Angelfire

TEN

CAL

^“So, you’re a lawyer, Mr. Griffin. A most maligned profession.”

Mary seated herself across from me in front of the fireplace in her office. Between us, a low coffee table of burnished pine held an odd collection of artifacts: arrowheads, a grinding rock, a rattle made of wood and leather.

“ ‘And He said, Woe to you, lawgivers also,’ ” I quoted, “ ‘for you load men with burdens hard to bear and you yourselves do not touch the burdens with one of your fingers.’ Gospel of Luke, Chapter Eleven, verse forty-six. Even God doesn’t think much of us as a tribe.”

“But I’ll bet you were one of the virtuous lawyers, weren’t you?”

I shook my head.

Her eyebrows rose. “A cynic?”

I laid a hand over my heart. “A fallen idealist.” “But repentant?”

I shrugged, smiling in the face of accusing memories. “Were you any good at it?”

I had to think about that. “I … yes. Yes, I was good at it. But not cutthroat enough to be truly great.”

“Are you cutthroat enough to take Enid away from us?” Mary McCrae didn’t pull punches.

“I don’t want to take him away. I just want to borrow him.” “For how long?”

“I don’t know. As long as it takes.”

“Days? Weeks? Months?”

“In months it could be too late.”

“For what?”

I had to search my head and heart for the right words. “I think the Source is gaining strength. I think that’s why things are continuing to change. At some point it may be too late for anyone to do anything.”

“So, if Enid were to go with you, you might be able to ‘pull the plug on the Source,’ as Goldie put it … or you might not.”

I nodded.

“And if not?”

“Then we do what we can and come back here to re — group.” If we’re still alive.

“Either way it could be weeks before Enid returns. If he returns. And while he’s gone-”

“I know. You’re stranded.”

“Worse. We have no consistent way to protect the flares, as you call them.”

“You protect them now while he’s away. How?”

She studied me, as if trying to decide how much to tell me. “A battery of sorts. Look, Mr. Griffin, let’s assume for a moment our… flares could be shielded inside the Preserve long enough for you to get where you’re going and back. Enid’s talent is essential to us in other ways. We wouldn’t survive long without it. Refugees aren’t the only thing that comes in from outside. Everything does: food, clothing, equipment. Even if I could ensure everyone’s safety, I must be able to open the door.”

I read her eyes. “Goldie,” I said.

“Goldie. You think that’s an unreasonable request?”

“No, but I can’t ask him to stay. I can’t afford to have him stay. He’s our bloodhound. He’s how we track the Source.”

She gazed at me for a moment. “So he said. No one else can do that?”

“The Change is selective, Mary. You know that better than anyone. It chose Goldie and Enid, but not me or Doc or Colleen.”

She was nodding. “Or me, for that matter. In my past life…” She paused, smiled. “Listen to me, sounding as if I’d died and been reincarnated. In my past life I was conversant, Mr. Griffin. I spoke the language. I knew the drill. I could perform because I knew the rules of engagement. There is a new language; I don’t speak it. There are new rules; I don’t know them. I don’t know the drill anymore-I’m winging it. It’s as if I’ve gone suddenly blind and Enid is my seeing-eye dog.”

“And Goldie is mine.”

“Your what?” Goldie was standing in the doorway of Mary’s office, looking from one of us to the other.

“Lucky rabbit’s foot,” said Mary wryly.

I decided to cut to the chase. “Goldie, Mary would need you to stay here and take Enid’s place if he comes with us.”

He was unsurprised. “Sure. Makes perfect sense, except that you’d be in dry dock without me.”

“You’re that sure?” Mary asked.

Goldie nodded. He wandered farther into the room, coming to squat by the coffee table.

“You couldn’t show them on a map?” she pressed him.

He chuckled, his eyes picking over the odds and ends on the tabletop. “Mary, I don’t know if you’ve tried using maps lately, but they can be awfully unreliable. Things aren’t where they belong. The Ohio is a whitewater theme park ride, and there are invisible corridors between Ohio and West Virginia. And it’s still changing. Isn’t it, Cal?” He glanced up at me, his eyes ice-pick sharp, reminding me that the Change hadn’t left me completely untouched.

If I were to twist suddenly, I wondered, what form would I take? I turned the thought aside.

“So you can’t just divine where it is on a current map and let them extrapolate?” Mary asked.

He picked up the rattle and fiddled with it, turning it over in his hands. It responded with a soft scrape of dried beans. He seemed fascinated by it. “I could point to … oh, South Dakota and say it’s there. I could even point to the Badlands and say it’s there. But the Badlands covers a hell of a lot of territory. The reality is: I feel a pull; I take a step. If it’s the right step, I feel the pull get stronger. If I take the wrong step…” He shrugged. “Right now, all I know is that the pull is coming from somewhere west of here.”

Mary sat back in her chair and looked at me. “So, that’s it, then. I can’t let Enid go. And you can’t let Goldie go. An impasse.”

I looked down at my hands. They were clenched, knuckles white. I relaxed them with effort. “Mary, I know you care about the people here. I understand that you want to protect them. But they’re a handful of people out of the millions- maybe billions-who are homeless, helpless, confused. When we left New York, it was coming apart at the seams. People were dying-worse, they were killing. Even people who didn’t change behaved like animals.”

“And your point?”

I looked up at her. “If Enid stays here, he can save a handful. If he goes with us, he could save billions.”

Mary flushed to the roots of her hair. “You overstate your case, Mr. Griffin. We have no way of knowing how widespread-”

“Did you hear what I said? We came here from Manhattan. We can vouch for the fact that the Change has affected New York, West Virginia, Ohio. Planes have fallen out of the sky, there’s no electricity, and the landscape in some places is as twisted as the people. You came here from farther west. Is it any different on this side of the Ohio?”

“Don’t push me, Mr. Griffin. And don’t try to manipulate me. Perhaps you think because I’m a woman you can do that. You’d be wrong. I can tell when I’m being jerked around.”

“Cal doesn’t jerk people around, Mary,” Goldie said quietly. “Right now he’s just trying to get you to look at the big picture. If we get to the Source and unplug it, which Cal believes we can, then it doesn’t just help your folks, it helps everybody.”

Her eyes struck me with the force of an arctic storm. “Why? Why do you believe you stand a snowball’s chance in hell of doing anything against the Storm? You saw it- what it did, what it’s still doing. What makes you think you can do anything?”

I had to smile. How many times a day did I ask myself that question? “Would you believe me if I told you I had a vision?”

