Smiling like a mannequin, she strode with calm deliberation into the nursery. The anger was still growing, and as it grew, the redness drained out of the walls, as if she’d soaked it up to help power the anger.

  And then she saw the child. Child? The…organism. The pink, veined, maggot-squirming thing that had grown in her like a parasite. Like a tapeworm. It had been a long, painful pregnancy. Sick every day for four months, and then the headaches, and then a new set of aches in her back, her legs. And then a ten-hour labor. The child. That was what had forced her to marry Evan. And she realized with a sense of revelation that she’d never loved Evan, not at all.

  That she fucking hated Evan’s guts.

  The child, this organism—not something she would refer to as he ever again—had forced her to live with Evan’s constant bitterness, his complaining, his prissy neatness. She looked at it. It’s mouth was wide open, its face contorted with its bellowing. Spittle dribbled from its lips.

  She should have realized before that it was just a thing that had used her to grow in. Like a tick fattening on your blood. And the things it had done to her, things babies did to all women in the nine-month course of pregnancy: nausea, vaginal discharge all day every day, making her underwear into a sewer… lower abdominal aches, constipation, heartburn, indigestion, flatulence, bloating. headaches, dizziness, fainting… nasal congestion, that constant drip in her nose, nosebleeds… leg cramps, backache, varicose veins, hemorrhoids, difficulty sleeping, clumsiness… periods of pointless anxiety, irritability, depression…

  All of it from pregnancy, like the symptoms of a disease. A disease! Why hadn’t she seen it before?

  And the creature itself… At this stage it wasn’t much more, she knew, than the fetus that people so casually abort. It’s just a monkeylike lower organism really, not yet much aware or intelligent. And why had she been adoring it and taking care of it so conscientiously? It could only have been instinct. They taught you what instincts were in high school now: DNA programming, that’s all. A gimmick for the survival of the species. Just a lot of glandular button pushing on behalf of the Master Molecule. Instincts were a kind a tyranny. She saw that now. The Master Molecule was the tyrant. To hell with the Master Molecule. To hell with instincts.

  When Wendy didn’t answer her knock, Lois decided to go inside anyway, to pick up her purse. There was a book in it she wanted to show Perry. She wanted him to see that she had more depth to her than she’d shown him in the sleeping bag.

  She tried the door; it was unlocked. She opened it, stepped into the kitchen, calling softly, “Wendy? You here?” No answer. She could hear the baby whimpering from the bedroom. That was strange; Wendy should be here, or a baby-sitter, if the baby were here. Maybe Wendy was down in the basement. Or maybe Evan was here.

  “Evan!” Lois called. But then she realized that Evan probably wasn’t home. His van hadn’t been out front.

  Lois went to the living room, half expecting to find Wendy asleep on the couch. She found only the TV droning to itself: a quiz show. She found her purse on the couch, half under a dingy throw pillow. She drew the strap over her shoulder, then headed for the back door.

  She stopped in the kitchen, listening. The baby was no longer whimpering. It was shrieking. It wasn’t the ordinary baby’s howl for attention. It was a squeal of pure terror.

  She ran down the hall and threw open the bedroom door. In the far corner of the almost barren room, beneath a bedroom window framed by yellow curtains printed with bright blue dancing bears, surrounded by a haphazard array of brightly colored baby toys and-baby bottles, Wendy was setting her son afire.

  She crouched by the small blue plastic basket bed, holding a flaming cigarette lighter to one corner of the baby’s blankets near Billy’s feet. The other corner was already burning; the baby was recoiling from the flames, squealing, lying on his back, trying to see what was burning him, unable to lift his head far enough. The small yellow flames looked almost toylike. But in a few seconds more, they would fill the bed basket.

  Lois broke from her paralysis of amazement and ran across the room. She slapped the lighter out of Wendy’s hand, grabbed the baby under the armpits, and swung him away from the flames. And almost in the same motion, she began to back away from Wendy.

  Lois expected to see Wendy’s face contorted with madness—she had to be crazy to be doing a thing like that—and she was confused when she saw Wendy’s face was calm, almost blank. A little bemused, perhaps, like a person watching a movie that interests but doesn’t move them deeply. Somehow, this placidity scared Lois more than a look of rage.

