It took a moment to process what she was seeing. The woman who turned from the cupboards, one hand still reaching up to take down the sugar, looked as incredulous and frightened as if Alison had burst in on her in her very own kitchen. She was tall and had long, dark blonde hair which she was wearing in two braids. The ends were tied with beaded leather thongs and a feather was stuck into one. Had they met elsewhere, Alison would have immediately cla.s.sified her as either a G.o.ddess-worshipping d.y.k.e or an old hippie. So what was she doing pilfering her cupboards?

The other woman was squatted down on the floor sorting through her pans. From the back her appearance with purple drawstring pants and tie-dyed rainbow top, agreed with that of her companion. There was, however, something strangely familiar about her multicolored spiky hair... Alison dropped the gun. "h.e.l.lo, Lydia," she said.

Lydia straightened and turned around. "Hi!" she said in cheerful voice that told Alison she not only missed the fact that Alison had drawn her gun, but also had not noticed her friend leaning against the counter clutching her throat. "Lavender. My name is Lavender now. I thought you were probably at work."

"No, I'm on vacation." Alison was surprised at how calm her voice sounded.

"Great! Perfect! You're just in time for breakfast. Pull up a chair." Lydia had the habit of falling immediately into the hostess role wherever she happened to be crashing. "This is Seven Yellow Moons." Without looking she gesture towards the tall woman who, still terrified, managed to give Alison a nod. Lydia had probably not, thought Alison, informed her either of her vocation or that they were unexpected.

"Excuse me for a moment," Alison said politely, backing out of the room while she put away her gun. She hoped that Lydia's friend would rake her over the coals for letting them into a cop's house without advance warning.

As she strode back through the living room she saw the sleeping bags and packs piled up behind the couch. Great, a long stay. She stuck her head out the front door.

"It's okay," she said. "False alarm."

"What are you talking about, 'false alarm?" Stacy was the first one in, talking in the loud, querulous voice that Alison had by now come to recognize as representing any excitement or upset. "I saw you lock that door when we left! You going to tell me that the cat did that?"

"No." Alison turned her head to address everyone so that she would not have to say it again. Carla and Janka were coming back up the steps, Carla's eyes bright with interest. She probably thinks she's walked into a TV show, thought Alison sourly. We're never going to get her to leave. Janka was holding her left arm with her right hand.

"Mich.e.l.le!" Her friend appeared from around the corner of the house, brandishing a rake. Good old Mich.e.l.le, guarding the back escape.

"What is going on?!" Stacy demanded. Mich.e.l.le exchanged a look with Janka that said plainly, 'Oh, bad temper as well as being kinky. Definitely not the girl for our Alison.' For a moment Alison wished that she were a friendless orphan.

"It's a misunderstanding. An old-" she almost tried to get away with 'friend'. But, h.e.l.l, Stacy was going to have to learn about the embarra.s.sments of her past eventually, "-lover dropped by to visit. Come on in." She gestured, but only Carla, eager to see the next installment, sprang up to the door.

"Who?" asked Mich.e.l.le.

"How did she get in?" asked Stacy at the same time.

"Lydia. And I presume she kept a key when she left." Actually, the amazing part was not that she had kept her key, but that she had been able to locate it on her jailer's key ring. Lydia could let herself into crash pads all over the U.S.

"Oh." said Mich.e.l.le. She did not put the rake down, and Alison got the distinct impression that she was rather sorry that Lydia had not tried to escape out the back door so that she could have hit her over the head.

"No killers?" asked Stacy, calmer. Alison took her by the hand and pulled her inside. Carla was already in the kitchen, from where came once again the sounds of water running, dishes clattering and eggs being broken. Alison closed her eyes. Lydia was an excellent cook, but she regarded cleaning up as someone else's job. Behind them Alison thought she heard Janka say, "I think I've broken my arm," but she chose to believe that she had misunderstood.

Carla was standing by the door with a huge smile on her face, staring at Lydia's hair. Alison, who had not really had time to appreciate it fully before, gave it a look herself. It was cut off no longer than an inch long all over her head, except for a tag in the back, and had been bleached and then rain-bowed in the same brilliant colors as Lydia's wide-sleeved shirt.

"Carla, Stacy, this is Lydia. And this is Lydia's friend." She wasn't even going to attempt the other woman's name; she was sure she would get the combinations of numbers, planets and colors wrong. The woman still looked as if she were going to jump out of her skin. Out of pity, since Lydia had obviously not explained a thing, Alison said to her, "My name is Alison. I live here. I'm a cop. I thought someone had broken in. I didn't have any idea that I was expecting company."

