The aerial car started toward the peak, swinging up the slope and quickly leaving the embrace of the lower tramway station. Cree gripped a pole as she looked out over the heads of the kids who had pressed themselves against the windows. Ahead stretched a steep rocky incline almost bare of vegetation; below, beyond the concrete planes and angles of the station, the flat valley and the streets of suburban Albuquerque began to open and fall away. The southern slopes of the Sandia range came into view, tinged pink by the westering sun, their rocky turrets set against hard shadows.
Space. Light. Rock. Sky.
A grand land, Cree realized. A place of heroic proportion. There were fifteen other excited sightseers standing with her in the car, but their chattering stopped as the ground dropped away and a gulf of air opened beneath their feet. Everyone was experiencing the same awe. For a long moment there was a collective suspension of breath broken only by the hum of the drive machinery. Then the kids' excitement boiled over in exclamations of astonishment, and people started talking again.
The views mesmerized Cree, but she couldn't suppress her apprehension. Drama aside, Mason would have some reason for meeting her on Sandia Peak when any coffeehouse or hotel lobby would have been sufficient. He always had a reason. It no doubt had to do with "instructional value," but Mason's motives were mysterious and would remain so until he revealed them. And then he'd stick it to you hard and enjoy watching you squirm. There was a sadistic quality to Mason and his methods.
So why take the effort to see him?
Actually, the answer was simple. Whatever he had in mind, it would be something eye-opening. Mason Ambrose was a genius, a pioneer in psychology in Cree's estimation as important as Freud or Jung. He was also a brilliant teacher, infinitely giving and subtle and patient despite what could seem a purely self-absorbed and confrontational style. In Cree's case, he'd served as guide, guru, and therapist as much as teacher. He'd had the insight to accept her as his research assistant seven years ago, even though he'd seen her for the damaged merchandise she was. When she'd applied for the internship advertised in the Harvard grad school bulletin, she had been a widow for almost three years, still deeply wounded by the loss of her husband, crazy and sick with it. The grief alone would have undone her, but the way she'd found out about Mike's death-his appearance in Philadelphia at his dying moment, three thousand miles from the Los Angeles car wreck that killed him-had upset all her beliefs about the world. About life. When she'd come to Mason, she'd been lost and frightened, a spiritual seeker floundering and flailing in her quest to find answers to life's mysteries. A swimmer about to go under.
Mason had seen all that in his first glance. He'd spent two years redirecting her anger and fear, merging them with her hunger to learn and helping her focus them on her work. He'd goaded or finessed her into disciplining her talents. He'd helped her accept that her urgent fascination with the paranormal was not compulsion but passion, not useless but crucial. Most important, he'd believed in her and affirmed that the empathic techniques she used to commune with ghosts and those haunted by them were valid and necessary.
But his methods were, as he liked to put it, "rigorous." He'd plunged her into experiences of the paranormal that drove her nearly to insanity. One of the first, long before she was ready for such an encounter, had been the New Jersey motel ghost. She'd lived in the squalid, piss- and cigarette-stinking room for a week as she slowly got to know the revenant of a serial killer whose dying moments consisted of remembering his murders. Mason had seemed to relish every detail, including Cree's terror and distress.
Huge tubes of blue steel intruded suddenly across her field of vision, jolting her out of her recollections. Just as startled, the other passengers gasped and laughed uneasily. The tramcar had reached one of the support gantries partway up the mountain, and as it came to the peak of the first swoop of cables and changed incline it bounded gently, suspending gravity and leaving Cree's stomach hanging. The gargantuan tower's passing revealed how fast they were moving and how high they were.
Below, a vast space had opened between the car and the slope. To the west, the grid of Albuquerque's streets stretched out on a plain so flat it could have been pressed by some titan's rolling pin. Beyond lay a breathtaking sweep of desert, slightly hazy with distance, bounded at the far horizon by purple mountains.
