Strangers

picture of the moon clipped from a magazine. "I'm going to make a big collection."
        "Why? Baby, why're you so interested in the moon?"
        "It's pretty," Marcie said. She put the picture on a blank page of the photo album and stared at it. In her fixed gaze, in the intensity of her fascination with the photograph, there was an echo of the single-mindedness with which she had played Little Ms. Doctor.
        With a quiver of apprehension, Jorja thought, This is how the damn doctor phobia started. Quietly. Innocently. Has Marcie merely traded one phobia for another?
        She had the urge to run to the telephone and somehow get hold of Dr. Coverly, even if it was Sunday and his day off.
        But as she stood by the table, studying her daughter, Jorja decided she was overreacting. Marcie certainly had not traded one phobia for another. After all, the girl wasn't afraid of the moon. Just… well, strangely fascinated by it. A temporary enthusiasm. Any parent of a bright seven-year-old was accustomed to these short-lived but fiercely burning fascinations and infatuations.
        Nevertheless, Jorja decided she would tell Dr. Coverly about it when she took Marcie to his office for a second session on Tuesday.
        

    ***
        
        At twelve-twenty A M. Monday, before she turned in for the night, Jorja looked in on Marcie to see if she was sleeping soundly. The girl was not in bed. In her dark room, she had drawn a chair up to the window and was sitting there, staring out.
        "Honey? What's wrong?"
        "Nothing's wrong. Come see Marcie said softly, dreamily.
        Heading toward the girl, Jorja said, "What is it, Peanut?"
        "The moon," Marcie said, her eyes fixed on the silvery crescent high in the black vault of the sky. "The moon."
        

    4.
        

    Boston, Massachusetts
        
        On Monday, January 6, the wind from the Atlantic was bitterly cold and unrelenting, and all of Boston was humbled by it. On the blustery streets, heavily bundled and bescarfed people hurried toward sanctuary with their shoulders drawn up and heads tucked down. In the hard gray winter light, the modern glass office towers appeared to be constructed of ice, while the older buildings of historic Boston huddled together, presenting a drab and miserable face utterly unlike their charm and stateliness in better weather. Last night, sleet had fallen.
        The barren trees were jacketed in glittering ice, bare black branches poking through the white crust like the marrow core revealed beneath the outer layers of shattered bones.
        Herbert, the efficient major domo who kept the Hannaby household functioning smoothly, drove Ginger Weiss to her seventh post-Christmas meeting with Pablo Jackson. The wind and the previous night's ice-storm had brought down power lines and disrupted the traffic lights at more than half the intersections. They finally reached Newbury Street at eleven-oh-five A. M., just five minutes past Ginger's eleven o'clock appointment.
        After the breakthrough during Saturday's session, Ginger had wanted to contact the people at the Tranquility Motel in Nevada and broach the subject of the unremembered event that had transpired there on the night of July 6, the summer before last. Either the owners of that motel were accomplices of those who had tampered with Ginger's memory, or they were victims like her. If they had been subjected to brainwashing, perhaps they also were experiencing anxiety attacks of one sort or another.
        Pablo was firmly opposed to immediate confrontation. He felt the risks were too great. If the owners of the motel were not victims but associates of the victimizers, Ginger might be putting herself in grave danger. "You've got to be patient. Before approaching them, you must have as much information as you can possibly obtain."
        She had suggested they go to the police, seeking protection and an investigation, but Pablo had convinced her that the police would not be interested. She had no proof that she had been the victim of a mental mugging. Besides, the local constabulary could not unravel a crime across state lines. She'd have to go to the federal authorities or local Nevada police, and in either case she might be unwittingly seeking help from the very people responsible for what had been done to her.
        Frustrated but unable to find a hole in Pablo's arguments, Ginger had agreed to continue following