A Darker Place (42 page)

At lunch she had seen Jason and Dulcie come into the dining hall, but she had also seen the blond kitchen girl walk in with them, so she went to sit with Sara and tried to get her talking. It proved not to be difficult.

Sara had been with Change nearly four years, but as far as Ana could tell had not made much progress in her personal transformation. Certainly she wore no silver necklace. She seemed mildly aware of her failure but not very troubled by it, and Ana decided that Sara had a
good heart but not a great brain—perfect for her purposes, although she would have laid money that Marc Bennett had little time for Sara other than for her obvious willingness to work.

It was confirmed when Ana’s tentative remarks about Bennett made Sara almost physically wince. Bennett, it seemed, made no effort to conceal the irritation and impatience Sara caused him to feel, so she tended to stay out of his way. Jonas, however, had once said something terribly kind and supportive to her (which she wouldn’t tell to Ana because it had been a part of her personal Work), so although he usually wandered around the place too distracted by his great thoughts and meditations to notice someone like Sara, she still found him a paternal figure. Strange, slightly scary and awe-inspiring, but paternal nonetheless.

Before lunch ended, Ana had arranged to join Sara in the walled garden, where Sara was due to set out seedlings. They then went their ways, Sara to private meditation and Ana to the dirty dishes and then the awkward broom.

She found that she was quite looking forward to meeting Jonas.

In the meantime, she was enjoying the respite from people, working her methodical way down the still, warm room with its high ceiling and jumble of furnishings. The dust motes she raised hung in the shafts of sunlight that streamed through the wide, uncurtained windows, and the collection of bread crumbs and lettuce leaves in her pan grew.

When she looked up, Marc Bennett stood in the doorway watching her.

“I don’t know if anyone has informed you,” he said without preliminary, “but we do not welcome newcomers to group meditation until Jonas has spoken with them.”

Ana opened her mouth to respond, framing the appropriately meek response of a novice to her master that would reduce some of the animosity he demonstrated toward her, but she found that the words would not come; her spine would not bend. Instead, her shoulders went even straighter and her face and voice clearly showed how unimpressed she was, and what came out of her mouth was simply “Yes, that’s probably for the best.” She went back to her sweeping, to all appearances completely indifferent to his presence.

A moment passed, and he gave a sharp laugh. “Steven thinks you’re hot stuff. He says you know things before you’ve learned them. But then, Steven has always been gullible. That’s why he’s in Arizona.”

“He’s a good leader,” she said easily, tipping a chair to reach a clot of dried mud next to its leg.

He took her mild emphasis on the pronoun as a criticism, as she had intended. “You assume because he’s in charge there, he’s higher than I am? Think again, Ana Wakefield. You’re not as clever as you think you are. Actually, you’re here only because Jonas wanted to see the boy Jason, and you’re the easiest way of prising him loose from his sister. You’re not an adept; you’re a glorified baby-sitter with a sore hand that excuses you from any real work.

“And,” he added spitefully, “if I hear of you going out again without a hat, you’re on your way home to Arizona.”

She paused in her work and turned on him the haughty, professorial raised eyebrow that had intimidated furious thirteen-year-olds and irate FBI agents alike. She just stood and looked at him until he whirled and left her alone in the empty, sun-filled dining hall, sweeping the floor and thinking mordant thoughts.

Stupid. That was a stupid, stupid thing to do, she told herself—a newcomer who had yet even to begin her
Work doesn’t stand up to the second in command. Bennett could make a great deal of trouble for her, and the worst part of it was, she did not know why she had not simply put on her humble face and ingratiated herself to him. It would have been easy enough to do. She’d done it a hundred times before, but for some reason, the automatic response had been overridden by a pride that might cost her dearly.

Was it just another inconvenient intrusion from her past, because Bennett reminded her of Martin Cranmer, the Kansas wheat farmer she had chosen to pursue, the man Glen had dubbed the Midwest Messiah? Even physically they were similar, that same tall, thin build and deep-set, burning eyes. Cranmer had been easy to manipulate in some ways, because he did not expect opposition from a woman, but he was difficult in others, for precisely the same reason. He had gathered to himself a high proportion of women in Utah, along with a number of men with low sex drives who seemed happy to turn a blind eye on Cranmer’s adoption of their wives. Fortunately, Ana had still been fairly gaunt, and her short-cropped hair and a lack of makeup, combined with a stubborn commitment to loose jeans and baggy men’s shirts, had kept her out of his grasp.

Not that Marc Bennett seemed to have made a private harem for himself at Change. Far from it; the most overt display of sexuality she had seen in the past twenty-four hours was the blond girl’s flirtatious laughter when Jason made a joke over the vegetable stew (which laughter had caused Dulcie to scowl).

Bennett wasn’t actually anything like Cranmer, was he? Tall and pushy, sure, but that was about it. No, the problem was with her, Ana, and her inability to keep the door to memory shut. Something in the past twenty-four hours had jostled her badly—jet lag, perhaps, or something random like the chimneys on the house or the
garden or Bennett’s speech, maybe even the dog that resembled Livy—and the past was now scrambling back at her, lost incidents washing in with every new sight, repressed images pressing at the back of her retinas. Jonestown, Abby in Texas, the armed kibbutz and the encampment of survivalists—once a memory had its toe in the door, it dragged a dozen more with it. Dangerous, distracting, and distorting to judgment, it was equally difficult to suppress.