Into the silence that followed, intruded a soft, rhythmic thudding. A peculiar vibration tingled under my feet. Goldie obviously felt it, too, because he put down the rattle and stood, looking puzzled. Mary raised a hand, as if to command silence, and sat listening to the eerie drumming. It seemed to come from everywhere, to be in the room with us.

When the vibration ceased, Mary rose. “Excuse me. I have to go. I’m assuming you won’t be leaving right away.” She was gone in a wash of tension I swear pricked my skin.

Goldie and I stared at each other for a moment, then I asked, “Is it in the Badlands?”

He gave me a look he could probably patent. “Now I’m a travel agent? How the hell should I know?”

We moved by unspoken consent to stand on the Lodge’s broad veranda. Down the hill, mellow afternoon sunlight tumbled through trees that were still green into an odd, gleaming mist that seemed to fit the forest like a woolly, translucent bonnet. It reminded me of Boone’s Gap, but this mist seemed benign, like a child’s favorite blanket. There were no angry ghosts in it. It was pleasant here, from the clutter of cottages and tents to the song of wind chimes. If it were not for Tina-no, if it were not for the Source-I’d consider staying. God knows, we all had talents we could put to use in a place like this.

“Bagel dog with kraut,” Goldie murmured.

“Excuse me?”

“Things I Miss Most. Your turn.”

“You have to ask?”

“Now now. This is supposed to be a lighthearted exercise in distraction. The category is Things We Miss Most About Life as It Once Was.”

“Okay. Um… Starbuck’s … double latte, tall, vanilla.”

“Figures. Low fat milk, too, I’ll bet,” he said, and when I nodded, he added, “Yeah, I figured you for a low fat kinda guy.”

“But if I had to do all over again? Whole milk and hazelnut.”

“You devil.”

“Could you learn to do what Enid does?”

He sobered and his eyes dropped to his feet. “Tried it. That’s what I was at this morning before Doc came around. I don’t get it.”

“Maybe it just takes practice.”

“Practice? Practice what?”

“Okay, trial and error, then.”

“Look, you remember the light-globe I used to scare away our Shadow friends?”

“How could I forget?”

“It’s a form of visualization. I imagine the globe; that somehow gathers the photons together and it’s there. That’s roughly the way Enid makes his shield around Magritte.”

“All right, so you understand the mechanism. So far, so good.”

“No. No good,” he said, shaking his head. “I work with light. Enid works with sound. They’re two different types of energy-at least so far as the Change is concerned. Enid creates a sonic shield around Magritte, so the Source can’t hear her. I could create a light-globe, but all that would do was keep her from being eaten by the local wildlife. It wouldn’t block her from the Source.” He paused to chew on his lip and pick at a knothole in the porch railing. “It’s not just Enid. It’s Magritte. They do it together.” He made a spasmodic gesture with his head. “The shield, the jamming thing.”

“Wait. You’re telling me … What are you telling me?” He shrugged. “They’re a duo. A team. Batman and

Robin, Scully and Mulder, lox and bagels. You can’t have one without the other. Symbiosis. And no room for cream cheese.”

“You and Magritte don’t have symbiosis?”

He glanced away from me so quickly, if we were standing in a courtroom, I’d have smelled guilt.

“What?” I prompted.

“Nothing.”

“Something.”

He wagged his head back and forth and sighed. “Magritte and I … we have some sort of … rapport. We connect. Or maybe she just makes me hot. I don’t know. But we don’t have what she and Enid do. Besides which, he needs her protection as much as she needs his. Protection from this Howard guy.”

“Howard? Refresh my memory.”

“His manager. The guy he’s hiding out from here. Irrelevant at the moment. The point is, I just don’t seem to have it-whatever it is.”

“Full circle. We’re back to Enid.”

He shook his head. “You heard Mary. He’s their lifeline.” “She said something about a battery-the thing that pro-

tects the flares while Enid is gone. What did she mean?” He gave me an odd look and held up a finger. “Listen.” “To what?”

“Shh! Listen.”

I heard a dog barking down the hill, water gurgling and splashing, a chorus of wind chimes. Goldie started humming. It took me a moment to realize that the tune was in perfect harmony with the wind chimes.

Enid used sound. “The wind chimes?”

He grinned. “Cool, huh? I haven’t verified it yet, but that’s my theory. It would explain a lot. Such as why they’re all over the place, why they all play the same set of perfectly tuned notes, and why something keeps them moving even when there’s no breeze.”

I looked up at the row of chimes along the eaves of the Lodge. There was no breeze, but they were rocking and sending out a sheer veil of song. “What keeps them moving?” I asked.

“Don’t know. Haven’t had a chance to ask anybody who’d say anything more than, ‘Well, uh, they’re wind chimes.’ ”

I grimaced. “I hope the answer isn’t ‘Enid.’ ”

“What if it is?”

“Then our job gets a little harder.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “There’s a way to do this, Goldie. If we can’t account for all of Enid’s talents, then we have to make Mary see that if we don’t shut down the Source, and shut it down soon, nobody will be safe anywhere. Not even here.”

Goldie’s eyes met mine, grim, troubled. “Cal, there’s something you should know. Enid’s sick.”

A cold fist wrapped around my stomach. “How sick?”

“I don’t know. Magritte says it’s just that he’s doing too much. Maybe she’s right, but intuition tells me it’s something more. He’s pretty used up.”

“Does Mary know?”

“Would she admit it if she did?”

Goldie was right about Enid-he was used up. It was hard to miss. He was right about Mary, too; she didn’t admit it, even when Doc offered to take a look at him.

“Why? He’s just very tired, Dr. Lysenko,” she insisted. “He does an awful lot for us here, and with winter coming on outside, we’ve been keeping him especially busy. He just needs rest.”

I tried to read her face, but she would’ve made a fabulous poker player; I couldn’t tell if she was lying, in denial, or telling the Gospel truth.

I figured Goldie was in a better position to read that situation than I was. If Enid wouldn’t tell him, chances were good that Magritte would. She seemed to trust him-something he found bemusing, but which didn’t surprise me. In a matter of days they formed a peculiar triad: Goldie, Magritte, and Enid. Nothing sexual, except perhaps in my friend’s fulsome fantasy world, but something musical and-I don’t know-spiritual, I guess.

I wondered if I still believed in spiritual things. I vaguely recalled that I once had. That Tina had. Or perhaps Tina was the believing part of me, and apart, I believed in nothing but Tina herself.

