Sometimes it’s hard to know where to begin a story.  Like starting with the time you were born, or when your first conscious memories appeared, or when you graduated from school, or when the universe came into being.  There’s a lot of places on the timeline to start.

But it’s easy to tell where this story began.

It began the day I saw her.

My name is Bill McGregor, and please don’t call me Rob Roy, okay?  That one gets old really fast.  I’m about to become a senior in college.  This happened on the summer between my sophomore and junior years.  June 12th, to be exact.

I didn’t really feel like going home that summer so I snagged a job as a checker in a grocery store.  It was just past six and I was out of the Working Class Hero uniform till the next day, walking down to where I’d parked the car.  It was hot, up to 99, which was a pretty wimpy temp considering it’d barely drop under highs of 100 for the rest of the summer.  My mind was somewhere else, and I’m not exactly sure where.   Maybe on how I was going to pass my pre-law curriculum when I started up again in a few months.  Maybe on how long it was going to be before the new Star Wars and Lord of the Rings came out.  I don’t know.

You wouldn’t think of yourself becoming a hero in ordinary circumstances.  Most of the time, if you saw something bad going down, you’d do the sensible thing.  Like go back in the store and grab the phone and call the cops, right?  Absolutely.

Only the other side of the street was pretty sparsely populated at that time of evening, except for two punks who were trying to break into a car.

The car was a used silver Chrysler and didn’t look that tough a job to crack.  The two guys who were trying to bust in were not your typical car thieves.   At least, not the way I think of them.  They looked like college types.  Not unlike me.  One of them, I swear, was wearing an Izod shirt.  Little alligator and all.  I can’t swear to it, but I think the other was wearing Keds.

I could see the crowbar in the hand of the Izod guy as he swung it to break the window.  Right in broad evening light.  He had to crack it twice more before it gave way.  Keds helped kick it in afterwards with his sneaker.

Don’t ask me why those prep-types wanted to ‘jack this car.  Maybe everybody needs a thrill every now and then.  Maybe they did stuff like this and got their jollies from being protected by Daddy’s money after they got caught.

Or maybe they weren’t exactly prep-types.  That last hypothesis seems to have some weight, in light of later developments.

Whatever.

Like I said, don’t ask me why I crossed the street, double-timing it, making sure I scrutinized the licence plate on the way.  One too many superhero comics, one too many Stallone movies, I don’t know.  My feet were on automatic, more or less.

One track of my brain was saying, “Stupid, this is not your problem, get back over there and call the cops!”  Unfortunately, the overriding track was operating my feet and my mouth, and I heard the latter saying, “This your car?”

Hypothetically, that was a possibility.  I would’ve been glad of it.  The guys could have locked the keys inside the car and had to bust in, being too stupid to call up a locksmith.  But how likely was that?

The way Izod looked at me and hefted that crowbar, I knew it wasn’t likely at all.

I put up my arm and went in, wishing I wasn’t just wearing a short-sleeved shirt, but in those temps, you just did not wear a jacket, man.  The idea was to bash aside his iron-wielding arm and simultaneously tag him in the chin with my right.  Things worked like that in the movies.

Guess I didn’t read the script right.  I got hit on the shoulder and it hurt just this side of brokenness.

Down on my knees I went, grabbing my damned arm, tears coming to my eyes.  Keds was just standing there, like he didn’t have to even get involved.  He didn’t.  Izod was looking at me with calm assessment, wondering what part of my body to lay the stroke down on next.  Or if he should just forget me and go back to breaking into the car and hot-wiring it.

That was when we heard the voice.

“Stop.”

Both the punks jerked their head in the direction from which it came.  So did I, even though my shoulder was still negotiating separation from my body.

Did I mention the voice was female?

It came from a girl who was holding two big paper bags of groceries with a half-gallon plastic milk jug hanging on her two last right-hand fingers.

She was blonde and she was wearing a white short-sleeved shirt that ended in a kind of frilled thing that bared her stomach just above the navel.  She also had on blue jeans and brown shoes with flat heels.  No, I didn’t consciously take all that in during my first look.  I’m just telling you now so I don’t have to describe it later.

What I did take in was her face.

She had a face that wouldn’t leave your memory in a month of watching your favorite movie queens.  Throw in a Sports Illustrated bathing suit video, too, and she still wouldn’t leave your mind.  She was somewhere in between tanned and pale, and if she was wearing makeup besides a bit of eyeshadow and some frosted lipstick, I couldn’t tell.  Her eyes were blue and fairly large, but not disproportionate to the rest of her face.  High cheekbones, a nose that was a bit upturned, a chin that was a bit more rounded than pointed, and the blonde hair which shone like gold and reached to her shoulders in back.

Somewhere between All-American Girl and a possible startout for a modeling competition.  And something beyond that.  Mainly in the eyes, I think.  The undefinable brightness of the eyes.

There was one more thing that was quite distinctive about her: the hank of blonde hair that hung right over her forehead.  It flopped there, as obvious as Superman’s spitcurl, but it didn’t look messy or out of place.  It just seemed to be her trademark.  No, it wasn’t like A Flock of Seagulls.  It was a hell of a lot nicer looking than that.  And so was she.

I wouldn’t exactly say that it was worth getting my shoulder bashed to see her.  I will say that it was a nice partial recompense for it, though.

The car had to be hers.  I was still holding my arm, and I was looking straight at her as I found my voice.

“Run!  Go get the cops!”

She walked up closer, still holding the bags and the milk.  I couldn’t believe it.  If this girl thought that chivalry was going to keep Izod from bashing her with a crowbar, she was dumber than a Delta Zappa.

“Didn’t you hear me?  Go call the cops!  These guys are armed!”

“I know,” she said, walking to her car and setting the bags and milk on the trunk.  “Does it matter?”

At which point I turned my head and looked at Izod and Keds.

Both of them were standing where they were, jaws open like a pair of bass, hands at their sides, Izod’s crowbar drooping, both of them looking as glass-eyed as if they’d been told they’d won the state lottery.

“What’d you do to them?”  I managed to get to my feet, one leg at a time.  I still felt as though I should hold my arm in place, for fear it would fall off.

“Nothing,” she said.  “They’ll be all right.”  She was reaching for the rear door nearest the curb.  I grabbed her arm and stopped her.

“Hold it,” I said.  “Don’t disturb the scene.  The cops will want to photograph it as evidence.”

The girl looked at me, and it was then I realized I was not only inches away from, but actually touching, a woman I wanted in my life more than any woman I’d met before.  Probably including my mother and my 3rd grade teacher, Miss Othmar.

She sighed and looked a bit annoyed.  “Look.  I want to thank you for what you did.  That was a very brave thing.  But I don’t need the cops.”

“Oh, yes, you do,” I said, still holding her arm firmly but as gently as I knew how.  “Believe me.”

She opened her mouth again and was about to say something.  I spoke first.  That may have saved my bacon.

“I’m a pre-law student and I know enough about how the law works in this,” I said, pretty quickly.  “You’ve got a busted window.  You want your insurance to pay for that?  You’re going to have to call the cops.  You want these guys to pay for what they’ve done?”

“I don’t care about them,” she said, in a definitely put-out tone.

“Well, I care about you and the next person they’re going to carjack, and the next one after that,” I said. “And don’t think somebody hasn’t seen this, even if nobody’s come over yet.  Furthermore, I got my shoulder bashed.”

“I can make that better.”

“Well, thanks, but this isn’t about massage and Ben-Gay.  Those guys committed an assault on me, and I want them charged with it.  If I need X-rays, medical attention, whatever–“

“I can take care of it.  I told you.”

“—my insurance will want to know what happened to the guys who did it to me.  If you don’t swear out a complaint, these two guys—“

I took a look at them.  They were still standing and staring.  We were lucky they hadn’t yet drawn a crowd.  But it suddenly hit me that, for no damned obvious reason, these two jerks were not even moving.  Probably not even registering our presence.

Swallowing hard, I turned back to her.  “—these two guys may get off.  They’ll hurt somebody else like they hurt me.  So we’ve got to call the cops.  It’s like having an accident.  You don’t drive your car home after you get hit, you leave it there till the cops can come see it and take down the information.  Am I coming through?”

She sighed.  “I can take care of this.”

“No, you can’t!  I don’t know what you did to them, but you cannot take care of this.  Now, please.  Come with me, and let’s go call the cops.”

“Do we have to?”

“We do.  Come back to the store with me.  I work there.  We can call from there.”

“I’ve got some stuff that might spoil.”

“I’ll carry one bag for you.  We can put it in back of the freezer case till the police get here.”  I stooped and picked up one of her bags from the trunk.  I think I winced.  Even that much movement made my other arm hurt.  She reached out to touch it, but I shrank away.  “Please,” I said.  “It hurts enough already.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.  She picked up the other bag and the milk.  “Look, I can take that bag, too.  I know you’re hurting, and you were really, really nice to do what you did for me.  But—“

“It’s all right.   I’ll take it.  Now come with me.”

The light was with us, thank God, and we strolled across the street.  I wanted to get things in motion before Izod and Keds decided to quit playing Statues.

On the way, I realized something I didn’t know.  I turned to her and asked a question.

“What’s your name?”

She looked at me, hesitated, and said, “Wendy.”

“Wendy?  Okay.  Wendy.  That’s a nice name.  I’m Bill.”

“Hi, Bill.”

“Hi, Wendy.  If you give me your last name, I’ll give you mine.”

She shook her head.  “Don’t know if I should.”

“The police are going to know it, Wendy, and I’d like to know it before they do.”

“Corrigan.  Wendy Corrigan.”

“Okay.  Hello, Wendy Corrigan.  I’m Bill McGregor.”  I automatically started to reach out my free hand to shake hers, but a few shooting pains made me consider a new line of thinking.

She smiled.  I never forgot that smile.

“Under the circumstances, it’s nice to meet you, Bill McGregor,” she said.

I looked behind us.  The two idiots were still posing for an invisible sculptor.

I made us cover the last few steps double-time.

 -W-

In re: the matter of the two carjackers, it was about as weird as anything else that had happened to date.  Which, considering Wendy, was pretty weird indeed.

The cops came down shortly after we called.  People were starting to gather around the two paralyzed ‘jackers.  But Wendy and I didn’t go back across the street till the police arrived, and Izod and Keds didn’t make a move besides breathing until we got back there.  Then each of them seemed to draw a deep breath, looked around, and appeared astonished.  Izod looked at the car tool in his hand like he’d never seen it before.  They asked the cops what they thought they were doing, handcuffing them like they did.  One of the fuzz pointed to the busted window and said, “Because of that.”  Then they hauled ‘em away.

The two of us were taken aside separately by the officers for our statements.  But after that, of course, Wendy had to take her car, with the broken glass whiskbroomed out of it, back to her place with her groceries in it.  I insisted on carrying something and she gave me the milk.  But the real reason I wanted to help her was obvious.

“Wendy,” I said as we started crossing the street.  “Hate to push my luck like this.  But could I take you out to dinner?”

She shot me a look, rolled her eyes, and said, “Oh, please.”

“Aw, come on.  I did try to save your car, you know.”

“I know, Bill.  And I’m grateful to you, believe me.  But that doesn’t give you dating privelages right off the bat.”

“Are you seeing someone else?”

“No.  But that doesn’t matter.”

“Well, it does to me.  I mean, you do like guys, don’t you?”

We were in the middle of the street and she stopped dead.  “I’m not gay, if that’s what you mean,” she said, tersely and under her breath.

“And.  Is there any reason you couldn’t like me?”

“Yeah.  I don’t know you.”

“Yet.”

“Yet,” she admitted.  Then she looked a bit sad, and, fortuitiously, a car came by and made us both stop for a few more seconds with our feet on the white line.  She looked down, then looked at me, and spoke again.

“Bill.  I know we’re going to see each other again, when we make our statements tomorrow.  But, well, it’s just not that easy for me, going out with somebody.”  She sighed.  “Could we talk about this some other time?  We’re right in the middle of the street.”

“Okay,” I said.  “As long as you’ll do one thing for me.”

“What?”

“After we make our talk to the insurance people tomorrow, will you consider having lunch with me?”

She gave me an appraising look with those bluest of eyes and it was probably the longest three seconds I’ve experienced in my life.

“I’ll consider it, Bill,” she said.  “Now let’s get across the street, okay?”

“Okay.”

If my arm was hurting anymore, I didn’t notice it.

 -W-

So we went down to each other’s insurance company in the morning, after having told our bosses we wouldn’t be in till after lunch, and gave our statements.  They asked more questions than the cops.  That was because the cops wouldn’t have to pay out money afterwards.

Along the way I found out that Wendy was 21, that she worked at the public library, that she looked great in a pink dress, and that yeah, she would go out with me.  Just once.  So we took it down to Quizmo’s for subs and iced tea, which was within my budget.

“So,” I said, sitting my tray in front of hers.  “Tell me about yourself.”

She was munching potato chips and even managed to make that look coquettish.  Considering they were Lays Barbecued, that was quite an accomplishment.  “You know about all I can tell you, Bill.  I’m 21, I’ve got two years in college, had to drop out because of money for the moment.  I hope I can go back in a year or two.”

“If my folks had money, I’d have them help you.  But they can barely get me through school.”  I shifted in my seat.  It was no big secret this gal was making me nervous.  Anybody who could do what she did to Izod and Keds would.  But I was trying not to show it, and having about as much luck as any man does who tries to conceal the signs before a woman.  “Are you from around the City?”

She drew a long breath and let it out.  “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I’d just as soon not get into it, Bill.”

“Are you an orphan?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sorry.  Never adopted?”

“Yes, I was,” she said.  “My foster parents, the Brownings, died in a crash a year before I graduated.”  She looked off into space, and probably time as well.

“I’m really sorry, Wendy.”  I ventured to touch her hand.  She flinched a little, but didn’t draw back.

“I wanted to go with them that night,” she said, still looking three years back.  “They were just going for miniature golf.  I loved miniature golf.”

“Uh huh.”  It seemed about the wisest thing I could say at the moment.

“But something told me not to go.  So I didn’t.  I tried to get them to stay home, too.  But Dad was stubborn.”  She shook her head.  “So stubborn.  Maybe I should have gone with them.”

“Don’t talk like that, Wendy.”

She gave me a blazing look.  “I’ll talk any way I darned well want to.  And don’t you forget it.”

“All right, all right,” I said, throwing up my hands.  “Look, I didn’t mean any harm.  And I’m sorry about your folks.”

“That’s all right,” she said.  “I’m sorry.  I don’t mean to sound like a bitch.”

“If it was my parents that got killed, Wendy, I think I’d be a little touchy about it, too.”

The waiter came by with our sandwiches right then (turkey swiss for her, roast beef for me), which was something of a save.  I was hungry.  It was halfway through the first half of the sub that I said, “You never knew your birth mother?”

“I don’t know of her now.”  She gave me a look that was a lot gentler than the one I’d gotten a few minutes ago.

“How is that so?”

“I’d just as soon not talk about it.”

“Okay.  What do you like to do?”

“Oh, girl stuff.  The forest.  I like to go out in it and just meditate sometimes.  I feel the trees talking to me, almost.”

“I talk to the treeeeees, but they never listen to meeee...”

“Shut up.” She had a wry grin on.  First down.  “It’s not like that.”

“I like boating, sometimes.  And the beach.  Like mysteries by female writers.  Should I act as if this was a dating video?”

“If you want.”

She sat up, pretending a camera was on her.  “I enjoy long walks in the park, as long as there aren’t a lot of unleashed dogs yapping at me.  I like moonlight, some old Broadway soundtracks, c and w, plus whatever else I happen to be into.  And I don’t do a lot of dating.”

“Do you dance?”

“Sometimes.  At home, in my apartment.  Not with guys, if that’s what you’re asking.”

I worked on the second half of the sandwich thoughtfully.  “You mean you’ve never been to a club?”

“Not very often, and not for very long,” she admitted.  “I got dragged along a couple of times by my girlfriend.  I made excuses and left early, and she finally stopped asking.”

I paused.  “What do you feel bad about, Wendy?”

She looked at me.  “I never said I do feel bad.”

“But you do, don’t you?”

“Yeah.  Sometimes.  But that’s just feelings.”

“But they’re your feelings, Wendy.  And that’s important.”

“Oh, boy.  Are we playing 80's Caring Man?”  She chuckled.  I liked the way even the flourescent lights sparkled in her eyes.

“Whatever it takes, honey.   Whatever it takes.”

“I haven’t made my mind up about you yet, Bill.”

“You don’t have to yet, Wendy.  I’m not the Predator.  I just think I like being with you.”

“Even though it makes you nervous?”

“I never said I felt nervous.”

“I can tell.”  She smiled the smile of a wise woman, and rubbed her chin.

“Okay,” I said.  “You tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine.  Deal?”

“No promises.  And you first.”

“Nope, you first.  I paid for the sandwiches, so it’s you first.”

“All right, all right.”  She rested her elbows on the table, interlaced her fingers, and lay her chin on top of them.  “I feel bad about my parents dying.  I feel bad about not knowing who my real folks were.  I feel bad about a few other things.  But that’s not going to stop me living.  And that’s all I can tell you right now.”

“Okay,” I said.  “That’ll do for right now.”

“Your turn.”

“All right,” I said, and lowered my voice.  “I’m nervous because of what happened to those two guys out there, Wendy.”

“What two guys?”

“You know.  The carjackers.”

“Oh.  Them.”

“Yeah.  Right.  Them.”

“Well, what about them?  Aren’t you glad they’re in jail?”

“Sure.  But they were about to hit me until you told them to stop.  And they stopped.  Dead stop.  Paralyzed.”

She stiffened a bit.  Her breaths came bit deeper.  Wendy looked a bit like a cat who felt threatened.

But I plowed on.  “They couldn’t move or speak until we got back over there.  Why did that happen, Wendy?  Why did they stop just when you told them to stop.”

She got up.  “I have to go.”

I grabbed her arm.  “Sit down, honey.  If you don’t want to tell me, don’t.  But you asked what was making me nervous.”

She shook her arm free and grabbed her purse quickly.  “This date is over.”

“Wendy.”  I stood up, grabbing what was left of my sandwich.

“Don’t follow me, Bill.  Please don’t follow me.”

But I did.  All the way out to the parking lot, asking her to come back, all the way out to her car.  She slammed the door.  I pressed my hands and face against the driver’s window.  “Wendy,” I said.

“Please,” she said through the glass.  “Go away.”

She started the engine.  I stepped back.  When I was far enough back, she pulled out and left.

I stared after her car.  Sure, I could have gotten in mine and followed.  But I didn’t.

I figured she needed space, and time.  I knew where she lived, anyway.  Later on, I could give her a call.  I could keep on giving her calls until she answered.

Unless she told me to stop.

And, against my will, that thought did make me shiver.

I finished the sandwich and went to my car.

For the rest of the day, and all of the next, I sleepwalked through my duties at the local Kroger’s.  The boss noticed it and, finally, asked me who I was in love with.  I said I wasn’t quite sure, but it was somebody definite.  At least I thought so.

“That blonde with the broken-into car?”, he asked.

“Yeah,” I admitted.

“So you think you can keep up with work, anyway?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Provided there aren’t any more carjackings.”

Luckily for me, he smiled.  I got through the rest of the day okay.

What was I supposed to do?  As soon as I got home, I called.  Got her recorded message, which wasn’t surprising.  “This is Wendy.  When you hear the beep, please leave your name and number.  Thank you.  BEEP.”  Very functional.

I started out with, “Wendy.  It’s Bill.  Please call me,” and giving my number.  By the time of my sixth recording, I was down to singing “Mammy” on one knee.  That last might have qualified as abusive stalking, given my ability to imitate Jolson, but I didn’t care.

No answers.

I gave up and tried to get some sleep.

The next day, Abel the bossman took me aside and said, “Bill.  One of three things.  Either get ahold of her, forget about her, or quit work.  But if you keep this up, I’m going to have to tape up the bags under your eyes with duct tape.”

“That’s an idea, boss,” I said.  “I’ll try choice number one tonight.”

“Okay,” he said.  “Get some sleep.  In the meantime, want some Jolt Cola?  At the register, you’ve got to stand up.”

Some people should have the Comedy Channel permanently blocked from their cable access, and Abel is one of them.  But I like him anyway.  I got through the rest of the day, hung up my apron, left through the back way, got into my car, got home, washed up, changed, and made one last call.  “Wendy,” I said.  “I’m coming over.  Fair warning.  Bye.”

Then I did.

It took me about half an hour to get across town.  The place where Wendy was living wasn’t exactly a condo.  It wasn’t a one-bedroom, one-bath, living room and kitchen kinda setup.  It was an efficiency apartment.

Well, what the hell.  Working in a library wasn’t exactly going to qualify you for a penthouse place, and my digs weren’t all that much better.  She was on the second floor and I mounted the iron-railed steps like Douglas Fairbanks about to cross swords with the bad guy for the virtue of the female lead.  I suppose I would have looked ridiculous to anyone passing by outside, but I don’t think anybody was at the time.

Her apartment was 3B.  I halted before it, banged on the door.  No response.  I looped the banging one more time.  No response, again.

“Wendy, it’s me.  It’s Bill,” I said.  Less than inspired, but functional.

A voice came from within.  O, frabjous day!  Even though she said, “I’m busy, Bill.  Go away,” it was evidence she still inhabited this world.

“Ain’t gonna do it, Wendy,” I said.  “You have to come out and talk to me, or let me in and talk to me.  I’m gonna lose my job if you don’t.”

“What?”  The voice held a note of curiosity, muffled though it was.

“The boss told me to either resolve this thing with you or quit.  I want to keep my job, Wendy.  Come on and open up, okay?”

“Bill, I just can’t.”

“I’ll wait till you get dressed, for crying out loud.”

“It’s not that.”

“Go to the bathroom.  I’ll wait.”

“It’s not that either, you idiot.”

“You’re cooking.  I like your cooking.”

“You’ve never had any.”

“I’m always looking far ahead.”

“Fine.  Then you know I’m not opening the door.”

“Nope.  That’s how I know you are.”

I leaned up against the railing, folded my arms in full view of the spyhole, and waited.

Three minutes later (I was checking) there was a fumbling at the lock and the door opened just enough to show a face-sized sliver of Wendy.

“Go.  Away,” she said.

“Will not,” I said.

“You’re stalking me, Bill.”

“Am not.  I’m just standing outside leaning up against the rail.  Ain’t it fine weather we’re having?”

She sighed.  “You prat.  Just exactly what am I going to have to do to get you out of my life?  Not that I should give you any ideas.”

I looked at her seriously.  “Just tell me you want me out of it.  Honestly.”

Wendy, all her blue eyes and most of her golden hair in view, said, “All right, Bill.  I want you...”

She stopped, with her mouth wide open.

“Yes?” I said, not moving from the railing.

“I want you...”

“Wendy, are you all right?”  I was beginning to be concerned.

Her mouth was barely open and her eyes were showing consternation.  “Wendy,” I said, starting to move towards her.  “Please, let me help.  I promise, I won’t try to do anything more than that.  And I mean it.”

She threw open the door and stood there, barefoot and blue-jeaned, in a red halter top that showed some of the nicest suntanned skin I’d seen since I had time to go to the beach.  Which, all things considered, had been a long time ago.

Altogether, Wendy looked pretty and sexy as hell.

But after taking that in, I was still concerned with what I could read on her face.  She was looking nerved and conflicted, and I could bet it wasn’t all about me.

“Come on in,” she said.

So I stepped into her room, and she locked the door behind me.

I looked around the place and saw the paneled walls were decorated with, of all things, a LeRoy Neiman football print, a framed color photo of a fortysomething couple who, I assumed, were her foster parents, her high school diploma, and a newspaper article behind glass.  There was a small stove, a microwave on a counter, a refrigerator, a bookcase full of authors like Ray Bradbury and Tom Wolfe, a blue-green couch which also served as a fold-out bed, an eMachines PC (that made me wince), a small trunk, an aquarium with two or three tropical fish, a phone hanging on the wall, a small Formica-top table and three white plastic chairs, a door to the bathroom (closed), a pair of folding doors to the closet (also closed), and green carpeting all over the floor.

Altogether, she kept it pretty tidy, which gave me an inferiority complex about my own place.

“I don’t know why I’m doing this,” she said, standing before me with her hands behind her back.  “I really don’t.”

“Maybe you can tell us both, Wendy,” I said.  I tried to touch her shoulder in a big-brotherly fashion, or so I hoped.  She flinched and moved back.

“Don’t do that,” she said.  “Please don’t do that.”

“Okay,” I said.  “Can I sit down.”

“Sure.  Certainly,” she said, waving towards the couch.  “I’m sorry the room is such a mess.”

“A mess?  In that case, I’m afraid to have you even come near my place!”

A smile sidled across her face.  “In your dreams, Bill.  Not in your wildest.”

“Okay,” I said, sitting on the couch.  It wasn’t too firm or too well-worn, which was a good sign. “Let’s not assume you know what made me come over here, Wendy.”

She was still standing there, her arms crossed and one beautiful bare foot resting on the other.  “And why do you assume I know or care?”

I spread my hands.  “Look.  Forgive me if I’m being bold by saying it, but to me, you look scared.  About something. And I don’t think it’s me.”

She flinched again.  But it wasn’t about me, I knew.

“I don’t know what’s gotten under that pretty tanned skin of yours, Wendy, sorry about saying that...”

“No, it’s all right,” she said.  “And thank you.  I’m sorry, I don’t want to be a poor hostess.”

“And I’ll try not to be a poor guest.  But good Lord, Wendy, it’s not just because I like you, because I can’t stop thinking about you, because I’m not getting as much sleep as I should and the boss keeps offering me Jolt Cola as a result, but it’s...”

“What?” she said.

“Curiosity,” I finished.

She looked down and appeared a bit sad.  “Not always the safest trait, I’m afraid.”

“Wendy.  Will you sit down?  Please?  Just for me?”

“All right,” she said, resignedly.  She took the end of the couch farthest from me, with one arm thrown across the back of it.

“Will you tell me what’s going on?  Are you in trouble, Wendy?  In some kind of danger?”  She looked a bit like a frightened fawn when I said that, which sounds cliche, but it’s true.  “Were those guys that bashed your car somebody you knew?”

“I never saw them before in my life.”

“Then were they maybe somebody operating for somebody you know?  Do you like, maybe, owe somebody money that plays hard?”

“No, Bill,” she said, dangling one leg over her other knee.  “I’m solvent.  For the moment, anyway.”

“That’s good to hear.  Tell me why you act like a cat hanging over a hot griddle.”

“Oh, please!”  She laughed.  That was good to hear.  It faded out to a snort and chuckle.  She put her hand in front of her mouth and flushed.  “You...oh, Bill, that was such a stupid image.”

I smiled.  “Well, it got the job done, didn’t it?”

“In a way,” she admitted.  “But I don’t open up a lot about my life, I’ll admit.  I’m kind of a private person.”

“We’ve all got private parts,” I leered.

“I won’t show you mine, you don’t show me yours.”

“See?  I knew she was a comedienne.”

“Opening Wendy’s Comedy Store tomorrow.  You can work in the janitorial staff.”

“Promise?”

“When you see the sign, go in and apply for a job.”

“It’ll probably pay better than what I’m getting now.  Wendy?”

“What?”

“I want to get serious for a minute.”

“Fine,” she said.  “But I don’t know that I can answer all your questions.”

“Just answer what you can, then.  And I’m not trying to hurt you when I ask them.  All right?”

“Yeah,” she said, thoughtfully.  “Bill?”

“What, Wendy?”

“I’m not worried about you trying to hurt me.  I think you’re, well...”

I waited.

“...kind of a nice guy,” she finished.

“Wunderbar.”  I was beaming like an airport searchlight.  “I was about to ask what you thought of me.”

“I think you’re kind of a nice guy,” she said.  “Maybe kind of courageous, maybe chivalrous, and maybe a little bit stupid.  That much I could pick up from the way you tried to save my car the other day.  So thanks very much.  Again.”

“Hey, you’re welcome.  Again.”

“You’re also very stubborn and very pushy.  At times.”

“Bad traits?”

“Um, irritating.  Not necessarily bad.”

“Okay.”

She waited.

“Should I say what I think of you?”

“Oh, I think I know what you think of me,” she said.

I shrugged.  “Tell me, then.”

“You think I’m pretty.”

“Uh huh.”

“You think I’m mysterious.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“You think you’d like to find out all about me.”

“Keep going, Wen.”

“But you wouldn’t, Bill.  Believe me.”

“Why not?”

“You just wouldn’t.  That’s all.”

I got up, put my hands behind my back, and started pacing.  That helps me get my thoughts together, like I was in a courtroom.  See what you can pick up from Perry Mason TV movies?  But really, one of the things I wanted to do was take a look at that newspaper article on the wall.  So I stopped in front of it.

“Bill,” said Wendy, still on the couch behind me.

“Just a second, Wendy,” I said.  “I’m reading.”

The photo in the article was of an 11-year-old Wendy, in some sort of thing that looked like a parka, only without drawstrings and it went all the way down over her feet, kind of like footie pajamas.  I can’t reproduce the article verbatim.  But it spoke of how she’d been found by the city P.D., stone unconscious, lying on a snowy street ten years ago.  They’d gotten her to the station house, warmed her up, awakened her, given her something hot to drink.

She was an amnesiac.  All she knew was that her name was Wendy.

The rest of the article was about where she’d been found, how her fingerprints weren’t on file, how nobody had yet been able to identify her, and an appeal for anybody with information to come forward to tender same.

Apparently, nobody had.

I managed to say, “Wendy, I had no idea, really,” and started to turn around.

That’s when she cried out, launched herself across the room, landed against my back, and wrapped one arm tight around my eyes.

“Bill, don’t move,” she said.  “Whatever you do, don’t move.  And don’t open your eyes!”

That girl was serious.  I didn’t know what about, but, even though I was pretty sure I was stronger than her, I didn’t try to disobey her.  I didn’t even think about the weight of her body against me.

I could hear her muttering something underneath her breath, something indistinct.  I don’t know that I quite heard something else, or that I didn’t.

Or maybe I perceived something with a sense other than the usual five.  I don’t know and I’m not sure I want to.  Stephen King can have that.

Only I feel now that if I shook her arm off right about then, I might have seen something that would have put Stephen King in the rubber room for the rest of his life.

I doubt that the whole process took over ten seconds.  Finally, Wendy’s voice came back to normal.  She also unwrapped her arm from my eyes and her body from my back.   “It’s okay, Bill.  We’re safe.  My God, I shouldn’t have let you in. Not like this.”

“Wendy.  What the hell happened?”

“Nothing, Bill.”  She was standing there with her hands on my arm.  “Believe it.  It was nothing.”

“That is one thing I do not believe.”

“I don’t want you to be hurt, Bill,” she said.  “Just please, it’s best that you go.  You’re safe now, but it’s best you go.”

“Wendy,” I said, putting both my hands on her shoulders.  “You just said you didn’t want me to be hurt.  And the only way I will be is if you make me go away, now.  But if you want me to, I will.”

She looked at me, mouth half open, and hesitated for one hell of a long half second.

Then she was up against me, hugging me, not quite crying but not quite not, and my arms found their way around her back as well.  Her head and blonde hair felt very good against my chest and her arms had surprising strength.  I mused, idly, that this was one librarian who maybe kept some free weights behind the stacks.

“Please, Bill,” she said, after awhile.  “Don’t ask me a lot of questions right now.  And don’t ask me for sex, okay?”

“Okay on both counts, if you want,” I said.  “I’m not the Predator, Wendy.”

“But will you stay with me tonight?  I could use...”

“It’s okay, Wendy,” I said.  “Where do I sleep?”

She looked up at my face, and her blue eyes seemed wet without tears.

“Let me make us both some supper,” she said.  “Then we’ll talk about that.  And other things.”

And we did.

Over the bird and vegetable matter, I said, “Can you tell me about yourself, Wendy?  Like, maybe, starting with when they found you in the snow?”

She looked at me intently, stuffed some chicken in her mouth, and chewed thoughtfully to give herself time to respond.

“I really don’t know what to say about it,” she admitted.  “Memories from that time are, well, like, hard to retrieve.  I think I remember waking up with these guys in blue suits around me, looking down at me, and a doctor with one of those cold stethoscopes on my chest.  They must have said something to me at first, but I don’t recall.  All I do remember is that they asked me my name, and I said, ‘My name is Wendy.’”

“Uh huh,” I said.  “And they weren’t able to track you down from that?”

She shook her head.  “There were a few lost girls with that name, but they didn’t fit my description.  If I had a last name, I didn’t know it.  Still don’t.  I knew how to read and write, how to do arithmetic.  But I didn’t know anything about where I was.”

“You mean the city you were in?”

“I mean the country, maybe the whole world,” said Wendy.  “I don’t think I’d ever heard of America.  I knew nothing about its history.  But I knew English, and my accent wasn’t too far off.  So the doctors figured that I had some kind of selective trauma.  They tried hypnosis on me, they tried drugs.  Nothing worked very well.  And like the paper said, my prints didn’t seem to be on file anywhere.  I didn’t match any birth records.”

“A girl without a past,” I said.

She nodded.  “Just like in a lot of old movies I’ve seen.  But I tested out okay, intelligence-wise.  So they put me in sixth grade after some special instruction, and I did all right.  I mean, I sucked on history, but I did all right in other things.  Especially literature.  When I got to high school, I was pretty good in botany and chem, too.  Got to work on the school paper, band, pep squad, speech, all for a time.”

“For a time, Wen?”

“Yeah.”

“And thereby hangs a tale. Correct?”

Wendy sighed and said, “Correct.”

“Talk to me, Wendy.  If we’re going to be in this thing together, I need to know.”

She looked at me intently over her fork.  “How do you know you want to be in this thing with me?  Or that you can be?”

“As to point one, I know.  As to point two, I don’t know, but I’m willing to try.”

“You don’t know a thing about it yet.”

“I know,” I said.  “That scares me.”

“Wise man.”

“But I can’t stay ignorant forever, Wendy.  Not if I want to be involved with you.”

“Bill.”  She lay her hand on my wrist and I loved the warmth and electricity of it.  “Don’t you know that’s why I haven’t gotten involved very much with men before?  Because of the danger.”

“I didn’t know you hadn’t,” I said.  “We’re just getting to know each other, remember?”

“Maybe you should tell me your story first.”

I covered her hand with mine.  She didn’t seem to object.  “No fair.  You started the story, now you have to finish it.”

“All right,” she said.  “Let me fill in the personal stuff a bit.  I got sent to the state orphanage first.  Then, after a year or so, I got adopted by Dave and Terri.  The Brownings, you know.  He worked as an accountant for the city, she was his wife, and they were both okay.  I was glad to be in with them.  Living with a bunch of kids, it’s like school all the time.”

“I can imagine.  Go ahead.”

“Well, I liked living with Dave and his wife.  Christmases were just great, you know, I’d never really experienced that except once at the orphanage.  Just the feeling of, like, us three, two people that seemed to care for me, no, did care for me, and the tree and all the presents...”

“Jesus, too?”

“Oh, yeah.  I went to church.”

“Good.”

“Are you religious?”

“I’m sitting across from an angel.”

It was the first time I’d seen her blush.  “Shut up!”

“So keep talking.”

“All right.  Terri was surprised at how good I was at cooking.  I was, too.  Anything that had something to do with mixing, formulating, preparing, I could do.  So I must have been a pretty good girl cook when I was younger.  If I can’t get back into school soon, I might just try being a chef.”

“Hey, no complaints from me.”

“Thanks.”  She smiled in genuine appreciation, and that was nice to see.  “Mom thought it was neat.  I knew more about herbs and natural flavoring and such than she did.  She like, asked me how I knew, and I just said–“ She shrugged.  “–‘I know.’”

“You’re the great ur-chef of the Julia Child set.”

“Even though this is pretty conventional, I gotta admit,” she said.

“Are you kidding?  I’ve never tasted chicken cooked like this in my life.  It’s really good, Wendy.”

She blushed.  “Way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, I guess.  Way to a woman’s heart is through her ear, about his stomach.”

“I’ll say.  With this, you’ll always have a job assured as a chef.”

“Thanks.”

“At KFC.”

“ARRGHHH!”  She was smiling, but she picked up a forkful of rice in her hand and pitched it at me.  It got partly on my face and partly on my shirt.  I grabbed up a handful and retaliated.  Rice fight!

Before I knew I was holding her down on the floor and rubbing rice against her forehead while she squealed.  “Dammit, Bill, get OFFA me!”

But she was laughing.

So I kissed her.

Not a tongue kiss, not that deep yet, but I did kiss her.  When I opened my eyes, I saw hers wide with surprise.  Or at least I hoped it was surprise.

“Uh, sorry, Wendy,” I said.  “If I went over the line, I apologize.”

She drew a couple of breaths.  Then she grasped me and pulled me closer and kissed me.

This time it was a tongue kiss.

It lasted for a long time.

When we finally broke, she sighed. “It’s been a long time since I did that.  It’s been a long time since I dared to do that.”

“Since you dared?”

She nodded, and looked serious.

“So,” I said.  “I love you very much when you’re daring.”

Wendy hugged me, running her hands over my back.  We stayed like that for a good long while.  She had to be feeling my reaction.  I sure as hell know I was feeling it.

“Bill,” she said, almost in a whisper, “I don’t want to sleep with you tonight.”

“Okay,” I said.  “If you want me to, I’ll go.”

“I didn’t say that,” she said.  “I just...don’t want to go so fast.  But I’d really like to have you stay over tonight.  I, uh...”

“But just not in your bed.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, hugging me harder.

“That’s okay.”  I was running my hands over the area from her neck to her beltline in back.  “Would you like to keep telling me the story of your life, Wendy?”

“Not tonight, Bill,” she said.  “But if you’ll come over tomorrow night after work, maybe.”

“All I needed was the invite.”

“I like you, Bill.  I like you very much, I think.  Can we keep it there until I’m more sure of things?”

“As long as it keeps me near you, kid, I’m in favor of it.”

She rested her head on my shoulder and we just lay together and breathed for awhile.

Then she gently disengaged herself, got up, and went to the sink.  She came back with a pair of moistened Bounty towels.  “I’ll wipe yours off if you’ll wipe mine,” she said.

“You could go to work like that in the morning.  They might think it was some new kind of makeup.”

“Shut UP!”  She almost whacked me with it, but she was still smiling.  So we wiped each other’s faces.

Then she went to her closet and pulled out every spare blanket and sheet she had, along with a pillow from below, and made up a pretty fair pallet on the floor.  “Will this be okay?”, she asked, hopefully.

“Sure,” I said.  “As long as the maid doesn’t kick us out in the morning.”

“Funny man,” she said, disparagingly.  “And I warn you, I wear jammies.”

“Boxers for me,” I said.  “Not briefs.”

“We’ll change that later.”  As soon as she said it, she flushed.  Hope was still loose in the world.

She took a pair of tanned pajama bottoms and tops, went into the bathroom, closed the door, and reemerged in her nighttime outfit.  “How do I look?”

“Haven’t I seen you on page 138 of the Sears catalog?”

She grinned in a nose-wrinkling way.  Then we sat on the couch, talked, and watched A&E for an hour or two.  Once, I wanted to check out the WB, but she pretended to gag.  “I hate their stuff.  Teenage garbage.”  So we didn’t.

Then we had to turn in.  Early hours and all that.  I helped her unfold the couch bed and make it.  After we were done, she stood there in her bare feet and held my hands.  “You know what I really like about you, Bill?”

“What?”

“That I know you like me.   And that I can trust you right now.”

I gave her a big hug and she gave it back.   Then she let me go, she turned out the lights, and I went in the john to strip to my underwear, coming out in a borrowed robe.  I turned off the bath light, draped my clothes over a chair, and got into the pallet.

“Your floor could be a little softer,” I complained.

“Hey.  You want I should put a pea under your mattress?”  She was already in bed.

“Good night.”

But for a good while, it wasn’t a good night.   And finally, she sensed it, too.  She turned on her bedside light.  “Bill?”

“Uhm?”

“What’s wrong?”

“What do you mean, what’s wrong?”

“I mean, you’ve been tossing and turning for an hour or so.  You’ve got to get some sleep.  I’ve got to get some sleep.  We’ve got work tomorrow.”  She was sitting on the side of her bed now, looking like a Boris painting of an angel in that subdued light.  “Come on, tell me what it is.”

“Wendy,” I said.  “I’m nerved.  I don’t know what happened tonight, when you jumped on my back, and I’m not sure I want to know.  But I’m having a hard time turning my mind off about it.”

She nodded, not smiling.

“And that bit about the two ‘jackers,” I said.  “I’m trying to look past it all.  But it’s not so easy, right here and now.  Especially not when I’m trying to sleep.”

“I understand, Bill,” she said.  “Better than you, I understand.”

“Have you maybe got a Tylenol PM or something?  That might help.”

“I have something even better.”  She got out of bed, barefooted it over to me, and knelt beside me.  If I had been expecting something different, I was about to be disappointed.  But definitely surprised.

She lay one warm hand on my brow and said, “Sleep.”  In the tone of a command.

I was about to say, “Now, wait a minute, Wendy,” but I don’t even think I completed the N.

My head hit the pillow and the next thing I knew, a fully-dressed Wendy was nudging me with her shoe.

