Strangers

gone, successfully fenced, and most of the money from the fratellanza warehouse in early December had been converted to scores of cashiers' checks and mailed to Jack's accounts at three Swiss banks. Only a hundred twenty-five thousand remained, his emergency getaway fund.
        He transferred most of the cash to a briefcase: nine banded pickets of hundred-dollar bills, a hundred bills in each, and five packets of twenty-dollar bills, a hundred in each. That left twenty-five thousand still in his cache, which seemed more than enough now that he was no longer involved in criminal activity and would not be putting himself in situations that might necessitate a swift exit from the state or country.
        Although Jack intended to dispose of a considerable portion of his ill-gotten wealth, he certainly did not plan to give away all of it and leave himself penniless. That might be good for his soul, but it would be bad for his future and undeniably foolish. However, he had eleven safe-deposit boxes in eleven of the city's banks - additional emergency caches in case he needed to escape but could not reach the money behind the false partition in his bedroom closet - and those caches contained more than another quarter of a million. His Swiss accounts were worth in excess of four million. It was far more than he needed. He was looking forward to shedding half of that fortune during the next couple of weeks, at which point he would pause to decide what he wanted to do with his future. Eventually, he might give away even more.
        At three-thirty Sunday afternoon, he carried his moneyfilled briefcase out into the city. All the strangers' faces, which for eight years had seemed fiercely hostile, every one, now seemed like animated portraits of promise and dazzling possibilities, every one.
        

        
        The Block kitchen smelled of coffee and hot chocolate, then of cinnamon and pastry dough when Faye took a package of breakfast rolls from the freezer and popped them in the oven.
        While the others sat at the table, listening, Dom continued to call the people who had registered at the motel on that special Friday night.
        He reached Jim Gestron, who turned out to be a photographer from L A. Gestron had driven throughout the West that summer, shooting on assignment for Sunset and other magazines. Initially, he was friendly, but as he heard more of Dom's story, he cooled off. If Gestron had been brainwashed, the mind-control experts had been as successful with him as with Faye Block. The photographer was having no dreams, no problems. Dom's tale of brainwashing, somnambulism, nyctophobia, obsessions with the moon, suicides, and paranormal experiences struck Gestron as the babbling of a seriously disturbed person. He said as much and hung up in the middle of the conversation.
        Next, Dom called Harriet Bellot in Sacramento, who was no more troubled than Gestron. She was, she said, a fifty-year-old unmarried schoolteacher who had developed an interest in the Old West when, as a young WAC, she was stationed in Arizona. Every summer, she traveled old wagon-train routes and visited the sites of the forts and Indian settlements of another age, usually sleeping in her little camper but sometimes splurging on a motel room. She sounded like one of those likable, dedicated, but stern teachers who brooked no nonsense from her pupils, and she brooked none from Dom. When he started talking about fanciful stuff like poltergeist phenomena, she hung up, too.
        "Does that make you feel better, Faye?" Ernie asked. "You're not the only one whose memories were so thoroughly scrubbed away."
        "Doesn't make me feel one damn bit better," Faye said. "I'd rather be suffering problems like you or Dom than feel nothing. I feel as if a piece of me was cut out and thrown away."
        Perhaps she's right, Dom thought. Perhaps nightmares, phobias, and terrors of one kind or another are better than having a little pocket of absolute emptiness inside, cold and dark, which would be like carrying a fragment of death around within her for the rest of her life.
        

        
        When Dominick Corvaisis telephoned St. Bernadette's rectory at 4:26 Sunday afternoon, seeking Brendan Cronin, Father Wycazik was in the study with officers of the Knights of Columbus, concluding the first of many planning sessions for the annual St. Bernadette's Spring Carnival.
        At four-thirty, Father Michael