"Oh." The woman breathed out a long sigh and relaxed visibly. She was wearing a pair of drawstring pants the same style as Lydia's-cotton, gathered at the ankles-only hers were red. Over a matching turtleneck that had seen better days, she had on a short vest that looked as if it had been hand-woven. Maybe she would enjoy talking to Janka.

"Lavender," said Lydia to Carla and Stacy. "Seven Yellow Moons." She pointed to the other woman. Stacy glanced quickly at Alison as if asking what the woman was called for short?

"I did contact you, Alison. Is that still your name?" She turned from ransacking the refrigerator to peer at Alison hopefully.

"Yeah. I think I'm going to keep it for a while."

Behind their conversation Alison heard Seven Yellow Moons say to Stacy, "Boy, you look just like someone I used to know."

"Oh. I had hoped since renaming usually signifies change...." Lydia turned back to contemplate the refrigerator. "Three days ago our family had a circle and sent you an image of our arrival. I know we reached you while you were sleeping. I felt your presence leap up to greet mine, and sleep is the only time that you relax enough to allow it that freedom. But you probably decided it was just a dream, right?" She spoke wearily, as if reminding Alison for the thousandth time that she had to look into her mailbox if she expected to get postcards. "Did you know that you have a flat tire?"

"No doubt," Alison replied to the first question. As far as Lydia was concerned the explanation was over and done with, and if she hadn't gotten the message it was Alison's fault for being such a tighta.s.s. There was no use arguing. "Did you tell me why you were here and how long you're planning on staying, too?... What?" Only now did the second question sink in.

"I noticed that, too," Carla volunteered, happy to be given a speaking role at last. "When we came in. Right front. I was about to tell you when you pulled your gun. Alison almost shot me in the foot the other night," she told Lydia and Seven Yellow Moons proudly, making it sound as if Alison frequently rode into Dodge and shot things up.

Lydia raised her eyebrows, but before she could comment on the politics of violence, Mich.e.l.le stepped into the kitchen with Janka in tow. "Janka thinks she's broken her arm," she announced with a dark look at Lydia. "h.e.l.lo, Lydia."

"Lavender," Lydia corrected. "Do you know what kind of disharmony you were feeling in order for you to need to hurt yourself?" she asked Janka.

"She fell off the porch because Alison thought the d.y.k.e-killer had broken into her house!" said Mich.e.l.le heatedly. She looked back over her shoulder as if wondering where she had left the rake.

"Well, we all make our choices, don't we?" Lydia replied somewhat mysteriously.

Seven Yellow Moons asked, "May I look at it?"

Mich.e.l.le looked as if she would rather receive the a.s.sistance of anyone else, even one of the dreaded leatherd.y.k.es-she did, in fact, glance at Stacy for a moment as if hoping to form an alliance-but Janka quelled her with a glance. Lydia turned back to her eggs; presumably if Janka chose to be injured it was her own problem, but not before she said, "Seven Yellow Moons is a healer. She does wonderful things with crystals."

Alison thought it was very inopportune for the phone to ring at that moment, for she wanted to be there to catch Mich.e.l.le's expression if Seven Yellow Moons decided to whip out a crystal and slap it on Janka's arm. She even debated, for a moment, letting the answering machine pick it up, but before she could commit herself, Stacy leaned back into the living room and snagged the extension off her desk.

"It's for you," she told Alison. The receiver still pressed to her chest she asked, "Am I hallucinating, or is this place turning into a nuthouse?"

"Different strokes," answered Alison. "But do try to keep Carla from cornering Lydia for a quickie unless you want to hear a very long lecture about the importance of pure s.e.x for spiritual power.... h.e.l.lo?"

She heard the words with a feeling of deja vu. "We need to talk to you right away!" said a woman without identifying herself. "Why didn't you call us?"

Oh, s.h.i.t. Beth. She had totally forgotten her. "Oh, the machine must not be working," she lied. "What's happening?"

"We need to talk to you! The police have been here! We think they may be coming back!" Obviously this was as close to coherency she was going to get over the phone.

"Look, I'll be right there, okay? Just stay put."

"You have a flat tire," Lydia sang out from the other room. "And I'll bet your spare is flat, too."

It was an accurate guess, one that Alison would have preferred not to have confirmed in front of Mich.e.l.le. Okay, all right, she could handle the fact that she wasn't Wonder Woman, that car maintenance happened to be down low on her list of priorities and skills. "There may be a slight problem," she told Beth, trying to calculate rapidly how many buses would be involved in the trip and what the estimated time would be.

"I can give you a ride," said Stacy who, like the rest of the household, seemed to have decided to take time off from the personal drama in order to give full attention to the phone call.