It had happened in the past, most strongly in her second case in Miami when the first stressful phase was successfully negotiated and her defenses had relaxed just a bit, and in swept all the anxieties and discomforts that were waiting at the gates like a horde of importunate peasants demanding audience. At home, when she was Anne Waverly and the ghosts crowded close to her skin and whispered just beneath her ability to hear, she had found that the only solutions lay in tranquilizers or alcohol, or long hours of exhausting labor.

The artificial controls were beyond her reach here, but she certainly seemed to be in the right place for hard work.

She reached the end of the room and carried the last dustpan load to the garbage can, then hung up the broom and pan where she had found them, retrieved her boots and the loathsome hat from the mudroom, and went outside to find her informant in the walled garden.

From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

Sara was in the greenhouse, rearranging flats of seedlings. Ana greeted her and looked over her shoulder at the plants.

“Broccoli?”

“Cabbage,” Sara corrected her. “But close—they’re hard to tell apart when they have only four leaves.”

“Boy, I love these greenhouses. They look like something out of Kew Gardens.”

“Aren’t they beautiful? It took months to rebuild them, apparently, they were in such terrible shape. Now they look like a place you should hold a garden party. Here’s a trowel. You’ll find some gloves in the wardrobe over there.”

Ana had noticed the object, a tall mahogany clothes closet more suitable for a cool bedroom than this hot, humid atmosphere. She wrenched open the doors with some effort and rummaged through the heap of mismatched gloves until she found two that fit and had a minimum of holes. Then she took up the trowel and a flat, and followed Sara out to the bed that had been set aside for the young cabbage plants.

“What a luxury to have the ground already prepared. And what gorgeous soil.”

“We dug it over yesterday and let it rest. And yes, that’s what soil looks like after five generations of care. Do you want a kneeling pad? I don’t know about you, but I can’t squat for two hours like I used to.”

Ana didn’t think she had ever been able to squat for two minutes, let alone hours, and accepted the offer of a peeling slab of thick, closed-cell foam rubber. She gingerly lowered herself onto her right knee and prepared to follow Sara’s lead in planting.

For twenty minutes or more, the only sounds were the gentle, soul-satisfying noises of trowel parting rich earth and then tapping it down again. Marc Bennett faded in her mind, Martin Cranmer might have been a thousand years ago, but eventually, reluctantly, Ana stirred herself to work around to the questions that had brought her out there.

“Have you always been a gardener, Sara? Or just since you came here?”

“Oh, I always had at least a patch of potatoes and lettuces, even when I lived in the city.”

“Was that London?”

“York. You know it?”

“I’ve been to the cathedral.”

“York Minster.”

“That’s right. And that area around it with all the narrow alleyways. It has some funny name.”

“The Shambles?”

“That’s right, the Shambles. York’s a beautiful town. Do you have family there?”

“My ex-husband and daughter are probably still there.”

“You’re not sure?”

“It’s been four years. Two since I heard from them, when there were some papers to sign.”

“You haven’t seen your daughter in four years?”

“Thereabouts. I think maybe come autumn I’ll go outside and look her up.”

Ana glanced at her, but couldn’t see Sara’s face behind the brim of the floppy straw hat.

“You like it here, then?” she asked.

“It’s where I need to be,” said Sara, which didn’t exactly answer the question. “I am growing and fulfilling myself in a way I never could outside. That’s worth the ache of not seeing my child.”

“I just asked because it seems, I don’t know, tense
here somehow. Like there’s a lot going on that people are worried about.”

“That’s always the case. But you’re right, it’s not an easy time for you newcomers to fit in. We’re going through a difficult time with the Social Services—the people who oversee the schooling and welfare of our children. One of the boys who left earlier this year, poor misguided soul, is trying to get back at his wife by making her choose between her life here and her children. It’s one thing to enter into it fully like I did with a nearly grown child, and quite another to be torn apart. A very difficult time all around,” she repeated. She had briskly planted the last of her seedlings in neat rows, and got up to go to the greenhouse for another flat. Ana worked more slowly, and with less tidy results. The natural look, she told herself.

When Sara came back, Ana maneuvered the talk around to Marc Bennett, giving Sara a shortened version of what had happened between them in the dining hall. Sara shook her head.

“He means well, love, but even he feels the sort of pressure he’s under. He hasn’t been here even as long as me, you know, and it’s a big responsibility he’s taken on. Hardly surprising he’s a bit tetchy, times. I know that ‘great heat makes for great growth,’ but Marc’s not had all that much time to prepare himself for it. Jonas just saw him standing there and dumped it all on him.”

Ana was astonished at Sara’s loose tongue, under the influence of common labor and the warm sun, but she was more than willing to take advantage of it.

“Why? Who was doing all the work before Marc?”

“A lovely woman name of Samantha, called herself Sami with an I. She’d been here forever, far as I know, and then she upped and left.”

Ah, thought Ana, at last, a trace of the elusive Samantha Dooley, whose main characteristic seemed to be
her ability to slip away—from her family and Harvard University to India, from Pune to England, from Change to the women’s community in Toronto. “Really? Why did she leave?”