The Birth of a New Moon

The Birth of a new moon

Laurie R. King

Book 1 in the

Anne Waverley

Series

THE BIRTH OF A NEW MOON

Anne Waverly, university lecturer and sometime FBI consultant, lives with the curse of a tragic past—the horrific deaths of her husband and beloved daughter Abby in a mass suicide pact. No one knows what she has suffered better than Glen McCarthy, an FBI expert in cult behavior.

As a professor of new religious movements, Anne is called on by McCarthy over the years to help solve certain FBI cases and Anne, in an attempt to atone for the long-ago tragedy, has never refused him. Until now.

But Anne finds she can't say no to this particular case: a religious community out in the desert that looks as though it has the seeds of dangerous fervor. Slowly Anne works her way into the life of the community, and there meets two children, one of whom reminds her strongly of Abby, and suddenly she finds herself involved at a level that could be fatal…

With thanks to Jane-Marie Harrison and Paul Harrison, Bronwen Buckley, Jack from Freedom Independent Service, Alverda Orlando, and Mark Jacobs from Intertec Publishing.

And particular gratitude for the clever hands and eyes of Ken Orrett and Nathanael King, who brought to life the vision of Anne Waverly and Jason Delgado.

Section headings are taken from The Compound of Alchymie by Sir George Ripley, collected in Theatrum Chemicum Brittanicum by Elias Ashmole in 1652 (reprinted in a facsimile edition by Kessinger Publishing Co., Kila, Montana, 1991). Some of the archaic spelling has been modernized by the current author.

Section definitions are from Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary.

I

Praeparatio

prepare (vb) The action or process of making something

ready for use or of getting ready for some occasion,

test, or duty.

O Power, O Wisdom, O Goodness inexplicable;

Support me, Teach me, and be my Governor,

That never my living be to thee despicable…

Grant well that I may my intent fulfill.

Chapter One

In this country, we have the right to religious freedom. The nation was given its form by men and women who came here to escape religious persecution. When their descendents joined together in independence to frame a constitution, they recognized the right to freedom of religion as the very backbone of the nation: take it away, define just what a religion is permitted to look like and how the people may worship, and the entire basis of constitutional government is threatened. Argue as we might with Satanists or witches, followers of disagreeable mullahs or believers in the efficacy of comets to conceal alien spacecraft, from the beginning it has been made clear that, so long as the doctrine involved does not interfere with the country's legal system, a religious community has the right to define its own beliefs: In this country, heresy is not a concern of governmental agencies. Madness may even, at times, be a relative definition; after all, two thousand years ago the Roman government and the Jewish authorities judged a middle-aged rabbi to be criminally insane.

Still, laws must be obeyed, and the dance of what may and what may not be allowed keeps the courts very busy and law enforcement agencies torn between the need to intervene in a community that is behaving in an unlawful manner and the need to preserve the rights of individuals to act out their beliefs in any way short of the unlawful. For example, a community has the right to treat its children as adults when it comes to matters of worship and the determination of authority; it does not have the right to violate the state's child labor laws or treat minors as adults in matters of sexuality.

In investigating the legality of a community, the key element is information, accurately obtained and accurately interpreted. We have all seen the tragedies that occur when law enforcement personnel simply do not share a common language with a group of believers; the only choice in that situation is

From the notes of Professor Anne Waverly

The woman at the focal point of the tiered rows of red and blue seats in the lecture hall did not at first glance seem the type to hold the attention of two hundred and fifty undergraduates at the slump time of three in the afternoon. She was small and her hair was going gray, and her figure, though slim, was long past the litheness of youth. Her voice was quiet and deliberate, which in another speaker would have lulled the back rows to sleep, and the subject of her lecture was more cerebral than kept the average twenty-year-old on the edge of his chair.

The number of sleepers were few, however, and the percentage of spines inclined forward over the tiny writing surfaces attached to the chairs was high. There was an intensity in her that proved contagious, a vivid urgency in her voice and her body that overcame her undistinguished appearance and the torpor of the unseasonably early warmth of the day, transforming her limp into the stately pace of a sage and the wooden cane she leaned on into the staff of a prophetess.

In the eyes of her undergraduates, at any rate.

"What the hell is she talking about?" whispered the woman standing high up at the back of the hall, speaking to the man at her side. The two were not undergraduates; even if their age had not disqualified them, her skirt and blazer and his gray suit made them stand out in the denim-clad crowd.

The man gestured for her to be quiet, but it was too late; they had been noticed. A nearby girl glanced over her shoulder at them, then openly stared, and turned to nudge the boy next to her. The woman saw the girl's mouth form the word "narcs", and then she felt her temporary partner's hand on her elbow, pulling her out the door and out of the lecture hall. Professor Anne Waverly's voice followed them, saying "In fourth-century Israel this concept of a personal experience of God came together with the political—" before her words were cut off by the doors, and then the police officer and the FBI agent were back out in the watery sunlight.

In truth, neither was a narcotics officer, although both had worked narcotics cases in the past. Glen McCarthy made for a bench just outside the building and dropped into it. Birdsong came, and voices of students walking past; in the distance the freeway growled to itself.

"Did you understand what she was talking about?" Gillian Farmer asked idly, examining the bench closely before she committed the back of her skirt to it.

"Merkabah mysticism as one of the bases for early Christian heresies," Glen answered absently.

She shot him a dubious glance and settled onto the edge of the bench.

"And what is mer-whatever mysticism?" she asked, although she was less interested in the question than in the underlying one of how he came by his easy familiarity with the subject of Professor Anne Waverly's arcane lecture. She listened with half an ear as he explained about the Jewish idea of the merkabah, or chariot, mystical experience, the "lifting up" of the devotee to the divine presence. The scattering of early flowers and one lethargic bee held more of her attention than his words, and he either saw this or had little to say on the subject, because he kept the lecture brief.

After a moment's silence, the bee stumbled off and the subject Gillian really wanted to talk about worked its way to the surface.

"This whole thing has got to be unconventional, at least," she said finally.

"I suppose it looks that way."

The mildness of his answer irritated her. "You don't think that hauling a middle-aged professor of religion out of her ivory tower and into the field to investigate a cult is a little unusual?"

"I wouldn't use the word "cult" in her hearing if I were you," Glen suggested. "Not unless you're interested in a twenty-minute lecture on the difference between cult, sect, and new religious movement."

Gillian Farmer was not to be diverted. "It still sounds like something out of an Indiana Jones movie, not at all like a setup the FBI would come within a mile of."

"The bureau has changed since the days of J. Edgar. Now we do whatever works."

"And you think this will work?"

"It has three times before."

"And, as I understand it, once it didn't. People died."

"We were too late there—the final stages were already in motion before Anne could work her way in. I don't think even she can still feel much guilt about that one."

"Why on earth does she do it?" Gillian asked after a while. "Undercover work has got to be the most nerve-racking job in the world, and she's not even a cop."

But the man from the FBI was not yet ready to answer that question.

Seven minutes later, the double doors burst open and the first students tumbled out into the spring air, heading for the coffeehouse. After a pause, they were followed by the main body of participants, walking more thoughtfully and talking among themselves. When this larger group began to thin out, Glen got to his feet and turned to face the hall, pausing to run his palms over his hair and straighten his necktie. This was the first sign of nerves Gillian had seen in him, and it surprised her; since they had met ten days before, she had found McCarthy more idiosyncratic than the caricature of the FBI man, but every bit as cold and competent as the most stiff-necked of them.

Agent and police detective walked back through the double glass doors and down the hallway to the big hall, where they again took up positions on the flat walkway that circled the top tier of seats. Gillian was seething with impatience; she did not at all like the feeling of being kept in the dark. McCarthy had his hands in his pockets, his feet set apart and his head drooping as he gazed down the length of the hall at Anne Waverly, who was now discussing papers, projects, and reading material with the six or eight remaining students.

She put off noticing the intruders for as long as she could—until, in fact, one of the students touched her arm and leaned forward to speak into her ear. She stood very still for three long seconds, then with great deliberation pulled off her reading glasses and slowly raised her eyes to the two figures on the high ground at the back of her lecture hall.

Her expression did not change, but even from on high Gillian Farmer could feel the impact their presence had on her. When the woman bent her head again and slid the glasses back onto her nose, she still looked strong, but she seemed older, somewhat flattened, and her uncharacteristic distraction from the words of her students was obvious. The young men and women knew that something was up and grew taut with a curiosity that verged on alarm; however, when eventually she wished them a good week, they could only disperse, reluctantly, and make their slow and suspicious way up the stairs and past the two intruders.

One boy, however, found retreat more than he could bear. He scowled at Glen as he went by, and then turned back to the podium to ask loudly, "Do you want some help, Dr W?" His stance even more than his words made it obvious that he was offering an assistance considerably more physical than merely carrying her books, but McCarthy was careful not to smile, and Gillian Farmer merely glanced at the boy.

The woman he had called "Dr W" did smile. "Thank you, Josh, I'll be fine,"

Their protests unvoiced, the students left, with a furtive rush of low conversation that was cut off when the glass doors shut behind them. The lecturer turned her back on McCarthy and Farmer, gathering up her papers from the table and pushing them into an old leather briefcase. She buckled the case, took it up in her right hand and the cane in her left, and started for the steps, her very posture vibrating with displeasure.

Each stair was deep enough for two short footsteps, which was how she took them, leading with her right, bringing her left foot up, and taking another step with her right foot. She seemed to depend on the cane more for balance than sheer support, Gillian decided while watching the professor's slow approach. And it was the knee, she thought, rather than the hip that was weak. Other than that, she was in good shape for a woman in her mid-forties, perhaps a vigorous fifty. Her back was straight, her graying hair worn as loose as that of her students, curling softly down on her shoulders. Her clothing, though, was far from a student's uniform of jeans and T-shirt. She was dressed in the sort of professional clothing a woman wears who does not care for dresses: khaki trousers, sturdy shoes that were almost boots, a light green linen shirt that seemed remarkably free of creases for the tail end of a day, and a dark green blazer shot through with blue threads. The clothes seemed a great deal more formal than those of the other adult women on the campus, Gillian thought, and found herself wondering about the professor's status in the tenure stakes.

At the top of the stairs, the woman neither paused nor looked up, but merely said to the carpeting, "Come to my office, please."

They followed obediently, submitting to the hard looks of the handful of students who hovered in the distance to be quite sure their professor did not need assistance. She ignored them, as did McCarthy. Farmer tried to avoid looking as though she was escorting a prisoner, with limited success.

They went down the paved path through some winter-bare trees and past a small patch of lawn, and into another building designed by the same architect as the hall. The lecturer unlocked a door and they followed her in, and Gillian revised her speculations: If her recollection of academia was correct, this was not the office of a woman with reason to fear a lack of tenure. The room looked, in fact, like that of a high administrator or department chair, a corner office complete with Oriental carpet and wooden desk—although surely an administrator would not be surrounded by shelves sagging under the weight of books and piled high with untidy heaps of journals and loose manuscripts. The professor slammed her briefcase on the desk, dropped the keys she had just used into her jacket pocket, hooked her cane over the edge of the desk, and sat down.

"Close the door, Glen."

McCarthy shut the door and settled into one of the three chairs arrayed in front of the desk. Gillian Farmer tucked the strap of her shoulder bag over the back of one of the other chairs, hesitated, and took a step forward with her hand out.

"Gillian Farmer," she said. "San Francisco Police Department."

The professor looked at the hand for a moment before reaching out to take it with her own. "Anne Waverly, Duncan Point University. And occasionally FBI. Glen, what are you doing here? I thought I was finished with you."

He did not say a word, but without taking his eyes from hers he reached inside his jacket and withdrew a thick, oversized manila envelope. This he laid softly on the wooden surface between them, allowing his fingers to remain for some seconds on the buff paper before he pulled his hand back. Anne Waverly tore her gaze away from his and stared at the envelope as if it might sprout scaly skin and rear up to strike her. When eventually she looked back at him, for the first time since she had seen them standing at the back of her lecture hall she gave them an expression, one that lay somewhere between exhaustion and loathing.

"Get out of here, Glen."

He immediately stood up. "My cell phone number's in there. Don't wait too long to call—Farmer here has to get back to her caseload,"

The two intruders left the office. McCarthy closed the door quietly behind them and strode off down the hallway.

"So much for 'whatever works'," Gillian Farmer said when she caught up to him. Her mind was already moving toward what she could do next, now that Anne Waverly had turned them down. She did not have many options left: the thought of being forced to do nothing filled her with deep apprehension.

"She'll do it," McCarthy sounded completely sure of himself.

"For Christ sake, Glen, she threw us out of her office,"

"She won't be able to keep away,"

"Oh, right," she said sarcastically. "She sounded so enthusiastic,"

"I didn't say she'd want to do it. I said she wouldn't be able to help herself,"

II

Fixatio

fix (vb) To make firm, stable, or stationary

In which our Bodies eclipsed begin to fight…

One in Gender they be and in Number not so,

Whose Father the Son, the Moone truly is Mother

Chapter Two

From the Journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefleld)

In the silence of their absence, Anne Waverly sat listening to the inner reverberations of the sound the envelope made sliding onto the surface of her desk. She had heard that ominous whisper before. Three times, in fact: twice when Glen had stood before her and put identical envelopes on this same desk, and once out in the desert when she had been sitting on a boulder and looked down to see a rattlesnake glide over the grit-covered rock inches below her boots. Anne's hand reached down and, of its own accord, began to massage away the eternal ache in her knee.

After some time, a soft rapping came from the door—a tentative noise, since all her students knew that Anne never closed her office door when she was inside. She took a deep breath, and her hand came back up to rest on the desk.

"Come on in," she called, and constructed a smile for the girl who appeared in the doorway. "Hello, Monica. What can I do for you?"

Two hours later, Anne's office hours were long over. The last students left, the last telephone calls were made, and around her she could feel the busy building settling into the doldrums of the dinner hour. Time to go home.

Papers and a book for review went into the briefcase. Three folders were set aside to leave at the steno pool for typing. Anne got tiredly to her feet, took the thick woolen coat from the wooden hanger on back of the door, and drew it on. She switched off the reading lamp on her desk, folded her glasses into their case and put it into her briefcase, and finally picked up the manila envelope that had waited at her elbow all afternoon.

She stood with it in her hand, a study in indecision; she even went so far as to turn back to the door and lock it, preparatory to opening the envelope, but she changed her mind and dropped Glen's offering into the briefcase with everything else, fastening the buckles over the case's bulging sides. She tucked the folders under her arm, took up cane and briefcase, clicked off the overhead light as she went out, and locked the door. On her way out to the parking lot she detoured past the steno pool, where she left the folders of typing for the secretaries to do the next day.

Then she went home.

It was dark when her headlights hit the tubular steel gate at the foot of her drive, despite the lengthening daylight hours of early spring. She put the ancient green Land Rover into neutral while she got out and unlocked the gate, then drove through and got out a second time to lock it up. The road just inside the gate was viciously rutted, and she picked her way with care as far as the first bend, where the surface became miraculously smooth and she could shift up into second gear for the long climb to the top.

A trio of floodlights came on when the car breasted the hill and a light shone from inside the log house, but these signs of life and welcome were purely mechanical, a matter of motion sensors and timer switches rather than human hands. Anne Waverly lived alone; she had done so for the past seventeen years.

There were the dogs, of course: in them lay life and welcome, and there was Stan now, ecstatic at her return, pushing his nose at the opening of the car door, bumping gently against her as she climbed out. His flat boxer face grinned at her, his hard body wriggled with the effort of wagging the ridiculous stump of his tail, he slobbered and whined and practically pissed himself in pleasure, and Anne allowed herself to be distracted by him. She thumped him and spoke nonsense to him and threw a stick before she picked up her things from the front seat to follow him into the house.

She went in through the unlocked back door, dumping her briefcase on the kitchen table, and then walked quickly into the small side room, once a pantry, that she had given over as a nursery. Away from the university, she did not seem to need her cane as much.

The boxer bitch got up to greet her, spilling pups in all directions, and then immediately looked worried at the tiny mewling protests that her movement had raised. Anne ran her hands along Livy's sleek sides and up her neck, and lowered her head to rest against the dog's hard forehead. The words 'animal comfort' came into her mind, the sheer, primitive comfort of touch, she thought; another living body making contact.

With that, Livy backed away apologetically to wade back among the pups and settle down to their tiny howls. The sightless grubs went for her as if she'd been away for hours, and Anne laughed quietly at her own abandonment. Oh well, she thought, there's always Stan.

The dog was quite happy to leave his preoccupied mate and join Anne for a brief moonlight hike up the mountain. This was a common ritual, just the sort of regular activity that Anne had been told not to establish, years ago, when the possibility of threat and retribution in her life had seemed real. Some of the precautions she had maintained until they were habit; others were difficult: How was she supposed to get in her road without climbing out of the car twice? How could she teach without showing up in predictable places at the posted times? Besides, all that covert mumbo jumbo was over and done with, she had thought. She had thought.

A close observer familiar with her habits would have noticed nothing out of the ordinary about her actions during that evening—or, rather, would have seen only minor things: the way Stan had to bark to catch her attention when shoving against her leg and drooling all over her hand failed; the length of time she held one of the blind puppies against her cheek, cupped in both hands, her own eyes tightly shut; the way she twice forgot to use the cane, walking back to get it with only a mild limp; how she cooked a large meal and ended up putting most of it into the refrigerator; and finally the way she got out of her bed after a couple of hours to sit in the small screened-in porch, wrapped in blankets and listening to the night sounds of the early mosquitoes and the bats and the pair of horned owls that lived nearby. She drank, first from a glass and later from a teacup, and let her hand rest on the back of the dog whenever he came and settled for a time beside her chair. She was still in the porch chair at dawn.

When the sun was up, she got to her feet. Stiff with discomfort and limping heavily at first, she went down the rough-hewn wooden stairs to the main room of the house that served her as study and living room and retreat from the world. She laid several split logs on the coals in the cast iron stove and opened the dampers full, and then made a restless circuit around the big wood-panelled room filled with comfortable furniture and bookshelves and dark rich colors of orange and red before she eventually fetched up at the heavy desk where she had left her briefcase the night before. She sat down in her chair and took the manila envelope from the bag, only to sit listening to the crackle and hiss from the fireplace with Glen's next worrisome community unopened in her hand.

Three times I've gone into the belly of the whale for Glen McCarthy, she thought; three times for him, and once for myself. More than any one person owed her fellow human beings, and a greater slice of her life, her sanity, and certainly her health than she could readily afford to give. She was tired now, she felt thick and damaged and middle-aged, and she wanted nothing but to dedicate herself to simple things like work and friendships and growing things.

In the beginning, she thought, I worked for Glen because doing so was the only thing that might justify my continued existence, a payback for the lethal blend of arrogance and blindness that killed Abby. Suicide would have been a relief and a coward's way out, so I gave myself over to Glen and his crazy schemes.

And on the whole, her work for Glen had been worth it. There was no bringing Abby back, but she had at least saved other mothers' children. Maybe only a few; perhaps as many as sixty-eight, all the children salvaged from the four communities she had interfered with. No matter the numbers, she had begun to feel a semblance of equilibrium, that she had done her penance and might be allowed to move on.

