Thorn

Chapter Sixteen

Pat O'Grandison was heading west again. From northern Indiana he thumbed his way through Chicago and right on, following Route 66, or Interstate 55 as they called it now. His intention was to find Annie, the girl he really liked.

He had missed Annie, he had to admit it to himself, more than he could remember ever missing anyone before. They had met—well, never mind where they had first met, but they had spent days together in Chicago some months back. Then Annie had dropped out of sight and Pat had just assumed that she was gone for good, like everything else good that had ever happened to him. Then bang, gosh, one night in Calumet City, Indiana, she had shown up again out of nowhere. At least Pat was almost sure she had. Not really absolutely sure, because next morning he had been having a bad time with his mind again, and the morning after that he woke up in the looney bin again.

He stayed in the mental hospital for a few weeks and was then discharged, with all the usual bullshit about commitment to a sheltered care program and a case worker and so on, and on that same day he sniffed the air and decided that the warm weather was far enough advanced to hit the road. And headed west.

Damn, but he missed her. Annie was the only girl, the only female, practically the only person of any kind that Pat could remember feeling anything like this about. Almost the only person he could remember ever really liking. And what made it even stranger, was that as a rule he could get along okay with girls and women but he didn't usually seek them out, or care for them as close associates. For a companion, a partner in bed or on the road, he generally felt better with another male. Preferably a bigger and stronger male whose presence could afford at least the illusion of protection; as almost any boy, by the time he was half grown, was bigger and stronger than Pat, that particular condition was not too hard to fulfill.

But now he just kept on thinking about Annie, the girl he really liked. She had told him once, just before they took her off to the juvenile home in Chicago and got ready to put Pat on trial, that her last name was Chapman. A lot of the people that Pat met had changed or were changing their names for one reason or another, so he tended not to take names very seriously—he wasn't always completely sure what his own real name ought to be, if it came to that. But he was sure that he liked Annie, whether Annie Chapman was her real name or not, and he needed her as much as he had ever needed anyone. She was all girl, nothing dyke about her, and yet she still had an air about her of being able to offer protection. Small as she was, no bigger than Pat himself, there was this hard core in her that he sensed he could lean on. And even if the protection she offered was not physical—well, maybe there were kinds of protection even more important.

In bed she did some kinky things, at least as far out as anyone else he'd ever known. And he had known a few. And the coupling of his body with hers had given him more than he'd ever got before, with man or woman or girl or boy. And maybe, Pat thought in a corner of his mind now that he was on the road again, maybe he had better convince himself that it was just the good sex with Annie that was making him look for her now. Because, if he thought about it, he was almost sure that there was more to it than that; and somehow it bothered him deeply that there should be more.

It could be that one of the things that had him out on the road again looking for her was the simple fact that Annie liked him. She had talked with Pat, stayed with him when she could have chosen to go off with someone else, had gone out of her way sometimes to do little things that she knew would make him happy. Very few people ever did that. Most people of whatever age or sexual orientation did not like Pat for long, once things between them had got beyond the elementary first stage in which they simply admired his more-than-half-childish good looks.

So here he was, hitchhiking southwest on the interstate out of Chicago. And how many times had he come this way before? He didn't really know. More than a couple. He wasn't at all sure how many. One of the problems with being periodically insane was that things in the past always tended to get blurred.

But, on the other hand, what you might have thought would be a difficult problem, that of locating Annie, didn't really bother Pat at all. Because he now had a strong feeling for where Annie ought to be. Where she had to be, in fact. He couldn't name the place but he could tell where it was. Roughly southwest of Chicago, and at some distance considerably more than a day's drive.

This was another thing that could be scary if he stopped and let himself think about it much. He knew it wasn't normal to have this kind of a strong hunch for where another person was. But then there were a lot of things about himself that were abnormal, as he had known for a long time. A number of doctors and other experts had found different words to tell him so. If you looked at it in that light, one more abnormality didn't seem all that worrisome. Besides, he had figured out that his hunch could have a logical explanation. Annie might have mentioned to him sometime that she intended to head for some certain place in the Southwest, and maybe Pat had been stoned or drunk or half asleep or a little crazy, or all of the above, and what Annie said hadn't registered properly with his conscious mind. But on some deeper level he had heard, and remembered.