At the same moment Seven Yellow Moons announced, "She's going to need an X-ray."

And Mich.e.l.le said, "Oh, Alison," in the sad, sad voice of a disappointed teacher who can't believe her student's very best has not been enough.

Twelve.

"This is it." Alison pointed to the well-kept little house, opening the car door even before they were at a full stop. "You can't come in." She was too on edge to try for tact, even if it had been a strong point. It had taken forever to decide that while Stacy was delivering her to Beth and Denise's, Seven Yellow Moons would take Janka to a Med Express Clinic in her van, Carla would stay with Lydia, and Mich.e.l.le would change the spare tire. This last task was insisted upon by Janka. Alison, who had once herself suffered from Mich.e.l.le's protective belligerence in an emergency room, totally approved. Janka and Seven Yellow Moons had been chatting about weaving as they went out the door, an ice pack on Janka's splinted arm. Alison had been so amazed to see this instead of a crystal bracelet or a healing circle that she had let it show on her face. Seven Yellow Moons had said to her in a voice that managed to be serene and withering at the same time, "I practice cross-disciplines. I'm a nurse pract.i.tioner as well as working with physic healing." She had lost the serenity altogether when she put her hand on her hip and said, "And who hasn't taken a multi-media first aid course these days?"

"You can just drop me off. I can catch a bus back."

"No way," said Stacy, and though it could have just meant that she didn't want her new squeeze to be subjected to that kind of inconvenience, heart sinking, Alison felt it was more in line with the enraptured expression Carla had had upon discovering Lydia and Seven Yellow Moon's arrival. This theory of living soap opera was confirmed by Stacy saying, in a rather coy voice, "Carla told me some interesting things when we were eating our donuts."

Alison tried to brush her off. "Carla is an interesting girl." She started to get out of the car but Stacy shot a hand across, and laid it on her wrist.

"These things were about a new theory you might have in the murders." Alison was silent. "Were you going to tell me about this? Considering the fact that I was so worried that you might think it was me?"

"Oh, yes," Alison lied, since Carla had spilled the beans already. They needed to put a gag on that girl. "But it didn't really come together until after you had pa.s.sed out last night. There hasn't really been a chance since." She knew that it was not good to start a relationship with lies, but she couldn't see how it would be helpful to tell Stacy the truth. "Well, no, I wasn't going to tell you because there's still a possibility that you're fairly deeply involved in a murder case, in fact, possibly the killer herself, and though that possibility is so small that I'm willing to ignore it in order to become your lover, I would just like to kind of cover my a.s.s by not telling you everything that I know." Right. It would go over real big.

Stacy appeared somewhat mollified by this explanation. She fished a library copy of Everything That's Yours Is Mine out of the bag she had flung at Alison's feet on the pa.s.senger's side, and settled in with it.

The front door was pulled open before Alison could knock. Beth nodded to her. Again she was wearing a tasteful, office outfit, and her features were composed. But Alison could see that the composure did not go far beneath the surface.

"The police have been here," she announced again. "They asked Denise to come into the station for questioning."

"Did she go?"

"Certainly not," Beth said coldly, as if Alison had somehow insulted them just by asking. "When I asked if it were a request or a legal order they had to admit that they had nothing, no reason at all to compel her."

Alison entered and glanced around the room. Denise was sitting on the sofa, sprawled back as if she had been thrown. Alison walked over to her.

"What haven't you told me?" she asked her, resisting the impulse to take her chin in her hand and tilt her face up. For a moment she thought that the question had not registered.

Then Denise spoke, "I just didn't think...! didn't see how...it didn't seem...."

You didn't see how? Alison wanted to shout. They're not fools. By now, of course, they know that you were at the bar that night. They know that Tamara left her things in the coat room like she was planning to come back. How are they not going to ask questions about that? But she spoke carefully, recognizing that Denise was almost paralyzed with fear and would have to be coaxed.

"You didn't think that they would find out that you tricked with Tamara in the parking lot that night, did you?"

"Oh, G.o.d," muttered Denise, pa.s.sing her free hand over her face. Beth began to chirp comfortingly. It was obvious to Alison that no matter how well intended Beth's fussing was, she would have more luck with Denise if she could talk to her by herself. She tried to think of a way to get rid of the other woman. That particular job was usually handled by Robert, who had a talent for phrasing commands like polite requests.

"But they will find out about it," Alison said, "if they haven't already. And of course they're going to want to hear about it, because you might have been the last one, besides the killer, to have seen Tamara alive." Or, you might have been the killer, she added silently. Denise certainly seemed shaken enough.

"I went outside with Tamara," Dominique began heavily. "I remember that. Just little bits. Her asking me. Talking to the girl at the door. But not all...."