How long, Abby? she whispered into the still air. How many more weeks of acting stupid and serene while my bowels go loose with shitting out the terror? How many more times do I ritually pollute myself with that man, whom I don't know if I love or hate? How long until a great wave of tiredness overtakes me at some crucial moment, and I blurt out something that triggers a madman's paranoia? Oh God; how many more times can I do this?

Anne had not realized that she was taking Abby's photograph from its resting place in the drawer until she found herself sitting back in the chair studying her daughter's face. She kept the picture hidden for fear that it would become familiar and lose its ability to reach her. Time, however, and the first faint distortions of color on the paper had conspired to make the child a bit of a stranger.

Abby had not been beautiful; Anne had known that even when she was alive. She was an ordinarily lovely child with a wild mop of curly, almost kinky black hair—Aaron's impossible hair—dark brown eyes, and a dimple in her right cheek. Her teeth would have required braces had she lived long enough, but at the age the photograph was taken, just after her seventh birthday, their crookedness was merely charming.

Aaron had taken the picture, unusually enough, although Anne had still been there on the Farm. In the early years of gazing at the photo she had thought that the faint blur on the far right border was her own arm, because she remembered Abby grinning just that way, on the picnic lunch two days before Anne had left, and she wanted very badly to be in the picture with her daughter.

Print it how they might, though, the photo labs had been able only to raise a blur. It might possibly have been Anne's elbow; more probably it was the tail of one of the Farm dogs.

Two days before Anne had driven away in their Volkswagen camper van, the aperture of Aaron's camera had opened and allowed Abby's face and her living body to be imprinted onto the emulsion of the film. Two days after the picture was taken, Abby's mother had abandoned her, driving off to try and 'find herself' (a phrase that still had the power to set Anne shaking with an intensity of fury and detestation, on the rare occasions when a student or a friend chanced to use it in her hearing). She drove off to find herself, and eight days later drove home to find instead the remote dirt road clogged with the pulsing lights of a hundred strange vehicles, sheriff and newsmen, ambulance and coroner's vans, disturbed neighbors and frightened relatives, and at the core of it, when she had finally clawed her frantic way through to the cloying miasma of death that lay over the farmhouse and barn complex, a dozen or more invisible, unmarked, and distinctive late-model cars of American manufacture, driven by men like Glen McCarthy.

The film in Aaron's camera had been developed by one of the government agencies as an automatic part of the investigation, and returned to her many months later along with Abby's shoes and teddy bear and several cartons of Aaron's books. More than three years later, during the final stages of her Ph.D., she had been moving apartments and come across the few things of theirs that she had kept, and she made the mistake of taking the developed strips of negatives in to be printed. There had been only seven pictures on the roll, three blurry shots of a new foal that Abby had wanted to take, a couple of the hills around the farm, green with the spring rains, one odd and accidental picture of (she thought) Aaron's boots, and this one of Abby.

It had been a bad mistake, a nearly disastrous one. The life she had built up for herself, the competent persona she had constructed so painstakingly, had proven more fragile than she could have suspected. That one photograph had acted like the carefully set charges of a demolitions expert taking down a high-rise; and when she slid it from the photo lab wallet, sitting behind the wheel of her car outside the shop, she had felt the shudder immediately, and succeeded only in making it to the safety of her apartment before her mind fell in on itself.

Once home, she had collapsed into bed and spent a week there, alternately crying and lying in a sleep so deep it felt closer to a coma, before she was dragged out of it by her insistent doorbell with Glen McCarthy's finger on it. His request for assistance, from someone with not only professional training but personal experience as well in the mechanics of religious aberrations, had literally hauled her back to life. Whether or not this was for the best she had never decided, but it had at least provided a focal point for her life, some sort of purpose to the random motions of eating and thinking. For that, at any rate, she supposed she was grateful.

Now, though, she was surprised to realize that the momentum of daily life had become a purpose in itself. There was an interest and a savor to her interactions at the university, and she had lately been anticipating the rich smell of warm, freshly turned spring soil as her digging fork sank into the overgrown vegetable patch and the amusement and satisfaction of seeing six boxer puppies learn to run and leap. She had even thought vaguely of taking a trip somewhere, for no reason other than pleasure. How long, Abby?

Abby looked back at her from the glossy rectangle in her hand, a smiling young face with a faint worry line between her brows as if in foreknowledge of the death that awaited her in her mother's absence, and did not answer. After a while, Anne Waverly closed the photograph of her long-dead only child away in the drawer and reached again for the manila envelope. She carried it into the kitchen, made herself a pot of strong coffee, and sat down at the table to read.

It was not a terribly thick file, as McCarthy offerings went, and Anne had read it through twice before the coffeepot was empty. She felt somewhat better about this one; indeed, the symptoms were so mild she had to wonder if Glen wasn't getting a bit fixated. Still, some signs of impending loss of balance within this remote religious community were there, and it was certainly worth taking a closer look from the inside.

They called themselves Change, and the leader of the Arizona branch, born Steven Chance, was now named Steven Change.

Twelve years ago Steven and two friends had taken a trip to India and returned, as had countless others, transformed.

Steven Chance was an American, a young chemist who had been born into a conservative Christian family in the Midwest, put himself through university on a full scholarship, graduated with a degree in chemical engineering, and then gone to work for the English branch of a huge chemical conglomerate. Thomas Mallory was a friend from university with whom Chance had kept in touch, who dropped his job in his father's contracting business to join Steven on the trip. With them went a brilliant and independently wealthy research physicist with an interest in metallurgy whom Steven had met in England, a man seven years older than Steven named Jonas Fairweather.

Something had caused Chance and Fairweather, these two members of levelheaded disciplines, to throw down their lab coats and turn to esoteric doctrines. They quit their jobs—Fairweather not even bothering to resign formally, simply walking away from his desk and his ongoing projects, to the confusion and indignation of his former employers—and sold their cars and furniture, and left.

In India, they met a young Canadian named Samantha Dooley, who had dropped out of her sophomore year at Harvard at the age of seventeen and a half and gone to live responsibly on the earth on a commune near Pune, where she was quietly starving when she met the three travelers. The four Westerners joined up, moved on to Bombay for a while, and eventually worked their way back to Fairweather's native England, where they used Fairweather's considerable inheritance to buy a run-down estate. There they established a doctrine and a community called Change, which attracted a growing number of followers over the years. Steven and Jonas changed their names, Fairweather becoming Jonas Seraph, although Mallory and Samantha Dooley retained theirs.

Eight years after returning from India, the original four divided: Steven and Mallory to concentrate on their new site in Arizona, which drew heavily from the San Francisco and Los Angeles branches, while Jonas and Samantha Dooley continued their efforts in rural England. Both enterprises flourished, and although the San Francisco branch was being shut down, there were still smaller branches in Boston, Los Angeles, southern France, Germany, and two in Japan. There were now nearly eight hundred members.

On the surface, there seemed little to draw the attention of Glen McCarthy's project to Change. One of the things working against a possible diagnosis of coming disaster was the far-flung nature of this particular group. Most problematic communal entities—the kinds of groups that were dubbed 'cults' by the media and which tended to flash into an orgy of violence, either self-directed or against a perceived enemy—were close-knit, close-mouthed little communities obsessively focused on one individual, a person whose irrationality and fears were in turn nourished by the attentions of his (or occasionally her) followers. In this case, although each branch had its leader, they were scattered. Members of the different groups were constantly in and out—Steven to England, the Japanese leaders to Arizona, families and kids moving from one house to another—not characteristic behavior from threatened communities.

Another interesting oddity was the Arizona branch. Within months of its founding it had begun a school, a large portion of its students being kids who had been thrown out of other schools, were on parole, or had been remanded from one of the state's youth facilities. 'Troubled youth', formerly called delinquents, were an odd choice for a religious community, but well established within Change: all three men of the original leaders had brushed up against the law in some way, Steven as part of a high school drunken spree with several friends (so much for sealed juvenile records, Anne noted disapprovingly) and Jonas Fairweather in England for a series of nuisance crimes that boiled down to ignoring rules rather than deliberately flouting them. Thomas Mallory had the most serious history, having spent six months in jail at the age of nineteen for threatening a neighbor with a gun and blowing holes in the man's television set. This was during university finals week, and although it marked the end of Mallory's university career, Anne could feel a twinge of sympathy for the man's desperate action. Mallory had also been fingered as instrumental in an investigation into illegal arms possession and sales in the Los Angeles branch of Change three years before, where he had gone to assume an apparently temporary leadership for a couple of months, but charges against him were dropped for lack of evidence. Beyond the three of them, the Change leader in Boston had a record as well, for drunk driving and drunk-and-disorderly, and one of the Japanese leaders had a history of 'political crimes', whatever that might be. Passing out leaflets at an antigovernment demonstration, no doubt.

It was the presence of the 'troubled youth' in Arizona that had first sparked Glen's interest, even though there were no official complaints, no firm evidence from the periodic medical checkups or the social workers' visits aside from one report that some of the older boys had seemed 'unnaturally subdued'.

Looking through the material the second time, Anne decided that it was probably Steven Chance's background in chemistry that had originally pressed an alarm button somewhere in the FBI's corporate mind. A small religious group led by a man who could construct a bomb was a group the government wanted to keep under observation.

The material she'd been given was detailed but hardly complete—another indication that Glen wasn't absolutely convinced that there was a problem, or if he himself was, he hadn't managed to bring his superiors around to his point of view. There was an elaborate chart comparing purchases of the various groups, but no conclusions had been drawn concerning the relatively high consumption of rice and fish by the Japanese compared to the Germans, the high demand for concrete mix and heavy lifting equipment in Arizona, currently under construction; or the large orders for chemical fertilizer, garden equipment, and chain saws by the English branch, which was busy restoring a large garden.

She put the purchase records to one side and returned to Glen's personal analysis, which was based largely on a visit he had made to Steven Change's compound in the Arizona desert. What it boiled down to was that a) the children were too well behaved, b) Steven's speech was heavily laced with references to the Book of Revelations and the cleansing nature of fire, and c) Thomas Mallory's history of guns.

Anne thought it all sounded very thin, although she had to admit that Glen's judgment in these matters had in the past been extraordinarily good.

And in the Arizona community alone, there were one hundred and three children.

At eight-thirty she reached behind her and took the kitchen phone down from the wall. The departmental secretary answered.

"Morning, Tazzie," Anne said. "I'm going to need half an hour with Antony today. Any chance?"

"He's really busy. Is it important?"

"Yes," Anne said flatly. There was a pause while Tazzie thought about this, and then Anne could hear the rustling of papers and a strange humming noise, Tazzie's habit while she was thinking. In a minute the secretary came back on the line.

"I can cancel a couple of things. Two-thirty do you?"

'I have a two o'clock lecture,' Anne said apologetically.

"Of course you do, stupid me. Four-thirty, then. I'll cancel Himself."

"Don't do that," Anne said in alarm. 'Himself' was the royal reference to the pompous academic vice-chancellor. "I could wait until tomorrow."

"Himself has cancelled on us twice, it would be a pleasure to return the honor. Are you okay? You don't sound yourself."

"I'm a bit tired."

"All those babies keeping you awake? don't get too run down. There's a nasty bug going around, and you wouldn't want it just before finals."

Anne's laughter was more hysterical than the remark called for: With all the things on her mind, a viral infection might prove a welcome distraction. Perhaps a nice bout of pneumonia would stick her in the hospital and give her an excuse to step aside.

When she had hung up, she hesitated over the phone. She ought to make this next contact in person, but perhaps for the preliminary stages, she could be a coward. She picked up the phone and dialed another number.

"Hello, Alice, could I speak with Eliot, please? Sure, I can wait." An interminable five minutes later, Alice Featherstone's flat-voiced monologue on the problems of raising chickens faded suddenly in mid-sentence, to be replaced by the taciturn young voice of her son Eliot, grunting a query into Anne's harassed eardrum. "Eliot," she said in relief. "Look, I just found out that I'm going to have to go away for a while. Are you available?" She knew that he would be, and that he would be overjoyed, in his completely undemonstrative way, at the chance to be away from his mother and the rest of the world. It was, nonetheless, only polite to make a question out of it.

"When?" he asked.

"As soon as I get the final grades in, a little under three weeks. I may be away 'till summer, I'm afraid. Maybe longer."

"The puppies?"

"Yes, we'll have to think about them. Could you come by one day and we'll talk?"

Eliot grunted en assent.

"Over the weekend?"

He grunted again. She thanked him and heard the telephone go dead in her ear. She put her own phone on its rest and then leaned forward, her elbows on the table and her hands buried in her hair.

Her hair smelled warm, faintly of coconut from the shampoo she used. It felt soft and thick to her fingers, a luxuriant, well-styled and well-cared-for head of hair. She bent her head further forward until the wavy mass tumbled down onto the table, forming a cave around her face. This is the longest it's been in seventeen years, she thought; almost five years worth of hair, smooth, thick, and alive. She pulled a handful around and pressed it against her face, inhaling the smell. She thought, it's no wonder hair has been such an issue and a symbol over the centuries. The tactile glory of the stuff.

I will miss it, she thought.

Chapter Three

Final Exam

Religious Studies 204, The Prophet and Prophetic Speech

Prof Anne Waverly

Choose three of the following questions. As you should know by now, having been in this class all term, there are often no right or wrong answers, simply arguments to be explored. You will be expected to support any opinions or statements with chapter and verse or specific references. Extra points will be given for the use of extra-canonical writings.

1. What was the role of the prophet in ancient Israel? Give an example of a twentieth century prophet, and explore the similarities and differences.

2. Trace the development of the prophetic idea of "speaking with God."

3. What are the essential differences in world view between First Isaiah and Third Isaiah? Can we determine what influenced these differences, and can we say how they affect the two concepts of God?

4. To what extent did Old Testament prophecy correspond to what we would now describe as mental illness? Choose two specific examples.

5. Describe some of the differences between prophet and messiah in first century Jewish thought.

6. Was Jesus a prophet? Was Paul? Why?

7. If Jesus were born today, how would he live and who would his followers be?

From the notes of Professor Anne Waverly

At four-thirty, the departmental secretary was just getting ready to leave for the day.

"Hello, Tazzie. Have I managed to catch Antony?"

"He called to say he'd be five minutes late, but better give him ten. You know, you really don't look too hot."

"Just tired, Tazzie."

"Don't get sick, honey. Anything I can get for you?"

"No, you run along."

"I think I will. I have to pop into the store and pick up some things for dinner."

"Hot date?"

"Warm, anyway. When can I come out and look at the pups?" Tazzie was on her feet, turning off the computer and retrieving her purse from a drawer.

"Give it another week or two. But really, Tazzie, you don't want a dog when you have a full-time job."

"Actually, I was thinking of my brother. His wife wants a puppy, and she's home with the kids all day."

"Have her come and look at them, then."

"A couple of weeks?"

"Good. They ought to have individual personalities by then."

Anne thought she was going to have to eject the woman out the door by force, but eventually she left, with one last warning about stray viruses. When she had gone, Anne went into Antony Makepeace's office and lowered herself into one of his tatty, overstuffed chairs to wait for him. She eased her bad leg out in front of her and leaned her head back to rest on the chair.

The office had not changed much since she had first seen it nearly eighteen years before, five months after losing her family. She had come in that door a shell-shocked, bereft young woman one narrow step from suicide, but this office had somehow made an impression on her. Antony had been missing that time, too, she remembered now, and she had sat in this same chair, waiting for him in the silence and the smell of books, looking at the leaves of the tree that grew outside one window and at the small birds that came and squabbled on the feeding tray at the other. She had fallen asleep, slipped into the easiest sleep for months, and woke an hour later to find Professor Antony James Makepeace, half-glasses on his nose and pen in his hand, matter-of-factly going about his work of grading papers, ten feet from where she slept.

She wasn't far from dozing off this time when he returned. He was grayer than he had been eighteen years earlier, and a little thinner, but still big and shambolic with the same warm, welcoming, and patient expression on his long face and an identical pair of half-glasses tucked into his breast pocket.

Instead of holding out his hand, though, this time he leaned down and kissed her cheek. "Don't get up, Anne. You look comfortable. Let me fix a cup of tea and I'll sit with you. Like a cup?"

"Thanks, I would."

"Not Earl Grey." His broad back was to her but his voice smiled.

"Flowery rubbish. You'll never convert me, Antony."

"I live in hope. How are the puppies getting on?"

They talked of her dogs and his cats while the electric kettle boiled and the tea was made, and he brought two mugs and a once-colorful cookie tin, now dented and worn down to bare metal at the edges, over to the arrangement of chairs and sat down with a sigh. The age of compulsory retirement had been done away with some years before, or he would not be there, but he had begun to make tentative noises about retiring, and had firmly said this would be his last turn as department chair.

The two old friends drank their tea and ate the cookies his wife made every week, and when the bottom of his cup was reached, Makepeace dusted off his fingers and said, "Now tell me, my dear, what I can do for you."

"I'm really sorry about the short notice," she replied, "but I'm going to have to ask you to get someone to take my classes for the coming quarter."

Surprise and administrative concern gave way almost instantly to a deeper, more immediate anxiety.

"Tazzie said you sounded tired…" he ventured.

Anne shook her head. "It's nothing like that. Glen McCarthy showed up yesterday."

He reared back in the armchair looking stricken, almost angry.

"No, Anne. Oh, no. Not again."

"I'm afraid so."

"I thought you were finished with that nonsense."

"So did I."

"Let someone else do it."

"They don't have anyone else."

"Make them find someone."

"Antony, I have to do it. It's the only reason I'm here."

"My dear Anne, you cannot continue to feel responsible for the world's actions. You have done your part—more than your part—and at great cost. Let it go."

"I can't, Tonio. I thought I could when I saw him yesterday. I tried all night to pick up the phone and tell him to go to hell, but I couldn't." She said nothing about her sure conviction that Glen McCarthy had handled her with his usual Machiavellian skill, putting her off balance from the beginning by deliberately appearing without warning and in the one place where she could not scream at him to fuck off—and by bringing the young policewoman along to distract Anne and keep her polite. He had even taken care to put his telephone number on the inside of the manila envelope, so she would be forced to open it and handle the papers even if she had already decided to refuse the case. From any other man, she might have thought the actions accidental, but not McCarthy: he was quite subtle enough to have planned his attack meticulously. And, he was very determined.

Makepeace did not know this, of course, and although the knowledge of the FBI man's manipulation might have armed him for another round of argument, all he heard was the flat commitment in her voice and the affectionate use of his nickname. He looked into his mug for a while, then, rose to brew another of his endless cups of Earl Grey.

"You don't have to go immediately? It's usually a drop-everything rush when Agent McCarthy shows up."

"Two weeks won't matter one way or another—or if they do, then the thing was moving too fast for me to interfere with anyway. I'll finish up the quarter, hand in my grades. I will tell the students there's an extra ten points for getting their final projects in on the Monday. That should help."

