Brain Child

CHAPTER ONE

La Paloma was the kind of town that absorbed change slowly. Tucked up in the hills above Palo Alto, it had grown slowly for more than a hundred years, yet its focus remained as it had always been, the tiny plaza of the old Spanish mission. Unlike most of the California missions, Mission La Paloma had never been converted to a museum or a historical monument, becoming, instead, the village hall, with its adjoining school now serving as a library.

Behind the mission there was a tiny cemetery, and beyond the cemetery was a collection of small rundown houses where the descendants of La Paloma’s Californio founders lived, still speaking Spanish among themselves, and eking out meager livings by serving the gringos who had taken over the lands of the old hacienda generations ago.

Two blocks from the plaza a smallish, roughly triangular piece of land dominated by an immense oak tree lay at the confluence of the main road through La Paloma and the side roads that wandered through the ravines into which the village had spread over the years. The patch of land had existed undisturbed because the original settlers, starting with the mission priests, had elected to leave the massive oak in place and route the roads away from it. And so it had remained. There were no sidewalks or curbings along La Palomas haphazardly meandering streets, and though the village that had grown up around the mission had eventually spilled over into this unnamed, unpopulated area, the plaza had remained the center of town.

Now the area surrounding the oak was known as the Square. And the huge oak under which generations of La Paloma children had grown up, had climbed on, hung swings from, carved their initials into, and generally abused beyond all reasonable horticultural endurance, was neatly fenced off, surrounded by a well-manicured lawn crisscrossed by concrete walks carefully planned to appear random. Discreet signs advised people to stay off the lawns, refrain from picnicking, deposit litter in cans prettily painted in adobe brown to conform to La Paloma’s Spanish heritage, and the tree itself had an ominous chain surrounding it, and a sign of its own, proclaiming it the largest and oldest oak in California, and forbidding it to be touched in any manner at all by anyone except an authorized representative of the La Paloma Parks Department. The fact that the Parks Department consisted only of two part-time gardeners was nowhere mentioned.

For now the computer people had finally discovered La Paloma.

At first, the thousands who had flocked to the area known as Silicon Valley had clustered on the flats around Palo Alto and Sunnyvale. But tiny, sleepy La Paloma, hidden away up in the hills, spreading out from the oak into the ravines, a beautiful retreat from the California sun, shaded by towering eucalyptus trees, and lush with undergrowth except up toward the tops of the hills where the pasturelands still remained, was too tempting to ignore for long.

The first to move to La Paloma were the upper echelons of the computer people. Determined to use their new wealth to preserve the town’s simple beauty, preserve it they had, spending large sums of their high-tech money to keep La Paloma a rustic retreat from the outside world.

Whether that preservation was a blessing or not depended on whom you talked to.

For the last remnants of the Californios, the influx of newcomers meant more jobs. For the merchants of the village, it meant more money. Both these groups suddenly found themselves earning a decent income rather than struggling for survival.

But for others, the preservation of La Paloma meant a radical change in their entire life-style. Ellen Lonsdale was one of these.

Ellen had grown up in La Paloma, and when she had married, she had convinced her husband that La Paloma was the perfect place in which to settle: a small, quiet town where Marsh could set up his medical practice, and they could raise their family in the ideal environment that Ellen herself had been raised in. And Marsh, after spending many college vacations in La Paloma, had agreed.

During the first ten years after Ellen brought Marsh to La Paloma, her life had been ideal. And then the computer people began coming, and the village began to change. The changes were subtle at first; Ellen had barely noticed them until it was too late.

Now, as she steered her Volvo station wagon through the village traffic on a May afternoon, Ellen found herself reflecting on the fact that the Square and its tree seemed to symbolize all the changes both she and the town had gone through. If the truth were known, she thought, La Paloma would not seem as attractive as it looked.

There were, for example, the old houses — the large, rambling mansions built by the Californio overseers in the style of the once-grand hacienda up in the hills. These were finally being restored to their original splendor. But no one ever talked about the fact that often the splendor of the houses failed to alleviate the unhappiness within, and that, as often as not, the homes were sold almost as soon as the restorations were complete, because the families they housed were breaking up, victims of high-tech, high-tension lives.

And now, Ellen was afraid, the same thing might be about to happen to her and her family.

She passed the Square, drove up La Paloma Drive two blocks, and pulled into the parking lot of the Medical Center.

The Medical Center, like the fence around the Square and the chain around the tree, was something Ellen had never expected to see in La Paloma.

She had been wrong.

As La Paloma grew, so had Marsh’s practice, and his tiny office had finally become the La Paloma Medical Center, a small but completely equipped hospital. Ellen had long since stopped counting how many people were on staff, as she had also long since given up trying to keep books for Marsh as she had when they’d first married. Marsh, as well as being its director, owned fifty percent of its stock. The Lonsdales, like the village, had prospered. In two more weeks they would be moving out of their cottage on Santa Clara Avenue and into the big old house halfway up Hacienda Drive whose previous owners had filed for a divorce before even beginning the restorations they had planned.

Ellen half-suspected that one of the reasons she had wanted the house — and she had to admit she’d wanted it far more than Marsh or their son, Alex — was to give her something to do to keep her mind off the fact that her own marriage seemed to be failing, as so many in La Paloma seemed to be, not only among the newcomers but those of her childhood friends as well, unions that had started out with such high expectations, had seemed to flourish for a while, and now were ending for reasons that most of them didn’t really understand.

Valerie Benson, who had simply thrown her husband out one day, and announced to her friends that she no longer had the energy to put up with George’s bad habits, though she’d never really told anyone what those bad habits had been. Now she lived alone in the house George had helped her restore.

Martha Lewis, who still lived with her husband, even though the marriage seemed to have ended years ago. Marty’s husband, who had flown high with the computer people for a while as a sales manager, had finally descended into alcoholism. For Marty, life had become a struggle to make the monthly payments on the house she could no longer really afford.

Cynthia Evans, who, like Marty, still lived with her husband, but had long ago lost him to the eighteen-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week schedule the Silicon Valley people thrived on, and got rich on. Cynthia had finally decided that if she couldn’t spend time with her husband, she could at least enjoy spending his money, and had convinced him to buy the old ruin at the top of Hacienda Drive and give her free rein to restore it as she saw fit.

And now, the Lonsdales too were involving themselves in one of the old houses. In the next two weeks, Ellen had to see to it that the floors were refinished, the replumbing and rewiring completed, and the interior of the house painted, activity that she hoped would take her mind off the fact that Marsh seemed to be working longer hours than ever before, and that, more and more, the two of them seemed to be disagreeing on practically everything. But maybe, just maybe, the new house would capture his interest, and they would be able to repair the marriage that, like so many others, had been damaged by the demands of too much to do in too little time.

As she slid the Volvo wagon in between a Mercedes and a BMW, and walked into the receiving room, she put a bright smile on her face and steeled herself to avoid a quarrel.

There had been too many recently, over too many things, and they had to stop. They were hurting her, they were hurting Marsh, and they were hurting Alex, who, at sixteen, was far more sensitive to his parents’ moods than Ellen would have thought possible. If she and Marsh quarreled now, Alex would sense it as soon as he came home that afternoon.

Barbara Fannon, who had started with Marsh as his nurse when he’d opened his practice almost twenty years ago, smiled at her. “He just finished a staff meeting and went to his office. Shall I tell him you’re here?”

Ellen shook her head. “I’ll surprise him. It’ll be good for him.”

Barbara frowned. “He doesn’t like surprises …”

“That’s why it’ll be good for him,” Ellen retorted with a forced wink, wishing she didn’t sometimes feel that Barbara knew Marsh better than she did herself. “Mustn’t let Doctor start feeling too important, must we?” she asked as she started toward her husband’s office.

He was at his desk, and when he glanced up, Ellen thought she saw a flash of annoyance in his eyes, but if it was there, he quickly banished it.

“Hi! What drags you down here? I thought you’d be up at the new place driving everyone crazy and spending the last of our money.” Though he was smiling broadly, Ellen felt the sting of criticism, then told herself she was imagining it.

“I’m meeting Cynthia Evans,” she replied, and immediately regretted her words. To Marsh, Cynthia and Bill Evans represented all the changes that had taken place in La Paloma. Of the fortunes that were being made, Bill’s was one of the largest. “Don’t worry,” she added. “I’m not buying, just looking.” She offered Marsh a kiss, and when it was not returned, went to perch uneasily on the sofa that sat against one wall. “Although we are going to have to do something about the tile in the patio,” she added. “Most of it’s broken, and it’s impossible to match what isn’t.”

Marsh shook his head. “Later,” he pronounced. “We agreed that for now, we’d only do what we have to to make the place livable.”

“I know,” Ellen sighed. “But every time Cynthia tells me what she’s doing with the hacienda, I get absolutely green with envy.”

Marsh set his pen down on the desk and faced her. “Then maybe you should have married a programming genius, not a country doctor,” he suggested in a tone Ellen couldn’t read.

While she tried to decide how to respond, her eyes surveyed the office. Despite Marsh’s objections, she’d insisted on decorating it with rosewood furniture. “This isn’t exactly what I’d call shabby,” she finally ventured, and was relieved to see Marsh’s smile return.

“No, it isn’t,” he agreed. “And even I have to admit that I kind of like it, even though I flinch every time I think of what it cost. Anyway, is that why you came down here? Just to terrify me with the idea of your shopping with Cynthia Evans?”

Ellen shook her head and tried to match his bantering tone. “Worse. I didn’t even come down to see you. I came down to pick up the corsage for Alex.” Marsh looked blank. “The prom,” she reminded him. “Our son? Sixteen years old? Junior prom? Remember?”

Marsh groaned. “I’m sorry. It’s just that there’s so damned much to keep track of around here.”

“Marsh,” Ellen began, “I just wish … Oh, never mind.”

“You wish I’d spend less time here and more at home,” Marsh finished. “I will,” he added. “Anyway, I’ll try.”

Their eyes met, and the office seemed suddenly to fill with the words that both of them had spoken so often they knew them by heart. The argument was old, and there was, both of them knew, no resolution for it. Besides, Marsh wasn’t that different from most of the husbands and fathers of La Paloma. They all worked too many hours a day, and all of them were more interested in their careers than in their families.

“I know you’ll try,” she said. Then she went on, her voice rueful in spite of her intentions. “And I know you’ll fail, and I keep telling myself that it doesn’t really matter and that everything will be all right.” Once again Ellen regretted her words, but this time, instead of looking irritated, Marsh got up and came to her, pulling her to her feet.

“It will be all right,” he told her. “We’re just caught up in a life we never expected, with more money than we ever thought we’d have, and more demands on my time than we ever planned for. But we love each other, and whatever happens, we’ll deal with it.” He kissed her. “Okay?”

Ellen nodded, as relief flowed through her. Over the last years, and particularly the last months, there had been so few moments like this, when she knew that she and Marsh did, despite the problems, still belong together. She returned his kiss, then drew away, smiling. “And now I’m going to get Alex his flowers.”

Marsh’s expression, soft a moment before, hardened slightly. “Alex can’t get them himself?”

“Times have changed,” Ellen replied, ignoring the look on her husband’s face and trying to keep her voice light. “And I don’t have time to listen to you recite the litany of the good old days. Let’s face it — when you were Alex’s age, you didn’t have nearly as much to do after school as he does, and since I was going to be in the village anyway, I might as well pick up the flowers.”

Marsh’s eyes narrowed, and the last trace of his smile disappeared. “And when I was a kid, my school wasn’t as good as his is, and there was no accelerated education program for me like there is for Alex. Except he’s probably not going to get into it.”

“Oh, God,” Ellen said, as the last of their moment of peace evaporated. Did he really have to convert something as simple as picking up a corsage into another lecture on his perception of Alex as an underachiever? Which, of course, he wasn’t, no matter what Marsh thought. And then, just as she was about to defend Alex, she checked herself, and forced a smile. “Let’s not start that, Marsh. Not right now. Please?”

Marsh hesitated, then returned her smile, though it was as forced as her own. Still, he kissed her good-bye, and when she left his office, she hoped perhaps they might have had their last argument of the day. But when she was gone, instead of going back to the work that was stacked up on his desk, Marsh sat for a few minutes, letting his mind drift.

He, too, was aware of the strains that were threatening to pull his marriage apart, but he had no idea of what to do about them. The problems just seemed to pile up. As far as he could see, the only solution was to leave La Paloma, though he and Ellen had agreed a year ago that leaving was no solution at all. Leaving was not solving problems, it was only running away from them.

Nor was Alex’s performance in school the real problem, though Marsh was convinced that if Alex only applied himself, he could easily be a straight-A student.

The problem, Marsh thought, was that he was beginning to wonder if his wife, like so many other people in La Paloma, had come to think that money would solve everything.

Then he relented. What was going wrong wasn’t Ellen’s fault. In fact, it was no one’s fault. It was just that the world was changing, and both of them had to work harder to adjust to those changes before their marriage was torn apart.

He made up his mind to get home early that evening and see to it that nothing spoiled his wife’s pleasure in their son’s first prom.

Alex Lonsdale leaned forward across the bathroom sink and peered closely at the blemish on his right cheek, then decided that it wasn’t a pimple at all — merely a slight redness from the pressure he’d put on his father’s electric razor while he’d shaved. He ran the razor over his face one last time, then opened it to clean it out the way his father had shown him. Not that there was much to clean — Alex’s beard, a month after his sixteenth birthday, was still more a matter of optimism than reality. Still, when he tapped the shaver head against the sink, a few specks appeared, and they were the black of his own hair rather than the sandy brown of his father’s. Grinning with satisfaction, he put the razor back together, left the bathroom, and hurried down the hall to his room, doing his best to ignore the sound of his parents’ argument as their raised voices drifted in from the kitchen.

The argument had been going on for an hour now, ever since he’d left the dinner table to begin getting ready for the prom. It was a familiar argument, and as Alex began wrestling with the studs of his rented dress shirt, he wondered how far it would go.

He hated it when his parents started arguing, hated the fact that as hard as he tried not to listen, he could hear every word. That, at least, would be something he wouldn’t have to worry about when they moved into the new house. Its walls were thick, and from his room on the second floor he wouldn’t be able to hear anything that was going on in the rest of the house. So when the shouting matches began, he could just go to his room and shut it all out. Every angry word they spoke hurt him. All he could do was try not to hear.

He finished mounting the studs, shrugged into the shirt, then began working on the cufflinks, finally taking the shirt off again, folding the cuffs, maneuvering the links halfway through, then putting the shirt on once more. The left link was easy, but the right one gave him more trouble. At last it popped through the buttonholes, and he snapped it into position.

He glanced at the clock on his desk. He still had five minutes before he had to leave if he wasn’t going to be late. He pulled on his pants, hooked up the suspenders, then eyed the cummerbund that lay on the bed. Which way was it supposed to go? Pleats up, or pleats down? He couldn’t remember. He picked up his hairbrush and ran it through the thick shock of hair that always seemed to fall across his forehead, then grabbed the offending maroon cummerbund and matching dinner jacket. As he’d hoped they would, his parents fell silent as he appeared in the kitchen.

“I can’t remember which way it goes,” he said, holding up the garment.

“Pleats down,” Ellen Lonsdale replied. “Otherwise it’ll wind up full of crumbs. Turn around.” Taking the cummerbund from Alex’s hands, she fastened it neatly around his waist, then held his coat while he slid his arms into its sleeves. When he turned to face her once more, she reached up to put her arms around his neck and give him a hug. “You look terrific,” she said. She squeezed him once more, then stepped back. “Now, you have a wonderful time, and drive carefully.” She shot a warning look toward Marsh, then relaxed as she saw that he was apparently as willing as she to drop their argument.

“Gotta go,” Alex was saying. “If I’m late, Lisa will kill me.”

“If you’re late, you’ll kill yourself,” Ellen observed, her smile returning. “But don’t rush off and forget these.” She opened the refrigerator and took out Lisa’s corsage, along with the white carnation for Alex’s lapel.

“You should’ve gotten red,” Alex groused as he let his mother pin the flower onto his dinner jacket.

“If you wanted a red carnation, you should have gotten a white jacket,” Ellen retorted. She stepped back and gazed proudly at Alex. Somehow, he had managed to inherit both their looks, and the combination was startling. His dark eyes and black wavy hair were hers; his fair complexion and even features, his father’s. The combination lent his face a sensitive handsomeness that had earned him admiring remarks since he was a baby, and, in the last few months, an unending string of phone calls from girls who hoped he might be tiring of Lisa Cochran. “Don’t be surprised if you and Lisa don’t wind up the king and queen of the prom,” she added, stretching upward to kiss him.

“Aw, Mom—”

“They still have the king and queen of the prom, don’t they?” Ellen asked.

Blushing, Alex nodded his head, checked his pockets for his keys and wallet, and started for the door.

“And remember,” Ellen called after him. “Don’t stay out past one, and don’t get into any trouble.”

“You mean, don’t drink,” Alex corrected her. “I won’t. I promise. Okay?”

“Okay,” Marsh Lonsdale replied. He handed Alex a twenty-dollar bill. “Take some of the kids out and buy them a Coke after the dance.”

“Thanks, Dad.” Alex disappeared out the back door. A moment later Ellen and Marsh heard his car start. Marsh arched his brows. “I don’t believe he’s actually going to drive all the way next door,” he said, unable to suppress a smile, despite the fact that it was Alex’s car that he and Ellen had been arguing about all evening.

