But on a second and closer look, his blue eyes were steely, not warm. His rounded features were too soft, and revealed not gentility so much as lack of character, as though they had been acquired through a lifetime of self-indulgence. His wide mouth would have given kindly old Doc Fogarty a winning smile, but its generous dimension served equally well to lend the look of a predator to the real Doc Fogarty.

“So Frank’s told you about us,” Bobby said. “But we don’t know anything about you, and I think we need to.”

Fogarty scowled. “Better that you don’t know about me. Better by far for me. Just get him out of here, take him away.”

“You want us to take Frank off your hands,” Julie said coldly, “then you’ve got to tell us who you are, how you fit into this, what you know about it.”

Meeting Julie’s gaze, then Bobby’s, the old man said, “He’s not been here in five years. Today, when he came with you, Dakota, I was shocked, I’d thought I was finished with him forever. And when he came back tonight ...”

Frank’s eyes had not focused, but he had cocked his head to one side. His mouth was still ajar like the door to a room from which the resident had fled in haste.

Regarding Frank sourly, Fogarty said, “I’ve never seen him like this, either. I wouldn’t want him on my hands if he was his old self, let alone when he’s half a vegetable. All right, all right, we’ll talk. But once we’ve talked, he’s your responsibility.”

Fogarty went behind the mahogany desk and sat in a chair that was upholstered in the same dark maroon leather as was the wingback in which Frank slumped.

Although their host had not offered them a seat, Bobby went to the sofa. Julie followed and slipped past him at the last moment, sitting on the end of the sofa closest to Frank. She favored Bobby with a look that essentially said, You’re too impulsive, if he groans or sighs or blows a spit bubble, you’ll put a hand on him to comfort him, and then you’ll be gone in a wink to Hoboken or Hell, so keep your distance.

Removing his tortoiseshell reading glasses and putting them on the blotter, Fogarty squeezed his eyes shut and pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, as if to banish a headache with an effort of will or collect his thoughts or both. Then he opened his eyes, blinked at them across the desk, and said, “I’m the doctor who delivered Roselle Pollard when she was born forty-six years ago, February of 1946. I’m also the doctor who delivered each of her kids—Frank, the twins, and James ... or Candy as he now prefers. Over the years I treated Frank for the usual childhood-adolescent illnesses, and I guess that’s why he thinks he can come to me now, when he’s in trouble. Well, he’s wrong. I’m no goddamned TV doctor who wants to be everybody’s confidant and Dutch uncle. I treated them, they paid me, and that should be the end of it. Fact is ... I only ever really treated Frank and his mother, because the girls and James never got sick, unless we’re talking mental illness, in which case they were sick at birth and never got well.”

Because Frank’s head was tilted, a thin, silver stream of drool slipped out of the right corner of his mouth and along his chin.

Julie said, “You evidently know about the powers her children have—”

“I didn’t know, really, until seven years ago, the day that Frank killed her. I was retired by then, but he came to me, told me more than I ever wanted to know, dragged me into this nightmare, wanted me to help. How could I help? How can anyone help? It’s none of my business anyway.”

“But why do they have these powers?” Julie said. “Do you have any clue, any theories?”

Fogarty laughed. It was a hard, sour laugh that would have dispelled any illusions Bobby had about him if those illusions had not already been dispelled two minutes after he’d met the man. “Oh, yes, I have theories, lots of information to support the theories too, some of it stuff you’ll wish you never heard. I’m not going to get myself involved in the mess, not me, but I can’t help now and then thinking about it. Who could? It’s a sick and twisted and fascinating mess. My theory is that it starts with Roselle’s father. Supposedly her father was some itinerant who knocked up her mother, but I always knew that was a lie. Her father was Yarnell Pollard, her mother’s brother. Roselle was a child of rape and incest.”

A look of distress must have crossed Bobby’s face or Julie’s, for Fogarty let out another bark of cold laughter, clearly amused by their sympathetic response.

The old physician said, “Oh, that’s nothing. That’s the least of it.”

THE TAILLESS MANX- Zitha by name—took up sentry duty in the concealment of an azalea shrub near the front door.