Doc was up and around on the second day of our stay, limping but mobile. By the end of that day he’d become a fixture. Surprise, surprise. He fit in here, the same way he fit in at Grave Creek; the same way he fit in on the corner of Lexington and Forty-second, the same way I have no doubt he’d fit in in the operating theater of any major urban hospital.

Doc Lysenko, chameleon.

I didn’t fit. So I put myself to work, mostly in the infirmary Doc was helping them piece together. A good place to gather information. There were moments I’d look up from a task and watch everybody fitting in, and I’d try to imagine what life would be like if we found Tina and brought her here. Would I fit then? If Tina was the part of me that believed, was she also the part of me that belonged?

Colleen understood this. She didn’t fit in any better than I did. We were misfits together, Colleen and I. Where Doc could get absorbed in the Preserve’s medical needs, and Goldie could just get absorbed-period, Colleen stayed focused. That helped me stay focused.

“It’d be really easy to get sucked into this place, wouldn’t it?” Colleen said at the end of our first day in the Preserve. “Just too good to be true.”

I gazed down the long hill at the evening view from the veranda of the Lodge and realized that she’d put my feelings to words pretty much exactly. “Who wouldn’t want a haven like this?”

She laughed, and I could feel the warmth of her gaze on the side of my face. “You. You’re already planning our next move, and that sure as hell doesn’t involve hanging here.”

“No. Because you’re right, as it happens. This place is too good to be true. Mary says it’s locked in space and time. But it’s not locked. And it’s not safe. The world outside is going to keep changing.”

“Until someone or something stops the Source.”

I turned my head to look at her. Her eyes met mine- open, frankly questioning. Did she take that for granted- that if the Source was somehow conquered or dispersed, the Change would simply stop? I didn’t.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I hope so. I hope it’s that easy.”

She laughed again. “Listen to the man-‘easy’!.. Well, I guess there’s only one way to find out, huh? We just have to keep going until we get… wherever it is Goldman is leading us.”

“Looks that way.”

The moment stretched out between us, silent, as we stood eye-to-eye on the veranda in the soft light of fey torches. I wanted to lean into her, to touch her, to establish something constant between us.

But then she pulled her eyes away, looked back down the hill and said, “So what’s next?”

“Next,” I repeated, pulling my thoughts back from the edge. “Next, I get to know the flares.”

There were seven of them, all but one pulled from the Source’s radar at the point of Change. The one exception to that serendipity was Javier, who had changed while in the Adena mounds. There, he had apparently been protected from the Source by whatever power the place held. The same power, I suspected, that linked it to Olentangy.

Javier and his family had been vacationing in West Virginia when the Change came. He was thirteen. His mother and father were also here. They no longer spoke of making their way home; they now understood that to do so would mean leaving their son behind. They stayed. They fit in.

The flares liked the Preserve’s little chapel. It was the light, Magritte said-the way it slanted through the stained-glass windows, making rainbows in the shadows and tinting their auras with the vivid hues of flame, ice, and Saint Elmo’s fire.

They didn’t seem to mind when I crashed their little gathering the morning after our arrival. I perched on the edge of a pew while they arrayed themselves about the altar like kinetic votive candles. If the gathering was odd, so was the chapel. The altar sported the usual cross, along with a menorah, a Lakota ceremonial pipe, a doll-size Buddha, and some relics I didn’t recognize.

A Bible verse stirred my memory: And My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. Maybe we were seeing the fulfillment of prophecy.

We talked about the Preserve, about Mary, about Enid. I mentioned the wind chimes casually, commenting on how many of them there were. The other flares turned to Magritte in eerie unison, and Magritte gave me a long, searching look and said nothing. And when I asked them about the Storm, there was a silence so deep I could hear the candles burning.

Then a girl with the unlikely name of Faun asked, “What’s to know about the Storm? It’s why we’re all here. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

“How did it affect you? How did it call to you? My sister talked about hearing a Voice or Voices. ‘The one and the many.’ Is that what you heard?”

They exchanged glances, and for a moment no one spoke. Then Javier said, “It wanted me to belong to it. The way I belonged to my family. It told me I belonged to it. It made me think…”

“Think what?”

“That it was where I was meant to be,” he finished. “That I wasn’t like my mom and dad anymore. I was… different. And I needed to be with my own kind.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t talk about it, Javy,” said Faun. “You know how it gets when you think on it too much.”

Javier looked from me to Faun and back again. “Your sister’s like us?”

“Yes. She wasn’t as lucky as you are, though. It found her.”

Auras rippled and shifted hues. Eyes, deep and mysterious as twilight, traded glances.

“When I was in the mounds,” Javier said, “I could feel it calling me. Somehow, I knew it couldn’t reach me as long as I stayed where I was. But after a while I wanted to leave the mounds. It made me want to leave. To go find it. Mom and Dad kept me there… and then Enid came. They were so scared. I’ve never seen them so scared.” He shook his head. “Then, I didn’t understand why.”

My blood chilled. “Do you now?”

He didn’t answer, but glanced over at Magritte, who hovered lightly above the pew on which I sat like a lump of coarse clay. “Should we tell him about Alice?” he asked.

Magritte’s expression went through a series of changes as she decided again how far she could trust me. “Enid found Alice up on Put-in-Bay Island. She was in the last of the Change and the Storm’d come for her.” She said the words as if they were dangerous. “Enid got to her just before the Storm did, and we barely made it back into the cave. But Alice… wasn’t very strong. When she’d hear the Storm, she’d listen. One night, she just left. She went back through the northern portal to the island and it got her. Enid followed, to try and bring her back, but it was too late.”

“What do you mean, when she’d hear the Storm? I thought you couldn’t hear it inside the Preserve.”

“Sometimes you can,” said Javier quietly. Terror and longing merged uneasily in his eyes, and I remembered Tina telling me that she wondered if she ought to just embrace the power tugging at her, heed the voices telling her how perfect a union it would be.

I remembered, too, as clearly as if I lived it again, our last moments together in the Wishart house in Boone’s Gap. The simple white board structure had held something too complicated and paradoxical for me to comprehend: two men, one less than a man, one more than a man. Bob Wishart, crippled, disintegrating. His brother Fred-Doctor Fred Wishart-a cocreator of the Source. Coauthor of the real Doomsday Book.

A piece of the One.

In the moments of quiet I tried to avoid, I could still hear Fred’s voice, gentle, trying to explain to me and to Tina why he held a tiny mountain mining town in deadly thrall.

