Diane set the groceries on the counter and returned to the back door to get her keys from the lock.

No keys.

She tried to recall – she had hurried inside from the car when she heard the phone ringing. She looked on hooks, on counters, at the bottom of her purse, in the freezer (it had happened more than once). On the off chance that she'd left them in the station wagon she walked outside and ducked her head through the open window. They hung from the ignition. She shook her head at her absentmindedness and plucked them out. She started back to the kitchen. She stopped cold, one foot on the doorstep.

How had she gotten inside without the keys?

The back door had been open.

The dead bolt was the only lock on the door and it could be secured only with a key. Diane clearly remembered locking it when she left for the A &P. Somebody had entered the house and left without bothering to relock the door.

Bill had been a cop for twelve years and had made his share of enemies; he'd instructed the children a thousand times always to lock the door when they left.

But Sarah of course could ignore a thousand stern warnings.

The girl had probably returned home to wash up after the incident at school then run outside to hide in her magic woods, forgetting to lock the door. I'll have another talk with her… But then Diane decided, no, the girl had been through enough. No scoldings today. She returned to the kitchen, dropped the keys into her purse, and began to think about supper.

She sits in the woods, hugging herself, knees up to her lowered chin, in the circle of magic stones. Sarah Corde is now breathing slowly. It has taken hours to calm down. By the time she got here, running the entire two miles from the school, her dress and underpants were dry but still she feels dirty – as if a sorcerer had thrown a potion on her.

She is no longer crying.

Sarah lies back in the grass that she pulled out of the nearby field and spread in the circle like a bed. She lifts the hem of her dress up to her waist as if the sunlight will clean the poison completely away and she closes her eyes. Sarah is sleepy. Her head grows heavy as a stone and she feels that she is floating in the moat of an old castle. Beiderbug Castle …

Sarah looks up at the clouds.

A huge dog with wings big as the county, a chariot pulled by a flying fish, and there, there – a towering thunderhead – is a god carrying a fierce club. He wears golden sandals, magic shoes that carry him high above this terrible place, the earth…

As she falls asleep she pictures the god turning into a wizard.

When she wakes, an hour or more has passed. The chariot is gone, the flying fish is gone, the god with his club is gone.

But Sarah finds that she has had a visitor.

She sits up, pulling her skirt down, then reaches forward cautiously and picks up Bedford T. Redford the world's smartest bear, who sits beside her, the shaggy face staring at her with humorous, glassy eyes. She left him that morning propped on her bed after she hugged him a tearful good-bye and left for school. How he got here she has no idea. In the ribbon around his collar is a piece of paper. Sarah unfolds it, panicking for a moment as she sees that it contains words she must now read. But then she relaxes and takes one word at a time. After fifteen minutes of agonizing work she manages to read the entire note.

She is shocked and terrified by its message. Suspicious of words, she decides she must have read it wrong. She tries again and finds that, no, she read it correctly.

Her first thought is that she could never do what the awkwardly printed letters suggest.

But as the girl looks around her at the dense woods, where she has hidden so often after fleeing from school, the woods in which she feels more at home than in her own living room, that fear slowly fades.

And eventually becomes joyous anticipation.

Sarah rises to her feet, thinking that one part of the note certainly is true. There really is nothing left for her to do.

3

The New Lebanon Sheriffs Department was a small place. Four private offices – for the sheriff, for Detectives Corde and Slocum and for Emma, the radio dispatcher/secretary. The central room contained eight gray GI desks for the deputies. To the side was a long corridor that led to the two cells of the lockup. On the wall was a rack containing three shotguns and five black AR-15s. The room was filled with enough unread and unfiled paper to go head to head with any small-town law enforcement office in the country.

Jim Slocum – fresh back from the pond – looked up from his desk, where he was reclining in a spring-broken chair and reading the Register. Sheriff Steve Ribbon stood above him. Ribbon, solid and sunburnt red as the flesh of a grilled salmon, was slapping his ample thigh with a book. What's the Pocket Fisherman want now? Slocum raised an eyebrow. "Damn mess." He held up the paper like a crossing guard with a portable Stop sign. It was folded to the article on the Gebben murder.

Ribbon crooked his head to say, yeah, yeah, I read it. "Come on into my den, would you, Jim?"

Slocum followed the sheriff five feet into his office. Ribbon sat, Slocum stood in the doorway.

This's right clever, we just reversed positions.

"Bill here?" Ribbon asked.

"He flew over to St Louis this morning to talk to the girl's father -"

"He did what?"

"Flew up to St Louis. To talk to the girl's -"

Ribbon said, "The girl was killed? That girl? Why'd he do that for? He think we're made of money?"

Slocum chose not to answer for Bill Corde and said only, "He said he wants us all to meet about the case. At four, I think it was."

"We gotta watch our pennies, I hope he knows that. Anyway, I wanted to kick something around with you. This killing's got me bothered. I hear it wasn't a robbery."

"Doesn't seem to be."

"I was noticing there were some parallels between what happened and a couple other cases I'd read about. It occurred to me that we might have a cult killer problem here."

"Cult?" Slocum asked carefully.

The book dropped onto the desk. A paperback, fanned from bathtub or hammock reading. Bloody Rites. On the cover were three black-and-white photos of pretty girls over a color photo of a blood-spattered pack of tarot cards. "Whatsis?" Slocum picked it up.

"I want you to read it. I want you to think about it. It's about this Satanist down in Arizona a couple years ago. A true story. There are a lot of similarities between what happened here and that fellow."

Slocum flipped to the pictures of the crime scenes. "You don't think it's the same guy?"

"Naw, they caught him. He's doing life in Tempe but there are… similarities." Ribbon stretched out the word. "It's kind of scary."

"Damn, they were good-looking." Slocum gazed at the page of the book showing the victims' high school graduation pictures.

Ribbon absently stroked his black polyester tie and said softly, "What I'd like you to do is get yourself up to Higgins. The state police have a psychology division up there. Follow up with them on it."

"You think?" Slocum read a passage where the writer described what the Arizona killer had done to one co-ed. He reluctantly lowered the book and said, "I'll mention it to Bill."

"Naw, you don't have to. Just call up the boys in Higgins and get an appointment."

Slocum grinned. "Okay. I won't fly."

"What?"

"I won't fly up there."

"Why would you? – Oh, yeah, haw." The sheriff added, "We gotta make sure word gets around about this."

"How's that?"

Ribbon said, "Well, we should make sure the girls in town are warned about it."

"Wouldn't that kind of tip our hand?"