How might he apply what Arbel had shown him? It took him two more blocks to speak again. "Can I ask some questions? To help me understand?"

This time Mary's aura did show irritation, and she stopped, about to tell him "no" again, emphatically this time. Yet somehow the word "yes" came out. "But not here," she said. "We can sit on the porch at home and talk."

They turned south down a residential street lined and darkened by Norway maples and Douglas-firs, the air cool and damp off the nearby ocean, smelling of salt and kelp instead of the smoke that had made the air so pungent recently.

The sheriff's two-story frame house stood in a large lot, well back from the street, dark with the shadows of trees and hedges, and lit dimly by a single light somewhere inside. They turned up the walk, went up the steps and onto the porch, where they seated themselves in wicker chairs, facing each other. It was hard to begin. He wished he had a shaman drum or flute, but even if he had, he could hardly start thumping a drum on the sheriff's front porch in the middle of the night. Nor had Varia used one to spell him when they were newlyweds, and she'd wanted to activate his ylvin genes.

For a moment he turned inward, gathering shaman focus, then turned that focus on Mary and spoke quietly. "I take it that you don't want to date or marry, but tell me-tell me something you could like about marriage."

She frowned. "About marriage."

"Right. Tell me something you could like about marriage." She might have told him it was none of his business-it occurred to her-or that she didn't want to talk about it. But there was something compelling in his question. She spoke even more quietly than he had. "Well-it would be nice to have someone to talk with, and go places with."

"Okay. Now tell me something you wouldn't like about being married."

There was a long lag before she answered. He wished he could see her eyes. Arbel had taught him that eye movements and color shifts could tell more about some things than auras could. "Children," Mary said at last. "I wouldn't like to have children."

That was it; that was the key. Her aura left no doubt. "All right. What is there about children that you don't want?" She was facing him, looking past him. "I couldn't stand to have children."

"Fine. What specifically is there about children…" Then, in his mind, he saw the picture that was stuck in her own, hidden from her by trauma. "That's it," he said. "What is that?"

"Nothing. There's nothing." Her voice was little more than a whisper.

"Is that lady in bed your mother?"

He felt her rush of emotion, followed by a sense of brittleness, as if she'd turned to glass. Then the brittleness dissolved, and she began silently to cry. Briefly he let her, then said, "Tell me about it."

"She-she died-because of me."

"All right. How did that happen?"

She shook her head. "I don't know, don't remember. I was just a little child. A baby, really."

"Ah. Look earlier, and tell me what you see."

"I don't see anything. There's nothing there."

"Okay. A minute ago you could see a lady in bed. Your mother. What I want you to do now is see what happened before she was in bed."

That picture came through too, for him as for her. "I see-I see her flopping around on the floor. Jerking. Howling." Mary's voice remained little more than a whisper. "I run out of the house to Mrs. Nelsen's next door." Mary's focus left the scene she'd described, shifting to Macurdy. "Mrs. Nelsen called the doctor. Mama had cancer of the brain. She died a few weeks later, maybe a few months, and they wouldn't let me see her while she was dying. They thought it was too terrible for a child to see. She'd have convulsions, and scream, and say terrible things."

Macurdy took a deep breath. "All right." He paused. "Did you do something to make that happen?"

Mary grimaced through her tears. "Me? What could I have done?" Abruptly her voice intensified. "She had cancer! In her brain! Don't you understand?"

"How old were you?"

Her anger subsided. "I was three when she died. On my birthday. So, two-something when she-got sick."

"Okay." He continued quietly, with a calm learned from Arbel. "Look a little earlier, to before her convulsions started, and tell me what you see."

She frowned, peering inward, then her aura sparked and swelled like a threatened cat, while her face began to slacken as if entering a trance.

"What do you see?" he nudged.

"I-see -a little child. Me. I'm playing with a dish, a bowl, and drop it. It breaks in pieces. Mamma's bowl that her isoditi gave her. I start to cry, and mamma hears and comes in, and cries hard, and scolds me because her grandma is dead, and spanks me so hard.! So hard! And screams at me because I broke her grandma's beautiful bowl she gave her before she died, that I knew I wasn't supposed to touch. And I'm so scared, and she spanks me so hard, I pee on her lap when she spanks me, and she throws me on the bed and falls on the floor, and begins to jerk and scream!"

All through her description, Mary's whisper had tightened, tightened, her body writhing now, twisting with inner agony. "Then cry!" Macurdy ordered sharply. "Cry! Let it out!-" and she began to keen, dismally.

Seconds later he heard feet hammering down the stairs inside. A wild-eyed Fritzi stepped onto the porch in his nightshirt. "What in hell?!" he said, staring.

"She told me about her mother dying."

Fritzi gawped, bug-eyed. Mary's keening had turned to blubbering; it seemed to Macurdy she didn't even know her father was there. When she'd calmed a bit, he spoke once more. "Tell me again, from the beginning. See if there's something you missed before."

Basically she repeated, this time in the past tense but added something now. "And while she was spanking me, mama yelled, `You terrible terrible child! I wish I'd never had you! How could you cause me such pain?!' Then she threw me on the bed and fell on the floor."

Mary's tears still flowed, but the terrible grief was gone. Both Macurdy and Fritzi stared. Klara too was peering out the door now, alarmed and bewildered. "And that's it," Mary said, then hiccuped, which made her giggle. Even Macurdy gawped at that. He'd seen Arbel's patients respond in more or less the same way, but he'd never caused such an effect himself.

"Sorry" she said. "Yes, Curtis, I'll go to a movie with you. What night?"

"I better find out for sure what night I can have off. I'll let you know."

She stared unseeingly past him toward the lilac bushes at the comer of the porch. "You know what? When they picked mamma off the floor and laid her on the bed, I told myself I would never ever have a child who would do such wicked things and make me die. Because I knew she was going to die. I knew it before any of the grownups. And I thought it was my fault. I was too little to understand that she'd already had the cancer, probably for months, and no one knew it; a kind the person is dying from before they show any symptoms. I remember Pappa telling Uncle Wiiri that."

Fritzi stared, shaken. "I remember. The doctor told me, and told Wiiri. He called it glioblastoma something. I remember that. It is what killed my Aina."

Klara spoke sharply to Fritzi in German, and he gave her a brief summary. The old woman grumbled something more, then left, presumably returning to bed. Fritzi spoke gruffly to Mary: "Better you come in and go to bed. Rest. The whole neighborhood must be awake now."

"In a minute, Pappa. First I have to thank Curtis. Privately." Fritzi backed through the door, no doubt to wait listening in the hallway. Macurdy wondered if Mary was going to kiss him. Instead she talked.

"You're a strange man, Curtis Macurdy, but a very nice one. How did you know what to do? To ask those questions? I feel like a new person, I can hardly believe how new."