"But you don't think you'll be finished with this… what do you call it, anyway?" His burst of mild irritation would be another man's fury.

"Case, investigation, mess, disaster, bit of primal chaos—whatever you like. No, it'll take at least two or three months."

"You will be back by September, though?"

"I hope so, but it's best not to count on me."

"God, Anne. I don't know what to say,"

" 'Good luck,' maybe?"

"I will pray for you every day."

Anne had to smile. "Antony, when will you learn that professors of religion are not supposed to actually believe in it?"

"When you learn to enjoy Earl Grey tea, I suppose. But seriously, Anne. You can't allow them to use you forever. And they will if you permit it, you know that. Do it this time if you must, but tell them it's the last."

"When I can't face it any more, Antony, they'll be the first to know."

Makepeace had to be satisfied with that. The talk turned to mundane matters, of replacement lecturers for one of the classes and the probable cancellation of the other, arranging for Antony to take over her three graduate thesis projects, the choice between leave-without-pay or trying for a last-minute paid sabbatical. Finally, Anne made a move toward gathering her things.

"Come home for dinner," Makepeace offered suddenly. "Maria would love to see you."

"I can't, Antony. I have to get home for the dogs."

"Another night, then. Before you go."

"I'd love to." She put on her coat and pulled a pair of gloves out of the pocket, and then she looked up with a faint trace of mischief in her eyes. "Oh, and I should warn you, rumors may start up when I fail to appear next quarter. Glen and his policewoman made quite an impression on some of the students. They'll probably work it up into an arrest for drug smuggling or white slavery."

"Agent McCarthy is fairly unmistakable, isn't he? I can't imagine him doing undercover work."

She heard a clear note of rather catty pride that she should be better at the wicked and dangerous job he so disapproved of than the hateful man who dragged her into it, but she hid her amusement. "He's actually not bad at it, given time to grow his hair out a bit."

Makepeace shot a glance at Anne's own thick hair, but did not say anything. He let her go and prepared to leave himself.

It was only much later that evening, as he sat in front of a dying fire brooding over their conversation, that it struck him there might be a second, darker meaning to Anne's not being able to face it any more.

For two days Agent McCarthy and Inspector Farmer cooled their heels, Farmer impatiently, McCarthy with the resignation of a man who had done this before. On Thursday afternoon, McCarthy was seated on a park bench, his arms spread out along its back and his face lifted to the weak sun, while Gillian Farmer paced up and down on the gravel pathways between rows of brutally pruned roses. As chance would have it, she was at the farthest point in her circuit when McCarthy's cellular phone chirped in his pocket, and she did not hear it. She saw it in his hand, however, the moment she turned, and broke into a trot in her eagerness to get back to him.

It was a very brief conversation; McCarthy was folding the telephone before she reached the bench. He stood, putting the phone back in his pocket.

"Was that her?"

"It was."

"Christ. About time."

McCarthy glanced at her sharply, but he did not speak until they were in the car and on the freeway out of town.

"Anne doesn't have to do this, you know. She's under no obligation; she doesn't even take a salary beyond expenses."

"So why does she?" Farmer demanded, still impatient. Three days was far too long, and her department had begun pressing for her return after the second.

"Eighteen years ago, Anne Waverly's seven-year-old daughter and thirty-one-year-old husband died in a mass suicide in northern Texas. The child drank a glass of cyanide-laced fruit juice, probably given to her by her father. You may have heard about it—they called it Ezekiel's Farm—but it was in the news for only a couple of days because there was a plane crash and then some enormous political scandal just after they were found that knocked them off the front pages. A lot of comparisons were made to the People's Temple suicide in Guyana two years before, and I suppose their reasons were much the same although there were only forty-seven people instead of nine hundred and some. The bodies were not found for nearly a week. In early summer. You can imagine what they looked like."

Gillian grimaced; she had been a cop long enough to know.

"Anne herself was a member of the group, but she had begun to question the methods and beliefs of the community. Her doubts were serious enough for her to take a leave of absence, as it were to go away and think about things for a few days. She left the child, Abby, with her husband. Three days later the leader Ezekiel had a final revelation, and broke out the cyanide."

"Christ."

He added in an unemotional voice, "Anne believes that her departure triggered the suicides. It is quite possible that she is right."

They drove in silence for a long time, until Gillian stirred and asked, "So this is, what, some kind of penance? Or revenge?"

"Neither, as far as I can tell. I believe it's her own form of suicide."

"You mean she goes into these situations with a death wish? Jesus, McCarthy, how could you possibly allow—"

"Not a death wish, no. She's sensible and cautious, and she does her part very, very well. She goes in, she looks around, she comes out and tells us what the community looks like and gives us her opinion concerning its internal stability. It's just that on a very deep level, she's made her peace with death, and she doesn't really care if she comes home or not. A lot of people who do long-term undercover work have it to some degree, and with Anne it's never interfered with getting the job done. Up to now, that is."

"What do you mean?"

"Probably nothing. It's just that her reaction to me this time was different. She was angry."

"Pretty normal reaction, I'd say."

"That's exactly it. She seems to have gotten used to the idea of living again."

Their rental car had problems with the first section of Anne Waverly's road, but at the end of it—up the rutted gravel track, through the gate, and around a mile or more of narrow twists and turns—she was waiting for them. She watched them get out of the car, saw the woman, Farmer, look around her with a sudden delight in the dappled sun and the clean silence that followed the laboring engine sounds of the last ten minutes, and waited with neither movement nor expression while her guests metaphorically brushed off the dust of their journey and came toward her.

They stopped when they saw Stan at her knee, then Glen came on with Gillian Farmer following cautiously. Ten feet away Glen stopped and spoke to the dog. "Hello there, Stan. It is Stan, isn't it?"

"That's right," Anne said.

"C'm'ere, boy." McCarthy dropped to his heels and held out a hand. "You remember me. I'm a friend, right?"

The dog shot his mistress a glance, and at her gesture went forward to snuffle with his flat nose at the man's hand. Something tickled his memory, because his tail wagged briefly before he turned his attention to Gillian. With dignity he walked up to her and examined her feet and the hand she ventured out; then, without expressing an opinion, he returned to Anne.

The incident with the dog confirmed Gillian's suspicions, that McCarthy knew Anne Waverly as something more than just an occasional colleague. His intimate acquaintance with the road had been obvious from the time they left the blacktop, for one thing. He knew the dog, knew that the door they would enter was not the one behind Anne Waverly but the kitchen door around the side of the house. He seemed unsurprised by the sharp difference between the dusty, rustic log exterior and the rich simplicity inside, and when he sniffed the air, it was more with the welcome of homecoming than puzzlement at the peculiar combination of the rich, yeasty odor emanating from two pans on the sideboard underlaid with the raw bite of cordite. The cap was put on her confirmation by his first words to Anne.

"Target practice?"

"I thought it might be a good idea," she said. "I was getting rusty." She walked past them and pulled shut a narrow door to what looked like a pantry.

"You shoot indoors?" Gillian asked in disbelief.

McCarthy laughed—actually laughed. She hadn't thought him capable of anything beyond a rueful chuckle. "Like Sherlock Holmes picking out the Queen's initials on the wall?" he asked, which reference meant nothing to Gillian. He looked at Anne and asked, "May I show her?" When she nodded, he went to another door and started down the open wooden stairs heading into a basement.

The bare bulb lit only the immediate area, but McCarthy reached over and flipped a series of switches, and to her amazement Gillian found herself at one end of what could only be called an indoor shooting range, complete with a man-shaped paper target hanging at the far end.

It was also, incongruously, a farmhouse cellar lined with cupboards and shelves, bearing canned goods, economy-sized packages of toilet paper and soap powder, odd shapes wrapped in black plastic garbage bags, and an array of hand tools and power saws—all the necessities of life in the woods. McCarthy called her over to a low table on which lay a pair of ear protectors, an automatic pistol, and the equipment for cleaning it. Standing next to him, she surveyed the panorama of bottled foodstuffs, the fruit on the top shelf, red tomato sauce below, a neat display of jams and preserves and shelled nuts that ended three-quarters of the way down the room at an arrangement of hay bales, tightly laid up to the ceiling. They were tired and dusty-looking, and no longer gave out enough odor to stand up to the gunpowder; they had been in place for years.

Bemused, Gillian studied the odd juxtaposition of home canning and the hanging targets with the cluster of shots in their centers until she realized that the FBI man seemed to expect a reaction.

"Wouldn't want a ricochet to smash your peaches, I suppose," she commented.

He looked a little disappointed at her lack of amusement, but personally she thought it a bit crazy. The woman lived in the middle of nowhere; why not shoot outside, where she could practice at distances of more than twenty yards? Or at a proper shooting range?

"Bring up a bottle of tomatoes when you come, would you, Glen?" the voice at the top of the stairs asked prosaically. "And don't forget to shut off the lights."

Back in the kitchen, they found Anne Waverly at the stove, lighting the gas under a big saucepan. McCarthy closed the basement door, put the quart bottle of tomatoes on the counter, and took a chair at the wooden table. He sat watching Anne Waverly's back, strong and straight with the lovely graying hair, caught up in a clip, that hung down between her shoulder blades, and Gillian abruptly realized what the two of them reminded her of: her sister Kathleen and Kathy's ex-husband when they were forced to be together at some family function. Between them was lingering affection, a heavy residue of physical attraction, and a lot of emotional scar tissue, and although they were polite for the sake of the children, there was also the mutual awareness that if they ever relaxed, blood would flow.

Glen McCarthy and Anne Waverly had been lovers, Gillian was sure of that. She was also quite certain that whereas the professor might be finished with the FBI man, he was afraid that he was not through with her. Gillian Farmer was enough of a cop to disapprove of sex cluttering up a professional relationship, enough of a woman to find it both troubling and mildly amusing. She cleared her throat. "Can I help with anything?"

"No thank you, Inspector Farmer. I'll just dump this together and we can eat when the rolls are done." Anne swept a handful of finely chopped onions and a heap of other vegetables into the seething pot, poured in the bottle of tomatoes and a generous amount of red wine, took a hefty pinch of dried herbs from a pottery jar and sprinkled it over, dropped the top on the pan, and turned the heat down.

"Coffee, tea, or wine?" she asked.

Over coffee, she finally joined them at the table, and Gillian began her side of the report.

It did not take long, or the hint of several culinary interruptions, for Gillian to see that Anne Waverly was not very interested in the events that had brought the group calling itself Change to the attention of the San Francisco Police Department. Missing persons reports and complaints of financial chicanery from swindled relatives were, her attitude seemed to say, only to be expected. She came alert only when Farmer started to tell about the emigration of Change members from their former urban setting into the Arizona high desert. Then she wanted to know precisely when the members had sold the houses they owned, how big the houses were, the physical state they had been left in by the former owners, what had been left behind, and a dozen other equally meaningless questions. Prepared as she was, Gillian had to admit that most of these things she could not answer. She told the professor that she would find out.

This seemed to signal a hiatus in the evening's program. Anne stood up and limped back to the sink, where she fished a head of garlic out of a pot on the windowsill and began to skin some cloves and squeeze them through a press into a small bowl.

"Dinner in ten minutes," she said. "Glen, show Inspector Farmer where the bathroom is—"

"Please, call me Gillian."

"And I'm Anne. And then if you'd choose a bottle of wine, Glen, and get a tablecloth from the drawer under the oven. Gillian, the silver is in that drawer, we'll need soup spoons. Plates and bowls are on that shelf,"

The plates were handmade stonewear, the tablecloth looked as if it belonged in a prosperous farmhouse in Avignon, the silver was silver, and heavy, and the dinner was an intensely flavored stew with olives and vegetables and some unidentifiable meat, with a simple green salad, bread rolls hot from the oven with herbed garlic butter to slather on, and deep red wine that had just enough of an edge to hold its own.

Respectful silence held, until Gillian spoke up. "What kind of meat is this?" she asked. "Bambi," Glen answered, his mouth full. "Venison," Anne corrected him. "My neighbor gives me a haunch every year and it takes me months to get through it. I'm trying to clear out the freezer before I go."

"So, how is dear Eliot?" Glen asked. "Talkative as ever?" He was concentrating on the application of garlic butter to hot bread. Gillian glanced at him curiously, and Anne seemed amused at the asperity of his question.

"Eliot is eternal; he changes not. He's going to—" Anne broke off at a scratching sound that startled Gillian, followed by a low whine. Anne put down her napkin on the table and went to open the narrow door that she had shut when they first arrived.

The mother of six stopped halfway through the doorway, torn by her need to go out and the protective drives of her hormones. Anne solved her dilemma by taking up the loose skin at the scruff of her neck, walking her to the outside door, and pushing her through it. Normally she would have scolded Livy for passing through the kitchen with lifted lip and a rumble in her chest, but then normally Livy would not have growled at visitors.

"She's had puppies," Glen exclaimed at the sight of the bitch's sagging belly. "I didn't know you were having puppies."

"Good Lord, something the FBI doesn't know," Anne said, dry to the point of sarcasm. The rest of the meal passed with brief and desultory conversation, although Gillian was the only one who seemed to feel the least uncomfortable. The other two merely ate, engrossed in the food and their own thoughts.

Eventually, with second helpings distributed and polished off, Anne got to her feet and began to clear the dishes. "There's an apple pie that Eliot's mother made for dessert. I hope you'll help me eat it, or I'll be living on it for a week."

"Gillian and I will wash the dishes first, and let the food settle a bit."

How very homey, Gillian Farmer thought. Who would believe that an FBI investigation could start with venison stew and a sink full of soapsuds?

While her two guests washed and dried, Anne made more coffee, put the pie in the oven to warm, carried two bowls of dog food outside, and took the opportunity to change the bedding under Livy's pups. She looked up from this last job to see Glen at the door.

"I think she wants back in," he said, and then asked, "Can I see them first?"

"Sure." He stepped into the tight space without even wrinkling his nose at the earthy smells of milk and blood and infant fecal matter, and squatted to look at the mound of fawn bodies. Gillian, too, came over, and Anne slipped out with her armful of laundry so the two hardened law enforcement personnel could coo over the grubs and argue over which one's eyes were closest to being open. She gave them five minutes, then called,

"Sorry, but if I don't let Livy back in she'll have the door off its hinges."

Reluctantly, they emerged, and Anne went to let one highly suspicious dog inside. This time she left the pantry door halfway open; time for socialization to begin.

Over the crumbly, sweet pie and strong coffee, Anne began to set out her requests to Gillian Farmer.

"The things I need to know may seem peripheral, and in a way, they are. Normally in a criminal investigation into embezzlement, for example, you're not looking for signs of child abuse." She saw Gillian begin to react, and held up her hand. "I'm not saying there is child abuse here, don't misunderstand me. There very probably is not, at least not the sort of abuse that the law can concern itself with. But children will act out the problems within their family, in symptomatic behavior.

"I need you to talk to their former teachers, or if they had a private school, the district liaison for home schooling. See if you can find any of the kids' work, written materials or drawings. You might try the relatives for that, the grandmothers and aunts—they may have been sent pictures to put on their refrigerators. And it would be helpful if the age and sex of each child was on the piece, and roughly the date it was made—not the names, though; I don't want to know their names. It distracts me when I meet them.

"Talk to the ex-neighbors again. Any problems or oddities, from vandalism to too-perfect behavior? What hours did the families keep, any odd sounds or smells coming from the houses, what vehicles did they have, what jobs?

"Bank accounts and credit references are probably best retrieved by Glen, but Steven in Arizona seems to have come from your town originally, Gillian, and so did the leaders of the smaller branches in Boston and L.A. See what you can find out about their histories—families, education, jobs, all that."

"Can I have those names?" Gillian asked, her pen poised.

Anne closed her eyes took a deep breath, then opened them, and Gillian was surprised to see her look at Glen with real anger. "The old "need-to-know" bullshit again, eh, Glen?"

"You know I—"

"You give her the information, or I will."

"I don't think I can get approval on—"

"I don't negotiate, Glen. You know that. We do it my way, or we don't do it."

McCarthy's eyes wavered and fell, and he threw up his hands in surrender. "Okay. She'll see the file."

"You will copy the file and give it to her. No crap about coming to a secure room to read it."

"Jesus, Anne."

"If you don't have the authority to run the photocopier, Glen," she said softly, "let me know as soon as you find someone who does. We'll resume then."

"Okay, okay. She'll get the file."

She leaned forward across the table with no sign now of the warm and encouraging teacher she was at the university. Her eyes glittered. "If you don't trust her, Glen, how can I trust you?"

Not knowing their past, there was no way Gillian could evaluate the depths to that bald question. She could see, though, that it hit McCarthy hard: His jaw tensed all the way down to his collar, and though he reared his head away, his eyes remained locked on those of Anne Waverly. After a long moment, the professor let him go and returned her gaze to Gillian.

"You'll find the names in the file. If there's anything else you notice, in its presence or its absence, please speak up. Even if it seems unimportant. You're going back to San Francisco soon?"

"Tomorrow, I guess."

"I'm sorry to have kept you here so long, but it was not an easy decision for me to make."

The last vestiges of Gillian Farmer's annoyance with this woman vanished, and she began to see why those students loved and respected her.

"I understand," she said.

Anne went into the next room, returning with a card that she handed to Gillian. "There's my phone number, my e-mail address, and my home fax number, which works fine if no more than two of my neighbors are using their phones at the same time. I'll be here for two weeks, and after that you'll have to go through Glen. Keep in touch."

Neither of Anne's visitors spoke on their way back down the hill. Gillian got out at the bottom to let Glen drive through the gate, then she shut the gate and locked the padlock through the chain. Back in the car she turned up the heat controls and sat watching the headlights illuminate the passing trees and gates and rural mailboxes.

"I tried to read one of her books," she told him. "I didn't get very far—it might as well have been written in German."

"Was that Modern Religious Expression? Big thick thing?"

"Yeah."

"That's an expansion of her doctoral thesis. You should take a look at Cults Among Us—a title she hates, by the way. It's much the same material, only rewritten for a general audience. I'll send you a copy if you can't find it."

"You know," Gillian said after a while, "I just can't see that woman living in a commune. She'd stick out like a sore thumb, she's so…"

"Cerebral?" Glen suggested.

"Professional," she supplied.

"She's superb," he said flatly. "It's like putting a chameleon on a leaf: She just becomes a different person. Her posture changes, her voice softens, her vocabulary shifts, her eyes go wide. It's not even an act—if anything, the person you saw is the artificial construct. She opens up and just sucks in the community, lock, stock, and Bible."

"Hmm," she grunted. "Well, most good undercover cops are people I wouldn't exactly trust with my wallet."

"In her case it's even more radical than that. Sure, sometimes the only difference between the cop and the criminal is a badge, but when Anne Waverly plays a person, she isn't just making a shift in emphasis; she turns herself inside out. She becomes… earnest. Accepting. Completely unconscious and nonjudgmental. And absolutely fearless. And it really isn't an act." This conundrum of the empty-headed professor was obviously something that Glen had long dwelt on in the privacy of his mind; Gillian had never heard so many words in a row from him, and so nearly lyrical. "Anne let slip during her second debriefing that what she experiences is a freedom born of terror, and she suggested I read Solzhenitsyn. In real life—or in her Waverly life, anyway—she's jumpy underneath that calm, she has panic attacks on airplanes, she only recently got off tranks and sleeping pills. She still sees a therapist regularly—her boss's wife, in fact."

