Audrey Rose

14

“You have been a practicing Catholic all your life, Miss Hall?”

“I go to church on Sunday.” The pretty blonde smiled.

“And what is the name of the church you currently attend?”

The lean, sparrowy figure of the young defense attorney listed at a relaxed, somewhat rakish angle toward the young woman.

“St. Timothy’s in the Village,” she replied.

Brice Mack’s boyish, ingenuous smile maintained the precise degree of harmless innocence as he carefully selected and put his questions to the twelfth prospective juror, constantly aware of the danger of antagonizing the other jurors by any word or gesture that might be construed as being offensive.

For three weeks the process had continued as the lawyer for the defense and the lawyer for the people delicately scoured among the impaneled veniremen for a jury as prejudiced to its own side of the case as possible.

For Bill, it was a time of sheer hell.

For Janice, it was simply one more episode in the same seemingly endless nightmare. Quite often, as a day wore on, the softly uttered questions and answers would lose the character of speech, become a pleasant, mesmerizing drone, whisking her off into soothing thought-free dream states from which she often didn’t return till the hard sound of the gavel brought the day’s session to an end. They were a looked-forward-to-blessing, these happy flights from the stodgy and wearisome goings-on in Part Seven of the Criminal Courts Building in downtown Manhattan.

For the duration of the trial—five weeks at the outside, according to Scott Velie, the deputy district attorney in charge of the case—the Templeton routine was fixed and unchangeable. Weekday mornings at nine, arms linked in a show of mutual support and confidence, Bill and Janice would take their seats in the second row of the nearly empty courtroom and await Judge Langley’s appearance. The front row of seats was set aside for the press, only two of whom were ever present at one time. This morning, there was the man from United Press International and the elderly woman from the Long Island newspaper. On one occasion the woman had turned suddenly around in her seat and, in a sympathetic, motherly way, tried to question them about the case. Bill had simply ignored her, but Janice could not and had responded with the set speech they had been instructed to give to the press: “We have been asked not to discuss the case.” A few days later the woman reporter asked Janice how Ivy was faring at the school up in Westport, which startled her, since they had kept their daughter’s whereabouts a top secret. Still, Janice was able to smile and reply that Ivy was doing well and was happy, which was the truth. The school had been a success from the start. Janice could see this in the pink and healthy glow of her daughter’s face, in the bright and shining eyes that greeted them each Saturday morning upon their arrival. Best of all, the nightmares had stopped.

Bill had been forced into agreeing to the school in Westport since the district attorney had insisted that both parents be in court each and every day of the trial, but Janice knew he was unhappy about sending Ivy away even though they did not discuss it.

Ever since the night of the kidnapping she and Bill maintained a relationship that could, at best, be described as strained. Always polite, considerate of each other, they were like two strangers on a plane, forced to share each other’s company. Their conversation was limited and noncommittal, each saying no more to the other than was necessary to convey the basic substance of a question or answer.

Bill’s hatred of Hoover and his ambition to see him put away for the full count burgeoned with each passing day. Whenever Janice sought her own feelings about Hoover, a switch in her brain would click off the thought and veer her mind in other directions.

For weeks now, at precisely 9:04, Janice’s eyes would drift to the side door leading to the prisoner’s holding room and watch as Elliot Hoover was ushered into the courtroom by a uniformed guard, who always, she was constantly surprised to see, held Hoover tightly by the arm.

Janice would always shift her gaze away from Hoover as he was led to his seat at the defense table because once at the beginning of the proceedings Hoover had caught her looking at him and had returned a nod and smile in her direction. Bill, sitting beside her, had noticed, for Janice could feel his arm tense and his breathing rate escalate. She wondered what Hoover thought about during the long days in the courtroom and the even longer nights alone in his prison cell. He had not tried to communicate with her since his arrest. She had half expected he would and had steeled herself to repel any such attempts, but she was thankful he hadn’t tried. Looking back on their evening together, fraught with its odd commingling of terror and intimacy, she wondered if Hoover considered her a traitor.

As on every other morning, Brice Mack would rise at Hoover’s entrance, smile, and shake his client’s hand in an open display of affection and confidence. After which they would both sit and briefly confer. That is, Brice Mack would do the talking, while Hoover, betraying no emotion whatever, would sit imperturbably, a vast cathedral calm within him, pencil in hand, entering notations on a legal pad as his lawyer engaged in a clearly one-sided conversation. For two weeks Janice had watched, fascinated, as Elliot Hoover filled page upon page with notes during the course of jury selection and, remembering his diary, wondered what deeply felt thoughts and emotions he must be expressing on those yellow legal pages. Then, late one afternoon, after court had adjourned and Hoover had been ushered out of the courtroom, she purposely passed the defense’s table and glanced down at several pages he had left behind. They were filled with neat rows of nearly perfect circles.

“Do you believe in the resurrection of Christ?” Brice Mack gently queried the pretty blonde in the jury box.

“Well, I used to when I was a kid,” she responded with a vague smile.

Brice Mack wasn’t sure that her answer was entirely acceptable. He begged the court’s indulgence while he conferred with his client. Since no objection was registered by the prosecution, Judge Langley banged the gavel and declared a five-minute recess.

Brice Mack leaned across to Hoover, his arm draped loosely around his shoulder, and spoke in a hushed tone.

“We have one more challenge left. I’ll use it if you wish; however, I think this juror is going to be okay. What do you think?”

“Fine,” Hoover replied, “I have confidence in anyone you select.”

It had been this way between them from the first day they met. In Brice Mack’s mind, the luckiest day of his life.

He had been sitting in the courtroom of Judge Ira Parnell when he happened to glance up and notice a prisoner, flanked by two bailiffs, standing in the rear of the room, looking over at the section beyond the railing where he and several other lawyers were sitting. The prisoner seemed to be sizing them up. None of the other lawyers had noticed him, but Mack did. Their eyes met, whereupon the prisoner marched forward with his two bailiffs and, halting in front of Mack, said, “My name is Elliot Hoover. Will you be my lawyer? I can pay.” Although there had been no great ego satisfaction in having been picked at random, Mack welcomed a case where, for a change, somebody could afford to pay him and without hesitation said yes.

However, his first conversation with his new client sent a ripple of current dancing up and down his spine. For here was a case to sink one’s teeth into. This had angles. All kinds. Oblique, obtuse, bizarre, the stuff that galvanizes courtrooms, magnetizes the press, draws in the eyes and ears of the world.

Reincarnation? Hot damn! If the man wasn’t psycho and the court could be prevailed upon to accept the evidence as a competent defense, who knew where it could lead to, and where it might end?

During the first meeting with Hoover, Mack had tentatively offered his client the possibility of a defense based on temporary insanity. He felt it his duty as a lawyer to do so, but the notion, fortunately, was rejected by Hoover.

During subsequent meetings Brice Mack was filled in on all the events that occurred before, during, and after the abduction at 1 West Sixty-seventh Street, and each new disclosure was more delicious than the last. Mack was delighted to find Hoover a willing client who forthrightly maintained that he was simply trying to help Ivy Templeton and, through her, his deceased daughter, Audrey Rose, and who related substantial eyewitness testimony that his daughter’s soul was crying out to him through the vehicle of Ivy’s body for help and that in abducting Ivy, he was simply doing what any concerned father with the capability of helping his ailing child would do. On this point, Hoover made his position perfectly clear; he had the right to take Ivy, he felt, under the circumstances.

Somehow a defense would have to be formulated to convince a court and a jury not only of the sincerity of his belief, but of the reality of reincarnation.

The next stunning event was Hoover’s refusal to be released on bail, contending that he found the accommodations in the detention cell block of the Criminal Courts Building perfectly adequate to his needs. When Brice Mack pressed him to accept bail, Hoover resisted strongly, stating that his religious principles decreed that all mortal suffering is natural and necessary to purify the soul on its cyclic journey through earth life. Mack accepted this reasoning with a large grain of salt and informed his client that he had sources who would be willing to arrange for bail to be posted and also provide the necessary collateral. Hoover seemed genuinely offended at the suggestion.

“I don’t need help of that kind. I have plenty of money.”

Brice Mack felt the same tingle of electricity prickle up his back as he casually asked, “How much do you consider plenty?”

“Oh,” Hoover replied, “by now it must be a quarter of a million at least.”

Mack felt his throat go dry. “Where is it?”

“In a Pittsburgh bank. The First Fidelity Savings.”

Mack managed to swallow a thickness of dry phlegm. “Would you be willing,” he gently put forth, “to spend some of it on your defense?”

“All of it, if necessary,” Hoover stated instantly.

That tore it. Every which way.

By some miracle of sheer luck and Buddha’s special grace, the case of the decade had dropped right into Brice Mack’s young and inexperienced lap. A fear of his ability to handle it properly briefly assailed his confidence, but he quickly suppressed it. With enough money to pursue evidence, gather information, call in expert witnesses from around the globe, the trial would become a classroom seminar. Here was a case that was precedential, textbook, a once-in-a-lifetimer, permitting the imagination its fullest range, opening avenues into legal terrain previously uncharted. The kind of case Darrow would have relished, that Nizer and F. Lee Bailey would drop everything to defend, free of charge. And here it was, all his, punk kid just out of law school.

His mind boggled. At age thirty-two, penniless, unmarried, struggling to survive in a cruel and alien profession, with two suits and one pair of shoes to his name, Brice Mack was suddenly plunged into the center of the winner’s circle. He was made.

Still, his antennae for danger, keened by the proximity of fame, kept a tight rein on his enthusiasm, cautioned him to proceed slowly and with care as there were hurdles ahead, dangerous road slicks and sudden, unmarked dead ends. Three of which were identifiable. The first, and least important to Brice Mack’s long-range game plan, was the jury itself. By a process of careful selection, he would have to requisition jurors of compassion and sensitivity whose minds would be open to fresh concepts and whose imaginations would permit them to take the plunge into the penumbra of the occult and whose religious backgrounds would not cause them to discount the supernatural as entirely unthinkable. He knew he would have to be careful in his questioning, since his adversary, Deputy District Attorney Scott Velie, was certainly no fool and represented to Brice Mack the second and most dangerous hurdle to overcome.

Scott Velie was an old-timer in the trade. A mild man with a soft manner and a sleepy face, but a killer. Brice had studied Scott Velie in law school. His lethal string of convictions were classroom exercises.

Long before a court convened, Velie would have learned from the Templetons of Elliot Hoover’s religious beliefs; hence, he would be privy to the defense’s strategy and would be waiting in the wings to counter any move they might make in the direction of reincarnation.

This, the third hurdle, was the toughest—that of getting the court to accept reincarnation as a feasible defense. Velie could be expected to pull out all stops to discredit such a defense, and the odds were in his favor, unless Brice Mack lucked in on a sympathetic judge or was clever enough to convince an unsympathetic judge of its feasibility.

The assignment of the trial to the court of the Honorable Harmon T. Langley was a break of mammoth proportions.

Elderly, silver-maned, a political appointee from the days of Carmine De Sapio and the O’Dwyer landslide, Harmon Langley, having come to the end of a long and unspectacular career, poised, so to speak, on the edge of the great forgettery, would not be the one, reasoned Mack, to shun the mantle of sudden fame this baby offered.

In less than a day a group of prospective jurors was impaneled; the court clerk revolved the large drum of cards, and the business of selecting a jury got under way.

During the three weeks it took to select eleven jurors, Brice Mack gradually came to learn one disconcerting fact: Scott Velie was allowing him to pick the jury he wanted.

At no point did the district attorney register objection to any question Mack put to the jurors, and very often he agreed to seat a juror acceptable to the defense on the barest minimum of information. That he could be so sure of himself discomfited Brice Mack, but even more discomfiting was the thin, bemused smile Velie wore as he sat back relaxed, listening to his opponent’s deeply probing examination of a juror’s religious beliefs and biases. Either Scott Velie put little stock in the defense’s ability to build its case on the reincarnation angle and was thus permitting him a free hand, or he was waiting for a more opportune moment to smash him.

“Your Honor”—Brice Mack rose from the defense table and faced the bench—“the defense finds no reason to dismiss this juror.” Then, smiling vividly at Miss Hall, he added, “In fact, we welcome her addition.”

Judge Langley turned to Scott Velie.

“Mr. Velie?”

Velie didn’t bother to stand or move, merely shifted the direction of his vision past the eleven seated jurors to the juror under examination.

“Miss Hall, do you believe that criminals should be pampered?”

“No, sir.”

“Have you ever been arrested?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you acquainted with anyone who has had trouble with the law—say, a relative, or friend?”

“No, sir.”

These were Scott Velie’s standard opening questions to each prospective juror. The prosecution could ill afford to take on a juror who at any time in her life might have looked on the law as an enemy.

“Tell me, Miss Hall, if someone takes a child who doesn’t belong to him and removes that child from her legitimate premises and takes her to other premises without consent of the parents, and indeed against the strong objections of the parents, even if that person believed he was committing no wrong and, in fact, the law could prove he was wrong and liable for his actions, would you have any difficulty in finding that person guilty?”

Miss Hall thought it best to give the question a considerable amount of thought before replying, “No, sir.”

Bill’s eyes stole past a row of heads to where Hoover sat, composed and serene. The hated face was like alabaster, its equanimity insufferable. With the slightest shift of focus, Bill brought his vision to rest on the gentle and cherished face of his wife, sitting beside him. The perfect, exquisite profile remained immobile, her attention seemingly fixed on a time and space beyond the present. Bill wondered what thoughts lay on the other side of the glazed and vacuous eyes. He recalled those eyes on another occasion—reflecting a look of shock, revulsion, betrayal, a look that was fleeting, yet one he would never forget. He had deserved it, God knew he had deserved that look—letting go like that, pulling her into the caldron of his anger, pointedly accusing her, practically branding her a traitor. Yes, Bill sadly reflected, in that moment he had lost his most precious possession, more dearly prized than love—the confidence and trust of the only person on earth who really mattered to him.

They ate, they conversed, they made love, by rote and necessity. They smiled a lot. Bill constantly found himself presampling and censoring each word and thought before uttering it. And when the need was upon him and he was able to muster the courage to reach out to her, he never failed to sense the momentary, slight stiffening of her flesh, the small sigh of resignation, the dutiful submission. It was all false. Both knew it. And in that knowledge the full measure of his loss was most painfully realized.

Their days and nights became computerized. Court from nine to four, cocktails and dinner, out mainly, from five to nine, the long walk home, and bed by ten. Weekends were spent in Westport with Ivy. They would drive up in a rental and stay at Candlemas Inn, the three of them.

Bill had agreed to the boarding school, but he didn’t like it. He hated seeing Ivy in uniform, her beauty camouflaged, shorn of individuality. Yet she seemed to love it. She had been readily accepted by the other girls and in three weeks had already made two “best friends.”

To date, newspaper accounts of the case had not traveled much. After the initial arrest and booking, which earned a second-page spot in the New York Times, the courtroom progress received minimal attention from the press. What coverage there was of the jury selection generally found itself in the back end of both the News and the Post. The Times printed an occasional squib. Connecticut papers ignored it entirely.

The time would come, Bill knew, when the case would rip its way into the headlines of newspapers around the country. For there was no doubt in Velie’s mind of the defense’s intention to put the issue of reincarnation into the record, although he would try to convince the court to rule it inadmissible as a viable defense. But by then the harm would have been done; the floodgates of publicity would have been opened.

Knowing what lay ahead of them, Bill had leveled with Sister Veronica Joseph, mother superior of Mount Carmel Parochial School for Girls, the day they had admitted Ivy, thus preparing her for the avalanche of publicity to come. While her bland expression had undergone a slight constriction of anxiety, she was quick to find the strength within her faith to cloak her shock and temper her misgivings with mercy. Bill saw her hand go instinctively to the large silver crucifix attached to a rope of black beads which fell from her habit as she softly intoned, “The poor child. We shall do everything possible to shelter her from the calumnies of the outside world.” Which, Bill thought, was a quaint, yet certainly correct way of putting it for all of them.

It occurred to him to speculate on what calumnies he might expect from his colleagues at the office when the bombshell burst. Pel Simmons had been genuinely concerned and more than fair in letting him take a leave of absence for the duration of the trial and with no disruption in the flow of his semi-monthly paychecks. It was an indication of his faith and trust in Bill, a lovely way of saying, “I like you, I want to keep you in my company.” Of course, Pel wasn’t aware of anything beyond what he had read in the newspapers and what little information Bill had vouchsafed him, which was precious little.

Soon, Bill glumly reflected, there would be one hell of a jarring note, one diamond-bright cog in Pel Simmons’ quietly purring nondescript machine to fuck up the works. It would mean his job, ultimately. Not quickly—there’d be no pink slip stapled to the paycheck—it would take a year or so to phase him down and out. Don Goetz would move into his slot, reluctantly, of course, hating like hell to depose the master, flushed and angry at the injustice of it all, at the same time feeling the soft leather of the Eames recliner edging closer while his eyes sought the restful and mysterious silences of the Motherwell.

And that would be it. He’d be out! On the street! Pounding the pavement, avoiding dogshit. Thump! Thump! Thump! His heart was playing handball against his chest. Pods of perspiration glistened on his forehead. Was he having a coronary? That would cap it. To drop dead, right here in the courtroom, in the presence of the nearly picked jury. He wouldn’t mind. It would help Velie’s case. Elicit sympathy. Guarantee a conviction. Put the prick away for the limit.

Bill studied Hoover through a haze of sweat droplets clinging to his eyelashes, rendering an image that was blurred, distorted, and malevolent. Like a jungle animal, the son of a bitch had padded into his life and had quietly devoured all he possessed and prized—family, career, the love and respect of his wife, all that really mattered.

He could feel the flexing of his skin at the corners of his mouth and knew he was smiling. It always happened when he hit bottom, when his depressions and despondencies became intolerable. It was then some inner survival mechanism switched on, and a smile came to the rescue. And with the smile, an accompanying thought: If I’m destroyed, so will you be, you bastard!

Scott Velie wheeled around to the bench.

“This jury is acceptable to the State, Your Honor.”

“Very well,” Judge Langley said, keeping things moving. “The bailiff will swear in the jury.”

Janice saw Hoover look up from his pad and turn to the twelve men and women, who rose in a body and faced the bailiff at the far end of the courtroom.

Reading from a sheet of paper, and in a voice that was low and grave, the uniformed man tremulously intoned the prescribed litany.

“Do you solemnly swear that you shall well and truly try and true deliverance make, between the people of the State of New York and the prisoner at the bar, whom you shall have in charge, according to the evidence and the laws of this State.…”

Hoover’s face radiated purity and innocence as his twelve peers, whose duty and responsibility it would be to decide the guilt or innocence of one Elliot Suggins Hoover “beyond a shadow of a doubt” of the charge of “feloniously, willfully, and with malice aforethought” kidnapping one Ivy Templeton, were sworn in.

Watching Hoover watching the jury, the bland exterior enveloped by a will of tempered steel, pursuing the ends of his own self-interests with no apparent care or awareness of the mischief and malice of his acts and no shred of concern for the irreparable harm he was doing them, Janice knew that with all of Velie’s confidence and Bill’s assurances, it would be Hoover’s single-minded obstinacy that would prevail in the end.

It was at this sepulchral moment that Janice knew they would lose the case.

15

“…So help you God?” The bailiff looked up from his paper toward the jury.

The organlike chorus of “I do’s” vibrated throughout the partially filled courtroom.

“Be seated,” Judge Langley instructed the jury and, turning to counsels’ tables, asked, “Are both sides ready to proceed?”

As Velie and Mack affirmed that they were, Judge Langley’s eyes flicked up at the wall clock. “It’s ten past eleven, Mr. Velie,” he said in an offering voice. “If you wish a continuance until after the lunch break before making your opening remarks—”

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Velie interposed. “I’m sure I’ll be able to conclude what few remarks I wish to make to the jury well before the noon break.”

“Very well,” Langley said, somewhat nettled. “Proceed.”

Scott Velie commenced his prepared speech as he sat, holding in abeyance his moment for rising, which was timed to occur at the delivery of a key sentence halfway into his brief statement. He began by swinging his chair around to the jury box and facing his twelve fellow citizens with an air of easy confidence. His voice was subdued, conversational, aimed at alleviating whatever tension might exist among them and putting them at their total ease.

“You know, folks,” he began, “there are few crimes committed today for no reason. Sometimes somebody’ll do something that’s against the law and either not know why he did it or be unable to distinguish between right and wrong. In many such cases those people are deemed by the law to be suffering from a mental disease and are often adjudged insane. But in the great majority of cases people commit crimes for a reason. And these reasons are many. Hatred, fear, jealousy, the desire to appropriate what doesn’t belong to them. You name it, the court records are full of reasons why people commit crimes.”

He hunkered forward, hands clasped, arms resting on knees, and went on, confidentially. “Now you know, there are reasons behind reasons for committing crimes. Take hatred. There are many reasons why people hate other people—and some of these reasons are strong enough to cause a man to rob, maim, batter, injure, and even kill another person. Sometimes these reasons behind the reasons are the only hope a man who is proved to have committed a crime has to keep out of jail. His lawyer will often build a defense based on this reason behind the reason and call it an extenuating circumstance. Now this is what I’m getting at and, please, listen to me good. In any crime, and especially a capital crime, there can be no reason behind the reason, no extenuating circumstance to absolve a man from accepting the full responsibility of his lawless act; there can be no reduction of his liability for that lawless act; there can be no condoning, forgiving, forgetting, and no acquitting him from paying the full legally prescribed penalty for his lawless act. Not in the name of extenuating circumstance, not in the name of mercy, mother, or God in heaven!”

On this dramatic note, Velie shot to his feet—a move so sudden and unexpected as to cause several jurors in the first row to flinch—and pointing a finger at the bench, he shouted, “Not in a court of law! Which is where you are sitting today! A court of law, ladies and gentlemen! Not a church, which is constituted to dispense God’s forgiveness. But a court of law, which is constituted to dispense man’s justice!”

Scott Velie’s eyes traveled slowly across the courtroom toward Elliot Hoover, sitting motionless beside his attorney.

“Today, in this courtroom,” the district attorney continued, “a man stands accused before us of a crime so heinous and offensive to society as to be, along with willful and premeditated murder, categorized a capital crime. For there can be no more despicable act of lawlessness, outside of the taking of another human being’s life, than the taking of another human being’s child.…”

There were several choice moments in Velie’s cracker-barrel sermon when Brice Mack might have objected, but he restrained himself. Juror Number Seven, Graser, Mack had noticed, seemed singularly unimpressed by Velie’s approach and, at one point, during his admonition that God’s forgiveness was to be found in church and not in court, even antagonistic. Juror Number Three, the carpenter and devout Catholic Mr. Fitzgerald, wasn’t buying either. But Velie plowed ahead, scourging the courtroom of God’s mercy and setting the stage, Mack realized, for the confrontation with the reincarnation issue, the mainstay in the defense’s case.

“And we will further prove that it was a carefully considered and premeditated act. Through eyewitness testimony, we will demonstrate the care and planning that went into the engineering of this depraved and heartless crime. We will develop eyewitness testimony to show how many times Elliot Hoover lurked outside the child’s school, in disguise, stalking his victim; the number of times he visited the apartment house in which the child lived, for the purpose of casing it; how he ultimately moved into the apartment house to be in a better position to steal the child; how he consciously, knowingly, and intentionally created an incident, a diversion: a brutal attack on the child’s father which enabled him to gain access to the apartment and take the child; how he sneaked out the back door and secreted the child in his hideaway.…”

Brice Mack glanced at the wall clock. Eleven twenty-five. Velie, he knew, would continue his harangue until just short of the noon hour, at which point he would wrap it up with a dramatic denunciation of his client’s execrable and depraved act and call for the full penalty allowable by law. Then, following the lunch break, some two hours in the future, the moment would finally arrive when the defense of Elliot Hoover would formally begin. When two months of hard, round-the-clock, frantic activity would all be risked on a single throw of the dice: proof of the existence of reincarnation.

“… and for the damage he has done this family in his unwarranted attentions, leading up to the perpetration of”—instead of “execrable” and “depraved,” as Brice Mack had predicted, Velie resorted to—“this degenerate and evil crime of kidnapping, and the incalculable damage he might have done to the child, the State demands that Elliot Hoover be found guilty of kidnapping in the first degree, and that the court assess upon him the maximum penalty allowable by law.”

The courtroom heaved a long and weary sigh as Scott Velie nodded to the bench that he was through. The time was eleven fifty-seven. Judge Langley rose.

“We’ll take our noon recess now. Court will reconvene at one thirty.”

A murmuring hum accompanied jury and spectators to their respective exits.

Janice remained standing while Bill and Scott Velie exchanged friendly smiles topped off by supportive winks, expressions of confidence, as each knew the moment of truth was upon them. Janice saw Brice Mack speaking animatedly to Elliot Hoover as they slowly gravitated toward the prisoner’s door in the company of the armed guard. They would all eat lunch, now, Janice thought, partake of sustenance, renew their energies for the ordeal ahead. The condemned would eat a hearty meal. All of them.

It would be a four-martini lunch for Bill, Janice calculated, since he’d just finished his second, and they hadn’t ordered as yet. She, too, had relented on this day and was nursing a double J & B with water.

Pinetta’s was located in an alleyway just east of Foley Square, within easy walking distance of the Criminal Courts Building. Featuring a Tudor façade with South-of-France striped awnings, the restaurant was the happy marriage of two stores with upper lofts merged into a Dickensian fantasy. A collection of small paneled rooms, authentically furnished and decorated in the tradition of the Cheshire Cheese offered quasi-private dining rooms on three levels. Staircases went up and down in the least expected places. A charming and totally unexpected treat to have discovered in this rather bleak and monotonous part of town.

Catering almost exclusively to a clientele made up of the more affluent members and guests of the Criminal Courts Building, it was possible, during ongoing cases, to reserve a luncheon table for the duration. Bill and Janice’s table was located on the second-floor balcony, not too noisy, and well serviced, but with one serious drawback. Below them, visible from every angle of their table, was Brice Mack’s long deal table, around which his “team” gathered each day: five, sometimes six men of varying ages and social backgrounds eating, drinking, smoking, and jabbering their reports and opinions to the “boss,” Brice Mack, who sat at the head of the table.

Twice Bill sought another table from the manager and twice was put off with the polite promise: “Soon there will be plenty of tables, sir. The case in Part Four goes to jury any day now.” The “any day now” stretched into three weeks.

A week before—it was a Monday, and Janice had skipped lunch to run some errands—Bill had invited Scott Velie to join him. Over tankards of beer and short ribs steeped in creamy horseradish sauce, Velie had identified each of Brice Mack’s cohorts for Bill and filled him in on their backgrounds.

“The two young guys are lawyers doing research and general legwork in the courthouse. The dignified old duffer with the rimless glasses and the goatee is Willard Ahmanson, professor of religious studies at NYU. The thin pimply guy is a legal secretary, name of Fred Hudson; he used to work as a court clerk. The old disreputable-looking character drinking whiskey neats is an ex-cop named Brennigan.” Velie smiled and winked. “Private eye.” Then, after chewing a forkful of meat and washing it down with beer, he added, “They’re all on run-of-the-trial retainers, which, when added up, comes to quite a piece of change.”

“Hoover’s got plenty.”

“Really? Well, that’s not all he’s paying for. They’ve got a Hindu maharishi stashed away at the Waldorf. A man named Gupta Pradesh, reputed to be one of India’s leading yogis. Flew him in all the way from Calcutta.”

Swallowing the rich food, Bill had experienced a momentary nausea as the full breadth and scope of Hoover’s defense suddenly struck him. There were no lengths or extremes the son of a bitch wasn’t prepared to go to prove his fucking point.

“Why is he paying a detective?”

“To get a line on your daughter’s nightmares. Brennigan’s been nosing around Dr. Kaplan’s office. With no luck, I’m pleased to say.”

Bill felt a quick surge of warmth for Kaplan and for all doctors in general. They were like priests. Tight lipped. Under the Hippocratic Oath to betray no confidence.

“Can Mack bring him into court to testify?”

“Certainly. But that doesn’t mean he’s going to be able to get answers to all his questions.”

“What do you mean?”

“Any communication between patient and doctor is privileged in the State of New York and, as such, cannot be elicited except under certain conditions. For example, if the patient should consent to the doctor’s testifying. Which she certainly is not about to do.”

Hoover and his attorney were seated at the defense table when Janice and Bill entered the courtroom at one twenty-six. Typically, Brice Mack was engaged in an animated one-sided conversation while his client doodled furiously on his pad, engrossed in his own mysterious labors and betraying no sign that he was the least interested or even heard what his lawyer was saying.

The spectators’ section of the courtroom was less than a quarter filled, and only one reporter, the woman, occupied the long row reserved for the press. The man from UP had not bothered to return. On the basis of all that had been heard and what meager coverage it had received in the press, the trial held little promise of being anything more than another routine, predictable, open-and-shut case. Thus far the proceedings had augured no slight hint of the drama to come; hence the house was definitely no sellout.

A few seconds before one thirty Scott Velie and two assistants ambled up to the prosecution’s table, where they remained standing and chatting quietly. In another moment what few people there were in the courtroom rose to their feet as Judge Harmon T. Langley swished past the flag of the State of New York and nestled his black-robed bulk behind the altar of justice. His acolyte with shining sidearm and badge accompanied his progress with all the rigidity of a papal guardsman.

Up until the very second it took for the bench to settle in, gather its thoughts together, bring the court to session, and ask the crucial question of the defense, Brice Mack had serious doubts about its answer. Only two were possible. Either, “Yes, Your Honor, the defense is ready to proceed with its opening remarks.” Or, “No, Your Honor, the defense wishes to postpone its opening remarks until it commences the presentation of its case.”

The former answer would bring about a quick confrontation on the reincarnation issue and create a sudden-death situation; however, the jury would have been made privy to the defense’s contention and would hear the testimony of each witness for the prosecution in the light of that knowledge. An important consideration, since it would tend to soften and compromise the prosecution’s case in the jury’s mind.

The only benefit in the latter answer was to buy more time. It would postpone the reincarnation issue for at least a week since the state’s roster of witnesses was considerable—twelve according to Velie’s office—and allow them to continue their investigation of Ivy Templeton’s nightmares. Until now Brennigan had been singularly lacking in success in tracking down any leads or information. Dr. Kaplan, who certainly was aware they existed, remained closemouthed. The friends of the Templetons, the Federicos, were totally unapproachable. Still, the nightmares were a fact. They existed. They had come to plague the child twice in her life. Both times when Hoover was present in the city. His presence, Hoover contended, triggered these deeply disturbing experiences that never varied in content or degree.

As Elliot Hoover had described the nightmares to him, and if his accuracy could be trusted, they constituted the one direct link between the Templetons’ child, Ivy, and Hoover’s daughter, Audrey Rose—or, at least, his daughter’s soul.

Brice Mack felt a light film of sweat appear on his face. It always happened at these times, when his most serious concentration was directed at the basic issue in the case and he found himself giving sober credence to such concepts, actually employing detectives to match a living child to the soul of a dead child, that his face became moist and clammy and the ground began to shift under his feet. It was at such moments of weakness, when the mind-boggling enormity and effrontery of such a defense suddenly struck like a whiplash, that the placid, sincere, and assured face of Elliot Hoover would come to his rescue. After all, he would tell his quaking heart, a lawyer’s duty is not to question the validity of his client’s beliefs or to render a judgment on his competency to entertain such beliefs. A lawyer’s duty is only to represent the legal interests of his client and see to it that he receives a fair and just hearing under the law. But his quaking heart knew better.

Born and bred in a tradition of reality in a tough Bronx ghetto, harsh and uncompromising, put through school by the sweat and toil of a working mother, gaining his Ivy League degree via the indignity of a change of name (their quota on Jews, he had heard recently, had gone up one-half percent in the last five years), Brice Mack, né Bruce Marmorstein, knew the difference between what is and what ain’t. Or, as Walt Whitman more fancily put it, “He could resist the temptation to see what a thing ought to be rather than what it is.”

And he also knew a meshuganeh when he saw one.

“Yes, Your Honor.” Brice Mack rose and addressed the bench. “We are ready to proceed with our opening remarks.”

Janice sensed a palpable stiffening in Bill, a girding of inner resources for the blow about to come, as Brice Mack slowly pressed forward toward the jury box, smiling easily, his hand extended confidently.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he began in a somewhat stilted and formal manner, “what I am about to tell you will take some time and will require your absolute attention, for what you are about to hear is unique in the annals of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. By the time this trial is over and this honorable court is adjourned; by the time the final words of the prosecution and the defense have been uttered and written into the court record; by the time you have returned to your seats in the jury box with a verdict which I am sure will be fair, just, and well considered; by that time, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you and this court and the world at large will know that what took place in this courtroom—Part Seven of the Criminal Courts Building—will forever be memorialized in the history books and records that assiduously follow the progress of mankind’s most important steps on earth.” He stopped, carefully sustaining a dramatic pause before continuing. “What you will hear may shock you. May elicit an initial response of disbelief. May even bring smiles of derision to your faces. But I promise you, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that before this trial is over, your shock will be replaced by understanding, your disbelief by total acceptance, and your derisive smiles will become smiles of pure joy and hope, for not only will the many proofs and testimonies we have amassed convince you to liberate a human being and free him from the fearsome punishment of imprisonment, these very same proofs and testimonies will serve to liberate each and every one of you sitting before me from the most fearsome and dreaded punishment known to man, the legacy we all inherit at birth and which hovers, shroudlike, above us through every day and night of our lives: the sure and certain knowledge of our own impermanence and our own personal oblivion.”

Brice Mack paused here to let the weight of his message sink in before continuing.

“Before going on, however, if you will bear with me in a small digression, I should like to tell you, since Mr. Velie failed to do so, just what precisely the law in this state regards as first degree kidnapping.…”

Scott Velie had come to his feet halfway through Brice Mack’s statement and was waiting patiently with arms folded for the proper moment to object, which was now.

