"You could pick up a generic supplement in town," Winnie said as she led the way to the living room. Sam had put an ice bucket and glasses on a side table. "Campari?" Winnie asked.

"Sure, thanks." Campari tastes awful, but it looked so fabulous that I liked to drink it anyway.

"You won't mind if it's mostly soda. You need to stay hydrated."

"Dr. Harding-"

"Call me Winnie."

"Winnie, when I came to see you, I had no idea..."

"I understand," she said.

I looked for jealousy in her eyes or even anger, but all I saw was weariness. Probably world-weariness. Her European education had taught her how to enjoy bitter aperitifs and accept the straying ways of men. I didn't think I would ever be so cosmopolitan and didn't know if I wanted to be.

Previous "Nothing actually happened, you know," I said. "He cut his mouth falling and..."

"And you just happened to have your mouth attached to his at the time." Her smile was bitter like the Campari and I suddenly warmed toward her.

"That does sound bad, doesn't it? But..."

"Milagro-"

"Call me Mil."

"Mil, I know that this was anomalous behavior on Oswald's part and I would like to think it was not typical of you either. He has assured me that it will not happen again."

"Absolutely! There's not a chance..."

We heard Sam coming down the stairs, and we stopped talking and sipped our red drinks in the natural conspiracy of women through time immemorial.

We ate by candlelight and the conversation became lively. Even Edna acted almost human. No one mentioned Oswald. Winnie told us how her neighbor, a gentleman who went by the name of Pepper, had knocked on her door after an accident in his meth lab. "I treated Pepper's burns and he wanted to pay me with a gun because 'There's some real scumbags round here,'"

she said with a dry laugh.

Sam said, "Winnie, you should have left that dangerous neighborhood and come here sooner."

"So Edna's been telling me, but I'm here now." She smiled serenely at him. "Even if the situation is a little complicated."

I froze, thinking that she meant me, when Edna held up her hands palms outward and said, "Must we talk about CACA at the table? Their recent acts show that they no longer have any boundaries."

"Okay," I said, "I can understand about not going to the police about my kidnapping, but can't you expose them to the media?"

"Expose them and we expose ourselves," Edna said. "Besides, they own most of the media."

"Sam told me that CACA may want to patent your DNA," I said. "But why couldn't you just come out and do that yourselves?"

Winnie gave Sam a warm glance and said, "I suspect Sam is right, as usual." Turning to me, she added, "We would like nothing more than to come out to the medical and scientific communities and conduct research that might benefit mankind. But we've learned that most people are governed by emotion rather than reason. If we announced ourselves..."

"CACA would feed all the old fears and superstitions," said Sam. "They would certainly use their power to try to deprive us of our rights as citizens by claiming we're a threat to national security. Then they'd see to it that no one could benefit from any medical research unless CACA profited from it."

"Are you sure you're not being paranoid?" I asked.

"No," said Sam. "It's happened before. In the old country, our family was routinely hunted down and slaughtered. History wrote off the atrocities as territorial disputes."

"But that was long ago, when people were ignorant."

"It's happened more recently here, too," Sam said. "The organization that formed CACA has instigated the hysteria time and time again." He asked me if I'd ever heard of an especially heinous serial murderer who'd slaughtered several families fifty years ago.

"Yes, he was a madman."

"He was paranoid schizophrenic to be precise," said Winnie.

"Our adversaries found him after he'd been released from an asylum, convinced him that the victims were demons, and let him loose," said Sam. "Afterward nobody noticed that the families' properties, sitting on a critical tract of land, were taken over by an agent for the Witherspoon family."

"They hate you that much?" I asked in amazement.

"They don't see us as quite human," Winnie said sadly. "If we're not human, then they feel justified in taking everything from us, even our lives."

"We won't talk of it further," Edna said with a flip of her hand. She began to speak of a goat farm she wanted to visit. Sam and Winnie politely joined in the intriguing chevre discussion and I said "Really?" a lot in an attempt to be a gracious dinner companion. But all the while I was ruminating on the ruthless and powerful Beckett-Witherspoon family.

Why hadn't I paid more attention to Sebastian's delusions of superiority? How could he believe that I'd only cared for his money and his status? What if he was right? What if I had been drawn to him because of what he represented, not who he was? I didn't want to think it was true. I didn't want to be my mother Regina's daughter.

After dinner, Sam gallantly offered to walk Winnie to the cottage to visit Oswald.

