The Family Trade

Weatherman

Ten and a half hours before a mounted knight with a machine gun tried to kill her, tech journalist Miriam Beckstein lost her job. Before the day was out, her pink slip would set in train a chain of events that would topple governments, trigger civil wars, and kill thousands. It would be the biggest scoop in her career, in any journalist’s career—bigger than Watergate, bigger than 9/11—and it would be Miriam’s story. But as of seven o’clock in the morning, the story lay in her future: All she knew was that it was a rainy Monday morning in October, she had a job to do and copy to write, and there was an editorial meeting scheduled for ten.

The sky was the colour of a dead laptop display, silver-gray and full of rain. Miriam yawned and came awake to the Monday morning babble of the anchorman on her alarm radio.

“—Bombing continues in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, in business news, the markets are down forty-seven points on the word that Cisco is laying off another three thousand employees,” announced the anchor. “Ever since 9/11, coming on top of the collapse of the dot-com sector, their biggest customers are hunkering down. Tom, how does it look from where you’re sitting—”

“Shut up,” she mumbled and killed the volume. “I don’t want to hear this.” Most of the tech sector was taking a beating. Which in turn meant that The Industry Weatherman’s readers—venture capitalists and high-tech entrepreneurs, along with the wannabe day traders—would be taking a beating. Her own beat, the biotech firms, were solid, but the collapsing internet sector was making waves. If something didn’t happen to relieve the plummeting circulation figures soon, there would be trouble.

Trouble. Monday. “I’ll give you trouble,” she muttered, face forming a grin that might have frightened some of those readers, had they been able to see it. “Trouble is my middle name.” And trouble was good news, for a senior reporter on The Industry Weatherman.

She slid into her bathrobe, shivering at the cold fabric, then shuffled along stripped pine boards to the bathroom for morning ablutions and two minutes with the electric toothbrush. Standing before the bathroom mirror under the merciless glare of the spotlights, she shivered at what she saw in it: every minute of her thirty-two years, in unforgiving detail. “Abolish Monday mornings and Friday afternoons,” she muttered grimly as she tried to brush some life into her shoulder-length hair, which was stubbornly black and locked in a vicious rear-guard action against the ochre highlights she bombarded it with on a weekly basis. Giving up after a couple of minutes, she fled downstairs to the kitchen.

The kitchen was a bright shade of yellow, cosy and immune to the gloom of autumn mornings. Relieved, Miriam switched on the coffee percolator and made herself a bowl of granola—what Ben had always called her rabbit-food breakfast.

Back upstairs, fortified by an unfeasibly large mug of coffee, she had to work out what to wear. She dived into her closet and found herself using her teeth to tear the plastic bag off one of the three suits she’d had dry-cleaned on Friday—only to discover it was her black formal interview affair, not at all the right thing for a rainy Monday pounding the streets—or at least doing telephone interviews from a cubicle in the office. She started again and finally managed to put together an outfit. Black boots, trousers, jacket, turtle-neck, and trench coat: as black as her Monday morning mood. I look like a gangster, she thought and chuckled to herself. “Gangsters!” That was what she had to do today. One glance at her watch told her that she didn’t have time for makeup. It wasn’t as if she had to impress anyone at the office anyway: They knew damned well who she was.

She slid behind the wheel of her four-year-old Saturn, and thankfully it started first time. But traffic was backed up, one of her wiper blades needed replacing, the radio had taken to crackling erratically, and she couldn’t stop yawning. Mondays, she thought. My favorite day! Not. At least she had a parking space waiting for her—one of the handful reserved for senior journalists who had to go places and interview thrusting new economy executives. Or money-laundering gangsters, the nouveau riche of the pharmaceutical world.

Twenty minutes later she pulled into a crowded lot behind an anonymous office building in Cambridge, just off Somerville Avenue, with satellite dishes on the roof and fat cables snaking down into the basement. Headquarters of The Industry Weatherman, journal of the tech VC community and Miriam’s employer for the past three years. She swiped her pass-card, hit the elevator up to the third floor, and stepped out into cubicle farm chaos. Desks with PCs and drifts of paper that overflowed onto the floor: A couple of harried Puerto Rican cleaners emptied garbage cans into a trolley laden with bags, to a background of phones ringing and anchors gabbling on CNN, Bloomberg, Fox. Black space-age Aeron chairs everywhere, all wire and plastic, electric chairs for a fully wired future.

“’Lo, Emily,” she nodded, passing the departmental secretary.

“Hi! With you in a sec.” Emily lifted her finger from the “mute” button, went back to glassy-eyed attention. “Yes, I’ll send them up as soon as—”

Miriam’s desk was clean: The stack of press releases was orderly, the computer monitor was polished, and there were no dead coffee cups lying around. By tech journalist standards, this made her a neat freak. She’d always been that way about her work, even when she was a toddler. Liked all her crayons lined up in a row. Occasionally she wished she could manage the housework the same way, but for some reason the skill set didn’t seem to be transferable. But this was work, and work was always under control. I wonder where Paulie’s gotten to?

“Hi, babe!” As if on cue, Paulette poked her head around the side of the partition. Short, blonde, and bubbly, not even a rainy Monday morning could dent her enthusiasm. “How’s it going? You ready to teach these goodfellas a lesson?”

“ ‘Goodfellas?’” Miriam raised an eyebrow. Paulette took the cue, slid sideways into her cubicle, and dropped into the spare chair, forcing Miriam to shuffle sideways to make room. Paulie was obviously enjoying herself: It was one of the few benefits of being a research gofer. Miriam waited.

“Goodfellas,” Paulette said with relish. “You want a coffee? This is gonna take a while.”

“Coffee.” Miriam considered. “That would be good.”

“Yeah, well.” Paulette stood up. “Read this, it’ll save us both some time.” She pointed out a two-inch-thick sheaf of printouts and photocopies to Miriam, then made a beeline for the departmental coffeepot.

Miriam sighed and rubbed her eyes as she read the first page. Paulie had done her job with terrifying efficiency yet again: Miriam had only worked with her on a couple of investigations before—mostly Miriam’s workload didn’t require the data mining Paulette specialized in—but every single time she’d come away feeling a little dizzy.

Automobile emissions tests in California? Miriam squinted and turned the page. Failed autos, a chain of repair shops buying them for cash and shipping them south to Mexico and Brazil for stripping or resale. “What’s this got to do with—” she stopped. “Aha!”

“Nondairy creamer, one sweetener,” said Paulie, planting a coffee mug at her left hand.

“This is great stuff,” Miriam muttered, flipping more pages. Company accounts. A chain of repair shops that—“I was hoping you’d find something in the small shareholders. How much are these guys in for?”

“They’re buying about ten, eleven million in shares each year.” Paulette shrugged, then blew across her coffee and pulled a face. “Which is crazy, because their business only turns over about fifteen mill. What kind of business puts eighty percent of its gross into a pension fund? One that bought two hundred and seventy-four autos last year for fifty bucks a shot, shipped them south of the border, and made an average of forty thousand bucks for each one they sold. And the couple of listed owners I phoned didn’t want to talk.”

Miriam looked up suddenly. “You phoned them?” she demanded.

“Yes, I—oh. Relax, I told them I was a dealership in Vegas and I was just doing a background check.”

“ ‘Background check.’” Miriam snorted. “What if they’ve got caller-ID?”

“You think they’re going to follow it up?” Paulette asked, looking worried.

“Paulie, you’ve got eleven million in cash being laundered through this car dealership and you think they’re not going to sit up and listen if someone starts asking questions about where those beaters are coming from and how come they’re fetching more than a new Lexus south of the border?”

“Oh. Oh shit.”

“Yes. ‘Oh shit’ indeed. How’d you get into the used car trail anyway?”

Paulette shrugged and looked slightly embarrassed. “You asked me to follow up the shareholders for Proteome Dynamics and Biphase Technologies. Pacific Auto Services looked kind of odd to me—why would a car dealership have a pension fund sticking eight digits into cutting-edge proteome research? And there’s another ten like them, too. Small mom-and-pop businesses doing a lot of export down south with seven—or eight-digit stakeholdings. I traced another—flip to the next?”

“Okay. Dallas Used Semiconductors. Buying used IBM mainframe kit? That’s not our—and selling it to—oh shit.”

“Yeah.” Paulie frowned. “I looked up the book value. Whoever’s buying those five-year-old computers down in Argentina is paying ninety percent of the price for new kit in cash greenbacks—they’re the next thing to legal currency down there. But up here, a five-year-old mainframe goes for about two cents on the dollar.”

“And you’re sure all this is going into Proteome and Biphase?” Miriam shook the thick sheaf of paper into shape. “I can’t believe this!”

“Believe it.” Paulette drained her coffee cup and shoved a stray lock of hair back into position.

Miriam whistled tunelessly. “What’s the bottom line?”

“ ‘The bottom line?’” Paulette looked uncomfortable. “I haven’t counted it, but—”

“Make a guess.”

“I’d say someone is laundering between fifty and a hundred million dollars a year here. Turning dirty cash into clean shares in Proteome Dynamics and Biphase Technologies. Enough to show up in their SEC filings. So your hunch was right.”

“And nobody in Executive Country has asked any questions,” Miriam concluded. “If I was paranoid, I’d say it’s like a conspiracy of silence. Hmm.” She put her mug down. “Paulie. You worked for a law firm. Would you call this … circumstantial?”

“ ‘Circumstantial?’” Paulette’s expression was almost pitying. “Who’s paying you, the defence? This is enough to get the FBI and the DA muttering about RICO.”

“Yeah, but…” Miriam nodded to herself. “Look, this is heavy. Heavier than usual anyway. I can guarantee you that if we spring this story we’ll get three responses. One will be Bowers in our hair, and the other will be a bunch of cease-and-desist letters from attorneys. Freedom of the press is all very well, but a good reputation and improved circulation figures won’t buy us defence lawyers, which is why I want to double-check everything in here before I go upstairs and tell Sandy we want the cover. Because the third response is going to be oh-shit-I-don’t-want-to-believe-this, because our great leader and teacher thinks the sun shines out of Biphase and I think he’s into Proteome too.”

“Who do you take me for?” Paulette pointed at the pile. “That’s primary, Miriam, the wellspring. SEC filings, public accounts, the whole lot. Smoking gun. The summary sheet—” she tugged at a Post-it note gummed to a page a third of the way down the stack—“says it all. I was in here all day yesterday and half the evening—”

“I’m sorry!” Miriam raised her hand. “Hey, really. I had no idea.”

“I kind of lost track of time,” Paulette admitted. She smiled. “It’s not often I get something interesting to dig into. Anyway, if the boss is into these two, I’d think he’d be glad of the warning. Gives him time to pull out his stake before we run the story.”

“Yeah, well.” Miriam stood up. “I think we want to bypass Sandy. This goes to the top.”

“But Sandy needs to know. It’ll mess with his page plan—”

“Yeah, but someone has to call Legal before we run with this. It’s the biggest scoop we’ve had all year. Want to come with me? I think you earned at least half the credit…”

They shared the elevator up to executive row in silence. It was walled in mirrors, reflecting their contrasts: Paulette, a short blonde with disorderly curls and a bright red blouse, and Miriam, a slim five-foot-eight, dressed entirely in black. The business research wonk and the journalist, on their way to see the editorial director. Some Mondays are better than others, thought Miriam. She smiled tightly at Paulette in the mirror and Paulie grinned back: a worried expression, slightly apprehensive.

The Industry Weatherman was mostly owned by a tech venture capital firm who operated out of the top floors of the building, their offices intermingled with those of the magazine’s directors. Two floors up, the corridors featured a better grade of carpet and the walls were genuine partitions covered in oak veneer, rather than fabric-padded cubicles. That was the only difference she could see—that and the fact that some of the occupants were assholes like the people she wrote glowing profiles of for a living. I’ve never met a tech VC who a shark would bite, Miriam thought grumpily. Professional courtesy among killers. The current incumbent of the revolving door office labelled EDITORIAL DIRECTOR—officially a vice president—was an often-absent executive by the name of Joe Dixon. Miriam led Paulette to the office and paused for a moment, then knocked on the door, half-hoping to find he wasn’t there.

“Come in.” The door opened in her face, and it was Joe himself, not his secretary. He was over six feet, with expensively waved black hair, wearing his suit jacket over an open-necked dress shirt. He oozed corporate polish: If he’d been ten years older, he could have made a credible movie career as a captain of industry. As it was, Miriam always found herself wondering how he’d climbed into the boardroom so young. He was in his mid-thirties, not much older than she was. “Hi.” He took in Miriam and Paulette standing just behind her and smiled. “What can I do for you?”

Miriam smiled back. “May we have a moment?’ she asked.

“Sure, come in.” Joe retreated behind his desk. “Have a chair, both of you.” He nodded at Paulette. “Miriam, we haven’t been introduced.”

“Oh, yes. Joe Dixon, Paulette Milan. Paulie is one of our heavy hitters in industrial research. She’s been working with me on a story and I figured we’d better bring it to you first before taking it to the weekly production meeting. It’s a bit, uh, sensitive.”

“ ‘Sensitive.’” Joe leaned back in his chair and looked straight at her. “Is it big?”

“Could be,” Miriam said noncommittally. Big? It’s the biggest I’ve ever worked on! A big story in her line of work might make or break a career; this one might send people to jail. “It has complexities to it that made me think you’d want advance warning before it breaks.”

“Tell me about it,” said Joe.

“Okay. Paulie, you want to start with your end?” She passed Paulette the file.

