“What about hypnosis? Conversion?”

  “Two different things. Conversion is an abrupt change of belief systems. It is still 7 who believes. We believe any number of different things in a lifetime, but the 7 am, the ego, if you prefer, is the same. And under hypnosis the subject is in an altered state of suggestibility. He will act on the hypnotist’s suggestions as long as they are acceptable. If they are not acceptable, he can come out of trance—the usual response—reinterpret them, go into actual sleep, or ignore them. Which one he chooses is determined by personality factors. The sense of 7 am, the ego, is never really at risk. It has too many defenses.”

  “Delusions,” Culbertson said, laughing. The laugh turned into a cough that seemed to be strangling him.

  Hugh started to go find Greta. The old man waved him down again. “Delusions,” he repeated, hardly above a whisper. “I am, we are. It is. I’ll have to find the weak spots in their defenses, won’t I, Professor?”

  Greta had come in then. “It’s late,” she had said, dismissing Hugh.

  This time yhen he stood up, no one motioned him to stay any longer.

  “I still don’t believe in it,” Culbertson had said, in his hoarse whisper. “That’s for the record, and it’s true. If it can happen, I’ll do it. You don’t have to believe. If you experience it, you know. I am,” he said, his voice fading. “I am. It’s a lie, Professor. It’s a lie.”

  Hugh shook himself back to the present. “There is no mechanism,” he said aloud, and for a moment he could almost hear that dry, rattling laugh. He went to join the others in the television room. He could use a drink, he thought, hurrying.

  He was rushing even faster from his own thoughts, his answer to the question about why they were all there. The children had no choice. Culbertson had known that exactly as Hugh had known it. Their reaction to his terms had been as predictable as any freshman stimulus-response experiment with a white rat. Dr. Fields had told Hugh no one would force him to conduct such a ridiculous experiment. The medical department could easily make the EEGs and keep them on file, and one of the neurologists could make the comparisons. He could have been out from the beginning. Yet here he was, and Culbertson had known he would be here.

  “You’ll stay,” he had whispered that night. “You’ll be here from start to finish.”

  Curiosity? Vindication for the paper that actually had been rather tongue-in-cheek, although Culbertson had not read it like that? Whatever it was, he would stay; he paused before the door to the television room. Behind the door, Mallory was cursing in a booming voice. Hugh hoped Mallory would never try to strangle him. It was almost a certainty that he would succeed.

  He had been threatened, he thought then. In some way that he had not yet examined closely, he had been seriously threatened. And, as much as his instincts urged him to flee, to take cover, his rational self demanded that he stay and even participate in this insanity.

  “Ask him,” Conrad drawled as Hugh entered. He was in one of the leather chairs, his long legs stretched out before him. Hugh remembered Regina’s mention of his feet in her journal. Size thirteen at least.

  Mallory gave him a bitter look and sat down opposite his brother. “Isn’t it possible that Ginny did it, all of it, herself?”

  “Remotely possible,” Hugh admitted.

  Mallory glanced at Conrad. “She, for God alone knows what reason, went up there and smashed everything. She started through the hallway back to her room and maybe the door slammed behind her, waking her up. She could have been sleepwalking or something. She realized what she had done and went back and tried to undo it. As simple as that. Of course, she doesn’t remember doing it in the first place, not if she was sleepwalking.”

  “And the book? The cookies? The glass in the dishwasher? Sleepwalking?” Conrad didn’t look at Mallory and didn’t raise his voice above the sleepy drawl. He glanced at Hugh. “We went through all the rooms looking for dirty shoes. Didn’t find anything. Didn’t really expect to. Plenty of time to clean up. There were gloves up there in that mess, could have fit any of us.”

  Mallory dismissed the snack and the book. “Who knows how many times she was up and down?”