Left alone, I felt lonely. The books in the maid's room were a hodgepodge of bestsellers, nature guides, and popular classics. I picked up an old favorite, Jane Eyre.

My mother Regina didn't object to my friends so long as they lived quietly within the covers of books. Jane had been my companion from childhood. Opening the pages at random, I found young Jane suffering from cold and hunger at her terrible boarding school. I wished that I could give her a warm bowl of oatmeal.

Chapter Thirteen

the arduous demands of country life

I awoke to someone sharply rapping on my bedroom door and heard Edna bark, "Enough lollygagging, young lady! Time to get up." The clock said seven-fifteen.

I crawled out of bed, grabbing a robe on the way, and opened the door. "For future reference, at what awful hour does lollygagging begin?"

"Seven a.m. You've had a full fifteen minutes of it. Help me get breakfast." She left before I could counter that according to my sources, primarily P. G. Wodehouse novels, guests at country houses lounged indolently before arising to enjoy a bath drawn by servants. I quickly showered and dressed in a skirt and blouse, regretting that my clothing still hung loosely on me.

Edna judged me sufficiently competent to make toast. Sam and Winnie came downstairs grinning and effusing wildly about Previous toast. Imagine how they'd respond to waffles.

After breakfast, Winnie said she wanted to check my vitals. She put her stethoscope to my heart and told me to breathe deeply and exhale slowly. She took my pulse, blood pressure, and temperature. When Winnie went into her doctor mode, she seemed far more adult.

"You are a somber girl," I told her.

She laughed, surprised. "Do you think so?" She was putting her medical equipment into her bag.

"Are you worried about my condition?"

"A little." Her eyes searched my face as if she was trying to make a decision. "I'm betting you'll be fine and I'm hoping that you'll overcome the infection. We call it an infection, but it doesn't act like a virus or retrovirus or bacteria. We have no idea of outcomes because experimenting on other humans could never be ethically condoned."

Perhaps I'd be able to ask informed questions if I'd taken a human bio class instead of "The High-heel Shoe in Post-WWI Literature: End of Innocence."

"Anything else on your mind?" I said, trying to encourage her to tell me more.

Her pale eyebrows knit toward each other. "If the infection remains in your system, you'll be an outsider, always having to be careful with others, knowing you'll never fit in."

"Doc, I'm already there."

"You joke, but what about marriage? If we intermarry, it's a huge risk to have children with our partners. The infant mortality rate is about twenty-five percent. Of course, those are old numbers from the nineteenth century. We learned not to try."

"At least you have each other," I said.

"Yes, at least we have that," she said with a small smile. "But our fertility rates are extremely low."

I realized that I had misinterpreted her comment about fertility when she'd examined me at the clinic.

"Actually," she said, sighing heavily for such a slight girl, "Oswald and I were both screened and matched for fertility. No, don't look at me like that! It's our own dating service and children are important to both of us." She ran her fingers through her hair and said, "Don't forget to buy those supplements and get lots of rest."

I wanted fresh air, so I put on sunscreen and a hat and went outside. I returned from a walk to find Sam watching Ernie and Oswald mark off the postholes for the fence. Sam was neatly dressed in khakis and a polo shirt, while Oswald and Ernie wore plaid work shirts and jeans. Sam was the first to notice me and he said, "Hi, Mil."

"Fellers," I replied.

Ernie shook his bottom in my general direction, which I thought was pretty dang funny. Oswald looked up at me, but his expression was that of a man who already has a perfect fiancee.

I kicked the soil underfoot. It was compacted, but still damp from the winter's rains and would be easy to work. "This is such a beautiful place," I said.

"Yes," said Oswald, as if I had been talking to him. "I'd like to do some landscaping, but I get busy. The animals seem to take up all my spare time.""Yeah," said Ernie. "Doc here did a great job with Stella. I thought she might need antibiotics, but he made a poultice and the swelling's gone down." How sad for Oswald that even Ernie humored his veterinarian fantasies.

Sam said, "My grandmother's in the family room if you'd like to discuss your ideas for the garden."

"Sure," I said as enthusiastically as if I'd just found out I was being given a pop quiz in astrophysics.

Edna was drinking coffee and watching a television show set in a courtroom.

"Edna," I said, "I thought you'd want to help plan out the garden."

"Young lady, you fail to grasp my utter lack of interest in the subject."

"Only dreadful people don't like gardens," I said, thinking of my mother Regina, who thought soil was dirty.

Edna deigned to let me sit beside her and sketch a plan. She even volunteered, "I've always liked lilacs."