“Yeah.” Paulie grimaced as she opened the file and launched into her explanation. “In a nutshell, they’re laundries for dirty money. There’s enough of a pattern to it that if I was a DA in California I’d be picking up the phone to the local FBI office.”

“That’s why I figured you’d want to know,” Miriam explained. “This is a big deal, Joe. I think we’ve got enough to pin a money-laundering rap on a couple of really big corporations and make it stick. But last November you were talking to some folks at Proteome, and I figured you might want to refer this to Legal and make sure you’re fire-walled before this hits the fan.”

“Well. That’s very interesting.” Joe smiled back at her. “Is that your file on this story?”

“Yeah,” said Paulette.

“Would you mind leaving it with me?” he asked. He cleared his throat. “I’m kind of embarrassed,” he said, shrugging a small-boy shrug. The defensive set of his shoulders backed his words. “Look, I’m going to have to read this myself. Obviously, the scope for mistakes is—” he shrugged.

Suddenly Miriam had a sinking feeling: It’s going to be bad. She racked her brains for clues. Is he going to try to bury us?

Joe shook his head. “Look, I’d like to start by saying that this isn’t about anything you’ve done,” he added hurriedly. “It’s just that we’ve got an investment to protect and I need to work out how to do so.”

“Before we break the story.” Miriam forced another, broader, smile. “It was all in the public record,” she added. “If we don’t break it, one of our competitors will.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Joe said smoothly. “Listen, I’ll get back to you in an hour or so. If you leave this with me for now, I just need to go and talk to someone in Legal so we can sort out how to respond. Then I’ll let you know how we’re going to handle it.”

“Oh, okay then,” said Paulette acceptingly.

Miriam let her expression freeze in a fixed grin. Oh shit, she thought as she stood up. “Thanks for giving us your time,” she said.

“Let yourselves out,” Joe said tersely, already turning the first page.

Out in the corridor, Paulette turned to Miriam. “Didn’t that go well?” she insisted.

Miriam took a deep breath. “Paulie.”

“Yeah?”

Her knees felt weak. “Something’s wrong.”

“What?” Paulette looked concerned.

“Elevator.” She hit the “call” button and waited in silence, trying to still the butterflies in her stomach. It arrived, and she waited for the doors to close behind them before she continued. “I may just have made a bad mistake.”

“ ‘Mistake?’” Paulette looked puzzled. “You don’t think—”

“He didn’t say anything about publishing,” Miriam said slowly. “Not one word. What were the other names on that list of small investors? The ones you didn’t check?”

“The list? He’s got—” Paulette frowned.

“Was Somerville Investments one of them?”

“Somerville? Could be. Why? Who are they?”

“Because that’s—” Miriam pointed a finger at the roof and circled. She watched Paulette’s eyes grow round.

“I’m thinking about magazine returns from the newsstand side of the business, Paulie. Don’t you know we’ve got low returns by industry standards? And people buy magazines for cash.”

“Oh.”

“I’m sorry, Paulie.”

When they got back to Miriam’s cubicle, a uniformed security guard and a suit from Human Resources were already waiting for them.

“Paulette Milan? Miriam Beckstein?” said the man from HR. He checked a notepad carefully.

“Yes?” Miriam asked cautiously. “What’s up?”

“Would you please follow me? Both of you?”

He turned and headed for the stairwell down to the main entrance. Miriam glanced around and saw the security guard pull a brief expression of discomfort. “Go on, ma’am.”

“Go on,” echoed Paulette from her left shoulder, her face white.

This can’t be happening, Miriam thought woodenly. She felt her feet carrying her toward the staircase and down, toward the glass doors at the front.

“Cards, please,” said the man from Human Resources. He held out his hand impatiently. Miriam passed him her card reluctantly: Paulette followed suit.

He cleared his throat and looked them over superciliously. “I’ve been told to tell you that The Industry Weatherman won’t be pressing charges,” he said. “We’ll clear your cubicles and forward your personal items and your final paycheck to your addresses of record. But you’re no longer allowed on the premises.” The security guard took up a position behind him, blocking the staircase. “Please leave.”

“What’s going on?” Paulette demanded, her voice rising toward a squeak.

“You’re both being terminated,” the HR man said impassively. “Misappropriation of company resources; specifically, sending personal e-mail on company time and looking at pornographic Web sites.”

“ ‘Pornographic—’” Miriam felt herself going faint with fury. She took half a step toward the HR man and barely noticed Paulette grabbing her sleeve.

“It’s not worth it, Miriam,” Paulie warned her. “We both know it isn’t true.” She glared at the HR man. “You work for Somerville Investments, don’t you?”

He nodded incuriously. “Please leave. Now.”

Miriam forced herself to smile. “Better brush up your résume,” she said shakily and turned toward the exit.

Two-thirds of her life ago, when she was eleven, Miriam had been stung by a hornet. It had been a bad one: Her arm had swollen up like a balloon, red and sore and painful to touch, and the sting itself had hurt like crazy. But the worst thing of all was the sense of moral indignation and outrage. Miriam-aged-eleven had been minding her own business, playing in the park with her skateboard—she’d been a tomboy back then, and some would say she still was—and she hadn’t done anything to provoke the angry yellow-and-black insect. It just flew at her, wings whining angrily, landed, and before she could shake it off it stung her.

She’d howled.

This time she was older and much more self-sufficient—college, pre-med, and her failed marriage to Ben had given her a grounding in self-sufficiency—so she managed to say good-bye to an equally shocked Paulie and make it into her car before she broke down. And the tears came silently—this time. It was raining in the car park, but she couldn’t tell whether there was more water inside or outside. They weren’t tears of pain: They were tears of anger. That bastard—

For a moment, Miriam fantasized about storming back in through the fire door at the side of the building, going up to Joe Dixon’s office, and pushing him out of the big picture window. It made her feel better to think about that, but after a few minutes she reluctantly concluded that it wouldn’t solve anything. Joe had the file. He had her computer—and Paulie’s—and a moment’s thought told her that those machines would be being wiped right now. Doubtless, server logs showing her peeking at porn on the job would be being fabricated. She’d spoken to some geeks at a dot-com startup once who explained just how easy it was if you wanted to get someone dismissed. “Shit,” she mumbled to herself and sniffed. “I’ll have to get another job. Shouldn’t be too hard, even without a reference.”

Still, she was badly shaken. Journalists didn’t get fired for exposing money-laundering scams; that was in the rules somewhere. Wasn’t it? In fact, it was completely crazy. She blinked away the remaining angry tears. I need to go see Iris, she decided. Tomorrow would be soon enough to start looking for a new job. Or to figure out a way to break the story herself, if she was going to try and do it freelance. Today she needed a shoulder to cry on—and a sanity check. And if there was one person who could provide both, it was her adoptive mother.

Iris Beckstein lived alone in her old house near Lowell Park. Miriam felt obscurely guilty about visiting her during daytime working hours. Iris never tried to mother her, being content to wander around and see to her own quiet hobbies most of the time since Morris had died. But Miriam also felt guilty about not visiting Iris more often. Iris was convalescent, and the possibility of losing her mother so soon after her father had died filled her with dread. Another anchor was threatening to break free, leaving her adrift in the world.

She parked the car in the road, then made a dash for the front door—the rain was descending in a cold spray, threatening to turn to penetrating sheets—and rang the doorbell, then unlocked the door and went in as the two-tone chime echoed inside.

“Ma?”

“Through here,” Iris called. Miriam entered, closing the front door. The hallway smelled faintly floral, she noticed as she shed her raincoat and hung it up: The visiting home help must be responsible. “I’m in the back room.”

Doors and memories lay ajar before Miriam as she hurried toward the living room. She’d grown up in this house, the one Morris and Iris had bought back when she was a baby. The way the third step on the staircase creaked when you put your weight on it, the eccentricities of the downstairs toilet, the way the living room felt cramped from all the bookshelves—the way it felt too big, without Dad. “Ma?” She pushed open the living room door hesitantly.

Iris smiled at her from her wheelchair. “So nice of you to visit! Come in! To what do I owe the pleasure?”

The room was furnished with big armchairs and a threadbare sofa deep enough to drown in. There was no television—neither Iris nor Morris had time for it—but there were bookcases on each wall and a tottering tower of paper next to Iris’s chair. Miriam crossed the room, leaned over, and kissed Iris on top of her head, then stood back. “You’re looking well,” she said anxiously, hoping it was true. She wanted to hug her mother, but she looked increasingly frail—only in her fifties, but her hair was increasingly gray, and the skin on the backs of her hands seemed to be more wrinkled every time Miriam visited.

“I won’t break—at least, I don’t think so. Not if you only hug me.” Iris grimaced. “It’s been bad for the past week, but I think I’m on the mend again.” The chair she sat in was newer than the rest of the furniture, surrounded by the impedimenta of invalidity: a little side trolley with her crochet and an insulated flask full of herbal tea, her medicines, and a floor-standing lamp with a switch high up its stem. “Marge just left. She’ll be back later, before supper.”

“That’s good. I hope she’s been taking care of you well.”

“She does her best.” Iris nodded, slightly dismissively. “I’ve got physiotherapy tomorrow. Then another session with my new neurologist, Dr. Burke—he’s working with a clinical trial on a new drug that’s looking promising and we’re going to discuss that. It’s supposed to stop the progressive demyelination process, but I don’t understand half the jargon in the report. Could you translate it for me?”

“Mother! You know I don’t do that stuff any more—I’m not current; I might miss something. Anyway, if you go telling your osteopath about me, he’ll panic. I’m not a bone doctor.”

“Well, if you say so.” Iris looked irritated. “All that time in medical school wasn’t wasted, was it?”

“No, Mom, I use it every day. I couldn’t do my job without it. I just don’t know enough about modern multiple sclerosis drug treatments to risk second-guessing your specialist, all right? I might get it wrong, and then who’d you sue?”

“If you say so.” Iris snorted. “You didn’t come here just to talk about that, did you?”

Damn, thought Miriam. It had always been very difficult to pull one over on her mother. “I lost my job,” she confessed.

“I wondered.” Iris nodded thoughtfully. “All those dotcoms of yours, it was bound to be infectious. Is that what happened?”

“No.” Miriam shook her head. “I stumbled across something and mishandled it badly. They fired me. And Paulie … Remember I told you about her?”

Iris closed her eyes. “Bastards. The bosses are bastards.”

“Mother!” Miriam wasn’t shocked at the language—Iris’s odd background jumped out to bite her at the strangest moments—but it was the risk of misunderstanding. “It’s not that simple; I screwed up.”

“So you screwed up. Are you going to tell me you deserved to be fired?” asked Iris.

“No. But I should have dug deeper before I tried to run the story,” Miriam said carefully. “I was too eager, got sloppy. There were connections. It’s deep and it’s big and it’s messy; the people who own The Weatherman didn’t want to be involved in exposing it.”

“So that excuses them, does it?” asked Iris, her eyes narrowing.

“No, it—” Miriam stopped.

“Stop making excuses for them and I’ll stop chasing you.” Iris sounded almost amused. “They took your job to protect their own involvement in some dirty double-dealing. Is that what you’re telling me?”

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Well.” Iris’s eyes flashed. “When are you going to hang them? And how high? I want a ringside seat!”

“Ma.” Miriam looked at her mother with mingled affection and exasperation. “It’s not that easy. I think The Weatherman’s owners are deeply involved in something illegal. Money laundering. Dirty money. Insider trading too, probably. I’d like to nail them, but they’re going to play dirty if I try. It took them about five minutes to come up with cause for dismissal, and they said they wouldn’t press charges if I kept my mouth shut.”

“What kind of charges?” Iris demanded.

“They say they’ve got logfiles to prove I was net-surfing pornography at work. They … they—” Miriam found she was unable to go on speaking.

“So were you?” Iris asked quietly.

“No!” Miriam startled herself with her vehemence. She caught Iris’s sly glance and felt sheepish. “Sorry. No, I wasn’t. It’s a setup. But it’s so easy to claim—and virtually impossible to disprove.”

“Are you going to be able to get another job?” Iris prodded.

“Yes.” Miriam fell silent.

“Then it’s all right. I really couldn’t do with my daughter expecting me to wash her underwear after all these years.”

“Mother!” Then Miriam spotted the sardonic grin.

“Tell me about it. I mean, everything. Warm a mother’s heart, spill the beans on the assholes who took her daughter’s job away.”

Miriam flopped down on the big overstuffed sofa. “It’s either a very long story or a very short one,” she confessed. “I got interested in a couple of biotech companies that looked just a little bit odd. Did some digging, got Paulette involved—she digs like a drilling platform—and we came up with some dirt. A couple of big companies are being used as targets for money laundering.

“Turns out that The Weatherman’s parent company is into them, deep. They decided it would be easier to fire us and threaten us than to run the story and take their losses. I’m probably going to get home and find a SLAPP lawsuit sitting in my mailbox.”

“So. What are you going to do about it?”

Miriam met her mother’s penetrating stare. “Ma, I spent three years there. And they fired me cold, without even trying to get me to shut up, at the first inconvenience. Do you really think I’m going to let them get away with that if I can help it?”

“What about loyalty?” Iris asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I gave them mine.” Miriam shrugged. “That’s part of why this hurts. You earn loyalty by giving it.”

“You’d have made a good feudal noble. They were big on loyalty, too. And blind obedience, in return.”

