door to see whether Candace’s handyman had been by to install a chain. No joy there.

She set her purse on the hall table, fetched a bottle of sparkling water from the kitchen, and went up to the studio to review her sketches. Now that there was no longer any point in hiding what she was doing from Charlie, she was free to move to the next stage of her creative process.

She would make a three-dimensional version of her rat-wolf man.

Fin had been pretty thorough where it came to stocking her studio with everything she might need, including some packages of plasticine, but she had no wire to fashion into an armature that would serve as the support for her model. But she recalled seeing some white wire hangers from a dry cleaner in her bedroom closet here. She rounded up a couple, but then realized she needed something strong enough to cut the wire, like tin snips or something smaller, and a pair of pliers to twist the wire into various configurations.

Shit.

She could round up Charlie and head back to that hardware store in Fenelon, but that seemed like a lot of trouble. Annie was willing to bet Daniel would have the tools she needed, but their last meeting had not ended well, with Daniel revealing that he knew about Evan Corcoran. Plus, there had been their debate about train sounds in the night. Daniel acknowledging she might have heard them, even though no trains ran on that nearby line, and Annie changing her position, pushing back, saying it could have been a truck.

There had been a development. She’d more than heard a train that wasn’t there. She’dseena train that wasn’t there.

Was she ready to talk to him about that?

Annie left her studio, went downstairs, and looked out the living room window. There was Daniel, across the way, sitting on his own porch, alone. She went to the front door, opened it, weighed whether to go see him.

No. I can’t do it. I can’t tell him.

Charlie went flying past on his bike. “Hey,” she shouted. “We’re making a quick trip into town.”

They were back in under an hour. Annie had a new pair of pliers and snippers strong enough to cut through coat hanger wire. Charlieresumed training for the Olympics on his bike as Annie went up to the studio.

She fashioned a wire stick figure in short order, then wrapped crumpled tinfoil around it to build up the body. Next came the plasticine, which she worked up into a torso and limbs and a head. The details would come after she had the basic shape done.