The Servants of Twilight

PART ONE: THE HAG

It began in sunshine, not on a dark and stormy night.

She wasn't prepared for what happened, wasn't on guard. Who would have expected trouble on a lovely Sunday afternoon like that?

The sky was clear and blue. It was surprisingly warm, for the end of February, even in southern California. The breeze was gentle and scented with winter flowers. It was one of those days when everyone seemed destined to live forever.

Christine Scavello had gone to South Coast Plaza in Costa Mesa to do some shopping, and she had taken Joey with her. He liked the big mall.

He was fascinated by the stream that splashed through one wing of the building, down the middle of the public promenade and over a gentle waterfall. He was also intrigued by the hundreds of trees and plants that thrived indoors, and he was a born people-watcher. But most of all he liked the carousel in the central courtyard. In return for one ride on the carousel, he would tag along happily and quietly while Christine spent two or three hours shopping.

Joey was a good kid, the best. He never whined, never threw tantrums or complained. Trapped in the house on a long, rainy day, he could entertain himself for hour after hour and not once grow bored or restless or crabby the way most kids would.

To Christine, Joey sometimes seemed to be a little old man in a six-year-old boy's small body. Occasionally he said the most amazingly grown-up things, and he usually had the patience of an adult, and he was often wiser than his years.

But at other times, especially when he asked where his daddy was or why his daddy had gone away-or even when he didn't ask but just stood there with the question shimmering in his eyes-he looked so innocent, fragile, so heartbreakingly vulnerable that she just had to grab him and hug him.

Sometimes the hugging wasn't merely an expression of her love for him, but also an evasion of the issue that he had raised.

She had never found a way to tell him about his father, and it was a subject she wished he would just drop until she was ready to bring it up. He was too young to understand the truth, and she didn't want to lie to him-not too blatantly, anyway-or resort to cutesy euphemisms.

He had asked about his father just a couple of hours ago, on the way to the mall. She had said, "Honey, your daddy just wasn't ready for the responsibility of a family."

"Didn't he like me?"

"He never even knew you, so how could he not like you? He was gone before you were born."

"Oh, yeah? How could I have been borned if he wasn't here?"

the boy had asked skeptically.

"That's something you'll learn in sex education class at school," she had said, amused.

"When? "

"Oh, in about six or seven more years, I guess."

"That's a long time to wait." He had sighed." I'll bet he didn't like me and that's why he went away."

Frowning, she had said, "You put that thought right out of your mind, sugar. It was me your daddy didn't like."

"You? He didn't like you?"

"That's right."

Joey had been silent for a block or two, but finally he had said, "Boy, if he didn't like you, he musta been just plain dumb."

Then, apparently sensing that the subject made her uneasy, he had changed it. A little old man in a six-year-old boy's small body.

The fact was that Joey was the result of a brief, passionate, reckless, and stupid affair. Sometimes, looking back on it, she couldn't believe that she had been so naive. or so desperate to prove her womanhood and independence. It was the only relationship in Christine's life that qualified as a "fling," the only time she had ever been swept away. For that man, for no other man before or since, for that man alone, she had put aside her morals and principles and common sense, heeding only the urgent desires of her flesh. She had told herself that it was Romance with a capital R, not just love but the Big Love, even Love At First Sight. Actually she had just been weak, vulnerable, and eager to make a fool of herself. Later, when she realized that Mr.

Wonderful had lied to her and used her with cold, cynical disregard for her feelings, when she discovered that she had given herself to a man who was utterly without respect for her and who lacked even a minimal sense of responsibility, she had been deeply ashamed. Eventually she realized there was a point at which shame and remorse became self-indulgent and nearly as lamentable as the sin that had occasioned those emotions, so she put the shabby episode behind her and vowed to forget it.

Except that Joey kept asking who his father was, where his father was, why his father had gone away. And how did you tell a six-year-old about your libidinous urges, the treachery of your own heart, and your regrettable capacity for occasionally making a complete fool of yourself? If it could be done, she hadn't seen the way. She was just going to have to wait until he was grown up enough to understand that adults could sometimes be just as dumb and confused as little kids.

Until then, she stalled him with vague answers and evasions that satisfied neither of them.

She only wished he wouldn't look quite so lost, quite so small and vulnerable when he asked about his father. It made her want to cry.

She was haunted by the vulnerability she perceived in him.

He was never ill, an extremely healthy child, and she was grateful for that. Nevertheless, she was always reading magazine and newspaper articles about childhood diseases, not merely polio and measles and whooping cough-he had been immunized for those and more-but horrible, crippling, incurable illnesses, often rare although no less frightening for their rarity. She memorized the early-warning signs of a hundred exotic maladies and was always on the watch for those symptoms in Joey.

Of course, like any active boy, he suffered his share of cuts and bruises, and the sight of his blood always scared the hell out of her, even if it was only one drop from a shallow scratch. Her concern about Joey's health was almost an obsession, but she never quite allowed it to actually become an obsession, for,he was aware of the psychological problems that could develop in a child with an overly protective mother.

That Sunday afternoon in February, when death suddenly stepped up and grinned at Joey, it wasn't in the form of the viruses and bacteria about which Christine worried. It was just an old woman with stringy gray hair, a pallid face, and gray eyes the shade of dirty ice.

When Christine and Joey left the mall by way of Bullock's Department Store, it was five minutes past three. Sun glinted off automobile chrome and windshield glass from one end of the broad parking lot to the other. Their silver-gray Pontiac Firebird was in the row directly in front of Bullock's doors, the twelfth car in the line, and they were almost to it when the old woman appeared.

She stepped out from between the Firebird and a white Ford van, directly into their path.

She didn't seem threatening at first. She was a bit odd, sure, but nothing worse than that. Her shoulder-length mane of thick gray hair looked windblown, although only a mild breeze washed across the lot. She was in her sixties, perhaps even early seventies, forty years older than Christine, but her face wasn't deeply lined, and her skin was baby-smooth; she had the unnatural puffiness that was often associated with cortisone injections. Pointed nose. Small mouth, thick lips. A round, dimpled chin. She was wearing a simple turquoise necklace, a long-sleeved green blouse, green skirt, green shoes. On her plump hands were eight rings, all green: turquoise, malachite, emeralds. The unrelieved green suggested a uniform of some kind.

She blinked at Joey, grinned, and said, "My heavens, aren't you a handsome young man?"

Christine smiled. Unsolicited compliments from strangers were nothing new to Joey. With his dark hair, intense blue eyes, and well-related features, he was a strikingly good-looking child.

"Yes, sir, a regular little movie star," the old woman said.

"Thank you," Joey said, blushing.

Christine got a closer look at the stranger and had to revise her initial impression of grandmotherliness. There were specks of lint on the old woman's badly wrinkled skirt, two small food stains on her blouse, and a sprinkling of dandruff on her shoulders. Her stockings bagged at the knees, and the left one had a run in it. She was holding a smoldering cigarette, and the fingers of her right hand were yellow with nicotine. She was one of those people from whom kids should never accept candy or cookies or any other treat-not because she seemed the type to poison or molest children (which she did not), but because she seemed the type to keep a dirty kitchen. Even on close inspection, she didn't appear dangerous, just unkempt.

Leaning toward Joey, grinning down at him, paying no attention whatever to Christine, she said, "What's your name, young man? Can you tell me your name?"

"Joey," he said shyly.

"How old are you, Joey?"

"Six."

"Only six and already pretty enough to make the ladies swoon! "

Joey fidgeted with embarrassment and clearly wished he could bolt for the car. But he stayed where he was and behaved courteously, the way his mother had taught him.

The old woman said, "I'll bet a dollar to a doughnut that I know your birthday."

"I don't have a doughnut," Joey said, taking the bet literally, solemnly warning her that he wouldn't be able to pay off if he lost.

"Isn't that cute?" the old woman said to him." So perfectly, wonderfully cute. But I know. You were born on Christmas Eve."

"Nope," Joey said." February second."

"February second? Oh, now, don't joke around with me," she said, still ignoring Christine, still grinning broadly at Joey, wagging one nicotine-yellowed finger at him." Sure as shootin', you were born December twenty-fourth."

Christine wondered what the old woman was leading up to.

Joey said, "Mom, you tell her. February second. Does she owe me a dollar?"

"No, she doesn't owe you anything, honey," Christine said.

"It wasn't a real bet."

"Well," he said, "if I'd lost, I couldn'tve given her any doughnut anyway, so I guess it's okay if she don't give me a dollar."

Finally the old woman raised her head and looked at Christine.

Christine started to smile but stopped when she saw the stranger's eyes.

They were hard, cold, angry. They were neither the eyes of a grandmother nor those of a harmless old bag lady.

There was power in them-and stubbornness and flinty resolve.

The woman wasn't smiling any more. either.

What'.9 going on here?

Before Christine could speak, the woman said, "He was born on Christmas Eve, wasn't he? Hmmm? Wasn't he'?" She spoke with such urgency, with such force that she sprayed spittle at Christine. She didn't wait for an answer, either, but hurried on: "You're lying about February second.

You're just trying to hide, both of you, but I know the truth. I know.

You can't fool me.

Not me."

Suddenly she seemed dangerous, after all.

Christine put a hand on Joey's shoulder and urged him around the crone, toward the car.

But the woman stepped sideways, blocking them. She waved her cigarette at Joey, glared at him, and said, "I know who you are. I know what you are, everything about you, everything.

Better believe it. Oh, yes, yes, I know, yes."

A nut, Christine thought, and her stomach twisted. Jesus. A crazy old lady, the kind who might be capable of anything. God, please let her be harmless.

Looking bewildered, Joey backed away from the woman, grabbed his mother's hand and squeezed tight.

"Please get out of our way," Christine said, trying to maintain a calm and reasonable tone of voice, wanting very much not to antagonize.

The old woman refused to move. She brought the cigarette to her lips.

Her hand was shaking.

Holding Joey's hand, Christine tried to go around the stranger.

But again the woman blocked them. She puffed nervously on her cigarette and blew smoke out her nostrils. She never took her eyes off Joey.

Christine looked around the parking lot. A few people were getting out of a car two rows away, and two young men were at the end of this row, heading in the other direction, but no one was near enough to help if the crazy woman became violent.

Throwing down her cigarette, hyperventilating, eyes bulging, looking like a big malicious toad, the woman said, "Oh, yeah, I know your ugly, vicious, hateful secrets, you little fraud."

Christine's heart began to hammer.

"Get out of our way," she said sharply, no longer trying to remain-or even able to remain-calm.

" You can't fool me with your play-acting-"

Joey began to cry.

— and your phony cuteness. Tears won't help, either."

For the third time, Christine tried to go around the woman and was blocked again.

The harridan's face hardened in anger." I know exactly what you are, you little monster."

Christine shoved, and the old woman stumbled backward.

Pulling Joey with her, Christine hurried to the car, feeling as if she were in a nightmare, running in slow-motion.

The car door was locked. She was a compulsive door-locker.

She wished that, for once, she had been careless.

The old woman scuttled in behind them, shouting something that Christine couldn't hear because her ears were filled with the frantic pounding of her heart and with Joey's crying.

" Mom!"

Joey was almost jerked out of her grasp. The old woman had her talons hooked in his shirt.

"Let go of him, damn you!" Christine said.

"Admit it!" the old woman shrieked at him." Admit what you are!"

Christine shoved again.

The woman wouldn't let go.

Christine struck her, open-handed, first on the shoulder, then across the face.

The old woman tottered backward, and Joey twisted away from her, and his shirt tore.

Somehow, even with shaking hands, Christine fitted the key into the lock, opened the car door, pushed Joey inside. He scrambled across to the passenger's seat, and she got behind the wheel and pulled the door shut with immense relief. Locked it.

The old woman peered in the driver's-side window." Listen to me!" she shouted." Listen!"

Christine jammed the key in the ignition, switched it on, pumped the accelerator. The engine roared.

With one milk-white fist, the crazy woman thumped the roof of the car.

Again. And again.

Christine put the Firebird in gear and backed out of the parking space, moving slowly, not wanting to hurt the old woman, just wanting to get the hell away from her.

The lunatic followed, shuffling along, bent over, holding on to the door handle, glaring at Christine." He's got to die. He's got to die."

Sobbing, Joey said, "Mom, don't let her get met"

"She won't get you, honey," Christine said, her mouth so dry that she was barely able to get the words out.

The boy huddled against his locked door, eyes streaming tears but open wide and fixed on the contorted face of the stringyhaired harpy at his mother's window.

Still in reverse, Christine accelerated a bit, turned the wheel, and nearly backed into another car that was coming slowly down the row. The other driver blew his horn, and Christine stopped just in time, with a harsh bark of brakes.

"He's got to die!" the old woman screamed. She slammed the side of one pale fist into the window almost hard enough to break the glass.

This can't be happening, Christine thought. Not on a sunny Sunday. Not in peaceful Costa Mesa.

The old woman struck the window again.

"He's got to die! "

Spittle sprayed the glass.

Christine had the car in gear and was moving away, but the old woman held on. Christine accelerated. Still, the woman kept a grip on the door handle, slid and ran and stumbled along with the car, ten feet, twenty, thirty feet, faster, faster still. Christ, was she human? Where did such an old woman find the strength and tenacity to hold on like this? She leered in through the side window, and there was such ferocity in her eyes that it wouldn't have surprised Christine if, in spite of her size and age, the hag had torn the door off. But at last she let go with a howl of anger and frustration.

At the end of the row, Christine turned right. She drove too fast through the parking lot, and in less than a minute they were away from the mall, on Bristol Street, heading north.

Joey was still crying, though more softly than before.

"It's all right, sweetheart. It's okay now. She's gone."

She drove to MacArthur Boulevard, turned right, went three blocks, repeatedly glancing in the rearview mirror to see if they were being followed, even though she knew there wasn't much chance of that. Finally she pulled over to the curb and stopped.

She was shaking. She hoped Joey wouldn't notice.

Pulling a Kleenex from the small box on the console, she said, "Here you are, honey. Dry your eyes, blow your nose, and be brave for Mommy.

Okay?"

"Okay," he said, accepting the tissue. Shortly, he was composed.

"Feeling better?" she asked.

"Yeah. Sorta.

"Scared?"

"I was."

"But not now?"

He shook his head.

"You know," Christine said, "she really didn't mean all those nasty things she said to you."

He looked at her, puzzled. His lower lip trembled, but his voice was steady." Then why'd she say it if she didn't mean it?"

"Well, she couldn't help herself. She was a sick lady."

"You mean. like sick with the flu?"

"No, honey. I mean. mentally ill. disturbed.

"She was a real Looney bin, huh?"

He had gotten that expression from Val Gardner, Christine's business partner. This was the first time she'd heard him speak it, and she wondered what other, less socially acceptable words he might have picked up from the same source.

"Was she a real Looney Tone, Mom? Was she crazy?""Mentally disturbed, yes."

He frowned.

She said, "That doesn't make it any easier to understand, huh? "

"Nope. 'Cause what does crazy really mean, anyway, if it doesn't mean being locked up in a rubber room? And even if she was a crazy old lady, why was she so mad at me? Huh? I never even saw her before."

"Well. "

How do you explain psychotic behavior to a six-year-old? She could think of no way to do it without being ridiculously simplistic; however, in this case, a simplistic answer was better than none.

"Maybe she once had a little boy of her own, a little boy she loved very much, but maybe he wasn't a good little boy like you. Maybe he grew up to be very bad and did a lot of terrible things that broke his mother's heart. Something like that could. unbalance her a little."

"So now maybe she hates all little boys, whether she knows them or not," he said.

"Yes, perhaps."

"Because they remind her of her own little boy? is that it'?"

"That's right."

He thought about it for a moment, then nodded." Yeah. I can sorta see how that could be."

She smiled at him and mussed his hair." Hey, I'll tell you what-let's stop at Baskin-Robbins and get an ice cream cone. I think their flavor of the month is peanut butter and chocolate.

That's one of your favorites, isn't it?"

He was obviously surprised. She didn't approve of too much fat in his diet, and she planned his meals carefully. Ice cream wasn't a frequent indulgence. He seized the moment and said, "Could I have one scoop of that and one scoop of lemon custard? "

"Two scoops?"

"It's Sunday," he said.

"Last time I looked, Sunday wasn't so all-fired special.

There's one of them every week. Or has that changed while I wasn't paying attention?"

"Well. but. see, I've just had He screwed up his face, thinking hard. He worked his mouth as if chewing on a piece of taffy, then said, "I've just had a. a traumamatatic experience."

"Traumatic experience?"

"Yeah. That's it."

She blinked at him." Where'd you get a big word like that?

Oh. Of course. Never mind. Val."

According to Valerie Gardner, who was given to theatrics, just getting up in the morning was a traumatic experience. Val had about half a dozen traumatic experiences every day-and thrived on them.

"So it's Sunday, and I had this traumatic experience," Joey said, "and I think maybe what I better do is, I better have two scoops of ice cream to make up for it. You know?"

"I know I'd better not hear about another traumatic experience for at least ten years."

"What about the ice cream?"

She looked at his torn shirt." Two scoops," she agreed.

"Wow! This is some terrific day, isn't it? A real Looney Tune and a double-dip ice cream!"

Christine never ceased to be amazed by the resiliency of children, especially the resiliency of this child. Already, in his mind, he had transmuted the encounter with the old woman, had changed it from a moment of terror to an adventure that was not quite-but almost-as good as a visit to an ice cream parlor.

"You're some kid," she said.

"You're some mom."

