The Door to December

focused on external events for any substantial length of time. Whether Melanie was following the plot or was merely fascinated by the bright images didn't matter. The important thing was that the music and the color and Spielberg's cinematic artistry — his imaginative scenes and archetypal characters and bold use of the camera — had done what nothing else could do, had begun to draw the child out of her self-imposed psychological exile.
     Laura knew there would be no miraculous recovery, no spontaneous rejection of autism simply because of the movie. But it was a start, however small.
     In the meantime, Melanie's interest in the film made it easier for Laura to monitor her and keep her awake. The girl exhibited no signs of being sleepy or of slipping back into a more profound catatonic state.
    * * *
    Dan drove back and forth through Westwood, winding from street to street. Each time that he came to a stop sign or a red traffic light, he shifted the car into Park, got out, and hastily searched one small portion of the sedan's body for the compact transmitter that he knew must be attached to some part of the vehicle. He could have pulled to the curb and examined the entire car methodically from end to end, but then the Bureau agents tailing him would catch up and see what he was doing. If they realized that he suspected being monitored they would not give him an opportunity to find and discard the bug and slip away from them; they would most likely arrest him and take him back to Michael Seames. So at the first stop sign, he frantically checked up under the left front fender and in the wheel well around the tire, groping for a magnetically attached electronics package about the size of a pack of cigarettes. At the next stop he checked the left rear wheel well; during the two stops after that, he ran to the right side of the car and explored under those fenders. He knew other motorists were gawking, but because of his zigzagging route of randomly chosen streets, none of them were behind him for more than two stops, so none had enough time to begin to think that his behavior was suspicious rather than merely odd or eccentric.
     Eventually, at a stop sign at an intersection in a residential neighborhood, two blocks east of Hilgarde and south of Sunset Boulevard, when he was the only motorist in sight, with rain pasting his hair even tighter to his scalp and drizzling under the collar of his coat, he found what he was looking for under the rear bumper. He tore it loose, pitched it into a line of plum-thorn shrubs in the front yard of a big pale-yellow Spanish house, got behind the wheel of the sedan again, slammed his door, and got the hell out of there. He repeatedly checked the rearview mirror during the next few blocks, afraid that the men tailing him had gotten close enough to see him discard the bug and were following visually. But he was not pursued.
     His pants legs and shoes were soaked, and a lot of water had gotten under the collar of his coat while he'd twisted and strained to feel beneath various portions of the car. Waves of shivers swept through him. His teeth chattered.
     He turned the car's heater control to its highest position. But this was a cheapjack city vehicle, and even when the equipment worked, it didn't work well. The vents spewed a vaguely warm, moist, slightly fetid breeze in his face, as if the car had halitosis, and he didn't stop shivering until he had driven all the way into the heights of Bel Air, had wound through the tangled network of very private streets, and had found the Boothe estate on the most secluded street of all.
     Beyond the massive pines and intermingled oaks that were almost equally enormous as the ancient evergreens, rose a brick wall the color of old blood, between seven and eight feet tall, capped with black slate and black iron spikes. The wall was so long that it seemed to delineate the property line of an institution — a college, hospital, museum — rather than that of a private residence. But in time Dan came to a place where the brick ramparts curved in on both sides of a driveway, flanking it for twenty feet and terminating at a formidable iron gate.
     The cross-supported bars of the gate were two inches thick. The entire structure, which was flanked and capped by intricately wrought scrolls and fleurs-de-lis of iron, was impressive and elegant and beautifully crafted — and seemed capable of