"You ever try and get her psych records? They'd make for interesting reading."

"God, no!" Glen's face twisted in the dim light, perhaps from disapproval, although it looked more like revulsion. "The last thing I want to know is what's going on in that woman's head."

"Really? I thought she was fascinating."

"She's one of the most disturbing creatures I've ever met," he said, and firmly changed the subject.

Chapter Four

From the notes of Professor Anne Waverly

For the next two weeks, it was chaos upon chaos as Professor Anne Waverly coaxed and goaded her students into their exams and final papers, as homeowner Anne Waverly scrambled to make arrangements so that her lawyer, her neighbor Eliot, and her friend Antony Makepeace among them could keep her creditors happy and her roof standing, as the FBI's consultant on cultic behavior Dr. Anne Waverly embarked on the necessary research into the Change movement, and as the newly incarnated seeker-after-Truth Ana Wakefield began to take form.

After two days, Anne decided that the easiest thing would be just to give up sleeping, and to all intents and purposes that was what she did, napping at odd moments when she could no longer keep her eyelids up. Several nights she did not make it home, camping out instead in her office under the vastly disapproving eyes of Tazzie and her boss.

Still, the work seemed to get itself done. Three hundred exams were farmed out to grad students for grading, leaving Anne with some three thousand written pages to evaluate. Her own writing—two articles, a review, and the proposal for a book—were simply canceled or put off, with apologies. A replacement instructor for her big spring class was found, a casual, bearded young Ph.D. about whom Anne had grave doubts as she tried to impress on him her reading list and curriculum.

Anne's lawyer, on the other hand, was none too pleased with a proposal that the taciturn and unworldly Eliot be given any authority at all over Anne's financial affairs. Anne had eventually to admit that a man who had never owned a credit card and who wrote perhaps as many as three checks a year off the bank account he shared with his mother, brilliant as he was with machines and dogs and roof repairs, might be less than ideal as a custodian of her business matters. She appealed again to Antony. He patiently agreed to act as signator of checks and liaison between Eliot's inarticulate requests for occasional repair and maintenance funds and the lawyer's overall supervision.

Then there were the numerous visits to the specialist about her knee, first to convince her that Anne did indeed intend to mistreat it, then to come to an agreement about what therapy would make that possible, and finally to have several fittings for a new, high-tech brace, invisible under any but the tightest of trousers and guaranteed never to give off the faint but maddening squeaks the old one had developed.

Another specialist, too, agreed to several sessions in the short time before Anne had to leave. Anne's psychotherapy with Antony's wife, Maria, had tapered off over the last year or so, but halfway through the first week following Glen's reappearance, Anne knew she would never make it without committing murder if she could not talk with Maria, who was friend as well as therapist. Anne phoned her at home.

"Maria? Anne here. I wonder if you could fit me in for a couple of hours, soon."

"Of course. I hoped you would call. I was going to wait another day or two and then call you."

"Antony told you, then?" The lines between the professions were firm but flexible; of course Antony would have told his wife, Anne's friend, that she was suddenly leaving, although to his wife the psychiatrist he would only have hinted gently at the reason.

"You don't mind?"

"Certainly not. But, Maria? We're not going to be discussing whether or not I want to do this. I'm going, and I can't afford doubts."

"If you didn't have them already, you would not be concerned about them," Maria pointed out. "I can't promise to help you strengthen your resolve, Anne, just to understand it."

"I'll take the chance," Anne said with a smile, and went back to her work.

There were also, inevitably, the students, not only the regular end-of-term crush, but also the handful of independent study supervisions and the fragile few in need of babying as they went through times of personal trauma or entered the delicate phases of their thesis projects.

Meanwhile, in her role of sometime agent of the FBI, Anne was finding Gillian Farmer all she might have asked for in a research assistant. Faxes spilled daily into Anne's home machine, e-mail dinged merrily whenever she logged on to her computer, and three parcels arrived containing photographs and color reproductions of children's drawings. Anne spent hours poring over the material, particularly the drawings, and took long walks thinking about them.

She also looked at the odd details, the minutiae that comprised this unique organism that called itself Change. The Web site they had set up was remarkably down to earth, as such things go, and although Anne could see Steven's interest in what Glen had called "the cleansing nature of fire", the texts Steven (or whoever had drawn up the Web site) used were not taken exclusively from apocalyptic material, and indeed were often not even biblical. The quotations given ran the gamut from Aboriginal teaching stories to Zoroastrian writings, in what Anne could only assume was an attempt to prove the universality of the doctrine of Change—which doctrine, however, was remarkably unclear. There were small, tantalizing clues in the material Glen and Gillian sent her that set the scholar in her tingling; unfortunately, small and tantalizing they remained.

Former members of a religious movement were a valuable if dangerous source of information—valuable because they were usually as eager as ex-spouses to spill all the dark and misshapen beans of their former relationship, and a hazard because the negative was often the only information they were interested in giving. In this case, though, the only disgruntled exes they had found were four women and two men who had been involved in Change for only an average of four and a half months, with the longest stay just short of eight. Samantha Dooley, who had been with the movement from its beginning and would have been the most important informant they could have found, had apparently left Change some months before and was now hidden within an extremely withdrawn, even xenophobic, women's commune in Canada, flat out refusing to talk to Glen's men about her time with Change. Anne didn't even think they had been allowed to speak with her directly, and suggested that he send a woman to try.

Anne was forced to fossick through the pages of information for the odd trace of gold, though when she found a gleam, she had to admit that she could not be sure it wasn't mere pyrite instead.

Take the names of the two men who seemed to be joint heads of the movement: Steven Chance had become Steven Change when he and the others came out of India, but what of Jonas Fairweather, whose legal name was now Jonas Seraph?

Names have meanings, and a name deliberately chosen by an adult could only vibrate with resolve and a new identity. Jonas, like Steven, had kept his first name, but what did he mean by Seraph?

Anne spent a couple of hours late one night at the desk in her home study, deep in Hebrew dictionaries, biblical concordances, and a selection of commentaries, which told her that a seraph was, in Numbers 21 and Deuteronomy 8, a kind of venomous serpent. Whether or not this was related to the verb seraph, which meant to burn or consume in flames, was debatable, and one could only speculate about Isaiah's use of the plural seraphim when talking about angelic beings, and suggest that he may possibly have been visualizing winged serpents wreathed in fire.

Interestingly, a second Hebrew word with a completely different spelling but with an identical spelling when transliterated into English was tsaraf, which also had to do with purifying fires. That verb meant refining, purifying, with an overtone of testing a substance, putting it to the proof to determine its purity.

There were proper names spelled with some variation of the Hebrew roots srf, in Nehemiah and I Chronicles, but on the whole Anne wondered if she was not crediting the man with more subtlety than he possessed, and that the name Fairweather had taken wasn't simply a reference to Isaiah's fiery messengers.

Anne looked over the stacked chaos of books and scribbles, and shook her head. Speculation and word studies were all very well and good, but it was now two-fifteen in the morning when she had a lecture in eight hours. Tantalizing or not, she had to admit that she simply did not know enough to determine what the Englishman meant by his name change.

Quit playing with your books, Dr. Waverly, she told herself sternly. Go to bed.

And while all this was going on, while the householder's legal arrangements and professorial demands vied for her limited hours and Gillian Farmer's faxes spilled their stories into her home, all the while, on the edges of her vision, there moved the ominous presence of Glen McCarthy, solicitous as a wooing suitor, insistent as a slave owner, crowding her and driving her to fits of nervous petulance when they were due to meet. She found his unremitting cheerfulness, now that he had his way, foreboding, almost menacing, and she found it difficult not to take it out on her students. The phone messages and letters (the latter well sealed and marked with a large "Personal") began to provoke gently ribald comments from the steno pool, causing Anne no little humiliation until finally she blew up at McCarthy, heaping on him her accumulation of burdens and tensions and telling him to leave her alone if he expected her to continue. For two days he remained silent and invisible. For some perverse reason, this made her even more furious, until on the Friday afternoon she telephoned his message number and said that he should come to her house at midday Saturday.

That night she dreamed of Glen, dressed in a black turtleneck, black jeans, and black, steel-toed work boots, storming into her lecture hall in a terrible rage and thundering at her, "I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God."

She woke up laughing, a sound that rang through the silent house and startled the dogs into a barking fit.

Maria Makepeace had been Anne's therapist for years, beginning as a friend who helped put her together after the breakdown set off by Abby's photograph and continuing over the years. Anne, Maria, and Antony made for an odd friendship, one that should not have worked for any number of reasons, not the least of which was Anne's oft-stated preference not to inquire too closely into the darker places of her mind, a firm conviction that it was at times better to let sleeping Minotaurs lie rather than continually offering up virginal portions of herself to be devoured by them. Beyond this attitude, unacceptable to a believer in the psychotherapeutic method, there was the objection that a therapist and her client should never have a relationship outside the therapy room any more than a grad student-turned-employee ought to befriend her adviser-turned-boss, and as for a married couple who had to create a line between talking about Anne their friend and professional indiscretions about Anne the client—. All things considered, their friendship shouldn't have worked, but it did, quite smoothly.

She sat in Maria's comfortable chair in the quiet, fragrant, plant-filled room and told her about her dream of Glen the jealous God. Maria chuckled, as Anne had known she would, but she then went on, to Anne's dismay, to ask about the dream's meaning. Anne shook her head ruefully.

"What is it?" Maria asked.

"Oh, the mind is such an amazing thing. I tell you about a funny dream in order to make you laugh, but I manage to overlook the fact that you're going to make me dig beneath the surface and see things I don't want to see."

"Would you not have told me if you'd stopped to think about the consequences?"

"Oh, I probably would have. But it wouldn't have been funny."

"Perhaps that's why your mind chose selective blindness: in order to allow me the humor before the content."

The two women smiled at each other with affection, and the smile was still in Maria's eyes when she asked gently, "You are concerned about this upcoming investigation, aren't you?"

"I am."

"Tell me how you feel about Glen."

"He frightens me," Anne said immediately. "He's so utterly fixed on what he's doing, everyone else is just a tool. You have to shout just to make him aware of you as a person. He's inhuman, and he's not even aware of it."

"So why submit yourself to that treatment again?"

Anne tried to laugh, but it was a poor, twisted thing. "He may not be much of a god, but he's mine. No, of course I don't mean that I worship him or anything, but I suppose you could say that he created me in his image. I was thinking the other day about that time fifteen years ago. You know, I still think I would have killed myself in another day or two if Glen hadn't barged in and just swept it all away because he needed me to help him and he didn't have time for my problems. And with him there, I never stopped to think, never had the time or the energy to stand back and look at what it was I wanted to do, until—oh, maybe the last year or so. And now again he's just blindsided me and swept me along."

"Would you have agreed to help Glen this time if you had been forewarned that he was going to ask?"

"I wonder. Yes, I think so."

"Why?"

"Because it's what I do, who I am. I was dead for three years after Aaron and Abby were killed. I would have committed suicide at the time except I felt it would be the ultimate betrayal of their deaths. So instead I went dead. For three years after I came here, the only person I talked to was Antony. And I began to take stupid risks. I started walking around campus at night during that time we had the rapist attacks. One winter I kept forgetting to replace the tires on my car even though they were almost bald, and I couldn't stand to have the seat belt around me. Stupid, suicidal things."

"Guilt is an insidious force."

"I'd sometimes wake up in the morning and need an hour before I could bear to get on my feet, it was like I was under half a dozen of those lead blankets they lay over you when you have an X ray. Everything was just so much work."

"And then Glen came." The story was familiar to both of them, like reciting a litany.

"And then I collapsed under the weight of Abby's picture, and then Glen came and offered me a way out. And it was so… easy. I knew it was dangerous. Glen tried to convince himself and me that it wasn't, but I knew otherwise, and I was glad. Because if it killed me, at least the weight would be off me. And as soon as I left, as soon as I walked off the plane in North Dakota, I wasn't even frightened any more."

"Surely you must have been, to some degree."

"Oh I was, scared shitless about the whole setup and my inexperience and not knowing how I'd react, but at the same time I could push that person away and be just stupid, wide-eyed Anita Walls bumbling her way into an armed camp. It was intensely liberating. The three months flew by, and I never made a mistake, never showed any fear. It was like jittery old Anne Waverly was locked up inside a glass ball, looking over my shoulder."

"And then you came back."

"Christ, yes. I came out and was taken away for debriefing, and it left me so depressed, I couldn't eat. But I'm sure you remember that."

"I remember."

"It must have been fun to have one of Antony's flaky grad students move in on you and spend a couple of weeks staring at the walls."

"It was not that long, and you didn't stare at the walls. You were charming, in a quiet way."

"I'll bet. But the whole business in North Dakota helped. And once the postpartum depression lifted, the weight I woke up to every morning didn't seem quite so heavy."

"Let's talk about guilt."

" 'Survivor's guilt,' " Anne said wryly. "It wasn't quite that simple, was it?"

"No." Anne took a deep breath and let it out. "No, it wasn't. Still isn't. I did have something to do with Abby and Aaron's deaths. With all the Farm deaths."

"So you have told me."

"My leaving the Farm set Ezekiel off. Look, even then I had enough training, enough experience to know how dangerous it would be to cross a man in his mental state, but I went ahead. I should have known. I did know—but I took off anyway."

They had stepped off the familiar path of the litany, and Maria watched her carefully.

"Why?"

"Why? Because I was selfish. I was stupid and greedy—I was bored with life on the Farm. I wanted to get back to grad school, where people valued what I did instead of telling me how bad I was at milking cows and how unfocused and disruptive I was getting."

"You are saying that your desire for self-fulfillment led to their deaths."

"My impatience, my self-importance, my… My… inability to get along with the father of my child."

"You and Aaron were having arguments," Maria said quietly.

"We had a huge fight about going back to Berkeley and I got in the car and drove away. He didn't want me to take Abby, and I didn't want her with me. And that was the end."

"But not for you."

"Yes, for me. Annie died too, and Anne was built up on the wreckage, poor old battered Anne with her limp and her dogs. And every so often Anne goes away and Anita or Ana or whoever comes to life instead."

"So why are you concerned about this investigation, Anne? Why have you come to me?"

"I'm worried that I can't do it this time. That Ana won't, you know, take over."

"Is this different, the feeling this time?"

"Yes. No. I don't know. I know it sounds crazy, but I'm afraid that I'm not frightened enough."

"You need to be frightened?"

"You know I do," Anne said, growing angry with the slow repetition of the therapist.

"Tell me again," Maria said, meaning, Remind yourself how it works.

"Fear is the force that drives Anne into her corner. Fear's like pain—it can be overwhelming at first, but if you live with it long enough, it can be shaped and molded, and it can be walled away to give you just a little space of your own where it isn't. And that's where Ana and the others live and breathe."

"And you wish to undertake yet another enterprise that will require you to break open your half-healed wounds and encourages you to split into a dual personality."

"You're exaggerating, Maria."

"Am I? Listen to your own words."

"That's just a way of talking about a mental process. A shorthand."

"I don't know that it is."

"Maria, I can't afford this," Anne snapped, and began to gather herself to go. "I can't risk anything getting in the way. You don't know what you're asking."

"Anne, sit down." Maria waited for her client to subside warily into the chair. "Anne, I cannot encourage self-deception, I cannot countenance actions that are so antithetical to the healing process. You knew this when you came here with your dream about Glen."

"Maria, sometimes you have to work beyond the immediate good to see the long-term picture."

"You are saying you need to do this work for Glen for your own state of health?" Maria asked dubiously.

"I'm saying there's unfinished business."

"I thought the last case, the one that you took to Glen, was meant to settle unfinished business."

"It was. But." Anne thought for a moment and then said slowly, "When I volunteered to go into Kansas, I was deliberately going after Martin Cranmer as a way to balance the disaster of the previous case in Utah. Kansas did that. Now it's a matter of reaching back to the beginning of the circle again, back to when Glen first took control of my life."

"The creature has to stand up to the creator?"

"Something like that."

"You and Glen have been very close from time to time. Tell me this, Anne: Do you love Glen?"

"I detest him," Anne said without thinking. "No, I suppose it's not that simple. I feel… God, what don't I feel when it comes to Glen McCarthy? It's like every emotion put together, all the contradictory drives at once. Maybe that's why he was wearing black in the dream—don't they say that when you mix all the colors together, you come up with black? That's Glen, the black hole of my emotions."

"He declared himself God."

"And was dressed as the devil."

"So tell me, Anne: How does Glen feel about you?"

"I think I make him nervous." There was a degree of satisfaction in her voice that neither of them missed.

"Why would that be?"

"He thinks he controls me but he's afraid he doesn't. He thinks he understands me, and he does on one level, better than anyone else in the world, but not on another. He respects and admires me, to the extent that he has an inflated sense of my abilities, but he also, without realizing it, hopes that I will fail."

Maria had been a therapist for a long time, but even so it took her two or three seconds to wipe all trace of the shock and concern she felt out of her voice so she could ask evenly, "Why would Glen hope that you will fail?"

"Oh, he's not about to set me up for a fall. If I screwed up again, it would mean his job. I just meant that deep down he has to feel some resentment that he's so dependent on me. I mean, really: don't all men secretly want to be the one to come riding on the white stallion to the rescue?"

Maria chuckled again at that, but Anne decided against any further revelations in the Glen department. If Maria, friend and therapist, was already worrying about Glen's motivations, it would only muddy the waters further if Anne were to voice her growing suspicion that Glen, deep in a hidden place within that smooth, whole, and completely unscarred skin of his, held a certain dark fascination with the scars and injuries that his job had inflicted on her body and mind.

No, they both had enough to think about; besides, her hour was up.

The term ended, the grade sheets were turned in, she had a final appointment with her lawyer, a farewell dinner with Antony and Maria, and a relatively full night's sleep. Two days, and she would be gone.

The next day she brought out the old Volkswagen bus named Rocinante from its resting place in the barn. Eliot had spent the better part of one enraptured week stripping down the engine and servicing it from roof to road, and it now had nearly-new tires, completely new brakes, a more powerful electrical system, a rearview mirror that actually reflected the road behind her, and it had seen the occasional and disconcerting loss of power during acceleration cured by a radical revamping of the entire fuel system. The old lady was set to tackle mountains and deserts again, albeit at her own placid speed.

Glen McCarthy's men had also had their hands on the bus, adding a new and very well concealed compartment for her gun and the supply of cortisone and needles for her knee as well as an emergency call transmitter that would be discovered only if the entire body of the vehicle were torn away. Even if a cellular phone would go with her persona (which it would not), it would be useless away from the cities.