“Wake up, Joe Boxer,” she said.  “Haven’t got enough time to make us brekkies.  But if you get dressed quick enough, you can take me for hotcakes at Mickey D’s.”

I shook my head.  “Wendy.  You know who you remind me of right now, more than anyone else in the world?”

“Who?”

“Scheherezade.”

She smiled again.  “You’re not as dumb as you look.  Get dressed, Bill.”

I wrapped the blanket around me and got up to do just that.

I wouldn’t miss the next Arabian Night for the world.

“You’ve gotten the first good sleep in three days, Bill,” said Abel at work.  “That’s good.”

“Thanks, Mr. Renzik,” I said, threading a paper tape through the innards of my cash register.  “I’m glad it shows.”

“How did you manage it?”  He seemed genuinely curious.  I humored him.

“Wendy told me to sleep,” I said.  “And when that woman gives an order, you don’t mess with it.”

He grinned.  “Okay.  Just make sure you’re...”

“Mr. Renzik,” I said, facing him with eyes a bit wider.  “I said sleep, not...sleep.”

Abel was still grinning.  He nodded.  Then he left.  Oh, well, you don’t tell the boss off until you’re sure you won’t need his recommendation.

If my mind was on her for most of the day, which it was, at least I was physically better-equipped to cope with the customers.  I shoveled them through my station with great efficiency.  I shoveled in my lunch with even greater efficiency.  And, when work was done, I whipped off my apron faster than Gypsy Rose Lee could have done it, got in my car, and varoomed home.

We had agreed that Wendy would come over to my place tonight.  There was no way in hell I was going to be able to make everything look good enough for her, so I just tidied up as much as I could before I heard the honk of a car horn outside my place.

“Oh, boy,” I muttered, ran to the john, combed my hair, checked my neck for stubble, tucked in my shirt, and ran to the door.  Then I casually opened it and saw, among the other cars outside, Wendy in her silver Chrysler.  She was grinning.  I smiled back.  Then I locked the door behind me, walked over, and got into her car.

As usual, her effect was casual but stunning, which may have been more of an effect of Wendy than what she wore.  Black pants, red tube top, black jacket, and sandals.  I don’t know where women learn that bare feet turn a guy on, but I’m glad somebody out there is telling them.

“My compliments to the escort agency,” I said.

“Say that again and I’ll knock you into the middle of next week.”  She was still smiling.

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry, Wen.  Honestly, I’m sorry.”

“Apology accepted.  Besides, if I was working for an escort agency, I could afford somebody higher-priced than you.”

“All right.”

“But I might not like them as well.”  She leaned over and kissed me on the nose.

“Thanks.”  I leaned over and kissed her on the lips.  She didn’t object.  “Now where to?”

“It’s your date tonight.  You choose.”

“Okay.  Italian, if you please.”

“Fine by me, Bill.”

“They may even play selections from the Mafia Hits CD in the background.”

“Now you’ve got me hooked.  Tell me where to go.”

 -W-

So we went to Luigi’s, which is a pretty nice downtown place, and I had stromboli (my favorite, a folded-over pizza) while she stuck with spaghetti and meatballs.  Wendy was a lot neater than I would have been with that.  “A little too much oregano,” she said, “but otherwise it’s fine.  I think I could do a bit better, though.”

“Yeah, but the best part is, you didn’t have to,” I said.

“Tush, Bill.  A woman likes to show off her abilities.”  Then she smiled wickedly.  “But don’t let that give you any ideas.”

“Too late, Wendy.”

She playfully kicked my ankle under the table.  “I’m glad I don’t know why I like you.  It’d be too hard to analyze.”

“Yeah.  But I’m glad you do like me.  And that I like you.”

“You’re a sweet guy, Bill.  An idiot at times, but a sweet guy nonetheless.”

“And you play too hard at being Little Miss Enigmatic.  But you’re still a doll.”

She sighed.  “Glad you think so.  But it mostly isn’t play.”  She sipped some red wine.

“Well?”

“Well, what?” She looked up at me, quizzically.

“Aren’t you going to finish telling me the story of your life?”

“I...well, I want to, Bill.  But could we save it for last?  After we’re out of here?”  She looked more than a little troubled.

“Well, sure, if you want to.  But don’t you trust me, Wen?”

She touched my arm, gently.  “Oh, yes.  Yeah.  I think I can trust you.  As much as any guy I’ve ever met, I guess.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re very welcome.”

“I’m just scared,” she said.

“So I’ve noticed,” I replied.  “And I wish you’d tell me what you’re scared of.”

“That’s not just it.”  She looked serious.  “If you knew...”

I waited.

“...Then it might be our last date.”

“Why don’t you let me be the judge of that?”  I lay my hand on her wrist.  She moved her hand and interlaced her fingers with mine.  I’ve never met a girl who could make that seem a sexier motion than her.  “Because, from everything I’ve seen, I want to be with you for a very long time.”

She smiled, a bit sadly.  “Well, thank you.  I appreciate that, Bill.  But you haven’t seen everything, that’s the point.”

“Well, we could start with a bikini.”

“Shut up!”  She smiled, disengaged her hand, and slapped my wrist.  “But thanks.  Maybe sometime.  That’s not what I’m talking about.”

“I know.  I’m just trying to make a joke.”

“Emphasis on trying,” she said.  “But I appreciate it.”  She paused.  “Bill?”

“Mm-hmm?”

“I really like you, too.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t know if it’s love or not.  It’s too early for that, still.  But I don’t know that it isn’t.  And I do know I like being with you.”

“Yeah.  And as strange as it may seem, mystery girl, I like being with you as well.”

The smile she gave out made her blue eyes crinkle.  I loved it.

“Too bad they don’t have a gypsy violinist here,” I said.

“Yup.  Or maybe even a guy with an accordion, like in Lady and the Tramp.”

“You watched Disney?  I can’t believe it!”

“Oh, yeah!  I loved Disney.  Well...most of Disney, anyway.”

“I liked the heck out of it when I was a kid.  Mom used to rent the cartoon videos all the time.  101 Dalmatians, Fantasia, Snow White...”

She shivered.  “Snow White scared the hell out of me.  I got to see it with some other kids in the orphanage.  Hardly slept that night.”

“Oh,” I said.  “How’s about Sleeping Beauty?”

She stiffened.

“Hey, hey, Wendy, I’m sorry.  Won’t bring it up again.”

Wendy exhaled, very slowly.  “It’s all right, Bill.  When we talk about Disney, why don’t we stick to stuff like Donald Duck and Goofy?  Those, I can handle.”

“It’s okay, Wen.”  I took her left hand in both of mine.  “It’s really okay.  I just didn’t know about your pressure point there.”

“That’s fine.”  She was getting back to normal.  “I did love Cinderella, though.  I guess every girl does.  Wanting that freaking prince to come looking for the foot that’ll fit his glass slipper.”

“Cinderella must’ve been the hardest gal to buy shoes for in the world.”

She was smiling again.  “Must’ve been.  Especially if you had to shop at a glass works.”

We both laughed.   “You’re a freak, Wendy.”

“Jerk.”

“But a nice freak.”

“And you’re a nice jerk.”  She held my hand, rubbing the spot between my forefinger and thumb with her thumb.  “Thanks for putting up with my cartoonophobia.”

“Any time,” I said.  “Long as you’re with me.”

“If it wasn’t too far, I’d lean over and kiss you on the cheek,” she said.

I got up, went over to her chair, bent over politely, and let her do so.  “Thanks,” I said.

“A pleasure,” she said.  “I’ll put it on your bill, Bill.”

“Will you do it enough to bankrupt me?”

“What?  I’m not dating a rich man here?  Get me a cab!”

“How’s about a pumpkin?  A silver pumpkin with six mice under the hood?”

“That’ll do,” she said.  “Quite nicely.”

“Wendy,” I said.  “You like to dance?”

“Sure,” she said.  “Don’t get enough opportunities to, but yeah, I like dancing.”

“Then let’s pay and get out of here.  I know the place to take you.”

 -W-

And I did.

It wasn’t exactly a pumping rock ‘n’ roll place or an emporium of latter-day disco, but the place was nice, a converted airplane hangar with plenty of foot space.  I’d taken dates there before.  The band was good, equipped for country, pop, light rock, and some other stuff.  You could shake it down, slow dance, or, sometimes, even line dance if you were good enough at that.  And maybe brought your boots.

I liked it because, among other things, the band would take requests.  Since there’s been a song written about almost every girl’s name in creation, and since they knew or could fake a lot of tunes, I could ask them for a song with the name of the girl I happened to be with.  Over time, that required them to play Kiss’s “Beth”, “Amie” by the Pure Prairie League, and one they nearly foundered on, “Joanne” by Michael Nesmith and the First National Band.  It sounds corny and maybe I liked it more sometimes than the girls did, but I never heard complaints.

Wendy seemed to like it, too.  We were one of about seven dancing couples on the floor and, after a little more wine, we’d done a spirited 50's dance to “Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee”, gotten close in for “Little Surfer Girl” (she seemed to like putting her head on my shoulder during that one), and then got ready for the next onslaught.  I was wondering when the fiver I’d given each band member would take affect.

Then I heard the opening notes: Dah-dah-dah-dah, dah-DAH-dah-dah-dah...  Not as good as the Association would have done, but it was over thirty years later, after all.

I sighed and she looked up at me curiously.  Then she started to recognize the song.  “Bill, you nut!  You didn’t.  Tell me you didn’t.”

I leaned in and kissed her on the forehead.  The lead guitarist launched into his vocal:

“Who’s peekin’ out from under a stairway
Smilin’ at everybody she sees?
Who’s reachin’ out to capture a rainbow?
Everyone knows it’s Wendy!”

She grinned fiercely, slapping me on my shoulder.  “That’s supposed to be ‘Windy,’ not ‘Wendy.’”

“I know.  I paid them to change it.”

“Like I haven’t been sung that song half a billion times before!”

“You don’t like it?”

“I love it.”  She kissed me.  Then we kept on dancing.

And for a long time, it seemed like it was just us and the music out there on the dance floor.  I know it’s cliche, but it’s true.  Or it feels like it, anyway.  The subdued light and the substantial feel and good smell and lovely sight of this blonde-haired, blue-eyed woman in my arms, actually enjoying being with me, and I, needless to say, with her...well, the perceptions slowed down quite a bit.  That was very good.  That was very, very good.

By the second chorus, I was singing along with the band.

“And Wendy has stormy eyes that flash at the sound of lies...and Wendy has wings to fly above the clouds,” I sang.  Badly, I’m sure, but I sang.

“Above the clouds,” sang another, female voice.  I looked, startled.  Wendy was singing.  Singing the counterpoint chorus.

“Above the clouds,” I responded.

“Above the clouds!” she finished.

For the rest of the song, it felt as though that was more or less where we were.

Finally, a year or so later, the song wound up and we left the dance floor, arms wrapped about each other.  I don’t know how many folks there knew who the subject of the song had been, but they probably had a good idea from looking at us.

It didn’t seem like we could speak for a few seconds.  But when one of us did, it was Wendy.  “I want to go,” she said, her head against my chest.

“Okay,” I said.  “Don’t feel like talking about it tonight?”

“No, I will,” she said.  “But I want to talk about it someplace else.”

“So we’ll go,” I said.  “And then you’ll talk?”

“I’ll try.”

We got in the car, a little lifted by the wine and a lot more so by the love vibes, but both of us still capable of driving.  Wendy drove.  She drove us past the outskirts of town, off on a rather country road, and down to a wooded area.  That was where she stopped.  Then she looked at me, almost apologetically.

“I’m sorry if this is pretty far out for you, Bill.  But I like coming out here.  I feel at home in the forest, if that makes any sense.”

“Uh huh.”  I wasn’t exactly a woodsman.  I wondered if she had parking or anything further out on her mind.  But I’d come this far with her and had one of the nicest times I’d ever had in my life.  So I decided to follow it out to the end.

A thought crossed my mind.  What if the thing Wendy was afraid of was something truly nasty?  Just suppose she had another personality locked away in her mental chest somewhere.  Suppose she’d taken other guys out to this woody place and done something a lot worse than parking with them.  She sure as hell didn’t seem like the type.  But you never knew, until you went through with it.

So, since I didn’t know, I decided to go through with it.

“When I tell you some things, I want it to be out here, because that’s where I feel most secure.  Okay, Bill?”

She was giving me a very sincere look.  Well, whatever she wanted to do to me, at least it’d be service with a smile.  “All right, Wendy, if that’s the way you want it.”

“Thanks, Bill.” She gave me a squeeze on the forearm.  “Thanks for being understanding.  Come on, let’s go.”

We left the car and she took my hand, leading me into a copse of trees.  It was a clear night and the half-moon above gave us adequate enough light not to trip over any damned stump or fallen trunk.  But she seemed to know her way, even at night.

“There’s nobody out here, is there?” I asked, not knowing what the answer could be.

“Nope,” she said.  “Just us.”   She stopped.  We were in the midst of what seemed like a small circle of trees.

“This is what I call my Thinking Place,” she said.  “But right now, I’ve gotta do something else before I do any thinking or talking.  Okay, Bill?”

“Like what?”

“I’ve gotta take a whiz.”

“Oh, boy.”  I sighed.  “Well, okay.  Don’t take any longer than you have to, okay?”

“Don’t worry.”  She kissed me on the cheek.  “I’ll be back.”  She walked off, treading on a few fallen leaves as she did so.  She must have gone far enough so that she would be out of hearing as well as out of sight.  I stood there in my light jacket, a slight breeze chilling me, wishing like hell she’d stopped at a gas station along the way.

After a minute or so, I heard a sound that didn’t seem to be one she could make.

I wish I’d handled the following business better, but I have to say one thing in my defense.

If it had just been the trees forming faces in their trunks, I might have been able to handle it.

It was when their branches started reaching for me that I started to scream.

Try facing something that, despite all evidence of your senses, cannot rationally happen.  Your conscious brain will not process all the information.  Given the limitations of your conscious brain, you’d most likely be dead.

That’s why it was a good idea when God placed enough common sense in our unconscious brain to make us get the hell away from danger, no matter what our jammed-up conscious brain is telling us.

My feet and body lurched me away from the reaching branches of those trees with the mug shots in their bark.  I fell to the ground, rolled away, the leafy wood-fingers brushing air just about where my head and shoulders had been.  The problem was that the damn trees were too close in at this place.  There wasn’t that much room to avoid them.

They were going to open a branch office in my body.

The ones behind me, to the side of me, were reaching.  I somehow bounced to my feet, flailed out with my arms, hit some of the thin branch-ends and broke some of them off.  But I’d put myself in range of some of the beefier limbs, and they were reaching out towards me with pops and cracks, displaying remarkable flexibility nonetheless.  I screamed.  I kicked out at them and ran to another side, but it just put me within reach of another bunch of wooded octopi.

Then there was something around my middle and it was dragging me back.

I was lifted off my feet and the world turned into slow fear.

Despite that, I had two thoughts.  One: how do you put down on an obituary that the deceased was treed to death?  Two: At least the trees didn’t seem able to talk.  I really couldn’t have taken that, if they had been trying to say something to me.

I had a feeling I was about to find out what the interior of one of those tree mouths was like.

Then I heard a quite familiar and quite welcome voice, in a shout: “KAH!”

That’s an approximation of what she said.  I don’t know if it’s written quite that way, and I’m not sure that I want to know.  But it’s sufficient for here.

The confining branch stiffened at the word, and, from my vantage point a couple of feet off the ground, I could see a figure rushing into the circle of trees.  Wendy, moonlight gleaming off her blonde hair, looking astonished and huffy.

Thank God she didn’t look like she’d set me up.

Wendy positioned herself in the midst of the trees, raised her arms, and started rattling off dialogue in a language I had never heard before.  I can’t reproduce a bit of it.  I’ve heard talk from Japanese and Arabs, among others, and this was nothing like their wordage or any I’ve ever heard before.  I doubt even an ancient Egyptian would know it.

She turned in a circle to face each tree in turn, and her tone was stern, as if she were lecturing them.  That was fine by me.  I could almost imagine the trees turning sheepish, like they’d been caught by a schoolmarm disturbing fishes in a tank, or something.  At any rate, they didn’t seem to be much interested in me anymore.

“Wendy, get me down from here!” I yelled.  The grip of the wood wasn’t exactly comfortable.  She didn’t halt in her strange speech.  Maybe, at that point, she couldn’t or didn’t dare.

At the end of it, she closed her eyes and twirled once again, her hands extended towards the trees.  She seemed graceful, like a ballerina.  I knew she’d been on pep squad, but I didn’t think she’d learned this move in any high school dance class.  She finally ended up on her knees, her hands touching the ground.

The faces of the trees were swallowed up by the bark.  The branches were retracted to their normal positions.  The limb around me let go, and I dropped a couple of feet to the ground, landing on my knees and shins with an “Umph!”.  Wendy looked up, and about one and a half seconds later had her arms around me.

“Are you hurt, Bill?  Did the limb squeeze you too hard?”

I could barely speak.  “Wendy,” I said.

“I blame myself for this, Bill,” she said, earnestly.  “But it wasn’t my doing.  You have to believe me.  I never thought they’d have the power to reach us here.”

“Wendy,” I repeated.

“I’m sorry, Bill.  I’m so, so sorry.”  She hugged me and she almost seemed an inch away from tears.  But I was still shaking.

“Wendy,” I said, “get me the hell out of here.”

She got to her feet and helped drag me up.  I looked at the trees and shrank back.  She had me by the arm.

“You’ll be just fine now, Bill,” she said.  “The spirits have gone.”

“The what?”

“The spirits.  The ones that invaded the trees.  Oh, hell, I should have done a shielding before we came here.  But I never dreamed they’d try and attack me in a place that I hold holy.”

“They didn’t attack you!  They attacked me!”

“And they won’t do it again.  I made sure of that.  I’m sorry, Bill, and I know you’re scared.”

“You’re telling me!  The hell with Joyce Kilmer!”

“Bill.”  She looked at me sternly.  “We have to go.  Just come with me.”

Despite the residual fear, I felt somewhat stupid.  She led me towards a break in the trees.  I kept as far back from the nearest one as I could, but it could still have reached out and turned me into pulp for tree writing material if it had wanted to.  Wendy kept a firm grip on my arm, and we made it through.

We kept on walking till we were back in her car, at which point we got in and locked the doors at my insistence.

“I didn’t mean that to happen, Bill,” she said, looking at me pleadingly.  “I really, really never expected that to happen.”

“But it did,” I said, my hands still shaking despite one track of my brain telling me how bad this looked in front of my girl.  “It happened, Wendy.”

“I know,” she said.  “And from now on, we’re not going anywhere without shielding.”

“Shielding,” I said.

She nodded.  “It keeps the spirits from inhabiting things.  From using them against us.”

“Against us,” I said.

“If you’re going to keep repeating the ends of my sentences,” she said, “I ought to end this one with, ‘I love you.’”

“I love–“ I stopped.  “Oh, cripes.  Wendy. Wendy, what are you?”

She sighed.  “I’d hoped to tell you in my Thinking Place, Bill, because that’s the place I feel most at home.  It would have been special there.  Believe me, I didn’t in a million years think that would happen.”

“Stop stalling,Wendy.  Tell me who you are.  Tell me what you are.”

“Okay,” she said, holding the wheel with both hands and staring out through the windshield.  “My name is Wendy Corrigan, and I’m a magician.”

“A magician.”  I rolled it around on my tongue, in my mind.  “A magician.”

“You’re repeating me again,” she said.

“For cripes’ sake, Wendy!  Cut me some slack!  I’m the guy who almost experienced tree surgery of a different kind.”

Suddenly she hugged me.  Harder than she’d ever hugged me before.  Her chest was heaving and I think she was holding back crying.  I wasn’t exactly sure what for, then, but I think now it was all about acceptance.  Or not getting it.

“Bill, Bill.  You’ve got to believe me.  Please believe me.  I wasn’t setting you up.  I like you too much for that.  Maybe I love you too much for that, I don’t know.  But I don’t want to see you hurt.  I’m trying to keep you from getting hurt.  And maybe...”  There was a sob in her voice, now.  “...maybe I’m not sure if I can.”

I put my shaky hands around her body, and it was as warm and fine as it had ever been.  “Wendy,” I said.  “Oh, Wendy.  Why the hell couldn’t you tell me before?  Why couldn’t you tell me somewhere other than this?”

“Because it’s never happened with this intensity before.  Or so many times,” she said.  She was still holding me.  “Bill, please.”

“Please what, Wendy?”

“Please stay with me.  At least till we find out if we can love each other or not.  I’ve had guys leave before—“

“I can’t imagine why.”

“Shut up!  And I don’t want it to happen again.  I’m on guard now, Bill.  I can keep things from happening.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure as I can be,” she said.  She sighed.  “It’s getting pretty late, Bill.  Do you want me to give you the condensed version on the way back to your place?”

“Why not?” I said.  “Why the hell not?”

She started the engine and we pulled out, back to the main road.  While she was talking, I kept watching the trees.

 -W-

This is what Wendy told me:

“It started out...at least I remember it starting out...when I was in the orphanage.  The woman who was in charge of us was Mrs. Meyers, Lucinda Meyers.  She introduced me to all the children, particularly the girls.  I’ll skip over a lot of that because I know what you want to hear about.

“They liked to let us do sports and such, to amuse us, to keep us fit, and I suppose to keep our minds off the fact that we didn’t have mothers or fathers.  I was still learning stuff, and I had a lot to learn.  But I was, like, found in winter.  And there were a lot of snows that winter.  One of them powdered down a hill we had near the orphanage, and we had some sleds.  So after school, Mrs. Meyers let some of us girls and some of the boys go sledding.  She had one of the older guys, Ricky Davis, go with us to watch out.  Which was great, because I’d never gone sledding before.  I was Little Miss Bellywhomper, but I loved it.

“I was standing there at the bottom after one run, holding my sled, snow all over my snowsuit and in my eyebrows, not caring a bit about it.  I was having fun.  Maybe the most fun I’d had since I woke up in that cop station.

“So anyway, here comes Jimmy Morrison on that Flexible Flyer he was using.  Only I guess he wanted to impress somebody—God knows who, it couldn’t have been me—and he wasn’t holding on as well as he should to the front.  Maybe he wanted to play daredevil.  He hit a bump, and whop—up he goes, not too far, but far enough, and as the sled’s coming down without him, he’s coming down hard on his back.  Right on top of a rock which was pretty well-concealed, as we found out.  And all of a sudden, Jimmy isn’t moving.

“Cherie, one of the girls beside me, started calling out to him to get up and quit joking.  But he wasn’t getting up.  Then she called his name about twice more, and he still wasn’t moving.  So us two girls and the one boy who was down there with us start up the hill towards him, on feet and hands, yelling up at the kids above us that Jimmy’d been hurt.

“Ricky was down there like a shot, skidding down on his butt and legs, ‘cause it was the fastest way he could get down there without a sled.  He was, like, 16 and a lot bigger than yours truly.  Older, too.  Cherie and I and the other two got up there a few seconds after him, and we saw that Jimmy wasn’t only, like, not moving.  He was not breathing.  The damn air had been knocked out of him, and he couldn’t get anymore in his lungs.

“So Ricky’s pushing on his chest to try and get the breath back in him, like maybe he’d seen on Baywatch or something.  And nothing’s happening.  Kelly, who was the other girl, put her mouth over Jimmy’s and tried breathing in it, but we were just kids.  We didn’t know how to do CPR.  Even Ricky didn’t know.  Cherie’s going nuts, maybe ‘cause she had a crush on him, I don’t know, and trying to hold up his legs so they’d be higher than his head.  And the other kids are, like, wanting to scoot down too and help, but Ricky’s yelling for them to go back to the house and get help.

“But me, all I was doing was standing around like a little dummy, ‘cause I didn’t know anything I could do.  I wanted to help him.  I wanted to do something, ‘cause I felt like, well, if nobody did anything to bring Jimmy around, he wasn’t going to be there to help by the time the grownups got there.  Right then, I wanted to help Jimmy more than anything I’d ever wanted in the world.  Including getting a new Malibu Barbie, which was really high on my list of priorities that year.

“And all of a sudden, Bill, all of a sudden, I felt something.  A rush of power, kind of, like an aura around me.  Maybe it was an aura.  That’s what it feels like, to this day, when I use it.  I didn’t know what it was.  It just felt warm and kinda electric, like I was toasty out there even in all the cold.  I didn’t know what it was, and I didn’t have time to wonder.  All I knew—all I felt—was that it was maybe something I could use to help Jimmy.  And that was good enough for me.

“So I pulled off my right glove and I got in close and knelt down and put it on Jimmy’s chest, right above where Ricky was pumping away on him.  Ricky was saying something like, ‘Are you nuts?  Give me room!’  But I wasn’t concerned with him.  I could feel the aura around me, like it was ready for a command or something.  Like it was Ali Baba’s genie, the one I’d heard about in Story Time.  If it was like that, I was willing to give it a try.

“So I said, ‘Breathe.’

“And I felt part of the aura, part of the power, going into him.  Don’t ask me how, but I did.  I said, ‘Breathe’ again, a little louder, just to make sure I’d be heard and there’d be no mistake.  And Jimmy was in pretty bad shape, I could tell.  His lips were turning blue, and it wasn’t from the cold.

“That’s when Jimmy drew in a breath.

“Cherie saw it and she screamed.  She said, ‘Look, he’s breathing!  Jimmy is freaking breathing!’  Only she didn’t use the word ‘freaking’, and we didn’t much care.  She was so excited she dropped his legs and just about slid down the hill herself.  But Ricky saw it, too, and he kept pumping away with his hands on Jimmy’s chest.  He finally just pushed me away with one hand, told me I was getting in the way.  Not mean, but not very courteous, either.  He made Kelly get away from Jimmy’s mouth, too.

“But none of that mattered, Bill, because Jimmy was starting to suck in air and push it out again, and his lips turned pink again and everything.  In a couple of minutes, his eyes opened up and he went, ‘Where am I?’  I swear, that’s what he said.  And Ricky just sighed and smiled, and Cherie ran to his head and hugged him, and the rest of the kids just broke out cheering.  As far as anybody knew, Ricky was the big hero of the day.  That was okay, because I was standing over there to the side of them, and knowing I had a secret.  It was kinda frightening, but kinda reassuring, too.  If I could do something like this, it was a nice secret to have.

“And that was the first time I used my power.  The first time I can remember, that is.”

I let it hang there for a long moment.  Then I said, “What about...what about...”

“The spirits?” She turned to me with a sad and sober look.  “I was just about to get to that, Bill.  Sit back, and make yourself comfortable.”

How does one make oneself comfortable when less than an hour ago, you were grabbed by trees with faces, you’ve learned your girlfriend can do magic, and she tells you she’s going to tell you about spirits?

“I’m fine,” I said.  “Go ahead.”

Wendy put both hands to the sides of her face, sighed, then clasped her hands in her lap and looked at me.  “Bill, I’m sorry.  I know you were scared by the trees.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“I would be too, if I hadn’t gone through everything I had since I was 12 or so.  I mean–“ She shot me a look of uncertainty.  “–I think I was 12.  They just had to guesstimate my age when they found me that night.  I’m really not sure how old I am, Bill, but I know I’m around 21.  I even had to pick my own birthday.”

“Which was?”

“November 27th.  The night they found me in the snow.”

“Okay.  Very, very nice, Wendy.  Now, you were speaking about spirits?”

“Yeah.  All right, Bill.  Settle back, because this is where it gets scary.”

Nice to know everything up to this point had just been entertainment.

 -W-

“It wasn’t very long after that incident with Jimmy, maybe four months, max, that I got the first Visitation.

“But before that, I started getting the Dreams.  Or maybe it was the Dream.  I don’t know what else to call it.  Not that long at first, just kind of like a subliminal frame stuck in a movie.  But it scared me, like putting dry ice on your back.  These three old women.  Could have been the Fates, I don’t know.  Indistinct at first, not all that much better the last time I saw them.  I don’t often have nightmares, but I remember these.  They’ve got the same cast of characters.  They didn’t start till after I helped Jimmy breathe.

“That week, I saw the three old women for the first time in my dream.  I won’t say I woke up right then, but one of the girls in my room woke me up.  She said I was thrashing around in my sleep.  I guess I was.  Sheets and covers were tangled.  I got up, took a jog down the hall and back in my PJ’s, felt better, managed to get back to sleep.  But I didn’t forget the dream.

“About three months after the Jimmy thing, I saw them again.  A bit longer this time.  You can’t really estimate time in a dream, but they were more distinct, and it was a longer experience.  I could see them, dressed up in some robes and hats, just like something out of Macbeth.  They were in some forest setting, I think.  I know they were later on.  They also had this big cauldron between them, just like ‘Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,’ and all that stuff.  You might think I’d picked that up from a movie, or from that Shakespeare play.  But I’d never seen Macbeth, I was just a little girl.  And I never saw a movie with a scene like that.

“As near as I can tell, it was something I may have remembered.

“And it looked to me at the end of it like they were turning and looking at me.

“I wasn’t just thrashing in my sleep then.  I screamed.  Sally, one of my roomies, shook me awake.  I almost slapped her.  I thought one of the witches had me.  I came to and she had to hold me to keep me from shaking.  God help me, Bill, I was scared.  I went to the doctor and he prescribed some pills.  They kind of helped.

“But they didn’t stop the Visitation.

“You know I’m a good cook, Bill.  I don’t know why, but I guess I’ve always had the talent.  Maybe I learned in my early life.  Anyway, they let me help out in the kitchen, and I was good enough for them to trust me on my own after a little while.  We had a gas stove there, and it was just me one afternoon.  Me and a pan of tomato soup I was heating.

“Yeah.  That’s what I thought.

“So there I was, little 12-year-old Wendy, stirring the soup, and all of a sudden...on the far side of the pot...

“...the flame formed a hand and reached around for me.

“I screamed, natch, and upset the pot.  Soup went all over the place, on my apron, on my dress, on my face, on the linoleum.  It burned, but lucky enough the pot didn’t touch me.  I wasn’t even thinking about that, though.  I was on my butt and sneakers, trying to back away from that damned stove.  I...oh, God, Bill, give me a chance to get my stuff together.  This was as bad for me at least as the tree thing was for you.

“Okay.  Okay, let me go ahead.

“These three...beings...these three demons...they were made out of flame.  They were coming out of the burner.  They had human shapes, but they were made out of blue gas flames.  And they were...

“...They were coming for me.

“I had scooted across the room, all the way to the wall.  Those things were out of the burner now, walking on the floor, burning their prints into the linoleum.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to get away from them in time, not to the side or whatever.  I was still sitting down with my back to the wall and I guess my eyes were like saucers, and it was like one of those dreams where you want to scream and you can’t, you just can’t, and the damn things were so close, Bill, they looked like they had faces, and they were reaching out for me and they were gonna touch my face and...

“...And I screamed, ‘KAH!’

“Yeah.  ‘Kah.’  Just like you heard me say in the Thinking Place.  I didn’t know where it came from.  I didn’t even know what it meant.  Now I know it’s a command.  It means ‘Stop’.

“And they stopped.

“There the buggers were, just standing in front of me, flickering and sending smoke up to the ceiling, burning the damned floor with their feet.  But they weren’t getting any closer.  I could see their faces.  I didn’t want to look at their faces.

“I just sat there, looking at those burning demons for a couple of seconds, breathing in and out, in and out.  Then I started saying something.  Something really fast.  Even I wasn’t certain it was me saying it, until a few seconds into it.

“I was talking in the language you heard me use to the trees, Bill.  The magic language.  It was like, automatic.  I didn’t understand it, but I understood the meaning of it, kinda.  Does that make sense?  I know it didn’t to me.  And I don’t know how I knew it.  But I did.

“It was a spell I was speaking.  A shielding.  It kept those butane buggers away from me.  It was like I had a force field, and maybe I did.  A strengthening of my aura, maybe.  But I didn’t even know I had an aura, back then.  Anyway...

“There they were, just standing there, burning holes in the flooring.  They were a few inches away from me, but I managed to sidle away from them and got on my feet.  Still scared as hell, you bet, but I was kinda curious, too.  About them, about me, about what I was saying.  I knew somebody would be coming pretty quick, and I didn’t know what I was going to do.  They were paralyzed, yeah, but they were still out of the burner.  And I thought, What if I could make them go back inside?  Then I wouldn’t have to talk to Mrs. Meyers about it, and how am I supposed to explain three burning demons and the fact that I could stop them by saying something I didn’t understand?

“That’s when I started talking again.

“It was pretty similar to what you heard me say in the ring of trees, Bill.  It’s kind of a scolding thing: ‘You are not where you belong.  You have no right to do what you are doing.’  And so forth.  It also implies that there are higher powers that can punish them for what they’ve done.  Finally, you give an order for them to go back where they came from and not come back.  I didn’t really know this stuff when I was doing it, but I did it.  I could half-sense the meaning of it, not the individual words, but what they were supposed to do.

“And the three burning men turned around, walked back to the stove, and jumped in the burner. Just like that.  They were gone.

“I couldn’t believe it.  Neither could Mrs. Meyers and the staff.  They busted in a couple of seconds later and they asked me what had happened.  I told ‘em the stove had backfired or something.  The burner was still on, but it was just acting like usual.  She turned it off, told them not to monkey with it, got me cleaned up and put some stuff on me for my burns.  They weren’t too bad.  Then she asked me what had happened.  I told her the fire under the pot had flared up like it was an explosion.  Wasn’t too far off.  Finally convinced her I wasn’t playing with the gas.  We had to get a new stove, even though there wasn’t anything wrong with the old one.   It was a good long while before she’d let me cook again, and she always had somebody watching me.  But I was good enough so that she’d let me help fix meals on a regular basis.  Betty Crocker’s understudy, that’s me.

“I had a few more dreams after that.  Witch dreams.  But I got adopted by Dave and Terri.  They came to the orphanage and I did an interview and we got along okay.  I mean, there’s not a lot more to it than that.  They couldn’t have kids and she didn’t want to do artificial-i, so they adopted.  They promised they’d take good care of me, and see if they could help me get my memory back.  So I went with them and it turned out all right.  Except for the memory.  And except for a few other things.

“One other thing was that I had to save them both from a water spirit.  It came up right out of the pool where they were swimming and tried to drown them.  I had to run out there in my little red bathing suit and stop it.  They were scared as all get-out.  That’s when I had to tell them everything.  Everything I knew.  I prayed that night, Bill.  I prayed that they wouldn’t give me back to the orphanage.  They didn’t.

“But every now and then, things would happen.  The neighbors’ house on the south burned up.  A pack of dogs, like twenty or thirty, chased our car down the street.  I told them to stop, in the magic language, and they did.  Things like that.  But it’d only happen maybe once a year, or once every two years.  The witch dreams weren’t that frequent, either.  We coped.  We kept our secret.

“And yeah, I did some dating.  But by that time, I’d gotten to figure out the drill.  Anybody that was around me for too long a time, they might be a candidate for attack.  I was safe, as far as I know.  I kept up the shielding spell.  But you have to say it when you’re under attack, or when somebody else is.  I didn’t want that to happen to a guy because of me.  So I didn’t date any one guy very long.  I had to be a Runaround Sue.

“Then I met this guy in my junior year, Robin was his name, and don’t do me any Batman jokes, okay?  He was on the tennis squad and he was really nice.  I liked him, he liked me, you know the whole nine yards.  So I broke my rule and went steady with him for a long time.  I thought sure...I thought sure this would be the guy I could love.  I was going to do it with him, Bill.  I was...going to lose it.  I was going to love him.

“I even had the place picked out.  I was going to ask him out, do dinner and a movie, then have him go up to a lover’s lane and have him do me.  Oh, yes, we can be very methodical about it when we want to.  I don’t know if Robin knew what I was planning, but the way we’d made out, I didn’t think he was going to much object.

“That was the week that my mom and dad asked me if I wanted to go miniature golfing with them.  But I said no.  I wanted to stay home, do my homework, and think about what it was going to be like doing it with Robin.  If it would hurt or not, if it would feel good or not...I’m sorry if I’m getting too graphic.  Am I?  Okay.

“And...you know what happened.

“Their car went right off the street, up a sidewalk, into the side of a building.  I don’t even know how a car could do that if it was out of control.  Maybe it wasn’t out of control.  Maybe it was just out of Dad’s control.  Whatever.  Nobody else got hurt.  All the walkers managed to get out of the way.  Both my foster parents died.

“I was...oh, God...I don’t want to talk about it, Bill.  I just don’t want to talk about it.  Just let me get through this thing, okay?

“I had a witch dream that night.  The witches were laughing.

“That’s why I had to break up with Robin.  I couldn’t risk something like that happening to him.  He just thought it was because I was shook up over my parents’ deaths.  It was that, all right.  And more.

“I got the house and most of the property, in Dad’s will.  That let me go to school for a time.  But not more than a couple of years.  And about my name...I changed it.  I wasn’t Wendy Doe, like I’d been in the orphanage, and Browning was a nice name, but it wasn’t my name.  So I kept Browning for one of my middle names, and gave myself another middle name, Lee.  But my last name was one I chose for myself.

“Corrigan.  Look it up.  It means a wise-woman.  A magician.  Which I guess I am.  Not too sure how wise I am, but I do have these powers.  It’s not hocus-pocus, Bill, and it’s not like those stupid posers with their books and their charts and their made-up spells and all that.  Nothing I do is like that.  It’s just drawing on powers and saying spells.  I don’t think I’m some witch out of a fairy tale.  I feel more like, say, one of those characters in that movie, X-Men.  You ever see it?  Okay.  One of those girls with built-in powers.  That’s kind of what I have.

“But I didn’t date when I was in college.  And I got awfully lonely.

“Then this thing happened with you, Bill.  That’s why I didn’t want to let you in, at first.  I was afraid for you.  I guess I should have been, the way things have turned out.  But I was...I was lonely.  I guess I was, well, willing to chance it.  Even though that carjacking...it had to be the work of the spirits.  Those guys didn’t know what they’d done, afterwards.  But I let you in.  I wanted to see if it could work, Bill.  I wanted to know if, even with all this crap happening around us, if we could want each other enough to make it work.

“And...maybe we have, Bill.  Just maybe, maybe we have.

 -W-

“Bill?  Are you still with me?”

“What?  Oh, oh yeah.  I’m listening.  I’m definitely listening.”

Wendy moved her legs a bit.  They must have been cramping or going to sleep.  “So...what do you think, Bill?”

“About what?”

She looked straight on at me.  “About us?”

“I...”

I was about to say nothing could matter.  I was about to say we were in love, and that’d be the end of it.  I was about to say that nothing could keep us apart, no force of humanity or nature or even blue butane burner people.

But then I looked out the windshield at the copse of trees, in the distance, where I’d almost ended up as not-quite-naked lunch for a bunch of Wooden Willies.

I finally sighed and said, “I’m scared, Wendy.  I’m still scared.”

She looked pained, grasped my wrist, held it in a warm grip.  She looked into my eyes with those big blues of hers, and if there was any further I could fall for her, I fell.

Yet, there still was the stuff she had told me.  And the moving trees.

I had to be honest.   God help me, I had to tell the truth.

“I want to go home, Wendy.  I want to sleep on it.  Can you take me home?”

“All right,” she said.  “But that doesn’t change things, does it?  We’re still together, aren’t we?”

“Wendy.  I want to go home.”

She looked at me a couple more seconds and then let go of my wrist.  She twisted the key in the ignition and the engine fired up.

A little while after that, she pulled up in front of my place.  I opened the door.  I didn’t trust myself to look at her.  But she was looking at me.

“Bill,” she said.  “Please don’t shut me out.  Please let me know.  I’ve got to know.”

I hesitated.  I finally looked at her.  If I’d let myself go, my heart would have broken so hard right then and there an industrial vice wouldn’t have been able to hold it together.

“There’s so much to think about, Wendy.  So much to, I don’t know, integrate.  I feel...”

She looked at me, hopefully.

I had to finish it up.

“Scared,” I said.

Her expression wilted and died.

“Will you give me a call?” she asked.

“Yeah.  Yeah, definitely,” I said.

“I can say a sleep spell for you,” she said.

“That’s very nice of you, Wendy.  But I’ll try a Tylenol PM.  Okay?”

A long, long beat.  “Okay,” she said.

“You take care, Wendy,” I said, and held out my hand.  “You take care.”

She took it.  We held on for a while.   But if there was any warmth, it was hard to feel.

Finally I let go, got out, and slammed the door shut.  I went to my apartment, opened it up, went in, shut the door.  I didn’t even bother turning the lights on.  I just sat there.

It was about five minutes before I heard her car engine start up again.  By the time I looked out the window, she was gone.

I took the Tylenol.  It helped me get to sleep.

That was all it could help me with.

The alarm went off too early.  I did the morning rituals, drove to work, put in my eight hours.  Abel asked me what was wrong.  I told him everything was fine.  He didn’t believe me and I don’t blame him.  But he let me alone.

One of the girls, Shannon, got a strange expression on her face and asked me if I’d like her to come along with her to lunch that day.  I said no, thanks.  She said, “Okay,” and that was it, outside of her shooting me a worried glance or two that afternoon.

I came home and wondered why I was there.  I wondered why I wasn’t trying to get into the arms of the most wonderful girl I’d ever known.

Then I remembered the trees, and I knew why.