On the first day of this present trip, going southwest through Illinois and then Missouri, Pat told the people who gave him rides that he was headed for California. Each time, as soon as he had told someone where he was going, they wanted to know where he was coming from, and each time he said that he had just left home. To questioners who tried to pin him down more closely, he answered that home was in Chicago—it was a big city, as good a place to be from as any other. He never mentioned his just-concluded stint in the Indiana mental hospital, or any of his previous stints in similar institutions elsewhere. Pat knew he was crazy, but he had never been crazy enough to tell a benefactor that.

As evening approached at the end of his first day's travel, Pat hiked himself down off the main highway. Spring was far enough advanced so that he wasn't going to freeze to death overnight no matter where he slept, but he hoped to somehow get inside. He thought he would be able to manage that. Enough trips on the road, and you developed a feeling for such things, when things were likely to be easy, and when hard. Here the crickets were out as darkness fell, and it was almost like summer. Pat liked deep summer best.

On the outskirts of Joplin, Missouri, he found himself hiking past a deserted-looking house. No other houses were very near. A look around and another quick sniff of the air decided him that he was not likely to find a better prospect. He went to a side window and checked out the house. No furniture. It was not only deserted but seemed to have been standing vacant for some time. Pat broke a window in the back and climbed inside.

He put his knapsack on the floor for a pillow and covered himself with his light jacket, the best he could do toward keeping warm. As for food, the last people to give him a ride had bought him a sandwich, too, out of pity, and that would have to do for food until tomorrow. Pat was used to not eating a lot. Though it was still early in the evening he fell asleep almost at once, stretched out on the bare floor.

At first he knew that he was asleep, and shivering a little. Then he began to dream of Annie. In Pat's dream, she was asleep, stretched out also upon boards, but her boards looked like the floor of an attic somewhere. She was wearing a nondescript pullover shirt and jeans. Then Annie in the dream opened her eyes and looked at Pat, and smiled at him, and he knew beyond any doubt that in a moment she would reach out her arms to him and they would make love. Instead all that happened was that he woke up, uncomfortable on the boards after having got used to a hospital bed again, and shaking a little more with cold than he had been before. Well, life was usually like that.

Late next morning, when he had got as far as Oklahoma, Pat began to have serious doubts about California as his real destination, though he continued to use it as an answer whenever he was asked. Everyone more or less expected that a young drifter would be headed for the Coast. Whereas if he had said that he was bound for somewhere in Arizona or New Mexico, that would be an interesting answer; people would wonder why he was going there, and ask more questions, and think about him some more. Or so it seemed to Pat. As a general rule, the less other people wondered and thought and talked about him, the happier he was.

As the day went on a little, he began also to have a feeling that he didn't want to go to Arizona. He wasn't sure why. But he certainly hoped it would turn out that Annie wasn't there.

A few of the people who gave him rides asked him what he meant to do when he reached California. He answered that he meant to get a job there making films. Whenever he said this, his questioner looked at him again, and chuckled to himself or herself in one tone or another, and immediately became patronizing. Because they could see he wasn't joking. But in fact his answer was quite sane and realistic. He would have got a job making films if he had been going to California. Not Hollywood movies, no, which the people assumed he meant. But there were a number of people in other towns out there making a lot of other movies of one kind and another, and during the past few years Pat had already been connected with several of them. In matters having anything to do with movie-making he was an authentic genius, though totally unpublicized, usually unemployed, and practically unpaid.

Sometimes the people who gave him rides asked him how old he was. They were beginning to have plans for him, at least tentative plans, of one kind or another, when they asked that. Pat's answer would vary, depending. If he thought the tentative plan was to hand over poor young Pat to the juvenile authorities somewhere, for his own good, he could answer with the truth. To the best of his own belief he was actually twenty-two, though he had to overcome a certain inner reluctance to admit to himself that he was that old. And he could document that age with a driver's license that bore his photograph, if the discussion ever got that far.