He turned on the radio and hummed along happily with the music, all the way to Baskin-Robbins.

Christine kept checking the rearview mirror. No one was following them.

She was sure of that. But she kept checking anyway.

After a light dinner at the kitchen table with Joey, Christine went to her desk in the den to catch up on paperwork. She and Val Gardner owned a gourmet shop called Wine & Dine in Newport Beach, where they sold fine wines, specialty foods from all over the world, high quality cooking utensils, and slightly exotic appliances like pasta-makers and expresso machines. The store was in its sixth year of operation and was solidly established; in fact, it was returning considerably more profit than either Christine or Val had ever dared hope when they'd first opened their doors for business.

Now, they were planning to open a second outlet this summer, then a third store in West Los Angeles sometime next year. Their success was exciting and gratifying, but the business demanded an ever-increasing amount of their time.

This wasn't the first weekend evening that she had spent catching up on paperwork.

She wasn't complaining. Before Wine & Dine, she had worked as a waitress, six days a week, holding down two jobs at the same time: a four-hour lunch shift in a diner and a six-hour dinner shift at a moderately expensive French restaurant, Chez Lavelle. Because she was a polite and attentive waitress who hustled her butt off, the tips had been good at the diner and excellent at Chez Lavelle, but after a few years the work numbed and aged her: the sixty-hour weeks; the busboys who often came to work so high on drugs that she had to cover for them and do two jobs instead of one; the lecherous guys who ate lunch at the diner and who could be gross and obnoxious and frighteningly persistent, but who had to be turned down with coquettish good humor for the sake of business. She spent so many hours on her feet that, on her day off, she did nothing but sit with her aching legs raised on an ottoman while she read the Sunday papers with special attention to the financial section, dreaming of one day owning her own business.

But because of the tips and because she lived frugally-even doing without a car for two years-she had eventually managed to put enough aside to pay for a one-week cruise to Mexico aboard a luxury liner, the Aztec Princess, and had accumulated a nest egg large enough to provide half the cash with which she and Val had launched their gourmet shop.

Both the cruise and the shop had radically changed her life.

And if spending too many evenings doing paperwork was better than working as a waitress, it was immeasurably better than the two years of her life that had preceded her jobs at the diner and Chez Lavelle. The Lost Years. That was how she thought of that time, now far in the past: the bleak, miserable, sad and stupid Lost Years.

Compared to that period of her life, paperwork was a pleasure, a delight, a veritable carnival of fun…

She had been at her desk more than an hour when she realized that Joey had been exceptionally quiet ever since she'd come into the den. Of course, he was never a noisy child. Often he played by himself for hours, hardly making a sound. But after the unnerving encounter with the old woman this afternoon, Christine was still a little jumpy, and even this perfectly ordinary silence suddenly seemed strange and threatening. She wasn't exactly frightened. Just anxious. If anything happened to Joey.

She put down her pen and switched off the softly humming adding machine.

She listened.

Nothing.

In an echo chamber of memory, she could hear the old woman's voice: He's got to die, he's got to die.

She rose, left the den, quickly crossed the living room, went down the hall to the boy's bedroom.

The door was open, the light on, and he was there, safe, playing on the floor with their dog, Brandy, a sweet-faced and infinitely patient golden retriever.

"Hey, Mom, wanna play Star Wars with us? I'm Han Solo, and Brandy's my buddy, Chewbacca the Wookie. You could be the princess if you want."

Brandy was sitting in the middle of the floor, between the bed and the sliding closet doors. He was wearing a baseball cup emblazoned with the words RETURN OF THE JEDI, and his long furry ears hung out from the sides of it. Joey had also strapped a bandoleer of plastic bullets around the pooch, plus a holster containing a futuristic-looking plastic gun. Panting, eyes bright, Brandy was taking it all in stride; he even seemed to be smiling.

"He makes a great Wookie," Christine said.

"Wanna play?"

"Sorry, Skipper, but I've got an awful lot of work to do. I just stopped by to see if. if you were okay."

"Well, what happened is that we almost got vaporized by an empire battle cruiser," Joey said." But we're okay now."

Brandy snuffled in agreement.

She smiled at Joey." Watch out for Darth Vader."

"Oh, yeah, sure, always. We're being super careful cause we know he's in this part of the galaxy somewhere."

"See you in a little while."

She took only one step toward the door before Joey said, "Mom? Are you afraid that crazy old lady's going to show up again?

Christine turned to him." No, no, she said, although that was precisely what had been in her mind." She can't possibly know who we are or where we live."

Joey's eyes were even a more brilliant shade of blue than usual; they met her own eyes unwaveringly, and there was disquiet in them." I told her my name, Mom. Remember? She asked me, and so I told her my name."

"Only your first name."

He frowned." Did I?"

"You just said, 'Joey."

'Yeah. That's right."

"Don't worry, honey. You'll never see her again. That's all over and done with. She was just a sad old woman who-"

"What about our license plate?"

" What about it?"

"Well, see, if she got the number, maybe there's some way she can use it. To find out who we are. Like they sometimes do on those detective shows on TV."

That possibility disconcerted her, but she said, "I doubt it. I think only policemen can track down a car's owner from the license number."

" But just maybe," the boy said worriedly.

"We pulled away from her so fast she didn't have time to memorize the number. Besides, she was hysterical. She wasn't thinking clearly enough to study the license plate. Like I told you, it's all over and done with. Really. Okay?"

He hesitated a moment, then said, "Okay. But, Mom, I been thinking.

"

"What?"

"That crazy old lady. could she've been. a witch?"

Christine almost laughed, but she saw that he was seriout She suppressed all evidence of her amusement, put on a sober expression that matched the grave look on his face, and said, "Oh, I'm sure she wasn't a witch."

"I don't mean like Broom Hilda. I mean a real witch. A real witch wouldn't need our license number, you know? She wouldn't need anything.

She'd sniff us out. There's no place in the whole universe where you can hide when there's a witch after you. Witches have magic powers."

He was either already certain that the old woman was a witch or was rapidly convincing himself of it. Either way, he was scaring himself unnecessarily because, after all, they really never would see her again.

Christine remembered the way that strange woman had clung to the car, jerking at the handle of the locked door, keeping pace with them as they pulled away, screeching crazy accusations at them. Her eyes and face had radiated both fury and a disturbing power that made it seem as if she might really be able to stop the Firebird with her bare hands. A witch? That a child might think she had supernatural powers was certainly understandable.

" A real witch," Joey repeated, a tremor in his voice.

Christine was aware that she had to snip this line of thought right away, before he became obsessed with witches. Last year, for almost two months, he had been certain that a magical white snake-like one he'd seen in a movie-was hiding in his room, waiting for him to go to sleep, so that it could slither out and bite him. She'd had to sit with him each evening until he'd fallen asleep. Frequently, when he awakened in the middle of the night, she had to take him into her own bed in order to settle him down.

He'd gotten over the snake thing the same day that she'd made up her mind to take him to a child psychologist; later, she'd cancelled the appointment. After a few weeks had passed, when she'd been sure that mentioning the snake wouldn't get him started on it again, she asked what had happened to it. He looked embarrassed and said, "It was only imagination, Mom. I sure was acting like a dumb little kid, huh?" He'd never mentioned the white snake again. He possessed a healthy, rampaging imagination, and it was up to her to rein it in when it got out of control. Like now.

Although she had to put an end to this witch stuff, she couldn't just tell him there was no such thing. If she tried that approach, he would think she was just babying him. She would have to go along with his assumption that witches were real, then use the logic of a child to make him see that the old woman in the parking lot couldn't possibly have been a witch.

She said, "Well, I can understand how you might wonder about her being a witch. Whew! I mean, she did look a little bit like a witch is supposed to look, didn't she?"

"More than a little bit."

"No, no, just a little bit. Let's be fair to the poor old lady."

"She looked exactly like a mean witch," he said." Exactly.

Didn't she, Brandy?"

The dog snorted as if he understood the question and was in full agreement with his young master.

Christine squatted, scratched the dog behind the ears, and said, "What do you know about it, fur-face? You weren't even there."

Brandy yawned.

To Joey, Christine said, "If you really think about it, she didn't look all that much like a witch."

"Her eyes were creepy," the boy insisted, "bugging out of her head like they did. You saw them, sort of wild, Jeez, and her frizzy hair just like a witch's hair."

"But she didn't have a big crooked nose with a wart on the tip of it, did she? "

"No," Joey admitted.

"And she wasn't dressed in black, was she?"

"No. But all in green," Joey said, and from his tone of voice it was clear that the old woman's outfit had seemed as odd to him as it had to Christine.

"Witches don't wear green. She wasn't wearing a tall, pointed black hat, either.

He shrugged.

"And she didn't have a cat with her," Christine said.

"So?"

"A witch never goes anywhere without her cat."

"She doesn't?"

"No. It's her familiar."

"What's that mean?"

"The witch's familiar is her contact with the devil. It's through the familiar, through the cat, that the devil gives her magic powers.

Without the cat, she's just an ugly old woman."

"You mean like the cat watches her and makes sure she doesn't do something the devil wouldn't like?"

"That's right."

"I didn't see any cat," Joey said, frowning.

"There wasn't a cat because she wasn't a witch. You've got nothing to worry about, honey."

His face brightened." Boy, that's a relief! If she'd been a witch, she mightve turned me into a toad or something."

"Well, life as a toad might not be so bad," she teased." You'd get to sit on a lily pad all day, just taking it easy."

"Toads eat flies," he said, grimacing, "and I can't even stand to eat veal."

She laughed, leaned forward, and kissed his cheek.

"Even if she was a witch," he said, "I'd probably be okay because I've got Brandy, and Brandy wouldn't let any old cat get anywhere near."

"You can rely on Brandy," Christine agreed. She looked at the clown-faced dog and said, "You're the nemesis of all cats and witches, aren't you, fur-face?"

To her surprise, Brandy thrust his muzzle forward and licked her under the chin.

"Yuck," she said." No offense, fur-face, but I'm not sure whether kissing you is any better than eating flies."

Joey giggled and hugged the dog.

Christine returned to the den. The mound of paperwork seemed to have grown taller while she was gone.

She had no sooner settled into the chair behind the desk than the telephone rang. She picked it up.

"Hello? "

No one answered.

"Hello?" she said again.

"Wrong number," a woman said softly and hung up.

Christine put the receiver down and went back to work. She didn't give the call a second thought.

She was awakened by Brandy's barking, which was unusual because Brandy hardly ever barked. Then she heard Joey's voice.

"Mom! Come quick! Mommy!"

He wasn't merely calling her; he was screaming for her.

As she threw back the covers and got out of bed, she saw the glowing red numbers on the digital alarm clock. It was 1:20 A.M.

She plunged across the room, through the open door, into the hail, headed toward Joey's room, flipping up light switches as she went.

Joey was sitting in bed, pressing back against the headboard as if he were trying to pass through it and slip magically into the wall behind it, where he could hide. His hands were filled with twisted lumps of sheet and blanket. His face was pale.

Brandy was at the window, forepaws up on the sill. He was barking at something in the night beyond the glass. When Christine entered the room, the dog stopped barking, padded to the bed, and looked inquiringly at Joey, as if seeking guidance.

"Someone was out there," the boy said." Looking in. It was that crazy old lady."

Christine went to the window. There wasn't much light. The yellowish glow of the streetlamp at the corner didn't reach quite this far.

Although a moon ornamented the sky, it wasn't a full moon, and it cast only a weak, milky light that frosted the sidewalks, silvered the cars parked along the street, but revealed few of the night's secrets. For the most part, the lawn and shrubbery lay in deep darkness.

"Is she still out there?" Joey asked.

"No," Christine said.

She turned away from the window, went to him, sat on the edge of his bed.

He was still pale. Shaking.

She said, "Honey, are you sure-"

"She was there!"

"Exactly what did you see?"

"Her face."

"The old woman?"

"Yeah."

"You're sure it was her, not somebody else?"

He nodded." Her."

"It's so dark out there. How could you see well enough to-',

"I saw somebody at the window, just sort of a shadow in the moonlight, and then what I did was I turned on the light, and it was her. I could see. It was her."

"But, honey, I just don't think there's any way she could have followed us. I know she didn't. And there's no way she could've learned where we live. Not this soon, anyway."

He said nothing. He just stared down at his fisted hands and slowly let go of the sheet and blanket. His palms were sweaty.

Christine said, "Maybe you were dreaming, huh?"

He shook his head vigorously.

She said, "Sometimes, when you wake up from a nightmare, just a few seconds, you can be sort of confused about what's real and what's just part of the dream. You know? It's all right.

It happens to everybody now and then."

He met her eyes." It wasn't like that, Mom. Brandy started barking, and then I woke up, and there was the crazy old lady at the window. If it was just a dream. then what was Brandy barking at? He don't bark just to hear himself. Never does. You know how he is."

She stared at Brandy, who had plopped down on the floor beside the bed, and she began to feel uneasy again. Finally she got up and went to the window.

Out in the night, there were a lot of places where the grip of darkness was firm, places where a prowler could hide and wait.

" Mom?"

She looked at him.

He said, "This isn't like before."

"What do you mean?"

" This isn't a imaginary white snake under my bed. This is real stuff.

Cross my heart and hope to die."

A sudden gust of wind soughed through the caves and rattled a loose rain gutter.

"Come on," she said, holding out a hand to him.

He scrambled out of bed, and she took him into the kitchen.

Brandy followed. He stood in the doorway for a moment, his bushy tail thumping against both jambs, then came in and curled up in the corner.

Joey sat at the table in his blue pajamas with the words SATURN PATROL, in red, streaking across his chest. He looked anxiously at the windows over the sink, while Christine telephoned the police.

The two police officers stood on the porch and listened politely while Christine, in the open front door with Joey at her side, told them her story-what little there was to tell. The younger of the two men, Officer Statler, was dubious and quick to conclude that the prowler was merely a phantom of Joey's imagination, but the older man, Officer Templeton, gave them the benefit of the doubt. At Templeton's insistence, he and Statler spent ten minutes searching the property with their long-handled flashlights, probing the shrubbery, circling the house, checking out the garage, even looking in the neighbors' yards.

They didn't find anyone.

Returning to the front door where Christine and Joey waited, Templeton seemed somewhat less willing to believe their story than he had been a few minutes ago." Well, Mrs. Scavello, if that old woman was around here, she's gone now. Either she wasn't up to much of anything.

or maybe she was scared away when she saw the patrol car. Maybe both.

She's probably harmless."

"Harmless? She sure didn't seem harmless this afternoon at South Coast Plaza," Christine said." She seemed dangerous enough to me."

"Well. " He shrugged." You know how it is. An old lady.

maybe a little senile. saying things she really didn't mean."

"I don't think that's the case."

Templeton didn't meet her eyes." So. if you see her again or if you have any other trouble, be sure to give us a call."

"You're leaving?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"You're not going to do anything else?"

He scratched his head." Don't see what else we can do. You said you don't know this woman's name or where she lives, so we can't go have a chat with her. Like I said, if she shows up again, you call us soon as you spot her, and we'll come back."

With a nod of his head, he turned away and went down the walk, toward the street, where his partner waited.

A minute later, as Christine and Joey stood at the living room windows, watching the patrol car drive away, the boy said, "She was out there, Mom. Really, really. This isn't like the snake."

She believed him. What he had seen at the window could have been a figment of his imagination or an image left over from a nightmare-but it hadn't been that. He had seen what he thought he'd seen: the old woman herself, in the flesh. Christine didn't know why she was so sure of that, but she was. Dead sure.

She gave him the option of spending the rest of the night in her room, but he was determined to be brave.

"I'll sleep in my bed," he said." Brandy'll be there. Brandy'll smell that old witch coming a mile away. But. could we sorta leave a lamp on?"

"Sure," she said, though she had only recently weaned him away from the need for a night light.

In his room she closed the draperies tight, leaving not even a narrow crack through which someone might be able to see him.

She tucked him in, kissed him goodnight, and left him in Brandy's care.

Back in her own bed once more, with the lights out, she stared at the tenebrous ceiling. She was unable to sleep. She kept expecting a sudden sound-glass shattering, a door being forcedbut the night remained peaceful.

Only the February wind, with an occasional violent gust, marred the nocturnal stillness.

In his room Joey switched off the lamp that his mother had left on for him. The darkness was absolute.

Brandy jumped onto the bed, where he was never supposed to be (one of Mom's rules: no do, in bed), but Joey didn't push him off.

Brandy settled down and was welcome.

Joey listened to the night wind sniffing and licking at the house, and it sounded like a living thing. He pulled the blanket all the way up to his nose, as if it were a shield that would protect him from all harm.

After a while he said, "She's still out there somewhere."

The dog lifted his square head.

"She's waiting, Brandy."

The dog raised one ear.

"She'll be back."

The dog growled in the back of his throat.

Joey put one hand on his furry companion." You know it, too, don't you, boy? You know she's out there, don't you?"

Brandy woofed softly.

The wind moaned.

The boy listened.

The nilit ticked toward dawn.

In the middle of the night, unable to sleep, Christine went downstairs to Joey's room to look in on him. The lamp she had left burning was off now, and the bed-room was tomb-black. For a moment fear pinched off her breath. But when she snapped on the light, she saw that Joey was in bed, asleep, safe.

Brandy was comfortably ensconced in the bed, too, but he woke when she turned on the light. He yawned and licked his chops, and gave her a look that was rich with canine guilt.

"You know the rules, fuzzy-butt," she whispered." On the floor."

