Death Before Facebook

outside, but she tasted sweat.
    She tried deep breathing
. Can I meditate
? she wondered. Usually, she couldn’t—she hated to sit still—but she had to get her center back. She sat and breathed until her heart slowed down. Only then did it occur to her to wonder what had gotten to her. Why was the thing so scary when there probably wasn’t any danger at all? The only weapon she’d seen was the dagger on the altar, and she had a .38. What was the big deal?
    She honestly didn’t know.
    Much as she would have given anything to go home and pull the covers over her head, she settled down to wait for the strange ritual to end. It was no night to beard Lenore, but she had to try to find out who’d been in there.
    She wrote down the license numbers of the nearby cars and hunched down.
    She had plenty of time to meditate; she could have written a sonnet or a symphony, too, if she’d been the creative kind. It was an hour and a half before the door opened and women’s voices chimed merrily.
    “’Bye!”
    “See you soon.”
    “Give Caitlin a kiss for me.”
    Skip shivered.
    They hugged their hostess good-bye and tripped daintily to their cars, as if they’d just been to a tea party. They looked pretty normal except for the one with the nose ring—and she would have without it.
    Several of them went to the cars Skip was watching.
    Excitedly, she ran the plates. Two were noteworthy: one was registered to a Michael Kavanagh, one to a Nita Susan Terry.
    Yes, now that she thought of it. The heavy girl who’d gotten in Kavanagh’s car was probably the one in the picture he’d shown her. The other one, the one with the nose ring, was about the age to be Neetsie Terry.
    When she got home she ran all the names she had—six in all—through the TOWN’s data bank. Three were TOWNspeople—Neetsie (SaraB), Suby (Michelle), and someone named Kathryne Brazil (Kit), a tall slim woman who seemed a good deal older than the others.

CHAPTER TEN
     
    SKIP FOUND, AS always, that once logged on it was difficult to get off. It wasn’t that she was fascinated—in fact, she was more or less bored—but there were so many choices, so many possibilities….
    Who could resist checking a few of them out?
    First, of course, she went to Geoff’s topics. Nothing new, which was wonderful news. Maybe she was up to speed with regard to the TOWN; that should improve her self-esteem.
    What next? This was supposed to be a place where you could get information. Was there anything that could help her? How about religion? Yes, there was a Religion conference; she went there. There were 305 topics, mostly, it seemed, dealing with various forms of Buddhism and with channeling.
    Ah, there it was—“Is It True What They Say About Satanism?”
    Eagerly, she dropped in.
    Reading quickly, licking her lips, she went through 150 entries in about half an hour. The gist of the discussion seemed to be whether Satanism was somehow an urban myth, a product of false memory syndrome, rather than a real phenomenon. Some of the people who posted, for instance, found it hard to believe that women were systematically gotten pregnant and forced to give birth to babies who were then sacrificed and eaten.
    The whole Satanic scare, it seemed, had started with a book called
Michelle Remembers
that blew the whistle on the baby sacrifices and such described by people who claimed to have grown up in a Satanic cult. The name Michelle, Suby’s user ID, gave Skip a tiny bit of hope, but it was the only thing that did. Neither Lenore, Suby, nor Neetsie had posted in the conference.
    Kathryne Brazil (Kit) had, however. She noted that nearly all the victims of the Inquisition had confessed to witchcraft and had described it in the same terms as all the other confessors—something about having sex with the devil, who had a memorable member. Though since none of the women complained of frostbite in a usually warm area, Kit couldn’t see why, unless they were lying. Well, not lying exactly—simply asked certain leading questions under torture. She had said she didn’t know whether that was quite like a shrink questioning a kid about his adventures with Mom and Dad’s naked pals, but it was funny the subject was the same.
    That tells me exactly nothing
, Skip thought.
Oh, well, what next?
    I know. What’s with tattoos and nose rings
?
    In her mind, the two went together. Lenore had a tattoo and Neetsie had a nose ring. She associated both with heavy metal, which seemed