"But this is her house," she said. "I visited her here before. I know she's back in this country. She left before I did. She doesn't have anywhere else to go."

"She must have sold it," the man said. "You just came from overseas to find her? You didn't call her? Write? But you're American."

"Yes."

Too complicated to explain, Gilman realized. She bent to pick up the suitcase again.

"Are you okay?" the woman asked.

"Where did you come from?" The man frowned.

"Biafra. I mean Nigeria," Gilman mumbled, starting for the door. Now all she wanted was to escape, to find out what happened to Wilton, to think...The man behind her drew in a sudden hiss of breath.

"Wait a minute," he said. "You mean the place in Africa where all the kids were starving to death? We saw that on TV. Walter Cronkite."

Gilman nodded. She took another step toward the door.

"Hey, do you have someplace to go?"

"Yes," she said quickly. "It's okay. Really. I better hurry."

"You sure? Were you in the Peace Corps?"

"No," Gilman said. "Thank you. Good-bye."

She walked fast down the street, turned the corner. She wanted to run. All she could think was that she had to look like she knew where she was supposed to go in case they watched her from Wilton's windows. A few turns and several blocks later she stood once more at the Greyhound Bus Station with its stained and scraped snow mounded in hard lumps along the edges of the parking lot. The cloud cover seemed thicker, darker, threatening more snow. She looked up at the bus waiting there, the casual line of motley folk assembling at the steps. "New York City" the bus said on the front display.

That would have to do.

Finding the Topsfield Massachusetts lawyer Lawrence Sullivan in the phone book proved easy. Calling him did not. Gilman completed all but the final digit then she couldn't make herself finish.

She felt the staring windows by the desk, sensed the little trickle of cold that came in under the sills. This taupe-and-blue motel room felt so empty. Not even a gecko or mouse. Gilman tried to argue herself out of the creeping unease, even fear, that held her back, but she couldn't. Finally she hung up the phone.

There had to be another way. If Wilton weren't making the decisions, who was? Lindsey. Had to be. Gilman looked at the phone in her hotel room. Okay. Worst case scenario. Wilton wasn't miraculously cured.

As soon as she said that to herself she felt a slow tide of anger rise, anger at herself as much as anyone else. Why had she believed that Wilton was all right?

She should've known better. Remember Wilton's condition when Gilman said goodbye to her in Lagos? God, what a fucking deluded fool she was. She'd only believed that Wilton was cured because she wanted it to be true. She wanted someone to go home to. She imagined Wilton waiting here for her, patient and forgiving, the friend for all time. Someone who would understand everything, with whom even silence would have comforted.

But Lindsey sent Wilton to America, doubtless because she saw Wilton as a potential danger, and with Sandy dead, there wasn't anyone to stop Lindsey from putting Wilton away. Far away. If she were Lindsey Kinner, what would she have done with a liability?

Chapter 90: Gilman.

June 1970 Boston, MA, USA "Dr. Lowenstein? I'm Katherine Gilman. My father knew Doctor Jacobs, who recommended you..."

"Glad to meet at last. Your letters caught my interest."

He was a large-boned fellow of considerable height, with a comfortable face, everything about it exaggerated. Big nose, big mouth and extremely blue eyes. He'd allowed his balding to progress with no attempt to halt or conceal the inevitable. She liked that. Now he listened attentively to her prepared tale, while he folded and unfolded his carpenter's hands on the orderly desktop. She'd given background in their correspondence, and now she limited what she said.

"So you wish my help in making inquiries?"

"If you doubt my legitimacy, you can check my record with Bellevue and the International Red Cross," Gilman said. She regretted her tone as soon as the words left her mouth.

"You recognize the problems?" Lowenstein didn't show any reaction to her manner. "If you locate your friend in a hospital or care unit she'll probably not be fit for release. Also you'd have quite a tussle persuading the authorities to release her to your custody. What facilities do you have to offer her?"

"Yours. I want to place her with you. I know you run an excellent private hospital for psychiatric patients."

"If she is a patient. If she hasn't deliberately disappeared on her own and by her own choice."

Gilman had a sudden terrifying vision of Wilton on the streets, bundled up in someone else's dirty rags, picking rat leavings from a garbage can. Gilman couldn't allow that to be true. She couldn't bear it. She saw herself plucking at vagrants' elbows, searching forever through the icy streets of Chicago or Boston or New York.

"If. And if she's in a custodial institution, you know what they're like even better than I do. Anything you have to offer will be an immense improvement," Gilman said, "and every day will damage her, until we save her."

"Save her. What would you suggest we do if she has a legal guardian who opposes her removal?"

"You're the specialist. You could inquire about her case as one that accidentally came under your attention. You could be intrigued for professional reasons. You could write to the person who's telling her lawyer what to do."