“Well, of course he is,” Ellen replied. “Do you really think he’s going to pick up Lisa, then walk her down our driveway? Not our Alex.”

“He could have walked her all the way to the prom,” Marsh suggested.

“No, he couldn’t,” Ellen said, her voice suddenly tired. “He needs a car, Marsh. After we move, I just can’t spend all my time ferrying him up and down the ravine. And besides, he’s a responsible boy—”

“I’m not saying he isn’t,” Marsh agreed. “All I’m saying is that I think he should have earned the car. And I’m not saying he should have earned the money, either. But couldn’t we have used the car as an incentive for him to pick up his grades?”

Ellen shrugged, and began clearing the dinner dishes off the table. “He’s doing just fine.”

“He’s not doing as well as he could be, and you know it as well as I do.”

“I know,” Ellen sighed. “But I just think it’s two separate issues, that’s all.” Suddenly she smiled. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we compromise? Let’s wait until his grades come out, and see what happens. If they get worse, I’ll agree that getting him the car was a mistake, and you can take it away from him. I’ll cope with the transportation problem some way. If they stay the same, or improve, he keeps the car. But either way, we stop fighting about it, all right?”

Marsh hesitated only a second, then grinned. “Deal,” he said. “Now, what say I help you with the dishes, and we try to put together something with the Cochrans?” He offered his wife a mischievous wink. “I’ll even drive over next door and pick them up.”

The last of the tension that had been vibrating between them all afternoon suddenly dissipated, and together Ellen and Marsh began clearing away the dinner dishes.

Alex carefully backed his shiny red Mustang down the driveway, then parked it by the curb in front of the Cochran’s house next door. He picked up Lisa’s corsage, crossed the lawn, and walked into the house without knocking. “Anybody here?” he called. Lisa’s six-year-old sister, Kim, hurtled down the stairs and threw herself onto Alex.

“Is that for me?” she demanded, grabbing for the corsage box.

“If Lisa isn’t ready, maybe I’ll take you to the dance,” Alex replied, peeling Kim loose as her father’s bulky frame appeared from the living room. “Hi, Mr. Cochran.”

Jim Cochran raised one eyebrow and surveyed Alex. “Ah, Prince Charming descends from the castle on the mountain to take Cinderella to the ball.”

Alex tried to cover his feelings of embarrassment with a grin. “Aw, come on. We’re not moving for two more weeks. And it’s not a castle anyway.”

“True, true,” Cochran agreed. “On the other hand, I haven’t noticed you asking if you can rent Kim’s room. We’ll happily throw her out.”

“You will not,” Kim yelled, aiming a punch at her father’s belly.

“Will too,” her father told her. “Want a Coke, Alex? Lisa’s still upstairs trying to make herself look human.” He dropped his booming voice only slightly, still leaving it loud enough to fill the house. “Actually, she’s been ready for an hour, but she doesn’t want you to think she’s too eager.”

“That’s a big lie!” Lisa said from the top of the stairs. “He always lies, Alex. Don’t believe a word he says.” Lisa, unlike Alex, had inherited all her looks from her mother. She was small, with short blond hair swept back from her face so that her green eyes became her dominant feature. And, being not only Lisa, but her father’s daughter as well, she had chosen a dress in brilliant emerald rather than the more subdued pastels the other girls would be wearing. Alex’s grin widened as she came down the stairs. “Hey, you look gorgeous.”

Lisa smiled appreciatively and gave him a mock-seductive wink. “You don’t look so bad yourself.” She stood waiting for a moment; then: “Aren’t you going to pin the corsage on?” Alex stared at the box in his hands, his face reddening as he handed it to Carol Cochran, who had appeared from the direction of the kitchen.

“M-maybe you’d better do it, Mrs. Cochran. I … I might slip or something.”

“You won’t slip, Alex,” Lisa told him. “Now, come on. Just pin it on, and let’s go. Otherwise we’ll be here all night while Mom takes pictures.”

Alex fumbled clumsily with the corsage for a moment, but finally succeeded in getting it fastened to Lisa’s dress. Then, true to Lisa’s words, Carol Cochran began herding them into the living room, camera in hand.

“Mom, we don’t have time—” Lisa pleaded, but Carol was adamant.

“You only go to your first prom once, and you only wear your first formal once. And I’m going to have pictures of it. Besides, you both look so—”

“Oh, God, Alex,” Lisa moaned. “She’s going to say it. Cover your ears.”

“Well, I don’t care,” Carol laughed as Alex and Lisa clapped their hands over their ears. “You do look cute!”

Twenty-four pictures later, Alex and Lisa were on their way to the prom.

“I don’t see why we have to stand in the receiving line,” Alex complained as he carefully slid the Mustang into a space between an Alfa Romeo and a Porsche. Before Lisa could answer, he was out of the car and opening the passenger door for her.

From a few yards away, a voice came out of the dusk. “Scratch that paint, and your ass is grass, Lonsdale.”

Alex grinned and waved to Bob Carey, who was holding hands with Kate Lewis, but paying more attention to his Porsche than his girlfriend. “You tore the side off it last month!” Alex taunted him.

“And my dad nearly tore the side off me,” Bob replied. “From now on, I have to pay for all the repairs myself.” He waited until Lisa was out of the car and Alex had closed the door, then relaxed. “See you inside.” He and Kate turned and started toward the gym, where the dance was being held.

“We have to stand in line because you’re going to be student-body president next year,” Lisa told Alex. “If you didn’t want to do that kind of thing, you shouldn’t have run.”

“No one told me I had to. I thought all I had to do was have my picture taken for the annual.”

“Come on, it won’t be that bad. You know everybody in school already. All you have to do is say hello to them.”

“And introduce them to you, which is stupid, because you know them all just as well as I do.”

Lisa giggled. “It’s all supposed to improve our social graces. Don’t you want your graces improved?”

“What if I forget someone’s name? I’ll die.”

“Stop worrying. You’ll be fine. And we’re late, so hurry up.”

They hurried up the steps into the foyer of the gym and took their places in the receiving line. The first couple to approach them were Bob Carey and Kate Lewis, and Alex was pleased to see that Bob seemed as nervous about moving down the line as Alex was about standing in it. The two of them stood for a moment, wondering what to say to each other. Finally it was Kate who spoke.

“Isn’t this wonderful?” she asked. “All year I’ve been looking forward to tonight, and I’m never going to forget a minute of it.”

“None of us will,” Lisa assured her.

And none of them ever did. For none of their lives was ever quite the same again.

CHAPTER TWO

The last thundering rock chord was abruptly cut off, and Alex, gasping, glanced around the gym in search of Lisa. The last time he’d seen her — at least fifteen minutes ago — she’d been dancing with Bob Carey, and he’d been dancing with Kate Lewis. Since then, he’d danced with three other girls, and now Bob was standing near the wall shouting in Jennifer Lang’s ear. He started outside, certain that he’d find Lisa out on the lawn catching her breath. As he reached the door, a hand closed on his arm. He turned to see Carolyn Evans smiling at him.

“Hey,” Carolyn said, “if you’re looking for Lisa, she’s in the rest room with Kate and Jenny.”

“Then I guess I’ll have a glass of punch, if there’s any left.”

“There’s loads left,” Carolyn told him in the slightly mocking voice Alex knew she always used when she was trying to seem more sophisticated than the rest of the kids. “Hardly anybody’s drinking it except you and Lisa. Come on out to my car — I’ve got some beer.”

Alex shook his head.

“Oh, come on,” Carolyn urged. “What’s one beer gonna do to you? I’ve had four, and I’m not drunk.”

“I’m driving. If I’m driving, I don’t drink.”

Carolyn’s head tipped back, and a throaty laugh that Alex was sure she practiced for hours emerged from her glistening lips. “You’re just too good to be true, aren’t you? Not even one little tiny beer? Come on, Alex — get human.”

“It’s not that,” Alex replied, forcing a grin. “It’s just that my dad’ll take my car away from me if I come home with beer on my breath.”

“Too bad for you,” Carolyn purred. “Then I guess you can’t come to my party.” When she saw a slight flicker of interest in Alex’s eyes, she decided to press her advantage. “Everybody’s going to be there — sort of a housewarming.”

Alex stared at Carolyn in disbelief. Was she really talking about the hacienda? But his mother told him the Evanses weren’t letting anyone see it for another month, until it was completely refurbished.

And everyone in La Paloma, no matter what he thought of the Evanses, wanted to see what Cynthia Evans had done with Bill Evans’s money.

At first, when the rumors began circulating that the Evanses had bought the enormous old mansion on top of Hacienda Drive, the assumption had been that they would tear it down. It had stood vacant for too many years, was far too big for a family to keep up without servants, and was far too decayed for anyone to seriously consider restoring it.

But then the project had begun.

First to be repaired was the outer wall. Much of it had long since collapsed; only a few yards of its southern expanse were still standing. But it had been rebuilt, its old wooden gates replaced by new ones whose designs had been copied from faded sketches of the hacienda as it had looked a hundred and fifty years earlier. Except that the new gates were wired with alarms and swung smoothly open on electrically controlled rollers. And then, after the wall was complete, Cynthia had begun the restoration of the mansion and the outbuildings.

Almost everybody in La Paloma had gone up to the top of Hacienda Drive once or twice, but the gates were always closed, and no one had succeeded in getting inside the walls. Alex, along with some of his friends, had climbed the hills a few times to peer down into the courtyard, but all they’d been able to see was the exterior work — the new plaster and the whitewashing, and the replacement of the red tiles on the roof.

What everyone was truly waiting for was a glimpse of the interior, and now Carolyn was saying her friends could see it that very night.

Alex eyed her skeptically. “I thought your mother wasn’t letting anyone in until next month.”

“Mom and Dad are in San Francisco for the weekend,” Carolyn said.

“I don’t know—” Alex began, remembering his promise not to go to any parties after the dance.

“Don’t know about what?” Lisa asked, slipping her arm through his.

“He doesn’t want to come to my party,” Carolyn replied before Alex could say anything.

Lisa’s eyes widened. “There’s a party? At the hacienda?”

Carolyn nodded with elaborate casualness. “Bob and Kate are coming, and Jenny Lang, and everybody.”

Lisa turned to Alex. “Well, let’s go!” Alex flushed and looked uncomfortable, but said nothing. The band struck up the last dance and Lisa led Alex onto the floor. “What’s wrong?” she asked a moment later. “Why can’t we go to Carolyn’s party?”

“ ’Cause I don’t want to.”

“You just don’t like Carolyn,” Lisa argued. “But you won’t even have to talk to her. Everybody else will be there too.”

“It isn’t that.”

“Then what is it?”

“I promised my folks we wouldn’t go to any parties. Dad gave me some money to take some of the kids out for a hamburger, and I promised we’d come home right after that.”

Lisa fell silent for a few seconds; then: “We don’t have to tell them where we were.”

“They’d find out.”

“But don’t you even want to see the place?”

“Sure, but—”

“Then let’s go. Besides, it’s not where we go that your mom and dad are worried about — they’re afraid you’ll drink. So we’ll go to the party, but we won’t even have a beer. And we won’t stay very long.”

“Come on, Lisa. I promised them I wouldn’t—”

But Lisa suddenly broke away from him and started pulling him off the dance floor. “Let’s find Kate and Bob. Maybe we can convince them to go up to Carolyn’s with us for just a few minutes, then the four of us can go out for hamburgers. That way we can see the place, and you won’t have to lie to your folks.”

As Lisa led him out of the gym, Alex knew he’d give in, even though he shouldn’t. With Lisa, it was hard not to give in — she always managed to make everything sound perfectly logical, even when Alex was sure it wasn’t.

The headlights of Alex’s Mustang picked up the open gates of the hacienda, and he braked the car to a stop. “Are we supposed to park out here, or go inside?”

Lisa shrugged. “Search me. Carolyn didn’t say.” Suddenly a horn sounded, and Bob Carey’s Porsche pulled up beside them, its window rolled down.

“Over there,” Bob called. He was pointing off to the left, where a small group of cars already stood parked in the shadow of the wall. Following Bob, Alex maneuvered the Mustang into a spot next to a Camaro, shut off the engine, then turned to Lisa.

“Maybe we oughta just go on home,” he suggested, but Lisa grinned and shook her head.

“I want to see it. Come on — just for a little while.” She got out of the car, and after a second’s hesitation, Alex joined her. A moment later Kate and Bob appeared out of the darkness, and the four of them started toward the lights flooding from the gateway.

“I don’t believe this,” Kate said a moment later. They were standing just inside the gate, trying to absorb the transformation that had come over what had been, only a year earlier, a crumbling ruin.

To the left, the old stables had been rebuilt into garages, and in the bright whiteness of the floodlights, the new plaster was indistinguishable from the old. The only change was that the stable roofs, originally thatched, were now of the same red tile as the house and the servants’ quarters.

“It’s weird,” Alex said. “It looks like it’s a couple of hundred years old.”

“Except for that,” Lisa breathed. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”

Dominating the courtyard, which until recently had been nothing more than an overgrown weed patch, was a glistening swimming pool fed by a cascade of tumbling water that made its way down five intricately tiled tiers before finally splashing into the immense oval of the pool.

Bob Carey whistled softly. “How big do you s’pose it is?”

“Big enough,” Alex replied. Then his eyes wandered to what had once been the servants’ quarters. “Wanta bet that’s a pool house now?”

Before anyone could venture an answer, Carolyn Evans’s voice rang out over the rock music that was throbbing from the huge main house. “Hey! Come on in!”

Glancing at each other uneasily, the four of them slowly crossed the courtyard, then stepped up onto the broad loggia that ran the entire length of the house. Carolyn, grinning happily, waited for them at the elaborately carved oaken front door. “Isn’t it neat? Come on in — everybody’s already here.”

They went through the front door into a massive tile-floored entry hall that was dominated by a staircase curving up to the second floor. To the right there was a large dining room, and beyond it they could see through another room into the kitchen. “That’s a butler’s pantry between the dining room and kitchen,” Carolyn explained, then raised her voice as someone turned up the volume on the stereo. “Mom wasn’t really sure it was supposed to be there, but she put it in anyway.”

“You going to have a butler?” Kate Lewis asked.

Carolyn shrugged with elaborate unconcern. “I don’t know. I guess so. Mom says the house is too big for María to take care of by herself.”

“María Torres?” Bob Carey groaned. “That old witch can’t even take care of her own house. My mom fired her after the first day!”

“She’s okay—” Alex began, but was immediately drowned out by the others’ laughter. Even Lisa joined in.

“Come on, Alex, she’s a loony-bin case. Everybody knows that.” Then she glanced guiltily toward Carolyn. “She isn’t here, is she?”

Carolyn giggled maliciously. “If she is, she just got an earful.”

At the top of the stairs, María Torres faded back into the darkness of the second-floor hallway, her black dress making her nearly invisible.

She had been sitting quietly in the large bedroom at the end of the corridor — the bedroom that, by rights, should have been hers — when the first of the cars had arrived.

No one, she knew, should have come back to the hacienda for hours, and she should have had the house to herself and her ghosts from the past. But now her reverie was shattered, and the pounding din of the gringo music, and the children of the gringos she had spent her life hating, filled the ancient rooms.

She had been in the house since seven o’clock, having let herself in with her own key as soon as Carolyn had left. She had spent the last four hours drifting through the house, imagining that it was hers, that she was not the cleaning woman — no more than a peón—but the mistress of the hacienda: Doña María Ruiz de Torres. And one day it would happen; one day, sometime in the vague future, it would happen. The gringos would be driven away, and finally the hacienda would be hers.

But for now she could only pretend, and be careful. The gringos were strict and never wanted her to be alone in their homes. She must leave the hacienda without being seen, and make her way back down the canyon to her little house behind the mission, and when she came back tomorrow, she must give no hint that she had been here at all tonight.

She glanced once more around the gloom of the bedroom that should have been hers, then slipped away, down the back stairs, the stairs that her ancestors never would have used, and out into the night. Then, as the gringo revelry went on — a desecration! — she kept watch, her ancient anger burning inside her.…

“Jeez,” Bob whispered. “Last time I saw this, it looked like the place had burned. Now look at it.”

The living room, across the entry hall from the dining room, was sixty feet long, and was dominated by an immense fireplace on the far wall.

The oak floor gleamed a polished brown that was nearly black, but the white walls picked up the light from sconces that had been wired into them at regular intervals to fill the room with an even brightness that made it seem even larger than it was. Twenty feet above, huge peeled logs supported a cathedral ceiling.

“This is incredible,” Lisa breathed.

“This is just the beginning,” Carolyn replied. “Just wander around anywhere, and make sure you don’t miss the basement. That’s Daddy’s part of the house, and Mom just hates it.” Then she was gone, disappearing into the mass of teenagers who were dancing to the rhythms of a reggae album.

It took them nearly an hour to go through the house, and even then they weren’t sure they’d seen it all. Upstairs there was a maze of rooms, and they’d counted seven bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, in addition to a library and a couple of small sitting rooms. All of it looked as if it had been built and furnished nearly two hundred years ago, then somehow frozen in time.

“Can you imagine living here?” Lisa asked as they finally started down toward the basement.

