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Janice wondered if Hoover took ice in his water and decided finally to serve the ice separately. The thought of Russ, upstairs, listening to this strange conversation, brought a fleeting smile to her lips. Somehow Hoover didn’t seem so frightening tonight. He had no doubt been through a very bad experience and was a tortured man, willing to believe in anything. Janice almost felt sorry for him.

When she returned with the tray, Hoover was speaking in a voice charged with passion.

‘The ego in man never dies. It keeps coming back over and over again, having gained in wisdom during each sojourn spent on other planes of being between the incarnations. Therefore, some souls are older in wisdom, have enjoyed more stages of spiritual and intellectual evolution, so that a great teacher may be an older soul than, say, a bricklayer or a savage…’

‘Ummmm, yeah …’ Bill said as Janice put down the tray.

‘I didn’t know if you wanted ice,’ she said unsurely, placing the glass of cubes on the table next to Hoover.

‘No, thanks,’ he said with a quick smile. ‘I take it straight.’

‘What did you do for money, Mr Hoover,’ Bill asked, ‘for sustenance during all this time? I mean, you quit working back in sixty-seven. How did you support yourself during all those years?’

Janice was sure this was one of Harold Yates’ questions.

Hoover finished drinking his water and answered simply. ‘A great deal of money came to me from the death of my wife and daughter. A double indemnity policy amounting to more than two hundred thousand dollars has more than provided for me during these years.’

Bill did a quick mental calculation: At eight and one-half per cent interest, two hundred grand would net him seventeen thou per year, which, if true, was enough to support him on any number of truth searches.

While the money, on the one hand, was abhorrent to me,’ Hoover continued, ‘I did make positive use of some of it. There’s still a great deal left as my needs are very simple.’

‘When did you come to New York?’

‘This year, on the twelfth of July.’

‘And you used a disguise?’

‘Not until I was pretty sure I had … found the right people.’

‘You mean us?’

‘Yes.’

‘How were you sure we were the right people?’

A process of elimination. I had only three real clues: She lived in New York City; her hair was blond; her name was Ivy. That, plus the time of her birth, which had to be soon after Audrey Rose’s death. I went to the boards of health in all five boroughs and checked the birth records. I found six girls who were possibles: two in Queens, one in the Bronx, one in Brooklyn, and two in Manhattan. All had been born within a year of Audrey Rose’s death. But only one was born at the moment of her death. Your daughter.’

His words settled deeply into the atoms of the room. Janice licked her lips, which had suddenly become parched. Bill cleared his throat.

‘Isn’t that a little unusual,’ he ventured, ‘a person coming back so quickly? I mean, I always heard it took … uh … a long time to come back. I mean, people who believe in it, always speak of having lived during the time of Caesar and Davy Crockett, you know? Isn’t it unusual for someone to die one second’ - Bill snapped his fingers - ‘and be born the next second? I mean, you tell me—’

‘In my experience, Mr Templeton, I have found that those who die an early or violent death and are interrupted from experiencing the full opportunities of their mental, physical, and spiritual growth often return sooner than those who die in peace at a ripe old age. Oftentimes a soul may return at the instant of death. In Tibet each Dalai Lama is the immediate incarnation of his predecessor. When a Dalai Lama dies, Tibetan notables immediately begin a search for the new incarnation.’

‘And they always find him?’

‘For five centuries they have never failed.’

‘How do they do it?’

‘By interpreting certain portents. After the thirteenth Dalai Lama died, they placed his body on a throne, facing south. After several days, they found that his face had turned to the east, where curious cloud formations were also seen in the vicinity of Lhasa. High lamas and notables went to all parts of Lhasa in search of the newly born Dalai Lama.’

‘And they found him?’

‘Yes. In the village of Taktser, they found a boy of two, living in humble surroundings. When the leader of the party, Lama Kewtsang Rinpoche, entered the house, the little boy went to him immediately and sat on his lap. Around the lama’s neck was a rosary which had belonged to the thirteenth Dalai Lama. When the child saw it, he recognized it and wanted it. The lama promised to give it to him if he could guess who he was, and the boy said, Sera-aga, which means, ‘A lama of Sera.”

Bill coughed.

