“So that sound last night,” Hitch said, beginning this conversation the way he began most, without preamble, as if we had been apart for no significant time, “like a Navy jet, you heard that?”

I had. I’d heard it about four a.m., shortly after Janice stomped off to bed. Kaitlin was asleep at last, and I was alone at our burn-scarred linoleum kitchen table with a cup of sour coffee. The radio was linked to a U.S. jazz station, turned down to polite chatter.

The broadcast had turned brittle and strange for about thirty seconds. There was a crack of thunder and a series of rolling echoes (Hitch’s “Navy jet”), and a little after that an odd cold breeze rattled Janice’s potted bougainvilleas against the window. The window blinds lifted and fell in a soft salute; Kaitlin’s bedroom door opened by itself, and she turned in her netted crib and made a soft unhappy sound but didn’t wake.

Not quite a Navy jet, but it might have been summer thunder, a newborn or senescent storm mumbling to itself out over the Bay of Bengal. Not unusual, this time of year.

“Party of caterers stopped by the Duc this morning and bought all our ice,” Hitch said. “Heading for some rich man’s dacha. They said there was real action out by the hill road, like fireworks or artillery. A bunch of trees blew down. Want to go see, Scotty?”

“As well one thing as another,” I said.

“What?”

“Means yes.”

It was a decision that would change my life beyond repair, but I made it on a whim. I blame Frank Edwards.

Frank Edwards was a Pittsburgh radio broadcaster of the last century who compiled a volume of supposedly true miracle lore (Stranger Than Science, 1959), featuring such durable folktales as the Mystery of Kaspar Hauser and the “spaceship” that blew up over Tunguska, Siberia, in 1910.