About nine o’clock the phone started ringing.

It rang once, twice, three times.  I thought for sure it would quit after three.  But no, it kept on.  Twelve times.  I counted it.

I finally got up and there was nobody on.  They had quit trying.

I pressed the numbers that let you dial the party who’s been calling you last.  I let the phone ring twelve times and I was tempted to go for a thirteenth.  But I didn’t.  I just pushed the disconnector and then hung up the receiver, none too gently.

Nobody else tried to get me that night.  I fixed a Swanson’s turkey dinner in the microwave, ate it, tried to read, gave up, tried TV, said to hell with that, messed about a little on the Internet, and went to bed.

I know I went to sleep because I wasn’t tired in the morning.  Not physically, anyway.

Thought about tossing her an e-mail but I didn’t know her addy.  I suppose she didn’t know mine, either, because I didn’t get one from her.  I checked it five times before I left for work.

By about 10 a.m., Shannon came over to my station.  “You’re going to lunch with me, Bill.”

“Thanks, Shannon,” I said, “but I’ll just brown-bag it today.”

She stepped up to within ten inches of my face.  “I said, you are going to lunch with me today, Bill McGregor.   No arguments required.”

I shook my head.  “All right.  Yes, ma’am.”

“Good.”  Shannon sauntered back to her register.  She was auburn-haired, kind of short, pretty enough, but nothing like the girl whose call I hadn’t taken.  I wondered if she was trying to move in on vacated territory.  Somehow, it didn’t seem like it.

I was right.

Over pizza at the Food Court, she grilled me as thoroughly as any burger.  “So.  What’s your problem, and what’s her name?”

I consulted with a pepperoni before answering.  “So who says it’s got either?”

“Come on, Bill.  You’re wearing your heart on your sleeve, you know?  If it was out there any further, I could give you CPR on your arm.  She left you, right?”

I sighed.  “Look, Shannon.  It isn’t exactly like that.  Something happened and I...well, I didn’t know how to deal with it.”

“Something bad?”

“Something scary,” I said.

She waited before answering.  “Was it her fault?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“Bill, there’s either a yes or no answer to that.  Was it her fault, or not?”

I was getting mad.  “Damn it, Shannon.  Exactly why do I have to tell you everything about my love life?”

“You don’t,” she said, calmly.  “I’m just a friend.  If you want me to keep my little busybody nose out, I will.”

We ate in silence for a few minutes.  Then she said, “Wendy what?”

“Huh?”

“You said something under your breath.  Sounded like Wendy something.”

I put down my pizza slice and leaned my head on both hands.  “It’s that obvious, huh?”

She smiled with one corner of her mouth.

“Wendy Corrigan,” I said.  “She works at the library and I think she’s an angel.”

“That’s a good sign,” Shannon said.

“Something happened last time we were out that shook me up quite a bit,” I said.  “Don’t want to talk about it.”

“But you seem to indicate, Bill, that it wasn’t really her fault.”

“It wasn’t.  Not really.   It kind of happened because of the place we were in.”

“Well, if it’s a place, you can stay away from there, can’t you?”

“I’m not ever going back there.  Ever.”

She nibbled on her beef-and-anchovies.  “But what about her?”

“I don’t know, Shannon.  I just don’t know.”  I grabbed my tea glass to stop my hand from shaking.

“Too much caffeine, Bill?”

“Not enough.”

Shannon got up.  “Gotta go to the ladies.  I’ll be back in just a minute.”

“Shannon.  The ladies is that other way.”

“I’m taking the long way around.”

And after she got back, we got in her car and went back to work.

 -W-

It was 5:30 and just about time for my shift to be over.  I was looking forward to it, though I didn’t have a good reason for doing so.  Maybe I could study some of my law books.  After all, summer vacation wasn’t going to be there forever.

I’d just got finished with a woman whose two rugrats seemed inextricably bound to the cart when I noticed the next cart in the line and I couldn’t believe it.

The damn thing was piled over the top with enough expensive items to choke a politician’s fund-raising dinner.

At least seventeen joints of meat, all the plastic-wrapped kind.  The most expensive cheeses we had on the rack.  Pate.  Five bottles of champagne and three of wine.  A long ton of various vegetables.  A sample of every kind of pasta we had in stock, a rackful of seasonings, four bags of sugar, four family-size boxes of Lipton’s tea bags, various cans of fruit and soup, a 12-pack of Classic Coke, three bags of Pillsbury’s flour, a box or two of Bisquick, and, riding on top of it all like a conquering hero, a box of Alpha-Bits.

I think I knew who was wheeling the cart before I got up to her eye level.

She was standing there in a three-piece blue suit with brown sunglasses and the greatest hair and makeup job I’d ever seen on her.

“Well?” said Wendy, sweetly.  “Aren’t you going to check me out?”

When I found my jaw and replaced it, I said, “Wendy.  Come on.  There’s no way you can afford this stuff.”

“I didn’t know it was the place of employees to argue with the customer,” she said in a haughty manner.

“You don’t have enough money to pay for all this?”

“How do you know?  Have you checked my bank balance lately, sir?”

There were three people behind her already, and the line was bound to be getting longer.  “Wendy,” I protested.  “What’s this all about?”

“I’m checking out.”  She smiled.

“Do you just want to talk to me?”

“Well, I recall phoning someone the other night and having it ring almost an unlucky number of times.”

“Yeah, and I called back and let it ring the same number.”  I paused.  “I’m sorry.”

She nodded.  “Apology accepted, Bill.”

“Thanks.  And I understand why you didn’t pick up, either, I guess.”

“Maybe you do,” she said.  “I’m not sure I do.  But I hope you’ll forgive me that, too.”

“Don’t even need to ask.”  I was smiling.  Don’t ask me how, but I was smiling.

“Hey, you guys,” said an old man in back of her with French bread and sardines in his cart.  “Break it up.  Some of us gotta get home before we go back to work, you know?”

“Wendy,” I said.  “Go put this stuff back.”

“I thought you wanted to make a sale.”

“Do you want me to come to dinner?”

“Well, that might be a nice way to start out.”

“Okay,” I said.  “7 o’clock?”

“Sure.  If you’ll help me fix it.”

“I will.  Now go put this stuff up!”

“Absolutely.”  She turned to the folks in the line behind her.  “Excuse me.  Could you people please back up so I can come through and put a few things back?  I’d appreciate it.”  They complied.  Our drama hadn’t gone unnoticed, I guess.

Just before she went, she pecked me on the cheek.  The line and the other cashiers gave me a standing ovation.  The blonde minx was grinning as she took the buggy back to the various places of replacement.

Shannon, at the next register, cupped her hands over her mouth and called out.  “Hey, Bill.  I think you were right.  She does look like an angel!”

I think I melted into a puddle.  But over all the laughter, I couldn’t really be sure.

 -W-

So after work I showed up at her apartment with my VCR under my arm, two videos (Wag the Dog and a Harrison Ford film), and me.  She opened the door and hugged me before I could put anything down.  “Welcome back, Wandering Bill,” she said.

“Guess all roads lead to Wendy,” I said.  “At least, the ones that don’t go to Rome.”

“Come on in before your arms fall off,” she said.  She was wearing a red T-shirt, blue jean overalls, and an apron.  As usual, she was barefoot.  “You get to stir the sauce.”

“You’re cooking Italian?”

“Uh huh.  Spaghetti and meatballs, garlic toast, Caesar salad.  I’ll have the Mafia eating out of my hand in no time.”

“They’ll have to fight me for it.”

“Oh, I’d like that.”

Within a few minutes, I think I’d forgotten the impact of the event of two nights back.  Not exactly forgotten, but repressed.  Well, it was understandable.  With the presence of that lovely blonde cook in close proximity to me, and us finding excuses to accidentally bump into each other more often than not, the warmth in that room was only caused in part by the cooking.

Nothin’ says lovin’ like something from the oven.

Can’t believe I wrote that.

When we carried the stuff to the table at last, we each had one arm around the other and our heads on each other’s shoulder.  Think it’s easy to carry in spaghetti, garlic toast, and salad like that?  You haven’t tried it.  But we managed.

“Hope you don’t try to hog all the meatballs,” she said.

“We’ll treat it just like they did Roger Rabbit,” I said.  “Count every one of them and make sure no meatball gets more screen time than the other.”

“You nut!”

We set everything down, went to our places, and dug in.  “Very tasty, Wendy,” I said.

“Thank you,” she beamed.

“The food’s nice, too.”

“Shut up!”  She was grinning like before.

A little while later, I said, “Shannon called you, didn’t she?”

Wendy looked at me sideways.  “What could give you that idea?”

“Masculine intutition.”

“You’ll never be a good spy, Bill.  Can’t keep your lip zipped.  But I love you for it.”

“What’d she tell you, Wen?”

“Confidential information.  Sealed in a time capsule till the time Star Wars really happens.”

“Okay.  Then whose idea was the cart?”

“Oh, that was my idea.”  She smirked.  “Was it a good one?”

“The best.  But I think my boss died a small death when he saw you weren’t really going to buy all that stuff.”

“You might have broken your quota.”

“Might.  What if I’d started checking you out?”

“I would’ve taken the stuff back anyway and gotten a refund.”

“Okay.”  I paused.  “I apologize for being such a chickensh—“

“Bill.”  She grabbed my hand, fork and all.  “Don’t apologize.  It’s okay.  It was frightening.  God knows, this stuff scared the crap out of me when it first happened.  Several times thereafter, too.”

“You, uh...weren’t frightened when it happened two nights ago?”

“Oh, yeah, I was afraid.  Afraid that something might happen to you.”  She gave me a soulful look.  “But that’s all past now, Bill.  Isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said.  For tonight it was, anyway.

Her hand caressed mine.  “I’m glad, Bill.  I’m very, very glad.”

Before we could eat anything more, I leaned over and kissed her.  We both tasted of spaghetti and garlic.

Later on, watching Dustin Hoffman do the funniest spin-doctoring in the world, she lay with her body on my legs and her head against my chest.  Both our hands were clasped, folded on her chest.   “I like having you back, Bill,” she said, softly.

“I think it’s great having you back, Wendykins.”

“Everybody thinks they’ve gotta make a new name out of Wendy,” she said.  “WendyWoo, WendyBird, Wendell.  Guess I’ll just have to put up with it.”

“Right, WendyBird.”

She snuggled against me.  “You’re off tomorrow, aren’t you, Bill?”

“Yeah.”

“Want to go to the lake with me?”

“You bet.  Haven’t seen you in a bathing suit, yet.”

“Hey, that goes for me with you, too, sweetbuns.”

“I don’t wear Speedos.”

“Not yet, anyway.”  She smiled.  “Bill?”

“What, Wendy?”

“I didn’t want to lose you.  I’m so glad I haven’t.”  She turned her head to look at me.  Her expression was very serious.  “After you, I don’t think I could go back to being a Runaround Sue.”

“I’m glad you didn’t have to,” I said, giving one of her hands a gentle squeeze.

“I like you a lot,” she said, freeing one hand to stroke the side of my face.  “You don’t look like Harrison Ford.  But you’re a good man.”

“Well, thanks, Wen.  And I know why I like you.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re like you.”

She turned around on me and gave me a body-to-body hug.  It lasted a long time.  “I know it’ll take some getting used to me, Bill.  But I want us to make it.”

“Uh huh,” said I, rubbing her back from shoulders to waistline.  “Me, too.  I don’t want to miss out on having you, Wendy.”

It was nice just lying there, feeling her chest against mine as she breathed.  The human touch, it seems to mean everything.  Not just sex, but closeness, contact, acceptance.  The feeling that, hey, this beautiful girl is accepting me, and I’m accepting her, too.  The feeling of your emotions going out and her giving them back, amplified, in a circuit.

All right, I’ll say it.

The feeling of love.

“Bill?”

“Um humm?”

“Would you stay over again tonight?”

“Um hmm.”

“I’ve got a strange request.”

“What?”

“Could I get you to sleep in the same bed with me, and not have sex?”

I looked at her.  “Wendy.  What’s the problem?”

“I’m just kind of nervous,” she said.  “About that.  But if I can be with you, maybe I can get past it.  Soon.”

“You’re putting me to the test.”

“I know.”

“Oh, hell,” I said.  “Will there be snuggling?”

“The best.”

“Then I’ll do it.”

“Sweet man.”  She kissed me.  I kissed back.  We moved against each other.

Later on, after TV, she introduced me to a Ray Bradbury story from, I think, The October Country.  It was called “The April Witch”.  Big surprise, right?  She read it aloud in a clear voice and did quite a good job on it.  Then she had me read one, a story about a boy whose dog digs up something probably best left where it was.  I don’t think I did as well as she did, but she liked my effort.

Finally, we got in our jammies and went to bed.  I’ll admit that I was a bit put out.  It seemed that she was just dancing too damn much around the topic of how far, when, and what was I supposed to do while she was making up her mind about it all.

But when we folded out the couch, put on the sheets, pillows, and a light cover, and climbed in, I had to admit that it was worth it.  She lay there in the crook of my arm with the lights off.  Her arm was around me, as well.  I knew we’d have to change positions or wake up with our arms numb as wood in the morning.  But right now, I wasn’t too concerned with that.

“You feeling all right?”  I asked.

“Never better,” she said.  “Thanks for obliging me, Bill.  I appreciate it.”

“Why don’t we try to get some sleep?”

“Sure.  Bill?”

“What, Wendy?  What?”

“If I tell you something, will you believe I’m not trying to tease you?”

“I’ll try.”

“If sex with you is better than this, then I’m not dying before I have a chance to try it.”

“Go to sleep, Wendy.  Please.”

Yep, sometimes, whether she tried to be or not, she seemed like a tease.

But somehow, I didn’t mind much at all.

And finally, against all odds, we each drifted off.
 
 

“Joe Boxer?”

No response.

“Billlll?”  She nudged me with her foot.

“Mm hmmm?”  Didn’t have my eyes open yet.

“Get up, Sleepybuns.”  I felt the sensation of her lips on mine and opened my eyes.  She was leaning over me, dressed in a white T-shirt with a “One Tequila Two Tequila Three Tequila Floor” legend on it, blue jean shorts, and her customary bare feet.  I flashed on the kind of girl who’d probably show up on an old Beach Boys album cover.  “I want to fix breakfast for us both, you’re not up, and I’m getting hungry.”

“O—kay,” I said, throwing back the covers with some reluctance.  “Then we go to the lake?”

“First we get you a suitable bathing suit,” she said.  “Then we go to the lake.”

“Suitable by whose standards?”

“Mine, of course.  Get up, get up.”

I raised up.  “I am not wearing Speedos.  No way, Wendy.”

“Oh,” she said in mock horror.  “Then I guess I’ll have to put back that tiny white bikini I was going to wear.  What a shame.  I even had to do a wax job for it.”

“Now, wait a minute!”

“We’ll talk about it after brekkies.  Get out of bed, Bill, I’m starving.”

I hauled myself out of the sack.  “You know, for a girl who says she hasn’t done a lot of dating, you’ve got major training in being a pain in the ass.”

“One of my most endearing traits.  Come help me, slugabed.”

Once out and in pants and a spare apron, Wendy instructed me in the finer arts of making an omelet.  I’m a graduate student in Guy Food, which means anything that can be shoved in a microwave or toaster or comes in a tray with directions, I’m on.  But I’m not limited to that.  I do a mean macaroni and cheese.  She had to take over a couple of times but the results were quite satisfactory.  “Gonna make a chef out of you yet,” she said.

“Men were meant to be lawyers, not cooks,” I said, holding the pan handle in one hand and putting my other arm about her waist.

“Better not tell that to the Iron Chef,” she said, putting her chin on my shoulder.  “He’ll come after you with his secret Ninja throwing dicer knives.”

“You can deflect them with your Amazon bracelets.”

“Hmmm.  I’m a magician, not Wonder Woman.”

“You read comic books?”

“Not much.  Just saw the show in reruns when I was a kid.  I thought she was neat.  Used to...”  She broke and twirled herself around on the floor.   “Never got a costume when I did that.  Kind of disappointing.”

“From your point of view, maybe,” I said.  “Me, I kinda liked it.”

“You would!”

So, after omelets and toast, we went down to the mall to the biggest department store on site.   Wendy, in the aforementioned outfit plus a pair of sandals, led me to the area where they had the swimming trunks.  She picked up a pair of multicolored drawers with wavy patterns.  “Nuh-uh,” I said.

“Good,” she said.  “I was just testing you.  How about these?”  She held up a pair of what we euphemistically called “ball-huggers”.

“Wearing those would practically ensure that we would never have children,” I said.

“Ah.  A bathing suit that’s its own contraceptive.  I love it,” she said, putting them back.  “How’s about...”

“How’s about you let me pick out my own suit, Wendy?”  I reached for a pair of fairly conservative trunks.

“Hey,” she said, putting her hand on my arm.  “I’m paying for it, I deserve to have some input.  Girls like having something to look at, too.”

“Well, if you wanted that, I could have slept without my jammies last night.”  I leered.

“Shut up!”  She whacked me playfully on the arm.  “Keep trying, Bill.  We’ve got to get there before sundown.”

Finally we picked out a pair of black trunks that were tight and small enough to satisfy her and loose and big enough to mollify me.  We got into a small argument before we checked out.  I insisted on paying for half of it, as I knew she wasn’t pulling in big bucks at the library.  She insisted on paying for it all, because it was supposed to be a gift.  I negotiated by asking her if she’d like me to throw a hammerlock on her right then and there in the store.  We went half and half.

Then we got back in the car, in which we’d also stored a cooler with a six-pack of Classic Coke, some chips, and some sandwiches she’d made, and didn’t stop till we got to the lake.  As usual, I couldn’t stop stealing glances at her on the way.  The windows were down and her hair was blowing back in the breeze.  She was wearing sunglasses and the aforementioned T-shirt and shorts and was smiling and hanging one arm out of the window and dammit to hell, she looked like the perfect beach babe, not the Baywatch kind, to be sure, but the kind of girl you’d be proud to have on your arm, be honored to be seen with, and absolutely love to look at.

I didn’t consider myself any great package, but I was glad she seemed to like looking at me, too.

But, hell, with Wendy it was more than just a nice surface.  If that was all there was to it, I would have probably bugged out long before then.  No, I loved her.  Because she was the person she was.  She had a heart, she had a brain, and she was fun to be with.  But it was more than that.  If you’ve ever been in love, you don’t need me to explain the process.  You just know that you’re in it, and all you can do is pray the other party feels the same way.

That’s something you remain unsure of for too long a time.  But you have to put up with it.

At the lake we found a parking space, then disrobed in the car.  She said, “You first,” and I made a big joke deal about unbuttoning my shirt, but she had to help pull my sleeve off.  Then I managed to de-pants myself, with the suit she’d bought me underneath.  “Well?” I said.

She looked at it appraisingly.  “Looks even better in 3-D.”

“Hardy har har.  Now it’s your turn, Brooke Burke.”

“Okay,” she said, with a wicked smile.  With that, she pulled her T-shirt over her head and revealed her upper body in a small white bikini top.   Wendy closed her eyes and smoothed back her hair in an affected manner.  Try and tell me she wasn’t giving me time to watch.

She wasn’t exaggerating about the size of the suit, but it was enough to cover her assets and still leave enough exposed.  Her breasts weren’t huge, but they were well-proportioned to her frame, nicely rounded, and a definite turn-on.  Plus the sight of her tanned skin against the white bra was enough to get my motor in idle right there.  Her stomach was toned without going for the six-pack look of a fitness type and, thankfully, she didn’t go in for a navel piercing.  In case you’re wondering, she had an innie, and her waist did definitely nip in a bit.

Then Wendy unbuttoned and unzipped her blue jean shorts and shoved them down her legs.  The white bikini bottom was pencil-thin where it met the sides of her legs, supporting a triangle of white in front and back that was straight out of a James Bond girl fantasy.  She had thighs, calves, and a butt to die for, as the phrase has it.  I’ve already praised her bare feet and toes enough for you to get the picture.  They completed the total package, and it was everything I’d been dreaming of.  And suspecting.

I was wondering where in the hell she’d gotten that kind of a tan working in the library.

“I go to a tanning place once a week,” she explained.  I must have been too obviously curious.  “Well, Bill?”

“I like the general effect,” I admitted.

“Oh, poo.  Is that all?”

“Nope.”  I pounced her, held her down, rubbed my chin all over her cheeks, and made her shriek and giggle.  Her arms flailed out.  One of them went up against the back of the seat.  The other one whacked the glovebox in just the right place.

Up until then, I didn’t think much of the fact that the glovebox had an easy latch.

The thing popped open and various things spilled out onto the floorboard.  A flashlight, an assortment of maps, my registration, a bottle of Bayer Aspirin, and a small white box.  It was this last that caught her eye.  “Hold on,” she said, and reached out for it.

“Um, Wendy,” I said.  “I’d really like to hit the beach right now, if it’s okay by you.  I mean, really...”

She slid out from under me, sitting on doubled knees with me kneeling on the other half of the front seat.  She was eyeing her prize, then looking up at me.

It was a box of Trojans.

“Sooooo,” she said, slowly.  “Tiger really thinks he’s getting lucky tonight.”

“Wendy, I’m sorry,” I said.  “It’s just a precaution.  I mean, I wouldn’t really...”

She laughed, threw the box at my face, popped open the door, and ran down the asphalt to the grass and sand.  I shoved it back in the glove compartment and shut it, then ran after her, slamming the car door behind me.  The flash and maps were still on the floor, but I didn’t give that much of a damn about them.

Wendy ran, threading her way through the small number of bathers who were walking the sand or lying on blankets, with me in hot pursuit.  Given the temp of the sand that day, I’m not exaggerating.  Some of the guys she passed by took long pauses to admire the view.  I had to say, “Excuse me,” more than once as I dodged them.  She hit the water a few seconds before I did.  When we were far enough out for us both to swim, I went underwater, circling her with one hand stuck up in what I hoped was a manner worth of Jaws.

“Catch me!” she yelled, and struck out for deeper water.  I took up the challenge.

Wendy was a strong enough swimmer, but I had incentive on my side.  I think she wanted the shark to catch her, anyway.  I grabbed both her ankles and listened to her squawk before I dragged her back.  She put both her hands on my head and dunked me.  I came up spluttering and dunked her.  She splashed me, laughed, and took off for shore.  I followed and she turned around when we were in shallow enough water.  Her arms were spread wide as I came nearer.

“You lunkhead,” she said, and embraced me.

“I’ll bet you say that to all the boys.”

We kissed and got a number of whistles from the peanut gallery on the sand.  After we broke, we both waved at them.  Then we went back underwater and chased each other for a while more.  Finally we came up again, clasped each other’s hands, and looked into each other’s eyes.

“Ready for lunch yet?”, she said.

“I don’t know.”

“We could throw in sunbathing with that.”

“You’re on,” I said, and headed in.

The two of us got the cooler and a beach blanket, plus a bottle of sunblock Wendy had wisely insisted on getting, and went to a less populated section of the beach.  Once there, we noshed on the foodstuffs.  She’d insisted on tuna sandwiches and I didn’t mind at all.  I was halfway through a bag of Lay’s chips when I got the courage to tell her what was on my mind.

“Wendy,” I said.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

She giggled.  “Oh, Bill.  Do you think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen a package of condoms?  I mean, I may be...what I mean is, that...”  She realized what she was about to say and, for once, looked a bit red-faced herself.

“You mean that you’ve like, never,” I finished for her.

Wendy lay her hand on mine.  “Yeah.  Kinda thought I made that clear a couple of nights ago.”

“More or less, yeah,” I said.  “That bit you told me didn’t rule out a one-night stand later, I guess.  But you don’t seem like that kind of girl to me.”

“Thank you, Bill.”  She leaned in closer and kissed me on the cheek.

“Even though you tease like a minx.”

“Ought to kick sand in your face like a Charles Atlas ad for that, Bill.”

“Go ahead, and watch me be Hero of the Beach.”

“Nah.”  She smiled.  “Don’t you know I’m dressing this way for you?”

“I know.  And I really appreciate it.”

“Thanks.”

“Don’t know there’s any woman I’d rather be here with in the world, right now.”

“You know something, Bill?”  She paused.  “I don’t think there’s any other man in the world I could be with, right now.”

I don’t remember who was first to grab for whom.  But I do know that, a millisecond after that, we were hugging very tightly, then rolling on the sand, giggling, and kissing.

“At least you could have gotten all the tuna off your tongue before you did that!”

“Stop complaining!”

“Bill,” she said.  “Want to know what I really thought of that little box?”

“I’m afraid to ask.”

“I thought it was very considerate.  That you wanted to be prepared, that you didn’t want something to happen to me.”

“Um,” I said.

“Don’t get me wrong,” she said.  “I’m not giving the invitation just yet.  But lots of guys would just be out there to do it, and be gone, and to hell with the consequences.  You aren’t.  And I do love you for being that way.”

“Thanks very much, Wendy.”

“Oh, my God.  Oh, my God, oh my God.”  She buried her face in her hands.  “Ohhhh, my God.”

“Wendy.”  I leaned over, put my hands around her shoulders.  “What’s wrong?  What is it?”

“I don’t believe it,” she said.  “I just don’t believe it.”

“Don’t believe what?”

“What I just said!  Oh, nuts, Bill.”

“You just said that you kind of, I don’t know, appreciated me being prepared.”

“Not that.  What I said after.”

“Like, what?  I’m not a tape recorder, Wendy.”

She pulled her hands away and drew in a deep breath.  “I said, I do love you for being that way.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.  Oh,” she said.

“It’s okay, Wendy.  It’s okay.  I understand.  You just meant that you, I don’t know, kind of liked the way I was acting.”

“No, you nut!  Don’t try and give me an out.  I said, ‘I love you.’” She stared at me.  “Can’t you interpret a Freudian slip correctly, for once in your life?”

I hesitated.  “I’m a dummy, Wendy.  And a lawyer.  You have to say it clearly for me to understand.”

“All right, then,” she said.  “Bill.  I think...I think I love you.”

I took her hands in mine.  “I’m one up on you, then.  I already know I love you.”

The kiss we shared was the longest one we’d ever had, up to then.

When we broke, after a long time of hugging, she said, “Lay down on the blanket, Bill.  If you don’t let me oil you up, you’re going to look like a lobster.”

“Okay.”  I turned over on my front and she applied the stuff like a skilled masseuse.  I closed my eyes and enjoyed it.

“Bill?”

“What, Wendy?”

“I didn’t mean to seem like a tease last night.  I mean, about wanting you in my bed, but not wanting to make love.”

“Oh.  That’s okay.”

“I’m kind of skittish about sex,” she said.  “I know I shouldn’t be that way, but I’ve...you know.  I’ve never done it.  I don’t know how it feels to go all the way.  And I wanted to be sure that I was in love with the man, first.”

“That’s fine, Wendy.”

“That didn’t seem to be possible, with my serial dating.  I’m sorry to download this all on you, Bill.  I know I must seem like one hellacious neurotic.”

“Wendy,” I said, turning over in mid-rub.  “You are anything but a neurotic.  You are a lovely and lovable girl.  You do have a lot of baggage.  You can do things.  You’ve got amnesia.  You’ve had strange things happen to you.”

“I have,” she admitted, still holding the sunblock bottle.

“Don’t you think that a weaker girl than you would have gone, I don’t know, bonkers under the strain of those things?  How many women do you know could face down those killer trees, or those flame things you told me about?”

“Well,” she said, “I had to.  I didn’t have any choice.”

“You could have given up and died against the flame guys,” I said.  “You could have left me to die with the trees.”

“I could not!  Never, Bill.”

“Of course not.  Because you aren’t a coward, Wendy.  You’re a very brave woman.  I know.”

“Oh, come on.  I get scared as hell a lot of times.”

“So do we all,” I said.  “But you keep going, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” she said, quietly.  “I guess I have to.”

“So don’t you think that makes you special?  In just a little way more than that magic stuff?”

She didn’t say anything.

“I think it makes you one hell of a woman,” I said.

She was crying as she embraced me.

“Bill,” she said, when she could manage it.  “I know I don’t believe in coincidence, now.  I don’t know what it was made us get together.  But I know it couldn’t have been an accident.”

“Wendy.”

“Shut up,” she said.  “Just hold me, Bill.  Just do that.  Please.”

So I did, and she did, for a very long time.

“Now you see why I wanted you in my bed last night?” she said, after that long period of silence.

“I think so,” I answered.

“It’s not just, you know, doing it,” she said.  “If it was that, it’d just be wham, bam, thank you ma’am, get up and get out.  It’s about...oh, you know.  The physical closeness.  Feeling somebody with you, next to you.  The smell, the sight, the sound.  But there’s nothing better than touch, Bill.  Even if you don’t have sex, there’s nothing better than touch.”

“If that’s anything like the present sensation, I’m inclined to agree.”

She smirked.  “You dog, you.  But I love it.”

“Wendy.  Let me say something.”

“Okay.”

“You know that I want to make love to you.”

“Oh, yes.  If you were pitching any more of a tent, we could get Barnum and Bailey’s Ringling Brothers Circus under it.”  She giggled.

“Will you shut up and let me say what I’ve gotta?”

“Okay, Bill.  Lips zipped.”

“Given the fact that you turn me on.  And I guess, though I say it with some hesitation, that you like me, too, or we wouldn’t have got this far.  Given both of those factors, let me say that I’m not going to do anything to you before you’re ready to do it.”

“I know,” she said, quietly.  “And thank you, Bill.”

“But I think we’re both coming to the point soon in which we will.”

She sighed.  “You could be right, Bill.  Please don’t press me on that, okay?  I give you as much as I can, right now.  I’m sorry.  It’s not like I don’t want to.”

“I know, Wen.  I know.”

She broke the hug, stood up, stretched.  “Why don’t you oil me up?  Isn’t fair that you should have all the fun.”

“You’re already tan.”

“The applying of suntan lotion very often has little to do with the shade of one’s skin, darling,” she said, lying face down on the blanket.

So I did.  She had very soft skin, despite the effects of the tan.  After I did her back (she whacked my hand when I almost put my fingers under her bikini bottom), she turned over and I did her front.  As I got to her chest, I said, “You know, that old saying just isn’t true.”

“What old saying?”

“About it being colder than a witch’s...”

She pointed both hands at my face.  “Don’t.  Even.  Think.  About.  Completing.  That.  Sentence.”

I grinned at her.

Afterward we just lay back on the blanket and dozed for awhile, side by side.  I don’t remember if I dreamed, or, if I did, what I dreamed about.  I do know that I was about as calm and peaceful as I’d ever been in my life.

It seemed as though Wendy was in the same mood.

I woke up with her shaking my shoulder.  “Bill,” she said.

“What’s up, Wen?”

“I want to go for a swim.  How’s about you?”

“Nah, I think I’m just going to lie here till the moon comes up.  You go ahead, Wendy.”

“You sure?”

“Think so.”

“Okay,” she said.  “Just wanted to be sure you were up when I went in.”  She paused.  “Bill.  I really loved being out here with you today.”

“Hey.  Same for me.”

“I don’t mean to be the driver in this thing so much,” she said.  “It’s just we got so much said today, and...”

“And we told each other that we loved us,” I said.

“Yeah,” Wendy said.  “That.”  She leaned over and kissed my forehead.  “I’m sorry about the, uh, circus remark, Bill.”

“Don’t be.  I’m glad you noticed.”

“I couldn’t help but notice!”

“Go swim, Wendy.”

She smiled, took my hand, then let it go and gave me a hip-swinging show on her way down to the water.  It was late afternoon by now.  There wasn’t anybody else in the lake, as far as I could see.  No swimmers, no boaters, no skiiers.  Only a few people left on blankets, and they’d probably be heading in before long.  So would we.

Wendy waded into the water and was soon swimming with her strong strokes.  I watched her jackknife her body and plunge below the surface for some underwater swimming, her pretty feet coming up and then going under last of all.

I wished like hell I’d brought a camera along, but I figured I could get her to pose for me sometime later.

A few seconds after that, I started to notice something.

The waters of the lake seemed to be going around in a circular motion.  I stood up.  It had to be a trick of the light, maybe an illusion of my beleaguered brain.

It wasn’t.  The lake was swirling around, faster by the second.  Like a gigantic whirlpool.

And Wendy wasn’t coming up.

It wasn’t any witch’s spell that made me run like hell and jump into the water.  Anybody who’s been in a similar situation will tell you the same.  Despite what the meaner sort of feminist will say about us, when the one you love is in trouble, your overriding impulse is to get her out of there.  At which point, concern for your life and limb is generally put on hold, even if a rational track is arguing in vain, “Idiot!  You could get killed out there!”

That’s not what the game is all about.  Such instincts were put in us or developed for a purpose.  I’m glad they’re there.

It’s only once you’re in the thing that you start figuring out your chances, and realize they may not be good.

Some red-shorted lifeguard had yelled at me along the way to stay out, this was his to handle, or words to that effect.  I didn’t notice him much.  He was probably in the lake, too, but I couldn’t see him.

At that point, I couldn’t see Wendy, either.

I just felt the whirling motion of the water, like a giant agitator down below was on pre-wash and getting ready to hit Permanent Press.  I was underwater, all the way, and marveling at the noise of it, my eyes open and straining to see a slim, white-bikinied body down there.  The pull was getting harder to fight.  The rushing water stung my eyes.

It took considerable effort to push myself to the surface and grab air.  But I managed.  As I went back down, I didn’t know how many more times I could do that.  Things were speeding up.

I heard splashing not terribly far away and looked in that direction.  Unfortunately, it wasn’t her.  It was the lifeguard, a guy with light brown hair, a mustache, and an intense expression which probably matched mine.  He was trying to reach me.

I couldn’t let him do that.

“My girl’s in the lake,” I managed to say, before I went down again.

The circular motion of the lake waters was accelerating.  I started swimming as strongly as I was capable of below the surface, going deeper, looking in every direction.  It was dangerous getting this far from the top.  An undertow was developing.

But there was one thing I was certain of: this thing had developed to kill Wendy.

There was no way I was going to give up before I found her.  Even if I Davy Jonesed it right alongside her.  And the cold thought of that possibility began impressing itself on my soul, more indelibly by the moment.

Silently, I prayed.  Didn’t really have time for the Our Father.  It was just, Get us out of here alive.  If You can’t manage that, at least get her out, and let me know it.  But get us out of here alive.  Please?  Open the lines up there and let this through.

And while You’re at it, let me see her.

I suppose I should have included the lifeguard in that, but I had priorities and I wasn’t really thinking of him then.  If we got out, maybe he’d be included in the residual benefits.

Don’t recall seeing any fish, water snakes, trash, or other objects down there.  Maybe I edited them out of my consciousness.  There was just me and the water schusshing by, and some shafts of sunlight penetrating down there with less efficiency the further down I got.

I hoped she’d managed to get a breath somehow, or she was going to be in hella bad shape when I got to her, in my estimation.  This was a particularly nasty and effective way to attack her.  Down here, she couldn’t say a spell.  She couldn’t say anything.

Unless she could sprout gills and a fish tail like a Daryl Hannah mermaid, which I seriously doubted, the girl I loved was going to drown.

The swirling waters were carrying me along now more than I was directing myself.  I tried fighting my way up.  Couldn’t go without new air for much longer.  Swimming to the surface felt like climbing Jacob’s Ladder with your weight increasing every step.  I strained to keep what air I had down there in my lungs.  I was losing.

My rational brain was going, “See, what did I tell you?”  I told it to shut up.

I did one more frantic look-around and this time, I saw her.

She was some yards distant and some yards down.  We had to be over twenty feet from the surface, more like thirty at this point, and whatever was creating the spin-cycle was interested in keeping us down there until, well, just until.  Probably long beyond that, too.  But it was Wendy.  Definitely Wendy.

There was still some motion on her part, but it was hard to tell if it was the water or her conscious impulses making her arms move weakly.  Considering how strong a swimmer she was, it was a bad sign.  But at least she was still conscious.

She was heading down, pulled by the developing undertow.  So was I.

I fought like Horatio at the freaking bridge.  My face was probably settling into a nice shade of blue-purple by then, and I had to let out some bubbles of air from my nose.  The pressure was getting pretty damn bad.  I had to swim across the lake waters at an angle, to make it work.  But I was getting closer.

Close enough to see that she saw me.

Wendy’s expression was frantic.  I had no idea how long it had been since she’d been able to grab air.  She tried moving her arms, and I could tell she was trying to push herself towards me.  But she wasn’t doing a great job of it.

It was getting harder and harder to push myself onward and I had a stab of fear that both of us would die before I could even touch her.

Then something she told about flashed even harder in my mind.  The bit about the witch-dream she’d had after her foster parents had died in that wreck.   The three bitch-sisters were standing around their cauldron, according to her, and laughing.

Maybe they were laughing right now.

That was just enough to get me mad.

I shoved back against the waters, shot forward feeling like two panes of glass were pressing in on me from both sides, and bumped up against her.  My right arm was around her in an instant’s time and, even down there, I could feel the familiar shape and weight of Wendy and was surprised, oddly, how familiar that had become.  That played out along another minor track of my mind.

Really, I was looking into her face.  She was scared, scared as hell.  I didn’t blame her.  She also put her arms lightly about my shoulders, which was all she seemed to have strength for.  Her eyes seemed to be half-closing as she did it.

I put one arm under her right armpit and used my other arm and feet to push towards the surface.

The water seemed to be telling me, You’ve just got to be kidding me.  Had to admit it had a point.

But I looked at Wendy’s face right then, and disregarded it.

It was like trying to swim in a NASA centrifuge full of water.  I felt myself slip, strength-wise, and yelled at my autonomic nervous system to cut that out.  There was no chance of us reaching shore in this condition.  Even if we both managed to get oxygen, the whirlpool would drag us back down with its increasing velocity and settle us then and there.  The lifeguard, too.  Mustn’t forget about him.

The only chance we had was if Wendy got her head out and was conscious enough to say a spell.

I shot a glance at her again.  Her face indicated she was barely hanging on.  I couldn’t even tell what color it was.  But I’d grown a great crop of emotions around that face over the last week, and they were surging into my forebrain in full force.

We were making some progress, but to my sight, it was getting darker.  Not good.

Up farther.  Gaining by inches.  Lord, we’re not off the hook yet.  Keep watching.  Please.

My lungs forced me to shoot out more air and, despite my best efforts, gulp in some water before I could stop.

<You’re going to die down here.>

<Shut the hell up.>

The light and darkness in my vision had just about equalled themselves.  I was trying to hold Wendy’s head a bit above mine, so that hers would be first to break water.  Even her grip on me was so weak, the water was swirling one of her arms off of my shoulder.  Kettle drums straight out of Also Sprach Zarathustra were beating in my ears.

Blood was coming from my nose.

The image that came to mind right then was of Robert DeNiro playing a Navy trainer, in some bar where they had a diver’s helmet filled with water.  The trick was to see how long you could hold your breath, competing with another guy doing the same.  After a certain point, he started bleeding from his nostrils.  That’s when they had to open the helmets and let the water spill out.

“I do not know why anyone would want to be a Navy diver!”  That was his famous line from the movie.

Right now, I could agree with him in spades.

Strength was failing. Consciousness was fading.  This aquatic cement mixer was about to take us under again.

We’d die together.  Some consolation there.  At least, maybe on the other side we’d find out about who Wendy really was, and who had managed to do us both in.  I was disappointed that I’d never get near taking the bar exam.

Somehow, her hand tapped me on the shoulder.

I realized that, by a slight degree, the light was overpointing the dark.

I slogged my face upwards.   Light.  We weren’t more than ten feet down.

That was all it took.

Last desperate chance.  I put it all into one kick, maybe one and a half.  I think she may have helped somehow...God only knows how, she’d been under for so long.  I put my arms under both of her armpits, holding her head up, her collarbone on a level with my forehead.  Her breasts probably were in front of my eyes, but I couldn’t register such stuff at that point in time.

Her head broke water.

Mine didn’t.

Don’t ask me how I heard it.  The lake was still acting like a colossal wave pool.  Another instant and the undertow would put her down again, administer the coup de grace.  I don’t think I could see anything.  But I did hear something.  Even below the surface, I heard it.

I heard Wendy spluttering for an instant, and then saying, as loud as she could manage, “KAH!”

And the waters went calm.

Just like that.

The circular motion didn’t just stop like a car hitting a brick wall.  The laws of physics still rule.  But the great force behind the waters was removed, and the mighty tides faded into a gentle ripple within seconds.

At least, that’s what she told me happened.  I was down, taking on water, and unconscious.

She wrapped her legs around me to stop me from going any further down.  It was amazing she still had strength enough to do that, but I guess adrenalin is mighty within the female body, as well.  Then Wendy said she reached down with her right hand, grabbed me by the hair, and pulled my head up till it was out of the water.  She said I was purple and I think she was just telling me that out of flattery.

Nothing was going in or out of my lungs.

Not till she put her hand on my chest underwater, and said, “Breathe.”

I spluttered out about enough water to fill a kid’s sandpail and started dragging in air.

Many more breaths followed, thank God, which I mentally did as soon as I had a mentality with which to do it.  There were a pair of soft but strong arms around me and we were bobbing up and down like floaters on two fishing lines.  I was only about one-quarter aware of all this.  It seemed very, very nice.

I do know that the first thing I managed to say, as soon as the gaps between gasps were big enough to say it, was “Wendy.”