“Objection, Your Honor! Defense counsel knows that only the bench has the authority to instruct the jury on the law and that it is improper for either counsel to assume such an authority; besides which, this is not a proper statement to be made in an opening address anyway.…”

“Your Honor,” Brice Mack retaliated with equal force, “the defense contends that the charge of first degree kidnapping is inept, inappropriate, and improper as it applies to the defendant; that, if any charge had pertinence in this case, and the defense is confident of its ability to disprove even that, it would be the lesser charge of custodial interference in the second degree.…”

It was coming. Janice’s hand groped for Bill’s, found it tense and clammy. The woman reporter seemed suddenly revitalized, her attention riveted on the dueling lawyers. Even Judge Langley was leaning forward in an attitude of renewed interest.

“Custodial interference, Mr. Mack,” the judge instructed, “as I’m sure you know, implies the existence of a direct blood relationship between the litigants in an action. Can you offer such proofs?”

“Yes, Your Honor. Through the development of testimony based on the knowledge and experience of expert and learned witnesses, the defense will clearly demonstrate that the most conclusive and strongest possible familial relationship does indeed exist between the defendant, Elliot Hoover, and the child known as Ivy Templeton—”

“Objection, Your Honor,” Velie cut in. “This is totally improper in an opening address. Again, defense counsel is attempting to discuss the law; if he felt the charges were inappropriate, there were motions he could have made before the trial commenced to have the charges dismissed. Further, the state can offer substantial proofs and documents to refute any earthly claim of a direct blood relationship between the victim and her abductor.”

“Well,” said Judge Langley somewhat dryly, “it would seem that both of you are aware of a good deal more than I.”

“Your Honor!” Both lawyers spoke at once, but Velie’s booming voice overpowered and outdistanced his opponent’s.

“Your Honor, lest this hearing become polluted with wild and unfounded assertions, may I beg the court’s indulgence for a conference in chambers out of earshot of the jury?”

Judge Langley, his curiosity piqued, was quick to agree. “Very well, court will stand in recess. Jury will be ushered back to the jury room until summoned.”

Janice heard a sibilant sigh slowly escape from Bill as the pent-up tension within him was gradually released. He turned to Janice and smiled nervously.

“Velie’s round, I’d say,” he murmured.

Janice smiled back encouragingly. His hand clasped hers tightly, as would a child’s about to enter a haunted house.

“Why wasn’t I advised of this earlier?” Judge Langley said, his irritation showing. “Not a word about reincarnation in our pretrial conference. Why wasn’t this matter brought to my attention?”

“The only matters that are important in this case, Your Honor, are the hard, earthbound facts,” Velie said in a sulky, aggrieved tone of voice. “It doesn’t matter whether Hoover believes in reincarnation or believes that the moon is made of green cheese. The fact is he committed a crime by taking someone else’s legitimate offspring, removed her from her home, secreted her in his own home, and then interfered with the performance of a government function. No matter what his reasons were for doing this act, he is liable to arrest and prosecution under the law.”

Judge Langley fixed a cold stare on Brice Mack.

“All right, Mr. Mack, let’s have it.”

“Very simply, Your Honor,” Brice Mack said, holding his voice to a discreet and reverent level, “we believe that the question of reincarnation is relevant and material to this case.”

“On what grounds?”

“On the grounds that it provides the defendant with a perfectly valid defense.”

Langley’s voice fell like a hammerblow. “You mean, just because your client happens to believe this poppycock, you are prepared to turn my courtroom into a three-ring circus?”

“Your Honor,” Brice Mack quickly interjected, “please, sir, it is certainly not our intention to in any way compromise the dignity of your court. However, my client stands accused of one of the gravest charges on the books, and I’m sure you will allow that he does have the constitutional right to defend himself against such a charge.”

“Your client is entitled to a reasonable and proper defense under the law, Mr. Mack. Nothing more and nothing less. Do I make myself clear?”

“Yes, sir, perfectly clear. And we believe that a defense based on reincarnation is entirely reasonable and proper under the circumstances.”

“Have you done any research?” growled Langley. “Can you site sources, give me any legal precedents for such a defense?”

“No, Your Honor,” said Mack in his most disarming little-boy voice. “We have found no legal precedents to support this defense.”

Judge Langley appeared stunned. “And you expect me to instruct the jury that if they find your client took the child in the belief she was his reincarnated daughter, they must find him not guilty?”

He gazed at Scott Velie with a twinkle of a smile and shook his head. Velie, sunken deeply in his chair, grinned back. Brice Mack waited until their exchange of looks was completed before continuing.

“It is not my client’s belief in reincarnation that’s important, Your Honor. What’s important is whether reincarnation is a fact. I believe, in order for my client to be found guilty, the jury must make a finding that there is no such thing as reincarnation and that it is impossible for Ivy Templeton to be Elliot Hoover’s child. We have experts who will testify to the contrary, and regardless of Your Honor’s predilection or predisposition to believe or not to believe this, we believe the court owes the defense the opportunity of presenting this evidence. We believe it is material and relevant and competent, and we should be permitted to convince the jury that this is so; because if we are able to do this, then the kidnapping charge is not a viable charge.”

During the soft-spoken, slowly articulated statement, Judge Langley felt himself retreat into the soft burnished leather of his ancient chair as a sick, oppressive weight bore down on his chest. He had had a prescience when he awakened that morning, after having passed a restless and mainly sleepless night, that it would be one of those days. Looking across at the unlined, eagerly bright, and rapacious face of the young attorney, Judge Langley suddenly felt very, very old.

Scott Velie was quick to catch the momentary flagging of attention, the diminution of intensity in the judge’s eyes, and knew it was his cue to step in. The old hyprocrite’s intellectual range and judicial acumen were obviously being sorely tested.

“Your Honor,” he said, removing a document from his inner pocket and passing it across the desk to the judge, “this is a Xeroxed copy of Ivy Templeton’s birth certificate; physical evidence that Ivy was born to William and Janice Templeton and was the issue of Mrs. Templeton’s womb. So, unless Mr. Hoover fathered the child through sexual intercourse with Mrs. Templeton, which he does not claim to have done, there is no way in my mind that he can prove the child is his. Even if, and I submit the ‘if’ is a mighty big one, even if reincarnation could be proved to be a viable theory, all it would show is that she may have formerly been Hoover’s child, but is not presently. This document is the only certified legal instrument attesting to the child’s parentage, and nothing Elliot Hoover claims or believes can ever change that.”

A certain strength returned to the judge’s face as he eagerly perused the birth certificate. This was something he could grapple with, something tangible, of legal import.

Holding it before Brice Mack like a cudgel, he asked, “What about it, counselor, can the defendant render a like document to the court proving his legal right to claim the child as being his?”

Brice Mack’s eyes sought the floor as a small, tolerant smile formed on his lips. It was a smile that Judge Langley could not abide. It smacked of arrogance, smart, slick Jewboy arrogance, born of assurance, know-how, and the need to make it.

“Your Honor”—the smile spoke—“there is no doubt, nor is the defense contending to the contrary, that the child was produced at the time and place and to the person that the birth certificate attests to. But just because there is the physical act of a baby coming out of a womb, it can’t be assumed ipso facto that the baby necessarily belongs to that person.”

About to answer, Judge Langley was cut short as Brice Mack stood up and slammed a half dollar down on his desk with a ringing clatter.

“If you were to swallow my half dollar, Your Honor, and it passed through your system and was finally ejected by you, would you say that that half dollar was then necessarily your property?”

Again Judge Langley, about to speak, was overridden by Mack. “I say to you that Janice Templeton’s body may only have been a conduit to pass Elliot Hoover’s child on from a past life into a present life.”

Both Velie and Judge Langley waited for Brice Mack to continue, as it seemed he would since he remained standing, but it gradually became evident that he had finished what he had to say and was awaiting the judge’s response.

“Sit down, Mr. Mack,” Judge Langley said icily. “I’m not used to looking up to people in my own office.”

The little smile never left Brice Mack’s face as he slowly resumed his seat and hunched forward in an attitude of rapt attention.

“To begin with, young man,” the judge continued, “if I were made to straddle a commode and strain out a fifty-cent piece, it damn well would be my property.”

Brice Mack joined Scott Velie in a small chuckle, a salute to the judge’s nimble sense of humor.

“Secondly,” the old man went on, “the defense you are proposing, that of establishing the truth of reincarnation as a means of substantiating your client’s innocence, even if successful, will not let your client off the hook unless you are also able to prove the kidnapped girl was in fact the defendant’s reincarnated daughter. Your witnesses, as I now understand it, have no relationship to the defendant or to the crime he is accused of committing—they are to appear in court merely for the purpose of arguing and expounding on concepts of a philosophical and religious character, which arguments, may I say, would seem to me to be more fittingly heard in a seminary and not in a court of law. In short, Mr. Mack, you are proposing a defense that is highly irregular, highly unorthodox, and one which fills me with grave misgivings.”

“Precisely, sir.” The warm, knowing smile again. “As well it should, for the very nature of this case is highly irregular and highly unorthodox. As I explained to the jury, it is a case that is unique in the annals of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence and one that will be studied, discussed, written about, and forever chronicled in the histories and record books detailing man’s advent on earth.”

He was courting him. Judge Langley knew the bastard was courting him—dangling the carrot fame in front of his nose, appealing to his baser instincts in order to jockey him into position. There were no ends these Hebes wouldn’t go to in order to get what they wanted, he thought sourly. And yet the point was well made; there was no denying that. There’d be a hell of a press on this baby. For a change, Part Seven would find itself bustling and glittering under the glare of lights, cameras, boob-tube lenses, hallway press conferences, the whole ball of wax. They had never thrown the big ones his way. Fuller, Kararian, Pletchkow, Tanner, they got the cream of the cases. And left the dregs for him. The family squabbles. The junkie busts. The crap. Well, maybe the time had come to drag his ass out of the sewer they had consigned him to and step up into the light of day. It would mean letting his guard down, leaving himself open to possible criticism and ridicule. But what the hell? So what? How much longer did he have left anyway? Damn heart rumbling around inside his chest like an old motorboat. Be nice being followed around for a change. Asked questions. Made a fuss over. Yeah, it’d be nice for a change.

“… and I submit, Your Honor, that if you deny the defense the right to develop a full understanding of what reincarnation consists of, a belief that is shared by millions upon millions of people in this world, you will be denying the defendant his constitutional right to plead his case and defend himself in the only possible manner left him. Furthermore, the defense is prepared to submit evidence supporting the defendant’s claim that the girl is his reincarnated daughter.”

Velie caught something in the judge’s look, a slight slackening of the skin around the mouth, a wandering of focus in the eyes, that set off warning bells clanging in his brain. Langley was going for it! He was buying the bullshit! Goddamn!

“Your Honor,” Velie quickly interposed, but even as he spoke, he knew it was too late. “Your Honor, this is beyond belief. Such a defense is totally unknown in Western courts. Reincarnation is believed in a portion of the world, true, but that world is not our world here. Are you going to impose another culture on our culture? You cannot do that, for then it will defy the laws that our legislature in its wisdom has passed down for the benefit of our society.”

Judge Langley’s tongue carefully moistened his lips before they opened to speak.

“You may be absolutely right, Mr. Velie, and I’m not saying you are wrong. However, I feel there is some merit in Mr. Mack’s assessment of the situation. Since kidnapping is such a serious charge, I don’t feel I can deprive the defendant of any defense he chooses to engage in that has some semblance of possibility for him.”

Brice Mack remained immobile, scarcely breathing, as Scott Velie shot to his feet and, flushed with anger, turned upon the old judge.

“Judge Langley,” he said, pronouncing the name as he would a malediction, “I plead with you to reconsider a decision for which there is no legal precedent.” His tone shifted subtly to a threatening register. “It may well open a Pandora’s box you may find impossible to close.”

“Your concern is appreciated, Mr. Velie,” Langley said dryly. “Nevertheless, until you can cite me any authority that holds reincarnation is impossible, I am not disposed to close off any area of defense for the defendant, so I will allow this testimony to go in, subject to its being connected to the actual facts of the case.”

And that was it.

Brice Mack had won.

16

By the time Judge Langley had returned to the bench and reconvened the court the room was more than three-quarters filled with spectators waiting breathlessly in an atmosphere charged with anticipation. How the news that something was about to break in Part Seven had managed to travel as quickly and reach as many people as it had was completely baffling to Janice. Even the press row was accommodated by an assortment of newspaper and radio people, slouching in their seats, quietly awaiting the recommencement of the proceeding with smiling interest.

The defense attorney began with a tightly puzzled expression on his face. “Now where were we,” he softly queried, leaving unstated but strictly implied, “before we were so rudely interrupted?” The question and the way in which it was put clearly informed the jurors that he had won his point in chambers and was now able to pursue the ends of justice in a free manner. Janice noticed that several jurors smiled and that a number of them cast surreptitious glances at Scott Velie, who sat motionless with his back turned to the defense attorney. She also sensed Bill gradually sinking deeper and deeper into his seat as the message of Velie’s defeat got through to him.

“Let me see,” Mack continued, pretending to sort through the cobwebs of his mind for the correct point of departure, not only fully aware of exactly where he had left off but of the precise order and nuance of each word he was about to utter—written, rewritten, rehearsed, and performed for hours on end each night for the past month before the cracked mirror in his cheap roach-ridden flat on West 103rd Street.

“Oh, yes, I was saying that we will demonstrate that the most conclusive and strongest possible familial relationship does indeed exist between the defendant, Elliot Hoover, and the child known as Ivy Templeton. A relationship, ladies and gentlemen, based not on the laws of man, which are imperfect and changeable, but on the perfect and immutable laws of a God and a religion embraced by more than one billion people on earth today; laws which are adhered to, believed in, practiced, and utilized in their daily lives with the same conviction and faith that we, in this courtroom, that you, sitting in that jury box, ascribe to your own religion.”

There was a soft rustling throughout the court as Brice Mack paused. The jury exchanged glances with one another. The reporters’ pencils remained poised over their pads.

“In the course of testimony, you will hear learned men expound on this religion, this faith and belief. You will be made privy to its tenets, its beauty, its rules and conditions, and its rewards.” Turning toward Hoover, Brice Mack extended a finger out to him in a gentle gesture. “You will hear a story from that man, from his own lips—a story that will shake you, grieve you, but that will in the end thrill you and uplift you. You will know of his child, his only child, Audrey Rose, aged five, and of her tragic and horrible end along with her mother in a fiery automobile accident. You will feel the keenness of Elliot Hoover’s loss, the desperate loneliness of his life in the aftermath of that terrible tragedy; you will hear how, in his darkest moment, a power and insight were granted him, how a message came to him, from the other side of the grave, as it were, a message through the intercession of one of this nation’s most honored and revered exponents of psychic phenomena, the late Erik Lloyd. A message that sent this honest, toiling, bedrock American, a man such as you and I,” he emphasized, gazing pointedly at Mr. Fitzgerald, “on a journey to far and exotic lands in order to corroborate its authenticity, to rid himself of all skepticism and doubt before permitting himself to credit its contents. A journey lasting seven years, during which time he embraced not only a faith and religion theretofore totally unknown to him, but a people as well, living with them, sharing their lives, their joys, their hopes, their misfortunes, and all for the purpose of ascertaining the validity of that strange and wondrous message proffered him by Erik Lloyd. A message that, if inaccurate, could seriously injure, do irreparable damage to the lives of three innocent human beings, but a message that, if true, could well provide the answer to one of man’s most ancient and unexplained mysteries; that would shed light on the very meaning and nature of life … and death.

“A message that said.…”

The graveyard silence in the courtroom sustained the perfect atmosphere for Brice Mack’s next remark, which came with the force and fury of a thunderclap.

“SHE LIVES!” he shouted, and wheeled around from the jury box to face the audience, his right hand pointing dramatically toward heaven. “YOUR DAUGHTER LIVES! AUDREY ROSE LIVES!”

Janice felt the entire courtroom jump as the words rent the air. Even Judge Langley flinched. Only Bill, burrowed deeply in his seat, eyes shut, chin sunk into his collar, mired in liquor and his own despair, seemed out of it.

“She lives!” Mack crooned tremblingly, his voice filled with a child’s awe. “Audrey Rose has returned! Her soul has crossed over the vale of darkness into a new earth life where it now resides in perfect harmony within the body of a child—a child who dwells in the city of New York and who is called Ivy.”

A general breath was exhaled by the court, accompanied by scattered titters. The jurors’ faces seemed stiff and unnatural, under constraint to maintain the proper degree of decorum under the circumstances; a losing battle in Juror Number Four, Mr. Potash, the accountant, who was smiling blatantly.

Judge Langley pounded his gavel for order but voiced no warning.

“Yes, folks,” Brice Mack continued on a less histrionic note, “this is the message that Elliot Hoover received from Erik Lloyd. It said that his daughter was alive. That Audrey Rose had been reincarnated. And through subsequent investigations, he would learn that on August 4, 1964, at exactly eight twenty-seven in the morning, a few minutes after the car accident which took his child’s life, she was reborn in New York Hospital to Mr. and Mrs. William Templeton and would in this earth life henceforth be known as Ivy.”

Janice heard the woman reporter in front of her softly chuckle and say, “Oh, come now.” Bill, deep in his seat beside her, made neither sound nor movement and seemed to be asleep or, Janice did not rule out the possibility, passed out.

Stepping back and with a wave of the arm that was all-inclusive, Brice Mack appealed, “Please, ladies and gentlemen, look into your hearts and consider well your attitudes to what I have just told you. Words such as ‘incredible,’ ‘unbelievable,’ and ‘impossible’ have a distinct place and utility in the earthly matters of men but—I’m sure you will allow—have no pertinence at all in the heavenly affairs of God. All things are possible with God. And on God’s lofty plane do the basic issues in this case reside! For we are dealing here with a man’s faith, belief, and a most deeply felt religious commitment. A commitment to a religious concept that was made only after long and anguished soul-searching and years and years of travel and study before the seed of a firm conviction and absolute faith could take root and blossom in his heart and mind.”

Brice Mack had slowly retreated from the jury box to a point just parallel to Elliot Hoover, who was sitting stiffly upright, scribbling intensely on his pad. Scott Velie, Janice noticed, had turned about in his chair and was observing his adversary with the interest and curiosity of a scientist studying a bug on the end of a pin. Even the press had paused in their note taking and were watching the young attorney, transfixed.

“Only then, ladies and gentlemen, after nearly a decade away from home, did he allow himself the privilege of returning to this country in order to bring down the curtain on the final act of his long and desperate quest. Only then, firm in his belief of the verity of Erik Lloyd’s message, did he dare approach the lives of the plaintiffs and seek to introduce himself to them. And how did he present himself? As a beggar? No. As a robber out to take that which was not legally his? Never! He presented himself simply as the man of honor and decency that he is, requesting their indulgence, their understanding, and perhaps even a crumb of kindness. As he himself stated it to me, wanting nothing more than they were prepared to give him. He expected their derision, and he got it. He expected their rejection and received it. He expected their absolute denial of his God-granted right to meet and to visit with the child, Ivy—the earthly embodiment of his daughter, Audrey Rose—and fully accepted the whiplash of their denial with grace and understanding and was prepared to turn away from their door, to step out of their lives and never return again, when—when something happened to stop him, ladies and gentlemen. An event so extraordinary as to cause Elliot Hoover to halt in his tracks—to cause him to reconsider his adamant resolve to escape that intolerable situation, an event that suddenly lent force and meaning to all the years of travel and study and dedication he had given to his untiring pursuit of truth.”

The defense attorney selected this crucial moment to relieve his parched throat and cruelly lingered over each step of pouring, measuring, and sipping the water.

“And that event, ladies and gentlemen, occurred on the very first night Elliot Hoover visited the Templeton family, at their invitation by the way, at which time, as if God in heaven had heard his appeal, a miracle took place. Yes, a miracle. For that night, for the first time in ten years, Elliot Hoover heard the voice of his daughter, Audrey Rose, cry out to him in desperate appeal, ‘Daddy, Daddy, help me, help me!’

“Now let me make myself perfectly clear. I’m not talking about a voice that came to him out of his own anguish, an imagined voice, a voice in his head, disembodied, oh, no! It was a voice that was heard by all present, a real, honest-to-God voice that belonged to the one person who had the right to transmit Audrey Rose’s appeal to her father—the Templetons’ own daughter, Ivy!”

There was a noticeable stirring in the courtroom as throats were cleared and looks exchanged. A kind of nervous questioning in the faces of press, jury, and spectators alike, as if seeking corroboration to credit what they were hearing. Janice saw Scott Velie bestir himself and thought he might be preparing to object, but noting the disbelief on the jurors’ faces, he apparently decided not to do so. A smug smile appeared on his face, instead, which, if Janice read it correctly, seemed to say, “Go on, buster, you’re doing fine.”

“Yes, ladies and gentlemen,” Mack continued doggedly, “Ivy Templeton, who, caught in the grip of a terrible nightmare and in the presence of four witnesses, cried out to Elliot Hoover. And her cry was the cry of a soul in torment, the soul of Audrey Rose, who, seared by the flames of the fire that had consumed her, was unable to find rest, to find surcease from that devastating horror until … until, ladies and gentlemen, that man, Elliot Hoover, her father, went to her and through his very presence and fatherly love was finally able to soothe her restless spirit and allay her terrors.”

The attorney turned to the jury and shook his head in quick negative jerks.

“No, I will not go into greater detail at this time. But understand, there is a great deal you need to know. And before this trial is over, you shall know it all, I promise you.” His eyes shifted toward Scott Velie. “A prima facie case on kidnapping in the first degree against the defendant has been somewhat sparingly suggested by the learned prosecutor. Before this trial is over, we shall present evidence to refute that charge in its entirety. We will show that Elliot Hoover, far from entering the lives of the Templetons as an interloper and villain, bent on evil and mischief, was instead their benefactor, a man of compassion and concern who alone could assuage the awful and devastating torments of their daughter, Ivy, and through her the spirit of his own daughter, Audrey Rose. We will demonstrate beyond all shadow of a doubt that Elliot Hoover did not go to visit the Templetons that fateful night for the purpose of assaulting their daughter, but to place his special and unique services at their disposal in the hope of alleviating the sufferings of a young and innocent child.”

In one abrupt motion he spun around to Janice and fixed her with a hard and accusing look.

“You will hear how, upon entering the bedroom of the apartment, he found the child bruised and bloodied and tied, yes, TIED to the bedstead like an animal. You will come to understand and fully believe why Elliot Hoover needed to take Ivy Templeton to his own apartment—not to steal or sequester her for purposes illegal or illicit, but to help her, to save her, to calm her, to wash her wounds, to treat and care for her pained and injured body and to pacify and ease her restless and tormented soul: the soul of Audrey Rose.”

Calmly and with assurance, he turned to the jury.

They were listening. They were hanging onto his last word, waiting for his next. Sure, there was doubt, disbelief on the faces of Three and Ten. Number Four, Potash, was grinning. But Mrs. Carbone was listening. And Harrison and Fitzgerald and Hall. They were hearing. They were hooked. Nice going for ten minutes’ work.

“I’m certain you will all keep an open mind to the testimony of the expert witnesses I will bring into this courtroom to establish a firm basis for our contention that Elliot Hoover had a perfect right—a ward’s right—to take that child from an atmosphere fraught with violence and peril and remove her to a place of peace and safety. I am equally certain that when the testimony is completed, you will render a verdict—a just and honorable verdict—that will clear Elliot Hoover of any taint of guilt in regard to the false and misleading charges brought against him by the State of New York.”

Then, turning to the bench, Brice Mack effected a slight bow and said, “Thank you, Your Honor.”

Judge Langley quickly banged his gavel.

“This court will stand in recess until nine o’clock tomorrow morning.”

Even after the judge’s departure, the entire courtroom remained silent as time hung suspended for seconds until reality took over. Then the silence was rent as a sudden hailstorm of voices deluged the room with a huge, formless wave of sound.

As Janice rose and joined the exodus, she noted the smiles on the jurors’ faces as they filed out of their box and were taken back to the jury room. There was no sign of the judge, but Scott Velie had remained behind and was chatting and laughing with a reporter. Spotting Janice, Velie winked and smiled at her encouragingly.

Elliot Hoover and Brice Mack were standing, hands clasped, smiling amiably while the guard stood by, wearing a small grin as he waited to take the prisoner back to his cell. Smiles and laughter seemed to dominate the moment, forcing Janice into a well of merriment.

The case of the People v. Elliot Hoover had got off to a gay and happy start.

There were messages at the desk, mainly for Bill and mainly from his office; his secretary twice, Don Goetz four times, Mr. Simmons once, and two from a reporter named Hazard from AP. There was a message for Janice from Carole: “Would they care to join them for dinner that night, veal birds and fettuccini casa linga? PLEASE!!” Janice would not at all have minded but knew that Bill would say no. She would call Carole later and thank her.

Bill thrust aside the messages and put through a call to Mount Carmel.

Janice hung up their coats, then went upstairs and picked up the extension in time to hear, “And please don’t worry, Mr. Templeton, all the sisters and the teachers have been alerted to safeguard your child’s privacy and tranquillity. You can depend on us.”

“Thank you, Mother Veronica,” Bill said huskily, then made several fatherly inquiries about Ivy’s schoolwork, deportment, and state of health.

“She’s a lovely child,” the mother enthused, “and a very good student; alert, bright, and well liked by the other girls. She’s at dinner now. Suppose I have her call you after evening prayers?”

“I’d be grateful, Mother.”

The omelette à fines herbes sec which she whipped together with dried parsley and basil flakes was a disaster since there was neither butter nor oil in the house. The final result, poached in a bit of water, was limpid, mealy, and inedible.

Before Ivy’s call came through at seven fifteen, they’d received two other calls, both for Bill. Don Goetz’s call came first, a few minutes after they had given up on the omelet.

“Hey, guy, you’re famous,” Don chortled. His voice held a note of mild shock and hilarity. “You made page six of the Post.”

“Yeah, I know,” Bill lied with a matching laugh. “Crazy, isn’t it?”

“Wow! Is it on the level?”

“Is what on the level?”

“What it says: this is my child, kidnapper claims, reincarnated.”

Bill felt a lump take root inside his chest as Don chuckled his way through a couple of the choicer lines in the news story. “ ‘… renowned psychic clued Hoover to reborn daughter’s whereabouts … defendant heard cry of his daughter’s soul issue from mouth of kidnapped girl … defense promises expert witnesses will substantiate claim.…’ Jesus, man!” Don said in a high, strident voice. “Is this guy for real?”

There was no hint of levity in Pel Simmons’ voice when he called a few minutes later. In fact, there was a decidedly funereal quality to their brief transaction as Bill filled Pel in on the essentials of the case and Pel, undoubtedly disturbed, expressed sympathy and support for Bill and his family.

“Don’t worry about things at the office,” Pel said in conclusion. “Don will stay on top of your accounts.”

Bill felt the first vague and distant reverberations of the death knell in this last statement.

Ivy’s call came through as Bill was wrapping up with Pel. Janice answered and was listening mutely and with concern to Ivy as Bill approached.

“What is it?” he asked, fearing the worst.

Janice covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “She’s coughing. I think she’s coming down with a cold.”

“Oh,” said Bill with a sigh of relief.

“Here’s Daddy. He’d like to say hello.” Janice handed the phone to Bill.

“Hi, Princess, what’s this about a cold?”

“It’s nothing, Daddy,” Ivy said in between coughs. “All the girls have the sniffles.”

“Well, be sure to bundle up good when you go out, and if it gets any worse, go see the nurse in the dispensary.”

“I’ve already been,” Ivy said agreeably. “She gave me some groovy cough medicine. Tastes like cherries, of course.” Then, shifting subjects: “Daddy, you and Mommy are coming up this weekend, aren’t you?”

“Try keeping us away.” Bill grinned.

“You know Mina Dawson?”

“Yeah, sure—that pretty friend of yours.”

“Right, she’s really swell, and I was wondering, Daddy. You see, her mother won’t be coming up this weekend.” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “She’s going to Florida to file for a divorce and”—she continued aloud—“since Mina is going to be terribly lonely, I wondered if we couldn’t ask her to join us for dinner at the Clam Box Saturday night.”

Janice saw a pleased, crooked smile spread over Bill’s features as he chuckled and said, “We’d be delighted, Princess. Tell Mina to count on it.”

They talked a while longer; then Bill allowed Janice to say good-bye before taking the phone back for a final word.

“And if any of the kids there should say anything to you, Princess, anything at all that might sound strange and funny, promise me you won’t listen to them, promise you’ll tell them to bug off, okay?”

“Strange and funny like what?”

“Oh.…” Bill groped. “Like … your father’s got two heads and a bushy tail, crazy, creepy things like that.”

Ivy laughed. “The only girl here’d say anything like that is Jill O’Connor, but then she’s a freak.” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “Her left boob is twice as big as her right one.”

After hanging up the receiver, Bill checked with the desk for messages. There were three, two from the man named Hazard and one from a girl in the news department of WNBC local. Bill told Ernie not to bother sending them up.

Later, after a long, relaxing bath, Bill put on his robe and joined Janice in the living room.

She was surprised to see him go to the television set and turn it on. He had pointedly avoided the six thirty news but now seemed almost eager to catch the ten o’clock summary.

It did not come until the really important issues of the day had been put aside and six commercial messages had been heard. It was only in the final minutes of the telecast that the worry lines in the newscaster’s craggy face gradually relaxed, and the dark, brooding eyes displayed an unaccustomed glint of humor and mischief as he launched into the lighter side of the day’s happenings.

“Shades of The Exorcist in Old Bailey,” he intoned, forcing an ill-fitting smile onto his face. “The courtroom of Judge Harmon T. Langley was the scene of strange and eerie doings this day as a voice from the grave was offered as an extenuating circumstance by defense attorney Brice Mack during his opening remarks in the trial of Elliot Hoover, accused kidnapper of ten-year-old Ivy Templeton. It seems, or at least it says here in my script, that the kidnapped child was no stranger to Mr. Hoover, since she had shared his company in another lifetime—as his daughter, Audrey Rose, deceased these past ten years. More spectacular episodes in this occult thriller are promised in the days and weeks ahead as Judge Langley’s caldron boils and bubbles while Mr. Mack toils and troubles to prevent his client’s incarceration on the reasonable assumption of reincarnation.”

At which point the newscaster, obviously caught unaware by the demented poesy his waggish writer had planted in the script, fell into a deep and rumbling fit of laughter from which he could not be retrieved. All his efforts to control himself failed, until finally the camera cut away from him and went to a commercial.

At the first eruption Janice laughed with him and, she was happy to see, so did Bill. Their laughter grew and intensified apace with the stricken newscaster’s, and even after he had been ignominiously removed from the air, their laughter continued until their eyes watered and their throats grew hoarse. Then, weak and exhausted, they flopped onto the sofa and simply fell into each other’s arms, their laughter trailing off as they wiped the tears from each other’s faces. Both knew it was the first genuine contact between them in weeks, and each was afraid to spoil it.

“Oh, Bill.” Janice breathed huskily and snuggled closer to him. His mouth smelled of mint, his skin of soap, aphrodisiac scents to Janice. Undoing the belt of his robe, her hand began to explore and fondle the body she loved. With a deep sigh, Bill’s back sought the pillows, and he allowed the tender touches, first of hands, then of lips, to work their wondrous magic to restore his harmed and aching spirit. Once he raised her head from his lap and softly moaned, “Let’s do it together,” to which Janice replied, “Later,” and hungrily bent to conclude her obeisant and purifying ritual.

17

As predicted and feared, the corridor outside the courtroom was a maze of wires, cables, and people. Spotlights on stands were nestled in clusters in out-of-the-way corners and niches, their accumulated light bathing the smiling figure of Brice Mack, caught in the center of a crush of news people from all media.

Emerging from the elevator, Bill and Janice surreptitiously edged around the periphery of the camera crew and succeeded in making it through the courtroom door without being recognized.

Unlike previous mornings, the courtroom was filled with a congregation of curious and excited spectators. Many of them wore turbans and flashing smiles on swarthy faces. Newspaper people, including some out-of-town press, filled the press row just behind the railing.

As they moved across the row to their seats, both Bill and Janice felt a deep hush and a soft buzz of recognition spread across the courtroom. Even the reporters filling the seats in front of them stopped what they were doing and looked around at them as they took their seats. The man immediately in front of Janice turned full around and smiled his acknowledgment of her arrival. It was then she noticed that he was not a conventional reporter, but an artist assigned to quick-sketch various aspects of the proceedings. His pad presently contained a remarkable likeness of Elliot Hoover sitting at the defense table, brooding over his doodles. The artist had perfectly captured the expression of saintly forbearance in the eyes.

Janice glanced over the rows of heads to where Hoover sat and was immediately sorry she had, for she found him looking straight at her. Worse still, she found it impossible to tear her eyes away from his eyes, which clung to hers with the intensity of a command, willing her to obey, to take note, to listen, then, seeing compliance, gradually softening as if beseeching her pardon, understanding, and forgiveness and expressing sadness for all that had happened and was about to happen. When Janice was at last released through the intervention of Judge Langley’s arrival in the courtroom, she felt light-headed and dizzy as she rose and sat in obedience to the bailiff’s command and heard her heart pounding in the grip of an emotion she could not define.

The proceedings against Elliot Hoover finally got under way as the parade of witnesses for the prosecution in response to the bailiff’s admonishments to “tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help you God,” each added his or her small isolated piece of evidence to Scott Velie’s intricately wrought case against the defendant.

In the next four days twelve persons, several of whom were totally unknown to Bill and Janice, would take the stand and tell what they knew from firsthand knowledge about the defendant and his actions near or about the vicinity of the Ethical Culture School, and the apartment house known variously as 1 West Sixty-seventh Street and by the sobriquet Des Artistes.

Three women, one a grandmotherly type, all of whom Janice only vaguely recognized as part of the group who waited daily in front of the school, followed one another in quick order. Each told approximately the same story of having seen a man with black mustache and sideburns hovering about the school steps each morning the children arrived and each afternoon at their departure. None, however, could actually identify the defendant as being that man.

Nor would the next two witnesses make that connection, as Ernesto Pucci and Dominick D’Allesandro, both looking decidedly uncomfortable and unfamiliar out of their burgundy and braid uniforms, took the stand and affirmed the fact that Elliot Hoover did enter the lobby of the plaintiff’s abode on at least four occasions with the expressed intentions of “calling on the Templetons.”

“Can you describe the defendant’s demeanor on these occasions?” Velie asked Dominick.

“Demeanor?”

