screamed, a mighty burst of energy that exploded in her mind, spewing her rage into each of the tiny sensors that monitored every portion of her brain.
George Engersol and Hildie Kramer watched the monitor above the tank that held Amy Carlson’s brain with a combination of fascination and awe.
The graphs seemed to have exploded, and colors blazed over the screen like fireworks, reds and purples bursting into greens and oranges, wave after wave of hues mixing together, separating, then dying away, only to be replaced with new patterns, patterns that weren’t patterns at all, but graphic representations of the turmoil within Amy’s mind.
“What is it?” Hildie breathed. “What’s happening to her?”
Engersol’s eyes remained fixed on the monitor as he watched the results of his years of research.
“I think she just figured out where she is and what’s happening to her,” he said. “The question is whether she’ll survive it, or whether it will drive her insane.”
Hildie frowned. “But what about Adam? He survived, didn’t he?”
Engersol’s lips curled into a smile that was totally devoid of warmth. “But there’s a difference, isn’t there? Adam knew exactly what was going to happen to him, and where he would be when he woke up.”
He was silent for a moment, then spoke again. “And of course Adam wanted to go. Amy didn’t.”
22
Margaret Carlson wondered how much longer she could hold herself together. She was sitting on a chair in Hildie Kramer’s office, having ignored Hildie’s gesture toward the sofa when the housemother had ushered her in five minutes ago. Frank had disdained the sofa as well, pacing nervously around the office, finally standing at the window, his back to the room, as if by refusing to face Hildie, he could refuse to face what she was telling them as well. Margaret, though, had chosen to perch on the edge of a straight-backed chair, her spine held perfectly erect, as if the act of holding her body in complete control could cause her to master her emotions as well.
She was on the verge of hysteria.
She knew it, for all around her the tendrils of reaction to the news she had heard by telephone early this morning kept reaching out to her, curling around her, drawing her toward an abyss of grief from which she wasn’t certain she could ever emerge.
Until now she’d battled the hysteria by rejecting the facts, telling herself that it had to be some kind of mistake, that Amy couldn’t possibly be dead.
Throughout the long ride to the airport, inching along through the morning rush-hour traffic along the San Diego Freeway, she had clung to that single thought.
It’s a mistake. It’s not Amy at all. It’s someone else, another little girl with red hair.
On the plane to Monterey she had sat silently next to Frank, her hand clutching his, silencing him every time he spoke with a tightening of her fingers, until she could feel her nails digging into his flesh.
A shark attack.
Frank had told her what they had found on the beach, for immediately after talking to Hildie Kramer, he had called the Barrington Police Department, insisting on whatever details they might have.
Mutilated.
The body that had washed up had been mutilated almost beyond recognition. They didn’t know yet exactly how Amy had died.
“Ask them if they could be wrong!” Margaret had insisted as she hung close to Frank while he talked to the police, picking up the barest facts from his responses to whatever the man on the other end was saying. “Ask them if it’s possible there’s a mistake!”
They had reluctantly agreed that there was perhaps the slimmest possibility that the body wasn’t Amy’s. It was to that possibility that Margaret had clung, refusing to accept that her daughter—the only child she had, the only child she ever could have, since the cancer last year—was gone.
Now Hildie Kramer had destroyed that last, thin hope, telling her that there was no longer any doubt that the little girl who had been delivered up by the sea that morning was Amy. And yet the hysteria she had been battling for almost four hours was still at bay as a strange numbness began to spread through Margaret’s body, beginning somewhere in the pit of her stomach and spreading outward until a bloodless chill seemed to invade even her fingertips. “How?” she breathed. “How did it happen?”
Hildie Kramer shifted in her chair, carefully arranging her matronly features into the expression she habitually wore for sessions like this, when she had to project the feeling