"But," Timmy said, "we haven't met them. Darren says they're pretty out of control.

Especially Charm Stankewitz. And they know about Zinsser and the old FFE He told them all about it, apparently hoping to show how cool he once was."

"Are Charm, Pheromone and Edward their real names?"

Thad casually spat something ugly into the dust and said, "Charm's real name is Patricia Stankewitz, and Edward's is Edward Nicetwink. It had been Edward Beers, but he had it legally changed last winter when he hit eighteen and his parents in Stockbridge couldn't stop him. Pheromone's actual name, believe it or not, is Pheromone Peabody."

"An old New England Yankee family via the sixties, it sounds like," Timmy said.

"And what about Darren, your source for all this data?" I asked. "I take it Darren strikes you as a reliable source of information."

"He's got no axe to grind that's evident," Timmy said. "He's Zinsser's boyfriend, and that's clearly where his sympathies lie. But his story of these three troubled youths is plausible enough."

"Why don't you go in and meet Darren?" Thad said. "He'll give you a free sample of Woolly Llama Cheese."

Timmy said, "Yes, you haven't had any yet."

"Is it pretty awful?"

"Of course," they said, nearly in unison.

"Lead the way."

Darren, a slender, sloe-eyed man a good twenty years Zinsser's junior, was wearing a llama T-shirt like his partner's. He had a small llama tattoo on one upper arm, and on the other upper arm were tattooed the words "Robert Forever," apparent evidence of the hazards of subdermal body decoration.

At my request, Darren reiterated what he had told Timmy and Thad about Charm, Pheromone and Edward. He had nothing new to add, although when I asked him directly whether he thought these three schoolkidsPheromone was only seventeen, and Edward and Charm just a year older-were capable of pulling off a kidnapping, Darren said, "Nothing those brats did would surprise me. They are totally unpredictable, and I've always thought truly dangerous."

"But how could they kidnap anybody in New York? Are any of them big enough and tough enough to wrestle a man in his forties into a waiting vehicle? Do they possess firearms or other weapons, or drugs they could use on somebody?"

"I don't know about guns," Darren said, "but I suppose they could drug someone. All three of them have extensive experience with pharmaceuticals. They're all rather small, but if they were going to snatch somebody in New York they might have larger friends there who could help them. They go into the city at least once a week and stay with some people in Brooklyn."

"Any idea who these people are?"

"Not really. I've heard them mention Louis somebody, and a Sharon, I think, and somebody they refer to as Strawberry Swirl."

You could practically hear the wheels turn as we all made mental notes on Louis, Sharon and Strawberry Swirl.

"Were Charm, Pheromone and Edward in the city yesterday?" I asked. "That's when the kidnapping took place. Late morning sometime."

"Actually, I think they were," Darren said, his eyes widening. "Or Charm was anyway. We weren't making cheese yesterday. We won't make cheese again until Tuesday. By then Kurt thinks he'll have some new people to work for us who are less obnoxious to have around."

Timmy said, "Don, you haven't tried any cheese yet."

"No," Thad added. "We have but you haven't."

Darren got up from his stool behind the counter. "This stuff will change your life," he said, with no trace of irony. His was supposed to be the generation steeped in irony, but apparently that had all gone by him. Using a small square of parchment paper, Darren retrieved a sample-sized portion of Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese from the refrigerator case. It was grayish, and it resembled a mouse minus its extremities.

"You're serving this cheese chilled," I said. "Shouldn't it be allowed to warm to the task of being eaten, to collect its cheesy thoughts for a while?"

"Ideally, yes," Darren said. "But much of the flavor and nearly all of the healing properties are in the oil of the wool. As you suck the cheese out of the wool, the chewing and sucking combined with the heat of your own saliva release the oil and its protein. One of the sad aspects of modern American life is the haste with which most people devour their food. It was easier for the ancient Incas, of course, to take the time to absorb the healing oils in their llama cheese, because they lived a much less pressured existence."

As I inserted the moist morsel into my mouth, Thad said, "Rural agricultural people have plenty of pressure on them, usually associated with the vagaries of climate. But it is true that the pace of that life is much slower a lot of the time."

"The trouble with the hectic lives we lead," Timmy said, "is that for most of us it's all too rare that we take the time to stop and suck the cheese."

Which was what I was doing at that moment. The cheese itself wasn't bad-ripe, a little salty, with a hint of smoke, and not so gluey as I feared. The wool that was marbled through it, however, was another matter. I was counting on my finely tuned gag reflex to prevent disaster. What if I swallowed this thing whole? Had that ever happened to a Berkshire Woolly Llama Cheese devotee? Were there FDA warnings on the package?

I glanced around the shop for a Heimlich-maneuver instructions poster. None was visible, although I knew Timmy was capable of successfully executing the proce-dure. Some years earlier I had seen him apply the maneuver and dislodge what looked like half a strip steak from an old lady's trachea at a Friendly's restaurant near Lake George. So adept was Timmy that upon the first upward thrust under the desperate woman's rib cage, the deadly gob was ejected and shot across the room, knocking over a little boy's Fribble®.

"What do you think?" Thad said.

"It's tasty," I replied. "But sucking a wad of hair takes some getting used to. It's uncommon in our culture."

Timmy said, "Thad, do the Amish chew hair?"

"Not in Pennsylvania, as far as I ever heard. In Indiana maybe they do, or Ohio."

Darren said, "To achieve the full benefits, you really need to eat it every day for several weeks."

Almost as if by plan, we quickly changed the subject back to Charm, Pheromone and Edward, and discussed how we would carry out a visit to them at Charm's father's house up the road.

Chapter 14

"You can ask us anything you want to ask," Charm Stanke-witz said, blowing clove-cigarette smoke in my direction. "But anything we don't feel like talking about, we're not going to talk about. Got that? It'll be up to us, not you, what subjects are covered.

If you want to talk about J-Bird Plankton, maybe we'll answer your questions, and maybe we won't. Just so you understand what the rules are before we get started with this… this whatever."

Charm, Pheromone, Edward and I were seated in the living room/dining room of the converted carriage house near the main Stankewitz house, a gorgeous federal-style former farmhouse that looked as if it had been painted white just minutes before.

The building we were in, apparently a guest house being occupied for the summer by Charm and her friends, was nicely furnished with an assortment of comfortable antique and reproduction nineteenth-century New England country furnishings. The building's current occupants had added some touches of their own, too. A large sound system and a rack full of CDs were perched on the mahogony sideboard, and an array of posters touting queer and feminist causes had been taped to the picture molding. One poster, vividly illustrated, advertised something called the