“How did he act? Did he seem upset, nervous?”

“Oh, yes, especially when they wouldn’t let him up.”

“All right, Mr. D’Allesandro,” Velie continued. “Let’s talk about the first time you saw the defendant. Describe what happened.”

“Well, the first time he came, he was okay, I mean, he was calm because they let him up.”

“And the following times?”

“In my opinion, he was definitely not happy about not getting to go up.”

“Did you see the defendant on the morning of November 12th?”

“Yes.”

“How did the defendant appear to you on that day?”

“He appeared happy again because he had sublet an apartment in the building, and now he could go up whenever he wanted. I mean, we can’t keep tenants out of the elevators.”

There was a brief spate of laughter and gavel rapping during which Scott Velie walked to his table to consult his notes.

“Now, then, Mr. D’Allesandro”—Velie’s tone signified a shift to the crucial issue—“on the night of November 13, the night of the alleged kidnapping, will you tell the jury what you saw?”

Dominick nodded and launched into a detailed and obviously prepared recitation of his actions and observations. It was a fine, concise narrative of the night’s events, told with operatic flair and fervor, Janice thought, feeling a surge of pride for Dominick.

When Scott Velie passed the witness to the defense, Brice Mack had a short series of questions for him.

“Think back, Mr. D’Allesandro, and take your time in doing so, but wasn’t there one more time between the first and last times when Mr. Hoover was also happy? Or, at least, not unhappy?”

Dominick brooded over the question a long time before answering.

“There was another time between the first and last time when he got up. Mr. Templeton was away on a business trip, and Miz Templeton, she let him up.”

“Right. And wasn’t he happy at that time?”

“I couldn’t say.”

A few titters in the courtroom were brought under control by the gavel.

“You did say, did you not, that Mr. Hoover was definitely not happy about not getting to go up?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, when Mrs. Templeton did invite him up, did the defendant appear to be happy?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

“That is all.”

Bill felt Janice flinch at the mention of her name and saw the veiled wink of encouragement Velie flashed her just prior to excusing the witness. They knew the defense was banking heavily on Janice’s testimony regarding the evening she had invited Hoover to the apartment and were prepared to “handle” it. Yet, with all of Scott Velie’s assurances and displays of confidence in their ability to “handle” things, Janice dreaded the moment when she would have to rise and walk to the witness box and answer questions about that night.

The legal ceremony moved slowly and surely onward. Day after day, irrefutable items called facts were chipped from witnesses and presented to the jury to help them render a verdict that would be fair beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Hammering onward, the agile and resolute district attorney summoned Carole Federico to the stand to tell of the two harassing phone calls from Hoover which she had taken during Janice’s absence and of her salty and somewhat abusive reprimand of his behavior, which drew a laugh from all precincts of the courtroom, including the bench.

The two arresting police officers were next to take the stand, followed by the Templetons’ neighbors who had been witness to Elliot Hoover’s assault on Bill in the hallway that evening two months before, and all, so help them God, told their version of the truth, which was filed and registered in the court record and in the jury’s mind along with the rest of the “facts.”

Brice Mack had few objections to offer and even fewer questions to ask of these witnesses, excusing all of them but one without stirring from his seat. Of Officer Noonan he wished confirmation of the fact that Elliot Hoover did open the door, albeit after some slight hesitation, but that he did ultimately open it at the officer’s request.

“It wasn’t a request, sir,” Officer Noonan responded tautly. “It was an order. And he did it only upon threat of our sending for the riot squad.”

“But he did voluntarily open that door, did he not?”

“Yes, sir,” Noonan said wryly. “We persuaded him to open the door.”

Pale and with fear in her eyes, Janice addressed herself to the comings and goings of the court’s business those first four days in a state of suspended animation.

On the Friday before the weekend break, however, an event took place to bring Janice out of her self-imposed dream state.

It occurred just after they had returned from lunch and court was preparing to reconvene. Bill was conferring with Scott Velie at the railing. The morning’s witness had been Dr. Kaplan, and there had been a controversy over the propriety of some of the questions Brice Mack had put to him on cross-examination and would continue to put to him, since Kaplan had not been excused. The defense attorney had sought to know the reason Kaplan had been summoned on the night in question and what the nature of Ivy’s illness was. Velie had objected on the grounds that the questions were improper, that they went beyond the scope of direct examination, and they violated the doctor-patient privilege.

“Dr. Kaplan cannot testify to what treatments he gave the child or even the reason he was summoned to treat her.”

Judge Langley sustained, whereupon Brice Mack asked permission to call Dr. Kaplan as a witness for the defense and further asked the court’s permission to take the witness out of turn since his questions were indeed beyond the scope of direct examination and were pertinent to the defendant’s case. After a moment’s consideration, and some hesitation, Langley instructed Dr. Kaplan to remain available but said he would consider the defense’s request to call Dr. Kaplan “out of turn” during the lunch recess.

Now they were back, and Bill and Scott Velie were plotting strategy to thwart the defense attorney’s attempts to gain information from Kaplan regarding Ivy’s nightmares should the judge grant Brice Mack’s request.

A few minutes after Janice had taken her seat and was idly watching the artist putting the finishing touches on a full-figure sketch of Scott Velie rising to his feet to object, a newspaperman ambled down the press row and, his body shielding his actions from Bill’s view, thrust a slip of paper into her hand. Before she could react or look up, he had turned and was walking rapidly back to his seat in the middle of the press row behind the defense table.

It took Janice some minutes to work up the courage to examine the slip of paper, and when she did, she did so covertly, stealthily. The paper had been torn from a yellow legal pad and was folded. She sensed it was from Hoover and was right; yet, opening it, she was surprised to see, instead of the expected mincing script, two lines of bold black letters, hand-printed at an arresting angle and with exclamation marks emphasizing the urgency of the message, “I AM AFRAID FOR THE CHILD!! IS SHE ALL RIGHT?? PLEASE, PLEASE LET ME KNOW!!! E. H.”

Terse, pointed, terrifying, like a telegram from the Defense Department. Janice felt a shudder ripple over her, a trembling of the flesh as she crumpled the slip of paper into a nervous ball and allowed it to drop from her hand to the floor.

Slyly, surreptitiously, and with pounding heart, Janice dared a glance in Hoover’s direction and saw his eyes boring across the courtroom at her. Once engaged, she was riveted by the compelling, beseeching, anguished intensity of his demand for an answer to his question.

At this moment Judge Langley decided to enter the courtroom, forcing all to rise. Their eyes continued to hold fast throughout half of the bailiff’s litany, at which point Janice, fearing the imminence of Bill’s return to his seat, allowed her face to soften into the semblance of a smile and, with a barely perceptible nod of her head, affirmed Ivy’s well-being. Hoover sighed and immediately relaxed. Fear and concern drained from his face and were replaced by a look of gratitude and a smile of such ineffable sweetness that Janice was forced to look away lest she betray an emotion she would later regret.

The drone of Judge Langley’s voice ruling on Brice Mack’s request formed an unintelligible hum in the background of Janice’s thoughts, still focused on the contents of Elliot Hoover’s message. Some dire premonition must have prompted his sudden concern, of this she was sure. Too much had happened in their lives for her to start doubting him now. If some intuitive apprehension for Ivy’s safety had telepathed itself to him, then she must honor and act upon it. Her first thought was that the dreams had come back, that Audrey Rose had once again succeeded in blasting through Ivy’s subconscious and was crying out to her father sitting in a jail cell some fifty miles away. And that he had received the message. But if that were so, the school would certainly have got in touch with them. In any case, she must call Mount Carmel and speak to Ivy. Now!

Rising and leaving the courtroom during the judge’s solemn oration would certainly draw attention to her, might even incur the judge’s displeasure, but there was no help for it. She had to get to a phone. Shifting around in her seat, she hurriedly whispered to Bill that she wasn’t feeling well and edged her way across to the side aisle. Judge Langley’s voice hesitated in midsentence as a soft hum of whispers, like a distant drone of locusts, accompanied her progress to the door. A gentle rap of his gavel rebuked all and sundry for the unseemly interruption.

Janice found the public phones in a cul-de-sac between the men’s and ladies’ rest rooms at the very end of the long corridor. She was happy she had committed the school’s phone number to memory and had kept her purse bulging with coins for just such an eventuality. Still, the transaction took close to five minutes before Ivy’s voice sprang back at her through the receiver.

“Mom! How great! What gives?” The voice was joyful, exuberant, healthy, thank God!

“Nothing important, dear. Just lonely,” said Janice with an inward sigh of relief. “How’re things?”

“Great!”

“Sleeping okay?”

“Sure, except not enough. They wake you up at six for matins. By the way, guess what you interrupted?”

“What?” Janice tried to keep her voice casual.

“Algebra,” Ivy said with disgust. “Sister Mary Margaret was just about to call on me. I could tell by the shifty looks she was giving me.…”

As Ivy chattered, Janice listened with the concentrated, intensive smile of a mother sharing a moment of joyful intimacy with her child, yet in actuality she was scarcely listening. Her mind flitted over other fields of concern. With the play the trial was getting in the press and on television, could it be that Ivy still knew nothing about it? True, the sisters had promised to do their best to shelter Ivy from its impact, but Mount Carmel was certainly no walled-in cloister observing the rule of silence. Certainly there was television, and most of the children owned transistor radios. How Ivy could have been kept innocent of what was going on for so long was a total mystery to Janice.

“… and Sylvester’s more than sixteen feet tall, and we’re only up to his shoulders.”

Ivy was talking with unrelieved enthusiasm when Janice tuned back in to her.

“Mina thinks he’ll top twenty-three feet when we crown him, and that’ll beat the school record.…”

Sylvester was the school snowman—a yearly tradition at Mount Carmel, weather permitting, the cooperative project of the entire student body.

“I’m happy to hear you’ve stopped coughing, dear,” Janice interposed.

“I still do at night a little. Postnasal drip. Nothing serious, the nurse said.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Jill O’Connor menstruates. At least that’s what she told Mina. And she’s only nine, Mom, do you believe it?”

“No, I don’t.” Janice laughed. “I think Jill O’Connor’s a fibber.”

“She’s a liar,” Ivy affirmed with sudden vehemence. “She’s spreading the craziest stories about me around the school.”

“What sort of stories?” Janice inquired with apprehension.

“She says I’m two people, that I’m some kind of freak and that it’s all over the radio and TV.”

Janice hesitated. “That’s silly.”

“I know,” Ivy answered cheerfully. “Besides, there aren’t any radios and TV’s allowed here anymore. Mother Veronica Joseph outlawed them last week. The sisters had a shakedown inspection and collected every one of them.”

Janice hesitated again.

“Daddy and I are looking forward to tomorrow,” she said, forcing a cheery note into her voice.

“So are we. Mina and I’ve decided on pork chops and french fries for supper. We hardly ever get meat here.”

There was no possible way to shield her from the truth forever. Sooner or later she would have to be told, and if Janice had her way, it would be sooner.

As soon as possible.

This weekend.

18

Sunk in a mood of agitated gloom, Janice forbore returning to the courtroom till the last possible moment, lingering in the ladies’ room to sponge her face and repair her makeup until she felt her continued absence ran the danger of exciting Bill’s curiosity. If she didn’t return soon, she was certain a matron would be dispatched to search for her.

One hour and twenty-five minutes after she had left, she returned to the big double doors and, reaching out to the brass handle, felt the door push silently outward as the guard emerged. Smiling and nodding, the elderly man graciously held the door open for Janice to enter.

“Thank you,” Janice whispered, and crossed the threshold.

The shock of what greeted her brought her to a full swaying stop. Holding onto the door handle, she found herself unable to move as she stood staring, in pained surprise, at Brice Mack battering questions at Bill, sitting grimly in the witness box. That Bill had been called to the stand as a witness was not what shocked Janice; it was that he had been called so soon. She had thought surely there would be several interim witnesses, Russ, Harold Yates, before it would be their turn. But for some reason, Scott Velie had put Bill on sooner, which meant that she would probably follow him. And probably today. It was still quite early. Janice was seized with panic. She had not counted on taking the stand today. She wasn’t prepared to or at least hadn’t fortified herself for the ordeal. She had banked on more time, the weekend at least, to think about it, to put her head in order, to get her act together. They had no right to rush her onto the stand like this.

Her return to her seat caused no stir among the spectators since all eyes and ears were firmly fixed on the witness box.

Brice Mack stood with his arms folded across his chest, shooting questions at Bill, who was sitting just inches away from him.

“You have declared under oath that the moment you ordered Mr. Hoover to leave, he seized you and flung you bodily over his head? Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“And that prior to this hostile act of his, you did nothing that could, in any way, be construed as having, either by movement, gesture, or direct physical contact, precipitated this harsh and seemingly arbitrary reaction of Mr. Hoover’s?”

“I never laid a hand on him,” Bill said resolutely, failing to add that he had been given no opportunity to do so.

The defense attorney was about to question Bill further on this point, had a change of mind, and asked instead, “After the neck-pinching episode, Mr. Templeton, during which time you were paralyzed, tell me again, if you don’t mind, exactly what happened after Mr. Hoover released your carotid artery?”

“Well, as I said, my wife came out and helped pull him off me, at which point he turned and rushed into the apartment and locked himself inside.”

“Yes, so you’ve said, but think back, Mr. Templeton. Was he not, in fact, requested to enter your apartment?”

“Requested?”

“Yes, requested—by Ivy!”

Bill hesitated. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean, Mr. Templeton, that Ivy’s pathetic cries and pleadings funneled down through the apartment and were heard and accepted by Mr. Hoover as a legitimate summons for his help, that’s what I mean!”

Bill shook his head. “I didn’t hear any cries or pleadings.”

“Is it not a fact that Ivy, just shortly prior to Mr. Hoover’s arrival, had experienced one of her nightmares—a nightmare from which she could not be awakened and of such a punishing nature as to require you and your wife to tie her to the bed?”

“Just a moment,” Velie interrupted. “I object to the form of the question. It calls for a compound answer, and furthermore, it is objectionable because it goes beyond the scope of direct examination.”

“The objection is sustained,” Judge Langley ruled.

Brice Mack shrugged. Then, turning to Bill: “The witness is excused, but I will ask the court to instruct him to keep himself available to serve as a witness for the defense when we present our case.”

“The witness is so instructed.” Judge Langley looked toward Scott Velie. “Your next witness?”

Janice shut her eyes and tensed her body for the expected blow, but it failed to materialize. There was a slight delay as Scott Velie selected this moment to introduce Ivy’s birth certificate into the record. Bill edged his way down the row to his seat as the attenuated ritual of entering the birth certificate in evidence as People’s Exhibit Number One was ceremoniously performed.

Looking grim and baleful, Janice leaned over to Bill. “I’m not ready for this,” she said in a high, choked whisper.

“It’ll be all right,” Bill whispered back, his hand gripping her knee, which he found was trembling.

“What happened to Russ and Harold Yates? Why didn’t he put them on?”

“He’s saving them as rebuttal witnesses after the defense has put on its case.”

“I’m not ready for this,” Janice reiterated. Her face was florid, unhealthily so.

“Proceed with your next witness,” Judge Langley directed.

“My next witness,” Velie announced, “is Mrs. William Templeton.”

Janice pushed herself up from the seat and immediately began to feel worse. Her face, flushed and red a moment before, became pale as ashes, and she was sure she would collapse before reaching the witness stand.

An uncommon quiet settled over the courtroom as Janice awkwardly sidestepped her way to the aisle and, the blood surging and pounding in her head, mechanically made her way toward the gate in the railing, each step of her wavering progress seemingly energized by an inner force beyond her command or comprehension. It struck her that under just such a dissociated, yet irresistible compulsion must the French nobility have climbed the ladder to conclude their tête-à-tête with Madame La Guillotine.

At the witness stand Janice held up her right hand, took the oath, then sat, all at the bailiff’s direction.

Scott Velie approached her with a mien of gentle warmth and compassion.

“Would you state your full name, please?”

“Janice Gilbert Templeton.”

“You are the wife of William Templeton?”

“Yes.”

“And the mother of Ivy Templeton?”

“Yes.”

“She is your natural child?”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Templeton, describe the events that occurred between the date you first saw the defendant and the date he removed your daughter from your apartment and carried her to his apartment.”

Janice swallowed, cleared her throat, and sought her voice. That she found it, and found it full-bodied, strong, and authoritative, was a further enigma in an afternoon of enigmas. The sound of her own voice was immediately reassuring to her, and soon she heard herself talking more rapidly.

It was with the confidence, assurance, and the practiced hand of a master that Scott Velie elicited the story he wished the jury to hear from Janice, permitting her no opportunity to flesh out, embellish, or develop any points or stray into areas that could in any way provide the defense with an opening wedge on cross-examination that would be detrimental to the people’s case. Even Brice Mack had to admit it was an astonishing feat of legal legerdemain.

At last, Scott Velie turned to the defense attorney.

“Cross-examine,” he said.

“Your Honor”—Brice Mack purposely kept the moment dangling, taking an obvious sadistic pleasure in tantalizing the frightened woman in the witness box—“may I say that as long as Mrs. Templeton is shielded by the rules of evidentiary procedure, there is little I can hope to learn in cross-examination. However, there is a great deal to be learned from this witness and from the witness preceding her, a great many truths that have been suppressed by my distinguished colleague’s artful and inspired direct examination.” His eyes fixed Janice with a cold, steely look of warning. “Truths that I fully intend to bring forth into the light of day. Therefore, I have no questions of the witness at this time, but I will certainly want her back as a witness for the defense.”

“Very well,” Judge Langley said as Brice Mack strode back to the defense table. “The witness is excused but instructed to keep herself available as a witness for the defense.”

Turning to Scott Velie, who was heavily engaged in a strategy powwow with his associate, Judge Langley dryly registered his annoyance.

“Mr. Velie, if you will forgive the court’s interruption, we are awaiting the calling of your next witness.”

“If the court please,” Velie said, rising with an apologetic smile, “that is my case. I have no further evidence to put on at this time.”

“In that case,” said Judge Langley with a solemn rap of his gavel, “we will continue the trial until Monday morning at nine o’clock. The defendant is remanded to custody.”

Rising from her chair, moving unsurely and unsteadily toward Bill, Janice experienced the sense of elation, the delicious inertia of a person stumbling dazed but unscathed away from a plane crash.

The time for telling Ivy “all the facts” came the following evening just after they had returned from delivering Mina back to the school and had settled themselves into their family suite at the Candlemas Inn.

Bill and Janice had driven up earlier in the day, arriving just after lunch, in time to sit in on afternoon choir practice along with a number of other parents. Ivy’s vivid blond beauty could be easily distinguished among the group of girls in the alto section. It was during Handel’s Kryie Eleison that Janice began to sense the first vague stirrings of interest and curiosity in the air—the secretive glances, smirks, and whisperings flitted about them like straws in a high wind.

Even more disturbing were the bright, darting glances they received from the girls as they bounded past them out of the chapel and into the snow-clad yard, where a headless Sylvester awaited their attention. Ivy and Mina brought up the rear, their hands clasped, moving slowly and indolently up to them, both wearing brave smiles in the presence of tragedy.

“Hi, Daddy. Hi, Mommy,” Ivy said wanly. “You remember Mina.”

“Sure, Princess.” Bill smiled. “Hi, Mina.”

“Hi, Mr. Templeton. Hi, Mrs. Templeton,” Mina said, passing the ball to Janice.

“Hello, Mina,” Janice said, completing the circle of greetings.

Bill bent to kiss Ivy and felt her flinch the slightest millimeter. Janice noticed and quickly asked, “Gonna go to work on Sylvester?”

“Not today, we don’t feel like it.”

“No,” Mina repeated with distaste, “we don’t feel like it.”

“Well, then,” Janice said with a surge of enthusiasm, “why don’t you girls go and get ready for our little party?”

The prospect of dinner out brightened the moment for Mina at least. After they had left to shower and change into their prettiest dresses, permitted at Mount Carmel only on weekends or on family outings, Bill and Janice walked across the yard, past the towering snowman under construction, and entered the administration building.

“One of the girls smuggled newspapers into the dormitory. We think it was Jill O’Connor, but we are not sure of it.”

Several copies of the Westport Guardian containing the front-page item “Jurors hear tape of principals in reincarnation-kidnapping case” were spread open on the mother superior’s desk. Mother Veronica Joseph’s eyes held the familiar note of pity and compassion, but the set of her face had altered, Bill thought; had hardened, become stern, even severe.

“I will talk to the parents collectively before they leave today and seek their cooperation in the matter. And I’ve asked Father Paul to speak to the children during mass in the morning.”

Bill leaned anxiously forward in his chair. “We appreciate all you’ve done, Mother, to shield our daughter from this knowledge. Ivy told us about the ban on radios and TV.”

Mother Veronica Joseph’s face softened the slightest bit.

“While my heart and sympathy go out to Ivy and to both of you,” she said in a hushed tone more suited to the confessional booth, “please understand what I am about to say. The rules I instituted and the things I did to suppress this story at Mount Carmel were not done for your entire benefit. What I did I did for all the children and for the sake of the school. There is no doubt that Ivy was the unwilling victim of a poor soul’s delusion and deserved to be shielded from the attendant publicity. But an equal, if not greater, danger was that the school would find itself the unwilling victim of a celebrity in its midst, which now indeed has occurred and which, as you must know, is the kind of distraction few institutions of this order can long tolerate.”

“Which,” as Bill succinctly put it to Janice on their way to pick up Ivy and her friend, “simply means, start looking for another school for Ivy.”

“That’s not at all what she said,” protested Janice.

“It’s what she meant.”

Yes, Janice thought, it was true, it was there in her voice, a clear warning to them to get the problem solved soon, or she would be forced to take action.

Dinner with the girls was a quiet, intense affair consisting of much eating and little talk. Ivy was withdrawn and remote but managed to finish her chops and french fries and even join Mina in a second dessert. Several times Bill caught her looking at him in a kind of lost, perplexed way, as if saying, “What does it all mean? What’s happening?”

The burden of disclosure fell on Bill and took place in Janice’s presence in the small sitting room which doubled as Ivy’s bedroom. Propped up and bundled in the rollaway bed, Ivy listened intently as Bill told her all the facts with delicacy, understanding, and total candor, omitting only one—the nightmares.

“But is that possible?” Ivy asked. The words and her tone held a heady, breathless incredulity, as well as a tinge of excitement.

“No, Princess,” Bill responded. “But Mr. Hoover seems to think so.” Then, in a gentler voice: “Understand, Ivy, when a father loses someone he loves very dearly—in this case, his wife and daughter—his sadness and hurt can be so great as to cause his mind to refuse to believe what happened. It’s at such times that a man is willing to believe anything just to keep himself going. Mr. Hoover is such a man. When he lost all he held dear, he could not accept the fact and went looking for other answers. And the saddest thing is that there were people, wicked people, who were waiting on the sidelines ready to give him the answers he wanted to hear. This is how he came to believe that his dead child was reborn in your body. So you see, Princess, it really wasn’t his fault; he was just a victim of his own grief.”

There was a long silence, during which Ivy heaved a long, woebegone sigh.

“How awfully sad,” she said in a muffled voice. “I remember him at school. And the time he walked me home. He seemed so nice.”

“Maybe he is nice, Princess. Maybe he’s just misguided. Let’s think that, shall we?”

Ivy nodded, then looked at Janice. “Isn’t it funny that I don’t remember a thing about it. I mean, his taking me out of bed and carrying me off like that?”

“You were asleep,” Janice said.

“Wow!” said Ivy with a shake of the head and an amazed lift of the eyebrows. “No wonder all the girls are giving me the treatment. I really am a freak.”

“You are not a freak, Ivy,” Bill insisted. “As I explained, you are the victim of a man’s hallucinations—a man whom the State of New York is going to send to jail for a good long time for what he has done. Whenever the girls look at you or say anything or snicker behind your back, just remember that, will you? You have nothing to fear and certainly nothing to be ashamed of.” Bill’s voice softened. “And if things get to be too difficult here, just let me know, and I’ll come and take you home.”

Ivy felt a sudden twinge of sadness. “I hope I’ll be able to stay. I really like it here.”

At three ten in the morning, Janice was awakened by sounds coming from Ivy’s room—coughing sounds, high-pitched, racking.

Hurrying into the sitting room and quietly closing the door behind her so as not to waken Bill, Janice turned on the wall switch and gazed, stunned, at the sight of her child sitting up in bed, head hunched over her knees, coughing and wheezing into the blanket. Janice sped across to her side, quickly gathered her into her arms, and began to pat her back to stem the course of the spasms.

“Medicine’s in my bag.” Ivy managed to choke out the words between coughs.

The label read “To be taken as needed.” Ivy swallowed some from the bottle as there was no spoon nearby. Whatever it contained worked rapidly, and soon the coughing spell was under control, leaving her limp and shaking.

“Wow,” she squeaked. “That was something.”

Her face was pure scarlet, and her eyes watered pitifully.

Janice was shocked by the force and fury of the attack.

“Does this happen every night?”

“Umm,” affirmed Ivy. “Most nights this past week. Not as bad as this, though.”

“I’ll take you to a doctor in the morning.”

“ ’Kay.” Ivy swallowed. “Mom?”

Janice felt Ivy’s head. It was cool.

“Yes, dear?”

“Wouldn’t it be wonderful?”

“What?”

“If what Mr. Hoover believes is really true. That we all just keep on living and living and living forever and never die?”

The question had a dreamlike quality that lulled Janice into a mood of somber contemplation in which the face of Elliot Hoover appeared to her: gentle, pained, distraught.

Drawing Ivy to her bosom and nestling her face into the soft blond hair, Janice whispered in a crooning, abject way, “Yes, darling, it would be wonderful. Really wonderful.”

The two men faced each other across the metal table in the small, spare, windowless room. A panel of overhead fluorescent lights cast hard shadows over papers and file folders spread out between them, lending to each face the gaunt and bloodless aspect of a death mask. But for the steady hum of the ceiling air conditioner and their own subdued voices, the room preserved the dull, echoless silence of a vault.

Elliot Hoover had called for the meeting and had engineered its course for the past hour, requesting a full and thorough review of the defense’s strategy in all its myriad details and complexities. At this, the eleventh hour, he was challenging witnesses, suggesting changes, and ordering reappraisals of evidence and testimony.

Sitting beneath the harsh light, mopping his face with a soggy ball of cloth, Brice Mack could only stare appalled at the cucumber-cool countenance of his client as be softly uttered his recommendations, which, if questioned or disputed, became orders.

The discussion had started with a further analysis of Gupta Pradesh, the renowned maharishi from Ghurni, who was currently ensconced at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and would be called to the stand as their first witness. Elliot Hoover did not know Pradesh personally, but was sufficiently acquainted with his background and works to consider him the ideal witness to inform the jury on some of the deeper philosophical aspects of the Hindu religion. However, because of the maharishi’s undisputed saintliness and the extreme reverence he was held in by all his followers, the defense attorney was instructed to desist from any but the loftiest of inquisitions, eliminating any references or attempts to indulge in chitchat concerning the lay, or “bread-and-butter,” aspects of reincarnation during his examination. Which dealt a severe blow to the solar plexus of Brice Mack’s curtain raiser in the case.

“But he must know of actual cases of reincarnation,” Brice Mack protested. “Specific instances that would help substantiate your position.”

“There’s no doubt he can cite such instances,” Hoover blandly replied, “but it would be demeaning for him to discuss such matters in a public forum. Understand, the maharishi is a holy individual bound to the same oath of confidentiality as a Catholic priest, so you will accord him all the respect due a man of his station.”

Brice Mack groped in his briefcase for Kleenex but found none.

There was no disagreement on the questioning of the second witness, who, like Gupta Pradesh, professed an expertise in Far Eastern religious concepts but, unlike the maharishi, was a pure-blooded American scholar—professor emeritus of religious studies in one of the country’s leading citadels of learning—a man whose name conjured up every folksy image of early American history from the battle green of Lexington to the fog-shrouded perch of a Rocky Mountain rendezvous.

James Beardsley Hancock’s testimony on the specific laws of Karma would, it was reasoned by Mack and his associates, weigh heavily with a jury not only because it came from a white, grass-roots, eminently credentialed American, but because it was also the faith he personally practiced and espoused.

As Hoover put it to Brice Mack, “He’s on the inside looking out, which makes him our man.”

The big wrangle came over the inclusion of the third “expert” witness, Marion Worthman, a latter-day Edgar Cayce, a psychic, self-professed witch, prophet, seer, and devoted proponent and interpreter of the Bible, a woman who could tune in telepathically on a person’s mind and body and relate information regarding that person’s present and past lives.

Although her adherents numbered in the tens of thousands, and her published works topped every bestseller list, Elliot Hoover fought against bringing her into the courtroom to render testimony in his behalf, fearing that she would bring to the proceedings the taint of a medicine show, which was precisely the reason Brice Mack fought for her inclusion.

Still, Hoover remained skeptical, feeling that their greatest source of help would be forthcoming from the Templetons and Carole Federico when Mack put them on the stand.

“They were there,” Hoover stressed. “They were present during the nightmare and saw the child respond to my appeals to Audrey Rose. They know the truth and must be made to tell it.”

“The truth?” Brice Mack said, suddenly weary. “What truth are you talking about? Your truth or theirs?”

“They’re one and the same.”

The attorney sighed pathetically.

“Did you ever hear the one about the three blind men who were each asked to describe an elephant? Each described what he felt as his hands explored the elephant’s body, and each description was totally different. Yet they all told the truth.”

Nonplussed, Hoover gazed at him.

“What I’m saying,” Mack explained, “is that while four people witnessed the same event, in this case a child’s nightmare, it doesn’t necessarily mean they all saw the same thing. In fact, I’m willing to bet we’ll get four different interpretations of what transpired in the bedroom that night.”

“Janice Templeton knows the truth,” Hoover quietly said. “She summoned me because she knew that I was the only one who could help the child.”

“Fine,” the attorney allowed. “And when I get her on the stand, I’ll certainly explore that matter with her. But don’t hold your breath about how much she’s going to remember or admit that she remembers about that night.”

There was a moment of silence during which Elliot Hoover regarded Brice Mack carefully.

“I take it you don’t have much faith in the outcome of this case.”

“Put it another way,” Brice Mack said. “I don’t have much faith in the Templetons coming to your rescue. The case I have spent eight weeks and a good deal of your money preparing relies heavily on the testimony of our expert witnesses. If you’ll permit me to handle them as I had planned to, I think we stand a good chance of selling reincarnation to even the most doubtful juror.”

“Otherwise?”

Brice Mack decided to lay it on the line.

“Otherwise, I don’t think your chances for acquittal are very good.”

Hoover studied the attorney minutely.

“I appreciate your frankness, Mr. Mack,” Hoover said in a voice edged with scorn. “Now let me be frank with you. I still insist, no matter what your opinion of the outcome of the case may be, that you conduct it with all possible taste and decorum. I realize how driven you are by personal ambition to succeed. Still, the determination of my guilt or innocence before man’s bar of justice is not a platform to serve your egotism, nor will I permit it to become a base for your self-aggrandizement. It is my freedom that is at stake here, Mr. Mack, not your reputation. Therefore, I will be the one to decide each step we take in the course of this case. If you do not understand me or feel that you cannot respect my wishes to the letter, please tell me now, and I shall have you replaced.”

“Sure, anything you say.” Brice Mack’s light, off-handed acceptance of Hoover’s contempt was contrived to conceal his profound shock and surprise. The accuracy with which Hoover had hit the mark was devastating. Could it be he was always this transparent?

Leaving the stuffy environs of the Criminal Courts Building and stepping into the frigid, abandoned streets of late Sunday afternoon, Brice Mack sensed the exquisite irony of the bulging briefcase he was toting, filled with hopes, ambitions, and eight weeks of striving and planning which now, shorn of his power to function, represented a briefcase full of nothing.

The temptation to drop it in a litter bin as he searched in vain for a cab while sloughing his way toward the BMT on the corner of Foley Square was dissipated by a crescendo of confused noise rumbling beneath his feet as he approached the subway kiosk.

The trip home in the nearly empty car was made in the company of two frightened women and a vomiting black, which, all things considered, seemed the proper coda to cap off the day’s dispiriting events.

Pressed against the corner of his quaking seat, enveloped by the clatter of wheels and groans and the overpowering stench, the young attorney observed the second hand of his wristwatch sweeping inexorably toward the morrow, producing the disquieting sensation of an unstoppable doom hurtling toward him. It was at this moment that Brice Mack thought of his mother and the night she was sped into the operating theater with less than a ten percent chance of making it back out alive. He smiled, remembering the brave smile on her face as she winked her encouragement at him, both knowing it would be the last physical gesture they would ever share together on this earth.

19

The first inkling of catastrophe greeted Brice Mack’s arrival at the Criminal Courts Building the following morning.

The time was early enough to provide a calming and comforting vista of empty, slushy streets as his cab sluiced up the narrow canyons leading into Foley Square. Four chartered buses parked in front of the court building directly behind a television truck provided the first shiver of anxiety in the young attorney as he paid off the cabdriver and hurried up the freshly sanded steps.

Even in the sealed container of the elevator with its attendant hum, rhythmic sounds could be heard increasing in volume as the car approached the seventh floor, sounds that exploded into joyous chanting, “HARE KRISHNA! HARE KRISHNA! HARE KRISHNA!” as the doors slid open to a corridor packed solid with more than a hundred and fifty Children of Lord Krishna, who, he later learned, had arrived with the dawn from their gurukula in Bronxville to pay tribute to the venerable saint Gupta Pradesh, the first of Brice Mack’s witnesses.

Girls and boys, ranging in ages from thirteen to eighteen, all dressed in saffron robes, the girls’ foreheads daubed with paste, the boys’ heads shaved except for the topknot enabling Krishna to yank them up to heaven at the proper time, were gathered in a six-deep phalanx down the length of the corridor, hopping up and down, beating drums, ringing bells, and chanting “Hare Krishna” over and over, transforming the bleak, sterile surroundings into a gay and vivid bazaar. All under the amazed and watchful eyes of a cordon of helmeted, club-wielding police officers who had been summoned to maintain order.

Brice Mack was literally stunned by the sight and noise and wavered momentarily before plunging ahead into the mass of exotically scented bodies in a game attempt to reach the telephone at the other end of the corridor. It was important he reach Gupta Pradesh at the Waldorf and warn him to stay clear of the main elevators and to find his way into the building through the service entrance.