In cases where the plan did not involve turning him over to the cops, he often varied his answer downward. No one as far back as he could remember had ever doubted him if he said he was sixteen. If he said he was seventeen, they sometimes still doubted, believing him to be certainly younger than that.

To the truck driver he was riding with when he reached Albuquerque, Pat had said he was sixteen. The truck driver had then responded with: "First time away from home, huh?"

"Yeah."

"I got a long drive ahead. We'll keep going all night," said the driver, and squeezed Pat's thigh, and smiled.

It was still early afternoon. Pat smiled back and made no protest about the hand on his leg. The driver was surprised and chagrined when just a little later, at a truck stop near the junction of Interstates 40 and 25 Pat announced that he was getting out, for good.

"Hey. What the hell. I thought ya wanted to go to California."

Still smiling, Pat slid down from the cab to stand on the sunstroked pavement. He stretched. Mountains whose name he had never learned, though he had come through this way going east or west so many times, rose barrenly a few miles to the east. He had chosen a good place for his announcement; a truck stop surrounded by a city, with a fair number of people about. The jilted trucker was not going to be able to do anything, or even to argue very much.

"Hey. Kid."

Pat did not even turn, but simply walked away. His feeling for Annie had altered suddenly. West was no longer the right direction. Now she had to be somewhere to his right, somewhere to the north of here. He could tell that she was out of walking distance still, but now she was no longer anything like a full day's drive away.

Interstate 25 going north out of Albuquerque was a new route to Pat. But one highway was not all that different from another; he was really at home on them all. Hiking the shoulder now, going up an entry ramp toward the northward traffic flow, Pat felt a certain relief. Not only at leaving that particular trucker behind—sadistic tendencies there, experienced instinct whispered—but at not having to go on to Arizona, which was the next state west.

There had been a bad scene out there in Phoenix, once. Real bad. Pat couldn't remember it consciously. But the stink of it still came up to conscious memory, like something dead and too shallowly buried. A warning: Don't dig here.

Pat topped the entrance ramp and kept on moving, hiking, looking over his left shoulder at a burst of speeding cars that passed him. Like an accomplished athlete or an old actor going into an old routine, he only needed to use half his attention in trying to flag a ride. Meanwhile he could use the other half on the question of what he ought to do when he reached Annie.

He could tell where she was, in a general way that seemed to get more particular the closer he got to her. But he couldn't tell what she was doing. For all he knew, she might be home, reconciled with her parents; or maybe in some other situation that she wouldn't be anxious to leave, just to hit the road again with Pat. So he ought to have some kind of hopeful proposition ready for her, something really attractive to suggest.

He would talk about—what else?—getting her into movies of some kind. Every girl liked that idea, and Annie was quite good-looking enough to make it credible. In fact, now that he thought of it . . .

Now that he thought about it, making movies with Annie was suddenly the one thing Pat wanted desperately to do.

Sure. Of course. There would be some way. Why not? Almost forgetting to work at picking up a ride, Pat hiked excitedly along the shoulder. The mountains to his right were forgotten, as was the intermittent roar of traffic at his left elbow. He would find Annie, and they would go off somewhere and make films, and everything in his whole screwed-up life might fall into the right place for once . . .

He remembered now how he had been talking with her in Chicago once, and she had been fascinated by some of the stories of movie-making that he'd had to tell. She seemed to understand that he was telling her the truth . . . or maybe it wasn't in Chicago. Somewhere. She had been with him somewhere else, before Chicago, now that he came to think of it. Or was it after?

Somewhere else. A place he didn't want to think about right now. But she had liked him, and it had been so good, that special way that they'd made love . . .

A movie with Annie in it was certainly a great idea, and if he wasn't crazy he would have thought of it before now. Could he really do it? Could he really at last straighten out his own life that much? The idea, when put in those terms, scared him a little.

