She must have tightened her grip on the child, because Dulcie stirred briefly, then subsided.
So, could she trust herself in this state? Her mind was urging caution and rationality, forcing her to admit that the individual threats she had seen here did not necessarily add up to the sort of desperate scenario her inner eye was putting together: An antagonistic attitude toward the authorities, a man in the woods carrying a shotgun, a titular leader who was thinly connected with reality, and a de facto leader who was overly full of himself. That was it. Everything else came from her and her strange ties to two children, and all of it was tainted by her own past. Dulcie reminded her of Abby—that was where the cracks had begun. And then Bennett looked like Martin Cranmer, and the woods made her nervous, and by the time the pantry and the communal phobia about outsiders entered into the equation, she was so sensitized to parallels that a particular brand of pencil would take on an ominous significance. She had no business being there, no right to jeopardize everything by making decisions that could be based only on irrationality. The best thing for everyone would be if she were to stand up and walk away from the compound.
Leaving behind Jason in his alembic.
Abandoning Dulcie to strangers.
They would survive, her mind insisted. They would be fine.
But her gut, her heart, her every instinct cried out that here and now, the rational decision would be the wrong one, that the long-term goal was just too far away. There were times when the expedient solution was not the right one, when only faith justified an action—educated and open-eyed faith if possible, but if that failed, blind faith would have to do.
There was, in truth, no choice to be made.
The deep trembling had subsided while she wrestled with her demon, and with that final realization, that a decision had made itself, she actually drifted into sleep for a while, free at last of the tension of being of two minds. When she woke, the harsh blue glare of the floodlights pressing at her curtains had given way to the gentle rose light of dawn, and she was not the same person who had lain down on this bed the night before.
"My name is Anne Waverly," she whispered into the room. For better or for worse, Ana was gone, and when she went to the toilet down the hallway and moved to the sink to wash her hands, she half expected to see a woman with hair curling onto her shoulders. Instead, the same crop-haired woman looked back at her, although her eyes were calm and her face seemed older. She looked… satisfied.
Back in her room, Anne exchanged her sweat pants for jeans, took out a plain T-shirt for the upper half, and then thrust that back into the drawer and took out the small buckskin medicine pouch she had been forbidden to wear. She dropped it defiantly over her neck, and then pulled on a high-collared polo shirt to conceal the cord.
The sound of the drawer closing woke Dulcie, who sat up, blinking.
"Ana, are you going to find Jason?"
"We're going to get you dressed, and then we'll have breakfast, and then you're going to the schoolroom—no, today is Saturday, isn't it? Well, we'll find something for you to do, and after that yes, I'll go and see if anyone knows about Jason. But, sweetie, I think it would be best if you didn't say anything about Jason to anyone else for a little while. Some of the work that people do is kind of private, and they might not think it was a good idea if I tried to find out what Jason is doing. Okay?"
Dulcie nodded solemnly. One thing her past had taught her was the importance of not blabbing to adults.
Dressed and scrub-faced and downstairs with their bowls of muesli, Anne spotted Sara and led Dulcie over to her table. Introductions were made and the topic of the weather disposed of, and then Anne asked Sara about her plans for the day. The dining room was noisy and Anne, sitting next to Sara, pitched her voice low. Dulcie, concentrating on slicing a banana for her cereal, did not even look up.
"I'll be working in the runner beans most of the day," Sara told her. "You know, down near the stream?"
Anne nodded; the field was at the far end of the clear area from the house, an ideal place for Dulcie today. Keeping her voice low, she said to Sara, "I wonder if you'd mind having a small helper for the morning? I have to do some Work, but I should be finished by lunch." One way or another, a quiet voice in the back of her head added. "She's a good little girl and I'm sure she wouldn't be any trouble,"
"Sure, no problem. I'd be happy to have someone help me weed. Dulcie," she said across the table, "do you know the difference between a baby bean plant and a weed?" Dulcie shook her head doubtfully and Sara laughed. "That's quite all right, dear. It's a skill many adults haven't mastered either, but something tells me you'll catch on in a flash. Finish your breakfast, my dear, and then we're off to rescue the runner beans from the weeds. See you at lunch, Ana,"
To Anne's relief, Dulcie went with neither protest nor question, swept up in Sara's energetic program. The child was as safe as Anne could make her for the next few hours. Now for her brother.
Anne loaded up a tray of dishes and carried them into the kitchen. Dierdre was on kitchen duty this morning, and after Anne had deposited her contribution in the lineup to the right of the sink and exchanged a few cheerful phrases about the never-ending nature of washing-up, their mutual preference for bean-free clothing, and the beauty of the morning, she left Dierdre and the others to their labors.
At the door she paused, hovering on the edge of saying something, of issuing a vague warning, or at least of urging Dierdre to take herself down to the bean field with Sara for the day, anything but staying in this brick monstrosity where anything might happen. Dierdre glanced up and frowned vaguely at her, and the words died on her lips. What was there to say, after all? I'm going to go and bait the bear in his den, perhaps? Or, I plan to go help Jason with his Work, so beware the explosion from the laboratory? She turned and left the kitchen.
Outside the insignificant door that led to Jonas's subterranean world (and, she prayed, Jason Delgado), Anne knelt to tie her shoelace four or five times until the hallway was clear of people. When she was alone, she stepped quickly forward, wrenched open the door, and closed it behind her as silently as she could.
The landing and the stairway it gave on to were as cramped and unadorned as they had been when the Victorian builder had created them for the use of the servants. The only essential change was the string of bare electrical bulbs where once a solitary gas flame would have hissed and sputtered.
Anne stood still, on the threshold dividing two worlds. Outside the door were voices and movement, the rattle of dishes in the kitchen and a snatch of song. She heard a vacuum cleaner start up in a distant room, and a woman's voice asking Call if she thought the flour would last until Tuesday. From below came nothing. Silence crept up the stairway, as palpable as the odor of damp stone.
Anne was a woman well accustomed to the textures of silence. She lived alone in a house with no neighbors and she rarely listened to recorded music or the television set. She knew silences that were uncomfortable, or pointed, or suggestive, but silence for her was generally more a matter of potential than of absence.
The silence coming up the stairs at her was the same silence she had felt out in the jungle with Jonas, thick and alive and with a distinct trace of malevolence. A person from Sedona might declare that bad things had happened here, to disturb the building's aura. A Victorian might say there was a ghost. Anne knew it to be a projection from her own mind onto the blank screen of the disappearing staircase, but it hardly mattered; they all amounted to the same thing.
She started down the stairway, leaving the upstairs noises behind.