Brandy got off the bed without waking Joey, slunk to the nearest corner, and curled up on the floor. He looked at her sheepishly.

"Good dog," she whispered.

He wagged his tail, sweeping the carpet around him.

She switched off the light and started back toward her own room. She had gone only a step or two when she heard movement in the boy's room, and she knew it was Brandy returning to the bed. Tonight, however, she just didn't care all that much whether he got dog hairs on the sheets and blankets. Tonight, the only thing that seemed to matter was that Joey was safe.

She returned to her bed and dozed fitfully, tossing and turning, murmuring in her sleep as night crept toward dawn. She dreamed of an old woman with a green face, green hair, and long green fingernails that hooked wickedly into sharp claws.

Monday morning came at last, and it was sunny. Too damned sunny. She woke early, and light speared through her bedroom windows, making her wince. Her eyes were grainy, sensitive, bloodshot.

She took a long, hot shower, steaming away some of her weariness, then dressed for work in a maroon blouse, simple gray skirt, and gray pumps.

Stepping to the full-length mirror on the bathroom door, she examined herself critically, although staring at her reflection always embarrassed her. There was no mystery about her shyness; she knew her embarrassment was a result of the things she had been taught during the Lost Years, between her eighteenth and twentieth birthdays. During that period she had struggled to throw off all vanity and a large measure of her individuality because gray-faced uniformity was what had been demanded of her back then. They had expected her to be humble, self-effacing, and plain. Any concern for her appearance, any slightest pride in her looks, would have brought swift disciplinary action from her superiors. Although she had put those grim lonely years and events behind her, they still had a lingering effect on her that she could not deny.

Now, almost as a test of how completely she had triumphed over the Lost Years, she fought her embarrassment and resolutely studied her mirror image with as much vanity as she could summon from a soul half-purged of it. Her figure was good, though she didn't have the kind of body that, displayed in a bikini, would ever sell a million pin-up posters. Her legs were slender and well shaped. Her hips flared just right, and she was almost too small in the waist, though that smallness made her bustline-which was only average-seem larger than it was. She sometimes wished she were as busty as Val, but Val said that very large breasts were more of a curse than a blessing, that it was like carrying around a pair of saddlebags, and that some evenings her shoulders ached with the strain of that burden. Even if what Val said was true and not just a white lie told out of sympathy for those less amply endowed, Christine nevertheless wished she had big boobs, and she knew that this desire, this hopeless vanity, was a blatant reaction to-and rejection of-all that she had been taught in that gray and dreary place where she had lived between the ages of eighteen and twenty.

By now, her face was flushed, but she forced herself to remain in front of the mirror a minute more, untit she had determined that her hair was properly combed and that her makeup was evenly applied. She knew she was pretty. Not gorgeous. But she had a good complexion, a delicate chin and jawline, a good nose. Her eyes were her best feature, large and dark and clear.

Her hair was dark, too, almost black. Val said she would trade her big boobs for hair like that any day, but Christine knew that was only talk.

Sure, her hair looked good when the weather was right, but as soon as the humidity rose past a certain point, it got either lank and flat or fizzy and curly, and then she looked like either Vampira or Gene Shalit.

At last, blushing furiously but feeling that she had triumphed over the excessive self-effacement that had been hammered into her years ago, she turned away from the mirror.

She went to the kitchen to make coffee and toast, and found Joey already at the breakfast table. He wasn't eating, just sitting there, face turned away from her, staring out the window at the sun-splashed rear lawn.

Taking a paper filter from a box and fitting it into the basket of the dripolator, Christine said, "What can I get for you for breakfast, Skipper?"

He didn't answer.

Spooning coffee into the filter, she said, "How about cereal and peanut butter toast? English muffins? Maybe you even feel like an egg."

He still didn't answer. Sometimes-not often-he could be cranky in the morning, but he always could be teased into a better mood. By nature, he was too mild-mannered to remain sullen for long.

Switching on the dripolator and pouring water into the top of it, she said, "Okay, so if you don't want cereal or toast or an egg, maybe I could fix some spinach, brussel sprouts, and broccoli. They're all your favorites, aren't they?"

He didn't rise to the bait. Just stared out the window. Unmoving.

Silent.

"Or I could put one of your old shoes in the microwave and cook it up nice and tender for you. How about that'? Nothing's quite as tasty as an old shoe for breakfast. Mmmmmmmm! Really sticks to your ribs."

He said nothing.

She got the toaster out of the cupboard, put it on the counter, plugged it in-then suddenly realized that the boy wasn't merely being cranky.

Something was wrong.

Staring at the back of his head, she said, "Honey?"

He made a wretched, stifled little sound.

" Honey, what's wrong?"

At last he turned away from the window and looked at her.

His tousled hair hung down in his eyes, which were possessed by a haunted look, a bleak expression so stark for a six-year-old that it made Christine's heart beat faster. Bright tears glistened on his cheeks.

She quickly went to him and took his hand. It was cold.

"Sweetheart, what is it? Tell me."

He wiped at his reddened eyes with his free hand. His nose was runny, and he blotted it on his sleeve.

He was so pale.

Whatever was wrong, it wasn't simply a standard complaint, no ordinary childhood trauma. She sensed that much and her mouth went dry with fear.

He tried to speak, couldn't get out even one word, pointed to the kitchen door, took a deep shuddery breath, began to shake, and finally said, "The p-p-porch."

"What about the porch?"

He wasn't able to tell her.

Frowning, she went to the door, hesitated, opened it. She gasped, rocked by the sight that awaited her.

Brandy. His furry, golden body lay at the edge of the porch, near the steps. But his head was immediately in front of the door, at her feet.

The dog had been decapitated.

Christine and Joey sat on the beige sofa in the living room. The boy was no longer crying, but he still looked stunned.

The policeman filling out the report, Officer Wilford, sat on one of the Queen Anne armchairs. He was tall and husky, with rough features, bushy eyebrows, an air of rugged self-sufficiency: the kind of man who probably felt at home only outdoors and especially in the woods and mountains, hunting and fishing. He perched on the very edge of the chair and held his notebook on his knees, an amusingly prim posture for a man his size; apparently he was concerned about rumpling or soiling the furniture.

"But who let the dog out?" he inquired, after having asked every other question he could think of.

"Nobody," Christine said." He let himself out. There's a pet portal in the bottom of the kitchen door."

"I saw it," Wilford said." Not big enough for a dog that size."

"I know. It was here when we bought the house. Brandy hardly ever used it, but if he wanted out badly enough, and if there wasn't anyone around to let him out, he could put his head down, wriggle on his belly, and squeeze through that little door. I kept meaning to have it closed up because I was afraid he might get stuck. If only I had closed it up, he might still be alive."

"The witch got him," Joey said softly.

Christine put an arm around her son.

Wilford said, "So you think maybe they used meat or dog biscuits to lure him outside?"

"No," said Joey adamantly, answering for his mother, clearly offended by the suggestion that a gluttonous impulse had led to the dog's death."

Brandy went out there to protect me. He knew the old witch was still hanging around, and he went to get her, but what happened was… she got him first."

Christine was aware that Wilford's suggestion was probably the correct explanation, but she also knew that Joey would find it easier to accept Brandy's death if he could believe that his dog had died in a noble cause. She said, "He was a very brave dog, very brave, and we're proud of him."

Wilford nodded." Yes, I'm sure you've got every reason to be proud.

It's a darned shame. A golden retriever's such a handsome breed. Such a gentle face and sweet disposition."

"The witch got him," Joey repeated, as if numbed by that terrible realization.

"Maybe not," Wilford said." Maybe it wasn't the old woman."

Christine frowned at him." Well, of course it was."

"I understand how upsetting the incident was at South Coast Plaza yesterday," Wilford said." I understand how you'd be inclined to link the old woman to this thing with the dog. But there's no solid proof, no real reason to think they are linked.

It might be a mistake to assume they are."

"But the old woman was at Joey's window last night," Christine said exasperatedly." I told you that. I told the officers who were here last night, too. Doesn't anyone listen? She was at Joey's window, looking in at him, and Brandy was barking at her."

" But she was gone when you got there," Wilford said.

"Yes," Christine said." But-"

Smiling down at Joey, Wilford said, "Son, are you absolutely, positively sure it was the old lady there at your window?"

Joey nodded vigorously." Yeah. The witch."

"Because, see, when you looked up and noticed someone at the window, it would have been perfectly natural for you to figure it was the old woman. After all, she'd already given you one bad scare earlier in the day, so she was on your mind. Then, when you switched the light on and got a glimpse of who it was there at the window, maybe you had the old woman's face so firmly fixed in your mind that you would've seen her no matter who it really was."

Joey blinked, unable to follow the policeman's reasoning. He just stubbornly repeated himself: "It was her. The witch."

To Christine, Officer Wilford said, "I'd be inclined to think the prowler was the one who later killed the dog-but that it wasn't the old woman who was the prowler. You see, most always, when a dog's been poisoned-and it happens more often than you think-it's not the work of some total stranger. It's someone within a block of the house where the dog lived. A neighbor. What I figure is, some neighbor was prowling around, looking for the dog, not looking for your little boy at all, when Joey saw them at the window. Later they found the dog and did what they'd come to do."

"That's ridiculous," Christine said." We've got good neighbors here.

None of them would kill our dog."

"Happens all the time," Wilford said.

"Not in this neighborhood."

"Any neighborhood," Wilford insisted." Barking dogs, day after day, night after night. they drive some people a little nuts."

"Brandy hardly ever barked."

"Well, now, 'hardly ever' to you might seem like 'all the time' to one of your neighbors."

"Besides, Brandy wasn't poisoned. It was a hell of a lot more violent than that. You saw. Crazy-violent. Not something any neighbor would do."

"You'd be surprised what neighbors will do," Wilford said.

"Sometimes they even kill each other. Not unusual at all. It's a strange world we're living in."

"You're wrong," she said hotly." It was the old woman. The dog and the face at the window-they were both connected with that old woman."

He sighed." You may be right."

"I am right."

"I was only suggesting that we keep our minds open," he said.

"Good idea," she said pointedly.

He closed his notebook." Well, I guess I've got all the details I need."

Christine got up as the officer rose from his chair. She said, "What now?"

"We'll file a report, of course, including your statement, and we'll give you an open case number."

" What's an open case number?"

"If anything else should happen, if this old woman should show up again, you give the case number when you call us, and the officers answering your call will know the story before they get here; they'll know what to look for on the way, so if maybe the woman leaves before they arrive, they'll spot her in passing and be able to stop her."

"Why didn't they give us a case number after what happened last night?"

"Oh, they wouldn't open a file just for one report of a prowler,"

Wilford explained." Last night, you see, no crime had been committed-at least so far as we could tell. No evidence of any sort of crime. But this is. a little worse."

"A little worse?" she said, remembering Brandy's severed head, the dead glassy eyes gazing up at her.

"An unfortunate choice of words," he said." I'm sorry. It's just that, compared to a lot of other things we see on this job, a dead dog isn't so-"

"Okay, okay," Christine said, increasingly unable to conceal her anger and impatience." You'll call us and give us an open case number. But what else are you going to do?"

Wilford looked uncomfortable. He rolled his broad shoulders and scratched at his thick neck." The description you've given us is the only thing we've got to go on, and that's not much.

We'll run it through the computer and try to work backwards to a name.

The machine'll spit out the name of anyone who's been in trouble with us before and who fits at least seven of the ten major points of standard physical comparison. Then we'll pull mug shots of whatever other photos we have in the files. Maybe the computer'll give us several names, and we'll have photos of more than one old woman. Then we'll bring all the pictures over here for you to study. As soon as you tell us we've found her. well, then we can go have a talk with her and find out what this is all about. You see, it really isn't hopeless, Mrs. Scavello."

"What if she hasn't been in trouble with you before and you don't have a file on her?"

Moving to the front door, Wilford said, "We have data-sharing arrangements with every police agency in Orange, San Diego, Riverside, and Los Angeles Counties. We can reach their computers through our own.

Instant access. Datalink, they call it. If she's in any of their files, we'll find her just as quickly as if she were in our own."

"Yeah, sure, but what if she's never been in trouble anywhere?"

Christine asked anxiously.

Opening the front door, Wilford said, "Oh, don't worry, we'll probably turn up something. We almost always do."

"That's not good enough," she said, and she would have said it even if she had believed him, which she didn't. They wouldn't turn up anything.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Scavello, but it's the best we can do."

"Shit."

He scowled." I understand your frustration, and I want to assure you we won't file this away and forget about it. But we can't work miracles."

"Shit."

His scowl deepened. His bushy eyebrows drew together in a single thick bar." Lady, it's none of my business, but I don't think you should use words like that in front of your little boy."

She stared at him, astonished. Astonishment turned to anger.

"Yeah? And what're you-a born-again Christian?"

"In fact, I am, yes. And I believe it's extremely important for us to set good examples for our young ones, so they'll grow up in God's image.

We've got to-" "I don't believe this," Christine said." You're telling me that I'm setting a bad example because I used a four-letter word, a harmless word-"

"Words aren't harmless. The devil beguiles and persuades with words.

Words are the-"

"What about the example you're setting for my son? Huh? By your every act, you're teaching him that the police really can't protect anyone, that they really can't help anyone, that they can't do much more than come around afterwards and pick up the pieces."

"I wish you didn't see it that way," Wilford said.

"How the hell else am I supposed to see it?"

He sighed." We'll call you with the case number." Then he turned away from the door, away from her and Joey, and moved stiffly down the walkway.

After a moment, she hurried in his wake, caught up with him, put a hand on his shoulder." Please."

He stopped, turned to her. His face was hard, his eyes cold.

She said, "I'm sorry. I really am. I'm just distraught. I don't know what to think. All of a sudden I don't know where to turn."

"I understand," he said, as he had said a couple of times before, but there was no understanding in his granite face.

Glancing back to make sure Joey was still in the doorway, still too far away to hear, she said, "I'm sorry I flew off the handle at you. And I guess you're right about watching my language around Joey. Most of the time I do watch it, believe me, but today I'm not thinking straight.

That crazy woman told me that my little boy had to die. That's what she said. He k got to die, she said. And now the dog's dead, poor old fur-face. God, I liked that mutt a lot. He's dead and gone, and Joey saw a face at the window in the middle of the night, and all of a sudden the world's turned upside-down, and I'm scared, really scared, because I think somehow that crazy woman followed us, and I think she's going to do it, or at least try to do it, try to kill my little boy. I don't know why. There can't be a reason. Not a reason that makes any sense.

But that doesn't make any difference, does it? Not these days. These days, the newspapers are full of stories about punks and child molesters and lunatics of all kinds who don't need a reason to do what they do."

Wilford said, "Mrs. Scavello, please, you've got to keep control of yourself. You're being melodramatic. I won't say hysterical, but definitely melodramatic. It's not as bad as you're making out. We'll get to work on this, just like I told you. Meanwhile, you put your trust in God, and you'll be all right, you and your boy."

She couldn't reach this man. Not ever. Not in a million years.

She couldn't make him feel her terror, couldn't make him understand what it would mean to her if she lost Joey. It was hopeless, after all.

She could barely remain on her feet. All the strength went out of her.

He said, "I sure am glad, though, to hear you say you'll watch your language around the boy. The last couple generations in this country, we've been raising anti-social, know — it-all snots who have no respect for anything. If we're ever going to have us a good, peaceful, God-loving and God-fearing society, then we got to raise 'em up by the right example."

She said nothing. She felt as if she were standing here with someone from another country-maybe even from another planet-who not only didn't speak her language but who had no capacity to learn. There was no way he could ever grasp her problems, appreciate her concerns. In every way that counted, they were thousands of miles apart, and there was no road between them.

Wilford's flinty eyes sparked with the passion of a true believer as he said: "And I also recommend you don't go around without a bra in front of the boy, the way you are now. A woman built like you, even wearing a loose blouse like that, certain ways you turn or stretch. it's bound to be.

arousing."

She stared at him in disbelief. Several cutting remarks came to mind, any one of which would have stopped him dead, but for some reason she couldn't seem to summon the words to her lips. Of course, her reticence was in part the result of having had a mother who would have made General George Patton look soft-hearted, a mother who had insisted on good manners and unfailing politeness. There were also the lessons of the Church, deeply ingrained in her, which said you were supposed to turn the other cheek. She told herself she had broken loose from all of that, had left it far behind, but now her inability to put Wilford in his place was indisputable proof that, to her dismay, she was still to some degree a prisoner of her past.

Wilford went right on babbling, oblivious of her fury." Maybe the boy doesn't even notice now, but in a couple of years he'll notice for sure, and a boy shouldn't be having those kinds of thoughts about his own mother. You'd be leading him in the way of the devil."

If she hadn't been so weak, if she hadn't been weighed down by the terrible awareness of her and Joey's helplessness, Christine would have laughed in his face. But right now there was no laughter in her.

Wilford said, "Well, okay then. I'll be talking to you. Trust in God, Mrs. Scavello. Trust in God."

She wondered what he'd say if she told him it wasn't Mrs. Scavello. What would he do if she told him Joey had been born out of wedlock, a bastard child? Would he work on the case a little less eagerly? Would he be at all concerned about preserving the life of an illegitimate little boy?

God damn all hypocrites.

She wanted to hit Wilford, kick him and hit him and take out her frustration on him, but she only watched as he got into the patrol car where his partner waited for him. He looked back at her, raised one hand, and gave her a curt little wave through the window.

She returned to the front door.

Joey was waiting for her.