I turned my head to look at her.  The girl was tired, as tired as I’d ever seen her before.  It was taking everything she had just to keep us up.  We were a decent distance from shore and I didn’t know how we’d find the strength to make it.

But she was smiling.  And she managed to kiss me on the forehead.

People had materialized on the beach.  Two of them were shoving a canoe into the lake and getting into it, heading for us.

I said “Wendy” again, just to make sure I knew how to say it.

“We’re safe, Bill,” she said, shakily.  “We’re safe.”

That seemed like a good time to blank out, so I did.

 -W-

With the whirlpool effect gone, more people rushed in where only Lloyd Bridges would have tread.  Some of them had boats.  Several others just played Baywatch volunteers.  The lifeguard, whose name was Robert Jones, no relation to the university, was a bit fagged, but managed to wave a boat over and had them head for the canoe that had picked us up.  I was on the bottom of it, lying on Wendy’s legs while she cradled my head in her arms.  Jones insisted on doing CPR on me as soon as we reached the shore, even though I was breathing well by that time.  He also did it on Wendy, just to make sure.

The folks on hand asked him what the hell had happened to the lake, and he said he didn’t know.  Wendy gave them the same answer when they asked her.  I woke up around that time, but Jones insisted on calling an ambulance from his mobile phone and putting me in it.  Wendy rode with me in the back.  She managed to throw on her T-shirt and shorts, both of which got awfully wet from her damp bod and bikini, and drape her purse over her shoulder before we left.

I was dozing in and out on the way there, and, truthfully, she wasn’t in a lot better shape than me.  She told me that she managed to get to the surface a couple of times in between when I’d jumped in and when I’d found her, or she would have died.  But there was no way, she said, she would have made it a third time without my help.  Absolutely no way.

Each time she’d tried to say her “Kah!” word before, she’d been hit by a tide of water and forced under.

Did the successful third attempt have anything to do with us being together?  I don’t know.  I really don’t care.

The docs in the emergency room checked us out, figured us in pretty good shape despite it all, and said we could go home.  I was awake on a guerney by then.  Wendy was holding my hand, very tightly.

We got a couple of seconds on the evening news.  The story about the uncanny whirlpool effect on the lake made for a segment, and Robert Jones got his fifteen minutes of fame.  Wendy, looking like a slightly soggy angel, got to say, “The lake just started swirling around.  I don’t know what caused it.   I really don’t.”  That was it, and that was fine, as far as we were concerned.  The city fathers closed it down for bathing and boating for two weeks, discovered nothing that could have caused what happened, muttered something about “unusual tidal motion”, gave Jones several new assistants, and reopened it.

But Wendy and I left the hospital arm in arm, me in the shirt, pants, and shoes she’d brought in from the car, which she had Jones bring from the lake.  We didn’t say much until we were inside the vehicle.  We just gave each other the closest vibes we’d ever managed.

I don’t know if two people can share the same heart, but we were overlapping enough to be content, concerned, and thank-God grateful.  That in addition, of course, to the love.

She wanted to drive but I insisted on doing the honor myself.  As much to convince myself of my worth as anything else.  Once the doors closed, she leaned over, wrapped herself around me, and tongue-kissed me like a diva.  There may have been people watching in the parking lot, but I didn’t give a damn.  My hands came off the wheel and my arms went around her and we were supine on the front seat in seconds, my barefoot babe atop me, feeling her breath go in and out as she lay on my chest.

After we broke the kiss, we lay like that for a long time, hugging.

“I almost lost you,” she said, in a voice damn near to breaking.

“Wendy,” I said, “you almost lost your life.”

“You, too,” she said.

Another long bit of affection and silence.

“Tell me you’re not going to leave me because of this,” she whispered.

“Wendy, you’re an idiot,” I said.  “If you think that, I mean.  You almost got killed.  Do you think there’s any way I’d leave you after this?”

Her head was on my shoulder and I could still feel dampness.  It wasn’t coming from her clothes.  It was coming from her eyes.

“I love you, Bill,” she said, very softly.  “Sorry about how corny that sounds, but...”

“Not corny at all, Wendy.  I love you, too.  And there’s something more than that.”

“Like what?”

“I need you.  I think we need each other.”

Another very long kiss, with some salt mixed in for flavoring.

“The strikings,” she said, after we broke the kiss.  “They’re coming closer and closer together.  More than ever before.  It’s dangerous, Bill.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“Are you still sure you want to stick with me?”

“There’s no way I wouldn’t, after this,” I said.  “But there’s also some things we have to do, Wendy.”

“What, Bill?”

“We’ve got to find out who you are.  And what these...I don’t know...forces are that are trying to attack you.  It’ll just keep getting worse until we do.”

“I know,” she said, very softly.

“Maybe if we learn who you really are, we can find some way to fight them.  This just can’t go on the way it’s been going, Wendy.  You can’t go on being a duck in a shooting gallery.”

“Don’t you think I’ve tried to find out who I am, Bill?  Don’t you know I’ve tried?”

“I do,” I said.  “But you’ve never tried with me helping you.”

Another pause.  Then she said, “There’s other things we have to do first, Bill.”

“Okay.  What?”

“We have to go back to my place,” she said.

Then she took a deep breath, before she said what she had to say next.

“And then you have to make love to me.”

The biggest problem I’m going to have with this next chapter is when to cut to the fireplace.  You know what I mean.

“You’re sure,” I said.

“I’m sure,” Wendy replied.

“You’re sure you’re sure.”

“Bill, I am definitely sure.  Now will you get this car in gear and take it back to my place?”

“Sure you don’t want some eats first?”

“Bill.”

I turned the key and revved up the old motor.  It still couldn’t match mine.

We covered the miles between the hospital and Wendy’s apartment without talking much.  Occasionally I stole glances at her.  She was sitting there, occasionally working her hands in her lap, looking through the windshield with an expression of nervousness.  I didn’t blame her.

Nonetheless, for all our nerves, we were both into this next step with heart, mind, and body, and I guess you can throw soul in there, too.  I don’t think there was any way either one of us could have backed out at that point.  If one of us had, it probably would have been all over.  Everything.

Neither of us wanted that to happen.  I’d sooner face the wave pool again before that.

We finally pulled up in front of her place, which had come to be my second home over a week’s time.  She pulled on her sandals and opened the door, getting out.  “You want to bring the cooler in?” I asked.

“Nah,” she said.  “Nothing important’s in it.  Leave it be for now.”

I slammed and locked the car door.  Wendy was waiting for me on the other side of the car.  She looked at me, not with a smile.  But when I offered her my hand, she took it and kissed me on the cheek.

“Okay,” she said.  “Let’s do it.”

“I have an uncontrollable impulse to carry you over the threshhold,” I told her.

“Please, Bill, control yourself.  At least till we get the front door closed.  And then—“

“And then what?”

“Uncontrol yourself.”

My feet, wiser than my brain, managed to move forward and we walked hand-in-hand to the front door.  She took the keys from her purse, opened it, and led me through.  Then she double-locked it behind us.

The couch was still in its couch state.  “Help me with it, will you?” she said.

“Oh.  Uh, yeah,” I said, approximately.  I stooped to my task.

In a few seconds it was fully extended.  She took some sheets from the top of her closet and we changed the bedcovers, with her chiding me for not leaving enough hanging over on one side.  Then we sat on the side of the bed, one arm apiece around each other.  We were still dressed.

“You know I’ve never done this before,” she said, almost pathetically.

“You do want to go through with it, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” she said.  “I’m just nervous, Bill.  I really am.”

“That’s, well, that’s understandable.  I’m nervous, too.”

“You are?  What about?”

“That I might hurt you.”

“I know it’s going to hurt some, Bill.  I’m not that naive.”

“Yeah, but I’m afraid I might hurt you too much, Wendy.”

“I’ll let you know.  I will, Bill, really.”

“Wendy?”

“What, Bill?”

“I’ve never done a woman on her first time before.”

She actually chuckled.  “All right.  Okay.  That does put us on a bit of parity.”  Wendy tickled me under the chin.  “I guess we can go through with it, after all.”

“Wendy.”

“What?”

“Tell me why you want to do it.  Tell us both.”

“What do you mean?  You know why I want to.  Why we both want to.”

“I want to know it’s not just repaying me for helping save your life.”

She sighed.  Then she said, very gently, “That was only the excuse I needed, Bill.  I’m doing this...because...I...love...you.”

Wendy pressed her lips to mine and opened them.  While our tongues met, I felt her undoing the buttons on my shirt.  I couldn’t let this be a one-woman operation.  My hands went to the collar of her shirt in back and eased the zipper down.  We de-shirted each other at about the same time.  She was still wearing her bikini bra underneath.

Within a couple more seconds, we took care of that problem.

Hands went to other zippers and clasps then.  I wanted to be gentle, unhurried, but both of us were getting more impatient and we shucked her shorts and my pants in record time.  The only things we were wearing then were her bikini bottom and my black trunks.  We looked at each other for a long moment and then completed the final maneuver.

Both of us, fully revealed to one another.

She handed me the box that had been in my glovebox and I took something from it and applied it.  Then we clasped hands.

The blonde nymph holding my hands finally said, “It’s time, Bill.”

“I think it is, Wendy,” I answered.

We didn’t bother with turning down the top sheet.

Motion and effort and tears.  On both our parts.  Cries of pain and desire, pleas not to stop, sounds that neither one of us could bother to define, or care to.  Sensation of bare flesh on flesh, sight of the oneness of body and being, eyes open, eyes closed, mouth open but no voice being heard, pound pound pound of blood within eardrums, worry about another’s pain, worry about sustaining the level, legs wrapped tightly about my waist, feet scissored, pumping, grinding, feeling that this indeed was what we were destined for, came for...

...came for...

...and the feel of her nails on my back and her own back arching as a breathy cry of pain and triumph came from her lips, and my body knew the struggle was over and it was all right to deliver, and I stood and delivered like never before...

...yeah...

...and then the draining was done and all that was left was collapse and panting as the body, the bodies, cycled down panting and pumping blood through veins and arteries, trying to step down from Defcon Three, while the minds turned pinwheels and sweat on flesh never felt so good before in any of the beds which I had the luck to churn, make no mistake about that...

...and I heard the crying.

And I opened my eyes and saw the blonde-haired woman (not girl: woman) lying with me atop the sheets that were as crumpled as a piece of white paper you had wadded in one hand, and we hadn’t even thought to turn the lights off, and I was suddenly very conscious of her nudity and my own and

she was crying.

“Wendy,” I said.  “Wendy, I’m sorry.  Did I...was I...dammit, did I hurt you?”

Her face was tear-streaked and she sniffled, but she still managed a smile.

“No,” she said, embracing me with gentleness and Wendy-strength.  “You loved me.”

 -W-

“Bill.”

“Um hmmm?”

“How many times have you been with a woman?”

“More times than you’ve been with a man.”

“Oh, wow.  Big revelation.”  Gentle laughter.

We were lying on the bed, under a brand-new cover with a bath towel under us, both of which I had gotten out of Wendy’s closet.  She was nestled up against me with her head resting on my shoulder and didn’t even worry about pulling the sheet up over her breasts.  Both of us were very calm and I could easily have spent a month in the emotional and mental state I now occupied.

I was fairly sure the state population included at least one more inhabitant.

“Wendy,” I said after kissing her hair, “it really doesn’t matter.  You’re not my first.  But as far as I can tell, you’re my best.”

“I’d better be,” she said in mock-threat tones.  “Thanks, luv.”  Her fingers were walking gently up my chest.

“Still hope I didn’t hurt you too much.”

“Oh, that’s just like a man to say that,” she said, slapping my chest.  “It’s just part of the operation, Bill.  I understand that.  Have to be a complete naif not to.”

“So you’re not a naif?”

“No, but I’m working on it.  Seriously, though.  I mean, nothing prepares you for this.  Yeah, it hurt.  But it also felt good.  Breaking on through to the other side in more ways than one.”  She kissed me near the collarbone.  “I love you, Bill.”

“I love you, too, Wen.”  I sighed.  “Know it sounds trite as hell, but...”

“Shut up.”  She raised herself up on one elbow.  “Words like that are never cliche.  Not if you really mean them.”

“Well, I do.  You know that.”

“So do I.”  She sighed and threw one arm across my body.  “Know what I was thinking?”

“Then or now?”

“Then.  I was thinking, ‘This is what men and women do.’  Part of the reward you get when you grow up and find somebody you love.  Somebody you dare to love.  I’m glad it was you, Bill.  I’m very glad it was you.”

I shifted position to get under her, took her head between both my hands, and kissed her.

“You’re amazing, Wendy,” I said.  “Simply and totally amazing.”

She smiled.  “That’s because I’m a magician.”

“Nope.  Because you’re a woman.”

“Didn’t think one precluded the other.”

“Probably would agree with you there.”

“Oh, you definitely have to agree with me,” she said.  “I’ll prove I’m a magician.”  She reached under the covers.

“Watch me make something grow.”

 -W-

“Wendy.”

A yawn of response.

“I’m hungry, Wen.”

“So’m I.  Go open up a can of soup and warm it up.  I trust you with that.”

“No.  I want to go out, if you’re feeling up to it.”

“I’m a little sore, but I think I can make it.  Think we’ll have to shower first.”

“We?”

“Yeah.  I’m not the only one sweating here.”  She poked me gently in the stomach.

“Jeez.  This is like being on a toboggan ride,” I said.  “Zero to showering in one week.”

“I don’t want to hear any Cool Running jokes, Bill.”

“Don’t worry about that.  Is Denny’s romantic enough for tonight?”

“Do they have candles in holders and red tablecloths.”

“No.  But they’re still open and I want a Belgian waffle.”

“Okay, tiger.  Just remind me to get us out of the shower before we starve to death.”

 -W-

At Denny’s, I mastered the art of eating waffles with one hand.  Wendy was holding my other and working on a short stack of pancakes with her free hand.

“Wish I could tell you here how comfortable I’m getting to feel with your body,” she said.

“Thanks, same for me,” I said, forking out a big square of waffle.  “Is it okay to say that I enjoy looking at you, too?  All the way?”

“I might feel offended if you didn’t.”  She smiled wickedly and consumed a two-level forkful of hotcake.

“So,” I said between bites.  “What do we do now?  Move in together?”

“Ohhh...I don’t know,” said Wendy, thoughtfully.  “I won’t mind staying over at your place, or having you at mine.  Hell, you know that already, after tonight.”

“You gotta remind me.”

“Later, hon.  I’ve reminded you twice already.”

“I like your reminders.”

“Better than tying a string around your finger.  But seriously, Bill.  Sure, I’ll spend a week over at your place, and you can do the same over at my apartment.  Still, I want to be able to surprise you.  Give you something you weren’t expecting, every now and then.”

“I draw the line at chains.”

“If you keep making jokes like that, you’d better not draw them at gags.  But yeah, we can try it.  If we don’t like it, we can get our own spaces back.”  She paused.  “I’m a pretty private person. You know that.”

“Yeah.  But we can be private together.”

“I s’pose we’re going to see.”

“How long before we know if we want to live together, though?”

She paused long enough to fork up some more pancake, then looked at me.  “We’ll know.”

Couldn’t argue with that.  “Wendy.  There’s another reason why I want us to be together.”

“I’ll bite.  What is it?”

“It’s because we have to start trying to find out who you really are.  And what these things are that–-“

“Don’t bring that up here, Bill.”  She looked at me with gravity.  “I don’t want you to put that much a downer on this night.  Please?”

“Okay.  All right.  We’ll just limit it to finding out who you are.  Is that okay?”

“The cops already tried that, when they found me,” she said.  “I tried a couple of times myself.  What can we do?”

“For one thing, we can learn just what they found out when they investigated,” I said.  “Then we can try our luck with what clues we’ve got to hand.”

“Such as what, Bill?”

“You’ve still got that jumpsuit they found you in?”

She nodded.  “Certainly.  It’s in my trunk.  I’d never lose that.”

“We can use that as a starter.  Plus there’s your, uh, foreign language.”

“I’ve never found any language it’s similar to, Bill,” Wendy said.

“There’s tons of language scholars at the college,” I said.  “We can try them.”

“That’s true,” she said.  “But, Bill, I don’t have any money for a detective.”

“Me neither.  But we do have access to the university, through me.  And that place is loaded with experts in just about any field you can name.”

“Think they’d help us?”

“Don’t see why not.  But I don’t know until we’ve tried.”

“Bill?”

“What, Wen?”

She caressed my hand.  “I knew you were just the right idiot for me.  Really.”

“Love it when you talk dirty.”

“Shut up!”

 -W-

She woke in the middle of the night, sitting straight up in bed.  I heard her gasp.  “Bill.”

“What’s up?”  I had my arms around her in a flash.  “What’s wrong?”

Wendy drew some breaths to calm herself down.  “Bill, I had a witch-dream again.  The sisters were looking at me.  Straight at me.  And they weren’t smiling at all.  I could feel it, Bill.  It’s like they were broadcasting hatred.”

“Oh,” I said, for want of anything better.

She put her hands to her face.  I could sense she was holding back tears.  “I’m sorry.  Don’t mean to download this on you like that.”

“It’s all right, Wendy.  It’s really all right.  That’s what I’m here for.  Part of it, anyway.”

“I feel like such a wimp sometimes,” she said.  “And I don’t like feeling that way.”

“Wendy, honey, baby, darling, I’m here.  The dream hasn’t really hurt you, has it?”

“No.  Just...scared me.”

“It’s just because we crossed the line tonight,” I said.  “That’s why you had the dream.”

“I hope so,” she said.  “Even though I doubt it.”

“You aren’t a wimp, either.  Don’t like hearing that from you.”

“All right.  But there’s a few things that can still scare me, Bill.”

“Nothing wrong with that.  Want to just hold on, here?”

“Oh, yes,” she said.  Eventually she lay down with me again, her head against my chest, my right arm around her.  After awhile I could hear the steady state of her breathing.  She was asleep again.  This time, she looked a lot more peaceful.

That, I was glad of.

I didn’t want to tell her that I’d had the same dream.

It really is something to be able to wake up in the morning with a beautiful woman you love.

She wasn’t perfect.  Everybody’s hair looks like hell before they have a chance to comb it.  But there was something so nice about being that close to a sleeping Wendy, lying on her side as the sun prodded through the curtains and blinds, not wanting to move to disturb her rest, but just watching her.  Yeah, she snored a little bit.  But I didn’t care.

The sheets were white with green patterns and the aqua-colored couch was not the most comfortable bed I’d ever slept in, but it would do.  In fact, it had done.  I got up to do my morning rituals.  She moaned gently but didn’t open her eyes or stir very much.

Yep, I’d been in love before.  I’d certainly made love before.  But I’d never met a girl who would make me unequivocally want to spend the rest of my life with her before.

Now, I’d found her.

I grabbed a robe and completed my rituals, even to the shaving.  Then I went barefoot to the refrigerator, rummaged about, and found the essentials of breakfast.  Whole wheat bread, eggs, turkey bacon.  (Don’t knock it.  It’s good and not as fattening.)   The essential Guy Food regimen definitely includes breakfast, because it’s usually so simple to make you can’t screw it up without trying.  Lord knows I’d tried before.

Don’t think Wendy woke up until she heard the eggs popping in the skillet, or maybe smelled them, the bacon, and the toast.  “Over easy,” she demanded, and turned over in bed.

“Come do ‘em yourself if you want it your way,” I answered.

“Mmm.  I’m the empress and this is my castle, you peon.”

“I’ve already done that.  The bathroom is free.”

She phbbtted me, wrapped the sheet about her body, and went to use the john.  By the time she was out and headed for a robe of her own, I had the stuff done.  She enrobed herself, came to the table, and placed herself in front of her plate.

“How’d I do?”

Wendy looked at me.  “You were great.”

“About the breakfast, I mean.”

“I know.”  She gave me her wrinkled-nose grin.  “It’ll do.  Stick with me, and we’ll have you fixing breakfast at the Waldorf.”  She salted her egg lightly and began eating.

I was already ahead of her, finishing up my second piece of toast with one hand and shoving more in the toaster with the other.  “Why aren’t you fixing breakfast at the Waldorf?”

“I don’t know,” she said, around a mouthful of toast and bacon.  “Maybe I should be.  The library is an awfully easy job.”

“But it doesn’t pay much.”

“True,” she said.  “But being a chef in a high-class hotel is a stressy job.  I might could handle it, but...”  She shrugged.  “I just don’t know.”

“Ever want to take the training?”

“Oh, yeah.  I could learn a lot from them.  Are you trying to talk me into it, Bill?”

“Trying to get you to talk yourself into whatever you want to do or ought to do.”

“I might.  Let me think about it.”  She halved the yellow of her egg with her fork and ate one half of it.  “These are a bit runny.”

“Send ‘em back to the chef.”

“Ha ha, Bill.  And a half.  Want to go to church?”

I stared at her. “You go to church?”

“Sure I do.  I’m a fairly good Baptist.  What are you, Bill?  Religion-wise, that is?”

“Kind of a lapsed Catholic.  You really go to church?”

“Yes, Bill, I really go to church.”  She looked slightly annoyed.  “Want to try some holy water on me?”

“No.  It’s just that...well, I never pictured you as a churchgoing type, Wendy.”

“Oh, Bill.”  She leaned against the table with both hands.  “My magic and such, it doesn’t seem to come from an evil source.  I think it’s just from within me, somehow.  Like I have an aptitude for it.  Don’t you think I’ve prayed about it?”

“I didn’t know.”

“Well, I did.  Prayed that the powers would be taken away, if that was necessary.  When I was finished, I knew I still had them.  So—“ She shrugged.  “—I guess they’re here to stay.”

“Okay,” I said.  “We’ll have to go back to my place so I can get some decent clothes.  But why did you want to go to church, Wendy?  I mean, this day in particular?”

She pushed back from the table, got up, walked towards me with shining eyes, and embraced me.

“Because I want to give thanks for last night,” she said.  “And I want to give thanks for you.”

 -W-

So we went.

Wendy wore a modest knee-length blue dress and high heels.  I got out my token grey suit with blue shirt and a red tie (clip-on; I never could tie a real one), and we went down to her church, Bible in hand.  The service wasn’t as hellfire-and-damnation as I remember most Baptist services being that I’d been to occasionally in my youth.  The sermon had something to do with Jacob and the angel.  Guess I wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have.  But I got through it.

She was holding my hand through most of it.

We stopped for coffee at a burger place on the way back.  “See?” she said, sipping hers over a Formica’d table.  “I didn’t melt.”

“They didn’t throw water at you, either.”

“You toy with utter destruction, Bill.”

“It was okay.  But I like my kind of religion better.”  I took a long drink of the stuff and then put it down and faced her.  “You still have that suit they found you in?”

“What suit?” She looked at me quizzically, then said, “Oh.  You mean the one when I was a little girl?  Yeah, definitely.  It’s in my trunk at home.”

“I want to have a look at it.  See if it can tell us something about your past.”

“I wish it could, Bill,” she said.  “It’s a mystery to me, as well.  But it’s the only thing I carried on from my former life.”  She paused and put down her cup.  “That’s why orphans want to find out about their birth parents.  So they can make sure about hereditary diseases when they get married and all.”

“Save that for next week,” I said.  “But it’s a good reason to start.  The genetics bit, I mean.”

“Yeah,” she said.  “Save that for next season.  The, uh, you know what I mean.  If we feel like it.”

“When we feel like it,” I said.  “Don’t think there’s gonna be an ‘if’.”

“I hope you’re right, Bill.  I just hope you’re right.  You certain you really want to help me with my past?”

I looked straight at her.  “Do you really think we’ve got a choice?”

“Realistically, no,” she said, walking her fingers towards my hand.  “Not unless we want to keep dodging these kinds of bullets for the rest of our lives.  But, Bill?”

“Yes, Wen?”

She paused.  “I’m afraid of what we might find out.”

“That makes two of us.”

“But I still want to learn.”

“That,” I said, “definitely makes us two.”

 -W-

We went back to her apartment and she made sure the door was locked and the curtains were drawn.  Then she took a key from her key ring and opened the trunk that sat against one wall.  Throwing the top open, she said, “Here it is.  Most of my past, what I know and what I don’t.  It’s all in here, Bill.  Come see.”

And it was.

A sizeable stack of neatly packed clothes, small toys, thin children’s books, scrapbooks, clothes, mementos, and the like, all stuffed into a fairly large trunk.  This was what Wendy had as links to her life.

She lifted things out carefully and began stacking them on the floor.  Some she handed to me.  “Be careful with these,” she said.  I didn’t need much urging.  These things were the only clues she had to her identity, both known and unknown.  There were report cards, school dresses, a set of New Kids on the Block dolls.  I wrinkled my nose at these.  She caught that.

“Hey, I was a kid,” she said.

I was more interested in the scrapbooks.  There was more of a chance of a clue in them, and much chance to get to know more about my new lady.  But the real prize lay in the bottom of the trunk, and, eventually, she got to it.  Wendy paused for a second before touching it.  She handled it gently, with reverence.

It was a red jumpsuit with feet and a hood, without drawstrings.  It would just fit an 11-year-old girl.  She sat cross-legged on the floor, holding it and looking at it.

“This is what I was wearing,” she said, almost whispering.  “It’s the only thing I had.”

I set the scrapbooks down and knelt down, putting my hands on her shoulders.  “It’s okay, Wen.  It’ll help us.”

Wendy had her eyes closed.  I began kneading her shoulders.  She sighed, but not with relief.  “If only I could make this thing talk,” she said.  “But even I can’t do something like that.”

“Well, we can make it talk,” I said.  “We can find out all about it.  How it was manufactured, what from, where it was bought, all of that.  Those are clues, Wendy.”

She opened her eyes, sadly.  “Look at this, Bill.  It’s not mass-produced.  Nobody bought this off a store rack for me.  It’s woven.  Hand-made.”

“Can I see it?”

“If you’re very, very careful with it.”

I held out my hand.  It took a few seconds for her to hand it over to me.

The material was indeed woven, out of something like wool, but very fine.  It was dyed red, so deeply I don’t think a dozen washings could have faded it.  It would have fit her frame quite snugly, 10 years ago.  The seams weren’t obvious, but they did show hand-stitching.  I’m no expert on things such as this, but this suit had been made the old-fashioned way, not on a sewing machine.  There was, of course, no manufacturer’s tag.

“How’d you get in and out of it?” I asked.

“Look,” she said, and held up the left arm of it.  Underneath it, and down one side, was a well-concealed flap.  Below it were buttons, off-white in color, neatly spaced and holding it together.  Something looked familiar about them, and made me uneasy.  I touched them.

“What are they made out of?” I asked.

“As near as I can tell, bone,” she said.

I almost dropped it.  “Don’t be that way,” she said.  “Bone buttons were used on some old garments.  Don’t you know anything about the history of clothes?”

“It’s news to me,” I said.  “I’ll stick with plastic.”

Wendy shrugged.

“So this was made for you,” I said.  “By whomever kept you, wherever you came from.”

She nodded, her eyes moist.  “I’ve tried to imagine who it was made it for me, if it was my mother or somebody she hired to do it.  I think it’s very well-made.  But I’ve hardly ever worn it since that day I was found in the snow.  I wanted to keep it in as good a shape as I could.”

“Because it’s your history.”

“Yeah,” she said.  “Oh, yeah.”

“We can have this analyzed, Wen.  We can find out how old it is, where its material came from, how it was made.”

“The police asked all the seamstresses in the area,” she said.  “None of them had made it.  They’d never seen anything quite like it.  They all seemed to think it was a very good job, though.”

“It was,” I said.  “Heck, it is.”

“I don’t want pieces of this cut off, Bill.”

“Only a little piece would help.”

“This is important to me.”

“I know,” I said.  “But if they can cut off pieces of the Shroud of Turin to analyze it, wouldn’t you let them do the same to this?”

“I don’t want them to,” she said.

“All right, okay, we’ll see what we can do,” I said.  I had no idea what could be done, especially on my budget. But I was willing to try.  After all, I wanted to be a lawyer, and a lawyer has to find things out.  The best training ground might be finding something out about the person you loved.

“Can you give it back, now?”

“Sure,” I said, handing it over.  “But keep it out.  We’ll take this up to the college tomorrow.”

She folded it carefully and put it on a stack of clothes, not letting it touch the floor.  “I’ll put it on top of the pile, but it’s going back in the trunk.”

I picked up what looked to be the oldest of the scrapbooks and opened it.  The first page was blank.  The second had another copy of the article she had framed on the wall, about her being found by the police.  There were a few follow-up articles, mentioning the name of the detective who had worked the case, one Carlton House.  It looked pretty pat: nobody missing from hospitals, nobody who fit Wendy’s description from missing persons reports in the area or the region.  Of course, there were missing kids with the name Wendy, but nobody quite fitting her specifics.

She had been Wendy Doe when she was admitted to the orphanage.  No big surprises, except she was an awfully cute kid, though she looked kind of scared in the pictures that were shown of her.

“Nobody saw anybody who might have dumped you?” I asked.

She shook her head.  “Not so far as we’ve learned.  If there was, they haven’t told me.”

It just didn’t make any sense.  “Wendy.  Were you given a medical exam after they found you?”

“Sure,” she said.  “I told you about the doctor looking me over.”

“Do you remember his name?”

“No.  But they’ll have him on record.”

“Did they ever say anything about a trauma to the head?  Like you’d been hit, or something?”

“No,” she said.  “I was out, but I hadn’t been knocked out.”

“What about drugs?  Had they found anything in your system?”

“I don’t know,” she said.  “I really doubt it.  I think they would have told me if somebody had put something in me.”

“Or if you had, and didn’t remember it,” I said.

“Hey!  I’ve never done dope in my life, Bill.”

“Don’t get mad at me, Wendy.  I’m just considering all the possibilities.  Remember, you don’t know anything about your earlier life.”

“That’s true,” she said, holding herself.  “But I know myself well enough to know I would never use drugs.”

“Then how is it that you’re amnesiac, Wendy?”

She shivered.  “I don’t know, Bill.  I just don’t know.”

I sat across from her, cross-legged.  “Okay.  We know you’ve got the ability to use, well, for lack of a better term, magic powers.  Of some sort.  Right?”

“Right,” she nodded.

“You can speak in a strange language that neither one of us is able to identify,” I continued.

“Yes,” Wendy agreed. “It’s just something I do.”

“Every now and then, you get attacked by these strange...whatevers...and you know what to do about them.”

Silently, she nodded.

“You also have dreams that scare you.  Dreams about three witches.”

“Definitely,” she said, her hands on her knees.

“Let’s see...kind of with sallow complexions, long noses, purple robes...”

She looked at me drop-mouthed and I knew I’d really put my foot in it.

“Bill!” she said.  “You’ve dreamed about them, too?”

“Uh,” I said.  “I didn’t want to tell you.”

“Why not?  This is important, dammit!”

“I didn’t want to make you any more scared than you were,” I said.  “You were really whacked out last night.”

She was unmollified.  “You should have told me.  If they’re trying to get to you like that, I should have known about it, so I could help.”

“Hey, Wendy.”  I lay a hand on her right shoulder and looked into her eyes.  “If I’m not mistaken, I’ve been attacked about two or three times by these things already.  Remember?”

“Sure, but...”

“Therefore, it’s not like anything really new just happened.  Whatever wants to get you, wants to get me, too, now.”

And as I said it, the import of those words came home to me.  Hitherto, I’d only thought of the forces against us as being directed against Wendy.  Now, like it or not, I had to admit it: I was probably a target, too.

That didn’t make for a very secure feeling.

“I’m going to cast a shielding spell over you before you go to sleep,” said Wendy.  “It may not entirely stop it, but it’ll reduce the chances.  Believe me, you don’t need those dreams.”

“But they’re a clue.”

“Those kinds of clues you don’t need.”

“All right.  Okay.  Wendy, I’ve got to ask the next question, and I don’t want to.  Have you talked to other people who might be into the occult, or done research about it?”

Her jaw was set and her eyes were wide open.

“Hey, I’m sorry, Wen,” I said.  “I just have to follow every avenue of questioning, if we’re going to find something out.”

“No, it’s all right,” she said.  “It’s just...scary.  I’ve done a little research, just mainly looking through what texts are available.  I don’t like them, and I know it isn’t what I do.  I’ve talked to a few people, but they’re pretty much posers.  Some of them think they can do things.  Not like me.  I don’t want to get involved with them.”

“I don’t blame you,” I said.   Something occurred to me.  “Is that why you don’t watch the WB, and don’t like those Disneys we were talking about?”’

“The witch-dreams is why I don’t like them,” she said.  “Those magic-girl shows are mostly crap.  But it’s also me feeling like they might be playing with dynamite, and not know how to use it.”

I nodded, not sure I understood and not sure that I wanted to.  “But you do.”

“To the extent that I use it, yeah.”

“The three witches,” I said.  “Kind of like out of Sandman...”

“What’s that?” she asked.

“It’s a comic book.  A pretty good one.”

“I don’t read comics.  Sorry, Bill.”

“But you might have, when you were a kid.  Or you might have seen a production of ‘Macbeth’.  You know, ‘Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble’, and all that.  Before you lost your memory.”

“I might,” she said.  “But the dream seems too real for that.”

“I know,” I said.  “I’ve had it too, remember?”

“Yeah.  So you know what they’re like, kind of.”

“So a reasonable hypothesis is that maybe these three witches are the ones behind what’s been happening to you.”

“Brilliant, Sherlock,” she said.  “I’ve known that for years.”

“But you didn’t tell me about it,” I said.

“You know I couldn’t come out and say, ‘Oh, hi.  I’m Wendy Corrigan.  I don’t have any memory of my childhood, I can do magic, and I have nightmares about witches.’  Not exactly a way to start off a date, Bill.”

“Okay, okay,” I said.  “Point well taken.  But I’m just trying to sketch out all we know, so we can try and figure out what we don’t.”

She looked away, towards the window.  “Sometimes, Bill...”

“What?”

“Sometimes, I’m not sure that I want to learn what I don’t know.  Maybe it’s a blessing that I don’t.”

“If you don’t learn, we both could die.”

She looked back at me, and didn’t say anything for a long moment.  Then, quietly, she said, “Maybe if you left me, you’d be safe, Bill.  The witches or whatever might not take any interest in you, if we weren’t together anymore.”

“No guarantee of that,” I said.  “But there’s no way I’m going to leave you.  Positively no way.”

Wendy threw herself into my arms and bore us both to the floor.  The scrapbook went flying.  She started covering me with kisses.

The telephone, with the usual great timing for such things, began to ring.

“Damn,” I said.

“Oh, it’s all right, I’ll get it.”  She got off of me and went to the phone.  “Hello?  Yes, this is she.  You’re who?  Um.  Yes, he is here.  You wish to speak with him?”

Wendy held out the phone to me.  I hoped it wasn’t a call to come in early to work.  “Hello?”

“Bill,” said my mother.  “Why in heaven’s name didn’t you call me?”

“Ohhhh, boy,” I said. “Uh, hi, Mom.”

“Do you know what we had to go to find out about you?  Somebody sees you on TV, says you were almost drowned, and you don’t even call?  What is this, Bill?”

“Well, I was kind of occupied, Mom.  I’m sorry, I should have called.”

“Do you know we had to call up the TV station, find out the name of that girl you were with, and spend over an hour trying to get her number when you didn’t answer your phone?  Or even your e-mail?  What are you trying to do to us, Bill?”

“Look, Mom, like I said, I’m sorry.  I’m all right now.  Believe me, I’m really all right.”

Wendy was sitting on her bed, not saying a word and not moving very much.

“Well, I can hardly say we are,” Mom said.  “You almost get killed and you don’t even tell us?”

“I haven’t had much of a chance to be home this weekend,” I said.  “Believe me, I was going to call when I got a chance.”

“You should have made the chance earlier.”

“I know.  I know.  I’m sorry.”

“Bill.  Who is this girl you were with on that TV thing?”

I looked across to Wendy.  I was pretty sure she could hear what Mom had said.

“You probably know her name,” I said.  “Wendy Corrigan.  And, Mom?  I’m in love with her.”

Silence on the other end of the line.  A lovely blonde girl hugging me about the waist.

“Well, tell me about this,” said Mom.

“Can I call you back, Mom?  I’m suddenly kind of busy.”

“Bill,” said Mom.

“Talk to you in, say, half an hour or so,” I said, and hung up.

Wendy, from her vantage point, said, “Half an hour?  You must not have any faith in me.”

“I have all the faith in the world, darling,” I said.

The phone rang multiple times over the next hour or so.

We ignored it.

I got up in the middle of the night and used Wendy’s computer to send an e-mail back to Mom telling her I’d call her after work and explain everything.  In the midst of it I found a comforting girl-shape wrapping her arms about me from behind the chair.  “You’ve got to go back to sleep, Bill,” she said.  “We’ve both got work in the morning.”

“I know, Wen, I know,” I said.  “But I feel guilty about not answering the phone calls last night.”

“Well, you sure would have sounded odd if you’d answered them during what we were doing!”

“Tease.”

“Teasee.”

I touched one of her hands with one of mine while the other finished the letter and sent it.  Thankfully, I’d shown Mom and Dad how to use the Internet to the extent that they could get and send mail and surf.  “Okay.  This may buy me some slack.  You didn’t need to get up just because I was, Wendy.”

“That’s precisely why I did need to get up, Bill.”  She moved her cheek over the top of my head.  “I want you back in bed with me.”

“We need to sleep.”

“We surely do.”  Her arms enfolded my front around the neck and she kissed the top of my head.  “God, I’m acting like such a blamed schoolgirl.  But I love it.”

“I don’t have any objections to it, either.”  I smiled.  Sex was great, especially with her.  But romance...ah, that was the foundation of everything.

And it stunned me how quickly I was just taking in stride the fact that I was in love with a girl who could do magic.  That, in short order, I had been hurt during a carjacking, I had been attacked by moving trees, and both of us had almost been drowned in a lake whirlpool.  But, somehow, that seemed less fearsome than not having her in my life.

Go figure.  I sure can’t.

“You haven’t told me anything about your parents, Bill,” she prompted.

“Okay,” I said.  “My father runs a tire place.  My mom is his secretary.  They both scrimped to put me in college.  They’re both great.”

“So why aren’t you spending the summer with them?”

I looked at her.  She had an expression, visible in the light of the monitor, that said, I really want to know.

“Because,” I said, “we don’t see eye to eye.”

“Like how do you mean?”

“Like Dad is still disappointed I wasn’t a football player like him and Mom wants to know when I’m going to find a rich girl, settle down, and move them both out of the place where they’re living.”

“Guess I’ll be disappointing to her.”

“That’s her tough luck, Wendy.”  I grasped her hand gently but firmly.  “I wouldn’t trade you for Martha Stewart, for crying out loud.”

“Well, if you need money, maybe you could have Martha Stewart on the side.”

“Don’t even joke about it.”

“Sorry.”  She lay both hands on the sides of my head.  “But you don’t seem to understand, Bill.  Having a family, a mother and father, that’s really beautiful.  No matter what problems you have with them.  Be glad you’ve got them.  Take it from somebody who doesn’t.”

Uh.

“I’m sorry, Wen.  I didn’t think about your perspective.”

“I want to meet them,” she said, leaning her chin on my right shoulder.  “As soon as we can.  As soon as you think it’s all right.”

“I’ll talk to them tonight when I get in,” I said.  “We’ll see what they think.  They’ll probably be curious.”

“Most likely curious about how far we’ve gone,” she said, seriously.

“I have a feeling Mom will know,” I said.

“Yep.  And I’ve got an urge to know you now.  In the Biblical sense, of course.”

“Wendy, we’ve only got three hours before we’ve gotta get up.”

“You really don’t want to do it?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Then let’s get started.  We’re both on the clock.”

 -W-

After love, we got some rest but not a heck of a lot of sleep.  At 8 a.m., we grabbed quickies at McDonald’s and separated to go to work.  She kissed me goodbye so nicely I wondered how many people in the parking lot we were giving a thrill.

It occurred to me that I’d never noticed Wendy at the library, not that I’d had that much chance to go there of late.  Also, she could have been working there when I had gone, before we met; she would have been just another girl working there and I would have been just another guy.  I wondered if she had any girlfriends.  Or if the others were jealous.  Doubt it, she was too nice to me to judge that.

I droned my way through work, a little tired but still game.  At break, Shannon grinned at me.  “I can tell,” she said.

“Tell what?”

“Tell that you and Wendy have been having a great time lately.  Am I right?”

I snurked.  “Is it that obvious?”

“It is to a woman, Bill.”

“Okay, then.  Yes, Wendy and I have been having a great time.  We’ve fallen in love.  Does that satisfy your curiosity, Shan?”

She covered my hand with hers.  “I’m glad for you, Bill.  I know you needed somebody, and you were really lucky to find somebody like her.”

“I know I was,” I said.  Even despite the carjackers, trees, whirlpool lake, and witch-dreams.  “What do you think of her?”

“Very pretty and very nice.”

“That all?”

“Just a teensy bit mysterious.  Which is good in a woman.”

“Yeah.  Men can tell about that.”

“You can’t tell when the break is over, though,” she said.  “We’ve been two minutes over.”

“Oh, hell.”

Abel gave me a sidewise look when I got back to my register, but didn’t do more than that.  I appreciate that guy.