“Wrong century, wrong side of the Atlantic, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

Now Iris grinned. “Oh, I noticed that much,” she conceded. “No foreign titles of nobility. That’s one of the reasons why I stayed here—that, and your father.” Her smile slipped. “Never could understand what the people here see in kings and queens, either the old hereditary kind or the modern presidential type. All those paparazzi, drooling after monarchs. I like your line of work. It’s more honest.”

“Harder to keep your job when you’re writing about the real world,” Miriam brooded gloomily. She struggled to sit a little straighter. “Anyway, I didn’t come around here to mope at you. I figure I can leave job-hunting until tomorrow morning.”

“Are you sure you’re going to be all right?” Iris asked pointedly. “You mentioned lawsuits—or worse.”

“In the short term—” Miriam shrugged, then took a deep breath. “Yes,” she admitted. “I guess I’ll be okay as long as I leave them alone.”

“Hmm.” Iris looked at Miriam sidelong. “How much money are we talking about here? If they’re pulling fake lawsuits to shut you up, that’s not business as usual.”

“There’s—” Miriam did some mental arithmetic—“about fifty to a hundred million a year flowing through this channel.”

Iris swore.

“Ma!”

“Don’t you ‘Ma’ me!” Iris snorted.

“But—”

“Listen to your old ma. You came here for advice, I’m going to give it, all right? You’re telling me you just happened to stumble across a money-laundering operation that’s handling more money in a week than most people earn in their life. And you think they’re going to settle for firing you and hoping you stay quiet?”

Miriam snorted. “It can’t possibly be that bad, Ma, this isn’t goodfellas territory, and anyway, they’ve got that faked evidence.”

Iris shook her head stubbornly. “When you’ve got criminal activities and millions of dollars in cash together, there are no limits to what people can do.” For the first time, Miriam realized with a sinking feeling, Iris looked worried. “But maybe I’m being too pessimistic—you’ve just lost your job and whatever else, that’s going to be a problem. How are your savings?”

Miriam glanced at the rain-streaked window. What’s turned Ma so paranoid? she wondered, unsettled. “They’re not doing badly. I’ve been saving for the past ten years.”

“There’s my girl,” Iris said approvingly.

“I put my money into tech-sector shares.”

“No, you didn’t!” Iris looked shocked.

Miriam nodded. “But no dot-coms.”

“Really?”

“Most people think that all tech stocks are down. But biotech stocks actually crashed out in ninety-seven and have been recovering ever since. The bubble last year didn’t even touch them. People need new medicines more than they need flashy Web sites that sell toys, don’t they? I was planning on paying off my mortgage year after next. Now I guess it’ll have to wait a bit longer—but I’m not in trouble unless I stay unemployed over a year.”

“Well, at least you found a use for all that time in med school.” Iris looked relieved. “So you’re not hard up.”

“Not in the short term,” Miriam corrected instinctively. “Ask me again in six months. Anyway. Is there anything I can get you while I’m here?”

“A good stiff drink.” Iris clucked to herself. “Listen, I’m going to be all right. The disease, it comes and it goes—another few weeks and I’ll be walking again.” She gestured at the aluminium walking frame next to her chair. “I’ve been getting plenty of rest and with Marge around twice a day I can just about cope, apart from the boredom. I’ve even been doing a bit of filing and cleaning, you know, turning out the dusty old corners?”

“Oh, right. Turned anything up?”

“Lots of dustballs. Anyway,” she continued after a moment. “There’s some stuff I’ve been meaning to hand over to you.”

“ ‘Stuff.’” For a moment, Miriam couldn’t focus on the problem at hand. It was too much to deal with. She’d lost her job and then, the very same day, her mother wanted to talk about selling her home. “I’m sorry, I’m not very focused today.”

“Not very—” Iris snorted. “You’re like a microscope, girl! Most other people would be walking around in a daze. It’s not very considerate of me, I know, it’s just that I’ve been thinking about things and there’s some stuff you really should have right now. Partly because you’re grown up and partly because it belongs to you—you might have some use for it Stuff that might get overlooked.”

Miriam must have looked baffled because Iris smiled at her encouragingly. “Yes. You know, ‘stuff.’ Photograph albums, useless things like Morris’s folks’ birth certificates, my old passport, my parents’ death certificates, your adoption papers. Some stuff relating to your birth-mother, too.”

Miriam shook her head. “My adoption papers—why would I want them? That’s old stuff, and you’re the only mother I’ve ever had.” She looked at Iris fiercely. “You’re not allowed to push me away!”

“Well! And who said I was? I just figured you wouldn’t want to lose the opportunity. If you ever felt like trying to trace your roots. It belongs to you, and I think now is definitely past time for you to have it. I kept the newspaper pages too, you know. It caused quite a stir.” Miriam made a face. “I know you’re not interested,” Iris said placatingly. “Humour me. There’s a box.”

“A box.”

“A pink and green shoebox. Sitting on the second shelf of your father’s bureau in the guest bedroom upstairs. Do me a favour and fetch it down, will you?”

“Just for you.”

Miriam found the box easily enough. It rattled when she picked it up and carried it, smelling of mothballs, down to the living room. Iris had picked up her crochet again and was pulling knots with an expression of fierce concentration. “Dr. Hare told me to work on it,” she said without looking up. “It helps preserve hand-eye coordination.”

“I see.” Miriam put the box down on the sofa. “What’s this one?”

“A Klein-bottle cosy.” Iris looked up defensively at Miriam’s snort. “You should laugh! In this crazy inside-out world, we must take our comforts from crazy inside-out places.”

“You and Dad.” Miriam waved it off. “Both crazy inside-out sorts of people.”

“Bleeding hearts, you mean,” Iris echoed ominously. “People who refuse to bottle it all up, who live life on the outside, who—” she glanced around—“end up growing old disgracefully.” She sniffed. “Stop me before I reminisce again. Open the box!”

Miriam obeyed. It was half-full of yellowing, carefully folded newsprint and elderly photocopies of newspaper stories. Then there was a paper bag and some certificates and pieces of formal paperwork made up the rest of its contents. “The bag contained stuff that was found with your birth-mother by the police,” Iris explained. “Personal effects. They had to keep the clothing as evidence, but nobody ever came forward and after a while they passed the effects on to Morris for safekeeping. There’s a locket of your mother’s in there—I think you ought to keep it in a safe place for now; I think it’s probably quite valuable. The papers—it was a terrible thing. Terrible.”

Miriam unfolded the uppermost sheet; it crackled slightly with age as she read it. UNKNOWN WOMAN FOUND STABBED, BABY TAKEN INTO CUSTODY. It gave her a most peculiar feeling. She’d known about it for many years, of course, but this was like seeing it for the first time in a history book, written down in black and white. “They still don’t know who she was?” Miriam asked.

“Why should they?” Iris looked at her oddly. “Sometimes they can reopen the case when new evidence comes to light, or do DNA testing, but after thirty-two years most of the witnesses will have moved away or died. The police officers who first looked into it will have retired. Probably nothing happens unless a new lead comes up. Say, they find another body or someone confesses years later. It’s just one of those terrible things that sometimes happen to people. The only unusual thing about it was you.” She looked at Miriam fondly.

“Why they let two radicals, one of them a resident alien and both of them into antiwar protests and stuff like that, adopt a baby—” Miriam shook her head. Then she grinned. “Did they think I would slow you down or something?”

“Possibly, possibly. But I don’t remember being asked any questions about our politics when we went to the adoption agency—it was much easier to adopt in those days. They didn’t ask much about our background except whether we were married. We didn’t save the newspapers at the time, by the way. Morris bought them as morgue copies later.”

“Well.” Miriam replaced the news clipping, put the lid back on the box, and contemplated it. “Ancient history.”

“You know, if you wanted to investigate it—” Iris was using that look on her, the penetrating diamond-tipped stare of inquisition, the one Miriam tried to think herself into when interviewing difficult customers—“I bet a journalist of your experience would do better than some doughnut stuffed policeman on a routine job. Don’t you think?”

“I think I really ought to help my real mother figure out what she’s going to do about not going stir-crazy while she gets better,” Miriam replied lightly. “There are more immediate things to investigate, like whether your tea is cold and if there are any cookies in the kitchen. Why don’t we leave digging up the dead past for some other time?”

Pink Slippers

Miriam drove away slowly, distractedly, nodding in time to the beat of the wind—shield wipers. Traffic was as bad as usual, but nothing untoward penetrated her thoughts.

She parked, then hunched her shoulders against the weather and scurried to her front door. As usual, her keys got muddled up. Why does this always happen when I’m in a hurry? she wondered. Inside, she shook her way out of her raincoat and jacket like a newborn moth emerging from its sodden cocoon, hung them on the coat rail, then dumped her shoulder bag and the now-damp cardboard box on the old telephone table and bent to unzip her boots. Free of the constraints of leather, her feet flexed luxuriously as she slid them into a pair of battered pink slippers. Then she spotted the answering machine’s blinking light. “You have new messages,” she sang to herself, slightly manic with relief at being home. “Fuck ’em.” She headed for the kitchen to switch on the coffeepot, then poured a mug and carried it into her den.

The den had once been the dining room of this suburban home, a rectangular space linked to the living room by an archway and to the kitchen by a serving hatch. Now it was a cramped office, two walls jammed with bookcases and a third occupied by a huge battered desk. The remaining wall was occupied by a set of french windows opening onto the rear deck. Rain left twisting slug trails down the windows, kicking up splashes from the half-submerged ceramic pots outside. Miriam planted the coffee mug in the middle of the pile of stuff that accumulated on her desk and frowned at the effect. “It’s a mess,” she said aloud, bemused. “How the hell did it get this untidy?”

“This is bad,” she said, standing in front of her desk. “You hear me?” The stubborn paperwork and scattering of gadgets stubbornly refused to obey, so she attacked them, sorting me letters into piles, opening unopened mail and discarding the junk, hunting receipts and filing bills. The desk turned out to be almost nine months’ deep in trivia, and cleaning it up was a welcome distraction from having to think about her experience at work. When the desk actually showed a clear surface—and she’d applied the kitchen cleaner to the coffee rings—she started on the e-mail. That took longer, and by the time she’d checked off everything in her in-box, the rain battering on the windows was falling out of a darkening sky as night fell.

When everything was looking shipshape, another thought struck her. “Paperwork. Hmm.” She went through into the hall and fetched the pink and green shoebox. Making a face, she upended it onto the desk. Papers mushroomed out, and something clattered and skittered onto the floor. “Huh?”

It was a paper bag. Something in it, a hard, cold nucleus, had spilled over the edge of the desk. She hunted around for a few seconds, then stooped and triumphantly deposited bag and contents next to the pile of yellowing clippings, rancid photocopies, and creamy documents. One of which, now that she examined it, looked like a birth certificate—no, one of those forms that gets filled in in place of a birth certificate when the full details are unknown. Baby Jane Doe, age approximately six weeks, weight blah, eye colour green, sex female, parents unknown… for a moment Miriam felt as if she was staring at it down a dark tunnel from a long way away.

Ignoring the thing-that-rattled, Miriam went through the papers and sorted these, too, into two stacks. Press clippings and bureaucracy. The clippings were mostly photocopies: They told a simple—if mysterious—tale that had been familiar to her since the age of four. A stabbing in the park. A young woman—apparently a hippie or maybe a Gypsy, judging by her strange clothes—found dead on the edge of a wooded area. The cause of death was recorded as massive blood loss caused by a deep wound across her back and left shoulder, inflicted by some kind of edged weapon, maybe a machete. That was unusual enough. What made it even more unusual was the presence of the six-week-old baby shrieking her little heart out nearby. An elderly man walking his dog had called the police. It was a seven-day wonder.

Miriam knew the end to that story lay somewhere in Morris and Iris Beckstein’s comforting arms. She’d done her best to edit this other dangling bloody end to the story out of her life. She didn’t want to be someone else’s child: She had two perfectly good parents of her own, and the common assumption that blood ties must be thicker than upbringing rankled. Iris’s history taught better—the only child of Holocaust refugees settled in an unfriendly English town after the war, she’d emigrated at twenty and never looked back after meeting and marrying Morris.

Miriam shook out the contents of the paper bag over the not-quite birth certificate. It was a lens-shaped silver locket on a fine chain. Tarnished and dull with age, its surface was engraved with some sort of crest of arms: a shield and animals. It looked distinctly cheap. “Hmm.” She picked it up and peered at it closely. This must be what Ma told me about, she thought. Valuable? There was some sort of catch under the chain’s loop. “I wonder…”

She opened it.

Instead of the lover’s photographs she’d half-expected, the interior of the shell contained a knotwork design, enamel painted in rich colours. Curves of rich ochre looped and inter-penetrated, weaving above and beneath a branch of turquoise. The design was picked out in silver—it was far brighter than the exposed outer case had suggested.

Miriam sighed and leaned back in her sprung office chair. “Well, there goes that possibility,” she told the press clippings gloomily. No photographs of her mother or long-lost father. Just some kind of tacky cloisonné knotwork design.

She looked at it closer. Knotwork. Vaguely Celtic knot-work. The left-hand cell appeared to be a duplicate of the right-hand one. If she traced that arc from the top left and followed it under the blue arc—

Why had her birth-mother carried this thing? What did it mean to her? (The blue arc connected through two interlinked green whorls.) What had she seen when she stared into it? Was it some kind of meditation aid? Or just a pretty picture? It certainly wasn’t any kind of coat of arms.

