Dean Koontz - By the Light of the Moon

'Lynette was changing a flat tire when I saw her,' Tom said. 'Helped her tighten the lugs, and the next thing I knew, she used some hoodoo or other to make me propose marriage.'

Smiling affectionately at Tom, Lynette said, 'I cast a spell on you, all right, but the purpose was to turn you into a warty toad and make you hop away forever. And here you are instead. That'll teach me not to slack off on my spellcastin' practice.'

On the table, two small gifts, as yet unwrapped, and a bottle of wine indicated a special evening. Although Lynette's simple dress appeared inexpensive, the care with which she had done her makeup and brushed her hair suggested she'd worn her best. The aging Pontiac in the parking lot further supported the conclusion that an evening as fancy as this must be a rare treat for them.

'Anniversary?' Dylan asked, relying on deduction rather than on clairvoyance.

'As if you didn't already know,' said Lynette. 'Our third. Now who put you up to this, and what's next?'

Surprise froze her smile when Dylan briefly touched the stem of her wineglass to reacquaint himself with her psychic imprint.

He felt again the unique trace that had been on the passenger's door of the Pontiac, and in his mind another connection occurred with the ca-chunk of coupling railroad cars. 'I believe your mother told you that she was adopted, told you as much as she knew.'

The mention of her mother thawed Lynette's smile. 'Yes.'

'Which was nothing more than her adopted parents knew – that she'd been given up by a couple somewhere in Wyoming.'

'Wyoming. That's right.'

Dylan said, 'She tried to find her real parents, but she didn't have enough money or time to keep at it.'

'You knew my mother?'

Fully dissolve a heavy concentration of sugar in an ordinary bowl of water, suspend a string in this mixture, and in the morning you will find that rock-sugar crystals have formed upon the string. Dylan seemed to have lowered a long mental string into some pool of psychic energy, and the facts of Lynette's life crystallized on it much faster than sugar would separate from water.

'She died two years ago this August,' he continued.

'The cancer took her,' Tom confirmed.

Lynette said, 'Forty-eight is too young to go.'

Repulsed by the continued invasion of this young woman's heart, but unable to restrain himself, Dylan felt her still-sharp anguish at the loss of her beloved mother, and he read her secrets as they crystallized on his mental string: 'The night your mom died, the next-to-last thing she said to you was, "Lynnie, someday you should go lookin' for your roots. Finish what I started. We can better figure where we're goin' if we know where we come from."'

Astonished that he could be privy to the exact words her mother had spoken, Lynette began to rise, but at once sat down, reached for her wine, perhaps remembered that he had put his fingers to the stem of the glass, and left the drink untouched. 'Who… who are you?'

'There in the hospital, the night she died, the last thing she ever said to you was… "Lynnie, I hope this won't count against me wherever I'm goin' from here, but as much as I love God, I love you more."'

By reciting those words, he wielded an emotional sledgehammer. When he saw Lynette's tears, he was appalled that he had broken her pretty anniversary mood and had knocked her into memories unsuitable for celebration.

Yet he knew why he'd swung so hard. He had needed to establish his bona fides before introducing Ben Tanner, ensuring that Lynette and the old man would more immediately connect, thereby allowing Dylan to finish his work and to slip away as quickly as possible.

Although Tanner had hung back until now, he'd been near enough to hear that his dream of a father-daughter reunion would not become a reality in this life, but also that another unexpected miracle was here occurring. Having taken off his Stetson, he turned it nervously in his hands as he came forward.

When Dylan saw that the old man's legs were shaking and that his joints seemed about to fail him, he pulled out one of the two unused chairs at the table. As Tanner put his hat aside and sat down, Dylan said, 'Lynette, while your mom hoped one day to find her blood kin, they were looking for her, too. I'd like you to meet your grandfather – your mother's father, Ben Tanner.'

The old man and the young woman stared wonderingly at each other with matching azurite-blue eyes.

While Lynette was silenced by her astonishment, Ben Tanner produced a snapshot that he had evidently fished out of his wallet while standing behind Dylan. He slid the photo across the table to his granddaughter. 'This is my Emily, your grandma, when she was almost as young as you. It breaks my heart she couldn't live to see you're the image of her.'

'Tom,' Dylan said to Lynette's husband, 'I see there's but an inch of wine left in that bottle. We're going to need something more to celebrate, and I'd be pleased if you'd let me buy this one.'

Bewildered by what had happened, Tom nodded, smiled uncertainly. 'Uh, sure. That's nice of you.'

'I'll be right back,' Dylan said, with no intention of keeping that promise.

He went to the cashier's station by the front door, where the hostess had just paid out change to a departing customer, a florid-faced man with the listing walk of one who had drunk more of his dinner than he had chewed.

'I know you're not serving dinner any longer,' Dylan said to the hostess. 'But can I still send a bottle of wine to Tom and Lynette over there?'

'Certainly. The kitchen's closed, but the bar's open for another two hours.'

She knew what they had ordered, a moderately priced Merlot. Dylan mentally added a tip for the waitress, put cash on the counter.

He glanced back at the corner table, where Tom, Lynette, and Ben were intensely engaged in conversation. Good. None of them would see him leave.

Shouldering through the door, stepping outside, he discovered that Jilly had moved the Expedition from the parking lot, as he had requested. The SUV stood in the street, at the curb, half a block north.

Angling in that direction, he encountered the florid-faced man who had left the restaurant ahead of him. The guy apparently had some difficulty remembering where he'd parked his car or perhaps even what car he'd been driving. Then he focused on a silver Corvette and made for it with the hunched shoulders and the head-down determination of a bull spotting a matador with unfurled cape. He didn't charge as fast as a bull, however, nor as directly, but tacked left and right, left and right, like a sailor changing the course of his vessel by a series of maneuvers, singing a slurred and semicoherent version of the Beatles' 'Yesterday.'

Fumbling in the pockets of his sport coat, the drunk found his car keys but dropped a wad of currency. Oblivious of the money on the blacktop behind him, he blundered on.

'Mister, you lost something,' Dylan said. 'Hey, fella, you're gonna want this.'

In the melancholy mood of 'Yesterday,' singing mushily of his many troubles, the drunk did not respond to Dylan, but weaved toward the Corvette with the newfound key held at arm's length ahead of him, as though it were a dowsing rod without which he would be unable to find his way across the last ten feet of pavement to his vehicle.

Picking up the wad of cash – Dylan felt a cold slippery twisting serpent in his hand, smelled something goatish and rank, heard an internal buzzing as of angry wasps. At once he knew that the drunken fool lurching toward the Corvette – Lucas something, Lucas Croaker or Crocker – was more despicable than a drunk, more sinister than a mere fool.

Even drunk and stumbling, this Lucas Crocker should be feared. After casting aside the wad of cash saturated in repulsive spoor, Dylan rushed him from behind, with no further warning.