He knew he could handle the movie itself, if he ever got the chance. He would pick up Annie, and they would go somewhere where he could get a job with some filmmaker. Maybe even right here in New Mexico. There were bound to be people here somewhere making films, and some of them had probably heard about Pat from people out on the Coast. When you were good, word got around.

Porn was by far the easiest kind of work to find, for Pat at least. Particularly when they found out that he was ready, willing, and able to double as an actor. He did well in front of the camera as well as behind it, though acting or performing of any kind wasn't really what he liked to do. His androgynous good looks were in demand, for straight, gay, or free-style porn. There was only one kind of thing he'd never touched, and never would. So he took part in the filmed sex smiling like the madman he sometimes was, faking the sex as much as possible, meanwhile continuing to keep himself happy by thinking how he would do the lights and the camera work and time everything differently if he were put in charge. Of course there was a dreary sameness in all porn, or almost all. But there were an infinite number of ways to disguise the sameness, if you knew what you were doing. Pat never doubted that he did.

But very rarely had he ever been allowed to take charge, to show what he could really do, though sometimes his suggestions on specific points were taken, by filmmakers who were always gratified with the results. The equipment and the space had always belonged to someone else. Nowhere, as far as he knew, was there a complete film of any kind that he had made. Once he had been allowed to take complete charge, at some real madman's house in Mexico. And once, another time, in this mansion with giant roof beams they had been going to let him take over, but . . .

. . . something had happened. And now here he was, hiking north on Interstate 25 and trying once more not to think about Phoenix. Today for some reason was a day for struggling with that problem. Maybe just because this was the first time he had returned to the Southwest since . . .

. . . someone had brought him into that rich guy's mansion out there, someone promising what they called a party. And Pat had thought he understood what that entailed . . .

His thought recoiled now, twisting, from a half-vision of blood. The memory faded, like a dying dream, almost as quickly as it had come. It left behind it no new knowledge, only a wash of sick fear. What he couldn't stand was the fear that that time he had been maneuvered into working on a snuff film.

Real torture on film, and real death. That would be for Pat an ultimate profanation, a blasphemy. He would have no part in it at all, though what exactly was being profaned, he could not have said . . .

His inner thoughts had become a burden, and it was a great relief when a car stopped for him at last. A new yellow Pinto, stopping cautiously, well ahead. Pat hitched his small backpack higher on his back, and trotted. The face peering back at him from the window on the driver's side was that of a middle-aged man with steel-rimmed spectacles, alone in the car. A fatherly type, it would appear. Perhaps genuinely so. As soon as they were under way, the man would begin to wonder aloud just why a young kid like Pat was hitchhiking alone; didn't he realize it could be dangerous?

"Hi, young feller, you going up to Santa Fe?"

Something about the name sounded reasonable. "Yeah," said Pat, and climbed in on the right. Santa Fe was one of those towns whose name everyone had heard, but he had never seen the place before. Right now, though, it sounded congruent with Annie.

The car was rolling, easing cautiously off the shoulder onto pavement, picking up speed. The man asked: "You got some family up there?"

Pat not-answered, as he often did. Looking out the window, he pretended that he hadn't heard. The man cleared his throat but did not repeat the question. Later on he would. A small roadside sign announced that they were entering an Indian reservation. God, what could even Indians do on land as barren as this? Raise sheep? But there were none in sight.

You could make movies, of course, you could do that just about anywhere. Pat visualized a line of Indian dancers a thousand strong, their line stretching away over the yellow-brown plain. Make it ten thousand, the line would still look small. A camera in a low-flying aircraft, skimming just above their heads . . . tell them to show no expression on their faces . . .

The Pinto sped in scanty traffic. They kept topping long brown hills, one after another. Annie was getting close. In the distance, on every side now, more mountains reared. Somehow the highway had shrunk, it seemed too narrow here to be called an Interstate. Pat hadn't been watching the signs. The man, after his first attempt to talk, was unexpectedly going to be silent. Who knew what went on inside people's heads? No one did. No one. It was all right, silence was okay with Pat.

