The Door to December

to nab them in the act? But I still don't understand why they didn't come to me and tell me they were going to be watching.'
     'They don't trust you,' Flash said.
     'They were angry with us for revealing their presence not just to anyone who might've been watching out there,' Earl said, 'but to you as well.'
     Puzzled, she said, 'Why?'
     Earl looked uncomfortable. 'Because, as far as they know, maybe you've always been in this thing with your husband.'
     'He stole Melanie from me.'
     Earl cleared his throat and looked unhappy at having to explain this to her. 'From the Bureau's point of view, could be that you let your husband take your daughter, so he'd be able to experiment on her with no notice or interference from family or friends.'
     Shocked, Laura said, 'That's insane ! You see what's been done to Melanie. How could I be a party to that?'
     'People do strange things.'
     'I love her. She's my little girl. Dylan was disturbed, maybe crazy, okay, so he was too unbalanced to see or even care how he was hurting her, destroying her. But I'm not unbalanced too ! I'm not like Dylan.'
     'I know,' Earl said soothingly. 'I know you're not.'
     She saw belief in Earl Benton's eyes, trust and compassion, but when she looked at the other two men, she saw an element of doubt and suspicion.
     They were working for her, but they didn't entirely believe that she had told them the truth.
     Madness.
     She was caught in a whirlpool that was carrying her down into a nightmare world of suspicion, deception, and violence, into an alien landscape where nothing was what it appeared to be.
    * * *
    Surprised, Dan said, ' Nut? I didn't know psychologists used words like that.'
     Marge smiled ruefully. 'Oh, not in the classroom, and not in published papers, and certainly not in a courtroom if we're ever asked for testimony in a sanity hearing. But this is in the privacy of my office, just between almost-strangers, and I tell you, Dan, he was a nut. Not certifiable, mind you. Not close. But not merely eccentric, either. His primary area of research was supposed to be the development and application of behavior-modification techniques that would reform the criminal personality. But he was always off on a tangent, riding one odd hobbyhorse or another. He regularly announced a deep commitment — "obsessed" is the right word — to some new line of research, but after six months or so, he would completely lose interest in it.
     'What were some of those hobbyhorses?'
     She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms across her breasts. 'For a while, he was determined to find a drug therapy that would combat nicotine addiction. Does that sound sensible to you? Help smokers get off cigarettes — by getting them onto drugs? Hell's bells. Then for a while, he claimed to be convinced that subliminal suggestion, subconscious programming, could enable us to set aside our prejudices against a belief in the supernatural and help us open our minds to psychic experiences, so we'd be able to see spirits as easily as we see one another.'
     'Spirits? Are you talking about ghosts?'
     'I am. Or, rather, he was.'
     'I wouldn't think psychologists would believe in ghosts.'
     'You're looking at one who doesn't. McCaffrey was one who did.'
     'I'm remembering the books we found in his house. Some of them were about the occult.'
     'Probably half his hobbyhorses dealt with that,' she said. 'One occult phenomenon or another.'
     'Who would pay for this kind of research?'
     'I'd have to look at the files. I imagine the occult stuff was done on his own, without funds, or by cleverly misusing funds meant for other work.'
     'It's possible to misuse funds that blatantly? Isn't there some accounting required?'
     'The government's relatively easy to dupe if you're dishonest. Sometimes thieves make the easiest target for another thief, because they never see themselves as being the victims, only perpetrators.'
     'Who financed his primary research?'
     'He got some of his money from trust funds set up by alumni for research purposes. And corporate grants, of course. And as I said, the government.'
     'Mostly the government?'
     'I'd say mostly.'
     He frowned. 'Well, if Dylan McCaffrey was a nut, why would the government want to