Now the bus was Anne's again. She sat in the driver's seat and breathed in the musty odor of old upholstery and traces of mildew, a scent that always reminded her of her grandfather's old Chevy with its wide horsehair seats and soft cloth roof lining. She sniffed, wondering if any of it was the smell of ancient blood that Glen's men had missed after the Utah shootout. (Such a melodramatic word, that, and inaccurate as well: she'd been far too busy negotiating an escape to try to return fire.)

She shook herself out of her macabre reveries and got out of the car to begin her own renovations. She began by pulling the inside furnishings apart and scrubbing every corner and surface, then giving the bus back its personality. Curtains, a cheerful batik fabric with heavy lining to keep out the light, went up on the rods over the windows, along with new covers for the cushions. She filled the water reservoir and checked the propane tank, stocked the tight little drawers and cupboards with sheets and blankets, a quilt and a towel, foodstuffs and pans, and a wardrobe of jeans and flannel shirts that would have surprised her students. Hiking boots and a pair of sandals, heavy wool sweaters and an old but sturdy rain poncho, Dr Bronner's liquid almond soap (good for body, hair, and light reading matter), a first aid kit, a couple of coffee mugs with humorous pictures on them, some cones of pine-scented incense, and a myriad of colorful necessities went into the camper van that was to be occupied by the woman Ana Wakefield. She ended by hanging a small, well-balanced mobile of varicolored crystals that she had bought in the local alternative bookstore over the table that converted into a bed and then mounting a Navajo dream-catcher on the cabinet over the one-burner stove, where the spiderweb shape would be set off by the white paint. Finally she arranged the smooth leather cord of a tiny, fringed buckskin bag from the rearview mirror. This, her medicine pouch, was lumpy with bits of rock from the stream in back of her house, tiny thread-wrapped tufts of hair from each of the dogs, some bits of bee pollen she had bought at a health food store, and one red bead from Abby's favorite necklace.

It should have been a relaxing day, with the relief of physical work and the blessed simplicity of concentrating on one thing, but in truth it was nearly unbearable. Anne wanted only to climb into Rocinante and drive off, leaving Glen McCarthy to run after her and fling all the last-minute business into her lap without speaking, allowing her to sort out her new identity and purpose unimpeded.

Instead, he phoned that evening as she was sitting with her stomach in a knot, pushing lumps of food around on her plate, to say that one of her credit cards had not yet arrived and he thought they ought to wait for it. Did she mind putting off her departure for another twenty-four hours?

Oddly enough, she did not mind; in fact, the rush of relief left her light-headed. No, she managed to say calmly, that was fine, she actually had a number of things left undone here anyway. It was a lie, but Glen would not know that, and he said he would be up in the late afternoon tomorrow.

Giddy with an entirely unwarranted sense of freedom, Anne ate her meal and had another glass of wine, chose a handful of improving books to take with her in the bus, and sank gratefully into ten hours of sleep.

The next morning she took a last look at the now-thick dossier that she had compiled from the things Glen and Gillian had sent her. She was careful not to see the details—Glen's material even had the names of the Change members blacked out, at her request—but she leafed through, letting her attention roam.

The last set of drawings Gillian had sent her held her gaze for several minutes. This was the abandoned drawing pad of a child who had stayed with his grandmother for several days when the boy's mother had taken ill on a visit home. The sketchbook began with stiff, cliched drawings of houses and figures, but as the days passed, so did the artist's reticence, until the pages flowed with snakes and rocks, horses in a paddock, two distinctive cats, and a very lifelike scorpion that had obviously made a deep impression on the child.

Then toward the end, the second from the last drawing in fact, there appeared an odd image of what looked like a stick figure of a bearded man trapped inside a giant raindrop. On either side hung two huge monsters all gaping teeth and red eyes, looking as if they were about to bite into the pear-shaped raindrop and the man inside.

The details were difficult to make out because the child had drawn over it when it was finished, brief but furious swings of the red crayon across the image, and then quickly gone on to the next page and drawn a cheerful rainbow in primary colors, arched over a grassy field with bright flowers.

Then he had closed the sketchbook and left it behind.

The drawing troubled Anne. She studied it for a long time, wondering what it could mean. Finally she closed the folder, put it into the box where she kept all the other Change material, and went to make herself a Spanish omelet for breakfast. She chopped the peppers and tomatoes and onions with great attention to their size and consistency and she ate the food slowly. She then washed and dried the dishes and pans, retrieved her hiking boots from Rocinante, strapped on the new knee brace, put on her heavy jacket, and set off up the mountain.

For the first hour, Stan was hard put to keep up with her. She walked fast, leaning into the cold wind, taking little notice of her surroundings, aware only of the need to get out, away, free. For the past two weeks she had felt as if fifty radio stations had been blaring in competition inside her brain, a cacophony of sounds and conversations and images, none of them strong enough to override the others for more than a few seconds. The truncated plan for next quarter's class on New Religious Movements, arrangements to find homes for the puppies, anger at Glen, concern about Antony, the nag of her unwritten book dying away in the back of her mind, details from the thick dossier on the Change community catching at her, the damage she might do her knee by forcing it to act normally, reminding herself to remind Eliot to clean out the water tank and replace two of the window screens and keep an eye on that place in the roof that seemed to need patching, and resentment at Glen and worry about one of her more troubled students and a book that interlibrary loan had recalled and Anne couldn't find and—.

And then below that lay the anger, a wild irrationality that was the only sane repsonse to the idea of walking calmly into the camp of a mortal enemy and pretending to be his friend.

And below the anger and the confusion and the craziness, underlying it all, she could feel the disturbing roil of her old, tired guilt, as worn and dull as a river rock from all the long years of handling. She was asking it now to support and energize yet another hard slog through the most distressing times of her past, a past that she thought she had earned the right, not to forget, but perhaps not to dwell on quite so much. The dreams she had were no longer so utterly devastating, the flashbacks she experienced no longer galvanizing; the memories had become, at long last, a part of the vocabulary of her inner life.

She'd been spoiled by complacency and resented being forced to face herself again. Very well: she would be manipulated. But only so far. And not again.

In the cold spring wind and the brush of damp, fragrant branches against her jacket and her face, the cacophony of voices began to fade. The confusion and resentment receded somewhat, the opposing pulls made an effort to sort themselves out, and the fluttering thrill and dread she always felt on these last nights screwed themselves down into a semblance of calm anticipation. At the same time, walking among the trees and hills with only Stan and the wind for company, she came to the decision that this would be the last time. Never again would she submit to Glen McCarthy, become a part of the machinations of federal justice and the personal manipulations of the man himself. Dues paid endlessly became tribute to an extortionist, and with this last operation, Glen had revealed himself as perilously close to a blackmailer.

Clear-headed and satisfactorily aching, her bad knee only one sharper twinge among the pangs of middle-aged exertion, Anne walked back down the hill to her home. She showered and washed her thick hair with slow attention, put a pot of lentils and sausages on the stove, and went outside to split firewood until she heard the sound of Glen McCarthy's government car dragging its inadequate transmission up her hill. So much warning did it give her that she had all the wood neatly stacked before he arrived.

As his overheated car pulled up onto the flat before her house, Glen saw her, standing next to the woodpile with an ax in her hand. She watched him park and heard the engine die, and then she half turned to sink the ax, one-handed, deep into the chopping block before stooping to gather the kindling and carry it in through the kitchen door. Glen sat for a long moment looking at the door before he reluctantly set the brake and got out. It must have been a trick of the light, he told himself, the approaching dusk and the overhang of her roofed-over woodpile, but when she had so easily driven the hand ax into the stump, there had seemed to be a very odd expression on her face, a sort of grim pleasure, almost of malice.

Not Anne, he told himself, closing the car door. It was the light. He said hello to Stan, who sat on the porch as aloof as always despite all Glen's friendly overtures, and then went in to see what Anne had on the stove.

Anne was calm over dinner, Glen was relieved to see. Quiet perhaps, but without the jitters he had been faced with at previous times. She seemed watchful, however, and smiled to herself at odd times. She also drank more than he'd seen her drink before, glass after glass of the heavy red wine that seemed to have no effect on her, and as time went on her strangeness began to worry him and inflict him with a compensatory anxiety, until he almost felt as if he were the one about to set forth in the morning.

It seemed odd to Glen that he did not know Anne well enough to tell what her behavior meant. On one level, he knew her better than he knew anyone else in the world. He was intimate with her physical history, her psychological profile, her finances, training, and personal history, her family and friends, her strengths and her weaknesses. He knew what size shoe she wore and what kind of blouses she liked, her taste in cosmetics and where she bought her furniture. He knew in general what men she had relationships with, and could, if he wanted to, find out a great deal more about them. He even knew why she liked men of their particular physical type, big and strong and preferably hairy, since he had seen pictures of her husband.

On another level, though, Anne was as much of an enigma to him as she had been the first day he had sought her out fifteen years before. How could he know, really know, what essential shifts would be made when a mother saw her own beloved daughter laid out on the ground beside a row of other children? How could he even begin to guess at the dark areas she hid so efficiently inside her? Nothing truly bad had ever happened to him personally—hell, both his parents were even still alive. He understood how Anne worked well enough to make use of her, but he could not say that he knew her. He did not even think that he wanted to.

When the table was clear and the dishes stacked by the sink, Glen brought out his briefcase and gave Anne her identity. She studied the California driver's license with its address in a town where she had actually lived, if briefly, and many years before. The photograph on her passport was a different one, more recent than that on the license, with an issue date three years earlier and a smattering of European and Asian stamps on the pages—again, all countries she had at least visited in the past.

She now possessed a checking account, two credit cards, a telephone card, an assortment of memberships to video rental places she had never heard of, an REI sporting goods member number, and three library cards (two of which were expired) from far-flung towns. He also gave her half a dozen letters and communications from mythical relatives and an insurance company, bearing forwarding labels to "general address" at a number of post offices up and down the West Coast. Ana Wakefield had kept an account with a mailbox service in Boise, Idaho, for the last four years, set up automatically when Anne had ceased being the last identity, Annette Watson. Glen had apparently thought it worth maintaining a new name for her even though she had made it clear at the time that she would not work for him again. Well, she had been wrong, and he had been right, and here was Ana Wakefield with a history ready to slip into. She pushed away the bundle of old letters, unable to face the new relatives and the paperwork from a minor accident Ana had had in Seattle. Glen drilled her on the methods of getting in touch, ranging from postcards addressed to her imaginary Uncle Abner to the extreme use of the panic alarm that was wired into Rocinante's chassis. Although they had been over this already, he decided that they had to review it again and check on the gun safe, so Anne turned on the floodlights and they went out to the barn.

She watched in silence while Glen fussed with the gun's compartment, which was indeed invisible and which did work perfectly, but when he stretched out on the floor and began to prod at the panel that hid the transmitter, she studied his legs for a minute and then withdrew to go back out to the woodpile. The crash of an armful of split logs dropping into the wire cage on the back of the bus, a device she had asked Eliot to weld on over the engine panel, brought Glen to investigate.

After a minute, he asked, "Doesn't the wood get pretty wet out there?"

"Last time out, I woke up one morning to find a nest of baby black widow spiders hatching out from a log I had stored under the front seat. I don't bring wood inside any more." She eased herself down to examine the welds, and then to look under the back fender at the exhaust pipe.

Staring down at the top of her head, the curve of her spine, and the jeans tight over her butt, Glen took a sudden step back and said abruptly, "I'm engaged, Anne. I'm going to get married in the summer."

"Good for you." Her voice was so lacking in interest that for a moment he wondered if she had heard him.

"Her name is Lisa. She's a—"

"I don't give a damn, Glen." Anne got to her feet and fastened the wire catch that kept the firewood from bouncing out onto the road.

"Anne, I'm serious. I can't—"

"Yes you can, Glen."

"Anne, no."

She whirled, and he took another step back. "No changes, Glen. No negotiations, no changes, not if you want me to drive away tomorrow. I'd be more than happy to stay here and teach my kids and never see you again. It's up to you."

"Jesus, Anne, why?" It was a question he had never asked her before, though he had certainly asked it of himself. "Why do you do it?"

"Don't ask, Glen. You wouldn't like the answer."

She did not move, did not bring up her hands to undo the buttons of her shirt or cock her hip in coy seduction or even pout her lips, but as he stared at her, angry and disturbed, he began to feel something growing along with the anger, something dark and strong and not very civilized but oh, very, very tasty. She felt the change, and a smile grew behind her eyes. He swallowed, put on a crooked smile of his own, and moved forward.

"God," he murmured, sinking his fingers into her thick hair and pulling her face up to his. "The things I do for my country."

Eight—no, nine times, over a period of twelve years, and sex with Anne Waverly had never been remotely the same twice. Breathless one time, funny the next, concentrated and athletic and even—terrible word but quite an experience—nurturing, and never once a repeat.

This time it was brutal.

They started there in the barn, nothing gentle about her mouth on his, her arms half fighting against his own, their two bodies grinding against each other. Their teeth scraped and then Anne's mouth opened and Glen's tongue was free to explore the vividly remembered and weirdly erotic plate of the dental appliance that held in place the front teeth lost in the Utah disaster. Their breathing quickened. Glen's hands moved up and down over Anne's clothes until she pulled away slightly, buried her head in Glen's neck, and bit down hard.

He yelped in surprise and real pain, shoving her away so that her bad knee would have failed to hold her had Rocinante not been there. She said nothing, just turned and walked off in the direction of the house. He followed more slowly, pausing to loosen his collar and crane his neck to see the tooth marks, touching the welt gingerly. He was examining his fingertips in the floodlight over the barn door for signs of blood and thinking ruefully that he would certainly have to stay away from Lisa for a couple of weeks, when the lights went off, leaving him to pick his way, stumbling and cursing, through the obstacle-strewn wood yard and up the steps to the kitchen.

He half expected the door to be locked, but it was not. He flung it open and was drawing breath to bellow a furious protest at the woman inside, when he saw Stan, feet braced, head down, and ready to do battle. Glen strangled on the angry words and forced out a soothing prattle while he inched past the dog. Stan allowed him to pass, and in relief Glen slipped through the door to the living room and slammed it. He then turned, fuming, for the stairs. He didn't know if this was rejection or foreplay, but he wasn't about to get in the car and drive meekly away without knowing for sure.

He found her in the bedroom, and took the fact that she was rapidly throwing off her clothes as a sign that she did not intend him to leave. He watched her push her thumbs into the waist of her jeans and peel them down, and when she stood naked before him, strong and middle-aged and bearing the scars he had given her, he took a shaky breath and decided to make a joke out of the past five minutes.

"Look, Anne, if you're still hungry, I'd be happy to bring you something from the fridge, but try not to bite any more pieces out of—"

Only his training saved him from a split lip, if not a concussion. He caught her arm as it came toward him, and then nearly fell victim to her knee. He was bigger, he was stronger, he was eight years younger, and he was trained, but she was wild and fast and she wanted seriously to hurt him, and all he could do was to wrap himself hard around her like a human straitjacket and ride out whatever storm had hold of her. It took an age to pass, and his arms were aching and his mind was torn between the wish simply to slap her hard to stop her from trying to bite him through his padded coat and the growing and genuine alarm for her sanity, when between one moment and the next she went limp and stopped struggling against him. He held her, fully clothed against her nakedness, and rocked her gently until he was sure it was not a feint. When her arms moved to free themselves, he allowed her to reach up and pull his mouth down to hers.

Still, the skirmish was not over. The outright violence turned to a slow struggle, with Glen gradually realizing that her arms were content only when they were pinned down, her body free to respond only when it was hedged around and wrapped by his. Putting on the damn condom one-handed while he was lying across her, the other hand clasping both of her wrists together behind her back and his legs wrapped around hers holding her down was one of the most difficult and grimly ridiculous things he had ever done. When he finally had it on, he was aroused in more ways than the one. He bruised her mouth with his, grabbed her and pinned her down, and finally entered her with no more thought of lubrication than a drunken teenager. He held her down and thrust against her, knowing that he had to be hurting her, wanting to make her ask him to stop. She did not ask, but eventually, finally, she arched herself away from his restraining hands and gave a brief shuddering cry like a sob. He shouted his relief into the hollow of her throat, moved against her slowly two or three more times, and collapsed.

He lay with his chest heaving, wondering what the hell had gotten into him, hurting her like that, and wondering how the hell he was going to begin to apologize, when to his astonishment he felt her arms go around him and he felt her mouth kiss his hair in an unprecedented gesture of affection.

He turned his head, heavy and damp with sweat, to rest against her breast. "Next time you want to do that," he gasped, "give me a little warning so I can bring along my cuffs and some rope."

"Duct tape," she said indistinctly, and he snorted in astonishment. Then, to his even greater disbelief, he heard her say, very clearly, a thing she had never told him before. "Thank you Glen."

He buried his face into her body and lay there. He listened to her heart slow, and heard her breath return to normal, and gradually he fell asleep.

Chapter Five

case an individual can achieve results that a concerted effort cannot. Small, niggling, low-key Intrusions by an intensively trained individual, who always has at the top of his or her priorities the need to keep a low profile and avoid escalation of the situation's tension, can result in the slow collapse of the group's structure.

Some of you may remember the case of the separatists in White Rock, Illinois a few years ago. I say some of you because it is a textbook example of how a tense religious situation—a 'cult'—is defused. In this case, the early signs of problems were caught, an undercover investigator sent in for several weeks, and the result of that investigation closely analyzed. As a result, one of your men dressed up as a fussy, bespectacled housing inspector in an ill-fitting suit, clutching his clip-board in his hand, utterly reasonable, terribly sympathetic, but determined to carry out his job for the housing department. [laughter] I see a number of you recognize the agent involved, particularly as he has now turned bright red, although I doubt you would have recognized him at the time. Anyway, he went in and spent a number of weeks slowly splitting the community down the middle-literally, as it turned out, by changing the tight living arrangements that had allowed the three leaders to control the rest, as well as figuratively, by sowing seeds of discontent and contributing brief and "accidental" glowing reminders of outside life.

It was a spectacular triumph, but was never acknowledged as such simply because it remained low key. The media were led astray, which avoided the intense pressures of the citizenry and their elected officials toward action, the community never felt threatened enough to resort to violence (particularly as the agent involved always offered to help them fill out all the forms he brought), [laughter] Tear gas was never even

Excerpt from the transcription of a lecture by Dr. Anne Waverly to the FBI Cult Response Team, April 27, 1994

When Glen woke, it was not yet light, although it seemed to him that the pale square of the window indicated dawn rather than moonlight. Too early to wake Anne, who had a long day ahead of her, although he felt a stir between his legs at the prospect of turning over and fitting himself against her warm and sleepy body. Instead, he thought about sex with Anne Waverly.

The first time—ten? No, twelve years before—had taken him completely by surprise. He had, then as now, been dismayed by the sheer unprofessionalism of it, and had long since convinced himself that the fear that she was about to back out of the project he had fought so long to set up was all that had kept him from standing up and walking out.

She had been terrified that night, so afraid at the idea of putting herself into the North Dakota community under investigation that her hands had been like ice, and she had turned to him impulsively in her apartment in town, where they were working late to complete the briefing, reached for him as the only warm thing in the world. Pity and compassion and the cold-blooded snap decision that a good screw tonight might be the only thing that got her through to the next day had stopped him from gently pushing her away; the intensity of her response had quickly overwhelmed rational decision, and had made the next morning's slow, languorous follow-up an experience that had not faded in memory in all the years and the various women since then—including his fianceé.