Cree gawked like the rest of the passengers. What was it about the Southwest? Maybe the New Agers of Santa Fe and Taos had it right after all, and it was a magical land, a place of Earth energy convergence. She had spent only a week in Arizona, three years ago, and had never been to New Mexico, yet the place felt familiar, as ifthe size and smell and feel of it had been latent in her blood for a lifetime. The light was stronger, purer. The sun was more immediate and commanding. Here on the Sandia ridge, the mountains were carved with gullies and clefts as expressive as the lines of ancient faces. Between dense stands of pine, towers of rock thrust naked from the escarpment; you could feel the geology here, millions of years of tectonic and mineral processes exposed to the eye.
That's what it was, she decided: Time itself was here. And time was big and there was lots of it. Good to remember.
Cree's ears popped for the fourth time. Another gantry loomed, and again the car did a hydraulic-suppressed lurch before beginning its final ascent. Three minutes later, they swung up into the arms of the receiving station, bumped softly, and eased to a stop. She stepped out with the other passengers onto a platform hung out over the nearly vertical slope. Just above was a small visitor center topped by the huge red wheels of the tram machinery, paused now; to the left lay a series of red-painted wooden decks, joined by stairs and ramps and cantilevered out over the mile-high cliff.
Below was the whole world.
The space and scope and light walloped Cree. She bellied up to the railing, feeling as if she'd stepped out on an airplane wing. When she fought off the vertigo and remembered to inhale, she found the air sweet and crisp and twenty degrees cooler than at the bottom.
The tourists had mostly dispersed by the time she pulled herself away from the rail and scanned the platforms for Mason and Lupe. She spotted thern on the farthest deck, past the restaurant, and began walking the meandering ramps toward them. Mason was staring outward at the grand view, but Lupe's round head swiveled as Cree approached. Wordlessly, she turned Mason's chair so he faced Cree.
He looked Cree up and down with eyes disconcertingly quick in his slack, fleshy face. After a long moment he tipped his head back toward Lupe. "I told you she'd ripen well! A fine, lush bit of woman flesh if there ever was one. I am always right in these things. Always." His voice had once been a rich and dignified baritone, but it hadn't survived the ruin of the rest of him.
Lupe regarded Cree disapprovingly, as if blaming her for Mason's lack of propriety.
"Hello, Lupe," Cree said. "Hello, Mason." Some physical contact seemed called for, but Lupe offered no opening, and the thought of touching Mason repelled her. When she put out her hand, Mason brought it briefly to his lips.
He wore an expensive charcoal suit tailored to minimize his growing deformity, but it couldn't hide the deterioration that had taken place since last she'd seen him. Though he was no older than his early sixties and his hair was still mostly black, his big body appeared to be collapsing in upon itself. He lurked deeper in his chair, chin nearly riding on his chest. His high, square forehead and strong jaw were well formed but now only made him all the more grotesque, a parody of the handsome man he'd once been. A thin green cylinder of oxygen was strapped to the chair, Cree noticed, its clear plastic tube and nose feeder looped on one of the handles.
"Your lecture was superb," Mason gurgled. Looking up at her exposed his face to the sky, and the light seemed to give him discomfort. "You struck precisely the right tone for speaking to the great unwashed of academia in terms their rigidly compartmented little intellects could grasp. Yet never the bald, craven appeal to the popular taste we see so much of these days." The big head twisted to the side again and he said to Lupe, as if scolding her, "I told you she would mature. I told you she would shine!"
"So what brings you to Albuquerque? Surely not the conference-"
"I live not far away now-Santa Fe. To the extent that I can be said to live" Mason chuckled. "Or to do so in any one place. I am mostly between here and Switzerland. Returning to Geneva tomorrow, in fact. One of the reasons I contacted you. It was most fortuitous, your coming at this time. Still enjoying Seattle? Your little outfit, what's it called…?"
"Psi Research Associates."
"— is it doing well? Doing a brisk business in ghastliness?"
"Yes."
"And your partner-the engineer, the physicist…?"
"Edgar Mayfield."
"Yes, our good Dr. Mayfield. Has he recorded the irrefutable physical evidence he so ardently desires?" Mason's expression conveyed his low opinion of Edgar's technological approach to paranormal research.