If I let go, I’m destroyed, too. Something bad needs me to be whole.

Something bad.

I’d been warned. And when Fred Wishart had been sucked into the void between Boone’s Gap and whatever place the Source inhabited, Tina was gone with him, torn away by an unnatural wind. Gone, while I lay in an impotent heap, stunned, broken, knowing her terror as starkly as if it had been me in the Storm’s embrace.

I wanted never to feel that combination of emotions again.

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore,” said Faun. “And I don’t think the rest of you should talk about it, either. It’s bad luck.”

The others seemed to agree. They drifted away in silent consensus, Javier giving me a long backward glance. Only Magritte stayed.

“They’re scared,” she said when they’d gone. “The Source is evil, but it has a pretty voice. I think that makes it more evil, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I also think that makes it more dangerous. You say you can hear it in here. How is that possible?”

She just looked at me and shook her head.

“The wind chimes-Goldie thinks they’re what protects you when Enid’s gone. Is that what they do? Is that when you can hear the Storm-when Enid’s gone?”

Her lips curled. “That Goldie’s pretty sharp.”

Yeah, and I wished he were here. Maybe he could get her to open up. “What makes the wind chimes work, Magritte? Does Enid do something to keep them moving? Is he the only one that can do that, too?”

I watched her glide along the altar, touching the sacred things there one after another as if they might protect her. Her movements had the feel of ritual-as if this were something she performed regularly as a ward.

“Look, Magritte, I know Enid is sick. Is that why the Source gets through sometimes, because he’s getting too weak to stop it?”

She swung around to look at me, her eyes wide and stricken. When she spoke, her voice was nearly a whisper. “When it came for me, I felt its touch. It was the same touch I felt every time I …” She hesitated, her hand cupping the little Buddha. “My johns really liked it when I started to change. They said it was like doin’ an angel. I was with a john when I changed final. The Storm came quick and sudden and it touched me. It was like somebody’d took that john and multiplied him times a million.”

Her hand had clenched around the Buddha. Now she let go, stroked it gently, and moved on to the next relic. “I don’t ever want to feel that touch again. I’ll die first.”

I didn’t have to ask if she meant it. I tried to put Tina out of my head, to stop thinking like a brother and start thinking like a strategist. “I don’t want you to feel it, either. I want to stop the Storm. Completely. And it’s possible that you and Enid might be instrumental in that. Maggie, I need your help. Tell me about the wind chimes. Is Goldie right-are they what protects you inside the Preserve?”

She was silent long enough that I thought she wasn’t going to answer me. Then she said simply, “Partly.”

“Partly. What else is there?”

“Enid’s music. Us fireflies. And this place. It’s a powerful place. It all kind of works together. But when Enid’s … when he’s gone, we have to work harder to tune out the Storm.”

“How do the chimes work? Do you know?”

She shook her head. “Enid says they scramble the signals. So we don’t hear the Storm clear and it don’t hear us.” “Does Enid have to move the chimes?”

“No. Anything can move ’em, but you can’t count on the wind around here, so he keeps them going. It’s in the music-in his head.”

“Maggie, do you have any idea why the Source wants you?”

She looked up from the altar, her face caught in a fall of bloodred light from the window behind the altar, the white silk of her tunic stained with it. “It’s hungry,” she said.

The strategist sat silent while the brother faced the horrible possibility that his sister might be dead-that the Source, for whatever reason, literally devoured flares. I forced my throat to make sound. “Do you… do you think it kills the flares it takes?”

“Not the way you mean. A pimp doesn’t kill his girls. At least not all at once. He just uses them up, bit by bit.”

Nausea swept me. I fought it down. “Maggie, can you hear the Storm now?”

Her eyes locked on mine, she shook her head. “Not right now. But I think some of the others do. I know Faun does. She’s not very strong.”

“And Enid? How strong is he?”

She stared at me from those bottomless eyes for an eternity. “I think he’s dying.”

I caught up with Mary in the caverns, walking into the middle of a scene that involved a trio of snarling grunters and a red blanket. The problem: one of them had it; the other two wanted it. They were in the process of ripping it apart when Mary stepped in and snatched it away from them. They turned on her in unison, showing fangs, reaching for the lost prize.

Adrenaline kicked in; I drew my sword and got in the way.

If the grunters were surprised, Mary was outraged. “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Put that damned thing away!”

I stood my ground between her and the grunters. “They were about to jump you.”

“They were not. And I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t talk over them as if they weren’t there. They’re people, dammit. Regardless of what they look like.”

I lowered my sword slightly and gave ground-a little. I glanced at the grunters. They dropped into defensive postures, eyes shuttling warily back and forth between the two of us.

Mary, meanwhile, swung a backpack down from her shoulder and pulled out more blankets. “This is a different sort of place than you’ve been before,” she told them. “There’s no treasure to be hoarded here. And there’s enough for everyone to have what he needs.”

They shuffled forward in unison, still snarling, eyes darting suspiciously. One reached his hand out for the red blanket. Mary smiled and gave it to him. He clutched it to his chest, grunted out something that sounded like “Thanks,” and headed off into the gloom. The other two dove for the backpack.

“Blue!” said one. “Want blue!”

“Mine!” said the other. “Blue mine!”

In another second they’d be fighting again.

I took a step forward. “Hey, fellas! Why are you here, huh?”

They both turned their milky eyes up to me and blinked.

“Didn’t you come here to find a more human life? Didn’t you come here because you didn’t want to end up alone, or wandering around with a pack of animals?”

Mary picked up the cue and grabbed a couple of blankets, which she held out, one to each grunter. “He’s right, boys. Try to remember what brought you here. You want to be better than what your friends outside have become? Well, being better starts here.”

“You’re a natural,” she commented as we made our way back to the surface after the incident.

Tweaked torchlight fluttered and ran across the rough walls, making and unmaking shadows. It was hard not to suspect them of harboring danger.

“A natural what?”

“Leader.”

“I was going to say the same of you.”

“Bullshit. If you’re so impressed with my leadership, why the hell did you run me over back there?”

“Run you over? Mary, I thought they were going to tear you to pieces. They can do that. I’ve seen them.”

“So have I. But you forget-the very fact of their having followed Enid in here shows that they’re different. You saw it yourself. They’re better than that.”

“I only hoped they were.”

She stopped in the middle of the room the tour signs called “Indian Council Chamber” and smiled up at me, her hands clasped in front of her like a schoolteacher … or a Buddha. Torchlight turned her graying hair to deep gold, burnished her face, and softened the lines there.

