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Even more disturbing were the bright, darting glances they received from the girls as they bounded past them out of the chapel and into the snow-clad yard, where a headless Sylvester awaited their attention. Ivy and Mina brought up the rear, their hands clasped, moving slowly and indolently up to them, both wearing brave smiles in the presence of tragedy.

‘Hi, Daddy. Hi, Mommy,’ Ivy said wanly. ‘You remember Mina.’

‘Sure, Princess.’ Bill smiled. ‘Hi, Mina.’

‘Hi, Mr Templeton. Hi, Mrs Templeton,’ Mina said, passing the ball to Janice.

‘Hello, Mina,’ Janice said, completing the circle of greetings.

Bill bent to kiss Ivy and felt her flinch the slightest millimetre. Janice noticed and quickly asked, ‘Gonna go to work on Sylvester?’

‘Not today, we don’t feel like it.’

‘No,’ Mina repeated with distaste, ‘we don’t feel like it.’

‘Well, then,’ Janice said with a surge of enthusiasm, ‘why don’t you girls go and get ready for our little party?’

The prospect of dinner out brightened the moment for Mina at least. After they had left to shower and change into their prettiest dresses, permitted at Mount Carmel only on weekends or on family outings, Bill and Janice walked across the yard, past the towering snowman under construction, and entered the administration building.

‘One of the girls smuggled newspapers into the dormitory. We think it was Jill O’Connor, but we are not sure of it.’

Several copies of the Westport Guardian containing the frontpage item ‘Jurors hear tape of principals in reincarnation-kidnapping case’ were spread open on the mother superior’s desk. Mother Veronica Joseph’s eyes held the familiar note of pity and compassion, but the set of her face had altered. Bill thought; had hardened, become stern, even severe.

‘I will talk to the parents collectively before they leave today and seek their cooperation in the matter. And I’ve asked Father Paul to speak to the children during mass in the morning.’

Bill leaned anxiously forward in his chair. ‘We appreciate all you’ve done, Mother, to shield our daughter from this knowledge. Ivy told us about the ban on radios and TV.’

Mother Veronica Joseph’s face softened the slightest bit.

‘While my heart and sympathy go out to Ivy and to both of you,’ she said in a hushed tone more suited to the confessional booth, ‘please understand what I am about to say. The rules I instituted and the things I did to suppress this story at Mount Carmel were not done for your entire benefit. What I did I did for all the children and for the sake of the school. There is no doubt that Ivy was the unwilling victim of a poor soul’s delusion and deserved to be shielded from the attendant publicity. But an equal, if not greater, danger was that the school would find itself the unwilling victim of a celebrity in its midst, which now indeed has occurred and which, as you must know, is the kind of distraction few institutions of this order can long tolerate.’

‘Which,’ as Bill succinctly put it to Janice on their way to pick up Ivy and her friend, ‘simply means, start looking for another school for Ivy.’

‘That’s not at all what she said,’ protested Janice.

‘It’s what she meant.’

Yes, Janice thought, it was true, it was there in her voice, a clear warning to them to get the problem solved soon, or she would be forced to take action.

Dinner with the girls was a quiet, intense affair consisting of much eating and little talk. Ivy was withdrawn and remote but managed to finish her chops and French fries and even join Mina in a second dessert. Several times Bill caught her looking at him in a kind of lost, perplexed way, as if saying, ‘What does it all mean? What’s happening?’

The burden of disclosure fell on Bill and took place in Janice’s presence in the small sitting room which doubled as Ivy’s bedroom. Propped up and bundled in the rollaway bed, Ivy listened intently as Bill told her all the facts with delicacy, understanding, and total candour, omitting only one - the nightmares.

‘But is that possible?’ Ivy asked. The words and her tone held a heady, breathless incredulity, as well as a tinge of excitement.

‘No, Princess,’ Bill responded. ‘But Mr Hoover seems to think so.’ Then, in a gentler voice: ‘Understand, Ivy, when a father loses someone he loves very dearly - in this case, his wife and daughter - his sadness and hurt can be so great as to cause his mind to refuse to believe what happened. It’s at such times that a man is willing to believe anything just to keep himself going. Mr Hoover is such a man. When he lost all he held dear, he could not accept the fact and went looking for other answers. And the saddest thing is that there were people, wicked people, who were waking on the sidelines ready to give him the answers he wanted to hear. This is how he came to believe that his dead child was reborn in your body. So you see, Princess, it really wasn’t his fault; he was just a victim of his own grief.’