“It’s not like a house at all,” Alex replied. “It feels more like a museum. Hey,” he added, suddenly stopping halfway down the stairs. “I don’t remember this place ever having a basement.”

“It didn’t,” Kate told him. “Carolyn says her dad wanted his own space, but her mom wouldn’t let him have any of the old rooms. So he dug out a basement. Do you believe it?”

“Holy shit,” Bob Carey muttered. “Didn’t he think the house was big enough already?”

At the bottom of the stairs they found a laundry room to the left, and beyond that a big empty space that looked as though it was intended for storage.

Under the living room, occupying nearly the same amount of space as the room above, they found Mr. Evans’s private space. For a long time they stared at it in silence.

“Well, I think it’s tacky,” Lisa said when she’d taken it all in.

Bob Carey shrugged. “And I think you’re just jealous. I bet you wouldn’t think it was tacky if it was your house.”

Kate Lewis raked Bob with what she hoped was a scathing glare. “My mother always says the Evanses have more money than taste, and she’s right. I mean, just look at it, Bob. It’s gross!”

It was a media room. The far wall was nearly covered by an immense screen, which could be used either for movies or projection television. Along one wall was a complex of electronic components that none of them could completely identify. They were, however, apparently the source of the rock music, and they could barely hear Carolyn demanding that it be turned down for fear the neighbors would call the police. Nobody, however, was paying any attention to her, and much of the party seemed to have gravitated downstairs.

What had elicited Lisa Cochran’s criticism, though, was not the electronics, but the bar opposite them. Not a typical home bar, with three stools and a rack for glasses, the Evanses’ bar ran the entire length of the wall. Behind the counter itself, the wall was covered with shelves of liquor and glasses, and each shelf was edged with a neon tube, which provided a rainbow effect that was reflected throughout the room by the mirrors that covered the wall behind the shelves and the bar itself. The bar, by now, was covered with bottles, and several of the kids were happily filling glasses with various kinds of liquor.

“Want something?” Bob asked, eyeing the array.

Kate hesitated, then shrugged. “Why not? Is there any gin?”

Bob poured them each a tumbler, added a little ginger ale, and handed one of the glasses to Kate, then turned to ask Alex and Lisa what they wanted. But while he’d been mixing the drinks, Alex and Lisa had disappeared. “Hey — where’d they go?”

Kate shrugged. “I don’t know. Come on, let’s dance.” She finished her drink and pulled Bob out onto the floor, but when the record ended, both she and Bob scanned the crowd, looking for Alex and Lisa.

“You think they got mad ’cause we had a drink?” Kate finally asked.

“Who cares? It’s not as if we need a ride home or anything. Forget about them.”

“No! Come on.”

They found Alex and Lisa in the courtyard, staring up at the stars. “Hey,” Bob yelled, holding up his glass, “aren’t you two gonna join the party?”

“We weren’t going to drink, remember?” Alex asked, staring at the glass. “We were going out for hamburgers.”

“Who wants hamburgers when you can drink?” Bob replied. He reached down and pulled a bottle of beer out of a tub of ice and thrust it into Alex’s hands. Alex looked at it for a moment, then glanced at Lisa, who frowned and shook her head. Alex hesitated, then defiantly twisted the cap loose and took a swig.

Lisa glared accusingly at him. “Alex!”

“I didn’t even want to come to this party,” Alex told her, his voice taking on a defensive edge. “But since we’re here, we might as well enjoy it.”

“But we said—”

“I know what we said. And I said I wasn’t going to any parties, either. But I’m here. Why shouldn’t I do what everybody else is doing?” Deliberately he tipped the beer bottle up and chugalugged it, then reached for another. Lisa’s eyes narrowed angrily, but before she could say anything else, Carolyn Evans’s voice suddenly rose over the din of the party as she came out of the front door with her arms full of towels.

“Who wants to go in the pool?”

There was a momentary silence, then someone replied that no one had suits. “Who needs suits?” Carolyn squealed. “Let’s go skinny-dipping!” Suddenly she reached behind her, pulled down the zipper of her dress, and let it drop to the patio. Stripping off her panties and strapless bra, she dived into the pool, swam underwater for a few strokes, then broke the surface. “Come on,” she yelled. “It’s great!”

There was a moment of hesitation, then two more kids stripped and plunged into the water. Three more followed, and suddenly the patio was filling up with discarded clothes and the pool with naked teenagers. Once more, Alex glanced at Lisa.

“No!” she said, reading his eyes. “We were only coming for a few minutes, and we weren’t going to drink. And we’re certainly not going into the pool.”

“Chicken,” Alex teased, shrugging out of his dinner jacket. Then he drained the second beer, put the bottle down, and began untying his shoelaces.

“Alex, don’t,” Lisa begged. “Please?”

“Aw, come on. What’s the big deal? Haven’t you ever skinny-dipped before?”

“It’s not a big deal,” Lisa argued. “I just don’t think we ought to do it. I think we ought to go home.”

“Well, I think we ought to go swimming,” Alex crowed. He stripped off his pants and shirt. “I didn’t think we ought to come here, but I came, didn’t I? Well, now I think we ought to go skinny-dipping, and I think you ought to go along with it.” Peeling off his Jockey shorts, he plunged into the water. A moment later he came to the surface and turned around to grin at Lisa.

She was gone.

The effects of the two fast beers suddenly neutralized by the cold water, Alex scanned the crowd, sure that Lisa must be among the kids still on the pool deck. Then he was equally sure she was not. If she’d made up her mind not to come into the pool, she wouldn’t change it.

And Alex suddenly felt like a fool.

He hadn’t wanted to come to the party, he hadn’t really wanted the two beers he’d drunk, and he certainly didn’t want Lisa mad at him. He scrambled out of the water, grabbed a towel, then dried himself off and dressed as fast as he could. As he started into the house, he asked Bob Carey if he’d seen Lisa anywhere. Bob hadn’t.

Nor had anyone else.

Ten minutes later, Alex left the house, praying that his car wasn’t blocked in.

*

A quarter of a mile down Hacienda Drive, Lisa Cochran’s quick pace slowed, and she wondered if maybe she shouldn’t turn around and go back to the party. What, after all, was so horrible about skinny-dipping? And who was she to be so prissy about it? In a way, Alex was right — it had been her idea that they go to the party. He’d even argued with her, but she’d insisted. Still, he had drunk a couple of beers, and by now he might be working on a third. And if he was, she certainly didn’t want to drive home with him.

She stopped walking entirely, and wondered what to do. Perhaps she should walk all the way into the village and wait for Alex at home.

Except that her parents would be up and would want to know what had happened.

Maybe the best thing to do was go back to the party, find Alex, and convince him that it was time for them to go home. She would do the driving.

But that would be giving in, and she wouldn’t give in. She had been right, and Alex had been wrong, and it served him right that she’d walked out on him.

She made up her mind, and continued down the road.

Alex jockeyed the Mustang around Bob Carey’s Porsche, then put it in drive and gunned the engine. The rear wheels spun on the loose gravel for a moment, then caught, and the car shot forward, down the Evanses’ driveway and into Hacienda Drive.

Alex wasn’t sure how long Lisa had been walking — it seemed as though it had taken him forever to get dressed and search the house. She could be almost home by now.

He pressed the accelerator, and the car picked up speed. He hugged the wall of the ravine on the first curve, but the car fishtailed slightly, and he had to steer into the skid to regain control. Then he hit a straight stretch and pushed his speed up to seventy. Coming up fast was an S curve that was posted at thirty miles an hour, but he knew they always left a big margin for safety. He slowed to sixty as he started into the first turn.

And then he saw her.

She was standing on the side of the road, her green dress glowing brightly in his headlights, staring at him with terrified eyes.

Or did he just imagine that? Was he already that close to her?

Time suddenly slowed down, and he slammed his foot on the brake.

Too late. He was going to hit her.

It would have been all right if she’d been on the inside of the curve. He’d have swept around her, and she’d have been safe. But now he was skidding right toward her …

Turn into it. He had to turn into it!

Taking his foot off the brake, he steered to the right, and suddenly felt the tires grab the pavement.

Lisa was only a few yards away.

And beyond Lisa, almost lost in the darkness, something else.

A face, old and wrinkled, framed with white hair. And the eyes in the face were glaring at him with an intensity he could almost feel.

It was the face that finally made him lose all control of the car.

An ancient, weathered face, a face filled with an unspeakable loathing, looming in the darkness.

At the last possible moment, he wrenched the wheel to the left, and the Mustang responded, slewing around Lisa, charging across the pavement, heading for the ditch and the wall of the ravine beyond.

Straighten it out!

He spun the wheel the other way.

Too far.

The car burst through the guardrail and hurtled over the edge of the ravine.

“Lisaaaa …”

CHAPTER THREE

It was nearly two A.M. when Ellen Lonsdale heard the first faint wailing of a siren. She hadn’t been asleep — indeed she’d been sitting in the living room ever since the Cochrans had left an hour earlier, growing increasingly restless as the minutes ticked by. It wasn’t like Alex to be late, and for the last half-hour she’d been fighting a growing feeling that something had happened to him. The siren grew louder. A few seconds later it was joined by another, then a third. As she listened, the mournful wailings grew into shrill screams that tore the last vestiges of calmness from her mind.

It was Alex. Deep in her soul, she knew that the sirens were for her son.

Then, inside the house, the phone began to ring.

That’s it, she thought. They’re calling to tell me he’s dead. Her feet leaden, she forced herself to go to the phone, hesitated a moment, then picked it up.

“H-hello?”

“Ellen?”

“Yes.”

“This is Barbara, at the Center?”

The hesitancy in Barbara Fannon’s voice told Ellen that something had gone wrong. “What is it? What’s happened?”

Barbara’s voice remained professionally neutral. “May I speak to Dr. Lonsdale please?”

“What’s happened?” Ellen demanded again. Then, hearing the note of hysteria in her voice, she took a deep breath and reminded herself that Marsh was on call that night. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Just a moment, Barbara.”

Her hand shaking in spite of herself, she laid the receiver on the table next to the phone and turned toward the hall. Marsh, his eyes still bleary with sleep, stood in the doorway. “What’s happening? Something woke me up.”

“Sirens,” Ellen breathed. “Something’s happened, and the hospital wants to talk to you.”

His eyes immediately clearing, Marsh strode into the room and picked up the phone. “This is Dr. Lonsdale.”

“Marsh? It’s Barbara. I’m in the emergency room. I hate to call you in this late, but there’s been some kind of an accident, and we don’t know how bad it is yet. Since you’re on call …” Her voice trailed off uncertainly.

“You did right. I’ll be right there. Does anybody have any details at all?”

“Not really. Apparently at least one car went off the road, and we don’t know how many people were in it—”

“Maybe I’d better go up there.”

There was a hesitation; then: “The EMT’s are with the ambulance, Doctor.…”

Now it was Marsh who hesitated, then grimaced slightly. Even after five years, he found it hard to accept that the emergency medical technicians were, indeed, better trained to handle such situations than he himself was. “I get the picture, Barb. Say no more. See you in a few minutes.” He hung up the phone, then turned to Ellen, who stood behind a chair, both hands gripping its back.

“It’s Alex, isn’t it?” she breathed.

“Alex?” Marsh repeated. What could have put that idea into Ellen’s head? “Why on earth should it have anything to do with Alex?”

Ellen did her best to steady herself. “I just have a feeling, that’s all. I’ve had it for about half an hour. It is Alex, isn’t it?”

“No one knows who it is yet,” Marsh replied. “It’s an automobile accident, but that doesn’t mean it’s Alex.” His words, though, did nothing to dissipate the fear in her eyes, and despite the tension that still hung between them, he took her in his arms. “Honey, don’t do this to yourself.” When Ellen made no reply, he reluctantly released her and started toward their bedroom, but Ellen held onto his arm, and when she spoke, her eyes, as well as her words, were pleading.

“If it isn’t Alex, why did they call you? There’s an intern on duty, isn’t there?”

Marsh nodded. “But they don’t know how many people might have been hurt. They might need me, and I am on call.” He gently disengaged her hand, but Ellen followed him into the bedroom.

“I want to go with you,” she said while he began dressing.

Marsh shook his head. “Ellen, there’s no reason—”

“There is a reason,” Ellen protested, struggling to keep her voice level, but not succeeding. “I have a feeling, and—”

“And it’s only a feeling,” Marsh insisted, and Ellen flinched at the dismissive tone of his words. He relented, and once more put his arms around his wife. “Honey, please. Think about it. Automobile accidents happen all the time. The odds of this one involving Alex are next to nothing. And I can’t deal with whatever’s happening if I have to take care of you too.”

His words hurt her, but Ellen knew he was right. Deliberately she made herself stop shaking and stepped away from him. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that … Oh, never mind. Go.”

Marsh offered her a smile. “Now, that’s my girl.”

Though her husband’s smile did nothing to alleviate her pain, Ellen picked up his wallet and keys from the dresser and handed them to him. “Marsh?” she asked, then waited until he met her eyes before going on. “As soon as you know what’s happened, have someone call me. I don’t need details — I just need to know it’s not Alex.”

“By the time I know what’s happened, Alex will probably be home,” Marsh replied. Then he relented. “But I’ll have someone call. With any luck, I’ll be back in an hour myself.”

Then he was gone, and Ellen sank slowly onto the sofa to wait.

“Jesus Christ,” Sergeant Roscoe Finnerty whispered as the spotlight on his patrol car illuminated the wreckage at the bottom of the ravine. “Why the fuck didn’t it burn?” Grabbing his flashlight, he got out of the car and started clambering down the slope, with his partner, Thomas Jefferson Jackson, right behind him. A few yards away, Finnerty saw a shape move, and trained his light on the frightened face of a teenage boy.

“Far enough, son,” Finnerty said quietly. “Whatever’s happened, we’ll take care of it.”

“But—” the boy began.

“You heard him,” Jackson broke in. “Get back up on the road, and stay out of the way.” He flashed his light on the knot of teenagers who were clustered together. Most of them had wet hair, and their clothes were in disarray. “Those your friends?”

The boy nodded.

“Musta been some party. Now, get up there with them, and we’ll talk to you later.”

Silently the boy turned and started back up the hill, and Jackson followed Finnerty down toward the wreckage. Behind him, he heard car doors slamming, and the sound of voices issuing orders. Vaguely he became aware of other people beginning to move down the slope of the ravine.

The car lay on its side, so battered its make was no longer recognizable. It appeared to have turned end for end at least twice, then rolled until it came to rest against a large boulder.

“The driver’s still in it,” Jackson heard Finnerty say, and his stomach lurched the way it always did when he had to deal with the victims of automobile accidents. Stoically he moved forward.

“Still alive?”

“Dunno,” Finnerty grunted. “Don’t hardly see how he can be, though.” He paused then, well aware of his partner’s weak stomach. “You okay?”

“I’ll throw up later,” Jackson muttered. “Anybody else in the car?”

“Nope. But if someone wasn’t wearing a seat belt, they’d have gone out on the first flip.” He shone his light briefly on Jackson’s sweating face. “You wanna help out here, or look around for another victim?”

“I’ll help. ’Least till the medics get here.” He approached the car and stared in at the body that was pitched forward against the steering wheel. The head was covered with blood, and it looked to Jackson as if Finnerty was right — if the smashup itself hadn’t killed the driver, he must have bled to death by now. Still, he had his job to do, and clenching his teeth, Jackson began helping his partner cut through the seat belt that held the inert body into what was left of the car.

“Don’t move him,” one of the emergency technicians warned a moment later. He and his partner began unfolding a stretcher as the two cops finished cutting away the seat belt.

“You think we haven’t done this before?” Finnerty rasped. “Anyway, I don’t think it’ll make much difference with this one.”

“We’ll decide that,” the EMT replied, moving forward and edging Jackson aside. “Anybody know who he is?”

“Not yet,” Jackson told him. “We’ll run a make on the plate as soon as we get him up to the road.”

The two EMT’s slowly and carefully began working Alex’s body out of the wreckage, and, what seemed to Jackson to be an eternity later, eased him onto the stretcher.

“He’s not dead yet,” one of the EMT’s muttered. “But he will be if we don’t get him out of here fast. Come on.”

With a man at each corner of the stretcher, the two EMT’s and the two cops began making their way up the hill.

The crowd of teenagers on the road stood silently watching as the stretcher was borne upward. In the midst of them, Lisa Cochran leaned heavily on Kate Lewis, who did her best to keep Lisa from looking at the bloodied shape of Alex Lonsdale.

“He must still be alive,” Bob Carey whispered. “They’ve got something wrapped around his head, but his face isn’t covered.”

Then the medics were on the road, sliding the stretcher into the ambulance. A second later, its lights flashing and its siren screaming, it roared off into the night.

In the emergency room of the Medical Center, a bell shattered the tense silence, and a scratchy voice emanated from a speaker on the wall.

“This is Unit One. We’ve got a white male, teenage, with multiple lacerations of the face, a broken arm, damage to the rib cage, and head injuries. Also extensive bleeding.”

Marshall Lonsdale reached across the desk and pressed the transmission key himself. “Any identification yet?”

“Negative. We’re too busy keeping him alive to check his I.D.”

“Will he make it?”

There was a slight hesitation; then: “We’ll know in two minutes. We’re at the bottom of Hacienda, turning into La Paloma Drive.”