With the help of a policeman, who seemed to delight in roughly clearing a path for him through the dancing, swaying, happy mob, the attorney finally made it to the end of the hall where the telephones were situated. There he found the space in front of them occupied by an impeccably dressed and carnationed Judge Langley standing in the center of a barrage of lights, cameras, and questioning reporters, vainly attempting to add a brick or two to his own national image and reputation.

The reporters, however, seemed of a different mind, for instead of concentrating on the relevant issue of the moment, that of reincarnation, they peppered him with embarrassing questions concerning his Tammany days and his ascendancy in the O’Dwyer hierarchy, wanting particularly to know how he had managed to elude the tentacles of the Kefauver inquisition and, in general, prying and poking into the shadier corners of a past that the aged jurist would just as soon had lain dormant and forgotten.

Even as the carnation wilted under the extreme heat of the lights, so did Judge Langley’s disposition and temper erode under the onslaught of punishing questions, until at last his replies and rejoinders descended to a brash, monosyllabic level better suited to the gutter than to the august environs of a courthouse corridor.

Finally, with a display of temper, Langley pushed his way past his inquisitors, shouting, “Out of my way, goddamn you,” and, calling for a police escort, ordered him to clear a path through the mob of caterwauling children to his chambers.

The area cleared of paraphernalia, Brice Mack put through his call to the Waldorf and learned that the maharishi, in the company of Fred Hudson, had already left. Bullying his way through the Hare Krishnas to the elevators, the attorney hurried down to the main entrance to intercept his witness.

Tall, lean, acetic, garbed in the simple orange-colored robe of one who has thrust aside the world of material delights, the Holy Maharishi Gupta Pradesh allowed Brice Mack and his assistant, Fred Hudson, to usher him through the dark and tortuous basement of the Criminal Courts Building to the service elevators, which they found stacked high with overflowing trash bins and with scarcely enough room for the operator. Only by huddling together in a tight knot, with their faces pressed through the grillwork of the elevator gate, were the three men able to make the slow trip up to the seventh floor.

Booming, rhythmic cadences from within the courtroom informed them that the Children of Krishna were inside, awaiting the appearance of their master.

At the first sight of Gupta Pradesh, a deep, reverent hush fell over the courtroom as all eyes strained to absorb the form and countenance of the saintly man. The purity and intensity of their consciousness of him flooded the courtroom so strongly that even Brice Mack could tangibly experience the high level of awareness the children radiated.

With a smile both serene and loving, Pradesh raised his hand in greeting toward the Children of Lord Krishna and then proceeded to the defense table and Elliot Hoover, who had risen and was awaiting him with outstretched hand.

Judge Langley remained speechless, his face contorted with incredulity as he silently observed the genteel passage of salutations between witness, audience, and defendant.

With a taut rap of his gavel and seething voice, he addressed the defense attorney.

“Mr. Mack, you have kept the court waiting a full five minutes, and I don’t mind telling you we are fast losing our patience! When I say, ‘Court will convene at a certain time,’ I mean it, and I make a point of personally being in the courtroom at that time!”

“I apologize to the court for our tardiness, Your Honor,” Brice Mack said with a small bow of the head. “With your permission, I am ready to call my first witness.”

“All right, proceed.”

As Brice Mack slowly turned around to the defense table, he quickly scanned the room, momentarily dwelling on the look of assured indifference on Scott Velie’s face; noting that the reporters’ row directly behind the railing was packed solid with an assortment of familiar and unfamiliar faces, including one Catholic priest and several dark, turbaned gentlemen probably representing some foreign or religious press; and also noting with some surprise the absence of Janice Templeton, her husband being the sole occupant of the witnesses’ row.

Brice Mack cleared his throat and in a loud, clear voice trembling with chivalrous politeness declaimed, “It is my honor to call His Holiness Gupta Pradesh to the stand.”

The silence in the courtroom deepened as the maharishi, who was still standing alongside Elliot Hoover and the guard, who had also risen and was attending his prisoner with a watchful eye, inclined his head toward the bench and slowly advanced to the witness stand at Brice Mack’s direction.

The bailiff, Bible in hand, stood by the chair and waited patiently to administer the oath; however, upon seeing the book containing the revealed truth of the Christian faith, the old Hindu came to a sudden halt and, turning to Brice Mack, engaged him in a whispered conference.

After a few seconds of this, Judge Langley craned forward in annoyance and demanded, “What’s wrong now?”

“It’s the Bible, Your Honor,” the attorney explained. “The maharishi informs me that he cannot swear an oath on the Christian Testaments.”

“Well, does he possess his own Bible?”

“No, Your Honor, the Hindu faith subscribes to neither a founder nor a sacred book.”

Judge Langley turned to the bailiff.

“Administer the substitute oath.”

While the bailiff foraged through the back flap of the Bible for the correct slip of paper, Gupta Pradesh ceremoniously ascended the stand and turned to confront his audience. His long, curly hair encompassed a face of purest tranquillity. His eyes, which seemed to be gazing into eternity, brimmed over with warmth and compassion for all they beheld.

At last, the bailiff found the right passage.

“Do you solemnly affirm that the testimony you may give in the cause now pending before this court shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, this you do under the pain and penalty of perjury?”

“To the extent that the power and the ability is given me to do so, I do solemnly affirm,” intoned the maharishi, for the very first time lifting his deep-chorded English-accented voice to the heights and depths of the immense chamber, filling it so entirely as to produce an overflow of reverberations at the conclusion of his statement.

It was a voice that thrilled, that sent shivers even up Bill’s spine, and that stimulated an immediate reaction in the Children of Lord Krishna, who rose from their seats as one and in perfect unison started to chant and hum and sway in an excess of joy.

“Order! Order!” Judge Langley’s voice was a whisper in a hailstorm. “I’ll have order in this courtroom!”

As Brice Mack stepped up to the railing and waved his arms in a desperate plea for silence, his face was as abject and distraught as Scott Velie’s was filled with amusement and delight.

“Hare Krishna! HARE KRISHNA!” The bedlam of voices grew and built, setting up a vibration that caused the water glasses to rattle on their trays.

There seemed no way to bring the situation under control short of sending for the police, which Langley was about to do when, suddenly, in response to a gesture from the venerable Hindu, the mere raising of his hands to the Children of Krishna, the chanting immediately stopped.

“My children,” appealed the maharishi in his melodious, commanding voice, “It is not necessary to visit and pay homage to my physical being when to find me you have only to look within your spiritual sight.”

The statement, meant to calm them, only served to rekindle their ardor and bring on a new wave of chanting, different in sound and pattern from the previous one: a formless, seemingly wordless humming, “OM! OM! OM! OM!” producing a deep, bell-like vibration of ear-shattering power and intensity.

“Order,” Judge Langley shouted, “or I’ll have this courtroom cleared!”

“My children!” the maharishi beseeched, to no avail.

Then, as if obeying some wordless, inner-inspired signal, numbers of the Children began drawing out small pots of incense from within the folds of their robes and setting them aflame.

Judge Langley shot to his feet in a rage and spluttered his final warning. “There’ll be no damn smoking in my court!” And turning to the bailiff, ordered: “Bailiff, I want this courtroom cleared! Send for the police, and eject these people from the building!” And with a final rap of the gavel: “Court will stand in recess until order has been restored!”

Pressing his way through the ranks of singing, laughing, chanting children, swaying amid clouds of incense, drumbeats, and recitations from the Bhagavad Gita, Bill hurried to outpace the reporters to the main door before the police arrived and the ensuing turmoil sealed off the route of escape. His single aim was to get to a phone and report the disaster to Janice, who had remained at the Candlemas Inn in Westport to care for Ivy.

The connection to their room made, he counted twelve rings before the desk clerk switched in to inform the operator that the party didn’t answer and offered the message desk. Bill then asked to have Janice paged, as it was still early enough for them to be at breakfast, but with no success.

Hanging up the receiver, Bill retraced his steps to the courtroom in bewilderment, augmented by a tinge of anxiety. It was more than odd not to find Janice at the inn, not only because of Ivy’s illness, which he felt Janice had been disposed to exaggerate, but because she knew the importance of staying close to the telephone. The decision for Janice to remain in Westport had been made with Scott Velie’s knowledge and concurrence. His only warning was to keep herself available for any summons from the court since failure to appear at the defense’s request would be construed as an act of contempt. Why would Janice have chosen to ignore Scott Velie’s warning?

Perhaps, he reflected gloomily, Ivy had taken a turn for the worse.

It was ten twenty before peace and quiet was at last restored and court reconvened.

The spaces vacated by the Children of Krishna, who had been boisterously carried off in the four buses to their gurukula in Bronxville, were only partially filled as Brice Mack opened his examination of the badly rattled Hindu sage, commencing with a series of questions concerning the rudiments of his background, his name, place of birth, education, place of current abode, and the general character of his life’s calling, and of the faith to which he had dedicated the sum and substance of his seventy-two years.

At Brice Mack’s gentle proddings, the maharishi picked his way through the complex web of the Hindu faith, telling of the origin of the word “Hindu” itself, in the sixth century B.C., as it was applied by invading Persians to the Sanskrit-speaking people living by the Indus River.

In a flutelike voice, he sang of the sacred writings, or Vedas, composed well before the first millennium b.c., and of the catalogue of magical yajnas, sacrificial formulas, mantras, and rituals that the Vedic religion embodied, and of the many schools, sects, and religions that had developed through the centuries: Sankhya, Yoga, Vedanta, Vaishnavas, Shaivas, Shaktas, all of which were preached and practiced under the separate canopies of Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism, which in turn took their impetus from the original Vedic, changing and refining the basic precepts into a multiplicity of separate doctrines: Karma, avatar, samsara, dharma, trimurti, bhakti, maya.

For more than an hour, what people were in the courtroom seemed mesmerized by the singsong voice and the strange-sounding words, as the maharishi particularized the many gradations of beliefs, emphasizing the eclectic nature of the faith, which adhered to no particular belief, nor worshiped any particular prophet or God, such as the Christians’ Jesus or Islam’s Muhammad, but found expression in the worship of animals, ancestors, spirits, sages, and the entire world of nature. A religion as variable as the people who practiced it, yet with certain constants: the belief in holy pilgrimages, in bathing in sacred rivers, in the veneration of sages and gurus, and, above all, the belief in the reality of reincarnation.

Which was the cue Brice Mack had been waiting for, since the expression on Scott Velie’s face presaged an objection about to erupt on several valid grounds.

“About reincarnation,” the young attorney quickly interposed, veering the maharishi toward the relevant issue in the case. “You speak of it as a reality, as a functioning doctrine believed in and subscribed to by millions of your countrymen. Can you elaborate for the jury on the precise manifestation of reincarnation?”

The impudence of the question brought a smile to the elderly man’s lips. From the casual tone of the young man, he might have been asking him to interpret the mechanics of a harvest combine instead of an eternal mystery vouchsafed to but a handful of saints. And yet, reasoned Pradesh to himself, he was in America, where machinery ruled, where the wonders of science were worshiped above faith, and only that which was explainable was viewed without suspicion and accepted as reality.

Delivering a primer on the dwelling place of the soul between its incarnations and the inner workings of the astral cosmos to an alien audience was tantamount to explaining the principles of atomic energy to a Bushman.

Turning to the oddly mixed faces of the twelve men and women sitting in the jury box, all of whom seemed to be observing him with varying degrees of doubt and skepticism, the elderly man began his discourse on the world between and beyond incarnations in a manner so childlike as to preclude misunderstanding by all but the densest of intelligences.

“The astral world,” he began, “contains many planes, many levels, many spheres to receive souls as they pass out of the body at death. There are many astral planes teeming with astral beings who have come from the earth life to dwell in these different mansions in accordance with Karmic qualifications. By this I mean the soul of a gross person whose Karmic qualifications are of a low order dwells on a lower plane than those souls of more enriched substance. The gross person, whose main drives in the earth life were of a fleshly and material tendency, will reincarnate very shortly after death since there is little for such a soul to meditate over, as all its attractions and needs are of a material kind. These souls soon find their way back, for there is always a sufficient supply of new bodies among parents of like natures, which offer ideal opportunities in which to reincarnate.”

As Gupta Pradesh continued to outline the rules and conditions of “life” in the astral world, Brice Mack’s eyes flicked toward the jury for a quick assessment of their reactions and was happy to see more than half of them sitting in rapt attention, listening with keen interest. The maharishi’s voice held a bell-like clarity as he joyously told of how souls occupying a higher plane were able to look down on the planes below them and how they were also able to visit friends and relatives on the lower planes, but that those living on the lower planes were unable to return the compliment as they could neither see nor hear the souls on a higher plane.

“As the earthbound needs of the material life decrease, so do the periods of spiritual existence between incarnations grow longer, some elevated and highly refined souls remaining in their state of rest for twenty thousand years or even more and returning to the earth life only when the need of their specialized services to enrich and improve the world is required. These are the leaders, the great philosophers, the great teachers, the great statesmen, men such as Abraham Lincoln, Luther Burbank, Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, men whose Karmic qualifications have approached the pinnacle of perfection and whose spiritual development has brought them to the very threshold of that state of bliss in the presence of the Divine One which is Nirvana, the place of final rest in the loftiest of spiritual realms.”

Brice Mack’s wandering eyes caught Juror Seven, Graser, yawning and Potash grinning like a loon. He’d had a feeling that Potash would be trouble and could kick himself for not having used a peremptory on him when he had the chance.

“But these perfect souls are few in number. The majority of souls occupy various lower levels of the astral world in which they wait and work and, through meditation, seek to clothe themselves in the higher spiritual garments and so achieve promotion from a lower to a higher plane. When a soul wishes to return to earth life, it allows itself to seek a rebirth, foraging about for the proper parents and circumstances in which to be reborn. Quite often, a returning soul may be accompanied by another soul, as, for example, the soul of a loved one, each selecting to be incarnated at the same time so as to enjoy a continuance of relationship on earth. None of the past, however, is remembered, and the new earth life manifests its own demands and conditions, sweeping the awakening child into the dizzying whirl of its own pace.”

Gupta Pradesh suddenly paused and remained caught in a torpor of contemplation, his glazed eyes reflecting the vacuity of a man who has temporarily lost his way. A ripple of restlessness coursed throughout the courtroom. When, after a full minute of silence, he had still not picked up the thread of his discourse, Brice Mack gently prodded, “Is there anything more you wish to add, sir?”

The question penetrated the empty look and brought the return of awareness.

“Just this,” the maharishi pronounced in a breathless, hushed tone and with a countenance suddenly revitalized. “A message from beyond. The journey is far. Progression is eternal. The end is good. There is nothing to fear. The power that rules on earth rules in the astral cosmos. And all is governed by law! All are blessed and watched over and protected, even to the final atom in the scale of being.”

A supernal glow of inner faith shone forth from the maharishi’s eyes and impinged upon Elliot Hoover, who sat mesmerized, a beatific smile on a face that radiated understanding, acceptance, and eternal gratitude. Neither tacit nor secret, but openly expressed, the communication between the two men did not pass the attention of the court. The jurors’ eyes, Brice Mack noted, shifted back and forth between the witness stand and the defense table as though covering the progress of a tennis match. Judge Langley’s crotchety face, hanging over the bench, wore an expression of perplexed irritation as a further spate of silence ensued, which finally provoked the nettled jurist caustically to demand of the defense attorney, “Any further questions of this witness, Mr. Mack?”

There were plenty of questions he desperately wanted to ask, basic, bedrock questions that would pull the maharishi off his lofty astral plane and bring him down to earth, but Hoover’s strict admonition prevented him from doing so. With a small, pathetic sigh and shake of the head, the defense attorney turned from the witness and addressed the bench.

“No, Your Honor, no further questions.”

The judge raised his eyes toward the prosecutor, who had already risen from his seat.

“Mr. Velie?”

“Yes, Your Honor, we have several questions we wish to ask the learned gentleman.”

The maharishi, assured of the veneration that his followers accorded him, preserved a mien of gentle acceptance and tranquillity even in the face of this gross and callous man lumbering toward him, his teeth partially exposed in a twisted smile that bespoke a heart of stone and a mind filled with harmful intentions.

“This astral world, or cosmos, that you speak of—is it simply a metaphysical symbol, like heaven and hell, or is it an actual place?”

“It exists,” replied the maharishi in a kindly and temperate voice.

“Have you ever been there? Seen it?”

“Many times throughout eternity.” The maharishi smiled. “As have you.”

“Well, I’m somewhat foggy on the physical details of the place; perhaps you can refresh my memory a bit.”

The pale and limpid waters of the sage’s eyes became like granite as Scott Velie continued.

“For example, this astral cosmos, teeming with astral beings, can you tell the jury what it looks like?”

“Looks like?”

“Yes. Is it like a big park with trees and shrubs and rocks, or is it rather like a desert, say, a barren wasteland, with no signs of vegetation?”

Gupta Pradesh moistened his lips with his tongue.

“The astral universe cannot be described in the same way one describes the material cosmos. The astral universe consists of subtler hues of light and color and numberless vibrations. In the astral world, all is beauty, purity, and perfection.”

“Hmm.” Scott Velie took a few seconds to consider the maharishi’s words. “What you’re saying is, it’s no place like home?”

The quip brought a response of laughter from jurors and reporters alike and a smile to Judge Langley’s face. Bill saw Brice Mack rise to object and Elliot Hoover’s hand stop him from doing so.

The maharishi seemed impervious to the prosecutor’s cynicism and calmly replied, “It is certainly not a home as we know it on earth; however, to the beings who dwell on the various levels of the astral universe, it is a home of infinite and shining beauty.”

“Oh, yes—can you tell us about these beings who dwell there? Do they continue to take a human form, or are they just … uh … you know, smoke and blobs?”

“Astral beings may manifest any forms they so desire, human, animal, even floral. There are no restrictions or limitations.”

A mischievous grin appeared on Velie’s face.

“Really?” His voice struggled to subdue laughter. “You don’t say! You mean I could transform myself into a rose or a daisy if I wanted to?”

“Or, even more easily, a pig.”

The maharishi’s equanimity was supreme. Potash guffawed aloud, as did Carbone and Fitzgerald. Judge Langley, wreathed in smiles, banged his gavel half-heartedly as Velie, obviously chagrined, took the time to walk to his table and consult his notes.

“By the way,” Velie asked in an offhanded manner, “are you aware of the defendant’s belief that the victim in this case, the child, Ivy Templeton, is the reincarnation of his daughter, Audrey Rose?”

“I have been told that, yes.”

“Do you subscribe to his belief?”

“Yes, I believe it.”

Brice Mack was itching to object on a couple of legitimate grounds. The question assumed a fact not yet in evidence, and it certainly was not proper cross-examination since it went far beyond the scope of his direct examination; still, he restrained the impulse in the hope that Velie would lead the witness up the very channels that had been denied him by Elliot Hoover.

“Can you tell the jury your reasons for believing this to be true?” pursued the district attorney.

“Such occurrences are not uncommon in my land,” the maharishi replied. “Presently working in my ashram is a young student who is the reincarnation of a former student of mine who died in the cholera epidemic of 1936.”

The statement had a magical effect on the jury, Brice Mack noted; they all seemed to lean forward in their chairs in fascination.

The district attorney also noted the surge of sudden interest in the jury and quickly interposed, “Move to strike his answer as not responsive to my question.”

“So moved,” Judge Langley said. “The answer to the last question is stricken from the record, and the jury is instructed to disregard it.”

Scott Velie continued. “Let me repeat, can you tell the jury your reason for believing this—and by ‘this,’ I mean the defendant’s belief that the victim is the reincarnation of his daughter—to be true?”

The maharishi gazed across the courtroom at Elliot Hoover and graced him with a look that bespoke faith and confidence.

“I believe this to be true,” he said simply, “because a man of truth told me it was so.”

“I see,” Velie said, smiling. “Would you believe anything this man of truth told you?”

The maharishi returned the prosecutor’s smile.

“I would believe any truthful thing he told me.”

Judge Langley looked down at Brice Mack. “Any objection from the defense?”

“No objection,” Mack said. “I feel the state should have every opportunity to pursue the subject of reincarnation with the witness.”

“Very well, proceed,” the judge said to Scott Velie.

“Thank you, Your Honor,” Velie said, as he pored through his notes and finally found what he was looking for. “Oh, yes, let me ask you, Mr. Pradesh. These trips that astral beings take from a higher plane to a lower one, how are they made?”

The question drew a blank stare from the maharishi.

“Do they fly?” Velie pressed. “Do they have wings?”

“No, they are not as the angels on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” replied the maharishi in all seriousness. “Communication and travel from one astral plane to another is accomplished through telepathic means and is faster than the speed of light.”

“Really? Speaking of travel, may I ask how you got here?”

The maharishi’s clear brow furrowed in puzzlement.

“How I got here?”

“Yes, how you came to America?”

“I do not understand—”

“It’s a simple enough question. You certainly didn’t make the trip by telepathic means—”

“No. I was flown in an aircraft.”

“Precisely.” Scott Velie thumbed down his page of notes. “Air India, to be exact. Flight Seventeen, departed Calcutta the evening of December 23, arrived Kennedy Airport on the following afternoon at three thirty-five, which was the day before Christmas. Round trip first-class passage in the amount of two thousand, seven hundred, and twenty-eight dollars and fourteen cents was paid from a special legal account in the defendant’s name at Chase Manhattan Bank, as were all your personal expenses during the past month, which to this date, including your one-hundred-and twenty-dollar-a-day suite at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, come to the tidy figure of six thousand, three hundred, and fifty dollars, or thereabouts.” Velie lifted his eyes from his notes and fixed the witness with a cynical smile. “That’s quite a heap of living for a man who’s turned away from the gross and fleshly tendencies of the material world, wouldn’t you say?”

Brice Mack jumped to his feet, shocked to discover that Elliot Hoover’s bank records had been subpoenaed by the DA’s office.

“Your Honor, I object to this spurious, argumentative, and demeaning attack against the character of the witness. It has never been a secret that the defense paid for the Reverend Pradesh’s trip to America, as well as his expenses while he patiently stood by and awaited his day in court. The comforts provided His Holiness were never a request or condition of the maharishi but the generous gift of the defendant and, as such, are entirely proper, as the district attorney well knows.”

Before Judge Langley had a chance to rule on the defense’s objection, Scott Velie announced, “Your Honor, I will allow that the expenses incurred by Mr. Pradesh, while obviously excessive, may be deemed proper; however, since I was interrupted by defense counsel before the completion of my question, there is one more item that I wish to enter into the record.”

“Very well, continue,” Judge Langley said.

Consulting his notes, Velie dramatically dropped his bombshell.

“It is the item of a check drawn on the legal account of Elliot Hoover in the amount of twenty-five thousand dollars and made payable to Mr. Gupta Pradesh.”

Bill noticed the look of stunned amazement on Brice Mack’s face as he turned and rapidly conferred with his client. The sketch artist’s pen worked furiously to catch the various reactions on paper: Hoover and his attorney huddled in head-to-head colloquy, Judge Langley’s wide-eyed expression, Scott Velie lording triumphantly above the maharishi, whose eyes gazed up at the prosecutor with a serpentine malevolence.

“I now ask you, Mr. Pradesh,” Velie demand, “did you, in fact, receive such a check?”

“Yes, I did.”

“And were you given that check in exchange for your testimony?”

“I object to this line of questioning,” Brice Mack shouted, rising and facing the bench with an expression of helpless innocence. “I had no idea of the passage of money between the defendant and the witness, Your Honor; however, my client informs me that while the check was made in His Holiness’ name, it was specifically earmarked for philanthropic uses of the highest possible order and was never intended for his personal use.”

“Your Honor,” Scott Velie quickly put in, “Mr. Mack is not a witness or under oath, and I asked the question of Mr. Pradesh and not defense counsel; therefore, I move that the defense counsel’s remarks be stricken from the record as improper. It’s immaterial to what uses the money is eventually put. What is material is that a witness for the defense had received payment from the defendant. I submit that twenty-five thousand dollars can buy a lot of cooperation, and that this witness’ testimony has been bought and paid for.”

“Your Honor,” Brice Mack shouted, but was stopped from continuing by a hard hammerblow on the gavel.

“Just a minute,” Judge Langley warned. “I will not grant Mr. Velie’s motion to strike defense counsel’s remarks from the record, but on my own motion I will strike all remarks made by both counsel from the record, and I will instruct the jury to disregard all arguments advanced by both counsel in connection with their opinions as to the reason the witness was given a twenty-five-thousand-dollar check.”

Then, turning to Velie: “If you have any further questions to ask of this witness, do so.”

“I am still waiting for an answer to my last question, Your Honor.”

In the interests of accuracy and saving time, Judge Langley asked the court clerk to read the prosecutor’s question to the witness.

“‘And were you given that check in exchange for your testimony?’”

During the entire exchange between lawyers and bench, the maharishi had maintained the bland and imperturbable façade of a man who has mentally absented himself from a world he found both petty and vulgar. He seemed to Bill to be in a trance or, rather, on a different plane from the others and either failed to hear or chose to ignore the clerk’s question.

“The witness will answer the question,” Judge Langley sharply ordered.

Still the veil of apathy remained drawn across the maharishi’s eyes.

With a gunshot rap on his gavel, Judge Langley leaned over to the witness and barked, “Does the witness hear me?”

The sudden harshness of the hammerblow caused the maharishi to jump and awareness to flood back into his eyes. He stared up at the judge in the disoriented manner of a man just awakened from a sound sleep.

“You must answer the question,” the judge snapped.

“The question?” the maharishi repeated in a seeming daze.

The judge turned impatiently to the clerk. “Read the question again!”

“‘And were you given that check in exchange for your testimony?’”

As the full significance of the question, barbed as it was with insult and innuendo, was finally absorbed by the maharishi, his eyes became deeply aggrieved, and his face tautened with rancor, hurt, and hostility. In one sudden motion, he rose from the witness stand and proceeded to stalk floatingly out of the courtroom.

There was a collective gasp from the audience. Judge Langley had trouble finding his voice and, jerking up to his feet, finally shouted after the departing witness, “Stop! You have not been dismissed! Guard! Restrain that man! Seize him and return him to the witness stand!”

The maharishi was now through the gate railing and moving swiftly up the aisle toward the exit when the door guard sprinted toward him and collected his featherlight body in a powerful hug (later telling a reporter that it felt as if he were grabbing a bag of loose bones).

At the first wince of pain on the maharishi’s face, Elliot Hoover jumped up from his seat and bounded to the old Hindu’s rescue, clearing the railing in a sprightly jump, and, seizing the guard by the carotid artery, quickly separated the two men.

Bill, standing and watching with a helpless grin of amazement, felt a quick stab of pity for the guard, who immediately sank to the floor in a daze.

Judge Langley banged furiously with his gavel. “Order!” he shouted. “This is a court of justice! Guards, restrain the defendant!”

The two burly officers needed no admonition from the bench to join the fray and zeroed in on Hoover from opposite directions with their pistols drawn.

The reporters were all on their feet, as were the jurors—Mr. Fitzgerald, shaking his head in disbelief; Mrs. Carbone, hand at mouth, weeping in anguish and emotion, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”; Mr. Potash’s ferocious metallic laughter rising above the din of insanity in peal after peal of mindless merriment.

It was at this juncture of the pandemonium that Brice Mack, seated at the defense table, lowered his head into his hands in an effort to blot out the specter of his own ignominious defeat. What had been planned as a tasteful inquiry into the esthetics and religion of a far-flung people had turned, instead, into a rough-and-tumble street brawl. How any jury could ever be brought back to a sober frame of mind after a debacle of this magnitude was a deep and impenetrable mystery to him, one he couldn’t even bear to think of.

“I want handcuffs on the defendant!” the grating voice of Judge Langley cut through the darkness of Brice Mack’s despair. “Return the witness to the stand and see that he doesn’t leave it until he’s excused!”

The clinking of metal handcuffs added its note to the general commotion.

“Order!” The judge’s voice cracked with hysteria. “There will be order in the court or I will clear the courtroom! The spectators will be silent!”

Drawing his hands slowly from his face, the first sight to assail Mack was his client, sitting beside him in an attitude of stoic resignation, his left wrist cuffed to the chair arm, and a disheveled guard hovering vigilantly over him. Turning his gaze to the maharishi, Mack found the lean and stately form of the holy man hunched deeply into the witness chair, peering forlornly forth from a ball of rumpled saffron cloth. Two policemen stood threateningly on either side of the hapless Hindu’s chair.

“Mr. Mack,” growled Judge Langley, huffing and puffing as if he had just ran a race, “I am going to hold you responsible for the actions of your witness and your client. If you cannot control them, not only will I have them bound and strapped to their chairs, but I will hold you in contempt of court. Is that understood?”

The whipped-dog expression on the young lawyer’s face was committed to the artist’s pad as he meekly replied, “Yes, Your Honor.”

“Mr. Velie,” Judge Langley continued in a strident, no-nonsense voice, “you will ask your question of the witness.”

Scott Velie, who had been seated throughout most of the tumult and enjoying it, took his time in rising and then stood waiting for absolute silence before measuredly addressing the bench.

“Your Honor,” he said, “I withdraw the question.” And, fixing the witness with a look of monumental disdain, he added, “I have no further questions to ask the Reverend Pradesh!”

The courtroom sighed and recessed for lunch.

20

Brice Mack sat hunched over the platter of barbecued pork ribs, maintaining a sulky silence while his teeth tore at the fatty flesh, ripping cartilage from bone in quick, cruel bites. The need to tear into something, to rip and mutilate and deform was hard upon him, and Fred Hudson, the only member of the “team” to have joined him at the long table at Pinetta’s this bitter hour—having quickly gauged the boss’ manic mood—kept a wary and respectful distance between them.

Greasily sucking at a bone, Mack quietly observed Hudson and the empty chairs across and between them with eyes void of expression. He knew where the two lawyers were—still screwing around in the library, picking and scratching about in the books for precedential straws to grasp at, which at this point would be thoroughly useless. Professor Ahmanson, he knew, had gone to Washington Heights to collect James Beardsley Hancock, their next witness. Mack felt a small comfort that he’d had the foresight to order a limousine to cart the old boy down to the court-house to ensure his getting there on time. One more foul-up at this point, and Langley would throw the book at him. He was itching to do it.

Only Brennigan was unaccounted for. His last contact with the Irish sot was on Friday, just after the lunch recess, when he showed up with half a bag on and whispered to Mack that he was on to something. “Something,” he had cryptically added, “that’ll loosen Velie’s bowels, me boy.”

Slowly chewing and swallowing the crisp, pungent pork, the young lawyer’s thoughts veered back to James Beardsley Hancock, his last bright hope on a dismal and threatening horizon. Hoover’s adamant refusal to allow Marion Worthman to take the stand in his behalf had been reinforced by the Pradesh fiasco. Now only Hancock was left to lend his expertise to their case, a fact which not only failed to discourage Brice Mack, but sent an odd surge of renewed optimism coursing through him.

Having met and interviewed the old man on six separate occasions, Mack had finally come to know and truly to believe that James Beardsley Hancock would make an imposing study on the witness stand. At times, his look was Olympian; at others, Lincolnesque. His head could have graced a Roman coin or a Yankee postage stamp. His bearing transmitted respect; his leather-hard face and eagle-bright eyes conveyed honor, truth, and a fearsome integrity. In the courtroom he would seem to belong where the judge was sitting.

Recalling bits and pieces of their first meeting in the graceful sun room of Hancock’s house overlooking the Hudson River always had a tranquilizing effect on Brice Mack. It was a house that was bristling with historic markers and was reputed to have quartered George Washington and his staff during the Battle of Harlem Heights on the several occasions when his headquarters at Jumel Mansion was under British fire.

Mack had brought to that visit the inflexible mind of a skeptic in an attempt to test the old man’s power of persuasion on a jury and was shocked to find himself, after an hour’s worth of niggling questions and patient answers, completely taken in by Hancock’s soft-spoken scholarship, plied with the most delicate of trowels, speaking neither up nor down to his guest, but capturing and keeping the spark of interest at a constant flash point. Mack not only was enraptured, but refused to believe that the morning had long gone and that they had talked clear through the lunch hour.

Reflecting back on the substance of that first meeting, the lawyer attempted to reconstruct those points in Hancock’s talk that had so beguiled him. Instead of belaboring the issue of reincarnation with a scholar’s cudgel, the wise old man had made a game of it, accepting Mack’s skepticism and doubts and, on a number of occasions, seeming himself to be confounded, allowing Mack to help him with the answers.

At one point Mack had asked Hancock about proofs of reincarnation and whether or not he could cite specific examples to substantiate the concept that the soul had lived through many lifetimes. The old man gave the question serious thought before speaking.

“It’s never happened to me, unfortunately, but many people have told me of experiencing fragmentary recollections of former lives—moments of sudden recognition of people or places they had never met or been to before and that yet seemed familiar to them.”

Brice Mack had remembered several such events in his own lifetime and told Hancock how once, when he was a child, be had been sent to a free summer camp up in the Adirondacks and, one day, had become separated from his group during a woodland hike. Hopelessly lost, he had been forced to spend the night in this totally alien environment. He remembered how he had wandered, in tears, through the darkness until sleep overcame him and how, with the coming of dawn, he had awakened cold, frightened, and hungry to a sight that immediately calmed his fears and restored his confidence. It was the sight of a rocky stream vaguely seen through a density of trees, but so familiar a sight as to seem an old friend to him. He was stunned by his firsthand knowledge of the place and was able to describe every rock, rill, and overhanging branch to himself, knowing for certain that somehow he had witnessed the same scene before and not in a picture or a painting, for the very atmosphere, scented with pine pitch and morning dew, was also a distinctly remembered smell.

“Yes, yes.” The old man chuckled in delight. “You no doubt witnessed a scene that awakened memories of a past lying far back in the misty ages of a former lifetime. I am sure, too, that you were able to draw on that former experience to help you retrace your steps to safety?”

“That’s the strangest part of all,” admitted Mack. “At that point the whole woodland seemed familiar to me, and I was able to find my way back to camp without any trouble.”

After a moment’s sober reflection the old man had continued with a question: “Tell me, Brice, was your childhood a happy one?”