After they had driven for the better part of an hour through virtual nothingness they topped a final long hill. Now, miles ahead, some kind of a town or city came into view, looking as if it had been dropped at the foot of the tallest-looking mountains around. Their peaks still showed white that Pat supposed was snow.

The man cleared his throat again. "Whereabouts can I let you off?"

Pat brought his gaze back into the car, shifted his position in the seat. Annie was near. "Somewhere around the center of town is fine. If you're going that way."

"The Plaza?"

Pat didn't know what The Plaza meant. "That's fine. Anywhere around there is fine."

The man stopped the Pinto twenty minutes later to let Pat out in the midst of a minor traffic jam in narrow streets. Slanting afternoon sunlight warmed low buildings covered with what Pat would have called beige stucco; they put him vaguely in mind of pictures that he had seen of Indian cliff dwellings. And here were some Indians, real-by-God Indians, with their blankets spread on a roofed sidewalk to display pots and jewelry for sale. Above their heads the rough ends of unfinished logs stuck out of the edge of the building's roof.

"Thanks for the ride." Pat flashed a merry smile as he got out. He always liked to do that, no matter what. Maybe he hoped that the people would remember him.

The man huffily not-answered as he drove away.

Annie was somewhere around here. That way. Within walking distance now, or almost. Pat started walking.

* * *

On the rear patio of his huge house near the northern edge of Santa Fe, Ellison Seabright was trying to get his wife posed properly to paint before the light changed any more. They were out on the rear patio, overlooking a spectacular scene of what was almost wilderness. Only a few other houses were visible, around the edges. Ellison had given Stephanie a supposedly genuine seventeenth-century Spanish shawl to put around her while she perched on the low stone balustrade that rimmed the patio. Just behind his subject, a slope of sandy earth and sparse wild grass, punctuated with dwarfish juniper, fell unfenced and almost untrodden for a hundred yards to end in the bottom of a sinuous ravine. Somewhere down there was an unmarked line where Seabright land ended and national forest land began.

Beginning right with the steep opposing slope of the wild ravine, the Sangre de Cristos mounted to the north and east, claiming the sky in one great rounded step above another. The highest and most distant shoulder of the mountain, blue-clad in distant fir and pine, hid behind it the bald snowcapped peaks projecting upward beyond timberline. Almost all the land in view was government land, unsettled and unpeopled. The mountains went up a mile or more in altitude above the seven thousand feet or so of the patio; a thousand years, Ellison thought, or maybe more than a thousand, back in time.

Ellison vaguely enjoyed thinking about the mountains, and liked knowing that they were there as a subject for his own painting, whenever he got around to it. He seemed to be chronically pressed for time, and rarely felt he could take time out from business to pick up a brush himself. But today, at last, he had Stephanie at home with him. And a few hours without people or business to interfere.

Stephanie, sitting on the balustrade, had at last got the shawl arranged to Ellison's satisfaction. She smiled into the lowering sun, as if she enjoyed its warmth.

"You're in a cheerful mood today," Ellison commented, getting some paints out of the box.

"Why shouldn't I be?" Her voice was lighter and easier than he had heard it in some time.

"No reason. You're basically a lucky lady." Except for Helen, of course, a few months back—but if Stephanie could start to forget that now, Ellison wasn't going to remind her. "But last week in Phoenix you were worried about the sun, how it aged the skin and brought on wrinkles. You said you weren't going to pose for me any more, out in the sun."

"The sun here isn't as hot."

"And you've stopped imagining you have wrinkles, I hope."

"I don't intend to get them. I know you divorce your wives when that happens, and look for someone younger. You've done it twice before."

Ellison looked at her. She gave him back a smile, enigmatic, Mona Lisa. "Shall I cross my legs?"

"No," he said, pretending patience, wondering what was going on. "We have the pose all settled. Let's just concentrate on keeping it." A change in his wife lately, sure enough; he had thought it was only Helen's death, but it was more. Ellison squinted about the huge patio, all winey sunlight and bluish shadow, with more furniture than a small house. He was looking for his tube of titanium dioxide white. "Do you realize," he asked, "that's it's now been almost four years since you have posed for me?"