Breath caught in my lungs; she reminded me, sharply, of someone from a past I’d lost. I hadn’t thought of my mother for what seemed an eternity, and suddenly her ghost was standing an arm’s length away.

“Well,” she said, “it seems your hope was rewarded. Your cynicism didn’t get you anything but hollered at.” She turned and began walking, now raising a hand to greet one of her subterranean citizens-human and twist-now reaching out to touch the moistly glistening walls.

Neither of us spoke again until we came out at the top of the spiral stair. The sound of wind chimes was heavy in the air. Mary struck out across the campground.

“Magritte says Enid is dying,” I said.

Mary turned around so fast, I thought I heard static electricity. “Magritte isn’t a doctor. But she is young and emotionally needy. A desperate combination.”

“We brought you a doctor. You won’t let Enid see him.” She shook her head and began moving in the direction of the Lodge. “Enid is just very tired. I told you-”

I matched her stride. “What you’ve told me doesn’t tally with what I’ve seen. He can’t stay awake. Sometimes he can barely walk straight. From what Goldie says, sometimes he can barely stand. The flares can hear the Source whispering to them through Enid’s Veil. I know you’ve already lost one, and I know it was while Enid was here.”

She paled, stopped. “Who told you that?”

“The flares.”

She started walking again, anger in every line of her compact body.

I stuck to her. “Come on, Mary. You’re in denial. And there’s nothing to be gained by it. You’re going to lose Enid one way or another.”

“So better your way?” she asked bitterly. “The flares will be destroyed-”

“If you don’t move now to shore up the Veil,” I finished. “How?”

“As Magritte described it, the wind chimes are a focus for power-the flares’ and Enid’s. They provide a sort of sonic veil, but only if they’re kept in motion. Good so far?”

She nodded, slowing her pace slightly.

“Then what we need is a way to keep them moving.” She snorted. “Are you God now, Mr. Griffin? Can you make wind?”

“We don’t need to make wind, we just need-” I broke off and stopped walking, distracted by the sight of several sets of wind chimes sharing a clothesline with some laundry. As I watched, a woman with a baby on her hip and a basket at her feet pulled the laundry to her by rotating a pulley wheel mounted on a tree trunk. The chimes shrilled.

Goldie would have called it an epiphany. Whatever it was, it shot adrenaline into my veins.

“Need what?” Mary asked, her eyes on my face.

“That.” I pointed at the rig of pulleys, wheels, and line. “A system.”

She glanced at it and shrugged. “Yes, but driven by what?”

“Something that never stops moving.”

Her eyes came back to my face, the anger gone. “Water.” For a moment, at least, Mary McCrae and I were on the same page.

We gathered rope, string, twine-anything that could be strung on the odd assortment of wheels we collected. Since over a homemade map of the Preserve’s inhabited area, plotting the most strategic places to set up lines, calculating how they would be connected with the locus of the system, the waterwheel.

It was nearly complete, lacking only the integration of its internal gears and the mounting of its big wheel. Colleen cheerfully volunteered to aid in that effort, declaring that waterwheels were right up her alley. Maybe, but her mechanical know-how was unfortunately offset by her lack of people skills. The engineer heading the project, Greg Gustavson, was not keen on the idea of having a “little girl” tinkering with his machinery. I don’t know if that slowed the wheel’s completion. I only know it wasn’t ready when we needed it.

I was in the company of flares that day, or at least, of three of them-Magritte, Faun, and Javier. Of all the flares, it was Javier who reminded me most of Tina. Like Tina, he was intelligent and, like Tina, he had a way of seeming older than his years and a direct gaze that was sometimes disconcerting.

We were in the chapel again, a place I found as calming as the flares did. Maybe it was the warmth and light. Or maybe it was the smell of beeswax, wood, and incense. It felt as if time had stopped there, and the world seemed a normal and safe place.

The first inkling I had that there was anything wrong was when Faun, in the midst of a colorful story about her marvelously dysfunctional family in Nashville, stopped speaking and began silently to cry. Her azure eyes were wide and fixed on the large window above and behind the altar, and I thought she was just feeling the pain of remembrance. But then her lips opened and she uttered a high, inhuman wail, so piercingly sad that it brought tears to my eyes.

Javier and Magritte stiffened, their eyes going to the same window. I rose, following their gazes.

The window was pictorial: Noah’s ark sat upon a grassy landscape while dark storm clouds, filled with lightning, billowed overhead. Animals looked up, two by two, and Noah, in the prow of the great boat, also had his face upturned, his beard wind-flung, his hands raised as if casting a spell or warding off the storm.

The light that had been falling through the window a moment before was gone, dulling the bright glass. The chapel darkened.

Faun wailed again and jerked upward. Javier echoed her, putting both hands over his upswept ears, crushing them against his skull.

Magritte turned frantic eyes to me. “Oh, God, I hear it! Enid!”

I understood in a chill jolt. Something was wrong with Enid. The Veil was unraveling. It had been a close, still morning; I already knew there was no breeze to move the chimes.

Without warning, Javier was pulled toward the rafters like a puppet on strings. Maggie grabbed him with both hands and began to sing Enid’s “Refugee Song,” wordlessly, her voice high and trembling. Javier’s upward movement stopped, leaving both flares suspended above the altar.

I turned and bolted from the chapel. There were two sets of chimes hanging under the eaves of the porch. I could make a shield of them.

The courtyard had been awash with morning light earlier. Now shadows swam across it, sucking away the sun, devouring the Preserve’s protective aura. Delmar Crow stood on the porch of the leather shop across the way, staring at the sky.

I shouted at him as I reached for the chimes, kept shouting as I yanked them from their hooks and shook a wild cascade of notes out of them. “Flares! In the chapel! The Storm’s getting at them!”

Delmar’s eyes swung to the chapel, realization dawning. He made a gesture of comprehension at me, then turned and disappeared into the leather shop.

Swinging the chimes, I turned back into the sanctuary, driven by the sudden, insistent sound of drumming, which seemed to come from everywhere at once. I was terrified that in the moments I’d been gone, Magritte and the others had been taken. But I heard her voice as I crossed the foyer, still reeling out song, trying to scramble the signal. I elbowed my way through the inner doors, chimes singing with every movement.

All three flares hung in midair before the altar, linked only by Magritte’s hands. She burned bright, white-hot, her delicate features twisted with effort. Faun and Javier were guttering flames. Their auras were no longer radiant and lucent, but pulsed with muddy reds and purples. Above them in the rafters a malignant shadow spread its arms, pulling them upward into its embrace. Its voice was like the hiss of whitewater, swiftly building to a roar.