“Well—” the attorney grinned—“we were poor.”

“Were your parents gifted or unique in any way?”

Brice shrugged. “Not especially. They weren’t intellectuals, if that’s what you mean. They came from a long line of peasants and were honest, hardworking people.”

“The salt of the earth,” added Hancock with undoubted sincerity. “Isn’t it strange how often we see evidences of the ‘prodigy,’ the ‘youthful genius’ springing from such humble soil? Children possessing tastes, talents, predispositions, qualities that seem to spring from a deeper, richer loam than those of heredity and environment?”

Mack had felt himself blush. “Well,” he allowed, “I’m no genius.”

“And yet how certainly you seemed to gravitate toward a degree of intellectual achievement that neither heredity nor environment can account for. Reincarnationists would say that your work in this life had been preordained by the mental demands of a former life.”

It was at this point in their conversation, Brice Mack recalled, that they had been interrupted by Hancock’s housekeeper, a sprightly lady who seemed every bit as old as Hancock. It was time for his pills, four of them, placed on a freshly pressed linen napkin on a pewter tray alongside a crystal carafe of water and a glass. After she replenished Mack’s coffee cup and left the room with the tray, Mack was reminded of another case that he thought might interest Hancock.

It concerned the six-year-old son of a friend of his, a man he had known since childhood. Neither his friend nor his friend’s wife possessed any particular artistic qualities to set them apart from the normal run of people, yet the boy, at age five, one day sat at a piano and began to play with a skill that was amazing, while he had never had a lesson.

“And what of Pascal,” trilled the old man in a burst of uncontained joy, “who, at the age of twelve, mastered the greater part of plane geometry without instruction, drawing on the floor of his room all the figures in the First Book of Euclid? And Mozart, executing a sonata on the pianoforte with four-year-old fingers and composing an opera at the age of eight? And Rembrandt, drawing with masterly power before he could read? Can you doubt that these ‘old souls’ came to earth with remarkable powers acquired in a former existence?”

No, thought Mack, sucking at the marrow of a spare rib, and neither will the jury. The old boy’s enthusiasm was infectious. He had a way with a word and a con man’s gift for making the outlandish seem perfectly reasonable. The jury would listen to this man and believe him.

Mack glanced at his wristwatch. Twelve forty-seven. At this moment the limousine transporting the sum and substance of his case and the salvation of his professional reputation would be speeding down the southbound lanes of the West Side Drive en route to Foley Square. Gnawing at the rib, which was cold and greasy, Brice Mack reasoned that traffic would not be a problem at this early hour and that even now they might have arrived at their destination.

Had it been possible for the youthful and hopeful attorney to have known that at this very moment, instead of proceeding on a southward course, the limousine, with the aid of a police car’s sirens to clear its path, was speeding eastward toward the emergency room of Roosevelt Hospital containing the catatonic and moaning form of a very sick and very old man, certainly the porker whose ribs he had so rudely desecrated would have had its revenge, for Brice Mack would surely have choked on the last mouthful.

Janice got the news at three fifteen.

The phone was ringing as she and Ivy entered the suite at the Candlemas. Handed a number of messages at the desk—all from Bill and all marked “Call back. Urgent! 555-1461”—they had hurried up to the room to comply, but Bill got to them first.

“Where the hell have you been?” he shouted in a wild and hysterical petulance that Janice suspected was as much the result of alcohol as anger.

“Out,” she replied, effecting a calm for Ivy’s sake.

“Out? Damn it, Janice! You were told to stick by the phone!” His voice blasted in the receiver, causing static.

Janice felt an impulse to hang up but restrained it. Instead, she asked, “What’s the matter?”

“What’s the matter?” he mimicked. “Where the hell’ve you been, anyway? It’s all over the radio and TV!”

Janice resisted asking, “What is,” forcing Bill to continue.

“The defense’s case has collapsed!” he shouted in a delirium of hostility and joy and proceeded to fill her in on the incredible happenings of the morning. And then—Bill’s strident voice rose to a new height of emotion as he delivered the real bombshell—James Beardsley Hancock’s sudden heart attack, the defense’s key witness out of the picture, perhaps for good.…

“Congestive heart failure,” Bill blurted out. “The hospital’s last report has him deep in coma and critical. Brice Mack asked the court for a continuance till tomorrow morning in order to realign his witnesses, and damn it, Velie had to accede to his request because you weren’t there and he was afraid Mack would want to bring you on next.…”

“Oh,” Janice said.

“Velie’s pissed, Janice, and so am I. We had them off-balance, on the run. This whole damn business could have been over by morning. Now the bastards have time to regroup and re-form their strategy.”

“I’m sorry,” Janice whispered.

“Damn it.” Bill’s voice lost its edge of shrillness. “We just can’t go about doing as we damn please, Janice. We’re not living a normal life. We’re in a battle.”

“I know.” Janice’s soft reply held just the right note of ambiguity, She could feel him weighing what she’d said. When he spoke next, he was decidedly calmer.

“How’s Ivy?”

“She’s here. Would you like to speak with her?”

“How is she, Janice?” Bill insisted.

“Okay … I think.”

“You think? What does that mean? Is she sick or isn’t she?”

“Her throat’s better, and the cough is gone.”

“Well then, bring her back to the city with you!”

Janice was taken unawares. “When?”

“Now. On the next train. It shouldn’t take you long to check out of that place.”

Janice hesitated. “She’d prefer to stay in school.”

“And I’d prefer to have her home, where we can keep an eye on her.”

Janice protested. “But we’ll be in court all day.”

“She’ll be closer to us here than up there. I’ll hire a sitter or a nurse, if you want. Pack her up and take her along, okay?”

A vein was throbbing in Janice’s temple. Ivy must not return to the city. She mustn’t give in to him on this point, and yet to raise the question of why she mustn’t would only rekindle his anger and bring on a new wave of scorn and contempt for fears he considered not only foolish but traitorous.

“Janice?” Bill prodded after a too-lengthy pause. “I’ll be expecting both of you down tonight, okay?”

Janice found herself stepping back warily from the receiver, not knowing how to answer him. Then, unexpectedly, surprising herself, she thrust the phone at Ivy and told her, “Here, darling, Daddy wants to say hello.”

The happy and assured smile on her daughter’s face brought a flush of guilt to Janice’s cheeks. It was difficult to stand there quietly and to smile as Ivy chattered innocently and with total unawareness that she had been used as the stopgap in an irreconcilable situation.

“… but I can’t come home now,” Ivy beseeched. “Tomorrow’s the crowning, and I just can’t miss it. We all worked so hard on Sylvester. Please, Daddy, please let me stay!”

Her pathetic pleas to remain gradually found a receptive ear, and soon Janice saw the clouds of gloom disperse and sunshine return to her face.

“Oh, thank you, Daddy,” she cried. “And please don’t worry, I’m really feeling much better. I haven’t coughed once since we got to the room.” Ivy’s eyes flicked toward Janice. “Yes, she’s here, I’ll put her on. And, Daddy, I love you—”

Janice’s grip tightened on the phone, and hearing Bill’s breathing on the other end, she cleared her throat.

“Thanks,” he said curtly. “Thanks a lot.” His comment required no response, and she made none. “What’s this crowning all about?”

“It’s an every-year thing they do at the school, with the snowman.”

There was a short space of silence.

“You feel all right about leaving her there?”

“Yes, I do,” Janice said firmly.

His voice was downcast. “All right. Get down as soon as you can. I’ll wait dinner for you.”

“Fine.”

Janice hung up the phone and turned to Ivy.

“We must pack quickly if we’re going to get you back to school in time for dinner.”

“I’m packed already,” Ivy said a bit nervously. “Remember?”

Yes, Janice remembered. It was for an instant an effort to remember, principally because with memory returned the sickness in her heart, the feeling of dread that had relentlessly pursued her ever since Bill had left the night before. The things that had happened in—what?—less than twenty-four hours, things that Bill would surely have considered trifling and innocuous, were things which, step by step, had plunged her into a renewed state of panic and despair.

It began Sunday night, several hours after she and Ivy had gone to bed—Janice in the bedroom, Ivy next door in the sitting room. Janice had considered sharing the big bed with Ivy and would have if Ivy had wanted to, but since she didn’t mention it, Janice didn’t encourage it.

After calling out their last good-nights to each other in the darkness, Ivy had asked, “Mom, what’s her name?”

The question troubled Janice, for she knew full well to whom Ivy was referring. Still, she had needlessly asked, “Who?”

“Mr. Hoover’s little girl.”

“Audrey Rose.”

Janice could sense Ivy considering it.

“That’s pretty.”

After another moment of silence, Ivy moved a thought closer.

“Do you think she looked like me?”

“No,” Janice answered abruptly.

“How do you know?”

“He showed us a picture of her. She had black hair and dark eyes, and her face didn’t look anything like yours.” Then, putting a cap on the conversation: “Shall we get some sleep now, darling?”

“Okay. Good night.”

“Good night.”

Later Janice was awakened by a slight disturbance. It was the soft creaking of the connecting door and the dying edge of a shaft of light as it closed.

Alerted by the possibility of illness, Janice quickly rose from the bed without turning on the lamp and quietly went to the door. She opened it a crack and saw that the light emerged from the bathroom at the far end of the sitting room. Ordinarily, she would have simply called out to Ivy and asked if anything was wrong, but some inner sense, vague and unspecific, stopped her from doing so. Instead, she silently padded across the ill-lit room to a point still some distance from the bathroom, but that afforded a clear view through the half-open door, whereupon she came to an abrupt stop.

Standing naked before the wall mirror, gazing transfixed at her own dimly reflected image, was Ivy. Her budding breasts pressed close to the glass, there was a strange, mad light in her eyes as they plumbed the eyes in the mirror, seeming to seek a route through the pale and glistening orbs and beyond, into the deep, impenetrable darkness that lay on the other side. For a moment, Janice thought it was the prelude to a nightmare—her proximity to the glass, the dazed, empty expression, her trancelike immobility all seemed to point in that direction—and she was about to enter when, all of a sudden, Ivy began to giggle: tinkling, high-pitched, girlish giggles directed at the image of herself in the mirror, at the eyes that returned the opaque, vacant gaze. Janice felt her knees trembling. The sight of her daughter’s nakedness, the bizarre laughter that seemed both childishly innocent and hideously sinister were totally mesmerizing. Then the laughter stopped as abruptly as it had started, and in a soft, taunting voice, Ivy began to croon the name

“Audrey Rose? Audrey Rose?”

Janice put a hand on the dresser to steady herself, then silently wheeled around and picked her way back to her own room, softly shutting the door behind her. Turning on the bed lamp, she consulted her watch. Twelve fifteen. The light from the lamp and the noises she purposely made alerted Ivy, and soon Janice heard the toilet flushing and her footsteps pattering across the floor back to bed. Janice waited a minute before opening the door and looking in on her. She lay on her side with her face to the wall and the blanket pulled tightly around her neck. Her pajamas were on the floor next to the bed.

“Are you all right?” Janice asked.

Ivy turned to her mother with a sleepy face of candid innocence and sweetness of youth.

“Umm.” She smiled. “Had to go to the bathroom.”

Sleep eluded Janice for what seemed hours. The fears, the terrors, the complexities, the tangles, the unhappy moments, the fevered pace of the past months pursued her toward dawn with a harpy’s persistence.

She was awakened by a shaft of sunlight, hot and bright, digging into her eyes. For a split second she didn’t know where she was, only that a light was burning her eyes and that a voice was shouting, “Mom! Mom!” She sat up.

“Yes—what is it?”

Struggling out of bed, she ran to the door and flung it open. And saw Ivy, standing in her pajamas in the center of the sitting room, shock and anguish splitting her face, her blond hair tousled.

“Mom, my things are gone. All my clothes—dresses, jeans, everything!”

“Gone? What do you mean, ‘gone’?”

Janice automatically moved toward the closet.

“They’ve been stolen!” Ivy persisted. “Somebody must’ve stolen them! Hairbrush, toothpaste, shampoo, everything! Even my medicine!” At which point she coughed reflexively.

“That’s impossible—”

“Well, look for yourself,” Ivy chided and, pointing to a chair overflowing with clothing, added, “The only things they didn’t take are what I wore yesterday. And my hat and coat.”

Janice opened the closet door and saw the row of divested wire hangers. Her eyes drifted down to the floor, which was barren of shoes and boots. She felt a clammy perspiration on her forehead and strove to contain her anxiety so as not to upset Ivy further. Turning to the dresser, she casually opened each drawer to assure herself they were empty.

Ivy’s lips drew into a grim line.

“Robbers must’ve come while we slept, Mom.”

Janice forced herself to smile.

“What would robbers want with your clothes?”

Even before she finished the sentence, she noticed the suitcase peeking out from under the rollaway.

“They didn’t seem to want your suitcase,” Janice idly commented, dragging it out onto the floor and finding it heavy. Releasing the clasps, the lid practically exploded under the pressure of clothes, bottles, brushes, boots, shoes, all beautifully and expertly packed.

Turning to Ivy to question her about it, Janice was stopped by the look of stunned amazement on her daughter’s face, a look that was completely genuine and spontaneous, a look no actor could have simulated.

“Who did that?” Ivy said in a tiny, stricken voice.

“One of us must have,” Janice said lightly.

“I didn’t!” Ivy exclaimed, putting all the force she could manage into the denial.

There was no doubt in Janice’s mind that Ivy had some time during the night packed the suitcase, just as certainly as there was no doubt that she had no idea she had done so.

Later, at breakfast, Ivy suggested that Bill might have packed the bag before leaving for the city.

“You know how much he wants me back home. He really doesn’t like my being up here. Maybe it was his way of saying so.”

“You mean, like a hint?”

“It’s possible, isn’t it?”

“It’s possible,” Janice managed, putting down her coffee cup which was slopping over the sides from the trembling of her hand.

The time was not quite seven, and they were alone in the breakfast room. Outside was one of those infrequent mornings in midwinter when the sun seems to shed a warm and kindly light over the whole world. Ivy thought it would be fun having a picnic on the beach, and though it meant deserting her post at the telephone, Janice was quick to agree, hopeful that the therapy of salt air and sun-baked sands would help to calm her flesh and spirit. Her mind was a tempest of thoughts and conjectures, a whirling confusion of half-formed fears centering on the eye of a single fact: Ivy had packed her bag without realizing it. Why? What did it mean? If the act was beyond Ivy’s control, then Audrey Rose must have been the motivating force behind it. If so, was it merely a symbolic statement, or did it have a practical application? A packed bag could mean but one thing. A trip. Was Audrey Rose pushing Ivy back to the city? Back to home—and Hoover? Was this her scheme? If so, how had she thought to accomplish it? A girl of ten—alone—with no money and no real knowledge of travel? The questions dizzied her, bringing a shocked, curling smile to her lips and a look of dumbstruck wonderment to her eyes. If Bill were privy to her fears, he would certainly have her locked up.

Her fears were to be confirmed later that morning.

There were gray clouds and stinging gusts of wind at the beach. Janice was sitting on the blanket, watching Ivy at the shoreline pitching shells into the boiling surf, when a sudden strong gust blew a speck of sand into her eye causing it to water furiously. Her hand felt its way to her tote bag for Kleenex, and after groping about and finding none, she looked down and discovered she was rummaging about in Ivy’s tote bag by accident.

She came upon the train schedule almost at once—a printed leaflet offered by the New York, New Haven and Hartford, listing train arrivals and departures between New York and Westport. The pain in her eye forgotten, Janice hurriedly continued to go through the tote bag, darting surreptitious glances at Ivy still at the water’s edge with her back turned, and drew out the blue satin hand-painted purse. She found the ten-dollar bill in a plastic folder tucked between two pictures, one of Janice and one of Bill.

An aura of doom closed around her as she conveyed both money and train schedule to her own purse, bringing a darkening pall to the lemon-bright day.

Janice knew that her daughter had taken both items from her purse, by her own conscious act or as the unconscious instrument of Audrey Rose’s desperate need to return to the city.

There was a way to find out, and when Ivy came walking toward her, her face ivory-pale, her eyes downcast, introspective, Janice casually asked, “Shall we go home, darling?”

“To the hotel?”

“No, to the city, to Daddy.”

“Do I have to?”

“Wouldn’t you like to?”

“No, not now, please!” she cried in a burst of passion that was obviously sincere. “I must go back to school. There are so many things happening right now that I can’t miss. Tomorrow’s the crowning, and afterward there’ll be a party in the rec room. It’s all we’ve talked about for weeks! Please, Mom, don’t take me back!”

She had slowly descended to her knees, bringing her tearful, beseeching face in close proximity to Janice’s.

“Okay, okay,” Janice soothed, reaching out to wipe a tear from the pale and worried face. “Of course, you can stay.”

Gazing into the blue eyes that met hers so candidly, the serious, yet tender mouth, she could feel no doubt at all about who the thief had been—and why.

Janice arrived in Grand Central Station on the 7:05 and quickly found a cab outside the loading ramp on Vanderbilt Avenue.

Having bought a late-edition Post in the station, she scanned the headlines, finding, in the rising and falling light of street-lamps and shop windows, nothing of interest on the front page.

The story, however, filled page three, continued on pages thirty-seven and eight, and was replete with sketches covering the highlights of the morning’s mayhem.

A small box in the center of the page told of James Beardsley Hancock’s heart attack and contained a quotation from Dr. John Whiting, a cardiologist in the intensive care unit at Roosevelt Hospital. “His condition is critical, but he seems to be holding his own. The next twelve hours will tell.”

Entering the lobby of Des Artistes, Janice had the feeling of having been away for months. Mario’s greeting was effusive, as was Dominick’s as they rode up the elevator. There was a flush of victory in the air, the kind of jubilant delirium that follows a war’s end.

She even found Bill sparkling, flushed with the day’s success and in a celebrating mood, which was totally unexpected. She had prepared herself for a sullen and quarrelsome evening and was, instead, greeted with festive gaiety and lingering kisses. After her trials of the past twenty-four hours this was precisely what she needed.

The bridge table had been lovingly set for two before the fireplace, crackling and sputtering and exuding a pine-scented warmth. A magnum of Taittinger was icing frostily in the bucket. Large red apples, a wheel of Brie, and a crispy cold roast duck in foil tray garnished with minted greens awaited their appetites. Janice was overcome.

“How lovely,” she said.

Bill grinned and twirled the bottle in its bucket. He seemed sober, which meant he had slept since they talked. He was dressed in pajamas and robe and was gazing at her longingly.

“Hurry down,” he said, with a meaning that didn’t escape her.

Bill timed it so that the cork popped as Janice, fresh and scented and in filmy, flowing peignoir, descended the staircase.

Their first toast was to success.

“Pel Simmons called,” he told her, chuckling. “The old boy was really fractured by the day’s events—couldn’t stop laughing—kept congratulating me over and over, as if I’d had anything to do with it. Good to hear, though,” he added, draining his glass. “Restores the faith.”

He topped off their glasses. The second toast was to health—theirs and Ivy’s.

“We’ve all been through a hell of a lot,” he said, his expression hardening, “too damn much. But it’ll be over soon. The seven o’clock news had Hancock sinking fast, poor old guy.”

The tragic face he affected failed to camouflage the note of exultation in his voice.

“The defense is scrambling for cover. Velie tells me two lawyers spent the afternoon down at the hospital trying to con the doctors into allowing them to set up a deposition, but Hancock’s on ‘critical,’ and chances are they never will.” Bill grinned. “Desperation time.”

He refilled his own glass.

“It will be over, you know,” he assured Janice. “All we have to do now is sit tight and keep our cool. Mack’s run out of time and people. Velie said that Hoover rejected his last expert witness—you know the one, that woman on the talk shows—the witch.” Bill laughed. “Can’t say I blame the nut. Probably the best decision he’s made so far. With their luck she’d probably put a hex on the court—turn Langley into a goddamn bat—he’s half bats already—”

Janice maintained a careful noncommittal smile that she hoped would conceal her shock at the callousness of his remarks.

“By this time tomorrow it’ll all be over but the shouting,” he went on thickly, putting down his glass and approaching her. “And when it finally is, there’s a hell of a lot of making up I’m gonna have to do to you. I know what I’ve been, Janice. And what I haven’t been.”

Janice felt herself stiffen in his arms as he kissed her, and she tried to repress it, tried to relax, but failed. Bill either didn’t sense it or didn’t care.

They made love on the rug, unsatisfactorily, then ate in silence and went to bed.

Bill feel asleep before Janice.

At three o’clock in the afternoon of that same day Brice Mack, laden down with hat, overcoat, and bulging briefcase, left the interviewing room and began to walk down the long Spartan corridor toward the elevators. His gait was sluggish as his head was aching, and the glaring fluorescents reflecting hot and bright off the enameled walls hurt his eyes. His underclothing clung damply to his skin, and his face felt clammy and feverish. He was suffering all the usual symptoms of another claustrophobic bout with Hoover; only this time, instead of dissipating, the symptoms seemed to linger and escalate. He smiled wanly and reflected on what his blood pressure must be at this moment and decided he wouldn’t care to know.

The meeting had been a normal one—predictable and totally bizarre. He knew in advance there would be no way to make his client understand the direness of their situation, that they were down to the wire and would lose the case unless they acted with boldness and daring.

“You don’t seem to understand,” insisted Mack anxiously. “There’s nobody left. By the time Professor Ahmanson finds a replacement for Hancock, it’ll be too late—unless we bring in Marion Worthman as a stopgap. I can keep her going for days.”

Hoover’s eyes narrowed to cynical slits, minutely studying the perspiring attorney.

“Don’t worry so much, lawyer,” he said imperiously, then added cryptically, “this case won’t be won by Mrs. Worthman’s presence, nor will it be lost by her absence. Whether you believe it or not, the verdict is already in. It was written long before you entered the case.”

The remark had literally flabbergasted Brice Mack. For a moment he thought he would burst out laughing. It could not be said that life till now with Elliot Hoover had been entirely logical or sane, but this—this was pure, unadulterated, looney-bin talk.

“I wouldn’t know about that, Mr. Hoover,” Mack had replied. “I don’t try my cases with a crystal ball. I’m forced to rely on the plain, ordinary, everyday methods prescribed by Sir William Blackstone.”

Hoover was neither impressed nor offended by the remark and, seeming to dismiss it entirely, hunched forward across the table with an arch smile and softly confided to Mack, “A great man once said, ‘Coincidence, traced back far enough, becomes the inevitable.’ What happened today, for example, the gross and shameful degradation of a saint; the sudden illness of a key witness—these were not simply arbitrary occurrences, but necessary steps in a larger and infinitely complex movement of events that will inevitably lead to a predetermined conclusion, the nature of which will ultimately be revealed to us in its own good time. There is nothing you or I can do to alter its course. It is clear to me now that the case you so carefully planned and structured was always doomed to fail. In other words, you have tried to manipulate the unmanipulatable. Goaded on by personal ambition, you have tinkered with the workings of a force far beyond the scope of your knowledge and have been soundly repudiated. There is no further need for you to ponder, plan, or toil in my behalf. All matters will attend to themselves, so just sit back and relax. The machine purrs smoothly under its own management. Even now, as we sit and chat, forces are aligning themselves to feed its forward momentum and bring about those events and those people who will bear witness to my innocence and render justice in my behalf.”

A wacky, though comforting philosophy, Mack reflected while waiting for the elevator to arrive. Yes, a comforting philosophy until one pinned it down to just who “those people” were. It sure as hell wouldn’t be the Templetons, even allowing Hoover’s boy scout faith in the basic honesty and integrity of Janice Templeton. Nor would his salvation descend on him like a bolt of lightning from a smiling sky. The attorney found himself chuckling. Miracles yet! If such things were possible, who’d need lawyers? Sit back and relax, he’d said. Sure, in the poorhouse, because they’d all be out of jobs.

While at the time these thoughts were simply an exercise in frustration, they would remain in the lawyer’s memory the rest of his life, for just as one elevator arrived, so did a second one, discharging Reggie Brennigan. Later Mack would puzzle deeply over the coincidence of the two cars arriving at precisely the same time and of the detective stepping out of one just as he stepped into the other, each failing to see the other until Mack turned and caught a fleeting glimpse of frayed coat collar, stained and battered hat, and thick red neck through the closing slit of his elevator door. Later he would ponder over the split-second decision to thrust his arm through the narrowing breach.

“Ah! There you are, me, boy.” The old cop exuded a stale, winy breath into Mack’s face.

“Where the hell’ve you been?” the lawyer grumbled in distaste and nausea.

“Places,” wheezed Brennigan with a sly grin, and tapped his coat pocket significantly. Then, pointing toward the men’s room at the end of the corridor, he added, “Shall we step into the presidential suite?” His pale and watery eyes attempted a twinkle and failed.

A few minutes later Mack found himself inside a toilet booth behind a locked door, reluctantly sitting on the commode with his trousers lowered, all at Brennigan’s insistence, “for the sake of appearances, you know …” The detective occupied the adjoining booth, sitting similarly, and only after carefully judging that the coast was clear, did he slip his find to Brice Mack through the space at the bottom of the separating wall.

The several dozen photo blow-ups were of such poor quality that the lawyer could hardly make them out in the poorly lit stall. They were photographs of documents, to be sure, written in a quick, scratchy hand that, under the best of circumstances, would have been difficult to read. Riffling through the batch, Mack paused at one and felt his heart skip a beat. It was a photograph of a manila file folder with the name “Templeton” printed boldly across the tab.

During the next five minutes, the lawyer, having forced his perceptions beyond the limit of their powers, was able to wring enough data out of the documents to convince him that herein lay the bulwark of his case: the much-needed missing element.

His face was hot and flushed, and his voice cracked when finally he spoke to Brennigan.

“Is this stuff legitimate?”

The detective chortled hollowly back through the wall separating them.

“Is a pig’s pussy pork?”

“Jesus! Where’d you find it?”

“Where it’s been sitting these seven years—in the file room of the Park East Psychiatric Clinic on One Hundred Sixth Street and Fifth Avenue.”

“Jesus!” The excitement in Brice Mack’s voice was beyond restraint. “How the hell did you get in? I mean … how’d you get these photos?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“No,” the lawyer said quickly, and heard Brennigan laugh, and then heard a small slurping sound as the detective swallowed something from a bottle. “Did you talk to this Dr. Vassar?”

“No, she’s dead. I spoke with a doctor named Perez, a young talkative spic who used to assist her. Knows all about the case.”

“Jesus—” was all Mack could say.

At this point, someone came into the men’s room and noisily entered a stall at the far end. During the five minutes of enforced silence, Brice Mack’s emotions ran the gamut from delirious enthusiasm to numbing despondency. After the interloper had flushed, washed, combed, whistled a strain from “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” and left, the lawyer unloaded his despair onto the old cop.

“We’ll never be able to get this into the evidence. It’s a privileged communication.”

A soft, wheezing laugh which, at first, the lawyer mistook for a strained and flaccid fart preceded the appearance at the base of the wall of still another batch of documents, which, incredibly, turned out to be a Xeroxed copy of a 1040 form for the year 1967—the joint return of William P. and Janice Templeton.

Mack’s amazement was unbounded.

“Don’t tell me you also broke into the Treasury Department!”

“I’ll tell you all about it one day.” The detective chuckled, then instructed: “Turn to the clipped page.”

Mack’s fumbling fingers found the clip and turned to a page of medical deductions, a long and detailed list that only gradually revealed its secret. And there it was—on two separate lines—the lead to the Park East Psychiatric Clinic and, immediately below it, the item that blew their privilege.

It was too much for the attorney’s bruised and battered mind to handle all at once. Too goddamn much to think about while sitting on a crapper with his pants on the floor in the heart of the citadel of justice.

Brice Mack shook his aching head in a weary but happy way and tried to lean back against the wall but was prevented from doing so by a complication of pipes and knobs which dug into his back and which started him laughing. A laughter soon joined in by the old, lovely, besotted, beet-faced ex-cop in the adjoining stall. Mack could envision the dying eyes staring out of the pickled face, and the pathos of the image suddenly struck at his heart roots, and his laughter eased as memory took over. The memory of something his father had once said to him—long ago—after a bum had come to their door for a handout and, for good reason, was politely refused.

“My pity, I could not help him,” Max had said in Yiddish, weeping. “He is a man, a creature made in God’s image, with a mind and a spirit that might have been the salvation of the world. It is my pity that I could not help him.”

A humble smile came to Brice Mack’s lips as he thought about all the avenues that Reggie Brennigan—this creature in God’s image—had opened to him. And then he thought of what Elliot Hoover had said, and the smile became fixed. The machine purred smoothly forward under its own power—aligning forces, creating events, introducing people.…

Could it be?

Was it really possible?

21

The sight of the lean olive-skinned man, soberly dressed in dark suit and carrying a slim briefcase, stepping through the door into the courtroom at 8:55 a.m. on Tuesday, triggered a sudden déjà vu in Bill Templeton. Somewhere, recently, he had seen this man, had seen the face in close proximity thrust before his own in a fleeting encounter. He couldn’t be certain where, only that the face was familiar and that his instinctive reaction was one of panic.

Bill’s eyes fastened blatantly on the man’s face as he walked through the rail gate and took a seat at the end of their row.

It was at this weak and anxious moment that the identity of the man came to him in a sudden flash. They had met at the Park East Psychiatric Clinic. They had almost collided in the hallway that day he went to examine Dr. Vassar’s notebook.

Bill felt a cold sweat sprout on his face as Judge Langley, cross and tired, entered the courtroom and hurriedly convened the court. Bill’s memory of the man’s name was soon refreshed by Brice Mack, who stood and, in a voice both bright and eager, said, “I call as my next witness Dr. Gregory Alonzo Perez.”

Even before Perez stood up, Janice saw the quick, puzzled expression leap into Scott Velie’s eyes as he turned to the courtroom, studying first the witness moving through the gate, then Bill, with a gaze that was intensely questioning. Bill’s only response was to sigh deeply and shake his head in an abject way.

The news-hungry press leaned forward in their seats as the witness took the stand and was sworn in by the bailiff. A polite silence ensued while Brice Mack allowed Perez to make himself comfortable.

“Would you state your full name, please?” he asked in a soft, friendly voice.

“Gregory Alonzo Federico Perez.”

“And what is your profession?”

“I am a Doctor of Psychiatry.”

Bill recalled the thin Spanish-accented voice from their phone conversation of more than two months before.

“Are you licensed to practice in this city?”

“Yes.”

“And at what address do you practice?”

“I hold a clinical appointment at the Park East Psychiatric Clinic at 1010 Fifth Avenue.”

An expression of fear passed over Janice’s face at the mention of the clinic.

“Will you tell the jury when you first received your appointment at the Park East Clinic?”

“Immediately after completing my training at the Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital in Towson, Maryland, I arrived at Park East and served my internship there. The year was 1966.”

“At that time were you brought into contact with Dr. Ellen Vassar?”

Scott Velie’s lips pursed as if to speak, but he restrained himself.

“Yes, I worked closely with Dr. Vassar as her assistant for six years, until her death in 1972.”

“Would I be correct in assuming that during that time you were familiar with most of Dr. Vassar’s cases?”

“Yes. All her cases.”

“Are you familiar with a case involving a patient named Ivy Templeton, who received treatment from Dr. Vassar during the period commencing December 12, 1966, and extending through September 23, 1967?”

Scott Velie rose slowly, his brow furrowed pensively, and in a flat, undramatic voice, said, “This is privileged information, Your Honor. Defense is getting into the question of a doctor-patient relationship, and this is privileged, and we object to it on that basis.”

Mack, with an eye on the jury, quickly interposed, “There’s no question that the privilege exists, Your Honor; however, in this case there has been a waiver of the privilege by the child’s parents.”

“At no time,” Velie lashed back, “have the parents of Ivy Templeton waived the privilege, Your Honor. I contend the question violates the doctor-patient privilege rule and is objectionable, and I—”

Judge Langley had begun to bang his gavel and cut in with: “Just a second here.” Then, turning a questioning face toward Brice Mack: “Are you prepared to make an offer of proof to support your claim of waiver?”

Mack, savoring this moment, said, “I am prepared to introduce into evidence three documents that clearly establish a waiver by the parents of Ivy Templeton of the doctor-patient privilege. One, the claim filed by Mr. and Mrs. Templeton with the Mutual Insurance Company of Manhattan. Two, the insurance claim form of the Mutual Insurance Company of Manhattan, completed by Dr. Vassar and submitted to the insurance company. And three, the written supplementary statement concerning Ivy Templeton’s mental disturbances, prepared by Dr. Vassar and submitted to the Mutual Insurance Company of Manhattan, all at the request of and with the authorization of Mr. and Mrs. Templeton.”

Velie shouted, “That’s not really a true waiver! It was only made for the purpose of collecting insurance money and wasn’t intended to reveal the nature and contents of the child’s illness!”

Judge Langley banged the gavel.

“They can’t have their cake and eat it,” he admonished the prosecutor. “They wanted to get reimbursed, and they had no objection to submitting information on the child’s illness to a third party—namely, the insurance company’s file clerks, typists, claim adjusters, and so forth. You can’t claim privilege here, Mr. Velie. I deem it’s been waived. Objection overruled.”

Brice Mack turned back to the witness, wearing the smile of a victor. “Once again, Dr. Perez, are you familiar with a case involving a patient named Ivy Templeton, who received treatment from Dr. Vassar during the period commencing December 12, 1966, and extending through September 23, 1967?”

“Yes.”

Brice Mack next addressed the bench. “Your Honor, in view of Dr. Perez’s answer I ask your indulgence to have him step down from the stand. I’d like to put another witness on the stand out of order so as to lay a foundation for the introduction into evidence of the three documents I’ve just mentioned to you.”

“Proceed,” Judge Langley said.

Dr. Perez resumed his seat in the witness row while Frank Tallman, custodian of records for the Mutual Insurance Company of Manhattan, was called to the stand and sworn in.

During the transaction, Brice Mack glanced briefly at the Templetons and was not surprised to see them both slumped deeply in their seats, wearing expressions of shock, fear, and self-recrimination.