Thomas Jefferson Jackson sat in the passenger seat of the patrol car, waiting for the identification of the car that lay at the bottom of the ravine. He glanced out the window and saw Roscoe Finnerty talking to the group of kids whose party had just ended in tragedy. He was glad he didn’t have to talk to them — he doubted whether he would have been able to control the rage that seethed in him. Why couldn’t they have just had a dance and let it go at that? Why did they have to get drunk and start wrecking cars? He wasn’t sure he’d ever understand what motivated them. All he’d do was go on getting sick when they piled themselves up.

“It was Alex Lonsdale,” Bob Carey said, unable to meet Sergeant Finnerty’s eyes.

“Dr. Lonsdale’s kid?”

“Yes.”

“You sure he was driving it?”

“Lisa Cochran saw it happen.”

“Who’s she?”

“Alex’s girlfriend. She’s over there.”

Finnerty followed Bob’s eyes and saw a pretty blond in a dirt-smeared green formal sobbing in the arms of another girl. He knew he should go over and talk to her, but decided it could wait — from what he could see, she didn’t look too coherent.

“You know where she lives?” he asked Bob Carey. Numbly Bob recited Lisa’s address, which Finnerty wrote in his notebook. “Wait here a minute.” He strode to the car just as Jackson was opening the door.

“Got a make on the car,” Jackson said. “Belongs to Alexander Lonsdale. That’s Dr. Lonsdale’s son, isn’t it?”

Finnerty nodded grimly. “That’s what the kids say, too, and apparently the boy was driving it. We got a witness, but I haven’t talked to her yet.” He tore the sheet with Lisa’s address on it out of his notebook and handed it to Jackson. “Here’s her name and address. Get hold of her parents and tell them we’ll take the girl down to the Center. We’ll meet them there.”

Jackson looked at his partner uncertainly. “Shouldn’t we take her to the station and get a statement?”

“This is La Paloma, Tom, not San Francisco. The kid in the car was her boyfriend, and she’s pretty broken up. We’re not gonna make things worse by dragging her into the station. Now, get hold of the Center and tell them who’s coming in, then get hold of these Cochran people. Okay?”

Jackson nodded and got back in the car.

Lisa sat on the ground, trying to accept what had happened. It all had a dreamlike quality to it, and there seemed to be only bits and pieces left in her memory.

Standing in the road, trying to make up her mind whether or not to go back to the party and find Alex.

And then the sound of a car.

Instinctively, she’d known whose car it was, and her anger had suddenly evaporated.

And then she’d realized the car was coming too fast. She’d turned around to try to wave Alex down.

And then the blur.

The car rushing toward her, swerving away at the last minute, then only a series of sounds.

A shriek of skidding tires—

A scraping noise—

A crash—

And then the awful sound of Alex screaming her name, cut off by the horrible crunching of the car hurtling into the ravine.

Then nothing — just a blank, until suddenly she was back at Carolyn Evans’s, and all the kids were staring at her, their faces blank and confused.

She hadn’t even been able to tell them what had happened. She’d only been able to scream Alex’s name, and point toward the road.

It had been Bob Carey who had finally understood and called the police.

And then there had been more confusion.

People scrambling out of the pool, grabbing clothes, streaming out of the house.

Most of them running down the road.

A few cars starting.

And Carolyn Evans, her eyes more furious than frightened, glaring at her.

“It’s your fault,” Carolyn had accused. “It’s all your fault, and now I’m going to be in trouble.”

Lisa had gazed at her: what was she talking about?

“My parents,” Carolyn had wailed. “They’ll find out, and ground me for the rest of the summer.”

And then Kate Lewis was beside her, pulling her away.

Suddenly she was back on Hacienda Drive, and the night was filled with sirens, and flashing lights, and people everywhere, asking her questions, staring down into the ravine.…

It had seemed to go on forever.

Finally there was that awful moment when the stretcher had appeared, and she’d seen Alex—

Except it hadn’t been Alex.

It had only been a shape covered by a blanket.

She’d only been able to look for a second, then Kate had twisted her around, and she hadn’t seen any more.

Now a voice penetrated the haze.

“Lisa? Lisa Cochran?”

She looked up, nodding mutely. A policeman was looking at her, but he didn’t seem to be mad at her.

“We need to get you out of here,” the policeman said. “We have to take you down to the Medical Center.” He held out a hand. “Can you stand up?”

“I … I …” Lisa struggled to rise, then sank back to the ground. Strong hands slid under her arms and lifted her up. A minute later she was in the back seat of a police car. A few yards away she saw another police car, and a policeman talking to some of her friends.

But they didn’t know what had happened. Only she knew.

Lisa buried her face in her hands, sobbing.

The speaker on the wall of the emergency room crackled to life once again.

“This is Unit One,” the anonymous voice droned. “We’ll be there in another thirty seconds. And we have an identification on the victim.” Suddenly the voice cracked, losing its professional tone. “It’s Alex … Alex Lonsdale.”

Marsh stared at the speaker, willing himself to have heard the words wrong. Then he gazed around the room, and knew by the shock on everyone’s face, and by the way they were returning his gaze, that he had not heard wrong. He groped behind him for a chair, found one, and lowered himself into it.

“No,” he whispered. “Not Alex. Anyone but Alex …”

“Call Frank Mallory,” Barbara Fannon told one of the orderlies, immediately taking charge. “He’s next on call. His number’s on the Rolodex.” She moved around the desk and put a hand on Marshall Lonsdale’s shoulder. “Maybe it’s a mistake, Marsh,” she said, though she knew that the ambulance crew wouldn’t have identified Alex if they weren’t absolutely sure.

Marsh shook his head and then raised his agonized eyes. “How am I going to tell her?” he asked, his voice dazed. “How am I going to tell Ellen? She … she had a feeling … she told me … she wanted to come with me tonight—”

“Come on.” Barbara assumed her most authoritative tone, the one she always used with people she knew were close to breaking. Outside, the sound of the approaching ambulance disturbed the night. “We’re getting you out of here.” When Marsh failed to respond, she took him by the hand and drew him to his feet. “I’m taking you to your office.”

“No!” Marsh protested as the approaching siren grew louder. “Alex is my son—”

“Which is exactly why you won’t be here when they bring him in. We’ll have Frank Mallory here as soon as possible, and until he gets here, Benny Cohen knows what to do.”

Marsh looked dazed. “Benny’s only an intern—”

Barbara began steering him out of the emergency room as the siren fell silent and headlights glared momentarily through the glass doors of the emergency entrance. “Benny’s the best intern we’ve ever had. You told me so yourself.”

Then, as the emergency-room doors opened and the gurney bearing Alex Lonsdale’s nearly lifeless body was pushed inside, she forced Marsh Lonsdale into the corridor.

“Go to your office,” she told him. “Go to your office and mix yourself a drink from the bottle you and Frank nip at every time you deliver a baby. I can take care of everything else, but right now I can’t take care of you. Understand?”

Marsh swallowed, then nodded. “I’ll call Ellen—”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Barbara cut in. “You’ll fix a drink, drink it, and wait. I’ll be there in five minutes, and by then we’ll know something about how he is. Now, go!” She gave Marsh a gentle shove, then disappeared back into the emergency room.

Marsh paused a moment, trying to sort out his thoughts.

He knew that Barbara was right.

With a shambling gait, feeling suddenly helpless, he started down the hall toward his office.

In the little house behind the old mission, across the street from the graveyard, María Torres dropped the blind on the front window back into place, then shuffled slowly into the bedroom and eased her aged body into bed.

She was tired from the long walk home, and tonight it had been particularly exhausting.

Unwilling to be seen by anyone that night, María had been forced to make her way down the canyon by way of the path that wound through the underbrush a few feet below the level of the road. Each time she had heard the wailing of a siren and seen headlights flashing on the road above, she had huddled close to the ground, waiting until the car had passed before once more making her slow progress toward home.

But now it was all right.

She was home, and no one had seen her, and her job was safe.

Tonight she had no trouble. Tonight it was the gringos who had the trouble.

To María Torres, what had happened on the road near the hacienda tonight was nothing less than a blessing from the saints. All her life, she had spent many hours each week praying that destruction would come to the gringos. Tonight, she knew, was one of the nights the saints had chosen to answer those prayers.

Tomorrow, or the next day, she would find out who had been in the car that had plunged over the edge of the ravine, and remember to go to church and light a candle to whichever saint had, in answer to her prayers, abandoned one of his namesakes this evening. Her candles were not much, she knew, but they were something, and the souls of her ancestors would appreciate them.

Silence finally fell over La Paloma. For the rest of the night, María Torres slept in peace.

Benny Cohen carefully peeled away the towel that had been wrapped around Alex Lonsdale’s head, and stared at the gaping wound on the boy’s skull.

He’s dead, Benny thought. He may still be breathing, but he’s dead.

CHAPTER FOUR

Ellen Lonsdale knew her premonition had come true as soon as she opened the front door and saw Carol Cochran standing on the porch, a handkerchief clutched in her left hand, her eyes rimmed with red.

“It happened, didn’t it?” she whispered.

Carol’s head moved in a barely perceptible nod. “It’s Alex,” she whispered. “He … he was alone in the car …”

“Alone?” Ellen echoed. Where had Lisa been? Hadn’t she been with Alex? But her questions went unspoken as she tried to concentrate on what Carol was saying.

“He’s at the Center,” Carol told her, stepping into the house and closing the door behind her. “I’ll take you.”

For a moment Ellen felt as if she might collapse. Then, with an oddly detached calmness, she picked her purse up from the table in the entry hall and automatically opened it to check its contents. Satisfied that everything was there, she walked past Carol and opened the front door. “Is he dead?” she asked.

“No,” Carol replied, her voice catching. “He’s not dead, Ellen.”

“But it’s bad, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think anyone does.”

Silently the two women got into the Cochrans’ car and Carol started the engine. As she was backing down the Lonsdales’ driveway, Ellen asked the question that was still lurking in her mind. “Why wasn’t Lisa with him?”

“I don’t know that. We got a call from the police. They said to meet them at the Center, that they were taking Lisa there. I thought … Oh, God, never mind what I thought. Anyway, Lisa’s all right, but Alex — his car went off the road up near the old hacienda. Carolyn was having a party.”

“He said he wouldn’t go to any parties,” Ellen said numbly, her body slumped against the car door. “He promised—” She broke off her own thought, and remained silent for several seconds as her mind suddenly began to shift gears. I can’t fall apart. I can’t give in to what I’m feeling. I have to be strong. For Alex, I have to be strong. She consciously straightened herself in the car seat. “Well, it doesn’t matter what he promised, does it?” she asked. “The only thing that matters is that he be all right.” She turned to gaze searchingly at Carol, and when she spoke, her voice was stronger. “If you knew how bad it was, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

Carol moved her hand off the steering wheel to give Ellen’s arm a quick squeeze. “Of course I would. And I’m not going to tell you not to worry, either.”

As Carol drove, Ellen tried to make herself concentrate on anything but what might have happened to Alex. She gazed out the window, forcing her mind to focus only on what her eyes were taking in.

“It’s a pretty town,” she said suddenly.

“What?” Carol Cochran asked, taken aback by Ellen’s odd statement.

“I was just looking at it,” Ellen went on. “I haven’t really done that for a long time. I drive around it all the time, but it’s been years since I really paid attention to what it looks like. And a lot of it hasn’t really changed since we were children.”

“No,” Carol said slowly, still not sure where Ellen’s thoughts were leading. “I don’t suppose it has.”

Ellen uttered a sound that was partly a hollow chuckle, partly a sob. “Do you think I’m crazy, talking about how pretty La Paloma is? Well, I’m not. Anyway, I don’t think I am. But I’m having a feeling, and if I let myself think about that, then I will go crazy.”

“Do you want to tell me what it is?”

There was another long silence, and when she spoke again, Ellen’s voice had gone strangely flat. “He’s dead,” she stated. “I have the most awful feeling that Alex is dead. But he isn’t dead. I … I won’t let him be dead!”

Ellen stared at the knot of people in the emergency waiting room. She recognized most of the faces, though for some reason her mind refused to put names to them. Except for a few.

Lisa Cochran.

She was sitting on a couch, huddled close to her father, and a policeman was talking to her. Lisa saw her and immediately stood up and started toward her.

“I’m sorry,” she blurted. “Oh, Mrs. Lonsdale, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to—”

“What happened?” Ellen asked, her voice dull.

“I … I’m not sure,” Lisa stammered. “We had a fight — well, sort of a fight, and I decided to walk home. And Alex must have been coming after me. But he was driving too fast, and …” She went on, blurting out the story of what had happened, while Ellen listened, but only half-heard. Around them, the rest of the people in the waiting room fell silent.

“It was my fault,” Lisa finished. “It was all my fault.”

Ellen laid a gentle hand on Lisa’s cheek, then kissed her. “No,” she said quietly. “It wasn’t your fault. You weren’t in the car, and it wasn’t your fault.”

She turned away to find Barbara Fannon at her elbow. “Where is he?” she asked. “Where’s Alex?”

“He’s in the O.R. Frank and Benny are working on him. Marsh is in his office.” She took Ellen’s arm and began guiding her out of the waiting room.

When she came into his office, Marsh was sitting behind his desk, a glass in front of him, staring at nothing. His gaze shifted, and he stood up, came around the desk, and put his arms around her.

“You were right,” he whispered, his voice strangling on the words. “Oh, God, Ellen, you were right.”

“Is he dead?” Ellen asked.

Marsh drew back sharply, as if the words had been a physical blow. “Who told you that?”

Ellen’s face paled. “No one. I just … I just have a feeling, that’s all.”

“Well, that one isn’t true,” Marsh told her. “He’s alive.”

Ellen hesitated; then: “If he’s alive, why don’t I feel it?”

Marsh shook his head. “I don’t know. But he’s not dead. He’s seriously injured, but he’s not dead.”

Time seemed to stand still as Ellen gazed deep into her husband’s eyes. At last she quietly repeated Marsh’s words. “He’s not dead. He’s not dead. He won’t die.” Then, despite her determination to be strong, her tears began to flow.

In the operating room, Frank Mallory carefully withdrew the last visible fragment of shattered skull from the tissue of Alex’s brain. He glanced up at the monitors.

By rights, the boy should be dead.

And yet, there on the monitors was the evidence that he was not.

There was a pulse — weak and erratic, but there.

And he was breathing, albeit with the aid of a respirator.

His broken left arm was in a temporary splint, and the worst of his facial lacerations had been stitched just enough to stop the bleeding.

That had been the easy part.

It was his head that was the problem.

From what Mallory could see, as the car tumbled down the ravine, Alex’s head must have smashed against a rock, crushing the left parietal plate and damaging the frontal plate. Pieces of both bones had broken away, embedding themselves in Alex’s brain, and it was these splinters that Mallory had been carefully removing. Then, with all the skill he could muster, he had worked the fractured pieces as nearly into their normal positions as possible. Now he was applying what could only be temporary bandages — bandages intended to bind Alex’s wounds only until the electroencephalogram went totally flat and the boy would be declared dead.

“What do you think?” Benny Cohen asked.

“Right now, I’m trying not to think,” Mallory replied. “All I’m doing is putting the pieces back together, and I’m sorry to say I’m not at all sure I can do it.”

“He’s not gonna make it?”

“I’m not saying that, either,” Mallory rasped, unable to admit his true thoughts. “He’s made it this far, hasn’t he?”

Benny nodded. “With a lot of help. But without the respirator, he’d be gone.”

“A lot of people need respirators. That’s why they were invented.”

“But most people only peed them temporarily. He’s going to need it the rest of his life.”

Frank Mallory glowered at the young intern, then softened. Cohen, after all, hadn’t known Alex Lonsdale since the day the boy was born, nor had Cohen yet lost a patient. When he did, maybe he’d realize how much it hurt to see someone die and know there’s nothing you can do about it. But Alex had survived the first emergency procedures, and there was still the possibility that he might live. “Let’s get him into the ICU, then start setting up for X rays and a CAT scan.”

Ten minutes later, still drying his hands with a white towel, Mallory walked into Marshall Lonsdale’s office. Both Marsh and Ellen struggled wearily to their feet.

“He’s still alive, and in the ICU,” Mallory told them, gesturing for them both to sit down again. “But it’s bad, Marsh. Real bad.”

“Tell me,” Marsh replied, his voice toneless.

Mallory shrugged. “I can’t tell you all of it yet — you know that. But there’s brain damage, and it looks extensive.”

Ellen stiffened, but said nothing.

“We’re setting up right now for every test we can give him. But it’s going to be tough, because he’s on a respirator and a cardiostimulator.” Then, as Marsh and Ellen listened, he described Alex’s injuries, using the dispassionate, factual tone he had learned in medical school, in order to keep himself under control. When he was done, it was Ellen who spoke.

“What can we do?”

Mallory shook his head. “Nothing, for the moment. Try to stabilize him, and try to find out how bad the damage is. We should know sometime early in the morning. Maybe by six.”

“I see,” Ellen murmured. Then: “Can I see him?”

Frank Mallory’s eyes flicked toward Marsh, who nodded. “Of course you can,” Mallory said. “You can sit with him all night, if you want to. It can’t hurt, and it might help. You never know what people in his condition know or don’t know, but if somehow he knows you’re there … well, it can’t hurt, can it?”

