Electric with this insight, I realized the time had come to learn more about satanism. Without knowledge, I could do nothing. But where? How? I knew there was nowhere in Pecking to find the kind of in-depth information I was going to want on satanism. Moreover, I wasn't sure I wanted to call attention to myself by asking for such material locally. The only place I could think to start was with the bookstore Hugh had mentioned up in the city. So I resolved to get up early and make the four-hour journey northward in the morning. Assuaged by having found a course of action, I was at last able to fall asleep.

Hugh came with me to the bookstore, and I was grateful for his company. A good deal of my bravado had left me by then. What had seemed an impeccably sound theory in the middle of the night seemed a bit silly in daylight, and I was feeling decidedly sheepish about going into the bookstore. I would have been quite comfortable inquiring about a book on astrology or even something a bit kookier, like channeling, but satanism went right off my kook scale.

I didn't need to worry much, however, being with someone like Hugh, who seemed able to discuss anything with anyone, often in loud, ringing tones. "Hey, Brenda!" he called out when we entered the store. "Remember me? Yeah, Hugh! Remember?"

The girl behind the counter looked up. It wasn't clear if she did remember, but she smiled in a friendly fashion.

"This is the one I was telling you about," Hugh said to me. "Brenda's the witch."

This wasn't too hard to imagine. Brenda had waist-long, black hair and pale, unmade-up skin. Although she was young-probably no more than in her early twenties-she wore relics of sixties hippy fashions. I eyed her; she eyed me. We both smiled cautiously.

"This is my girlfriend, Torey. She's looking for stuff on the occult. You know, satanism and all that. I said this was the best place to come."

Brenda brightened at this, clearly taking it as a compliment. "Yeah, okay. Over here. I'll show you the section where we keep all those books. You been into this sort of thing long? Or are you just getting started? I could recommend you some good books. You ever read Crowley's stuff?"

I shook my head. "No, I don't really know much about it."

"Well, Hugh's right, you know. You have come to the right place. We've got this shelf and this shelf and over here." She was a pretty girl in a wan sort of way. As I watched her wend her way among the bookshelves, I wondered what being a witch meant to her.

"If I ..." I paused a moment. "Well, say if I wanted to meet someone who's into this kind of thing ... Would I be able to find someone in the city?"

She searched my face, then gave a faint lift of her shoulders. "Yeah, probably." There was an undercurrent to her words, on the nature of a challenge, and I knew I'd have to prove my interest in some way, if I wanted to pursue that direction. I didn't really. I was only curious about how plentiful and easy to find these groups might be.

"Basically, I just want something that can give me the facts. I don't know anything about it, other than what I've gotten from the press, and I thought I'd like to be better informed."

"That's a good idea," Brenda replied. "It's not the way everyone says. Most of what people read is made up by the newspapers. Like, it sells newspapers, you know? But satanism's not anything bad. It's a kind of religion, like, and people ought to have the freedom to believe whatever their hearts say is right for them."

We browsed for more than an hour in the store. Never having been inside such a place, I found it very interesting, and the scope of the books took me by surprise. In the end, I settled on what looked like a type of primer on satanism and on a lengthy account with several pictures that told of a series of murders thought to be carried out by a network of satanists on the West Coast.

Afterward, Hugh and I retired to a nearby bistro for lunch. He knew why I had been looking and had taken a lively interest in browsing through the occult bookstore. Now, however, he paused pensively over his sandwich.

"Do you really believe in the devil?" he asked.

"I don't think that actually matters much. It's whether the people surrounding Jadie believe he exists."

"But do you?"

I shrugged. "I believe in evil. I don't really think there's an external entity, I suppose, but I don't know. It's the kind of thing I keep an open mind on."

Hugh turned his attention to his french fries, eating them one by one.

"Why do you ask?" I inquired.

"There're a lot of people for whom the devil's a very real thing. You get into this too much, and you're not going to have any trouble finding support, especially in a small place like Pecking. You get in some of these more conservative churches, the ones with the fundamentalist views. and they're already seeing occultists behind every rock. And you go into one of these little backwoods police stations making the kinds of allegations you're coming up with and they're going to go wild. Sitting a hundred years coping with parking tickets and drunks and something like this comes along, they're going to leap into your arms. Man, this is interesting."

