“HE’D ALWAYS SUFFERED FROM BOUTS OF DEPRESSION,” Stuart said, circling the spoon in his glass of lemonade. “But I guess you knew that.”

“Of course.” In spite of the fact that Laura was angry at Stuart for withholding the truth from her, she was worried about him. In the sunlight coming through the porch screens, Stuart’s eyes were rimmed by dark circles, as if he hadn’t slept for a week.

“Even when we were kids, he’d talk about wanting to die,” Stuart said. “But then he’d pull out of it for a while. As he got older, he became fascinated with the process going on inside his head and decided he wanted to be a psychologist.”

“I never knew that.”

“No. He never spoke of it, and you’ll understand why in a minute.” Pulling the spoon from his lemonade, he studied his reflection in its concave surface. “He got a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Catholic, and then entered the doctoral program.” He lowered the spoon back into his drink. “At the same time, he was very patriotic.”

“Ray?” Laura found that hard to believe.

“You have to understand the times, Laura. It was a terribly frightening period. We thought we were under threat, literally waiting for the bomb to drop. The government was convinced that mind control was possible and that our enemies knew how to achieve it. Ray saw a way to help. He’d learned somehow about Peter Palmiento’s experimentation, and he’d heard about a type of research taking place in Montreal called psychic driving—”

“The helmets and the tapes,” Laura said.

“Exactly,” Stuart said. “Ray discussed his plan to use psychic driving in the development of mind control to Palmiento, who was fascinated with the idea and curious to find out what the results would be. So, he hired Ray to develop the Psychic Driving Program at the hospital.”

“I can’t believe Ray would subject people to that sort of thing. It sounds so cruel.”

“It does now, at the turn of the century, but forty or fifty years ago it sounded like a way to alter people’s thoughts and behavior, something they were desperate to learn how to do.”

“But he was experimenting on human beings,” Laura protested.

“Ray came to regret that, Laura, trust me. But it’s hard to describe how thrilled he was at being a part of Palmiento’s work at the time. He’d found a way to help his country. He couldn’t tell anyone, though, except me, and he swore me to secrecy. I don’t think he told another soul.”

He looked at his sister-in-law and must have seen the revulsion in her face.

“Don’t hate him for this, Laura,” Stuart pleaded. “Please try to understand. He thought what was he was doing was right and necessary. Even the government supported it. His paycheck came from the CIA. It was laundered a bit along the way, but he knew the government was delighted with what he was doing and would do whatever it took to keep word about the research from getting out.”

Laura rubbed her arms through her sweater. She felt unclean. The thought of Ray touching her was loathsome.

“After a while, though, Ray began to realize that Peter Palmiento had his own set of psychiatric problems,” Stuart continued. “As Palmiento grew more paranoid, he was afraid that Sarah Tolley and a few others who worked at Saint Margaret’s might blow his cover, and he felt justified in taking whatever steps he thought were necessary to prevent that from happening. He knew he could get to Sarah through threats to her daughter. Ray felt torn then. He talked to me about it. He was still convinced the experiments were absolutely essential, but he was upset by Palmiento’s craziness.”

“He warned Sarah to protect Janie,” Laura said. “To protect me.”

“He probably did. I don’t know that for a fact. I do know that the disagreement between Ray and Palmiento grew until it turned into a physical fight, and Ray got shot. After that, Ray was able to get him committed to a different psychiatric institution as a patient. Ray was still dedicated to the research, though, and he was hoping the experiments would continue, but the government would no longer provide support, financial or otherwise, and Ray had to let it go.”

“Sarah was there when they fought,” Laura said. “She hit Palmiento’s arm when he fired the shot. Otherwise, he might have killed Ray.”

Stuart looked surprised. “I didn’t know that,” he said. He took a long drink of his lemonade, draining the glass. Laura didn’t bother to offer him more. She wanted him to get on with his story.

“He had no job then, after the research folded,” Stuart said. “No way to pay for school, so he had to drop out for a while. He worked in some menswear store for a few years to make money to go back. But while he was out of school, his attitude toward the government changed. Vietnam happened. I watched him lose faith in what we were doing over there. He started to feel like he’d been duped, by the government, by Palmiento and by himself. He really got depressed then. I remember him talking to me, literally crying about all the patients he’d help to torture. That was the word he used. He tried to block the past from his mind and pretend it never happened, and psychology all of a sudden left a bad taste in his mouth. He felt so ashamed of what he’d done at Saint Margaret’s. When he went back to school, he majored in sociology. That’s when he took up working with the mentally ill who’d been kicked out of institutions and left to fend for themselves on the street.”