I ate lunch with some of the boys and got through the rest of the afternoon okay.  Then I gave the woman a call and said, “My place tonight.”

“You’d better have something decent for me to make dinner out of,” she said.

“We’ll manage.”

She showed up in a short sleeveless red dress cut nicely low in front and in back, plus red flats.  She was also carrying a bag of stuff.  “What’s that for, Wen?”  I asked.

“Seasonings and stuff,” she said.  “I trust my own pantry better than yours.  What’s up for tonight?”

“Roast beef and potatoes,” I said.  “If you can hold out for a couple of hours for it to cook.”

She swept past me.  “Gimme room, boy.  Backup has arrived.”

Wendy instructed me in the finer points of roasting and we noshed on peanut butter and crackers while we were waiting for it to cook.  We microwaved the potatoes and carrots and she made gravy from the beef broth, adding some of the stuff she’d brought in the bag.  Tasty.  When it was done, after we hauled everything tableward, I held up my right forefinger.  “Just a minute.  We’re not ready yet.”

“If we’re not ready yet, we’re gonna starve before we go to bed.”

“Ceremony, dear,” I said, and went into my bedroom.

I came back with a candelabra I’d gotten cheap from a pawn shop and several candles which were somewhat less cheap.  Her eyes widened and her mouth came open.  Then she smiled.  “You sentimental dog, you.”

“One of my finer points,” I said.  She hugged me as I placed the thing in the center of the table.  Then we dug in.

At that, the phone rang.  “Oh, jeez,” I said, remembering what I’d forgotten.

“I’ll get it,” she said.

“You’d better let me.”  I went over to the wall and picked up the receiver.  “Hello, Mom.”

“Bill.  How are you?  Why haven’t you called me?”

“I’m fine, Mom, and I’m sorry I forgot.  Wendy and I were making dinner.  I apologize.”

“Don’t apologize for the dinner,” said Wendy.  “It’s really good.”

“Is this the same girl that almost drowned with you, Bill?”

“Uh, yes.  Yes, she is, Mom.  I’m very consistent about almost drowning with the girls I’m out with.”

“I don’t think it’s so funny,” Mom said.  “You get attacked by some hoodlums earlier in the week.  Later you almost drown.  Tell me what’s so funny about that, Bill.”

“On the face of it, not a whole hell of a lot.”

“William.  What have you been doing with this girl?”

“I may have to take the fifth on that right now, Mom.”

Wendy grinned.

“Have you been sleeping with this girl, William?”

“How’s the weather where you are, Mom?”

“William!”

“Mom.  I’m in love with this girl.  I feel what we do is our own business.  Okay?”

“William, I want to meet her,” said Mom.  “This weekend, if possible.”

“We were kind of planning on that, Mom, if you and Dad said it was all right.  She wants to meet you both.  She’s an orphan.”

“Oh.”  There was a note of sympathy in Mom’s voice.

“So she’s really interested in meeting you and Dad.  You can imagine why.”

“Yes, I guess I can,” said Mom.  “But William, you’re not doing anything dangerous, are you?”

“If you mean are either one of us into drugs, the answer is no, Mom.  Can I go back to being Bill now?”

Wendy materialized at my side.  “Let me speak to her.”

“What?  Mom, Wendy wants to talk to you.  Is it okay?”

“I would hope she would, William.”

I held out the receiver.  “Here.  It’s for you.”

She took it, pulled up a chair, and spoke to my mother.  Within two minutes, they were laughing.  “Yes, he is like that, Mrs. McGregor.  But he’s just great.  No, I don’t know what made the lake act like that.  But he jumped in to save me.  Yes, he did.  Oh, I think he’s a lot more than a hero.  He saved me, and I helped save him.  The lifeguard helped save us both.  He was sweet.  Bill, too, of course.”  She turned her head to me.  “Bill.  You owe me five bucks for that compliment.”

“On my salary?”

“I’m not exactly making Madonna money, either.”  She turned back to the phone.  “Yes, Mrs. McGregor, I’m looking forward to seeing you both.  I never knew my parents, so meeting Bill’s...well, it’ll be a trip, I think.  Thank you.  Thank you very much.  Okay.”  She held the phone out to me.  “Back to you.”

I took it.  Mom said, “Bill, I love her.”

“That makes two of us, Mom,” I said.  “Still want to see us on the weekend?”

“By all means.  We’ll take you both out to dinner.  I know your father will want to meet her, too.”

“Okay.  We’ll try not to book any tornadoes on the way there.”  Wendy gave me a harsh look, fork in her mouth.  I mouthed the word “Sorry”, then said to Mom, “I’ve got to go before I collapse from starvation, Mom.  Will you be okay?”

“Surely.  Love you, Bill.  See you on the weekend.”

“Thanks, Mom.  Love you too. Bye.”

I hung up.

“Don’t even joke about tornadoes,” Wendy warned.  “I don’t want to give the spirits any ideas.”

“Can you shield us on the road?”

“There’s a lot of road to shield, but I think one covering us will be enough.  It better be.”

I nodded and went back to my plate.  “That means we’ll have to delay finding out about your red suit till next week,” I said.

“That’ll be all right,” she said, going to work on the potatoes and gravy.

“Or I could call up somebody at the U. and run it by there on my lunch hour.”

“Would you have the time?”

“I could make time for it.”

“I’m not getting you in trouble at work?”

“Am I getting you in trouble at the library?”

She smirked.  “Janet asked me today in the ladies’ if we’d done it.”

“And you said, ‘Is it that obvious?’”

“You knew what I’d say?”

“Oh, yeah.  That’s what I had to say to Shannon today.”

Smiling, she stroked my hand.  “Word is spreading.”

“We’ve still got to find out who you are, Wen.”

She looked down at her plate.  “I guess we do, Bill.”

“I guess I could try hitting up my old man for money to hire a detective,” I said.

“Does he really have enough money for that?”

“I doubt it.”

“So I guess we’ll have to find out whatever we can on our own,” she said, looking at me.

“Bingo,” I replied.

“Where do you want to start?”

“There’s a lab in the U. at the criminology department.  I want them to run an analysis on your suit.  I think those amateur shamuses will like having something like that to work on.”

“What’ll it cost?”

“I don’t know if it’ll cost anything,” I said.  “But I’ll see.”

“I’ll help,” she said.  “I may not have much money, but I’ll help.”

“We’ll see, Wendy.  But I want to see if we can talk to the detective that worked your case.”

“Mr. House?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know if he’s still alive.  But I don’t know that he isn’t.”

“You still remember him, Wendy?”

“Yeah.  Kind of,” she said.  “I talked to him that night I woke up in the police station.  I’ve talked to him since then, but not for years.”

“Okay,” I said.  “Bill McGregor, Tracer of Lost Persons, that’s me.”

“Is that some reference to something old, Bill?  Like your old movies and records and things?”

“Yeah.  It’s from OTR, Old Time Radio.  A detective show.  ‘Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons.’  Never heard it, but I’ve heard of it.”

“How do you know all these old pop things?  Are you still waiting for the 80's to happen?”

“Nope.  My dad had a big stash of comics and old records in the back room.  I got an education in the Sixties and Seventies as soon as I learned to read and use the stereo.  He had this book called ‘The Great Radio Heroes’, all about the Shadow and stuff.  I read that, learned about those old radio shows they used to have on.”

“I know some of that stuff,” Wendy said.  “The Beatles, for instance.  Who could miss them?  But my real cultural refs, they’re like, from the 90's.   That’s all I know.”  She looked sad.

“Wendy.”  I entwined my fingers with hers, trying to comfort her.

“I wonder.  If I ever do get my memory back, will I remember being alive in the 80's?  Or will I remember something I don’t want to?”

I looked at her seriously.  “I definitely hope not.”

“Me, too,” she said.  “But whatever zonked my memories out must have been pretty traumatic, I think.  Like my brain was trying to block what came before, so I wouldn’t be afraid.  If I learn what I’ve tried to forget...”  She shuddered a bit.

I wanted to tell her she could stay amnesiac, that all that mattered was the present, and each other, and what we could make of the future.  To a certain extent, it was true.  But if the past week was any indication, we couldn’t count on that.  So I stayed silent.

“But I guess we have to,” she said.  Then she looked up.  “What’s for dessert?”

“Lemon pie.  Straight out of the frozen foods section.”

“Great.  But next time, let me make it.”

“Your treat, next time.”

Afterward, there was love, and sleep without dreams of witches.

I didn’t know whether or not to be glad of that or disturbed.

And if Wendy trembled in the night beside me, I tried not to notice it.

Luckily, the university which I attend is big enough to have a criminology department, and they have access to the labs.  I’m pre-law, so it’s in the same building, though I hadn’t taken any courses with Dr. Jerald, the head prof, yet.  I called ahead from work and had the red suit packed away in a valise.  On the way there, I munched a sandwich.

Thomas T. Jerald, who spelled it that way on his deskplate, worked out of a room lined with books, some of which he had not written.  “Mr. McGregor,” he greeted me.

“Professor Jerald,” I said, and shook his hand.  “What I need analyzed is this.”  I opened the case and set it on part of his desk that wasn’t too cluttered.

He picked up the red jumpsuit between two fingers, at the edge, and picked up a magnifying glass to examine it.  Dr. Jerald was sixtyish and still had all his hair, but it was almost all grey.  Green eyes behind old bifocals, a rather large nose, and a pointed chin without a cleft, plus a grey three-piece suit that looked like it had to be let out at least twice to accommodate his belly.  But he knew his stuff.

“And what is the point of the analysis again, Mr. McGregor?”, he asked.

I fastened up the valise again and stood holding it.  “It belongs to a girl, my girl, Wendy Corrigan.  She’s an amnesiac.  It’s vital we learn something of her past life, Professor.  That was what she was found in, when the cops picked her out of the street.”

“Ah, yes,” said Jerald, looking at me.  “I seem to remember that case.  A winter over 10 years ago, wasn’t it?”

I was impressed.  “You can remember news items that far back?”

“Sometimes farther,” he allowed.  “But don’t ask me what I saw on TV last night.  Little Miss Mystery.  I don’t recall the police making any headway on this one.”

“She knew that her name was Wendy, and that’s about it.”

“Or she thought her name was Wendy,” said Jerald.  “An injured mind can play surprising tricks, Mr. McGregor.  But you want to know the nature of this garment.”

“Yeah.  Maybe where it was made, where the material came from, stuff like that.”

“Bone buttons.  Most unusual.”  He fingered them, thoughtfully.

“I’ve got to go, professor, but here’s a number where you can reach me.   Plus my e-mail.”  I scribbled both on a notepad sheet and handed it to him.  “Please.  If you find anything, even a negative anything, let me know.”

“And you said you don’t want any of this cut off?  For testing?”

“If we could avoid it, no.  If you absolutely have to, I’ll ask Wendy and see if I can get her consent.”

“I understand.  As the only thing she has from her prior life, it’s bound to be an heirloom.  Well, Mr. McGregor, I’d better let you get back to work.”

“Yes, sir.  Thank you, sir.”

“And if I find out anything,” he said, “I hope you’ll bring Ms. Corrigan to see me.  I’d like to meet Little Miss Mystery, myself.”

“I’ll make a point of it, sir.”

 -W-

I went by the library after work.  Wendy got off about half an hour after I arrived, that day.  I saw her at the front desk, snuck in while she was stamping a flotilla of kids’ books for a mother with a four-year-old in hand, and, several minutes later, plunked an unexpurgated edition of Stephen King’s The Stand on the desk from a height of a foot.

She started and looked up.  “Oh!  Bill, you...!”

“Shhhh, Wen, this is a library!”  I grinned.  She was wearing a brown shortsleeve, dark blue pants, and sandals.  Wendy looked miffed, but she couldn’t sustain it.

“You idiot,” she said.

“You always insult the patrons around here like that?”

“Only if they deserve it,” she said.  “And you do.”

Another girl at the desk, a fair-skinned redhead, looked at us.  “Oh, so this is Bill.  Hi, there.”  She waved.

“Hi,” I said, waving back.  “My fame precedes me.”

“It sure does.”  The girl smiled knowingly.

“So did Saddam Hussein’s,” said Wendy.  “Janet, this is Bill.  Bill, this is Janet.  She’s my friend and coworker.   He’s a professional pain.”

“Oh, he can pain me anytime,” smirked Janet.

“Eyes left, Jan.  Well, Bill, what is it you came to tell me?”

“I took the suit by the professor’s office,” I said.  “He’s going to have the lab boys do an analysis.  He asked me if you’d be willing to have any small pieces cut off for chemical testing or something.”

“No,” she said.  “If anything gets cut off of that suit, I’ll have to be the one to do it.”

“Okay,” I said.  “But you may have to, if we want to get anywhere with it.”

“What’s all this about a suit?” asked Janet.

“It’s a libel suit,” said Wendy.  “Bill, let’s talk about this after work.  Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.  “My place?  Yours?”

“Oh, I guess mine,” she said.  “Now take this.”  She scanned and slapped a dated sticker on the book.  “And get out of here.”

“Should I come in with a load of 300 books next time?”

“Bill!”

I left.

 -W-

I brought over a couple of vids and my guitar, a Gibson Ovation, for the swelluvit.  She looked at it and said, “Oh!  You play guitar, too?”

“A little,” I admitted.  “Kinda wanted to hear you sing.”

“Um,” she said.  “Well, all right.  I feel like simple and cheap tonight.  Burgers and fries?”

“I can get behind that, totally.”  I set the guitar case against a wall, plunked the two videos (Blade Runner and Bert Rigby, You’re a Fool) on top of the TV, and went to do what I could not to mess up dinner by her side.

“You’ll be okay,” she confided.  “Even guys know how to fry hamburgers.  I think.”

“Vote of confidence. Ooo.”

“So.  What did he say about my jumper?”

“Just about what I told you.  But he knows of your case.”

“He does?”

“Yep.  Little Miss Mystery is what he called you.  He was even able to remember the date it happened.”

“Oh.”  She pressed down on a burger with a spatula.  “You don’t think he might be involved, do you?”

“In what?”

“In whatever happened to me, to put me on that street ten years ago.”

“Doubt it.  He just has one helluva memory.”

“If you say so,” she said.

“He also wants to meet you when he’s done with the analysis.  Little Miss Mystery in the flesh.”

“What did you say?”

“That I’d make sure of it.  He’s a nice guy, Wendy.”

“You can’t always count on that, Bill.  Believe me.”

“Don’t burn the burger, Wendy.”

“I know how long to leave it on, thankyouverymuch.”  She flipped it.  “Next time, don’t answer for me.  Okay?”

“All right, if you want to be that way.”

“I’m not being ‘that way’, Bill.  I’m just being...cautious.”

“Okay.”  I paused.  “If you don’t want to see him...”

“On the contrary,” she said, attending to the fries in another pan.  “I want to meet him.  Definitely.”

So we finished the cooking (she finished it, actually), ate, and then retired to the floor.  I liberated my guitar from the case.  “Are you sure you want to hear me play, this soon after dinner?” I said.

“If you’re sure you want to hear me sing,” she said.

“I’ll take a chance if you will.”

“You’re on.”

She sat crosslegged while I tuned up a bit and then blanged my way through the intro of “She Loves You,” getting into the yeah-yeah bit for a couple of choruses.  She looked on bemused, but said, “Don’t you know anything a little softer than that?”

“Sure.  What do you want to hear?”

“Told you I liked country and western.”

“I don’t know a heck of a lot of that, Wendy.”

“Hmm.  How’s about some Fleetwood Mac?”

“Like what?”

“You know ‘Rhiannon’?”

“I think I can fake it.  Let’s see...”

She began to sing.  “Rhiannon rings like a bell through the night and wouldn’t you love to love her...”

I caught up with her about that time, but I just played, didn’t sing.  I wanted to hear her.  She had a fine enough voice, as I suspected.  But she didn’t just do a clone of Stevie Nicks.  No, somehow Wendy’s stylings sounded a little more...authentic.

Like that should be a surprise.

“All your life you’ve never seen a woman taken by the wind,
Would you stay if she promised you heaven?
Will you ever win?”

I had to admit I had my doubts about that.  But I kept playing.

By the time she’d sung the word “Rhiannon” for what seemed to be the last time, I finished with a leftover riff and said, “Wow.  Moody.”

She looked up.  “Thanks, Bill.  I guess it’s kind of obvious I sort of identify with the song, right?”

“Yep.”  I didn’t know much of the backstory on that particular song, but I’d heard Stevie Nicks was into witchcraft and had my suspicions.  “But I like your voice on it.  Well, I like your voice, period.”

“Thanks.  I appreciate that.  I know I’m not ready for the Dixie Chicks, but I like singing every now and then.  Not bad guitar, either.”

“Does that song bring back any memories, Wendy?”

“You mean, about my early life?”  She shook her head.  “No.  Not consciously.  But the song’s about a magic woman, so you can see why I identify with it.”

“Yeah,” I said.  “Let me try this one.  Maybe you know it, even though it’s a Beatles.”

I launched into “If I Fell In Love With You,” one of my fave of the love songs that John and Paul put together in their early period.  Really simple, as a lot of their old music was, but it went right to the subject.

“If I fell in love with you, would you promise to be true, and help me understand...’cause I’ve been in love before, and I found that love was more than just holding hands...”

She surprised me by joining in on the chorus.  Even more surprising, we were in the same key.  Given my voice, I thought we’d probably sound like Ozzy and Lita, but to my ears, we sounded pretty good.

“If I give my heart to you, I must be sure...from the very start,” together we sang.  And so on.  She moved closer and put her head against mine as we harmonized.  Or, rather, as she harmonized with me.

“So you know Beatles,” I said, after the song was finished.

“Everybody knows the Beatles,” she said.  “They had some old records up at the orphanage.  I used to listen to them.  Not as many as you’ve got, I’m sure, but some.”

“You’re more cultured than I thought.”

She shrugged.   “So cultured I work in a library.”  She nuzzled my ear.  “Can you believe that two weeks ago, we didn’t even know each other?”

“It’s hard to believe we haven’t known each other all our lives,” I said, and meant it.

“Maybe we have,” said Wendy.  “Maybe we just didn’t know it.”

She had her hands around my middle under the guitar and was massaging me, tenderly.  As if she’d massage me roughly, right?  I took my strumming hand off the strings, dropping the pick where I could find it, wrapped my arm around her head, and kissed her.  She kissed back and we ended up more or less down on the floor.

“Wendy, at least let me get the guitar strap off first,” I said.  “I’ll choke.”

Once deguitared, we subjected ourselves to more necking and snuggling.  I opened my eyes once to see her face, eyes closed, as she kissed me.  She could testify that it had a great effect on me.  When we broke and hugged, I said, “Wendy.”

“What, Bill?”

“Have you ever tried using your powers to see if you can bring back your memory?”

She poked me in the side.  “Is that all you can think about in the middle of this?”

“Not even!  But if you could manage to drag up some memories, it might give us another piece of the puzzle.”

“Oh, now I’m a jigsaw puzzle.  How flattering.”  She bit my earlobe, gently.  “Make love to me, Bill.”

She didn’t have to ask twice.

Afterward, in the afterglow, lying on the carpet, she rubbed her hand on my chest and said, “I never thought I’d get this far with a man.  Either in sex, or in love.”

“Well, I’m glad I was the one you got this far with,” I said.  “In spades.”

“Bill, Bill, Bill,” she said, sighing.  “When are we going to get anything done except eating dinner and doing each other?”

“Hey, that’s how most relationships work out,” I said.  “Neither one of us is independently wealthy, you know.”

“I do,” she said.  “But we have to see your parents this week.  Looking forward to that, anyway.”

“Well, I hope so.”

“What else do you want to do?”

“Oh, never give me that kind of line, Wendy.”

“Shut up!  I mean, about my past.  Trying to find out who I am.”

“Well, like I said, you could try using your powers to dredge up some memories.”  I wondered why she had avoided talking about that earlier.  “I also want us to talk to the detective that worked your case.  We can pay a visit to your old orphanage.  And then...”

And then the phone rang.

“Don’t get up, I’ll get it,” said Wendy.  Still naked, she went to the phone and picked it up.  I hoped the curtains were still closed tightly enough.  “Hello?  Yes, this is Wendy Corrigan.  What?  What?  Yes, he’s here.  Do you want to talk to him?  All right.”

She held the telephone out to me.  “It’s the police.  They want to talk to you.”

“What?”

“The cops.”

I got up, working on a good case of bewilderment, and took the phone from her hand.  She went to pull up a chair for me.  “Um.  Hi,” I said, for starters.

“Bill McGregor?”

“Yes.”

“This is Officer Grimes, Precinct 17.  Somebody here wants to talk to you.  Think you’d better come down.”

“Well, okay,” I said, uncertainly.  “Can you tell me who it is?”

“Professor Thomas Jerald,” said the cop.  “He was mugged in his office tonight.  He says something was stolen from him.  Something you brought by.”

I shot a look at Wendy, who bore an expression of concern.

“Tell me where the station is,” I said.  “We’ll be right over.”

By the time we got to the station, Professor Jerald was sitting in a chair in the chief’s office with a bandage wrapped around his head.  It was stained with red in the back, and Wendy gasped when she saw him.  I wasn’t much better off.  The only other person there was Chief Madigan, a cop who would put up with about as much nonsense as General Patton would.

Nonetheless, the professor held out his hand for a shake.  “Little Miss Mystery, I presume?”

“Yes, I guess,” she said, hesitantly.   “I’m Wendy Corrigan.”

“Mr. McGregor, Ms. Corrigan,” the chief said.  “Pull up a pair of chairs.  We have some talking to do.”

“Professor, what went wrong?” I asked.  “Are you all right?”

“I was hit in the back of the head,” he said.  “Given that, I’m in reasonable shape.”

“Oh, sir, I’m so sorry,” said Wendy, taking his hand and putting her other hand on his brow.  “If I’d only have known...”

“Known what?” said the chief.

She turned her head towards him.  “He was analyzing an old suit of mine.  If I’d known it was going to cause this, well, I would never have let Bill give it to him.”

“Is there any way you could have known?”

“I don’t think so,” said Wendy.

“Believe me,” I said, “if there was any way to know, we wouldn’t have given him the suit.”  But, I said to myself, we might have given it to the police to analyze.

“The doctor says the professor isn’t in any real danger for now,” Chief Madigan said.   “We’ll tell you what happened.  Then I want to hear about that suit.”

As we found out, the professor had put Wendy’s suit in one of his desk drawers, went out to grab coffee, remembered halfway down to the basement that he’d left his money in his coat pocket, and elevatored back up to get it.  He interrupted two guys in ski masks who were quietly rifling his office.  Before he could run out for help, the guy standing guard by the door grabbed his arm and dragged him in.  The other guy had something in his hand.  Something wooden.  It came down on the back of his head with force.

Apparently nobody saw the two leave.  If they did, they weren’t wearing their masks.

Within ten minutes, a maildrop guy opened Jerald’s door, saw him bleeding on the floor, and called 911.  The paramedics zapped across campus, tended to him, got him in the ambulance to the local hospital, and found him diagnosed with mild concussion and scalp laceration.  It looked a lot worse than it was, thank God.

The only thing the thieves had taken was Wendy’s jumpsuit.

“So why did they take that?” asked the chief.

“I, I don’t know,” Wendy stammered.  “I’ve got amnesia.  I don’t remember anything about my childhood.  That’s why Bill and I were trying to get the suit looked at, because it was what I was found in ten years ago.”

The chief tented his fingers on the desk.  “Miss Corrigan.  You were found on the street, in the snow, by a pair of officers in a patrol car one night ten years back.  You had no memory, or claim to have no memory—“

“It’s true,” she said.  “I don’t know about my past.”

“—of your past life,” said Madigan.  “Just recently a couple of guys tried to break into your car.  Then, according to news reports, you and your boyfriend here almost drowned in a freak accident at the lake.  Now, Mr. McGregor here brings your suit to Professor Jerald for analysis, and he gets mugged and the suit is stolen.  I don’t know what’s going on here, but I want you to fill me in on it.  Now.”

My hand went to Wendy’s and grasped it, trying to loan her some strength.  She squeezed my fingers in empathy, but her eyes were straight on the police chief.

“Believe me, sir, if I knew, I’d be the first to tell you,” she said.  “All I can think of is that it has something to do with my past life.  My first eleven years.  I don’t know why these things are happening, but they are.”

“That’s why we brought in the suit,” I added.  “To see if we could learn something to point us to her past.”

“Which, I might add, I would have been glad to help with,” said Jerald.  “If we could have left out the banging of my head.”

“People’s memories seem to be playing tricks in this case,” noted Madigan.  “You claim amnesia about your early life, Ms. Corrigan.  The two guys we charged with ‘jacking your car both claim to have had a blackout during the time of the action.  They don’t have prior criminal records.  We polygraphed them and their statements appeared to be true, though we can’t make that stand up in court, of course.”

“Of course,” I said, like the dutiful pre-law I am.

“Don’t know if that’s going to be the case with the two we pick up, if we pick them up,” Madigan continued.  “But I’d like to ask you a few questions, if I might, Ms. Corrigan.”

Before she could reply, I said, “She has the right to have a lawyer present, sir.”

“She’s not being charged with anything, Mr. McGregor,” said the chief, with a hint of authority.  “I’d just like to find out about some of these coincidences.”

“Pardon me, sir,” said Wendy, “but that’s what I want, too.  I want to learn about my past life, so I can do something about these...’coincidences’.”

Jerald felt of the bandage on the back of his head.  “Mr. Madigan, Miss Corrigan doesn’t have to answer a blessed thing.  As you noted, she’s not being charged, she doesn’t have a lawyer present, and I hardly think she’s obstructing justice.”

Madigan spread his hands on the desk.  “All I’m asking is for some cooperation here, Ms. Corrigan.  If you want to help us find the men who attacked Mr. Jerald, and to help us recover your suit, anything you can give us would be of great assistance.”

“Information, you mean,” Wendy said, holding her purse in both hands.  I looked at her tensely.  It had to be a tell to the chief, but I couldn’t help myself.

“Yes,” said Madigan.

“Sir, with your permission,” I said, “I’d like to have a lawyer present when Wendy is questioned.”

“If she insists on it, fine, Mr. McGregor,” said the chief.  “But all I want to do is ask her a few questions, with yourself and the professor present, if that’s all right by her.”

I looked at Wendy.

“It’s all right,” she said.  “You can ask your questions.”

“Wendy,” I said.

She waved me off.  “I said it’s all right, Bill.  Go ahead and ask, Mr. Madigan.”

The professor looked concerned, too, but said, “If she isn’t held accountable for her answers, Madigan, how can they be considered reliable?”

“It’s an informal fact-finding session, professor,” said Madigan.  “As for her reliability, let’s just say I’ll trust her unless I find a reason not to.  Is that permissable, Ms. Corrigan?”

“It’s a ‘Miss’, not a ‘Ms.,’ Mr. Madigan,” said Wendy, leaning her elbows on the purse that was flat on her legs.  “I’ll agree to an informal questioning.  Bill is right here to let me know if I say something stupid.”  She smiled knowingly at me, and I think I rolled my eyes at the ceiling.  Professor Jerald drew in a deep breath and let it out.

“Very well, then,” said the chief.  He pulled out a cassette recorder.  “Mind if I record?”

“I’d mind it,” I said.  “If you want to record her statement, I want a lawyer here and I want her advised professionally.”

“All right, Mr. McGregor,” said Madigan, and put the machine back in his desk drawer, which he shut.  “To begin.  Your name is?”

“Wendy Lee Browning Corrigan.”

“Your residence?”

“2514 Elm Street, Apartment 16B.”

“Your age?”

“I’m uncertain, but I’m legally defined as 21.”

I tried holding hands with her, but Wendy pushed my hand gently back into my lap.  She was going to stand on this on her own.

“What’s your involvement with this case?  That is, the case of Professor Jerald’s assault.”

“My boyfriend, Mr. McGregor here, gave him the red suit I was found in ten years ago.  We wanted it analyzed by the criminology department at the university.”

“Why now?”

“Because, thanks to the carjacking incident, we thought we might be in danger, somehow,” she said.

“Carjacking is usually pretty random, Miss Corrigan.  What makes you think you were personally in danger?”

“The two guys who did it claim a memory loss.  I think that’s kind of suspicious.”

“Miss Corrigan.  Why did the two carjackers stop?”

“‘Scuse me?”

Madigan leaned over his desk a bit.  “Mr. McGregor here saw the two perpetrators breaking into your car by smashing the window with a crowbar.  When he tried to intervene, they hit him in the shoulder with the bar.  Is that right, Mr. McGregor?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.  There wasn’t anything else I could say.

“So if they were intent enough on stealing your car to commit assault in the act, Miss Corrigan, why did they stop before they did it?”

A long pause.

“Because I told them to,” she said.

“You told them to,” Madigan echoed.

She nodded.  “The only thing I could think of to do was yell, ‘Stop!’.  And they stopped.  Don’t ask me why.”

“Do you think if Mr. McGregor had asked them to stop, they would have stopped?”

“I don’t know,” she said.  “We’ve been over this at the examination, Mr. Madigan.”

“Cops have to go over the known evidence many times, Ms. Corrigan,” Madigan said.  “You should have learned that from TV.  Let’s continue.  Why do you think the perps stopped when you asked them to?”

Wendy shrugged.  “Given that their memory lapsed shortly after that, I can’t vouch for their mental state, Mr. Madigan.”

“Was there anything in the car that they could have wanted to get at, Ms. Corrigan?”

“Just a minute, sir,” I said.  I thought I could see where he was going.  Turned out I was right.

But Wendy said, “Only the car itself, as far as I know.”

“Nothing specific?  Like objects of value or...”

Her eyes widened and darkened.  “Are you accusing me of having stolen goods or drugs in my car, Chief Madigan?  I’m not a doper and I’m not a thief.  And your cops went all over my car before I drove it home.”

“They did,” he said.  “But I have to ask these questions, Ms. Corrigan, just to cover the bases.  I’m sorry.  You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because if you think you’re being threatened by a random carjacking, it indicates that you seem to suspect the crime wasn’t so random after all.”

Wendy breathed heavily, once.  “I’m an amnesiac, Mr. Madigan.  If something like that assault happens, like the assault on Professor Jerald, I’m suspicious that it could tie into the life I don’t know about.  The life I lived in my first eleven years.”

Madigan nodded.  “Now we’re getting someplace.  Do you think these two carjackers could somehow be connected with the two who assaulted Professor Jerald?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Do you think there was anything in the red suit that would have made it an attractive target to them?”

“I don’t know.  We were trying to find out.”

“Two assailants in each case,” said Madigan.  “Despite the first perps’ memory lapse, this is beginning to look like organized action.”

“Seems like it to me, too,” Wendy agreed.

“Have any idea who it could be?”

“Somebody who doesn’t want me to find out about my past?”

“Could be,” said Madigan.  “You really don’t remember anything from your childhood, Miss Corrigan?”

“Only that I knew my name was Wendy.”

He nodded.  “That’s about all I could dig up from the old files, as well.  We never did find a Missing Persons match for you.”

“Chief,” I said, “is there any way we could see those files, too?  We’re trying to find out her identity, ourselves.  If we could see them, and talk to the detective that worked the case, it might be of help.”

“Detective House is retired,” said Madigan.  “I could see if he wants to talk to you.”

“Or we could contact him ourselves,” said Jerald.  “But it’d be better, I think, if you called him first.”

Madigan smiled.  “Just like you were when I was in your class, Prof.  But let’s continue, Ms. Corrigan.  It’s not directly connected with either of these incidents, but you and Mr. McGregor were almost drowned in that whirlpool incident at the lake.  What’s the story on that?”

“I don’t know,” Wendy said.  “Have they sorted out what caused it yet?”

“They have no idea,” said Madigan.

“Then I can’t offer one, either,” she answered.

“I’ve got something else to show you,” said the chief, and he reached into another desk drawer.  A couple of seconds later, he came up with an object and threw it on the desk.  “Ever seen one of these?”

It was a strange looking doodad on a ribbon, almost like a medal.  Only it was shaped asymmetrically, made of some golden metal (maybe even gold, for all I knew), and lightly traced with some symbols or language with which I was unfamiliar.  All three of us looked at it.  I can’t be sure, but I think Wendy caught her breath before she peeked at it.

“No,” she said.  “I’ve never seen this thing before.”

“Would you like to pick it up?”

“No,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because it scares me, somehow.”

Madigan paused.  “We found that in the pocket of one of the men charged with breaking into your car.  Do you think he meant to leave it there?”

“I don’t know,” she said.  “He could have.”

“Do you think this is the symbol of a cult, Miss Corrigan?”

“I have no idea,” Wendy replied.  “It could be.  All I know is that I don’t like it.”

“Could it be linked with your past, Miss Corrigan?”

“There’s no way to tell, right now,” said Wendy.   “I won’t say it could be or couldn’t be.  But it spooks me.”

“So it could be, conceivably, something you saw in your childhood.  Connected with something that frightened you.”

I spoke up.  “Do you have any idea where you’re going with all this, Chief?  I’d sure like to know.”

“Mr. McGregor,” said the chief, “from what I can tell, it looks suspiciously as though Miss Corrigan was somehow involved with a cult.”

Oh, great.

“I’ve never been involved with a cult,” said Wendy.  “Not as far as I know, anyway.  I’m a Christian.  I was in church last Sunday with Bill, here.  Ask him.”

“But that’s not accounting for your early life, Miss Corrigan.”

“No,” she admitted.  “It isn’t.”

“Again, I’m not accusing you of any crime here,” confirmed the chief.  “I’m just giving you a possible scenario, based on deductions I’m making from the facts I have at hand.”

“Only one of many possible scenarios, Richard,” said the professor to Madigan.  “We could, for example, construct an organized crime plot just as easily, based on this evidence.  Or if one of Wendy’s parents or relations is still alive, and wants to harm her or keep her from learning something he doesn’t want her to know, there’s another route to go down as well.”

“Point well taken,” said Chief Madigan.  “But that doesn’t explain why one of those guys had a medal like that in his pocket.  Maybe he was the only one to whom it applies.  Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with Miss Corrigan.  Still...”  He paused and leaned back.  “...we have to consider it as a possible connection.”

“I understand,” said Wendy, quietly.  “Is there anything else I can tell you about, sir?”

“If you have something you’d like to share with us, feel free.”

Wendy said, “I’d just like to go home and see if I could get some sleep.  I’ve got work in the morning.  It’s pretty darned late.”

Madigan nodded.  “I know.  Mr. McGregor probably has the same situation, am I right?”

“Definitely,” I agreed.

“I won’t keep you much longer,” said Madigan.  “But here’s the points we have.  First, Miss Corrigan’s car is broken into.  Then you decide to take that red suit and get it analyzed.  Professor Jerald tells me that he told nobody else about the suit.  Neither of you did, either, did you?”

“No,” I said.

“I didn’t,” said Wendy.

“Yet, only hours after you turned it over to the professor, two thieves break into his office, take it, and assault him.  How did they know?”

“I don’t know,” said Wendy.  “I have no idea.”

“Is it possible that one or both of you are being observed?”

“Again, I don’t know,” she said.

“Well,” said Madigan, “I think it’s pretty important that we find out.  Wouldn’t you say?”

“I’d say that indeed,” said Jerald.  “Even though I don’t think they’re really interested in me.  At least, I hope not.”

“Evidently the suit is a lot more important than suspected,” said Madigan. “When it’s recovered, I want the police lab to perform the analysis.  Agreed?”

“As long as the college can conduct an analysis later, if we want,” said Wendy. “And I don’t want my suit damaged.  It’s an heirloom.”

“I’ll consult with you beforehand,” Madigan said.  “If that’s all, you can go.”

So we did.

On the way out, Professor Jerald stopped us on the steps.  “Mr. McGregor, Miss Corrigan, I hope you’ll consider me your third partner in this affair,” he said.  “I’ve obviously become interested.  Being in an assault can do that to a party.”  He smiled.

“That’d be up to Wendy,” I said.

She shook his hand and gave him her warmest smile.  “If we need your help, professor, we’ll be sure to ask.  Thank you.”

“No, thank you.  If I could be the one to uncover the secret of Little Miss Mystery, it’d be one hell of a personal triumph.  After all, to use a phrase that will probably mean nothing to your generation, I love a mystery.”

I said, “Who was your favorite?  Jack, Doc, or Reggie?”

The prof was taken aback, then beamed.  “You know them!”

“My dad was into Old Time Radio,” I said.

“Doc Long, of course,” he said.  “Honest to my grandma.  Goodnight, Mr. McGregor, Miss Corrigan.”  He tipped his hat a bit before going to his car.  We went back to mine.

Once inside, I said, “You recognized that thing on the ribbon, didn’t you?”

“Not entirely,” she said.  “But I seem to have feelings connected with it.  It’s like the magic language, Bill.  I know it, but I don’t know how I know it.”

“So those guys were trying to dump it in your car.”

“Yeah,” she said.

“And it wouldn’t be guaranteed to do you any good.”

“No,” she agreed.

“So now can we go back and get some sleep?”

“Not on your life,” Wendy said.  “We’ve got to find my suit tonight.  Before they can get it out of town or something.”

“What are you talking about?  How the hell do you expect to find your suit?”

“Watch me,” she said.  “And drive where I tell you to.”

“Wendy, it’s after 1 A.M.”

“Bill.”

I sighed and started the engine.  She placed the fingers of both her hands to her temples.  Her head swiveled to the west.   She pointed.

“That direction,” she said.  “Drive that way.”

“Are you sure of this?”

“Just drive!”

So I did.

Right about now, reading this myself, I wouldn’t have any doubt who was in charge of the relationship.  Because there we were, an hour past midnight, both of us having to get up for work the next morning, driving where she told me to go in order to find her old red suit.

I was beginning to get a little pissed with it, myself.

“What is this?  You can find your suit like you’re a Geiger counter?”

She kept her finger pointed at the windshield in the direction she wanted me to go.  “Bill, trust me on this, okay?”

“Trust you?  Yeah.  Which will it be this time, the trees, the whirlpool, or just two idiots with a crowbar?  How long do you think I can keep my insurance costs down, Wendy?”

She looked at me, tensely.  “I can sense the suit, Bill.  It’s got my presence in it.  I can’t do that with everything, but that little red thing is almost a part of me.  If I concentrate on it, that is.   So let me.”

“Let you?  Yeah.”  I turned right on red and started to wonder about the neighborhood we were getting into.  “I’ve only gotten killed almost twice now, letting you.”

“Bill, please,” she said, closing her eyes.  “Just go this way.”

The way we were going was leading us further into the industrial district.  Not everyplace there was operational.  The bad economy had left a few more or less deserted factories and warehouses where, most likely, winos and crackheads held court.  Those were not places I wanted to be at close to 2 A.M.

I wanted to be back home in bed with the girl who was sitting next to me.

But I was beginning to wonder if we’d get home at all, after this escapade.

“Turn left here,” she said.  “Left.”

“Wendy, we’ve got to talk.”

“Not now, Bill, I need to keep this fixed in my mind.”

“Wendy, we are going to talk.”

I pulled the car to the curb and stopped.  She looked at me in amazement.  “What are you doing?”

Taking the keys out of the ignition, I said, “Angling for some answers before we go any further.”

“What are you talking about, Bill?”

“Wendy,” I said.  “I’ll admit I want to help you find out about your past.  I’ll admit that your suit is a key to learning about it.  But what I won’t admit is that I should be out here risking my neck for that suit.  Why should I do that?”

“Bill, we haven’t got time to argue!”

“We haven’t got time not to!  Do you know how many times I’ve gotten hurt since knowing you?  Three, by conservative count.  That within the space of two weeks.  This is getting more dangerous than driving a Pinto.”

“Oh, Bill,” she said, and this time, by the light of the street lamp, I could see a look of concern in her face.  “I’m sorry, dammit.  I wasn’t thinking enough of you.”

“You’re damn right.  Wendy, not all of us have magic powers to protect ourselves.  What am I supposed to do, crash this car through a warehouse door and take on two guys like I was Rambo?  I’m just a pre-law, for pete’s sake!  I never even played varsity football!  What do you expect from me?  Well, what?”

She sighed, sat back in her seat, and put a hand to her brow.  “I don’t expect you to go in there, Bill.  Wherever there is.”

“Well, you’re not going in ‘there’, either.  We got off easy last time, honey.  They might have guns.  You got a shielding spell that’s any good against that?”

“No,” she admitted.

“Then what?”

Wendy turned and embraced me as quick as a grasshopper’s leap.  “Forgive me, Bill.  I should have, oh, hell, I should have told you what I intended to do from the start.  Not just given orders.”

I have to admit, my arms were around her, too, by that point.  “Babe,” I said.  “Wendy.  Next time, think before you jump in.  We’ve gotten into enough trouble without even trying to.  You dig?”

“I dig, Bill.”

“That’s good.  Now what was it you intended to do?”

“Wanted to find out where they had my suit, call the cops, and wait till we saw them nab the guys and recover it.”

“Sounds like a plan to me.”  I fumbled in my pants pocket and extracted the keys.  My hand dangled them before her eyes.

“I love you, Bill,” she whispered in my ear.  “Sorry I’m such a dummy sometimes.”

“You aren’t a dummy,” I said.  “You just go off half...uh, half-considered sometimes, Wen.  Can you still sense the suit?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Then let go of me, and let’s go.”