He wasn't sure what it was about her that made her so difficult to push from his mind. Physically, she had nowhere near the attraction of most of the women he slept with, and certainly nothing of Lisa's hard, sports-club-tuned body. Anne was fit, but it was the seasonal fitness of someone who went soft over the winter, and her skin was frankly wrinkled and stained with too many years in the sun. She was too old for him, she often made him more uncomfortable than attracted, and she had a knack of making him feel even younger than he was and considerably more incompetent. But he could not forget her and did not really regret whatever quirk it was that made her want to begin a case by sleeping with him. He had finally dismissed his discomfort by classifying their attraction as some mysterious form of "chemistry".

After that first time, three years went by before he had slept with her again, the night before she was to fly to Miami to look at a group of rumored Satanists. It had been a more clear-cut case, less personal to her and more professional, and her nervousness had been less intense. Still, when he had gotten to his feet to leave this house and drive down the hill to town, her cold hand had stopped him, and he had ended up in this same bed, with a vigorous and intense night followed by a slow and climactic morning.

The third session had also been here, eighteen months after the second, just before she left for Jeremiah Cotton's armed camp in Utah. That had been a lighthearted night, punctuated by laughter and the electrifying sensation of Anne seized by giggles while he was deep inside her, and she had turned to him in the morning with a sort of farewell affection. She had bought and restored the old Volkswagen bus by then, and as he stood next to his government sedan he'd seen her arm pop out of the driver's window and wave merrily before the lovingly revived old chatterbox of a vehicle dipped behind the trees and the distinctive rattle of the VW engine faded into the quiet morning sounds of the woods and the distant growl of a neighbor's chain saw.

Only twenty-nine days went by before Glen saw the bus again. He thought he was ready for the sight, having just come from the hospital bed of its owner, but the appearance of the old vehicle by the roadway had been chilling: spattered with mud, most of the paint gone along one side and a fender torn half away, two tires flat and all the front windows shattered by a continuation of the neat line of holes punched up the driver's side door. Inside, the bright cotton Mexican blanket covering the driver's seat was stiff with dried blood.

Anne was in intensive care for a week and in and out of half a dozen hospitals for the next year while they attempted to rebuild her knee. The fiasco aged her badly, and when Glen had last seen her, in a Bethesda surgical ward, she would not meet his eyes.

She disappeared for some months after that, and although the following September Glen had been relieved to get word that she was teaching again, he stayed away from her. Some bizarre impulse had prompted him to send her a Christmas card, but she had not answered it, and he had removed her from his mental list of potential colleagues. Someday, he thought, he would drop in and see her: but somehow whenever business took him to the Northwest, there was never quite enough time for a visit.

Three years went by after that last cold hospital conversation, three years and seven months before the Friday afternoon when he picked up a letter from his desk and saw, in the instantly familiar handwriting, the terse message off the fax machine:

Glen—must talk to you.

Anne

He did not hesitate—or at least not more than an hour or two. She was not at home or in her office, but when he reached the departmental steno pool, the secretary said she was around, and indeed, twenty minutes later he picked up his phone to hear her voice, tight and low.

"Glen, I have to see you."

"That's what your note said. What's it about?" He was pleased to hear that his voice sounded calm, professional, normal.

"Not over the phone. Are you free this weekend?"

He had not expected this. After a minute he said, "I am, but I have to stay available for an investigation I'm coordinating. I can't leave town."

"I'll come out," she said immediately. "Shall we say five o'clock tomorrow? Where shall we meet?"

Glen offered the name of a restaurant where they had eaten before, but she rejected it.

"I don't want to talk in front of waiters. Your office?"

"How about if I meet you at the airport and we can decide on the way in?"

She agreed, and called back half an hour later with the flight information, her voice still tight with inexplicable tension. That tension and her refusal to say what it was about had given him a sleepless night, as a parade of possibilities marched through his head, ranging from a bone cancer induced by the injuries to the revelation of a four-year-old child resulting from one of the dusty packets of condoms she had taken from her bedside table.

This last irrational thought had sent him angrily for the rarely used bottle of Scotch, and he gulped down the dose like medicine. No pregnancy could have been concealed during those months of intense medical care, he told himself, and went with spinning head back to bed.

Her flight was due into Kennedy at three forty-five. At two-thirty, something came up that demanded his attention, or seemed to, and so he sent a driver to meet the plane and take her to her hotel. Finally, at six, he had to admit that the need for his immediate presence was long over, and he phoned her room to suggest she meet him down in the hotel restaurant.

"I'm in Room 546, Glen, just come up. We'll order room service if you want something."

"I, er—"

"For Christ sake, Glen, I'm not going to eat you. I'm not even going to rape you. Just get here."

The phone went dead. Still, she had sounded more businesslike than seductive. She also still sounded tense, almost fierce. He put on his coat and took a taxi to the hotel.

Glen McCarthy was a pragmatist, and no romantic. He was good at his job; good, too, at allowing the past to fade. However, he had to admit that on the rare occasions when he was ambushed by memories, more often than not they were linked with this strange, damaged woman and the emotionally draining cases she was involved with. Odd things such as the sound of children in a park would jolt him with a palimpsest of horror overlaid with pleasure, a clear image of an array of young bodies, lovingly laid out and murdered by a madman, superimposed by a strong tactile memory of the small mole on Anne's left breast, a low bump tantalizing to the fingertips, two inches northeast of the nipple.

He was hit by such a memory as he stood in the anonymous hallway of the New York hotel, a vivid picture from the days when he was trying hard to shape her into some semblance of a law enforcement professional, driven by the uncertainty of what the hell he thought he was doing and the fear of how utterly unprepared she was for the position in which he proposed to put her. He had shouted at her, in doubt and anxiety, that Jesus Christ, you never open a door if you don't know what's on the other side. There in the hotel corridor, he saw the tiny dot at the center of the glass eyehole darken as she looked through it. She had not forgotten, he thought in relief, and he was oddly sad that she had not.

The security bolt rattled, the door opened, and the four and a half-year-old memory of a mole, lodged deep in the skin of his fingertips, flitted through his awareness before retreating again into deep storage.

"Hello, Anne."

"Glen." She retreated a step and he followed her into the room.

"Sorry I couldn't meet you. Something came up. How are you?" He watched her loop the security device back over its knob and then limp over to the chairs by the window.

"Not bad. With cortisone injections and a knee brace I can almost do an eleven-minute mile, but I hate the brace and the shots, and in the end I decided to make the limp a part of my new persona. I even carry a cane. You want a drink?" The room had a tiny locked refrigerator filled with tiny expensive bottles, but a normal-sized bottle of a California zinfandel stood uncorked on top of the desk and Glen told her he would have some of that. She stripped a glass of its sanitary wrapping, poured it half full, and raised her own glass in a toast.

"You look well," she said. "You've lost some weight."

"I've been working out. How was your flight?"

"Lousy." She put down her glass and reached over to the desk. "I have something I want you to look at."

To his astonishment and dismay, when her hand came back it was holding out a manila envelope, the same kind of envelope she herself had received from him three times now. He took it reluctantly, studying her face for clues, but she got up and went to stand looking out of the window at the traffic and buildings. Her hair was beginning to go gray, he noticed, but it curled gently down between her shoulder blades, still looking thick and very touchable.

Abruptly, he bent to tear open the envelope. With one glance at the top clipping his heart tried simultaneously to sink and speed up.

Martin Cranmer. One of a number of Midwest messiahs, there was a growing file on him in Glen's own office cabinets, including this very clipping. In the photograph, Cranmer was surrounded by the children of the school that he had just donated to the nearby town, there in the Kansas wheatfields. The school was built with his money and the labor of his followers, staffed by fully qualified volunteer teachers from the huge, heavily fenced farm where they all lived, a community outreach project that saved the local children an hour-long bus ride to the next nearest school, a noble gesture that got his picture in the weekly paper and reduced the anxiety level of the suspicious local farmers by a great deal.

McCarthy, when the action came to his attention, had not been so reassured. Neither, apparently, was Anne Waverly.

Her file missed some of the material his contained, mostly letters and missives sent out over the growing international computer network. It did, however, contain half a dozen items his lacked, two of which, had they come to his attention earlier despite being illegally obtained and therefore legally inadmissible would have upgraded the level of concern over Martin Cranmer's enterprise a number of notches.

Three of the pages were photocopies of letters to the editor of the county's local newspaper, complaints about suspicious activities on the Cranmer farm. They had not been published, an oddity that took on distinctly sinister overtones when coupled with six months' of photocopies of a man's bank statements clipped to an unsigned letter that read:

Dear Professor Waverly,

I know I said I couldn't help you, but I got to thinking, and I don't like the idea of what may be going on. I won't go into detail, and I won't testify or anything, but still, you may be able to use these somehow.

"Who's William Denwilling?" Glen asked, reading the name from the checking account statements.

"The owner and editor of the local paper."

Denwilling had received a postal order for five hundred dollars in the middle of each of the months for which there were photocopies. Glen read on.

The second alarming factor Glen missed at first, because the name on the photocopied obituary, a forty-six-year-old farmer killed in an automobile accident, meant nothing to him. However, the next page Anne had included was an assessor's map with the boundaries of two adjacent properties highlighted: Martin Cranmer's name was in one, the dead farmer's in the other. With that, a small bell rang, and Glen leafed back through the file to find that the man had been one of the three residents who had written irate yet unpublished letters to William Denwilling's newspaper, complaining about problems with their weird neighbors.

The rest of the file contained no revelations. However, the familiar material, from the harangues across the Web to the stockpiling of foodstuffs, took on a darker meaning with the knowledge of editorial bribery and the death of an outspoken critic.

He reached the end of the file, folded the earlier pages back, and sat for a moment studying the grainy photo of Cranmer, the smiling, bearded farmer/prophet.

"There's very little of this I can use, you know," he said.

"You won't have to if I go in."

Even with the evidence of her carefully compiled file in his hand, the blunt offer startled him. He had never expected to use her in anything but an advisory capacity again, and then only as a last resort.

"I don't think that's a good idea, Anne," he said carefully.

"Is there anyone else?"

"We have a couple of—"

She interrupted. "Anyone as good?"

He was silent. She turned back from the window then to look at him, and she was smiling.

"If I don't do it one more time, I'm going to live the rest of my life with the taste of failure in my mouth. My clumsiness in Utah killed seven people."

"Anne, your skill and your willingness to sacrifice yourself saved all the rest of them."

"From a situation I put them in."

"For Christ sake, Anne. Not even you can stop an avalanche. Not even you could second-guess a man like Jeremiah Cotton."

"In my head, I know that, Glen. In my gut, I need to try one more time."

"And if it happens that this one goes bad?"

"Well, I guess I'll just shoot myself," she said, still smiling.

"Anne…"

"I'm joking, Glen. Surely you must know that if I were going to commit suicide, I'd have done it a long time ago. And anyway, this one won't go bad. We're early enough with Cranmer, we can certainly defuse him and may even get enough evidence to put him away for a while. Very different from the last time. And a nice, tidy investigation might take your boss's mind off Waco."

"I didn't have anything to do with Waco," he said quick ly.

"I didn't think you had." It was a simple statement, but Glen heard Anne's faith in his abilities behind it. He looked down at the envelope.

"Okay," he said. "I'll push a little harder."

He had pushed, and Anne had gone in, and in fact, they had been early enough: Cranmer was in prison now for a variety of offenses. However, the night before Anne had gone to Cranmer had not been an easy one. It had taken Glen two hours of concentrated effort to gain Anne's full and undistracted attention, and he had felt distinctly triumphant when she had fallen asleep afterward. When she came back from Kansas, however, she looked immensely tired and had lost an alarming amount of weight. Besides, she was beginning to make him feel… uneasy. He went through the motions of preparing a new identity for her, but privately he vowed that he would not again pull her into one of his investigations.

Over the course of his nearly forty years, Glen had been forced to break any number of vows, some of them serious, but never had he gone back on his private word with greater reluctance than with the case that had taken him into Anne Waverly's lecture hall two weeks before that morning, and into her bed last night. In fact, it was something of a surprise that his reluctance had not manifested itself physically. Perhaps if Anne had not been so… uncontrolled, he might have had time to consider what he was doing and created difficulty for himself, but she had been. God, had she been.

He only hoped he hadn't hurt her. Whatever had taken possession of her last night had wanted to be hurt, and although Glen knew full well that wife-beaters and sadists the world around always used that rationalization, in this case he thought it might be true. He even had to wonder if somehow he had known it was going to be that way. A month ago, when he was wrestling with the need to call Anne back into service, he had dreamed: He and Anne were lying together on the rug in front of the downstairs fire, just at that urgent stage between caresses and actual intercourse, when the smooth pink scars scattered across her body, remnants of glass shards and shotgun pellets, had awakened under his touch and begun to move, twitching independently of each other until they opened and became numerous tiny mouths, gaping against the palm of his hand and speaking to him in tiny, insistent voices. He instantly shot awake, revolted by the sick eroticism of the image but so turned on, he had stirred Lisa awake and crawled into her for relief.

No, Anne had set the tone last night, as she always did in these encounters; he had only responded in kind. And it seemed to do the trick—she was always different after sex, softer and more womanly, and he knew that sex with him had become a part of the process by which she transformed herself into the character he had created for her. Sure, he had felt like he was knifing her last night when he stabbed into her, but she had responded, and that final gasp of pain had even set off her orgasm. And his.

It was light outside now, and by experience he knew that Anne would soon stir, making a small questioning chirp of a noise in the back of her throat as she half woke to his presence and pressed her back against him. When his rough face had nuzzled its way through her thick hair to the nape of her neck and his fingers located the intriguing mole on her left breast, she would begin to push back with a greater urgency, until after a minute she would twist around and fling her arms around his neck, and they would drown in each other until it was time to start the day.

All in all, Glen thought, smiling into the pillow and stiff now against the sheets, a hell of a way to begin an FBI investigation.

He turned then to reach for her, and sat up abruptly, his smile fading along with his arousal. The other side of the bed was empty.

Chapter Six

Anne Waverly, PhD

Duncan Point University, Oregon

Dear sir,

As the millenium draws to a close, we must be prepared for a sudden rise in the popularity of apocalyptic teaching and rnillenarial movements. The search for meaning seizes many disparate and apparently irrational handholds, and signs are seen in comets and calendars and anomalous weather patterns.

It is absolutely essential, therefore, that we develop a mechanism for communicating with these so-called cultists, a means of understanding their world-views, comprehending their symbolic language, and establishing a common tongue. In a situation involving a difficult, possibly hostile community, the primary act needs to be the establishment of a groundwork for communication between the governmental agencies involved and the religious community, and particularly the leader or leaders. The vocabulary and structure of apocalypticism may at first hearing seem irrational, even mad; however, if one regards it less as a symptom of delusional psychopathology and more as a complex language to be learned, a long step may be made on the road to communication, and an equally large step made back from the inevitability of confrontation. Previous experience has shown that if we can get the religious dynamics of the community under investigation down pat, when the time comes for intervention, armed or not, at least the two sides are able to speak a common language.

I write, both as a theoretician in the field and as an occasional active participant in investigations, that the FBI Cult Response Team be upgraded, in manpower and in resources. It would be a serious mistake to be taken unawares by a situation we can all see approaching.

Yours truly,

Anne M. Waverly, PhD

Excerpt from a memorandum sent by Dr. Anne Waverly to the FBI Cult Response Team, undated

The sudden panic that seized Glen and swept him to the top of the stairway went still with the awareness that someone was moving around down below and that the stairwell was warm from the woodstove. He stood, straining to hear, and abruptly relaxed into a relief that left him feeling queasy: Anne was in the kitchen, making breakfast.

He stepped back into the bedroom to retrieve the dressing gown she kept in the closet (a man's, size extra-extra large; he had never asked who had left it there, or who besides himself used it, although he knew that the man—or men—would have a lot of dark hair, a lot of upper-body muscle, and a real attitude). He started to pull it on, then changed his mind and went to take a shower first: If they did have a morning session, Anne might find a clean partner more appealing.

He showered and washed his hair with her coconut-smelling shampoo, and as the smell of it hit his nostrils, a cold thought shoved itself into his simple contentment. He looked sharply down at his feet, but the drain was clean of hair. He rinsed off and got out of the shower, took a towel from the rack (dry, he noted) and scrubbed at his head and face, shoulders and chest, and then wrapped it around his waist, tucking in the ends even as he was bending to peer into the wastebasket. It held two tissues and a loop of hair pulled out of a hairbrush—not what he was looking for. The tile around the sink was clean, but hanging off the edge he found one hair, perhaps eight inches long. He dropped to his knees, and on the floor he found it: a swatch of perhaps a dozen brown and gray hairs, cut flat on one end. In the drawer were the scissors she had used, with another long hair caught in the hinges. He stood up, curled the hair around his finger, and absently dropped the tuft into the pocket of his borrowed robe. What had he expected? "No changes," she had told him, and though he didn't altogether understand it, he knew it always happened.

Her toothbrush was not in its usual place in the cupboard, but he found the spares in her drawer and added a cellophane wrapper to the contents of the wastebasket so he could greet her with clean breath. He hung up the towel and put on the dressing gown, stuck another condom in the pocket, and pattered downstairs in his bare feet, happily registering the warmth of the woodstove and the smell of coffee emanating from the kitchen.

So vivid was Glen's anticipation that he took two steps into the room before his eyes informed him that the person sitting at the table with a steaming cup of coffee was not Anne. The man looked up, and Glen recognized Eliot Featherstone.

"There's coffee," he told Glen, and went back to the disemboweled toaster in front of him.

Anne's toothbrush was missing, thought Glen starkly. He flung himself out the door and into the yard, where he was confronted by the sight of the barn door standing open with no vehicle inside it. Her old Land Rover was parked in its usual place with Eliot's pickup truck beside it; the Volkswagen bus she called Rocinante was gone.

Aware suddenly of his lack of shoes, Glen picked his tender-footed way back to the porch, past Stan, who was lying on the edge of the steps with his head between his front paws and his eyes on the empty barn.

"When did she leave?" he asked Eliot in the kitchen. The younger man stared at him blankly for a minute, processing the question and his answer.

"Four?" he said finally. "Thereabouts." He went back to his screws and wires.

Well, thought Glen, of course she's gone, that's what she was going to do. Am I going to get all disappointed that she didn't wave good-bye?

He looked bleakly out the window, catching sight of the hatchet in the splitting block, and became aware that his skin was prickling with a tainted sense of uneasiness and reluctance. It felt, in fact, remarkably like the sensation of uncleanness, of needing a shower, a really hot one. He had just taken one, but he was after all in the habit of shaving in the shower, so maybe he would just go back upstairs and drain Anne's water heater. He reached for a mug to pour himself some coffee, needing strength before he submitted his face to the crappy little pink plastic razors he hoped she still kept in the bathroom, and then he paused on his way out of the room to open the cabinet under the kitchen sink.