Miriam leaned back further. Lifting the locket, she dangled it in front of her eyes, letting the light from the bookcase behind her catch the silver highlights. Beads of dazzling blue-white heat seemed to trace their way around the knot’s heart. She squinted, feeling her scalp crawl. The sound of her heart beating in her ears became unbearably loud: There was a smell of burning toast, the sight of an impossible knot twisting in front of her eyes like some kind of stereoisogram forming in midair, trying to turn her head inside out—

Three things happened simultaneously. An abrupt sense of nausea washed over her, the light bulb went out, and her chair fell over backward.

“Ouch! Dammit!” Something thumped into Miriam’s side, doubling her over as she hit the ground and rolled over, pulling her arms in to protect her face. A racking spasm caught her by the gut, leaving her feeling desperately sick, and the arm of the chair came around and whacked her in the small of her back. Her knees were wet, and the lights were out. “Shit!” Her head was splitting, the heartbeat throb pounding like a jackhammer inside her skull, and her stomach was twisting. A sudden flash of fear: This can’t be a migraine. The onset is way too fast. Malignant hypertension?

The urge to vomit was strong, but after a moment it began to ebb. Miriam lay still for a minute, waiting for her stomach to come under control and the lights to come back on. Shit, am I having an aneurism? She gripped the locket so tightly that it threatened to dig a hole in her right fist. Carefully she tried to move her arms and legs: Everything seemed to be working and she managed a shallow sigh of relief. Finally, when she was sure her guts were going to be alright, she pushed herself up onto her knees and saw—

Trees.

Trees everywhere.

Trees inside her den.

Where did the walls go?

Afterward, she could never remember that next terrible minute. It was dark, of course, but not totally dark: She was in twilight on a forested slope, with beech and elm and other familiar trees looming ominously out of the twilight. The ground was dry, and her chair lay incongruously in a thicket of shrubbery not far from the base of a big maple tree. When she looked around, she could see no sign of her house, or the neighbouring apartments, or of the lights along the highway. Is there a total blackout? she wondered, confused. Did I sleepwalk or something?

She stumbled to her feet, her slippers treacherous on leaf mulch and dry grass stems. She shivered. It was cold—not quite winter-cold but too damned chilly to be wandering around in pants, a turtleneck, and bedroom slippers. And—

“Where the hell am I?” she asked the empty sky. “What the hell?”

Then the irony of her situation kicked in and she began to giggle, frightened and edgy and afraid she wouldn’t be able to stop. She did a twirl, in place, trying to see whatever there was to see. Sylvan idyll at nightfall, still-life with deranged dot-com refugee and brown office furniture. A gust of wind rattled the branches overhead, dislodging a chilly shower of fat drops: A couple landed on Miriam’s arms and face, making her shudder.

The air was fresh—too fresh. And there was none of the subliminal background hum of a big city, the noise that never completely died. It didn’t get this quiet even out in the country—and indeed, when she paused to listen, it wasn’t quiet; she could hear distant birdsong in the deepening twilight.

She took a deep breath, then another. Forced herself to thrust the hand with the locket into her hip pocket and let go of the thing. She patted it obsessively for a minute, whimpering slightly at the pain in her head. No holes, she thought vaguely. She’d once worn pants like this where her spare change had worn a hole in the pocket lining and eventually spilled on the ground, causing no end of a mess.

For some reason, the idea of losing possession of the locket filled her with a black terror.

She looked up. The first stars of evening were coming out, and the sky was almost clear of cloud. It was going to be a cold night.

“Item,” she muttered. “You are not at home. Ouch. You have a splitting headache and you don’t think you fell asleep in the chair, even though you were in it when you arrived here.” She looked around in wild surmise. She’d never been one for the novels Ben occasionally read, but she’d seen enough trashy TV serials to pick up the idea. Twilight Zone, Time Squad, programs like that. “Item: I don’t know where or when I am, but this ain’t home. Do I stay put and hope I automagically snap back into my own kitchen or… what? It was the locket, no two ways about it. Do I look at it again to go back?”

She fumbled into her pocket nervously. Her fingers wrapped around warm metal. She breathed more easily. “Right. Right.”

Just nerves, she thought. Alone in a forest at night—what lived here? Bears? Cougars? There could be anything here, anything at all. Be a fine joke if she went exploring and stepped on a rattler, wouldn’t it? Although in this weather… “I’d better go home,” she murmured to herself and was about to pull the locket out when she saw a flicker of light in the distance.

She was disoriented, tired, had just had a really bad day, and some cosmic trickster-god had dumped a magic amulet on her to see what she’d do with it. That was the only explanation, she reasoned afterward. A sane Miriam would have sat down and analysed her options, then assembled a plan of action. But it wasn’t a sane Miriam who saw those flickers of orange light and went crashing through the trees downhill toward them.

Lights. A jingle, as of chains. Thudding and hollow clonking noises—and low voices. She stumbled out into the sudden expanse of a trail—not a wide one, more of a hiking trail, the surface torn up and muddy. Lights! She stared at them, at the men on horseback coming down the trail toward her, the lantern held on a pole by the one in the lead. Dim light glinted off reflecting metal, helmet, and breastplate like something out of a museum. Someone called out something that sounded like: “Curl!” Look. He’s riding toward me, she thought dazedly. What’s that he’s—

Her guts liquid with absolute fright, she turned and ran. The flat crack of rifle fire sounded behind her, repeated short bursts firing into the night. Invisible fingers ripped at the branches overhead as Miriam heard voices raised in hue and cry behind her. Low branches scratched at her face as she ran, gasping and crying, uphill away from the path. More bangs, more gunshots—astonishingly few of them, but any at all was too many. She ran straight into a tree, fell back winded, brains rattling around inside her head like dried peas in a pod, then she pushed herself to her feet again faster than she’d have believed possible and stumbled on into the night, gasping for breath, praying for rescue.

Eventually she stopped. Somewhere along the way she’d lost her slippers. Her face and ribs felt bruised, her head was pounding, and she could barely breathe. But she couldn’t hear any sounds of pursuit. Her skin felt oddly tight, and everything was far too cold. As soon as she was no longer running, she doubled over and succumbed to a fit of racking coughs, prolonged by her desperate attempts to muffle them.

Her chest was on fire. Oh god, any god. Whoever put me here. I just want you to know that I hate you!

She stood up. Somewhere high overhead the wind sighed. Her skin itched with the fear of pursuit. I’ve got to get home, she realized. Now her skin crawled with another fear—fear that she might be wrong, that it wasn’t the locket at all, that it was something else she didn’t understand that had brought her here, that there was no way back and she’d be stranded—

When she flicked it open, the right-hand half of the locket crawled with light. Tiny specks of brilliance, not the phosphorescence of a watch dial or the bioluminescence of those plastic disposable flashlights that had become popular for a year or two, but an intense, bleached blue-white glare like a miniature star. Miriam panted, trying to let her mind drift into it, but after a minute she realized all she was achieving was giving herself a headache. “What did I do to make it work?” she mumbled, puzzled and frustrated and increasingly afraid. “If she could make it—”

Ah. That was what she’d been doing. Just relaxing, meditating. Wondering what the hell her birth-mother had seen in it. Miriam gritted her teeth. How was she going to re-create that sense of detached curiosity? Here in a wild forest at night, with strangers shooting at her in the dark? How—she narrowed her eyes. The headache. If I can see my way past it, I could—

The dots of light blazed up for a moment in glorious conflagration. Miriam jack-knifed forward, saw the orange washout of streetlights shining down on a well-mowed lawn. Then her stomach rebelled and this time she couldn’t keep it down. It was all she could do to catch her breath between heaves. Somehow her guts had been replaced by a writhing snake, and the racking spasms kept pulsing through her until she began to worry about tearing her oesophagus.

Noise of a car slowing—then speeding up again as the driver saw her vomiting. A yell from the window, inarticulate, something like “Drunk fucking bums!” Something clattered into the road. Miriam didn’t care. Dampness and cold clenched their icy fingers around her, but she didn’t care: She was back in civilization, away from the threatening trees and her pursuer. She stumbled off the front lawn of somebody’s house and sensed harsh asphalt beneath her bare feet, stones digging into her soles. A road sign said it was somewhere she knew. One of the other side roads off Grafton Street, which her road also opened off. She was less than half a mile from home.

Drip. She looked up. Drip. The rain began to fall again, sluicing down her aching face. Her clothes were stained and filthy with mud and vomit. Her legs were scratched and felt braised. Home. It was a primal imperative. Put one foot in front of another, she told herself through the deafening hammering in her skull. Her head hurt, and the world was spinning around her.

An indefinite time—perhaps ten minutes, perhaps half an hour—later, she saw a familiar sight through the downpour. Soaked to the skin and shivering, she nevertheless felt like a furnace. Her house seemed to shimmer like a mirage in the desert when she looked at it. And now she discovered another problem—she’d come out without her keys! Silly me, what was I thinking? she wondered vaguely. Nothing but this locket, she thought, weaving its chain around her right index finger.

The shed, whispered a vestige of cool control in the back of her head.

Oh, yes, the shed, she answered herself.

She stumbled around the side of her house, past the cramped green rug that passed for a yard, to the shed in back. It was padlocked, but the small side window wasn’t actually fastened and if you pulled just so it would open outward. It took her three tries and half a fingernail—the rain had warped the wood somewhat—but once open she could thrust an arm inside and fumble around for the hook with the key dangling from it on a loop. She fetched the key, opened the padlock—dropping it casually on the lawn—and found, taped to the underside of the workbench, the spare key to the french doors.

She was home.

Walk On The Wild Side

Somehow Miriam found her way upstairs. She worked this out when she awakened sprawled on her bed, feet freezing and hot shivers chasing across her skin while a platoon of miners with pickaxes worked her head over. It was her bladder that woke her up and led her still half-asleep to the bathroom, where she turned on all the lights, shot the deadbolt on the door, used the toilet, and rummaged around for an Advil to help with the hangover symptoms. “What you need is a good shower,” she told herself grimly, trying to ignore the pile of foul and stinking clothes on the floor that mingled with the towels she’d spilled everywhere the night before. Naked in a brightly lit pink and chromed bathroom, she spun the taps, sat on the edge of the bathtub, and tried to think her way past the haze of depression and pain.

“You’re a big girl,” she told the scalding hot waterfall as it gushed into the tub. “Big girls don’t get bent out of shape by little things,” she told herself. Like losing her job. “Big girls deal with divorces. Big girls deal with getting pregnant while they’re at school, putting the baby up for adoption, finishing med school, and retraining for another career when they don’t like the shitty options they get dealt. Big girls cope with marrying their boyfriends, then finding he’s been sleeping with their best friends. Big girls make CEOs shit themselves when they come calling with a list of questions. They don’t go crazy and think they’re wandering around a rainy forest being shot at by armoured knights with assault rifles.” She sniffed, on the edge of tears.

A first rational thought intruded: I’m getting depressed and that’s no good. Followed rapidly by a second one: Where’s the bubble bath? Bubble bath was fun. Bubble bath was a good thought. Miriam didn’t like wallowing in self-pity, although right now it was almost as tempting as a nice warm shower. She went and searched for the bubble bath, finally found the bottle in the trashcan—almost, but not entirely, empty. She held it under the tap and let the water rinse the last of the gel out, foaming and swirling around her feet.

Depression would be a perfectly reasonable response to losing my job, she told herself, if it was actually my fault. Which it wasn’t. Lying back in the scented water and inhaling steam. But going nuts? I don’t think so. She’d been through bad times. First the unplanned pregnancy by Ben, in her third year at college, too young and too early. She still couldn’t fully articulate her reasons for not having an abortion; maybe if that bitch from the student counselling service hadn’t simply assumed… but she’d never been one for doing what everyone expected her to do, and she’d been confident—maybe too confident—in her relationship with Ben. Hence the adoption. And then, a couple of years later when they got married, that hadn’t been the smartest thing she’d ever done either. With twenty-twenty hindsight it had been a response to a relationship already on the rocks, the kind that could only end in tears. But she’d weathered it all without going crazy or even having a small breakdown. Iron control, that’s me. But this new thing, the stumbling around the woods being shot at, seeing a knight, a guy in armour, with an M-16 or something—that was scary. Time to face the music. “Am I sane?” she asked the toilet duck.

Well, whatever this is, it ain’t in DSM-IV. Miriam racked her memory for decade-old clinical lectures. No way was this schizophrenia. The symptoms were all wrong, and she wasn’t hearing voices or feeling weird about people. It was just a single sharp incident, very vivid, realistic as—

She stared at her stained pants and turtleneck. “The chair,” she muttered. “If the chair’s missing, it was real. Or at least something happened.”

Paradoxically, the thought of the missing chair gave her something concrete to hang on to. Dripping wet, she stumbled downstairs. Her den was as she’d left it, except that the chair was missing and there were muddy footprints by the french doors. She knelt to examine the floor behind her desk. She found a couple of books, dislodged from the shelf behind her chair when she fell, but otherwise no sign of anything unexpected. “So it was real!”

A sudden thought struck her and she whirled then ran upstairs to the bathroom, wincing. The locket!—

It was in the pocket of her pants. Pulling a face, she carefully placed it on the shelf above the sink where she could see it, then got into the bathtub. I’m not going nuts, she thought, relaxing in the hot water. It’s real.

An hour later she emerged, feeling much improved. Hair washed and conditioned, nails carefully trimmed and stripped of the residue of yesterday’s polish, legs itching with mild razor-burn, and skin rosy from an exfoliating scrub, she felt clean, as if she’d succeeded in stripping away all the layers of dirt and paranoia that had stuck to her the day before. It was still only lunchtime, so she dressed again: an old T-shirt, jeans that had seen better days, and an old pair of sneakers.