"Really? That long?"

"Since shortly after we were married."

"Surely it hasn't been that long."

"Oh, yes. I remember that Helen was hardly more than a little girl. She kept sneaking around to see what we were up to in those days I generally had you posing in the nude."

The mention of Helen seemed to have had no effect. Something else was certainly on her mind.

"I wish you would have posed nude again today. Out here, against the mountains. I gave all the help the day off, you know."

"I know. But it's too cold today. Maybe next time."

"There. That's just the smile I want. Hold it for me, if you can. Just like that."

Ellison found that he was a little nervous about the painting. God, it was a long time, it must be a couple of years now, since he had really tried to paint anything at all. Would he really be able to do it now?

He suddenly spotted the tube of paint he had been looking for. It was on a small stone ledge not an arm's length from where he had set up his easel; now he recalled setting it down there. He picked up the tube and fidgeted with it and dropped it back into the paintbox. Then holding a stick of charcoal he looked at his model, and then beyond her to the mountains, where the changing sunlight made blue folds slowly appear and disappear. The light changing like that, and it was so long now since he had really tried. It was going to be hopeless.

"Are we going to talk about Del, sometime?" Stephanie asked him suddenly.

"What's there to talk about?"

"We both know that he's still alive. You don't have to be so cagey with me."

"Yes," said Ellison. He was not going to try to get the background in at all today. Only Stephanie. "Yes, well, don't you think it's wiser not to talk too much about the fact?"

"No one can overhear us. I just wondered how much you knew about the—details. I know you're handling business deals for him. Do you think anyone else knows he isn't dead?"

"I say it's wiser not to talk, even out here. There could be someone up there, behind any of those rocks, listening. Directional microphones have amazing capabilities these days."

Stephanie glanced behind her, at the hillside, then resumed her pose without appearing to be convinced. "Someone? Who?"

"My dear, you must have some idea of how much that painting is worth. Whenever such amounts of money are concerned, a lot of people take an interest."

"Ellison, our phone might be tapped, but no one's hiding up on that mountain twenty-four hours a day watching our house."

"How do you know that?"

The sound of the doorchime came drifting coolly out through the open patio doors, from inside the cool caverns of the house. Ellison sighed, put down the charcoal stick, wiped his hands, and went to answer. Having all the help gone was not necessarily a boon. He supposed this would turn out to be some neighbor brat with Girl Scout cookies to sell.

The boy standing at the front door was undersized and shabby. He was a total stranger to Ellison, yet at first glance Ellison knew he was not selling cookies. Nor was his presence here merely some routine mistake. The young face waiting had something extraordinary about it; and not only extraordinary but wrong. This unusual wrongness Ellison accepted as a sign that the visitor knew what door he stood at.

"What is it?" Ellison demanded. In annoyance he used the lordliest tone he could produce, even though he was already sure that there would be no getting rid of this lad that easily.

The young eyes, cloudy blue, looked back at Ellison. Most people would have seen in them a probability of innocence. But Ellison saw more, and worse.

"I want to see Annie," the apparition announced, in a voice whose boyish appeal seemed to have been practiced.

The name meant nothing to Ellison. He only looked at the intruder, willing without much hope that he should go away.

"Annie knows me. My name is Pat O'Grandison, I'm a good friend of hers. I know she lives here."

"No one named Annie lives in this house. Or ever has."

"You her father?" the youth asked doubtfully. "Maybe she's not here right now, but if not she'll be back soon. Has she run away from home, or something like that? If that's it, she'll soon be back."

Ellison heard a soft sound behind him, and turned to see Stephanie approaching. She came looking like a great Spanish lady, with the old shawl still round her shoulders. Her face was troubled as she stared at the visitor.

Ellison spoke to his wife while nodding toward the boy. "One of Del's old crowd, perhaps?" he mused. "But he never brought any of them here, to my knowledge. I thought all that went on out in Arizona, not here under my roof."

