A Darker Place (44 page)

Ana had met any number of people who were as wrapped up in themselves as Jonas seemed to be. Some of them had been profoundly retarded; others were off-the-scale geniuses. Sociopaths were this way, and the severely neurotic, and madmen of various flavors, for that matter—as well as think-tank employees, high-ranking business executives, high-flying academics, half the archbishops she had met, and even, it is true, one or two genuinely holy people. The utter self-absorption of these individuals would have seemed brutal if there had been any awareness in it; as it was, it often seemed only otherworldly. Into which category, she wondered, did Jonas Seraph fit?

The big Victorian house was quiet now, the smaller children abed and group meditation absorbing the adults. Perhaps she might find some hot water in the pipes to soak away the aches.

Ana pried herself up from the soft chair, laid the story about the church mice on the seat, and took herself to bed.

At about the same time that Ana was brushing her teeth and splashing water on her bleary eyes, the diary pages she had mailed at the Phoenix airport landed on Glen’s desk. Glen happened to be there, having a tense phone conversation with his fiancée about a dinner party. When he saw the handwriting on the label, he told Lisa that he had to go, hung up on her, and ripped open the envelope.

White-faced, he skimmed the final entry and Ana’s guarded note to Uncle Abner. Then, more slowly, he read both again. Gone? Ana Wakefield suddenly up and vanished into England’s Change compound, out of his reach, his authority, his sight even. What the hell was she thinking of? What kind of an amateur game was she pulling? His phone rang and he reached out automatically to switch on the answering machine, then sat back in his chair and stared out the window at the uninspiring view for several minutes. When he moved again, he looked his age and more. He reached down to open a desk drawer and take out a fat file, worn and dog-eared with age. He leafed through it until he came across a photograph, which he removed and laid on his desk. From another, much newer file on the corner of his desk he took a second photo, a kindergarten portrait of “Dulcie” Delgado taken not long before she and her brother had come to Change. He laid it next to the older picture, which was a duplicate of the snapshot of Abby that Anne Waverly kept in the bottom drawer of her own desk.

The two girls could have been sisters.

He had seen the resemblance before, of course he
had. Why, then, had he not stopped to consider the implications? Or had he, and then dismissed them? Anything that made Anne Waverly vulnerable was his responsibility, but the question was—the question that would be asked was—should he have seized on that potential weakness in his operative and immediately upgraded the level of surveillance on her? In other words, was his ass covered?

He had nearly lost her before, eight years ago in Utah. If she had died then, or if her presence in the Utah community had not been so obviously crucial in saving as many lives as it had, Glen’s job would have been quietly phased out. He might even have found himself removed from fieldwork. That success, tainted though it was, followed by the clean, almost elegant conclusion of the Cranmer investigation, had left Glen with firm ground beneath his feet, which he had laboriously reinforced during the intervening years until it was nearly as solid as rock.

If anything happened to Anne this time, he would again feel the mud squishing up around his toes. His job was safe—even his enemies would have to admit that if one of his operatives took it into her foolish head to go waltzing out of his sphere of influence and beyond his ability to protect her, it was regrettable, but it could not be construed as his fault.

Which did not mean that he should not move heaven and earth to drag the crazy woman back home. His job might be safe, but his position would not be, and if she failed, the voices behind his back would be poisonous. To say nothing of the reproachful voices inside his own head, telling him that he should somehow have known, and put a watch over the airports, even without the disturbing memorandum that had arrived that same afternoon.

Since his conversation with Ana in Sedona, he had
become more and more uncomfortable with the dangling thread that was Samantha Dooley. He had finally sent Rayne up to Toronto again with orders to talk her way inside the women’s community where Dooley had taken shelter the previous October. To his great satisfaction, this time Rayne succeeded. His satisfaction was short-lived; Samantha Dooley was not there. She had never been there, and one of the two women who had left Change around the time she disappeared swore to Rayne that the Change founder had not come with them.

No one had seen Samantha Dooley since the middle of October.

Glen pulled forward the Rolodex file that had once been his father’s, flipping it open at the H section. There it was: Paul Harrison, National Crime Investigation Service, with two numbers.

He dialed the fifteen digits of the man’s private number and sat back, studying the photographs of the two curly-headed girls he held in his free hand while he listened to the double ring of the English phone system.

“Paul? Glen McCarthy here. Sorry to disturb you at home, hope you weren’t in bed. Oh, just fine, and you? You heard right—her name’s Lisa. Of course she’s gorgeous, you know I have great taste. Oh, blond, of course. And how’re those two kids of yours? Great. Yeah, I’d like that—Lisa’s never been to England. But look, Paul, I’ve got a kind of situation here I need some help with. Like, yesterday.”