In total command of himself and greatly relishing the moment, the defense attorney quickly ascertained from the custodian of records his name, function, and the nature and contents of the record room over which he held custodianship. Brice Mack then asked him to identify the file which he had been subpoenaed to produce in court. Taking a folder from his briefcase, Tallman described it as a file concerning the claim of Mr. and Mrs. Templeton for reimbursement of medical expenses incurred by their daughter during the period of December 12, 1966, and September 23, 1967.

Selecting the three documents he had previously referred to from the file, Brice Mack offered them into evidence as Defense Exhibits One, Two, and Three, captioned “Templeton” and as identified by the witness.

Whereupon Scott Velie rose and, putting a good face on a bad situation, not only agreed to their admission, but insisted, “Your Honor, I think the entire file ought to go into the evidence.” And further to demonstrate his utter lack of concern over their introduction into evidence, he even declined the right and privilege to examine the exhibits.

It was all over and done with in less than five minutes, at which point Frank Tallman returned the witness chair to Dr. Perez.

Brice Mack’s smile went out to him like a soft embrace.

“Dr. Perez, will you tell the court something about the reputation Dr. Vassar enjoyed as a psychiatrist?”

“Certainly. She was an acknowledged leader in her field, being that of child psychiatry. She was in great demand as a lecturer, and she published frequently. Her papers are considered definitive by most psychiatrists even today. She was a brilliant woman.”

“Thank you. Now, you said you worked in close association with Dr. Vassar until the time of her death?”

“Yes.”

“And that you were privy to all her cases?”

“Yes.”

“Dr. Perez, the subpoena served upon you required that you produce a file of Dr. Vassar’s concerning her patient, Ivy Templeton. Have you produced those records?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have them with you?”

“Yes.”

“May I see them?”

With a nod, the witness unzipped his briefcase and removed the file folder that was immediately recognizable to Bill and Janice.

Accepting the folder, Brice Mack held it up to the witness.

“I show you a file folder, dated December 12, 1966, to September 23, 1967, and bearing the caption Templeton. Can you identify it?”

“Yes. It is the file containing the records of the examination and interviews and conclusions concerning a patient named Ivy Templeton, who, at two and a half years of age, came under the psychiatric care of Dr. Vassar during the period of those dates.”

Turning to the bench, Mack said, “Your Honor, I offer this entire file into evidence as Defense Exhibit Number Four and ask that its entire contents be read into the record.”

Velie stood. “Your Honor, defendant’s attorney hasn’t even shown me the common courtesy to permit me to examine this file before showing it to the witness. I ask that before the file is accepted into evidence, I be allowed to examine it.”

“Granted.” Judge Langley rose. “Court will take a thirty-minute recess.”

“What do you think?” Bill asked.

Velie’s hand lifted tenuously to ward off distraction as he continued flipping through the pages, dwelling at great length on the final entry, which referred to Jungian archetypes as a possible explanation for the nightmares. At last Velie shut the small book with a thump and sighed deeply.

“Well, I haven’t found any material I think I can exclude on the basis of hearsay.” He looked at Bill starkly. “It certainly opens a door for them.”

“They didn’t have this file yesterday,” Bill said hotly.

Noting Bill’s hunched-over, hangdog expression, the district attorney smiled and said equably, “He’s opened a door, Bill, but let’s not commit suicide till we find out what he thinks there is on the other side of it.”

When court reconvened at ten forty, Brice Mack quickly renewed his motion to introduce the file into evidence. No objection was made by the district attorney, and the court ordered it marked as Defense Exhibit Four. At that point Brice Mack again asked the court’s permission to read the entire file into the record.

Scott Velie came to his feet, pouting. “Your Honor, it’s a voluminous file. The jury will have the opportunity to take the file into the jury room for assistance in its deliberations if it so chooses, and we strongly feel that it would be an unnecessary abuse of the court’s time to permit the reading of the entire file into the evidence.”

“Your Honor,” Mack sighed with a maddening indolence—“I do ask the court’s indulgence to read the entire file into the evidence, for I believe that it will assist the jury in intelligently evaluating the testimony that will be forthcoming in the trial if they have heard its contents.”

Judge Langley, who seemed more than interested in hearing the entire contents of the file himself, quickly decided in favor of the defense.

The balance of the morning was spent in reading its contents into the record. Brice Mack identified each page of the notebook by page count and slowly enunciated each entry, struggling over the pronunciation of the more complex psychiatric terms and often being forced to spell a word into the record.

When the reading came to an end, a hushed expectancy hovered over the courtroom while Judge Langley considered his next move, which, although it was twenty minutes shy of twelve o’clock, was to declare the noon break.

Janice skipped lunch at Pinetta’s on the pretext of some fictional errands. There was nothing ambiguous in the looks Bill had been sending her throughout the morning session, and her innate sense of danger ahead had sent up enough warning signals to convince her that his company was to be avoided at all costs. With a couple of martinis inside him, the short fuse on a temper that was boiling murderously close to the surface was sure to erupt, especially if she was there to ignite it.

Getting a call through to Ivy at Mount Carmel was an equally urgent reason for missing lunch. She had planned to call that morning; but Bill had routed her out of the apartment too early, and the courtroom pressures of the morning session had also prevented her from doing so.

Having lost three of her dimes, Janice trudged up and down icy streets in a biting wind, seeking a telephone booth with a working phone, and finally found one in the warm and aromatic precincts of an Optimo cigar store.

The woman who answered her call was a secular teacher named Miss Halderman, or Alderman, an assistant art teacher who supervised the lower grades. Her sprightly voice informed Janice that the girls had just finished lunch and were happily engaged in preparing Sylvester for the crowning and melting ceremonies that were due to commence at four fifteen sharp. Yes, Ivy was fine; in fact, Miss Alderman could spot her through the office window—at least, the lovely blond hair seemed to be Ivy’s—in the midst of a group of girls who were helping Mr. Calitri, the school custodian, pile the boxes. Did Janice want her to go fetch Ivy?

“No, it’s all right,” Janice said, feeling a sudden unaccountable chill in the oven-warm booth. “I don’t want to bother her. I just called to see how she is.”

On the walk back to the Criminal Courts Building, Janice went into a pharmacy to buy some aspirin. Her head felt light, and the chill persisted.

Inside the lobby, she stopped at a fountain and took three aspirin. As she rose from the water spout, a wave of dizziness seized her, forcing her to grab onto the porcelain basin to keep from falling. She was trembling. Uncontrollably. Dear God, what was wrong? What was happening to her? It had started after the phone call. Actually, during it. Something in their conversation. Something Miss Alderman had said caused her to suddenly feel ill. But what?

“Dr. Perez, tell me.…”

Janice heard Brice Mack’s voice as if through a filter. The trembling had stopped, but the chill persisted. That, and the empty hollow feeling of encroaching doom, which seemed to be moving now at a swifter pace.

A dry cough from Bill beside her caused her to open her eyes and steal a glance at him. He seemed blessedly out of it all—eyes shut, body slumped down in his seat, totally relaxed in a deep alcoholic euphoria. She was alone. The thought struck her in a painful way. She was alone. Bill’s withdrawal into bitterness and his deepening self-absorption had made any real communication between them impossible. He had shown himself to be incapable of understanding not only her, but all that was truly happening in their lives. Yes, she was alone.

“… and you say that Dr. Vassar took you into her confidence on all of her cases, including this one?”

“We worked very closely on every case, and especially this one.”

“Why especially this one?”

“Because it was unusual, unique. It defied categorizing. Dr. Vassar had never before encountered such a case.”

“And you and she discussed it at great length?”

“At great length and in great detail.”

Brice Mack referred to a page in the notebook.

“I want to call to your attention certain language in Dr. Vassar’s notebook, Dr. Perez. Certain language that requires interpretation.”

Turning slightly toward the jury, the lawyer read in a clear voice:

“In the entry dated January 18, 1967, she says: ‘[the child] tries to climb over the back of a chair—and succeeds! Appears well coordinated and shows a degree of muscular coordination and skill of an older child. (Test subject’s ability to climb over chair during wakened state.)’”

Flipping to a clipped section in the notebook, he continued:

“And in the entry dated February 20, 1967, she says, ‘results of chair-climbing test during wakened state disclosed subject unable to climb over chair successfully without falling … but within dream state is able to climb over chair and appears to show much greater creative muscular skill and coordination than one would expect in a child of two and a half.…’” Mack looked up at the witness. “How do you interpret this observation that the child seemed ‘older’ during her dream state?”

“It didn’t make sense to either of us. Because a person in a somnambulistic state may enact an event that happened at an earlier time, but in that case the person would appear younger. And yet here she was, enacting some prior event in a somnambulistic state in which she appeared to be actually older.”

“So in your discussions with Dr. Vassar, what conclusions did you reach in regard to this phenomenal behavior?”

“We could reach none. It was completely unexplainable.”

“Dr. Perez, what do you mean by the word ‘unexplainable’?”

“I mean, there was no explanation for the child’s behavior that we could give with any degree of medical certainty.”

The lawyer hesitated. He weighed the wisdom of getting into the matter of Jungian archetypes at this point. Even though Vassar had suggested this as a possibility in her final entry, he finally decided to forgo raising the issue at all. It was possible that Dr. Vassar might have been more amenable to Jungian theory than Dr. Perez would be. Besides, the first rule in questioning any witness is: Never ask a question if you are not sure what the answer will be. He moved on to the next entry.

“On April twenty-first, there is an entry which reads: ‘the window seems to be her main goal … the glass pane presenting a barrier of prodigious heat … the fires of hell? … attempts to approach glass unsuccessfully as heat too intense … stumbles back, falls, weeps.…’ Did you have discussions with Dr. Vassar about this particular entry?”

“Yes, indeed. Many discussions.”

“Did you and she discuss the significance of this behavior?”

“Yes, we did.”

“And did you come to any conclusions?”

“We both felt there may have been a memory of an incident in which the child was trapped in some sort of enclosure and sought to escape, but the escape route was painful. So there was this contradiction of moving in a direction and being repelled by it at the same time.”

“Were the child’s parents questioned to determine whether or not such an incident existed in the child’s past that would account for such a memory?”

“The file indicates that the matter was discussed with the parents and with the obstetrician who delivered Ivy, but none knew of any event in the child’s past to account for such a memory.”

Assuming an air of grave concentration, Brice Mack continued in a carefully measured voice. “Dr. Perez, assume that a child was trapped in a burning automobile, but the windows were closed and the fire blocked that avenue of escape. Do you have a medical opinion as to whether this set of circumstances might produce a similar reaction to the one you observed in the case of Ivy Templeton?”

“Yes, conceivably, that would account for such behavior.”

“And to your knowledge, the patient, Ivy Templeton, had no history of having suffered the experience of being trapped in a burning automobile?”

“Yes, that’s correct.”

Brice Mack turned to the prosecutor.

“Cross-examine.”

Scott Velie rose with exaggerated slowness. His voice seemed tired, his manner sleepy.

He said, “As I understand it, you joined the Park East Clinic in 1966, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“The same year that the parents of Ivy Templeton sought help for their child?”

“Yes, it was in 1966.”

“What month did you arrive at the clinic?”

“It was in November.”

“Early November? Late November?”

“It was after Thanksgiving.”

“I see.” Velie pondered this a moment. “So that, in actuality, you commenced your internship only a few weeks before Ivy Templeton became a patient of Dr. Vassar’s?”

“Yes.”

“And yet new as you were to the psychiatric profession, you maintain that Dr. Vassar took you into her complete confidence on a case so unusual and unique that it defied categorizing?”

Dr. Perez licked his lips.

“Yes, that is correct.”

“Is it customary in the psychiatric field for psychiatrists to consult with their interns on cases of behavior so complex as to be, and I quote you, ‘unexplainable with any medical certainty’?”

“Dr. Vassar did so,” Perez answered simply. “She was a remarkable woman.”

“Well, how much did you actually participate with her on this case?”

“As I said before, we worked together very closely on it.”

“How?”

“After each session we would review the substance of what happened and what was said and discuss it.”

“And together arrive at conclusions?”

“Sometimes, when it was possible to do so.”

“Did you sit in on these sessions with the child?”

“No.”

“Were you with her at the apartment?”

“No.”

“Did you ever observe the child during one of her nightmares?”

“No.”

“Therefore you relied on what Dr. Vassar told you she had observed?”

“Yes.”

“Then, when you say you came to conclusions with, her, you’re basing your conclusions only on what Dr. Vassar told you she heard or saw?”

“Yes.”

The district attorney studied some notes and, after the full impact of his witness’ testimony had been absorbed by the jury, renewed his questioning.

“Tell me, Doctor, this matter of the child ‘appearing’ older during her seizures, of performing functions and displaying greater muscular skill and coordination than a child her age normally would—is there not a circumstance under which such behavior may be seen to occur, a circumstance which you as a psychiatrist should be quite familiar with?”

Seeing the perplexed look on the witness’ face, Velie went on, helpfully: “Is not hypnosis a fairly commonplace psychiatric tool in usage today among people in your profession?”

“Well, yes—”

“And is it not true that under a hypnotic trance a subject may be induced by suggestion to perform physical feats well beyond his normal capabilities during the wakened state?”

“Yes, but—”

“Thank you,” Velie interrupted. “You have answered my question.”

Brice Mack was watching the district attorney like a hawk, ready to strike, ready to ask Judge Langley to instruct Mr. Velie to permit the witness to give his questions the deliberate and careful consideration the jury required of an expert witness, but he held back, allowing the prosecutor to pluck half answers from the witness and preferring to await his own moment on redirect to fully explore the issues being raised.

Velie, meanwhile, had picked up Dr. Vassar’s notebook and was flipping through its pages.

“Turning now to the matter of the child’s groping motions toward the window …” He found the entry he was looking for. “‘… the window seems to be her main goal … the glass pane presenting a barrier of prodigious heat … stumbles back, falls, weeps …’ and so forth. I put it to you, Dr. Perez, isn’t it conceivable that if someone is trapped in a building during a blizzard and is seeking to escape through that window but is unable to touch it because the window was so cold as to hurt his hand, that this, too, might account for the kind of behavior described here by Dr. Vassar?”

“Well, you see.…”

“I’m only after a simple yes or no. Is it or is it not possible?”

“Well, it’s possible …”

“Thank you.” Velie flipped to the back of the book. “This final entry of Dr. Vassar’s, which, by the way”—Velie’s voice became pointed—“counsel for the defense seemed disposed to bypass, deals with Dr. Jung’s archetypes as a possible answer to account for the child’s behavior. What is the significance of her reference to Dr. Jung’s archetypes, Dr. Perez?”

Doctor Perez took his time about answering.

“It would be hard for me to say. I don’t really subscribe to that theory myself.”

“The theory being?”

“The theory she refers to is one that suggests that there is, within the human mind, the capacity to have memory of events that a person had not experienced. Events that are experiences of the human race, but not experiences of the individual. Dr. Vassar, because she studied at the Burghölzli, probably was influenced by Jungian theory and may have reached for that conclusion. Dr. Vassar was not herself actually a Jungian, but it may have been her only way to explain this behavior, since there is no way to explain the reenactment of events a person had not experienced in life unless, of course, you believe in reincarnation.”

There, it was said, Janice thought. For the first time that day, the word was actually said. And strangely, the first to bring it up was the man of science.

“In your opinion, does Jungian theory extend toward reincarnation?”

“No, I don’t really think so. What I think Jung believed was that the experience of generations of prior individuals created a kind of inheritance of memory. Just as earlier experiences leave genetic traces physically, he believed they left genetic traces on the memory. But I don’t think he believed that individuals literally had a prior existence.”

“What do you believe, Dr. Perez?”

“What?”

“Do you believe in reincarnation?”

A startled laugh escaped from the witness.

“No,” he said. “I do not.”

Brice Mack’s confident smile successfully shielded the concern he felt at hearing the tenor of Perez’s answer and noting the jurors’ smiling faces. Still, there would be moments of high drama aplenty soon to come, he was certain, that would bring the jury back to his table.

Velie continued.

“Dr. Perez, are there many people in the world today, to your knowledge, who believe in the supernatural?”

“Yes, of course.”

“From a psychiatrist’s point of view, what is the basis of this belief in the supernatural?”

“Well,” Perez said soberly, “we are most of us terrified at the thought of death, the sense of finality of death. And if one is religious, one may avoid accepting death as final by believing in an afterlife. But the fear of death and the fear of not existing lead many people to try to find something that will give them a feeling of continuity. That is one aspect. Another aspect is that there is so much about human behavior that is mysterious, unexplainable, that presumably has some rational explanation, but that we can’t explain now. And people, just by the nature of human curiosity, are driven to try to find explanations for things that are mysterious and supernatural to them. But I as a scientist assume there is no such thing as the supernatural, only things about nature we as yet do not know.”

“But you do not think that reincarnation is one of those things?”

“No, I personally do not.”

“Thank you. That is all.”

Brice Mack, rising, bowed his head to Scott Velie and approached the witness.

“Just a few more questions, Dr. Perez, if you don’t mind. I believe you were prevented from amplifying on your answers to several of Mr. Velie’s questions. Specifically, the one concerning hypnosis as a means of inducing a subject to perform feats beyond his normal capabilities. In your opinion, does this suggestion, in any way, apply to, or explain, the behavior of Ivy Templeton as reported in the entries on January 18 and February 20, 1967?”

“No, of course not. I was going to say that the nature and conditions of a hypnotic trance and a somnambulistic form of hysteria are entirely different. Under hypnosis a subject is entirely under the control and is responsive to the examiner who is conducting the experiment. In a hypnotic trance a subject will make an overwhelming effort to obey all commands given by the examiner and even display physical dexterities that go beyond a subject’s skill during the wakened state, but only on command of the examiner. In the somnambulistic state, however, a subject is under no such influence and is either recapitulating or expressing behavior of an earlier, deeply repressed traumatic experience. In each case, the conditions are entirely different.”

Brice Mack accepted his explanation soberly, then steered the witness toward the issue of reincarnation.

“Although you expressed a disbelief in reincarnation, Dr. Perez, to your knowledge, are there scientists who do believe in reincarnation?”

“Yes, I suppose there are.”

“Do you suppose there are qualified doctors, psychiatrists, who believe in reincarnation?”

“Yes, there probably are some.”

“And is it possible, notwithstanding your opinion, that they are right and you are wrong?”

Dr. Perez shrugged.

“I guess that’s a possibility.”

Mack sent a sweeping glance along the jury box before turning back to the notebook.

“Oh, yes.… Dr. Perez, you previously testified that it was possible that the coldness of a window during a blizzard might be sufficient to hurt a person’s hand and might account for the kind of behavior described by Dr. Vassar. I now ask you, in your opinion, is that likely?”

“No, the reaction of the child, the quick, reflexive drawing back from the glass pane, indicates that the magnitude of the painful experience was greater than ice could produce. This, plus her word-stream babbling of ‘hothothothot,’ suggests to me conclusively that it was a fire situation.”

“Thank you, Dr. Perez. That is all.”

As the witness started to rise, Velie swiveled about in his chair and his head jerked around.

“Just a second, Dr. Perez, you’re not through yet.”

Perez turned a languid look on Velie as he sat back down.

“Was Dr. Vassar a hypnotist?” he loudly asked from a seated position.

The crude manner in which the question was put seemed momentarily to fluster the witness. A droll and skeptical smile came to his lips.

“Dr. Vassar was a psychiatrist. She was adept in the use of hypnosis as a therapeutic tool, as are most psychiatrists today, including myself.”

“I see,” Velie said. “Then she was a hypnotist. Thank you.”

The objection from Brice Mack came in a swift, businesslike way.

“I move that Mr. Velie’s remark ‘Then she was a hypnotist’ be stricken from the record, Your Honor, since he’s characterizing the answer of the witness. It is no more true that a person who’s adept in hypnosis is a hypnotist than a man who’s adept with a hammer is a carpenter.”

“Objection sustained.”

There was a momentary impasse during which Dr. Perez remained seated, not knowing whether he was to leave the stand or not.

Assuming his most weary expression, Judge Langley asked both attorneys if they were finally finished with the witness.

“For the time being, Your Honor,” Velie said. “I’ll probably want to ask him more questions later, however.”

Judge Langley instructed Dr. Perez to keep himself available for possible recall and excused him. As the psychiatrist hurriedly escaped the courtroom, Judge Langley turned to Brice Mack and told him to call his next witness.

All eyes in the courtroom shifted expectantly to the door. However, Mary Lou Sides did not appear through the door but rose instead from a seat in the middle of the courtroom and walked down the aisle to the witness stand, causing a light flurry of nervous giggles among the spectators who had been taken unawares.

Janice stared at the big, heavyset, seemingly shy girl who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five, as she raised her right hand and was sworn in by the bailiff. Looking at the straight cornsilk hair and the well scrubbed, smiling face flushed with health, Janice was reminded of the Swiss milkmaid on the Baker’s Chocolate boxes. Shifting her gaze to Hoover, she discovered that he, too, was staring at the girl and was smiling and that Mary Lou Sides returned his smile as she sat, which meant that they were probably acquainted.

The jury, reporters, spectators, and members of the court were not kept wondering long about the purpose of Mary Lou Sides’ presence on the witness stand, for Brice Mack, after eliciting from the soft-spoken girl her name, age (she was thirty-one), and home address, which was in an outer suburb of Pittsburgh, launched immediately into the crux of her testimony.

“On the morning of August 4, 1964, Miss Sides, were you involved in a car accident on the Pennsylvania Turnpike?”

“Yes.”

“Is it true that the car you were driving collided with a car being driven by Sylvia Flora Hoover?”

“Yes.”

“Were you alone in your car?”

“No, I was with my girlfriend.”

“And was Mrs. Hoover alone in her car?”

“No.” Here the witness’ voice faltered slightly, and her eyes seemed to cloud. “Her daughter was in the car with her.”

“What was the name of Mrs. Hoover’s daughter?”

“Audrey Rose.”

“Will you tell the jury, Miss Sides, to the best of your recollection, just what happened as you observed it on the morning of August 4, 1964, at about eight thirty?”

“Yes.” Miss Sides took a second to compose her thoughts, to place them back and fix her mind on that moment more than ten years before.

“I was driving on the Turnpike, on my way to work, traveling east. I was with a friend. We both worked for Forsythe Insurance Company, whose main office building was about twenty miles outside Pittsburgh, and were due in the office at nine o’clock.” She paused a moment. “It was a hot morning, but the sky was dark. It was going to storm, and I hoped I’d get to work before it started to rain. I always hate driving in the rain.” The courtroom tensed as her voice, calm and expressionless till now, began to change pitch as she started reliving the next episodes.

“About five miles from work the storm broke. It was terrible. Hailstones as big as eggs. I thought they were going to break my windows. I could hardly see through the windshield and was thinking of pulling off to the side, when this car … this car.…” Her voice broke perceptibly. Press and jury strained forward in anticipation. “This car came skidding past me on my left … a big sedan, skidding and twisting in the road, and I tried to stop, but I couldn’t and … I started skidding too, and I could see we were going to crash into each other.…” Her voice broke again. “I tried to control the car, but I couldn’t, the wheel just twisted around in my hands … and then we hit each other … we crashed.…” A sob escaped her throat. “We crashed.…” Overcome by tears, she paused.

“Are you able to go on, Miss Sides?”

“Yes, I am.”

The words came out in a rush now, punctuated with anguished cries and tears.

“We crashed and both cars went into the guardrail, but at the time I couldn’t see what I’d hit or what stopped my car from going over the cliff because of the hailstorm, but it was a guardrail, and that stopped us, but it didn’t stop the other car. It went over the guardrail and down this steep embankment.” She paused here to control herself. “I don’t know how long I remained in the car, but my girlfriend was unconscious, and I felt wet stuff on my face, which turned out to be blood, because I’d hit my head against the windshield, since I didn’t have a safety belt on, and neither did my girlfriend, but she was unconscious.” She paused, her eyes widening. “And then, all of a sudden, the storm ended, and the sun came out very bright. I remember getting out of the car and seeing the road lined with cars that had stopped, and people standing at the edge of the road, looking down the embankment at the other car, which was upside down. It was smoking, and one of the back wheels was still turning, and then I saw … I saw the face of a girl … a little girl … looking out of the window inside the car … and screaming.…”

The witness broke down here and sobbed openly as she tried to go on.

“Men were trying to climb down the steep embankment to rescue her, but it was hard at this point because it was too steep. Some other men drove down the road about a quarter of a mile to a place where it wasn’t so steep, and I could see them coming far in the distance. But they never got there, because just then … there was an explosion … not loud … like a puff … and all at once the car was swallowed up in flames.… It was just horrible. I could still see the little girl screaming and screaming and beating her hands against the window.… I could see her through the flames as the car was melting all around the window … the paint of the car melting and pouring down over the window.…”

Janice’s heart was pounding. Her body was trembling.

“… as she screamed and screamed and tried to get out of the car and kept.…”

The paint of the car melting and pouring.…

“… beating her hands against the window.…”

Melting! The melting! The crowning and melting ceremonies, the woman had said.…

“… which was slowly being covered over by the melting paint.…”

Dear God in heaven!

Janice’s eyes darted to the wall clock. Four twenty. It was happening! It was happening! Now! Her eyes shot across at Hoover.

He was standing.

The two guards standing nervously behind him.

His face was wet, florid.

His eyes were ablaze—

—seeming to search a distance beyond the sobbing girl on the stand, beyond the memory of that distant horror freshly revived, to a time and place where future sounds were struggling to be heard, where winds whipped cold and children laughed and sheets of snow, pouring white on black, came melting down in a hiss of flame.…

Watching from her window, Mother Veronica Joseph felt the acrid taste of fear rising in her throat. As it did every year on this day.

Pagan, unchristian, she thought anxiously, watching the rapt and intense faces of one hundred and twenty-seven virgins observing their sacrificial effigy—a labor of weeks—succumb to the all-consuming flames. Homage to Moloch, pagan god of fire. Heathen gambols on consecrated soil. Why did she permit it? Each year she vowed to eliminate it from the school program, and each year she hesitated doing so. Why?

The flames were gathering force now—licking and hissing against the snowman’s lower extremities—eroding his strength, vanquishing his pride, devouring his crowned glory. Creation. Adulation. Destruction. A primitive rite. Unthinkable.

And yet somewhere in Mount Carmel’s Christian past, it had started. With the Franciscan Brothers, the old custodian, Calitri, had once told her. In the time when Mount Carmel was a school for boys. Before the conversion. In the days when her own name was not Veronica Joseph, but Adele Fiore. Yes, it was the brothers. They had put flame to the very first effigy—the first of what would become a yearly tradition at Mount Carmel—a yearly event so rooted in the minds of each succeeding class as to become a fixed and immutable part of the school, like the very ivy that cloaked its stained and ancient walls.…

Ivy? Was that the Templeton girl? She was much too close to the fire.…

Yes, the brothers. Respectable, honorable men, who doubtless were ignorant of what they had started, were responsible for the desecration that assaulted her vision and her senses.

Observing the leaping flames eating away at the mammoth snowman, Mother Veronica Joseph felt a small consolation in the thought that it would soon be over; that soon the effigy would come toppling down in a steaming, hissing mountain of blackened snow and the tradition would be done for another year. Yes, Mother Veronica Joseph vowed, this would be the final year. The haulage and cleaning charges alone were enough reason to bring the tradition to an end.…

The nun’s eyes suddenly sharpened.

What was that child doing? Moving slowly toward the fire? Were all so fascinated by the flames they didn’t see her?

Yes, fire fascinates. She had not understood its power until this moment. Fire! Man’s age-old enemy! Satan’s pillow! The licking flames, like demon eyes, beckoning, beguiling—

Now she’s down on all fours! Moving ahead! Does no one see her?

“Stop!” shouted the nun, with a stuttering heart, but knew her voice was swallowed by the silences of the thick-skinned chancellery. Her fists beat at the leaded panes; she tried to budge the ancient windows but the rusted hinges held.

Dear God, dear Mary, the child was nearly into the flames, and still nobody noticed! Were they dreaming? Were they all mesmerized by the flickering flames? Seduced by the warmly inviting tongues of Satan’s fiery embrace?

“Stop! Stop her!” screamed the nun, seizing a chalice and smashing the diamond-shaped panes of glass, inviting plumes of frigid air to batter her face and send her veil billowing behind her.

Dear Mary, Mother of God … she’s into the flames!

“THE CHILD!” shrieked the nun in the teeth of the blasting wind. “THE CHILD! STOP HER! STOP HER!”

Dear Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.…

22

They arrived at the hospital outside Darien in the uncertain gray of twilight. It was bitter cold, and it seemed to both of them that there would be snow, but, they did not discuss it.

They were met in the reception lounge just inside the main doors. Mother Veronica Joseph began talking even before Bill and Janice came to a stop, as did an elderly doctor—Dr. Webster—who quickly assuaged the pale and stricken parents in a calm, professional voice. Each went on talking animatedly, Bill and Janice trying to follow two streams of thought at once as they walked down the broad corridor, passing occasional nurses and other family groups clustered before half-open doors. The first dealt with what had happened—Mother Veronica Joseph’s low, stunned voice re-creating, in detail, her eyewitness account of the accident, which had erupted without expectation and which, but for the quick action of Mr. Calitri, might have ended in real tragedy. The other was more complex a stream, dealing with the extent and prognosis of Ivy’s injuries, which, they were assured, were mainly first- and second-degree burns, producing only a mild shock with no indication of a developing toxemia or septicemia.

“Lucky she was so well bundled and there was all that snow around,” Dr. Webster encouraged. “Her body was completely untouched. Her face took some heat; however, there’s no indication of respiratory tract damage; we don’t see singed nasal hair, she’s not coughing, and her throat doesn’t seem hoarse. No expectoration of blood or carbon particles associated with inhalation of fire cases, just some transient facial swelling, redness on the left check, singed eyebrows and a few small developing blisters.…” He chuckled. “Nothing permanent to mar her good looks.”

Janice, walking well ahead of them, strained to hear their conversation, but the distance and Mother Veronica Joseph’s constant prattle made it impossible.

“…I don’t mind your knowing, Mrs. Templeton,” the nun murmured softly and with a trace of self-righteousness, “that while nothing like this has ever happened before at Mount Carmel, it needn’t have happened this time. What I’m saying is that it was no accident. Your daughter literally walked, then crawled into that fire.”

Janice flinched. Then, with a shake of her head, she replied inadequately and with no conviction, “You must be mistaken. Why would she do a thing like that?”

“That I cannot answer, Mrs. Templeton. But I am not mistaken about what I saw. Understand, I am not saying that she was aware of what she was doing, only that it was no accident.”

Ivy was sitting up in bed, perusing a magazine somberly. Her face, beneath the glistening medication, seemed lightly sunburned. Her long blond hair was singed in a ragged bob. The sight of Janice and Bill stirred her bruised senses, and unwilled tears rushed to her eyes. Bill and Janice hurried to her bedside but were cautioned by Dr. Webster to desist from embracing her.

“It’s all right, baby,” Bill soothed, kneeling at her side and clutching her hand.

Sitting on the edge of the bed, Janice held her other hand. For a time, Ivy could only look at her parents, back and forth at each face, in a lost, abject way and sob.

“What happened to me anyway?” she cried in a delirium of anguish. “What made me do such a thing?”

“It was an accident, baby,” Bill said in a soft, relaxing voice.

“No, Daddy, I did it on purpose. They say I walked into the fire, and I don’t remember anything about it.”

Bill’s expression tightened. “Who says you did that?”

Ivy’s eyes sought the stately black-cloaked form standing at the foot of the bed. “Mother did,” she said, weeping.

Bill ran a finger between his neck and his shirt collar.

“She’s wrong,” he said, then turned a hard, brutal face on Mother Veronica Joseph. “What do you build fires for anyway?” he rasped. “What kind of business is that in a convent? We send our children to you for peace and protection, and you build fires.”

In receipt of Bill’s anger, Mother Veronica Joseph made no reply. Silence quivered in the room until the old nun, her lips a thin, grim line, forced herself to speak.

“I’ll wait outside,” she said quietly, clutching her beads, and left.

Dr. Webster coughed and in a hushed voice conferred with the nurse who was in the room, attentive and constant, yet so unobtrusive as to have escaped Janice’s notice.

“What’s happening to me anyway?” Ivy repeated in a continuing moaning lament. “What’s happening to me?”

Janice considered the question—a question unanswerable to all but herself—and one other person. There was never a doubt in her mind about who had been behind this murderous escapade, as there now was no doubt about Audrey Rose’s ultimate intentions. As Elliot Hoover had warned, “She will keep pushing Ivy back to the source of the problem; she’ll be trying to get back to that moment and will be leading Ivy into dangers as tormenting and destructive as the fire that took her life.…” Yes, Audrey Rose clearly had no compunction about showing her hand and would continue to have none. The consideration of how easily they could lose Ivy made her shudder. “Audrey will continue to abuse Ivy’s body until her soul is set free.…” There was nothing to hold her, nothing to make her even hesitate. Unless—

Janice sat stunned by her own thought. Sitting erect, almost wooden, listening to the soft and mending sounds of Bill’s voice gradually restore and calm their fear-stricken child, she gravely hesitated to pursue the thought, knowing with certainty that there could be only one possible result from such an act. Had the answer come to her too quickly? It was, in its way, a bizarre and capricious answer; still, it blazed in her head, for it seemed the only right answer. Tread lightly, a voice within her warned. Consider deeply. The next moves are fraught with peril. The decisions of the next twelve hours could blow up your world.

They didn’t leave the hospital till nine fifteen. Neither was surprised to find that Mother Veronica Joseph had not waited. They encountered Dr. Webster in the reception lounge, chatting intimately with an elderly patient in a wheelchair.

Upon seeing the Templetons, he excused himself and joined them at the door. He reiterated his confidence that Ivy would be fine and would probably be discharged by the weekend. Janice asked if Nurse Baylor might be told to stay with Ivy through the night.

“She’s off duty at twelve,” the doctor said.

“Isn’t there someone who replaces her?” Janice asked.

“Just the floor nurse, but there’s nothing to be concerned about, her TV monitor covers each room.”

Janice frowned. “Can’t you get someone to stay with her?”

Bill flashed her a quick look, then turned to the doctor.

“Yes,” he agreed. “We’d be willing to pay for a private nurse, of course.”

Dr. Webster thought a moment. There was an urgency in the request he felt he couldn’t ignore.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he finally said.