There in the compost bucket, mixed up with coffee grounds and eggshells, lay the thick, wavy mass of Anne Waverly's hair.

Anne herself was nearly two hundred miles to the south, walking stiffly back across the parking lot that surrounded a big Denny's restaurant just off the freeway. She had used their toilet and bought a cup of coffee to go that she did not intend to drink. Instead, she crawled into the back of the bus, tugged the curtains shut, wrapped herself up in the quilt, and slept.

For once, no one came tapping at the windows ordering her to move on, and she woke hours later, sore all over from Glen's violent attentions and feeling the black burden of a massive emotional hangover, but at least rested, and ravenous. She swallowed a couple of aspirin with the cold coffee and went back into the restaurant, where this time she ordered a full meal. She drank some of the strong, hot coffee that had hit her cup almost before the seat of her jeans had come to rest on the bright orange vinyl, and then she got up to use their rest room again before her food arrived. When she saw the woman in the mirror, she wished she had stayed in her seat: Her hair looked as if it had gotten in the way of a lawn mower, her lips were swollen, her eyes bloodshot, and her jaws and cheekbones had patches of what looked like angry red sunburn that hurt to the touch—Glen had evidently needed a shave. She splashed a great deal of cold water on her face without looking again in the mirror, and ran her wet fingers through her strangely cropped hair. She'd certainly lost the knack of doing her own haircut.

She took her time over the meal, and as she paid the bill, she asked the waitress for the nearest no-appointment haircut place. When the woman gave her the information with only the briefest glance at Anne's head, she earned herself the heftiest tip she'd ever had from a lone woman.

It was a day for freedom—what remained of the day, anyway. A haircut and shampoo left her with a brief cap of hair hugging her scalp, after which a visit to the Recreational Equipment store she stumbled across entertained her for more than an hour and provided her with a long black metal flashlight, a brilliant yellow fleece pullover manufactured out of recycled soda bottles, two pairs of heavy socks, and a delightful gadget with knife blade, pliers, two kinds of screwdriver head, and a can opener. She topped off the holiday mood with a night in a motel, where she took first a deep bath and then a hot shower, watched some delightfully inane and utterly incomprehensible television, and slept for eight hours in a bed designed to fit a ménage à quatre.

The next day it was raining, and she resumed her flight south toward the desert.

Rocinante chugged her way steadily past the well-fed rivers and rich soil of Oregon, and gamely threw herself at the mountain passes. Laden trucks tended to pass her going uphill, but she made it, and Anne dropped with a sigh of satisfaction down into the disturbingly unnatural green of California's central valley, where rice paddies grew at the base of desert hills.

California was even more endless than she remembered, with barely half of it behind her when she finally pulled into a rest stop and allowed Rocinante's poor overworked engine to fall silent for the night. She made up the bus's converting bed and lay on it while the trucks and a few cars pounded by on the freeway fifty feet away, setting the crystal mobile over her head to jingling. At two in the morning she gave up and walked over to use the rest area toilets (avoiding looking at the mirror under the harsh fluorescent lights) and then she walked up and down the dark and deserted picnic area for a while before perching on the edge of a splintered wooden table to watch a feral cat teaching her kittens how to raid a waste bin.

Anne did not know what to think about what she had done the previous night. The sudden elemental upwelling of rage and sheer animal fury frightened her and filled her with self-disgust, that she could be so consumed with the desire to inflict damage on another person, and then by the need to be hurt herself. Her shoulders ached, her wrists and arms were dark with the bruises from Glen's violent hands, but they were nothing next to the inner turmoil.

She did not understand her relationship with Glen McCarthy, had never fully understood it. She had long realized that sex with Glen, a man she both liked and loathed, was her way of cutting herself off from her normal self. Sex was invariably a complicated human endeavor—even when monogamous and marital it was the delight of anthropologists and psychologists, and in this case it seemed to have become necessary to complete the transformation of the cerebral and responsible Anne Waverly into the flightier, rootless personalities of Ana Wakefield or Anita Walls or whatever name Glen had picked out for her. Beyond that, however, she was wary to go: too much analysis, too close an understanding, might well make it impossible to participate in the powerful symbolic energy of the act, leaving her unable to cut her ties and walk away from Anne Waverly.

Now, though, the thing with Glen seemed to have moved from the merely complex to the truly bizarre. It was fortunate, she reflected, that she had already decided to be done with Glen. The next time she might easily find herself going after him with a kitchen knife in her hand.

It was cold and, easing her stiff knee, she got down from the picnic table to return to the folds of Rocinante's bed, and perhaps to sleep.

Still, she thought as she pulled the quilt over her head, she had to admit: it had certainly had its moments…

Late the next afternoon she finally left the interstate and hit the desert, and began to breathe again.

She had forgotten how beautiful it was, how bare and clean and disdainful of human beings. Living a life that was divided between a cabin in the tall trees and concrete buildings in the city, Anne was never greatly conscious of the sky, and the sun and moon were things glimpsed and treasured and quickly forgotten.

Not so in the desert: When the sun was up it was there, unarguably present for all the hours of light, and the division set between the light and the dark was strongly felt. There were no buildings and trees here to filter the daylight and prolong the periods of growing dawn and fading dusk, no city lights to take the edge off the night; just the hot white day and the cold black night, and the brief sly times when one handed over to the other.

All these things Anne had managed to forget, and she was caught out by the rapid fall of night before she could find a good side road down which to park. Instead, she found herself peering forward in Rocinante's dim headlights; she eventually gave up and pulled into a wide shoulder used by trucks.

The road was a minor one, and the cars only occasional, heard at a distance and swishing past to fade equally slowly in the other direction. Anne heated up a can of refried beans and wrapped them with some lettuce and tomatoes in a couple of tortillas, and carried her dinner outside with a bottle of beer to sit on one of the old telephone poles that had been laid down to mark the limits of the pullout.

The night was so still, she could hear the bubbles rising in the bottle from the ground between her feet. She left the second tortilla on the plate because the crunch of teeth on lettuce offended her ears, and because she wanted to listen, and to see, and to breathe.

She wrapped her arms around herself and raised her face to the stars, tentatively taking stock. Her scalp and the bare nape of her neck felt cold and light without the thick covering of hair. Her many aches were already fading, and she was beginning to accept what she was embarked on, starting to feel better about the whole thing, abandoning her classes and the puppies and haring off after Glen's community. No, better than acceptance: she was feeling good. Clean and strong, in fact. Reborn.

With that knowledge, in this place, she could finally admit to herself the deep, hidden reason that her nerves had been stretched to the point of snapping ever since she had seen the contents of Glen's envelope: the desert itself.

Since the days of the Hebrew fathers, and no doubt for unrecorded millennia before then, the desert had called out as a place of refuge for the disenfranchised, the oppressed, and the just plain mad. God spoke out in the desert—or perhaps humankind could simply hear the divine voice more clearly in a place clean of the distractions of busy life.

Anne Waverly had once loved the desert places. They had reached out to her as they had to countless others, men and women who had removed their followers from the temptations and distractions of life in the green places and settled them to grow in the hot, rocky soil of Egypt or Israel or Rajastan. She had loved the southwestern desert and revelled in its purity and silence, in the harsh simplicity of its choices, and would no doubt never have sought out a cabin in the deep woods had life been good to her.

Instead, the desert was where Aaron and Abby had died, and where Anne herself had walked so close to her own death. The desert was inextricably linked in her mind with the color of fresh blood and the nauseating smell of putrid meat.

She knew this. How could she not be aware of the cold feeling in her gut whenever she had to drive through eastern Oregon, or when she was forced to go to Texas or Arizona for research or to give a lecture and fly over all that vast dead land? She loathed the very idea of the desert, and given a choice would never have set foot again outside the rainy Northwest.

When she had laid eyes on Glen's aerial photograph of the Change compound in Arizona's high desert, her stomach had clamped up. It had remained taut, day and night, for the entire time since then, and had begun to loose only when the dry air had actually hit her face.

Funny, she thought as she had a thousand times in recent years, how the disastrous case in Utah eight years ago, four weeks of tension and despair that had ended with her getting shot, had faded in her memory. Not only was the shooting itself wiped from her memory, with the hours before only vague and sketchy, but all the rest had illogically and inexorably bonded itself to the original disaster in her life, Texas, becoming a seamless whole. In Anne's mind, Abby's death blended in with her own shooting, as if hundreds of miles and the ten intervening years of Anne's survival counted as nothing in the eyes of catastrophe. The two pains had merged, the Utah community under investigation tended to blur into the Texas Farm that she and Aaron had joined, and the desert had become one place, an environment inextricably linked with terror and pain.

She had set out fully expecting to spend the coming weeks shouldering the burden of what the desert represented to her, but now that she was actually here on a log with the grit under her boots and the memory-laden smell of the scrub in her nose, the burden was gone.

The relief was a bestowal of grace she could not have hoped for, so unexpected was it. She felt like weeping with release, or laughing with the sheer joy of living. She did neither; she merely sat with all her skin alive to the night, feeling the cold air waking her up and renewing her.

A dog barked far away, and a rooster crowed with irritating frequency from somewhere closer. A point of light moved across the heavens, becoming an airplane bound for Los Angeles or Asia. A car grew and whistled past without slowing, and faded, and when the headlights were gone, Anne raised her face to the heavens and saw the moon being born.

A delicate sliver of bright new moon hung above her in the cloudless expanse of black sky, sharp-edged and brilliant among the hard points of a million stars. A new moon was a good omen, Anne decided—at least, Ana Wakefield was sure to think so. Half-humorously, she lifted her bottle of beer to salute the vision, but before she could put the mouth of the bottle to her lips, to her astonishment the moon dimmed, flickered, and disappeared. From one end up to the other Anne watched the darkness crawl over it and take possession, leaving only a faint light shadow, like the impression that a brief glare makes on the retina. It was difficult not to feel uneasy, impossible not to feel relief when the crescent shape crept back into view. Then it wavered again, and was gone.

She watched for a quarter of an hour, openmouthed and oblivious to the cold and the cramp in her neck as the delicate crescent first was there, then gone. Eventually, whatever it was coming between the moon and its sun—high mountains on the other side of the world? distant masses of clouds? or just the curvature of the earth itself?—cleared away, and the moon resumed its place in the heavens, eternal and innocent as if it had never given reason to doubt its solidity.

For a believer in omens this would have been a mighty portent, the infant moon struggling to find the light that gave it definition. Among primitive peoples it would be the basis for myths about moon-eating demons and cause for lengthy political and theological debates, used by opposing sides to prove both divine support and disapproval of some controversial action.

How would Ana interpret the vision? Anne wondered. A woman who had worked her way through the I Ching (both coins and yarrow sticks), the tarot major and minor, and the consultation of crystals on a string would not take the birth pangs of the moon lightly. Perhaps I should drive over and buy that damned rooster, Anne mused, kill it, and spill its entrails in an attempt to divine the future.

Oh yes; it was easy enough to recognize an omen, in thing was how to read it.

III

Calcinatio

calcine (vb) To heat to a high temperature but

without fusing in order

to drive off volatile matter

or to effect changes

Calcination is the purgation of our Stone

Chapter Seven

From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

The following morning Anne crossed the border into Arizona, and returned to winter.

Working her way south through California, she had seen a concentration of spring akin to the time-lapse film of an opening flower. In the Pacific Northwest the first bulbs had been pushing their determined heads into the cold; by northern California the almond blossoms were out; in the central part of the state the glorious full blush of spring flaunted itself from every apple orchard, every wisteria-draped fence, every front garden, and by the time Anne entered the desert it might have been a Portland summer.

Not, however, in Arizona. The only sign of burgeoning life Anne could see from the window of the roadside coffee shop where she sat with her hands wrapped around a hot cup of coffee was the spray of flame-colored flowers on the tips of the ocotillo cactus, and even those had tufts of snow weighting them down.

For the past half hour she had amused herself with watching snow flurries approach from the west. They began as a dark shadow on the distant rise of the highway, a clearly drawn line that advanced steadily toward her. The thin sunshine would be blotted out and a whirl of thick flakes would pat against the glass for a minute or two before the flurry swept on by, leaving the road clear but for another dark line moving down the far-off rise.

Driving conditions were disconcerting but not dangerous, as long as Anne took shelter among those other refugees from the northern winters, the trailers from Idaho and the recreational vehicles with Manitoba plates. They all lined up obediently in the slow lane, nose to tail at three miles above the speed limit while the interstate big-rigs thundered past on the outside, sucking at Rocinante and the other frivolous beings with the vacuum of their passing. What had driven Anne to seek the shelter and coffee of the dubious-looking restaurant was not hazard, but comfort: Rocinante's heater, a vestigial entity at the best of times, seemed to have retreated entirely into the shell behind the back bumper.

The coffee was stale, but the buckwheat pancakes Anne had ordered with so little confidence turned out to be fresh and fulfilled the requirements of their kind to combine a hearty mealiness with the miraculous ability to absorb more maple syrup than any other substance known to science. The café had even disdained the modern notion of miserly glass jiggers of syrup in favor of the traditional metal flip-top jug, so that the final bites Anne lifted with her fork were as thoroughly saturated as the first had been.

It was tempting to stay within reach of this unexpected oasis and use the anticipation of what the cook would do with other diner staples—chicken-fried steak, say, and apple pie à la mode—as a means of getting through the heater repairs (standing with her head in Rocinante's innards and her backside hanging out in the snow). However, it was not to be; much better to make use of the repairs later, when they could become something more than mere repairs.

With a sigh, Anne dropped a tip on the table, carried her tab to the register, and pushed back out into the winter.

Even with long underwear, her new yellow recycled soda-bottle pullover, a padded jacket, wool hat, and gloves, the cold was pervasive, and Anne stopped every hour to thaw her fingers over a cup of wayside coffee.

The original plan, Glen's plan, had been for her to pass through the town of Prescott and meet her local contact there. However, vague memory told her that Prescott was at a considerably greater altitude than the road she was on now, and a parking-lot conversation with some tourists getting out of a snow-laden camper had confirmed that yes, Prescott was picturesquely deep in snow. However, the couple assured her that the roads were clear and safe all the way to Phoenix, and urged her not to miss the experience. It was an appointment she had in mind, not an experience, but she thanked them anyway.

She did, after all, have chains for the tires, as well as warm blankets and plenty of food if she got stuck, and although she would have welcomed a real excuse to bypass the local agent who was charged with keeping an eye on her, she thought a few inches of snow a coward's way out.

So she drove to Prescott and found it as pretty as advertised, although the snow in the streets was treacherous, its fresh white purity concealing frozen slush and a substratum of slick ice from an earlier melt. She negotiated a parking place and picked her cautious way into the designated place of meeting, and found a table.

Her contact arrived before her coffee did. He was even younger than she had thought when she spotted him through the steamed-up window of his car in the street outside, and she watched without enthusiasm as he came in the door and ran an elaborately casual eye over the crowded restaurant before doing a theatrical double take at the sight of her. He pasted a look of astonishment onto his fresh young face as he wound through the tables in her direction. An actor, he wasn't.

He greeted her by her new name, saying his own as if reminding her of it while he pumped her hand up and down and expressed his pleasure and surprise at seeing her in Prescott. He looked about nineteen, red-haired, jug-eared, earnest, and eager to get things right, and she hadn't the heart to tell him that probably half the people in the room knew that he was the local FBI man.

Instead, she played her part. She invited him to sit down and maintained her side of the meaningless conversation until he was satisfied that the neighboring tables had no interest in them, at which point he lowered his voice to get down to business. It did not take long to reassure him that yes, she had his phone number memorized, yes she would call for help if she needed it, yes she knew how to keep in touch with Glen, and no she did not need anything. She took a few minutes to explain to him just what she wanted: no interference, no drop-ins, no clever surveillance. His disappointment was profound, but with the authority of Glen McCarthy behind her, she was satisfied that he would not try to put together his own operation behind her back. She relaxed and thanked him nicely, and told him again that she would definitely call if she needed anything at all. Then she left him to pay the tab.

Anne shambled out of the restaurant feeling like a curmudgeon—no, like a bear: a vastly experienced, irritable, wily old bear disturbed too early from a winter's sleep. She climbed behind the wheel, and paused to tug Rocinante's stained mirror around. Same old lines on her face, same new brutal haircut on her head; she made a face into the mirror, baring her teeth and growling at her misted reflection. Where on earth did the government find so many fresh-faced youngsters? she asked herself sourly, reaching down to turn the key, waiting for Rocinante's engine to rattle into life. And why do they all have to be so damned cute?

Christ, Anne, she thought. Don't be disgusting. What the hell is wrong with you?

It was at that point that she realized that something was awry. Sardonic self-criticism and easy mild profanity should not be her response; those were straight from the voice of Anne Waverly, and Anne had no business here. Ana Wakefield was proving very tardy in taking her place behind Rocinante's wheel.

Anne sat in the bus, not aware that the engine was running, staring unseeing at the cracked plastic of the steering wheel and searching internally for the person she had once been: interested, gentle, patient, contemplative Annie, now Ana, a Seeker who believed rather than analyzed, who was open to ideas, not cynical about motivations, concerned with the individual and the immediate, not with patterns and theories.

Ana had to take over; it was as simple as that. There was no way Anne Waverly could act the part in Change without endangering herself and others, because it would be an act, and obvious, and dangerous as hell.

Gradually, imperceptibly, her fingers and toes grew colder and her breathing rate slowed, and the analytical scholar she had forged, through defense as much as inclination, took a small step back, and then another. Ana Wakefield was born in that bus in the snow, as curiosity began to awaken.

First off, she had to forget the details. She had never heard of Steven Change, never seen an aerial photograph of the Arizona compound or a photocopy of its building application, never reviewed the community's Web site or studied its tax returns. These were all thing she should not know; that would only trip her up and get in the way of her innocence.

Instead of facts, she had to concentrate on how she felt about Change, to open herself up and make her mind receptive to its nuances. She already had the impression of Change as a growing, energetic, interesting group of people with a strong leader filled with original ideas. Yes, she knew that Glen had reservations, and yes, an ex-member had complained at great length about the secrecy and limitations he had encountered, but that did not explain the almost excessive openness the community displayed when it came to the school or to visitors to its frequent retreat sessions, nor did it account for the presence of a number of educated, intelligent people—a professor of economics, a doctor, several schoolteachers, and a rabbi—who had dropped out of their former lives to join the community. Granted, even the most critical of minds could become gullible, open to the point of emptiness when confronted by the mumbo jumbo of another discipline. And she could not forget that boy's odd and disturbing nightmare drawing of the man in the giant pear surrounded by monsters. Still, Change promised to be sufficiently complex to be interesting.

Who knew? Ana might even learn something there.

Ana became aware that she was sitting in Rocinante staring out at the plowed drifts of snow, and had been for some time. She shook herself mentally and reached for wheel and gearshift, then hastily drew back her bare hands and patted her pockets until she found her gloves. Once they were on, she put Rocinante into first gear, drove out of the parking lot, and turned toward Jerome.

