A Darker Place Read online

  “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.

  “Professorial,” 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 4

  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—was 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. It seemed, as she complained to Antony, that he preferred to “let it flow” rather than commit himself to too rigid a structure. How did he expect the campus bookstore to conjure up two hundred twenty-five copies of a book he might not decide upon until the seventh week of the ten-week quarter? she demanded. Antony shook his head and patted her shoulder and took her home to his wife for dinner.

  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 eventually had to admit that a man who had never owned a credit card and who wrote perhaps as few 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 between Eliot’s inarticulate requests for occasional repair and maintenance funds and the lawyer’s overall supervision.

  Then there were the numerous visits to the specialist about her knee, first to convince her that Anne did indeed intend to mistreat it, then to come to an agreement about what therapy would make that possible, and finally to have several fittings for a new, high-tech brace, invisible under any but the tightest of trousers and guaranteed never to give off the faint but maddening squeaks the old one had developed.

  Another specialist, too, agreed to several sessions in the short time before Anne had to leave. Anne’s psychotherapy with Antony’s wife, Marla, had tapered off over the last year or so, but halfway through the first week following Glen’s reappearance, Anne knew she would never make it without committing murder if she could not talk with Marla, who was friend as well as therapist. Anne phoned her at home.

  “Marla? Anne here. I wonder if you could fit me in for a couple of hours, soon.”

  “Of course. I hoped you would call. I was going to wait another day or two and then call you.”

  “Antony told you, then?” The lines between the professions were firm but flexible; of course Antony would have told his wife, Anne’s friend, that she was suddenly leaving, although to his wife the psychiatrist he would only have hinted gently at the reason.

  “You don’t mind?”

  “Certainly not. But, Marla? We’re not going to be discussing whether or not I want to do this. I’m going, and I can’t a
fford doubts.”

  “If you didn’t have them already, you would not be concerned about them,” Marla pointed out. “I can’t promise to help you strengthen your resolve, Anne, just to understand it.”

  “I’ll take the chance,” Anne said with a smile, and went back to her work.

  There were also, inevitably, the students, not only the regular end-of-term crush, but also the handful of independent study supervisions and the fragile few in need of babying as they went through times of personal trauma or entered the delicate phases of their thesis projects.

  Meanwhile, in her role of sometime agent of the FBI, Anne was finding Gillian Farmer all she might have asked for in a research assistant. Faxes spilled daily into Anne’s home machine, e-mail dinged merrily whenever she logged on to her computer, and three parcels arrived containing photographs and color reproductions of children’s drawings. Anne spent hours poring over the material, particularly the drawings, and took long walks thinking about them.

  She also looked at the odd details, the minutiae that comprised this unique organism that called itself Change. The Web site they had set up was remarkably down-to-earth, as such things go, and although Anne could see Steven’s interest in what Glen had called “the cleansing nature of fire,” the texts Steven (or whoever had drawn up the Web site) used were not taken exclusively from apocalyptic material, and indeed were often not even biblical. The quotations given ran the gamut from Aboriginal teaching stories to Zoroastrian writings, in what Anne could only assume was an attempt to prove the universality of the doctrine of Change—which doctrine, however, was remarkably unclear. There were small, tantalizing clues in the material Glen and Gillian sent her that set the scholar in her tingling; unfortunately, small and tantalizing they remained.

  Former members of a religious movement were a valuable if dangerous source of information—valuable because they were usually as eager as ex-spouses to spill all the dark and misshapen beans of their former relationship, and a hazard because the negative was often the only information they were interested in giving. In this case, though, the only disgruntled exes they had found were four women and two men who had been involved in Change for only an average of four and a half months, with the longest stay just short of eight. Samantha Dooley, who had been with the movement from its beginning and would have been the most important informant they could have found, had apparently left Change some months before and was now hidden within an extremely withdrawn, even xenophobic, women’s commune in Canada, flat-out refusing to talk to Glen’s men about her time with Change. Anne didn’t even think they had been allowed to speak with her directly, and suggested that he send a woman to try.

  Anne was forced to fossick through the pages of information for the odd trace of gold, though when she found a gleam, she had to admit that she could not be sure it wasn’t mere pyrite instead.

  Take the names of the two men who seemed to be joint heads of the movement: Steven Chance had become Steven Change when he and the others came out of India, but what of Jonas Fairweather, whose legal name was now Jonas Seraph?

  Names have meanings, and a name deliberately chosen by an adult could only vibrate with resolve and a new identity. Jonas, like Steven, had kept his first name, but what did he mean by Seraph?

  Anne spent a couple of hours late one night at the desk in her home study, deep in Hebrew dictionaries, biblical concordances, and a selection of commentaries, which told her that a seraph was, in Numbers 21 and Deuteronomy 8, a kind of venomous serpent. Whether or not this was related to the verb seraph, which meant to burn or consume in flames, was debatable, and one could only speculate about Isaiah’s use of the plural seraphim when talking about angelic beings, and suggest that he may possibly have been visualizing winged serpents wreathed in fire.