Outside, the snow had stopped and only a misty drizzle fell. Bill drove south on the Boston Post Road in search of a restaurant that wasn’t crowded and found one with a few cars parked in front, just south of Stanford.

The dining room was nearly empty. A waiter led the way to a table against the wall, apart from the ones that were occupied. Drinks were brought them, after which they ordered and consumed an unusually large dinner.

They did not talk until the steak plates were removed and their drinks refilled. And then it was Bill who did the talking, not Janice. The things he said were pleasantly irrelevant, taxing neither her mind nor her emotions, which were deeply embedded in her own private turmoil. She was grateful for Bill’s unwillingness to discuss the subject uppermost in both their minds. His attack on Mother Veronica Joseph had left no doubt about his feelings on the matter and was clearly intended as a warning to Janice as well.

To Bill, it was an accident. Nothing more. To suggest anything different would only fan the flames of his anger, unleash the full torrent of his scorn and ridicule. No useful purpose could be served in confiding her thoughts and feelings to Bill. Not now or ever. Her fears for Ivy’s safety—for her life—would be her own private business.

She deliberately put from her mind all thoughts of Bill and, against the backdrop of his innocuous ramblings, plunged into the total consideration of the decision she must make before morning.

He noticed her absence and said harshly, “Where the hell are you anyway?”

His comment startled her. “What?”

“Up flittin’ about with the spooks and goblins?”

There was an ugly twist to his grin. He drained his glass and ordered another. Janice’s failure to answer further intrigued him.

“I suppose you agree with Reverend Mother?” And without waiting for her reply, added: “Well, it doesn’t matter who you agree with or what you think. Hoover’s had it. That little display in the courtroom this afternoon was their full salvo, and it didn’t mean a goddamn thing. Velie said they’ve run out of witnesses. They’ve no place to go but us.” He chuckled with grim pleasure. “Nobody left but us chickens. Unless they decide to put on Hoover or fly in some other goony bird from Timbuktu.” This idea made him laugh. “Gunga Din,” he said, rounding out the thought. His drink came. He drank it while he settled the bill.

Nothing more was said until the drive south on the Merritt Parkway. It was a cold ride since the car heater was faulty, a fact which had a decidedly sobering effect on Bill.

As they approached the Henry Hudson Parkway, he said without rancor, “We should do something for Mr. Calitri—to show our appreciation. A nice gift or a check.”

Janice agreed.

Later, walking home from the Hertz garage, the two of them bent into the chill January wind which bore against them, he shouted to her, “I’d ask Harold Yates to look into a possible lawsuit for incompetence or negligence, but how the fuck do you sue the Catholic Church?”

It was near midnight when they entered the apartment.

Bill took a cold beer out of the refrigerator and poured himself a double bourbon. He seemed distant and sulky again and carried the drinks unsteadily to the staircase, where he paused. After some trouble balancing his nightcap, he managed to flick on the light switch with his elbow, illuminating the upstairs hallway. Before ascending, he stepped aside to allow Janice to precede him.

“Coming to bed?”

Janice said cautiously, “In a while.”

He nodded sagely and with infinite wisdom. “Good night,” he said, and raised his shot glass in a toast. “Pleasant dreams.”

His scorn of her fears, which he had easily fathomed, was definitive, as was his amusement at her cowardice in expressing them.

Janice watched him ascend the stairs with a dazed stillness—not for his taunting ridicule of her, but for the barrier he had erected between them which now separated them irrevocably.

By one forty-five the apartment was silent.

Sitting in the rocker, Janice’s expression was calm except for two pinched lines at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes traversed the living room—the only real world she ever knew and loved: the white stuccoed walls that encompassed it, the darkly stained pegged floor that supported it, the glorious ceiling that crowned it. She lingered over each cherished part of it, each pillow and piece of furniture, each painting, lamp, and oddment of bric-a-brac, each item invested with a sweet and gentle memory of a shared, beloved moment in their lives.

A sudden panic gripped her at the thought of all she was risking. She’d lose him. She’d surely lose Bill. She’d lose it all. His love. Their marriage. Their perfect life in their perfect apartment. She felt faint at the thought, and her senses battled against the reality of a life without Bill—a life alone—one more member of that vast unloved, unwanted set, poking about on the fringes of other people’s lives, outside looking in.

Her eyes filled with tears. She wiped them away with her hand and focused her blurred vision down at the worn and scuffed leather cover of the diary resting on her lap.

Hoover’s diary.

She had taken it down from the closet for a reason—a reason that seemed urgent at the time, but that now was vague and incomprehensible.

Why had she taken it down? Was it simply an exercise to while away the sleepless hours ahead? Her need for a companion, a hand to hold through the dark and waiting night?

Or—her face grew stark—were there still things she had to know about this man before she could take her awesome step? All the scraps and pieces of his past, his thoughts and feelings, hopes and dreams, the deep and intimate confidences that lovers convey to each other during courtship.

Yes. That was it—reaching for the diary was a further step in their courtship. A further getting to know the man to whom she was about to consign her family’s future.

Her trembling fingers sought the center page of the bulging diary, and pulling it open, she found herself in a section crammed with small, what seemed to be hieroglyphics—tiny pencil scrawlings in a language that was probably Hindi or Sanskrit. Page after page was filled with these writings; strange, nubby intense words that, although incomprehensible, purveyed a sense of deep passion in their very design and outpouring. The pages continued in this vein until Janice wondered if the tragedy of Prana and her family and Hoover’s loss of faith in the aftermath of their deaths had not caused him to forsake the English language entirely. And then, turning a page, she was startled to see a paragraph written in the same chatty, informational Baedeker-English she remembered reading in the earlier part of the diary.

I am in Mysore. I want to be here because it has been inhabited, I understand, as long as any place on earth. It is the size of New England, which seems almost nonexistent to me now. Are we really all under the same sky?

Good roads. Hotels with formal gardens and fountains. Palaces across the river. But I am looking for animals and trees, not temples. Let me see if there is any majesty inside me.

The next two pages were in Sanskrit, followed by a page in English.

Village life. Get me out of here. I see the same sweet women filling water jugs at the central fountain and the men, once again with their simple dignity as they move with the buffalo and the plows. Thousands of years old. The huts are skimpier than I am used to, and all the beds are outside. I never used to look at something and visualize catastrophe at the same time. But all I can think of is monsoon. Son of a bitch. In Benares I thought I was testing India. The sky opened; the tables turned. India tested me.

After a few more pages of Sanskrit, she came upon:

I walk fast but keep hearing shouts of “Khedda! Khedda!” and eventually follow throngs—in India there are only throngs—hoping they will lead me out of the more civilized parts of Mysore.

Now it’s becoming clear to me what Sesh meant when he explained why the monks go off by themselves. He compared it to an artist during the act of creation. Stopping life to produce life. The artist who will give up all else when involved in creation. I’ve seen men give up food, sex, money, all because of a picture they have to paint. What feeds them is the love of the object and the desire to see it born. Stopping life to produce life. And in the center, the plan toward perfection. The work.

Janice’s fingers flipped through the clipped weeks and months, through prayers and comments and observations, pausing now and again to read an entry that particularly caught her interest.

I walk every day. In order to watch life happen. What I want to see is process, rather than the changes once they’ve happened.

I don’t seek beliefs or religion or divine inspiration here. I seek the quality of silence. I must hear that part of myself that is the most quiet. It is the bridge of my past, present, and future—offering the potential to make past, present, and future all one.

And later:

The birth of a wild elephant baby. A circle is formed around the mother made up of all the members of the herd who face outward to ward off danger. The leader circles around, inspecting, guarding.

Circles. Ritualistic circles. Cycles. The freedom here to watch night and day happen. To watch myself happen. The cycles that I am. I look inside myself and cannot find where I start or stop for there is motion. I think that’s good. And yet, with no ends or beginnings, there is a center in me. Me, me, me, me, me! I’m connecting that funny center in ME to all I’m perceiving outside of ME. INFINITY. INDIA. INSIDE. All these words begin with IN.

IN

CARNATION.

The barely legible script swam before Janice’s vision, and she shut her eyes to rest them. She could hear, in the stillness of the apartment, the whir of the refrigerator and felt an overwhelming despair as she contemplated the coming day. For a long time she sat unmoving, listening for some sound of Bill’s presence upstairs, but could hear nothing. She glanced down at the open diary and, with a nagging conscience, riffled through its remaining pages. There was so much left to read, so many words, so many years of wanderings and thoughts. Pausing at a page toward the end of the diary, she read:

My walnut skin turns white. An icicle hardens on the tip of my nose. I breathe out warm air, and my nose tickles as the icicle melts. Something changes. Something remains. I laugh, and in my giggle there is a roar. Do I sound cocky? That’s the thing with awareness. It just turns into greater awareness. Truth constructs truth.

Tabe Asi, Himalayas

. How that confused me when I first heard it. In Bengali, “good-bye,” but literally, “then I come.” Nothing ends. Everything evolves.

India, my friend, my lover, my teacher, I leave you. Yet, we shall always hold hands. Prana, “breath of life” as they named you, within my pulse is the melody you sang that first day. I can open my eyes and close them. It is the same thing. A sense of what I am and all that I have learned, that energy we all share, I can now embrace and set into worthy action.

Soon my physical environment will be very different. But I shall still have the height of the sun to strive for. What is necessary is to connect all daily activity to my ultimate purpose.

To know, to love, to do.

That is the potent gift of life.

And the very final entry, written in pen and in a bolder hand:

Today, I am in Dharmsala. In a week I shall be in New York. I shall trade my

kata

for a business suit, put on shoes of leather, and move in the panic of cars and subways. Ham and eggs will be my breakfast and not the

moo-moo

I have become accustomed to. After seven years, a strange and frightening prospect. Yet I leave with a mind that hopes and a heart that leaps, for soon I shall be privileged to take the final step in my quest for truth, a step so Godlike as to be granted to only saints and deities. For given the knowledge and the faith and the belief I now possess, I must set my life’s course on a trajectory that will intercept the progress of my daughter’s soul. I must discover its abode and offer myself to its service, to pray and do good works in atonement for the lacks and errors of the past.

Janice shut the diary.

Outside, the January wind whistled shrilly and knifed in through the window cracks, bringing a chill to the room and causing her to shiver.

Words kept tumbling about in her head in random bursts. Hoover’s words, repeated from close and distant corridors of memory.

… to know, to love, to do—I must intercept … my daughter’s soul.…

He had come to their door to offer himself to the service of his daughter’s soul—to pray for it and do good works for it—and they had him thrown into jail.

“Your daughter’s health is an illusion. As long as her body shelters a soul that is unprepared to accept its Karmic responsibilities of earth life, there can be no health, not for the body of Ivy or the soul of Audrey Rose. Both are in peril!”

He had warned them, fully and correctly, and they had had him locked up in a cell.

“We must form a bond … a bond that is so tight and so filled with all the love you have, and all the love that I have, that we can carefully mend her, patch her—so that Audrey Rose’s soul may be put to rest once again.…”

He had offered them the only possible solution, and they had rejected it, had him put behind bars, and were now striving to make it permanent.

“We are all part of this child. We have all had to do with the making of her, and only we can help her.…”

He was right. They were all part of her. All had to do with her making, and now only they, together, could help her.

It was the only way.

If Ivy was to live.

It was just nearing daybreak when he arrived at Foley Square. He had asked the cabdriver to let him off at Fourteenth Street and had been walking for the past hour and a half. He had stopped once briefly in one of those small, bad-smelling all-night hole-in-the-wall eateries for a cup of coffee, which he drank without sugar or cream—not his usual habit—but a necessary act of self-mortification in this, his hour of grief.

Sipping its scalding bitterness, Brice Mack remembered how his mother had sat shivah after his father’s death. A neighbor had brought her an orange crate, rough and splintered, upon which she sat for the seven days and nights, her face unwashed, her hair unkempt, her clothes rent, drinking the bitterest of teas, rocking quietly backward and forward, moaning softly from the depths of her soul, putting her anguish on public display in memory of the husband she had lost, the man she had loved and whose son she had borne, lamenting in expiation for all she had not said and not done for him—the lapses and lacks and wifely duties she had failed to perform in life and would no longer have opportunity to correct in death.

The morning air was cold and damp, and spumes of steam filtered up through manhole covers in the empty streets surrounding Foley Square.

Yes, Brice Mack reflected solemnly, running his tongue over his teeth, cleansing them of the acrid taste of coffee, Momma sat shivah for Poppa, as Brice had sat shivah for Momma. But who was there to sit shivah for James Beardsley Hancock? Who was there to moan and rock from side to side and for seven days mount the rough and bruising crate of anguish for him?

There would be a Times obituary for him, one of considerable length and detail, no doubt, but possessing none of the passion and rending torment of a shivah to mark his passage from life. His would be a simple service—a brief, pallid, goyish exercise totally lacking in power and meaning. And here was a man whose splendid, exemplary, and beautiful life warranted—no, demanded!—the full outcry, the full spectacle of human grief and suffering to mourn its loss properly. There was no justice. Had he been born a Jew, he would have got the full treatment. Now, unfortunately, there was only Brice Mack, a miserable, unworthy substitute for the real thing, to cry for him.

He had been with James Beardsley Hancock at the end. Sitting at his bedside. At one ten there had been no fore-warning that at one eleven it would be the end. They had been conversing—that is, Hancock had been talking, softly and eloquently, on the very subject of death when it came stealing into the room on tiptoes to claim him.

Mack had spent most of the evening at the hospital, not exclusively to pay a sick call, but to confer with the doctors to ascertain whether Hancock would be in a condition improved enough to enable a deposition to be taken or, provided Mack could persuade the court to come up to the hospital with the jury, whether Hancock would be physically able to subject himself to what might be a grueling examination and cross-examination.

Despite the day’s stunning success with his witnesses, whose combined testimony forged an absolute link between Audrey Rose’s gruesome death and the substance of Ivy Templeton’s nightmares, Brice Mack knew that unless he could make a strong and convincing case for reincarnation, he was still a long way from home. With the Pradesh mess, Hancock’s heart attack, and Hoover’s rejection of Marion Worthman, his case for reincarnation at this point was practically nonexistent. Unless and until a full exposure of the subject could be placed before the jury by a person of consummate skill and unimpeachable scholarship and integrity, there would be little point in bringing Hoover or even the Templetons to the stand since their testimony would be heard in the absence of any real understanding of the basic issue in the case. It was essential their next witness be an expert on the level of Hancock.

At eight twenty that evening the doctors were sufficiently encouraged by Hancock’s improvement to hold out a vague hope that Hancock might be able to testify intra muros on the following day. Which was sufficiently encouraging to Brice Mack to permit him to leave the hospital and keep a nine o’clock dinner appointment with Professor Ahmanson and a man named Robert Vanable, a possible substitute expert whom Ahmanson had met in a Scientology meeting hall.

Himself a “clear,” a term applied to those who had achieved the apex of Scientological perfection and were moving up the OT Levels on which one attains abilities which are God-given and God-like, Robert Vanable instructed Mack through dessert on the true nature of life beyond death as revealed to L.R.H., the initials of L. Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology, and as expressed by him in his famous lecture to the Eighteenth American Advanced Clinical Course back in 1957.

“L.R.H. was the first to cognate what really happens when a thetan splits the scene, and to postulate it,” enthused Vanable, sipping his Irish coffee. “A thetan exteriorizes fast from a body when it kicks the bucket. There’s plenty of confusion, too, and it has a terrible time until it can locate another body and get going again. Meanwhile, it’s totally cognizant. Knows who it was and who its friends were. All it’s suffered is the loss of mass. The mind remains. The Christian misconceptions of heaven, hell, purgatory—that’s all baloney. A thetan’s proving ground is still good ol’ terra firma.”

“Forgettingness doesn’t start till the pickup of the new body, at which point the memory valve shuts off, but not before some interesting prayers and dedications are said to insure a happy is-ness in the next life.…” And more.

After leaving the restaurant, Brice Mack returned to Roosevelt Hospital to check on Hancock’s condition.

The time was twelve twenty-seven when he entered the anteroom of the intensive care unit. A nurse informed him that Dr. Pignatelli, Hancock’s personal physician, was with the patient now. At twelve forty Dr. Pignatelli emerged and, flashing the lawyer a quick smile, briefly conferred with the nurse before turning to the lawyer. He told him that Hancock’s prognosis was good, his vital signs were improved, and barring a setback, he seemed to be making excellent progress. It was still too soon to tell when he would be able to authorize the heavy program of activity Brice Mack had earlier outlined since Hancock wasn’t off the critical list as yet.

Brice Mack felt fatigue press down on him. What Pignatelli was saying was that Hancock wouldn’t be well enough to testify in the morning. Which left Mack with the tricky problem of having to vamp till the old boy was ready. That meant bringing on other witnesses—but who? Not Hoover. Not now. Not ever, if he could help it. Nor the Templetons. Maybe the doctor—Dr. Kaplan—he’d be good for a morning. And Carole Federico. He might be able to string them out for a day or so.…

“Would you care to see him?” Dr. Pignatelli’s voice cut in on the lawyer’s somber musings.

“Is it allowed?”

Pignatelli laughed. “It’ll do him good. He’s just awakened from a long nap, and he’s bored to distraction.”

It wasn’t difficult to pick out James Beardsley Hancock in the large, brightly lit, antiseptic room. Every other patient was enclosed within the inviolate privacy of screens and curtains. James Beardsley Hancock was fully exposed to view, sitting rigidly up, with the mattress raised to its highest position, like an enthroned king, imperiously surveying his domain through eagle-bright eyes.

The old man stared straight at the lawyer coming across the room toward him, and a smile spread across his face, a smile that seemed genuinely glad and fiercely self-assured, a smile that said, “Look! I’m still here. I have not left this earth life, not quite yet.”

Encompassed by gurgling bottles and TV monitors, each reporting a phase of his illness, and hampered as he was by tubes and wires that seemed to sprout from every orifice of his body including his mouth, which held a thermometer, James Beardsley Hancock could not say a word, or offer Brice Mack his hand, or even wave him into a chair. He could only express his pleasure at seeing his guest with eyes that glowed and a head that gently nodded.

“Well, sir, this is a pleasure,” Brice Mack said, pulling up a white metal chair to the bedside and sitting down. “I didn’t expect to be let in.”

A nurse arrived to take the thermometer out of Hancock’s mouth and to register its reading on a chart at the head of the bed. Before leaving, she carefully checked the tubes and wires attached to his body and critically studied the TV monitors.

Hancock sighed. “That’s better.”

His voice was strong, resonant and, as always for Brice Mack, a pleasure to listen to. For a long space of time they sat in silence, smiling at each other, and then the lawyer saw a look of sorrow come over the hard, bony face and a mistiness cloud his eyes.

“I must apologize to you, Brice, and to Mr. Hoover, for my“—the flicker of a smile returned—“my unscheduled truancy.”

The lawyer grinned and made a demurring gesture with his hand.

“Tell me,” Hancock continued, “how is the case going for him?”

“It’s going.” The lawyer shrugged. “It’ll be all right.” He laughed rather nervously. “Once we get you up there, we’ve got it made.”

Hancock nodded sagely and reached for a slim book which was on the bed a few inches away from his right hand.

“I’m boning up for my part.” He smiled and ran his thumb along the side of the pages. “Louis Fiquier. French philosopher. Makes a good case for reincarnation. Good for our case.” His smile broadened. “Convince the skeptics.” His fingers opened the book at a page marked by a tiny folded corner. “Read here, Brice,” he said, and pushed the book slightly toward the lawyer.

Mack rose and, reaching out for the book, found his hand suddenly enclosed by Hancock’s in a strong grip. Startled, he raised his eyes to Hancock’s eyes and found a twinkling mischief in them.

“Maybe even convince the most stubborn of skeptics,” Hancock said pointedly.

Brice returned his smile and gently disengaged his hand from Hancock’s. Sitting back in his chair, he opened the book, which was entitled The Tomorrow of Death, to the indicated page and began to read. After a moment of silence, Hancock’s deep voice ordered, “Aloud, please.”

Brice Mack cleared his throat and, in a voice soft enough so as not to disturb nearby patients but loud enough to be heard above the cacophony of beeps and squeaks of the heart machines and pacemakers, read.

“ ‘Some men are endowed with all the benefits of mind; others, on the contrary, are devoid of intelligence, penetration and memory. They stumble at every step in their rough life-paths. They can succeed in nothing, and Fate seems to have chosen them for the constant objects of its most deadly blows. Why are they here on earth? God would be unjust and wicked if He imposed so miserable an existence upon beings who had done nothing to incur it, and have not asked for it. But God is not unjust or wicked; the opposite qualities belong to his perfect essence. Therefore the unequal distribution of evil on our globe must remain unexplained, unless we admit the plurality of human existences and reincarnation—that is, the passage of the same soul through several bodies—then all is made wonderfully clear. We have a soul that we must purify, improve, and ennoble during our stay on earth, or, having already completed an imperfect and wicked life, we are compelled to begin a new one, and thus strive to rise to the level of those who have passed on to higher planes.…’”

When Brice Mack looked up, he was certain that Hancock had fallen asleep. His eyes were closed; a soft, peaceful stillness was upon his face. About to rise and leave, the lawyer was stopped by Hancock’s voice.

“You see, Brice,” he said in the quietly modulated, wandering way of a person on the edge of sleep, “without the doctrine of reincarnation, it is not possible to justify the ways of God.”

His voice trailed off, and again be seemed to drift off into a drowse. Mack remained seated, waiting to see if sleep had indeed overcome him. His eyes flickered down to his wristwatch. It was one ten. Apparently, even this slightest movement alerted Hancock, for his eyes fluttered open and remained watchful, seeking the intruder who had disturbed his slumber. There ensued a passage of time—no more than a few seconds—during which the old man re-formed his senses, reestablishing the time and place of the space he occupied, and, finding it, relaxed again in the security of its knowledge.

“It’s all right,” he whispered scarcely audibly. “We all experience levels of dying in our daily lives.… We’re just so used to life and death being opposites … that we don’t allow ourselves to have these thoughts.…”

His speech was so low that Brice Mack could hardly distinguish his words.

“And yet just drifting off into sleep, that twilight hour, is a different level of consciousness and very much … what part of death … is like.…”

Hancock’s eyes suddenly snapped open. He seemed at first to be staring at Mack, then through Mack, and beyond him, beyond the walls of the room, into some vast ethereal infinity beyond the spatial confines of the known world, wherein was revealed to him a vision which brought a radiance to his face, a surprised and wondrous look of utter joy and longing and needing and finally, at the end, an expression of bliss so intensive and absorbing as to cause his whole body to vibrate in its divine totality. His mouth opened, and in his last gurgling breath, he choked out the words “Oh, my!”

What happened in the next minutes—the perfunctory, professional reaction to the beeper’s strident warning signals, drawing nurses and doctors from all parts of the room like a swarm of locusts around a crust of bread, and their concerted attempts to restore Hancock to life, their quick, definitive moves with hypodermics, oxygen equipment, and finally their very fists pounding on his chest as one would pound on a door, hoping to encourage the sleeper to awaken—was scarcely apprehended by Brice Mack. His gaze remained firmly fixed on Hancock’s face, on the eyes casually closed, the mouth that was smiling, the nostrils flared, the sense of peace, of perfected joy, suffusing the noble countenance.

“He’s dead,” somebody murmured, and gradually the group retreated, in stages, first the doctors, then the nurses, all but one nurse, who stayed behind to disconnect the tubes and wires, roll down the mattress, and gently pull the sheet over the still-strong and energetic face.

For a very long time Brice Mack remained rooted, gazing entranced at the draped quiescent form on the bed, till he became aware that tears were running down his face. Their wetness snapped him back to awareness of the life struggles going on all around him and sent him stumbling from the room in a daze. The nurse in the anteroom said something to him which he didn’t quite get but which sounded like an expression of sympathy as he plowed through the double doors and into the corridor leading to the exit doors.

It was a little after two o’clock when he left the hospital and began to walk eastward on Fifty-seventh Street, across the entire width of the island, until he came to the East River. The night was dark and freezing, and a sharp wind at his back propelled him forward on his aimless course.

At Sutton Terrace he leaned over the railing and gazed into the stirring waters. The rumbling of speeding traffic coursing up and down the East Side Drive made the pavement quiver beneath his feet.

For a time, his mind remained void of thought, caught in the hums and vibrations of the surrounding night, until the very quality of the sounds became blurred and distorted, taking on the gurgling sound of speech, of words, “Oh, my!,” the parting words of Hancock, “Oh, my!,” while in the middle of the dark, swirling waters, his eyes found the fragmented image of the dead man’s face, reflected in a thousand flickering lights.

Tears sprang to his eyes, and his throat clutched as he fought to subdue the deep sob of anguish which came to it.

What am I doing? he berated himself. Crying over a dead man I hardly knew. It makes no sense. Especially when you consider it’s what he wanted … what he’s looked forward to all his life.

“Bullshit!” He spit out the word into the wind gusts whipping off the river. “Bullshit!” he repeated, seeming to find comfort in its sound. Dead is dead! he told himself angrily. When the lights go out, they stay out, and those who believe different are crappin’ themselves, and that includes Hancock and Hoover and all the pathetic bastards who can’t stand to face the—how did the shrink put it?—“The finality of death.” He was right. Perez was right. We’re so scared shitless of death that we’re ready to buy anybody’s bullshit theory. And yet—And yet, an implacable voice within him cautioned, there was that look on Hancock’s face … that expression of pure ecstasy? Yeah, ecstasy, that was it. The old boy was really seeing something, and feeling something.

Swirling lights? Beckoning hands? Siren songs? The lush, inviting vulva of the astral womb? Or was it simply as Mel Stern, his doctor, once told him, that the body orgasms at death? Yeah, that would account for the look of ecstasy. Especially in a man of eighty-four.

Who knew? Who really knew anything? The only thing he knew for certain was that Hancock was dead, departed, gone, of no further use to himself or to Mack or the case or anything or anybody, ever again, and that save for the icing tears which were beginning to itch his cheeks, there would be few, if any, to cry for the old man and properly mourn his passing.

With considerable surprise, Brice Mack discovered he was standing on the corner of Fifty-ninth Street and Second Avenue. He had no memory of having left the railing over-looking the East River and walking the distance. What made him aware of it now was the lone cab cruising down the broad avenue which, devoid of traffic, seemed elegantly spacious. He frantically waved the cab down.

Entering from the bitter cold, he found the heat inside the cab oppressive and stifling. The extreme contrast of temperatures made his skin flow with rivulets of perspiration that even the removal of his coat and the loosening of his tie failed to stanch.

At Fourteenth Street he paid off the cab and walked the rest of the way to Foley Square in the solitude of his thoughts and in the company of Hancock’s face imprinted on his mind in that final instant of life, alert, vital, every inch the man he was and in that first instant of death, shocked, surprised, wondrous, his faculties at their fullest stretch, and the gurgling breath, “Oh, my!,” and then nothing.

The first person Brice Mack saw, upon making his weary entrance into the courtroom at eight forty, was Elliot Hoover, already seated at the defense table. There was a worn and haggard look on Hoover’s upraised face, and the bloodshot eyes staring vacantly off into space clearly told of an anxiety-ridden and sleepless night. Had he learned about Hancock’s death? If not, he must inform him at once and try to impress on him their weakened position and the need to bring on Marion Worthman and keep her on until Ahmanson came through with somebody else. This was no time to fret over taste and decorum and other such niceties, not now, and not in a court of law, especially when the charge was kidnapping in the first degree. He must make him realize that the waters in Part Seven were shark-infested and highly dangerous, even murderous.

The spectators’ section was fully occupied and the reporters had begun to file in as Brice Mack, wearing his most serious and worried face, walked up to Elliot Hoover. About to engage him in what he knew would be a one-sided, probably useless discussion, the lawyer’s attention was suddenly diverted by a noticeable lull, more a hush, in the otherwise noisy chamber, followed by an electric ripple of excitement. Glancing up to the center aisle, he saw Janice Templeton, her face pale, drawn, yet animated by a luminous intensity, striding purposefully down to the witness row well in advance of her husband, who seemed his typical, hung-over self. It was the quality of Janice Templeton’s bearing—the stick-straight, ramrod, resolute way in which she carried herself—that caught the lawyer’s interest and, apparently, the interest of the spectators and reporters as well, for the room was abuzz with whispers and aflutter with covert side glances.

Janice Templeton seemed a different woman this morning.

Something had happened.

With his eyes firmly fixed on Janice Templeton, Brice Mack failed to notice that Elliot Hoover had risen to his feet and was standing and facing the spectators’ section, facing the witness row and, particularly, facing Janice Templeton—not until he saw Janice Templeton, still a couple of steps from her seat, suddenly stop and turn and stare back at Elliot Hoover.

It was in this one stricken moment of frank and open exchange, in this deep and intimate silent communication between plaintiff and defendant, in the subtle passage of looks of affirmation, the bestowal and acceptance of each other’s trust and confidence—there for all the court to see, including her husband, whose expression of utter confusion had frozen on his face, and in light of the fearful, darting looks that were being exchanged at the DA’s table—that Brice Mack realized that whatever had happened to Janice Templeton was good for their case.

Through some special grace, the machine continued to purr smoothly under its own management and had, once again, provided him with his next witness.

23

NEW YORK, NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 29, 1975, 9:00 A.M.

JANICE TEMPLETON

called as a witness by the defendant herein, having been sworn, testified as follows.

DIRECT EXAMINATION

By MR. MACK:

Q Mrs. Templeton, you said in your earlier testimony that the birth of your daughter was entirely normal?

A Yes.

Q And the child was normal and healthy in every respect?

A Oh, yes. She was healthy and beautiful.

Q So that when the nightmares occurred two and a half years later, you did not attribute them to some possible malfunction at birth?

A No, not at all.

Q As a result of the nightmares, did you seek the services of a psychiatrist?

A Yes.

Q What was the name of the psychiatrist?

A Dr. Ellen Vassar.

Q Did Dr. Vassar observe your daughter during her nightmares?

A Yes, during many of them.

Q Were you present on each occasion that Dr. Vassar observed your daughter undergoing a nightmare?

A Yes.

Q Mrs. Templeton, were you in court when Dr. Perez testified and described Dr. Vassar’s eyewitness account of the nature and content of the nightmares?

A Yes.

Q Does your eyewitness account of the nightmares differ from that of Dr. Vassar’s?

A No.

Q How often did these nightmares happen?

A The first few weeks they came about every third night, then increased as time went on. By the time we went to see Dr. Vassar they were happening every night.

Q Did the nightmares ever vary in nature or content?

A No, they pretty much duplicated each other.

Q So that in each nightmare the child was running around the room, sobbing and babbling, “Hothothot?”

A Yes.

Q And in each nightmare she was attempting to touch the window with her hands and recoiling as if in pain?

A Yes.

Q How long did this first episode of nightmares continue?

A Through the winter and spring of ’67. They became less and less frequent under Dr. Vassar’s therapy. By summer they had stopped.

Q At the time did you attribute their lessening frequency to something Dr. Vassar was doing in her therapy?

A Yes, of course.

Q So that when they finally stopped, you credited Dr. Vassar with having brought about their end?

A Yes.

Q Did Dr. Vassar ever discuss with you her opinion as to what triggered the nightmares?

A She said that Ivy was expressing some special fears of separation from me and that she appeared to have mastered them.

Q Then she never once confided to you any of the thoughts and suspicions she put down in her notebook?

A No.

Q Let’s move forward from the 1967 series of nightmares to the time when Ivy next experienced a nightmare. Am I correct in placing the date at October 22, 1974?

A Yes.

Q Please relate the circumstances of what happened on that night, to the best of your recollection.

A Yes. We sent Ivy to spend the night with a neighbor. We were expecting Mr. Hoover. He was coming to visit us, and we thought it best that Ivy not be around since—well, you know—because of the things he was claiming and the way he was acting.

Q Will you explain what you mean by “the things he was claiming and the way he was acting”?

A Well, he was claiming that Ivy was the reincarnation of his daughter, Audrey Rose. And he was very persistent in his claims, very assured of himself. Of course, we thought his claims outlandish and that possibly he was a mental case. That’s why my husband and I didn’t want Ivy around when he showed up. We didn’t know what he might do or say.

Q When did you first learn that Ivy was having a nightmare that evening?

A About an hour after Mr. Hoover arrived. Carole—Mrs. Federico—phoned us, terribly upset. She said that Ivy was having a fit and was running around the room, screaming and babbling, and that she couldn’t waken her. Naturally, my husband and I knew what that meant.

Q And you rushed down to the Federico apartment?

A Yes.

Q And what did you find?

A Ivy was in the midst of a nightmare. It had returned.

Q And this nightmare was similar in nature and content to the ones she suffered seven years before?

A Identical. Even her speech and movements were those of a much younger child.

Q So that during the first episode of nightmares, whereas she seemed to be duplicating the speech and displaying the muscular coordination of an older child, during this nightmare, she seemed to be duplicating the speech and muscular coordination of a younger child?

A Yes, it seemed that way.

Q What happened next?

A The same conditions prevailed. She was running about the room, falling over furniture, sobbing and pleading and babbling those words, “hothothot,” and trying to get to the window, but not being able to.

Q And as before, you could do nothing to help her?

A Yes. It was the same as before. We could only stand by and watch. Until—

Q Yes?

A Mr. Hoover came into the room.

Q What happened then?

A He said, “My God.” He seemed staggered by what he was seeing, and he said, “My God,” as if he suddenly realized the truth of what was happening.

Q And what did he do?

A He went to Ivy—she was near the window, sobbing and screaming terribly—and he called to her.

Q By name?

A Yes.

Q What name?

A Audrey Rose.

Q And did she respond to him?

A Not at first. It took some time. He continued to call to her and tried to break through her nightmare. He’d say, “Come to me! Come, Audrey Rose! It’s Daddy, I’m here! Come!”

Q And did she finally go to him?

A Yes. It was incredible. All at once, she seemed released from the nightmare, and she went to him.

Q How did she go to him?

A She ran to him. And threw her arms around him.

Q And then?

A He held her. And he comforted her. And soon she fell asleep. Peacefully.

Q What was your reaction to what you were seeing?

A I didn’t know what to think. I was amazed.

Q Did you discuss it with your husband?

A Yes, later.

Q What did he say?

