A Darker Place by Laurie R. King

same kind of envelope she herself had received from him three times now. He took it reluctantly, studying her face for clues, but she got up and went to stand looking out of the window at the traffic and buildings. Her hair was beginning to go gray, he noticed, but it curled gentlydown between her shoulder blades, still looking thick and very touchable.
    Abruptly, he bent to tear open the envelope. With one glance at the top clipping his heart tried simultaneously to sink and speed up.
    Martin Cranmer. One of a number of midwest messiahs, there was a growing file on him in Glen’s own office cabinets, including this very clipping. In the photograph, Cranmer was surrounded by the children of the school that he had just donated to the nearby town, there in the Kansas wheat fields. The school was built with his money and the labor of his followers, staffed by fully qualified volunteer teachers from the huge, heavily fenced farm where they all lived, a community outreach project that saved the local children an hour-long bus ride to the next nearest school, a noble gesture that got his picture in the weekly paper and reduced the anxiety level of the suspicious local farmers by a great deal.
    McCarthy, when the action came to his attention, had not been so reassured. Neither, apparently, was Anne Waverly.
    Her file missed some of the material his contained, mostly letters and missives sent out over the growing international computer network. It did, however, contain half a dozen items his lacked, two of which, had they come to his attention earlier (despite being illegally obtained and therefore legally inadmissible) would have upgraded the level of concern over Martin Cranmer’s enterprise a number of notches.
    Three of the pages were photocopies of letters to the editor of the county’s local newspaper, complaints about suspicious activities on the Cranmer farm. They had not been published, an oddity that took on distinctly sinister overtones when coupled with photocopies of six months of a man’s bank statements clipped to an unsigned letter that read:
    Dear Professor Waverly,
    I know I said I couldn’t help you, but I got to thinking, and I don’t like the idea of what may be going on. I won’t go into detail, and I won’t testify or anything, but still, you may be able to use these somehow.
    “Who’s William Denwilling?” Glen asked, reading the name from the checking account statements.
    “The owner and editor of the local paper.”
    Denwilling had received a postal order for five hundred dollars in the middle of each of the months for which there were photocopies. Glen read on.
    The second alarming factor Glen missed at first, because the name on the photocopied obituary, a forty-six-year-old farmer killed in an automobile accident, meant nothing to him. However, the next page Anne had included was an assessor’s map with the boundaries of two adjacent properties highlighted: Martin Cranmer’s name was in one, the dead farmer’s in the other. With that, a small bell rang, and Glen leafed back through the file to find that the man had been one of the three residents who had written irate yet unpublished letters to William Denwilling’s newspaper, complaining about problems with their weird neighbors.
    The rest of the file contained no revelations. However, the familiar material, from the harangues across the Web to the stockpiling of foodstuffs, took on a darker meaning with the knowledge of editorial bribery and the death of an outspoken critic.
    He reached the end of the file, folded the earlier pages back, and sat for a moment studying the grainy photo of Cranmer, the smiling, bearded farmer/prophet.
    “There’s very little of this I can use, you know,” he said.
    “You won’t have to if I go in.”
    Even with the evidence of her carefully compiled file in his hand, the blunt offer startled him. He had never expected to use her in anything but an advisory capacity again, and then only as a last