"Good gracious, Hugh, the last thing I'd want would be to make some kind of media circus out of this. It's not a moral crusade. I've gotten caught up in something I don't even believe in, and I'm still not sure I do. But it's Jadie ..."

Hugh nodded his head thoughtfully. "Yeah, I know," he said. "But be sure and listen to what you're saying, Tor. It's all right to go making jokes with Brenda down at the bookstore. She's sweet, but she hasn't got the brains God gave a goose, and so you expect it out of someone like that, but ... not out of someone like you. I mean, listen to what you've cooked up, for Pete's sake. It sounds like the plot to a bad novel."

I stayed over with Hugh, planning to drive back on Sunday. On impulse, we decided to go ice skating early Saturday evening. Afterward, still in our jeans, we risked going into a fancy Mexican restaurant for chimichangas and then took in a movie. Thriving on the change, I enjoyed myself tremendously and Jadie was eclipsed.

Once back in Hugh's apartment, however, I was unable to keep away from the books I'd bought. Just a few chapters, I pleaded, and then I'd turn the light out. Exhausted from our activities, all Hugh wanted was sleep, so I picked the thicker of the two books up and went out into the living room to read. Stoking the embers in the fireplace back into flames, I added another couple of logs and settled into the armchair.

The premise of the book was that a series of murders committed in various locations around the West were not isolated incidents but the work of a large, loose network of Satan worshippers. The first section dealt in appallingly graphic detail with the murder of a young woman, whose body was found in a church. Revulsion is not an adequate word for the feeling that came over me while reading. The violence, alone, would have been enough to put me off in normal circumstances, but this went far beyond that. I felt dirty having the book in my hands. Closing it, I set it on the table beside me, but found I still felt tainted by it. A need to destroy the book overpowered me.

Rising from the chair, I pulled the fireguard back and grabbed the book with the full intention of throwing it in. I paused. Hey ho. Was this me? The rational, more down-to-earth side of myself struggled forward to remind me that I'd paid almost five dollars for this thing just that afternoon and had read less than a hundred pages. Intellect, however, didn't stand much of a chance. Burn it I did. It was the only way of relieving that need to get it away from me.

By Monday I'd come back to my senses. Pulling aside the kitchen curtains while I was eating my breakfast, I gazed out over the Pecking rooftops. It was a dull, mid-November morning, heavily overcast and absolutely still. From the height of my attic window, I could see past the bare trees, past the houses to the plains beyond. They stretched away, yellow-brown, until they met the sky. Devils and devil worship, murder and mayhem all seemed a long way removed from Pecking, bathed in pale gray morning light.

Now, in daylight, I was having difficulties giving credence to the idea of something as outlandish as occultism being involved in Jadie's problems. I hadn't needed Hugh's reminder of the willingness of certain groups to jump at proof of the supernatural. As I sat eating my breakfast and studying the view from the window, my thoughts were drawn back to another time, another place, and another Devil's child. He was twelve, his name was David, and he suffered from a chronic and very debilitating form of childhood schizophrenia. I was in a small town then, too, in an area of strong, fundamental religious views, which were shared by many of my colleagues on the staff; and I remembered encountering David's physical education teacher on one occasion outside the school. "There's no point in doing therapy," he'd said. "There's not much any of us can do for David until he accepts Jesus. But our whole church is praying that the Lord will take pity on him and cast his demons out." And I remembered going back to class the next day, to David, who often fell writhing to the floor when in the grip of his hallucinations, and it was easy to believe demons possessed him. It was easier still to want the Lord to take over the back-breaking, heart-wrenching job of helping David. Was that the case with Jadie, too? Was I looking to shift the responsibility elsewhere, to free myself from the hopelessness of working with a psychotic child?

On playground duty, we worked in threes, one teacher at the back of the school where the playing field was, one on the side where the long span of asphalt ran alongside the building, and one in front where the swings, monkey bars, and sandbox were. I usually supervised this last area when it was my turn at duty. There weren't any regulations as to where the children could play, but they tended to divide themselves roughly by age, so that I usually had the youngest on my patch. Even by seven or eight, most usually gravitated around to the side of the building to play ball games or hopscotch.

