CHAPTER 1

One night in February while working late at the real estate office Marian noticed a man pause outside her window. He looked at her through the glass for a moment, hesitated, then walked away.

Marian knew the man slightly, she had seen him around the town, shopping at the center where her office was located, appearing at functions at the local high school where Marian's

daughter was a student. She was aware that the man had a son one grade behind her daughter, but she could not recall the boy's name, nor the father's.

After a moment he returned as if he had forgotten something. This time he studied the home listings that were patchworked across the window, glancing in at Marian from time to time. Marian smiled professionally and returned to her work so that he could peruse the listings in peace. His name, she thought uncertainly, was Rivers. She had no idea of his first name, if indeed she had ever heard it.

The man entered the little office and stood nervously in front of Marian's desk.

"Hello," Marian said. "Can I help you?"

"I don't know how to do this," the man said. His eyes flitted away from Marian and around the office. For the first time Marian realized she was alone.

"Were you interested in looking at a house?" she asked.

"I'm not sure why I'm here. I shouldn't have come. I'm sorry," he said, but he didn't leave. He suddenly clasped his hands together in front of his body as if to keep them from doing something else. Marian told herself she was silly to feel frightened, there was no crime in Weston.

"Listen," he said intensely. "I don't know how to say this. I shouldn't say it at all, but I don't seem to be able to stop myself." He laughed nervously, without humor.

Marian sat very still, watching.

"You don't know me," he said.

"Mr. Waters," she said as his real name suddenly popped into her head.

He smiled broadly this time, surprised and pleased. "Oh, you do. Well...I didn't know you even knew who I was."

Marian nodded. "How can I help you?"

The man sat in the wooden client's chair next to Marian's desk and seemed to have a sudden change of heart. "This isn't right," he said, shaking his head, looking away from Marian. "It isn't right."

Marian waited. She was certain now that he wasn't dangerous, but she had no idea what he wanted.

"I see things in your face," he said, haltingly. His eyes had been fixed on the floor, or his hands, but now he sneaked a peek at her. "I saw it when I looked in the window...and other times."

Marian touched her cheek self-consciously. "What do you see?"

He looked directly at her. His eyes were large and luminous and immensely sad, Marian thought. Whatever he saw now made him shake his head.

"It's not right," he said. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have...I wanted to tell you but..." He stood, unable to continue, then hurried from the office, still shaking his head.

After he had gone Marian studied her face in the mirror in the tiny closet that served the office as a toilet. She looked for signs of doom, warnings of impending disaster. She was

convinced that Mr. Waters was trying to warn her of something imminent. But what could be so troubling that he couldn't mention it? She feared for her daughter, she feared for her husband. Oddly, she thought, she was not much concerned for herself.

Before she left the office, she looked up Waters in the telephone book. Weston was a small town, there was only one listing. His name was Daniel.

Waters had been sent--scourged, as he thought of it--to Weston's tiny shopping center in a desperate last-minute quest for the cream necessary to make a sauce veloute. The sauce was required for a blanquette de veau that his wife was concocting for guests. Guests whom Waters did not like. His wife did not like them either but she thought them useful rungs on a social ladder that she was ever climbing towards the clouds like Jack on his beanstalk. Or perhaps a greased pole was a better metaphor, Waters thought. The more Maxine struggled upwards, the more she slid back down. Progress was illusory, every advance a laborious exercise in staying in place. Waters did not know how to tell her, did not dare to tell her, that it was her questing, pushy, over eager, presumptive personality that greased the pole.

To Waters' mind it was an unnecessary dish for unnecessary guests, hardly the sort of thing to risk his life for, but racing through the darkened roads to beat the unpredictable closing time of the center's grocery store had become perilous thanks to the local deer population that leaped across the unlighted asphalt on their own suicidal schedule, families of them, like so many ducks in a shooting gallery, each a fresh chance at disaster. Only a month ago a teenager had been seriously injured as a result of a collision with a deer and the sense of running an obstacle course was on the minds of many, including Waters, but as is usually the case, the exigencies of the moment outweighed the wisdom of experience and he raced to the market, braving errant deer, opossum and raccoon to serve his despairing wife.