There was a long silence, during which Ivy heaved a long, woebegone sigh.

‘How awfully sad,’ she said in a muffled voice. ‘I remember him at school. And the time he walked me home. He seemed so nice.’

‘Maybe he is nice, Princess. Maybe he’s just misguided. Let’s think that, shall we?’

Ivy nodded, then looked at Janice. ‘Isn’t it funny that I don’t remember a thing about it. I mean, his taking me out of bed and carrying me off like that?’

‘You were asleep,’ Janice said.

‘Wow!’ said Ivy with a shake of the head and an amazed lift of the eyebrows. ‘No wonder all the girls are giving me the treatment. I really am a freak.’

‘You are not a freak, Ivy,’ Bill insisted. ‘As I explained, you are the victim of a man’s hallucinations - a man whom the State of New York is going to send to jail for a good long time for what he has done. Whenever the girls look at you or say anything or snicker behind your back, just remember that, will you? You have nothing to fear and certainly nothing to be ashamed of.’ Bill’s voice softened. ‘And if things get to be too difficult here, just let me know, and I’ll come and take you home.’

Ivy felt a sudden twinge of sadness. ‘I hope I’ll be able to stay. I really like it here.’

*

At three ten in the morning, Janice was awakened by sounds coming from Ivy’s room - coughing sounds, high-pitched, racking.

Hurrying into the sitting room and quietly closing the door behind her so as not to waken Bill, Janice turned on the wall switch and gazed, stunned, at the sight of her child sitting up in bed, head hunched over her knees, coughing and wheezing into the blanket. Janice sped across to her side, quickly gathered her into her arms, and began to pat her back to stem the course of the spasms.

‘Medicine’s in my bag.’ Ivy managed to choke out the words between coughs.

The label read ‘To be taken as needed.’ Ivy swallowed some from the bottle as there was no spoon nearby. Whatever it contained worked rapidly, and soon the coughing spell was under control, leaving her limp and shaking.

Wow,’ she squeaked. ‘That was something.’

Her face was pure scarlet, and her eyes watered pitifully.

Janice was shocked by the force and fury of the attack.

‘Does this happen every night?’

‘Umm,’ affirmed Ivy. ‘Most nights this past week. Not as bad as this, though.’

‘I’ll take you to a doctor in the morning.’

‘Kay.’ Ivy swallowed. ‘Mom?’

Janice felt Ivy’s head. It was cool.

‘Yes, dear?’

‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful?’

‘What?’

‘If what Mr Hoover believes is really true. That we all just keep on living and living and living for ever and ever and never die?’

The question had a dreamlike quality that lulled Janice into a mood of sombre contemplation in which the face of Elliot Hoover appeared to her: gentle, pained, distraught.

Drawing Ivy to her bosom and nestling her face into the soft blond hair, Janice whispered in a crooning, abject way, ‘Yes, darling, it would be wonderful. Really wonderful.’

*

The two men faced each other across the metal table in the small, spare, windowless room. A panel of overhead fluorescent lights cast hard shadows over papers and file folders spread out between them, lending to each face the gaunt and bloodless aspect of a death mask. But for the steady hum of the ceiling air-conditioner and their own subdued voices, the room preserved the dull, echoless silence of a vault.

Elliot Hoover had called for the meeting and had engineered its course for the past hour, requesting a full and thorough review of the defence’s strategy in all its myriad details and complexities. At this, the eleventh hour, he was challenging witnesses, suggesting changes, and ordering reappraisals of evidence and testimony.

Sitting beneath the harsh light, mopping his face with a soggy ball of cloth, Brice Mack could only stare appalled at the cucumber-cool countenance of his client as he softly uttered his recommendations, which, if questioned or disputed, became orders.

The discussion had started with a further analysis of Gupta Pradesh, the renowned maharishi from Ghurni, who was currently ensconced at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel and would be called to the stand as their first witness. Elliot Hoover did not know Pradesh personally, but was sufficiently acquainted with his background and works to consider him the ideal witness to inform the jury on some of the deeper philosophical aspects of the Hindu religion. However, because of the maharishi’s undisputed saintliness and the extreme reverence he was held in by all his followers, the defence attorney was instructed to desist from any but the loftiest of inquisitions, eliminating any references or attempts to indulge in chitchat concerning the lay, or ‘bread-and-butter,’ aspects of reincarnation during his examination. Which dealt a severe blow to the solar plexus of Brice Mack’s curtain raiser in the case.

