– When you really open your perceptions and take it all in, the view is breathtaking.

I look at Lydia. She’s got her eyes squeezed shut, fingers rubbing her temples.

I tilt my chin at her.

– Got a headache?

She peels her eyes open and flips her hand in Terry’s direction.

– You don’t?

I check out Terry, his eyes still shaded, smiling at us.

– I’ve been listening to it for a long time. Guess I’m building an immunity.

Terry drops his hand.

– An immunity to truth, Joe? I hope not, man. I hope not.

I fiddle with the unlit smoke in my hand. Terry and Lydia don’t like me to smoke in Society headquarters. Like secondhand smoke is gonna kill them. The principle of the thing, they’d say. Like there’s any principle involved in breathing smoke other than it tastes good.

– The big picture, Ter, I’m missing it, so fill me in.

He lowers himself to the floor, slowly bending his legs till he’s folded into a full lotus.

– The Candy Man is dead.

– Got that.

– Sure, sure you do, that’s basic. The Candy Man is dead. Which, you know, he was a guy in a high-risk market. The blood, I mean, not the candy. So getting murdered isn’t like a statistical improbability or anything. But, and this is the down the rabbit hole part, he’s killed in a fashion that suggests a pretty well-versed Van Helsing was involved. A Van Helsing with enough, I don’t know, foresight, savvy, whatever, to poison the Candy Man’s stock so no one could scavenge it. And then the final tree in this, well, not really forest, but grove, maybe, or copse is a better word. The final tree in this copse is the really relevant fact that Solomon wasn’t what a Van Helsing would call a, you know, a vampire. So that’s our copse, our thicket of trees within the forest. The question is, What’s out of place here? What tree, or shrub even, doesn’t belong in the thicket?