“You didn't speak with any of them face to face?”

“I guess they were in a hurry to be off.”

“Did you see them leave?”

"No, though I . . . well . . . I looked out a couple of times, but I must've missed them."

“The twins went with them?” Parker asked. “Isn't school in?”

"It's a progressive schooltoo progressive, I sayand travel is thought to be as broadening as classroom work. Did you ever hear such-"

“How did Mr. Salcoe sound when you spoke with him on the phone?”

Impatiently, Essie said, "Well . . . he sounded . . . like he always sounds. What do you mean?"

“Not at all strained? Nervous?”

She pursed her tight little mouth, cocked her head, and her birdbright eyes glittered at the prospect of potential scandal. "Well, now that you mention it, he was a bit odd. Stumbled over his words a few times, but until now I didn't realize he'd probably been drinking. Do you think ... oh, that he's had to go off to some clinic to dry out or-"

Parker had heard enough. He rose to leave, but Essie got between him and the doorway, trying to delay him by making him feel guilty that he had not finished his coffee or even tasted a cookie. She suggested tea instead of coffee, some strudel, or “perhaps an almond croissant.” By dint of the same indomitable will that had made him a great painter, he managed to get to the front door, through it, and onto the portico.

She followed him all the way to the rental car in her driveway. The little vomitgreen Tempo looked, for that one moment, as beautiful as a RollsRoyce, for it offered escape from Essie Craw. As he sped away, he quoted Coleridge aloud, an apt passage.

Like one that on a lonesome road

Doth walk in fear and dread,

And having once turned round walks on,

And turns no more his head;

Because he knows a frightful fiend

Doth close behind him tread.

He drove around for half an hour, working up the courage to do what must be done. Finally, upon his return to the Salcoe house, he parked boldly at the head of the circular driveway, in the shadows of the massive pines. He went to the front door again, insistently pressed the bell for three minutes. If anyone was home and merely unwilling to see visitors, he would have answered that unrelenting ring out of sheer desperation. But no one responded.

Parker walked along the veranda, studying the front windows, being nonchalant, acting as if he belonged there, though the property was so shrouded by trees and lush landscaping that he could not be spotted easily from the streetor from Essie Craw's windows. The drapes were shut, preventing a glimpse of the interior. He expected to see the telltale electricityconducting tape of an alarm system on the glass. But there was no tape and no other indication of electronic security.

He stepped off the end of the veranda and went around the western side of the house, where the morning sun had not shrunk the long, deep shadows of the pines. He tried two windows there. They were locked.

In back of the house were more shrubs, flowers, and a large brick patio with a lattice cover, outdoor wetbar, expensive lawn furniture.

He used his coatprotected elbow to smash in a small pane on one of the French doors. He unlocked the door and went inside, pushing through the drapes into a tilefloored family room.

He stood very still, listening. The house was silent.

It would have been uncomfortably dark if the family room had not opened onto a breakfast area and the breakfast area onto the kitchen, where light entered through the glass in that uncurtained door to the patio. Parker moved past a fireplace, billiards tableand froze when he spotted the motiondetection alarm unit on the wall. He recognized it from when he had investigated security systems for his Laguna house. He was about to flee when he recalled that a small red light should have been visible on the unit if it was in operation. The bulb was therebut dark. Apparently the system had not been activated when the Salcoes had left.

The kitchen was roomy, with the best appliances. Beyond that was a serving pantry, then the dining room. The light from the kitchen did not reach that far, so he decided to risk turning on lights as he went.

In the living room, he stood very still again, listening.

Nothing. The silence was deep and heavy, as in a tomb.

When Brendan Cronin entered the Blocks'kitchen after rising late and taking a long hot shower, he found little Marcie coloring moons and murmuring eerily to herself. He thought of how he had mended Emmeline Halbourg with his hands, and he wondered if he could cure Marcie's psychological obsession by the application of that same psychic power. But he dared not try. Not until he learned to control his wild talent, for he might do irreparable harm to the girl's mind.

Jack and Jorja were finishing omelets and toast, and they greeted him warmly. Jorja wanted to make breakfast for Brendan, too, but he declined. He only wanted a cup of coffee, black and strong.