Stephanie only shook her head slightly in reply. Eyeing the visitor up and down, she asked him: "Who are you? Why are you here?"

The boy put out a frail arm to lean his weight tiredly against real adobe bricks. He scratched at one with a black-rimmed fingernail, as if he wondered what it was. "Can I come in and get a drink of water, please? It's all right, I really know Annie." Then he focused on Ellison suddenly; as if, Ellison thought uncomfortably, he might be trying to recall where he had seen the big graying man before.

"I think we'd better let him in," advised Stephanie. "He looks a little sick to me."

"On something, more likely."

"What's the difference?"

"Oh all right, let him in."

The boy came in and like someone near exhaustion dropped himself into the first handy chair. He was blond and undersized, dressed in travel-worn jeans with white road dust on them, and a plain T-shirt, once white. A small knapsack of fabric dull as camouflage lay on the floor beside his chair, one of its straps still resting limply in his slack right hand. His snub nose and beardless cheeks made him look no more than fifteen or so. But Ellison was sure that he was older.

Several components of Ellison's mind, one of them artistic, considered that young face with growing fascination. Here was one of Del's people, certainly. The face was beautiful. And, leaving aside whatever might be due to present tiredness, there was that inward something that was very wrong, that had told Ellison at first glance that the boy was here for some real purpose. His coming meant trouble, maybe, but there was nothing accidental about it. Ellison wondered: Did Del send him here?

He asked: "Have you been here before?"

"No." A hesitation. "Though I got the feeling that maybe I seen you someplace."

Ellison looked at him.

"I guess I'm mistaken. Hey, if Annie's not here, how about Helen? It just occurred to me, maybe it's possible that you and I know this girl by different names? I mean, sometimes when people run away they'll use a different name?"

The blue eyes shifted from Ellison to Stephanie and back again. It was impossible to read just how much was truth in them, and how much guile.

Ellison looked at his wife, trying to get some cue from her, but he couldn't. She kept regarding the visitor very thoughtfully. At last Ellison said: "There was a girl named Helen in this family once, living in this house. She's dead."

The boy considered that. He had slumped down in his chair until his head rested on its padded back. The strap of the backpack had fallen free of his limp fingers.

Stephanie crouched down gracefully beside the chair. "Helen was my daughter. If we're really talking about the same Helen. It's true, she did run away from home once. And she is dead—there was a lot of publicity about it at the time. You must have read some of that? Seen it on television?"

The visitor opened his mouth, then closed it again, evidently reconsidering whatever he had been going to say. "I didn't know she was dead. Sorry."

"Where," asked Ellison, "did you think that you had seen me before?"

"I dunno. Maybe I was wrong about that, too. Sometimes my ideas get all, all screwed up."

Stephanie straightened up. She was smiling briskly, almost like a nurse, as she touched the youth on the shoulder. "You must be hungry and thirsty," she said in bright inviting tones. "Come along with me to the kitchen, and we'll see what we can find. What's your name?"

"Pat." And Pat got up out of his chair quickly, following Stephanie like a puppy entranced by a first kind gesture.

A few moments later, Ellison followed them both, keeping a little distance. Peering into the breakfast room, he could see the youth seated at the table there, his back to Ellison, already chewing on something. Stephanie was pouring milk into a plastic tumbler for him. Beyond, in the kitchen, the sink was modestly stacked with dirty dishes from lunch. It would be tomorrow morning before any of the help came back.

Once the wanderer in his dirty T-shirt had been launched on a meal, Stephanie rejoined Ellison for a conference. "What do you make of this?" she whispered.

Ellison tugged her a little further from the kitchen, into the next room. "I don't like it," he answered in his own almost rumbling whisper. Then with a gesture he retreated further still, to where the boy had left his pack. Ellison bent and opened it. A dirty, lightweight jacket came to view, along with a few other items of spare clothing. In the bottom were some granola bars, their wrappers worn with a long time of jostling in the pack.

Ellison stood, grunting. "And I don't know what it's about. But I'm going to take whatever steps are necessary to find out."