As he turned onto the long, steep incline leading up to the center, another car streaked past him, a blur of silver resolving itself into the rapidly receding rear end of a Porsche. Where is a cop when you need one, Waters thought, as the tail lights shrunk to pin points in the gloom, ignoring the fact that he was well over the speed limit himself. A fog was descending like a falling cloud and the Porsche vanished into it as if by magic, gone in the blink of an eye. In seconds Waters, too, was within the haze and suddenly the night took on a spectral quality. His headlight beams reflected and diffused around him until he was surrounded by an otherworldly glow. It was like an artist's rendering of the enveloping light reported by survivors of near-death experiences, he thought. He knew it was dangerous, knew that his vision was all but nil, but the feeling of being encased in a cocoon of shimmering vapor was just as serene as the survivors said it was. He felt no anxiety, only a curious expectancy of whatever might occur next. It seemed as if he had stepped out of the real world and into a place of enchantment where all the laws of science had been repealed and anything could happen. A translucent ectomorphic creature from outer space might appear before him, its digit aglow, or fairies could dance upon his windshield. Waters felt as if his spirit had been taken over and that he was, if only for the moment, only partly himself. He wanted the feeling to last and last.

Reality returned in the form of a blaring siren and a flashing colored light in his windshield. Waters braked instinctively and the police car swept past him like a vision of an avenging angel. When he reached the crest of the long hill and turned into the center's parking lot the enveloping fog had thinned enough for him to see the police car in the distance where he had pulled the Porsche off the road.

Even my wishes are granted on this enchanted night, he thought.

He could barely make out the one-story buildings that composed the center, their shapes seeming to form then dissolve in the fog. Tonight the center is like Brigadoon, he thought, here then gone, waiting for the right person at the right time to give it magical life. Although Waters would never describe himself as a whimsical man, he was at a loss to explain his current sense of giddiness. It is Nature at work, he decided. Nature has transported me and transformed my lovely little town. My own, beloved enchanted little town.

Weston was a healthy, distancing, commute from Maxine's coveted, unaffordable Manhattan. No sprites danced upon the mist in New York, no elves tended to one's desires there. He felt an effusion of good spirits that he could not fully account for, but then he didn't need to on such a mystical night. It was Nature at work, the Nature that held no sway over Gotham and its rapacious millions. Weston was an accepting and forgiving place for those content to prosper modestly and its comforts and beauties were rich compensation. He knew himself a lucky man. It was not a common experience for him.

The grocery store was closed. Waters gave the iron grill a pro forma kick of frustration, but his heart wasn't in it, the night was too pure for anger. He scanned the rest of tiny Weston Center as if the pharmacy or the hardware store might suddenly transmogrify into shops offering pints of cream.

"I wish for cream," said aloud, throwing his arms out. "I wish for a pint of cream." Acoustics were affected by the fog as well as sight and his voice came back to him as if traveling through water.

The Center consisted of six shops including the grocery which was self-termed a "market." All were closed and the only light came from the window of the real estate office on one end of the horse shoe that formed the center. As a gentle breeze moved the haze and shaped it into greater and lesser densities the light from the window appeared to blink and wink and beckon Waters towards it. He had no reason now to hurry home, no hero's welcome to expect, only Maxine's deep but unspoken disappointment in him for failing to deliver. The guests could amuse themselves perfectly well without him.

Waters approached the winking light that urged him forth.

He felt himself drawn to it by a force which neither then nor afterwards could he explain. Disorientation due to the fog. The sense of magical forces that encased him as completely as the mist. The irresistible gravity of one spinning body for another. Yin and yang, opposites attracting, something ancient and ineluctable and romantic and absolutely inexplicable. Or pure chance, which his rational mind would insist upon when he returned to rationality. Later he would convince himself that the truth was he went to look in the real estate window out of a desire not to return home creamless to the chilly comfort of an annoyed spouse and annoying friends. If a light had been shining from the window of the dry cleaners he would have gone there instead. But that was a thought he would have only later; for the moment he felt pixies tugging him forward.

Fully half of the expanse of the window was obscured by small advertisements taped to the glass, creating a patchwork of paper borders and photographs...And there they were, the new horrors, the McMansions, posted on the window in full color. The great creeping invasion of bloated residences that were taking over Weston like so much customized two- and three-story colonial kudzu. He saw them like a rogue's gallery of modern dinosaurs, animated by some Spielbergian fantasy, huge, omnivorous and ravenous, advancing in cohort to devour the town. Waters' house would be just an hors d'oeuvre, ripped from its foundation and swallowed in a single crunch like a bacon-wrapped water chestnut waiting now in his kitchen on his wife's eclectic and out-dated appetizer tray. A million six hundred thousand dollars, a million nine, two mill three, three mill eight. On and on they came, ever larger. Six thousand square feet, seven thousand, eight thousand--like a procession of billy goats gruff, each more massive than the one before, as big as a chateau, as big as a palace, with some approaching brontosaurus just below the horizon as big as the Pentagon. The window provided an unwanted reminder that his lovely little town, the town that was tonight embraced by Celtic mythology, was changing under his feet.