"Physical evidence, quite a bit. Irrefutable-that's up for argument."
"But he hasn't succeeded in winning your heart with his efforts, has he. Because, one can safely assume, you're still searching for your dead husband and remaining chaste as a statue of the Virgin Mary." A glint of malicious amusement lit the hooded eyes.
Cree tried not to stiffen. "You know, Mason, I've never considered your sadism to be your most admirable characteristic."
"And just what would that be, Lucretia-my most admirable characteristic?"
Cree was tempted to say something hurtful. But, as she'd inventoried on her way up, she did admire a great many things about him. Even now, even as he did his best to be offensive, she could feel something noble in him-synesthetically, it came across as a rich crimson-and-peach- toned glow, steady and fine, just visible beneath the blackened, warted surface of his affect. Mason was the ultimate frog prince, always awakening her desire to free him from his enchantment, too ugly to bear to kiss. He was a hideous, aging man being eaten alive by some unknown malady, collapsing upon himself in a wheelchair, and he broke her heart.
In any case, rule one with Mason was you couldn't let him get under your skin. The only way to get by was to stay yourself. Show him you were above his provocations, which, she had to believe, were nothing more than oblique affirmations of affection and intimacy.
She touched his hand. "That you're easily disarmed by candor and affection. It suggests you have a human streak in you somewhere. That you're not the monster you think you are."
Lupe snorted at that, and Mason joined her with a chortle, chin hard against his chest. When he recovered, his big face hardened quickly.
"Lupe, I will need a moment to speak with Cree in confidence."
Lupe's mahogany eyes locked accusingly on Cree's before she took her hands from the wheelchair grips and removed herself to the railing.
"If you wouldn't mind, Cree-" Mason gestured toward the far corner of the platform, an acute angle jutting well out over the cliff face.
Cree rolled him away from Lupe, feeling the woman's incomprehensible resentment. At the corner, she stopped the chair and came around to face Mason, leaving him oriented toward the vast space. Far below, another tramcar was inching up past the giant blue gantry.
"Do you know I can still stand?" he asked conversationally. He didn't look at her, just stared out at the bigness.
"No. I-"
"I could grab the railing and pull myself up right now. Not for long, of course." His voice was flat, almost disinterested, and Cree wondered why he was telling her this. "I could even throw myself over. In fact, I come here whenever I'm in Albuquerque just to savor that knowledge."
She gave him an exasperated smile. "Mason, how about skipping the high drama? Just tell me why we're here."
"Do you know why I might want to do that?"
"I can think of a lot of reasons why someone might-"
" No-why would I, Mason Ambrose, choose to fling myself over and stain the rocks down there with my brain matter?" Now his eyes were on her, and they seemed very deep, like holes to some subterranean pit. Whatever he wanted from her, his intensity was disturbing. Forty feet away, Lupe stood at the rail, watching them from the side of her eyes. Beyond her, the tramcar slid silently up the cable.
"You're trying to upset me. But it won't happen. Sorry."
He shook his head. "Come along, Lucretia! You're the most talented empath I've ever encountered. You know emotions and longings. You see them. What do you see in your old mentor?"
She appraised him. There were so many possibilities: that living as a toad in a wheelchair had become intolerable, or that by throwing himself over the edge he'd have some control over himself, otherwise denied him in so many ways. That his noble and good parts wanted to be free of the awful things in him. That his disease was progressing and promised a life of unbearable pain.
Possible, she decided, but too obvious, not what he wanted from her now.
"I don't know," she said finally. "Maybe that you want to know what happens after-what's on the other side. That your curiosity is that strong."
Mason looked flattered and proud of her in a proprietary way, the folds around his mouth puckering. "Oh, you unabashed romantic. You poor naive idealist." He turned his head to frown across the deck at his assistant, and his voice turned into a snarl: "What makes you think I wouldn't do it just to get away from Lupe? Or to punish her? Look at her! My grandfather's old cowhide razor strop had more give than that woman!"
Cree knew she couldn't hope to fathom the awful twists and coils of their relationship. She'd always suspected they were lovers, and Mason's treatment of Lupe was among the things that offended her the most about him. And he knew it.