‘Okay, so you found your girl. Why the disguise? Why all that Secret Service stuff, following us around, scaring the hell out of us?’

‘I apologize for that,’ Hoover replied with a look of regret. ‘But I had to be sure you were the right people. That Ivy was the right child. The times of death and birth, although pretty remarkable, were still not convincing proof. It might still have been only a coincidence…’

‘And your research convinced you that we were the right people?’

‘Try to understand, Mr Templeton. In the Buddhist belief, death becomes a mere incident in life, a change of scene, a brief journey in which the soul wanders in search of a new life, selecting the parents to-whom it wishes to be born. Audrey Rose would naturally have sought out a life and parents similar to those she knew and loved in her previous life. It was no accident that she chose you. The kind of people you are, the depth of love and understanding, the quality of intellect, the way of life you offered made you the perfect family in which to be reborn.’

‘What if Audrey Rose hadn’t died?’ Bill interjected. What would our daughter have become, an empty shell?’

‘She would have become the receptor of another soul.’

Bill shook his head. ‘You would think, if that were the case, that she’d remember some of her past lives.’

‘Such remembrance would only complicate her present life, Mr Templeton. Hindus consider it tragic if a child remembers a former existence, for this, they believe, signifies an early death.’

Bill heaved a deep sigh, as if catching his second wind.

‘Okay,’ he continued, his mind ferreting among the questions still left to be asked, seeking the proper, logical successor to the last. ‘So you came to New York, and using a disguise, started observing our family…’

‘No, not immediately. As I said, there were others, but for one reason or another they didn’t fit. I started observing your daughter a little over a month ago, and almost at once I began to see little things in Ivy that did indeed remind me of Audrey Rose…’

‘Like what?’

‘The way she walks, for example. Her tendency to get lost in a daydream whenever she walks’. The funny habit of licking her lips just before she starts to speak. Her sudden laugh; the way she throws back her head when she laughs; the gentle sadness in her eyes when something painful occurs - like that day, Mrs Templeton, when you both stopped to help that injured pigeon…’

Janice felt her soul turn white as he went on to describe the myriad, lovely, subtle gestures and qualities that were Ivy’s exclusive property - those rare, tenuous nuances of movement, style, and nature that Janice thought she herself had only been aware of. She was suddenly thankful that Ivy was not around, that she was safely tucked away with Carole downstairs, beyond the proximity of Elliot Hoover’s strange and terrible insight.

‘All these things, these little idiosyncrasies were Audrey Rose’s, Mr Templeton. In so many ways, the two of them are one and the same person.’

‘Do they also resemble each other?’

‘No. It is only the spirit which passes from life to life; the physical you is new with each birth. Here’ - Hoover reached into his pocket and removed his wallet; he carefully extracted a small photograph from its Plasticine container and handed it to Bill - ‘a picture of Audrey Rose, taken about a month before she passed on.’

Bill studied the picture. The face he saw staring back at him was round, flat-featured, and plain. Her hair was straight, light brown, and resembled her father’s, as did her eyes. Bill passed the photograph to Janice, who glanced at it briefly and quickly thrust it back to Bill as if it were something diseased and contagious. Bill offered the photograph back to Hoover, who gingerly reinserted it into its protective covering.

‘Well, Mr Hoover,’ Bill said, flashing his best street smile, ‘we seem to have come to the point where I’m supposed to ask you what it is exactly that you want from us?’

Hoover smiled back. ‘Nothing more or less than you and your wife are prepared to give me.’

‘Well, like what?’ Bill urged. ‘You tell us.’

Hoover’s eyes became distant, serene. ‘The chance to see Ivy occasionally, to watch her grow, to be of help, if needed…’

‘That might be difficult to arrange.’

‘Not if I became your friend. Your neighbour. I intend to settle in New York and take up my professional life once again.’ Hoover saw the stiff lines of resistance on their faces and quickly added, ‘Understand, I’ll make no demands on your time or expect any special privileges or considerations…’

Yeah, sure, Bill thought hotly, in a pig’s ass you won’t.

