LORRAINE

I turned on the television to a local station, and muted the sound, waiting for the next newscast. I showered and put on the same clothes I had taken off and felt as if the shower had been wasted. I started a pot of coffee and, waiting for it, sat gazing at the television screen but couldn’t have said what was being shown. I was waiting for news of a fatal car crash, an unidentified driver.

Finally I called Cat’s motel number. She answered on the first ring.

“Hang in there,” she said after I told her what had happened. “We’re on our way.”

She and Jack arrived at ten. He waved a lazy greeting and wandered into the other room as Cat and I embraced in relief.

“God, you had me worried,” she said. “How crazy is he?”

“A bit. We have to beat it. Cat, he has no intention of coming back. He’ll fall asleep at the wheel while speeding, or he might deliberately wreck, or by now he’s out of gas and walking somewhere until he falls over asleep, probably in front of a truck or something. Whatever. The point is he doesn’t intend to go back to the farm. I want out of here before the police come asking questions.”

“I hope he’s picking up the tab,” Jack said, looking inside the refrigerator.

“He doesn’t have a cent, no credit card, no ID.”

Jack was putting some things in the plastic bag from the supermarket. I pulled on my jacket, picked up my purse, and we left. After rearranging the SUV, taking things from the back and putting them in the passenger seat, Cat and I sat side by side in the back while Jack drove, heading for Cat’s house in New Jersey.

“There are three filled tapes,” I said, “but the interesting parts came later, after I had run out of tapes.” I told her everything Cary had said during that long evening. “He was afraid of Lorraine,” I said. “It seems that Elly ran the show as long as she lived, and she groomed Lorraine to take over when it was her turn. Shirley is practically helpless without someone to tell her what to do next and that’s Lorraine’s job. She’s as intelligent as Elly was, and better educated. She’s assembling a research team, and they start building early next year. That’s when Cary and his sisters were to be put to work.”

I looked out the side window at a landscape that had been red and gold in an autumn display of splendor, and that day was gray and sodden.

“I liked him, Cat. He’s… he was like a kid, so young in so many ways. He tried to get away twice in the past five years and they hauled him back. This time, he meant it when he said he wasn’t going back. I thought I had him talked into going to his father. Last night he agreed to go. I was going to start driving to Florida today. Then he skipped instead.”

Cat took my hand and held it for a moment. “You did what you could. Have you eaten anything yet?”

I shook my head.

“Neither have we, just bad coffee. Let’s stop for breakfast. You’re right, the cops will want to ask questions, and we have to decide how much to tell them. Certainly not the whole story. Who’d believe it?”

We stopped at a café in a small town somewhere in Pennsylvania. The wind was cold and biting and I pulled my jacket closer when we left the SUV, and put my other hand in my jacket pocket. That was when I found his note.

I took it out as soon as we were in a booth in the café. It was brief.

Mercy, just thank you. It wouldn’t have worked. Lori would have sent someone after us before we reached Florida, and you could have been hurt. Now, I’ll head west.

I handed the note to Cat. She read it and without a word passed it to Cracker Jack. We all were silent until the waitress came to take our orders.

Then, over ham and eggs, Jack said, “The best way to handle the cops is to confirm what they’ll suspect. A day-long joy ride, motel, he wanted to share your bed, and you said no and made him take the couch. So he stranded you. An old story to them.”

I shrugged. I was going to lie, and I’d keep it simple.

Late that afternoon, showered, with clean clothes on, I was in the screening room with Cat trying to plan our next move when her doorbell rang. I could hear voices from there, Cat speaking, and the other voice.

“Ms. Thorne? I’m Lorraine Granville. I would like a word with you and your assistant, if she’s available.”

When Cat led Lorraine in, I stood up to meet her.

She was beautifully dressed in a pale blue pantsuit, with a frilly blouse of the same color. About five feet nine, and slender, with dark brown hair cut short, deep-set blue eyes like Cary’s, she was very handsome. Her jaw was slightly too large, and her mouth was wide with thin lips. She looked over the screening room, dismissed it.

Cat pulled two chairs around and I turned mine. Then, seated, Lorraine said to me, “I understand that you spent all day and night with my cousin Cary. Was he escaping from aliens at the farm again? He’s convinced they’re trying to steal his precious bodily fluids.” Her smile as she said this was at once amused, contemptuous, and supercilious.

I had been prepared to dislike her, but not prepared for the depth of that dislike, an almost instant response to her words, her smile, her attitude of superiority.

“Why are you here?” I asked. “What do you want?”

Her mouth tightened as she raked me with a cold, measuring look. “My cousin died in a motor accident early this morning. I have just identified his body, and I came to tell you that if either of you exploit his illness, make public a word concerning him or his paranoid delusions, I’ll sue you. He suffered from narcolepsy, of which you were warned, and he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, and was never out of sight of a caretaker, and never allowed behind the wheel of a car. You were told that, but you neglected to take all due precautions, and as a result you deliberately and carelessly were responsible for his death. Negligent homicide I believe is the charge if one is brought.”

I stood up. “I think that concludes this discussion.”

She rose leisurely, her supercilious smile back on her face. “You’ve both been warned. Take heed of my words, or you will face extreme consequences.”

Cat was already on her feet. She motioned to Lorraine and led the way to the door. I sank back into my chair as soon as they were out of the room. Not just dislike, but pure, unleavened, visceral hatred growing more and more powerful was pumping adrenaline through me like a tidal wave.

When Cat came back she brought two tall drinks and placed one in my hand. “Down, girl,” she said, and took her chair again. “I’d say offhand that Cousin Lorraine is not totally overwhelmed by grief. Cheers.” She lifted her glass in a salute and we both drank.

Vodka sour, just what I needed at that moment.

“That was clever of her, to pave the way for whatever he might have told you,” Cat said thoughtfully. “Paranoid schizophrenia covers a lot in the event that you might be inclined to talk.”

I drank again, then set my glass down. “Cat, I’m going to stop her.”

She nodded. “I thought you might try. How?”

“I know how to find her now. He said they call her Lori, she went to Johns Hopkins, and trained in neuropsychiatry. That’s enough for a start.”

She didn’t question that. It was my specialty, after all, research, finding elusive subjects, digging out information.

“Then what?” she asked.

“I don’t know yet. But she can’t be allowed to make guinea pigs of those two insane, helpless young women, Cary’s sisters. God alone knows what she intends if she follows through and succeeds in whatever she’s planning. Cat, do you believe anything good can come out of it? Prying into the future? Using the future in some way?”

She had no answer, and neither did I. Most of the time I thought absolutely not, but then, why not? And I had no answer.

Later, an investigator from the Pennsylvania State Police showed up to ask questions. I told him pretty much the truth, it had apparently been an impulse on Cary’s part to go for a ride. He told his mother, and I talked to her and learned of his narcolepsy, but she had not asked or told me to bring him home. I had assumed that since he was of age, if he wanted to ride around the countryside and see the fall foliage, there was no reason not to go along with it. It was a chance to ask him about his grandfather, my part of the video.

“He was like a kid who had been over-protected all his life and wanted to see what other kids took for granted,” I said. “A Big Mac, a picnic in a motel room. Like a kid, that’s how I thought of him. If he had fallen asleep in the car I intended to head straight back with him and let them deal with it. And the following day, after he’d had his outing, I planned to take him home. I shouldn’t have left the keys on the table, but I just didn’t think about it. I regret leaving the keys on the table.”

The officer waved that aside. “It wouldn’t have mattered,” he said, closing his notebook. “He had a car key in his pocket. He could have left when you were getting the hamburgers, or while you were in the supermarket. I guess he really wanted that picnic.”

After he left, Cat and I ate scrambled eggs and bacon, with apples for dessert. We cleared the table, and I claimed it as my desk for the rest of the night, plugged in my computer, and went to work to track down Lori, the neuropsychiatrist.

Some time later Cat brought in a cup of coffee, and said there was fresh coffee in the thermos, and left me alone. Much later she looked in again and said goodnight.

It was very late when I staggered to bed, not to surface again until ten the next morning.