 -W-

It was in an old abandoned factory, a pretty small one, as opposed to a warehouse.  At that time of night, I didn’t really give a damn one way or the other.  We approached from over a block away, our headlights off.  I could see one car parked to the side of the place.  There weren’t too many lights on in this district, and even though the sky was clear, it was only a quarter moon.  As far as I could tell, we were in the only other vehicle for at least half a mile.

Not exactly the most appetizing place to be at that time of night.

“That’s it, Bill,” said Wendy, staring straight at it.

“Can you tell the name of the place?  A sign or something?”

“Not from here,” she said.  “Wait a minute.  I can see part of one.”

“What’s it say?”

“Hard to tell.  Letters are kind of weathered.  Looks like ‘End Bros.’”

“Ah, yes, the Ends.  I remember them well.  Manufactured jeans, if I recall.”

“Smart aleck.”

“Now,” I said, “is the part where we turn around and call the cops.”

“All right,” she said.  “The Fina station by the overpass?”

“Good as any,” I answered.  “Where we’ll wait for the police.”

“Not on your life.”  She looked at me, hard.  “We’re coming right back here and wait for them.”

“You’re nuts!”

“Bill, I don’t want us losing them while we wait for the cops.”

“You’re still nuts!  What has this suit of yours got?  Microdots with plans for an anti-matter bomb sewn inside?”

Wendy grabbed my shoulder.  “Listen, Bill.  If they want this suit bad enough to break into an old man’s office and hit him over the head for it, it has to have value to somebody other than me.  With all the things that have happened in my life, especially lately, it has to be tied in with these powers that are striking us.  Reasonable assumption?”

“The assumption is reasonable.  Your plan isn’t.”

“Fine,” she said.  “But we’re still going to do it.”

“No, we won’t.”

“Let’s argue about it later,” she said.  “Get this thing in gear and let’s get out of here.”

We’d been parked against the curb.  I was about to comply when, all of a sudden, I saw a very substantial dark shape come up on the driver’s side and, with a screech of body-by-Fischer metal, pin us between itself and the curb.

It was a blacked-out car that was bigger than ours.  Somebody was in it.

“Oh, my God,” whispered Wendy.

I don’t remember saying anything.  I just know I was starting the engine, but we were wedged too firmly for the wheels to do anything but spin.  Given a little time, I know I could have shot us out of there.

There was a rapping sound on my window.  Nobody can blame me for looking that way.

A guy in a flat cap and a jacket, looking as delicate as a nuclear submarine, was pointing an automatic at my face.

When he didn’t shoot, we figured he wanted us to get out of the car.   We complied, hands up.  As the guy got out, Wendy muttered something very quickly, and finished up with the words, “Shielding spell,” to me.

“Against bullets?”

“No.”

The man spoke to us three words.  “Come with me.”  Our hands went in the air without us being told.  Wendy and I shot glances at each other.  If we’d had the presence of mind to comply with our bodily functions, we probably each would have needed a change of underwear about that time.  Thankfully, we didn’t.

The three of us marched to the factory.  As we got nearer, I saw that it was “Whitend Bros.”, not “End Bros.,” the latter of which still seems more unique and memorable to me.  He told us, “Stop,” when we were near the door.  He kept his gun on us while he fished in one pocket for a key.

“Stop,” Wendy echoed, in her commanding voice.

I caught my breath.  Just that sort of command had forced the two carjackers to turn into statues when I first met her.  This was the ticket.  The guy would stop in mid-fumble and we could run the hell away, make our way back to the sainted Fina station, call the cops, and have a couple of Sprites while we waited.  Order would be restored to the universe.

He just looked at her.   “That’s what I just said.”  He opened the door, waved his gun at us, and didn’t have to give any verbal orders.

I looked at Wendy.  She looked back at me, befuddled as I was.  Nonetheless, we went inside.

It was past two in the morning and I didn’t know if we’d ever see daybreak.

Forget what you see on cop shows.  When a guy is facing you holding death in his hands, you don’t make any wisecracks.  You don’t think up any smart remarks.  You’re so damn scared that your brain is in basic self-preservation mode.  Whatever he tells you, that’s what you’re gonna do.

If he doesn’t initiate any conversation, you keep your mouth shut.

All of this, I thought to myself.  All of this because of some stupid red jumpsuit.

What the hell kind of woman was Wendy, anyway, that she was this important to someone?  Or something?  What the hell even kind of magician was she?

I had no idea.  I remembered that she probably didn’t, either.  But whoever was taking us prisoner probably knew more than we did about it.

It would have been a great time for Batman to swoop down and save our asses.  He didn’t show.

Inside the factory, it was pretty much an open concrete place.  Everything had been cleared out a long time ago.  The windows were covered over with dark plastic, taped down.  What was new was a simple table with a lamp and a glass-and-wood case on it, laid flat, and a chair with somebody else in it.  The chair’s occupant was looking at both of us.

He looked to be about 30 years of age, with blonde, buzz-cut hair and a widow’s peak.  Grey eyes, mustache, brown shirt with a red tie, brown pants from what I could see.  The man looked at the both of us with eyes that seemed kind of odd.  Not physically, of course, as if they were mismatched or blind or something.  More like, well, the usual occupant was not home.  Think of the little kid in The Shining when he started doing his pinky jive and you’ve got the idea.

Then his gaze came more into focus.  With one hand, he tipped up the case to show us what was within.

Wendy’s old red jumpsuit.

“Where the others failed, I succeed,” he said, in a voice that sounded no more sinister than a high school principal’s.  “Do them.”

That was when Wendy yelled, “KAH!”

It didn’t exactly stop them.  But it did noticeably make the gunman jerk and Mr. Buzz-Cut recoil for a second.  I hate to say that was all I needed, because it wasn’t.  It was all my reflexes needed.

I grabbed Wendy and threw us both on the floor.  She banged her nose and said, “Ouch!” just as a shot rang out overhead.  As long as it was overhead, that was all right by me.

She extended both her arms and spread her hands out, raising her fingers up from the concrete floor.  Her voice started in with some of that magical mumbo that I could never quite understand.  She was saying it faster than a radio announcer calling a Dodgers game.  I think I called her name.

The air pressure was changing.

Inside the factory, a gale-force wind was starting to blow.

The guy with the gun was blown against the side of the factory.  His hand was pressed flat against the wall, as was his body.  He still held the gun, but it wasn’t pointed at anything more than the ceiling.  The boss man was tumbled off his chair and the table and case were blown over on their side.  The lamp went flying, but it didn’t break when it hit the floor.  Lucky us, I guess.

Buzz-Cut yelled, “Kah!” himself.  The wind started slackening off.  Immediately, Wendy yelled something else, and kept chanting in the magician’s language.  He answered back.  The two of them were on their feet, their hands pointed at each other, chanting.

I was watching a freaking magicians’ duel.

No sparks of electricity coming from their hands, no demons jumping out of warp-space to grapple with each other.  Just Wendy and Buzz-Cut, facing each other and doing chant and counter-chant.  It was like we were at the eye of a hurricane.  The winds were still blowing away from the center, but where we were, it was relatively calm.

The problem was, the winds were lessening.  I don’t know whether it was because Wendy had to devote more of her concentration to fighting this guy, or what.  But I knew it was happening.

So did the guy who had been pinned against the wall.

Deja vu.  My reflexes were on automatic.  Or maybe not.  Maybe this time I was prompted by the fact that Wendy was there, and that I knew she was in danger.  It wasn’t exactly a retake of the carjacking thing, but it was close enough.

He was standing on both feet and bringing his gun hand down in Wendy’s direction.

I hit him hard with my head in his gut and my fist in his groin.

We both went bang up against the wall.  It was solid concrete and he was cushion enough for me.  His head whanged forward first, then whanged backward and caught itself a good lick against the concrete.  I kneed him as hard as I could where I’d hit him.

No, I’m not Captain America.  My reptile-brain had taken over, I guess.  When your life and the life of your lover are at stake, I guess your performance tightens up quite a bit.

The guy was tough, or he wouldn’t be in the profession he appeared to be in.  But getting hit hard twice in the cojones and banged in the back of the head are going to give somebody pause, no matter who he is.  I figured it was time to press luck to its utmost.

I grabbed the damn gun and wrenched it out of his hand.

Then the thing was in mine, and it was pointed at him.  He looked at me like he couldn’t believe it.  Also like he was hurting from the spot he had one hand covering.

My reasoning must have overwhelmed my lizard-brain a tad, and I was glad it did.  I didn’t pull the trigger.  I don’t know if I could have, and I never want to find out.

Instead, I brought the barrel of the gun down over his head.  I kept doing it over and over again, until it was red with his blood and he was sitting slumped over against the wall.  He was still breathing, a little bubble of red coming out of one nostril.  But he was unconscious.

I wanted to be sick.  God help me, I wanted to throw up right there.  But I just didn’t dare.

Instead, I turned, pointed the gun with both hands like I’d seen on TV, straight at Mr. Buzz-Cut, and yelled loud enough to drown both him and her out for a moment: “Freeze!”

Actually, I said something after “Freeze!”, but that’s better left to the imagination.  The point is, it worked.  For just a moment.  Buzz-Cut heard me, saw me and what I was holding, and hesitated in his chant while he pivoted towards me.  He had one hand thrust in my direction and what he would have done to me is a subject for much speculation.  Don’t bother, though, I’ve speculated on it enough.

Wendy thrust both palms out in his direction and spoke three words.  Or three syllables.  Whatever they were.  I can’t reproduce them, and probably wouldn’t want to.  My girl was looking a bit taxed, and it wasn’t because of the late hours we were keeping, either.  But she came through.  That’s for sure.

Because, an instant later, Buzz-Cut was lifted off his feet as if an invisible Muhammad Ali had hung one on him, and didn’t stop until he slammed into the concrete wall behind him.  He looked dazed, and he wasn’t chanting or pointing anymore.

Wendy shouted, “KAH!”, and then spoke a few more words.  The man’s arms fell limply to his sides.  He was down, not out, but it didn’t look as though his motor functions were operant.

I should have been experiencing a major set of the creeps.  Whether I was too adrenalined up for that or not, I don’t know.  What I suspected at the time, and still think now, is that I was slowly getting acclimated to the weirdness that gravitated around Wendy.  That did scare me.  But it was in the back row balcony seat of my mind.  The part that controlled my functions was sending me forward, to grab Wendy as she sagged to her knees.

“I’m all right,” she said.

“If you were all right, you wouldn’t need me,” I said.

She breathed heavily, then hugged me with one arm, tightly.  “I want to tell you everything you are to me,” she whispered.  “But let me take care of business first.”

“Business?”

“Help me up.”

I braced her and got her back on her feet.  Wendy was sweaty, the stains showing right through the armpits of her jacket.  Her face was flushed.   She’d been in a fight, all right, but she’d managed to pull off a win.  I felt proud of her, but another part of me was calling my judgment-self an idiot.  We’d almost gotten killed, after all.

Again.

My bowels wanted to loosen but I wouldn’t let them.

Wendy walked over to where Buzz-Cut sat against the wall.  She lay her right hand against his brow.  His eyes were open and staring at her with hatred.

“Speak,” she commanded.

His mouth opened.

“A setback,” he said.  “Not a failure.”  Then he laughed.  His eyes began to unfocus.

“Tell me your name,” she said.  “Tell me your name, dammit!”

But I sensed that she’d lost her chance.  The guy’s eyes were focusing again.  This time, he looked as though he didn’t know where the hell he was.  He looked scared.  I didn’t blame him.

“Who are you?” he said.  “Where am I?”

Wendy looked at him for a long moment, then pressed her hand hard against his brow.  “Sleep,” she said.  “Forget us.”

“Wendy,” I said.

It was a little late.  His head was already slumped to the side, and he was sawing logs.

She stepped away from him.   “Come on, Bill. We have things to do.”

“Come on, where?” I said.

“Put the gun down,” she said, walking to the wooden case.

“Put it down where?”

“Anywhere.  But wipe it off, first.”

I wiped it on my shirt, knowing numbly that it might or might not take care of fingerprints, but would still leave enough of my sweat and DNA on it for a determined police lab to find.  Then I dropped it on the floor.  It didn’t go off.

She had the case opened and the suit was in her hands.  For a few seconds she just ran her hands over it.  Then she crushed it to her face, as if it were a long-lost friend.  Which, in a way, I suppose it was.

“Wen, come on,” I said.  “We’ve got to get the hell out of here before either of these guys wakes up.”

Wendy took the suit away from her face and sighed.  “Look in the other guy’s pocket for his keys.”

“His keys?”
“Yes, for cripes’ sake.  He’s got his car up against ours.  Remember?”

“Oh.  Yeah.”

It didn’t give me any pleasure rummaging through Bozo’s pockets, especially seeing and smelling him bleeding and knowing I’d done it to him.  True, he’d done as much to the professor, if he was the one who’d sapped him.  But I didn’t excuse barbarity in myself.  It had to be done, and I’d done it.  It didn’t make me feel good.

I found the keys.  We went outside, started the guy’s car, moved it with a slight screech away from my car, parked it down the curb, and left the keys inside it.  Then we got back in my car, shut the doors, and locked them.  I hesitated for a second.

“Wendy,” I said, “this is insane.”

“I know,” she said.  “You want me to drive?”

“Hell, no.”  I started it up and pulled away.  The old, not-quite abandoned factory was visible in my rear-view for a short time.  I never wanted to see it again.

She was still holding onto her red suit.

We pulled up to the Fina station.  As soon as I stopped, Wendy opened the door and bounded out.  “I’ll make the call,” she said.

“Wait,” I said, and got out as quickly as I could.  But she’d already scampered to the pay phone, dropped in a quarter, and punched in a number.  By the time I reached her, she’d already made the connection.

“Hello, Professor Jerald?  This is Wendy Corrigan.”

My mouth dropped open.  She waved a hand at me, telling me to shut up.

“Yes, sir, I know how late it is.  But we’re going to bring something by to you.  You’ll have to put it in your office and give it to the cops.  Yes, you know.  We’ll have a lot to talk about, I know.  We’ll be there in a moment.  Thank you.  ‘Bye.”

She hung up and looked at me.  “I’ll explain on the way, Bill.”

“You were supposed to call the cops,” I said.

“Keep your voice down,” she said.

“You were supposed to call the cops!”

“I said I’d explain,” she assured me.  “Give me the keys.  I’ll drive.”

“Oh, no,” I said.   “I’ll drive.  That much I want to be in control of, at least.”

“Fair enough,” she said, with a tired smile.  Then she reached out and kissed me.

And she said with her eyes everything that I meant to her.   I hoped I said it back.

When we broke the kiss, I finally said, “Get in, Wendy.  At least I know the way to the professor’s house.  And the story’d better be damned good.”

She squeezed my hand and we got back in the car.

I was running on caffeine, excitement, a doughnut, and fumes by the time we got to Professor Jerald’s place, a bungalow near the university.  Luckily, there was a light on.  I expected that.  Wendy was still caressing the red suit.  I think I shot her an irritated glance.

Jerald was in a maroon robe and slippers.  His door was open by the time we got out of the car.  He had a cup of coffee in his hand, a cap on his head, and a neutral expression on his face.  “Welcome,” he said.

“Thank you,” Wendy said.  “We need to get in, quickly.”

“Wendy,” I said.  “Show some class.  The man’s opening his home to us at 5 A.M.”

“It’s all right,” Jerald replied.  “Get in here and talk to me, both of you.”

We entered.  The prof’s place was economical but homey, lined with a lot of books, some framed photos of his academic career, wife, and kids, and a very comfortable couch and set of chairs arranged about a coffee table, one end of which faced a medium-sized TV.  He already had a pair of coffee mugs and coasters out, with cream and sugar available.  “Please don’t talk loudly,” he said.  “Laura is asleep.”

Wendy proferred the red jumpsuit, carefully.  “Please, Professor, let me see you put this where you’re going to put it.”

He touched the suit gingerly, then went into the dining room beyond.  We followed.  His briefcase was sitting beside a chair.  Jerald opened it, stuffed the suit carefully inside, and clasped it shut.  Then he carried it back to the front room, both of us coming obediently with him.

“Now,” he said.  “Tell me about your adventure.”

“Who said we had an adventure?” I said.

“Young Mr. McGregor, don’t insult me.  You show up at my home in the middle of the night bearing an article of clothing that was stolen from my office, both of you as sweaty as if you’d run a two-minute mile, and you, Mr. McGregor, with a bruise on your right hand that wasn’t there when you left me yesterday, and you haven’t had an adventure?  What, sir, do you think I am a professor of?”

I attempted a wry grin.  “Professor, you’re all that,” I said.

“Indeed.”

Wendy said, “We tracked down the two who snatched it.  We got it back.  That’s all I want to say.”

“Well, then,” he said, opening the valise and extracting the suit, “take this back with you, Miss Corrigan.”

She was open-mouthed for a moment, then said, “No.  No, Professor.  You have to hide that in your office so that the cops can come pick it up, don’t you see?  That’s the only way to do it.”

“It is not,” he said.  “You can take this yourself to the police, and see if they will play ball with you when you refuse to tell them what you don’t wish to.”

“Uh, Professor,” I said, “I’m not sure how much of that we can really tell you.”

“What did you have to do, Mr. McGregor?”

Yeah.  Like I could answer that one.

Wendy was sitting on the couch beside me, both hands on her right knee, which she was dangling over her left knee at the time.  She was breathing very evenly.  “I think we’ll have to let him in, Bill,” she said.

“Wendy,” I said in a warning tone.  “You can’t.”

She got up and walked over to Jerald.  “Just sit still, Professor,” she said.  “Does your head feel better?”

“Yes,” he said.  “But it’s not exactly as good as new, if I may say so, and there’s a bump the size of a cartoon lump on the back of my head.  That’s why I’m wearing this.”  He indicated the cap.

She pulled it off, lay it on his lap, touched the back of his head gently with both hands and said, “Heal.”

“Wendy, I’m warning you,” I said.

“Bill,” she said, with her eyes closed, “please shut up.  Just for a moment.”

Behind his glasses, Jerald’s eyes widened.  “My dear,” he said, “what are you, what are you doing to me?”

“Just a moment,” she said.  “There.”

Wendy took her hands away from his head and stood away from him a bit.  Jerald felt of the back of his head.  “It’s gone,” he said.  “The lump is gone.”

“How do you feel?” she said.

“Much better.  Much, much better.  Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

I was shielding my eyes with one hand.  Good Lord, this night was deconstructing.

Jerald took off his glasses with one hand and still felt the back of his head with the other.  He looked puzzled.  “How did you do that?  Even autosuggestion wouldn’t produce this effect.”

She folded her arms.  “It’s because I’m a magician.  I can do things like that.”

“You’re a what?”

“It’s true, Professor,” I said, resigned to our fate.  “I’ll let her handle this one.”

So Wendy proceeded to tell him some of what had transpired in her life and especially that night, leaving out a few things along the way.  It was about 6 A.M. by the time she finished and the morning sun was peeking through the blinds.  He had asked only a few questions along the way.

One of them was, “What of those two you left behind in the factory?”

“I gave the gun guy a sleep-and-forget spell, too,” said Wendy.  “We left them both behind.  They’re still asleep, by my estimation.  They can stay there.”

“They most certainly can not,” said Jerald.  “We must go back and take one of them away.”

“What?”  We both echoed the word.

Jerald said, “If I choose to believe you...and quite frankly, right now, I can hardly believe your story without more proof...you have left behind two persons who are now free of what we might term ‘outside control’.   Correct?”

“Yeah, we have,” I said.  “They were both trying to kill us.”

“So you say,” said Jerald.  “But one of them had the appearance of a career criminal.  The other looked and spoke like a normal middle-class citizen.  Also correct?”

“Correct,” said Wendy.  Both of us began to get it.

“So what do you suppose will occur when both of them wake up in the same room, not knowing what has become of them, and one finds himself beaten and bloodied?  The criminal one?”

“Oh, great,” I said.  “Didn’t think of that.”

“You did not,” he said.  “Let me get dressed.  I’m coming with you.”

A voice came from the bedroom.  “Thomas, who are you talking with?  Are they here for breakfast?”

“Just students, my dear,” he said.  “And I’ll be having breakfast out.”

 -W-

How we got Buzz-Cut out of the factory without being seen and where we took him, sleeping happily away, and left him, I really don’t feel like talking about.  We never met him again and that’s just fine by me.  I hope he chalked it up to a fugue episode.

“I am still not entirely convinced,” said Professor Jerald, over a stack of blueberry pancakes at an IHOP.  “But at least that much of your details checks out, so far.”

“Believe me, professor,” I said, “you really don’t want to be convinced the way I was.”

Wendy was looking at him with concern.  “Professor Jerald.  Whether you believe us or not, we’ve got to be certain that you won’t tell others what we had to tell you.  I, uh...”

“Take your time, Miss Corrigan,” said Jerald.  Wendy was tired and starting to show it.  So was I.  I wasn’t looking forward to keeping up with the cash register that day.  In fact, I was resolved to calling in sick that morning, even though I needed the dough.

“You see why I can’t reveal this to the cops?” she said.  “Even if we let them analyze the suit?”

Jerald nodded.  “You haven’t apparently been involved in any criminal enterprises.  And I believe you both acted quite heroically, whether I allow for this magical nonsense or not.  Therefore, Miss Corrigan, you can regard me as your confessor priest.”

She beamed, wearily, and put her hand on his.  “Thanks, prof.  I am taking a chance with you.  I hope it’ll work out.”

“He’s taking a chance with us,” I said.  “Remember what happened to me when I got involved?”

She shot me a glance.  “It’s already happened to him, Bill.  What do you think I had to heal him from?”

“Yep.  Friendship with you is a definite risk, Wendy.”

That got me a look of surliness and guilt.

“But in my case, at least, it’s been worth the risk,” I said.

She sighed and smiled a bit.  “Thanks, Bill.  I know it’s been hard on you.  I’m sorry.”

I kneaded her shoulder.  “It’s also been great on me, Wendy.  Have you forgotten I’ve found somebody to love?”

Wendy grasped my hand and pressed her forehead to mine, looking into my eyes.  “I try not to.  As long as you don’t forget the same about me.”

“Not much chance of that.”

Jerald said, “As little as I hate to interrupt this, my friends, I must point out that I must be off to the campus, and both of you should call up your employers and tell them you won’t be in today.  Tell them you both got mild food poisoning from Mr. McGregor’s cooking.  You can list me as a reference.”

“That won’t be necessary, sir,” said Wendy.  She placed one hand on my chest and the other on her own.  “Vitalize,” she said.

Immediately I felt the fatigue leaving my body and mind.  I straightened up in the seat, frightened in a low-level way.  “Oh, boy,” I said, not necessarily in an approving way.

She was sitting up straighter, too.  She smiled.  Jerald looked at both of us.

“This will help us make it through the day,” she said. “But you come right over to my place afterward, Bill, and I’ll lift it.  Too much isn’t good for the system.”

“I can imagine,” I said.  It had to be something like mystic benzedrine.  Still, I’d be able to make it through the day with what she’d done.  I figured that I knew what a trucker felt like after taking one of those little white pills.

Jerald took Wendy’s hand and examined it.  “Nothing there,” he said.  “No patches, no needle, nothing.”

“So what do you think now, professor?” said Wendy.

Cautiously, he said, “That in the future, belief may be hard.  But disbelief may be a great deal harder.”

 -W-

I was only five minutes late to work after dropping Wendy off and performed pretty close to optimum for the rest of the day.  Even Abel handed me a compliment or two, along with a wink-wink nudge-nudge.  Finally, after handing over my post to the part-timer who worked till 9 p.m., I punched out, hung up my apron, and headed over to the library.  Wendy was sitting on a bench outside, looking at least as attractive as her considerable norm.

“Hi,” she said, showing her pearly whites in a grin.

“‘Lo, Wendy,” I said.  “How’s about my place this time?”

She shrugged.  “Suits me.  Have you got enough fixings for dinner?”

I pointed a thumb at the sack in the back.  “Bought a few things.  Want to see how you do on a steak salad.”

Wendy arose from her perch, purse in hand.  “The infidel dares challenge the Aluminum Chef.  Wait till you see how I answer your affront.”

“You can answer in affront or in aback,” I said.  “Just get in.”

Steak salad used to be one of my favorite things to order in McKean’s, a restaurant in my hometown.  I’d gotten a couple of the monster-sized taco shells used to contain the mess, along with steakfingers, red onions, tomatoes, lettuce, and a couple of other things.  The rest, including the dressing, I had at the house.  She lay her head on my shoulder as I drove us over.  “Tired?” I said.

“Nope.  Not yet.”

“Didn’t think so.  Neither am I.  Did the police call you?”

“Yeah, they did,” she said.  “They told me that the prof had found the suit back in his desk drawer.  They figure that the suspects just put it back when they didn’t find what they wanted.  At least that’s all they know.”

“That’s what they said to me, too,” I said.

She rubbed her hand up and down my right arm.  “Bill.  I hope we can keep our secrets secret.”

“Hey, you were the one who wanted to tell Jerald.  Not me.”

“Yeah,” she said.  “But we needed him.   We needed his help.”

“Just hope we don’t need the cops’ help that much.”

“It would have been too risky to let them know about the factory, Bill.  Too many things have been popping up around us lately.”

We were stopped at a light.  “Wendy.”

“Hmm?”

“How did you know how to fight that guy?”

“Oh.  It’s just, I don’t know, kind of latent knowledge.  Like when I had to stop the fire things from the stove.  When I have a need, I can remember spells.”

“But you can’t remember your past.”

“No,” she admitted.  “Not yet.  I’m sorry.”

The light changed and I drove on.

Wendy was as good as her word about the meal.  She knew just how to cook the steak, drain and combine the vegetables, arrange it all appetizingly inside both warmed monster taco shells, and serve them to both of us.  I had to admit that McKean’s would have increased their customers with her in the kitchen.

Afterwards, once we’d done the dishes, she said, “Come with me, Bill,” and led me into the living room.  She had us sit on the couch, her in her baby-blue top and Guess jeans, me in my U2 T-shirt and off-the-rack pants and green socks.  I have no idea what kind of picture I presented to her and don’t suppose it mattered all that much.

“Now what?” I said.

She placed her left hand on her own chest and her right hand on mine.  “Normalize,” she said.

The next thing I remember was seeing the inside of my own eyelids and feeling a familiar body across my legs and stomach.  “Um,” I said, approximately.

I opened my eyes.  Both of us had passed out on the couch.  Wendy was still asleep.  I checked my wristwatch. 6:07 in the morning.

“Wen-deeee...”  I shook her by one shoulder.

“Uhrm, umph,” she said.  She smoothed her hair back without opening her eyes.  “What time is it?”

“About six in the morning.”

“Good.  Just ‘bout right.”  She opened her eyes.  “We needed to catch up on sleep, Bill.  That’s why I let us down after dinner.”

I yawned.  “Uh huh.  Guess I’m a little tired, but I feel all right, basically.”

“Me, too.”  She yawned sympathetically.  “You got cornflakes?”

“The great Aluminum Chef stoops to something as low as Post Toasties?”

“She does if she doesn’t want to cook or go out for breakfast,” said Wendy.  “Do you have ‘em, Bill?”

“Sure,” I said.  “Want me to get you a bowl?”

“Later,” she said, smiling.  “You’ve been my hero.  You need a hero’s reward.  I just wanted to be rested up enough to give it to you right.”

After one reward, and another one in the shower, I had to admit to myself (and her) that I liked that kind of vitalization spell best of all.  Then we got dressed, I took her back to her place, and I went on to work.

That was the kind of normalization I needed, right then.

I also had a feeling it wasn’t going to last.

On the way back from work I started seizing up.

My hands grabbed the wheel with muscles that felt so tight, it was like somebody had a winding crank in my back.  I was astonished.  My jaws clamped together as tight as Dr. Sardonicus’s.  The breaths I took got increasingly harder to take.  I didn’t snap out of it until somebody behind me honked his horn.  That got me out into traffic in just enough time to avoid the red light.

I was scared.  I didn’t know why.

Wendy and I were supposed to get together after work, as usual.  I was panting, breathing through my mouth.  Scared.  Terrified.  Black fear.  Still didn’t know why.

Panic attack, I told myself.  Panic attack.  I’d never had them before, but I knew of them.  They happened to people, at times.

This time it was happening to me.

The few miles I had to cover between the grocery store and my digs were distances that Gunga Din would have found tough to cover.  I was never so glad to see my home before, not even the night of the animated trees.  I shut the car off and tore out the keys before the engine could even stop.  Ran up the steps, scrabbled with the key in the lock, finally had to grab my wrist with my other hand to steady it.  When the door opened, I just about fell on the carpet.

I slammed the door, locked it, threw myself on the sofa.  Breathe.  Breathe.

Closed my eyes.  Kicked off my shoes.  Fumbled on the coffee table for the remote control, turned on the TV, listened to an old Friends rerun.  That should have been comforting.  Really, it was.  But even Phoebe couldn’t get me to open my eyes.

I just lay there, on my back, and sighed and tried to sleep.

The phone must have rang for a long time before I convinced myself that it wasn’t a dream.

I got up and got to the thing after it stopped ringing, but I punched callback and, to no surprise, it was Wendy.  “Hi,” I said.

“What happened, Bill?  Why aren’t you here?”

“I’m sorry, Wen,” I said.  “I just don’t think tonight is a great time.”

“Oh,” she said.  It seemed a strange sound.  “Why?”

“I’m just having a little trouble, is all.  I want to stay in tonight.  Is that all right?”

“Well, sure.  But what’s the trouble, Bill?  Maybe I can help.”

“No.  No.  No trouble, Wendy.  Really.  Don’t bother.”

“Bill.”  She sounded no-nonsense and pleading at the same time.  “You just said you’re having trouble.  Now you tell me you’re not.  What’s the matter, for crying out loud?  What did I do?”

“You didn’t do anything, Wen.  I’m just not feeling good tonight.  I want to spend it alone, okay?”

“Well, okay,” she said, in a faint voice.  “But can’t you tell me what’s wrong, Bill?”

I hesitated.  “I don’t know, Wen.  I just don’t know.”

“What does it feel like?”

“I don’t know!”

“What do you feel like?”

“Scared.”

“Okay,” she sighed.  “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“I want to get off, Wendy.”

“I want to come over, Bill.”

“Don’t.  Please don’t.”

“I’m coming over,” she said.  “If you want to kick me out when I get there, you can.”

“Wendy,” I said.  But the only answer I got was the dial tone.  I tried redialing, but it was no good.  She was already gone, or not answering.

I considered just hiding in the bathroom, but there wasn’t much point in that.  I spent some time in there, though.  No matter what I did, I didn’t like the looks of the guy staring back at me from the mirror.  Too much fear in his eyes.

The refrigerator got raided for sandwich materials so that she wouldn’t have to fix me anything when she came over, if she did, if I let her in.  I made ham and cheese and bolted it down.  Mustard stain on my collar.  My muscles started tensing up again and I was hoping I wouldn’t throw the darned thing up.

Doorbell.

Go away, Wendy.

Doorbell continuing.

GO AWAY, WENDY.

Doorbell will not be denied.

I stumped to the door on stiff legs, unlocked it, threw it open.  Wendy was there, looking up at me hopefully, dressed in a white T-shirt, blue shorts, and sandals, carrying a purse.  She stood on the mat, not trying to enter.

I tried to tell her to go away.  Couldn’t manage it.

“Bill,” she said.  “Please let me come in.”

“Wendy, I...”

“I won’t if you don’t want me to,” she said.  “But please, let me come in.  I want to help.”

I stood there breathing deeply for several more seconds, and the deep breaths didn’t have anything to do with sex.  Finally I said, “Come in,” and moved aside a bit.

She smiled. “Thanks,” she said, and squeezed my hand as she passed by.  Her sandals flopped against her heels as she went in the front room and sat in my recliner.  “Okay if I sit here?”

“Sure.  Yeah.”  I managed to remember to shut and lock the door.

Wendy sat there, fumbling with her purse.  “Want to tell me about it?”

“I’m not sure what to tell,” I said.  “I don’t even know there is an ‘it’.”

She shifted her weight in the chair.  “Oh, yeah, there is.  You’re nerved, Bill.”

“Tell me about it!”

“Why don’t you tell me about it, honey?  I want to help.”

I turned my face away.  “I’m not sure that you can.”

“Bill.  It may be that I can’t help you.  But part of being in love with you is that I want to try.  And I do love you.”

Silence.

“What happened?  And when did it happen?”

I sighed.  “On the way back from work.  Had what you’d call a panic attack.  Made it hard to drive, hard to breathe, hard to think.   Got scared as hell.  I came back here.  Wasn’t in any shape to come over.”

Wendy nodded.

“Don’t know that I’ll be in any shape to see the ‘rents this weekend,” I said.

“If we have to call it off, we will,” said Wendy.

“Guess I’m not cut out to be your Parfait Gentil Knight, either.”

“Bill, you’ve been that enough already,” she said.

My hands were clenching and unclenching.  I was sweating.  “Wendy, I’m not cut out for all this stuff!  I’m just not!”

She was on the couch beside me in an instant.  I felt her arms around me and her head on my shoulder.  She wasn’t being sexually intrusive, just...comforting.

“It’s okay, Bill,” she said.  “Sometimes I don’t think I’m cut out for it, either.”

“Oh, hell,” I said.  “Here I am, and I’m supposed to be, I don’t know, the big strong guy, and I’m acting like this...”

“You are the big strong guy,” she said, quietly, her head against mine.  I felt the texture of her hair and it made me forget my fear for a good long moment.  “You’ve been so strong, it hasn’t even been funny.  Who was the one who beat up on that gunman last night, Bill?  It was you, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said.  I could smell my armpits.  “That scared me.  Scares me.”

“Well, what’d you expect?  It was a scary thing, honey.  He could have killed us both.  But you took him down.”

“Never done something like that,” I said.  “Never had to play James Bond.  Don’t want to.”

“But when you had to, Bill, you did.  Do you think I could have done that?”

I tried to chuckle, which was probably a good sign.  “You would have probably made his gun turn into a lizard, or something.”

“Nope,” she said.  “Even I can’t do that.  I’m also not as much a fighter as you.  I mean, I’ve taken some kickboxing classes, but do you think I could have beat the hell out of that guy the way you did?”

“I don’t know.  You’re pretty strong, for a girl.  I’m surprised by it, really.”

“Well, thanks.  But I’m not as strong as you.  I’d have had to find some way of stopping that guy, and, off hand, I don’t know what it’d be.  I mean, I tried my ‘stop’ word on him, and it didn’t work.”

“I noticed that.  Why didn’t it?”

She shrugged.   “I’m not sure.  Maybe he was shielded from it by the wizard he worked for.  Or maybe I should say, ‘by the spirit who possessed that guy in the buzz-cut’.  I’ve never seen something like that before.  I’m still learning, Bill.”

“Possessed.  Like something out of the Exorcist.  This crap scares me, Wendy.”

“It should.  But he wasn’t possessed by some kind of Biblical demon.”

“How do you know?”

She hesitated.  “I’m not sure.   It’s like, I can feel the vibe.  I sort of know what was in him.  It was like what was in the water in the Brownings’ pool.”

“What was that?”

“Spirits,” she said.

“That really helps.”

“Well, I’m sorry.  I can only tell you what I know.  Sometimes that isn’t much.”

“I know, Wendy,” I said.  “I’m sorry, too.”  I hugged her tighter and she snuggled up against me more.

“Bill, can I point out something?”

I stroked her hair.  “I imagine you will, whether I want you to or not.”

“If you don’t, I won’t.”

“Go ahead, Scheherezade.”

“More like Dr. Joyce Brothers.  Bill, since we’ve met, both of us have been, well, in harm’s way about four or five times.  The carjacking, the trees, the lake, now what happened last night.  Plus you’ve found out that magic exists.  You didn’t know about that before, did you?”

“Not in this way, no,” I said.  “I was just as glad not to.”

“Okay.  On top of that, your sleeping hours have been a little messed up, here and there.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“And you’ve fallen in love, and so have I.  Am I right?”

“Oh, yeah.”  I had to look at her face.  She was smiling.  I kissed the top of her head.

“So, darling,” she said, stroking my back, “don’t you think that’s enough to strain your emotions like, to the breaking point right there?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I didn’t expect anything like this to happen.”

“Well, it does,” she said.  “Happens to all sorts of people, I think.  Doesn’t mean you’re not brave, Bill, because you are.  Believe me.”

“Happened to you?”

She nodded, very seriously.  “For sure.”

“Tell me about it?”

“What do you think I felt like after those fire people came out of the oven?  I darned near used the bathroom right there on the kitchen floor.  Didn’t even want to get out of the bed the next day.  Didn’t want to go in the kitchen again, ever.”

“So how’d you get out of it?”

“Made myself go to the kitchen, once the stove was replaced.  I fixed myself some soup, just like I had before.  I thought I was going to slop it all over the floor, my hands were shaking so badly.  But...I got through it.  Ate a whole bowlful right there in the kitchen.   I almost slept there that night, except they would have caught me at bed count.”

“You weren’t nervous anymore?”

“I was, but not as bad.  I went back to the kitchen every time I had a chance.  I’m lucky I didn’t ruin my figure.  In about a week, I felt like the same old Wendy.”

I said, “Funny.  You feel like the same old Wendy to me, too.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” she said.  “But I never expected all this to come down around your head, Bill.  Believe me, I didn’t.  I never thought it’d come down around me like this, either.”

“The rate of attack is speeding up,” I said, musing.

“Yeah, definitely,” she said.

“So why is that?”

“I don’t know,” she said.  “But I don’t much believe in coincidence.”

I wondered, stroking her hair and back, feeling her bra strap through her T-shirt.  “Do you suppose it has something to do with your age?  Maybe it’s a ‘coming of age’ thing.”

“That’s as good a theory as any, I suppose,” she admitted.  “Are you all right with me being here like this, or would you prefer I let you go?”

“Just try.”

She snickered.

“Wendy,” I said. “Maybe it’s us.”

“What?”  She looked at me in genuine confusion.

“Maybe it’s us,” I said. “Maybe the forces against you, the spirits, the witches, whatever, maybe they’re hitting you so hard because they don’t want us to be together.”

She pondered.  “Maybe they don’t,” she said.  “But I’m not sure what for, except to make sure I’d be lonely and miserable.”

“It could be more than that,” I said. “Want to hear my theory?”

“Go ahead,” she said.  “Like you just said, I don’t think I could stop you.”

“Maybe they don’t want you to have a child.”

She looked at me, astonished.

“Look at it this way,” I said.  “You broke up with one of your boyfriends, the one you were going to make love to, because your foster parents died just before you were going to.  Am I right?”

Wendy nodded.

“If the forces wanted you not to make love, and couldn’t get to him, what better way than to hit the Brownings?”

“Oh, God,” she said, and breathed like she had a pair of anvils on her chest.  “Oh, my God...”

I had to hold her, now.  “You might’ve gone to bed with him just to comfort yourself.  But they probably knew you weren’t that kind of girl.  So they chose a target they could get to, when they could get to it.  I may be blowing smoke, here, Wendy, and I hope I am.  But if I’m not...”

“Bill, oh, Bill, ohhh, my God...”  Her eyes were tearing.  I put her head against my shoulder.

“I don’t know...I don’t know if this is right or not,” I said.  “But what if you’re like a princess?  Maybe you have the potential to carry on a royal line.  Or just an important magical line.  Maybe...maybe that’s why we were gotten together.  I don’t believe there can be forces on one side, and nothing on the other.”

She was sniffling.  “I don’t want you hurt, Bill.  I never, ever wanted you hurt.”

“I know, Wen.  But we’re not moving towards hurt, here.  I think we’re moving towards knowledge.  That’s the antithesis of hurt, in my book.”

“Maybe in mine, too.”  She was still trying to choke back sobs.  “Oh, Lord, Bill, I’m...I’m sorry.”

“Hey.  Wendy.”  I made her face me.  “We’ve been saying those two words too often tonight.  We don’t have anything to be sorry about, as far as I can tell.”

“You think that?”

“I do,” I said.

“Then you don’t have to be sorry about being scared.”

I think I sat there with my jaw open for a few seconds, because she started laughing at me.   “Oh, Bill, forgive me,” she said.  “But you look so dumb like that!”

After awhile I started laughing, too.  “Oh, crud,” I said.

She took my face in her hands and kissed me.  After we broke, I took hers in my hands and did the same.  Wendy kicked off her sandals and lay under me on the couch.  “I had hoped we could get dinner before we did this,” she sighed.

“We will, food freak,” I said.  “But not before I do something else.”

“What?”

“Follow me.”

I got up and off of her, opened the door, and held it for her.  She looked at me curiously, put on her sandals again, and went through it.  I turned off the light, went out behind her, and shut and locked the door.  Then I took her hand and walked us both to my car.

“You may have to give me directions on how to get there,” I said.  “But you know where we’re going.”

“Oh,” she said.

The sun was setting, which was just fine by me.  I wanted it to be dark, where we were going.  It needed to be.

I’m pretty good with directions.  All the same, Wendy had to point out a couple of country roads to take as we went out of town again on a now-familiar route.  I went slowly, giving the sky time to darken.  The stars eventually came out and my hands began to tremble a bit.  I told them to quit it and told my fear to shut up for awhile.  Kind of like telling the demons in Pandora’s box to get back down in there.  But I managed.