‘And, of course, Ivy would never know about our … relationship. As I said before, it would be dangerous for her to know…’

Bill held up his hand. ‘Okay, I have a question. Since, by your own admission, your presence does present a danger to Ivy, and since you say you care about what happens to her and that you wish to be of help to her, why don’t you just step out of the picture? That would be the greatest help you could give her, as I see it. Right now, our daughter is a normal, healthy child. Aren’t you interested in seeing that she stays that way? I mean, say that there is a little bit of your child mixed up in her somehow, why take a chance on destroying them both?’

The question was a good one, direct, simply expressed, to the point, and Janice was proud of Bill for having thought of it. There was no way Hoover could answer without betraying his own selfish interest. She watched Hoover press the bridge of his nose with his thumb and index finger and knew that behind the bland gesture was a mind that was racing.

‘You are right, of course,’ he finally said. ‘It would be the simplest thing for me just to walk away. And it’s quite possible it may ultimately come to that. But put yourself in my position, Mr Templeton…’

He was interrupted by the sudden ring of the house telephone - a strident, continual ring that signified danger. The last time it had rung like that was when the building was thought to be on fire.

Bill jumped up and dashed down the hallway. Janice rose, as did Elliot Hoover, startled and confused by the sudden activity.

Bill snatched up the receiver and heard Dominick’s tense voice say, ‘Go ahead, Mrs Federico.’

‘Bill?’ Carole’s frantic whisper stung his ear. ‘Bill, get down here! Something’s happening to Ivy!’

‘What is it?’ Bill snapped.

‘I don’t know … she’s … she’s running around the room, crying…’ Carole’s voice heightened with panic. ‘She’s having some kind of nightmare…’

‘Coming!’ Bill said, slamming down the receiver and turning to Janice, standing white-faced behind him. ‘It’s Ivy! Get Kaplan’s number!’

The fleeting look between them raised the shroud on a memory shared, yet abhorred. Janice felt a chill sweep through her veins as she pulled the leather-bound telephone book from the kitchen drawer, then found herself floating, featherlike, through the service door and down the fire stairs in pursuit of Bill. She was unaware of her feet as they sped her down the iron and concrete steps, to the floor below, transporting her to the Federicos’ door, where Bill stood, knocking lightly and quietly calling, ‘Carole! It’s Bill!’ An anxious heart pounded in Janice’s ear merging with the noise of the chain as it slipped off its track and the door opened inward. Carole stood on the threshold, her tense face white as a sheet.

‘Upstairs,’ she cried faintly and hurried after Bill, who pushed past her through the archway into their small living-room and up the short flight of stairs.

‘Everything was fine,’ she panted frenziedly. ‘She had dinner … went to bed on time … then I heard these noises … I was in the kitchen … I went up … and … you’ll see … it’s … it’s frightening … I mean … she’s sleepwalking or something … and crying … I tried to wake her up … but I couldn’t…’

The door to the spare bedroom was partially ajar. Bill waited before entering, listening to the terrified little sounds emerging from the room: the scampering of bare feet on the carpeted floor; the light impact of a body crashing into objects; the soft, mouselike weeping of infantile anguish, desperately repeating the same pleading litany of strung-together words, ‘Mommy-daddymontrnydaddymommydaddymomrnyhothothothot-mommydaddy …,’ they had heard on certain other nights more than seven years before.

As Janice quietly entered the room behind Bill, the bizarre, incredible memory of that distant time, sapped of reality for seven long years, sprang back to sudden and pulsating life.

Totally oblivious of their presence, Ivy’s eyes shone wildly; her feverish face was swept with a thousand night-time terrors as she fled about the small, cluttered room this way and that in random disorder, knocking into furniture, chairs, sewing machine, desk, climbing over the larger pieces in order to gain some unknown, desperately sought objective. As before, the tiny, baby-like, fretting sounds, ‘Mommydaddymomtnydaddyhothothot-mommydaddy …,’ underscored her tortured necessity to succeed.

Each time she’d get by an obstacle and seem to approach the door or window - her hands flailing, groping, reaching towards the glass - she would draw back suddenly in pain and plunge back into the helter-skelter circle of confusion, weeping, crying, mewling her plaintive lament, ‘Mommydaddymommydaddy-hothothothotmommydaddymommydaddy…’

Janice’s hand grasped Bill’s tightly as they stood rooted, just inside the room, helplessly watching the macabre spectacle, knowing, from past experience, how ineffective they both were during these crises.