She wanted to say something reassuring to him. He looked as if he needed that. But even if she'd been able to find the words, she wouldn't have been able to deceive him by speaking them.

Right now, until they knew what the hell was happening, it was probably better to be scared. If he was frightened, he would be careful, watchful.

She felt disaster coming.

Was she being melodramatic?

No.

Joey felt it coming, too. She could see a dreadful anticipation in his eyes.

She stepped into the house, closed the door, locked it.

She ruffled Joey's hair." You okay, honey?"

"I'm gonna miss Brandy," he said in a shaky voice, trying to be a brave little man but not quite succeeding.

"Me too," Christine said, remembering how funny Brandy had looked in the role of Chewbacca the Wookie.

Joey said, "I thought.

"What?"

"Maybe it would be a good idea.

" Yeah? "

". a good idea to get another dog soon."

She hunkered down to his level." You know, that's a very mature idea.

Very wise, I think."

" don't mean I want to forget Brandy."

"Of course not."

"I couldn't ever forget him."

"We'll always remember Brandy. He'll always have a special place in our hearts," she said." And I'm sure he'd understand about us getting another dog right away. In fact, I'm sure that's what he'd want us to do."

"So I'll still be protected," Joey said.

"That's right. Brandy would want you to be protected."

In the kitchen, the telephone rang.

"Tell you what," she said, "I'll just answer the phone, and then we'll make arrangements for burying Brandy."

The phone rang again.

"We'll find a nice pet cemetery or something, and we'll lay Brandy to rest with all the right honors."

"I'd like that," he said.

The phone rang a third time.

Heading toward the kitchen, she said, "Then later we'll look for a puppy." She picked up the phone just as it completed a fifth ring."

Hello?"

A woman said, "Are you part of it?"

"Excuse me?"

the woman asked."Are you part of it-or don't you know what's happening?"

Although the voice was vaguely familiar, Christine said, "I think you've got the wrong number."

"You are Miss Scavello, aren't you?"

"Yes. Who's this?"

"I've got to know if you're part of it. Are you one of them?

Or are you an innocent? I've got to know."

Suddenly Christine recognized the voice, and a chill crept up her spine.

The old woman said, "Do you know what your son really. is?

Do you know the evil in him? Do you know why he's got to die? "

Christine slammed the phone down.

Joey had followed her into the kitchen. He was standing just this side of the door to the dining room, chewing on a thumbnail. In his striped shirt and jeans and somewhat tattered sneakers, he looked pathetically small, defenseless.

The phone began to ring again.

Ignoring it, Christine said, "Come on, Skipper. Stay with me.

Stay close to me."

She led him out of the kitchen, through the dining room and living room, upstairs to the master bedroom.

He didn't ask what was wrong. From the look on his face, she thought he probably knew.

The phone kept ringing.

In the bedroom she pulled the top drawer out of the highboy, rummaged under a stack of folded sweaters, and came up with a wicked-looking pistol, a selective double-action Astra Constable.32 automatic with a snub-nosed barrel. She had purchased it years ago, before Joey was born, when she'd begun living alone, and she had learned how to use it.

The gun had given her a much-needed sense of security-as it did now, once again.

The phone rang and rang.

When Joey had come into her life, especially when he had begun to walk, she'd been afraid that, in his ceaseless curiosity, he would find the weapon and play with it. Protection against burglars had to be weighed against the more likely-and more frightening-possibility that Joey would hurt himself. She had unloaded the gun, had put the empty magazine in a dresser drawer, and had buried the gun itself beneath the sweaters in the highboy, and fortunately had never needed it since then.

Until now.

The shrill ringing of the telephone became louder and more irritating by the moment.

Pistol in hand, Christine went to the dresser and located the empty magazine. She hurried to the closet where she kept a box of ammunition on the top shelf, all the way at the back. With trembling and clumsy fingers, she pushed cartridges into the magazine until it was full, then slapped it into the butt of the pistol hard enough to lock it in place.

Joey watched in wide-eyed fascination.

At last the telephone stopped ringing.

The sudden silence had the force of a blow. It briefly stunned Christine.

Joey was the first to speak. Still chewing on a thumbnail, he said,

"Was it the witch on the phone?"

There was no point in hiding it from him and no point in telling him the old woman wasn't really a witch." Yeah. It was her."

" Mommy. I'm scared."

For the past several months, ever since he had overcome his fear of the imaginary white snake that had disturbed his sleep, he had called her "Mom" instead of "Mommy" because he was trying to be more grown-up. His reversion to "Mommy" was an indication of just how badly frightened he was.

"It'll be all right. I'm not going to let anything happen to.

either of us. If we're just careful, we'll be okay."

She kept expecting to hear a knock at the door or see a face at the window. Where had the old woman been calling from?

How long would it take her to get here now that the cops were gone, now that she had a clear shot at Joey?

" What're we gonna do?" he asked.

She put the loaded gun on top of the six-drawer highboy and dragged two suitcases from the back of the closet." I'm going to pack a bag for each of us and then we're getting out of here."

"Where're we going?"

She threw one of the suitcases onto her bed and opened it."

don't know for sure, sweetheart. Anywhere. To a hotel, probably. We'll go someplace where that crazy old hag won't be able to find us no matter how hard she looks."

"Then what?"

As she folded clothes into the open suitcase, she said, "Then we'll find someone who can help us… really help us."

"Not like the cops?"

"Not like the cops."

"Who? "

"I'm not sure. Maybe… a private detective.

"Like Magnum on TV?"

"Maybe not exactly like Magnum," Christine said.

"Like who, then?"

"We need a big firm that can provide us with bodyguards and everything while they're tracking down that old woman. A firstrate organization."

"Like in them old movies?"

"What old movies are those?"

"You know. Where they're in real bad trouble, and they say, 'We'll hire Pinkelton." "

"Pinkerton," she corrected." Yeah. Something like Pinkerton. I can afford to hire people like that and, by God, I'm going to hire them.

We're not just going to be a couple of sitting ducks the way the cops would have us."

"I'd feel a whole bunch safer if we just went and hired Magnum," Joey said.

She didn't have time to explain to a six-year-old that Magnum wasn't a real private eye. She said, "Well, maybe you're right.

Maybe we will hire Magnum."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. I "He'll do a good job," Joey said soberly." He always does."

At her direction, Joey took the empty suitcase and headed toward his room. She followed, carrying the suitcase that she had already packed-and the pistol.

She decided they wouldn't go to a hotel first. They'd go straight to a detective agency and not waste any time dealing with this.

Her mouth was sandpaper-dry. Her heart thudded. She was breathing hard and fast' '

In her mind a terrible vision rose, an image of a bloody and decapitated body sprawled on the back porch. But in the vision, it wasn't Brandy she saw in gory ruin. It was Joey.

Charlie Harrison was proud of his accomplishments. He had started with nothing, just a poor kid from the shabby side of Indianapolis. Now, at thirty-six, he was owner of a thriving business-full owner since the retirement of the company's founder, Harvey Klemet-and was living the good life in southern California. If he wasn't exactly on top of the world yet, he was at least eighty percent of the way there, and the view from his current elevation was quite satisfying.

The offices of Klemet-Harrison were not remotely like the seedy quarters of private investigators in novels and films. These rooms, on the fifth floor of a five-story building on a quiet street in Costa Mesa, were comfortably and tastefully decorated.

The reception lounge made a good first impression on new clients. It was plushly carpeted, and the walls were covered with a subtle grass cloth. The furniture was new-and not from the low end of the manufacturer's line, either. The walls weren't adorned only with cheap prints; there were three Eyvind Earle semigraphs worth more than fifteen hundred dollars apiece.

Charlie's private office was even somewhat plusher than the reception area, yet it avoided the ponderous and solemn look favored by attorneys and many other professionals. Bleachedwood paneling reached halfway up the walls. There were bleached-wood shutters on the windows, a contemporary desk by Henredon, armchairs covered in an airy green print from Brunschwig & Fils. On the walls were two large, light-filled paintings by Martin Green, undersea scenes of ethereal plant life fluttering gracefully in mysterious currents and tides. A few large plants, mostly ferns and pothos, hung from the ceiling or rested on rosewood stands. The effect was almost subtropical yet cool and rich.

But when Christine Scavello walked through the door, Charlie suddenly felt that the room was woefully inadequate. Yes, it was light and well-balanced and expensive and truly exquisite; nevertheless, it seemed hopelessly heavy, clunky, and even garish when compared to this striking woman.

Coming out from behind his desk, he said, "Ms. Scavello, I'm Charlie Harrison. I'm so pleased to meet you."

She accepted his hand and said she was pleased to meet him, too.

Her hair was thick, shiny, dark-dark brown, almost black. He wanted to run his fingers through it. He wanted to put his face in her hair and smell it.

Unaccustomed to having such a strong and immediate reaction to anyone, Charlie reined himself in. He looked at her more closely, as dispassionately as possible. He told himself that she wasn't perfect, certainly not breathtakingly beautiful. Pretty, yes, but not a total knockout. Her brow was somewhat too high, and her cheekbones seemed a little heavy, and her nose was slightly pinched.

Nevertheless, with a breathless and ingratiating manner that wasn't like him, he said, "I apologize for the condition of the office," and was surprised and dismayed to hear himself make such a statement.

She looked puzzled." Why should you apologize? It's lovely."

He blinked." You really think so?"

"Absolutely. It's unexpected. Not at all what I thought a private detective's office would look like. But that just makes it even more interesting, appealing."

Her eyes were huge and dark. Clear, direct eyes. Each time he met them, his breath caught for an instant.

"Did it myself," he said, deciding the room didn't look so bad, after all." Didn't use an interior decorator."

"You've got a real flair for it."

He showed her to a chair and noticed, as she sat down, that she had lovely legs and perfectly shaped ankles.

But I've seen other legs as lovely, other ankles as well shaped, he thought with some bafflement, and I haven't ever before been swept away by this adolescent longing, haven't felt this ridiculously sudden surge in hormone levels.

Either he was hornier than he thought, or he was reacting to more than her appearance.

Perhaps her appeal was as much in the way she walked and shook hands and carried herself (with an easy, graceful minimum of movement), and in her voice (soft, earthy, feminine, yet unaffected, with a note of strength), and in the way she met his eyes (forthrightly), as it was in the way she looked. In spite of the circumstances in which he was meeting her, in spite of the fact that she had a serious problem about which she must be worried, she possessed an uncommon inner tranquility that intrigued him.

That doesn't quite explain it either, he thought. Since when have I ever wanted to jump into bed with a woman because of her uncommon inner tranquility?

All right, so he wasn't going to be able to analyze this feeling, not yet. He would just have to go with it and try to understand it later.

Stepping behind his desk, sitting down, he said, "Maybe I shouldn't have told you I'm interested in interior design. Maybe that's really the wrong image for a private detective."

"On the contrary," she said, "what it tells me is that you're observant, perceptive, probably quite sensitive, and you have an excellent eye for details. Those are the qualities I'd hope for in any man in your line of work."

"Right! Exactly," he said, beaming at her, delighted by her approval.

He was stricken by an almost irresistible urge to kiss her brow, her eyes, the bridge of her nose, the tip of her nose, her cheeks, her chin, and last of all her sculpted lips.

But all he did was say, "Well, Ms. Scavello, what can I do for you?"

She told him about the old woman.

He was shocked, intrigued, and sympathetic, but he was also uneasy because you never knew what to expect from flaky types like this old woman. Anything might happen, and it probably would. Furthermore, he knew how difficult it was to track down and deal with any perpetrator of this type of irrational harassment. He much preferred people with clear, understandable motivations. Understandable motivations were what made his line of work possible: greed, lust, envy, jealousy, revenge, love, hate-they were the raw material of his industry. Thank God for the weaknesses and imperfections of mankind, for otherwise he would have been without work. He was also uneasy because he was afraid he might fail Christine Scavello, and if he failed her, she would walk out of his life forever. And if she walked out of his life forever, he would have to be satisfied with only dreams of her, and he was just too damn old for dreams of that kind.

When Christine finished recounting the events of this morning-the murder of the dog, the call from the old womanCharlie said, "Where's your son now?"

"Out in your waiting room."

"All right. He's safe there."

"I'm not sure he's safe anywhere.

"Relax. It's not the end of the world. It's really not."

He smiled at her to show her that it wasn't the end of the world. He wanted to make her smile back at him because he was certain that her smile would make her lovely face even lovelier, but she didn't seem to have a smile in her.

He said, "All right, about this old woman. You've given me a pretty detailed description of her." He had made notes as she talked.

Now he glanced at them." But is there anything else about her that might help us make an identification?"

"I've told you everything I remember."

"What about scars? Did she have any scars?"

"No."

"Did she wear glasses?"

"No."

"You said she was in her late sixties or early seventies-"

"Yes."

',-yet her face was hardly lined."

"That's right."

"Unnaturally smooth, somewhat puffy, you said."

"Her skin, yes. I had an aunt who took cortisone injections for arthritis. Her face was like this woman's face."

"So you think she's being treated for some form of arthritis?"

Christine shrugged." I don't know. Could be."

"Was she wearing a copper bracelet or any copper rings?"

"Copper? "

"It's only a wives' tale, of course, but a lot of people think copperjewelry helps arthritis. I had an aunt with arthritis, too, and she wore a copper necklace, two copper bracelets on each wrist, a couple of copper rings, and even a copper ankle bracelet. She was a thin little bird of a woman, weighed down with crummy-looking jewelry, and she swore by it, said it did her a world of good, but she never moved any easier and never had any relief from the pain."

"This woman didn't have any copper jewelry. Lots of other jewelry, like I said, but nothing copper."

He stared at his notes. Then: "She didn't tell you her name-"

"No."

"— but was she wearing a monogtam, like maybe on her blouse-"

"No."

— or were her initials spelled out on one of her rings?"

"I don't think so. If they were, I didn't notice."

"And you didn't see where she came from?"

"No."

"If we knew what kind of car she got out of-"

"I've no idea. We were almost to our car, and she just stepped out from beside it."

"What kind of car was parked next to yours?"

She frowned, trying to remember.

While she thought, Charlie studied her face, looking for imperfections.

Nothing in this world was free of imperfections.

Everything had at least one flaw. Even a bottle of Lafite Rothschild could have a bad cork or too much tannic acid. Not even a Rolls Royce had an unblemished paint job. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups were unquestionably delicious-but they made you fat. However, no matter how carefully he studied Christine Scavello's face, he could find nothing whatsoever wrong with it. Oh, yes, well, the pinched nose, and the heavy cheekbones, and the too-high brow, but in her case those didn't strike him as imperfections; they were merely. well, deviations from the ordinary definition of beauty, minor deviations that gave her character, a look of her own And what the hell is wrong with me? he wondered. I've got to stop mooning over her as if I were a lovesick schoolboy.

On one hind, he liked the way he felt; it was a fresh, exhilarating feeling. On the other hand, he didn't like it because he didn't understand it, and it was his nature to want to understand everything.

That was why he'd become a detective-to find answers, to understand.

She blinked, looked up at him." I remember. It wasn't a car parked next to us. It was a van."

"A paneled van? What kind?"

I 'White." "I mean, what make?"

She frowned again, trying to recall.

"Old or new?" he asked.

"New. Clean, sparkling."

"Did you notice any dents, scrapes?"

"No. And it was a Ford."

"Good. Very good. Do you know what year?"

"No."

"A recreational vehicle, was it? With one of those round windows on the side or maybe a painted mural?"

"No. Very utilitarian. Like a van somebody would use for work." "Was there a company name on the side?"

"No."

"Any message at all painted on it?"

"No. It was just plain white."

"What about the license plate?"

"I didn't see it."

"You passed by the back of the van. You noticed it was a Ford. The license plate would've been right there."

"I guess. But I didn't look at it."

"If it becomes necessary, we can probably get it out of you with hypnosis. At least now we have a little something to start with." "If she got out of the van."

"For starters, we'll assume she did."

"And that's probably a mistake."

"And maybe it isn't."

"She could've come from anywhere in the parking lot."

"But since we have to start somewhere, we might as well begin with the van," he said patiently.

"She mightve come from another row of cars altogether. We might just be wasting time. I don't want to waste time. She isn't wasting time. I have an awful feeling we don't have much time."

Her nervous, fidgety movements escalated into uncontrollable shivers that shook her entire body. Charlie realized that she had been maintaining her composure only with considerable effort.

"Easy," he said." Easy now. Everything'll work out fine. We won't let anything happen to Joey."

She was pale. Her voice quavered when she spoke: "He's so sweet. He's such a sweet little boy. He's the center of my life. the center of everything. If anything happened to him. "

"Nothing's going to happen to him. I guarantee you that."

She began to cry. She didn't sob or wall or get hysterical. She just took deep, shuddery breaths, and her eyes grew watery, and tears slipped down her cheeks.

Pushing his chair back from the desk, getting up, wanting to comfort her, feeling awkward and inadequate, Charlie said, "I think you need a drink."

She shook her head.

"It'll help," he said.

"I don't drink much," she said shakily, and the tears poured from her even more copiously than before.

"Just one drink."

"Too early," she said.

"It's past eleven-thirty. Almost lunchtime. Besides, this is medicinal"

He went to the bar that stood in the corner by one of the two big windows. He opened the lower doors, took out a bottle of Chivas Regal and one glass, put them on the marble-topped counter, poured two ounces of Scotch.

As he was capping the bottle, he happened to look out the window beside him-and froze. A white Ford van, clean and sparkling, with no advertising on it, was parked across the street.

