moving toward what she could do next, now that Anne Waverly had turned them down. She did not have many options left: the thought of being forced to do nothing filled her with deep apprehension.
'She'll do it,' McCarthy sounded completely sure of himself.
'For Christ sake, Glen, she threw us out of her office,'
'She won't be able to keep away,'
'Oh, right,' she said sarcastically. 'She sounded so enthusiastic,'
'I didn't say she'd want to do it. I said she wouldn't be able to help herself,'
II
Fixatio
fix
Chapter Two
From the Journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefleld)
In the silence of their absence, Anne Waverly sat listening to the inner reverberations of the sound the envelope made sliding onto the surface of her desk. She had heard that ominous whisper before. Three times, in fact: twice when Glen had stood before her and put identical envelopes on this same desk, and once out in the desert when she had been sitting on a boulder and looked down to see a rattlesnake glide over the grit-covered rock inches below her boots. Anne's hand reached down and, of its own accord, began to massage away the eternal ache in her knee.
After some time, a soft rapping came from the door—a tentative noise, since all her students knew that Anne never closed her office door when she was inside. She took a deep breath, and her hand came back up to rest on the desk.
'Come on in,' she called, and constructed a smile for the girl who appeared in the doorway. 'Hello, Monica. What can I do for you?'
Two hours later, Anne's office hours were long over. The last students left, the last telephone calls were made, and around her she could feel the busy building settling into the doldrums of the dinner hour. Time to go home.
Papers and a book for review went into the briefcase. Three folders were set aside to leave at the steno pool for typing. Anne got tiredly to her feet, took the thick woolen coat from the wooden hanger on back of the door, and drew it on. She switched off the reading lamp on her desk, folded her glasses into their case and put it into her briefcase, and finally picked up the manila envelope that had waited at her elbow all afternoon.
She stood with it in her hand, a study in indecision; she even went so far as to turn back to the door and lock it, preparatory to opening the envelope, but she changed her mind and dropped Glen's offering into the briefcase with everything else, fastening the buckles over the case's bulging sides. She tucked the folders under her arm, took up cane and briefcase, clicked off the overhead light as she went out, and locked the door. On her way out to the parking lot she detoured past the steno pool, where she left the folders of typing for the secretaries to do the next day.
Then she went home.
It was dark when her headlights hit the tubular steel gate at the foot of her drive, despite the lengthening daylight hours of early spring. She put the ancient green Land Rover into neutral while she got out and unlocked the gate, then drove through and got out a second time to lock it up. The road just inside the gate was viciously rutted, and she picked her way with care as far as the first bend, where the surface became miraculously smooth and she could shift up into second gear for the long climb to the top.
A trio of floodlights came on when the car breasted the hill and a light shone from inside the log house, but these signs of life and welcome were purely mechanical, a matter of motion sensors and timer switches rather than human hands. Anne Waverly lived alone; she had done so for the past seventeen years.
There were the dogs, of course: in them lay life and welcome, and there was Stan now, ecstatic at her return, pushing his nose at the opening of the car door, bumping gently against her as she climbed out. His flat boxer face grinned at her, his hard body wriggled with the effort of wagging the ridiculous stump of his tail, he slobbered and whined and practically pissed himself in pleasure, and Anne allowed herself to be distracted by him. She thumped him and spoke nonsense to him and threw a stick before she picked up her things from the front seat to follow him into the house.
She went in through the unlocked back door, dumping her briefcase on the kitchen table, and then walked quickly into the small side room, once a pantry, that she had given over as a nursery. Away from the university, she did not seem to need her cane as much.
The boxer bitch got up to greet her, spilling pups in all directions, and then immediately looked worried at the tiny mewling protests that her movement had raised. Anne ran her hands along Livy's sleek sides and up her neck, and lowered her head to rest against the dog's hard forehead. The words 'animal comfort' came into her mind, the sheer, primitive comfort of touch, she thought; another living body making contact.
With that, Livy backed away apologetically to wade back among the pups and settle down to their tiny howls. The sightless grubs went for her as if she'd been away for hours, and Anne laughed quietly at her own abandonment. Oh well, she thought, there's always Stan.
The dog was quite happy to leave his preoccupied mate and join Anne for a brief moonlight hike up the mountain. This was a common ritual, just the sort of regular activity that Anne had been told not to establish, years ago, when the possibility of threat and retribution in her life had seemed real. Some of the precautions she had maintained until they were habit; others were difficult: How was she supposed to get in her road without climbing out of the car twice? How could she teach without showing up in predictable places at the posted times? Besides, all that covert mumbo jumbo was over and done with, she had thought. She had thought.
A close observer familiar with her habits would have noticed nothing out of the ordinary about her actions during that evening—or, rather, would have seen only minor things: the way Stan had to bark to catch her attention when shoving against her leg and drooling all over her hand failed; the length of time she held one of the blind puppies against her cheek, cupped in both hands, her own eyes tightly shut; the way she twice forgot to use the cane, walking back to get it with only a mild limp; how she cooked a large meal and ended up putting most of it into the refrigerator; and finally the way she got out of her bed after a couple of hours to sit in the small screened-in porch, wrapped in blankets and listening to the night sounds of the early mosquitoes and the bats and the pair of horned owls that lived nearby. She drank, first from a glass and later from a teacup, and let her hand rest on the back of the dog whenever he came and settled for a time beside her chair. She was still in the porch chair at dawn.
When the sun was up, she got to her feet. Stiff with discomfort and limping heavily at first, she went down the rough-hewn wooden stairs to the main room of the house that served her as study and living room and retreat from the world. She laid several split logs on the coals in the cast iron stove and opened the dampers full, and then made a restless circuit around the big wood-panelled room filled with comfortable furniture and bookshelves and dark rich colors of orange and red before she eventually fetched up at the heavy desk where she had left her briefcase the night before. She sat down in her chair and took the manila envelope from the bag, only to sit listening to the crackle and hiss from the fireplace with Glen's next worrisome community unopened in her hand.
Three times I've gone into the belly of the whale for Glen McCarthy, she thought; three times for him, and once for myself. More than any one person owed her fellow human beings, and a greater slice of her life, her sanity, and certainly her health than she could readily afford to give. She was tired now, she felt thick and damaged and middle-aged, and she wanted nothing but to dedicate herself to simple things like work and friendships and growing things.
In the beginning, she thought, I worked for Glen because doing so was the only thing that might justify my