The headache and chills subsided slowly, as did the lethargy. She headed downstairs slowly and dumped her dirty clothing in the washing machine. Then she poured herself a glass of orange juice and managed to force down one of the granola bars she kept for emergencies. This brought more thoughts to mind, and as soon as she’d finished eating she headed downstairs to poke around in the gloom of the basement.

The basement was a great big rectangular space under the floor of the house. The furnace, bolted to one wall, roared eerily at her; Ben had left lots of stuff with her, her parents had passed on a lot of their stuff too, and now one wall was faced in industrial shelving units.

Here was a box stuffed with old clothing that she kept meaning to schlep to a charity shop: not her wedding dress—which had gone during the angry month she filed for divorce—but ordinary stuff, too unimportant to repudiate. There was an old bag full of golf clubs, their chromed heads dull and speckled with rust. Ben had toyed with the idea of doing golf, thinking of it as a way up the corporate ladder. There was a dead lawn mower, an ancient computer of Ben’s—probably a museum piece by now—and a workbench with vice, saws, drill, and other woodworking equipment, and maybe the odd bloodstain from his failed attempts to be the man about the house. There on that high shelf was a shotgun and a box of shells. It had belonged to Morris, her father. She eyed it dubiously. Probably nobody had used it since Dad bought it decades ago, when he’d lived out west for a few years, and what she knew about shotguns could be written on one side of a postage stamp in very large letters, even though Morris had insisted on teaching her to use a handgun. Some wise words from the heavyweight course on industrial espionage techniques the Weatherman HR folks had paid for her to take two years ago came back: You’re a journalist, and these other folks are investigators. You’re none of you cops, none of you are doing anything worth risking your lives over, so you should avoid escalating confrontations. Guns turn any confrontation into a potentially lethal one. So keep them the hell out of your professional life! “Shotgun, no,” she mused. “But. Hmm. Handgun.” Must stop talking to myself, she resolved.

“Do I really expect them to follow me here?” she asked the broken chest freezer, which gaped uncomprehendingly at her. “Did I just dream it all?”

Back upstairs, she swiped her leather-bound planner from the desk and poured another glass of orange juice. Time to worry about the real world, she told herself. She went back to the hall and hit the “play” button on the answering machine. It was backed up with messages from the day before.

“Miriam? Andy here. Listen, a little bird told me about what happened yesterday and I think it sucks. They didn’t have any details, but I want you to know if you need some freelance commissions you should give me a call. Talk later? Bye.”

Andy was a junior editor on a rival tech-trade sheet. He sounded stiff and stilted when he talked to the telephone robot, not like a real person at all. But it still gave her a shiver of happiness, almost a feeling of pure joy, to hear from him. Someone cared, someone who didn’t buy the vicious lie Joe Dixon had put out. That bastard really got to me, Miriam wondered, relief replaced by a flash of anger at the way she’d been treated.

Another message, from Paulette. Miriam tensed. “Miriam, honey, let’s talk. I don’t want to rake over dead shit, but there’s some stuff I need to get straight in my head. Can I come around?”

She hit the “pause” button. Paulette sounded severely messed up. It was like a bucket of ice water down her spine. I did this. I got us both fired, she began thinking, and her knees tried to turn to jelly. Then she thought, Hold on. I didn’t fire anybody! That switched on the anger again, but left her feeling distinctly shaky. Sooner or later she’d have to talk to Paulie. Sooner or—

She hit the “next message” button again.

Heavy breathing, then: “Bitch. We know where you live. Heard about you from our mutual friend Joe. Keep your nose out of our business or you’ll be fucking sorry”—click.

Wide-eyed, she turned and looked over her shoulder. But the yard was empty and the front door was locked. “Bastards,” she spat. But there was no caller-ID on the message and probably not enough to get the police interested in it. Especially not if Joe’s minions at The Weatherman started mud slinging with forged fire-wall logs: They could make her look like the next Unabomber if they wanted to. For a moment, outrage blurred her vision. She forced herself to stop panting and sit down again, next to the treacherous, venomous answering machine. “Threaten me in my own home, will you? Fuck.”

The gravity of her situation was only just sinking in. “Better keep a gun under my pillow,” she muttered under her breath. “Bastards.” The opposite wall seemed to be pulsing slightly, a reaction to her fury. She felt her fingers clenching involuntarily. “Bastards.” Kicking her out of her job and smearing her reputation wasn’t enough for them, was it? She’d show them—

—Something.

After a minute she calmed down enough to face the remaining message on the answering machine. She had difficulty forcing herself to press the button. But the next message wasn’t another threat—quite the opposite. “Miriam, this is Steve from The Herald. I heard the news. Get in touch.”

For that, she hit the “pause” button yet again, and this time frowned and scribbled a note to herself. Steve wasn’t a chatty editor, like Andy; Steve treated words like dollar bills. And he wouldn’t be getting in touch if it didn’t involve work, even freelance work. A year ago he’d tried to head-hunt her, offering a big pay raise and a higher position. Taking stock of her options—and when they were due to mature—she’d turned him down. Now she had reason to regret it.

That was the end of her mailbox, and she hit the “erase” button hard enough to hurt her finger. Two editors talking about work, a former office mate wanting to chew over the corpse—and what sounded like a death threat. This isn’t going to go away, she realized. I’m in it up to my neck now. A stab of guilt: So is Paulie. I’ll have to talk to her. A ray of hope: For someone who’s unemployed, I sure get a lot of business calls. A conclusion: Just as long as I stay sane I should be all right.

The living room was more hospitable right now than the chairless den, its huge french doors streaked with rain falling from a leaden sky. Miriam went through, considered building a fire in the hearth, and collapsed into the sofa instead. The combination of fear, anger, and tension had drained most of her energy. Opening her planner, she turned to a blank page and began writing:

Miriam’s eyes narrowed and she chewed the cap of her pen. This was going to take planning, but at least it was beginning to sound like she had her ducks lined up in a row. She began jotting down tasks:

That afternoon Miriam went shopping. It was, she figured, retail therapy. Never mind the job-hunting, there’d be time for that when she knew for sure whether or not she was going insane in some obscurely non-standard manner. It was October, a pretty time of year to go hiking, but fall had set in and things could turn nasty at the drop of a North Atlantic depression. Extensive preparations were therefore in order. She eventually staggered home under the weight of a load of camping equipment: tent, jacket, new boots, portable stove. Getting it all home on the T was a pain, but at least it told her that she could walk under the weight.

A couple of hours later she was ready. She checked her watch for the fourth time. She’d taken two ibuprofen tablets an hour ago and the propionic acid inhibitor should be doing its job by now.

She tightened the waist strap of her pack and stretched nervously. The garden shed was cramped and dark and there didn’t seem to be room to turn around with her hiking gear and backpack on. Did I put the spare key back? she asked herself. A quick check proved that she had. Irrelevant thoughts were better than Am I nuts?—as long as they weren’t an excuse for prevarication.

Okay, here goes nothing.

The locket. She held it in her left hand. With her right she patted her right hip pocket. The pistol was technically illegal—but as Ben had pointed out, he’d rather deal with an unlicensed firearms charge than his own funeral. The rattling memory of a voice snarling at her answering machine, the echo of rifle fire in the darkness, made her pause for a moment. “Do I really want to do this?” she asked herself. Life was complicated enough as it was.

Hell yes! Because either I’m mad, and it doesn’t matter, or my birth-mother was involved in something huge. Something much bigger than a billion-dollar money-laundering scam through Proteome and Biphase. And if they killed her because of it—A sense of lingering injustice prodded her conscience. “Okay,” she told herself. “Let’s do it. I’m right behind myself.” She chuckled grimly and flicked the locket open, half-expecting to see a photograph of a woman, or a painting, or something else to tell her she needed help—

The knot tried to turn her eyes inside out, and then the hut wasn’t there any more.

Miriam gasped. The air was cold, and her head throbbed—but not as badly as last time.

“Wow.” She carefully pushed the locket into her left pocket, then pulled out her pocket dictaphone. “Memo begins: Wednesday, October 16, 8 p.m. It’s dark and the temperature’s about ten degrees colder… here. Wherever the hell ‘here’ is.” She turned around slowly. Trees, skeletal, stretched off in all directions. She was standing on a slope, not steep but steep enough to explain why she’d skidded. “No sign of people. I can either go look for the chair or not. Hmm. I think not”

She looked up. Wind-blown clouds scudded overhead, beneath a crescent moon. She didn’t turn her flashlight on. No call for attracting attention, she reminded herself. Just look around, then go home…

“I’m an astronaut,” she murmured into the dictaphone. She took a step forward, feeling her pack sway on her back, toward a big elm tree. Turning around, she paused, then knelt and carefully placed an old potsherd from the shed on the leafy humus where she’d been standing. “Neil and Buzz only spent eight hours on the moon on that first trip. Only about four hours on the surface, in two excursions. This is going to be my moonwalk.” As long as I don’t get my damn fool self shot, she reminded herself. Or stuck. She’d brought her sleeping bag and tent, and a first-aid kit, and Ben’s pistol (just in case, and she felt wicked because of it). But this didn’t feel like home. This felt like the wild woods—and Miriam wasn’t at home in the woods. Especially when there were guys with guns who shot at her like it was hunting season and Jewish divorcees weren’t on the protected list.

Miriam took ten paces up the hill, then stopped and held her breath, listening. The air was chilly and damp, as if a fog was coming in off the river. There was nothing to hear—no traffic noise, no distant rumble of trains or jets. A distant avian hooting might signify an owl hunting, but that was it. “It’s really quiet,” Miriam whispered into her mike. “I’ve never heard it so silent before.”

She shivered and looked around. Then she took her small flashlight out and slashed a puddle of light across the trees, casting long sharp shadows. “There!” she exclaimed. Another five paces and she found her brown swivel chair lying on a pile of leaf mould. It was wet and thoroughly the worse for wear, and she hugged it like a long-lost lover as she lifted it upright and carefully put it down. “Yes!”

Her temples throbbed, but she was overjoyed. “I found it,” she confided in her dictaphone. “I found the chair. So this is the same place.” But the chair was pretty messed up. Almost ruined, in fact—it had been a second hand retread to begin with, and a night out in the rainy woods hadn’t helped any.

“It’s real,” she said quietly, with profound satisfaction. “I’m not going mad. Or if I’m confabulating, I’m doing it so damn consistently—” She shook her head. “My birth-mother came here. Or from here. Or something. And she was stabbed, and nobody knows why, or who did it.” That brought her back to reality. It raised echoes of her own situation, hints of anonymous threatening phone calls, and other unfinished business. She sighed, then retraced her steps to the potsherd. Massaging her scalp, she sat down on the spot, with her back to the nearby elm tree.

She stopped talking abruptly, thrust the dictaphone into her hip pocket, pulled out the locket, and held her breath.

The crunch of a breaking branch carried a long way in the night. Spooked, she flicked the locket open, focused on its depths, and steeled herself to face the coming hangover: She really didn’t want to be out in the woods at night—at least, not without a lot more preparation.

The next morning—after phoning Andy at The Globe and securing a commission for a business supplement feature on VC houses, good for half a month’s income, with the promise of a regular weekly slot if her features were good enough—Miriam bit the bullet and phoned Paulette. She was nerving herself for an answering machine on the fifth ring when Paulette answered.

“Hello?” She sounded hesitant—unusual for Paulie.

“Hi, Paulie! It’s me. Sorry I didn’t get back to you yesterday, I had a migraine and a lot of, uh, issues to deal with. I’m just about getting my head back together. How are you doing? Are you okay?”

A brief silence. “About as well as you’d expect,” Paulette said guardedly.

“Have you had any, uh, odd phone calls?”

“Sort of,” Paulette replied.

Miriam tensed. What’s she concealing?

“They sent me a reemployment offer,” Paulie continued, guardedly.

“They did, did they?” asked Miriam. She waited a beat. “Are you going to take it?”

“Am I, like hell!” Miriam relaxed slightly. Paulette sounded furious. She hadn’t expected Paulie to roll over, but it was good to get this confirmation.

“That bad, huh? Want to talk about it? You free?”

“My days are pretty open right now—listen, are you busy? How about I come over to your place?”

“Great,” Miriam said briskly. “I was worried about you, Paulie. After I got past being worried about me, I guess.”

“Well. Should I bring a pizza?”

“Phew…” Miriam took stock. Just a bitch session together? Or something more going on? “Yeah, let’s do that. I’ll lay on the coffee right away.”

“That’d be wonderful,” Paulette said gratefully.

After she’d put the phone down, Miriam pondered her motives. She and Paulette had worked together for three years and had hung out together in their off-hours. Some people you met at work, socialized with, then lost contact after moving on; but a few turned into friends for life. Miriam wasn’t sure which Paulie was going to turn out to be. Why did she turn the reemployment offer down? Miriam wondered. Despite being shell-shocked from the crazy business with the locket, she kept circling back to the Monday morning disaster with a rankling sense of injustice. The sooner they blew the lid off it in public, the sooner she could go back to living a normal life. But then the locket kept coming back up. I need a sanity check, Miriam decided. Why not Paulie? Better to have her think she’d gone nuts than someone whose friendship went back a long way and who knew Iris. Or was it?

An hour later the doorbell rang. Miriam stood up and went to answer it, trying to suppress her worries about how Paulette might be coming. She was waiting on the doorstep, impatiently tapping one heel, with a large shopping bag in hand. “Miriam!” Paulette beamed at her.