  “Maybe,” Hugh said. He mixed himself a drink and noticed that soda and ginger ale now appeared along with the assortment of liquors. That did simplify it, he decided. She could have become so upset over Lucas’s story of life in the old homestead that she had acted out her resentment and anger for his father, taking it out on his plants. Asleep or awake, she could have done it, and she most certainly would have denied it later if she remembered.

  He knew that Conrad didn’t believe that, and neither did he. No one who had been with her in the hour after they had found her would believe it.

  Janet came in and said that dinner was ready. No plate had been set for Lucas. Janet had a large salad and a piece of broiled fish; the others had lamb chops in a rich velvety sauce. Dinner was a silent meal. Afterward they all returned to the television room where Conrad watched an old movie, Janet did her needlepoint, and Mallory went over a ledger, making notes, flipping pages back and forth. Hugh had brought a pile of journals that had been accumulating. His department head was leaning on him more than usual these days to publish, but he generally hated the journals, primarily because of the jargon. Papers on the visual cortex, on Broca’s area, on the cellular structure of the myelin sheath…It was like studying the fabric and metals that made up an automobile, and never guessing what the entire structure was for. He read a White and Lieberman paper on their latest work with the split brain phenomenon, and even that left him dissatisfied. They needed a new approach. An Einsteinian breakthrough into a new way of thinking, or perceiving what was there. A holistic approach that considered the entire organ, not its various parts that never could be made to add up to the whole. They kept milking the same tired cow, he thought with irritation, turning pages faster, bored with one paper after another. And the cow was running dry, although no one seemed to notice. Cow runs dry, you slaughter it, if it’s too old to breed again, he thought, and the page he was staring at seemed to waver out of focus. He jerked. He had nearly fallen asleep; he glanced about to see if anyone had noticed. Conrad was still watching the television and, across the room, Mallory was regarding the ceiling with a frown wrinkling his forehead. Janet was threading a needle.

  “Seven hundred eighty-five acres of prime Douglas fir,” Mallory murmured. “I thought that had been sold years ago.’*

  Conrad glanced at him, back to the movie.

  “Wonder what it’s going for now,” Mallory said.

  “Five hundred a thousand board feet,” Conrad replied without turning.

  Hugh was sitting fairly close to Conrad, almost facing him. He saw the sudden start that rippled through his long, lank body, saw his fingers tighten on the arms of his chair.

  Conrad stared at the television fixedly; his jaw tightened until a bulge appeared; after a moment he relaxed and took a deep breath. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them, he was normal in appearance. Hugh, pretending to read, flipped a page before he looked at Conrad, who was watching him.

  “Fix you a drink?” Conrad asked in his sleepy voice.

  “Thanks. Have they cut that movie much? I saw it years ago and it was pretty good.”

  “Tell the truth,” Conrad said, “I haven’t been paying much attention.” He made the drinks and ambled out of the room, leaving the set on. Janet got up and switched it off.

  “What happened to him?” she whispered. “You saw, didn’t you?”

  Hugh shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Janet glanced at the liquor hut did not approach it. Sitting down again she picked up her handiwork. “I read your article this afternoon. You really do believe it’s impossible, don’t you?”

  “Yes. Absolutely.”

  “And telepathy, precognition, all the ESP effects, they’re impossible too?”

  “I believe so. It’s coincidence. How many times do we all have hunches that are wrong? We forget them. But no one ever forgets the one in a thousand that turns out to be right. Hunches can be explained by everyday normality.”

  She smiled slightly. “Let me tell you about a coincidence I experienced years ago,” she said. “I was twenty, studying art under Rudolf Fiske. You know his work at all?”

  Hugh nodded. “Modernist, abstract stuff?”

  “That’s the one. I liked abstract art for a while. That’s all I was doing. Not very well because I have very little talent. He never looked at our work until we were ready to show him. At this time I was working on something quite different from my usual stuff. I had been at it for three weeks when one day one of the students went crazy and jumped out the window. I didn’t know him; he had just come into the class during the last week. I had never seen him before that. I became hysterical and Rudolf slapped me. I couldn’t speak. Finally he looked at my painting. It was that student as he must have looked down there on the pavement, staring at the sky, splashed out in all directions. His face was quite recognizable. There was green paint on his hands—in the painting and down there on the street.”

