'A martini with my husband when he comes home from work.'
'Adjusted to your environment,' I said.
Anne grinned. 'That would be me,' she said. 'Adjustable Annie. If people were eating smoked worms for supper, I'd be gobbling them right down.'
'Nothing wrong with flexible,' I said. 'Did you know Bunny well?'
'Yes. We were both into causes. Did a lot of marches and sit-ins. Very serious. Smoked a lot of dope together, but very seriously. It was a political position to smoke dope then.'
'How fortunate,' I said.
'Yes. I notice as I grow older that if you have deeply felt political convictions, you can make pretty much everything fit them, if you need to.'
'Yes,' I said. 'I've noticed that, too. She have any pet causes?'
'Mostly what we all had. The war! The establishment! The moral imperative of acid! She and I and about four other kids formed a prison outreach group. We figured all prisoners were political prisoners.'
'Tell me about that,' I said.
'We used to go down to Walpole two nights a week and give seminars on revolutionary politics with one of the professors.'
'Whose name was?'
'Nancy Young.'
'Do you know where she is?'
'Probably dead. She must have been in her fifties then. Big woman with a lot of gray hair. In retrospect, she was probably a lesbian. But we didn't think about that much at the time.'
'How about the folks in charge at the prison,' I said. 'They didn't mind you teaching revolution to the inmates?'
'They thought we were just teaching American history. Nobody ever monitored us. We loved it. We thought we were revolutionaries. We decided to organize with some of the prisoners. Make a cell to help them when they got out or if they escaped. Like an underground railroad.'
'What fun,' I said.
'It was heaven,' Anne said. 'We wanted to help them escape, but we didn't really know how, and we never freed one. But several of them joined us when they got out. We felt so authentic, we nearly wet our pants.'
'Can you remember who the prisoners were?'
'One of them called himself Shaka. We loved that. Shaka. It was so primeval.'
'Can you remember his real name?'
'We would have called it his slave name in those days.'
'Can you remember?'
'It was a funny name. Made me think of a comic strip.'
'Abner Fancy?' I said.
'Yes, that's it. Abner Fancy. Always made me think of Li'l Abner.'
'Any other prisoners?'
'There was another man, a friend of Shaka's, I think. We called him Coyote. I really can't remember his actual name. I probably never knew it.'
I looked at the yearbook pictures for another minute.
'How about Emily Gold?' I said. 'Any pictures of her?'
'Emily? Oh God, Emily. She was killed a long time ago. Murdered.'
'Was she in your group?' I said.
'Yes. She was Bunny's best friend.'
'She was in the group with Shaka and Coyote?'
'Yes.'
'When did you last see any of these people?'
Anne was thumbing through the yearbook.
'Oh, God. Years. I'm a nice Irish Catholic girl from Milton. Once there were actually ex-convicts in the Brigade, I got scared. My only close friends in the Brigade were Bunny and Emily. They both dropped out of school, and I didn't. We just sort of drifted apart.'
'Brigade?'
'Yes, we called ourselves the Dread Scott Brigade. D-r-e-a-d, isn't that so college kid?'
She pointed at a picture in a montage of photos.
'Oh, sure,' she said, 'here's Emily.'