Waters did not notice the woman working in the office until she moved. He had seen her before, perhaps working, perhaps elsewhere in town but until now he had never realized how stunningly beautiful she was. Through the prism of the moistened window he saw the face of Botticelli's Venus, chaste and angelic, framed with golden hair. He stared, not believing that such beauty existed and had gone unnoticed by him before this.

She turned to him abruptly, startled by his sudden presence, then quickly adopted the quizzically expectant look of the professional. He thought he could detect fear in her eyes. A woman working alone at night, a stranger at the door. He raised his hand and tried to allay her concerns with a gesture but she misunderstood and opened the entrance.

"Hello," she said. "Can I help you?"

She was a little woman, unlike his wife. Petite, was the word, or, in keeping with the mystical theme of the evening, elfin. And vulnerable, he could see that so clearly, a woman unsure of herself, trying to cover her frailty with the bluff straight forwardness of the businessman.

As he entered the office, light from behind her struck the moisture-laden air and formed a nimbus around her head. She seemed to him to shimmer with the irresistible allure of the fabled pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. She was the fairy queen he thought-knowing he was out of his mind--and this night was intended for this very meeting. She was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen and all of the elements of nature had conspired to reveal her to him. Waters felt himself suddenly overwhelmed. Something stirred within him, something he had not felt in years and could not immediately put a name to. Her eyes were so large, doe-like and timorous; she was so small, he must appear to her huge and menacing, he thought. A monster materializing from the dark, an ogre. And even as his mind continued to race with images of fairy lands, his body grew heavy and awkward. His lips seemed leaden and the power of human speech threatened to fail him.

"I don't know how to do this," he said, slumping into the chair beside her desk. He did not know what he meant or what he intended to do. He looked away from her as though from a blinding light, his eyes flitting around the office. Three desks, steel, standard cheap office ware, another three on the other side of the room where the realtors shared space with an insurance broker. There was no help for his confusion to be found on the wooden plaques listing credentials, the framed diplomas.

When he looked back at her he saw that she was squinting slightly in concern, her smile beginning to fade.

"Were you interested in looking at a house?" she asked.

"I'm not sure why I'm here. I shouldn't have come. I'm sorry," he said, but he didn't leave. He suddenly clasped his hands together in front of his body as if to keep them from doing something else.

Marian moved uneasily in her chair.

"Listen," he said intensely. "I don't know how to say this. I shouldn't say it at all, but I don't seem to be able to stop myself." He laughed nervously, without humor.

She continued to look at him and he could see the alarm growing in her eyes.

"You don't know me," he said.

"Mr. Waters," she said.

Waters was disproportionately pleased. She knew him, she had noticed him, taken the trouble to learn his name.

"Oh, you do. Well...I didn't know you even knew who I was."

"Your son is a year behind my Ellen at high school," she said.

Waters nodded as if that explained it although it merely raised more questions. Who was her Ellen? Why had he never noticed this extraordinary woman at high school functions? He glanced at the black plastic nameplate on her desk and saw that she was Marian Facini. Waters was bewildered, she could not look less Italian. Marriage, neither his nor hers, occurred to him in his moment of strange rapture.

"How can I help you?"

Waters' heart was pounding, he couldn't think straight. "This isn't right," he said, looking at his hands as the fingers worried each other in his lap like mating worms. "It isn't right."

She waited. He could see by her face that she no longer thought him dangerous, but there remained that shy hesitancy, that timidity. All he wanted to do was protect her, he realized.

Wrap her in his arms and tell her all was well and keep her safe and...

"I see something in your face," he said, haltingly. "I saw it when I looked in the window..."

Marian touched her cheek self-consciously. His eyes were large and luminous and immensely sad, she thought. Whatever he saw now made him shake his head.

"What do you see?"

What did he see in her face? He saw transformation of his life, he saw bliss and understanding, he saw release and escape, he saw salvation. He had not realized that he sought salvation from his existence until this moment but now, there it was, shimmering in her luminescent eyes, in the perfection of her lips.

"It's not right," he said. "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have...I want to tell you but...". He wanted to embrace her, he wanted to fall to the floor and embrace her knees and beg her to come with him, run off with him, create a new world with him, hang the moon in a different spot, transfigure nature, bless him with her presence as together they reset the sun. But he could not. He wasn't ready, he wasn't strong enough, the tidal pull of reality was too powerful. He stood, unable to continue, then hurried from the office, defeated by the significance of the moment. It was either throw himself at her feet or flee. He fled.