The old Spanish house had exterior window ledges, and the second cat—as black as midnight, and named Darkle—sprang to another one in search of the room to which the old man had taken the younger man and woman. Darkle put his nose to the glass. A set of interior shutters inhibited snooping, but the wide louvres were only half closed, and Darkle was able to see several cross-sections of the room by raising or lowering his head.

Hearing Frank’s name spoken, the cat stiffened, because Violet had stiffened in her bed high on Pacific Hill.

The old man was there, among the books, and the couple as well. When everyone sat down, Darkle had to lower his head to peer between another pair of tilted louvres. Then he saw that Frank was not only one of the subjects of their conversation but actually present in a high-backed chair that stood at just enough of an angle to the window to reveal part of his face, and one hand lying limply on the wide, maroon-leather arm.

LEANING OVER his desk and smiling humorlessly as he talked, Doc Fogarty resembled a troll that had crawled out from its lair beneath a bridge, not content to wait for unsuspecting children to pass by, prepared to forage for his grisly dinner.

Bobby reminded himself not to let his imagination run away with him. He needed to keep an unbiased perspective on Fogarty, in order to determine the truthfulness and value of what the old man had to tell them. Their lives might depend on it.

“The house was built in the thirties by Deeter and Elizabeth Pollard. He’d made some money in Hollywood, producing a bunch of cheap Westerns, other junk. Not a fortune, but enough that he was fairly sure he could give up films and Los Angeles, which he hated, move up here, get into some small businesses, and do all right for the rest of his life. They had two children. Yarnell was fifteen when they came here in 1938, and Cynthia was only six years old. In forty-five, when Deeter and Elizabeth were killed in a car crash—hit head-on by a drunk driving a truck full of cabbages down from the Santa Ynez valley, if you can believe it—YameM became the man of the house at the age of twenty-two, and the legal guardian of his thirteen-year-old sister.”

Julie said, “And ... forced himself on her, you said?”

Fogarty nodded. “I’m sure of it. Because over the next year, Cynthia became withdrawn, weepy. People attributed it to the death of her folks, but it was Yarnell using her, I think. Not just because he wanted the sex—though she was a pretty little thing, and you could hardly fault his taste—but because being man of the house appealed to him, he liked authority. And he was the type who wasn’t happy until his authority was absolute, his dominance complete.”

Bobby was horrified by the words “you could hardly fault his taste” and what they implied about the depth of the moral abyss in which Fogarty lived.

Oblivious of the disgust with which his visitors were regarding him, Fogarty continued: “Yarnell was strong-willed, reckless, caused his folks a lot of heartache before they died, all kinds of heartache but mostly related to drugs. He was an acidhead before they had a name for it, before they even had LSD. Peyote, mescaline ... all of the natural hallucinogens you can distill from certain cactuses, mushrooms and other fungi. Wasn’t the drug culture back then that we have now, but crap was around. He got into hallucinogens through a relationship he had with a character actor who appeared in a lot of his father’s movies, got started when he was fifteen, and I tell you all this because my theory is it’s the key to everything you want to know.”

“The fact that Yarnell was an acidhead,” Julie said. “That’s the key?”

“That and the fact he impregnated his own sister. The chemicals probably did genetic damage, and a lot of it, by the time he was twenty-two. They usually do. In his case some very strange genetic damage. Then, when you add in the fact that the gene pool was very limited, being as Cynthia was his sister, you might expect there’s a high chance the offspring will be a freak of some kind.”

Frank made a low sound, then sighed.

They all looked at him, but he was still detached. Though his eyes blinked rapidly for a moment, they did not come back into focus. Saliva still drooled from the right comer of his mouth; a string of it hung from his chin.

Though Bobby felt that he should get some Kleenex and blot Frank’s face, he restrained himself, largely because he was afraid of Julie’s reaction.

“So about a year after their parents died, Yarnell and Cynthia came to me, and she was pregnant,” Fogarty said. “They had this story about some itinerant farmworker raping her, but it didn’t ring true, and I pretty much figured out the real story just watching how they were with each other. She’d tried to conceal the pregnancy by wearing loose clothes and by staying in the house entirely during her last few months, and I never could understand that behavior; it was as if they thought the problem would just go away one day. By the time they came to me, abortion was out of the question. Hell, she was in the early stages of labor.”

