"I saw it," Deborah said as she put on the directional signal.

After another twenty minutes of driving along a narrow two-lane road bordered with apple trees and stone fences that wound across a countryside of rolling hills and rust-colored cornfields, the women entered a typical New England town. At the outskirts there was a large billboard that said WELCOME TO BOOKFORD, MASSACHUSETTS, HOME OF THE BOOKFORD HIGH SCHOOL WILDCATS, DIVISION II STATE FOOTBALL CHAMPIONS 1993. The country road leading from the highway became Main Street and proceeded to bisect the town in a north and south direction. It was lined with the usual bevy o: turn-of-the-previous-century, brick-fronted stores. About midway a large white steepled church stood behind a green across from -i granite municipal building. A swelling and noisy throng of schoolkids with bookbags were moving north along the sidewalks like migratory wingless birds.

"It's a cute town," Deborah commented as she leaned forward to get a better view through the windshield. She slowed to less than twenty miles per hour. "It looks almost too cute to be real, like it's part of a theme park."

"I didn't see any sign for the Wingate Clinic," Joanna commented.

"Hey, did you hear the one about why it takes a hundred million sperm to fertilize one egg?"

"Can't say that I have," Joanna said.

"Because none of them are willing to stop and ask directions."

Joanna chuckled. "I suppose that means we're going to stop."

"You've got that right," Deborah said as she turned into a parking spot in front of the RiteSmart drugstore. There was angled parking up and down both sides of Main Street. "Do you want to come in or wait here?"

"I'm not going to let you have all the fun," Joanna said as she alighted from the car.

The women had to dodge children chasing each other along the sidewalk. Their taunting yells and screeches were just shy of the auditory pain threshold, and it was a relief for both women when the drugstore door closed behind them. In contrast, the interior of the store was engulfed in a relative hush. Adding to the calm was the fact that there were no customers. There weren't even any store personnel in sight.

After exchanging shrugs when no one appeared, the two women walked down the central aisle toward the prescription section in the back of the store. Positioned on the counter was a bell, which Deborah struck decisively. The noise was considerable in the comparable silence. Within moments a mostly bald, obese man in a pharmacist's tunic unbuttoned at the collar appeared through a pair of swinging doors like those leading into saloons in Hollywood westerns. Although it was relatively cool in the store, beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead.

"Can I help you ladies?" the proprietor asked cheerfully.

"We're looking for the Wingate Clinic," Deborah said.

"No problem," the proprietor said. "That's out in the Cabot State Mental Hospital."

"Excuse me?" Deborah said with surprise. "It's in a mental institution?"

"Yup," the proprietor said. "Old Doc Wingate bought or rented the whole damn place. I'm not sure which. Nobody really knows, not that it matters much."

"Oh, I understand," Deborah said. "It used to be a mental institution."

"Yup," the proprietor repeated. "For about a hundred years or so. It was also a TB sanitarium. Seems that the people down in Boston were eager to banish their mentally ill and people suffering with tuberculosis. Kinda locked 'em up in a fortress of sorts. Kinda outta sight, outta mind. A hundred years ago Bookford was considered to be way out in the sticks. Boy, times have sure changed. Now we're a Boston bedroom community."

"They just locked these people up?" Joanna questioned. "Didn't they try to treat them?"

"I suppose," the proprietor said. "But there wasn't much treatment back in those days. Well, that's not entirely true. They did a lot of surgery out there. You know, experimental stuff like collapsing the lungs of the people with TB and lobotomies on the crazies."

"That sounds awful," Joanna said. She shuddered.

"I imagine it was," the proprietor agreed.

"Well, there's no TB or mental patients anymore," Deborah added.

"Of course not," the proprietor said. "The Cabot, as we call it around here, has been closed for twenty to thirty years. I think it was in the seventies when the last patients were moved out. You remember: That was when the politicians began to seriously screw around with health care. It was a tragedy of sorts. I think they just bused the remaining patients back to Boston and let 'em loose in the Boston Common."

"I think that was a little before our time," Deborah said.

"Suppose you're right there," the proprietor agreed.

"Could you tell us how to get to the Cabot?" Deborah asked.

"Sure as shooting," the proprietor said. "Which way you headed?"

"North," Deborah said.

"Perfect," the proprietor said. "Head up to the next traffic light and hang a right. That's Pierce Street with the public library on the corner. From the intersection you can see the Cabot's brick tower. It's about two miles east of town, off Pierce Street. You can't miss it."

The women thanked the pharmacist and retreated back to their vehicle.

"Sounds like a charming environment for an infertility clinic," Joanna said as she buckled her seat belt.

"At least it's no longer a TB sanitarium-cum-mental institution," Deborah said as she backed out into the street. "For a moment there I was ready to head back to Cambridge."

"Maybe we should," Joanna said.

"You're not serious, are you?"

"No, not really," Joanna said. "But a place having a history like that gives me the willies. Can you imagine the horrors it's witnessed?"

"I can't," Deborah said.

PAUL SAUNDERS PUT DOWN THE MEMORANDUM SHEILA Donaldson had prepared for him and forcefully rubbed his eyes with the fingers of both hands, keeping his elbows on his desk. He'd repaired to his fourth-floor tower office after spending several hours in the lab checking his embryo cultures. For the most part they were doing reasonably well although not perfectly. He feared it was due to the age and quality of the eggs, a problem that he hoped to remedy shortly.

Paul was an early riser. His usual schedule was to get out of bed before five and be in the lab before six. That way he could get a significant amount of work done prior to the patients' arrival which generally began at nine. That morning he was starting his clinical day early because two egg retrieval procedures were scheduled. He liked to do retrievals as early as possible to ensure that the donors would have adequate time to recover from anesthesia to be discharged the same day. In-patient accommodations were for emergencies only, and even then, Paul preferred to refer them to the nearest acute-care hospital.

Picking up the memorandum again and pushing back from the desk, Paul ambled over to the windows. They were triple-hung monsters that were considerably taller than Paul's diminutive five-foot-six stature. The view was the extensive lawn in front of the clinic that stretched down to the cast-iron, razor-wire-topped fence that encircled the entire grounds. Slightly to Paul's left was the stone gatehouse from whence came the macadam drive. It swept up toward Paul and then curved away before disappearing from view to the left where there was parking on the south side of the building. In the middle distance Paul could see the spire of Bookford's Presbyterian church as well as the chimneys of a few of the town's taller buildings poking up through the fall colors. In the far distance the foothills of the Berkshire Mountains were arranged along the horizon in the form of purple blips.

Paul reread the memorandum, pondered it for a moment, then looked back out at the view. He had every reason to be content. Things couldn't have been going better, and the thought brought a smile to his doughy face. It seemed incredible that only six years previously he'd been essentially run out of Illinois, having lost his hospital privileges and barely keeping his medical license. His lawyer at the time had told him it didn't look good, so he'd left, and migrated east, all because of a stupid fracas over his Medicare and Medicaid billing. He had, of course, pushed the envelope, but so had his ob-gyn colleagues. In fact, he'd merely copied and then refined a practice that another group that occupied the same medical building was using. Why the government came after him was still a mystery – one that could make him furious if he thought about it. But he didn't need to, not anymore now that things had turned out so rosy.