  She stopped talking; her needle slipped into the canvas, out again, trailing a light-blue thread. Hugh took a deep breath, but before he could speak, she said, without looking up, “Don’t say you believe, or disbelieve, or that it was coincidence, or anything else.”

  He exhaled. She was right. There was never anything to say. It had happened just as she had told it, or nothing had happened, or something had happened and she had distorted it.

  “Has anything else like that ever happened to you?” he asked finally.

  “Not just like that. Nothing dramatic or exciting. A few little things, but I won’t bore you with them. Even I could see how they might be called coincidences, although, of course, they weren’t.”

  She looked at him still smiling faintly, and for a moment he saw the beauty that Regina had seen, lovely eyes, very fine complexion. Then it was gone and again she was simply an immensely overweight woman. She turned her attention once more to her needlework. He felt uncomfortable, as if she knew he had seen her, really seen her, however briefly, and that he had not been able to maintain the image. When had she started to put on weight, he wondered. At twelve, when her father had beaten her because she had kissed her half-brother, or gone further than a kiss perhaps? And now, at thirty-five—virginal, no matter what had happened then, she was virginal—was she going to try to catch up with the life that she had missed for so many years? How long would it take to lose seventy-five pounds? A year? Two years? His thoughts were interrupted by the arrival of Lucas. It was nearly midnight He stood in the doorway and said good night “Luke, wait a minute. I’m going up, too,” Janet said, dropping her work into the basket by her chair. They went out together, speaking in low tones. The closing of the door silenced their voices completely; again Hugh was reminded of the solidity of the house where no noise carried beyond any door.

  “Me too,” Mallory said. He stood up, leaving the ledger open, a pencil between the pages. He went to the door, where he paused. “I’m leaving my bedroom door cracked tonight Would you mind leaving yours open a little, just in case…”

  “I intended to,” Hugh said, and Mallory nodded, said good night, and left the room. He looked old and tired, as if his quarrel with Lucas had hurt him more than the death of his father. Or it could have been the cumulative effect of the death, funeral, fight, the insane will…Or maybe it was because he didn’t believe any more than Hugh did that Regina had destroyed the plants. But if she had not done it, then one of them had. No one else had been in the house overnight. Anita Mantessa and her husband lived in a small cottage up the lava road, and Greta had already left. One of the children, or Regina or Hugh.

  He sat before the fire for another half-hour before he closed the screen and switched off lamps in the room. He paused at the desk and looked at the ledger without real curiosity. He knew the valley was full of people who were land-poor, all their wealth tied up in the acreage that they couldn’t bring themselves to divide. It seemed almost a condition of the farmers here: They fell in love with the rich land and accumulated more and more of it until their taxes were too burdensome. Only then did they begin to strip it off again. He was afraid the Culbertson children would be bitterly disappointed when they learned the extent of the other assets.

  “I’m a wealthy man,” Culbertson had said during that first meeting. “Not cash, never’s enough cash. But rich in what counts, the only thing that counts. Land. Funny thing about land is the more you think you own, the more it owns you. It’s alive, the land is. It’s a mystical thing I’m talking about, sir, something you psychologists can’t acknowledge, I know. But it’s a real thing I’m talking about You touch that land out there and you touch something that’s living, breathing, touching back. You’d think of all ray children at least one of them would understand that, wouldn’t you? They don’t. Land is negotiable for them, and that’s all it is. Even Mallory, who owns a couple of thousand acres of scrub, he doesn’t realize it’s something more than a way to make more money. It’s a way to live, a master to serve as long as you live, a home to go to after you live.”

