Even miles from our burning house, Penny repeatedly frowned at the rearview mirror.

“Someone following us?” I asked.

“No.”

The lead-gray sky of the previous afternoon, which had looked as flat and uniform as a freshly painted surface, was deteriorating. Curls of clouds peeled back, revealing darker masses, and beards of mist hung like tattered cobwebs from a crumbling ceiling.

She glanced at the mirror again.

“Someone?” I asked.

“No.”

“It makes me nervous, the way you keep checking the mirror.”

In my lap, Milo said, “It makes me nervous the way you keep asking Mom is someone behind us.”

When she frowned at the mirror again, I could not help asking: “Anything?”

“If I see something,” she said, “I’ll tell you.”

“Even if you think it’s nothing, it might be something,” I said, “so if it’s nothing or something, tell me either way.”

“Good grief,” said Milo.

“Okay,” I admitted, “that didn’t make any sense.”

Barely escaping our house before it blew up had left us in a state of shock. But as writers and readers, Penny and I were drunk on words, and we needed conversation as much as we needed air and water. Not much short of death could shut us up. Even Milo, when he wasn’t lost in an electromagnetic-field-theory reverie, could be garrulous. The shock of our loss did not reduce us to a brooding silence; in fact, the opposite was true.

In the Greenwich-Boom family, conversation was not just talk but also a way we helped one another heal from the abrasions and contusions of the day. We started with practicalities and progressed swiftly to absurdities, which was not surprising, considering our conversations expressed our philosophies and experiences.

Penny thought we would be staying at a hotel, but I nixed that. “They’ll want a credit card, at least for ID. We don’t want to be using our credit cards right now.”

As she braked to a stop at a red traffic light, she said, “We don’t? Why wouldn’t we?”

“John Clitherow called while you were packing. He gave me some advice. Credit cards were part of it.”

“Clitherow—the writer?”

“Yeah. He read the review. He has some experience of this … of Waxx.”

“What experience?”

Because I didn’t want to talk about the murder of Clitherow’s family in front of Milo, I said, “John wants me to tell you his three favorite children’s stories are Dumbo, Kate DiCamillo’s The Tale of Despereaux, and your first Purple Bunny book.”

“That’s nice. But you said ‘experience.’ What’s he know about Waxx?”

“John especially likes the funny physiology in those books.”

In my usually savvy wife’s defense: Having been Tasered, having seen her house blown up minutes earlier, she urgently wanted to hear anything that I might have learned about the critic, and she was not in a state of mind that allowed her to pick up on kid-evading code.

Holding Milo with one arm, I grimaced at Penny, tugged on my left ear, and pointed at the boy.

She looked at me as if I were suffering delayed spasms from the Tasering.

I said, “Dumbo, Despereaux, Pistachio,” because the last was the name of her bunny character.

The driver behind us tapped his horn to encourage us to notice that the traffic light had turned green.

As she drove through the intersection, Penny said, “I guess I misunderstood. I thought he called about Waxx.”

In my lap, Milo said, “The little elephant, the little mouse, and the little bunny all had really big ears.”

“Did they?” I asked. “Hey, yes, they did. How about that?”

“Mom,” the boy said, “Dad’s trying to tell you that I’m little but I’ve got big ears, and there’s something Mr. Clitherow told him that I guess I’m too young to hear.”

“So what did he tell you?” Penny asked me.

I sighed in exasperation.

“Probably something really bloody, strange, and scary,” Milo said. “Or a sex thing, ’cause from what I know about it, that’s totally weird.”

“How do you know anything about sex?” Penny asked.

“Collateral information. While I’m reading about other things.”

“How much collateral information?”

“Not much,” Milo said. “Relax. I’m not interested in it.”

“You better not be interested in it.”

“It’s boring,” Milo said.

“It’s even more boring than it is weird,” Penny assured him.

“It’s not all that boring,” I said.

Milo said, “I guess someday it finally won’t bore me.”

“Someday,” Penny agreed, “but that’s decades from now.”

“I figure seven years,” Milo said.

“When you’ve conquered the problem of time travel,” Penny informed him, “then I’ll let you date.”

“I don’t think time travel is possible,” Milo said.

“Then I won’t need to worry about having a daughter-in-law with two nose rings, a pierced tongue, seven tattoos, jeweled teeth, a shaved head, and attitude.”

“Never bring home a girl with attitude,” I advised Milo. “Your mother will just have to beat the crap out of her.”

“I don’t understand why we can’t just go to a hotel,” Penny said. “But if we can’t—then where do we go? Maybe to my folks’ place?”

“No. Somewhere Waxx is unlikely to look.”

“What about Marty and Celine’s place?”

Marty and Celine were good friends who lived only a mile from us. They had flown to Wyoming to take care of Celine’s parents, who had been nearly killed in an avalanche.

Since Monday, Penny had been checking on their house once a day, taking in mail and newspapers, watering plants as needed.

“I feel a little funny about it,” I said.

“Marty and Celine won’t mind.”

“I mean … I wonder if friends as close as Marty and Celine are too much of a connection to us. Clitherow seemed adamant that we had to drop off the radar.”

“But if somehow Waxx could find out who our closest friends are,” she said, “he’d still need time, a lot of time, to do it.”

“Maybe he already knows,” Milo said.

The boy’s suggestion was the intellectual equivalent of a shock from a Taser.

In spite of what Clitherow had told me about the many similar phrases in the reviews of Mr. Bluebird and One O’Clock Jump, I had continued to operate under the assumption that John had become a target for destruction because of the letter he had written to Waxx’s editor and that I had earned a promise of doom merely by conspiring to get a look at the great man in Roxie’s Bistro.

Waxx’s assaults on John and on us were no less psychotic but a great deal more logical, strategically and tactically, if we assumed that he had planned to kill us and our families before he published reviews of our novels. Harder to credit was that his violation of our house twice, the planting of sophisticated packages of explosives, and the Tasering were part of an impromptu response to the encounter in the bistro men’s room, all within fourteen hours of Milo’s brief misdirection of his stream.

I remembered what Clitherow had said about Waxx being less a critic with opinions than one with an agenda. Understanding that agenda would be key to survival.

“What about the Balboa sinkhole?” Penny said as she turned onto Pacific Coast Highway.

Marty was an architect and Celine was a Realtor, but they were primarily entrepreneurs. Over the years, they carefully acquired prime properties for the land value, tore down the existing houses, built new houses, and sold for a profit.

Usually they had two projects going at once, sometimes three. Fortunately, they foresaw the coming real-estate bust. By the time values began plummeting, they had only one project left to sell. Because it was a harborside house on Balboa Peninsula, because it had been on the market two years without an offer, and because they would make no profit from it, they called it the Balboa sinkhole.

When they left their keys with Penny before flying to Wyoming, they also left the keys to the peninsula house on the same ring, in the unlikely event that someone wanted to tour the place. Like many high-end homes, this one could be shown by appointment only and strictly to qualified buyers; therefore, no key was left on-site in a lockbox.

“Sounds plausible,” I said. “Let’s check it out.”