"And why should you interfere?"

"I've said it before. She's my friend and was once my patient. We went through a lot together. I told you the basics. You saw Biafra on television," Gilman said. There must be some way to pull this man out of his rote channels.

Then Dr. Lowenstein nodded. "That's all right, Dr. Gilman. I simply needed to hear your answer to that question in person. Let me think it over. Shall I call you tomorrow afternoon?"

Gilman hesitated before she agreed. Again, she knew it was enough of a pause for Lowenstein to notice, but too late for her to hide it. He was going to refuse to take the case when he called. She hoped she hid her sense of disappointment when she mouthed the necessary polite closing.

She crossed the room and turned the doorknob, then Lowenstein coughed.

"Doctor," he said. "Permit me to take you to dinner. I'd like to know more than your letter told me, have some idea what the subtext is here. Let me call my wife, and I'll tell her where I am in case something comes up at our hospital."

"Why would anyone give up a doctor's life in America to go to Africa and hang on through a civil war?" Lowenstein asked. He lifted his glass of red wine.

A small restaurant, homey. Gilman could smell roast chicken, maybe beef.

"I'm no Peace Corps type." Gilman knew how defensive she sounded. Not good. Relax, act simple and earnest and above all honest.

"At the very least, there's ambiguity," Lowenstein said. "I see it in your face, have from the start when you say her name. Wilton. You name her by her surname, like you can't deal with her sex. But that's not the real issue, is it?"

Lowenstein's expression of concentration told Gilman he moved into psychiatrist mode. He looked so normal, steady, older, comfortable as a familiar piece of furniture. Must help him a lot in his profession. She needed him to cure Wilton. She would do anything to get him on her side, wouldn't she? Even talk?

"Having fun analyzing me?" Gilman looked into the deep center of her wine, weighing her options. Maybe she could say enough to convince Lowenstein she wasn't crazy. Wasn't under some compulsion that would bite him later if he helped her.

"Wilton wasn't responsible for what happened to me. She gave me opportunity, that's all. I wanted to visit Africa. Hospital work in the States depressed me. Bored me." Gilman said. "I thought about marriage and children. But God, I knew so many children who came from that kind of thought. Bandages on discontent, that's what Wilton used to say in college."

"You went to the same college?"

"Yes, four of us, Wilton, Lindsey, Sandy and I came out of Wellesley, same dorm. We all went to Nigeria once we had our professional credentials."

She could tell from Lowenstein's posture that he listened. She looked down at the red fragments of candlelight refracted through her glass.

"I wanted to be swept away. A romance bigger than any man could offer. I knew Nigeria's attractions might be dangerous, but that was the relish. How could Wilton predict the future that slammed us? You've seen my notes on her. You know whatever she did, she paid for it."

"What was it like?" Lowenstein said. "I have no idea. I only remember the ads begging for aid after the war began. Starving babies, legs like kindling."

"Oh God, it was a place where you could walk through a marketplace and hear Beethoven played against Perry Como and honkey tonk. At full volume. People grabbing at you calling 'Onocha!' like you were a long-lost best friend."

"What does ono-whatever mean?"

"White man," Gilman felt the smile on her face. "Those Biafrans, the Igbo, were merchants born. Every day filled with passionate rejoicing and passionate terror, a land where grown men wailed like babies and soaked their shirts with tears when Mother died. But you gotta remember, Lowenstein, that I'm talking about the Eastern region of Nigeria and the Igbo and Ibibio. My people. The part that became Biafra. The other three Regions were as different as Atlanta is from New York or Tucson."

She took a sip of wine.

"How can I make it into a sensible story?" She looked up to see if he sat back or let his attention wander. No, she hadn't lost him. "In Nigeria there were four major regions, the enormous Muslim North with lots of nomadic tribes, the other three regions stacked under it. The West, traditional and full of Yoruba who are formal in their manners, and the cockeyed optimistic Igbo in the Mid-West and the East, where I lived. Those Igbo were my kind of people. But you asked how I got there. I went on a visit to see Wilton. For fun.

"On the third day of my visit Wilton oh-so-casually arranged for me to see a hospital. I had a premonition, hesitated, felt Wilton's eyes on me. If she'd been sure of herself, I wouldn't have gone in. Now I wonder if that was acting too. She threw down a gauntlet, and I picked it up. Perhaps for the hell of it, perhaps because I couldn't separate my self-respect from her opinion of me. I went in.

"God, what I saw in that hospital. At the time the ignorance, the suffering shocked me. Of course what came later, during the war, trivializes that."

She fought for the right way to say this, a phrasing that wouldn't trigger too much of the shrink in Lowenstein.