  Lois backed out the bedroom door, then turned and ran into the bathroom. The baby kicked and screamed against her chest. She held him in the crook of one arm, using her free hand to lock the bathroom door behind her—and just as she locked it she heard Wendy trying the knob. She carried the baby to the sink and cooed at him as she bathed his burns. They weren’t bad. If she’d come five seconds later, they would have been.

  She realized, then, that she was sobbing. She made herself stop and dried her eyes. Then she rubbed an analgesic gel on the baby’s burns. She held him against her; he wailed, pausing now and then to take a long, wet, rattling breath. She looked at the door. She’s outside the door, Lois thought. Lois started convulsively when she heard the tapping on the door. And Wendy’s voice.

  “Lois? Open the door, kid, huh?”

  “I can’t right now,” Lois called. She was afraid to. Although Wendy didn’t seem overtly violent, now. Her voice sounded normal. But then, she’d had that cool, collected look on her face when she’d been setting the baby’s bedclothes afire. Fire! “Wendy, you’d better put out that fire before it gets bigger, or the whole house’ll go. There’s a fire extinguisher your dad left in the garage.”

  “Yes, I think you’re right,” Wendy said. And then she said something more softly that Lois couldn’t be sure of, but it sounded like, “The house could be useful.” Minutes later, Lois heard the sound of the fire extinguisher swishing from the nursery.

  “She’s sane enough to do that, anyway,” Lois murmured. The baby quieted, whimpering a little, every so often his face twisting as if he were about to cry. But he was tired; probably hoarse from crying.

  Another tapping at the door. “It was a weird kind of accident, Lois. Come on out and I’ll explain.”

  An accident? Had she misunderstood what Wendy was doing with the lighter? Maybe she just happened to have it in her hand and—

  She shook her head. “Bullshit, Wendy. You’ve been taking drugs. PCP or something. You should call a doctor for you and the ba—” She broke off, staring.

  Staring at the shiny chrome blade of a screwdriver thrust between the door and the jamb.

  Wendy was trying to force the door.

  What would she do, Lois wondered, once she’s got the door open?

  “You don’t think Sandra will be back within, say,”—Rofocale looked at his watch—“an hour?”

  “No. I doubt it,” Aunt June said. She and Perry sat on the couch, across from Rofocale, who was perched a little awkwardly on a threadbare footstool.

  Perry glanced at Aunt June, wondering what she was up to. Why had she invited Rofocale in? From what she’d said about him, she clearly detested him. Maybe she wanted to pump him for information about Tetty. Rofocale had spent more time with Tetty than anyone except Sandra in the past six months.

  “I’m curious about your therapeutic center, doctor,” Aunt June said evenly. “I’d like to come out for a visit sometime.” Aunt June had introduced herself; Rofocale knew her work.

  “Naturally, of course you must,” Rofocale said, with all the enthusiasm of sawdust.

  “Now as I understand it,” Aunt June began, “your therapy—”

  “My therapy,” Rofocale interrupted, something mischievous in his voice, “has entered a new phase. A whole new direction. And I owe that partly to you, doctor.”

  “Me?” Aunt June looked startled.

  Rofocale smiled. “Yes indeed. Your paper on the self-interest gene. A gene that controls the manufacture of, I believe, Empathy Suppression hormone…”

  Aunt June blurted, “But that paper was never published! There wasn’t enough substantiation!”

  He looked at her blandly. “Never published? I had assumed it was published somewhere. One of your friends was kind enough to show it to me. He was one of my clients. A Mr. Berman.”

  “Berman? He was a student, a graduate student in my—damn! He must have photocopied it, the bastard. I only left him with it for an hour.”

  He shrugged. “It was really just a kind of springboard for me, frankly. You stopped short of the truth. But you mentioned Dr. Horescu’s work in Romania. And I followed up on that.”

  “How does ESS apply to—therapy? Is this something you used to treat Tetty?” There was only the faintest edge of anger in Aunt June’s tone. But Perry could see by the clenching of her jaw muscles that she was furious. She hated the idea of Rofocale misusing her work.

  “Naturally my work with Tetty is confidential. You understand. At any rate Tetty was not a part of my current methodology. She was not a part of the New Direction.”