“Come in, come in.” Miriam retreated. “Hey, what’s that? Have you been all right?”

“I’ve been worse.” Paulie bounced inside and shut the door behind her, then glanced around curiously. “Hey, neat. I was worried about you, after I got home. You didn’t look real happy, you know?”

“Yeah. Well, I wasn’t.” Miriam relieved her of her coat and led her into the living room. “I’m really glad you’re taking it so calmly. For me, I put in three years and nothing to show for it but hard work and junk bonds—then some asshole phoned me and warned me off. How about you? Have you had any trouble?”

Paulette peered at her curiously. “What kind of warning?”

“Oh, he kind of intimated that he was a friend of Joe’s, and I’d regret it if I stuck my nose in any deeper. Playing at goodfellas, okay? I’d been worrying about you … What’s this about a job offer?”

“I, uh—” Paulette paused. “They offered me my job back with strings attached,” she said guardedly. “Assholes. I was going to accept till they faxed through the contract.”

“So why didn’t you sign?” Miriam asked, pouring a mug of coffee while Paulette opened the pizza boxes.

“I’ve seen nondisclosure agreements, Miriam. I used to be a paralegal till I got sick of lawyers, remember? This wasn’t a nondisclosure agreement; it was a fucking straitjacket. If I’d signed it, I wouldn’t even own the contents of my own head—before and after working for them. Guess they figured you were the ringleader, right?”

“Hah.” There was a bitter taste in Miriam’s mouth, and it wasn’t from the coffee. “So. Found any work?”

“Got no offers yet.” Paulette took a bite of pizza to cover her disquiet. “Emphasis on the yet. You?”

“I landed a freelance feature already. It’s not going to cover the salary, but it goes a hell of a way. I was wondering—”

“You want to carry on working the investigation.”

It wasn’t a question. Miriam nodded. “Yeah. I want to get the sons of bitches, now more than ever. But something tells me moving too fast is going to be a seriously bad idea. I mean, there’s a lot of money involved. If we can redo the investigative steps we’ve got so far, I figure this time we ought to go to the FBI first—and then pick a paper. I think I could probably auction the story, but I’d rather wait until the feds are ready to start arresting people. And I’d like to disappear for a bit while they’re doing that.” A sudden bolt of realisation struck Miriam, so that she almost missed Paulette’s reply: The locket! That’s one place they won’t be able to follow me! If—

“Sounds possible.” Paulie looked dubious. “It’s not going to be easy duplicating the research—especially now that they know we stumbled across them. Do you really think it’s that dangerous?”

“If it’s drugs money, you can get somebody shot for a couple of thousand bucks. This is way bigger than that, and thanks to our friend Joe, they now know where we live. I don’t want to screw up again. You with me?”

After a moment, Paulette nodded. “I want them too.” A flash of anger. “The bastards don’t think I matter enough to worry about.”

“But first there’s something I need to find out. I need to vanish for a weekend,” Miriam said slowly, a fully formed plan moving into focus in her mind—one that would hopefully answer several questions. Like whether someone else could see her vanish and reappear, and whether she’d have somewhere to hole up if the anonymous threats turned real—and maybe even a chance to learn more about her enigmatic birth-mother than Iris could tell her.

“Oh?” Paulette perked up. “Going to think things over? Or is there a male person in play?” Male persons in play were guaranteed to get Paulie’s notice: Like Miriam, she was a member of the early thirties divorcee club.

“Neither.” Miriam considered her next words carefully. “I ran across something odd on Monday night. Probably nothing to do with our story, but I’m planning on investigating it and I’ll be away for a couple of days. Out of town.”

“Tell me more!”

“I, um, can’t. Yet.” Miriam had worked it through. The whole story was just too weird to lay on Paulie without some kind of proof to get her attention. “However, you can do me a big favour, okay? I need to get to a rest area just off a road near Amesbury with some hiking gear. Yeah, I know that sounds weird, but it’s the best way to make sure nobody’s following me. If you could ride out with me and drive my car home, then put it back there two days later, that would be really good.”

“That’s … odd.” Paulette looked puzzled. “What’s with the magical mystery tour?”

Miriam improvised fast “I could tell you, but then I’d have to get you to sign a nondisclosure agreement that would make anything The Weatherman offered you look liberal. And the whole thing is super secret; my source might spike the whole deal if I let someone in on it without prior permission. I’ll be able to tell you when you pick me up afterward, though.” If things went right, she’d be able to tell a more-than-somewhat-freaked Paulie why she’d vanished right in front of her eyes and then reappeared in front of them. “And I want you to promise to tell nobody about it until you pick me up again, okay?”

“Well, okay. It’s not as if I don’t have time on my hands.” Paulette frowned. “When are you planning on doing your disappearing act? And when do you want picking up?”

“I was—they’re picking me up tomorrow at 2 p.m. precisely,” said Miriam. “And I’ll be showing up exactly forty-eight hours later.” She grinned. “If you lie in wait—pretend to be eating your lunch or something—you can watch them pick me up.”

Friday morning dawned cold but clear, and Miriam showered then packed her camping equipment again. The doorbell rang just after noon. It was Paulette, wearing a formal black suit. “My God, is it a funeral?”

“Had a job interview this morning.” Paulette pulled a face. “I got sick of sitting at home thinking about those bastards shafting us and decided to do something for number one in the meantime.”

“Well, good for you.” Miriam picked up her backpack and led Paulie out the front door, then locked up behind her. She opened her car, put the pack in, then opened the front doors. “Did it go well?” she asked, pulling her seat belt on.

“It went like—” Paulette pulled another face. “Listen, I’m a business researcher, right? Just because I used to be a paralegal doesn’t mean that I want to go back there.”

“Lawyers,” Miriam said as she started the engine. “Lots of work in that field, I guarantee you.”

“Oh yeah,” Paulette agreed. She pulled the sun visor down and looked at herself in the mirror. “Fuck, do I really look like that? I’m turning into my first ex-boss.”

“Yes indeed, you look just like—naah.” Miriam thought better of it and rephrased: “Congresswoman Paulette Milan, from Cambridge. You have the floor, ma’am.”

“The first ex-boss is in politics now,” Paulie observed gloomily. “A real dragon.”

“Bitch.”

“You didn’t know her.”

They drove on in amiable silence for the best part of an hour, out into the wilds of Massachusetts. Up the coast, past Salem, out toward Amesbury, off Interstate 95 and on to a four-lane highway, then finally a side road. Miriam had been here before, years ago, with Ben, when things had been going okay. There was a rest area up on a low hill overlooking Browns Point, capped by a powder of trees, gaunt skeletons hazed in red and auburn foliage at this time of year. Miriam pulled up at the side of the road just next to the rest area and parked. “Okay, this is it,” she said. There were butterflies in her stomach again: I’m going to go through with it, she realized to her surprise.

“This?” Paulette looked around, surprised. “But this is nowhere!”

“Yeah, that’s right. Best place to do this.” Miriam opened the glove locker. “Look, I brought my old camcorder. No time for explanations. I’m going to get out of the car, grab my pack, and walk over there. I want you to film me. In ten minutes either I’ll tell you why I asked you to do this and you can call me rude names—or you’ll know to take the car home and come back the day after tomorrow to pick me up. Okay?”

She got out in a hurry and collected her pack from the trunk. Then, without waiting to see what Paulette did, she walked over to the middle of the parking lot. Breathing deeply, she hiked the pack up onto her back and fastened the chest strap—then pulled the locket out of the outer pocket where she’d stashed it.

Feeling acutely self-conscious, she flicked it open and turned her back on the parked car. Raised it to her face and stared into the enamelled knot painted inside it. This is stupid, a little voice told her. And you’re going to have your work cut out convincing Paulie you don’t need to see a shrink.

Someone was calling her name sharply. She screened it out. Something seemed to move inside the knot—

Hide-And-Seek

This time it was raining gently.

Miriam winced at the sudden stabbing in her head and pocketed the locket. Then she did what she’d planned all along: a three-sixty-degree scan that took in nothing but autumn trees and deadfall. Next, she planted her pack, transferred the pistol to her right hip pocket, retrieved her camera and the recorder, and started taking snapshots as she dictated a running commentary.

“The time by my watch is fourteen twelve hours. Precipitation is light and intermittent, cloud cover is about six-sevenths, wind out of the northwest and chilly, breeze of around five miles per hour. I think.”

Snap, snap, snap: The camera had room for a thousand or so shots before she’d have to change hard disks. She slung it around her neck and shouldered the pack again. With the Swiss army knife Ben had given her on their second wedding anniversary—an odd present from a clueless, cheating husband with no sense of the difference between jewellery and real life—she shaved a patch of bark above eye level on the four nearest trees, then fished around for some stones to pile precisely where she’d come through. (It wouldn’t do to go back only to come out in the middle of her own car. If that was possible, of course.)

As she worked, she had the most peculiar sensation: I’m on my second moon mission, she thought. Did any of the Apollo astronauts go to the moon more than once? Here she was, not going crazy, recording notes and taking photographs to document her exploration of this extraordinary place that simply wasn’t like home. Whatever “home” meant, now that gangsters had her number.

“I still don’t know why I’m here,” she recorded, “but I’ve got the same alarming prefrontal headache, mild hot and cold chills, probable elevated blood pressure as last time. Memo: Next time bring a sphygmomanometer; I want to monitor for malignant hypertension. And urine sample bottles.” The headache, she realized, was curiously similar to a hangover, itself caused by dehydration that triggered inflammation of the meninges. Miriam continued: “Query physiological responses to … whatever it is that I do. When I focus on the knot. Memo: Scan the locket, use Photoshop to rescale it and print it on paper, then see if the pattern works as a focus when I look at it on a clipboard. More work for next time.”

They won’t be able to catch me here, she thought fiercely as she scanned around, this time looking for somewhere suitable to pitch her tent and go to ground. I’ll be able to nail them and they won’t even be able to find me to lay a finger on me! But there was more to it than that, she finally admitted to herself as she hunted for a flat spot. The locket had belonged to her birth-mother, and receiving it had raised an unquiet ghost. Somebody had stabbed her, somebody who had never been found. Miriam wouldn’t be able to lay that realization to rest again until she learned what this place had meant to her mother—and why it had killed her.

With four hours to go before sunset, Miriam was acutely aware that she didn’t have any time to waste. The temperature would dip toward frost at night and she planned to be well dug-in first. Planting her backpack at the foot of the big horse chestnut tree, she gathered armfuls of dry leaves and twigs and scattered them across it—nothing that would fool a real woodsman, but enough to render it inconspicuous at a distance. Then she walked back and forth through a hundred-yard radius, pacing out the forest, looking for its edge. That there was an edge came as no surprise: The steep escarpment was in the same place here as on the hiking map of her own world that she’d brought along. Where the ground fell away, there was a breathtaking view of autumnal forest marching down toward a valley floor. The ocean was probably eight to ten miles due east, out of sight beyond hills and dunes, but she had a sense of its presence all the same.

Looking southwest, she saw a thin coil of smoke rising—a settlement of some kind, but small. No roads or telegraph poles marred the valley, which seemed to contain nothing but trees and bushes and the odd clearing. She was alone in the woods, as alone as she’d ever been. She looked up. Thin cirrus stained the blue sky, but there were no jet contrails.

“The area appears to be thinly populated,” she muttered into her dictaphone. “They’re burning something—coal or wood—at the nearest settlement. There are no telegraph poles, roads, or aircraft. The air doesn’t smell of civilization. No noise to speak of, just birds and wind and trees.”

She headed back to her clearing to orient herself, then headed on in the opposite direction, down the gentle slope away from her pack. “Note: Keep an eye open for big wildlife. Bears and stuff.” She patted her right hip pocket nervously. Would the pistol do much more than annoy a bear? She hadn’t expected the place to be quite this desolate. There were no bears, but she ran across a small stream—nearly fell into it, in fact.

There was no sign of an edge to the woods, in whichever direction she went. Nor were there signs of habitation other than the curl of smoke she’d seen. It was four o’clock now. She returned to her clearing, confident that nobody was around, and unstrapped her tent from the backpack. It took half an hour to get the dome tent erected, and another half-hour with the netting and leaves to turn it into something that could be mistaken for a shapeless deadfall. She spent another fifteen minutes returning to the stream to fill her ten-litre water carrier. Another half-hour went on digging a hole nearby, then she took ten minutes to run a rope over a bough and hoist her bag of food out of reach of the ground. Darkness found her lighting her portable gas stove to boil water for her tea. I did it, she thought triumphantly. I didn’t forget anything important! Now all she had to do was make it through tomorrow and the morning of the next day without detection.

The night grew very cold without a fire, but her sleeping bag was almost oppressively hot with the tent zipped shut. Miriam slept lightly, starting awake at the slightest noise—worried at the possibility of bears or other big animals wandering through her makeshift camp, spooked by the sigh of wind and the patter of a light predawn rainfall. Once she dreamed of wolves howling in the distance. But dawn arrived without misadventure and dragged her bleary-eyed from the tent to squat over the trench she’d remembered to dig the day before. “The Girl Scout training pays off at last,” she dictated with a sardonic drawl.

A tin of sausages and beans washed down with strong black coffee made a passable breakfast. “Now what?” she asked herself. “Do I wait it out with the camp or go exploring?”

For a moment, Miriam quailed. The enormity of the wilderness around her was beginning to grind on her nerves, as was the significance of the situation she’d thrown herself into. “I could break a leg here and nobody would ever find me. Or—” Gunfire in the night. “Someone stabbed my mother, and she didn’t come here to escape. There must be a reason why. Mustn’t there?”