"I knew I could do miracles. I bit down orders, bursting to roll up my sleeves. I was perishing of frustration when a young Nigerian doctor came up to say welcome and asked if I'd examine a patient and consult. Postsurgical complications in a tubercular patient."

She managed to smile at Lowenstein as if to say, wasn't I a funny young thing? But pain splintered her heart at the remembered glory of the moment.

"I'm sure now Wilton arranged this to set her hook. Africa's hook. It was too much--the admiration of the doctor, the gratitude of the patient. The pride in Wilton's face, all for treating a cryptic infection. I even enjoyed Wilton's half-hidden smile of triumph. And I forgot that being a god is heartbreaking twenty-four-hour-a-day slavery, even without war to make it a losing battle with hell."

Was that doubt in Lowenstein's face? She could show she was grown up now. She'd examined her own flaws and come to terms. No leftover issues. No delusions of grandeur.

"My motives weren't altruistic," Gilman said. "I've thought it all over, faced what was true and what wasn't. Vanity got me in, and vanity kept me there."

"Vanity," Lowenstein said. "And a need for Wilton's approval. What about your parents? Did they agree?"

"They thought I was nuts, but remember my father was a famed plastic surgeon who called me a fool for heading toward internist. No money in that, he used to say. Waste of his investment."

"Should we eat, or would you rather drink yourself into a stupor?"

He startled her and when she stared across the table at him, he laughed.

"I may be old and settled, but Doctor Gilman, I'm not a complete stick in the mud. I know you're afraid I'm going to analyze you in some way you find threatening, but though I'm curious and would like to hear what you'd say drunk, I'm also hungry."

Hungry. Like a trigger, the word made her feel the gnaw of her empty stomach.

"Yes," she said, "I'm always hungry. I can't seem to get enough."

"Not surprising," Lowenstein said, "after the years you spent starving in Biafra."

"You know, Wilton told me to get out. She cared for my safety."

"Now you return her care."

"Yes. How could that be wrong?"

Lowenstein studied the menu. A ploy, she felt certain. He had the air of a man who'd been to this place so many times he could order from memory.

"Will you take this on?"

His blue eyes had a worried cast, but maybe that came with the job.

"Yes, I will. First we find her. Did you say you had a position in New York?"

"Mostly ER shifts. Bellevue. I get consulted on parasites on lucky days."

He didn't need to know that she'd stooped to calling one of her father's old friends to get herself a paying position. No need to bother with information that would give him another Freudian tag for her.

Steak. She didn't care how tough it might be, but she wanted a steak, and potatoes on the side. Nigeria hadn't been a place for potato farming, even before the war, and suddenly all she could see before her imagination was a plate of crusted home fries with well-sauteed onions, a few grains of salt on the browned surfaces. Her stomach growled and she caught Lowenstein's amused glance.

Chapter 91: Wilton.

October 1970 Norwich, MA. USA Purgatory was cold. Strangers everywhere, moaning, rambling and wanting, and bright lights hurt her eyes. She slept or woke, and time did not pass because nothing changed. No one here made peace with God. His absence was all she knew.

She came awake because of the sun. She'd been standing at a window, leaning against the mesh of metal that pressed against her shoulder and arm, when it came to her that her hand and arm had changed color to a brightness. Colors. Yellow and white against the gray and pink. She did not want to move lest this change fade, but it did anyway, slipping away like feathers of color on the wind.

She began over the next few days to draw a sense of what she was and how. Where, took much longer. Who, was not possible. She dared not talk to anyone, even if they might have answered her.

Not a prison. This was something else. A punishment but not a prison.

It seemed she would never be done with waking. She came to herself again and again, with blanks between that didn't even hold dreams. Sometimes her hands would hurt and she would look down at them and try to peel off the red paint that spread from the fingers onto the palms and backs, but if she did not keep it secret, people would come and bind her hands, sometimes both arms, so that she had to stumble about in a cocoon of grayish white that held her upper body stiff. They would put her in her bed and strap her there when it pleased them. She hated their unclean hands upon her and showed her teeth and they hit her.

Words came back in clumps. She found them first clotting then running like water in her mouth and she had to bite her tongue to keep them in. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth...fourscore and seven...it was a dark and stormy night. Something out there go and get it." Ah, she knew that one was true. Because if you don't go, it will come for you.

Don't tell, or something will happen. Don't tell or they will find you. Don't tell.

She woke from a vision of Sandy's copper shining hair and tears ran on her face and into her mouth, salty and cool. She could feel the memory of the snake's smooth coils in her arms. There was no ram in the bushes. Lindsey still lived. Gilman still lived. Sandy was insufficient sacrifice. If she could go out from this place and find her friends, she could complete her work. All these little frantic birds trembling in her hands.

Here she could abide. Hide. Let nothing change. God could not hate her for not completing her sacrifice if she were trapped here.