“I guess you just might earn your fees,” Cat said when I joined her. She had been out and bought several Philadelphia and New York newspapers. “He made them all,” she said. “Not much, just grandson of the genius inventor, fatal one-car accident, under investigation. And a lot more about his famous grandfather. No mention of you or his all-day jaunt. Did you find her?”

“Sure. Dr. Lori Schaeffer, Johns Hopkins, UCLA, Harvard. Coauthored two articles in prestigious journals, bookmarked to read later, New York address. Park Avenue. No mention of family connections.”

She looked impressed. “For that, my girl, you get some breakfast. More scrambled eggs? Juice? Toast? I even bought doughnuts.”

I settled for juice and toast, but added a doughnut after that was gone. I said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about how to go from here. Those apartments have real security. Not through the front door, then. I think we need Matt Scanlon.”

She looked startled. “To do what?”

“I think he knows what was going on,” I said. “He’s drinking himself to death because he didn’t face it then, and hasn’t since. His way of heading west. But he was genuinely crushed by his fuzzy little girls becoming insane. He needs to know about Cary, that we were planning to go to him. He needs to know what the plans are for those fuzzy little girls. We need him, Cat. I don’t know for what, just that we do. Or, at least, I do.”

“Not I. In this crazy affair, it’s we all the way. I got you into it, remember. It’s we. Let me think about it a minute.”

After a few minutes she nodded. “We need him. Are you free to fly out any time?”

“You know it. The sooner the better.”

She went to her computer. After checking flights and availability, she asked, “Tonight? Midnight flight?”

I nodded. “I’ll pack up my stuff.”

She made the reservations, then called Scanlon and told him we’d be in town the next morning and had to see him. She left little room for argument, and that afternoon we took the train to New York.

In my apartment, I found a note on my pillow. “This tears it. I don’t know where you are, who you’re with, or what you’re doing. I’m out of here.” He had signed his initial, W.

“That bastard,” I cried, infuriated. “He takes off for months at a time without a word!” I thrust the note at Cat.

“Do unto others as they have done unto you and they turn tail and run,” she commented after skimming it, then dropped the note back on the bed, where I left it.

Matt Scanlon admitted us to his apartment at nine the next morning. He appeared awkward and hesitant as he said, “I passed out on you last time. Sorry.”

“No big deal,” Cat said. “We have to talk. There’s something we have to tell you.”

“Sure. Come on in.” As before, he led the way to his living room, where the sun was blazing in through the wide east-facing windows. He pulled a vertical shade closed.

“First,” Cat said, “you have to know this. Your son Cary died in a car accident yesterday morning. I didn’t know if the family would notify you, but you have to know that.”

He blinked a time or two, then rubbed his eyes. “I don’t even know him, never knew him,” he mumbled. “Just a name.”

“No,” Cat said. “He was your son. We have a tape to play for you. A little background first, then the tape. We went to the Granville Museum on Monday to add it to my video.” She told her part succinctly, then turned to me and nodded.

“I walked outside and Cary and Leo came after me. I admired his car, a gold BMW convertible, and Cary suggested that we go to town to get some cold drinks, and asked if I wanted to drive.”

I told him that after we left Leo behind, I had taped every word for the next three hours. Cat put the tape in her player.

“I won’t play it all now,” she said, “just a sampling.”

Matt Scanlon looked stricken when Cary’s voice came on, and after a moment he stood up and went to the window, moved the blind aside a little, and stood with his back to us, listening. Facing the morning sun as he was, he must have had his eyes closed tightly. As Cat had said, she did not play the entire three hours, but turned the machine off right after Cary talked about déjà vu, and I went on with my story.

“After we had the Big Mac, a first for him, we drove around the countryside… ”

I was telling him everything I had told Cat, but suddenly he turned from the window and said harshly, “Stop! That’s enough. Why are you telling me this?”

“Not yet,” I said. “You have to hear it all. We talked for hours in the motel room. Matt, we were going to start driving to Florida. I was going to bring your boy here for you to protect. I found this note in my pocket later.”

It was the original. Cat had made copies, but we brought the original with us to show him. He was very pale as he read the note, then read it again. “It wasn’t an accident that killed him,” he said in a low, agonized voice. “Another suicide. Is that what you’re telling me? Another suicide?”

Cat went to him and took his arm. “Come sit down, Matt, and hear the rest of it. He knew if he went back, he’d never be able to leave. Matt, he did exactly what you did years ago. He said no. He refused to father more doomed children, and he knew that Lorraine would not let him reach you. He headed west, the only escape he saw.”

He jerked away from her and yelled, “Get the hell out of here! Both of you, get out! And don’t come back! I need a drink.” He started to move toward the door, and Cat caught his arm again and pulled him to a stop.

“No! You’re going to listen to us! Cary is gone, it’s too late for him. But damn it, Matt, your two daughters, those beautiful fuzzy doomed babies, need you. They need someone to protect them. We’re going to take that house down, and we need your help. You’re going to hear this out. Mercy will make coffee, and we’re going to sit here and talk through this.”

I left them, but he wasn’t pulling away any longer, and I knew she would lead him to the couch. He was too torn and shaken to put up a lot of resistance.

When we were seated with coffee, I finished telling him exactly what Cary had told me. “He said it drove them all crazy,” I said. “The confusion, mixing present with future, living a life of reruns, is how he put it, until they go mad.” I poured myself more coffee, then asked, “How much did you know of it?”

Matt had been leaning back, his gaze fixed on the ceiling, almost as if he were in a stupor, only semiconscious, as he listened to me talk about the last day of his son’s life. At my question, he straightened up and looked at me, then at Cat. “Funny how you can know and not believe what it is you know. That’s how it was. It went against everything my life stood for, my education, training as an engineer, all of it, up in smoke if that was true, yet I knew it was. Knowing, not believing, butting your head against the paradoxes. . . It’s best not to believe. Couldn’t tell anyone. Who’d believe it if I didn’t myself?” His voice was dull, the voice of a man without hope, despairing, defeated.

He drew in a long breath and said to Cat, “You can’t get in up there. It’s like a fortress, security fence, dogs, the works. How are you going to get to her?”

“I don’t know yet, but we will.”

He looked up from his hands to her, then turned to give me a long look.

I nodded. “With or without you, we’ll take them down.”

He drew in a long breath and asked Cat, “What are you thinking of doing?”

“To start, I want you to go back with us and look at the video of the museum and tell me, on tape, everything you can about the things you worked on with Gorton. When I bought our tickets online, I bought one for you, one way to New York, and from there we’ll go to my house. Will you come with us?”

He rubbed his eyes and drew in another long breath, then said, “Yes. I dropped out long enough. It’s time to see what’s left of my family.”

What I had interpreted as a passive slide to an alcoholic death, a laxness, softness, was no longer what I saw in his expression. He looked hard, possibly even dangerous. The change was startling. He reminded me of Cary with his own rapid changes of direction.

I said, “Matt, you can’t do anything that might land you in jail. Afterward, you’re going to have to run that place, take care of your girls, John, probably Stephen. Cary said Shirley is barely competent and takes her orders from Lorraine.”

“Figures. First Elly, now Lorraine, Elly reincarnated.”

We all went to lunch in a seafood restaurant a few blocks from his condo. Then, back in front of his building, he said, “You don’t have to keep an eye on me. I’ll come by your motel at eight in the morning, and we’ll take off. I have some heavy thinking to do now.”

He still had a tremor in his hands, but his voice was steady and firm. After a moment Cat nodded, and we left him there.

The following afternoon, Cracker Jack met us at the train station and, when we got to the house, good smells were coming from the kitchen. We had already decided that I’d share Cat’s bedroom, and Jack and Matt would have the other two bedrooms. Cat had called ahead and lined up Dorothy to prepare dinner for the next few days, and we were all set to do some serious work.

When I left the three of them in the screening room, they were watching her video of the museum. I took my laptop to Cat’s office. I wanted an aerial view of the entire Granville estate, another one of the property and the house Karl Levins occupied adjoining it, and finally one of the Granville residence, and the outbuildings. Although much of the whole was covered with trees, it was possible to follow the road from the main house to the Levins fence, and on out to a county road several miles from the road we had driven on to go to the museum. Shirley’s exit corridor.

I was still at the computer when Cat looked in and said dinner was on the table.

