A Darker Place (6 page)

“Coffee, tea, or wine?” she asked.

Over coffee, she finally joined them at the table, and Gillian began her side of the report.

It did not take long, or the hint of several culinary interruptions, for Gillian to see that Anne Waverly was not very interested in the events that had brought the
group calling itself Change to the attention of the San Francisco Police Department. Missing persons reports and complaints of financial chicanery from swindled relatives were, her attitude seemed to say, only to be expected. She came alert only when Farmer started to talk about the emigration of Change members from their former urban setting into the Arizona high desert. Then she wanted to know precisely when the members had sold the houses they owned, how big the houses were, the physical state they had been left in by the former owners, what had been left behind, and a dozen other equally meaningless questions. Prepared as she was, Gillian had to admit that most of these things she could not answer. She told the professor that she would find out.

This seemed to signal a hiatus in the evening’s program. Anne stood up and limped back to the sink, where she fished a head of garlic out of a pot on the windowsill and began to skin some cloves and squeeze them through a press into a small bowl.

“Dinner in ten minutes,” she said. “Glen, show Inspector Farmer where the bathroom is—”

“Please, call me Gillian.”

“And I’m Anne. And then if you’d choose a bottle of wine, Glen, and get a tablecloth from the drawer under the oven. Gillian, the silver is in that drawer, we’ll need soup spoons. Plates and bowls are on that shelf.”

The plates were handmade stoneware, the tablecloth looked as if it belonged in a prosperous farmhouse in Avignon, the silver was silver, and heavy, and the dinner was an intensely flavored stew with olives and vegetables and some unidentifiable meat, with a simple green salad, bread rolls hot from the oven with herbed garlic butter to slather on, and deep red wine that had just enough of an edge to hold its own.

Respectful silence held, until Gillian spoke up.

“What kind of meat is this?” she asked.

“Bambi,” Glen answered, his mouth full.

“Venison,” Anne corrected him. “My neighbor gives me a haunch every year and it takes me months to get through it. I’m trying to clear out the freezer before I go.”

“So, how is dear Eliot?” Glen asked. “Talkative as ever?” He was concentrating on the application of garlic butter to hot bread. Gillian glanced at him curiously, and Anne seemed amused at the asperity of his question.

“Eliot is eternal; he changes not. He’s going to—” Anne broke off at a scratching sound that startled Gillian, followed by a low whine. Anne put down her napkin on the table and went to open the narrow door that she had shut when they first arrived.

The mother of six stopped halfway through the doorway, torn by her need to go out and the protective drives of her hormones. Anne solved her dilemma by taking up the loose skin at the scruff of her neck, walking her to the outside door, and pushing her through it. Normally she would have scolded Livy for passing through the kitchen with lifted lip and a rumble in her chest, but then normally Livy would not have growled at visitors.

“She’s had puppies,” Glen exclaimed at the sight of the bitch’s sagging belly. “I didn’t know you were having puppies.”

“Good Lord, something the FBI doesn’t know,” Anne said, dry to the point of sarcasm. The rest of the meal passed with brief and desultory conversation, although Gillian was the only one who seemed to feel the least uncomfortable. The other two merely ate, engrossed in the food and their own thoughts.

Eventually, with second helpings distributed and polished off, Anne got to her feet and began to clear the dishes. “There’s an apple pie that Eliot’s mother made for dessert. I hope you’ll help me eat it, or I’ll be living on it for a week.”

“Gillian and I will wash the dishes first, and let the food settle a bit.”

How very homey, Gillian Farmer thought. Who would believe that an FBI investigation could start with venison stew and a sink full of soapsuds?

While her two guests washed and dried, Anne made more coffee, put the pie in the oven to warm, carried two bowls of dog food outside, and took the opportunity to change the bedding under Livy’s pups. She looked up from this last job to see Glen at the door.

“I think she wants back in,” he said, and then asked, “Can I see them first?”

“Sure.” He stepped into the tight space without even wrinkling his nose at the earthy smells of milk and blood and infant fecal matter, and squatted to look at the mound of fawn bodies. Gillian, too, came over, and Anne slipped out with her armful of laundry so the two hardened law enforcement personnel could coo over the grubs and argue over which one’s eyes were closest to being open. She gave them five minutes, then called, “Sorry, but if I don’t let Livy back in she’ll have the door off its hinges.”

Reluctantly, they emerged, and Anne went to let one highly suspicious dog inside. This time she left the pantry door halfway open; time for socialization to begin.

Over the crumbly, sweet pie and strong coffee, Anne began to set out her requests to Gillian Farmer.

“The things I need to know may seem peripheral, and in a way, they are. Normally in a criminal investigation into embezzlement, for example, you’re not looking for signs of child abuse.” She saw Gillian begin to react, and held up her hand. “I’m not saying there is child abuse here, don’t misunderstand me. There very probably is not, at least not the sort of abuse that the law can concern itself with. But children will act out the problems within their family, in symptomatic behavior.

“I need you to talk to their former teachers, or if they had a private school, the district liaison for home schooling. See if you can find any of the kids’ work, written materials or drawings. You might try the relatives for that, the grandmothers and aunts—they may have been sent pictures to put on their refrigerators. And it would be helpful if the age and sex of each child was on the piece, and roughly the date it was made—not the names, though; I don’t want to know their names. It distracts me when I meet them.