A Bill thought he was some kind of hypnotist. That he had somehow cast a spell on Ivy and influenced her into doing what she did.

Q Did you agree with him?

A Yes.

Q Let us move on to the following night, Mrs. Templeton. The night of the twenty-third. Did the nightmare recur on that night?

A Yes.

Q Describe what happened on that night, to the best of your recollection?

A The same things happened. The screaming, running around, babbling—it was a duplication of what happened the night before, except Mr. Hoover wasn’t there to stop it. The nightmare continued for hours until the doctor arrived and gave her a sedative.

Q That would be Dr. Kaplan?

A Yes. He’s Ivy’s pediatrician. He’s taken care of her since she was born.

Q Let us move on to the night of the twenty-fourth. Your husband was out of town, I believe, and you were alone with Ivy?

A Yes.

Q Tell the jury what happened on that night.

A The nightmare started at about ten o’clock, and it was the most terrifying of them all. In trying to phone Dr. Kaplan, I accidentally left the bedroom door open and she got out. She fell down the stairs and hurt herself. She was bleeding, and there was nothing I could do to help her. She kept running away from me every time I’d approach. I’d never seen her so desperate and hysterical. She kept running around the living room from window to window, lunging at them and then pulling away, seeking to get out. I was terrified that she might accidentally go through one of them.

Q Did you have a visitor that night?

A Yes. Mr. Hoover. He came to the apartment house at about eleven.

Q Did you ask him up?

A Yes.

Q Why did you ask him up?

A Because I needed help.

Q But wasn’t the doctor coming?

A I needed help immediately.

Q Then why didn’t you call the police or send for one of the men on duty in the apartment house?

AI needed Mr. Hoover’s help!

MR. VELIE: Your Honor, if the court please, it has come to my attention that Mrs. Templeton suffered a severe trauma yesterday brought about by the injury of her daughter in an accident. Mrs. Templeton is in a highly agitated and emotional state, and I feel she should be spared the burden of testifying at this time.

MR. MACK: Your Honor, this is patently a device by the prosecution to prevent this witness from testifying because the witness’ testimony will destroy the prosecution’s case.

MR. VELIE: I’m sure the defense joins the prosecution in wanting to get to the truth of this matter; therefore, it is important that the testimony being presented be given in the absence of disturbing emotional influences. I believe that a recess until tomorrow morning in order to give the witness an opportunity to calm herself so that she may answer questions with some degree of responsibility is in order. I believe it not only is the humanitarian thing to do but will best serve the ends of justice.

MR. MACK: It is because the defense wants the truth to come out that it believes this witness should be permitted to testify here and now, and I object to Mr. Velie’s statements concerning Mrs. Templeton’s condition and state of mind which imply that she is incapable of testifying honestly and truthfully at this time, and I request that his statements be stricken from the record and that the jury be instructed to disregard them.

THE COURT: I won’t strike the remarks from the record, but I will instruct the jury that arguments made by either side are not to be considered as evidence. Mrs. Templeton, are you able to continue?

MRS. TEMPLETON: Yes, I’m all right. I want to continue.

THE COURT: Proceed, Mr. Mack.

QBY MR. MACK: You said you needed Mr. Hoover’s help, Mrs. Templeton. What help did you need from Mr. Hoover?

A I needed him to help stop my daughter’s nightmare, to bring it to an end, as he did before.

Q And did you ask Mr. Hoover to help you?

A I didn’t have to. He came into the apartment and immediately began saying those things to her.

Q What things?

A You know, calling to her, telling her he was here now, and that everything was all right. He said, “Audrey Rose! It’s Daddy! Here, darling! I’m here!”

Q Did that help your daughter?

A Yes, almost at once. She seemed to recognize him, as she did on the previous night, and rushed into his arms, and then, as he was comforting her, she just fell asleep. Peacefully.

Q What happened after he calmed your daughter?

A He carried her upstairs, and he washed her wounds and then dressed them. And he put her to bed.

Q Was this done with your consent?

A Yes.

Q Did you have a discussion with Mr. Hoover at that time?

A Yes.

Q What did he say to you?

A He said that Ivy was in danger. That his daughter’s soul—that is, Audrey Rose’s soul—was crying out to him for help through Ivy’s nightmares. That Audrey Rose was very unhappy and was seeking to escape this earth life, and because of that, she would be pushing Ivy into dangerous moments.

Q Did he say anything else?

A He said that since her soul was crying out for help, he must take an active part in providing it with the help it needed, that we would have to form a bond between us, a bond so tight with all the love I had and all the love that he had that together we might mend and patch it and put the soul of Audrey Rose to rest again.

Q Did you believe what be was telling you?

A No. I just couldn’t comprehend this kind of thinking. It was foreign to my upbringing and religious training. I just couldn’t believe it.

Q Mrs. Templeton, is your belief as to what Mr. Hoover told you the same today as it was that night?

A No.

Q Tell us what way your belief has changed?

A (Answer unclear)

THE COURT: Will the witness please speak up?

A I said, I believe now in Mr. Hoover and what he is claiming.

MR. VELIE: Your Honor. I object.

THE COURT: Yes, Mr. Velie? What is your objection?

MR. VELIE: I’ve changed my mind. I withdraw the objection.

THE COURT: Continue.

Qby MR. MACK: Are mere any reasons, Mrs. Templeton, that you can describe that have caused you to change your opinion of Elliot Hoover?

A Yes, a number of events have happened recently to convince me that Mr. Hoover’s fears were justified.

Q What, specifically?

A Well, my husband and I made the decision to send Ivy to a boarding school out of the city for at least while the trial lasted. I thought she would be safe there, away from the influence of Mr. Hoover. I thought that Audrey Rose, if indeed she were the force that triggered the nightmares, would remain subdued away from Mr. Hoover’s close proximity. And indeed the nightmares did stop, but other things started happening. Subtle things.

Q For example?

A Well, she caught a cold. Most of the girls at the school had colds, but Ivy’s cold developed into a severe bronchial infection. She was up half the night—that was this past Saturday night—having terrible coughing spasms. And she had a fever. I didn’t have a thermometer, but I could feel her head all flushed and feverish. I don’t know how we managed to get through the night it was so terrible, and the next morning Bill suggested we take her back to the city to see Dr. Kaplan. But I was afraid to take her back to the city, because of Mr. Hoover’s being there, so we took her to United Hospital in Port Chester instead, since it was Sunday, and the few doctors we called in Westport were unable to see her. Well, when we got to the hospital, the fever was gone, and so was the bronchial infection. The cough had completely subsided, and the doctor who examined her found her perfectly normal, except for a slight redness in her throat.

Q And what greater significance did you place in this, other than your daughter had suffered a slight cold?

A Well, I saw the whole tiling as a ploy to get Ivy back to the city. The coughing spasms and fever were meant to frighten us into taking Ivy down to see Dr., Kaplan. And it almost worked.

Q You say, “a ploy to get Ivy back to the city,” Mrs. Templeton. Who was behind this ploy?

A Audrey Rose, of course.

MR. VELIE: Objection. The witness’ answer is unbelievable. Her reference to a mythical Audrey Rose is compelling proof that she is under such an emotional strain as to be incapable of giving competent testimony.

THE COURT: Objection sustained.

Qby MR. MACK: Did anything else happen?

A That same night, Sunday night, I remained in Westport with Ivy while Bill returned to the city. Well, that night I was awakened by a noise coming from Ivy’s room. When I went to investigate, I found Ivy in the bathroom, standing naked in front of the mirror, looking at herself and giggling and whispering, “Audrey Rose,” as if she were calling to her, as if Audrey Rose were hiding somewhere inside her body and Ivy were trying to reach her.

Q Did your daughter know about Audrey Rose at this time?

A Oh, yes, we had told her everything the night before. Some of the girls at the school found out what was going on down here and quickly spread the word around, so we thought it best to tell Ivy everything.

Q How did your daughter accept the news?

A Amazement. Disbelief. But all in all, she took it pretty well. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more romantic and appealing she found the whole notion. She particularly loved the idea of living on and on and never dying.

Q And what significance did you place in her behavior in front of the mirror?

A At first, I thought it was simply little girl curiosity, but the nakedness seemed to suggest something more.

Q What was that?

A She was displaying herself, showing her body, it seemed to me, on someone else’s command.

Q On whose command?

A Audrey Rose’s.

MR. VELIE: Objection, Your Honor. Move to strike the answer as referring to a mythical person. There has been no evidence that such a person exists.

THE COURT: Objection sustained.

Qby MR. MACK: Did anything else happen that night?

A That night Ivy packed her suitcase and in the morning didn’t realize she had done it. Sometime during the night she arose in her sleep and quietly, neatly packed all her things. It was a clear sign to me of Audrey Rose’s desperate need to get back to the city; however, I didn’t know how she hoped to accomplish it, since Ivy had no money and knew nothing about train travel. Later that day, however, I found a train schedule and a ten-dollar bill in Ivy’s tote bag. Both had been stolen from my purse.

Q Stolen by Ivy?

A Of course not. By Audrey Rose.

MR. VELIE: Objection on the grounds that there has been no evidence that Audrey Rose is a living person.

THE COURT: Sustained.

Qby MR. MACK: Do you know why Audrey Rose was so desperate to get back to the city?

MR. VELIE: Objection, Your Honor. The question assumes a fact not in evidence; that there is such a person named Audrey Rose.

THE COURT: Objection sustained.

Qby Mr. Mack: Do you know why your daughter was so desperate to get back to the city?

A To be close to her father.

Q Her father being?

A Mr. Hoover.

Q You mean Mr. Templeton, don’t you?

A No, I mean Ivy was being driven to reach Mr. Hoover.

Q Did anything else happen?

A Yes, she tried to kill Ivy.

Q Who tried to kill her?

A Audrey Rose.

MR. VELIE: Objection on the same grounds previously stated, Your Honor. There has been no evidence that such a person as Audrey Rose exists.

THE COURT: Objection sustained.

Qby MR. MACK: When was there an attempt to kill Ivy?

A Yesterday afternoon. All the girls at the school had built this huge snowman and they were having what they call a crowning and melting ceremony. That is, they had built a fire around it and were melting it down, destroying it; it’s a ritual they do every year. And while it was burning, Ivy, Ivy started to walk into the fire. It wasn’t accidental; she did it purposely; Mother Superior told me that. She said that Ivy literally walked and then crawled into the fire, and if it hadn’t been for the custodian, Mr. Calitri, who rushed in after her and pulled her out, she would have been killed.

Q You mean, your daughter purposely tried to kill herself?

A Oh, no! It wasn’t Ivy. It was Audrey Rose who tried to kill her. Don’t you see, she was thwarted? Unable to get back to the city, she was seeking to escape this earth life by forcing Ivy to walk into the fire. (Witness overcome by tears)

MR. VELIE: Your Honor, I have refrained from objecting to the last two answers given by Mrs. Templeton, although I believe there are ample grounds to have her answers stricken from the record as hearsay, because I believed that it would soon become apparent to this court that Mrs. Templeton is so distraught, because of the near miss that her daughter had with death yesterday, that she cannot possibly be responsible for the answers that she’s giving and I, again, most urgently, suggest that it would be appropriate to recess this court until such time as the witness has been able to calm and collect herself.

THE COURT: Do you feel able to continue, Mrs. Templeton?

MRS. TEMPLETON: Yes, yes. I want to continue. I want to tell it all.

THE COURT: There seems no reason, in my opinion, to grant a recess at this time, Mr. Velie. Mrs. Templeton seems to have recovered sufficiently to continue. However, I will strike the witness’ last two answers from the record and direct the jury to disregard them.

Qby MR. MACK: Mrs. Templeton, do you believe in reincarnation?

A Yes. I do.

Q Mrs. Templeton, do you believe that your daughter, Ivy, is the reincarnation of Mr. Hoover’s daughter, Audrey Rose?

A Yes, I do.

Q Mrs. Templeton, do you believe that Mr. Hoover kidnapped your daughter?

A No, I do not. I believe he was doing a humanitarian thing and had every right to go to her bedroom that night to help her, to see to her, to take care of her, because I believe that what he says is true. I believe that the only help my child will ever get on this earth will be through Mr. Hoover. The only chance she has of living is if this man is released from jail. (Witness overcome by tears)

MR. VELIE: I object to the question, Your Honor, as calling for a conclusion of law, and I move that the witness’ answer be stricken in its entirety. It’s for the jury to make that judgment.

THE COURT: Sustained. Strike the entire answer of the witness from the record, and the jury is instructed to disregard the witness’ answer. Continue, Mr. Mack.

MR. MACK: Your Honor, I have no further questions.

THE COURT: Mr. Velie, you may cross-examine.

MR. VELIE: Your Honor, this woman is in such a highly charged and emotional state, in my opinion, I do not believe that the answers she has given to the questions addressed to her by defense counsel bear any relation to the truth in the matter, and I would feel that any cross-examination I might subject her to at this point would also elicit answers that would be based on her highly distraught condition. Therefore, I will not ask her any questions.

MR. MACK: Your Honor, I move that all of Mr. Velie’s remarks be stricken from the record as being argument and that the jury be instructed to disregard them.

THE COURT: Motion sustained. The court reporter will strike the entire last statement by Mr. Velie from the record, and the jury is instructed to disregard it. You may call your next witness, Mr. Mack.

MR. MACK: I have no further witnesses at this time, Your Honor. The defense rests.

THE COURT: Are you prepared for rebuttal, Mr. Velie?

MR. VELIE: Your Honor, in the light of Mrs. Templeton’s testimony and in the light of the fact that I have determined that I am unable to cross-examine her because of her condition, I do require additional time to prepare my rebuttal portion of the case. I therefore request a recess until tomorrow morning.

THE COURT: Very well. Court will reconvene at nine o’clock in the morning.

(Whereupon the above proceedings were concluded)

Judge Langley’s hammer shot on the gavel brought down the curtain on the performance. In this heightened moment the audience was held in the grip of a tomblike hush, lightly punctuated by the soft aftersobs of the witness. In the next moment the air was rent by what seemed a thunderous ovation—a dramatic and explosive outburst of surprise, delight, approval, and amusement as spectators scrambled noisily to their feet and reporters launched a wild gallop to the doors.

In the midst of pandemonium, Janice Templeton remained seated in the witness chair, her stricken face lowered into her hands, blotting out the scene, taking deep, even breaths to control the tears and the chill in her bones. She could sense the hot flickerings of a thousand eyes upon her, including Bill’s eyes—oh, God, what hatred must be in them!—yet she felt cleansed, relieved, the anxiety that had been eating at her these past months suddenly gone.

All at once, she became aware that the courtroom noise had diminished—were they all staring at her in silence?—which caused her to open her eyes and look up. The first face to swim before her blurred vision was Elliot Hoover’s, hovering in the forefront of the clearing courtroom, surrounded by smiles and sparkles of curiosity as far as the eye could see. Flanked by two guards, Hoover had purposely remained behind, waiting for Janice to look up, insisting on his right to thank her, to relay to her his gratitude for all she had said, for all she had risked in his behalf. Her vision clearing somewhat, she saw that tears had formed in his eyes, too, and that he was smiling at her and nodding his head in a gesture that said, “I know, I know.”

Janice wanted to look away but dared not shift her gaze to the side of the room where Bill was sitting. It was too soon to confront him; she was too weak to cope with all the problems that awaited her in that quarter.

What finally brought her attention around was the sound of her name, spoken in a low, throbbing voice by Scott Velie.

“Mrs. Templeton,” he said dully, “we’re having a meeting in my office after lunch. Can you be there?”

He looked as he sounded, empty.

“Can you be there?” he repeated.

She felt her head nod and saw him turn away and walk briskly to the door.

It was at this moment that she worked up the nerve to face Bill and, when she did, discovered that his seat was empty.

Scott Velie, senior deputy district attorney of the City of New York, sat alone in his office.

His eyes scanned the somber shelves of lawbooks rising to the ceiling on each wall, found its darkly stained, lemon-oiled atmosphere and soft resonances conducive to thought, restful to spirit. It was his think tank, hall of memories, and phone booth, all rolled in one. It fitted his moods and temperaments like an old leather glove, calming him during troubled times, energizing him when weariness threatened to clog his brain, and gently stroking him when the depressions struck.

Why had his instinct failed him this time?

Normally, he would have sensed that Mrs. Templeton was on the edge. He had seen the signs in her darting looks, her too-quick smile, in the hundred little mannerisms she employed to camouflage her fears and guilts. All the signposts had been up. She had all but screamed to him that she was ready to crack. Why had he failed to see it?

Velie knew that his instinct, that rare and delicate instrument, had gone wrong. At age sixty-three, after years of service, it had failed him.

In thirty-two years he had seen the full pageant of human misery walk through his door—all ages, sexes, colors, shapes, sizes, and with every kink in the book: junkies, pushers, prosties, pimps, thieves, kooks, killers, you name it. He had felt sorry for many of them, especially the ones stamped for misery at birth, the professional losers, who, even in this great land of opportunity, never seemed to find their way. He knew about these people. They formed the backdrop of his own youth and still lurked in the corners of his memory. Sometimes, standing across his desk, he’d recognize his own face in the hopeless, fear-ravaged visage of a young felon and wonder how he’d managed to escape a similar fate. Sometimes he’d see himself so clearly he’d allow himself to be plea-bargained by some green-behind-the-ears-attorney and not feel he had abused his trust.

Then there were the Hoovers—the ivory-white Hoovers flushed with all the benefits of a doting society, the people of intelligence and position who slid through life plucking up the breaks as they dropped in their laps—who had nothing better to do with their lives than indulge their fantasies with harebrained schemes and crackpot notions and then feel they had the legal right to inflict their sick delusions on decent, law-abiding people. Janice Templeton’s testimony was proof of Hoover’s contaminating influence on the helpless, the good people. She wanted so desperately for her child to be spared the pain and suffering of mental illness she was willing to buy any crackpot theory. She had accepted Hoover’s reincarnation claims as a terminal patient accepts a phony cancer cure—out of desperation. Hoover not only had buffaloed her, but had surely destroyed a good marriage.

Velie could see that it was all over between the Templetons from the way they sat and looked away from each other during their meeting. They were like strangers. Worse, like enemies. She couldn’t face him, and he couldn’t bear to look at her. From her cool, bland expression, she seemed to be in another world—on an astral plane of her own. The only time she reacted was when Velie made his suggestion. Her face became like chalk. The husband, on the other hand, seemed to grow a couple of feet. He really sparked to the notion. Especially when he saw his wife’s reaction, when he saw the color drain from her face and her expression turn lunatic. It was his wife’s stunned reaction that made him rise to Velie’s bait; not because he thought that much of it, but to punish his wife. Velie had never seen such venom in a smile of pleasure. Yes, Hoover did a great job on those two. Brought out their finest instincts.

When Velie sprang his gimmick on them, he never expected either of them to agree to it. He hardly expected himself to agree to it. It was pure hokum, the kind of horseshit Mack would fling and totally alien to his own nature. Yet this was the kind of arena he was in, the kind of game they were playing, and if they start throwing horseshit at you, you throw horseshit back. Sometimes it was the only way to deal with the Brice Macks—the horseshit throwers. Well, he knew his way around this sort of arena, too. He knew enough about horseshit to be able to throw it back at the best of them.

Scott Velie rose and walked to the window. The late-afternoon sky was blue for a change. Maybe the weather would hold out through the weekend. He had promised Ted and Virginia that he’d spend the weekend with them at their lodge in Pennsylvania and was looking forward to it. It would be good seeing them again, spending a few days with old friends. Since Harriet died, that’s all he had now, all he could depend on—the kindness of old friends.

When he saw the slim figure of Janice Templeton descending the courthouse steps six stories below, Scott Velie knew why he had come to the window. He was curious to know if they would leave the building together. Seeing her now descending the steps alone and walking to the hack stand, the prosecutor began to wonder if perhaps he hadn’t been as much to blame for their breakup as Hoover.

What had she said to Bill, with that lost, haunted look? “You’d really subject your own child to a terrible thing like that?” And how had he answered her? Grinning? “It’s no worse than what you’re willing to subject her to.”

Scott Velie saw the cab with Janice Templeton in it pull away from the curb. A few seconds later he saw Bill Templeton descend the steps and head in the direction of Pinetta’s.

Velie heard himself sigh. There’d be a cold and lonely bed in the Templeton household this night.

Velie knew about cold and lonely beds. The last five years qualified him as an expert.

Judge Langley entered his courtroom determinedly for a change, with a jaunty step and a flourish of robes. Settling himself onto his elevated perch, he silently contemplated his constituency. Another packed house, he was pleased to see. Another day in which Part Seven would fulfill its sacred trust to render justice fairly, impartially, and judiciously and uphold the public’s right to know—the public’s inalienable right to gawk, titter, whisper, and express their oohs and ahs at the drama unfolding before their eyes. That’s what it was, by God! A drama! A goddamn spectacular. A whizbang meller with more thrills, spills, and chills than a three-ring circus.

A note of awe entered the judge’s thoughts. A lawsuit like this one came but once, if ever, in a jurist’s lifetime, and though it was tardy in making its appearance in his own lifetime, it had finally come, and he vowed, by God, to make the most of it. Having his picture taken, having his expert opinion constantly sought after by the press, and, just last evening, being offered that contract by one of the country’s most exclusive and important lecture agencies gave Harmon T. Langley the gloriously buoyant feeling of having at last arrived.

A sudden hush and sense of expectancy in his courtroom encroached on the judge’s daydreams of the good life that lay ahead and caused him reluctantly to wrest his mind back to the day’s order of business.

“If you are ready, you may proceed with your rebuttal, Mr. Velie,” said the judge, his eyes shifting between the battle stations of the opposing attorneys, while, to himself, adding the silent prayer, “And please, God, for my sake, grant them the wisdom to keep the ol’ pot boiling.”

Velie rose and smiled stiffly.

“Thank you, Your Honor. I recall Dr. Gregory Perez to the witness stand.”

At the defendant’s table Brice Mack sat relaxed and comfortable, letting a weary smile indicate his lack of concern over the prosecution’s recall of his own witness. Shortly, however, his smile would become frozen as the import of Velie’s questions gradually unfolded.

“Dr. Perez,” began Velie, approaching the witness with quiet deference, “I understood you to say earlier that hypnosis is a therapeutic tool utilized by most psychiatrists, including yourself, is that correct?”

“Yes. Many psychiatrists employ hypnotic techniques in their therapy.”

“And is one of the techniques used by psychiatrists called hypnotic age regression?”

Perez looked at Velie impassively.

“Yes.”

“What exactly is meant by hypnotic age regression?”

“It is the process by which an individual under hypnosis is brought back to an earlier time in his life and then can reexperience feelings, memories, thoughts, behavior that were characteristic of that period. A person who has been regressed under hypnosis will behave just as though he were literally back at that time.”

As the question was being answered, the prosecutor slowly turned toward the jury box, so that he was now fully facing the defendant’s twelve peers as he put his next question to Dr. Perez.

“How far back can a person be regressed hypnotically?”

“Theoretically, there isn’t any limit, except that one would not use age regression to bring a person back to a time before that person could speak.” The doctor’s voice trailed behind Velie as he began a slow walk toward the jury box. “Theoretically, one could take a person back to infancy, but since he couldn’t speak in infancy, he couldn’t report to you what he was experiencing, so that, normally, when we take a person back under age regression, we usually do it to young childhood in order to recapture memories of events that took place and are now repressed but that may be causing an effect on the adult’s behavior and feelings. In order to try to remove those things that produce neurotic behavior now, we try to recapture the earlier, ‘hidden’ memories through age regression.”

Velie paused at the jury railing.

“But it is possible to regress a person to infancy?”

“Yes.”

“Is it possible to regress a person to a time prior to infancy? To some stage, say, of fetal development in his mother’s womb?”

Perez hesitated.

“It’s theoretically possible to do so, provided there is consciousness and awareness, but again, there would be nothing one could learn since a fetus cannot relate its thoughts and feelings.”

Velie gripped the jury railing, pressed his body forward dramatically, and clearly enunciated, “Dr. Perez, is it possible through hypnotic age regression to take a person back beyond the fetal age, beyond the barrier of current existence, and into a past existence?”

The question elicited a burst of nervous laughter from the doctor.

“Well, there are those who have claimed to be able not only to regress patients back prior to their birth but actually to regress them back to different personalities.” His words tumbled forth in rapid staccato. “They have had patients claim, under hypnosis, that they had lived before, at another time and with other identities and who, in the hypnotic state, had spoken languages that they did not know in the awakened state. To answer your question, is it possible to do this, I would have to say, theoretically, yes, it is possible. It is believed by some and disbelieved by others. It’s a controversial issue, but there are people who have claimed to be able to regress patients into other existences.”

Velie’s eyes made a circuit of the arena, covertly studying the reactions of reporters, spectators, and, particularly, the defendant and his attorney, who were engaged in a subdued, yet energetic discussion. It seemed to Velie that Hoover was restraining Brice Mack from objecting, and he was pleased to see the noxious effect his questions were having on his youthful opponent, who seemed ready to jump out of his skin at suddenly finding himself on the receiving end of his own horseshit.

“Dr. Perez,” said Velie, turning back to the witness “if this court asked you to attempt it, would it be possible for you to regress a subject back beyond the barrier of this life and into a prior existence, if indeed such a thing exists?”

Perez shrugged nervously.

“I have never attempted such a thing.”

“Would you be willing to try?”

Perez stirred restively.

“I would be willing if the court wanted me to.”

Brice Mack, incapable of further restraint, exploded from his seat.

“Objection, Your Honor,” he shouted. “This is pure speculation! It is obvious what the district attorney is leading up to, and I register my strongest possible objection. It is not only highly irregular, but a cheap and tawdry attempt on the part of Mr. Velie to influence and inflame the jury!”

A hum of excitement swept across the courtroom. A light tap of the gavel quickly restored order, whereupon Judge Langley addressed himself to the defense’s objection.

“You are probably right, Mr. Mack,” said the judge courteously. “The questions do call for speculation on the part of the witness, but insofar as he is an expert witness, I’m inclined to permit the district attorney to continue this line of questioning until I see where it’s leading.”

Velie picked up on the judge’s ruling swiftly.

“Your Honor,” said the prosecutor soberly, “I have what may be an unusual request to make of the court, but I think this is a most unusual case. It’s a case that has excited national and even world attention, and I think that in the interest of seeing justice done, and to try all possible means of arriving at the truth in this matter, Your Honor should authorize the conducting of an experiment whereby Ivy Templeton is put under regressive hypnosis by Dr. Perez to ascertain whether or not, in fact, she had a prior life and, if so, whether or not that prior life conforms with the defendant’s claims and whether the hypnosis will reveal it. I further propose that the experiment be conducted under controlled conditions in the hospital in Darien, Connecticut, where Ivy Templeton is presently recovering from injuries sustained a few days ago. I have taken the liberty of calling the hospital and ascertaining what facilities it has. It can provide this court with a large room in its psychiatric wing that is normally used as an observation theater to permit doctors and students the opportunity of studying cases from an unseen vantage point. The room contains a substantial viewing space behind one-way glass which can comfortably seat the jury, defendant, all the lawyers, the court reporter, and this court. I have been assured by the doctors attending Ivy Templeton that she is physically able to withstand the hypnosis, and they foresee no problems arising from such an experiment. With the understanding, Your Honor, that this test be conducted under rules that you promulgate to make sure it is fair to both sides.” A stiff smile formed on Velie’s face. “I’m sure the defense will welcome this experiment if, in fact, the defendant believes in reincarnation as fully and completely as he says he does.”

Brice Mack had remained standing throughout Velie’s proposal, his face a mime show of shock and incredulity. His voice, after he had struggled to find it, was held to the level of a stunned whisper.

“Your Honor, this is unbelievable.”

“Is defense objecting?” Langley inquired.

“Yes. Defense objects most emphatically on the basis that such a test could not possibly be conclusive. There is no way such a test could be conducted with any guarantee of accuracy.” A helpless note of amusement entered his voice. “Look, Your Honor, if the hypnotist is unable to bring Ivy back beyond her birth, that won’t prove that reincarnation doesn’t exist. All it would prove is that he’s not a very successful hypnotist.”

Velie smiled derisively.

“It was not the prosecution who introduced Dr. Perez as a qualified and trustworthy expert in his field, but the defense. And now the defense is seeking to impugn the professional credibility of his own witness.”

Judge Langley swiveled about to consider the position, but in truth, his decision had been reached the moment Scott Velie propounded the motion. Moving the entire court into a hospital theater with all those juicy little dramatic touches—the one-way glass, hypnotizing a child, the search for a former lifetime conducted under the hard, uncompromising scrutiny of both science and the law—offered just the right dash of spice to round out his coming lecture tour, even though, as the defense rightly contended, such a test could not possibly provide evidence of a conclusive or substantive nature.

The softening, almost sensual drifting of the eyes and the slack, succumbing expression on the judge’s face, an expression whose meaning both attorneys had come to know, communicated itself to them simultaneously and brought an immediate roaring objection from Brice Mack.

“I reiterate my objection most strongly, Your Honor! This test is not only highly irregular, but—”

“I do not object, Your Honor,” shouted Hoover, over-powering his attorney’s objection and springing lightly to his feet, which quickly brought the guards to their feet. “I want it done and give my permission!”

The suddenness of Hoover’s countermanding statement brought several reporters to their feet and a heightened atmosphere to the courtroom.

Brice Mack glanced grimly at his client.

“I will not withdraw my objection, Your Honor,” he said coldly and defiantly.

“And I insist on the experiment,” said Hoover tightly.

Chairs squealed as spectators in the rear stood up to gain a clearer, less encumbered view of the action.

“Sit down, Mr. Hoover,” ordered Judge Langley wearily. “You have a lawyer representing you, and you’re not permitted to speak.”

Anger flooded Hoover’s sallow cheeks.

“Then I discharge my lawyer, Your Honor.”

Brice Mack went while. “May I have a few minutes, Your Honor?” he said.

“Granted,” said Judge Langley.

Startled into wariness, the attorney approached his distraught client and began a low-voiced conversation at the defense table. The court waited patiently as the two men engaged in vigorous discussion with much hand waving and head shaking. Finally, Brice Mack stood up and faced the bench, striving to maintain an air of command over a bad situation.

“I withdraw my objection, Your Honor,” he said firmly. “My client is most anxious that this test be conducted, as he feels he will be vindicated by it.”

Sunk down on his spine, Bill Templeton stared fixedly and with enjoyment at the ignominy of Brice Mack’s disgrace. It was a comeuppance the young cock richly rated.

“I see no reason why this court should not permit this test,” said the judge with unusual mildness. “After all, this is a case of truly unique dimensions and, as Mr. Velie so rightly pointed out, of international concern. Since I have permitted the defendant a wide latitude in presenting his defense, I do not feel that I can now place arbitrary restrictions on the prosecution’s right to seek its own path to the truth. However, I do demand that there be some specifications of how the test will be conducted and what safeguards can be provided to insure that it’s being conducted properly, that it’s doing a fair and unbiased job of seeking a true result, and that the person or persons conducting the test are highly qualified to do so.”

Judge Langley addressed his next remarks to the district attorney.

“In the light of the defense’s objection, Mr. Velie, I have decided that in addition to Dr. Perez, two other psychiatrists be selected to participate in the test, both of whom have used hypnosis in the treatment of their patients. The court will name the two experts and will seek to retain the most highly qualified people it can find.”

The courtroom remained tensely quiet as Judge Langley made a notation on his pad, then looked blandly up at the sea of expectant faces, and said, “If there are no further questions, we will recess the case till Monday morning, which should give the court enough time to arrange for the additional psychiatrists and the procedures for testing. The defendant is remanded to custody.”

Janice heard about it over the bedroom radio.

The noon news report confirmed her defeat.

Not only was the court willing to permit the barbarity to take place, but according to the newscaster, Elliot Hoover had unqualifiedly endorsed the test.

Janice stood stunned in the middle of the bedroom, listening to the high-pitched, eager voice punch across the grisly details.

It would take place on Monday morning. At the hospital in Darien. The entire court would be transported there. Jury, judge, lawyers, and defendant would observe from a hidden room. Three psychiatrists would preside. The public would be excluded. A special room with closed circuit TV would accommodate the press.

Janice turned off the radio, hurried to the telephone, and dialed information. Bill might still be at the court building. And if not Bill, Scott Velie or Judge Langley. She had to reach one of them, had to stop this test from happening. She would deny her consent. After all, she was Ivy’s mother—she had some rights.…

Paged, Bill Templeton did not respond. Scott Velie had just left, would be out of town for the weekend, someone thought. Judge Langley might still be in his chamber, however, hold on, please—

The voice that returned was masculine, elderly, but not Langley’s.

“Who is calling?” it asked.

“This is Janice Templeton.”

“Oh, Mrs. Templeton, this is John Cartright, the court bailiff.”

“I must speak to Judge Langley, Mr. Cartright. It’s urgent.”

“The judge isn’t here at present, Mrs. Templeton. Can I help?”

“It’s about my daughter. About the test. I do not want it to take place. I refuse to give my permission.”

“I’ll try to get your message to Judge Langley.”

Fingers of terror seemed to be reaching toward her, seeking to grip her as she quickly showered and packed enough clothing for a lengthy stay. Her hands moved automatically—she was scarcely aware she was directing them—while her mind raced. She must get to Ivy. She must stay with her. Be with her. Somehow she’d stop the test.

Her head reeled sickeningly as she lifted the heavy suitcase and dragged it down the narrow staircase to the living room.

She went out into the hallway and rang for the elevator. While Ernie went inside to fetch the suitcase, Janice remained at the door, looking wistfully back into the living room—a long, piercing, unmoving look—thinking of all she was leaving, and wondering if it would ever be the same again, if she and Bill and Ivy would ever again share the sweet and beautiful life they had made for themselves.

“Dear God, let it not be the end,” Janice cried to herself as tears bit at her eyes and she squeezed them shut against the thought of the terrible deprivation. “Don’t let it be the end,” she prayed, while, at the same time, deep, deep in her heart knowing, as she had known all along, from the very beginning, from that very first day in front of the school and the man with the sideburns and mustache, in that moment of instant prescience, that one day the final act would have to be played out, on its own terms, finding its own way to its own ending.