“I told Dorothy we’d put things in the dishwasher, and she’s gone,” Cat said when we were all seated at the breakfast table.

Matt looked bemused. “This is just like it was at my folks’ house when I was growing up,” he said. “Haven’t had a meal like this since then.” He helped himself to pot roast.

“We’ve separated out the gizmos that Matt worked on with Gorton,” Cat told me. “Step number one. He’ll study them, refresh his memory, and tomorrow we’ll get to the taping. What are you coming up with?”

“After we clear the table, I’ll show you,” I said.

What I had were the three aerial views, plus a closer look at the road to the Levins property, and the glimmer of an idea. As soon as we finished dinner and the dishwasher was put to work, I spread my printouts on the table.

“That road,” I said, pointing to it. “It’s a real road, not just a driveway. I’d be willing to bet that it’s used a lot. Levins must be their agent, probably shops, or accepts deliveries, and takes them up to the house. It doesn’t make any sense to have everything delivered by helicopter—toothpaste, dishwasher detergent, whatever they use on a daily basis. Doctors and nurses must come and go. Possibly Lorraine uses it when she visits. And we know Shirley does. It’s a fortress, but with a back door.”

I leaned back in my chair and said, “If you live with your blood relatives and see them go mad, one after another, I wonder how concerned you might be for your own mental health.”

Cat was watching me closely. She nodded. “I’d be scared to death, like having a relative develop cancer. You begin to watch your own possible symptoms. What’s your point?”

I hadn’t thought it all the way through, but I told them what I was considering. “I think it might be possible to make Lorraine doubt herself big time with a little prodding. Really shake her, and she may become vulnerable in a way she seems not to be now. And probably really shake up Shirley as well.”

We had coffee and talked about driving Lorraine crazy.

The next day Cat taped Matt as he discussed the problems Hiram and Gorton had encountered with several of the patented devices, and what his own contributions to them had been. Then we all listened to the tape I had made of Cary as we drove around, and later in the motel. One or the other of us stopped it now and then, and motioned to Cracker Jack that we wanted that segment on the new tape he was to make. A tape that skipped everything not relevant to the process of living in the present and the future simultaneously, experiencing déjà vu, living in a never ending rerun of your own life.

Later, listening to it when condensed to just those elements gave me goosebumps, and my stomach felt queasy.

“He played an acoustic guitar,” I said. “He used to play it for hours when he was most depressed. If we could work something like that into it… ”

Jack nodded. “No sweat. If that’s the spoken part you want, I’ll just take this and fool around with it awhile.” Of course he played a guitar, and acted as if everyone else did, also.

The tape, after he had added a guitar, was so strange it was disquieting to all of us.

Cary’s voice came on, strong, then weak, fading out to be replaced by a melancholy guitar, starting again, the guitar competing, then dominating, fading, giving way to the voice… On and on, and finally the guitar playing the same few notes over and over.

Jack cleared Cat’s iPod and installed the altered tape.

“How will you turn it on and off?” Cat asked.

“Matt and I will figure that out,” Jack said confidently, and they left with it.

Later they both came back to say they were going to town, to Jack’s apartment, where he had some equipment they wanted to use. “Back in a day or two,” Jack said. “Maybe you can figure out a way to get the bitch out here again?” Cat drove them to the village in her Civic and they took the train to New York City.

They had their job to do, we had ours. Two days later when they returned, looking satisfied, even smug, we had done our part as well.

“You first,” Cat said.

“Screening room,” Jack said. We went there and arranged chairs while he put a CD in a player. Jazz came on, not loud enough to interrupt conversation, but in the background as he said, “We need to get her alone in a car for it to work. Matt and I think that’s how she’ll come, if she comes back at all.” Cat nodded. That was how we planned it also.

“Okay. So after your act, she takes off in the car, probably back to the farm, but maybe to the city. Doesn’t matter which. Let’s assume she’ll be shaken up by the time she starts driving. Is that part of your plan?”

Cat nodded again, but she was growing impatient, as I was. A clarinet solo had started on the CD. My inclination was to go turn it off, but I held my peace. The gleam in Jack’s eyes suggested he knew what he was doing, and Matt was looking just as smug as Jack was.

“So, she’s driving along, probably listening to music, and then things change.” Even as he said that, suddenly Cary’s voice was there, words I had taped, the ones we had selected to go on the condensed tape. It was the tape we had heard before, his voice soft, then louder, in the background the jazz clarinet was still playing. Jack turned the CD sound down, and the other tape continued. He turned the CD louder and Cary’s voice faded out as a guitar started to play. The clarinet, with the guitar in the background now, was so unsettling, discordant, and eerie that I felt my hands clench. Then Cary was speaking again. Jack turned the CD off, but Cary kept talking, faded out, the guitar played, then his voice, trailing off now and then.

Finally there was only the guitar playing some mournful notes, again and again, until Cat said in a too-shrill voice, “Make it stop.”

Jack clapped his hands sharply and the guitar was silenced. For a time no one spoke.

Matt was as strained and tense as Cat’s voice had revealed her to be, as I was. He might not have known his son, but that voice, the words, the mournful guitar, it was enough to make all of us tense.

Jack cleared his throat. “For it to work,” he said, “she has to drive and come alone. She’ll turn on something, radio, tape deck, DVD, something. Any device she turns on will turn ours on. Eight minutes later it starts. It plays one time only, but it will keep playing until the car door is opened and closed. Then never again. Don’t want it to start with anyone else driving or in the car with her. A one-time show for one person alone.” He picked up a slim item from the floor by his chair. It was black, or in a black covering of some sort. He didn’t hand it around.

“It’s a little delicate,” he said. “We removed the case and played around with it.” He turned it over. “Velcro backing. Fine black net cover. I’ll need ten minutes to put it in her car. You figure out how to get her to come around again?”

“I’ll show you,” Cat said. She stood up and went out to her office, returned with a letter we had worked on together, and read it. “Dear Mrs. Scanlon, in editing the video footage of the museum, and coordinating images of the inventions with a taped interview I made some time ago with Matthew Scanlon, along with some of the things your son Cary told my researcher, I find a very disturbing situation. I strongly suggest that you or your representative come to a private screening of this material before I make it public.” She looked at Jack, then Matt. “I think it will bring Lorraine out.”

“It won’t be enough,” Matt said. “If she’s as much like Elly as she seems, that will shake her, but it won’t be enough.”

“I added another touch,” I said. “I found stores that deliver in that area of Allentown, and ordered a few things in her name.”

“What things?” Jack asked.

“Oh, cases of champagne, roses, five-pound boxes of expensive chocolates. A few things like that.”

“How did you know which store they use?”

“I didn’t. I ordered from all of them. One person who took the order asked if I wanted to include it in the regular delivery and I said, of course, and hung up. The others might be very happy to have a rich new customer. Let her figure it all out.”

Jack chuckled. “Three, four cases of champagne. The good stuff?”

“Well, of course.” It was a close approximation of Lorraine’s disdainful voice, the same mimicry I had used when ordering in her name. Jack’s smile widened.

Matt was still eyeing Cat narrowly. “She won’t let it go, and probably she’ll connect you, even if she doesn’t know how you worked it. Again, if she’s like Elly, you’ll make a dangerous enemy. Why are you doing it?”

Cat was equally serious when she said, “At first it was just an intriguing story, good material for my work. Then I began seeing the anomalies, the things that don’t fit my understanding of reality. First Hiram, then John, suicidal girls, the seclusion, secrecy. I really listened to you that day in Florida. When you called it a curse, I knew that you were grasping at a very weak straw. You don’t believe in curses any more than I do. Then Cary’s words, and his suicide. In-breeding with insanity on both sides. Those helpless young women. The possibilities for anyone who can train others to peer into the future. To bring back what? That’s the puzzle. What does she want? Then she came to my house and threatened us. I won’t let it go any more than she will. She’ll come back, and I’ll tape and film everything.”

“She’ll send someone after that,” he said heavily. “Or she’ll be back with a gun or something.”

“And we’ll deal with it if it goes that way,” Cat said. “Matt, I told you I intend to bring down that house. You have to be ready to step into it and take over when that happens.”

Silently he nodded.

