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remembered from back in Lausanne was telling Inspector Gobet she wanted to see the cathedral once more before leaving Switzerland. And she could remember standing on the esplanade, looking at the tower for a few minutes . . . Then Inspector Gobet took her by the arm and led her back to the car. They gave her a shot on the way to the airport, one of those shots that sent her off to Neverland. She didn’t even remember boarding an airplane. Next thing she knew, she was here. And if they told her “here” was Miami Beach instead of the boondocks of Washington State, she wouldn’t have known the difference.
    She remembered wandering upstairs and downstairs and through the halls. The fat furry cat she’d carried all the way from Switzerland was still in her arms. She found her way to the kitchen. A small wooden table stood in the center of the room, two wooden chairs tucked under it. She walked around the table, counterclockwise, three times before dropping Monsieur Booty to the floor and pushing the table and chairs to the side of the room, blocking a counter and some cabinets. She had no idea why she’d done it, other than the table felt out of place where she’d found it. The next morning Katherine returned to the kitchen to find someone moved the table and chairs back to the center of the room. Katherine shoved them back to the wall. It went on like this for a week, till she wrote a note and tacked it to the kitchen door:
    Whoever the fuck you are, leave the fucking table where I fucking put it.
    The next day, the table was left against the wall. And every day since, Katherine would sit alone at the table with a pot of tea, watching a candle burn. One day, after a long week of rain, her eyes were drawn to a ray of light passing through the open door. She looked out to the garden, saw the clearing sky, saw the snow-covered peak of Mount Hood glowing in the light, and she realized why she needed the table to be here. It reminded her of the small table jutting from the wall in the belfry loge of Lausanne Cathedral. And some afternoons, sipping her tea, Katherine could almost see the crooked little man who lived in the loge . . . and after a time she remembered his name: Marc Rochat. Then she remembered how he found her running through the streets, knowing she was hunted by a pack of killers. He brought her into the cathedral to hide her because . . . because the crooked little man thought she was an angel who needed to find a way home. She remembered how he’d sit with her at the table and stare at her with a half-mad look in his eyes, telling her he was back with her in “nowtimes,” and that he’d been in “beforetimes.” And he had the funniest stories about the people he’d met along the way. She remembered how the belfry loge shook at the ringing of the hour, how it scared her to death at first. Rochat told her it was only Marie-Madeleine telling Lausanne the time. She remembered how on that last day, amid the cacophony of all the bells, the crooked little man saved her life, saved the cathedral he imagined to be a hiding place for her and all the lost angels in the world. She remembered looking down from the belfry and seeing him dead on the ground. She remembered calling his name, begging him to come back.
    And there was another man, she thought, but she could never remember who he was, or if he was even real. As if the man was there and not there at the same time. Sometimes she thought she could almost see him, but each time her memory searched for a name, the man disappeared.
    The clock above the kitchen door chimed four times.
    Katherine stared at it, feeling something very strange, as if coming back to nowtimes. She looked at the calendar hanging from a hook on the wall.
    â€œTwo and a half years ago. Two and a half fucking years.”
    She poured a cup of tea and inhaled the fumes, wishing to remember more, but she couldn’t.