Barbara Fannon glanced up at the clock on the wall and was surprised to see that it was nearly five in the morning. To her, it seemed as if it couldn’t have been more than an hour since the ambulance arrived with Alex.

There had been so much to do.

There had been all the tests that needed to be set up, and it had fallen to Barbara to coordinate the testing so that Alex was subjected to the least amount of movement possible. Not only had she coordinated the X rays and CAT scan, but everything else Frank Mallory had requested. And, as far as Barbara could determine, he hadn’t forgotten anything: he’d ordered ultrasound imaging and a cerebrospinal tap, as well as an arteriograph and an EEG. The only thing he’d left out was a pneumoencephalograph, and Barbara knew the only reason he’d skipped it was that Alex would have had to be put in a vertical position to carry it out. In his present condition, that simply wasn’t feasible. It had taken Barbara nearly an hour simply to contact all the technicians necessary and get them to the Center. And then, of course, there had been the people in the waiting room.

They had thinned out after the first couple of hours, when Barbara had finally told them that there would be no more news that night — Alex was undergoing a series of tests, but the results would be unavailable for an indefinite period.

Now, at five o’clock, she could at last go home. Everything that needed to be done, or could be done, was finished, and she realized she was bone weary. All she had to do was check the waiting room, and she could go. She pushed the door open, expecting the room to be empty.

It wasn’t.

Sitting on the couch in the far corner was Lisa Cochran, her parents flanking her. She was dry-eyed now, and sitting straight up, her hands folded quietly in her lap. Barbara hesitated, then went into the waiting room, letting the door swing shut behind her.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked. “Some coffee, maybe?”

Lisa shook her head, but said nothing.

“If you can think of a way to convince her to come home with us, that might help,” Carol said, rising to her feet, stretching, and offering the tired nurse a resigned smile.

“I can’t, Mama,” Lisa whispered. “What if he wakes up and asks for me?”

Barbara crossed the room and sat next to the girl. “He’s not going to wake up tonight, Lisa.”

Lisa regarded her with bloodshot eyes. “Is … is he going to wake up at all?”

Barbara knew it wasn’t her place to talk to anyone about Alex Lonsdale’s condition, but she also knew exactly who Lisa was, and how Alex felt about her. God knew he’d spent enough time perched on the edge of Barbara’s desk telling her how wonderful Lisa was. And after watching her through the last several hours, Barbara was convinced that Alex was right. She sighed heavily. “I don’t know,” she said carefully; then, when Lisa’s eyes turned suddenly frightened, she went on: “I said I don’t know. That doesn’t mean he’s not going to wake up. All it means is that I don’t know, and no one else does either.”

“If he wakes up, will that mean he’s going to be all right?”

Barbara shrugged. “We don’t know that, either. All we can do is wait and see.”

“Then I’ll wait,” Lisa said.

“You could go home and try to get some sleep,” Barbara suggested. “I promise I’ll arrange for someone to call you if anything happens. Anything at all.”

Lisa rubbed at her eyes, then shook her head. “No,” she said. “I want to be here. Just in case.” She looked at the nurse beseechingly. “He might wake up.”

Barbara started to speak, then changed her mind. She’s right, she decided. He damned well might wake up. And as she absorbed the thought, she realized that she, like most of the staff at the clinic, had only been going through the motions of administering to Alex.

For all of them, all the trained medical people who had seen injuries like Alex’s before, it was a hopeless case. You did what you could, tried not to overlook any measure, no matter how drastic, that might save the life, but deep inside you prepared yourself for the fact that the patient wasn’t going to make it.

And at the end of your shift, you went home.

But Lisa Cochran wasn’t going home, and Barbara Fannon decided she wasn’t going home either, even though her shift had ended long ago. Coming to that decision, she stood up. “Come on,” she said.

The Cochrans looked at her uncertainly, but followed her down the hall. Without knocking, she opened the door to Marshall Lonsdale’s office and led them inside. “If we’re all going to stay, we might as well be as comfortable as possible.”

“This is Marsh’s office,” Jim Cochran said.

“Nobody else’s.”

“Should we be here?”

“You’re his friends, aren’t you? It’s been a long night, and it’s going to be an even longer one. I was going home, but if you can stick this out, so can I. But not out there.” She lowered the lights a little, and closed the blinds to the windows. “Make yourselves comfortable while I go find some coffee. If you want something stronger, you might poke around the office while I’m gone. I’ve heard rumors that sometimes there’s a bottle in here.”

Jim eyed the nurse. “Any rumors about just where it might be?”

“No,” Barbara replied. Then, as she left the office, she spoke once more. “But if I were you, I’d start looking in the credenza. Bottom right.”

Ellen Lonsdale sat in a straight-backed chair that had been pulled close to Alex’s bed, her right hand resting gently on his. He lay as he had been placed, on his back, the cast on his left arm suspended slightly above the mattress, his limp right arm extended parallel to his body. His face, covered with the respirator mask and a mass of bandages, was barely visible, and totally unrecognizable. Around him was an array of equipment that Ellen couldn’t begin to comprehend. All she knew was that the monitors and machinery were somehow keeping her son alive.

She had been there for nearly five hours now. The sky outside the window was beginning to brighten, and she shifted slightly in her chair, not as a reaction to the stiffness that had long ago taken over her body, but so that she could get a clearer look at Alex’s eyes.

For some reason, she kept thinking they should be open.

The night had been filled with odd thoughts like that.

Several times she had found herself feeling surprise that the respirator was still operating.

Once, when they brought Alex back from one of the tests — she couldn’t remember which one — she had been shocked at the warmth of his hand when she touched it.

She knew what the odd feelings were about.

Despite what she had been told — despite her own inner resolve — she still had the horrible feeling that Alex was dead.

Several times she had found herself studying the monitors, wondering why they were still registering life signs in Alex.

Since he was dead, the graphic displays of his heartbeat and breathing should be flat.

She kept reminding herself that he wasn’t dead, that he was only asleep.

Except he wasn’t asleep.

He was in a coma, and despite what everyone kept saying, he wasn’t going to come out of it.

Abstractly she already understood that it wasn’t a matter of waiting to see what would happen. It was a matter of deciding when to remove the respirator and let Alex go.

She didn’t know how long that thought had been in her mind, but she knew she was beginning to get used to the reality of it. Sometime today, or perhaps tomorrow, after all the test results had been studied and analyzed, she and Marsh were going to have to make the most difficult decision of their lives, and she wasn’t at all sure either of them would be up to it.

If Alex’s brain was, indeed, dead, they were going to have to accept that keeping Alex alive the way he was was cruel.

Cruel to Alex.

She stared again at all the machinery, and momentarily wondered why it had ever been invented.

Why couldn’t they just let people die?

And yet, she realized with sudden clarity, even though she understood the reality of Alex’s situation, she would never simply let him die.

If she were going to, she would have done it already. During the last two hours there had been plenty of opportunities. All she would have had to do was turn off the respirator. Alarms would have gone off, but she could have dealt with that. And it wouldn’t have taken long — only a minute or two.

But she hadn’t done it. Instead, she’d simply sat there battling her feelings of despair, strengthening her resolve not to let him die, and whispering encouraging words to Alex as she held his hand.

And even though part of her still insisted that Alex was already dead, the other part of her, the part that was determined that he should live, was growing stronger by the hour.

Suddenly the door opened, and Barbara Fannon stepped into the room, closing the door behind her.

“Ellen? It’s eight o’clock — you’ve been here all night.”

Ellen turned her head. “I know.”

“Marsh is in Frank’s office. They have the test results. They’re waiting for you.”

Ellen thought about it for a moment, then slowly shook her head. “No,” she said at last. “I’ll stay here with Alex. Marsh will tell me what I need to know.”

Barbara hesitated, then nodded. “I’ll tell them,” she said, then let herself out of the room, leaving Ellen alone with her son.

*

“It’s bad,” Frank Mallory said. “About as bad as it can get, I’m afraid.”

“Let’s see.” Marsh’s whole body felt drained from the shock and exhaustion of the last hours, but for some reason his mind was perfectly clear. Slowly and deliberately he began going over the results of all the tests and examinations that had been administered to Alex during the long night.

Mallory was right — it was very bad.

The damage to Alex’s brain was extensive. Bone fragments seemed to be everywhere, driven deep into the cortex. The cerebrum showed the heaviest damage, much of it apparently centered in the temporal lobe. But nothing seemed to have escaped injury — the parietal and frontal lobes showed extensive injury as well.

“I’m not an expert at this,” Marsh said, though both he and Mallory were well aware that many of the ramifications of Alex’s injuries were obvious.

Mallory decided to take the direct approach. “If he lives at all, he won’t be able to walk or talk, and it’s doubtful that he’ll be able to hear. He may be able to see — the occipital lobe seems to have suffered the least amount of damage. But all that’s almost beside the point. It’s highly doubtful if he’ll be aware of anything going on around him, or even be aware of himself. And that’s if he wakes up.”

“I don’t believe that,” Marsh replied, fixing Mallory with cold eyes.

“Don’t, or won’t?” Mallory countered gently.

“It doesn’t make any difference,” Marsh replied. “Everything’s going to be done for Alex that is humanly possible.”

“That goes without saying, Marsh,” Frank Mallory said, his voice, reflecting the pain Marsh’s words had caused. “You know there isn’t anyone here who wouldn’t do his best for Alex.”

If Marshall heard him, he ignored him. “I want you to start by getting hold of Torres, down in Palo Alto.”

“Torres?” Mallory repeated. “Raymond Torres?”

“Is there anyone else who can help Alex?”

Mallory fell silent as he thought about the man to whom Marsh was considering turning over his son.

Raymond Torres had grown up in La Paloma, and though there was little question in anyone’s mind of the man’s brilliance, there were, and always had been, many questions about the man himself. He had left La Paloma long ago, remaining in Palo Alto after medical school, returning to La Paloma only to see his mother — old María Torres. And even his visits to her were rare. There was a feeling in La Paloma that Torres resented his mother, that she was little more to him than a constant reminder of his past, and that, if there was one thing Torres would like to ignore, it was his past. In La Paloma he was primarily regarded as a curiosity: the boy from behind the mission who had somehow made good.

Beyond La Paloma, he had become, over the years, something of an enigma within the medical community. To his supporters, his aloofness was a result only of the fact that he devoted nearly every waking hour to his research into the functioning of the human brain, while his detractors attributed that same aloofness to intellectual arrogance.

But for all the questions about him, Raymond Torres had succeeded in becoming one of the country’s foremost authorities on the structure and functioning of the human brain. In recent years, the thrust of his research had changed slightly, and his primary interest had become reconstuctive brain surgery.

“But isn’t most of his work experimental?” Mallory asked now. “I don’t think a lot of it has even been tried on human beings yet.”

Marshall Lonsdale’s desperation was reflected in his eyes. “Raymond Torres knows more about the human brain than anybody else alive. And some of the reconstruction work he’s done is just this side of incredible. I’d say it was incredible if I hadn’t seen the results myself. I want him to work on Alex.”

“Marsh—”

But Marsh was on his feet, his eyes fixed on the pile of X rays, CAT scans, lab results, graphs, and other documentation pertaining to the damage his son’s brain had sustained. “He’s still alive, Frank,” he said. “And as long as he’s alive, I have to try to help him. I can’t just leave him alone — you can see what he’ll be like as well as I can. He’ll be a vegetable, Frank. My God, you told me so yourself just now. Nothing can hurt him anymore, Frank. All Torres can do is help. Call him for me. Tell him what’s happened, and that I want to talk to him. Just talk to him, that’s all. Just get me in to see him.”

When Frank Mallory still hesitated, Marshall Lonsdale spoke once more. “Alex is all I have, Frank. I can’t just let him die.”

When he was alone, Frank Mallory picked up the phone and dialed the number of Raymond Torres’s office in Palo Alto, twenty miles away. After talking to him for thirty minutes, he finally convinced Torres to see Marsh Lonsdale and look at Alex’s case.

The doctor made no promises, but he agreed to talk, and to look.

Privately, Frank half-hoped Torres would turn Marsh down.

CHAPTER FIVE

Exhaustion was overtaking Marsh, and he was beginning to feel that the situation was hopeless. He’d been in Raymond Torres’s offices for most of the day, and for most of the day he’d been by himself. Not that it hadn’t been interesting; it had, despite the overriding fear for his son’s life that had never left his consciousness since the moment he had arrived that morning.

He’d stared at the Institute through bleary eyes. The building itself was a bastard — it had obviously started out as a home, and an imposing one. But from the central core of the mansion — for a mansion it had been — two wings had spread, and no attempt had been made to make them architecturally compatible with the original structure. Instead, they were sleekly functional, in stark contrast with the Georgian massiveness of the core. The buildings were surrounded by a sprawling lawn dotted with trees, and only a neat brass plaque mounted on the face of a large rock near the street identified the structure: INSTITUTE FOR THE HUMAN BRAIN.

Inside, a receptionist had led him immediately to Raymond Torres’s office, where he’d turned all of Alex’s records over to the surgeon himself, who, without so much as glancing at them, had given them to an assistant. When the assistant had disappeared, Torres had offered him a chair, then spent what Marsh thought was an unnecessarily long time lighting his pipe.

It took Marsh only a few seconds to decide that there was nothing of Torres’s scientific reputation in either his manner or his bearing. He was tall, and his chiseled features were carefully framed by prematurely graying hair in a manner that seemed to Marsh more suitable for a movie star than a scientist. The star image was further enhanced by the perfectly cut tan silk suit Torres wore, and the cool casualness of his posture. For all his fine credentials, the first impression Raymond Torres gave his visitor was that of a society doctor more interested in the practice of golf than in the practice of medicine.

Nor was Marsh’s instinctive dislike of the man alleviated by the fact that once the pipe was lit, the meeting had lasted only long enough for Torres to tell him that there would be no decision made until his staff had been able to analyze Alex’s case, and that the analysis would take most of the day.

“I’ll wait,” Marsh had said. From behind his desk, Raymond Torres had shrugged with apparent disinterest. “As you wish, but I could just as easily call you when I’ve come to a decision.”

Marsh had shaken his head. “No. I have to be here. Alex is my only child. There’s … well, there’s just nowhere else for me to go.”

Torres had risen from his chair in a manner that Marsh found almost offensively dismissive. “As I said, as you wish. But you’ll have to excuse me — I have a great deal to do this morning.”

Marsh had stared at the man in stunned disbelief. “You’re not even interested in hearing about the case?”

“It’s all in the records, isn’t it?” Torres had countered.

“Alex isn’t in the records, Dr. Torres,” Marsh had replied, his voice trembling with the effort to control his anger. Torres seemed to consider his words for a moment, but didn’t reseat himself, and when he finally replied, his voice was cool.

“I’m a research man, Dr. Lonsdale. I’m a research man because, as I discovered long ago, I don’t have much of a bedside manner. There are those, I know, who don’t think I relate to people very well. Frankly, I don’t care. I’m interested in helping people, not in coddling them. And I don’t have to know the details of your son’s life in order to help him. I don’t care who he is, or what he’s like, or what the details of his accident were. All I care about are the details of his injuries, so that I can make a reasonable judgment about whether or not I can help him. In other words, everything I need to know about your boy should be in his records. If there is anything missing, I — or someone on my staff — will know, and do whatever has to be done to rectify the matter. If you want to spend the rest of the day here, just in case we need you, I have no objection. Frankly, I doubt we’ll need you. If we need anybody, it will be the patient’s attending physician.”

“Frank Mallory.”

“Whoever.” Torres shrugged disinterestedly. “But feel free to stay. We have a comfortable lounge, and you’ll certainly find plenty to read.” Suddenly he smiled. “All of it, of course, having to do with our work. One thing I insist on is that the lounge be well stocked with every article and monograph I’ve ever written.”

Offended as he was by the man’s open pride in himself, Marsh managed to keep silent, for without Torres, he knew there was no hope for Alex at all. And by two o’clock that afternoon he’d become totally convinced that whatever Raymond Torres lacked in personal warmth, he more than made up for in professional expertise.

The articles he’d read — and he’d read at least thirty of them, forcing himself to maintain his concentration through the interminable hours — covered a wide field of interest. Torres had not only made himself an expert on the structure of the brain, but he had also become a leading theorist on the functioning of the brain as well. In dozens of articles, Torres had described cases in which he’d found methods with which to circumvent damaged areas of a brain, and utilize other, healthy areas to take over the functions of the traumatized tissue. And through it all ran one constant theme — that the mysteries of the human brain were, indeed, solvable, but that the potentialities of the brain were only just being discovered. Indeed, he’d summed it up in a few sentences that had particularly intrigued Marsh:

The backup systems of the brain appear to me to be almost limitless. Long ago, we discovered that if a portion of the brain fails, another portion of the same brain can sometimes take over the function of the failed portion. It is almost as if each area of the brain not only knows what every other area does, but can perform that work itself if it really has to. The problem, then, seems to be one of convincing a damaged brain not to give up, and, further, of making it aware of its own problems so that it may redistribute its work load among its healthy components.

Marsh had read and reread that article several times when the receptionist suddenly appeared, smiling warmly at him.

“Dr. Lonsdale? Dr. Torres will see you now.” He put the journal aside and followed the neat young woman back to Torres’s office. Nodding a greeting, Torres beckoned him to a chair near his desk. In another chair, already seated, was Frank Mallory.