Over the next few days tension in the house was thick enough to walk on. Cracker Jack was fidgety to the point of driving us all insane. In and out, up and down the stairs, biting his fingernails, griping about the weather, about the bed in his room, even the food, which was probably the best he’d ever had after leaving his mother’s house.

Cat and Matt worked on the inventions he’d had a part in, with him explaining his role, second guessing the patent attorney, who had been almost as clueless as Hiram had been some of the time. Cat was getting more data than she could ever use, but doggedly she persisted. She wanted every scrap.

And I started reading about time. Wikipedia, scientific articles, books I downloaded to my Kindle, book reviews, fiction. By midweek I was pulling my hair, and it was a relief when Warren called.

“Come home, Mercedes,” he said. “All’s forgiven, forgotten.”

“I’m working on a project,” I said.

“Let it wait. A little time-out, a spot of vacation, a reunion. You know.”

I bit my lip. I did know. “How’s the book coming?” I asked.

“I hit a snag. Writer’s block or something. I need a break. You. I want you to come back, take a few days off playing, relaxing. How about it? Tomorrow? Late train tonight?”

“I can’t. I told you, I’m working.”

He began to whine at about that point, and I had a flash of memory of how it would be. We’d spend a great deal of time in bed, no talk. Then some food, no talk. Take in a show or something, no talk. More time in bed. But we never would talk, not really, not about anything weightier than what to order in for dinner. And he would sigh a lot and mention how hard it was to write a full-length book.

“Warren,” I said, interrupting whatever he had been saying, “I want you to pack up everything of yours in my apartment and get it out of there. Don’t forget your toothbrush.”

“You don’t mean that, honey. You know you don’t mean—”

“If I find anything left, I’ll heave it out the window,” I said, cutting him off again. “Goodbye, Warren.” I hung up.

“My God,” Cat said, standing in the doorway, “I believe the worm has finally turned.”

“Just bug off,” I snapped, glaring at her. She grinned and retreated to the screening room.

I sat before my computer screen seething because she had seen through my shielding and called me a worm. Not absolutely right, but close enough. He had used me and I had used him, two worms unable to make a real commitment, content to use, be used. Afraid? Maybe, I thought, and denied the thought. Not just that. Awareness was more like what it was that had prevented commitment. I’d been aware that he never was right for me any more than I was right for him. Place-holders, I thought, and jerked up from the table where my computer was set up. We’d been using each other as place-holders, no more than that.

I put on a heavy jacket, ski cap and gloves and went out for a walk. I’d been doing that night after night, walking in the cold dark after hours of reading on-screen print.

Two nights later, standing on a narrow bridge watching the flashing water of a small creek catch light and drown it again, I heard footsteps and turned to see Matt.

“Mind if I join you?” he asked.

“Not at all.”

“Waiting for the next act is hell, isn’t it?”

“It is. We’ll be at each other’s throats in another day or two.”

He chuckled.

“I’ve been reading about time,” I said and turned away from him to look down at the water rushing by. “It doesn’t exist. It’s not a thing, like a tree, or the creek here, or anything else real. Did you realize that we never speak about time except in relation to something else? Duration of an event, interval between events, time to get going, time of the lunar month, or the distance light travels expressed in time… ”

“Or the fall of the apple, thirty-two feet per second per second.”

“Cosmic time, big-bang time, humming-bird time, mayfly time. Always in relation to something else. Time can’t exist by itself. It’s a manmade construct to try to explain what can’t be explained.”

“Time’s arrow. A way to define past, present and future? Does that satisfy?”

“No,” I said. “Thinking about time made me think about what we call now. Even that’s an impossibility suddenly. You know the mantra: Be here now. How can we? Matt, something Cary said makes me question what we think of as now. It has to be where consciousness is, and while his body would be here, visible, real, his consciousness was in a different now. That other now existed, does exist. Four days in what we call the future, but it was his now, as real for him as this moment is for you, for me. And Hiram’s two days in a future five years from his physical presence, in a different now, Stephen’s still different now eighteen months ahead of his physical presence. All those other nows exist. And it’s not just the future. We always run into the kill-your-grandfather paradox when we try to unravel time travel to the past. But we are the past for all those future nows. And they can change the past. Hiram changed the past with his inventions, results in this present, information from the future. Our being here this moment on this rickety bridge would never have happened if Hiram hadn’t changed the past.”

“Let it go, Mercy,” Matt said in low intense voice. “A hell of a lot of books have been written in an effort to explain or just to understand time—”

I cut him off exactly the same way I had done with Warren. “All of time is just a now for consciousness. You don’t need a time machine, big shiny boxes with a million wires and unlimited energy. You just have to know that it’s your mind, your consciousness, that determines which now you are in. That’s what Lorraine wants to control, isn’t it? Find a way to direct consciousness to a particular now and bring back information that can change the world. They’re in a loop, five years, four days, a year and a half. She wants to break that loop, send the mind to where, or when, it’s directed, bring back what she or others like her want. We’re in a fog of possible nows—”

I was rushing the words, mixing up what had seemed clear only moments earlier, drowning in what had become a sea of ideas, words, thoughts without meaning; past, present, future had become meaningless, replaced by an endless impenetrable fog of nows, everything possible now; no flow, no before, after…

Matt put his hand on my arm and shook it. “Let it go, Mercy. It can drive you crazy. You can choose to return to the city, to stay on here, to go anywhere you desire. Do whatever you decide to do. Nothing’s changed. It will drive you crazy if you let it.”

“Or drive me to drink,” I said.

“Or drive one to drink. I’ve been through all this. I read the books, the articles, the quantum physics theories, all of it, and more will be written, again and again more will be written.” His voice had become harsh and he became silent for a moment, then said, “I stopped reading. Stopped thinking about it. I had to.”

“And now you’re stopped drinking, haven’t you? Why?”

“Because you and Cat… I accepted the reality of what’s happening, what I can admit finally. I can’t explain it, but I can accept it. We have to go in. You’re shivering.”

His hand was still on my arm, firm, unyielding, pulling me away from the rail. We walked back to the house without another word. I was shivering, but not from cold.

The following day the next act started. It worked almost exactly as Cat had planned, a perfectly scripted play with the actors all in place, waiting for their cues. Lorraine returned that morning a week after Cat mailed her letter to Shirley Scanlon.

Both Matt and Cracker Jack vanished when her car pulled up before the house. I was watching from a window in Cat’s office. Lorraine had come alone. Cat went to the door and admitted her, then stopped a few feet inside the door, where a concealed stationary video camera would record everything.

“What do you want this time?” she asked coldly.

“I came to see the video you’re making,” Lorraine said, just as icily. “I warned you. You’re playing a reckless game, Ms. Thorne.”

“You came to see my video? Are you out of your mind? What on earth makes you think I’d show it to you? Dr. Schaeffer, I think you’d better just turn around and leave.”

Lorraine stiffened. “Now what are you trying to pull?” she demanded.

Matt called from the kitchen, “Ms. Thorne? You around?” He stepped into the hallway, but stayed by the kitchen door, a bulky figure in a shapeless jacket and billed cap. “I got all the storm windows in, but I need some caulk. Oh, sorry to interrupt. Morning, Doctor. I’ll just run to town and get the caulk and come back this afternoon,” Matt said, and retreated to the kitchen. His voice carried as he said something indistinguishable to Dorothy, and she came into the hall, halfway down it.

“Good morning, Doctor,” she said. “Are you going to be here for lunch?”

“No, she isn’t,” Cat said.

“Good,” Dorothy said. “Not enough chops for three.” She returned to the kitchen, and on cue I came out of the office.

“Dr. Schaeffer, I don’t know why you’re here, but I haven’t changed my mind. I still don’t intend to tell you about my conversation with Cary. You may have been his doctor, but you’re not mine, and what we talked about is private and confidential. Exactly what I told you the last time you came. Do you need it in writing? What don’t you understand about no?”

“I don’t know what game you’re playing,” Lorraine said, “and I don’t care. You know damn well who I am, and why I’m here. My aunt asked me to review the video you told her about in a recent letter. Now let’s get on with it.”

Cat looked at me. “Does Shirley Scanlon have a niece named Lori Schaeffer, a psychiatrist?”