  The son of a bitch is lying, Perry thought. He’s too damn smooth.

  Rofocale glanced at his watch, then flashed a wide, brilliant smile at them. It was like he’d thrown a switch, to make something shine out of him.

  “I really wanted to talk to Sandra. I’m sure we could work things out.” Meaning the lawsuit, Perry thought. “I can’t afford a settlement but my new process will involve instructional videotapes and as Tetty was involved in my research, I willingly confess to owing her family a little something—only for that involvement, not for any subsequent problems, you understand—and, ah, I can offer Sandra a percentage of the videotape sales.”

  “If she drops the lawsuit? That’s rather speculative,” Aunt June said.

  “So is a lawsuit, doctor,” Rofocale said, standing.

  He beamed at Perry and actually winked—and then went to the door, where he turned toward Aunt June. He took a pen from an inside pocket of his coat, found a small notebook in another pocket, and wrote an address and phone number on it. Briskly, he tore the sheet from the notebook and handed it to Aunt June. “Give a call before you come to the therapy center, doctor.” He looked around the room, seemed to be listening. He was suddenly distant. “And may I say—” He never said it. He cut himself off, turned to look at the back door, visible through the length of the kitchen.

  Perry had already stood and started for the kitchen. He’d heard the same thing Rofocale had. A woman crying.

  Lois stood in the open back door, sobbing softly. Her hair was disheveled. There was blood on her blouse, and blood dripped from a cut on her forehead over her right eye.

  6

  “No, no thanks, I don’t need an ambulance, nothing like that,” Lois said finally. She was sitting at the kitchen table. Aunt June had gone for a first-aid kit. “It’s just a little cut, and a couple of bruises. I’m just sort of all shook up. And I got a headache. Thanks.”

  She swallowed the two aspirin Perry gave her, drinking half a beer to chase it. Aunt June bustled back into the kitchen, opened the small plastic kit, and laid out BandAids, iodine, alcohol.

  “Hey, that’s okay, just a BandAid,” Lois said, trying to smile. “No major surgery.” She winced when Aunt June dabbed the iodine on her cut forehead.

  Perry couldn’t hold back any longer. “Lois—”

  “Wendy hit me,” Lois said. Her eyes got shiny, but she didn’t let the tears go. “She—” She shook her head in disbelief. “She jabbed a screwdriver at my head. It didn’t hit straight on, just kind of glanced off me. But I really think she wanted to put it through my head. And she was kicking me and—” She hesitated, looking up at. Perry. “You’re not going to believe this. You wouldn’t if you knew her.”

  “Try me.”

  “She bit me. Bad.” She tugged her sleeve up to show the white-edged toothmarks on her forearm. The bite had broken the skin in three places.

  Aunt June splashed alcohol over it and bandaged it. “You keep your eye on that. Bites from people are dangerous. Your name is Lois?”

  “Yeah—you’re Perry’s Aunt June, right? Hi. I’m sorry to meet you in such a weird, uh, situation.”

  “Wendy is that girl with the little kid?” Perry asked, pulled a chair up beside Lois. He took her right hand, held it between his two hands.

  “Her baby, Billy—that’s the worst part.” She looked at Aunt June. “You’re a psychiatrist, right? Well, how do you explain this: she loved that baby, but she was trying to set him on fire. She put a cigarette lighter to his bed and the blankets caught fire and she kept spreading fire around. With this sort of dreamy smile on her face. So I took the baby away and locked myself in the bathroom with him and she broke in and—and slashed me, and bit me. And then her husband Evan came home with these guys and, uh, she saw them coming and she ran out the back. She didn’t seem, you know, manic. I think she was humming a little tune all the time. She didn’t seem even worried—or angry.”

  “Lots of times people don’t seem angry when they’re brimming over with it,” Aunt June said. “But I can’t really explain what happened until I know more about her. Maybe not even then. Is the baby okay?”

  “He’s all right, I guess. Just first-degree burns, looked like. He’s out at Evan’s parents house. Damn, I’m worried about Wendy. She was carrying that screwdriver when she left.”

  “Excuse me,” said Rofocale, stepping into the room, “but perhaps it is best if you tell us how long ago this happened.” He glanced apologetically at Perry. “I could not help overhearing. I’m concerned.”