  How could anyone with that kind of love in him show so much hatred for people, for his own children, his wives? Hugh turned off the desk lamp and left the room. He started through the living room toward the curved staircase to the upper hall, then stopped and instead went on to the stairs everyone else always used. He felt foolish, but he didn’t even try to unravel the reason for disliking that room, those stairs, that balcony. He knew he had no reason.

  October 18

  Lucas arrived at the little house the next morning at seven-thirty. He looked wretched, as if he had not slept. He held Regina tightly, then drew back to look at her. ••How are you? Where’s the nurse?**

  “Okay. I sent her away. She snored like a trooper all night. And ate like one this morning. I won’t stay here alone again, Lucas. We stay together here, or there, or at home, wherever.”

  He took a deep breath, as if preparing to argue with her, and she turned her back on him and went into the kitchen. “I have coffee made if you want some.” She stopped at the table and held on to it with both hands. “Lucas, let’s go home. Today. This morning. You’ll have the cash, that’s enough.” She did not look at him and when the silence lengthened, she found that she was gripping the table harder and harder.

  Finally he said, “You know that’s impossible.”

  “Why is it?”

  His voice was angry now, the words fast, almost slurred. “I won’t give up anything, not a cent of it! Do you understand? I was forced to pay my dues, Regina, and I won’t give it up. Not for you, or myself, not for anything. All those years I paid, now I collect. That’s why it’s impossible. You go back. I wanted you to get out from the start.”

  She shook her head and now she released the grip that was making her hands ache. ’Together,” she murmured. “What will we do all day?”

  She looked at him, and she knew it was not the money, that wasn’t his reason. He never had cared about money; if they had it, he spent it without a thought. When they were broke, he was patient, never complaining. He never had shown any urgency about money; even the game he played—When I Get Rich…—was without urgency. She knew it was not the inheritance as such that held him, and it was frightening to think that he was trying to prove something to his father even now. You can’t win, she wanted to say to him, echoing what Mallory had said. It’s a no-win game. You can’t prove a point to a dead man; he can’t prove anything to you.

  Lucas was rigid, too ready to make the argument into a real fight. Regina knew she dared not let it go that far; a real fight would require time to sort out, hours of talk time, hours of making love time, the kind of time they did not have and would not have until they were away from the farm and the insane conditions of the will. Last night the sedative the doctor had given her had put her to sleep easily, but she had come awake in the middle of the night, and, sitting up in Hugh’s bed, she had felt herself being pulled back, stretched out between the town and the farmhouse, had felt herself reaching out to touch Lucas at her side. A dream, she knew; nothing but a silly dream, but it had left her uneasy, unwilling to be separated from him again at night, unwilling to have him alone in that house. His family did not count, she knew. He was alone unless she was with him, just as she was alone without him, no matter how crowded the scenes each moved through. She took a deep breath. They could not fight now, not until next week sometime. It was enough to make her smile—scheduling their next fight. Lucas smiled back at her and reached out to put his arms around her.

  “I love you,” he whispered. “Ever tell you that?”

  “You hinted from time to time.”

  “Let’s go to bed before we make any demanding decisions.”

  Hugh was ready to leave the big house for campus to check in at his office when Lucas and Regina drove up in the rental car. He met them at the door.

  “We’re going to go look for fossils,” Regina said. “Lucas has some petrified wood from up the stream somewhere. He remembers where it came from. I’ve never seen any in the wild.”

  Too voluble, Hugh thought. Too determinedly not looking around the house.

  “I’ll go up and get my old backpack,” Lucas said. “And some rain gear for you. You may need it before the day is over. Anything else?”

  She shook her head. “Can’t think of a thing.” Lucas ran up the stairs and she said to Hugh, “It’s a beautiful day.”

  “You should have stayed in town.”

  She frowned, then turned and opened the door, looked out. I was upset. It scared me for someone to make such a mess. I’m fine now. Besides, Lucas han’t been back here for years; it was killing him not to see some of the old places he used to know.”