“No. No one by that name on the record. Dr. Schaeffer, we know who you told us you are, Cary’s psychiatrist. If that isn’t the truth, it really doesn’t concern us, does it?” I looked at Cat. “Are we going to finish that editing this morning or not?”

“We are. As soon as this person beats it.” She reached around Lorraine and opened the door. “Get lost, Dr. Schaeffer, and don’t come back. Go home and take your meds and you’ll feel better.”

“You haven’t heard the end of this,” Lorraine said furiously. She turned and stalked away.

We both stood at the open door and watched her get in her car, a black sporty, low-slung Olds, and drive away throwing rubber.

Cat and I high-fived it. A few seconds later Cracker Jack passed by in Cat’s Civic. He would follow Lorraine for a while, he had said.

Cat went to the kitchen to give Dorothy a hug. “You’re a born actor,” she said. “That was perfect, especially about the chops.”

Dorothy beamed. She had ad-libbed the part about not enough chops.

When Jack returned, he announced in a solemn voice, “Subject drove fast toward farm, exceeding the speed limit by eight miles an hour, then her driving became erratic and she slowed down a lot and even pulled over to the shoulder while she fooled with something or other out of sight. Began to drive fast again, and I lost contact.”

“She didn’t get out, open the door?” Cat asked.

“Nope. She may keep hearing things for a while.”

That afternoon I pulled up the bookmarked journal articles that included Dr. Lori Schaeffer’s name with the other authors, and printed them. Two authors were from UCLA, one from Harvard, one from the University of Minnesota. I skimmed the articles, but decided they were too dense and dry for our present purposes. They could wait.

“We can’t use any of our own phones,” I told Cat. “Too easy to trace it back with caller ID, or dial back, or something. We need one of those temporary cells and a pay-in-advance card or two.”

Jack volunteered to go buy a cell phone and cards. He and Matt went out together. I tackled the journal articles again.

At eight that night, five California time, I made the first of several calls we planned to make over the next day or two. I called the number Shirley Scanlon had given me before, then held the phone so that Cat could hear along with me. Shirley Scanlon answered after a ring or two.

“Good evening,” I said in my most aloof, efficient secretary’s voice, “I have Dr. Hofstedder on the line returning Dr. Schaeffer’s call of last Monday.”

“Who? Who do you want? Doctor who?” Shirley was just as strident as she had been before and clearly confused by the call.

“Dr. Schaeffer, please. Is she in?”

“Yes. I mean no. She can’t come to the phone now. Who is this?”

“Will she be available this evening?”

“Who are you? Why are you calling me?”

“Is this the correct number?” I read the number she had given me previously.

“Yes, that’s my number. What do you want?”

“I’m calling from Dr. Hofstedder’s office. Thank you,” I said and hung up.

Cat was looking thoughtful. “She sounded as if someone’s been rattling her cage,” she said. Glancing at Matt, and quickly away, she added, “I wonder how stable anyone in that family really is.”

He could choose to respond or not was the clear implication of that swift look. He took it as a question. “She used to not be able to tolerate dissension. Fly off the handle if crossed. I imagine she had real tantrums as a kid. Lorraine certainly did. I think Elly wouldn’t let Shirley go with Suzette because she was too unpredictable in her reactions to hassles of any kind.”

The next day Cat called Eric Hockner in Philadelphia. He was a free-lance journalist who had made a name for himself writing various investigative reports for organizations like Time, Newsweek, or one of the biggies in print newspapers.

“I have something interesting,” she told him on the phone. “Let’s talk.”

He wanted a hint but she held out for an in-person talk, nothing on the phone, and that seemed to intrigue him. He drew the line at driving to her place, however, without knowing what it was all about, and in the end Cat agreed to go to Philadelphia with me in tow.

We met Hockner in a dimly lighted bar in the afternoon when there were few others about. He was short, heavy set, and looked sleepy with heavy-lidded dark eyes and a pale mustache that was either just starting to grow, or possibly the result of his missing his upper lip when he shaved.

We all ordered beer.

“So, give,” he said.

Cat told him about her plan to do the documentary about Hiram Granville and his inventions. “We went to the museum and Cary Scanlon came along to open it for us. Then, while I was taping, Cary and Mercedes went for a ride.”

The beer came and he looked at his watch.

“He called his mother to tell her I was taking him for a drive,” I said, and continued, keeping my part nearly as short as Cat had made hers. “It started to rain, and he wanted to go to a motel, get a suite, and have a picnic on the floor. My whole purpose was to get him to talk about his grandfather, the genius, but as it turned out he had little to say about him. He said he was crazy and tried to burn down the library fifteen years ago, and for the rest of his life he had been confined to his rooms or to a private hospital they have on the grounds. And he said both of his sisters were insane, hospitalized, as was his Uncle John. And Stephen was in the hospital at times.”

Hockner was no longer looking sleepy and bored.

“Okay,” I said, “that night he slept on the sofa, and I was in the bedroom, and he skipped out sometime during the night, and that’s all I know about him. But it made me curious about the rest of the family.”

I told him about the suicides. “I looked up the property,” I said, “and there’s something interesting there. Until about ten years ago, it was all just one big Granville estate. Then the ownership of a parcel changed hands, and the road from the estate dead ends at the fence line of it. The name on the deed now is Karl Levins. No trace of him before he turned up on the deed, no mortgage, no realtor involved, no traceable past. Also interesting,” I went on, “is the fact that a building permit has been issued in his name to build a research center on that parcel. It doesn’t say what kind of research.” I stopped, and lifted my beer stein.

Hockner drank deeply, then motioned the waiter for another one. “It doesn’t end there,” he said. “Go on.”

Except for some omissions, I had told him pretty much the truth, but when Cat continued our story, she began to stray off the straight and narrow.

“One of the tidbits Cary told Mercy is that Lorraine Granville is also known as Dr. Lori Schaeffer. Of course we looked her up. She was involved in a research group at UCLA, coauthored a couple of papers with other neuropsychiatrists, and their line of research concerns about a hundred other subjects worldwide who suffer from a particular kind of narcolepsy that involves a great deal of anomalous brain activity and insanity. The thought struck me that if she’s a research psychiatrist with access to the Granville fortune, and a permit has been granted to a guy without a past to build a research center out there, it might be very interesting to know what they intend to research. And whose research would it be? Do they plan to stock the place with insane, narcoleptic patients and study them? Experiments using human subjects? Just a thought.”

“Yeah, interesting.” Hockner said. Then he began to ask questions.

No mention was made any time that afternoon and evening of the future. Too unbelievable. As they say, you had to have been there.

The bar filled up and got a little noisy. We ordered sandwiches, and the interrogation continued as we ate. He was very good, very sharp, starting back at the beginning and not missing a thing.

It was late when he finished. He regarded Cat speculatively and said, “There’s big bucks involved.”

She nodded. “Real big bucks. Enough for a nonentity to acquire a great big chunk of prime real estate, and then to get a building permit without specifying what kind of research it’s for.”

“I’ll think about it,” he said and stood. He paused, picked up the tab, and left us in the bar.

Cat was satisfied. “He’ll take it from here. The tab was his signal.”

At the very least, the permit would come under a new review, probably would be revoked, and no ground would be broken for a very long time, if ever. Perhaps it was only a delaying tactic, but a necessary one, we felt. Lorraine might prove to be as invulnerable as Matt had suggested.

At dinner the next night I said I had to go back to the city, get a job, and pay my rent. That much was true, but more than that, I wanted to get away from my swirling thoughts, put some distance between me and the whole business of time loops, all possible nows. I kept hearing Matt’s words: it could drive me crazy.

Matt was watching me intently. He shook his head. “Stay with us, Mercy. Distance won’t help. Besides, we’re a team, at least until this is over. Consider this your job, and I’m your employer. All of you, I mean. This one’s on me.”

I looked at Cat, who was eyeing Matt curiously, then turned the same curious gaze toward me. She nodded. “It’s his show,” she said.

“Good,” Matt said, as if that settled that. “I think it’s time to shake the tree again. No point in waiting. Shirley’s had all the prep work she needs. I’m going to go ahead and make that call. Let’s see how desperate she’s feeling right now.”