  “Was this girl Wendy your patient?” Perry asked him.

  He shook his head. “We have no one named Wendy.”

  Lois stared at Rofocale. She’d recognized him. “Why do you want to know how long ago it happened?” She didn’t try to conceal her suspicion.

  “I think we should notify the police, tell them when it happened, what direction she went in. She’s clearly dangerous. For her protection and everyone else’s we’d better find her,” Rofocale said.

  “Have you called the police, Lois?” Aunt June asked.

  She shook her head, made a face as if she’d bitten something sour. “No, I was afraid they’d hurt her, the cops around here are trigger-happy. I mean, she’s just flipped, that’s all, but she’ll come out of it. She used to take acid sometimes, before she got married. Maybe she got bored and took some acid and it was too much for her. Or it was bad acid or something.”

  “Acid?” Aunt June said, surprised. “People still take LSD?”

  Perry nodded thoughtfully. “Some do. It’s coming back into fashion. Underground chemists are whipping it up again. She might’ve got some in Portland.”

  Aunt June said, “That could be it, I suppose.” But she didn’t sound as if she believed it. “Has Wendy been upset lately about anything?”

  “Sure,” Lois said. “Not happy in her marriage. Feeling trapped.”

  “Then it would be a dangerous time for her to take LSD. She could well have gone off the deep end; sometimes it flings depressed people into a kind of temporary psychosis.”

  “Yeah,” Perry said, relieved at having found a logical explanation. But he thought: First Tetty. Then the little girl drowns. Now this. In twenty-four hours. But aloud he said, “Yeah, she probably flipped out on acid. Or PCP…”

  “In which direction did she go?” Rofocale asked again, gently.

  Lois answered distantly. “Oh, northeast through the woods back of the housing project. She lives on Lakeshore, Twenty-seven Lakeshore, right at the end of the road, and there’s woods just behind their garage, with a lot of paths in it. Goes into a campsite eventually. She took off into that about a half hour ago. Evan’s at home, hoping she’ll come back.”

  Perry turned to Rofocale—and was a little startled to see that he’d gone. He hadn’t stopped to use the phone.

  Aunt June stared at the open front door. Then, slowly, she went to the telephone and dialed the sheriffs office. “Sheriff Dawson, please. No, it’s urgent. Sheriff, this is—that’s right. I’m all right, thanks. Listen, a friend of my nephew has had some kind of hysterical fit. Tried to set her house on fire, attacked someone, and then wandered off into the woods. Now, I’m going to let you talk to a friend of hers who’ll give you her description and all we know about it, but I wanted to ask you, first, to deputize some civilians to find her—men without guns, you see—and ask them to try not to hurt her. She might he dangerous but she hasn’t got a gun. What? Yes, it might be drugs. All right.” She put the receiver down on the table and called, “Lois? Could you talk to the sheriff, please?”

  “Now what the hell,” said Suze Bergstrom, finding her husband asleep in his workshop. It was Harry’s day off, and she’d suggested that he spend it resting—he was overworked, the doctor said, and he was pushing sixty-five—but he’d refused to consider it. Said he had to replace the broken leg of that old coffee table so he could give the table to his sister. Big job, just had to do it, no putting it off. “So then you fall asleep in a pile of wood shavings, for God’s sake,” Suze muttered with affectionate disgust. “Boy, you’re a case, Harry, you’re really a case.”

  Harry was sitting on his wooden bench, slumped over the scarred, paint-spattered oak table, his arms on either side of the wood shavings, his head on the mealy yellow heap as if it were a pillow. It was sawdust spilled from the mini-lathe, just in front of him. The sawdust was left over from the last project. He hadn’t touched the chunk of wood he’d picked for the new table leg; it was still suspended in the lathe. Harry hadn’t even selected a tool to shape it with; they were all in their racks on the wall—a perforated wooden wall patched with the tops of old tin cans. To one side was a rack of wrenches, screwdrivers, hammers, small saws and blades, everything still coated with fine sawdust left over from the kitchen chair he’d made for her two weeks ago. A film of dust seemed to cover even Harry. He usually wore a mouth mask to keep from breathing the dust, and here he was sleeping on the stuff. The mask hung on its nail to the left. Maybe—