said, and the blue packages of ordinary table salt, looking peculiarly homely and out of place, still bore their factory seals. She didn't know what antimony, saltpeter, or half a dozen other labelled substances ought to look like, but she could think of no real reason to doubt that they were what they said. A large bowl contained an incongruous heap of dried half-eggshells; a topless shoe-box sagged out under the burden of twenty or so large lead fishing weights; and six small stoppered test-tubes held granules of what appeared to be silver.
She searched the back of each shelf with her light, careful to move nothing. Everything was dusty, the disused substances at the back more so, until she got to her knees to check the contents of the very bottom shelf, and noticed a small box, nearly hidden behind some stoneware mortars, that seemed remarkably dust free. Taking note of its precise location, she reached in and eased it out. It was a grocer's package of ordinary blocks of paraffin wax.
She ran a thumb thoughtfully over the cool, slightly greasy surface of the wax block, struck by the combination of pushed-to-the-back abandonment and its cleanliness. After a minute, she began to smile.
A useful substance, wax. Children made strange, amoeba-shaped candles on the beach with it and handymen rubbed it onto sticking drawers. Ana's mother used to pour a thick layer of melted wax onto the top of her jams and jellies, and Ana could recall the childhood magic of pushing down on the round wax plug and having the other side rise up to reveal the sweet preserves underneath. Wax was useful, too, in molding itself around a shape, in providing weight and bulk to a hollow core—or, conversely, in obscuring whatever it surrounded.
She bent down and carefully put the box back into its original place. One of the commoner tricks of the alchemical charlatan, according to one of Glen's books, was to soften a lump of dirty gray wax and wrap it around a piece of gold. When the resulting 'lead' was heated in its glass alembic, the wax burned away as black smoke, miraculously revealing a puddle of pure gold.
The word 'sincere' literally translates 'without wax', Ana mused, brushing the dust from the knees of her sweats. Unadulterated. Pure. The presence of
Although she would have sworn that Steven truly believed that he himself had actually created gold.
She glanced at her watch: nearly 4 A.M., and time to leave. She walked a last time around the man-sized alembic in the center of the room, and suddenly knew where she'd seen the shape before: as an aura, surrounding a meditating figure at the end of the TRANSFORMATION mural in the dining hall.
She closed the laboratory door behind her and hurried up the steps. At the top she paused to catch her breath, and then cautiously pulled the door open. The hall was still dark; her straining ears could make out no noise. She stepped out onto the platform, closed the door, and stood rigid for a long time before she was satisfied that the hall was empty but for her. She switched on her flashlight, retrieved the key, and used it to lock the door, then replaced it just as she had found it, tugging the corners of the pillow to straighten the cover. She retreated down the platforms to the shadowy floor and out of the first set of doors into the hall's small foyer, and was just reaching out to push open the doors to the school entranceway, when she heard voices. She snatched back her hand and turned to leap back into the hall before she caught herself: to be caught in a panicky retreat would be the worst possible thing. She lived here at Change, and if she felt like meditating at four in the morning, so what?
Still, she couldn't quite bring herself to walk brazenly out to the voices, and in the end it was just as well that she did not, because the two men—it was Steven, his low voice shockingly loud as he came into the entranceway —did not enter the hall. Instead, his voice faded in the direction of the school offices, saying, 'I'll go make the call; you see if you can find some milk in the kitchen.'
There was a swishing noise as the office door shut; it was followed by the distinctive click of the main entrance. Ana pulled her own door open a fraction of an inch, fully expecting the two men to be standing there ready to pounce, and looked out onto emptiness. She counted out thirty seconds, which was about seventy heartbeats, and pulled the door open all the way. She walked briskly through the hallway and slipped out into the cold night air.
Chapter Twenty-one
From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)
A few hours later, Ana staggered out of bed and drove again to Sedona to pick up her new bridge. Two different people threatened to come with her, but she managed to put them off by simply offering to do their tasks for them. The solitude within Rocinante's thin walls combined with sleeplessness and the exhilarating feeling of Having Gotten Away With It was a heady mix; she spent most of the trip down singing old rock-and-roll songs and grinning widely at the passing cactus.
The intoxication lasted through the dental visit. The new bridge settled into the front of her mouth as neatly as the old one had, restoring a sense of security to her face. She smiled at the dentist, the nurse, and at everyone she passed on her way back to Rocinante, where she found not Glen, but a tourist brochure for The Chapel of the Holy Cross tucked under the windshield wiper. None of the neighboring cars bore them. She folded it into her pocket and went on to the post office, where she collected two imaginary bills forwarded by her Boise mail service and the heavy parcel she had agreed to fetch. She left the parcel in the bus and walked a few doors down to a stationers' shop to buy the supplies she had been asked to get, and incidentally to copy the recent diary entries on the shop's photocopier. It did not, of course, contain the details of the previous night's excursions, but it gave in great detail her conversations with Steven.
After all that busy work, the day's bubble began to go a bit flat. She was aware of being very low on sleep, and her hand ached, particularly as the day was turning cold. Still, she was alive and free, and was about to have a conversation with Glen that might help her make sense of the situation. Euphoria faded, inevitably, but she remained what in her long-skirted youth had been called 'mellow'.
She drove out of town on the Phoenix road, past the pseudo-Mexican shopping center that contributed mightily to the Sedona tax base and through an area of carefully scattered homes and looming rock buttes to the turnoff to the chapel, and found it as she remembered, a blunt, angular block of glass and concrete that some woman had commissioned to be jabbed down among the lifting, organic shapes of the rock, back in the days before planning commissions.
There were half a dozen cars parked in the marked area and tourists wandering up and down the steep hill. Ana joined them (feeling tired now, and distinctly underdressed without a camera) and pulled open the heavy door of the chapel. Inside, she found Glen disguised as a tourist, complete with video recorder and even a wife in the shape of Agent Steinberg, whom Ana had last seen leaving the museum rest room in Phoenix.
Ana sat down in the pew behind them and waited for two elderly women making the rounds to struggle their way out the door.
'Hello, Glen,' she said over the back of the pew. 'You look like a real sunbird, down from Nebraska for the winter.'
He shifted sideways and gave her a lopsided grin that went with the image. He didn't have a cowlick but he looked as if he did, and Ana was briefly visited by the memory of Antony Makepeace's disparaging remarks concerning Glen's undercover abilities. 'Howdy, ma'am,' he said. 'You know Agent Steinberg. My right-hand woman.'
'We met. Do you have a first name?' she asked the woman.
'Rayne.'
'Originally Rainbow?' Ana ventured.
Agent Steinberg actually blushed, an endearingly human reaction that caused Ana to wonder how far the woman would get in the agency. She was about the same age that Abby would have been, and for a moment Ana played with the amusing idea that one of the many hippie babies she had known named Rainbow might have become this young woman. 'Never mind,' she told her. 'None of us are responsible for our parents. Anything new from your end, Glen? You heard from Gillian, or that Dooley woman in Toronto?'
'Gillian has nothing new to offer—she's got a loaded desk at the moment and has put the Change case onto the back of it. And the Toronto situation is… frustrating. The woman's community where she's supposed to be is bristling with lawyers and there's no way we can get a warrant to talk to her if she's not interested. Rayne went up last week to have a try, and they just told her that they have too many women hiding out from their abusive husbands to want the FBI poking their snouts in. I quote.'
'Is that why Samantha Dooley is there? Is she in hiding? And if so, from whom?'