As Jack ate, he examined four handguns that were lying on the table beside his plate. Two of them were Ernie's. Jack had brought the other two with him from the East. Neither Brendan nor anyone else referred to the firearms, for they knew their enemy might be listening right now. No point revealing the size of their arsenal.

The guns made Brendan nervous. Maybe because he had a prescient feeling that the weapons would be used repeatedly before day's end.

His characteristic optimism had left him, largely because he had not dreamed last night. He'd had his first uninterrupted sleep in weeks, but for him that was no improvement. Unlike the others, Brendan had been having a good dream every night, and it had given him hope. Now the dream was gone, and the loss made him edgy.

“I thought it would be snowing by now,” he said as he sat down at the table with a cup of coffee.

“Soon,” Jack said.

The sky looked like a great slab of darkgray granite.

Ned and Sandy Sarver, serving as the second team of outriders, had driven into Elko to rendezvous with Jack, Jorja, and Brendan at the Arco MiniMart at four in the morning, then had cruised around town until seventhirty, by which time some of those back at the Tranquility would have set out on their tasks for the day. They returned to the motel at eight o'clock, ate a quick breakfast, and went back to bed to get a few more hours of rest in order to cope with the busy day ahead.

Ned woke after little more than two hours, but he did not get out of bed. He lay in the dimness of the motel room for a while, watching Sandy sleep. The love he felt for her was deep and smooth and flowing like a great river that could bear them both away to better places and times beyond all the worries of the world.

Ned wished he was as good a talker as he was a fixer. Sometimes he worried that he had never been able to tell her exactly how he felt about her. But when he tried to put his sentiments into words, he either became tonguetied or heard himself expressing his emotions in hopelessly inarticulate sentences and leaden images. It was good to be a fixer, with the talent to repair everything from broken toasters to broken cars to broken people. Yet sometimes, Ned would have traded all his mending skills for the ability to compose and speak one perfect sentence which would convey his deepest feelings for her.

Now, watching her, he realized that she was no longer sleeping. "Playing possum?" he asked.

She opened her eyes and smiled. "I was scared, the way you were watching me, that I was going to get eaten alive, so I played possum."

“You look good enough to eat; that's for sure.”

She threw aside the covers and, naked, opened her arms to him. They fell at once into the familiar silken rhythms of lovemaking at which they had become so sensuously adept during the past year of her sexual awakening.

In the afterglow, as they lay side by side, holding hands, Sandy said, "Oh, Ned, I'must be the happiest woman on earth. Since I met you down in Arizona all those years ago, since you took me under your wing, you've made me very happy, Ned. In fact, I'm so crazyhappy now that if God struck me dead this minute, I wouldn't complain."

“Don't say that,” he told her sharply. Rising up on one elbow, leaning over her, looking down at her, he said, "I don't like you sayingthat. It makes me ... superstitious. All this trouble we're init's possible some of us will die. So I don't want you tempting fate. I don't want you saying things like that."

“Ned, you're about the least superstitious man I know.”

"Yeah, well, I feel different about this. I don't want you saying you're so happy you wouldn't mind dying, nothing like that. Understand? I don't want you even thinking it."

He slipped his arms around her again, pulling her very tightly against him, needing to feel the throb of life within her. He held her so close that after a while he could no longer detect the strong and regular stroking of her heart, which was only because it had become synchronized withand lost inhis own beat.

In the Salcoe family's Monterey house, Parker Faine was looking primarily for two things, either of which would fulfill his obligation to Dom. First, he hoped to find something to prove they had actually gone to NapaSonoma: If he found a brochure for a hotel, he could call and confirm that the Salcoes had checked in safely; or if they went to the wine country regularly, perhaps an address book would contain the telephone number of the place where they stayed. But he halfexpected to find the other thing instead: overturned

furniture, bloodstains, or other evidence that the Salcoes had been taken against their will.

Of course, Dom had only asked him to come talk with these people. He would be appalled to know that Parker had gone to these illegal lengths when the Salcoes had been unlocatable. But Parker never did anything by halves, and he was enjoying himself even though his heart had begun to pound and his throat had clutched up a bit.

Beyond the living room was a library. Beyond that, a small music room contained a piano, music stands, chairs, two clarinet cases, and a ballet exercise bar. Evidently, the twins liked music and dance.