It began to snow along the narrow, mountainous road, but the fat flakes seemed to be blowing about rather than sticking, so she pressed on. The flurries dove toward her hypnotically, a moving tunnel she was driving into. Oncoming cars startled her with their nonchalant speed, but she was also encouraged by their presence—if they contained irritated drivers forced to return by a road closure ahead, one of them anyway would surely give her some sign as to the hopelessness of her progress.

Trees and sheer cliffs and the infinitely reassuring white lines of the road made up Ana's world, and she started singing to herself as a means of keeping alert, and talking aloud to Rocinante about the camber and slope of the surface, the unseen depths off to their right, the speed of the oncoming madmen, and the weather.

Coming around one sharp and completely blind turn, she was plunged into icy horror when her entire windshield was suddenly filled with a Winnebago out of Minnesota, its driver trying to avoid the overhanging cliffs by driving along the center line. She slapped her hand onto the horn and her foot gingerly on the brakes, bracing for the impact. The driver of the tin box seemed to think her panic unjustified; he clamped his hand onto his own horn in reply, drowning out Rocinante's thin wail, and pulled his vehicle just enough to the right that they passed each other with nothing more than a tap on the back of Rocinante's side mirror and a certain momentary insecurity of the right-hand tires.

Ana furiously rolled down the window and shook her fist at the behemoth, but he was already around a corner, gone from sight, and the only recipients of her indignation were the equally frustrated drivers of the mud-stained pickups and four-wheel-drive vehicles caught behind the man from Minnesota. Ana rolled up the window, shivering from the combination of cold and adrenaline, and deliberately forced her mind back to the road ahead.

With her eyes on the pavement, fighting to separate what she needed to see from the constant distraction of the swirling snowflakes, she noticed nothing else of interest the rest of the way down from the mountains aside from a handful of small waterfalls and one valiantly blooming shrub, its pink blossoms looking a bit stunned against the gray stone and white snow.

The small town of Jerome, perched on a steep hill above the mines that had given birth to it, was a welcome interruption as well as being a sign that the worst of the drive was over—and indeed, by the time she was actually in town, the snow had turned to a dull rain. Her target was Sedona, just a few miles away, but she decided to stop here and piece her nerves back together. She parked alongside the road, careful to turn the wheels into the curb, pulled her knit hat down across her ears, and got out.

The air was magnificent, clean and cold and damp and fragrant. She could smell smoke from well-seasoned firewood, and wet dog from the recesses of the porch behind her, and a faint waft of pipe tobacco. A symphony of odors, but standing out, clear as two instruments in a duet, came the fragrances of fresh coffee and hot chili peppers. She turned, smiling, and went into the café.

An hour later, when she came back out onto the street, she was warm inside and out, her nose still running from the spice in the chili. She tugged on her wool hat, got in behind the wheel, and launched Rocinante's nose downhill, out of the mountains toward the Mecca of the New Age, the town of Sedona.

Chapter Eight

From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

Sedona had changed, dramatically. Drastically, even. When Anne and Aaron had spent the summer driving from the East Coast to grad school in Berkeley the year before they were married, they had spent a couple of days hiking the red rock cliffs and sleeping beside Oak Creek. She remembered that some of the New Age residents had talked about the recent "discovery" of metaphysical vortices, the earth's "power points", but for the most part the town was simply another quiet artists' community, supported by visitors from Flagstaff and Phoenix and a growing population of retirees attracted by the clear air, the cooler summers, and the stunning beauty of the area.

Now the only thing that made her certain it was the same place was the unchanging arrangement of red cliffs, dark with the rain, that looked down on the town. Ana had reckoned that differences would be apparent. The phenomenal growth of New Age ideas over the last twenty years had put Sedona on the map of must-sees for the crystal, aura, and alien-abduction sets. Somehow, though, she had visualized the changes along the lines of longhairs camped along the road selling each other moonstones and tie-dyed T-shirts; she was unprepared for the great clusters of expensive new homes with picture windows looking out on the vortex-bearing rock upthrusts, and for the sprawl of motels, drugstores, and—God!—car dealerships.

Not until the far end of town did Ana begin to recognize a few buildings, and by then she was so put off by this blatant defilement of Anne's past that she drove on through and out of town, heading up the precipitous Oak Creek road that proved blessedly free of the intrusions of civilization. After a few miles, she pulled over into a wide spot, cut the engine, and got out to look around her.

Yes, she thought; this is where we slept, back there above that boulder. We'd been driving for hours and hours in the heat, and we got in at night, and couldn't see a damn thing except by the headlights of Rocinante's predecessor. In the morning Aaron got up and made us coffee on the pump-up campstove, and brought me a cup, and we made love in the zip-together sleeping bags. Afterward, there was a blue jay sitting on that branch there, that very branch (although the tree was smaller then), and it flew away when we began to laugh. Aaron always said that morning was when Abby was conceived, and I never argued with him, even though I knew it was ten days later, on our first night in the apartment in Berkeley.

Cars went by on the road, pickups and delivery trucks from Flagstaff and RVs from Montana, but Ana heard only the wooded silence of that distant day and the familiar low, loving groan of the man who was going to be her husband; it was cold, but she felt only the cool air of an early summer's morning on her face and the faint imprint of a pair of rather poorly made elkskin boots beneath her feet, high elkskin moccasin boots worn by a young woman with long hair, a woman who had not only a full scholarship, but a man who adored her and a life opening up before her.

Ah, Annie, she said to the young woman giggling in the sleeping bag with her man's rough black beard buried in her neck; Annie, it's God's true blessing that we cannot see our future, because we'd never be able to bear it if we had any warning.

The blare of an air horn brought her back to herself, and she looked up to find the red cliffs dim behind low, wet clouds.

She stood for a moment longer to look down at the spot where the tent had been. Good-bye, Annie, she said. Good-bye, Aaron. Enjoy each other. Cherish your daughter. Be grateful for the life you have left.

Despite the cold drizzle, Sedona was bustling with the incongruous life of commerce. On this side of the town, however, it seemed more familiar, a place of galleries and coffeehouses instead of supermarkets and garages, the vehicles at the curbs leaning more toward mud-spattered four-wheel-drives and less to shiny travel trailers. Ana slowed to allow a family in bright, worn anoraks to scuttle across the road in front of her, then pulled into a parking place between a muddy Willy's Jeep with a bumper sticker that declared FRANKLY MY DEAR I DON'T GIVE A DAM and a newish Mercedes with a window sticker showing three almond-eyed aliens. Rocinante's om mandala fit right in.

For the better part of two hours, she wandered up and down the street, in and out of shops, smiling at the locals and talking to the shopkeepers. She bought a delicate blue crystal on a deerskin thong, a pair of thick wool socks made in Ecuador, three slim books on Sedona, and a newspaper, which she took into a small cafe that seemed to cater mostly to scruffy vegetarians rather than the polished tourist classes. She ordered a latte and a slice of apple pie from the waitress, a girl with thick black braids, two gold studs in her nose, and a long-sleeved T-shirt with a Tibetan lotus blossom on it, and then she opened the paper to immerse herself in the printed word and the overheard conversations of the locals.

The coffee was very good, the whole-wheat crust on the pie less successful, and the news and conversation had more to do with small town politics and economics than with the otherworldly considerations Sedona was known for. True, the couple at the next table was earnestly discussing the miraculous reappearance of a medicine wheel a week after the local parks department had kicked the earlier one apart, scattering the rock design in all directions, but the six people gathered around the table in back of her were involved in a vigorous debate concerning the area south of town around the Chapel of the Holy Cross, and although the New Age books in the bag next to Ana's elbow had told her that the Chapel had been built (all unknowing) on the site of a powerful vortex, the four bearded men and two flannel-shirted women were more interested in the sewage problems involving the houses being constructed in that area and the need for a traffic light where the access road met the highway.

It was very comfortable, this snug little coffeehouse with its woodstove, dark walls, and the amateur paintings of red rock buttes done in a realistic style alternating with visionary depictions of those same rocks psychedelically glowing with the energy of a vortex. The air inside smelled of wet clothing and baked goods and was filled with low music, the clatter of pans in the kitchen, and the hum of voices discussing matters of no earthly interest to her. She felt at home here, just one more aging refugee from the sixties, with no lectures, no papers to read or to write, no Glen watching over her shoulder. All she lacked was a dog to lie across her feet, and she suspected that if she poked her head into the kitchen and asked, she'd even be provided with one of those.

Ana smiled into the dregs of foam in her glass, tipped it back to allow the coffee-stained island of foam to slide slowly down into her mouth, and put it down with a small sigh. She was of an age to know that a person had to take her pleasures when and how they came, and not to grasp after them as they faded. Sitting here had been very pleasant, but it did not, as her grandfather used to say, pay the bills.

The tip Ana left, nearly matching the size of the amount she owed for her latte and pie, was her offering of thanks to the resident deity responsible for this moment of calm. Restored, she buttoned her jacket, pulled her hat down over her brief hair, and went back out into the street.

The rain had let up, though low clouds still hid the taller of the surrounding hills. Rocinante was not far away, but she was not about to get back on her mount and ride away, attractive as the thought might be, for five doors down from the cafe lay the Changing Earth Crafts Gallery, the shop that had been her circuitous goal during the entire afternoon.

She started in the direction of the shop that Change ran, glancing in the windows of the intervening shops with no intention of entering any of them until all her attention was seized by a small display of silver jewelry arranged across a length of dark brown velveteen. Most of the pieces were conventional enough—arching dolphins and delicate fairies—but one piece caught her and would not let her go.

It was a crescent moon, but instead of being the usual small wisp of silver, this one was larger around than Ana's thumbnail and had a thickness and texture to it that invited the fingers. And if the new moon shape wasn't enough, calling out from her vision in the desert, above the moon the cord passed through a single red bead that could be the double of the one Ana had in the medicine pouch hanging from Rocinante's mirror, the remnant of Abby's favorite necklace.

Ana smiled at herself, started reluctantly to move on. Then she stopped. An omen was an omen, after all, and who was she to fight it?

The moon necklace cost little more than the weight of the raw silver, and it dropped around her neck as if she had worn it for years. She refused a box, rubbed the satisfying shape between thumb and forefinger, and zipped her jacket up over it against the cold.

A bell tinkled overhead when she entered the Change gallery, and the pretty young woman at the desk raised her head to give her the standard greeting, grateful and hopeful, of a shopkeeper on a slow day. Ana started to respond in the browser's usual way, a quick phrase and a duck of the head, when her eyes caught on the other person in the shop; the words in her mouth turned to dust, and shock froze her spine.

Next to the woman sat Abby, hunched up on a stool, weaving a yarn rope from a wooden spool with four small nails in it, one side of her mouth pursed up in concentration, her hair its usual wild mass of intractable black curls. Abby looked up from her work to the young woman at her side, and then glanced at Ana, and the rigid shock melted into a shudder of mixed relief and despair, because of course it was not Abby. Abby was dead. This was another child, a pleasant enough child, no doubt, who resembled Anne's daughter strongly in her hair and her eyes and the quirk of her lips, a child who was looking wary now at a powerful current of something she did not understand.

Ana tore her eyes from Abby's double and glanced at the woman, who she assumed was the child's mother and whose face was now looking positively apprehensive.

First meetings are dangerous moments. Ana pulled off her hat with one hand, ran the other over the brief bristle that covered her skull, and gave a shaky laugh.

"How weird," she said to the woman. "For a second there I could have sworn the child was someone I knew a long time ago. She's the spitting image of my sister's kid at that age. How old is she? Five? Six?"

"Almost six," the shopkeeper said, still cautious.

Ana shook her head and took a few steps forward, careful to stay closer to the mother than to the child. "My goodness," she said to the little girl. "That's quite a rope you've made."

It was, too. It looped around and around on the child's jean-covered lap and trailed off onto the floor, yards and yards of tubular weaving, uneven and full of gaps but gloriously bright, almost fluorescent in intense shades of alternating orange, fuchsia, lime green, and yellow. It was obviously a work of great dedication. "May I ask what you're going to do with all that?"

The child looked down at the spool in her hands, and after a moment of silence, the woman spoke up. "She's thinking of making a rug with it, to put on the floor next to her bed,"

Ana studied the immense pile of soft yarn rope, and raised her eyebrow in puzzlement at the mother, who let go of the last traces of apprehension at being in an empty shop with a stranger who had reacted oddly to the sight of her daughter. She said, "Like a braided rug, you know? Show the lady how it's done, Dulcie."

Obediently, the child laid down her spool and crochet hook and slid down from the stool to dig around in the bright mass until she came up with the end, two feet of an almost neon orange dimmed only slightly by collected grime. This she laid on the counter, holding it in place with two fingers, and began deliberately to coil the rope around the center.

"Ah," said Ana. "I see. In fact, I have one like that on the floor of my bus. Only this one is brighter than most of the ones I've seen."

"A lot brighter," agreed the woman.

"It's going to be magnificent," Ana told the little girl.

This pronouncement brought the child's head up, so that for the first time she was looking straight at Ana. After a moment, she smiled, a shy and brilliant smile that acknowledged Ana as a true and kindred spirit, and Ana felt as if she'd been kicked in the stomach, because it was Abby, sharing a moment of complicity against Aaron and the world. In another moment she would be crying for the first time in years.

Abruptly, Ana moved away, reaching blindly for the first thing she came across, which turned out to be a crudely thrown pottery mug with a quail drawn into the side. The bird was nicely done, simple, brief lines bobbing with the essence of quailness, even if the glaze had slipped into it, and the shape of the cup was inviting in the hand. She held it for a moment, finding it oddly soothing, then took it over to the counter.

"I broke my favorite mug last week," she told the woman. "Funny how certain shapes seem just right, isn't it? And the bird is great."

"Isn't it? In fact—is this one of Jason's, Dulcie?" she asked the child. Dulcie looked up from her work, nodded, and dropped her head again. "I thought so. Jason is Dulcie's brother," she told Ana. "Not much of a potter, I'm afraid, but he can draw beautifully."

Ana asked hesitantly, "Is Jason your son?"

The shopkeeper gaped at her for a moment, and then laughed loudly, a noise more uncomfortable than amused, and shook her head in rejection of the idea. "Oh, no, no. And Dulcie's not my daughter. She's just a good friend who's helping out in the store for a day or two. Aren't you, honey?" she said to the girl, and reached out to give her an awkward hug, which Dulcie allowed but did not respond to.

Ana seized the small opening and introduced herself. "I'm Ana Wakefield," she told the woman. "I just got into town, and I'll probably be staying for a while. You have a great shop."

"Carla Mclntyre," said the woman in return, and picked up the mug to check on the price. "And the shop's not mine, it's a communal effort." It sounded like someone else's phrase, but she chose not to continue with the quote. Instead, she wrote up a sales slip and gave it to Ana, saying, "That's ten fifty."

It was more than the mug was worth, but Ana meekly handed her the money and waited for her to wrap it and put it into a bag. She thanked Carla, said good-bye to her and to the child, and went back out onto the street, the bell tinkling behind her.

Thirty-five minutes later, right on time, the shop closed. On the doorstep Carla, bent over the lock, felt Dulcie tug at her sleeve. She pushed away the brief irritation she felt at the child's interference with the always difficult task of locking up, which involved inserting the key and then easing it out the tiniest fraction of an inch before jiggling it and hoping it would turn.

"What is it, honey?" she asked absently. She really was going to have to insist that someone fix the lock. One of these days it wasn't going to work at all.

Her only answer was another tug. Hopeless to try locking the door with the child hanging on her arm. She summoned the patience of the truly wise and reminded herself that a child would lead them.

Probably not this child, but one never knew.

She straightened up and looked to see what had caught Dulcie's interest, and found herself staring down the road at a human backside emerging from the remains of an exploded engine.

That was an instant's impression, but on closer examination Carla decided that the assorted parts and tools lined up along the edge of the sidewalk were too orderly for an explosion, and besides, she hadn't heard anything. Someone was just working on his car.

"Yes, I see, Dulcie," she said, and turned again to the lock. "The man has just chosen a strange place to fix his engine,"

Ah, success, and the satisfying click of the bolt sliding across. Carla was so pleased at this minor victory, it was a moment before she registered the fact that the child Dulcie had spoken.

"What did you say, honey?" Carla's voice slid upward in astonishment and excitement: Dulcie could talk, and occasionally had in the weeks she had lived at Change, but she had been silent all that day.

Now, however, she even repeated herself.

"I said, It's the lady."

Carla had been instructed not to fuss if Dulcie decided to verbalize. However, It wasn't easy to be natural, thinking how pleased Steven would be when he heard.

"Lady?" she said. "What lady?"

Dulcie apparently thought that Carla could figure that one out by herself, because she did not answer, merely put the hand that was not busy carrying the canvas bag with the future rug in it into her pocket, and studied the blue-jeaned buttocks of the person emerging from the Volkswagen bus.

Ana dropped back to her knee again, holding a length of frayed tubing in the greasy fingertips of a hand clothed in fingerless wool gloves. She reached behind her for the toolbox, rummaged through it a bit, and then seemed to notice her audience.

"Hi," she said cheerfully. Her frozen hands found a roll of duct tape in the box. "Hello, Dulcie. Going home now?" She began to pick at the end of the tape with a thumbnail, with limited success. Both hands and tape were too cold.

"What are you doing?" Dulcie asked her. Amazing, thought Carla. Three times in a matter of minutes.

"Well," said Ana, "my old friend here sometimes has things go wrong with her. Today it's her heater, which is not very convenient, considering how cold it is. So I thought I should try to patch it together before I turn into an icicle. Can you get that end loose for me?" She held out the roll of silvery tape to Dulcie, who put her bag down between her feet, pulled off her mittens, and worked at the end of the thick tape until she had a half-inch or so of corner free.

"That's great," said Ana. "I can get it from there.".

Dulcie gave her back the roll, and frowned as she saw Ana take the loose corner between her right front teeth and tug free a length of tape with a loud, ripping sound.

"You shouldn't do that," the little girl said to Ana in disapproval. "Your teeth will fall out."

"Will they?" asked Ana. "You mean like this?" She worked her tongue across the roof of her mouth and then reached up with her black fingers to pop loose the small plastic plate that held her other front teeth, the two false ones on the left. She then grinned at the child with her jaws clenched, poking the tip of her tongue through the hole left by the missing bridge.

Dulcie stared openmouthed at the gap in Ana's teeth, and at the thin device of pink plastic and wire with the two neat white teeth attached that lay in the palm of the greasy woolen glove, and then burst into a paroxysm of giggles. Tears came to her eyes at the absurdity of the lady with no teeth, and she bent over and laughed so hard, she probably would have wet herself if Carla hadn't made her use the toilet just before they left the shop.

There is nothing more contagious than a child's giggles, and Ana's mouth twitched, then she started to laugh, and soon she was reduced to a weak-kneed collapse onto the wet street and rather needing a toilet herself. Even Carla, who had little sense of humor at the best of times and who was moreover distracted by the unexpected descent of the problematic, enigmatic Dulcie into an ordinary silly five-year-old, even Carla began to grin at the two of them.