Track 3

careful records of stock-purchase dates, garnished with instructions for everybody. He had been a control freak right to the end. He had probably never felt the thing, his silly seaplane dropping like a rock into the Ontario woods, witnesses all around. When he had died, she had been stricken, but had recovered, and knew even on the day of his death that she would

would recover. They were married, but they'd been psychologically split for years, living separate lives in separate rooms, with little sex now and then. Francis, though, was different. She hadn't had her life yet. She hadn't died, if she were dead, doing something voluntarily, and she was Alyssa's blood. Whatever their conflicts, and they'd mostly concerned the

father and husband, Hunter, they would have been worked through. They only needed time, and they hadn't gotten it. So Alyssa cried, short, violent jags at unexpected moments. And she looked for her daughter the only ways she knew. She called people, politicians who called the cops, who whispered back that something was going on here. The politicians apologized, and temporized, and shuffled away.

She'd become a liability. And she looked in the stars. She did her astrological charts using the latest software. She talked with a master on the east coast who wondered aloud if Francis might still be alive.

His chart for the girl showed a passage of darkness, but not death. Nothing that big. Alive? It's a possibility that has to be examined, he said, in Tones' portentas even for a wizard of the zodiac.

I see an instability, a hovering, a waiting. The cards said the same thing. Alyssa had picked up the tarot as a teenager, believed in the cards, used them at all important business junctures and should done so well, so well.