We spent an hour devising a plant list, and every now and then Edna would let out a bit of tantalizing information, such as, "I went to a midnight ball that was decorated completely in white and black flowers. White tuberoses and hyacinths, black tulips and pansies."

I chattered about the garden in hopes that she would tell me more, but she finally said, "If you don't stop talking, I'm going to slit my wrists."

"Don't encourage me, Edna," I said. "Do you have any landscape books around? Just so I can show you pictures?" I asked.

"Will this hell never end? Do I look like someone who knows about books? Where are books usually kept?"

Pleased that I now had an excuse to snoop, I sashayed into the study. Luckily, no one was there. I skimmed quickly through the titles on the shelves. There was a lot of nonfiction, especially true-life adventures, with a mix of respectable biographies and autobiographies.

On the bottom shelf, there were books about wine country gardens. I lugged three oversized volumes to the desk and settled in the cushy leather chair. I opened the books, composed my face into a scholarly expression, and slowly eased out the middle desk drawer. Pens, paper clips, a packet of Juicy Fruit gum, and business cards from local merchants. I took a piece of gum and chewed it with loud snaps, like a bad girl in a gangster movie.

The drawer on the right held files. Remodeling bids, receipts, and indecipherable spreadsheets. I pulled the drawer out further and there at the very back were folders titled "CACA" and "De Los Santos, Milagro."

Flipping through the CACA folder, I saw photos of Sebastian and other clean-cut ail-American men. The jargon-laden documents seemed to be internal strategy pieces and referred to "desired outcomes." There was an itinerary of Sebastian's literary tour as well as an organizational chart. Sebastian was on the fourth tier. His father was in the third tier and his grandfather was in the second. The top tiers were blank.

A sheet listed CACA's political activities, which included fear-mongering legislation that would financially benefit their consortium. In college, Sebastian had been disdainful of materialism as a guiding principle.

I opened the file with my name. It contained my F.U. transcript and photos of me from various public sources. There was my shabby employment history and dismal financial report. The file even contained a copy of the newsletter I had written for the nutritional supplements company.

The worst thing in the folder was a photo of Sebastian and me. It had been taken at an English department party and published in their quarterly. I had been midway through my junior year; Sebastian had been a senior. We'd been inseparable since we'd met the year before. In the photo, we were leaning against each other, his arm over my shoulders as we sat on a ledge, his head resting against mine, his mouth open in laughter that I could still hear. I was smiling as if I held the world on a string.

In an instant, I reverted to the girl who had been dazzled by Sebastian, a beautiful boy who rendered powerless all the criticism from my mother Regina-that I was too clumsy, too noisy, too peculiar, too garish, too inexcusably alive. When Sebastian would listen attentively to my musings or surprise me with a book of poetry or look at me with those clear azure eyes, I knew that I was special.

Seeing Sebastian at Kathleens had been easier than seeing this photo. I thought I'd reinvented myself as one cool tomato, hobbing where he was nobbing, full of clever zingers and urbane insouciance. But my feelings still hurt from then, from the marvelous boy abandoning me for reasons he would not explain.

How often had I written to him, called him, tried to find out why he had cut me off so completely? I had lived in a dark netherworld for months, waiting for Sebastian, as for Orpheus, to lead me out into the light again.

I hated the vampires for digging up dirt on me, for finding details about my life (many inaccurate) that made me out to be a deluded pea-brained slut who groveled after Sebastian and wrote purple prose in praise of herbal remedies. I was not the sum of these insignificant and distorted parts.

"Milagro."

Sam stood in the doorway. I forgot my plan to pretend that I was reading the landscaping books. "How dare you!" I cried.

"You have no business in those drawers," he said nervously.

"I don't want any business in your drawers!" That came out all wrong, so I tried to fix it by saying, "And you have no business in my drawers! I mean, you have no business prying into my life!" Now everything I said was going to come out with an exclamation mark-I was that furious. "How dare you!"

Sam came closer. "There is no need to shout. We can discuss this civilly."

"Yes, yes, there is a reason to shout! You are the most unconscionable..." I had a lot of other multisyllabic words to hurl at him, but I started choking up. "You have the effrontery to, to, to..." To my embarrassment, I started to cry.

"Mil," Sam said, and approached me like an insane asylum attendant edging toward a particularly unstable patient. "Mil." He put his hand on my shoulder. I jumped up and shook him off.

"You had no right!" I was shuddering with fury and shame.