The longer he listened to Fogarty, the more it seemed to Bobby that the air in the library was foul and growing fouler, thick with a humidity as sour as sweat.

“Claiming that he wanted to protect Cynthia as much as possible from public scorn, Yarnell offered me a pretty fat fee if I’d keep her out of the hospital and deliver the baby right in my office, which was a little risky, in case there were complications. But I needed the money, and if anything went really wrong, there were ways to cover it. I had this nurse at the time who could assist me-Norma, she was pretty flexible about things.”

Just great, Bobby thought. The sociopathic physician had found himself a sociopathic nurse, a couple who would be right in the social swim of things among the medical staff at Dachau or Auschwitz.

Julie put a hand on Bobby’s knee and squeezed, as if the contact reassured her that she was not listening to a mad doctor in a dream.

“You should have seen what came out of that girl’s oven,” Fogarty said. “A freak it was, just as you’d expect.”

“Wait a minute,” Julie said. “I thought you said the baby was Roselle. Frank’s mother.”

“It was,” Fogarty said. “And she was such a spectacular little freak that she’d have been worth a fortune to any carnival sideshow willing to risk the anger of the law to exhibit her.” He paused, enjoying their anticipation. “She was an hermaphrodite.”

For a moment the word meant nothing to Bobby, and then he said, “You don’t mean—she had both sexes, male and female?”

“Oh, but that’s exactly what I mean.” Fogarty bounced up from his chair and began to pace, suddenly energized by the conversation. “Hermaphroditism is an extremely rare birth defect in humans, it’s an amazing thing to have the opportunity to deliver one. You have traverse hermaphroditism, where you have the external organs of one sex and the internal of the other, lateral hermaphroditism ... several other types. But the thing is ... Roselle was the rarest of all, she possessed the complete internal and external organs of both sexes.” He plucked a thick medical reference book from one of the shelves and handed it to Julie. “Check page one forty-six for photos of the kind of thing I’m talking about.”

Julie handed the volume to Bobby so fast it seemed as if she thought it was a snake.

Bobby, in turn, put it beside himself on the sofa, unopened. The last thing he needed, with his imagination, was the assistance of clinical photographs.

His hands and feet had gone cold, as though the blood had rushed from his extremities to his head, to nourish his brain, which was spinning furiously. He wished that he could stop thinking about what Fogarty was telling them. It was gross. But the worst thing about it was, judging by the physician’s strange smile, Bobby sensed that what they had heard thus far was all just the bread on this horror sandwich; the meat was yet to come.

Pacing again, Fogarty said, “Her vagina was about where you’d expect, the male equipment somewhat displaced. Urination was through the male part, but the female appeared reproductively complete.”

“I think we get the picture,” Julie said. “We don’t need all the technical details.”

Fogarty came to them, stood looking down at them, and his eyes were as bright and lively as if he were recounting a charming medical anecdote that had bewitched legions of delighted companions at dinner parties over the years. “No, no, you must understand what she was, if you’re going to understand all that happened next.”

THOUGH HER OWN mind was split into many parts—sharing the bodies of Verbina, all the cats, and the owl on Fogarty’s porch roof—Violet was most acutely aware of what she was receiving through the senses of Darkle, as he perched upon the windowsill outside the study. With the cat’s sharp hearing, Violet missed not a word of the conversation, in spite of the intervening pane of glass. She was enthralled.

She seldom paused to think about her mother, although Roselle was still in this old house in so many ways. She seldom thought about any human being, for that matter, except herself and her twin sister—less often Candy and Frank—because she had so little in common with other people. Her life was with the wild things. In them emotions were. so much more primitive and intense, pleasure so much more easily found and enjoyed without guilt. She hadn’t really known her mother or been close to her; and Violet would not have been close, even if her mother had been willing to share affection with anyone but Candy.

But now Violet was riveted by what Fogarty was telling them, not because it was news to her (which it was), but because anything that had affected Roselle’s life this completely also had profound effects on Violet’s life. And of the countless attitudes and perceptions that Violet had absorbed from the myriad wild creatures whose minds and bodies she shared, a fascination with self was perhaps paramount. She had an animal’s narcissistic preoccupation with grooming, with her own wants and needs. From her point of view, nothing in the world was of interest unless it served her, satisfied her, or affected the possibility of her future happiness.