I moved without thinking, chimes tangled in my fingers, rushing up the aisle, leaping, grabbing, managing somehow to get my arms around the struggling flares. I felt the warm chill of their changed flesh, the homely fabric of their clothing. I was surprised when my human weight had an effect; they dropped suddenly and my feet met the chapel’s firm floorboards.

Magritte sobbed in my ear. Her voice faltered. We were buoyed upward.

“Keep singing!” I shouted.

“Scared,” she keened, and turned the cry into a note and the note into a trill of song.

“Me, too,” I murmured, and wondered how long we could keep this up. My arms around the flares, the chimes I held were useless. And Magritte was weakening.

There was a crack like thunder and the ceiling above us ripped apart in a hail of debris. The Storm surged into the breach; I could feel and hear the alien wind, sucking at us from above. It stirred the chimes tangled in my hands, but the chaos voices drowned out their song.

Faun let out a cry of despair and fury and twisted in my grasp, her fists striking glancing blows across my shoulders. Javier screamed. We were being lifted again, tugged from the solid earth toward the looming shadows. I looked up.

The Storm’s maw was gaping, black, eternal and ablaze with unnatural, translucent flame in a thousand hues. And behind it Something smiled, unseen, and hungered.

I don’t ever want to feel that touch again.

I tightened my grip. In response, Faun lashed out with a charge of pure, freezing energy that blinded all my senses. My arms went numb, my legs spasmed, my head exploded with hot-white pain. Faun twisted away and flew upward. Javier shot up after her, slipping from the circle of my arms.

I grabbed desperately, clumsily, losing the wind chimes. But I caught one thin ankle with a hand that seemed part of someone else’s body. With the other hand I captured Magritte, crushing her against my side. I would not let go. I swore it to myself, to Tina, to God, to the Source. I would die before I’d let go of either of them.

Enid’s voice cut through the storm fury like a velvet knife, accompanied by a sheet of chime-song. Melody reached up into the blazing darkness and joined battle with it.

Above us, in the Storm-mouth, Faun twisted this way and that, a stray ember thrown from a fire to die. Javier reached after her. The unearthly wind crescendoed, roaring, wailing like a maddened animal, like a lost soul. Then it was gone so suddenly that all sound, all sensation, seemed to have been sucked out of the room.

And with it, Faun.

I quivered in the aftermath, dimly aware of Enid’s voice flowing around me. Javier was a dead weight in my arms, his fey light extinguished. He weighed no more than a young child. My legs felt as if they were made of rubber, not flesh and bone. I sank to my knees on the hardwood floor.

Magritte, halo dimmed, sagged against me, panting. She touched Javier’s face with a trembling hand. “He’ll be all right,” she whispered. It may have been a promise or a prayer.

We both looked to Enid. He still sang, desperation in his eyes, sweat gleaming on his face. His voice was raw and his fingers faltered on the strings of his guitar.

I got to my feet, passing the limp Javier to Delmar, who had come into the chapel with Enid. “We’ve got to get the waterwheel online,” I said. “I’ll need Colleen, Goldie-hell, I’ll need everybody you can get.”

Delmar nodded. “I’ll take care of these two. And pray the others got to safety.”

“Where will you take them?”

“Down. Into the caves.”

I headed for the unfinished millhouse, trying to keep my eyes from being drawn to the sky. I knew what I’d see. The weak shimmer of chimes, powered by human hands, held the Storm at bay, but it hadn’t been repulsed. Its unnatural clouds roiled overhead, licking the treetops; I felt them as a hot weight on my soul.

Mary met me near the center of camp, Goldie and Kevin Elk Sings at her side.

“Magritte.” The name tumbled out of Goldie’s mouth the moment he saw me. His hand clutched my sleeve.

“She’s okay. How did you-”

“Delmar,” said Mary. She seemed dazed, wounded. “The drums.”

“Faun,” I said.

She nodded. “I know.”

“There was nothing I-”

“I know. If there were a way you could have saved her, she’d be here now. But the others … you… they’re still with us.” Her eyes came in to sudden focus, locked with mine. “We’ve got to protect them.”

At the millhouse the great wheel was still, poised above the water. A cascade of curses rolled from the open door. We dove inside.

The obscene litany came from a stocky gentleman with an impressive shock of white hair and five o’clock snow on his jaw. Within the halo of white, his face was the color of a boiled lobster and glistening with sweat; a sledgehammer was clenched in his fist. Like Thor or Vulcan, Greg Gustavson must surely be capable of tossing thunderbolts.

Colleen was here, too, crouched above him in the confusion of large wooden gears that formed the mill’s mechanism.

Greg ceased cursing long enough to look at Mary and say, “Before you ask, it can’t be done. She’s not ready. The clutch isn’t finished, and if it were, the wood’d be too green yet.”

“Great Scotty’s Ghost,” murmured Goldie.

I looked up into the recesses of the building. About a dozen feet above our heads a beam as big around as a century oak stretched the width of the millhouse. It was suspended from the ridgepole above its cradle by a web of ropes. Along with the framework of gears that would drive the grinding plates below, there were several pulley-wheels, their lines threaded through the millhouse walls through small, high windows. They connected the mill to our system of chime lines. They were useless without the wheel.

I swung up next to Colleen amidst the machinery and knelt to inspect the clutch “Scotty’s Ghost” had mentioned. I could feel the Storm above us, circling like a vast bird of prey, muttering to itself, looking for another opening.

“What’s the good news?” I asked.

“The good news is the gearbox is finished. The bad news is-”

“I didn’t ask for the bad news.”

Colleen shot me a sideways glance. “Well, you’re gonna get it anyway. Bad news is, these brakes need work.”

She ran her hands over the curved wooden brake pads that were intended to slow or stop the wheel. “These are smooth,” she told me. “Too smooth. It’d be a miracle if they could brake this thing under normal circumstances; there’s no way they’ll survive if the shaft hits the cradle moving.”

“Which it will do,” said Greg Gustavson from below, “if the wheel catches running water.”

“We have to get it in the water,” I said. “Now.”

Colleen met my eyes, then looked down at the engineer. “What if we bypass the clutch and-”

“If you drop this thing in the water without a clutch, it’ll tear the whole mill apart,” he snapped. “We’ve got to be able to disengage the gears.”