On Thursday of that week, it was my turn out on the playground, so morning recess found me leaning against the wall of the building, where it was warmest. It was a pleasant day for that late in the year. Weak sunshine shone through high, diffuse clouds, and although it was cold enough for gloves, it was not bitter.

Most of the period passed peacefully. Jadie and Jeremiah were out of sight, around the corner of the building. Reuben and Philip were together on the swings, and Brucie sat slumped in the sandbox, being solicitously entertained by a kindergartner. I stood alone, scanning the kids, my attention not focused on much of anything. Then, all of a sudden, a great caterwaul rose up from the vicinity of the monkey bars. Pushing myself off the wall, I went to investigate.

"Amber Ekdahl's hurt herself!" one kindergartner yelled. "She's got blood all over."

I pushed through the throng of children to find Amber wailing, hands over her mouth, blood flowing through her fingers.

"She fell off the monkey bars from way up there," one little boy said, gestering. "She should of been more careful, huh?"

"Come on, lovey," I said and tried to encourage Amber to her feet. She wouldn't budge. Finally, I pulled her up through the bars and carried her into the small first-aid room adjacent to the front office.

The injury to Amber's face was a lot less serious than it had first appeared. There was a nasty scrape across her nose, a cut beneath it, and quite a large cut on her upper lip, but nothing was broken, and the cuts all responded well to a cold, wet cloth. Once away from the hysteria of the other children, Amber calmed down immediately, taking the cloth from me and holding it in place without any further fuss. This matter-of-fact response to the injury impressed me.

"You're being very brave about all this," I said. "I bet it hurt."

She nodded.

"You've hardly cried at all, and you seem to know just what to do. That's good thinking for someone who's just six."

"I am brave," she garbled through the cloth.

"Yes, I can tell."

"I'm like She-Ra, Princess of Power. She's the bravest girl in the whole universe."

I smiled down at her.

"She's always beating Hordak. He's the evil person. And that's why I like her. He tries to get her, but she always wins."

"Is that your favorite TV program?"

Amber nodded enthusiastically.

I took the cloth from her and rinsed it out before handing it back. "Do you watch much TV?"

"Yeah. I like TV."

I eyed her. "Do you ever watch 'Dallas'?"

Her brow furrowed, then a slight shake of the head. "I think that might be a grown-ups' program. Mostly I watch cartoons."

"Just wondered. Jadie seems to watch it."

"Jadie watches lots of junk. My mom always yells at her."

I had perched Amber on the tabletop while I cleaned her face, and now she sat, swinging her legs back and forth in a relaxed fashion. Taking down the bloodied cloth, she examined it. Her lip had already swollen to twice its usual size.

"I'm a little curious," I said, trying to keep my tone conversational. "Does your sister's friend Tashee come over to your house very often?"

Amber's eyes went wide and she regarded me oddly, then she smiled. "Tashee's not real. Didn't you know that? Tashee's just pretend, someone Jadie talks to."

"A make-believe friend? She's not a real little girl? Does Jadie have any other friends like that?"

Amber shrugged. "Jadie don't act like everyone else. My mom says its 'cause she got borned the wrong way."

"I see." Inspecting her face one last time, I judged all the bleeding to be stopped, so I took the cloth from her. "Well, there you go. I think we have you fixed."

"But what about my knee? I hurt my knee, too. Look. See? It's blooded right through my pants."

In the mayhem caused by her facial injuries, I'd completely forgotten about her knee. Lifting her down from the table, I bent and attempted to pull the leg of her rather too-small jogsuit Torey," Lucy said, her voice almost plaintive up, but I couldn't get it high enough without hurting her. "I think you're going to need to pull your pants down from the top."

"I'm not supposed to take my clothes off at school. I'm always supposed to ask my mom about these things first."

"Amber, I'm sure it's quite all right in this instance. I can't get to your knee otherwise." I reached over and pulled the pants down myself.