"Oh, it's the drinking, it's the drinking, it wasn't like she was herself, surely they can't blame..." Beth interrupted. Tears were rolling down her cheeks. Alison sensed what she must be going through since Beth had been with Denise for years and obviously cared a great deal for her, but they were never going to get anywhere if she didn't put a sock in it.

"Beth," Alison said, "I'm going to have to ask you to keep quiet so that Dominique-Denise-and I can talk. You know how important it is."

"Yes, yes, I'm sorry." Beth nodded her head in agreement, but Alison doubted Beth would be able to keep quiet.

"Go ahead," she said to Denise.

"I remember talking to the girl at the door," Denise repeated in a whisper.

"Oh, G.o.d," moaned Beth.

Alison stood up. "Let's walk," she said to Denise. "Just you and me," she added, just in case it wasn't quite clear.

Denise seemed to have become one with the couch, so Alison grasped her by the elbow and wrestled her up. Denise was so depressed that she made no protest as Alison hustled her down the steps and out the gate, though Beth stood at the door and watched them anxiously. Alison started them off briskly. In a few minutes, when she thought perhaps Denise had been stirred out of her lethargy, she slowed to a pace at which talking was possible.

"Tell me what happened. You're going to have to sooner or later."

"That's just it." Denise slammed her fist into a tall board fence, making Alison jump. She had gone suddenly from comatose to hyped-up with no stops in between. "I don't know what happened. d.a.m.n it all, I just don't remember."

"You had a blackout," Alison guessed. Denise nodded. "Then tell me everything you can remember, and we'll try to put it together."

"I was at the bar the night of the contest," Denise began, "with some friends of mine. I was drinking a lot. I had thought maybe I would pick up a couple of quick...jobs." She looked sideways at Alison to see how she was going to react to this. Alison nodded encouragingly. "I remember Tamara asking me to go outside. She was excited from all the energy and she wanted to do a quick scene. She was willing to forgive me because I knew what she liked, and I wouldn't bother her asking for a date later. I remember going outside. The church people were there, and some of the bikers were standing around. We met at my van. And then...."

"Yes?" coached Alison. They had come to a complete stop.

"I don't remember," said Denise hopelessly. She began to walk again, her hands in her pockets. "The next thing that I remember is waking up in the van alone. Tamara was gone. I was cold. I thought, okay, I pa.s.sed out, and she went into the bar by herself for the rest of the contest. I was kind of p.i.s.sed of T. I opened the door and got out. But then I stumbled and fell down on the pavement with my hands out. When I lifted them...." She stopped for a moment, looking over Alison's shoulder as if she saw something.

"What?"

"There was blood on them." She spoke as if in a dream. Suddenly-she did not know if it were a psychic experience, or just her own imagination- Alison saw the whole scene Denise had described. She saw the brown van parked behind the bar where the lights didn't reach very well. She saw Denise coming to and climbing over the front seat to open the door. Dressed all in black with her hair slicked back, falling as she tried to alight, falling and putting her hands out to stop herself....

"There was blood on my hands," Denise repeated, her eyes still unfocused. "I thought it was oil at first, and I was really angry, wondering if I'd gotten it on my clothes, and why the stupid b.i.t.c.hes couldn't keep their cars fixed so they didn't leak. But when I put them up by my face I could smell that it was blood, and then the moon came out...." She raised her hands now and looked at them wonderingly.

"What happened then?" Alison whispered.

"I froze. I was so frightened that I couldn't move. I didn't look around. I didn't want to look around. I was afraid of what I might see. It seemed like I stayed there forever. I could hear the bikers laughing and talking...I was that close to them...but I couldn't make a sound. I was so scared that I thought I was going to be sick. Then really carefully, I started to get up."

"Why were you so frightened?" asked Alison. "Why did you think that there was something wrong, instead of just a.s.suming that there'd been a fight or an accident?"

"There was too much of it," said Denise simply. "There was too much blood there. n.o.body could lose that much blood and live."

"So what did you do?"

"I started to get up. But when I moved my knee back I felt something underneath it, something sharp. I reached back and picked it up." She stopped again. Her face was drawn and white.

"What was it?"

"It was a knife. It was all sticky with blood too."

"You picked it up?" Alison pushed, remembering the police report mentioning a knife too smeared for fingerprints.

"Yes."

"And then what?"

"I dropped it. I threw it down. It went beneath a car."

"Then?"

"I stood up and I walked away. I must have tried to start the van earlier, because I knew that I didn't have my keys, that it wouldn't do any good to get back into it. I just walked away really slowly, and I didn't look back."