Looking over the tops of the uppermost fronds of an enormous date palm that rose almost to his fifth-floor window, Charlie saw a man in dark clothing leaning against the side of the van.

Coincidence.

The man seemed to be eating. Just a workman stopped on a quiet side-street to grab an early lunch. That's all. Surely, it couldn't be anything more than that.

Coincidence.

Or maybe not. The man down there also seemed to be watching the front of this building. He appeared to be having a bite of lunch and running a stakeout at the same time. Charlie had been involved in dozens of stakeouts over the years. He knew what a stakeout looked like, and this sure as hell looked like one, although it was a bit obvious and amateurish.

Behind him, Christine said, "Is something wrong?"

He was surprised by her perspicacity, by how sharply attuned to him she was, especially since she was still highly agitated, still crying.

He said, "I hope you like Scotch."

He turned away from the window and took the drink to her.

She accepted it without further protestations. She held the glass in both hands but still couldn't keep it from shaking. She sipped rather daintily at the whiskey.

Charlie said, "Drink it straight down. Two swallows. Get it inside you where it can do some good."

She did as he said, and he could tell that she really didn't drink much because she grimaced at the bitterness of the Scotch, even though Chivas was about the smoothest stuff ever to come out of a distillery.

He took the empty glass from her, carried it back to the bar, rinsed it out in the small sink, and set it on the drainboard.

He looked out the window again.

The white truck was still there.

So was the man in the dark pants and shirt, eating his lunch with studied casualness.

Returning to Christine, Charlie said, "Feel better?"

Some color had crept back into her face. She nodded." I'm sorry for coming apart on you like that."

He sat half on the edge of his desk, keeping one foot on the floor. He smiled at her." You have nothing to apologize for.

Most people, if they'd had the scare you've had, would've come through the door blubbering incoherently, and they'd still be blubbering incoherently. You're holding up quite well."

"I don't feel as if I'm holding up." She took a handkerchief from her purse and blew her nose." But I guess you're right.

One crazy old lady isn't the end of the world."

"Exactly."

"One crazy old lady can't be that hard to deal with."

"That's the spirit," he said.

But he thought: One crazy old lady? Then who's the guy with the white truck?

Grace Spivey sat on a hard oak chair, her ice-gray eyes shining in the gloom.

Today was a red day in the spirit world, one of the reddest days she had ever known, and she was dressed entirely in red in order to be in harmony with it, just as she had dressed entirely in green yesterday, when the spirit world had been going through a green phase. Most people weren't aware that the spirit world around them changed color from day to day; of course, most people couldn't see the supernatural realm as clearly as Grace could see it when she really tried; in fact, most of them couldn't see it at all, so there was no way they could possibly understand Grace's manner of dress. But for Grace, who was a psychic and a medium, it was essential to be in harmony with the color of the spirit world, for then she could more easily receive clairvoyant visions of both the past and future. These visions were sent to her by benign spirits and were transmitted on brilliantly colored beams of energy, beams that, today, were all shades of red.

If she had tried to explain this to most people, they would have thought her insane. A few years ago her own daughter had committed Grace to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation; but Grace had slipped out of that trap, had disowned her daughter, and had been more cautious ever since.

Today she wore dark red shoes, a dark red skirt, and a lighter red.

two-tone, striped blouse. All her jewelry was red: a double strand of crimson beads and matching bracelets on each wrist; a porcelain broach as bright as fire; two ruby rings; one ring with four dazzling ovals of highly polished camelian; four other rings with cheap red glass, vermilion enamel, and scarlet porcelain. Whether precious, semi-precious, or fake, all the stones in her rings glinted and sparkled in the flickering candlelight.

The quivering flames, adance upon the points of the wicks, caused strange shadows to writhe over the basement walls. The room was large, but it seemed small because the candies were grouped at one end of it, and three-quarters of the chamber lay beyond the reach of their inconstant amber light. There were eleven candles in all, each fat and white, each fitted in a brass holder with an ornate drip guard, and each brass candlestick was gripped firmly by one of Grace's followers, all of whom were waiting eagerly for her to speak. Of the eleven, six were men and five were women. Some were young, some middle-aged, some old. They sat on the floor, forming a semicircle around the chair on which Grace sat, their faces gleaming and queerly distorted in the fluttering, shimmering, eldritch glow.

These eleven did not constitute the entire body of her followers. More than fifty others were in the room overhead, waiting anxiously to hear what transpired during this session. And more than a thousand others were elsewhere, in a hundred different places, engaged upon work that Grace had assigned to them.

However, these eleven at her feet were her most trusted, valued, and capable lieutenants. They were the ones she most cherished.

She even knew and remembered their names, although it wasn't easy for her to remember names (or much of anything else) these days, not as easy as it had been before the Gift had been given to her. The Gift filled her, filled her mind, and crowded out so many things that she had once taken for grantedsuch as the ability to remember names and faces. And the ability to keep track of time. She never knew what time it was any more; even when she looked at a clock, it frequently had no meaning for her. Seconds, minutes, hours, and days now seemed like ridiculously arbitrary measurements of time; perhaps they were still useful to ordinary men and women, but she was beyond the need of them. Sometimes, when she thought only a day had passed, she discovered that an entire week was missing.

It was scary but also curiously exhilarating, for it made her constantly aware that she was special, that she was Chosen. The Gift had also crowded out sleep. Some nights she didn't sleep at all. Most nights she slept one hour, never more than two, but she didn't seem to need sleep any more, so it didn't matter how little she got. The Gift crowded out everything that might interfere with the great and sacred work she must accomplish.

Nevertheless, she remembered the names of these eleven people because they were the purest members of her flock. They were the best of the best, largely untainted souls who were the most worthy of carrying out the demanding tasks ahead of them.

One other man was in the basement. His name was Kyle Barlowe. He was thirty-two, but he looked older-older, somber, mean, and dangerous. He had lank brown hair, thick but without luster. His high forehead ended in a heavy shelf of bone under which his deeply set brown eyes were watchful and shrewd. He had a large nose, but it wasn't regal or proud; it had been broken more than once and was lumpy. His cheekbones and jawbone were heavy, crudely formed, like the plate of bone from which his forehead had been carved. Although his features were for the most part over-sized and graceless, his lips were thin, and they were so bloodless and pale that they seemed even thinner than they actually were; as a result, his mouth appeared to be nothing more than a slash in his face. He was an extraordinarily big man, six-eleven, with a bull's neck, slab shoulders, well-muscled chest and anus. He looked as if he could break a man in half-and as if he frequently did exactly that, strictly for the fun of it.

In fact, for the past three years, since Kyle had become one of Grace's followers and then a member of her inner circle and then her most trusted assistant, he hadn't raised a hand against anyone. Before Grace had found and saved him, he had been a moody, violent, and brutal man.

But those days were gone. Grace had been able to see beyond Kyle Barlowe's forbidding exterior, had glimpsed the good soul that lay beneath. He had gone astray, yes, but he had been eager (even if he hadn't realized it himself) to return to the good and righteous path. All he needed was someone to show him the way. Grace had shown him, and he had followed. Now, his huge, powerful arms and his marblehard fists would harm no virtuous man or woman but would smite only those who were the enemies of God and, even then, only when Grace told him to smite them.

Grace knew the enemies of God when she saw them. The ability to recognize a hopelessly corrupt soul in the first instant upon encountering it-that was but one small part of the Gift that God had bestowed upon her. One split second of eye contact was usually all Grace needed in order to determine if a person was habitually sinful and beyond redemption. She had the Gift.

No one else. Just her, the Chosen. She heard evil in the voices of the wicked; she saw evil in their eyes. There was no hiding from her.

Some people, given the Gift, would have doubted it, would have wondered if they were wrong or even crazy. But Grace never doubted herself or questioned her sanity. Never. She knew she was special, and she knew she was always right in these matters because God had told her that she'was right.

The day was rapidly coming when she would finally call upon Kyle (and upon some of the others) to strike down many of those disciples of Satan. She would point to the evil ones, and Kyle would destroy them.

He would be the hammer of God. How wonderful that day would be! Sitting in the basement of her church, on the hard oak chair, in front of her innermost circle of believers, Grace shivered with anticipatory pleasure. It would be so fine, so satisfying to watch the big man's hard muscles bunch and flex and bunch again as he brought the wrath of God to the infidels and Satanists.

Soon. The time was coming. The I.

Now, the candlelight flickered, and Kyle said softly, "Are you ready, Mother Grace?"

"Yes," she said.

She closed her eyes. For a moment she saw nothing, only darkness, but then she quickly established contact with the spirit world, and lights appeared behind her eyes, bursts and squiggles and fountains and spots and shifting-heaving-writhing shapes of light, some brilliant and some dim, all shades of red, naturally, because they were spirits and spectral energies, and this was a red day in their plane of existence. It was the reddest day Grace had ever known.

The spirits swarmed on all sides of her, and she moved off among them as if she were drifting away into a world that was painted on the backs of her own eyelids. At first she drifted slowly. She felt her mind and spirit separating from her body, gradually leaving the flesh behind. She was still aware of the temporal plane in which her body existed-the odor of burning candies, the hard oak chair beneath her, an occasional rustle or murmur from one of her disciples-but eventually all that faded.

She accelerated until she was rushing, then flying, then rocketing through the light-spotted void, faster and faster, with exhilarating, now sickening, now terrifying speed Sudden stillness.

She was deep in the spirit world, hanging motionless, as if she were an asteroid suspended in a distant corner of space. She was no longer able to see, hear, smell, or feel the world she had left behind. Across an infinite night, red-hued spirits of all descriptions moved in every direction, some fast and some slow, some purposefully and some erratically, on adventures and holy errands that Grace could not begin to comprehend.

Grace thought about the boy, Joey Scavello. She knew what he really was, and she knew he had to die. But she didn't know if the time had come to dispose of him. She had made this journey into the spirit world for the sole purpose of inquiring as to when and how she should deal with the boy.

She hoped she would be told to kill him. She wanted so much to kill him.

The double shot of Chivas Regal seemed to have calmed Christine Scavello, although not entirely. She finally leaned back in her chair, and her hands were no longer knotted together, but she was still tense and noticeably shaky.

Charlie continued to sit on the edge of his desk with one foot on the floor." At least until we know who this old woman is and what kind of person we're dealing with, I think we should put two armed bodyguards with Joey around the clock."

"All right. Do it."

"Does the boy go to school?"

"Preschool. He starts regular school next fall."

"We'll keep him out of preschool until this blows over."

"It won't just blow over," she said edgily.

"Well, of course, I didn't mean we were just going to wait it out. I meant to say that we'll keep him out of preschool until we put a stop to this thing."

"Will two bodyguards be enough?"

"Actually, it'll be six. Three pairs working in eight-hour shifts."

"Still, it'll only be two men during any one shift, and I-"

"Two can handle it. They're well trained. However, this can all get pretty expensive. If-"

"I can afford it," she said.

"My secretary can give you a fee sheet-"

"Whatever's needed. I can pay."

"What about your husband?"

"What about him?"

"Well, what's he think about all this?"

"I don't have a husband."

" Oh. I'm sorry if-"

"No need for sympathy. I'm not a widow, and I wasn't divorced, either."

Here was the forthrightness he had seen in her, this refusal to be evasive was refreshing." I've never been married."

" Ah," he said.

Although Charlie was sure his voice contained not the slightest note of disapproval, Christine stiffened as if he had insulted her.

With a sudden, irrational, quiet yet steel-hard anger that startled him, she said, "What're you trying to tell me? That you've got to approve of your client's morality before you accept a case?"

He gaped at her, astonished and confused by her abrupt change of attitude." Well of course not! I only-', "Because I'm not about to sit here like a criminal on trial-"

"Wait, wait, wait. What's wrong? Huh? Whatd I say? Good heavens, why should I care if you've been married or not?"

"Fine. Glad you feel that way. Now, how are you going to track down that old woman?"

Anger, like a smouldering fire, remained in her eyes and voice.

Charlie couldn't understand why she was so sensitive and defensive about her son's lack of a legal father. It was unfortunate, yes, and she probably wished the situation were otherwise. But it really wasn't a terrible social stigma these days. She acted as if she were living in the 1940s instead of the '80s.

"I really mean it," he said." I don't care."

"Terrific. Congratulations on your open-mindedness. If it was up to me, you'd get a Nobel Prize for humanitarianism. Now can we drop the subject?"

What the hell is wrong with her? he wondered. He was glad there was no husband. Couldn't she sense his interest in her Couldn't she see through his tissue-thin professional demeanor?

Couldn't she see how she got to him? Most women had a sixth sense for that sort of thing.

He said, "If I rub you the wrong way or somethin, I can turn this case over to one of my junior men-"

"No, I-"

"They're all quite reliable, capable. But I assure you I didn't mean to disparage or ridicule you-or whatever the heck you think I did. I'm not like that cop this morning, the one who chewed you out about using four-letter words."

"Officer Wilford."

"I'm not like Wilford. I'm easy. Okay? Truce?"

She hesitated, then nodded. The stiffness left her. The anger faded and was replaced by embarrassment.

She said, "Sorry I snapped at you, Mr. Harrison-"

"Call me Charlie. And you can snap at me anytime." He smiled." But we have to talk about Joey's father because maybe he's connected with this."

"With the old woman?"

"Maybe."

"Oh, I doubt it."

"Maybe he wants custody of his son."

"Then why not just come and ask?"

Charlie shrugged." People don't always approach a problem from a logical point of view."

She shook her head.."No. It's not Joey's… father. As far as I know, he isn't even aware that Joey exists. Besides, that old woman was saying Joey had to die."

"I still think we have to consider the possibility and talk about his father, even if that's painful for you. We can't leave any possibility unexplored."

She nodded." It's just that….. when I got pregnant with Joey, it nearly destroyed Evelyn….. my mother. She had expected so much of me

She made me feel terribly guilty, made me wallow in guilt." She sighed." I guess, because of the way my mother treated me, I'm still overly sensitive about Joey's.

illegitimacy."

"I understand."

"No. You don't. You can't."

He waited and listened. He was a good and patient listener.

It was part of his job.

She said, "Evelyn. Mother. doesn't like Joey much.

Won't have much to do with him. She blames him for his illegitimacy.

She sometimes even treats him as if. as if he's wicked or evil or something. It's wrong, it's sick, it doesn't make sense, but it's so much like Mother to blame him because my life didn't turn out exactly the way she planned it for me."

"If she actively dislikes Joey, is it possible that your mother might be behind this thing with the old woman?" he asked.

That thought clearly startled her. But she shook her head.

"No. Surely not. It isn't Evelyn's style. She's direct. She tells you what she thinks, even if she knows she's going to hurt you, even if she knows every word she speaks is going to be like a nail going into you. She wouldn't be asking her friends to harass my boy. That's ludicrous."

"She might not be involved directly. But maybe she's talked about you and Joey to other people, and maybe this old woman at the mall was one of those people. Maybe your mother said intemperate things about the boy, not realizing this old woman was unbalanced, not realizing the old woman would take what your mother said the wrong way, take it too literally and actually act upon it."

Scowling, Christine said, "Maybe. "

"I know it's far-fetched, but it is possible."

"Okay. Yeah. I suppose so."

"So tell me about your mother."

"I assure you, she couldn't be involved with this."

"Tell me anyway," he coaxed.

She sighed and said, "She's a dragon lady, my mother. You can't understand, and I can't really make you understand, because you had to live with her to know what she's like. She kept me under her thumb.

intimidated. browbeaten. all those years. "

all those years.

Her mind drifted back, against her will, and she became aware of a pressure on her chest and began to have some difficulty drawing her breath, for the predominant feeling associated with her childhood was one of suffocation.

She saw the rambling Victorian house in Pomona that had been passed from her Grandma Giavetti to Evelyn, where they had lived from the time Christine was a year old, where Evelyn still lived, and the memory of it was an unwelcome weight.

Although she knew it to be a white house with pale yellow trim and awnings, with charming gingerbread ornamentation and many windows to admit the sun, in her mind's eye she always saw it crouched in shadows, with Halloween-bare trees crowding close to it, beneath a threatening gray-black sky. She could hear the grandfather clock ticking monotonously in the parlor, an ever-present sound that in those days had seemed always to be mocking her with its constant reminder that the misery of her childhood stretched almost to eternity and would be counted out in millions and millions of leaden seconds. She could see again, in every room, heavy over-stuffed pieces of furniture pressed too close to one another, and she supposed that her memory made the ticking clock louder and more maddeningly intrusive than it had actually been, and that in reality the furniture hadn't been quite so large and clunky and ugly and dark as it was in recollection.

Her father, Vincent Scavello, had found that house, that life, as oppressive as it was in Christine's memory, and he had left them when she was four and her brother, Tony, was eleven. He never came back, and she never saw him again. He was a weak man with an inferiority complex, and Evelyn made him feel even more inadequate because she set such high standards for everyone. Nothing he did could satisfy her. Nothing anyone didespecially not Christine or Tony-was half as good as Evelyn expected of them. Because he couldn't measure up to her expectations, Vincent developed a drinking problem, and that only made her nag him more, and finally he just left. Two years later, he was dead. In a way he committed suicide, though not with a gurmothing so dramatic as that; it was just a case of drunken driving; he ran head-on into a bridge abutment at seventy miles an hour.

Evelyn went to work the day after Vincent walked out, not only supported her family but did a good job of it, living up to her own high standards. That made things even worse for Christine and Tony." You've got to be the best at what you do, and if you aren't the best there's no use doing it at all," Evelyn said-at least a thousand times.

