"I know someone," he said. "I'll call her before you leave. She'll know to expect you, and she'll have my number and an attorney's contact if we need one."
Mara nodded. "That's a start."
At that moment Eli returned from checking on the mechanic. He slipped into the booth, rain damp again and carrying the grave satisfaction of a child who had spoken to an adult as an equal. "The truck won't be ready before tomorrow afternoon," he announced. "Maybe the day after. He said the part has to come from somewhere else."
"We'll find a place to sleep," Mara told him.
Eli laid the two desert photographs side by side. He stared at the difference between them, his father laughing in one and alone in the other. "He looks sad here," he said, touching Cole's picture.
"He was thinking," Cole answered.
"About what?"
Cole looked at Mara, then at the man in the photograph. "I think he was thinking about home."
Eli considered that carefully. "Dad wrote that the compass wasn't really for finding north. He said it was for remembering where home was, even if you couldn't see it."
"That sounds right."
"Do you know where home is?"
Cole had no easy reply. For three years his home had been whatever room he could afford for a night, whatever stretch of road lay ahead. He was still trying to find the words when the low thunder of several engines rose from the parking lot. The sound stopped at the diner entrance and settled into a purposeful idle. Cole moved to the window. Three motorcycles were waiting in a loose line under the security light, their riders still mounted, looking toward the highway rather than toward the food.
Then Cole's phone vibrated. An unfamiliar number filled the screen. He answered and heard a voice he had not heard in eight years, a woman's voice roughened by time but instantly recognizable.
"He's still alive."
The line went dead. Cole stared at the screen, unable for a moment to fit those three words into the life he had spent eight years living. Behind him, Mara was asking what was wrong. Eli was looking at him with eyes full of questions. Outside, the three motorcycles remained exactly where they were, engines running in the November mist, waiting for him to understand that the past had not merely returned. It had been alive all along.
Cole looked at the window again. The riders remained astride their machines, stationary in a way that told him they were watching for movement on the road. They did not behave like men stopping for a late meal. One rider was smaller than the others, upright and motionless behind a clear visor; Cole could not see the face. The other two kept their attention fixed on either end of the parking lot, their headlamps washing the wet gravel white.