After Waters left, Marian studied her face in the mirror in the tiny closet that served the office as a washroom. She looked for signs of doom, warnings of impending disaster. She was

convinced that Mr. Waters was trying to warn her of something imminent. But what could be so troubling that he couldn't mention it? She feared for her daughter, she feared for her husband. Oddly, she thought, she was not much concerned for herself.

Before she left the office, she looked up Waters in the telephone book. Weston was a small town, there was only one listing. His name was Daniel.

On the drive home Waters found himself shuddering from the unused residue of adrenaline, whether with fear or exultation he couldn't say. He felt as if he had very nearly thrown himself off a cliff, he had come so close to it that he had viewed the abyss, and it had left him deeply shaken. But was his reaction one of relief that he had saved himself, or excitement that he had brought himself so close to self destruction?

He was not an impetuous man, he would be the first to say so; he was not given to flights of whimsy. He prided himself on being a serious person, one who thought things through before acting, a man who could and would consider the consequences before taking a step. He was the last person he knew to give over to impulse. Normal, is how he thought of himself and he would often say to his wife after observing the peculiar, aberrant and neurotic behavior of those around him that he was the only normal man he knew. Maxine never disagreed

And yet, here he was, driving through a night that still seemed enchanted, only moments away from having curled his toes over the very edge of precipitate lunacy. Such a close call, what on earth could have compelled him to act that way? And why on earth was he so very pleased with himself?

At home he entered from the garage into the kitchen where he found Maxine frantically scraping burnt pastry from an over-baked brie.

"What a night," he said. "It's like a fairy land out there!"

"Where's the cream?"

"Come out with me, you've got to see it."

"What are you going on about? Where's the cream?"

"It was magical, I had the strangest experience..." Waters stopped himself. He was accustomed to telling Maxine everything of interest, but he could hardly tell her about Marian Facini, the queen of this extraordinary night. Distracted though she was by the guests in the other room and the exigencies of a culinary near-disaster, he could hardly expect her to not be alarmed by his tale of...of whatever it was. Delusion or delight? The further in time he got from the moment of almost throwing himself on his knees in supplication to this remarkable vision of a woman, the more confused he became about the incident.

"I sent you for cream," Maxine said in exasperation. "All I asked was a little help entertaining the Sawyers."

The mention of their guests brought Waters immediately to earth. "He's a jerk and she's a non-entity," he said reflexively, although he voiced it with less heartfelt animosity than usual. Tonight he was inclined to charity and forgiveness.

"Just go in there an be nice," she said. "You can malign them later."

He detected the usual weary forbearance in her tone but found it less patronizing than usual, too. Waters stepped into the living room to greet his guests with a genuine smile.

Following a decent interval of thoroughly innocuous conversation after Maxine joined the group, Waters excused himself and stood in front of the bathroom mirror, beaming at his image. The memory of the incident with Marian, which had never really left him, reasserted itself and now there was no confusion, no ambivalence. He had looked over the edge into the abyss but what he had seen was not a yawning chasm but a different world, a different planet. It was not a frightening place, one had merely to summon the courage to take the leap.

He was sent forth into the gloom, a knight errant questing for a pint of lactic fat, and he had returned, transfigured.

"My destiny for a pint of cream," he thought.

When Marian told her husband, he was more annoyed than perturbed.

"Does he think he's psychic?" Todd demanded.

"I don't know," she said.

"Why don't I call the jerk up and ask him what he meant?"

"No," Marian said.

"Why not? He didn't mind waltzing in and getting you upset, why not call him and hassle him a little bit?"

Marian did not know why not. She was beginning to wish she hadn't mentioned the incident to Todd.

"Who is he, anyway?"

"Just a man, someone who lives in town, I've seen him around. I know he didn't wish me ill by it."

"What's his name?"

"I don't know," she said, turning away from her husband. She did not know why she lied except in some vague way to protect Daniel Waters. For all the things she did not know, Marian did understand that he had spoken to her on a plane that was beyond Todd's comprehension.

That night she turned to Neal in bed and made love to him with an urgency that surprised them both.

Her friend Valentina had a very different take on the incident.

"He was coming on to you," Valentina said.

"Don't be ridiculous."

"A man comes into your office when you're alone, gets you excited, then leaves...he's coming on to you. You are excited, aren't you?"

"I'm curious. I'm a little concerned..."

"He's getting at you through your curiosity."

"He was very sincere."

"As if you'd know. Watch out for the sincere ones, they're the most dangerous."