Christine had one especially clear memory of an entire, tense evening spent at the kitchen table, after Tony brought home a report card with a D in math, a failure that, in Evelyn's eyes, was in no way mitigated by the fact that he had received an A in every other subject. This would have been bad enough, but that same day he had been mildly reprimanded by the school principal for smoking in the boys' washroom. It was the first time he tried a cigarette, and he didn't like it and didn't intend to smoke again; it was just an experiment, hardly unusual for a fourteen-year-old boy, but Evelyn was furious. That night the lecture had gone on for almost three hours, with Evelyn alternately pacing, sitting at the table with her head in her hands, shouting, weeping, pleading, pounding the table." You're a Giavetti, Tony, more of a Giavetti than a Scavello. You might carry your father's name, but by God, there's more of my blood in you; there must be. I couldn't bear to think half your blood is poor weak Vincent's, because if that was true, God knows what would become of you. I won't have it! I won't! I work my fingers to the bone to give you every chance, every opportunity, and I won't have you spitting in my face, which is what this is, goofing off in school, goofing off in math class-it's just the same as spitting in my face!" The anger gave way to tears, and she got up from the table, pulled a handful of Kleenex from the box on the kitchen counter, noisily blew her nose." What good does it do for me to worry about you, to care what happens to you?

You don't care. There's that few drops of your father's blood in you, that loafer's blood, and it only takes a few drops to contaminate you.

Like a disease. Scavello Disease. But you're also a Giavetti, and Giavettis always work harder and study harder, which is only right, only fitting, because God didn't intend for us to loaf and drink our lives away, like some I could mention.

You've got to get As in school, and even if you don't like math, you've got to just work harder until you're perfect in it, because you need math in this world, and your father, God pity him, was lousy with figures, and I won't have you being like poor weak Vincent; that scares me. I don't want my son being a bum, and I'm afraid I see a bum in you, just like your father, weakness in you. Now, you're also a Giat etti, and don't you forget it. Giavettis always do their best, and their best is always as good as anyone could do, and don't you tell me that you're already spending most of your time studying, and don't tell me about your weekend job at the grocery store. Work is good for you. I got you that job because you show me a teenage boy who doesn't have a part-time job and I'll show you a future bum. Why, even with your job and your studying and the things you do around here, you should still have plenty of free time, too much, way too much. You should maybe even be working a night or two during the week at the market. There's always more time if you want to find it; God made the whole world in six days, and don't tell me you aren't God because if you listened to your catechism lessons you'd know you were made in His image, and remember you're a Giavetti, which means you were made in His image just a little more than some other people I could name, like Vincent Scavello, but I won't. Look at me! I work all day, but I cook good meals for you, too, and with Christine I keep this big house immaculate, absolutely immaculate, God as my witness, and though I may be tired sometimes and feel like I just can't go on, I do go on, for you, for you I go on, and your clothes are always nicely pressed-Aren't they? — and your socks are always mended-Tell me once you ever had to wear a sock with a hole in it! — so if I do all this and not drop dead and not even complain, then you can be the kind of son to make me proud, and by God you're going to be! And as for you, Christine. "

Evelyn never ceased lecturing them. Always, every day, holidays, birthdays-there was no day free of her lectures. Christine and Tony sat captive, not daring to answer back because that brought the most withering scorn and the worst punishment-and encouraged even more lecturing. She pushed them relentlessly, demanded the greatest possible accomplishments in everything they did, which wasn't necessarily a bad thing; it might even have been good for them. However, when they did achieve the best grade possible, win the highest award being given, move up to the first seats in their sections of the school orchestra, when they did all that and more, much more, it never satisfied their mother.

The best wasn't good enough for Evelyn. When they achieved the best, reached the pinnacle, she chastised them for not having gotten there sooner, set new goals for them, and suggested they were trying her patience and running out of time in which to make her proud of them.

When she felt lecturing wasn't sufficient, she used her ultimate weapon-tears. She wept and blamed herself for their failures.

"Both of you are going to come to a bad end, and it'll be my fault, all my fault, because I didn't know how to reach you, how to make you see what was important. I didn't do enough for you, I didn't know how to help you overcome the Scavello blood that's in you, and I should have known, should have done better.

What good am I as a mother? No good, no mother at all."

all those years ago.

But it seemed like yesterday.

Christine couldn't tell Charlie Harrison everything about her mother and that claustrophobic childhood of shadowy rooms and heavy Victorian furniture and heavy Victorian guilt, for she would have needed hours to explain. Besides, she wasn't looking for pity, and she was not by nature the kind of person given to sharing the intimate details of her life with others-not even with friends, let alone strangers like this man, nice as he might be.

She only alluded to her past with a few sentences, but from his expression, she thought he sensed and understood more than she told him; perhaps the pain of it was in her eyes and face, more easily read than she supposed.

"Those years were worse for Tony than for me," she told the detective."

Mainly because, on top of everything else that Eyelyn expected of him, she also wanted him to be a priest. The Giavettis had produced two priests in her generation, and they were the most revered members of the family."

In addition to the Giavettis' tradition of service to the Church, Evelyn was a religious woman, and even without that family history, she would have pushed Tony toward the priesthood. She pushed successfully, too, for he went straight from parochial school into the seminary. He had no choice. By the time he was twelve, Evelyn had him brainwashed, and it was impossible for him to imagine being anything but a priest.

"Evelyn expected Tony to be a parish priest," Christine told Charlie Harrison." Maybe eventually a monsignor, perhaps even a bishop. Like I said, she had high standards. But when Tony took his vows, he asked to be assigned to missionary work, and he was-in Africa. Mother was so upset! See, in the Church, like in government, the way you usually move up through the hierarchy is largely through astute politicking. But you can't be a constant, visible presence in the corridors of power when you're stuck in some remote African mission. Mother was furious."

The detective said, "Did he choose missionary work because he knew she'd be against it?"

"No. The problem was Mother saw the priesthood as a way for Tony to bring honor to her and the family. But to Tony, the priesthood was an opportunity to serve. He took his vows seriously."

"Is he still in Africa?"

"He's dead."

Startled, Charlie Harrison said, "Oh. I'm sorry. I-"

"It's not a recent loss," she assured him." Eleven years ago, when I was a high school senior, Tony was killed by terrorists, African revolutionaries. For a while Mother was inconsolable, but gradually her grief gave way to a. sick anger. She was actually angry with Tony for getting himself killed-as if he'd run away like my father before him. She made me feel I ought to make up for how Daddy and Tony had failed her. In my own grief and confusion and guilt… I said I wanted to become a nun, and Evelyn… Mother leaped at the idea. So, after high school, at her urging, I entered the convent… and it was a disaster. "

So much time had passed, yet she could still vividly remember the way the novice's habit had felt when she'd first worn it: the unexpected weight of it; the surprisingly coarse texture of the black fabric; the way she had continually caught the flowing skirts on doorknobs, furniture, and everything else that she passed, unaccustomed as she was to such voluminous clothes.

Being trapped within that venerable uniform, sleeping within a narrow stone cubicle on a simple cot, day after day spent within the dreary and ascetically furnished confines of the convent-it all stayed with her in spite of her efforts to forget. Those Lost Years had been so similar to the suffocating life in the Victorian house in Pamona that, like thoughts of childhood, any recollection of her convent days was apt to put pressure on her chest and make breathing difficult.

"A nun?" Charlie Harrison said, unable to conceal his astonishment.

"A nun," she said.

Charlie tried to picture this vibrant, sensuous woman in a nun's habit.

He simply couldn't do it. His imagination rebelled.

At least he understood why she projected an uncommon inner tranquility.

Two years in a nunnery, two years of long daily sessions of meditation and prayer, two years isolated from the turbulent currents of everyday life were bound to have a lasting effect.

But none of this explained why she exerted such an instant, powerful attraction on him, or why he felt like a randy teenager in her company.

That was still a mystery-a pleasant mystery, but a mystery nonetheless.

She said, "I hung on for two years, trying to convince myself I had a vocation in the sisterhood. No good. When I left the convent, Evelyn was crushed. Her entire family had failed her.

Then, a couple of years later, when I got pregnant with Joey, Evelyn was horrified. Her only daughter, who might've been a nun, instead turned out to be a loose woman, an unwed mother.

She piled the guilt on me, smothered me in it."

She looked down, paused for a moment to compose herself Charlie waited.

He was as good at waiting as he was at listening.

Finally she said, "By that time, I was a fallen-away Catholic.

I'd pretty much lost my religion… or been driven away from it.

Didn't go to Mass any more. But I was still enough of a Catholic to abhor the idea of abortion. I kept Joey, and I've never regretted it."

"Your mother's never had a change of heart?"

"No. We speak to each other, but there's a vast gulf between us. And she won't have much to do with Joey."

" That's too bad."

"Ironically, almost from the day I got pregnant, my life turned around.

Everything's gotten better and better since then. I was still carrying Joey when I went into business with Val Gardner and started Wine & Dine.

By the time Joey was a year old, I was supporting my mother. I've had a lot of success, and it doesn't matter at all to her; it isn't good enough for her, not when I could have been a nun, and not when I am an unwed mother. She still heaps guilt on me each time I see her."

"Well, now I can understand why you're sensitive about it."

"So sensitive that. when all this started with the old woman yesterday. well, in the back of my mind I sort of wondered if maybe it was meant to be."

"What do you mean?"

"Maybe I'm meant to lose Joey. Maybe it's inevitable. Even.

predestined."

" I don't follow you."

She fidgeted, managed to look angry and dispirited and frightened and embarrassed all at the same time. She cleared her throat and took a deep breath and said, "Well, uh, maybe.

just maybe. it's God's way of punishing me for failing as a nun, for breaking my mother's heart, for drifting away from the Church after once having been so close to it."

, SBut that's. "

"Ridiculous?" she suggested.

"Well, yes."

She nodded." I know."

"God isn't spiteful."

"I know," she said sheepishly." It's silly. Illogical. Just plain dumb. Yet… it gnaws at me. Silly things can be true sometimes."

She sighed and shook her head." I'm proud of Joey, fiercely proud, but I'm not proud of being an unwed mother."

"You were going to tell me about the father… in case he might have something to do with this. What was his name?"

"He told me his name was Luke-actually Lucius-Under."

"Under what?"

"That was his last name. Under. Lucius Under, but he told me to call him Luke."

"Under. It's an unusual name."

"It's a phony name. He was probably thinking about getting me out of my underwear when he made it up," she said angrily, and then she blushed.

Clearly, she was embarrassed by these personal revelations, but she forged ahead." It happened aboard a cruise ship to Mexico, one of those Love Boat-type excursions." She laughed without humor when she spoke of love in this context." After I left the sisterhood and spent a few years working as a waitress, that trip was the first treat I gave myself I met a man only a few hours out of L.A. Very handsome.

charming. Said his name was Luke. One thing led to another.

He must have seen how vulnerable I was because he moved in like a shark.

I was so different then, you see, so timid, very much the little ex-nun, a virgin, utterly inexperienced. We spent five days together on that ship, and I think most of it was in my cabin. in bed. A few weeks later, when I learned I was pregnant, I tried to contact him. I wasn't after support, you understand. I just thought he had a right to know about his son."

Another sour laugh." He'd given me an address and phone num-her, but they were phony. I considered tracking him down through the cruise line, but it would've been so. humiliating." She smiled ruefully." Believe me, I've led a tame life ever since. Even before I knew I was pregnant, I felt. soiled by this man, that tawdry shipboard affair. I didn't want to feel like that again, so I've been.

well, not exactly a sexual recluse. but cautious. Maybe that's the ex-nun in me. And it's definitely the ex-nun in me that feels I need to be punished, that maybe God will punish me through Joey."

He didn't know what to tell her. He was accustomed to providing physical, emotional, and mental comfort for his clients, but spiritual comfort wasn't something he knew how to supply.

"I'm a little crazy on the subject," she said." And I'll probably drive you a little crazy with all my worrying. I'm always scared that Joey'll get sick or be hurt in an accident. I'm not just talking about ordinary motherly concern. Sometimes.

I'm almost obsessed with worry about him. And then yesterday this old crone shows up and tells me that my little boy is evil, says he's got to die, comes prowling around the house in the middle of the night, kills our dog. Well, God, I mean, she seems so relentless, so inevitable."

"She's not," Charlie said.

"So now that you know a little something about Evelyn.

my mother. do you still think she could be involved in this?"

"Not really. But it's still possible the old woman heard your mother talking about you, talking about Joey, and that's how she fixated on you."

"I think it was probably just pure chance. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time. If we hadn't been at the mall yesterday, if it had been some other woman with her little boy, that old hag would have fixated on them instead."

"I imagine you're right," he said.

He got up from the desk.

"But don't you worry about this crazy person," he said.

"We'll find her."

He went to the window.

"We'll put a stop to this harassment," he said." You'll see."

He looked out, over the top of the date palm. The white van was still parked across the street. The man in dark clothes was still leaning against the front fender, but he was no longer eating lunch. He was just waiting there, arms folded on his chest, ankles crossed, watching the front entrance of the building.

"Come here a minute," Charlie said.

Christine came to the window.

"Could that be the van that was parked beside your car at the mall? "

"Yeah. One like that."

"But could this be the same one?"

"You think I was followed this morning?"

"Would you have noticed if you had been?"

She frowned." I was in such a state… so nervous, upset…

I might not have realized I was being tailed, not if it was done with at least some circumspection."

"Then it could be the same van."

"Orjust a coincidence."

"I don't believe in coincidences."

"But if it's the same van, if I was followed, then who's the man leaning against it?"

They were too far above the stranger to get a good look at his face.

They could tell very little about him from this distance.

He might have been old or young or middle-aged.

"Maybe he's the old woman's husband. Or her son," Charlie said.

"But if he's following me, he'd have to be as crazy as she is."

"Probably."

"The whole family can't be nuts."

"No law against it," he said.

He went to his desk and placed an in-house telephone call to Henry Rankin, one of his best men. He told Rankin about the van across the street." I want you to walk past it, get the license number, and take a look at that guy over there, so you'll recognize him later. Glom anything else you can without being conspicuous about it. Be sure to come and go by the back entrance, and circle all the way around the block, so he won't have any idea where you came from."

"No sweat," Rankin said.

"Once you've got the number, get on the line to the DMV and find out who holds the registration."

"Yes, sir." "Then you report to me."

"I'm leaving now."

Charlie hung up. He went to the window again.

Christine said, "Let's hope it's just a coincidence."

"On the contrary-let's hope it's the same van. It's the best lead we could've asked for."

"But if it is the same van, and if that guy's with it-"

"He's with it, all right."

"— then it's not just the old woman who's a threat to Joey.

There're two of them."

"Or more."

"Huh?"

"Might be another one or two we don't know about."

A bird swooped past the window.

The palm fronds stirred in the unseasonably warm breeze.

Sunshine silvered the windows of the cars parked alon, the street.

At the van, the stranger waited.

Christine said, "What the hell is going on?"

In the windowless basement, eleven candles held the insistent shadows at bay.

The only noise was Mother Grace Spivey's increasingly labored breathing as she settled deeper into a trance. The eleven disciples made no sound whatsoever.

Kyle Barlowe was silent, too, and perfectly still even though he was uncomfortable. The oak chair on which he sat was too small for him.

That wasn't the fault of the chair, which would have provided adequate seating for anyone else in the room. But Barlowe was so big that, to him, most furniture seemed to have been designed and constructed for use by dwarves. He liked deep-seated, over-stuffed easy chairs and old-fashioned wingbacked armchairs but only if the wings were angled wide enough to accommodate his broad shoulders. He liked king-sized beds, Lay-Z-Boy recliners, and ancient claw-foot bathtubs that were so large they didn't force him to sit with his legs drawn up as if he were a baby taking a bath in a basin. His apartment in Santa Ana was furnished to his dimensions, but when he wasn't at home he was usually uncomfortable to one degree or another.

However, as Mother Grace slipped deeper into her trance, Barlowe became increasingly eager to hear what message she would bring from the spirit world, and gradually he ceased to notice that he seemed to be perched on a child's playroom chair.

He adored Mother Grace. She had told him about the coming of Twilight, and he had believed every word. Twilight. Yes, it made sense. The world was long overdue for T. By warning him that it was coming, by soliciting his help to prepare mankind for it, Mother Grace had given him an opportunity to redeem himself before it was too late.

She had saved him, body and soul.

Until he met her, he had spent most of his twenty-nine years in the single-minded pursuit of self-destruction. He'd been a drunkard, a barroom brawler, a dope addict, a rapist, even a murderer. He'd been promiscuous, bedding at least one new woman every week, most of them junkies or prostitutes or both.

He'd contracted gonorrhea seven or eight times, syphilis twice, and it was amazing he hadn't gotten both diseases more often than that.

On rare occasions, he had been sober and clear-headed enough to be disgusted or even frightened by his lifestyle. But he had rationalized his behavior by telling himself that self-loathing and anti-social violence were simply the natural responses to the thoughtless-and sometimes intentional-cruelty with which most people treated him.

To the world at large, he was a freak, a lumbering giant with a Neanderthaloid face that would scare off a grizzly bear. Little children were usually frightened of him. People of all ages stared, some openly and some surreptitiously. A. few even laughed at him when they thought he wasn't looking, joked about him behind his back. He usually pretended not to be aware of it-unless he was in a mood to break arms and kick ass. But he was always aware, and it hurt. Certain teenagers were the worst, especially certain girls, who giggled and laughed openly at him; now and then, when they were at a safe distance, they even taunted him. He had never been anything but an outsider, shunned and alone.

