By the light of the moon

had
expected it would. Barbed-wire grief fenced his heart, which seemed
to swell to test itself upon the sharpest points.
    Blair O'Conner had been forty-four, so young.
    He remembered her as gentle, as kind, as patient, with a beauty
of the mind equal to her lovely face.
    Here, now, however, she revealed her fiery side: green eyes by
anger brightened, face by anger sharpened, stalking back and forth
as she talked, with a mother-panther threat in every movement, in
every pause.
    She had never been angry without good cause, and never this
angry in Dylan's experience.
    The man who'd struck these sparks of anger from her flinty sense
of right and wrong stood at one of the living-room windows, his
back to her, to all of them gathered here from this time and from
across time.
    Her ghostly audience unseen, not yet even aware of ten-year-old
Shep watching from just this side of the dining-room doorway, Blair
said, 'I told you they don't exist. And even if they did exist, I'd
never give them to you .'
    'And if they did exist, who would you give them to?' the
man at the window asked, turning to face her.
    Slimmer in 1992 than in 2002, with more hair than he would have
in a decade, Lincoln Proctor, alias Frankenstein, was nonetheless
at once recognizable.

34
    Jilly had once described it as an 'evil-dreamy
smile,' and so it appeared to Dylan now. The man's faded-denim eyes
had earlier seemed to be the lusterless lamps of a meek soul, but
on this second encounter, he saw windows of ice looking out from a
cold kingdom.
    His mother had known Proctor. Proctor had been in their house
all those years ago.
    This discovery shocked Dylan so profoundly that for a moment he
forgot to what dark resolution this encounter must progress, and he
stood in semiparalytic fascination, a rapt listener.
    'Damn it, the diskettes don't exist!' his mother declared. 'Jack
never mentioned any such thing. There's no point discussing
this.'
    Jack had been Dylan's father, dead now fifteen years, dead five
years on the February night of this confrontation.
    'He took delivery of them the day he died,' said Proctor. 'You
wouldn't have known.'
    'If they ever existed,' Blair said, 'which I doubt, then they're
gone with Jack.'
    'If they did exist,' Proctor pressed, 'would you give
them to the unfortunate investors who lost money—'
    'Don't prettify it. You cheated them out of their money.
People who trusted Jack, trusted you – and you swindled it from them. Set up companies for projects you
never intended to develop, funneled the money out of them into your
stupid robot research—'
    'Nanobots. And it's not stupid. I'm not proud of swindling
people, you know. I'm ashamed of it. But nanomachine research takes
a lot more money than anyone wants to invest in it. I had to find
additional sources of funds. There were—'
    Defiant, Dylan's mother said, 'If I had these diskettes you're
talking about, I'd have given them to the police. And there's your
proof that Jack never had them, either. If he'd had that kind of
evidence, he would never have killed himself. He'd have seen some
hope. He'd have gone to the authorities, fought for the
investors.'
    Proctor nodded, smiled. 'Not the kind of man you expected to
swallow a bottle of pills and suck an exhaust hose, was he?'
    Some fire went out of Blair O'Conner, doused by emotions more
raw than anger. 'He was depressed. Not just over his own losses. He
felt he'd failed the good people who relied on him. Friends,
family. He was despondent....' Belatedly she read a more ominous
meaning in Proctor's question. Her eyes widened. 'What're you
saying?'
    From inside his leather coat, Proctor drew a pistol.
    Jilly gripped Dylan's arm. 'What is this?'
    Numbly, he said, 'We thought an intruder killed her, a stranger.
Some passing psychopath just off the highway. It was never
solved.'
    For a moment Dylan's mother and Proctor regarded each other in
silence, as she absorbed the truth of her husband's death.
    Then Proctor said, 'Jack was my size. I'm a thinker, not a
fighter. I admit I'm a coward in that regard. But I thought I might
overcome him with surprise and chloroform, and I did.'
    At the mention of chloroform, Jilly's hand tightened on Dylan's
arm.
    'Then while he was unconscious, gastric intubation was an easy
matter. All I needed was a laryngoscope to be sure I got the tube
down the esophagus, not the trachea. Flushed the Nembutal capsules
down with water, straight into the stomach. Pulled out the tube,
kept him sedated with