Miss Alpaca Acres looked around the room, bewildered. Another lady joined them, the really fat one from the yarn spinning display. “Who’s she looking for?”

“Arthur Whitacre?” said the gentleman.

“He had four llamas!” Mandy repeated.

“There’s nobody here by that name,” said the gentleman.

The rancher who’d been doing the lecture arrived. She had to tell him the same things all over again.

“Are you sure you’re in the right building?” he asked.

She stared back at them, aghast. Such unbelievable, total know-nothingness. They could have been mannequins, dream people.

“Daddy …” slipped in a hoarse whisper from her lips. She turned away from the strangers and toward the huge room to look just one more time, hands trembling, barely gripping the paddock rail. If only she could see him. If only he were working close to the ground, spreading straw or checking hooves, and would finally stand up straight and appear chest and shoulders above the pens, billed cap on his gray head, feed pail in his hand. If only she could see him smile big and wave at her and she could run to him and let him put his guarding arm around her and pull her close for just a moment …

Then everything else wouldn’t matter. She would have been home, even in this place.

“Please don’t be gone,” she whispered. “Please, dear God, don’t take him away, not him, too!”

She was crying, really crying, and she didn’t care who noticed even as gentle hands touched her shoulders and the strangers came close.

“Where’d you come from, sweetie?” asked the gentleman.

“Is there somebody we can call?” asked Alpaca Acres.

Mandy came away from the railing and let them gather around her. They were less strangers now and she needed them.

The fat lady asked, “What’s your name, sweetie?”

“Mandy Whitacre—and my father’s Arthur Whitacre, and we had some llamas …”

She could see them looking her over, reading something in what they saw.

“Mmm,” said the rancher. He was looking at her bare feet and her hospital gown. “She might have gotten out of the …” He jerked his head toward the west.

The gentleman seemed to understand. He nodded, then spoke kindly, “You don’t worry now. We’re gonna get you some help.”

“We sure are,” said the fat lady.

The llama lecture rancher took a little gadget from his belt, touched it, and it lit up like a tiny color television. He rubbed his finger across the screen, and the picture moved. Little numbers and letters appeared like a keyboard on the screen and he started touching them as they made soft, musical beeps.

It was enough to scare her. “What’s that?”

He looked up at her, strangely interested in her question.

She asked him, “What’s that going to do to me?”

The four exchanged looks and nodded little yeses to each other.

chapter

3

Mandy sat on a hospital gurney, bare feet on the linoleum floor, trying not to wrinkle the white sheets. She had a robe now— Thank You, Jesus and Spokane County Medical Center—and under the circumstances she was deeply grateful. It even had the hospital logo stitched on it.

She was in one of those through-the-door-and-down-the-hall examining rooms every hospital and doctor’s office has, the one in which the smiling nurse takes your temperature and blood pressure, asks you some questions, tells you the doctor will see you shortly, and then leaves you to sit for a while. She could hear some occasional stirrings from the hall outside, a nurse or doctor walking by, some muffled conversations, sometimes the low rumble of a passing gurney or cart. It was a big, busy place out there with lots of people waiting their turn, just as she was.

I should be safe.Unless this was like Planet of the Apesand she was Charlton Heston, the astronaut who landed there, and all the apes thought hewas the weird guy.

Like that lady sheriff’s deputy back at the fairgrounds. “Honey, we’re going to take you to the hospital just to make sure you’re okay, all right?”

It made sense at the time. Something had to be wrong with her head and she was desperate.

But it was a little heavy riding in the back of a police car with no handles on the doors and a cage between the front and back and a big shotgun mounted on the dash… . She didn’t have anything against cops, at least not yet, not personally, but plenty of her friends did, and maybe for good reasons: Mayor Daley’s cops during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and those kids at Kent State getting shot, to name a few.

The lady deputy was named Rosemary and she talked a little bit, but Johnny, the big Hispanic guy who drove, hardly said a word except on the radio, something about “transporting subject for police hold.”

Subject.She was a subject. And “police hold” didn’t sound like help.

She fidgeted, dried her palms on her robe, stood up because she was tired of sitting. I’ve got to call Daddy.He’d be looking for her by now, getting worried. Joanie and Angie—wow, they’d be ready to skin her.

She touched the soft surface of the gurney. It was really there. She was really here. There were no boogie men or aliens or armored apes standing around trying to jab her with big needles or suck out her brain. She could recite the opening of the Declaration of Independence and the opening lines from the Gettysburg Address. Two plus two was four. Eight plus eight was sixteen. Eight times eight was … um … sixty-four!

“Mandy Eloise Whitacre,” she recited, “January 15, 1951, 12790 North Lakeland Road, Hayden, Idaho, 83835. Arthur and Eloise Whitacre—Eloise passed away March 12, 1965. I graduated from Coeur d’Alene High School in 1969. Sophomore at North Idaho Junior College working toward a major in theater …”

There was a gentle knock on the door and it opened. Two nurses came in—at least she figured they must be nurses. One of them, a nice-looking lady in her forties, was dressed in dark pants and a comfortable blouse with pockets and had a stethoscope around her neck. She could have been somebody’s mom. The young, pretty one was wearing blue pants and a flowered top and had long hair done up in braids. Neither wore a cap. The younger one was pushing a little wheeled stand with a … Mandy didn’t know what it was. A TV? A typewriter? Both? How could it be so small and flat and be either one?

The mom-looking nurse said, “Hi, Mandy. I’m Dr. Fried, but you can call me Angela, and this is June.”

Mandy shook Angela’s hand, actually looking at it. It was warm and real. “Mandy Whitacre.”

“Go ahead, sit down,” Angela said, indicating the gurney. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Mandy settled back down, again trying not to crinkle the sheets.

Angela left the door half open—Johnny the cop was standing just outside like a wall, watching everything—then came close to Mandy, looking her in the eyes and with a gentle hand to her chin to turn her head, either side of her face. “So, what brings you here today?”

“The sheriffs.”

“June’s going to take your blood pressure, okay?”

Mandy was staring at the really flat TV hinged to a really flat typewriter as June wrapped the cuff around her arm. “Okay.”

“Do you know where you are right now?”

“Spokane County Medical Center.”

“That’s right.”

June pressed a button on a small white box; the cuff squeezed around Mandy’s arm all by itself and red numbers began blinking on a little machine. Now Mandy stared at that.

“And why do you think they brought you here?”

Mandy’s mind went dead in the water. The question wasn’t hard; it was the answer that was tough.

“One-forty over eighty,” said June, removing the cuff. “Pulse is one-ten.”

Angela nodded with a smile and touched Mandy’s hand. It was trembling a little. “It’s okay, Mandy. You’re safe.”