He called Shirley and said he intended to show up on Friday, and he demanded permission to see his daughters, especially since no one had had the decency to let him know that his son was dead. He added that if he was refused, he would get a court order to instigate an investigation to certify that his daughters were alive and being cared for. “Believe me, Shirley,” he said, “if I have to call in the arm of the law, I’ll show up with a sheriff’s deputy or two and a flock of reporters.”

Shirley’s shrill cry of alarm could be heard by all of us gathered around him, even though he did not hold out the phone.

Cat and I waited at the house when Matt and Jack left on Friday morning.

When they returned, Matt looked grimmer than ever, but Jack was buoyant. “You should have see Lorraine,” he said. “They both met us, Shirley and Lorraine, and she’s an ice sculpture, if you ask me. Or dry ice maybe. Anyway, I said hello, Dr. Schaeffer, and she shot icicles through me just by looking.”

She had demanded to know why he called her that, and he said he had done some work for the Hathaway Ad Agency, and had seen her with Chuck Hathaway a couple of times.

“Chuck, Charles,” he had reminded her. “He introduced us. Remember?”

“I never saw you before in my life!” she had said angrily.

“Oh. Oh, okay. Whatever you say.”

Lorraine had stared at Matt, then at Jack, who smiled in a conspiratorial manner, and winked at her as if to say her secret was safe with him. She turned and walked away fast. Jack said it was like watching a store dummy in motion.

“Shirley is a mess,” Matt said soberly when Jack finished. “She’s sure that Lorraine is losing it, and she doesn’t know what she’ll do. She said that Lorraine keeps forgetting things, whole incidents, meetings, what she did yesterday or last week. She said one day she roared into the driveway, stopped the car, and practically tore it up looking for something. She wouldn’t say why she did that, or what she had lost, or what she was looking for.”

“Did she find anything?” Cat asked.

“No. Jack, where did you put it?”

“Made a little slit in the underside of the passenger seat, fastened it there with velcro, and mended the slit with black fabric tape. Nearly invisible. A pro would have found it, but not her.”

Cat nodded. “Good job.” She looked at Matt, and her voice was soft and compassionate when she asked if he had seen his daughters.

He said no. “Lorraine gives the orders. Visitors are too upsetting for them, she said. After she stomped out, I gave Shirley my cell phone number and said I’d be around, that she should call me if she needed help. I asked her about the girls, and she said they’re hopeless, incurable. Well, I knew that. She said they don’t suffer physically. They’re well cared for.”

Cat put her hand on his arm and he covered it for a moment with his.

That night I dreamed I had been thrust through a doorway into darkness, a place where bright light came on as soon as I had taken a few steps. I gasped. I was in a house of mirrors, floor-to-ceiling mirrors, and each reflection was different. I saw myself as a teenage girl, as an old woman, younger, older, but nowhere the image I saw in my own mirror when awake. I touched my hair and so did all the reflections. I was trying desperately to find the doorway, a way out, and the mirrors kept shifting, moving as I did, with ever-changing images of me at different ages. I couldn’t tell from touching myself which was the true image, myself here and now. I couldn’t tell. Groping with both hands outstretched, afraid to touch any of the multitude of outstretched hands reaching for me, old hands, youthful, childish, ancient…

I came wide awake, sweating, my heart racing, and I got out of bed and stood holding onto the side of it, taking deep breaths. No more sleep, not yet, I thought, and found my robe at the foot of the bed. Cat was sleeping. My tossing and turning in a bed separated from hers by a night stand had not roused her. I left the bedroom and hurried downstairs.

The kitchen light was on, and I turned and went into the screening room. It was dimly lighted from the kitchen and only after I had drawn near a chair did I see that someone else was already there.

“Hello, Mercy,” Matt said.

I backed up a few steps. “Sorry, didn’t mean to intrude.”

“No intrusion. Please, join me. Bad night?”

When I hesitated, not really wanting company just then, he said, “I wish you would join me. Bad night for me, too. One of many.”

I sat down. I could see him, but not clearly; the light was too dim for that. Just a figure in a chair, and probably he could see no more of me. Talking heads. Just two talking heads, or maybe only one. I had nothing to say.

“I’m grateful to you, Mercy,” he said, “for giving Cary the best day of his life. You were very good to him, very kind. I am grateful. I failed him but you were good to him. You tried to save him, and I gave up when he was small. That’s a heavy load.”

I could think of nothing to add to that.

“I tried to get back in two times,” he said after a moment. The second time Elly herself got on the intercom they use and she told me I’d never be allowed to enter. She said Cary was even worse than the girls, and I went to Florida. God help me, I left. I might have been able to save him if I hadn’t left.”

He became silent. A heavy load, I thought, and one he would never be able to put down. I said, “I had a nightmare. I was lost in time, in a house of mirrors, and I couldn’t tell which reflection was mine in the present. I was younger, older, changed in so many ways, myself at different times, and I couldn’t tell which one was seeing the reflections, which one I was. I was panic-stricken, terrified. He, Cary, said it drives you mad, being lost in time. No one could have saved him from that. Drug-induced stupor, or your whole life a rerun lived in a house of distortion mirrors, lost in time. It wasn’t just being used to prove what happened, or being used to breed more like him and his sisters. It was more than that and there was no escape. He had to choose, and he did. I would have done the same thing.”

We were both quiet for a time, then Matt said softly, “Thank you, Mercy.” He rose and went to the door. “How appropriate your name is. Goodnight.”

We had discussed the vast Granville fortune and who controlled it. Matt had definite ideas about that. “How it was when I was there,” he said, “was that everything was jointly held by Elly and Hiram. But, of course, she controlled it all. She died first, and that means her share most likely reverted to him. I wasn’t there any more, but can guess how it went. He was demented, and Lorraine was underage. At that time Shirley was nominally in charge, but there were accountants and lawyers. Anyway, after Elly’s death Hiram’s will no doubt designated his two children as his heirs and I doubt it was ever changed. It would have raised too many questions to skip his own children in favor of a grandchild who was still underage. Of course, John is demented and out of it, and that leaves Shirley, with as little real control as a pebble to stop a river.”

“But it’s actually in her name?” Cat asked. “Do you think Lorraine is an added-on signatory?”

“Probably something like that.”

“And if Shirley had Lorraine’s name added, she can have it removed?”

He nodded. “Just guessing, but that’s my best guess.”

“I think it’s time to cut Lorraine’s tent ropes,” Cat said.

We returned to Allentown and took rooms in a downtown hotel. I called Shirley’s cell phone and listened to several rings, then got switched to voice mail. I hung up and instantly redialed, and hung up a second time when I was switched. The third time, she answered in a near whisper. Of course, she could see who was calling, and it was obvious that she was afraid.

“What do you want?” she asked, almost inaudibly.

“I have to talk to you,” I said. “Mrs. Scanlon, Cary told me some things that I couldn’t believe at the time, but I can’t put them out of mind, and I have to tell someone. I thought his mother would be the one. I’m in town, and can come right out.”

“No!” she said. “God no! I can’t talk to you!”

“Then I have to go to the authorities. Someone has to know what he told me.”

“You can’t come here,” she said.

“Meet me in town, then.”

“No, no! She’ll want to know where I’m going. The Levins house. Meet me there. I’ll walk down. I’ll wait for you there.”

I drove the Civic, and Cat and Jack followed in the SUV. They kept going when I pulled into the Levins drive that was really a road. I turned the car around, heading out, just in case a fast retreat was called for.

Karl Levins admitted me. He was a stooped, sallow-faced man in his middle years, and suspicious of me and this visit, but he showed me to a room where Shirley was waiting, and then vanished without a word.

“No one will think a thing of it if I go walking,” Shirley said nervously. “I walk a lot.” She was acting as if we had already met, and I accepted that. She was too nervous for me to add to her disquiet prematurely. She was about five five, lean and looked fit, gray hair and little makeup, dressed in sweat pants and top, walking shoes. Playing the part.

“What did Cary tell you?” she whispered.

“He told me about the family, narcolepsy, and the madness and suicides. And he told me about going to the future. Of course, I didn’t believe that was possible.”

