A Darker Place (4 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He’s really busy. Is it important?”

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

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

“I have a two o’clock lecture,” Anne said apologetically.

“Of course you do, stupid me. Four-thirty, then. I’ll cancel Himself.”

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

“Himself has canceled on us twice, it would be a pleasure to return the honor. Are you okay? You don’t sound yourself.”

“I’m a bit tired.”

“All those babies keeping you awake? Don’t get too run-down. There’s a nasty bug going around, and you wouldn’t want it just before finals.”

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

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

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

“When?” he asked.

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

“The puppies?”

“Yes, we’ll have to think about them. Could you come by one day and we’ll talk?”

Eliot grunted an assent.

“Over the weekend?”

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

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

I will miss it, she thought.

From the notes of Professor Anne Waverly

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

“Hello, Tazzie. Have I managed to catch Antony?”

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

“Just tired, Tazzie.”

“Don’t get sick, honey. Anything I can get for you?”

“No, you run along.”

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

“Hot date?”

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

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

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

“Have her come and look at them, then.”

“A couple of weeks?”

“Good. They ought to have individual personalities by then.”

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

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

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

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

“Thanks, I would.”

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

“Flowery rubbish. You’ll never convert me, Antony.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Tazzie said you sounded tired…” he ventured.

Anne shook her head. “It’s nothing like that. Glen McCarthy showed up yesterday.”

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