She saw me shaking a bit and touched my arm.

Eventually, we came to the site I’d been looking for.

The ring of trees.

“I want to do this,” I said out loud.  “I want to do this.”

“I know you do, honey,” said Wendy.  “And I’ll be right there for you, too.”

“No, you won’t,” I said.  “I have to do this alone.”

So I stopped the car, kissed Wendy on the cheek, got out, and slammed the door.  I looked back at her one time.  She was looking back at me, like she was trying to transmit hope.

The walk.  It had to be taken.

I moved one foot at a time, hearing the leaves crunch underneath my soles, smelling the clean air and the wood-scent and all the good odors of the country.  I may be a city boy, but I have to get out myself, every so often.  It cleans my soul out.

Talk about a stupid-looking phrase.  But I mean it.

There they were.  The wooden soldiers.  The guys who had almost squeezed me into so much luncheon meat a week or so ago.  I had to stop as I got to their perimeter.

The fear was coming back on me again.

I looked at them.  Just trees.  The night winds were rustling their leaves.  Should it have sounded sinister?  Even in my mental state, it didn’t sound like it.  Just sounded the way trees always sounded.  Like they did when I was walking down the street to my house, when I was a kid, after going to a movie or just hanging out with the crew.  A sound that always, to me, sounded strangely comforting.

“Okay, boys,” I said.  “Here’s where you get your second chance at me.”

Before my brain could countermand it, I made my feet take me within the circle.

It was dark and the branches moved with the wind enough to nerve me.  I recalled how the faces had formed on those trunks, how those same branches had reached out to kill me...

...I was breathing fast, turning in a circle, looking at all the trees about me, all the monsters about me...

...no, just trees, just trees...

And then I heard somebody yelling and saw one of those leafy monsters getting closer to me and a fist of flesh shooting out and banging against one of those trunks, BAM...

...and hurting like hell.

I yeeoutched and grabbed my aching mitt, clasping it between my legs as the pain pounded through my knuckles.  Well, what’d you expect, idiot?, my superego told me.  If you go around punching a tree, you’re going to hurt your hand.

It was then I realized I was leaning up against the trunk of the tree.

“Oh.  Hello,” I said.

I stayed there for at least a minute.  My breathing was easier.  My mitt was still hurting, but it deserved to, so I paid it less and less attention.  I slid down the trunk and sat with my back against the tree, my legs spread wide.

There were just me and the trees and the stars above, visible though their ring at the top.

It seemed one of the most peaceful moments of my life.

I realized, now, why Wendy had made it her Thinking Place.

After about five minutes, I got up, and then walked around, touching every tree in turn.  Not one of them tried to bite me.  Not one of them felt like anything other than a government-regulation tree.

In the end, I went to the dead center of the circle, turned myself around several times, fell down on my back, and laughed, briefly.

Then I went through the gap between two of them and said, “Don’t worry, guys, I’ll be right back.”  I didn’t stop until I reached the car.  Wendy, when she saw me, bounced up and down to make sure I saw her, clapped her hands, and cheered.  I opened the door on her side.

“Doesn’t take much to get you to cheer, does it?”  I was smiling.

Wendy got up and kissed me on the mouth.  “Believe it or not, I’m proud of you, you lug,” she said.

“I’m proud of me, too,” I said.  “And I’m proud of you.”

“What for?”

“Just for being what you are.”

“Oh.  Well, thanks.”  She laughed.  “It’s not like I had a choice, you know.”

“We all have choices.  It’s just that I love the ones you’ve made.”

She smiled back. “Thank you, Bill.  Very much.”

“You’re very welcome.”

“Now,” she said, “can we go back and get some dinner?  I haven’t eaten.”

“Not yet, Wendy.”

“Why not?”

I took her hand.  “Come with me.”

The two of us went back to the ring of trees.  I led her to the center of the circle.  She looked at me without speaking.  There wasn’t any need for words, anyway.

We proceeded to consecrate the site with our bodies and our love.

Afterward, she traced patterns on my chest.  “That was nice,” she said.

“I think so, too,” I said, an arm across her bare stomach.

“You didn’t just do this for us, did you?” she said, knowingly.

“Nope.  I did it for them, too.”  I looked at the trees.

“You’re a sweet guy,” she said, hugging me.  “And maybe not as much of an idiot as I think, sometimes.”

“Guess we’re back on for the weekend,” I said.  “And maybe I’ll be your parfait knight, too, if I have to.”

“Bill.  You never stopped being it.”

“Thanks, Wen.”

“But if you expect me to go meet your parents, you’d better get some food in me before the weekend.”

So we got dressed and I took her down to the Pizza Inn.

You want more romance than that?  Give me a break.  We were on a budget.

And anyway, we were still in love.

-W-

Come Saturday morning, as the old song goes, we went to see my parents.

We got up a little early.  Wendy had packed a grip and had it over at my place, where we spent the night.  She dressed in her red tube top and jeans for the journey.  I was wearing a light brown shirt and blue shorts, along with white socks and sneakers.  I loaded both our suitcases in the trunk, crowding the spare and jack, slammed the hatch, and got us the heck out of town.

“Do you think they’ll have a problem with us tonight, Bill?” Wendy asked for the umpteenth time.

“Frankly, Wen, I don’t know,” I said.  “I’ve never slept with a girl under their roof.  We’ll just play it as it...uh, we’ll see what happens.”

She leaned against the door and looked out the open window.  “I guess I could go a night without sex, if we have to.  But I hope we don’t have to.”

“Yeah.”  I chuckled.  “Me, too.  Let’s remember this, when we get to be 50 or so.”

“Lots of people have good love lives when they’re 50, Bill.”  She was still watching the posts of a white fence go by.  “And I love it when you say, ‘When we get to be 50.’”

“Well, heck, Wendy.” I was finding it difficult to keep my eyes on the road, and not on her.  “Don’t you think we’ve finally, like, found something special?  Each one of us?”

“I know we have,” she said, turning away from the window and resting her head on my shoulder.  “Can you drive like this?”

“I’ll manage,” I said.  “But don’t put your head in my lap.  That I couldn’t take right now, and stay on the road at the same time.”

“Love it when you talk highway.”

“Just remember.  You don’t know my mom and dad.  Let them get used to you.  Just be your usual charming pretty self and I think you’ll go over.”

“I hope so,” she said.  “It’d be nice to get a set of parents.  Even if they aren’t quite my own.”

“Well, they will be.”

“Bill McGregor,” she said, sitting up.  “Is that what I think it is?”

Oh, Lord.

“Um.  What do you think it is, Wendy?”

“Well, statements like that, they usually come with a ring, don’t they?”  She was smiling, very widely.

I rolled my eyes.  “I haven’t got a ring yet.”

“That’s all right, Bill.  I mean, good grief, we’ve only known each other less than a month.  But still.  That sounded pretty kissing close to a proposal.”

“Wendy,” I said.  “I feel exceedingly stupid.”

She looked through the windshield.  “That road up there,” she said, pointing to a gravel road that spurred off the highway.  “Pull off there where we get to it.”

“Say please.”

“Please, dammit!”

I did so, and Wendy made me drive about a quarter mile up it.  Then I killed the engine.  All of a sudden I had an armful of blonde.

“You idiot,” she said, snuggling against my neck.

“Quit calling me that,” I said, my hands around her back, feeling her flesh and the fabric of her top.

“All right, you beautiful numbskull,” she said.  “I love you, too.  Do you have anything else to say to me?”

“Do you really want me to say it, Wen?  I mean, crap, we’ve known each other only a few weeks and all.”

“Yeah.”

“And I haven’t got a damn ring.  I don’t know that I’ve budgeted for it yet.”

“That’s all right.”

“So you do want me to say it?”

“You bet.”

“All right, all right.  Dammit.”  I drew a deep breath and pushed her to half arm’s length so I could look at her face.  Her hands were still locked behind my head.  “Wendy Corrigan.  Will you marry me?”

“YES!”

“Oh, my God,” I said, shaking my head.  “Did I say that?  Did I really say it?”

“You did.  You really did.  And I’ve got a good memory, Bill.  You’re not getting out of it.”

“I didn’t imply that I wanted to, did I?”

“Nope,” she said, smiling.  “I don’t, either.  Yes, Bill.  I will marry you.”

“O—kay.”  All of a sudden, my head felt like it was floating above the disembodied ghost of my fleshly self.  I didn’t mean to propose to her.  I had no idea of doing such a thing.  Sure, I was in love.  We were in love.

Was this the way people asked each other to marry them?

I made a note to ask Dad and Mom when I got home.

Wendy jiggled her hands behind my head.  “You big lug, Bill.  I think there are forces that move for our good, you know?  I think they brought us together.  I think they want us together, Bill.”

“Well, I know I want us together, Wendy, and that’s good enough for me.”

“For me, too.”  She was radiating love.  I was picking it up like a ham radio tuned to the same signal, and I hoped I was broadcasting back on a wavelength she could receive.  From what I could tell, she was.

“Wendy,” I said, “if we’re going to make it there before noon, we’d better get back on the road.”

“Just a moment.”  She drew me closer and laid an open-mouthed liplock on me that lasted a good long time.  Then she broke it.  “Sealed with a kiss,” she said.

“Some sealing.”

“The great seal of the state of Wendy,” she said, grinning.  “Now, tiger.  Get us back on the road.”

I did.  For a good part of the trip, she had her head up against my shoulder.  For the last part of it, despite my earlier protest, she had it in my lap.

I didn’t mind.

 -W-

Dad and Mom lived in a small town near a fairly large lake, created by a dam on a river.  He sold tires and what went with them and had a relatively successful business doing such.  Dad had wanted me to go into the business.  I wasn’t hot on it, any more than I was on playing football when Dad had wanted me to.  I got injured in an early game and used that as an excuse to quit the squad and go onto the debate team.  I did well there, and didn’t get injured.  At least not physically.

In my senior year, I hung around enough lawyers’ offices after school until one of them gave me a job as a glorified gofer.  I didn’t mind.  It looked a hell of a lot better, and more remunerative, than selling tires or digging ditches.  With a few recommendations from my boss and his friends, some student loans, a scholarship, and, of course, money from Dad, I made it into college.

I hadn’t told Wendy all of this.   She knew some of it, but I didn’t talk a lot about my folks when I was with her.  Most of the time, of course, we were pretty darned busy.  Come the end part of August, I’d be trying to juggle classes, studies, and after-hours with a blonde enchantress.  I wasn’t sure how I was going to put that all together.

It was startling to realize that I might be as much of a mystery to Wendy as she was to me.

We passed by the lake on the way there and Wendy said, “Hey, that’d be neat to swim in.”

“It is,” I said.  “So long as you stay near the shore.  It gets down to sixty feet in some places.”

“If we get a chance, maybe we can go there,” she said.  “I don’t want to have a thing about lakes the way you almost did about trees.”

“We’ll see, Wen,” I said.

Finally, we pulled into town, what there was of it, and I took us up Cherry Street to my folks’ home.

The place is pretty nice, as far as that goes.  Brick exterior, white trim, a lawn and flower bed Mom can be proud of, light green curtains, and a dog named August on a leash outside.  He was named after the month we’d gotten him.  White with brown spots.  He was the first to greet me once I got out.  He jumped up to my waist and I grabbed him so he could lick me in the face.

“Augie,” I said.  “How you doin’?”

He licked me again and then looked suspiciously at Wendy.  “It’s okay, pal,” I said.  “She’s with me.”

“Oh, he doesn’t bother me,” said Wendy.  “Some women are afraid of dogs, but I never was.”

I put Augie down.  He went over to Wendy, sniffed up her pants leg.  She stood and took it, at inspection.  Finally he snorted and sat down.  Apparently she presented no threat to the realm.

“Good dog,” she said.  She tried to pet him.  August barked.  Wendy drew back.

“New dog,” I amended.  “That is, to you.”

“That’s okay,” she said.   “Things take time.”

I started up the walk and noticed she wasn’t behind me.  “Wendy,” I said.

Turning, I saw that she was standing on the sidewalk, her eyes closed, her hands at her side.  She was chanting.  Had to be a shielding spell.  Why the hell hadn’t she done that while we were in the car?

The door was opening.  I imposed myself between Wendy and what I thought would be the viewpoint of whoever would be in the doorway.  As it turned out, it was Dad.  “Hello, son,” he said.  “Aren’t you going to introduce me?”

Wendy was still chanting.  “Dad, it’s so good to see you,” I beamed.  Augie came over and snuffled my jeans.  I picked him up.  “Great to see the dog, too.”

“Great to see you, too, but can’t I see her?”

No avoiding it.  I moved away.  Wendy was standing there, still doing her chant.  Dad looked at her, kind of open-mouthed.  Augie eyed her curiously, one ear up.

Then Wendy finally wound up with, “Amen.”  She opened her eyes and smiled.  “Hi, Mr. McGregor.  I’m Wendy Corrigan.”  She rushed up and offered her hand.  Dad took it with an amazed look on his face.

“Do you always pray before entering somebody’s house?” he asked.

“Mr. McGregor, after what happened to me and Bill lately, I pray a lot.”

Dad nodded.  “I can understand that.  Well, Miss Wendy, welcome to our home.”

“Thank you.  Very much.”  She beamed.  “Let me give Bill a hand with the suitcases first.”

“Oh, he can get ‘em himself.  I’ll help him,” said Dad.

“No, that’s all right, sir,” she said, putting a hand on Dad’s arm.  “I’m used to pulling my own weight.  Let me.”

Dad shrugged.  “If you insist.  But you are a guest.”

“And I’m very glad to be one.”

So she and I carried a suitcase apiece up the steps and, on the way, Augie sniffed her rear and Wendy laughed.  She patted his head with her free hand and he didn’t object this time.

Dad, I suppose, looks roughly like what I’m going to be in 25 years’ time. He’s still got all his hair, but it’s grey at the temples and there’s no hiding his paunch.   I hope I don’t get that.  He was wearing a white short-sleeve and brown pants.  Dad wore long pants everywhere except while swimming in the lake, and if he could have done it there, he would have.

It’s not like David McGregor and I don’t have our overlap.  We do, and we don’t hate each other.  I suppose it’s just the normal leaving-the-nest kind of thing.  Bears act like they’re fighting to make their children leave the nest, when the kids are old enough.  In our society, we have work and college.  I’m not sure which species is the wisest.

By the way, Mom’s name is Marcia and she was dressed in a Mexican dress and apron that day.  Not surprising, since I smelled the scent of baking ham from the kitchen.  Her hair’s light brown, she’s proprietary about the domain of food, and she talked a lot to her friends in the beauty shop about how her son was going to be a lawyer, meet a rich girl in college, and move them out of town one of these days.  I had a feeling Mom was going to have to wait a long time for that outcome.

In the meantime, they had the tires.

“Bill,” she said, and wrapped her arms about me.  I did the same to her.  “It’s so good to see you again.  Especially after THAT.”

Ouch.  “Uh, yeah, Mom.  Good to see you, too.  I’d like you to meet the girl who was with me during THAT.”

Wendy and Dad were right behind me.  Wendy set her suitcase down by the wall, mustered a smile, and held out her hand.  “Hi, Mrs. McGregor.  I’m Wendy Corrigan.  It’s very good to meet you.”

“The same for me, dear,” said Mom, and offered Wendy a hand she released from holding me.  Wendy shook it.  “What on Earth happened to you both at the lake?”

“Yes, I’d like to hear that too,” said Dad.

Wendy shrugged.  “Nobody’s really sure.  The lake just, like, turned into a whirlpool.  Both of us almost drowned, but the thing passed and Bill and a lifeguard rescued me.”

“Don’t let her bluff you, Mom,” I said.  “It was Wendy and the lifeguard who saved me.”

“I think I’ll split the difference and say you saved each other with the help of the lifeguard,” Mom said.  “How does a lake turn into a whirlpool?”

“No telling,” I said.  “They had scientists and city guys out there examining it.  They turned up approximately nothing.  Just reopened it recently, and I’ve heard they’ve tripled the guard.”

“They should,” said Mom.   “Well.  Let me look at you.  You’re still looking fine.”

“Thanks.  Mom, Wendy here is great in the kitchen.”

Wendy caught the cue.  “I’d be glad to help on lunch.  Really, I would.”

Mom put on her generous face.  “Oh, dear, I wouldn’t think of it.  Really.  You’re a guest here.  Today, I’m doing the cooking.”

“Yes, ma’am.  I know.  And from the smell of things, you seem like a very good cook, if I can say so.”

“Thank you.”

“But I’ve been cooking ever since I can remember.  I mean, back at the orphanage, I cooked all the time.  And Bill can tell you–“

Mom broke in.  “You’re an orphan?”

“Yes, ma’am.  I am.”

My mother turned to me.   “You didn’t tell me that.”

“You’re right, Mom,” I said.  “I didn’t.”

Mom took Wendy’s hands in hers.  “Oh, baby, I’m sorry.   I didn’t know you didn’t have any parents.”

“That’s all right, Mrs. McGregor,” Wendy said.  “That’s why I definitely wanted to meet you and Bill’s dad.  Ever since my foster parents passed on, I’ve really been missing parents.”

Dad was even more drop-mouthed than Mom at this moment.  I don’t know how Wendy knew, but she was pressing all the right buttons.

“Your foster parents are dead, too?”

“Yes,” said Wendy, quietly.  “In a car crash.”

“Oh, dear,” Mom said, and crushed Wendy to her in a hug that outdid the one she gave me.  “I’m so sorry.  Bill should have told me.”

“Well, he can’t think of everything,” Wendy said.  I squirmed a bit.

Dad touched Wendy’s shoulder.  “Wendy, I’d like to welcome you to our house all over again.  With all that’s happened to you, I don’t blame you for praying before you come to somebody else’s house.”

“That’s all right, Mr. McGregor,” she said.  “It’s just something I do.”  Dad found a way to get in on the hug and I sat on the sidelines.

“Let her go, David,” said Mom.  “You say you know your way around a kitchen, dear?”

Wendy said, “Ask Bill.  I’ve been feeding him for a couple of weeks.”

Dad gave me a gentle look that just as well said, Yeah, and I’ll bet I know what else she’s been doing for you in that time, too.  I have no idea what I looked back at him.

“We’re going to give you a chance to prove it,” Mom said, taking her by the hand.  “Come into the sanctum sanctorum.  Men, stay out.”

“With pleasure,” Dad said.

First hurdle over.  I had a feeling there were going to be a hell of a lot more before the weekend was done.  But at least we had a nice start.

“And you met her exactly how, again, son?” asked Dad.

I took a deep breath.  “I was trying to keep her car from being stolen, Dad.”

“It took that to get you together with a girl.”

“What can I say, Dad?  Sometimes it’s just like magic.”

We got through dinner fatteningly well, with honey-glazed ham, sweet potatoes, hot rolls, salad, and cherry pie for dessert.  Mom seemed to be warming up to Wendy.  I guess prowess in the kitchen does count for a lot with women.  Men too, I suppose.

After dessert, we retired to the front room and Wendy and I occupied the front couch.  Dad took over his recliner and Mom pulled up a chair.  Now the grilling would begin.

“So,” said Dad.  “You two really got together over a carjacking?”

“That’s how it happened, Dad,” I said, my arm about Wendy’s shoulders.  “Crime in the medium-sized city.”

“That, I didn’t know about till long after the fact,” said Mom, reprovingly.

“Sorry, Mom,” I said.  “We were kind of busy.”

“Yes,” said Wendy.  “Both of us had to go to the hearing and i.d. the guys who did it.  You should have seen him, Mrs. McGregor.  He was a real hero.  He didn’t even know me then, either.”

“If I had, I think I would’ve come on like Dirty Harry,” I said, smiling at her.

“Bill, shut up!”  She flushed and turned to my parents.  “Sorry.  I just say that to him a lot.”

“I don’t mind,” I said.

“We’ve had to tell him a lot worse than that, dear,” Mom assured her.  I know she meant it as a joke, but inwardly, I writhed.

“What it amounted to was, two guys across the street from the store were breaking into her car,” I said.  “I went over there and tried to stop ‘em and they caught me a lick.”

“Caught you a lick?” Dad said.

“With a crowbar,” Wendy prompted.  “Right on his shoulder.”

“Good Lord!  And you didn’t tell us?”  Dad was amazed.

“Uh, I guess I didn’t.”

How do you look like anything more than a moron when you make statements like that?  Anyone who knows, please tell me.

“I may have been the reason he didn’t, Mrs. McGregor,” said Wendy, stroking my hand.  “He was, um, kind of taken with me.  Is that all right to say, Bill?”

“It’s the truth, Wendy,” I said, and drew her close enough for her to lay her head on my shoulder.

Mom and Dad looked a little more understanding at that.  Dad still said, “No matter who you fall for, Bill, when you get hurt, I expect you to call.”

“I should imagine so,” said Mom.  “If you get in a car crash, are you going to keep us from hearing about it just because you’re in love?”

“Hopefully not,” I said.

“Definitely not,” Wendy said.  “I have to admit, it was a weird way to meet.  But it’s worked out.”

“And you’ve known each other for how long?” asked Dad.

“Oh, over a couple of weeks,” I said.

“A couple of weeks?” Mom echoed.  “Fast work.”  She laughed, and I tried to grin, but I could feel a bit of misgivings there.

“We just fell in love, Mom,” I said.  “It happens that way, a lot of times.”

“Well,” said Dad, with some hesitation, “I hope you’re taking time to know each other before making any definite plans.”

“We’ve gotten to know each other really well, Mr. McGregor,” said Wendy, slapping my knee lightly.  “And I think he’s fine.  We’ve already shared so much...”

Then she realized what she was saying, or about to say, and shut up.  Mom gave us both a knowing look.

“We’re not at the same address, Mom,” I said.  “But we do spend a lot of time together.  We didn’t rush into things.”

“Yes, Bill,” she said, dryly.  “Two weeks sure couldn’t be called rushing into things, could it?”

Wendy clasped her hands together.  “In a way it was, but in a way it wasn’t.  We had...I had...to make sure we were in love with each other first.  But it was a case of it not being able to be anything else.”

“I understand, Wendy,” said Dad.  “I was young once, too.  Marcia will testify to that.  But you both should realize that you’re still in the start of a relationship.  Right now, everything’s all fireworks and roses.  But in awhile, you’ll start wanting your own space.”

I knew what he was going after.  “You’re trying to say that, later on, Wendy and I might not feel as passionately for each other as we do now.”

“Well, we might not put it that way, dear,” said Mom.  “But love takes pacing, like anything else.”

I hadn’t tried to think of something like that.  My relationship with Wendy had been like a horserace at Pimlico up to then.  I knew that the passion dies down in married couples, but it doesn’t have to go out.  Does it?

“His pacing is just fine, Mrs. McGregor,” Wendy answered.  “Best of any guy I’ve known.”

“Please, dear, call me Marcia,” said Mom.  “You make me sound like a schoolteacher.  And I was young too, once.  Like Bill’s father.  We know what it’s like to be in love.  Still do.”

“Mom,” I said, slowly, “Wendy and I don’t need any advice about our love life.  Not right now, anyway.”

“I’m sorry, dear,” she said.  “Really, we shouldn’t bring up things like this en famille.  I apologize, Wendy.”

“That’s all right, Mrs....uh, Marcia,” said Wendy.  “I understand.  This is the first time we’ve met, after all.  You really don’t know anything about me.”

“And you probably don’t know a lot more about us,” said Dad.  He extended a hand.  “Hi, Wendy.  David McGregor.  I run McGregor’s Tires in town.  Used to be in the National Guard.  Wife’s named Marcia.  How are you?”

She grinned, got up, and shook his hand.  “I’m fine.  My name is Wendy Corrigan, and I’ve fallen in love with your son.  How are you?”

“Fine, thanks.”  Dad was getting into it.  “Want me to give you some advice from the former owner?”

“Dad!”

“Please do,” smiled Wendy.

“He eats too much, spends too much, doesn’t know how to fix cars beyond changing tires, and stays away from his parents a lot.  Other than that, I think he’s a bargain.”

“I’ll take him.”

Thankfully, nobody made a joke like, You already have.

“Take time to try him out first.  You don’t want to rush into a purchase like this.”

I sighed.  “He’ll throw in a pair of white sidewalls in the deal.”

“I’ll take ‘em,” Wendy said.  “But the thing I really want to know is: if I have trouble with him, can I call Triple A?”

Mom and Dad both cracked up.

“Why didn’t you ever think of that, David?” said Mom.  “Maybe we could have even gotten bonus points.”

“I thought you were the brains in the family, Marcia,” Dad said.  “You should’ve thought of it!”

“What a tragedy,” I said.  “Here I thought I came from a hospital, now I learn I came from an OK lot.”

Wendy ruffled my hair.  “Check your oil, sir?  Wipe your windshield?”

“Service with a smile,” I said.  “That’s what I like about you.”

She looked like she wanted to whack me, but that passed.  “Not that kind of service!” I said.

The ‘rents cracked up again.  How long was it going to be before I had to admit that we were doing what they already knew we were?

Dad finally said, “So what is it that you do, Wendy?  Office work?  Student?”

“I’m a librarian,” she said.

“Oh, okay,” said Dad.

I stepped into the silence.  “Wendy’s got a couple of years of college in already.  She ran out of money and had to take a regular job.  She’s told me she’s going back as soon as she can.  Right, Wen?”

“Essentially,” she said.

“But, dear,” said Mom, “aren’t there loans you could get, or grants?  Bill’s got those, and he’s going to finish out his four years.  Or I’ll kill him!”

Wendy said, quietly, “I dropped out because I wanted to.”

“You what?” said Dad.

She looked up.  “I’d gone into school with the idea that I was going to find out there what I was good at, what I wanted to major in.  I was undeclared for two whole years.  When it came time to choose a career plan for my junior year, I realized I didn’t have a clue.  Not a single clue.  So I decided to see what the real world was like, the workaday world.  The library job was open.  I applied for it, because I like libraries.  Turns out I’m pretty good at it, so that’s where I am.”

“But how much does that pay, Wendy?” asked Mom.

“Not much.  But enough to live on.”

“She’ll go back to school, Mom,” I said.  “I’ll make sure of that.”

“How can you, Bill?” said Mom.  “Wendy’s not your indentured servant.”

“Don’t I know it,” I said.  “I’m more like hers.”

“He’s living on borrowed time,” said Wendy, with a smile.

“But how do you think you’ll be able to do it?” asked Mom.  “You’ve got two more years of school.  Then you’ll be in law school, if you make it.  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you did get married.”

I hope I kept a poker face through that statement.

“This is just academic, dear.  But let’s say you did.  Most of the time, if the husband goes to law school, medical school, or graduate school, it’s the woman who works to support the family.  Even assuming you don’t have children, and you probably will, let’s face it–-no, don’t interrupt me, I know all about planned parenthood—that’ll mean she’ll have to put off going back to school for several more years.  Do you really think, after Bill gets through with his education and becomes a lawyer, if he ever does, that you’ll be interested in going back to school?  Life tends to get in the way of things, sometimes.”

More silence.

“When we get married, I’ll see to it, Mom,” I said.  “Even if we work and go to school at the same time.”

“You can’t do that and be newlyweds,” said Dad.  “Unless you want to be newly divorced.”

“Dad!”

“It’s all right, Bill, it’s all right,” said Wendy.  “Mr. McGregor–“

“David,” said Dad.

“All right, David.  You’ve got a point.  I may have been guided more by emotion than by logic a lot of times.  It may have been the case with my college thing.  I never quite fit in.  I’m not the sorority type, didn’t find the right kind of guy to settle down with, made okay grades but nothing outstanding.  It came time for me to make a big decision about my life, and I was too afraid to make it.  So I put it off.  I’ve been putting it off for the better part of a year.  I admit it.”

“But it’s not too late to stop putting it off, dear,” said Mom, gently.  “It’d be a lot easier if you went back next year, and graduated when Bill was just a year into law school.  You’ve got to make plans for life, if you expect to have a life.”

“I suppose so,” said Wendy.  “No.  I guess I know so.”

I held her closer to me.  There’s only so much physical closeness can accomplish, but at least it makes you feel better.  “Barring any of that, I think she could learn how to be a chef in a big hotel, easily,” I said.  “And they make good money.”

“They do,” said Mom.  “But even they need an education.”

Wendy sighed, and didn’t look up.

“We don’t mean to make you feel bad, Wendy,” said Dad.  “It’s just that...”

I got up.  “It’s just that I thought I was bringing her over for a visit, and it turned into a job interview.”

“Bill!” Mom said.  “That’s not fair.”

“The hell it isn’t.  Mom.  This is Wendy, the girl I love.  The girl I’m sleeping with.  There, I’ve said it. And I’m going to say something else.”

“No, Bill, don’t!” said Wendy.  “Please.”

“She’s also the girl,” I said, paused, and then went ahead.   “She’s also the girl who, this morning, I asked to marry me.”

The bomb was dropped.

Wendy was looking at me, her mouth open, breathing very hard.  Mom looked as though I’d told her I’d decided to become a mercenary and fight Saddam Hussein.  Dad just sat there and massaged his temples.

Time to try a little spin control.  “We haven’t set any dates yet, and it was really just a spur of the moment thing.  Nothing more than that.  I haven’t even bought a ring.  Didn’t have any idea I was going to.  It just popped out while we were driving.  I mean, I didn’t intend to pop the question, Mom.  I really didn’t.  It was almost like a trap.  Before we knew it, or before I knew it, anyway, I was saying something, and then something else, and I didn’t know what else to say, but—“

“Billllllll,” said Wendy, warningly.  “Darling.  Shut up.”

“Bill,” Dad said, not looking up.  “Wendy.  Do not take this step so quickly.  Believe me.  You need to take time to get to know each other.  You can’t get married after just knowing each other for two weeks.”

“Not if you want to stay together for more than two months,” said Mom.  “Your father’s right, son.  And Wendy.”

“We haven’t set a date yet, David,” said Wendy.  “We haven’t gotten that far.”

“Considering how far you both have gotten in two weeks, you must be slowing down,” Dad remarked.

“David!” Mom warned him.

“Look, I know I’m being intrusive here,” said Wendy, holding out her hands.  “I know it’s hard to, well, figure me into the picture of things.  You’ve never met me.  I only met Bill less than three weeks ago.  If you’d told me I’d fall in love with him on the day I met him, I’d have checked you for signs of brain damage.”  She looked at me and smiled.  “Maybe they should have checked us both.”

“Oh, Wen,” I groaned.

“But we couldn’t help it,” she said, turning back to Mom and Dad.  “I don’t know why we did, but we did fall in love.  I don’t think there’s anybody that’s come into my life, what I remember of it, that’s quite like Bill.  I’ve been afraid of relationships before him.  Dated around a lot, sure.  But not serious.  All right, you know we’re sleeping together.  Do you know Bill is the first man I ever slept with?  That’s right, Mrs. McGregor.  He took my virginity.  And I’m glad.”

Mom said nothing, but she looked sympathetic.  To Wendy, I mean.  She didn’t look at me at all.

“I didn’t mean to drag up all the gory details, but it seems like that’s what we’re doing today,” Wendy said.  “And, I mean, that’s okay.  If that’s what it takes.  You know what?  I’m glad we had this talk.  It may not have been the pleasantest thing in the world.  But it did bring a few things into focus that maybe I’d been avoiding.  Maybe Bill’s been avoiding them, too.  I don’t know.  If we end up having to face these things in our lives, maybe we’ll be better off for it.  So thank you for the talk, even if it wasn’t always what I wanted to hear.

“But I do know this.  That if we did fall for each other as much as we did, as fast as we did...it’s a lot more than just sex.  We’ve shared a lot over these two weeks.  A lot more than the physical, and that just happened in stages.  I had to make sure, before I let him in.  But there was no way of keeping him out, after I met him.  Not even if I wanted to.  I love your son, Mr. and Mrs. McGregor.  I think he loves me just as much.

“The last week or so, we’ve been trying to find out who I am.  Why I don’t remember who I am, outside of my name.  All we have to go on is that little red suit that I wore when they found me.  We’re getting it analyzed.  Bill helped me find somebody who can do that.

“Please, let me just talk.  Maybe that’s the only thing I can do right now, and maybe it’s what I have to do.  I believe there are forces in this world, Mrs. McGregor.  Forces of good, and forces of evil.  I also believe that because of what happened when Bill and I were thrown together, that our meeting was no coincidence.  I think Bill and I were destined to meet.  And if we were...I know that had to be the work of the forces of good.  You can call it God, or Fate, or whatever.  I just call it the forces of good.  I think they’re at work here.

“I just...I’m sorry...I didn’t mean to be a disappointment to you,” she said, and I could tell she was beginning to cry.  “I didn’t mean all of this to come out in a lump like it did.  I’m sorry, David, and, and Marcia.  I’m so...”

Before I knew what was happening, Mom was out of her chair and had her arms wrapped around Wendy.  Dad was right beside her.  I was hard-pressed to believe it.

They were actually showing affection.

“Sorry for what, dear?” asked Mom, hugging Wendy.  “Sorry for falling in love?  If that’s something you should be sorry about, then I should be sorry for the last twenty-three years I’ve been with David here.  I should be sorry I’ve loved my son for twenty-one.  Do you think you’ve done anything terrible?  If you have, I certainly haven’t heard about it.”

“The same for me, Wendy,” said Dad.  “We don’t know everything about you.  We don’t even know a lot about you.  We’re just careful.  We have to be.  Bill is our son.  But you know what?”

Wendy looked up, still teary-eyed and silent.

“From a first impression, if you turn out to be a daughter-in-law, I really think we can live with that.”

My girl turned on the tear ducts again and hugged both of my parents tightly.  Dad looked at me and said, “Son, get in on this.  It’s a family moment.”

“Yes, sir!”

They made room for me right beside Wendy and we did the first group hug that I can remember.  It seemed like it lasted an hour.  Thank God for subjective memory.

Dad said to Wendy, “And if you think we’re going to just throw out a girl who needs help finding her memory and getting back into school, then you’re even crazier than my son.”

“Dad,” I said, smiling, “shut up.”

I guess I still can’t say whether or not Wendy was using her powers right then.

It sure seemed like magic to me.

 We drove home the next evening with the batteries recharged.  Mom and Dad had given us their qualified blessing, which amounted to, Get to know each other a little better before you get the rings.  That was fine by me, as I wanted to get a little more dough before I got a pair of rings.

There was also a lot more planning to be done.  I wanted Wendy to get back into school as soon as we could manage it.  But she wanted to see if we could find out who she was before then, as she didn’t want to be dodging disasters and trying a work-and-study bit, all at the same time.  That kind of sobered me.  We didn’t have any incidents while we were at my parents’ house.  It hadn’t pushed all our adventures out of my mind, but I’d been glad to ignore them for the duration.

The two of us went over to Wendy’s apartment when we got back.  The message light of her phone was on.  Hoping for the best, she went and picked it up.  It was Professor Jerald.  “Miss Corrigan,” he said into the recorder, “some of the analysis has been completed.  When you and Mr. McGregor have a chance, I’d like to speak with you.  Thank you.  Goodbye.”

She looked at me and I looked back.  “Did you hear all that?”

I nodded.  “Go ahead and call him back.”

Wendy did.  The prof asked us to come over when we had a chance.  It was 8:30 already but I said if she was up to it, we could go over for a short visit.  She okayed it and the two of us got back in the car and drove across town to the professor’s house.

This time we got to meet Mrs. Jerald.  Laura turned out to be a professor’s wife of the old school, smart but willing to be her hubby’s support.  She had on a blue dress and glasses and already had some club sandwiches and coffee waiting for us when we got there.  Wendy got along with her just fine, but the prof asked her to leave after awhile so we could discuss “private matters”.  I didn’t know if I liked her exclusion that much.  But I didn’t want Wendy’s secret getting out any more than it had to, so I accepted it.  Wendy herself looked sympathetic to Laura.

When his wife was gone, Jerald said, “The suit appears to be something of an anomaly.”

“In what way, Professor?” asked Wendy, holding her coffee cup with both hands.

“To begin with, Miss Corrigan, I would estimate that every last bit of it was made by hand,” he said.  “By old-fashioned methods.  The cloth itself, of course, is wool.  But it appears to have been carded and spun not by modern industry, but by human hands.  The way garments were made a century and more ago.”

I considered it.  “Aren’t there countries where that’s still done, Professor?  And aren’t such clothes also made over here, sometimes?”

“Indeed, Mr. McGregor,” said Jerald.  “But that narrows it down quite a bit.  Most cloth material is made by modern textile mills in America these days.  The wool appears to be that of normal merino sheep.  The red dye isn’t of a sort used in modern fabric dyeing.  Again, the type and technique seem consistent with that used, at the latest, in the early years of the 20th Century.”

“Couldn’t it be a hand-me-down?” I asked.  “Maybe from her grandmother to her mother to herself.”

“I doubt it, Bill,” said Wendy.  “For one thing, it didn’t show that much wear and tear when they found me in it.”

“Agreed,” said Jerald.  “It had been worn, from the looks of it.  But our best guess was that the suit was twenty years old or less.  So it would have been of fairly recent manufacture when Miss Corrigan was found in it.”

“Call me Wendy, please, Professor,” said Wendy.  “So the suit is about my age, or less.”

“From what we can tell, yes,” Jerald answered.  “The bone buttons are another giveaway.  Such buttons have not been used in clothing in this country for decades.   Again, consistent with the mark of an earlier century or the very early years of this century.”

“So, what Wendy was found in was something out of an historical era,” I said, getting a handle on what he was saying.  “Couldn’t it also have been, like, the Amish?   They still make clothes like that.”

Wendy wrinkled her nose.  “I could be Amish?  Ewww!   I don’t want to wear long black dresses, churn butter, and plan my life around quilting bees.”

“Maintain, Wendy,” I said, covering her hand with mine.

“Possible, but not likely,” said Jerald.  “There aren’t any large enclaves of Amish people in the area.  Also, if someone in Amish dress was seen in the area where Miss Corrigan—ah, excuse me, Wendy—was dropped off, they would have been hard-pressed to conceal their identity.”

“Could have been in disguise,” I said.  “In regular street clothes.”

“You are complicating matters needlessly, Mr. McGregor,” said Jerald.  “Let us hypothesize from the evidence, rather than hypothesize and seek evidence to confirm it.  Wendy’s red outfit would be somewhat unusual by Amish standards, would it not?”

“I sure think it would,” said Wendy.  “Guess that rules that out.”

“So it could be imported,” I said.  “From another country.  Maybe Mexico, or Africa, or South America, or some other place.”

Jerald spread his hands.  “Or simply from this country, from a craftsman or craftswoman who manufactures clothes the old-fashioned way.  But, as I have said, it narrows matters down.”

“Professor,” said Wendy.  “Can they find out what area the sheep that provided the wool came from?”

“Not as of yet, if ever,” said Jerald.  “We are dealing with a fifteen- to twenty-year-old garment, after all.  But there is one other thing.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“The buttons, Mr. McGregor.  The buttons themselves.”

“Um, the bone,” I started.  “You’re not saying...”

“No, Mr. McGregor, the buttons are not made of human bone,” he said, patiently.  “They appear to be from the bones of animals, most likely cattle.  However.  This design was found on each of the buttons, carved into their faces.”  He opened a heavy book lying on the coffee table, extracted a paper, and handed it to Wendy.  I looked over her shoulder at it.  It looked like some kind of letter, although in what language I didn’t have a clue.

“I’ve seen this, naturally,” said Wendy.  “Are they able to tell us anything about it?”

“Only that it doesn’t seem to be in any recognizable language,” Jerald said.  “We looked in a dictionary of symbols and weren’t able to find a match.  As for magic, well...I’m afraid I don’t know any of the faculty who are practitioners.  To my knowledge.”  He actually smiled when he said that.

“What does it look like to you, Wendy?”, I asked.

She scrutinized the paper.  “All I can say is what I’ve always felt it was.  Kind of a good-luck symbol, or a charm against bad things.  It’s the same kind of deal with the magic language.  I know what it is, but I don’t know how I know it.”

Jerald rubbed the back of his neck.  “So the real links you have to your past are this suit and your unknown language.”

Wendy looked up at him.  “Yes, I suppose they are.  What should we do, Professor?”

“Well, Wendy, would you consider letting me record you speaking in that language?   Perhaps I could run it by the language labs and see if there are any similarities with the known tongues, living or dead.”

She froze.  “That...could be dangerous.”  I moved to hold her.

“Can’t you say things which are not magical commands?” asked Jerald.  “Just for comparative purposes?”

“Well, I...I never really tried.  But I suppose so,” Wendy allowed.  I gave her a squeeze for comfort.

“Can you write your magical language?”

“No,” she said.  “At least, I don’t think so.  As far as I know, it’s just something I’ve spoken.”

“Yet, there must be a written language, or that letter wouldn’t have been carven on your suit’s buttons,” said Jerald.  “Could you try?”

“Professor, we’ve got to get up in the morning,” I reminded him.

“I understand, Mr. McGregor,” Jerald said.  “That’s why I don’t want more than a short demonstration here.  If Wendy is willing, that is.  But if it is too mentally painful to attempt...”

“Ja’a’tna Wendy Corrigan.”

We both looked at her.  Wendy was holding her breath, then let it out.  “Good.  Nothing happened,” she said.

