"Well, if he hasn't, he probably will. We've stayed close, Melanie and me, and sometimes I think Lew's suspected us of having an affair." He smiled bitterly and pointed to his blanketed lower body. "But that, I'm afraid, is quite impossible."

Canfield's legs shifted under the plaid fabric, and something about the way they moved sent a chill across Jack's upper back. He felt he should make some sort of response but couldn't think of anything that didn't sound lame.

Canfield shrugged. "Ironic, in a way: The thing that keeps us close also keeps us from getting too close."

"I'm not following you," Jack said.

"Our deformities…they're a kind of bond unhindered people can't understand."

Jack was baffled. "Melanie has a deformity?"

Canfield looked smug. "You mean you don't know? Perhaps I shouldn't have said anything." He tugged on his red beard and stared at Jack. "You really haven't met her, have you."

"Why would I be lying?" Jack said, then had to smile. "But then, considering the nature of this gathering, why should I be surprised I'm not believed?"

Canfield nodded. "You've got a point."

Jack mentally reviewed the photos he'd seen both in Shoreham and in Monroe. Melanie had looked perfectly normal.

"What's Melanie's deformity?"

Canfield looked around. "Let's get out of the traffic." He started rolling his chair to the left. "Over here."

He stopped before a couch against the wall. Jack sank into the too-soft cushions, so far down that he was now looking up at Canfield.

"I'm not going to discuss Melanie's particular deformity," Canfield said. "When you meet her you'll know."

At least he's optimistic, Jack thought.

"But I will tell you," Canfield went on, "that it shaped her life. It's the fuel powering her engine. She's searching for the cause of the Monroe Cluster."

"Cluster of what?"

"Deformities. Toward the end of 1968, half a dozen deformed children were born in Monroe over a period of ten days. The parents all got to know each other. That was how my folks met the Rubins, Melanie's folks. I remember others—the poor Harrisons, whose severely deformed daughter Susan didn't survive past age five, and the doubly damned Bakers, whose daughter Carly disappeared after murdering her brother. They and a few others formed a mini-support group, looking for answers, wanting to know, Why us??'

Jack glanced at Canfield's shrouded nether half, wondering what hid beneath that blanket.

"A radiation leak, maybe?" Jack offered.

Canfield shook his head. "An investigative team from Mount Sinai came out and puttered around, looking for evidence of just that. When that didn't pan out they tested the water and the ground for toxic contamination, but never found a thing. Melanie thinks they came up empty-handed because they were looking for a natural cause. She thinks the cause was unnatural."

Canfield's legs shifted again under their blanket…something not quite natural about that, either.

"Like what?"

"Something else…something other."

"Is this a secret code or something? You're losing me."

Canfield sighed. "Melanie and I have discussed it endlessly. She's been convinced that something 'unnatural' happened in Monroe in late February or early March of 1968 when her mother and my mother and all these other mothers were newly pregnant. Something happened that warped the fragile cell structures of the newly conceived fetuses. 'A burst of Otherness,' she calls it. She refers to us and the other deformed ones as 'Children of the Otherness.'"

Uh-oh, Jack thought. Do I sense another conspiracy theory in the making?

"All right," he said. "I'll bite: What's that supposed to mean?"

Canfield shrugged. 'That's the question Melanie has spent her life trying to answer. But just a couple of weeks ago she told me that with Professor Roma's help, she was getting close…and that she soon might have the key to her Grand Unification Theory."

Back to Melanie's theory again. All roads seemed to lead to that particular Rome.

"I'd love to hear this theory," Jack said.

"You and me both. Believe me, if a single event has shaped your life—or misshaped your life—you want to. know what it is."

"How exactly did it misshape Melanie?" Jack said.

"Sorry," Canfield said, shaking his head. "Better ask Lew. Good talking to you."

But I can't ask Lew, Jack thought. He's on his way out to Shoreham.

And then it occurred to him that the secret of Melanie Ehler's whereabouts—as well as her mysterious deformity—might not be here with the SESOUP loonies, but back in her home town. In Monroe.

Canfield had backed up his wheelchair and started to roll away.

"One more thing," Jack said. "What's your angle here?"

Canfield stopped and looked back. "Angle?"

"Yeah. UFOs? Satan and the End Days? The New World Order? The International Cabal of Bankers? The Cthulhu cult? Which is your baby?"

"Haven't you been listening?" Canfield said, then rolled away.

He knows something, Jack thought as he watched him go. The way he dodges the important questions—oh,yeah, he's definitely involved.

Jack looked across the common area and saw Evelyn step out of the hotel's business office and head for the elevators in the company of two suits with little brass name tags on their lapels. On their way to Olive's room, no doubt. Which meant the hotel would be crawling with blue uniforms in about ten minutes.

Maybe now was a good time to take another look around the missing lady's ancestral home.

12

Jack retrieved his rental car from the garage and backtracked out to the Long Island Gold Coast. He didn't have a map and wasn't sure of Monroe's exact location, but remembered it was somewhere at the end of Glen Cove Road. Along the way he spotted a road sign pointing him in the right direction. After that, he had no problem finding his way back to Melanie's family home. He also found himself glancing repeatedly in his rearview mirror, looking for a black sedan. He had a vague feeling that he was being watched, and he scrutinized every black car he spied along the way.

Melanie's old home was easily identified by the big oak and its oversize lot. Jack parked in the driveway this time, but went to the back door. The knob was a Yale; so was the dead bolt. Jack was good with Yales. Took him thirty seconds on the knob, less than a minute on the dead bolt, and he was in.

He wandered through the house again, rechecking all the photos. He began to see a pattern that had escaped him completely on his first pass: in not one photo was Melanie's left hand visible. In solo shots it was always behind her back; when with her mother or father she was always positioned so that her left lower arm was behind the other person.

A deformed left hand? That sort of jibed with the box full of dolls with mutilated left hands…

But so what? What if anything did that have to do with her disappearance?

Jack went downstairs to the basement. Yeah, the rope ladder was still imbedded in the cement. Did that have anything to do with Melanie's disappearance?

He stood staring at it, as baffled as ever, waiting for some sort of epiphany that would explain everything.

The only thing that happened was the front of his chest started itching again.

Damn, he thought. Must be allergic to something down here.

Still scratching, he went over to the desk and checked out the large amber crystals. He held one up to the light but saw nothing unusual about it.

He sighed. Deformed children, a missing wife, a mutilated corpse, black-clad tough guys, a gathering of paranoids…were they linked? He couldn't buy them as random and unrelated. But where was the common thread?

Frayne Canfield had said that something "unnatural" had happened in Monroe in late February or early March of 1968. Was that the link?