  Interestingly, a second Hebrew word with a completely different spelling but with an identical spelling when transliterated into English was tsaraf, which also had to do with purifying fires. That verb meant refining, purifying, with an overtone of testing a substance, putting it to the proof to determine its purity.

  There were proper names spelled with some variation of the Hebrew roots srf, in Nehemiah and I Chronicles, but on the whole Anne wondered if she was not crediting the man with more subtlety than he possessed, and that the name Fairweather had taken wasn’t simply a reference to Isaiah’s fiery messengers.

  Anne looked over the stacked chaos of books and scribbles, and shook her head. Speculation and word studies were all very well and good, but it was now two-fifteen in the morning when she had a lecture in eight hours. Tantalizing or not, she had to admit that she simply did not know enough to determine what the Englishman meant by his name change.

  Quit playing with your books, Dr. Waverly, she told herself sternly. Go to bed.

  And while all this was going on, while the householder’s legal arrangements and professorial demands vied for her limited hours and Gillian Farmer’s faxes spilled their stories into her home, all the while, on the edges of her vision, there moved the ominous presence of Glen McCarthy, solicitous as a wooing suitor, insistent as a slave owner, crowding her and driving her to fits of nervous petulance when they were due to meet. She found his unremitting cheerfulness, now that he had his way, foreboding, almost menacing, and she found it difficult not to take it out on her students. The phone messages and letters (the latter well sealed and marked with a large “Personal”) began to provoke gently ribald comments from the steno pool, causing Anne no little humiliation until finally she blew up at McCarthy, heaping on him her accumulation of burdens and tensions and telling him to leave her alone if he expected her to continue. For two days he remained silent and invisible. For some perverse reason, this made her even more furious, until the Friday afternoon she telephoned his message number and said that he should come to her house at midday Saturday.

  That night she dreamed of Glen, dressed in a black turtleneck, black jeans, and black, steel-toed work boots, storming into her lecture hall in a terrible rage and thundering at her, “I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God.”

  She woke up laughing, a sound that rang through the silent house and startled the dogs into a barking fit.

  Marla Makepeace had been Anne’s therapist for years, beginning as a friend who helped put her together after the breakdown set off by Abby’s photograph and continuing over the years. Anne, Marla, and Antony made for an odd friendship, one that should not have worked for any number of reasons, not the least of which was Anne’s oft-stated preference not to inquire too closely into the darker places of her mind, a firm conviction that it was at times better to let sleeping Minotaurs lie rather than continually offering up virginal portions of herself to be devoured by them. Beyond this attitude, unacceptable to a believer in the psychotherapeutic method, there was the objection that a therapist and her client should never have a relationship outside the therapy room, any more than a grad-student-turned-employee ought to befriend her adviser-turned-boss, and as for a married couple who had to create a line between talking about Anne their friend and professional indiscretions about Anne the client—All things considered, their friendship shouldn’t have worked, but it did, quite smoothly.

  She sat in Marla’s comfortable chair in the quiet, fragrant, plant-filled room and told her about her dream of Glen the jealous God. Marla chuckled, as Anne had known she would, but she then went on, to Anne’s dismay, to ask about the dream’s meaning. Anne shook her head ruefully.

  “What is it?” Marla asked.

  “Oh, the mind is such an amazing thing. I tell you about a funny dream in order to make you laugh, but I manage to overlook the fact that you’re going to make me dig beneath the surface and see things I don’t want to see.”

  “Would you not have told me if you’d stopped to think about the consequences?”

  “Oh, I probably would have. But it wouldn’t have been funny.”

  “Perhaps that’s why your mind chose selective blindness: in order to allow me the humor befor
e the content.”

  The two women smiled at each other with affection, and the smile was still in Marla’s eyes when she asked gently, “You are concerned about this upcoming investigation, aren’t you?”

  “I am.”

  “Tell me how you feel about Glen.”

  “He frightens me,” Anne said immediately. “He’s so utterly fixed on what he’s doing, everyone else is just a tool. You have to shout just to make him aware of you as a person. He’s inhuman, and he’s not even aware of it.”

  “So why submit yourself to that treatment again?”

  Anne tried to laugh, but it was a poor, twisted thing. “He may not be much of a god, but he’s mine. No, of course I don’t mean that I worship him or anything, but I suppose you could say that he created me in his image. I was thinking the other day about that time fifteen years ago. You know, I still think I would have killed myself in another day or two if Glen hadn’t barged in and just swept it all away because he needed me to help him and he didn’t have time for my problems. And with him there, I never stopped to think, never had the time or the energy to stand back and look at what it was I wanted to do, until—oh, maybe the last year or so. And now again he’s just blindsided me and swept me along.”

  “Would you have agreed to help Glen this time if you had been forewarned that he was going to ask?”

  “I wonder. Yes, I think so.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s what I do, who I am. I was dead for three years after Aaron and Abby were killed. I would have committed suicide at the time except I felt it would be the ultimate betrayal of their deaths. So instead I went dead. For three years after I came here, the only person I talked to was Antony. And I began to take stupid risks. I started walking around campus at night during that time we had the rapist attacks. One winter I kept forgetting to replace the tires on my car even though they were almost bald, and I couldn’t stand to have the seat belt around me. Stupid, suicidal things.”