The Birth of a new moon

'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.

'Professional,' 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.

Chapter Four

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.

After two days, Anne decided that the easiest thing would be just to give up sleeping, and to all intents and purposes that was what she did, napping at odd moments when she could no longer keep her eyelids up. Several nights she did not make it home, camping out instead in her office under the vastly disapproving eyes of Tazzie and her boss.

Still, the work seemed to get itself done. Three hundred exams were farmed out to grad students for grading, leaving Anne with some three thousand written pages to evaluate. Her own writing—two articles, a review, and the proposal for a book—were simply canceled or put off, with apologies. A replacement instructor for her big spring class was found, a casual, bearded young Ph.D. about whom Anne had grave doubts as she tried to impress on him her reading list and curriculum.

Anne's lawyer, on the other hand, was none too pleased with a proposal that the taciturn and unworldly Eliot be given any authority at all over Anne's financial affairs. Anne had eventually to admit that a man who had never owned a credit card and who wrote perhaps as many as three checks a year off the bank account he shared with his mother, brilliant as he was with machines and dogs and roof repairs, might be less than ideal as a custodian of her business matters. She appealed again to Antony. He patiently agreed to act as signator of checks and liaison