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‘I mean you no harm, understand. But we must, talk.’

Janice’s eyes shifted to her purse and saw it shaking in her hand. She was trembling all over, visibly, violently, clearly betraying her fear to the man, admitting his power over her. She tried to will the trembling to stop, but it refused to obey. She must move, she thought. She must find the energy to walk away from the man before he noticed the shaking and took advantage of her weakness.

The sleet stung her eyes as she found herself in motion, taking mincing steps down the slick pathway. She walked on her toes, as Bill had taught her to do on icy pavements, for to slip and fall now would be disastrous, encouraging a further relationship with the man, who would naturally rush to her assistance.

‘Tell your husband that I’ll call him tonight.’

The man’s words were fading behind her, which meant, she was thankful, that he was not following her.

Janice thought how proud Bill would be to learn that she never once looked at the man, or said a word to him, or acknowledged his presence in any way.

*

‘Come.’ Janice spoke the word with all the heat and force of a rebuke.

Ivy quietly gathered up her books and outer garments and followed Janice into the waiting elevator. Ernie, the relief elevator operator, gave Janice’s soaked, mud-spattered garments-a fleeting once-over as they rode up in silence. Ivy cast nervous, surreptitious glances up at her mother, knowing full well the cause of her anger and dreading the moment of confrontation which was only three floors away.

‘I waited till three twenty-five, Mom,’ Ivy said the moment they were alone in the ninth-floor corridor, keeping her voice at a soft, ingenuous level, striving to crack the armour of her mother’s hostility. ‘I didn’t know what time you’d be there, so I walked home. A man helped me cross the streeTs,’ she added proudly, innocently.

Janice opened the door of the apartment and, grasping Ivy’s arm, ushered her across the threshold with a sharp tug. After slamming the door shut, Janice spun the frightened child around to her own lowered face and shouted, ‘You do not leave without me! You do not go with a strange man! You sit in the office and wait! And wait! And wait! And wait! Do you understand me?’ Janice was screaming and shaking the sobbing child with all the force she could muster.

‘Yes, yes!’ shrieked Ivy. ‘Mom, you’re hurting me!’

Janice quickly let go of Ivy’s arms and took a step back, appalled by her own cruelty, as she saw red welts begin to form on the delicate white of her beautiful daughter’s skin. Oh, dear God, she thought in utter anguish. I am truly going mad.

‘Go upstairs, please,’ she told Ivy in a small, stunned voice.

Choking, racking, tormented sobs assaulted Janice’s ears as the child dashed down the narrow hallway and rounded the bend of the living-room, the sobs gradually fading as they followed the route of her escape up the staircase and into her bedroom, where they lingered distantly.

‘Oh, God. Oh, God,’ Janice mumbled again and again as she staggered into the living-room and fell crying across the sofa, vaguely aware of the soggy, muddy garments staining the black silk upholstery, and not giving a damn, letting it all pour out over the expensive Schumacher fabric, all the pent-up feelings, the hidden fears, panics, hurts, horrors of the past three days -Dear God, has it only been three days?

The telephone rang.

Janice’s first reaction was to let it ring. But then the knowledge that their bedroom extension was susceptible to Ivy’s curiosity forced her to pull herself, sobbing across the sofa, to pick up the receiver.

‘Janice?’ It was Bill’s voice. ‘Darlene says you called before. What’s up?’

Bill’s steady, assured voice finally broke the dam. ‘Oh, God, Bill!’ Janice cried, unleashing the full torrent of hysteria. ‘Oh, God, come home!’ ‘Leaving now,’ Bill said crisply and hung up.

*

Somehow Bill made all the right connections and arrived home in less than ten minutes. After quickly surveying the wreckage and spot-checking its seriousness, he immediately commenced to put his house back into order. He drew two steaming bubble baths and put both his women into them to soak. He divided himself between the two bathrooms, allowing each equal time to sob out her story to him.

From Janice, he learned the incredible details of each grisly experience that had befallen her upon leaving him outside Rattazzi’s, with special emphasis on her encounter with the man, recalling every word he said to her, including intonation, inflection, and possible intent behind each sentence.

What time did he say he’d call?’ Bill asked.

‘He didn’t give a time; he simply said tonight.’

‘He told you he took Ivy home?’

‘No, she told me that. He said that she was in the lobby, waiting for me, and that she was all right.’