She was shaking her head violently. “No! No! It isn’t true! It isn’t!”

“And,” I said, ignoring her outburst, “he told me that Dr. Lori Schaeffer is going to build a research center on this piece of property, and she intends to experiment on his sisters, and would have used him in her experiments if he hadn’t fled.”

“She’s going to try to cure them,” Shirley said. “She’s a doctor. She’s going to help them.”

“He said she will produce more babies using your daughters and her brother, that she would have used Cary and herself as well. She will try to train the new babies from infancy on to control the episodes. To direct them.”

Shirley had turned deathly white, even her lips were without color, and she continued to shake her head.

“She’s mad, Mrs. Scanlon. She threatened me if I told anyone a word of what he said. Cary said she was as mad as his grandfather and his Uncle John, and she would have to be mad to consider creating more mad children.”

We heard a car horn blast, and her pallor increased when I would have thought it impossible. “She’s here,” she said desperately.

“Do you want to go back to the house?”

“God no! No!”

“Come on.” I grabbed her arm and raced her through the house and out to the car where I pushed her into the front seat and got in as fast as I could move, and started to drive. Cat stepped out of a shadow at the side of the road with her camcorder aimed at the driveway road. Another car was already coming along it as I sped away.

I drove straight to the hotel in Allentown. I left the car in front, showed my room key to the doorman, and gave him the car key for valet parking. He nodded, and pretended not to see Shirley in her sweats and walking shoes. Inside, I hustled her to the coffee shop and into a booth, with her on the inside. She was breathing hard, and looked terrified.

A waitress came promptly and I ordered coffee, then said to Shirley, “Pull yourself together. Lorraine will show up and you have to be prepared to tell her no, you won’t go back with her. You have to do it yourself, Mrs. Scanlon, tell her no. Will you do that?”

“What you said. It isn’t true. Cary was mistaken, or you were. It isn’t true.”

I handed her a copy of the note Cary had left me and watched her read it, her hand trembling so hard it rattled the brief note as she held it.

“I was going to take him to Florida, to his father. Everything I said is true, Mrs. Scanlon. And you know she’s crazy. Maybe she doesn’t sleep first, but she’s insane. You’re the only sane one left. The only one who can stop her.”

Lorraine appeared then, with a tall man at her side. I remembered what Cary had said: “Leo, or someone like him.” I saw what he had meant. She spotted us and came to the booth. Ignoring me, she said in a low, intense voice, “Come along, Shirley. Time to go home.”

Shirley shook her head.

Lorraine looked at me with the same contempt she had shown before, then said to Shirley in the same low voice, “You’re sitting next to the person who killed your son. She knew he shouldn’t drive, yet she gave him the car keys. She’s his murderer, Shirley. Now, come on home.”

Shirley shrank farther back against the side wall.

“Get out of the way,” Lorraine said to me, keeping her voice too low to attract attention. Her lips had thinned to near invisibility, her eyes narrowed until she was nearly a caricature of herself. Venomous. Dangerous.

The waitress came with a tray and put our cups and a carafe on the table. “Do you folks want to order?” she asked Lorraine.

“They aren’t staying,” I said. “I’ll pour.” She had started to do it. She nodded and left.

“I told you to move,” Lorraine said. She stepped to one side and motioned the tall man to come closer.

Just then Cat walked up to the booth and slid into the seat opposite me. “Well, if it isn’t the Dragon Lady,” she said in a voice that was meant to carry. “And what are you calling yourself today? The mad scientist Dr. Lori Schaeffer, or the dutiful niece Lorraine Granville?”

Heads turned at her voice.

“I warned you both,” Lorraine said, her voice thick with rage. “I’m taking Shirley home where she belongs. You,” she said facing me, “get out of my way.”

“My goodness!” Cat said in the same loud voice. “You’re still telling us what to do. I read somewhere that repeating the same action over and over and expecting different results is one definition of insanity. Is that true, Doctor?”

The man with her was looking more and more uncomfortable, but he stretched out his hand toward me, and I said, “At the first touch, I’ll start screaming bloody murder.”

“Well, here comes the last member of our little party,” Cat said. “Hi, Matt.”

He came to the booth and looked over Lorraine and her companion, and I said, “She wants him to yank me out of the way.”

Matt looked the other man up and down, and smiled. “Back off or I’ll floor you.”

He was as tall as the other one, and bigger in all dimensions. He looked as if he could do it. His smile hinted that he would be happy to do it.

“Ms. Granville, let’s get out of here,” the man said, taking Lorraine’s arm.

She was livid, but her companion evidently was exerting some pressure on her arm, and she turned abruptly and walked out with him. Many people watched them leave, some of them craning from booths to see.

Shirley had drawn as far against the wall as she could, and she was shaking hard. “You’re with them?” she asked Matt in a quavery voice.

He sat down next to Cat. “Yes. I know what Mercy told you, that’s why I’m here. Lorraine can’t do that to our daughters. We can’t let her do that.”

“I don’t believe it,” Shirley said desperately. “She wouldn’t do it. She wants to cure them, all of them.”

“Elly was hired to treat your father,” Matt said, “and you know how that turned out. Lorraine will do it if we don’t stop her.”

“I can’t stop her. No one can.” She sounded anguished, disbelief and belief staging a battle that was wrenching to see.

“You can stop her legally,” Matt said very quietly. “If you don’t do it legally, I’ll kill her.”

No one moved, possibly no one breathed following his words, spoken with such certainty that there was no doubting that he meant it.

“How?” Shirley whispered. “What can I do?”

“Register here. Get a suite of rooms. We’ll go up and call the Granville Enterprises office and you’ll tell the most senior attorney to get over here instantly, and to bring along an equally senior officer of your bank. Take her name off all accounts, turn off the spigot to the money stream. And do it fast before she thinks to clean you out. If you decide it was a mistake later you can always undo it, but for now, cut her off.”

Shirley looked more terrified than ever. “She’ll kill me,” she said.

“I won’t let her,” Matt said in that same quiet, forceful voice.

“But what will I tell them? How will I explain?”

Matt stood up. “Shirley, you don’t have to explain a thing. Just tell them what to do, they don’t need to know squat.” He held out his hand. “Come on, let’s get started.”

I got up and moved out of the way. After a moment she slid across the seat, stood up, took his hand, and they walked out together.

I sat down again and drew in a long breath and exhaled it slowly. Across the booth Cat did the same. Then I poured the coffee.

It was a long afternoon. Cat went to her room to put the new camcorder material on a disk, and after channel-hopping a bit, I went out for a walk. It was not successful. Not knowing where Lorraine and her goon were, what she was up to, how much of a threat she really was, I kept half-expecting to see one or both of them around each corner, or hear ominous footsteps behind me. I returned to the hotel.

Cat and I got together in the bar at five or a little after, and I was ready to do anything or go anywhere by that time. Hanging out in a hotel all afternoon was not my idea of a day well spent.

“What will you do with all that footage now?” I asked.

“No idea yet. I may even be able to get something worthwhile, who knows?”

I doubted that. Most of it, the interesting parts, would never be told. We were both gloomy when Cracker Jack showed up and joined us. He had been smart enough to stay out somewhere all day after dropping off Cat.

“The Dragon Lady headed back to the farm,” he said. “What happened to Matt and Shirley?”

“He talked her into getting rooms here, and getting someone from the office and her bank to come for a meeting. Bye, bye all accounts for Lorraine.”

“Wow!” he said. “So the fun part’s over. She’s done for?”

“I wish,” I said.

“I don’t think she’s finished yet,” Cat said darkly. “She could have money stashed away. She could get her own attorney and attempt to undo anything Shirley does, get her declared incompetent, and there are still the other gung-ho researchers she was recruiting to think about, plus the one already at the farm. We don’t know how far that’s gone, but probably whatever Eric Hockner finds and writes about will make them scatter. No guarantees yet. Anyway,” she added, “Matt’s going to come by the room later and tell us what’s going on. He’ll call first.”

“Do we beat it out of here tomorrow?” Jack asked.

“We sure do,” she said.

We knew there wasn’t a chance that Matt would be ready and able to leave with us. Shirley was going to take a lot of handling in the coming days.