For many years, his violent and self-destructive life had been easy to justify to himself. Bitterness, hatred, and rage had seemed to be essential armor against society's cruelty. Without his reckless disregard for personal well-being and without his diligently nurtured lust for revenge, he would have felt defenseless.

The world insisted on making an outcast of him, insisted on seeing him as either a seven-foot buffoon with a monkey's face or a threatening monster. Well, he wasn't a buffoon, but he didn't mind playing the monster for them; he didn't mind showing them just how viciously, shockingly monstrous he could be when he really put his mind to it. They had made him what he was. He wasn't responsible for his crimes. He was bad because they had made him bad. For most of his life, that's what he had told himself.

Until he met Mother Grace Spivey.

She showed him what a self-pitying wretch he was. She made him see that his justifications for sinful and self-indulgent behavior were pitifully flimsy. She taught him that an outcast could gain strength, courage, and even pride from his condition. She helped him see Satan within himself and helped him throw the devil out.

She helped him understand that his great strength and his singular talent for destruction were to be used only to bring terror and punishment to the enemies of God.

Now, sitting in front of Mother Grace as she drifted in a trance, Kyle Barlowe regarded her with unqualified adoration. He didn't see that her untrimmed mane of gray hair was frizzy, knotted, and slightly greasy; to him, in the flickering golden light, her shining hair was a holy nimbus framing her face, a halo. He didn't see that her clothes were badly wrinkled; he didn't notice the threads and lint and dandruff and food stains that decorated her. He saw only what he wanted to see, and he wanted to see salvation.

She groaned. Her eyelids fluttered but did not open.

Still sitting on the floor and holding their candles steady, the eleven disciples of the inner council became tense, but none of them spoke or made any sound that might break the fragile spell.

"Oh God," Mother Grace said as if she had just seen something awesome or perhaps terrifying." Oh God oh God oh God!"

She winced. She shuddered. She licked her lips nervously.

Sweat broke out on her brow.

She was breathing harder than before. She gasped, open mouthed, as if she were drowning. Then she drew breath through clenched teeth, with a cold hissing sound.

Barlowe waited patiently.

Mother Grace raised her hands, grabbed at the empty air. Her rings gleamed in the candlelight. Then her hands fell back into her lap, fluttered briefly like dying birds, and were still.

At last she spoke in a weak, strained, tremulous voice that was barely recognizable as her own." Kill him."

"Who?" Barlowe asked.

"The boy."

The eleven disciples stirred, looked at one another meaningfully, and the movement of their candles caused shadows to twist and flap and shift all over the room.

"You mean Joey Scavello?" Barlowe asked.

"Yes. Kill him," Mother Grace said from a great distance.

"Now."

For reasons that neither Barlowe nor Mother Grace understood, he was the only person who could communicate with her when she was in a trance. If others spoke to her, she wouldn't hear them. She was the only contact they had with the spirit world, the sole conduit for all messages from the other side, but it was Barlowe, through his careful and patient questioning, who made certain that those messages were always clear and fully detailed. More than anything else, it was this function, this precious gift that convinced him he was one of God's chosen people, just as Mother Grace said he was.

"Kill him. kill him," she chanted softly in a raspy voice.

"You're sure this boy is the one?" Barlowe asked.

"Yes."

"There's no doubt?"

"None."

"How can he be killed?"

Mother Grace's face was slack now. Lines had appeared in her usually creaseless skin. Her pale flesh hung like wrinkled, lifeless cloth.

" How can we destroy him?" Barlowe inquired again.

Her mouth hung open wide. Breath rattled in her throat. Saliva glistened at one corner of her lips, welled up, and drooled slowly onto her chin.

"Mother Grace?" Barlowe prodded.

Her voice was even fainter than before: "Kill him… any way you choose."

"With a gun, a knife? Fire?"

"Any weapon… will succeed… but only if… you act soon." "How soon?"

"Time is running out. Day by day… he becomes… more powerful…

less vulnerable."

"When we kill him, is there a ritual we must follow?" Barlowe asked.

"Only that… once dead… his heart.

"What about his heart?"

"Must be… cut out," she said, her voice becoming somewhat stronger, sharper.

"And then?"

"It will be black."

"His heart will be black?"

"'As coal. And rotten. And you will see.

She sat up straighter in her chair. The sweat from her brow was trickling down her face. Tiny beads of perspiration had popped out of her upper lip. Like a pair of stricken moths, her white hands fluttered in her lap. Color returned to her face, although her eyes remained closed. She was no longer drooling, but spittle still shone on her chin.

"What will we see when we cut his heart out?" Barlowe asked.

"Worms," she said with disgust.

"In the boy's heart?"

"Yes. And beetles. Squirming."

A few of the disciples murmured to one another. It didn't matter.

Nothing could disturb Mother Grace's trance now. She was thoroughly caught up in it, swept away by her visions.

Leaning forward in his chair, his big hands clamped on his meaty thighs, Barlowe said, "What must we do with the heart once we've cut it out of him?"

She chewed on her lip so hard he was afraid she would draw blood. She raised her spastic hands again and worked them in the empty air as if she could wring the answer from the either.

Then: "Plun,e the heart into

"Into what?" Barlowe asked.

"A bowl of holy water."

"From a church?"

"Yes. The water will remain cool… but the heart… will boil, turn to dark steam… and evaporate."

"And then we can be certain the boy is dead?"

"Yes. Dead. Forever dead. Unable to return through another incarnation."

"Then there's hope?" Barlowe asked, hardly daring to believe that it was so.

"Yes," she said thickly." Hope."

"Praise God," Barlowe said.

"Praise God," the disciples said.

Mother Grace opened her eyes. She yawned, sighed, blinked, and looked around in confusion." Where's this? What's wrong?

I feel all clammy. Did I miss the six o'clock news? I mustn't miss the six o'clock news. I've got to know what Lucifer's people have been up to."

"It's only a few minutes till noon," Barlowe said." The six o'clock news is hours away."

She stared at him with that familiar, blurry-eyed, muddleheaded look that always marked her return from a deep trance.

"Whore you? Do I know you? I don't think I do."

"I'm Kyle, Mother Grace."

"Kyle?" she said as if she'd never heard of him. A suspicious glint entered her eyes.

"Just relax," he said." Relax and think about it. You've had a vision. You'll remember it in a moment. It'll come back to you. "

He held out both of his large, calloused hands. Sometimes, when she came out of a trance, she was so frightened and lost that she needed friendly contact. Usually, when she gripped his hands, she drew from his great reservoir of physical strength and soon regained her senses, as if he were a battery that she was tapping.

But today she pulled away from him. She frowned. She wiped at her spittle-damp chin. She looked around at the candles, at the disciples, clearly baffled by them." God, I'm so thirsty," she said.

One of the disciples hurried to get her a drink.

She looked at Kyle." What do you want from me? Why'd you bring me here?"

"It'll all come back to you," he said patiently, smiling reassuringly.

"I don't like this place," she said, her voice thin and querulous.

"It's your church."

"Church?"

"The basement of your church."

"It's dark," she whined.

"You're safe here."

She pouted as if she were a child, then scowled, then said, "I don't like the dark. I'm afraid of the dark." She hugged herself.

"What've you got me here in the dark for?"

One of the disciples got up and turned on the lights.

The others blew out the candles.

"Church?" Mother Grace said again, looking at the paneled basement walls and at the exposed ceiling beams. She was trying hard to get a handle on her situation, but she was still disoriented.

There was nothing Barlowe could do to help her. Sometimes, she needed as long as ten minutes to shake off the confusion that always followed a journey into the spirit world.

She stood up.

Barlowe stood, too, towering over her.

She said, "I gotta pee real bad. Real bad." She grimaced and put one hand on her abdomen." Isn't there anywhere to pee in this place? Huh?

I got to pee."

Barlowe motioned to Edna Vanoff, a short stout woman who was a member of the inner council, and Edna led Mother Grace to the lavatory at the far end of the basement. The old woman was unsteady; she leaned against Edna as she walked, and she continued to look around in bewilderment.

In a loud voice that carried the length of the room, Mother Grace said,

"Oh, boy, I gotta pee so bad I think I'm gonna bust."

Barlowe sighed wearily and sat down on the too-small, toohard wooden chair.

The most difficult thing for him-and for the other disciplesto understand and accept was Mother Grace's bizarre behavior after a vision. At times like this she didn't seem at all like a great spiritual leader. Instead, she seemed as if she were nothing more than a befuddled, crazy old woman. In ten minutes, at most, she would have regained her wits, as she always did; soon she would be the same intense, sharp-minded, clear-eyed woman who had converted him from a life of sin. Then no one would doubt her insight, power, and holiness; no one would question the truth of her exalted mission. However, just for these few disconcerting minutes, even though he had seen her in this dismaying condition many times before and knew it wouldn't last, Barlowe nevertheless felt uneasy, sick with uncertainty.

He doubted her.

And hated himself for doubting.

He supposed that God put Mother Grace through these sorry, undignified spells of disorientation for the very purpose of testing the faith of her followers. It was God's way of making certain that only Mother Grace's most devoted disciples remained with her, thereby insuring a strong church during the difficult days ahead. Yet, every time she was like this, Barlowe was badly shaken by the way she looked and acted.

He glanced at the members of the inner council, who were still sitting on the floor. All of them looked troubled, and all of them were praying. He figured they were praying for the strength not to doubt Mother Grace the way he was doubting her. He closed his eyes and began to pray, too.

They were going to need all the strength, faith, and confidence they could find within themselves, for killing the boy wasn't going to be easy. He wasn't an ordinary child. Mother Grace had adamantly made that clear. He would possess awesome powers of his own, and perhaps he would even be able to destroy them the moment they dared lift a hand against him. But for the sake of all mankind, they had to try to kill him.

Barlowe hoped Mother Grace would permit him to strike the mortal blow.

Even if it meant his own death, he wanted to be the one who actually drew the boy's blood because whoever killed the boy (or died in the attempt) was assured of a place in Heaven, close to the throne of God. Barlowe was convinced that this was true. If he used his tremendous physical strength and his pent-up rage to strike out at this evil child, he would be making amends for all the times he had harmed the innocent in the days before Mother Grace had converted him.

Sitting on the hard oak chair, eyes closed, praying, he slowly curled his big hands into fists. He began to breathe faster. Eagerness was apparent in the hunch of his shoulders and in the bunching of muscles in his neck and jaws. Tremors passed through him. He was impatient to do God's work.

Less than twenty minutes after he had left, Henry Rankin returned to Charlie Harrison's office with the Department of Motor Vehicles' report on the white van's license number.

Rankin was a small man, five-three, slender, with an athletic grace and bearing. Christine wondered if he had ever been a jockey. He was well dressed in a pair of black Bally loafers, a light gray suit, white shirt, and a blue knit tie, with a blue display handkerchief carefully folded in the breast pocket of his jacket. He didn't look anything like Christine's conception of a private investigator.

After Rankin was introduced to Christine, he handed Charlie a sheet of paper and said, "According to the DMV, the van belongs to a printing company called The True Word."

Come to think of it, Charlie Harrison didn't look much like a private investigator, either. She expected a PI to be tall. Charlie wasn't short like Henry Rankin, but he was only about five-ten or five-eleven.

She expected a PI to be built like a truck, to look as if he could ram through a brick wall. Charlie was lean, and although he looked as if he could take care of himself well enough, he would never ram through a wall, brick or otherwise.

She expected a PI to seem at least a little bit dangerous, with a violent aspect to his eyes and perhaps a tight-lipped, cruel mouth.

Charlie appeared to be intelligent, efficient, capable-but not dangerous. He had an unremarkable, though generally handsome face framed by thick blond hair that was neatly combed.

His eyes were his best features, gray-green, clear, direct; they were warm, friendly eyes, but there was no violence in them, at least none that she could detect.

In spite of the fact that neither Charlie nor Rankin looked like Magnum or Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, Christine sensed she had come to the right place. Charlie Harrison was friendly, selfpossessed, plain-spoken. He walked, turned, and performed every task with an unusual economy of motion, and his gestures, too, were neat and precise.

He projected an aura of competence and trustworthiness. She suspected that he seldom, if ever, failed to do his job well. He made her feel secure.

Few people had that effect on her. Damned few. Especially men. In the past, when she had relied upon men, her faith had not always-or even usually-been well placed. However, instinct told her that Charlie Harrison was different from most other men and that she would not regret placing her trust in him.

Charlie looked up from the paper Rankin had given him." The True Word, huh? Anything on it in our files?"

"Nothing."

Charlie looked at Christine." You ever hear of them?"

"No."

"You ever have any brochures or stationery or anything printed for that gourmet shop of yours?"

" Sure. But that's not the printer we use."

"Okay," Charlie said, "we'll have to find out who owns the company, try to get a list of their employees, start checking everyone out."

"Can do," Henry Rankin said.

To Christine, Charlie said, "You might have to talk with your mother about this, Ms. Scavello."

"I'd rather not," she said." Not unless it becomes absolutely necessary"

"Well….. all right. But it probably will become necessary.

For now….. you might as well go on to work. It'll take us awhile to dig into this."

"What about Joey?"

"He can stay here with me this afternoon," Charlie said." I want to see what'll happen if you leave without the boy. Will the guy in the van follow you-or will he wait for Joey to come out? Which of you is he most interested in?"

He'll wait for Joey, Christine thought grimly. Because it" s Joey he wants to kill.

Sherry Ordway, the receptionist at Klemet-Harrison, wondered if she and Ted, her husband, had made a mistake. Six years ago, after three years of marriage, they had decided they didn't really want children, and Ted had had a vasectomy. With no children, they could afford a better house and better furniture and a nicer car, and they were free to travel, and the evenings were always peaceful and perfect for curling up with a book-or with each other. Most of their friends were tied down with families, and every time Sherry and Ted saw someone else's child being rude or downright malevolent, they congratulated themselves on the wisdom of avoiding parenthood. They relished their freedom, and Sherry never regretted remaining childless. Until now. As she answered the telephone and typed letters and did filing, she watched Joey Scavello, and she began to wish Oust a little) that he was hers.

He was such a good kid. He sat in one of the armchairs in the waiting area, dwarfed by it, his feet off the floor. He spoke when spoken to, but he didn't interrupt anyone or call attention to himself. He leafed through some of the magazines, looking at pictures, and he hummed softly to himself, and he was just about the cutest thing she'd ever seen.

She had just finished typing a letter and had been surreptitiously watching the boy as, with much frowning and tonguebiting, he checked the knots in the laces of his sneakers and retied one of them. She was about to ask him if he would like another of her butterscotch Life Savers when the telephone rang.

" Klemet-Harrison," Sherry said.

A woman said, "Is Joey Scavello there? He's just a little boy, six years old. You can't miss him if he's there; he's such a charmer."

Surprised that anyone would be calling the boy, Sherry hesitated.

"This is his grandmother," the woman said." Christine told me she was bringing Joey to your office."

"Oh. His grandmother. Why, yes, of course, they're here right now.

Mrs. Scavello is in Mr. Harrison's office at the moment.

She's not available, but I'm sure-"

"Well, it's Joey I really want to talk to. Is he in with Mr. Harrison, too?"

"No. He's right here with me."

"Do you think I could speak to him for a moment?" the woman said." If it's not too much trouble."

"Oh, it's no trouble-"

"I won't tie up your line for long."

"Sure. Just a minute," Sherry said. She held the phone away from her face and said, "Joey? It's for you. Your grandmother."

" Grandma?" he said, and seemed to be amazed.

He came to the desk. Sherry gave him the phone, and he said hello, but didn't say anything else. He went stiff, his small hand clenching the handset so tightly that his knuckles looked as if they would pierce the skin that sheathed them. He stood there, wide-eyed, listening. The blood drained out of his face. His eyes filled with tears. Suddenly, with a gasp and shudder, he slammed the phone down.

Sherry jumped in surprise." Joey? What's wrong?"

His mouth became soft and tremulous.

"Joey? “

"It was… h-her.

"Your grandmother."

"No. The w-witch."

"Witch?"

"She said… she's gonna… c-c-cut my heart out."

Charlie sent Joey into his office with Christine, closed the door after them, and remained in the lounge to question Sherry.

She looked distraught." I shouldn't have let her talk to him.

I didn't realize-"

"It wasn't your fault," Henry Rankin said.

"Of course it wasn't," Charlie told her.

"What sort of woman-"

"That's what we're trying to find out," Charlie said." I want you to think about the call and answer a few questions."

"There wasn't much said."

"She claimed to be his grandmother?"

"Yes."

"She said she was Mrs. Scavello?"

"Well. no. She didn't give her name. But she knew he was here with his mother, and I never suspected. I mean, well, she sounded like a grandmother."

"Exactly what did she sound like?" Henry asked.

"God, I don't know. a very pleasant voice," Sherry said.

"She speak with an accent?" Charlie asked.

"No."

"Doesn't have to've been a real obvious accent to be of help to us,"

Henry said." Almost everyone speaks with at least a mild accent of some kind."

" Well, if it was there, I didn't notice it," Sherry said.

"Did you hear anything in the background?" Charlie asked.

"Like what?"

"Any noise of any kind?"

"No."

"If she was calling from an outdoor pay phone, for instance, there would've been traffic noises, street noises of some kind."

"There wasn't anything like that."