In doing so, I exposed a faint mark on her skin, partially obscured by the waistband of her underpants. "What's this?" I asked in surprise. Putting a finger out, I gently eased the band down. The mark was a pale red and raised, a healing scar, and it was familiar-a cross with a circle around it. "What is this?"

"X marks the spot."

Chapter Twenty.

I go dead calm in crises. No matter how frightened or emotionally wrought I may be feeling immediately prior to it, the moment a situation pushes over into a state of genuine emergency, I'm flooded with an internal anesthetic. With it comes a sense of time winding down to move very slowly, each moment taking on sharp, freeze-frame clarity, and I get a faint sensation of being outside myself.

When I first saw the mark on Amber's abdomen, a rush of adrenaline overtook me, making my ears roar and my heart rush. Here it was, the concrete evidence to substantiate Jadie's claims. A moment of abject terror hit, as it came home to me just how horrifying this case was likely to be, how I was going to be right in the middle of it through all the police action, the courts, the social service intervention, and the undoubted media attention such matters attract, and how from this moment on, I would not be able to turn back the clock and uninvolve myself. Then came the calm. The noise in my ears faded; I could no longer feel my pounding heart. Amber took on unusual clarity.

"I think we need Mr. Tinbergen to come in here."

At once, Amber began to cry.

"No, it's all right, sweetheart. You haven't done anything wrong. I just think we better have Mr. Tinbergen take a look at this."

"What for?" she asked plaintively.

Then came confusion. Recess was over, so I had to make arrangements for Lucy to take my group temporarily. I had to stop and tell Alice that Amber was in the office, and all the while we were looking for Mr. Tinbergen.

At last Mr. Tinbergen was located in the boiler room with Mr. O'Banyon. Back in the small first-aid room, I closed the door behind him and then approached Amber. "This has been put here deliberately," I said. "It's healing over, but someone has intentionally carved this symbol on her."

"How did this happen, Amber?" Mr. Tinbergen asked.

"I don't know," she whimpered.

"Oh, come on, honey. I can't think you really don't know."

This reduced her to a wail.

"'X marks the spot,' that's what she said." I turned to Mr. Tinbergen.

He smiled in a warm, fatherly fashion and leaned forward to push wayward strands of hair from Amber's face. "No one's going to be angry with you, sweetheart. We're here to help you, so it's very important that we know what's happened."

"I'm not supposed to tell," Amber said through her tears.

"I'm sure it'll be perfectly all right to tell Torey and me. Come on now, sweetheart."

Amber cut a pathetic figure. Like Jadie, she was attractive in a rather atavistic way, with her long, uncombed hair and her dark-lashed eyes, however, her paler coloring gave her a washed-out appearance and her ill-fitting clothes made her look less the untamed creature Jadie often seemed and more simply uncared for. Now, lumbered with the scratched, bloodied nose and a ballooning upper lip, she looked like a war orphan.

"Why are you not supposed to tell?" I asked. "Has someone warned you not to?"

There was a long pause. Amber cautiously daubed her streaming nose, but apparently it hurt too much, because she took the tissue away and let it run. Mr. Tinbergen and I stood, tense, alert, and silent.

At last Amber nodded. "My mama did."

"Why is that?"

"'Cause my sister done this. 'Cause my sister took one of the knives in the kitchen and cut me with it."

"Jadie did that?" I asked, stunned.

Amber nodded. "And my mom says if we don't keep good care of Jadie when she does awful things, they're gonna come and take her away. She said I shouldn't ever tell what kind of things she does." Amber dissolved into tears again. "'Cause if she gets tooken away, it's gonna be my fault."

Mr. Tinbergen looked over at me to see my assessment of this matter. I widened my eyes to convey my own surprise at this unexpected turn of events.

"Please take off your shirt," Mr. Tinbergen said, and when Amber did, he thoroughly examined her back and arms, looking for evidence of other marks. There was none. He then had her remove her pants; however, aside from the bruised knee and the encircled X, there were no other marks there, either. "I think we need to see Jadie," he said and rose to go get her.

Alone with Amber, I looked at her. "Is that really how you got that mark?"

Warily, she glanced in my direction. "Yes," she said, her voice barely above a whisper.