Excerpt from the transcription of a telephone conversation between
Steven Change and Jonas Fairweather (aka Jonas Seraph)
4:46
P.M.
, GMT, May 21, 199_

Even when she was Anne Waverly, Ana did not have many nightmares. The male psychiatrist assigned to her following the Utah debacle eight years before had found that absence worrying, and kept suggesting that she must be having nightmares and be repressing even the memory of having had them. She had found his attitude unbearably irritating, and soon after that had gone back to Marla, but privately she had to agree: Surely a person who had witnessed as many vile and unnerving sights as she had ought to have more broken nights?

She eventually decided that since she had already gone through two or three real, living nightmares, her subconscious had simply thrown up its hands at manufacturing pale imitations. When she did have disturbing dreams, the actual content was usually innocuous, even when the emotional overtones were oppressive enough to send her bolt upright in her bed, all cold sweat and pounding heart.

That night she dreamed, lying in her narrow metal bed in the women’s wing of the Victorian industrialist’s run-down mansion, and she came awake in a flash of absolute pounding terror.

As usual, there had been nothing to the dream. Abby, aged three and a half or four, sat in the sandbox that Aaron had built for her in the yard of their house in Berkeley, the house on the quiet street that they had lived in for several years until they had moved to the commune in Texas when Abby was five. The child sat shirtless in the warm sunlight, dribbling sand from an old soup ladle into a series of discarded yogurt tubs and Styrofoam
egg
cartons. A small black cat, one of the
neighborhood animals that Anne chased off because it liked to use the sandbox as its cat tray, sat on one corner of the box, watching the concentrating child. Ana, or Anne, was in turn keeping her eye on the cat, not wanting to break into Abby’s serious experiment by shooing the animal away, but also not willing to have it pee in the sand. She was weeding the flower bed that ran along the side fence, tossing clumps of grass and oxalis into an old bucket and glancing up from time to time to be sure the cat had not ventured down from its perch, when she became aware of a man standing half hidden by the shrubs in the front of the yard, his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the browned, half-naked child with the sun in her gleaming tumble of coal-black hair.

Ana came gasping awake, cold with terror and choking on the protest caught in her throat, a cry that she had to stand up and move into view and chase the man off but she couldn’t because she was waking up now, and she could not reach back into her sleep to save Abby.

She lay still until the silence of the house overcame the pounding of her heart, and then swung her legs over the edge of the lumpy mattress and put her face in her hands, trying to think if she had actually seen that man. There had been just such a threatening stranger while they lived in Berkeley, a situation that involved meetings of the local parents and police. She remembered clearly how reluctant they had all been, good Berkeley radicals all, to call in the police department over a problem they felt they ought to be able to deal with themselves, and how a core group of the mothers had finally forced the issue by pointing out that it was they who were usually alone with the kids during the day, not the fathers, so the decision was theirs to make, and they wanted the police. And regular uniformed presences had done the job, at least locally and temporarily, for the man had moved on,
taken his disturbing and disturbed watching self away to haunt another neighborhood.

She had not thought of that episode in years, had not even thought of the Berkeley house for a long time. What would Marla make of the dream? she wondered, beginning to feel angry. She knew damn well that what she was feeling here in England was the same helpless rage she’d felt then, the same feeling of threat and oppression and the need to take some kind of action to protect a child. Why the hell did she need a dream to tell her all that?

She raised her head and looked at the bright shaft of bluish light that came through the gap in the curtains. Her first night in the room she had barely noticed it, one more strangeness among all the others, but the house was surrounded by brilliant floodlights. Presumably intended to keep away intruders. Tomorrow she would borrow a clothespin or a safety pin to close the gap so it wouldn’t disturb her again.

The light cut diagonally across the foot of her bed and showed her the thin coverlet, the worn braided rug that reminded her of Dulcie’s colorful efforts, left behind in Arizona for safekeeping, and her book, reading glasses, and wristwatch on the bedside table. It was not even three
A.M.
, but Ana’s body was trying to tell her that despite the position of the hands on the watch face, it was actually time to be awake and having some kind of meal. She wondered idly if Dulcie, too, was awake and begging Jason to play with her or find her something to eat.

She lay back down for a while, staring at the bare room. She had left the window open when she went to bed, and as she lay there she became aware of a heavy, sweet smell on the night air, the rich odor of the roses that grew in the bed below, underlaid by the dank fragrance of vegetation that arose out of the surrounding jungle. Ana had never much cared for heavy floral fragrances
and had been known to remove pots of blooming narcissus from a room to an external windowsill. She found herself thinking about the Arizona landscape, its spiky shapes and small, waxy leaves, with an affection that verged on longing. What she wouldn’t give for a boojum tree. There had been a similarly scented rose trained on an archway leading to the herb garden in Utah, she remembered, an annoyance due to the bees it attracted and the thorns that snagged at the unwary passerby—but she was not thinking about the past now; she would think about something else. Dulcie’s church mice, perhaps.