‘But he must know of actual cases of reincarnation,’ Brice Mack protested. ‘Specific instances that would help substantiate your position.’

‘There’s no doubt he can cite such instances,’ Hoover blandly replied, ‘but it would be demeaning for him to discuss such matters in a public forum. Understand, the maharishi is a holy individual bound to the same oath of confidentiality as a Catholic priest, so you will accord him all the respect due a man of his station.’

Brice Mack groped in his briefcase for Kleenex but found none.

There was no disagreement on the questioning of the second witness, who, like Gupta Pradesh, professed an expertise in Far Eastern religious concepts but, unlike the maharishi, was a pure-blooded American scholar - professor emeritus of religious studies in one of the country’s leading citadels of learning - a man whose name conjured up every folksy image of early American history from the battle green of Lexington to the fog-shrouded perch of a Rocky Mountain rendezvous.

James Beardsley Hancock’s testimony on the specific laws of Karma would, it was reasoned by Mack and his associates, weigh heavily with a jury not only because it came from a white, grass-roots, eminently credentialled American, but because it was also the faith he personally practised and espoused.

As Hoover put it to Brice Mack, ‘He’s on the inside looking out, which makes him our man.’

The big wrangle came over the inclusion of the third ‘expert’ witness, Marion Worthman, a latter-day Edgar Cayce, a psychic, self-professed witch, prophet, seer, and devoted proponent ‘nd interpreter of the Bible, a woman who could tune in telepathically on a person’s mind and body and relate information regarding that person’s present and past lives.

Although her adherents numbered in the tens of thousands, and her published works topped every best-seller list, Elliot Hoover fought against bringing her into the courtroom to render testimony in his behalf, fearing that she would bring to the proceedings the taint of a medicine show, which was precisely the reason Brice Mack fought for her inclusion.

Still, Hoover remained sceptical, feeling that their greatest source of help would be forthcoming from the Templetons and Carole Federico when Mack put them on the stand.

‘They were there,’ Hoover stressed. ‘They were present during the nightmare and saw the child respond to my appeals to Audrey Rose. They know the truth and must be made to tell it.’

‘The truth?’ Brice Mack said, suddenly weary. ‘What truth are you talking about? Your truth or theirs?’

‘They’re one and the same.’

The attorney sighed pathetically.

‘Did you ever hear the one about the three blind men who were each asked to describe an elephant? Each described what he felt as his hands explored the elephant’s body, and each description was totally different. Yet they all told the truth.’

Nonplussed, Hoover gazed at him.

‘What I’m saying,’ Mack explained, ‘is that while four people witnessed the same event, in this case a child’s nightmare, it doesn’t necessarily mean they all saw the same thing. In fact, I’m willing to bet we’ll get four different interpretations of what transpired in the bedroom that night.’

‘Janice Templeton knows the truth,’ Hoover quietly said. ‘She summoned me because she knew that I was the only one who could help the child.’

‘Fine,’ the attorney allowed. ‘And when I get her on the stand, I’ll certainly explore that matter with her. But don’t hold your breath about how much she’s going to remember or admit that she remembers about that night.’

There was a moment of silence during which Elliot Hoover regarded Brice Mack carefully.

‘I take it you don’t have much faith in the outcome of this case.’

Tut it another way,’ Brice Mack said. ‘I don’t have much faith in the Templetons’ coming to your rescue. The case I have spent eight weeks and a good deal of your money preparing relies heavily on the testimony of our expert witnesses. If you’ll permit me to handle them as I had planned to, I think we stand a good chance of selling reincarnation to even the most doubtful juror.’

‘Otherwise?’

Brice Mack decided to lay it on the line.

‘Otherwise, I don’t think your chances for acquittal are very good.’

Hoover studied the attorney minutely.

‘I appreciate your frankness, Mr Mack,’ Hoover said in a voice edged with scorn. ‘Now let me be frank with you. I still insist, no matter what your opinion of the outcome of the case may be, that you conduct it with all possible taste and decorum. I realize how driven you are by personal ambition to succeed. Still, the determination of my guilt or innocence before man’s bar of justice is not a platform to serve your egotism, nor will I permit it to become a base for your self-aggrandizement. It is my freedom that is at stake here, Mr Mack, not your reputation. Therefore, I will be the one to decide each step we take in the course of this case. If you do not understand me or feel that you cannot respect my wishes to the letter, please tell me now, and I shall have you replaced.’