“Frank? What are you doing here?”

“I asked him to come,” Torres replied. “There are some things I have to review with him.”

“But Alex—”

“He’s stable, Marsh,” Frank told him. “There haven’t been any changes in his condition for several hours. Benny’s there, and a nurse is always in the room.”

“If we may proceed,” Torres interrupted. He turned toward a television screen on a table next to his desk. The screen displayed a high-resolution photograph of a human brain.

“It’s not what you think it is,” Torres said. Startled, both Marsh Lonsdale and Frank Mallory glanced toward Torres.

“I beg your pardon?” Frank asked.

“It’s not a photograph. It’s a computer-generated graphic representation of Alexander Lonsdale’s brain.” He paused a beat; then: “Before the accident.”

Mallory’s gaze shifted back to the screen. “Here’s what happened,” he heard Torres’s voice say. “Or, more exactly, here’s a reconstruction of what happened.” He typed some instructions into the keyboard in front of him, and suddenly the image on the monitor began to move, turning upside down. Then, at the bottom of the screen, another shape came into view. As the three of them watched, the image of the brain came into contact with the other object, and suddenly began to distort. It was, Marsh realized, just like watching a movie of someone’s head being smashed against a sharp rock.

In slow motion, he could see the skull crack, then splinter and begin to cave in.

Beneath the skull, brain tissue gave way, part of it crushed, part of it torn. Fragments of skull broke away, lacerating the brain further. Frank Mallory and Raymond Torres watched in silence, but Marsh was unable to stifle a groan of empathic pain. Suddenly it was over, and the brain was once again right-side-up. And then, as Torres tapped more instructions into the computer, the image changed again.

“Christ,” Mallory whispered. “That’s not possible.”

“What is it?” Torres demanded.

“It’s Alex’s head,” Mallory breathed. Marsh, his face ashen, gazed at Mallory, but the other man’s eyes remained fixed on the screen. “It’s his head,” Mallory breathed. “And it looks just the way it did when they brought him into the hospital. But … how?”

“We’ll get to that,” Torres replied. Then: “Dr. Mallory, I want you to concentrate on that image very hard. This is very important. How close is that picture to what you saw when they brought the patient in?” He held up a cautioning hand. “Don’t answer right away, please. Examine it carefully. If you need me to, I can rotate the image so you can see it from other angles. But I need to know how exact it is.”

For two long minutes, as Marsh looked on in agonized silence, Mallory examined the image, asking Torres to turn it first in one direction, then in another. At last he nodded. “As far as I can tell, it’s perfect. If there are any flaws, I can’t see them.”

“All right. Now, the next part should be easier for you. Don’t say anything, just watch, and if there’s anything that doesn’t look as you remember it, tell me.”

As they watched, the image came to life once more. A forceps appeared and began removing fragments of bone from the brain. Then the forceps was gone, and a probe appeared. The probe moved, and a small bit of brain tissue tore loose. Mallory winced.

It went on and on, in agonizing detail. For each fragment of bone that was removed from the wound, a new wound was inflicted on Alex’s brain. And then, after what seemed an aeon, it was over.

Frank Mallory was staring at an exact image of Alex’s brain after he’d finished cleaning his wounds.

“Well?” Torres’s voice asked.

Mallory heard his own voice shake as he spoke. “Why did you show me that? Just to prove my incompetence?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Torres snapped. “Aside from the fact that I don’t need to waste my time with such a thing, you’re not an incompetent. In fact, you did as good a job under the circumstances as could have been expected. What I need to know is whether that reconstruction was accurate.”

Mallory chewed his lip, then nodded. “I’m afraid so. I’m sorry — I was doing my best.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Torres remarked coldly. “Just think about it.”

“It’s accurate,” Mallory assured him. “Now, can you tell us how you did it?”

“I didn’t do it,” Torres replied. “A computer did it all. For the last”—he glanced at the clock on his desk—“six hours, we’ve been feeding the computer information. Much of it the results of the CAT scan your lab did in La Paloma. Fortunately, that was a good job too. But our computer goes a lot further than yours. Your machinery can display any aspect of the brain, from any angle, in two dimensions. Ours is much more sophisticated,” he went on, and suddenly his eyes, so cool and aloof until now, took on a glowing intensity. “Once it had all the data, it was able to reconstruct everything that happened to Alexander Lonsdale’s brain from the first impact to the time of the CAT scan. For ourselves, an educated guess would have been the best we could do. We would have been able to extrapolate the approximate shape of the traumatizing instrument, and the probable angle from which it struck. And that would have been about all. But the wounds are extensive, and the computer is designed to handle a great many variables simultaneously. According to the computer, what you just saw is 99.624 percent accurate, given that the input was accurate. That’s why I wanted you to look at the reconstruction. If there were any basic errors in the data, they would have been magnified by the extrapolation process to the point where you’d have seen something significantly in error. But you didn’t, so we can assume that what we saw is what happened.”

While Mallory sat in silence, Marsh voiced the question that was in both their minds. “Why is that important? It seems to me that what comes next is what we should be concerned with.”

“Exactly,” Torres agreed. “Now, watch carefully. What you’re about to see is going to be at high speed, but it’s what we think we can do for Alexander.”

“Everyone calls him Alex,” Marsh interjected.

Torres’s brows arched slightly. “Very well. Alex. It makes no difference what we call him.” He ignored the flash of anger in Marsh’s eyes, and his fingers once more flew over the keyboard. The picture began to change again. As the two doctors from La Paloma watched in fascination, layers of brain tissue were peeled back. Certain tissue was removed entirely; some was simply maneuvered back into place. The chaos of the wound began to take on a semblance of order, and then, slowly, the mending process began, beginning deep within the medulla and proceeding outward through the various lobes of the brain. At last it was over, and the image on the screen was once again filled with the recognizable shape of a human brain. Certain areas, however, had taken on various shades of red, and Marsh’s frown reflected his puzzlement.

“Those are the areas that are no longer functional,” Torres told him before he could ask his question. “The pale pink ones are deep within the brain, the bright red ones on the surface. The gradations, I think, are obvious.”

Mallory glanced at Marsh, whose attention seemed totally absorbed by the image on the screen. Finally he turned to Torres, his fingers interlaced beneath his chin. “What you’ve shown us is pure science fiction, Dr. Torres,” he said. “You can’t cut that deep, and make repairs that extensive, without killing the patient. Beyond that, it appears to me that what you’re proposing to do is to reconstruct Alex’s brain, even to the extent of repairing nerve cells. Frankly, I don’t believe you or anyone else can do that.”

Torres chuckled. “And, of course, you’re right. I can’t do that, nor can anybody else. Unfortunately, I’m much too large, and my hands are much too clumsy. Which is why Alexan—Alex,” he corrected himself, “is going to have to be brought here.” He switched off the monitor and rose from his chair. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”

They left Torres’s office and walked down a corridor that led to the west wing of the building. A security guard looked up at them as they passed, then, recognizing Torres, went back to gazing at the television monitor at his desk. Finally they turned into a scrub room, beyond which was an operating room. Wordlessly Torres stood aside and let the two others precede him through the double doors.

In the center of the room was an operating table, and against one wall was the customary array of O.R. equipment — all the support systems and monitors that both Marsh and Frank Mallory were used to. The rest of the room was taken up with an array of equipment the likes of which neither of them had ever seen before.

“It’s a computerized microsurgical robot,” Torres explained. “In the simplest terms possible, all it does is reduce the actions of the surgeon — in this case, me — down from increments of millimeters into increments of millimicrons. It incorporates an electron microscope, and a computer program that makes the program you just saw look like simple addition in comparison to advanced calculus. In a way,” he went on, the pride in his voice belying his words, “with the development of this machine, I’ve reduced myself from being a brain surgeon to being little more than a technician. The microscope looks at the problems, and then the computer analyzes them and determines the solutions. Finally it tells me what to attach to what, and I make the movements relative to an enlarged model of the tissue. The robot reduces my motions and performs the procedures on the real tissue. And it works. Physically, that machine and I can repair much of the damage done to Alex Lonsdale’s brain.”

Marsh studied the equipment for several minutes, then turned to face Torres once again. When he spoke, his voice clearly reflected the uncertainty he was feeling. “What are the chances of Alex surviving the operation?”

Torres’s expression turned grim. “Let’s go back to my office. The computer can tell us that, too.”

No one spoke again until they were back in the old core building, with the door to Torres’s office closed behind them. Marsh and Frank Mallory took their seats, and Torres switched the computer back on. Quickly he began entering a series of instructions, and then the monitor flashed into life:

SURGERY PERFORMED

SURGERY NOT PERFORMED

PROBABILITY OF SURVIVAL

PAST ONE WEEK

90%

10%

PROBABILITY OF

REGAINING CONSCIOUSNESS

50%

02%

PROBABILITY OF

PARTIAL RECOVERY

20%

0%

PROBABILITY OF

TOTAL RECOVERY

0%

0%

Marsh and Mallory studied the chart, then, still staring at the screen, Marsh asked the first question that came to mind.

“What does partial recovery mean, exactly?”

“For starters, that he’ll be able to breathe on his own, and that he’ll be both cognizant of what is going on around him and able to communicate with the world beyond his own body. To me, anything less is no recovery at all. Though such a patient may be technically conscious, I still consider him to be in a state of coma. I find it inhuman to keep people alive under such circumstances, and I don’t believe that simply because such people can’t communicate their suffering, they are therefore not suffering. For me, such a life would be unbearable, even for a few days.”

Marsh struggled to control the inner rage he was feeling at this cool man who was able to discuss Alex so dispassionately. And yet, deep down, he wasn’t at all sure he disagreed with Torres. Then he heard Frank Mallory asking another question.

“And full recovery?”

“Exactly what the words say,” Torres replied. “In this case, full recovery is simply not possible. Too much tissue has been destroyed. No matter how successful the surgery might be, there will never be total healing. He might, however — and I want to stress the word ‘might’—recover what anyone would consider a remarkable number of his faculties. He might walk, talk, think, see, hear, and feel. Or he could recover any combination of those abilities.”

“And you, I assume, are willing to perform the surgery?”

Torres shrugged. “I’m afraid I don’t like the odds,” he said. “I’m a man who doesn’t like to fail.”

Marsh felt a knot forming in his stomach. “Fail?” he whispered. “Dr. Torres, you’re talking about my son. Without you, he’ll die. We’re not talking success or failure. We’re talking life or death.”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it,” Torres replied. “In fact, under certain conditions, I will do it.”

Marsh’s relief was apparent in his sigh, and he allowed himself to slump in his chair. “Anything,” he whispered. “Anything at all.”

But Frank Mallory was suddenly uneasy. “What are those circumstances?” he asked.

“Very simple. That I be given complete control over the case for as long as I deem necessary, and that I be absolved of any responsibility for any of the consequences of either the surgery or the convalescent period.” Marsh started to interrupt, but Torres pressed on. “And by convalescent period, I mean until such time as I — and only I — discharge the patient.” He reached into a drawer of his desk and withdrew a multipage document, which he handed to Marsh. “This is the agreement that you and the boy’s mother will sign. You may read it if you want to — in fact I think you should — but not so much as a comma of it can be changed. Either you sign it or you don’t. If you do, and your wife does, bring the boy here as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the riskier the surgery will be. As I’m sure you know, patients in your son’s condition rarely get stronger — if anything, they get weaker.” He rose from his chair, indicating his dismissal. “I’m sorry this has taken so long, but I’m afraid there was no choice. Even my computers need time to work.”

Mallory rose to his feet. “If the Lonsdales decide to go ahead, when will you do the surgery, and how long will it take?”

“I’ll do it tomorrow,” Torres replied. “And it will take at least eighteen hours, with fifteen people working. And don’t forget,” he added, turning to Marsh. “The odds are eighty percent that we’ll fail, at least to some extent. I’m sorry, but I don’t believe in lying to people.”

He opened the door, held it for Marsh and Frank, then closed it as soon as they had stepped through.

Raymond Torres sat alone for a long time after showing the two doctors from La Paloma out of his office.

La Paloma.

Odd that this case — the most challenging case he’d ever been given the opportunity to work on — should not only come from the town he’d grown up in but also involve someone he’d known all his life.

He wondered if Ellen Lonsdale would even remember who he was. Or, more to the point, who he’d been.

Probably not.

In La Paloma, as in most of California during those years of his childhood, he and all the other descendants of the old Californios had been regarded as just more Mexicans, to be ignored at best, and despised at worst.

And in return, his friends had despised the gringos even more than they were despised themselves.

Raymond Torres could still remember the long nights in the little kitchen, when his grandmother listened to the indignities his mother and her sisters had suffered at the hands of their various employers, then talked, as she always did, of the old days before even she had been born, when the Meléndez y Ruiz family had owned the hacienda, and the Californios were preeminent. Back then, it had been the families of Torres and Ortiz, Rodríguez and Flores who had lived in the big white houses on the trail up to the hacienda. Over and over, his grandmother had told the legend of the massacre at the hacienda, and the carnage that followed as one by one the old families were driven from their homes, and slowly reduced to the level of peones. But things would change, his grandmother had insisted. All they and their friends had to do was maintain their hatred and wait for the day when the son of Don Roberto de Meléndez y Ruiz would return and drive the gringos away from the lands and homes they had stolen.

Raymond had listened to it all, and known it was all useless. His grandmother’s tales were no more than legends, and her certainty of future vengeance no more solid than the ghost on which her hopes depended. When she had finally died, he’d thought it might end, but instead, his mother had taken up the litany. Even now, the old legends and hatreds seemed to be all she lived for.

But there would be no revenge, and there would be no driving away of the gringos, at least not for Raymond Torres. For himself, he had taken another path, ignoring the slights of the gringos and closing his ears to the hatreds of his friends and their plans for someday avenging their ancestors.

For Raymond Torres, vengeance would be simple. He would acquire a gringo education and become as superior to the gringos as they thought they were to him. But his superiority would be real, not imagined.

Now, finally, the day had come when they needed him.

And he would help them, despite the fury he would face from his mother.

He would help them, because he had long ago decided that all the years of having been dismissed as being unworthy of the gringos’ attention would best be avenged by the simple act of forcing them to realize that they had been wrong; that he had always been their equal. He’d always been their equal, though he’d never had their power.

Now, because of an accident on the very site of the ancient massacre, that power had come into his hands.

The skill he would need he had acquired over long years of hard work. Now he would combine that skill with the power they would give him to rebuild Alex Lonsdale into something far more than he had been before his accident.

Slowly and carefully he began making the preparations to rebuild Alex Lonsdale’s mind.

In the demonstration of his own genius, he would have his own revenge.

“But why can’t he do it here?” Ellen asked. Several hours of fitful sleep had eased the exhaustion she had felt that morning, but she still found it impossible to absorb every word Marsh had spoken. Patiently Marsh explained it once again.

“It’s the equipment. It’s extensive, and it’s all built into his O.R. It simply can’t be moved, at least not quickly, and not into our facility. We just don’t have the space.”

“But can Alex survive it?”

This time it was Frank who answered her question. “We don’t know,” he said. “I think he can. His pulse is weak, but it’s steady, and the respirator can go in the ambulance with him. There’s a mobile ICU in Palo Alto, and we can use that.”

There was a silence, then Marsh spoke, his voice quiet but urgent. “You have to decide, Ellen. This waiver needs both our signatures.”

Ellen gazed at her husband a moment, her thoughts suddenly far in the past.

Raymond Torres. Tall and good-looking, with dark, burning eyes, but no one anyone would ever consider going out with. And he’d been smart, too. In fact, he’d been the smartest person in her class. But strange, in a way she’d never quite understood, nor even, for that matter, cared about understanding. He’d always acted as though he was better than anyone, and never had any friends, either of his own race or of hers. And now, suddenly, the life of her son depended on him.

“What’s he like?” she suddenly asked.

Marsh looked at her curiously. “Does it matter?”

Ellen hesitated, then slowly shook her head. “I don’t suppose so,” she replied. “But I used to know him, and he was always … well, I guess he seemed arrogant, and sometimes he was almost scary. None of us ever liked him.”

Marsh smiled tightly. “Well, he hasn’t changed. He’s still arrogant, and I don’t like him at all. But he might be able to save Alex.”

Once more Ellen hesitated. In times past, she and Marsh used to spend hours discussing their problems, listening to each other, balancing their thoughts and feelings, weighing what was best for them. But in the last few months — or had it become years? — that easy communication had been lost. They had been too busy — Marsh with the expanding Medical Center, herself with the expanding social life that had accompanied the building of the Center. What had been sacrificed, finally, was their ability to communicate with each other. Now, with Alex’s life hanging in the balance, she had to come to a decision.

She made up her mind. “We don’t have a choice, do we?” she asked. “We have to try.” She picked up the pen and signed the waiver, which she had not bothered to read, then handed it back to Marsh. A sudden thought flashed through her mind.

If Raymond Torres thinks it will work, why won’t he take responsibility for it?

Then she decided that she didn’t want to know the answer to that question.

CHAPTER SIX

Carol Cochran covered the telephone’s mouthpiece with her right hand and called up the stairs, “Lisa? It’s for you.” She waited a few seconds, and when there was no answer, she called out again: “Lisa?”