Bill hesitated, then asked, ‘You’re sure it was the man? I mean, moustache, sideburns?’

‘For God’s sake, Bill,’ Janice shouted.

‘Okay, okay,’ Bill placated. ‘I suppose it had to be him.’

‘Well, I didn’t see him. I didn’t look at him or acknowledge him in any way. I thought you’d be pleased by the way I handled it.’

Bill placed a comforting hand on her soapy shoulder and grinned. ‘You did great, Janice, just great.’ Then, soberly: ‘I want you to know that I’ve had it with him. I’m through playing games.’

Bill found Ivy even more overwrought than Janice. She had never seen her mother behave like that; she was absolutely freaky, shaking her and shaking her till she almost vomited. And for what? All the girls her age walk home from school alone. ‘Bettina’s been doing it since she was nine! What’s so special about me?’

‘You’re our beautiful child,’ soothed Bill, holding her wet hand. ‘That’s what’s so special about you. We love you and want to protect you.’

‘Protect me against what?’

‘Against lots of things that happen each day in this city, Ivy. So far we’ve been lucky; they’ve happened to other people. People who are willing to take risks, take chances with their children. We’re not willing to do that.’

The warm bath, Bill’s tender touch and mollifying tone gradually eased Ivy’s tensions and gendy guided her back towards understanding and forgiveness.

‘Well, it’s really the first time I ever did a thing like that. And I wouldn’t have if that man hadn’t offered to help me cross the streets.’

‘Tell me about the man, Ivy,’ Bill asked in a disarming voice. ‘Did you ever see him before?’

‘Sure. He waits in front of the school every afternoon.’ Ivy looked up at Bill suddenly. ‘You must have seen him; he’s there in the mornings, too.’

‘Oh, yes - moustache, sideburns?’

Ivy nodded. ‘He was really very nice. He walked me to Sixty-seventh Street and waited till I crossed.’

‘Did he say anything? I mean, did you talk at all?’

‘Nothing special. It was starting to snow again, and he said he liked winters better than summers. I said I like them better, too. Then he said that his daughter liked winters better, too. Things like that.’

‘Did he ask any questions about me or Mother?’

‘No.’ Ivy studied Bill with a look of suspicion. ‘Do you know him, Dad?’

‘No, dear, we don’t know him.’

‘That’s funny—’

‘What is?’

‘I felt as if he knew us. Or at least he knew me.’

After their baths, relaxed and warm in the king-sized bed, with the electric blanket turned to ‘Hi,’ mother and daughter were left to repair their shattered relationship while Bill went down to the kitchen to fix dinner.

When he returned, carrying a huge tray filled with thinly sliced roast beef sandwiches with the crusts removed, a pot of steaming beans, two kinds of pie, and milk, he found Janice and Ivy bundled together in a warm embrace, playing Actors and Actresses.

Bill spread a tablecloth across the coverlet, and they ate their picnic dinner on the bed. By seven thirty, when the call came, love and togetherness were firmly reestablished.

Ivy snatched up the phone from the bedside table on the first ring.

‘Yes?’ A short pause, then: ‘It’s for you, Dad.’

Bill signalled Janice to take the receiver, then hurried out of the room to take the call on the downstairs extension. Janice kept the phone at her ear, but covered the mouthpiece with her hand. In a moment Bill’s voice came on the other end.

‘Hello?’

‘Mr Templeton?’

‘Yes.’

‘My name is Elliot Hoover.’

‘Yes.’

‘I think we should talk.’

‘All right.’

‘May I come to your home?’

‘No. How about my office tomorrow morning?’

‘I think we should talk right away. I’d also like Mrs Templeton to be present. How about meeting me downstairs in the restaurant bar?’

‘Impossible. We can’t leave our child alone.’

‘Carole Federico might be willing to sit with Ivy for an hour or so.’

Janice could well understand the long pause that followed this remarkable statement. She could sense Bill’s shock at the scope and depth of Hoover’s knowledge of the most intimate corners of their lives.

‘I’ll see,’ she heard Bill stammer at last.

‘Say, eight thirty?’

‘I’ll see.’

The phone clicked twice before Janice placed hers back on its cradle.

Ivy broke into a giggle. She had picked up a Snoopy book and was browsing through it while they talked on the phone. Inwardly, Janice reacted harshly to the laughter, felt it was all wrong, inappropriate, totally out of place - like someone laughing at a funeral.

