Mojave

Mojave is a California setting associated with two sharply different moments in Dan Davis’s search for Frederica Virginia Gentry and his effort to keep his movements secret from Miles Gentry. In one, an official school record offers a slender trace of Ricky; in the other, Dan uses Mojave as a cover story while pursuing personal business elsewhere.

A Trace in the School Records

When Dan searches for Ricky after waking in the future, he discovers that she has no Hired Girl stock and that the Bank of America never held a trust in her favor. A records office in Mojave supplies one limited confirmation: it has a grade-school record for a pupil named Frederica Virginia Gentry, who took a withdrawal transcript in 1971. The record establishes that Ricky attended school there, but it does not say where she went afterward.

That trace brings consolation without solving the search. Ricky could have taken the transcript to any of thousands of public schools, and Dan has no practical way to query them all. Against the scale of the United States’ population, the Mojave record is only a small foothold: it confirms her presence in the past while leaving her whereabouts unknown.

A Cover Story

Years earlier, while secretly working on his own inventions, Dan encounters an acquaintance while buying a servo motor. The acquaintance recognizes him as Danny Davis and assumes he is in Mojave. Dan says he is making only a quick business trip and will return there in a few days, then asks the man not to tell Miles that they met.

Dan explains that Miles believes he is in Albuquerque on company business, whereas the trip in question is private and has nothing to do with the firm. The Mojave return story helps preserve that separation: it is the destination Dan offers in conversation, not the location of his undisclosed work. When the acquaintance suggests that the secrecy concerns a woman, the exchange hints at personal stakes without disclosing more.

A Place Between Past and Present

The two appearances of Mojave frame distinct forms of uncertainty. In the search for Ricky, the town’s records preserve a name and a school departure but cannot bridge the distance between a documented child and the missing adult. In Dan’s earlier life, the place serves as a plausible public explanation that masks his private course of action. Mojave thus links the story’s lost family history with Dan’s practiced concealment, while remaining a specific location rather than an answer to either problem.