"Any noises that might help us figure the kind of place she was calling from?"

"No. Just her voice," Sherry said." She sounded so nice."

After her vision, Mother Grace dismissed all her disciples except Kyle Barlowe and Edna Vanoff. Then, using the phone in the church basement, she placed a call to the detective agency where Joey Scavello and his mother had gone, and she spoke briefly with the boy. Kyle wasn't sure he saw the sense of it, but Mother Grace was pleased.

"Killing him isn't sufficient," she said." We must terrify and demoralize him, too. Through the boy, we'll bring fear and despair to Satan himself. We'll make the devil understand, at last, that the Good Lord will never permit him to rule the earth, and then he'll finally abandon his schemes and hopes of glory."

Kyle loved to hear her talk like that. When he listened to Mother Grace, he knew that he was a vital part of the most important events in the history of the world. Awe and humility made his knees weak.

Grace led Kyle and Edna to the far end of the basement, where a wood-paneled wall contained a cleverly concealed door. Beyond the door lay a room measuring twenty by twenty-six feet.

It was full of guns.

Early in her mission, Mother Grace had received a vision in which she had been warned that, when Tcame, she must be prepared to defend herself with more than just prayer. She had taken the vision very seriously indeed. This was not the church's only armory.

Kyle had been here many times before. He enjoyed the coolness of the room, the vague scent of gun oil. Most of all he took pleasure from the realization that terrible destruction waited quietly on these shelves, like a malevolent genie in a bottle, needing only a hand to pull the cork.

Kyle liked guns. He liked to turn a gun over and over in his enormous hands, sensing the power in it the way a blind man sensed the meaning in lines of Braille.

Sometimes, when his sleep was particularly deep and dark, he dreamed about holding a large gun in both hands and pointing it at people. It was a.357 Magnum, with a bore that seemed as big as a cannon's, and when it roared it was like the voice of a dragon. Each time it bucked in his hands, it gave him a jolt of intense pleasure.

For a while he had worried about these night-fantasies because he had thought it meant the devil hadn't been driven out of him, after all. But he came to see that the people in the dreams were God's enemies and that it was good for him to fantasize their destruction. Kyle was destined to be an instrument of divine justice. Grace had told him so.

Now, in the armory, Mother Grace went to the shelves along the wall to the left of the door. She took down a box, opened it, removed the plastic-wrapped revolver that lay within, and put the weapon on a work table. The gun she had chosen was a Smith & Wesson.38 Chiefs Special, a snub-barreled piece that packed a lot of wallop. She took another one from the shelf, removed it from its box, and placed it beside the first.

Edna Vanoff removed the weapons from their plastic wrappings.

Before the day was done, the boy would be dead, and it might be one of these two weapons that destroyed him.

Mother Grace removed a Remington 20-gauge shotgun from one of the shelves and brought it to the work table.

Kyle's excitement grew.

Joey sat in Charlie's chair, behind the big desk, sipping CocaCola that Charlie had poured for him.

Christine was in the client's chair once more. She was shaken.

A couple of times, Charlie saw her put her fingernail between her teeth and almost bite it before she realized she'd be biting acrylic.

He was upset that they had been reached and disturbed here, in his offices. They had come to him for help, for protection, and now both of them were frightened again.

Sitting on the edge of his desk, looking at Joey, he said, "If you don't want to talk about the phone call, I'll understand. But I'd really like to ask you some questions."

To his mother, Joey said, "I thought we were going to hire Magnum."

Christine said, "Honey, you've forgotten that Magnum's in Hawaii."

"Oh, yeah. Jeez, that's right," the boy said. He looked troubled."

Magnum would've been the best one to help us."

For a moment Charlie didn't know what the boy was talking about, and then he remembered the television show, and he smiled.

Joey took a long drink of his Coke, studying Chaflie over the rim of the glass. Finally he said, "I guess you'll be okay."

Charlie almost laughed." You won't be sorry you came to us, Joey. Now… what did the woman on the phone say to you?"

" She said. "You can't hide from me." "

Charlie heard fear ooze into the boy's voice, and he quickly said,

"Well, she's wrong about that. If we have to hide you from her, we can.

Don't you worry about that. What else did she say? "

"She said she knew what I was."

"What do you think she meant by that?"

The boy looked baffled." I don't know."

"What else did she say?"

" She said. she'd cut my heart out."

A strangled sound came from Christine. She stood, nervously clutching her purse." I think I ought to take Joey away somewhere."

"Maybe eventually," Charlie said soothingly." But not just yet."

"I think now's the time. Before… anything happens. We could go to San Francisco. Or farther. I've never been to the Caribbean. This is a good time of the year for the Caribbean, isn't it? "

"Give me at least twenty-four hours," Charlie said.

"Yeah? Twenty-four hours? And what if that hag catches up with us? No.

We should leave today."

"And how long do you intend to stay away?" Charlie asked.

"A week? A month? A year?"

"Two weeks should be long enough. You'll find her in two weeks."

"Not necessarily."

"Then how long?"

Understanding and sympathizing with Christine's concern, wanting to be gentle with her, knowing that he had to be blunt instead, Charlie said,

"Clearly, she's got some sort of fixation on Joey, some sort of obsession about him. It's Joey that keeps her motor running, so to speak. Without him around, she might pull in her horns. She might evaporate on us. We might never find her if Joey isn't here to bring her out. Do you intend to go on vacation forever?"

"Are you saying you intend to use my son as bait?"

"No. Not exactly. We'd never put him right in the jaws of a trap.

We'll use him more as a lure."

" That's outrageous!"

"But it's the only way we'll get her. If he's not around, there'll be no reason for her to show herself." He went to Christine and put a hand on her shoulder." He'll be guarded at all times. He'll be safe."

"Like hell he will."

"I swear to you-"

"You've already got the van's license number," she said.

"That might not be enough. It might not lead anywhere."

"You've got the name of the company that owns it. The True Word."

"That might not be enough, either. And if it's not enough, if it doesn't lead us anywhere, then Joey has to be around so the old woman has a reason to risk exposing herself."

"Seems like we're the ones taking the risks."

"Trust me," he said softly.

She met his eyes.

He said, "Sit down. Come on. Give me a chance. Later, if I see any indication-the slightest indication-that we might not be able to handle the situation, I'll send you and Joey out of town for a while. But please. not just yet. II

She looked past him at her son, who had put down his glass of Coke and was sitting on the edge of Charlie's big chair. She seemed to realize that her fear was directly transmitted to the boy, and she sat down and composed herself as Charlie requested.

He sat on the edge of his desk again." Joey, don't worry about the witch. I know just how to deal with witches. Leave the worrying to me.

Now. you were on the phone, and she said she wanted to cut.

cut you. What did she say after that?"

The boy screwed up his face, trying to remember." Not much. just something about some judges."

"Judges?"

"Yeah. She said something like… God wants her to bring some judge men to me."

" Judgment?" Charlie asked.

"Yeah," the boy said." She said she was bringing these jude men to see me. She said God wasn't gonna let me escape from her." He looked at his mother." Why does God want that old witch to get me?"

"He doesn't want her to get you, honey. She was lying. She's crazy.

God has nothing to do with this."

Frowning, Charlie said, "Maybe, in a roundabout way, He does. When Henry said the van was owned by a printing company called The True Word, I wondered if maybe it was a religious printing company. "The True Word'-meaning the holy word, scripture, the Bible. Maybe what we've got on our hands here is a religious fanatic."

"Or two," she said, glancing at the window, obviously remembering the man with the white van.

Or more than two, Charlie thought uneasily.

During the past couple of decades, when it had become fashionable to distrust and disparage all of society's institutions (as if there had been no wisdom at all in the creation of them), a lot of religious cults had sprung up, eager to fill the power vacuum. Some of them were honest, earnest off-shoots of longestablished religions, and some were crackpot organizations established for the benefit of their founders, to enrich them, or to spread their gospels of madness and violence and bigotry.

California was more tolerant of unusual and controversial views than any other state in the union; therefore, California was home to more cults, both good and bad, than anywhere else. It wouldn't be surprising if, for some bizarre reason, one of these cults had gone looking for scapegoats or sacrifices and had settled on an innocent six-year-old boy. Crazy, yes, but not particularly surprising.

Charlie hoped that wasn't the explanation for what had happened to the Scavellos. No one was harder to deal with than a religious fanatic on a holy mission.

Then, as Charlie turned away from Christine, as he looked back at the boy, something odd happened. Something frightening.

For a moment the boy's smooth young skin seemed to become translucent, then almost entirely transparent. Incredibly, the skull was visible beneath the skin. Charlie could see hollow dark eye sockets glaring at him. WonTis writhing deep in those calcimined pits. A bony smile.

Gaping black holes where the nose should have been. Joey's face was still there, though it was like a vague photograph superimposed over the skeletal countenance. A presentiment of death.

Shocked, Charlie stood and coughed.

The brief vision left him almost as soon as it came, shimmering before him for no more than a split second.

And he told himself it was his imagination, though nothing like this had ever happened to him before.

An icy snake of fear uncoiled in his stomach.

Just imagination. Not a vision. There weren't such things as visions.

Charlie didn't believe in the supernatural, in psychic phenomena or any of that claptrap. He was a sensible man and prided himself on his solid, dependable nature.

To cover his surprise and fear, but also to put the grisly sight out of mind, he said, "Uh, okay then, I think now you should just go on to work, Christine. As much as you can, try to carry on as if this were an ordinary day. I know it won't be easy. But you've got to get on with your business and your life while we're sorting this out for you. Henry Rankin will go with you. I've already talked to him about it."

" You mean. he'll come along as my bodyguard?"

"I know he's not a big man," Charlie said, "but he's a martial arts expert, and he carries a gun, and if I had to choose any man from among my staff to entrust with my own life, I think it would be Henry."

"I'm sure he's competent. But I don't really need a bodyguard. I mean, it's Joey the woman wants."

"And getting at you is an indirect way of getting at him," Charlie said

" Henry goes with you."

"What about me?" Joey said." Am I going to preschool?"

He looked at his Mickey Mouse watch." I'm already late."

"No preschool today," Charlie said." You'll stay with me."

"Yeah? Am I gonna help you do some investigating?"

Charlie smiled." Sure. I could use a bright young assistant."

"Wow! You hear him, Mom? I'm gonna be like Magnum."

Christine forced a smile, and even though it was false it made her face lovelier than ever. Charlie longed to see a real, warm, genuine smile take possession of her.

She kissed her son goodbye, and Charlie could see that it was difficult, even painful, for her to leave the boy under these circumstances.

He walked her to the door while, behind them, Joey picked up his Coke again.

She said, "Should I come back here after I leave work?"

"No. We'll bring him to the store at… what… five o'clock? "

" That'll be fine."

"Then you and Joey'll go home with bodyguards. They'll stay the night.

Two of them in the house with you. And I'll probably have a man stationed out on the street, watching for people who don't belong in the neighborhood."

Charlie opened the door between his office and the reception lounge, but suddenly Joey called out to his mother, and she turned back.

"What about the dog?" the boy said, getting up, coming out from around Charlie's desk.

"We'll look for one tomorrow, honey."

During the past few minutes, the boy had not been visibly frightened.

Now, he became tense and uneasy again." Today," he said." You promised. You said we'd get another dog today."

"Honey-',

"I got to have a dog today, before it gets dark," the boy said plaintively." I just got to, Mom. I got to."

"I can take him to buy a dog," Charlie said.

"You have work to do," she said.

"This is not a hole-in-the-wall operation, dear lady. I've got a staff to do the leg work. My job, for the time being, is to look after Joey, and if getting him a dog is part of looking after him, then I'll take him to get a dog. No problem. Is there any pet store you'd prefer?"

"We got Brandy at the pound," Joey said." Rescued him from certain death."

"Did you?" Charlie said, amused.

"Yeah. They was gonna put Brandy to sleep. Only it wasn't just sleep, see. What it was… well, it was sleep, yeah, but it was a whole lot worse than just sleep."

"I can take him to the pound," Charlie told Christine.

"We'll rescue another one!" Joey said.

"If it's not too much trouble," Christine said.

"Sounds like fun," Charlie said.

She looked at him with evident gratitude, and he winked at her, and she smiled a halfway real smile this time, and Charlie wanted to kiss her, but he didn't.

"Not a German shepherd," Christine said." They sort of scare me. Not a boxer either."

"What about a Great Dane?" Charlie asked, teasing her." Or maybe a St.

Bernard or a Doberman?"

"Yeah!" Joey said excitedly." A Doberman!"

"How about a big, fierce Alsatian with three-inch-long teeth'?"

Charlie said.

"You're incorrigible," Christine said, but she smiled again, and it was that smile he was trying so hard to elicit.

"We'll get a good dog," Charlie said." Don't worry. Trust me."

"Maybe I'll call him Pluto," Joey said.

Charlie looked askance." Why would you want to call me Pluto? "

Joey giggled." Not you. The new dog."

"Pluto," Charlie said, mulling it over." Not bad."

For that one shining moment, it seemed as if all was right with the world. It seemed there was no such thing as death. And for the first time, Charlie had the teeing that the three of them somehow belonged together, that their destinies were linked, that they had more of a future together than just their investigatorclient relationship. It was a nice, warm feeling. Too bad it couldn't last.

Two revolvers and two shotguns lay on the work table in the armory. All four weapons had been loaded. Boxes of spare ammunition stood beside the firearms.

Mother Grace had sent Edna Vanoff on another errand. She and Kyle were alone.

Kyle picked up the shotgun." I'll lead the attack."

"No," Mother Grace said.

"No? But you've always told me I'd be allowed to-"

"The boy won't be easy to kill," Mother Grace said.

"So?"

"He isn't fully human. Demonic blood flows in his veins."

"He doesn't frighten me," Kyle said.

"He should. His powers are great and growing every day."

"But I've got the power of Almighty God behind me."

"Nevertheless, this first attack will almost surely fail."

"I'm prepared to die," he said.

"I know, dear boy. I know. But I mustn't risk losing you at the very beginning of this battle. You're too valuable. You're my link between this world and the spirit realm."

"I'm also the hammer," he said petulantly.

"I'm aware of your strength."

She took the shotgun away from him, returned it to the table.

He felt a terrible need to strike out at something-as long as he was striking out in the name of God, of course. He no longer needed to wreak pain and destruction on the innocent merely for the satisfaction of it. Those days were gone forever. But he longed to be a soldier for God. His chest tightened and his stomach twisted with his need.

He had been looking forward to the attack tonight. Anticipation had rubbed his nerves raw." The hammer of God," he reminded her.

"And in time you'll be used," she assured him.

"When? "

"When there's a real chance of destroying the child."

"Huh? If there's no chance of destroying him tonight, then why go after the little bastard? Why not wait?"

"Because, if we're lucky, we might at least hurt him, wound him," Mother Grace said." And that will shake his confidence.

Right now, the little beast believes that we can never really cause him harm. If he begins to think he's vulnerable, then he'll become more vulnerable. We must first weaken his self-confidence.

Do you see?"

Reluctantly, Kyle nodded.

"And if we're very fortunate," Grace said, "if God is with us and the devil is off guard, we might be able to kill the mother.

Then the boy will be alone. The dog is already gone. If the mother is removed, as well, the boy will have no one, and his confidence will collapse, and he'll become extremely vulnerable."

" Then let me kill the mother," Kyle pleaded.

She smiled at him and shook her head." Dear boy, when God wants you to be His hammer, I'll tell you. Until then, you must be patient."

Charlie stood at the window with a pair of high-power binoculars that doubled as a camera. He focused on the man standing by the white van on the street below.

The stranger was about six feet tall, thin, pale, with a tightly compressed mouth, a narrow nose, and thick dark eyebrows that grew together in the center of his face. He was an intense-looking man, and he couldn't keep his hands still. One hand tugged at his shirt collar.

The other hand smoothed his hair, then pinched one ear lobe. Scratched his chin. Picked lint from his jacket.

Smoothed his hair again. He would never pass for an ordinary workman taking a leisurely lunch break.

Charlie snapped several pictures of him.

When Christine Scavello and Henry drove away in the woman's gray Firebird, the watcher almost got in the van to follow them. But he hesitated, looked around, puzzled, and finally decided to stay where he was.

Joey stood beside Charlie. He was just tall enough to see out the window." He's waiting for me, huh?"

"Looks that way."

"Why don't we go out there and shoot him?" Joey asked.

Charlie laughed." Can't go around shooting people. Not in California, anyway. Maybe if this was New York. "

"But you're a private eye," Joey said." Don't you have a license to kill?"

"That's James Bond."

"You know him, too?" Joey asked.

"Not really. But I know his brother," Charlie said.

"Yeah? I never heard of his brother. What's his name?"

"Municipal Bond," Charlie said.

"That's a weird name," Joey said, not getting the joke.

He's only six, Charlie reminded himself. Sometimes the kid behaved as if he were a few years older, and he expressed himself with clarity that you didn't expect of a preschooler.

The boy looked out the window again. For a moment he was silent as Charlie snapped two final photographs of the man at the white van, and then he said, "I don't see why we can't shoot him. He'd shoot me if he got the chance."

"Oh, I don't think he'd really go that far," Charlie said, trying to discourage the boy from frightening himself.

But with an equanimity and a steadiness of voice that, given the circumstances, were beyond his years, Joey said, "Oh, yeah.

He would. He'd shoot me if he could get away with it. He'd shoot me and cut my heart out, that's what he'd do."

Five stories below, the watcher smoothed his hair with one pale, long-fingered hand.