Something about the isolation made her want to chatter, to fill up the oppressive silence. But the words that tumbled out didn’t tell her much, except that she was—Let’s face it. I’m scared. This wasn’t the sensible thing to do, was it? But I haven’t been doing sensible properly since I got myself fired on Monday.

Unzipping the day pack from her backpack, she filled it with necessities, then set out for the escarpment.

It was a clear, cold morning, and the wisp of smoke she’d seen yesterday had disappeared. But she knew roughly where she’d seen it, and a careful scan of the horizon with binoculars brought it into focus once more—a pause in the treeline, punctuated by nearly invisible roofs. At a guess, it was about three miles away. She glanced at the sky and chewed on her lower lip: Doable, she decided, still half-unsure that it was the right thing to do. But I’ll go out of my skull if I wait here two days, and Paulie won’t be back until tomorrow. Bearing and range went into her notepad and onto the map, and she blazed a row of slashes on every fifth tree along the ridgeline to help her on the way back. The scarp was too steep to risk on her own, but if she went along the crest of the ridge, she could take the easy route down into the valley.

Taking the easy route was not, as it happened, entirely safe. About half a mile farther on—half a mile of plodding through leaf mounds, carefully bypassing deadfalls, and keeping a cautious eye open—an unexpected sound made Miriam freeze, her heart in her mouth and ice in her veins. Metal, she thought. That was a metallic noise! Who’s there? She dropped to a squat with her back against a tree as a horse or mule snorted nearby.

The sound of hooves was now audible, along with a creaking of leather and the occasional clatter or jingle of metalwork. Miriam crouched against the tree, very still, sweat freezing in the small of her back, trying not to breathe. She couldn’t be sure, but it sounded like a single set of hooves. With her camouflage-patterned jacket, knitted black face mask, and a snub-nosed pistol clutched in her right hand, she was a sight to terrify innocent eyes—but she was frightened half out of her own wits.

She held perfectly still as a peculiarly dressed man led a mule past, not ten yards away from her. The animal was heavily overloaded, bulging wicker baskets towering over its swaying back. Its owner wore leggings of some kind, but was swathed from head to knees in what looked like an ancient and moth-eaten blanket. He didn’t look furtive; he just looked dirt-poor, his face lined and tanned from exposure to the weather.

The mule paused. Almost absently, its owner reached out and whacked it across the hindquarters with his rod. He grunted something in what sounded like German, only softer, less sibilant.

Miriam watched, fear melting into fascination. That was a knife at his belt, under the blanket—a great big pigsticker of a knife, almost a short sword. The mule made an odd sort of complaining noise and began moving again. What’s in the baskets? she wondered. And where’s he taking it?

There were clearly people living in these woods. Better be careful, she told herself, taking deep breaths to calm down as she waited for him to pass out of sight. She pondered again whether or not she shouldn’t go straight back to her campsite. In the end curiosity won out—but it was curiosity tempered by edgy caution.

An hour later, Miriam found a path wandering among the trees. It wasn’t a paved road by any stretch of the imagination, but the shrubbery to either side had been trampled down and the path itself was muddy and flat: Fresh road-apples told her which way the man with the mule had gone. She slashed a marker on the tree where her path intersected the road, crudely scratching in a bearing and distance as digits. If her growing suspicion was true, these people wouldn’t be able to make anything of it. She picked her way through the trees along one side of the path, keeping it just in sight. Within another half-mile the trees ended in a profusion of deadfalls and stumps, some of which sprouted amazing growths of honey fungus. Miriam picked her way farther away from the path, then hunkered down, brought out binoculars and dictaphone, and gave voice to her fascination.

“This is incredible! It’s like a museum diorama of a medieval village in England, only—Eww, I sure wouldn’t drink from that stream. The stockade is about two hundred yards away and they’ve cleared the woods all around it.

There are low stone walls, with no cement, around the field. It’s weird, all these rows running across it like a patchwork quilt made from pin-stripe fabric.”

She paused, focusing her binoculars in on a couple of figures walking in the near distance. They were close enough to see her if they looked at the treeline, so she instinctively hunched lower, but they weren’t paying attention to the forest. One of them was leading a cow—a swaybacked beast like something from a documentary about India. The buildings were grayish, the walls made of stacked bundles of something or other, and the roofs were thatched—not the picturesque golden colour of the rural English tourist trap she’d once stayed in outside Oxford, but the real thing, gray and sagging. “There are about twelve buildings; none of them have windows. The road is unpaved, a mud track. There are chickens or some kind of fowl there, pecking in the dirt. It looks sleazy and tumbledown.”

She tracked after the human figures, focused on the stockade. ‘There’s a gate in the stockade and a platform or tower behind it. Something big’s in there, behind the wall, but I can’t see it from here. A long house? No, this doesn’t look … wrong period. These aren’t Vikings, there’s, uh—”

Around the curve of the stockade an ox came into view, dragging some kind of appliance—a wooden plough, perhaps. The man walking behind it looked as tired as the animal. “They’re all wearing those blankets. Women too. That was a woman feeding the chickens. With a headscarf wrapped around her face like a Muslim veil. But the men wear pretty much the same, too. This place looks so poor. Neglected. That guy with the mule—it must be the equivalent of a BMW in this place!”

Miriam felt distinctly uneasy. History book scenes were outside her experience—she was a creature of the city, raised with the bustle and noise of urban life, and the sordid poverty of the village made her feel unaccountably guilty. But it left questions unanswered. ‘This could be the past; we know the Vikings reached New England around the eleventh century. Or it could be somewhere else. How can I tell if I can’t get in and see what’s inside the stockade? I think I need an archaeologist.”

Miriam crouched down and began to snap off photographs. Here three hens pecked aimlessly at the dirt by an open doorway, the door itself a slab of wood leaning drunkenly against the wall of the hut. There a woman (or a man, the shapeless robe made it impossible to be sure) bent over a wooden trough, emptying a bucket of water into it and then lifting and pounding something from within. Miriam focused closer—

“Wer find thee?” Someone piped at her.

Miriam jolted around and stared: The someone stared right back, frozen, eyes wide. He looked to be about fourteen or fifteen years old, dressed in rags and barefoot: He was shorter than she was. Pipecleaner arms, legs like wire, big brown eyes, and a mess of badly trimmed hair in a pudding-bowl cut. Time slowed to a crawl. That’s a skin infection, she realized, her guts turning to ice as she focused on a red weal on the side of his neck. He was skinny, not as thin as a famine victim but by no means well-fed. He had a stick, clenched nervously in his hands, which he was bringing up—

Miriam glared at him and straightened up. Her right hand went to her hip pocket, and she fumbled for the treacherous opening. “You’ll be sorry,” she snapped, surprised at herself. It was the first thing that entered her head. Her hand closed on the butt of the pistol, but she couldn’t quite draw it—it was snagged on something.

Oh shit. She yanked at her pocket desperately, keeping her eyes on his face, despite knees that felt like jelly and a churning cold in her gut. She had a strong flashback to the one time she was mugged, a desperate sense of helplessness as she tried to disentangle the gun from her pocket lining and bring it out before the villager hit her with his stick.

But he didn’t. Instead, his eyes widened. He opened his mouth and shouted, “An solda’des Koen!” He turned, dropping the stick, and darted away before Miriam could react. A moment later she heard him wailing, “An solda!”

“Shit.” The gun was in her hand, all but forgotten. Terror lent her feet wings. She clutched her camera and ran like hell, back toward the forest, heedless of any noise she might make. He nearly had me! He’ll be back with help! I’ve got to get out of here! Breathless fear drove her until branches scratched at her face and she was panting. Then the low apple trees gave way to taller, older trees and a different quality of light. She staggered along, drunkenly, as behind her a weird hooting noise unlike any horn she’d heard before split the quiet.

Ten minutes later she stopped and listened, wheezing for breath as she tried to get her heart under control. She had run parallel to the path, off to one side. Every instinct was screaming at her to run but she was nearly winded, so she listened instead. Apart from the horn blasts, there were no sounds of pursuit. Why aren’t they following me? she wondered, feeling ill with uncertainty. What’s wrong? After a moment she remembered her camera: She’d lost the lens cap in her mad rush. “Damn, I could have broken my ankle,” she muttered. “They’d have caught me for—” she stopped.

“That look in his eye.” Very carefully, she unslung the camera and slid it into a big outer hip pocket. She glanced around the clearing sharply, then spent a moment untangling the revolver from her other pocket. Now that she had all the time in the world, it was easy. “He was scared,” she told herself, wondering. “He was terrified of me! What was that he was shouting? Was he warning the others off?”

She began to walk again, wrapped in a thoughtful silence. There were no sounds of pursuit. Behind her the village hid in the gloom, like a terrified rabbit whose path had just crossed a fox on the prowl. “Who are you hiding from?” she asked her memory of the boy with the stick. “And who did you mistake me for?”

It was raining again, and the first thing she noticed once she crossed over—through the blinding headache—was that Paulette was bouncing up and down like an angry squirrel, chattering with indignation behind the camcorder’s view-finder. “Idiot! What the hell do you think you were doing?” she demanded as Miriam opened the passenger door and dumped her pack on the backseat. “I almost had a heart attack! That’s the second time you’ve nearly given me one this week!”

“I said it would be a surprise, right?” Miriam collapsed into the passenger seat. “God, I reek. Get me home and once I’ve had a shower I’ll explain everything. I promise.”

Paulette drove in tight-lipped silence. Finally, during a moment when they were stationary at a traffic light, she said: “Why me?”

Miriam considered for a moment. “You don’t know my mother.”

“That’s—oh. I see, I think. Anything else?”

“Yeah. I trusted you to keep your mouth shut and not to panic.”

“Uh-huh. So what have you gotten yourself into this time?”

“I’m not sure. Could be the story of the century—the second one this week. Or it could be a very good reason indeed for burying something and walking away fast. I’ve got some ideas—more, since I spent a whole day and a half over there—but I’m still not sure.”

“Where’s over there? I mean, where did you go?” The car moved forward.

“Good question. The straight answer is: I’m not sure—the geography is the same, the constellations are the same, but the landscape’s different in places and there’s an honest-to-god medieval village in a forest. And they don’t speak English. Listen, after I’ve had my shower, how about I buy supper? I figure I owe you for dropping this on your lap.”

“You sure do,” Paulette said vehemently. “After you vanished, I went home and watched the tape six times before I believed what I’d seen with my own two eyes.” Her hands were white on the steering wheel. “Only you could fall into something this weird!”

“Remember Hunter S. Thompson’s First Law of Gonzo Journalism: ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get weird’?” Miriam chuckled, but there was an edge to it. Everywhere she looked there were buildings and neon lights and traffic. “God, I feel like I spent the weekend in the Third World. Kabul.” The car smelled of plastic and deodorant, and it was heavenly—the stink of civilization. “Listen, I haven’t had anything decent to eat for days. When we get home I’m ordering take out. How does Chinese sound?”

“I can cope with that.” Paulette made a lazy right turn and slid into the slow-moving stream of traffic. “Don’t feel like cooking?”

“I’ve got to have a shower,” said Miriam. “Then I’ve got a weekend of stuff to put in the washing machine, several hundred pictures to download and index, memos to load into the computer, and an explanation. If you figure I can do all that and a pot roast too, then you don’t know me as well as I think you do.”

“That,” Paulette remarked as she pulled over into the parking space next to Miriam’s house, “was a very mixed metaphor.”

“Don’t listen to what I say; listen to what I mean, okay?”

“I get the picture. Dinner’s on you.”

After half an hour in the bathroom, Miriam felt human, if not entirely dry. She stopped in her bedroom for long enough to find some clean clothes, then headed downstairs in her bare feet.

Paulette had parked herself in the living room with a couple of mugs of coffee and an elegant-looking handbag. She raised an eyebrow at Miriam: “You look like you’ve been dry-cleaned. Was it that bad?”

“Yeah.” Miriam settled down on the sofa, then curled her legs up beneath her. She picked up one of the mugs and inhaled deeply. “Ah, that’s better.”

“Ready to tell me what the hell is going on?”

“In a moment.” Miriam closed her eyes, then gathered up the strands of still-damp hair sticking to her neck and wound them up, outside her collar. “That’s better. It happened right after they screwed us over, Paulie. I figured you’d think I’d gone off the deep end if I just told you about it, which is why I didn’t call you back the same day. Why I asked you to drive. Sorry about the surprise.”

“You should be: I spent an hour in the woods looking for you. I nearly called the police twice, but you’d said precisely when you’d be back and I thought they’d think I was the one who was nuts. ‘Sides, you’ve got a habit of dredging up weird shit and leaving me to pick up the pieces. Promise me there are no gangsters in this one?”

“I promise.” Miriam nodded. “Well, what do you think?”

“I think I’d like some lemon chicken. Sorry.” Paulette grinned impishly at Miriam’s frown. “Okay, I believe you’ve discovered something very weird indeed. I actually videoed you vanishing into thin air in front of the camera! And when you appeared again—no, I didn’t get it on tape, but I saw you out of the corner of my eye. Either we’re both crazy or this is for real.”

“Madness doesn’t come in this shape and size,” Miriam said soberly. She winced. “I need a painkiller.” She rubbed her feet, which were cold. “You know I’m adopted, right? My mother didn’t quite tell me everything until Monday. I went to see her after we were fired …”

For the next hour Miriam filled Paulette in on the events of the past week, leaving out nothing except her phone call to Andy. Paulette listened closely and asked the right questions. Miriam was satisfied that her friend didn’t think she was mad, wasn’t humouring her. “Anyway, I’ve now got tape of my vanishing, a shitload of photographs of this village, and dictated notes. See? It’s beginning to mount up.”