“You just told us your name?” I asked.

“Yeah,” she said, with a shrug of relief.  “I said, ‘My name is Wendy Corrigan,’ or ‘I am Wendy Corrigan’, in the other language.”

“And nothing happened,” said Professor Jerald.

“Nothing as of yet,” said Wendy.

Jerald paused, then nodded.  “Wendy.  Do you think, if I brought you a pen and paper, you might be able to write what you just said?  In the magic language?”

“Sir, we really need to get home and get to bed,” I said.  Double entendres be damned.  Sure, there were things I wanted to do.  But I wanted to get some shut-eye before I had to go to work, too.

“Bill,” said Wendy, putting her hand on my knee.  “Let me try it.”

I sighed.  We were making progress, I had to admit.  If only it could be after we had a chance to crash.

The professor went over to his desk, took a pad of memo paper and a cheap pen, and brought them back to us.  He handed the items to Wendy.  “Now, Miss Corrigan, if you can just relax, and try to remember.”

Wendy breathed evenly.  “That’s always a dangerous proposition, Professor.  But I’ll try.”

She balanced the pad on her knees and held the pen a few inches over it.  Then she closed her eyes, her mouth open slightly, and looked like she was trying to concentrate.  She kept that pose for a minute or two, making as little movement as possible.  Jerald looked at me and I at him, and both of us kept silent.  After two minutes had passed, I said, “Well, I guess we can call this off.  Professor, it’s been a good—“

Her hand started to dart across the paper as if in a spell of automatic writing.

When it was done, a line and a half had been filled by strange letters that looked like a rough cross between Greek characters, runes, and maybe Chinese ideograms.  The way she held her pen while she was doing it seemed to indicate that she would have been more comfortable using a brush.  But it didn’t take more than a few seconds, and she opened her eyes after finishing it.  Looking at the paper, she yelped in surprise.

“I wrote it,” she said.  “I really, honestly, wrote in it.”

Jerald looked at the paper.  “Is that the phrase you just gave us, verbally?”

“Yes,” she said.  “I spelled my name with letters from the other tongue.  But, professor, I’m scared.  This isn’t to be seen by just anybody.”

“Could there be danger?”

“Words have power,” she said, seriously.

“They certainly do,” he replied.  “Will you give me permission to show this to trusted persons in the language labs?”

“If you really, really trust them,” said Wendy.  “Learning about this could be dangerous to untrained people.  Maybe like, I don’t know, coming across secret atomic formulas or something like that.”

Jerald nodded.  “We will be very, very careful with it, Wendy.  If you could, after work tomorrow, I’d like to record you speaking something in the language.”

“I could do that,” she said.

“Are you sure you want to?” I asked.  “Your recorder might get up, start flying around the room, and bash you in the head.”

“I shall take that chance, Mr. McGregor,” said Jerald.  “And now, if you’ll excuse me, I think we all need to be abed.”

We stood up.  Wendy kissed him on the cheek.  “Thank you, Professor,” she said.  “Tonight, I feel as though I really learned something.  Like the barriers might be about to break down.”

“Does that make you feel good, Wendy?”

“Scares the hell out of me,” she said.  “But I guess it’s something that has to be.”

 -W-

We grabbed a couple of Cokes at a convienience store on the way back.  When she was back in the car, she said, “Bill.  Would it be okay if we spent the night separately, tonight?”

I looked at her, curiously.  “Why?  Did I do something wrong?”

“Not at all, Bill,” she said, taking my right hand.  “You’ve been really nice, these past couple of days.  I don’t have any complaints about last night, either.”

“Good,” I said.  “Neither do I.  Just hope it didn’t keep Mom and Dad up from the noise.”

She grinned and punched me gently in the arm.  “Too cool.  But that’s not what I’m talking about right now, Bill.  We’ve been together every night for a long time, now.  Would it be okay if we just had some space alone, for tonight?”

“Well, sure,” I said.  “As long as you’re not mad at me or anything.”

“Anything but,” she said.  “Tonight, though, those things he told me about my suit, and the experiments with the language...that gave me a lot to think about.  I just want a little time by myself to integrate it all, Bill.   Could you give me that?  Please?”

I shrugged.  “It’s your life.”

“Yeah.  But you’re a big part of it, now.  And tomorrow night, I promise I’ll make up for missing tonight.  In spades.  Will that be all right, Bill?”

“I’ll hold you to the promise,” I said, turning right on red.  “But yeah, I guess that’s all right.”

“I just hope nothing happens because of the sample I gave him,” she said, in a pensive manner.  “I really hope everything’s going to be all right.”

“If you’re worried about it, Wendy, why did you give it to him?”

She looked at me.  “Because to learn things, Bill, you often have to take a risk.  And that’s mine.”

Shortly thereafter, we pulled up in front of her apartment.  I walked her to her door.  She opened it, then threw her arms around me and gave me a fine, fine kiss.  After she broke it, she hugged me hard and said, “That’s just so you don’t forget what it’s like.”

“Small chance,” I said.

She smiled, patted my cheek, and went inside.

I turned around after she shut the door and went back to my car.

There was just about time to get stripped, shower, and hit the sack once I got home.  I sighed and did the trick of putting myself in a trance once I got home.  If you think, “I am sleeping, I am sleeping, I am sleeping,” enough, very often it convinces your body that you really are.  From there, slipping into dreamland sometimes isn’t that hard.  Even if it is, though, you tend to get enough rest so that you don’t mind it when you have to get up.

I don’t know what time I really went to sleep, but my dreams must have been innocuous until the time the real show started.

The first thing I can credit was the sight of the three witches and their cauldron on the smoky and indistinct landscape.  But as nebulous as it was, it seemed a whole lot clearer to me than it had been.

The three sisters, for such they seemed to be, were dressed in regulation witch outfits...the grey-purple robes with hoods, cinched with rope-sashes at the waist, reaching all the way down to the ground so that even their feet were not visible.  Their bodies were long and gaunt.  It’s hard to judge such things accurately, especially in a dream, but I would estimate their height–-the sisters were so alike as to nearly be clones—to be around six feet.  What hair I could see under their hoods was black.  Their hands were bony and blue-veined, but looked powerful and clawed, giving comparison almost to an eagle’s talons.  Their faces were aged and long, but not terribly ugly for all that.

There was madness in their eyes.  But a controlled madness, God help me to think on it.

One of them was stirring the brew in the cauldron with a long wooden staff.  I didn’t think it was a broomstick, by a long shot.  Nobody was reciting “Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,” but I guess it wasn’t necessary.

The ground was like hardpan around them, dotted with stones and animal skulls.  At least I hope all the skulls were of animals.  I didn’t want to look too closely at them.

And the witches were looking at me.

Worse, they were talking to me.

Come to our realm, one seemed to be saying.  Come into our hands, sweet man, and we shall pleasures and agonies prove, all in the same stroke.

Come to our hearth, sweet man, said another, and fulfill your purpose.   The guarding of the girl is not for your kind.

Come to our home, sweet man, said the third, and learn what can be done with you.  Yes, come. Oh, come, and learn the destiny of Man, and the end of your burden.  Come, and all secrets will be revealed.

I don’t know how they were doing it, since they didn’t seem to be moving.  But they were getting closer.

Come to our homeland, sweet man, the witches chorused.  Come to our lifespace, and know what is not to be known.  Come to us, and be done.

The two on either side of the cauldron were reaching out for me.

It was like a cheesy old 3-D movie, The Mask, I’d seen on video with a pair of polarized glasses.  Their hands were reaching out for me.  I was dreaming in three dimensions, and those witches wanted to touch me.

Hell, they wanted to grab me.

I could see the coarseness of their fingernails.  I could smell the fetid odor of the brew, and wasn’t going to guess as to the ingredients.  I had a suspicion that I was intended to be part of the mix, to tell the truth.

The worst thing that could have gone through my mind went through it just then: Bob Dylan singing the line, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody...”

I don’t know, but that may have just been my salvation.  It gave me a chance to think about something else.

A word that I’d heard Wendy use, in times of crisis.

Would it work for me?  Only one way to find out.  If I could.

I have no idea what my place was in that dream.  Presumably, behind the fourth wall.  But I was in it, so I theoretically could contribute to it.  Maybe, if I tried, I could speak.

So, with those witches’ claws about to give me an unhelpful hand, I mustered my efforts and, either verbally or mentally–-and really, does it matter which?—I yelled out one word:

KAH.

If the threesome had a disappointed look on their faces, it happened too fast for me to tell.  All I know is that they weren’t there anymore, and I wasn’t dreaming.  I was awake.

I sat up with a cry of surprise.  Hell, with a cry of terror.  I felt like somebody had put a brown recluse spider in my bed and, like James Bond in DR. NO, I’d had the thing crawl over me without sinking in its fangs.  I looked around on the bed.  No spiders.

It took more than a few deep breaths to calm me down.  The lights went on as soon as I could manage it.  I checked the clock.  It was 6:17 A.M.

Thought about calling up Wendy.  Thought long and hard about it.  Decided not to.  What the hell good would it do, waking her up right now?  Sure, I’d taken a scare.  But I had to cope with it.  I couldn’t just run crying to her everytime something bad happened, could I?

On the other hand, this was a definite attack.

I decided to wait till 7 and call her then.  She answered on the first ring.  “Bill?” she said.

“You were waiting for me?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Did you have a dream, Bill?”

“You had one, too?”

“I had a dream you were having a dream,” she said.  “About the three.”

I sighed.  “Wendy, Wendy.  Can’t I even keep my dreams to myself, these days?”

“Bill, you were under attack,” she said.  “I’ve been waiting to hear from you for almost an hour.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “Didn’t want to disturb you.”

“Well, if this ever happens again, call me the minute you wake up,” she said.  “I want you to come on over just long enough for me to beef up my shielding for you.  Okay?  This is important.”

“Well, all right,” I said.  “If you think it’s important.”

“Get dressed and I’ll have breakfast for you,” she said.

“Waffles?”

“You’ve got it.”  She sounded a little relieved.  “Just get a shower, shave, and suit, and get over here.”

“Okay,” I said, and paused.  “Um, Wendy.  Could they really have...”

“Let’s not talk about that right now, Bill.  Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

“See you in a few minutes.”

“Okay.  Bye,” I said, and hung up.

I went to do my morning stuff and took a good look at the mirror while I was shaving.  The witches, I decided, might have made a little mistake.  Sure, they’d scared the hell out of me.  That went without saying.

But they were also starting to make me mad.

-W-

I took off driving a bit before I went over to Wendy’s apartment.  We’d gotten into too much of a routine as it was, work / dinner / bed / do it again.  I liked being on my own sometimes, and Wendy was right...we’d just been together too damn much over the last couple of weeks.

So I took the car out and drove through some of the rich neighborhood, out by the park, and then to the university, which is a hell of a nice place to hang, really.  It’s pretty, the lawns are well-kept, the people are usually cool, and I have a lot of friends there.  I stopped in front of the library, took a bench, and vegged out in the shadow of the building.  Closed my eyes and meditated for awhile.

Thankfully, no witches lurked in the back of my eyelids.

I don’t know if I dozed or if I was just thinking hard and peacefully.  Didn’t really matter.  When I opened my eyes, my watch said it was just about 8:00.  Oh, boy.  If she’d been expecting me for dinner, it wouldn’t be the only thing that was heated.

Still, what the hell.  Shouldn’t she understand?  After all, she was the one who wanted some time and space to herself.  I’d seen her that morning, for cripes’ sake.

The sun had just about set by the time I pulled up in front of Wendy’s apartment.  I knocked on her door and she had it open within three seconds.  She was standing there in T-shirt, pants, and an apron.  She did not look happy.

“You,” she said.  “Where have you been?”

“Hey, take it easy, Wen,” I said, my hands up.  “I’ve just been out at the college.  I’m still allowed to do that, aren’t I?”  I came inside and she shut the door behind me.

“Have you already eaten?” she said, like a Perry Mason moment.  “Don’t you know I was making beef tips and scalloped potatoes for you?  And chocolate cake?  You didn’t even call!”

“All right!  Am I supposed to give you a call every hour on the hour?”

“You could have at least called me, Bill,” she said.  “Shouldn’t you show more courtesy than that?”

“I didn’t know you’d be making dinner.”

“I always make you dinner!”

“All right, all right, mea culpa, dammit, Wendy.  I didn’t mean to stand you up.  I’m here, aren’t I?”

“Yeah, you are,” she simmered.  “But you still should have called.  Now I’ll have to reheat everything.  Have you eaten?”

“I caught a Big Mac on the way.  I was hungry.”

“Oh!”

“But I’ll eat, honest.”

She huffed and went to her stove.  A few items were covered up in pots and pans.  She started the heat under them again.  I moved up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders.  “Wendy,” I said.

Wendy pushed my arms away.  “Don’t,” she said.  “It’ll be a few minutes.”

“Wendy, come on.  Stop acting like that.”

She turned, her eyes ablaze.  “Well, you stop acting like that, Bill McGregor!  I’m putting some effort into making this relationship work, and all you’re bringing over is your hungry mouth and your horny body, any time you want to.”

“Now, wait just a damn minute!  As I recall, you didn’t want my horny body over last night, and I said yeah.  Isn’t that right?”

“Yes, it is, Bill!”

“And I brought you over to see my parents this last weekend, which worked out pretty well, didn’t it?”

“It did.  I liked your parents.”

“Before that, I put my ass on the line, fighting some hired thug with a gun.  I saved your butt when you damn near drowned out there in the lake.  I almost got eaten by a bunch of trees and I almost got my shoulder broken by some nut with a crowbar.  Remember that, Wendy?”

“Oh, yeah.  Certainly.  That was when I was fighting another magician who could have done God-knows-what-all to us, when I stopped the lake from whirlpooling, when I stopped the trees from hurting you, and when I made the carjackers stop.  Remember that, Bill?”

“I remember all of it,” I said, my face just about three inches from hers.  “I remember it all, Wendy.”

We stood there, being pissed with each other, for about five seconds.

Then she turned away and said, “The beef tips are burning.”

“They’re not the only ones,” I said.

“Just shut up, Bill,” she said, taking a lid off a frying pan and letting the steam come up.  “Just shut up.”

I stomped to the table and sat down.  She took up the potatoes and such at the stove and microwave and dished them out.  Then she came back over, in a depersonalized mode, and set two plates before us.  We ate.

A little ways into it, I said, “This is good.  Very good.”

“What?” she said, kind of distracted.

“I like it.  The dinner.  It’s very good.”

“Thank you,” Wendy said, noncommittally.

I let it hang for a little longer.  Then, after scarfing up a bit more of the potatoes, I said, “Wendy.  I’m sorry.”

“Oh, that’s all right, Bill,” she said, toying with her food.  “It’s all right, really.”

“No, babe.  I should have called you.”

“I don’t have a freakin’ leash on you, Bill.  You’re not my dog.”

“Rowf.”

“Very funny.”

“I just wanted a little time to myself.  Just like you did, last night.”

Wendy looked up, a little sadness in her eyes.  “Oh, honey, I know it.  I just had this planned for you, and I was worried about you after what you told me this morning and all.  I was worried, Bill.”

“I understand, babe,” I said.  “Believe me, I understand.”

She shook her head.  “I didn’t mean to be a bitch.  I needed some time apart.  So did you.  I just didn’t know you wanted it this evening.”

I shrugged.  “We’ve been together a lot these last couple of weeks.  I’m not complaining.  Hell, I’m glad of it, Wendy.”

“Uh huh.  Me, too.”

“We’ll have to make some space even after we’re married, I guess.”

She looked at me curiously.  “You’re still sure you want to do that?”

“Hell, yes, I’m still sure I want to do that,” I said, forking the remnants of the spuds and beef together.  “It may have fallen out of my mouth, but I meant what I said.  Don’t you want to do it?”

Wendy pushed her chair back, came over, hugged me, and kissed me on top of the head.  “Of course I want to, you lug.  Just like I want to bang your brains out tonight.”

“Knew there was a reason I came over here,” I said, and finished up what was on my plate with her hanging onto me.  “How about that chocolate cake?”

“Oh.  Did I imply that a chocolate cake exists?”

“I distinctly heard you mention a chocolate cake.  As any pre-law will tell you, that is a verbal contract.”

“What if it’s only a hypothetical chocolate cake?”

“I will sue for breach of contract.  Court will force you to pay lawyer’s costs, too.  At the very least, you’ll end up doing community service.  Probably teaching kids how to use magic safely for a year.”

“Pre-law, you are.  Pre-comedian, you’re not.  But I can make a hypothetical chocolate cake exist.  I’m a magician.  Watch me.”  She sauntered over to the oven, made a gesture like Mandrake in the comic strips, and said, “Regis Lexus Myrrh,” or something like that.  Then she turned off the stove, opened its door, grabbed a pair of potholders,  took a big cake pan out from its interior, set it carefully between the burners while closing the door with her leg, and then turned triumphantly to me.

“There, now.  The cake has come into existence, by my will.”

“I saw the pan in there, Wendy.  Through the door window.”

“Did you see the cake in the pan, skeptic?”

“Well, not exactly.”

“Then that would not stand up in a court of law.  I rest my case.”

“Bring the cake and your backside over to the table,” I said.  “I’m ready for dessert.”

“Did I hear a double meaning in that last part?” she said, hauling the cake over.  It smelled excellent.

“All in good time, my dear, all in good time.”  It wasn’t iced, but I didn’t mind.  I was about to knife in when she stopped me.  She took a big metal bowl with a spatula in it from the refrigerator and began daubing white icing all over it.

“Here, I can do that,” I said, reaching for the bowl.

“Only if you want to wear this, instead of eat it,” she smiled.  I sat back down and she finished icing the cake.  Then she cut it and dished it up.  We ate.  Mom was a great cook, but if she made stuff like that, they would have had to tie my legs to a tow truck to get me away from home.

Over one of the forkfuls of cake, Wendy said, “Bill.”

“What, Wen?”

“I’m glad we had that.  Our first argument, I mean.”

“Oh.  Okay.”

“I’m glad it was over something that trivial.  That made it a lot easier.”

“If you say so.”

She looked at me.  “Don’t you think it did?”

“Wendy,” I said, and put the fork down.  “If you think something like me being late for dinner is going to break us up, you’re too stupid to be practicing magic.”

With a grin, she said, “I never had to practice it.  I was poifect at it!”

“Mel Brooks!  You know the 2000 Year Old Man!”

“I know about some old things.  We’ve got a few comedy albums at the library, after all.”

“It’s just...I’m concerned over which of us is driving this thing,” I said, looking at the cake to have something to look at.  “Sometimes it’s you all the way.  Sometimes it feels like you’re hanging back, so that I can feel like it’s me.”

“Oh,” she said.  “Do you, uh, really think I’m doing that?”

“I don’t know, Wen.  Sometimes maybe you’re doing it and don’t know it.  Sometimes maybe I’m wimping out and letting you do it too much.  Or maybe I’m full of it.”

“No, Bill,” said Wendy.  “If it’s what you feel, there’s something to it.  Go ahead.”

I left the cake alone.  “Dammit, it’s not easy for me to say.  I do love you, Wen.  You know that going in, right?”

“Certainly.  Just like you should know that I love you, Bill.”

“Okay.  We’ve got that established.  We love each other.  It’s just that, lately, we seem to have been tearing all over creation because of what’s happening to you.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, softly.  “I didn’t plan it that way.”

“I know you didn’t, Wen,” I said.  “I’m not backing out, and I’m not about to have another breakdown.  It’s just...we’ve gone from thing to thing to thing.  Never a dull moment.  And, Wendy, I’m not used to that.”

She got up.  “Could we go talk on the couch, Bill?  I’d feel better if we did it over there.”

“No,” I said.  “Let’s talk over here.”

“Why?”

“Because if we do that, you’re letting me drive.”

“Oh.  Well, okay.”  She sat back down and crossed her legs.

“Now we can go talk on the couch.”  I got up, took her hand, and guided her to the divan.  She looked glad.

“Is this little ceremony that important to you, Bill?” she said as she sat down.

“In a way, I guess it is,” I said, sitting across from her.  “Gimme your foot.”  She kicked it up on my lap.  I took hold of it and massaged it.  She didn’t object a bit.

“You know I’m grateful to whatever brought us together, right?” I asked her.

“Yeah, I imagine so,” she said.  “But it’s nice to hear you say it.”

“It’s just that I’ve never done this sort of stuff before,” I continued.  “I’ve never fought guys with weapons.  I’ve never risked my life in a big whirlpool.  I’ve never been grabbed by a bunch of animated trees.  Never had any witch-dreams.  I’m trying to cope, Wendy, but it’s hard.”

“My God, Bill, I know it is.  And you’ve done so well, so far, with so much coming down on you.  Tell me, sweetheart, don’t you think I know how tough it is on you?”

“I...well, I guess I thought so.  But I didn’t know.”

“Come here, honey,” she said, and embraced me, her foot out of my lap.  “It’s hard on me, too.  Like these things are hitting and hitting and hitting us.  But you don’t even have powers like I do, Bill.  And I don’t want to lose you like I lost my foster mom and dad.”

I hugged her tightly.  “That’s not going to happen.  Not as long as I can help it.”

“Baby, it’s unreal for me, too.  Three weeks ago, I’d never been in bed with a man.  The last time I’d had to fight off a strike, it was months before.  Don’t you see, Bill, my life has changed so much, too, it’s not even funny.  Just like yours has.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“We’ve fallen in love.  We’ve been to bed together.  Now we’ve both said we want to get married, and I do.  We’ve fought side-by-side together, and you’re trying to help me find out who I am, so maybe we can protect ourselves.”

“If we can,” I said.

“If we can,” she agreed.  “Bill, Bill.  Don’t you see?  If you were any less the man that you are, you wouldn’t be able to cope with it all.”

“I’m not that big a guy, Wendy.  I’m just a regular Joe.”

“You may think so,” she said, her head against mine.  “But I know better.  Only a very special someone could do what you’ve done, and not duck out or freak out.”

“I did freak out!”

“Only a little, and that’s natural.  Oh, Bill, it sounds corny as hell, but don’t you realize that you are the man for me?  And I hope I’m the woman for you.”

“Honey,” I said, gently, in her ear, “I may doubt the sun coming up in the morning, the moon coming up at night, the size of my tax return, and whether the 18 lost minutes on Nixon’s tapes are really missing.  But if there’s one thing I don’t doubt, Wendy, and please shut up and let me say this, it’s that you are the woman for me.  Like it or not.  And that’s the way it’s going to stay.”

She pushed me down on the couch and kissed me very hard for that.  After a few seconds, I could taste salt and wetness mixing with the kissing.

I don’t know how we got to bed from there, but we managed it.

From there, she fulfilled the rest of her verbal contract.  And then some.

It was a long time later that I was finally able to get up and turn off the lights.  I came back to bed and we lay there naked beside each other.  “Ummmm, Bill,” she said.  “We’re gonna be tired in the morning.”

“We’ll manage,” I said.  “No spells.”

“All right.  Spoilsport.”

I turned on my side and looked at her, propping up my head with my arm.  “Wendy.  I’ve got an idea or two.”

“‘Bout what?”

“Well, about the mystery, for one thing.  Four guys have attacked us so far.  Right?”

“Right.  This is something I really want to talk about in the afterglow, Bill.”

I stroked the side of her face.  “I’m sorry, hon.  But it’s just something I thought about.  If we could find something that tied all those guys together, something maybe they had in common, I don’t know, maybe just someplace they all went, we’d have a clue as to what’s after us.”

“We know what’s after us,” she said.  “The three Sisters.”

“Yeah.  But how are they accessing the people they use?”

She pondered it.  “Good point.”

“Maybe we can get the prof to help us with that.   But I’ve got a second thing I’m wondering about.”

“Okay.”

“When I had the dream last night...and I know that’s a hell of a thing to be bringing up right now...I was the one who said the ‘stop’ word, the ‘K’ word.  And it worked.”

“That’s what you told me,” she said.

“Well, how could it?  I’m not a magic man.”

She tapped the fingertips of both hands together.  “I’m not sure I have the answers to this one, Bill.  I can only speculate.  Here’s what I think.  First off, you were in a dream.  Even though the Sisters intruded into it, it was your dream.  You may have had more control than you think.  They may have been trying to break that control, or slide past it.  But as long as you had control, you had power.  And if you had power, in your realm, you might just be able to say the word and make it work.”

“I’ll buy that,” I said.  “I guess.”

“Or you might be more of a magician than you give yourself credit for.”

“I doubt that.  But thanks.”

“You’re welcome.  I like the kind of magic you do, anyway.”

“A magician’s only as good as his assistant, honey.”

“Flatterer.”

“There’s something else, Wendy.”

“What?”

“Have you ever tried using your powers to bring back your memories?”

She was silent.

“Did something bad happen when you did?”, I asked.

Her hands clenched and unclenched on the covers.  “It was like, there was a barrier in front of me.  In front of my mind-space, when I tried it.  I could almost visualize it.  Maybe I did.  I felt like...no, I knew...that if I touched that thing, it might hurt me.  Maybe destroy me.  I don’t know.”

“Did it hurt you?”

“Not physically, no.  I was just scared of it.”

“So something’s been set up in your mind to keep you from knowing your past.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe it’s just a symbol of a psychological block, Bill.  I don’t know.”

“Do you think it would make any difference if you were under drugs when you tried it?  In a hospital or doctor’s office?”

“I’ve been under drugs before, Bill.  When I was a kid they tried a lot.  Hypnosis, sodium pentothal, word association, you name it.  Didn’t work.”

“Do you think it would work if I were with you?”

She paused.  “I don’t know.”

I settled back. She said, “I’d be scared to try.”

“Okay,” I said.  “No problem.”

“But if you’d be there with me...I might try it.”

A long pause.

“We’ll talk about it more tomorrow,” I said.  “Maybe.”

“Yeah.  Maybe.  Go sleep, darling man.”

And while we slept, if the witches were watching, they definitely kept their distance.

-W-

A few days after that, I got a call at work from Wendy.  I was at the register and couldn’t take it, so Terry wrote down a short note and passed it on to me.  It read:

 Suit is back at the station and I’m going to pick it up.  Join me?

I would.  So, as soon as the last customer on my shift was totaled and I passed on my station to Roy, the part-timer, I de-aproned myself, went to the car, applied the Mennen Speed Stick that I kept in the glovebox to my underarms, and headed for Wendy’s.  She met me at the door, wearing  a fairly short green dress and holding her purse.  She was smiling a tad nervously.

“Hi,” she said.  “Professor Jerald said he’d meet us there, too.”

“Third member of the Scooby Gang,” I said.

She looked puzzled.  “Scooby Gang?  You mean, like in the cartoon?”

“Nah,” I said, taking her hand.  “That’s from Buffy.  You never watched that, did you?”

“WB garbage,” she said.  “I stay away from it.”

“Okay,” I said, and escorted her to the car.  We went to the cop station and were allowed into the chief’s office.  Madigan and Jerald were already in there, waiting for us.  “Miss Corrigan, Mr. McDonald,” the chief said.  “Hello.”
 

“From me as well, Mr. McDonald, Wendy,” said Jerald.

We returned their greetings.  Madigan had Wendy’s red suit on his desk.  Immediately she went over and grabbed it.  She flushed a little when she looked up.  “Um, sorry,” she said.  “But I’m glad it’s back in my hands.”

“I understand,” said the chief.  “Have a seat and I’ll let you know what we found.”

She went and sat beside me, the suit on her lap and her hands on top of it.

Madigan consulted a report on his desk.  “The professor tells me he’s already given you a preliminary report on what the college lab found, so I’ll just hit the high points.  Composition: wool.  Manufacture: hand-made.  Weave: not a modern method.  Buttons: bone, cattle.  Design on buttons: unidentifiable as of yet.  Age of material: Between thirty and twenty years, best guess.  Place where it came from: undeterminable.  More or less, any place they had merino sheep.”  He put the report down.  “That’s about all they were able to give us.”

“Okay,” I said.  “That much we found out.  Anything besides that?”

The chief tapped a pen on the glass desktop.  “The button design is something I’m interested in.  Bone buttons went out of style probably in the last century.  But these bones weren’t any older than the suit.  They had to be hand-carved, very cunningly.”

“They were,” said Wendy.  “I mean, they’d have to be.”

Chief Madigan lay the end of the pen against his temple, idly.  “Why would somebody go to all that trouble to make a button out of bone when they could go down to any number of places and buy all the buttons they needed?”

A beat.  “Maybe they weren’t within range of a store?  Or maybe they wanted to do it hand-made?”

Dropping the pen on his desk, Madigan spread his hands.  “The first part doesn’t make any sense.  Everybody’s got a car these days, or can ride with somebody who has one.  Even out in the boonies.  Somebody went to a lot of trouble to make this for Miss Corrigan, by hand.  Spinning the wool, weaving it, dyeing it, carving buttons and putting that weird character on it.  One way of thinking is, as the professor told me he said to you, that it might have been done by Amish people or an old-style craftsworker.  That’s one way of thinking.

“But I can’t imagine why they’d put the kind of design they did on those buttons.  Neither the university nor we have been able to make any sense of them.  So I’ve got to tell you something.”

He paused, and we waited.  Wendy was fondling the suit, almost absent-mindedly, but was looking straight at the chief while we waited.

“I’ve sent photographs and drawings of the button designs to the Occult Crimes unit,” Madigan said.  “There’s a possibility this might be the work of a cult.”

I started to protest.  But I stopped myself.  Best to let the chief go on with his theorizing.  Besides, we had no idea where Wendy came from, after all.  Could her parents have been cultists?  Was the reason she got dumped in the snow a decade ago an attempt by one parent, maybe both, to save her life from something?

I didn’t like the turn my mind was taking.  But there was no sense in ruling anything out.

Wendy took a deep breath.  “And they haven’t been able to match the design with anything?”

“Not yet,” said the chief.   “But they’re still looking.  Miss Corrigan, I’d like to voice a theory that might be disturbing to you.  It might be totally hot air, and I won’t say a thing to you if you don’t want to hear it.  But it’s a possible explanation of some of the facts as I see them.  Are you willing?”

Wendy took my hand and squeezed it.  “Go ahead, Mr. Madigan,” she said.

“All right.  If the cult theory is true, and the designs on those buttons have something to do with witchcraft, it could be that you fell into the hands of an occult group as a child.  It could be that this experience was so traumatic, you totally blanked it out from your consciousness.  Do you understand, Miss Corrigan?”

She nodded, hesitantly.  “Yes.  Amnesia induced by trauma.”

“Good.  That could mean that the regaining of your early memories would be extremely shocking to you.  Perhaps more than you could cope with.  Do you follow me?”

“I think so,” she said.  “Please, go ahead.”

“You were found unconscious in the street, apparently from some kind of trauma.  Possibly from a faint.  The doctor reported no physical abuse or drugs in your system, and you had not been abused sexually, to his knowledge.  That much we can be thankful for.  We don’t know why you were out.  But you were out.  That probably means you witnessed something so, well, shocking that you fainted from the sight.  This I say because I can’t see you being so deeply asleep that somebody could take you from your bed, carry you out of your house, possibly into a car, and then dump you in a snowy street without you once waking up.  Not unless you were under the influence of sleeping drugs, and, as I’ve said, the doctor determined you were not.

“Now.  I’ve never encountered what I’m about to say personally, in my years on the force, but we have experienced some activity related to cults in the area...any big city does, these days.  Not just paganism, or what they call wicca, and don’t ask me to define those things, because I can’t.  But stuff that’s practiced by people who really think they’re getting into what you might call black magic.  A lot of that stuff I don’t know about.  Some of what I do, I wish I didn’t.

“A few of these dark side cults are into sacrifices.  Sometimes it’s just chickens, like in voodoo.  Others favor dogs.  Now, we have never, ever had a verifiable case in my jurisdiction of a human being offered as a cult sacrifice.  But.  I’m sure you heard of what happened in Matamoros, Mexico some years back.  I’ve also read of some pretty sensational cases you may have heard of, and probably a lot more you don’t know about.  Those last ones, you’re better off not knowing about.  So it hasn’t happened on my watch.  But sometimes, a few times, it does happen.”

He was silent, then.  The chief was looking straight at Wendy, and I had my arm around her.  I could tell she was scared, but keeping control.  She was hanging onto her red suit with both hands, like it was a comforter.

“You’re saying, then, that...I might have been intended as a sacrifice?” she said.

“I’m saying that I don’t know,” the Chief said.  “I might be blowing smoke.  I know that lots of times, when people have had childhood memories brought up by hypnosis, lots of times they claim to be abused, and lots of times those memories are false.  Just imagination.  Sometimes they aren’t.  Even under hypnosis, memory is a tricky, deceptive thing.

“All I know is that somebody left you in the street, in that suit.  Not too many children get left on an orphanage doorstep these days.  If they do, they’re almost inevitably infants, very often newborns.  You were about eleven years old when you were found.  Whoever dumped you on the street either did it for reasons of convenience or to save you from something.”

“Couldn’t she conceivably have walked there herself, and fainted?” I said.  “Isn’t that possible, chief?”

“Not likely,” said Madigan.

“Well, there was snow all around that night, according to the newspapers,” I offered.  “What about footprints around her?  If there was one set, or two...”

Madigan sighed.  “Mr. McGregor, give the force some credit for brains.  Believe it or not, there were no footprints in the snow beside Miss Corrigan.  Neither hers, nor anyone else’s.”

Professor Jerald spoke up.  “Then how did she get there?”

“I.  Don’t.  Know,” said Madigan.

Wendy shrugged.  “I guess that makes two of us, then.”

“More like four,” I put in.

“Let me finish,” said the chief.  “We have a case of two carjackers who were trying to break into Miss Corrigan’s car, one of whom was carrying that medallion or whatever it is.  Whether he was trying to leave it in the car or just carrying it with him, I don’t know.  But both of those suspects are now claiming amnesia about that incident, as if they were in a fugue state.  From what we can tell after polygraphing and interviews, they’re telling the truth about it.  Also, we have two other suspects whom we haven’t yet got a line on, assaulting the professor here, stealing the suit, and bringing it back within 24 hours.

“All of that seems to add up to one conclusion.  Somebody is trying to get at Miss Corrigan.  They’ve made multiple attempts to do so.  The M.O., like it or not, seems to be that of a cult.  She apparently has something they want, or is someone that they want.  If they wanted the suit, they would have kept it.  If they wanted something that was in it, they may have taken it and returned it afterwards.  It’s possible that there is some information they want from Miss Corrigan, perhaps something that she knows or doesn’t know she has.  My question to you, Wendy, is: do you know anything that could make people want to get at you to obtain it?”

Silence for a long beat.  Wendy finally said, “No.  I don’t think so.”

“Are you being straight with me?”

“As far as I can be, yes.”

“Does that imply, Miss Corrigan, that there are some things you haven’t told me about?”

She sighed, looked down at the red suit, and then looked back at the chief.  “Yes, Mr. Madigan.  There are.”

“Related to this case?”

“Chief,” I said, “Wendy has the right to refuse any questions.  You know that.”

Jerald was looking concerned, too.  But Wendy said, “Possibly.  But I don’t know who or what is making these things happen, any more than you do.  And I still don’t have any memory of my childhood.  I can promise you that.”

The chief said, “Miss Corrigan, can you honestly testify that you haven’t been participating in anything illegal, such as drugs, prostitution, theft, or any other crime?”

“Absolutely,” said Wendy.  “In a court of law, I will testify to that.”

“But you’re implying you have knowledge that could help us with this case,” he said.

“I’m implying that I have a private life, about which nobody has the right to pry into,” said Wendy.  “Except the people directly involved.”

“Are you aware that, in a court of law, you can be made to testify about anything except something that would directly incriminate you?”

“She can take the Fifth about anything in court,” I said.  “But only if she’s being questioned at some point about something that might incriminate her.”

“She’s already said she’s not involved in criminal activity,” said Madigan.  “That means the court could ask her about anything it wants to.  If she refused to testify, she could be held in contempt of court.”

“Richard, please,” said Jerald.  “Stop treating her as if she were the perpetrator, instead of the victim.”

“Professor, there’s no way we can bring in the perps except through information supplied by the victims,” said Madigan.  “Well, Miss Corrigan?  Anything else you want to tell me?”

Wendy said, “No.”

“Does that go for you two as well?”  He looked at me and Jerald, in turn.  Neither of us said anything.

“All right, then,” he said.  “If any of your memories improve, no pun intended, Miss Corrigan, you know where to reach me.  That’s all.  You can go, now.”

“Thanks, chief.”  I made a point of going up and shaking his hand.  “You won’t believe it, but you’ve been a very big help.”

“Oh, I believe it, Mr. McDonald,” he said.  “I just can’t see why you’re not more of a help to me.”

There wasn’t anything else I could add to that, so I helped Wendy and the professor up and went with both of them out of his office.

 -W-

At Jerald’s urging, we went to a mall and invaded a coffee shop that had booths well-shielded enough for us to talk in lowered voices.  Their cappuccino wasn’t bad, either.

“It is evident that he has great suspicions,” said Jerald.  “Which puts the ball in your court, Wendy.  How much are you prepared to reveal to him?”

“Nothing,” she said.  “Do you think I want what I am to be on police record?”

“It wouldn’t have to be on record, Wendy,” I said, holding my French vanilla cap in both hands.  “We could tell him in confidence.  Have him agree not to put it on the record.”

“No way,” she said.  “Bad enough that I had to tell the prof here.  No offense, professor.”

“None taken,” said Jerald.  “But, Wendy, unless this matter is resolved rather quickly, you will very probably have to take him into confidence.”

“I don’t want to!”

“Miss Corrigan,” he said, leaning forward a bit.  “Do you think that the police are going to give a solitary damn about whether you want to, or not?  They have to ask questions of pushers, panderers, thieves, and murderers.  Do you suppose they’re going to make allowances for you, just because of your looks and innocence?  I can assure you, that is not the way law enforcement works.”

Wendy was silent.

I cleared my throat.  “So it looks as though we’re going to have to crack this on our own, if we can.  And quick.”

“Oh?” Jerald said.  “How many hours a week do you propose to devote to it, Mr. McGregor?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “As much as it takes, I guess.”

“I’ve got both of you to help,” said Wendy.  “And you know what I can do.”

“Yes, Miss Corrigan?”  Jerald looked at her coldly.  “Do you, perhaps, have some magic mirror that will tell you not only who is the fairest of the fair, but who is trying to attack you, as well?”

“Uh, no,” she said.  “Only a regular one.”

“And how much time do you think I have to devote to such a search?  I have classes to attend to, even during the summer.  I have a wife, and a private life.  I do wish to help you.  Not only to solve the mystery of who you are, Miss Corrigan, but because...and I am putting myself in a chancy position here...I’ve grown a bit fond of the both of you.”

“Thanks, prof,” I said.  “Same for me, too.”

“What he said, professor,” said Wendy.  “And thanks ever so much.”  She pecked him on the cheek.  The prof smiled and blushed.

“Yes.  Well,” he said.  “Like it or not, you can probably expect another ‘striking’, as you termed it, Miss Corrigan, possibly fairly soon, if recent events are any indication.  If the police have to be called in on it, Chief Madigan isn’t going to wait for his answers much longer.  So, like it or not, you must consider whether or not you will confide in him.”

“Professor, there’s only so many people who can learn my secret before it isn’t one anymore,” Wendy said, sincerely.  “And these things which we’re up against, it isn’t a case of people doing it on their own.  Not as far as I can see.”

“Then what is making them do it, Wendy?” said Jerald.

“Spirits,” she said.

“Of ammonia, or alcohol?”

She curled her lip.  “Not very funny, Prof.”

“It wasn’t intended to be,” he said.

“Prof, look,” I said.  “We don’t know exactly why these things are hitting Wendy.  If they’re manifestations of these three sisters we keep seeing in our dreams, or what.  Apparently they can possess people, and possess or maybe, I don’t know, direct things like fire and water.  It seems like they jump in, get things done, and jump out.  Am I right about that, Wendy?”

“More or less,” she said.  “That’s why I call them spirits.  They possess people.  And things.”

“Fire and water,” said Jerald.  “No earth or air so far?”

“I’m not sure,” said Wendy.  “Not direct attack through those means, as far as I know.”

“Well, you’d be the one to know,” I said.

She looked down at the cup in her hands.  “There’s so much I don’t know, Bill.  Maybe I’d be afraid to know it.  What I do know scares me enough.  I’m sorry.”

I put my hand on her arm.  “It’s all right, kid.  Really.”  I felt about as competent as Barney Fife right about then.  But she smiled and laid her hand on my wrist, anyway.  Then she turned to the professor.

“Prof, do you think you could help me with something?”

Jerald said, “What did you have in mind?”

“I’d like you to help arrange it, if you could.  And I’d like you and Bill to be with me when we do it.”

“Again: what is it, Miss Corrigan?”

“I want to have myself hypnotized, and put under truth drugs, with my power a factor in it, too,” she said.  “And see if my memory can be brought back that way.”

She was very serious as she said it.

Jerald paused and said, “Is that really what you want to do, Wendy?”

“I think it’s something we have to do, professor,” she said.

“Then I’ll see if I can get it arranged.”

I didn’t want to say anything.  I could figure what running that gauntlet was going to be like, for Wendy.  Or maybe I couldn’t.  It wasn’t my mind.

But as much as I could, I was going to be there to run it with her.

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