Valentina suspected all men, all the time. She also suspected most women, although in Marian's case she made an exception. Valentina had been involved in three affairs in the last ten years that Marian knew of, and was constantly thinking about the next one, sizing up and rejecting candidates with the flick of an eye. Romance was the salt of Valentina's conversation and sex the pepper and Marian enjoyed listening to her in the same way she would relish the tales of an Arctic explorer. Both spoke of alien worlds, places Marian was intrigued to hear about but would never visit herself. In Valentina's case, Marian often found herself a bit scandalized, but she struggled not to show it to her friend.

"He was trying to warn me," Marian insisted.

"I'm trying to warn you," Valentina said. "What's his name, do I know him?"

"I don't know," Marian said.

Valentina laughed. "You do so. How could you not know his name? I'd know his name and address and phone number by now, at the least, at the least."

"I don't know. Truly." Marian looked at her coffee, stirring it. She knew she was a bad liar, but she felt good about protecting Daniel Waters again. She could not have said what she was protecting him from.

Valentina leaned back in her chair, brushed pastry crumbs from her lap, and crossed her arms over her chest. She grinned knowingly at her friend.

"It's not like that," Marian said.

"Like what?"

Marian wet her finger and picked the last flake of croissant from her plate. "I think he's psychic."

"So am I. Want to hear my prediction?"

"Not really," Marian said with a coolness that surprised her.

Valentina arched an eyebrow and looked smugger than ever.

***

After two days of waiting, while cleaning up after dinner, Marian thought of calling Daniel Waters and asking him what he had meant. It seemed the easiest thing to do. Neal had even suggested it.

She wanted to know what he had seen in her face. And if he saw things in the faces of other people, or was it just hers. Was it something she should worry about? He hadn't told her that, he hadn't told her anything, really, and yet she could recall every word of their brief transaction, the nervous hesitancy of his manner, the shy sadness of his brown eyes.

Ellen, her daughter, was in her room, studying. Neal was lost in his computer. Marian hesitated, then picked up the telephone. It rang once before Ellen walked into the kitchen, holding a school book.

Marian hung up the phone abruptly, feeling guilty at the same time that she told herself she had nothing to feel guilty about.

"Who was Talleyrand, anyway?" Ellen demanded, too preoccupied with her own concerns to notice the blush on her mother's face. "I can't find him anywhere."

"Did you look him up on the internet?"

"Dad's on the computer. If you got me a better cell phone I could have done it already."

Marian took the book from her daughter and turned to the index, a procedure Ellen had never quite mastered. According to Neal, it was because Marian spoiled the girl, but Marian saw no harm in helping her own child with her homework.

"Do you know the Waters boy?" she asked as she turned to the appropriate Talleyrand page.

"Chuckie Waters?"

"What's he like?"

Ellen shrugged. "I don't know."

"Is he--does he seem like he's okay?"

"Yeah, he's okay. Why?"

"No reason," Marian said.

***

For five nights in a row Marian worked late at the office, sitting alone in a pool of light in the deserted town center, fiddling with busy work that needed no tending, playing solitaire on her computer, and finally giving up the pretense entirely and reading a paperback novel. She started at every shadow and every play of headlights on her window, thinking that Mr. Waters had come again to finish what he had started to say a few days earlier. Something had compelled him to come to her in the first instance. Had anything happened to ease that compulsion? Was her family any less threatened now than it had been those few days ago?

She waited for Mr. Waters to appear, wondering if he was outside in the dark, watching her. Was he anticipating his moment, biding his time until he had courage enough? She felt him like a wraith, a spirit of the night that circled and prowled and watched over her and her family in a way that was neither benign nor malevolent, but simply observant, its eyes ever on them. Marian knew that such an image should frighten her, but for some reason it did not. Like most people, Marian trusted her instincts without justification, remembering only the times in the past when she had been right, forgetting all the times that she was wrong. Her instinct told her that Daniel Waters was a good man who wanted to help her.

On the third night of her vigil she waited until she thought she must surely burst from self-restraint and then she called his house. A woman answered and Marian hung up the phone immediately, feeling oddly disoriented. She had known he was married, of course, but somehow Mrs. Waters had never entered her mind before. Her sudden appearance was intrusive and unsettling. Ellen put down the phone with the queasy feeling that she had been caught at something illicit.

Moments later she realized that the number of the real estate agency would have shown up on the Waters' telephone. What if Mrs. Waters called back? Marian's face burned at the thought of it as she imagined her inadequate and stammered evasions. She was a poor liar at the best of times, and even then only with preparation. Improvisational dishonesty was beyond her; it had taken weeks for her to master the formulaic and less than forthright answers required in her job as a real estate agent.

Rather than face the embarrassment of a confrontation with Mrs. Waters, Marian fled the office, listening for the dreaded ring all the way to her car as if it would resound like the scream of her guilty conscience.