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, nipping 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, blonde, 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.'
Chapter Twenty-seven
page 3 of 5
Change: I knew you'd like the boy. You don't intend to send him back, then?
Seraph: Of course not. He's wasted there. And the woman. Ana. She's…intriguing.
Change: I thought so. Almost too good to be true.
Seraph: You mean you suspect her?
Change: Suspect her of—Oh, I see. No, of course not. Since when would the police have that kind of imagination? No, I meant she seemed almost too perfect. A born adept, or someone who has spent her life preparing for the work without knowing it. She's got a lot of depth to her.
Seraph: I look forward to plumbing it. I might wish she wasn't so ugly
Change: You think she's ugly?
Seraph: Her hair looks like she's undergone radiation treatment.
Change: I guess. But then you've always been a man for the hair. Remember those two women in Madras? [laughter] She has nice eyes, though, Ana does. How—[pause] How is the other thing coming along?
Seraph: The same. Nothing.
Change: Is there anything I can do?
Seraph: You believe you can succeed where I fail?
Change: Of course not, Jonas. I am only an apprentice, compared to you. We both know that. But if there's any service I can perform as an apprentice, you only have to say
Seraph: I know, Steven. You're a friend. But it's my battle, my work, and I just need to return my mind and soul to a state of balance. Come next month, as you planned. We'll talk then.
Change: Everything else going amoothly? The Social Serices-
Seraph: Not on the phone, Steven. Marc seems to have it all under control.
Change: Marc is an asshole. He's manipulating you.
Seraph: He does Sami's job and lets me concentrate on the work. That's all that matters. You know, Steven, there is one thing you can help me with. There's a book I think you took with
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 Maria, 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 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 Maria 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