“Tell whoever it is I’m not here.” Lisa’s voice was muffled, and Carol paused a moment, wondering if she ought to go upstairs and insist that Lisa take the call. Then she sighed. “She says she isn’t here, Kate. I’m sorry, but she just doesn’t want to talk to anyone right now. I’ll have her call you back, all right?”

Hanging up the phone, Carol mounted the stairs, and found Kim standing in the hall.

“Her door’s locked, and she won’t come out,” the six-year-old reported.

“I’ll take care of it, dear. Why don’t you go find your father?”

“Is he lost?” Kim replied with the same look of innocence Jim always wore when he tortured her with the same kind of response.

“Just go, all right? I need to talk to your sister.”

“Do I have to?” Kim begged. “I could talk to her too.”

“I’m sure you could,” Carol observed. “But right now I want to talk to her alone.”

Kim cocked her head, her eyes narrowing inquisitively. “Are you gonna talk about Alex?”

“Possibly,” Carol parried.

“Is Alex going to die?”

“I don’t know,” Carol replied, sticking to the policy of total honesty she’d always followed in raising her children. “But that’s something we won’t talk about until it happens. I hope it won’t. Now, run along and find your father.”

Kim, who had long since learned when she’d pushed her luck as far as it would go, headed down the stairs as Carol tapped at Lisa’s door.

“Lisa? May I come in?”

There was no answer, but a moment later Carol heard a click as Lisa turned the key from the inside. The door opened a few inches, and Carol saw Lisa’s retreating back as the girl returned to her bed, sprawled out on her back, and fixed her gaze on the ceiling. Carol stepped into the room and closed the door behind her.

“Do you want to talk about it?” she asked. When there was no reply, Carol crossed to the bed and sat down on the edge of it. Lisa moved slightly to one side to make more room. “Well, I want to talk about it,” Carol went on. “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re wrong.”

Lisa’s tear-streaked face turned slowly toward her mother, who reached out to brush a stray hair from her brow. “It was my fault, Mom,” she said, her voice bleak. “It was all my fault.”

“We’re not going to go over it all again,” Carol told her. “I’ve heard the whole story too many times already. If you want to feel guilty, you can feel guilty about talking Alex into going to that party. But that’s all you can feel guilty about. It was Alex who drank the beer, and it was Alex who was driving the car.”

“But he had to swerve—”

“Only because he was driving too fast. He caused the accident, Lisa. Not you.”

“But … but what if he dies?”

Carol bit her lip, then took a deep breath. “If he dies, then we will all feel very badly for a while. Ellen and Marsh will feel badly for a long time. But the world won’t end, Lisa. And if Alex does die, that won’t be your fault any more than the accident was your fault.”

“But Carolyn Evans said—”

“Carolyn Evans is a selfish, spoiled brat, and you weren’t the only one who heard her say it was all your fault. I’ve talked to Bob Carey and Kate Lewis tonight, and they both told me exactly what Carolyn meant. She meant that if you hadn’t left the party, then Alex wouldn’t have either, and that the accident might not have happened. And do you know what she was worried about? Not you, and not Alex. The only thing that concerned darling Carolyn was the fact that her party was no longer going to be her little secret. Also, as far as I know, Carolyn was the only person at the party who didn’t bother to go to the Center last night. All she did was go home and try to clean up the house.”

“It doesn’t make any difference what she meant,” Lisa said, rolling over to face the wall. “It still doesn’t change the way I feel.”

Carol sat silently for a few seconds, then reached out and pulled Lisa close. “I know, honey. And I suppose you’re going to have to get over that feeling your own way. In the meantime, what about Alex?”

Lisa stirred suddenly, and sat up. “Alex? What about him?”

“Suppose he wakes up?”

“He will wake up,” Lisa said. “He has to.”

“Why? So you can stop feeling sorry for yourself? Is that why you want him to wake up? So it will make you feel better?”

Lisa’s eyes widened with shock. “Mom! That’s an awful thing to say—”

Carol shrugged. “Well, what else can I think?” She took Lisa’s hands in her own. “Lisa, I want you to listen very carefully. There’s a chance that Alex may survive all this, and there’s a chance he may wake up. But if he does, he’s going to be in bad shape, and he’s going to need all the help he can get. His parents won’t be enough. He’s going to need his friends, too, and he’s going to need you. But if you’re spending all your energy feeling guilty and sorry for yourself, you’re not going to be much good to him, are you?”

Lisa looked dazed. “But what can I do?”

“None of us will know that till the time comes. But for starters, you could try pulling yourself together.” She hesitated for a moment, then went on. “Alex is going to be operated on tomorrow.” Lisa’s eyes reflected her surprise, but before she could say anything, Carol went on. “I know you’re going to want to be there — we all want to be there — but you’re not going to sit on a sofa and cry. If anyone’s going to do that, it’s going to be Ellen, and I suspect she won’t do that either. It’s going to be a long operation, and Alex might not make it through. But if you want to be there, both your father and I expect you to behave like the girl we hope we raised.”

There was a long silence; then the slightest trace of a smile appeared at the corners of Lisa’s mouth. “You mean keep my chin up?” she asked in a tiny voice.

Carol nodded. “And remember that it’s Alex who’s in trouble, not you. Whatever happens tomorrow, or next week, or whenever, your life will go on. If Alex comes through this, he’s not going to have a lot of time to spend cheering you up.” She stood up, and forced a grin she didn’t truly feel. “The ball’s in your court, kid. Play it.”

Forty minutes later, Lisa Cochran came downstairs. She was wearing one of her father’s old white shirts and a pair of jeans, and her hair, still wet from the shower, was wrapped in a towel. “Who all called?” she asked. Her father lowered his paper and opened his mouth. “I mean besides Prince Andrew and John Travolta, Dad. I already talked to them and told them it’s definitely over.”

“All the messages are by the phone,” her mother told her. “Anything going on you want to tell us about, or shall we read it in the papers?”

“Nothing much,” Lisa said. “I just thought I’d get the kids organized for tomorrow. Do you know what time they’re operating on Alex?”

Jim put his paper aside, looking curiously at his older daughter. “Early,” he said. “They want to start by six, I think.” As Lisa started out of the room, he called her back. “Mind telling me just what you’re organizing?”

“Well, everyone’s going to want to go down there, but there’s no point in having everyone show up at once. I’m just going to sort of get them spaced out.”

“Most of them already are,” Jim commented.

Lisa ignored him. “Tomorrow’s Sunday, so nobody has to go to school or anything. We might as well all help out.”

Carol frowned uncertainly. “I hope there’s not going to be a mob like there was last night—”

“I’ll tell them not to stay very long. And I’m going to ask Kate if she’ll just sort of hang around, in case anybody needs anything.”

Now Jim was shaking his head. “Lisa, honey, I know you want to do the right thing, but—”

“It’s all right,” Carol interrupted. “But, Lisa? Can I make a suggestion? Why don’t you call Ellen and see what she thinks? She might prefer it if you just kept everybody away, at least until we know what’s happening.”

Lisa’s face fell, and she groaned. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

“ ’Cause you’re an idiot,” Kim said, abandoning the drawing she’d been working on to scramble into her father’s lap. “Isn’t she an idiot, Daddy?”

“It takes one to know one.”

“Daddy! You’re s’posed to be on my side.”

“I guess I forgot.” Jim snuggled the little girl in, then turned back to Lisa. “Got any plans for your sister?” he asked mildly. “If you really want to do some organizing, why don’t you line up your friends to take care of Kim?”

“I want to go with you!” Kim immediately objected.

“That’s what you say now,” Jim told her. “That’s not what you’ll say tomorrow. And don’t argue with me — I’m bigger than you are, and can pound you into the ground.” Kim giggled, but closed her mouth. “Maybe someone could take her to a movie or something. And we’ll need a baby-sitter after dinner.”

Lisa’s eyes clouded. “Won’t it be all over by then?”

Carol and Jim exchanged a glance, then Jim spoke. “I talked to Marsh earlier,” he said. “He told me the operation will take at least eighteen hours. It’s not going to be any party, honey.”

Lisa paled slightly, and fought down the tears that were welling in her eyes. When she spoke, though, her voice was steady. “I know it’s not a party, Dad,” she said softly. “I just want to do whatever I can to help.”

“Your mother can—”

“No! I can, and I will. I’ll take care of Kim, and see to it that there’s no mob scene. I’ll be all right, Dad. Just let me do this my way, all right?”

When she was gone, and they could hear her murmuring into the telephone, Jim turned to Carol. “What happened up there?” he asked.

“I think she just grew up, Jim. Anyway, she’s sure trying.”

There was a silence, then Kim squirmed in her father’s lap, twisting around to look up at him. “Do I have to go to the movies with her dumb old friends?” she demanded.

“If you do, I’ll bet they’ll let you choose the movie,” Jim replied. Somewhat mollified, Kim settled down again.

“I hope Alex gets better soon,” she said. “I like Alex.”

“We all do,” Carol told her. “And he will get better, if we all pray a lot.”

And, she added to herself, if Raymond Torres really knows what he’s doing.

As Carol Cochran entertained that thought, Raymond Torres himself was making his final rounds of the evening.

Not, of course, that they were really rounds, for Alex Lonsdale was his only patient. He stopped first in Alex’s room, just across the hall from the operating complex. The night nurse glanced up from the book she was reading. “Nothing, doctor,” she said as Torres scanned the monitors that were tracking Alex’s vital functions. “No change from an hour ago.”

Torres nodded, and gazed thoughtfully at the boy in the bed.

Looks like his mother. The thought drifted through his mind, followed by a sudden flood of unbidden memories from a past he thought could no longer hurt him. Along with his memories of Ellen Lonsdale came memories of three other girls, and as their faces came into focus in his mind’s eye, he felt himself begin to tremble.

Forget it, he told himself. It was long ago, and it’s all over now. It doesn’t matter. With an effort of will, he forced himself to concentrate on the motionless form of Alex Lonsdale. He leaned over and carefully opened one of the boy’s eyes, checked the pupil, then closed the eye again. There had been no reaction to the sudden incursion of light. Not a good sign.

“All right,” he said. “I’m sleeping here tonight, in the room over my office. If anything happens — anything at all — I want to be awakened at once.”

“Of course, doctor,” the nurse replied. Not that he need have said anything — the first rule for staff working under Torres was made very clear at the time they were hired: “If anything happens, let Dr. Torres know at once.” And everyone at the Institute adhered to the rule, quickly learning to suspend his own judgment. So tonight, if Alex Lonsdale so much as twitched, an instrument would record it, and Raymond Torres would be notified immediately. As Torres left the room, the nurse went back to her book.

Torres crossed the corridor and went into the scrub room, his eyes noting instantly that everything necessary for tomorrows scrub was already there — gowns, gloves, masks, everything. And it would all be checked at least twice more during the night. He proceeded into the O.R. itself, where six technicians were going over every piece of equipment in the room, running test after test, rechecking their own work, then having it verified by two other technicians. They would continue working throughout the night, searching for anything that could possibly fail, and replacing it. They would leave only when it was time for the sterilization process to begin, an hour before the operation was scheduled.

Satisfied, he moved on down the corridor to what had long ago become known as the Rehearsal Hall. It was a large room, housing several desks, each of which held a computer terminal. It was here that every operation carried out at the Institute was rehearsed.

Tonight, all the desks were occupied, and all the terminals glowed brightly in the soft light of the Rehearsal Hall. The technicians at the monitors, using the model of Alex’s brain that had been generated earlier that day, were going over the operation step by step, searching for bugs in the program that the computer itself, using its own model, had generated.

They didn’t expect to find any bugs, for they had long ago discovered that programs generated by computers are much more accurate than programs written by men.

Except that there was also the possibility that somewhere in the system there was a sleeper.

“Sleeper” was their term for a bug that had never been found. The defect might not even be in the program they were using. It could have been in a program that had been used to write another program, that had, in turn, been used to generate still a third program. They all knew, from bitter experience, that the bug could suddenly pop up and destroy everything.

Or, worse, it could simply inject a tiny error into the program, creating a new sleeper.

In this case, that would be a wrong connection in Alex Lonsdale’s mind, which could lead to anything.

Or nothing.

Or Alex’s death.

Torres moved silently through the room, concentrating first on one monitor, then on another. All of what he saw was familiar; he would see it all again tomorrow.

Except that tomorrow wouldn’t be a rehearsal. Tomorrow his fingers would be on the robot’s controls, and as he followed the program, making the connections inside Alex’s brain, there would be no turning back. Whatever he did tomorrow, Alex Lonsdale would live with for the rest of his life.

Or die with.

One of the technicians leaned back and stretched.

“Problems?” Torres asked.

The technician shook his head. “Looks perfect so far.”

“How many times have you been through it?”

“Five.”

“It’s a beginning,” Torres said. He wished they had months to keep rerunning the program, but they didn’t. So even in the morning, they wouldn’t be sure there were no bugs. That, indeed, was the worst thing about bugs — sometimes they didn’t show up for years. The only way to find them was to keep running and rerunning a program hoping that if something was going to go wrong it would go wrong early on. But this time, they simply didn’t have time — they would have to trust that the program was perfect.

Yet as he moved toward the little bedroom above his office that was always kept ready for him, one thought kept going through Torres’s mind: Nothing is ever perfect.

Something always goes wrong.

He pushed the thought away. Not this time. This time, everything had to be perfect. And only he would ever know what that perfection really was.

At five o’clock the next morning, Ellen and Marshall Lonsdale arrived in Palo Alto. It was still dark, but all over the Institute for the Human Brain, lights glowed brightly, and people seemed to be everywhere. They were shown into the same lounge where Marsh had spent most of the previous day, and offered coffee and Danishes.

“Can we see Alex?” Ellen asked.

The receptionist smiled sympathetically. “I’m sorry. He’s already being prepped.” Ellen carefully kept her expression impassive, but the other woman could clearly see the pain in her eyes. “I really am sorry, Mrs. Lonsdale, but it’s one of Doctor’s rules. Once the prepping starts, we always keep the patient totally isolated. Doctor’s a fanatic about keeping everything sterile.”

Suddenly the door opened, and a friendly voice filled the room. “Why do they always have to have operations at dawn?” Valerie Benson asked of no one in particular. “Do they think it’s a war or something?” She crossed the room and gave Ellen a quick hug. “It’s going to be all right,” she whispered. “I don’t get up this early unless I know nothing can possibly go wrong, and here I am. So you might as well stop worrying right now. Alex is going to be fine.”

Ellen couldn’t resist smiling at Valerie, who was a notorious late-riser. Indeed, Valerie sometimes claimed that the real reason she’d divorced her husband was that demanding breakfast by nine A.M. was the worst sort of mental cruelty. But here she was, as always, coming through in the pinch, and looking as if she’d been up for hours.

“You didn’t have to come,” Ellen told her.

“Of course I did,” Valerie said. “If I hadn’t, everybody would have talked about it for years. Is Marty here yet?”

“I don’t know if she’s even coming. And it’s so early—”

“Nonsense,” Valerie snorted. “Must be nearly noon.” She gave Marsh a quick kiss on the cheek. “Everything okay?” she asked, her voice dropping.

“They won’t even let us see Alex before the operation,” Marsh replied, making no attempt to hide the anger he was feeling. Valerie nodded knowingly.

“I’ve always said Raymond Torres is impossible. Brilliant, yes. But impossible.”

Ellen’s eyes clouded. “If he can save Alex, I don’t care how impossible he is.”

“Of course you don’t, darling,” Valerie assured her. “None of us does. Besides, maybe he’s changed over the last twenty years. My God, if I had any brains, I’d marry him! This is some place, isn’t it? Is it all his?”

“Val,” Ellen interrupted. “You can slow down. You don’t have to distract us — we’re going to get through this.”

Valerie’s bright smile faded, and she sat down abruptly, reaching into her purse and pulling out a handkerchief. She sniffled, wiped her eyes, then determinedly put the handkerchief away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that the thought of anything happening to Alex … Oh, Ellen, I’m just so sorry about all of this. Is there anything I can do?”

Ellen shook her head. “Nothing. Just stay with me, Val. Having you and Marty Lewis and Carol here is going to be the most important thing.” To know that her friends would be here to support her, to try to comfort her, would help.

The longest day of her life had just begun.

CHAPTER SEVEN

When the lounge door opened just after ten-thirty that evening, neither Ellen nor Marsh paid much attention. People had been in and out all day, some staying only a few minutes, others remaining for an hour or two. But now only her closest friends were still there: the Cochrans, Marty Lewis, and Valerie Benson. Only Cynthia Evans had not come.

Slowly she realized that someone was standing in front of her, had spoken to her. She looked up into the face of a stranger.

“Mrs. Lonsdale? I’m Susan Parker — the night person. Dr. Torres wants to see you and your husband in his office.”

Ellen glanced at Marsh, who was already on his feet, his hand extended to her. Suddenly she felt disoriented — she’d thought it was going to take until midnight. Unless … She closed her mind to the thought that Alex must, at last, have died. “It’s over?” she managed. “He’s finished?”

Then she was in Torres’s office, and the doctor was gazing at her from the chair behind his desk. He stood up, and came around to offer her his hand. “Hello, Ellen,” he said quietly.

Her first fleeting thought was that he was even more handsome than she’d remembered him. Hesitantly she took his hand and squeezed it briefly, then, still clutching his hand, she gazed into his eyes. “Alex,” she whispered. “Is he—?”