Laura stared into the woods. She wanted to feel sympathy for Ray, to understand and forgive what he’d done. The tenor of the times had been radically different in the fifties. The fear of the Communist threat, real or imagined, had been pervasive and oppressive. She remembered Sarah telling her about Donny, the little boy in the train crash who had feared being destroyed by “the bomb.” Yet human beings had still been human beings back then. Every person who spent a month in the isolation box suffered as much as she would now if forced to exist in those conditions. The patients who wore those helmets, desperately hoping the treatment would help them feel better, were every bit as trusting, fragile and vulnerable as she would be.

“The one thing he couldn’t let go of from those days at Saint Margaret’s was Sarah Tolley,” Stuart said. “He thought they’d put her through too much. They…I don’t remember what they did to her husband, but—”

“They drugged him and shocked him and flew him to Nevada, where they gave him a new identity.” Laura heard the bitterness in her voice. She was not ready to forgive. “They—Ray included—told Sarah they’d lobotomized him.”

Stuart winced. “Well, after that, I guess they threatened to harm her daughter. You. Until Sarah got scared enough to give you away. You know all this, huh?”

Laura nodded. “But what I don’t understand is how Ray ended up married to me. It couldn’t have been a coincidence.”

“No, of course it wasn’t.” Stuart set his empty glass down on the coffee table. “It tormented him that he didn’t know what Sarah had done with you. He didn’t know if you were safe or not. So he tried to find you. For years and years, he looked for you with no luck. He gave up, finally. But then, many years later, you discovered the comet. Your fifth, I think. The big one.”

Laura frowned. “How did that help him? My picture was all over the place, true, but he couldn’t possibly have recognized me. Or my name.”

“No, but he did recognize this.” He reached out and touched the pendant at Laura’s throat. “You had it on in all the pictures and TV interviews. He knew it must have been made from the pin Sarah always wore. It was one of a kind, he said. He did a little detective work and found out your age and was pretty sure you were Janie. Then he finagled a way to meet you and—”

“He came up to me in the cafeteria at Hopkins and asked if he could share my table,” Laura remembered.

“Well, he knew after talking to you for a while that you were the one—the little girl he’d hunted down and threatened through her mother so long ago.”

“I remember all those questions he asked me,” Laura said. “I thought he was simply curious. A rare sort of man to take that much interest in someone.”

“He cared about you, Laura. Maybe in the beginning it was because of how he’d changed your life, how he thought he might have hurt you. But I know you two became close friends, and I believe that friendship was completely genuine. When you got pregnant, he didn’t think twice before asking you to marry him.”

“Out of guilt, it sounds like,” Laura said. She felt sick.

“I’d prefer to think it was out of love,” Stuart said.

Laura didn’t respond. She looked toward the lake, the autumn leaves blurring in her vision.

“Ray panicked when your father asked you to look after Sarah Tolley,” Stuart said. “He was afraid you’d learn about his past. He didn’t want to face that past himself, can you understand that? That’s why he killed himself. It had nothing to do with how hard you worked, or his being rejected by publishers. It was Ray’s shame and self-loathing that killed him. He never forgave himself for what he did at Saint Margaret’s.”

“He should have told me,” she said, although she knew her reaction to his past would have been less than charitable.

“I never wanted you to find out, either,” Stuart said. “More important, I don’t want the rest of the world to know. It would destroy the acclaim and respect Ray’s finally going to receive for his book.”

“You did it,” she said, staring at her brother-in-law. “You sent those letters warning me to stay away from Sarah.”

“Yes, I did,” he admitted. “Coward’s way of dealing with the problem, I suppose.”

“That was my mother you wanted to keep me from, Stuart,” she said angrily. “My mother.” Both Stuart and Ray had toyed with her, trying to control her actions to serve their own needs.

“I know,” Stuart said. “But you didn’t have a clue who she was. You could have lived your entire life without knowing, and would that have been such a big deal? I still wish you’d heeded those letters.”

Laura thought of Sarah, sitting alone in her apartment with her dwindling memories and her picture of Joe.

“I’m so glad I didn’t,” she said.