Except for two functioning tables and a line-up of tuxedoed waiters, silently manning their posts at strategic peripheral intervals, patiently awaiting the nine thirty closing time, the Des Artistes Restaurant seemed poised on the precipice of sleep.

Bill and Janice quietly made their way through the hushed, sombre atmosphere, en route to the bar-room, which lay just beyond the restaurant in a small, partially enclosed niche.

Kurt, the bartender, gave Bill and Janice a smile of recognition as they stood on the threshold of the darkly panelled room, searching among several faces for a sign of Hoover. There were only five customers present.

‘Mr and Mrs Templeton, I’m Elliot Hoover.’

Janice jumped, startled; Bill swung about, too fast, betraying his surprise. Hovering before them was a face they would have sworn they’d never seen before.

The hairless pale skin, clear and unwrinkled, belonged to a man of twenty. The smile, sweet and ingenuous, disclosed two rows of small white teeth sandwiched between colourless thin lips. On closer inspection, the light-brown hair was somewhat sparse and receding, yet could this be the forty-six-year-old man they had read about in Who’s Who?

Hoover noted their surprise, and his smile deepened, as he suggested, ‘There’s a quiet table over there in the corner.’

Bill and Janice followed him like a pair of sheep being escorted by a Judas goat to the killing room. They sat together, against the wall, at the wave of Hoover’s hand, while he took the chair opposite them across the table.

‘I want to thank you both for agreeing to see me tonight,’ Elliot Hoover began, in a low, soothing voice that seemed to dicker over the selection of each word. ‘I truly appreciate it’

Marie, the pretty barmaid, appeared at their table, smiling inquiringly.

‘Would you care for something, Mrs Templeton?’ Hoover politely asked Janice.

‘No, thank you,’ she replied.

‘I’ll have a scotch and water,’ Bill said.

‘Do you have Chinese gunpowder tea?’ inquired Hoover.

‘I think they may have some in the kitchen,’ Marie ventured.

‘That’ll be fine for me, thank you,’ he said, dismissing Marie and turning his attention back to Bill and Janice. ‘I also want to apologize for the mysterioso behaviour these past few weeks,’ he continued with a small, embarrassed chuckle. ‘I know how frightened you must have both been, and I’m sorry, but it was necessary. You had a perfect right going to the police, Mr Templeton; under the circumstances I probably would have done the same thing myself. But all the subterfuge, the clumsy disguise were necessary steps that had to be taken before this meeting could be arranged.’ Hoover paused a moment to allow the words to sink in before he continued. ‘Actually, the preparation for this meeting has taken seven years to arrange. Seven years of travel, investigation, and study, calling for a total reconditioning, you might say, of my spiritual and intellectual perspectives…’

Bill felt Janice’s cold hand steal into his, beneath the table, as Hoover continued to talk, the words tumbling out of his mouth in quick, short, explosive bursts that, Bill decided, sounded laboured and prearranged. Many phrases he used were stilted, uncomfortable, as though he’d read them in a book and had memorized them.

He was in the midst of telling about the seven years he had spent travelling, how Pittsburgh, his home, could not provide him with the proper background for his investigations, and how his search had taken him to India, Nepal, the frozen reaches of Tibet, where in the sanctuaries of certain lamaseries he first began to glean (‘glean’ was his word) the light of truth, when Bill interrupted him in midsentence.

‘Er … excuse me, Mr Hoover, but what the hell is this all about?’

‘It isn’t easy saying what I’ve got to say to you,’ Hoover spluttered. ‘It requires a certain foundation of knowledge, of understanding…’

Hoover’s hand shook as, obviously flustered, he gratefully reached for the tea Marie placed before him. Bill had drained half his scotch before Hoover was able to go on, groping for words.

‘I can’t tell you how many times I’ve placed myself in your position and how unbelievable what I’m going to tell you sounded to me. I’ve done many things since arriving in New York - committed many bizarre acts, indeed - which are totally alien to my nature. I mean, the bio in Who’s Who should have given you some insight into the kind of man I am … I’m not the kind of person who would do these things for no reason, you must believe that.’

Hoover flung the disjointed sentences across at Bill in a quavering, impassioned barrage. He met his cup halfway and took a sip of the strong black tea, which gradually brought his shaking hand under control.