“He’s alive,” Torres said, his voice reflecting the exhaustion he was feeling, while his eyes revealed his triumph. “He’s out of the O.R., and he’s off the respirator. He’s breathing by himself, and his pulse is strong.”

Ellen’s legs buckled, and Marsh eased her into a chair. “Is he awake?” she heard her husband ask. When Torres’s head shook negatively, her heart sank.

“But it doesn’t mean much,” Torres said. “The soonest we want him to wake up is tomorrow morning.”

“Then you don’t know if the operation is a success.” Marsh Lonsdale’s voice was flat.

Again Torres shook his head, and rubbed his eyes with his fists. “We’ll know tomorrow morning, when — if — he wakes up. But things look good.” He offered them a twisted smile. “Coming from me, that’s something. You know what I consider success and what I consider failure. And I can tell you right now that if Alex dies in the next week, it won’t be from his brain problems. It will be from complications — pneumonia, some kind of viral infection, that sort of thing. I intend to see that that doesn’t happen.”

“Can … can we see him?” Ellen asked.

Torres nodded. “But only for a minute, and only through the window. For the time being, I don’t want anyone in that room except members of my staff.” Marsh seemed about to say something, but Torres ignored him. “I’m sorry, but that includes you. What you can do is take a look at him — Susan will take you over there — and then go home and get some sleep. Tomorrow morning’s going to tell the tale, and I want you to be here. If he wakes up, I’m going to want to try to determine if he can recognize people.”

“Us,” Ellen breathed.

“Exactly.” Torres stood up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going up to bed.”

Ellen struggled to her feet, and reached out to grasp Torres’s hand once again. “Thank you, Raymond,” she whispered. “I … I don’t know what to say. I didn’t believe … I couldn’t—”

Torres abruptly withdrew his hand from hers. “Don’t thank me, Ellen,” he said. “Not yet. There’s still a good chance that your son will never wake up.” Then he was gone, leaving Ellen to stare after him, her face ashen.

“It’s just him,” Marsh told her. “It’s just his way of telling us not to get our hopes too high.”

“But he said—”

“He said Alex is alive, and breathing by himself. And that’s all he said.” He began guiding her toward the door. “Let’s go take a look at him, then go home.”

Silently Susan Parker led them into the west wing and down the long corridor past the O.R. She stopped at a window, and the Lonsdales gazed through the glass into a large room. In its center stood a hospital bed, its guardrails up. Around the bed was an array of monitors, each of them attached to some part of Alex’s body.

His head, though swathed with bandages, seemed to bristle with tiny wires.

But there was no respirator, and even from beyond the window they could see his chest rising and falling in the deep, even rhythm of sleep. A glance at one of the monitors told Marsh that Alex’s pulse was now as strong and regular as his breathing.

“He’s going to come out of it,” he said softly. Next to him, Ellen squeezed his hand tightly.

“I know,” she replied. “I can feel it. He did it, Marsh. Raymond gave us back our son.” Then: “But what’s he going to be like? He won’t be the same, will he?”

“No,” Marsh said slowly, “he won’t be. But he’ll still be Alex.”

There was a soft beeping sound, and the nurse whose sole duty was to watch Alex Lonsdale glanced quickly up, scanning the monitors with a practiced eye, then noting the exact time.

Nine-forty-six A.M.

She pressed the buzzer on the control panel, then went to the bed to lean over Alex, concentrating on his eyes.

The beeping sounded again, and this time she saw its cause. She picked up the phone and pressed two buttons. On the first ring, someone picked it up.

“Torres. What is it?”

“Rapid-eye movement, doctor. He may be dreaming, or—”

“Or he may be waking up. I’ll be right down.” The phone went dead in her hand and the nurse’s attention went back to Alex.

Once more, the beeping began, and the occasional faint twitching in Alex Lonsdale’s eyelids increased to an erratic flutter.

Hazily he became vaguely aware of himself. Things were happening around him.

There were sounds, and faint images, but none of it meant anything.

Like watching a movie, but run so fast you couldn’t see any of it.

And darkness. Darkness all around him, and no sense of being at all. Then, slowly, he began to feel himself. There was more than the darkness, more than the indistinct sounds and images.

A dream.

He was having a dream.

But what was it about? He tried to focus his mind. If it was a dream, where was he? Why wasn’t he part of it?

The darkness began to recede a little, and the sounds and images faded away.

Not a dream. Real. He was real.

He.

What did “he” mean?

“He” was a word, and he should know what it meant. There should be a name attached to it, but there wasn’t.

The word had no meaning.

Then slowly “he” faded into “me.”

“Me.”

“Me” became “I.”

I am me. He is me.

Who?

Alexander James Lonsdale.

The meaning of those little words came back into his mind.

He began to remember.

But there were only fragments, and most of them didn’t make any sense. He was going somewhere. Where? A dance. There had been a dance. Picture it.

If you want to remember something, picture it.

Nothing.

Going somewhere.

Car. He was in a car, and he was driving. But where?

Nothing. No image came to mind, no street name.

Picture something — anything.

But nothing came, and for a moment he was sure that all he would ever know was his name. There was nothing else in his mind. Nothing but that great dark void. Then more names came into his mind.

Marshall Lonsdale.

Ellen Smith Lonsdale.

Parents. They were his parents. Then, very slowly, the blackness surrounding him faded into a faint glow.

He opened his eyes to blinding brightness, then closed them again.

“He’s awake.” The words meant something, and he understood what they meant.

He opened his eyes again. The brightness faded, and blurred images began to form. Then, slowly, his eyes focused.

Certain images clicked in his mind, things he’d seen before, and suddenly he knew where he was. He was in a hospital.

A hospital was where his father worked. His father was a doctor. His eyes moved again, and he saw a face.

His father?

He didn’t know. He opened his mouth.

“Wh-who … are … you?”

“Dr. Torres,” a voice said. “Dr. Raymond Torres.” There was a silence, then the voice spoke again. “Who are you?”

He lay quiet for a few seconds, then, once more, spoke, the words distorted, but clear enough to be understood. “Lonsdale. Alexander James Lonsdale.”

“Good,” the man whose name was Dr. Torres told him. “That’s very good. Now, do you know where you are?”

“H-hob …” Alex fell silent, then carefully tried it again. “Hos … pi … tal,” he said.

“That’s right. Do you know why you’re in the hospital?”

Alex lapsed into silence again, his mind trying to grasp the meaning of the question. Then, in a rush, it came to him.

“Ha-hacienda,” he whispered. “Car.”

“Good,” Dr. Torres said softly. “Don’t try to say anything else right now. Just lie there. Everything’s going to be all right. Do you understand?”

“Y-yes.”

The image of the doctor disappeared from his vision, and was replaced by another face that he didn’t recognize. He closed his eyes.

Ellen and Marsh rose anxiously to their feet as Torres walked into his office a few minutes later.

“He’s awake,” he told them. “And he can speak.”

“He … he actually said something?” Ellen asked, her voice alive with hope for the first time since the accident. “It wasn’t just sounds?”

Torres seated himself at his desk, his demeanor, as always, perfectly composed. “Better than just saying something. The first thing he did was ask me who I was. Then he told me his name. And he knows what happened.”

Marshall Lonsdale felt his heart pounding, and suddenly a vision leapt into his mind. It was the chart of probabilities he’d seen two days earlier. Partial recovery had been only a twenty-percent chance. Full recovery had been zero percent. But Alex could hear, and he could speak, and apparently he could think. Then he realized that Torres was still speaking, and forced himself to concentrate on the doctor’s words.

“… but you have to realize that he might not recognize you.”

“Why not?” Ellen asked. Then: “Oh, God. He … he isn’t blind, is he?”

“Absolutely not,” Torres assured her. His eyes fixed on her, and Ellen felt a small shiver run through her. There was a quality of strength in his eyes that had not been there twenty years ago. Where once his eyes had smoldered in a way that she used to find frightening, now they burned with a reassuring self-confidence. Whatever Raymond Torres told her, she was suddenly certain, would be the absolute truth. And if Alex could be healed, Raymond Torres was the one man who could heal him. In his presence, the overriding fear she had fallen victim to since the moment she heard of Alex’s accident began to ebb away. She found herself concentrating on his words with an intensity she had never felt before.

“At this point there’s no way of knowing what he will remember and what he won’t. He could remember your names, but have no memory at all of what you look like. Or just the opposite. You might be familiar to him, but he won’t remember exactly who you are. So when you see him, be very careful. If he doesn’t recognize you, don’t be upset, or at least try not to let him know that you’re upset.”

“The fact that he’s alive, and that he’s conscious, is enough,” Ellen breathed. Then, though she knew she could never truly express what she was feeling, she went on. “How can I thank you?” she asked. “How can I ever thank you for what you’ve done?”

“By accepting Alex in whatever condition he is now in,” Torres replied, ignoring the emotion in Ellen’s words.

“But you said—”

“I know what I said. You must understand that Alex will undoubtedly have a lot of limitations from now on, and you must learn to deal with them. That may not be a simple task.”

“I know,” Ellen said. “I don’t expect it to be. But whatever Alex’s needs are, I know we’ll be able to meet them. You’ve given us back Alex’s life, Raymond. You … well, you’ve worked a miracle.”

Torres rose to his feet. “Let’s go see him. I’ll take you in myself, and I’d like to do it one at a time. I don’t want to give him too much to cope with.”

“Of course,” Marsh agreed. They started toward the west wing and paused outside Alex’s room. Through the window, nothing seemed to have changed. “Does it matter which of us goes in first?” he asked.

“I’d rather you went first,” Torres replied. “You’re a doctor, and you’ll be less likely to have any kind of reaction to whatever might happen.”

The Lonsdales exchanged a glance, and Ellen managed to conceal her disappointment. “Go on,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

Torres opened the door, and the two men stepped inside. Ellen watched as Marsh approached the bed, stopping when he was next to Alex.

Alex’s eyes opened again, and he recognized Dr. Torres. On the other side of him was someone else.

“Who … are … you?”

There was a slight pause, and then the stranger spoke. “I’m your father, Alex.”

“Father?” Alex echoed. His eyes fixed on the man, and he searched his memory. Suddenly the face that had been strange was familiar. “Dad,” he said. Then, again: “Dad.”

He saw his father’s eyes fill with tears, then heard him say, “How are you, son?”

Alex searched his mind for the right word. “H-hurt,” he whispered: “I hurt, but not … not too bad.” A phrase leapt into his mind. “Looks like we’re going to live after all.”

He watched as his father and Dr. Torres glanced at each other, then back down at him. His father was smiling now. “Of course you are, son,” he heard his father say in an oddly choked voice. “Of course you are.”

Alex closed his eyes and listened to the sound of footsteps moving away from the bed. The room was silent; then there were more footsteps, and he knew people were once again standing by the bed. Dr. Torres, and someone else. He opened his eyes and peered upward. A face seemed to hang in the air, framed by dark wavy hair.

“Hello … Mom,” he whispered.

“Alex,” she whispered back. “Oh, Alex, you’re going to be fine. You’re going to be just fine.”

“Fine,” he echoed. “Just fine.” Then, exhausted, he let himself drift back into sleep.

“You can spend the day here if you want to,” Torres told them when they were back in his office. “But you won’t be allowed to see Alex again until tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Marsh asked. “But why? What if he wakes up? What if he asks for us?”

“He won’t wake up again,” Torres replied. “I’m going to look at him once more, and then give him a sedative.”

Marsh’s eyes suddenly clouded. “A sedative? He just came out of a coma. You don’t give that kind of patient a sedative — you try to keep them awake.”

Torres’s face seemed cut from stone. “I don’t believe I asked for your advice or your opinions, Dr. Lonsdale,” he said.

“But—”

“Nor am I interested in hearing them,” Torres went on, ignoring the interruption. “Frankly, I don’t have time to listen to what you have to say, and I’d just as soon you kept whatever thoughts you might have to yourself. Alex is my patient, and I have my own methods. I made that clear day before yesterday. Now, if you’ll excuse me.” He opened the door in his habitual gesture of dismissal.

“But he’s our son,” Marsh protested. “Surely we can—”

“No, Marsh,” Ellen interrupted. “We’ll do whatever Raymond wants us to do.”

Marsh gazed at his wife in silence for a moment, his jaw tightening with anger. But her obvious anguish washed his rage away, and when he turned back to Torres, he had regained his composure. “I’m sorry — I was out of line.” He offered Raymond Torres a crooked smile. “From now on I’ll try to remember that I’m not the doctor here. I’ve dealt with enough worried parents to know how difficult they can be.”

Torres’s demeanor thawed only slightly. “Thank you,” he replied. “I’m afraid I have few patients, and no patience, but I do know what I’m doing. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I want to get back to Alex.”

But as Ellen led him toward the lounge, Marsh’s anger surged back. “I’ve never heard of such a thing — he as much as told us he doesn’t want us around!”

“Apparently he doesn’t,” Ellen agreed.

“But I’m Alex’s father, dammit!”

Exhaustion threatening to overwhelm her, Ellen regarded her husband with oddly detached curiosity. Wasn’t he even pleased with what Raymond Torres had accomplished? “He’s Alex’s doctor,” she said. “And without him, we wouldn’t even have Alex anymore. We owe Raymond Alex’s life, Marsh, and I don’t intend to forget that.”

“Raymond,” Marsh repeated. “Since when are you on a first-name basis with him?”

Ellen gazed at him in puzzlement. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“I’m not,” Marsh countered.

Her confusion deepened. What on earth was the matter with him? And suddenly the answer came to her. “Marsh, are you jealous of him?”

“Of course not,” Marsh replied, too quickly. “I just don’t like the man, that’s all.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” Ellen said, a distinct chill in her voice. “But he did save our son’s life, and even if you don’t like him, you should be grateful to him.”

Her words struck home, and once again Marsh’s anger evaporated. “I am,” he said quietly. “And you were right back there. He did perform a miracle, and it’s one I couldn’t have performed myself. Maybe I am a little jealous.” He slipped his arms around her. “Promise me you won’t fall in love with him?”

For just a moment, Ellen wasn’t sure if he was joking or not, but then she smiled and gave him a quick kiss. “I promise. Now, let’s tell everyone the good news.”

They stepped into the lounge to find Carol and Lisa Cochran pacing anxiously. “Is it true?” Lisa asked eagerly. “Is he really awake?”

Ellen gathered Lisa into her arms and hugged her. “It’s true,” she said. “He woke up, and he can talk, and he recognized me.”

“Thank God,” Carol breathed. “The girl at the desk told us, but we could hardly believe it.”

“And,” Marsh told her, “we’ve just been thrown out. Don’t ask me why, but Torres wants to put him to sleep again, and says we can’t see him until tomorrow.”

Carol stared at him with incredulous eyes. “You’re kidding, of course.”

“I wish I were,” Marsh replied. “I think it’s crazy, but around here, I’m not the doctor. Let’s get out of here and go home. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get much sleep last night, and I don’t think Ellen got any.”

As they stepped out into the bright sunlight of the May morning, Ellen paused and looked around as if seeing her surroundings for the first time. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked. “The grounds, and the building — it’s just lovely!”

Carol Cochran grinned at her. “This morning, anything would look lovely to you!”

For the first time since Alex’s accident, a truly happy smile covered Ellen’s face. “And why shouldn’t it?” she asked. “Everything’s going to be fine. I just know it!” Impulsively she hugged Lisa close. “We’ve got him back!” she cried. “We’ve got him back, and he’s going to be all right.”

“Alex?” Raymond Torres waited for a moment, then spoke again. “Alex, can you hear me?”

Alex’s eyes fluttered for a second, then opened, but he said nothing.

“Alex, do you think you can answer a couple of questions?”

Alex struggled for the right words, then spoke carefully: “I don’t know. I’ll try.”

“Good. That’s all I want you to do. Now, try to think, Alex. Do you know why you didn’t recognize your father?”

There was a long silence; then: “After he told me he was my father, I knew who he was.”

“But when you first saw him, Alex, did he look familiar?”

“No.”

“Not at all?”

“I … I don’t know.”

“But you recognized your mother, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So she did look familiar?”

“No.”

Torres frowned. “Then how did you recognize her?”

Alex fell silent for a moment, then spoke again, his words strained, as if he weren’t sure he was using the right ones.

“I … I thought she had to be my mother if he was my father. I thought about it, and decided that if my father was here, then my mother was here too. After I decided she was my mother, she started to look familiar.”

“So you didn’t recognize either of them until you knew who they were?”

“No.”

“All right. Now, I’m going to give you something that’s going to put you to sleep, and when you wake up again, I’ll come to see you.” He slid a hypodermic needle under the skin of Alex’s right arm and pressed the plunger. As he swabbed the puncture with a wad of cotton soaked with alcohol, he asked Alex if the needle had hurt.

“No.”

“Did you feel it at all?”

“Yes.”

“What did it feel like?”

“I … I don’t know,” Alex said.

“All right,” Torres told him. “Go to sleep now, Alex, and I’ll see you later.”

Alex closed his eyes, and Torres watched him for a moment, then stepped to the monitors at the head of the bed and made some adjustments. Before leaving the room, he checked Alex once more.

Alex’s eyelids were twitching rapidly. Torres wished there were a way to know exactly what was happening inside the boy’s mind.

But there were still some mysteries that even he hadn’t yet unraveled.