“Talk to the ex-neighbors again. Any problems or oddities, from vandalism to too-perfect behavior? What hours did the families keep, any odd sounds or smells coming from the houses, what vehicles did they have, what jobs?

“Bank accounts and credit references are probably best retrieved by Glen, but Steven in Arizona seems to have come from your town originally, Gillian, and so did the leaders of the smaller branches in Boston and L.A. See what you can find out about their histories—families, education, jobs, all that.”

“Can I have those names?” Gillian asked, her pen poised.

Anne closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them, and Gillian was surprised to see her look at Glen with real anger. “The old ‘need-to-know’ bullshit again, eh, Glen?”

“You know I—”

“You give her the information, or I will.”

“I don’t think I can get approval on—”

“I don’t negotiate, Glen. You know that. We do it my way, or we don’t do it.”

McCarthy’s eyes wavered and fell, and he threw up his hands in surrender. “Okay. She’ll see the file.”

“You will copy the file and give it to her. No crap about coming to a secure room to read it.”

“Jesus, Anne.”

“If you don’t have the authority to run the photocopier, Glen,” she said softly, “let me know as soon as you find someone who does. We’ll resume then.”

“Okay, okay. She’ll get the file.”

She leaned forward across the table with no sign now of the warm and encouraging teacher she was at the university. Her eyes glittered. “If you don’t trust her, Glen, how can I trust you?”

Not knowing their past, there was no way Gillian could evaluate the depths to that bald question. She could see, though, that it hit McCarthy hard: His jaw tensed all the way down to his collar, and though he reared his head away, his eyes remained locked on those of Anne Waverly. After a long moment, the professor let him go and returned her gaze to Gillian.

“You’ll find the names in the file. If there’s anything else you notice, in its presence or its absence, please speak up. Even if it seems unimportant. You’re going back to San Francisco soon?”

“Tomorrow, I guess.”

“I’m sorry to have kept you here so long, but it was not an easy decision for me to make.”

The last vestiges of Gillian Farmer’s annoyance with this woman vanished, and she began to see why those students loved and respected her.

“I understand,” she said.

Anne went into the next room, returning with a card that she handed to Gillian. “There’s my phone number, my e-mail address, and my home fax number, which works fine if no more than two of my neighbors are using their phones at the same time. I’ll be here for two weeks, and after that you’ll have to go through Glen. Keep in touch.”

•     •     •

Neither of Anne’s visitors spoke on their way back down the hill. Gillian got out at the bottom to let Glen drive through the gate, then she shut the gate and locked the padlock through the chain. Back in the car she turned up the heat controls and sat watching the headlights illuminate the passing trees and gates and rural mailboxes.

“I tried to read one of her books,” she told him. “I didn’t get very far—it might as well have been written in German.”

“Was that
Modern Religious Expression?
Big thick thing?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s an expansion of her doctoral thesis. You should take a look at
Cults Among Us
—a title she hates, by the way. It’s much the same material, only rewritten for a general audience. I’ll send you a copy if you can’t find it.”

“You know,” Gillian said after a while, “I just can’t see that woman living in a commune. She’d stick out like a sore thumb, she’s so…”

“Cerebral?” Glen suggested.

“Professorial,” she supplied.

“She’s superb,” he said flatly. “It’s like putting a chameleon on a leaf: She just becomes a different person. Her posture changes, her voice softens, her vocabulary shifts, her eyes go wide. It’s not even an act—if anything, the person you saw is the artificial construct. She opens up and just sucks in the community, lock, stock, and Bible.”

“Hmm,” she grunted. “Well, most good undercover cops are people I wouldn’t exactly trust with my wallet.”

“In her case it’s even more radical than that. Sure, sometimes the only difference between the cop and the criminal is a badge, but when Anne Waverly plays a person, she isn’t just making a shift in emphasis; she turns herself inside out. She becomes… earnest. Accepting.
Completely unconscious and nonjudgmental. And absolutely fearless. And it really isn’t an act.” This conundrum of the empty-headed professor was obviously something that Glen had long dwelt on in the privacy of his mind; Gillian had never heard so many words in a row from him, and so nearly lyrical. “Anne let slip during her second debriefing that what she experiences is a freedom born of terror, and she suggested I read Solzhenitsyn. In real life—or in her Waverly life, anyway—she’s jumpy underneath that calm, she has panic attacks on airplanes, she only recently got off tranks and sleeping pills. She still sees a therapist regularly—her boss’s wife, in fact.”

“You ever try and get her psych records? They’d make for interesting reading.”

“God, no!” Glen’s face twisted in the dim light, perhaps from disapproval, although it looked more like revulsion. “The last thing I want to know is what’s going on in that woman’s head.”

“Really? I thought she was fascinating.”

“She’s one of the most disturbing creatures I’ve ever met,” he said, and firmly changed the subject.

From the notes of Professor Anne Waverly

For the next two weeks, it was chaos upon chaos as Professor Anne Waverly coaxed and goaded her students into their exams and final papers, as homeowner Anne Waverly scrambled to make arrangements so that her lawyer, her neighbor Eliot, and her friend Antony Makepeace among them could keep her creditors happy and her roof standing, as the FBI’s consultant on cultic behavior Dr. Anne Waverly embarked on the necessary research into the Change movement, and as the newly incarnated Seeker-after-Truth Ana Wakefield began to take form.