She let her voice get hard: "Okay, now we've done the courtesies, let's cut to the chase. What do you want?"
"There's a situation that will interest you, here in New Mexico. One that I believe requires your talents."
"Mason, I'm due to fly back to Seattle tomorrow. I can't just-"
"Of course you can."
"Sure. And you can cancel your flight to Switzerland and attend to it yourself."
"It's not a matter of travel itinerary, it's a matter of expertise. I was consulted as a neuropsychiatrist. In that capacity, I have determined that there is no neurological or immediately evident psychological cause for the patient's extreme behavioral aberrations. This is a matter for a different set of talents."
" Mason-"
"And it involves a child, Lucretia. Obviously, I am not the best confidant for a child already suffering from a surfeit of terror." His hand made a disgusted gesture at his sagging face and squat body.
"Look, I appreciate your thinking of me. But I… I got very stressed out this spring. I've had some difficult cases recently, and I made a pact with myself to take some personal time."
"You?" He puffed air out of his lips skeptically. "What could Cree Black do for 'personal time'?"
She stared at him. "Maybe I was wrong about you not being a monster."
But he wasn't baiting her this time, she saw. His voice was sepulchral and his stare without pretense. "How would you ever grant yourself a respite? There is no respite. Not for people like you and me."
She almost argued that, no thanks, she was not like him. But his gaze permitted no escape or deflection. And she knew what he meant.
He looked away to look up at the tram station, where a new flock of visitors was disembarking and fanning out at the railings. "I had another reason for bringing you up here this evening, beyond showing you a majestic view. I wanted to tell you that I've already arranged a meeting between you and the client." Cree started to protest, but he overrode her: "Her name is Julieta McCarty, and she's the founder, president of the board, and principal of a little boarding school for Navajo kids. You'll like her-a woman on a mission, just like you. No, don't bristle at me! All you have to do is talk with her, Lucretia. Afterward, you can tell her why your taking some personal time is more important than her whole life and the futures of sixty-odd bright and talented teenagers and the survival of one very special boy in particular."
Cree crossed her arms against the chill wind and looked away from him. "You're laying it on pretty thick here, Mason. The Dickensian sentimentality."
He dropped his voice to an urgent whisper: "You were right that I'd die to know. Just as you would. This situation at the school-it could be the breakthrough we both want, the one that brings us as close to the other side as we can get without dying ourselves. I'd love nothing more than to take it on. But I am simply not the right one for the job! It requires your talents. Beyond the empathic elements needed, this will take someone physically robust and mobile. Don't pass this up, Lucretia! Don't."
His intensity gave her pause. If Mason Ambrose said it might be a breakthrough case, he had good reason. She felt the familiar kindling of her senses, the awakening of that ravening curiosity.
But there was no way to communicate how important it was to take the time she needed. Time for life. How last spring in New Orleans she'd realized the full extent to which she'd slipped into obsession, into an emotional world so narrow that she'd become little more than a ghost herself. Preoccupied with death and haunts, with the past. Always looking through but never at the sunlit world of daily, physical life, always straining to see into the twilight that lay beyond. How she was, as Mason said, married to a dead man, unable to live as a flesh-and-blood woman. That she'd been turning into a kind of ghost herself.
It had nearly killed her, but out of the Beauforte House investigation and her unexpected attraction to Paul Fitzpatrick had come a hard-won determination to live. For the first time in the nine years since Mike's death, she had admitted to herself the need to get over him. To shed the confusion and guilt she felt whenever she felt drawn to another, living, man. Taking this case now would mean that once again she was putting life on hold in favor of the afterlife.
"I can't, Mason," she said finally. "I'm not going to do this one. I'm truly sorry."
Mason gave his head a skeptical toss. "Fine. As I say, you can tell it to Julieta McCarty. That's her now. And she's got the school physician with her-Dr. Tsosie. Excellent!" And he waved to a woman and a man who were descending the ramps toward them wearing expressions Cree knew only too well: the look of people coping, poorly, with the inexplicable.