Parker found nothing amiss on the first floor, so he slowly climbed the stairs, staying in the runner of plush carpet between oak inlays. The light from the first floor reached just to the top step. Above, the secondfloor hallway was dark.

He stopped on the landing.

Stillness.

His hands were clammy.

He did not understand why he was clutching up. Maybe instinct. It might be wise to pay attention to his more primitive senses. But if anyone had wanted to ambush him, there had been plenty of places on the first floor ideal for the purpose, yet the rooms had been deserted.

He continued upward, and when he reached the secondfloor hallway, he finally heard something. It was a cross between a beepsound and a blipsound, and it came from rooms on both ends of the hall. For a moment he thought the alarm system was about to go off, after all, but an alarm would have been a thousand times louder than these beepblips. The sounds came in counterpointed, rhythmic patterns.

He found a switch at the head of the stairs and snapped on the overhead lights in the hall. Standing motionless once more, he listened for noises other than the curious beepblips. He heard none. There was something familiar about the sound, but it eluded him.

His curiosity was greater than his fear. He had always been compelled by a chronic curiosity, with frequent acute attacks of same, and if he had not allowed it to drive him in the past, he'd never have become a successful painter. Curiosity was the heart of creativity. Therefore, he looked both ways along the hall, then turned right and walked cautiously toward one source of the beepblips.

At the end of the hallway, there were two distinct sets of beeping sounds, each with a slightly different rhythm, both coming from a dark room where the door was threequarters shut. Poised to flee, he pushed the door all the way open. Nothing leaped at him out of the darkness. The beeping became louder, but only because the door was out of the way now. He saw that the room was not entirely dark. On the far wall, thin ribbons of pale gray light outlined drapes that were drawn across a very large window or perhaps a pair of balcony doors; the Salcoes' Southern Colonial had lots of balconies. In addition, around the corner from the doorway, out of sight, were two sources of eerie soft green light that did little to dispel the gloom.

Parker eased forward, clicked the light switch, entered the room, saw the Salcoe twins, and thought for an instant that they were dead. They were lying on their backs in a queensized bed, covers drawn up to their shoulders, unmoving, eyes open. Then Parker realized that the beeping and the green light came from EEG and EKG monitors to which both girls were connected, and he saw the IV racks trailing lines to spikes inserted in their arms, so he knew they were not dead but merely in the process of being brainwashed. The chamber had none of the quality of a teenaged girl's room; from the lack of personal mementos or any stamp of individuality, he assumed it was a guest room and that the girls had been put here in a single bed simply to make it easier to monitor them.

But where were their captors and tormentors? Were the mindcontrol experts so certain of the effectiveness of their drugs and other devices that they could leave the family alone and dash out for a Big Mac and fries at McDonald's? Was there no risk at all that one of the Salcoes, in a moment of lucidity, might tear out his IV line, rise up, and flee?

Parker went to the nearest girl, looked into her blank eyes. For a few seconds she peered up unblinking, then suddenly blinked furiouslyten, twenty, thirty timesthen stared unblinking again. She did not see Parker. He waved a hand across her eyes and got no reaction.

He saw that she was wearing a pair of earphones connected to a tape recorder that lay on the pillow beside her head. He leaned close to her, lifted one earphone an inch, and listened to a soft, melodic, and very soothing voice, a woman's voice: "On Monday morning, I slept in late. It's a wonderful hotel "We're sleeping late because the staff is so quiet, so respectful. It's actually a country club as well as a hotel, so it's not like other places, where maids make a racket in the halls as soon as the sun rises. Oh, don't you just love the wine country! I'd like to live there someday. Anyway, after we finally got up, Chrissie and I took a long walk around the grounds, sort of hoping we'd run into some neat boys, but we couldn'tfind any. . .."

The hypnotic rhythms of the woman's voice spooked Parker. He put the earphones back in place.

Evidently, one or more of the Salcoes had remembered what they had experienced at the Tranquility Motel the summer before last. So those memories had again been repressed. Now to cover the time span of this current brainwashing session, new false memories were being implanted, a process that included the repeated playing of a tape recording that undoubtedly had subliminal as well as audible messages to impart.

Dom had explained some of it to Parker on the telephone, Saturday and Sunday nights. But Parker had not fully appreciated the hideousness of the conspiracy until he heard that insidious whisper in the Salcoe girl's ear.