"In her case it's even more radical than that. Sure, sometimes the only difference between the cop and the criminal is a badge, but when Anne Waverly plays a person, she isn't just making a shift in emphasis; she turns herself inside out. She becomes… earnest. Accepting. Completely unconscious and nonjudgmental. And absolutely fearless. And it really isn't an act." This conundrum of the empty-headed professor was obviously something that Glen had long dwelt on in the privacy of his mind; Gillian had never heard so many words in a row from him, and so nearly lyrical. "Anne let slip during her second debriefing that what she experiences is a freedom born of terror, and she suggested I read Solzhenitsyn. In real life—or in her Waverly life, anyway—she's jumpy underneath that calm, she has panic attacks on airplanes, she only recently got off tranks and sleeping pills. She still sees a therapist regularly—her boss's wife, in fact."
"You ever try and get her psych records? They'd make for interesting reading."
"God, no!" Glen's face twisted in the dim light, perhaps from disapproval, although it looked more like revulsion. "The last thing I want to know is what's going on in that woman's head."
"Really? I thought she was fascinating."
"She's one of the most disturbing creatures I've ever met," he said, and firmly changed the subject.
Chapter Four
From the notes of Professor Anne Waverly
For the next two weeks, it was chaos upon chaos as Professor Anne Waverly coaxed and goaded her students into their exams and final papers, as homeowner Anne Waverly scrambled to make arrangements so that her lawyer, her neighbor Eliot, and her friend Antony Makepeace among them could keep her creditors happy and her roof standing, as the FBI's consultant on cultic behavior Dr. Anne Waverly embarked on the necessary research into the Change movement, and as the newly incarnated seeker-after-Truth Ana Wakefield began to take form.
After two days, Anne decided that the easiest thing would be just to give up sleeping, and to all intents and purposes that was what she did, napping at odd moments when she could no longer keep her eyelids up. Several nights she did not make it home, camping out instead in her office under the vastly disapproving eyes of Tazzie and her boss.
Still, the work seemed to get itself done. Three hundred exams were farmed out to grad students for grading, leaving Anne with some three thousand written pages to evaluate. Her own writing—two articles, a review, and the proposal for a book—were simply canceled or put off, with apologies. A replacement instructor for her big spring class was found, a casual, bearded young Ph.D. about whom Anne had grave doubts as she tried to impress on him her reading list and curriculum.
Anne's lawyer, on the other hand, was none too pleased with a proposal that the taciturn and unworldly Eliot be given any authority at all over Anne's financial affairs. Anne had eventually to admit that a man who had never owned a credit card and who wrote perhaps as many as three checks a year off the bank account he shared with his mother, brilliant as he was with machines and dogs and roof repairs, might be less than ideal as a custodian of her business matters. She appealed again to Antony. He patiently agreed to act as signator of checks and liaison between Eliot's inarticulate requests for occasional repair and maintenance funds and the lawyer's overall supervision.
Then there were the numerous visits to the specialist about her knee, first to convince her that Anne did indeed intend to mistreat it, then to come to an agreement about what therapy would make that possible, and finally to have several fittings for a new, high-tech brace, invisible under any but the tightest of trousers and guaranteed never to give off the faint but maddening squeaks the old one had developed.
Another specialist, too, agreed to several sessions in the short time before Anne had to leave. Anne's psychotherapy with Antony's wife, Maria, had tapered off over the last year or so, but halfway through the first week following Glen's reappearance, Anne knew she would never make it without committing murder if she could not talk with Maria, who was friend as well as therapist. Anne phoned her at home.
"Maria? Anne here. I wonder if you could fit me in for a couple of hours, soon."
"Of course. I hoped you would call. I was going to wait another day or two and then call you."
"Antony told you, then?" The lines between the professions were firm but flexible; of course Antony would have told his wife, Anne's friend, that she was suddenly leaving, although to his wife the psychiatrist he would only have hinted gently at the reason.
"You don't mind?"
"Certainly not. But, Maria? We're not going to be discussing whether or not I want to do this. I'm going, and I can't afford doubts."
"If you didn't have them already, you would not be concerned about them," Maria pointed out. "I can't promise to help you strengthen your resolve, Anne, just to understand it."
"I'll take the chance," Anne said with a smile, and went back to her work.
There were also, inevitably, the students, not only the regular end-of-term crush, but also the handful of independent study supervisions and the fragile few in need of babying as they went through times of personal trauma or entered the delicate phases of their thesis projects.
Meanwhile, in her role of sometime agent of the FBI, Anne was finding Gillian Farmer all she might have asked for in a research assistant. Faxes spilled daily into Anne's home machine, e-mail dinged merrily whenever she logged on to her computer, and three parcels arrived containing photographs and color reproductions of children's drawings. Anne spent hours poring over the material, particularly the drawings, and took long walks thinking about them.
She also looked at the odd details, the minutiae that comprised this unique organism that called itself Change. The Web site they had set up was remarkably down to earth, as such things go, and although Anne could see Steven's interest in what Glen had called "the cleansing nature of fire", the texts Steven (or whoever had drawn up the Web site) used were not taken exclusively from apocalyptic material, and indeed were often not even biblical. The quotations given ran the gamut from Aboriginal teaching stories to Zoroastrian writings, in what Anne could only assume was an attempt to prove the universality of the doctrine of Change—which doctrine, however, was remarkably unclear. There were small, tantalizing clues in the material Glen and Gillian sent her that set the scholar in her tingling; unfortunately, small and tantalizing they remained.
Former members of a religious movement were a valuable if dangerous source of information—valuable because they were usually as eager as ex-spouses to spill all the dark and misshapen beans of their former relationship, and a hazard because the negative was often the only information they were interested in giving. In this case, though, the only disgruntled exes they had found were four women and two men who had been involved in Change for only an average of four and a half months, with the longest stay just short of eight. Samantha Dooley, who had been with the movement from its beginning and would have been the most important informant they could have found, had apparently left Change some months before and was now hidden within an extremely withdrawn, even xenophobic, women's commune in Canada, flat out refusing to talk to Glen's men about her time with Change. Anne didn't even think they had been allowed to speak with her directly, and suggested that he send a woman to try.
Anne was forced to fossick through the pages of information for the odd trace of gold, though when she found a gleam, she had to admit that she could not be sure it wasn't mere pyrite instead.
Take the names of the two men who seemed to be joint heads of the movement: Steven Chance had become Steven Change when he and the others came out of India, but what of Jonas Fairweather, whose legal name was now Jonas Seraph?