“Or stop the water,” said Kevin quietly. The boy hovered behind Mary, working his hands around and around the barrel of a wooden flute. Somehow I got the feeling he never put the thing down.

Greg shook his head. “The lock’s not finished yet, Kev. We got caught with our pants down. We’re not ready.”

“How fast can you get the wheel into the cradle?” I asked.

Greg shot me a glance that asked who the hell I thought I was to come onto his turf and start issuing orders. “In a matter of minutes, but what’s the point? I told you, if that wheel hits the water in motion-”

“Then Kevin’s right,” I said. “Our only chance is to stop the stream. Then we can lower the shaft into the cradle and use the brakes to control the momentum.”

“If we rough up these braking surfaces,” said Colleen. Greg snorted. “Hell, that’s the easy part. How’re you gonna stop the stream?”

Kevin and Goldie followed me from the mill while Greg, Colleen, and a couple of volunteers worked on the brakes. Mary hurriedly gathered a crew of brawn to manhandle the wheel.

Just above the millhouse the waterway narrowed before cascading into the broader, deeper channel along which the mill was being constructed. I tried not to hear the roaring of the frustrated Storm above the treetops, tried not to imagine its hot breath as we checked the lay of the land, the orientation of trees, the availability of large rocks, logs, branches, anything.

Near the mill, uphill from the stream, a large hunk of granite caught my eye. Apply the right leverage and we could roll this thing downhill into the current right about where the stream fed into the millpond. That would block it only partially and would leave us with the additional problem of getting the boulder out of the water again, but right now I didn’t see an alternative.

The sweet, clear tones of a flute floated up to me, mingled with the purl of the stream. I turned. Kevin Elk Sings sat cross-legged beside the flow, flute to his lips. He seemed to be playing to the water. Goldie squatted beside him, eyes raptly on the flute player.

I heard steps behind me. Shadows fell across the face of the boulder. I tried not to notice how dim they were in the growing darkness, what strange colors they cast.

“What are they doing, Calvin?” Doc asked.

“Not sure,” I said.

I turned. Doc wasn’t alone. Delmar Crow and several other men were with him. “Look,” I said, “here’s the situation. We need a dam. Gustavson and Colleen are getting the wheel ready to go in the water, but first we have to stop the water from flowing into the millpond.”

Delmar nodded, slapping his hand against the granite flank of the boulder. “You want to start with this?”

I nodded. “We’ll need leverage.”

Leverage came from a pile of scrap lumber stacked in the lee of the mill. We dragged out three long pieces and hurriedly worked them under the boulder’s flank.

I looked down the hill, mouth open to warn Goldie and Kevin out of the way. The sound stopped in my throat.

The two of them were just about as I’d last seen them, except that Goldie had moved closer to Kevin, the fingers of one hand resting on the barrel of the flute as if in a caress or a benediction. Just beyond where they crouched, the water eddied, curled, and slowed as if an arctic wind breathed over it. Then it folded back on itself and ran, with all the speed of syrup, back the way it had come.

If Kevin could keep this up, the millpond would be empty in a matter of minutes. I held my breath, feeling as if I were on the verge of an epiphany. But as I watched, the water fell back into its normal state, and my epiphany drained away with it toward the mill.

Kevin slumped on the bank with a wail of frustration.

I nodded to Delmar. “We’re on. Let’s get this thing in the water.” I wrapped my hands around a rough two-by-four. “Doc, can you go down there and get them out of the way?”

He threw me a sideways glance. “I am prepared to help here,” he said.

“Doc, we need them out of the way.”

He moved off down the hill, gait stiff, but no longer limping. At the water’s edge, Goldie gave him an argument and Kevin was slow to move, but he managed to get both of them out of the path we hoped our boulder would take.

It took more than the three tries requisite in most fiction, and Goldie, Doc, and Kevin had to add their strength to the effort, but in the end we heaved the boulder out of its bed and watched it roll ponderously into the stream. It splashed down about where we’d intended, but then rolled back toward the mill, leaving generous floodgates on both sides.

“Now what?” Goldie had to shout, making me realize that the roar of the Storm had grown.

I could no longer hear the wind chimes, and had to glance at those nearest us to even see that they were moving. Around us the woods flickered with strange, uncertain light and our shadows squirmed and writhed on the ground as if sinister life grew within them.

“Now we build a dam,” I answered.

Delmar was already headed for the pile of scrap lumber. The rest of us followed. We hauled everything we could lay our hands on down to the stream, then Delmar and I plunged in to start the water wall. We were joined by two men who could have easily passed for defensive linemen. Their names were Tomas and Hagen.

Our backs against the boulder, we worked desperately to seat the odd-size planks across the stream’s mouth. The water was glacially cold; in a matter of seconds hands and feet were numb. Wood slipped easily from frozen fingers, forcing us to grapple with it again and again.

When we had built an unsteady, shifting, four-foot wall, the others plunged into the stream with us, forming a human brace against the water. Only Doc was left on shore, ferrying materials from the mill.

It was working, but so damned slowly. And the stream was stubborn. It breached the wall in a dozen places and foamed over the top, blinding us. The roar of the water bled into the Storm chaos until I couldn’t tell one from the other. We needed more wood.

I glanced up to where Doc hovered on the bank, a short piece of board in his hands. “Too small!” I shouted. “Longer!”

He hesitated, then dropped the board and scrambled up the bank. It seemed an eternity before he was back, struggling with several longer pieces. He was trying to pass one of them out to us when he missed his footing and toppled into the stream just above our would-be dam. The force of the water slammed him into the leaking wall and sent Kevin Elk Sings tumbling backward into the dwindling millpond. Water shot through the unmanned gap.

Delmar shouted and lunged to cover the hole. Kevin scrambled as well, out of the water and around the end of the dam to help Doc clamber out of the water. The cavalry arrived, after a fashion; several more people hurried down the slope to tackle the pile of wood, pass us lumber, and lend brawn to the dam.

While Doc sat watching them, gasping for breath, Kevin turned to the millpond. “It’s falling!” he cried after a moment. “Water’s falling!”

He was right. The water was at my waist, then at my hips, then at mid-thigh. I had no way of knowing if it was enough, but we couldn’t wait any longer. I could distinguish between the sounds of stream and Storm now, and the Storm was the louder of the two.

I pressed a shoulder into the wall and waved at Kevin, shouting to get his attention. “The wheel! The wheel!”

He got it, turned and ran, slipping and sliding in the water that now lapped up the bank. Doc was nowhere in sight.