“Evidence,” said Paulette. “That would be useful if you want to go public.” Suddenly she looked thoughtful. “Big if there.”

“Hmm?” Miriam drank down what was left of her coffee.

“Well, this place you go to—it’s either in the past or the future, or somewhere else, right? I think we can probably rule out the past or future options. If it was the past, you wouldn’t have run across a village the way you described it; and as for the future, there’d still be some sign of Boston, wouldn’t there?”

“Depends how far in the future you go.” Miriam frowned. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. It’s funny; when I was a little girl I always figured the land of make-believe would be bright and colourful. Princesses in castles and princes to go around kissing them so they turned into frogs—and dragons to keep the royalty population under control. But in the middle ages there were about a thousand peasants living in sordid poverty for every lord of the manor, who actually had a sword, a horse, and a house with a separate bedroom to sleep in. A hundred peasants for every member of the nobility—the lords and their families—and the same for every member of the merchant or professional classes.”

“Sounds grimly real to me, babe. Forget Hollywood. Your map was accurate, wasn’t it?”

“What are you getting at? You’re thinking about… What was that show called: Sliders? Right?”

“Alternate earths. Like on TV.” Paulette nodded. “I only watched a couple of episodes, but… well. Suppose you are going sideways, to some other earth where there’s nobody but some medieval peasants. What if you, like, crossed over next door to a bank, walked into exactly where the vault would be in our world, waited for the headache to go away, then crossed back again?”

“I’d be inside the bank vault, wouldn’t I? Oh.”

“That, as they say, is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” Paulette commented dryly. “Listen, this is going to be a long session. I figure you haven’t thought all the angles through. What were you planning on doing with it?”

“I—I’m.” Miriam stopped. “I told you about the phone call.”

Paulette looked at her bleakly. “Yeah. Did I tell you—”

“You too?”

She nodded. ‘The evening after I told them to go fuck themselves. Don’t know who it was: I hung up on him and called the phone company, told them it was a nuisance call, but they couldn’t tell me anything.”

“Bastards.”

“Yes. Listen. When I was growing up in Providence, there were these guys … it wasn’t a rich neighbourhood, but they always had sharp suits. Momma told me never to cross them—or, even talk to them. Trouble is, when they talk to you—I think I need a drink. What do you say?”

“I say there’re a couple of bottles in the cabinet,” said Miriam, massaging her forehead. “Don’t mind if I join you.”

Coffee gave way to a couple of modest glasses of Southern Comfort. “It’s a mess,” said Paulette. “You, uh—we didn’t talk about Monday. Did we?”

“No,” Miriam admitted. “If you want to just drop it and forget the whole business, I’m not going to twist your arm.” She swallowed. She felt acutely uneasy, as if the whole comfortable middle-class professional existence she’d carved out for herself was under retreat. Like the months when she’d subliminally sensed her marriage decaying, never quite able to figure out exactly what was wrong until…

“ ‘Drop it?’” Paulette’s eyes flashed, a momentary spark of anger. “Are you crazy? These hard men, they’re really easy to understand. If you back down, they own you. It’s simple as that. That’s something I learned when I was a kid.”

“What happened—” Miriam stopped.

Paulie tensed, then breathed out, a long sigh. “My parents weren’t rich,” she said quietly. “Correction: They were poor as pigshit. Gramps was a Sicilian immigrant, and he hit the bottle. Dad stayed on the wagon but never figured out how to get out of debt. He held it together for Mom and us kids, but it wasn’t easy. Took me seven years to get through college, and I wanted a law degree so bad I could taste it. Because lawyers make lots of money, that’s numero uno. And for seconds, I’d be able to tell the guys Dad owed where to get off.”

Miriam leaned forward to top off her glass.

“My brother Joe didn’t listen to what Momma told us,” Paulette said slowly. “He got into gambling, maybe a bit of smack. It wasn’t the drugs, but one time he tried to argue with the bankers. They held him down and used a cordless drill on both his kneecaps.”

“Uh.” Miriam felt a little sick. “What happened?”

“I got as far as being a paralegal before I figured out there’s no point getting into a job where you hate the guts of everybody you have to work with, so I switched track and got a research gig. No journalism degree, see, so I figured I’d work my way up. Oh, you meant to Joe? He OD’d on heroin. It wasn’t an accident—it was the day after they told him he’d never walk again.” She said it with the callous disregard of long-dead news, but Miriam noticed her knuckles tighten on her glass. “That’s why I figure you don’t want to ever let those guys notice you. But if they do, you don’t ever back off.”

“That’s—I’m really sorry. I had no idea.”

“Don’t blame yourself.” Paulette managed an ironic smile. “I, uh, took a liberty with the files before I printed them.” She reached inside her handbag and flipped a CD-ROM at Miriam.

“Hey, what’s this?” Miriam peered at the greenish silver surface.

“It’s the investigation.” Paulie grinned at her. “I got everything before you decided to jump Sandy’s desk and get Joe to take an unhealthy interest in us.”

“But that’s stealing!” Miriam ended on a squeak.

“And what do you call what they did to your job?” Paulette asked dryly. “I call this insurance.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, oh. I don’t think they know about it—otherwise we’d be in way deeper shit already. Still, you should find somewhere to hide it until we need it.”

Miriam looked at the disk as if it had turned into a snake. “Yeah, I can do that.” She drained her glass, then picked up the disk and carried it over to the stereo. “Gotcha.” She pulled a multidisk CD case from the shelf, opened it, and slid the extra disk inside. “The Beggar’s Opera. Think you can remember that?”

“Oh! Why didn’t I think of doing that?”

“Because.” Miriam grinned at her. “Why didn’t I think of burning that disk in the first place?”

“We each need a spare brain.” Paulette stared at her. “Listen, that’s problem number one. What about problem number two? This crazy shit from another world. What were you messing around with it for?”

Miriam shrugged. “I had some idea that I could hide from the money laundry over there,” she said slowly. “Also, to tell the truth, I wanted someone else to tell me I wasn’t going crazy. But going totally medieval isn’t going to answer my problem, is it?”

“I wouldn’t say so.” Paulette put her glass down, half-empty. “Where were we? Oh yeah. You cross over to the other side, wherever that is, and you wander over to where your bank’s basement is, then you cross back again. What do you think happens?”

“I come out in a bank vault.” Miriam pondered. “They’re wired inside, aren’t they? After my first trip I was a total casualty, babe. I mean, projectile vomiting—” she paused, embarrassed. “A fine bank robber I’d make!”

“There is that,” said Paulette. “But you’re not thinking it through. What happens when the alarm goes off?”

“Well. Either I go back out again too fast and risk an aneurism or …” Miriam trailed off. “The cops show and arrest me.”

“And what happens after they arrest you?”

“Well, assuming they don’t shoot first and ask questions later, they cuff me, read me my rights, and haul me off to the station. Then book me in and stick me in a cell.”

“And then?” Paulette rolled her eyes at Miriam’s slow uptake.

“Why, I call my lawyer—” Miriam stopped, eyes unfocused. “No, they’d take my locket,” she said slowly.

“Sure. Now, tell me. Is it your locket or is it the pattern in your locket? Have you tested it? If it’s the design, what if you’ve had it tattooed on the back of your arm in the meantime?” Paulette asked.

“That’s—” Miriam shook her head. “Tell me there’s a flaw in the logic.”

“I’m not going to do that.” Paulette picked up the bottle and waved it over Miriam’s glass in alcoholic benediction. “I think you’re going to have to test it tomorrow to find out. And I’m going to have to test it, to see if it works for me—if that’s okay by you,” she added hastily. “If it’s the design, you just got your very own ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card. Doesn’t matter if you can’t use it to rob bank vaults, there’s any number of other scams you can run if you can get out of the fix instantaneously. Say, uh, you walk into a bank and pull a holdup. No need for a gun, just pass over a note saying you’ve got a bomb and they should give you all the money. Then, instead of running away, you head for the staff rest room and just vanish into thin air.”

“You have got a larcenous mind, Paulie.” Miriam shook her head in awe. “You’re wasted in publishing.”

“No, I’m not.” Paulette frowned seriously. “Y’see, you haven’t thought this through. S’pose you’ve got this super power. Suppose nobody else can use it—we can try me out tomorrow, huh? Do the experiment with the photocopy of the locket on you, then try me. See if I can do it. I figure it’s going to be you, and not me, because if just anybody could do it it would be common knowledge, huh? Or your mother would have done it. For some reason somebody stabbed your mother and she didn’t do it. So these must be some kind of gotcha. But anyway. What do you think the cops would make of it if instead of robbing banks or photographing peasant villagers you, uh, donated your powers to the forces of law and order?”

“Law and order consists of bureaucracies,” Miriam said with a brisk shake of her head. “You’ve seen all those tedious FBI press conferences I sat in on when they were lobbying for carnivore and crypto export controls, huh?” A vision unfolded behind her eyes, the poisonous fire blossom of an airliner striking an undefended skyscraper. “Jesus, Paulie, imagine if Al Qaida could do this!”

“They don’t need it: They’ve got suicide volunteers. But yeah, there are other bad guys who … if you can see it, so can the feds. Remember that feature about nuclear terrorism that Zeb ran last year? How the NIRT units and FEMA were able to track bombs as they come in across the frontier if there’s an alert on?”

“I don’t want to go there.” The thought made Miriam feel physically ill. “There is no way in hell I’d smuggle a nuclear weapon across a frontier.”

“No.” Paulette leaned forward, her eyes serious: “But if you have this ability, who else might have it? And what could they do with it? There are some very scary, dangerous national security implications here, and if you go public the feds will bury you so deep—”

“I said I don’t want to go there,” Miriam repeated. “Listen, this is getting deeply unfunny. You’re frightening me, Paulie, more than those assholes with their phone calls and their handle on the pharmaceutical industry. I’m wondering if maybe I should sleep with a gun under my pillow.”

“Get frightened fast, babe; it’s your ass we’re talking about. I’ve had two days to think about your vanishing trick and our goodfella problem, and I tell you, you’re still thinking like an honest journalist, not a paranoid. Listen, if you want to clean up, how about the crack trade? Or heroin? Go down to Florida, get the right connections, you could bring a small dinghy over and stash it on the other side, no problems—it’d just take you a while, a few trips maybe. Then you could carry fifty, a hundred kilos of coke. Sail it up the coast, then up the Charles. Bring it back over right in the middle of Cambridge, out of fucking nowhere without the DEA or the cops noticing. They say one in four big shipments gets intercepted—that’s bullshit—but maybe one in five, one in eight… you could smuggle the stuff right under their noses in the middle of a terrorist scare. And I don’t know whether you’d do that or not—my guess is not, you’ve got capital-P principles—but that is the first thing the cops will think of.”

“Hell.” Miriam stared into the bottom of her glass, privately aghast. “What do you suggest?”

Paulette put her own glass down. “Speaking as your legal adviser, I advise you to buy guns and move fast. Mail the disk to another newspaper and the local FBI office, then go on a long cruise while the storm breaks. That—and take a hammer to the locket and smash it up past recognition.”

Miriam shook her head, then winced. “Oh, my aching head. I demand a second opinion. Where is my recount, dammit?”

“Well.” Paulette paused. “You’ve made a good start on the documentation. We can see if it’s just you, run the experiments, right? I figure the clincher is if you can carry a second person through. If you can do that, then not only do you have documents, you’ve got witnesses. If you go public, you want to do so with a splash—so widespread that they can’t put the arm on you. They’ve got secret courts and tame judges to try national security cases, but if the evidence is out in the open they can’t shut you up, especially if it’s international. I’d say Canada would be best.” She paused again, a bleak look in her eye. “Yeah, that might work.”

“You missed something.” Miriam stabbed a finger in Paulette’s direction. “You. What do you get?”

“Me?” Paulette covered her heart with one hand, pulled a disbelieving face. “Since when did I get a vote?”

“Since, hell, since I got you into this mess. I figure I owe you. Noblesse oblige. You’re a friend, and I don’t drop friends in it, even by omission.”

“Friendship and fifty cents will buy you a coffee.” Paulie paused for a moment, then grinned. “But I’m glad, all the same.” Her smile faded. “I didn’t get the law job.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Will you stop doing that? Every chance you get to beat yourself up for getting me fired, you’re down on your knees asking for forgiveness!”

“Oh, sorry. I didn’t realize it was getting on your nerves,” Miriam said contritely.

“Fuck off!” Paulette giggled. “Pardon my French. Anyway. Think about what I said. Tomorrow you can mail that disk to the FBI if you want, then go on a long vacation. Or stick around and we’ll work on writing a story that’ll get you the Pulitzer. You can catch all the bullets from the goodfella hit men while I’ll be your loyal little gofer, get myself a star-spangled reference and a few points of the gross. Like, fifty percent. Deal?”

“Deal. I think my head hurts.” Miriam shuffled around and stood up. She felt a little shaky: Maybe it was the alcohol hitting her head on an empty stomach. “Where’s that takeout?”

Paulette looked blank. “You ordered it?”

“No.” Miriam snapped her fingers in frustration. “I’ll go do that right now. I think we have some forward planning to do.” She paused unevenly in the doorway, looking at Paulette.

“What?”

“Are you in?” she asked.

“Am I in? Are you nuts? I wouldn’t miss this for anything!”