He found himself wondering as he walked if perhaps there was some other way to tell the story of the Grove without flying in the face of Tesla's edict. If he forsook Swift, perhaps, and tried to find some poetic mode in which to couch all he'd experienced. It was a route he'd contemplated taking before, but now (as then) he knew without attempting it he'd fail. He'd come to the Grove a literalist, and nothing it had shown him would ever dissuade him from the cult of the re-portable fact.
He made a circuit of the town, only avoiding areas where trespass would have amounted to suicide, making mental notes of the sights he saw even though he knew he couldn't use them. Then he slipped out again, unchallenged, and returned to L.A., and to more nights filled with replayed memories.
It wasn't the same for Jo-Beth and Howie. They'd had their dark night of the soul on Quiddity's tide, and the nights that followed, back in the Cosm, were dreamless. At least, they woke remembering nothing.
Howie tried to persuade Jo-Beth that they were best going back to Chicago, but she insisted that any such plans were premature. As long as the Grove remained a danger zone, and the bodies there were unrecovered, she wasn't going to leave the vicinity. She didn't doubt that Momma was dead. But until she was found and brought out of the Grove to be given a Christian burial any thought of a life for them both beyond this tragedy was not to be contemplated.
In the meanwhile, they had a lot of healing to do, which they did behind closed doors in a motel in Thousand Oaks close enough to the Grove so that when it was deemed safe to return Jo-Beth would be among the first to do so. The marks that Quiddity had left upon them soon receded into memory, and they were left in a strange limbo. Everything was finished, but nothing new could begin. And, while they waited, a distance grew between them that neither encouraged or intended but neither could prevent. The love that had begun in Butrick's Steak House had instigated a series of cataclysms for which they knew they could not be held responsible, but which haunted them nevertheless. Guilt began to weigh on them as they waited in Thousand Oaks, its influence growing as they healed, and came to realize that unlike dozens, perhaps hundreds, of innocent Grovers they'd emerged physically unscathed.
On the seventh day after events in Kissoon's Loop the morning news informed them that search-parties were going into the town. The destruction of the Grove had been a big story, of course, theories being advanced from countless sources as to why the town had been singled out for such devastation when the rest of the Valley had survived with no more than a few tremors and some cracks in the freeway. There was no mention amid these reports of the phenomena witnessed at Coney Eye; governmental pressure had silenced all those who'd seen the impossible happen in front of their eyes.
The entry into the Grove was cautious at first, but by the end of the day a large number of survivors were back in the town, looking to salvage keepsakes and souvenirs from the wreckage. A few were lucky. Most weren't. For every Grover who came back to a once familiar street to find their house intact there were six who met a scene of total ruination. Everything gone; splintered, smashed or simply vanished into the ground. Of all the neighborhoods the one least damaged was paradoxically the least populated: the Mall and its immediate environs. The polished pine Palomo Grove Shopping Center sign at the entrance to the parking lot had slid into a hole, as had a fair portion of the lot itself, but the stores themselves were virtually undamaged, which meant, of course, that a murder investigation (never solved) got underway as soon as the bodies in the pet store were discovered. But corpses aside, had there been Grovers to shop the Mall could have opened for business that day without much more than a dusting off. Marvin Jr., of Marvin's Food and Drug, was the first to organize a removal of unspoiled stock. His brother had a store in Pasadena, and customers who couldn't give a damn where their bargains originated. He made no apology for the haste with which he got about his profiteering. Business was business, after all.
The other removal from the Grove, of course, and this a business of a grimmer sort, was that of bodies. Dogs and sound-sensitive equipment were brought in to establish whether anybody was left alive, the efforts of both drawing a blank. Then came the grisly task of retrieval. By no means every Grover who'd lost his life was found. When the final calculations were made, almost two weeks after the search began, forty-one of the town's members were unaccounted for. The earth had claimed them, then closed over their corpses. Or else the individuals in question had slipped away into the night, taking this opportunity to re-invent themselves and start afresh. One of the latter group, so rumor went, was William Witt, whose body was never recovered but whose house, upon investigation, was found to contain enough pornography to keep the Combat Zones of several cities supplied for months. He'd had a secret life, had William Witt, and the general suspicion was that he'd chosen to go and live it elsewhere.
When the identity of one of the two corpses in the pet store was revealed to be that of Jim Hotchkiss one or two of the astuter journalists noted that his had been a life dogged by tragedy. His daughter, they reminded their readers, had been one of the so-called League of Virgins, and in remarking on this the writers took a paragraph to comment on just how much grief the Grove had endured in its short life. Had it been doomed from the outset, the more fanciful commentators asked, built on cursed ground? There was some shred of solace in that thought. If not, if the Grove had simply been a victim of chance, then how many of the thousands of such communities across America were vulnerable to the same outrages?
On the second day of the search Joyce McGuire's body was found in the ruins of her house, which had sustained considerably worse damage than any of the surrounding property. It was taken for identification, as were the bulk of the bodies, to a makeshift mortuary in Thousand Oaks. That onerous duty fell to Jo-Beth, whose brother would be numbered among the missing forty-one. Identification made, arrangements were begun for her burial. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints looked after its own. Pastor John had survived the levelling (indeed he'd left the Grove the night of the Jaff's attack on the McGuire house and hadn't come back till the dust had settled) and it was he who organized Momma's funeral. Only once in that time did he and Howie cross paths, and Howie was quick to remind the Pastor of the night he'd blubbered beside the refrigerator. The Pastor insisted he remembered no such incident.
"Pity I haven't got a photo," Howie said. "To jog your memory. But I've got one up here." He pointed to his temples, upon which the last traces of Quiddity's reconfiguration of his flesh was fading. "Just in case I ever get tempted."