Doug Clayton was jerked inside as if hands — ones with big palms and pencil-thin fingers — had seized his shirt and pulled him. The station wagon lost its shape and puckered inward, like a mouth tasting something exceptionally sour. or exceptionally sweet. From within came a series of overlapping crunches — the sound of a man stamping through dead branches in heavy boots. The wagon stayed puckered for ten seconds or so, looked more like a lumpy clenched fist than a car. Then, with a pouck sound like a tennis ball being smartly struck by a racquet, it popped back into its station wagon shape.

The sun peeked briefly through the clouds, reflecting off the dropped cell phone and making a brief hot circle of light on Doug’s wedding ring. Then it dived back into the cloud cover.

Behind the wagon, the Prius blinked its four-ways. They made a low clocklike sound: Tick. tick. tick.

A few cars went past, but not many. The two workweeks surrounding Easter are the slowest time of year on the nation’s turnpikes, and afternoon is the second-slowest time of the day; only the hours between midnight and 5 AM are slower.

Tick. tick. tick.

In the abandoned restaurant, Pete Simmons slept on.

3. JULIANNE VERNON (‘05 Dodge Ram)

Julie Vernon didn’t need King James to teach her how to be a good Samaritan. She had grown up in the small town of Readfield, Maine (population 2,400), where neighboring was a way of life, and strangers were also neighbors. Nobody had told her this in so many words; she had learned from her mother, father, and big brothers. They had little to say about such issues, but teaching by example is always the most powerful teaching of all. If you saw a guy lying by the side of the road, it didn’t matter if he was a Samaritan or a Martian. You stopped to help.

Nor had she ever worried much about being robbed, raped, or murdered by someone who was only pretending to need help.