It was after ten when Matt called to ask if it was too late to come over. Cat told him to get his tail to her room right now. A minute later he was at the door.

“How’d it go?” she demanded before he had time to get inside the room properly. It became over-crowded with one more person, but no one objected. Cat was sitting in the middle of one of the beds. I was sitting on the edge of the other one, Jack on a straight chair, leaving the other chair for Matt.

“When she told the lawyer that Lorraine was to be removed from her accounts, he said maybe Ms. Granville should be at the meeting, and she took his head off,” Matt said. “After it was screwed back on, she told him I’m her agent, and he and the bank VP should regard any directions from me as official. Then she bowed out of the picture, more or less. She didn’t have a clue what to tell either of them.”

He looked very tired, not at all triumphant, but rather satisfied in a subdued way. He went on with details about the meeting. A trust would be set up for Lorraine, with a monthly payment deposited to her bank account. Plenty to live on, even in her Park Avenue apartment. She was to leave the farm within three days, and would not be given access to it in the future. She would be notified by a special delivery letter the next day, and the paper work finalized. The law firm was to start work immediately on setting up a Granville Foundation, a charitable organization, with the bulk of the Granville fortune going directly into it. Money would be rolling in for a long time through the patents, of course. That was going to be one very rich foundation.

“Shirley agreed to all that?” Cat asked.

“She doesn’t know what she agreed to,” he said wearily. “I assured her that we’d maintain the hospital, and her own life won’t change if she doesn’t want it to. That seemed to satisfy her.”

“Maybe I’ll still get a documentary,” Cat said thoughtfully after a moment. “The birth of a charitable foundation, making good use of great wealth. It’s going to take some thinking, but I can see something there.” She gave Matt a searching look. “You’re going to be deeply involved in all of it, aren’t you?”

“I have to be,” he said. “She’s… she really is incompetent. All she wants is for someone to see to things and tell her what to do. She isn’t evil or malicious. Her temper is still uncontrollable, but as long as things don’t go wrong in her life, she doesn’t lash out. I can deal with that. She called her maid and told her to pack up and bring her enough things for a week or more, and she’ll stay in that suite until Lorraine’s gone. She’s terrified of her.”

Remembering Lorraine’s thin lips and narrowed eyes as she faced us in the coffee shop, I could well understand Shirley’s fear.

“We’re taking off in the morning,” Cat said. “Back to the real world, back to work, all that good stuff.”

He nodded. “I’ll be in touch, and I’ll send you a check to pay our crew and yourself.” He looked at me then. “I owe you a lot. I’ll never forget that. I owe you, and I’m grateful to you.” Quickly then, as if embarrassed, he got up and went to the door. “Be seeing you. Take care.”

Back in Cat’s house, with Cracker Jack and Matt gone, I got the spare bedroom that night, but my sleep was fitful, dream-heavy with many mirrors appearing, vanishing, breaking. The next day I found I couldn’t stay inside another minute, and I had missed the train to New York. I borrowed Cat’s car and went out to drive aimlessly. I realized an hour later that I was retracing our route, the two of us, me and the boy on a raft making his escape. I kept driving, past the barns with hex signs, past farms, the small town where I had bought McDonald’s hamburgers. I knew where I was going by then and drove to the dismal park where Cary had eaten his first Big Mac. He liked it, I remembered, gazing ahead at the sluggish stream. Weedy, matted leaves in piles against trees, bits of paper stirring in a light breeze, settling again, mud, lifeless swings, all new to him. Nice, he had said. Part of his big adventure. I remembered how his eyes had sparkled with delight when we finally got the hang of how to raise the convertible top.

My eyes began to burn and I no longer could see the stream. I crossed my arms on the steering wheel, pressed my face against them, and I wept for the lost boy on the raft.

The next day I took the train back to the city to tell my agent I would be available for the next GUW who needed a crack researcher. It was late by the time I arrived at Port Authority and hailed a taxi, a luxury I seldom allowed myself.

Carrying my overnight bag, my door key in one hand, purse over my shoulder, I was just starting to unlock the outside door of my apartment building when I heard Lorraine’s voice and spun around.

At the same moment, I heard a shot and felt a searing pain through my shoulder.

“I warned you!” she cried. “I warned you!” She was moving closer and more in a reflex than with thought I swung my overnight bag around and heaved it at her as another shot fired, and this time I fell to the pavement and Lorraine screamed. Other voices were yelling, someone was touching me, and I blacked out.

I felt disconnected from myself as I came awake, aware of a bed, a room, curious things all around, and curious odors, but none of it seemed to concern me directly. I moved and a sharp pain jolted me back into the body on the bed with a groan that I didn’t realize was my own at first.

Cat was there by my side almost instantly. “Oh, Mercy! Mercy!” She was crying.

Slowly I became aware that I was in a hospital bed, a needle and tube in my arm, almost immobilized by bandages, and insanely I said, “It’s all right, Cat. I’m all right.” A stranger’s voice, not mine.

She cried harder. I hadn’t seen her weeping like that in years. Maybe, I thought then, maybe I was dying. But I didn’t feel as if I were dying. I felt pain when I moved, and a terrible thirst. “Can I have a drink of water?” My voice was hoarse, my tongue thick and dry.

They didn’t give me water, just a cup of ice to wet my mouth a little, and Cat told me about it. “A shot in the shoulder, and another one in your thigh. You deflected the second shot with your bag, or it might have been higher. She’s in jail, charged with attempted murder, scheduled for a psychiatric exam first. You’ve had surgery on your shoulder and leg.”

I slept, and the next time I opened my eyes Matt was in the chair Cat had been in earlier.

“You pulled a real show-stopper,” he said, smiling at me. “How are you feeling?”

“I don’t know yet. I’m really thirsty.”

This time they let me have a few sips of water.

Matt waited until I was fully awake. As long as I didn’t move much, nothing hurt much. I told him that.

“They’ll release you in a day or two,” Matt said, “but obviously you can’t go to your apartment. Cat said she’d take you to her place, but that’s out. Stairs. It’s going to be a while before you’ll want to deal with stairs. I’ll take you to the farm. Your own apartment, with doctors and nurses on hand to take out stitches, and keep an eye on things.”

I found that I could shake my head as long as the rest of me stayed still. “Not a good idea,” I said.

“Why not?”

I couldn’t think of a reason.

“You’re still on my team,” Matt said. “Remember? I’m responsible for you as long as you’re on my team. That’s the way the system works. In fact, I was going to get in touch with you and offer you a job as soon as I got things organized a little. I can’t manage the foundation alone. I’m going to need help, someone with a heart as big as the moon, and a brain to match it. You. Will you work for the foundation, be my partner, help me give away money? I think by the time you’re up and able, I’ll be organized enough to put you to work. I can be a slave driver, by the way.”

And that’s the whole story behind Cat’s last documentary, the story she didn’t tell, and the one she did, how one of the biggest philanthropies in the country came into being.

I still do research. It’s all on a dedicated computer that Cracker Jack set up for me. I’m tracking on a daily basis seventeen neuropsychiatrists and their teams as they investigate nearly one hundred inexplicable instances of narcolepsy during which the sufferers display strange brain waves. I read their emails, the results they publish in obscure journals. Much gets lost in translation, of course. The patients are scattered and their funding is limited. No famous name is attached to their research, and their sponsors are relatively minor universities and research hospitals.

I’m also following the work of a group of neuropsychiatrists at Stanford who are working on a theory to explain certain cases of paranoid schizophrenia. They haven’t made much progress yet. They are excluding patients with suspected causes for their malady, such as brain damage from trauma, childhood abuse, substance abuse of various kinds, environmental toxins, allergies, and so on. We’ll be keeping a close eye on their research. I sometimes think of what Sherlock Holmes said, that if you rule out all but one possibility, that possibility has to be it. Will that group come to the point when they have to make the leap to the impossible remaining cause? Most likely, their funds will dry up before they arrive at the one possible solution. As of now, we simply watch.

Cat and Cracker Jack visit Matt and me now and then, and the question inevitably arises: What will we do if… ? A long silence always follows.

And I still haven’t answered the troubling question of whether anything good can come from previewing the future. Perhaps in the fullness of time, I’ll have an answer.