I worked myself around so the dam was at my back and I could just see the mill past the curve of the boulder. Beside me, Delmar did the same. Along the ridgepole stood eight men and women intent on an array of tethers that ran down to and around the wheel’s massive hub. At some signal I could neither see nor hear, the phalanx of brawn leaned into the cant of the roof; ropes went taut.

From inside the mill there was a crack like the breaking of a tree limb. The top of the wheel tilted back toward the mill as the nether end of its shaft dropped into the inland cradle. A moment later there was a second crack and the wheel sagged toward the creek bed. Its weight hit the lines hard, pulling the team on the roof forward.

Breath stopped in my throat and I mentally pulled with them. Who knew? In this mangled reality, maybe willpower had a real effect.

The wheel stopped moving, suspended by the ropes. Then ponderously, a few inches at a time, it slid downward, groaning like an aged dinosaur, and slipped into its cradle. The water lapped at it but lacked the power to move it.

On the millhouse roof the rope team stood down, except for a lone figure that straddled the ridgepole, apparently waiting to signal us when the gears were engaged.

“Problem!” Delmar yelled in my ear. Water cascaded over his head in a foamy veil. “We just let go this stuff-it hits the wheel-could damage it!”

Damn. He was right. We’d have to dismantle our dam piece by piece, and try to lose as few of those pieces as possible.

I opened my mouth to shout back when I heard music. Flute music. Kevin stood above us on the stream bank, trilling out a melody that cut through the shriek of the Storm in gentle defiance. Around us the roar of water diminished. Less of it poured over the top of the dam. What did come over cascaded in slow motion-lazy banners of foam.

With the Storm winds pressing low enough to whip the treetops, I trained my eyes on that ridgepole silhouette. Praying it would move, would tell us we were ready to put the Storm to flight.

A second later my prayers were answered. The man pulled himself to his knees and waved both arms at us, shouting as he did: “Away! AWAY! NOW!”

We hauled scrap lumber out of the water as fast as humanly possible. I still had one foot in the stream when Kevin stopped playing and water exploded back into the pond, carrying away the few small pieces we’d missed.

I crab-crawled up the stream bank, panting, and watched as the flood rushed around the boulder, catching the wheel and turning it. There was a great creaking and the clatter of meshing gears, then lines moved on their wheels and the wind chimes stirred. All around the camp’s perimeter, they sang- loudly enough to be heard above the Storm’s fury.

Another sound carried down to us there on the bank of the millstream-a roar of celebration from the millhouse. The men around me echoed it.

Delmar pounded my back and laughed in my ear. “Look!” He pointed to the sky. “Look! It goes!”

I looked. My own laughter bubbled up from someplace hidden, catching me by surprise. I pumped my fist at the sky. Already the Storm was retreating, being replaced by the burnished gold of the Preserve’s strange mist. We had, with a perfect synthesis of the physical and the metaphysical, averted disaster.

“Nice work.” Goldie squatted beside me, grinning like the Cheshire cat. Kevin Elk Sings hunkered next to him, flute still clutched in his hands.

Yeah, it was good work. “Kevin, you really came through there. Thanks.”

He gave me a self-conscious smile. “I didn’t want to let you down. You were all putting yourselves on the line. I don’t have lots of muscle; this is the only thing I do well.” He turned the flute in his hands, then smiled again, rose, and moved away toward the mill.

“That was quite a piece of work,” I said.

Goldie nodded, eyes speculative. “Wasn’t it, though?” He got up and followed Kevin, leaving only his grin behind.

I pulled myself to my feet amid celebratory and congratulatory chatter and looked around for Doc, afraid he might have hurt himself again. I didn’t see him, and before I could go looking, Mary caught up with me.

“I suppose I should thank you,” she said. “You pulled off one hell of a save, Mr. Griffin. Something I doubt I could have done, under the circumstances. This thing blindsided me.”

“I didn’t save a damn thing, Mary. We did it, all of us. And we’re not safe-not yet. This is a temporary fix, a salve. It’s not the cure.”

She nodded, looking away toward the mill, her arms folded defensively over her heart. “The cure is defeating the Source.”

Neither of us spoke for a moment. Then she said, “You were right, Cal. Enid is dying. I don’t pretend to understand why, but I doubt it’s any natural disease. Whether I can afford for him to leave us or not, the simple fact remains that he’s going to leave us.” She turned to look up at me, her frosty eyes bright with tears. “If there were some way you could save his life, Cal Griffin, I would gladly let him go with you.”

I was stunned. “I’m not a miracle worker, Mary.”

“No? What do you call what you just did?”

“We did. And I don’t know. But it wasn’t a miracle.”

“It might as well have been. I can’t do what you do. I can’t …” She groped for words, her hands making futile gestures in the air. “I can’t drive people the way you do.”

“Maybe not, but you’ve already done something I know I couldn’t do: you’ve molded an incredibly diverse group of people into a thriving community. To me, that’s a miracle. One I doubt I could reproduce.”

“But they needed you to-to focus them just now. I … After Faun… God, Cal, I felt so lost.”

Impulsively, I put my hands out to take her shoulders. “For a moment, Mary. For only a moment. None of us are one-man or one-woman shows. How far do you think I’d have gotten if I didn’t have Doc and Goldie and Colleen with me? Where would any of us have been if you hadn’t rescued us from that dead-end mound cave? I needed you then, you needed me in this emergency. I’m good at emergencies, I guess. But after I’m gone, this community you’ve built will need someone who can hold it together. That’s what you’re good at.”

She took a deep breath and met my eyes, the light in them suddenly wry. “You know, I think you’d make a good lawyer.”

I laughed, dropping my hands from her shoulders. “Yeah, so I’m told. You know I’ve wondered: what were you before all this?”

She shook her head. “Unsatisfied. Tried being an executive secretary-oh, pardon, an executive assistant-tried teaching. I liked teaching, but frankly, it was a depressing occupation. Then I started a day-care center outside of Dayton.”

She’d surprised more laughter out of me.

“What?”

“I had you pegged as an administrator, a judge, or a politician.” Or the Dalai Lama.

She pointed a stern finger at my forehead. “Young man, I ought to wash your mouth out with soap for that last crack.”

A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, and I suffered another sharp pang of deja vu. She turned and headed toward the Lodge, then paused and glanced back over one shoulder. “I was an administrator’s secretary. Now, don’t you think you’d better get yourself into a change of dry clothes?”

There was, I thought, following her, something to that old truism about who really runs an office.