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Moira said that Josie had not taken a Greyhound to Morgantown. His mother drove him. Roberta was with him at the motel. She wasn't going to leave until he agreed to go home. He hadn't made up his mind but he was a mama's boy and Moira expected him to give in to his mother.

I had asked Moira earlier why Josie was so interested in Top. She had told him about The Lord of the Roads before she herself knew much about the bizarre element in Top's nature and in what our visit involved. She couldn't put her answer into words very well. It had to do with what Josie had read about the mysterious power of the mind.

He wanted to be a woman. He felt he was a female in a male's body and hoped that somehow he could shape-change into what he felt himself to be, through a psychic means. Anything is possible if one has the appropriate attitude and the confidence to express, and to expect, the desired outcome. What Moira had told him about Top intrigued him greatly. He wanted to see Top at work. He wanted to see what the mind could do. For Moira, it was all about ghosts, of spirits past that could be brought back and fashioned into a new past, a remedied past. She wanted to change the past into something tolerable, something she could live with. But for Josie it was about changing the present, changing himself into something closer to what he felt inside of him.

I remember thinking how accommodating Fate was, pulling a handful of strings to bring together a group of people whose collective desire could birth a fulfillment of each individual need. Ominously, Roberta was a part of this group. She wanted to accompany her son to the seance.

The relationship Roberta had with her husband Edgar was a dark twisted ugly thing that Moira could only hint at. She sensed something hideous in it, like a third person between the couple, a devil who perverted their affection into a mutual hate that masqueraded as love.

This idea has obsessed me for years now, the idea that there is a dark side to love that turns acts of grief into acts of cruelty. It was my experience of Moira and her acquaintances that started this obsession. I was beginning to see this darkness in everyone I knew, including myself. "Love me so I can hate you," or "feel my pain, let me show you what it's like."

In the guest room with Moira gazing coldly at the bathroom door I saw a seed of this darkness. What she wanted, far in the back of her mind, was to plant in the atmosphere of the seance a desire that it not be Neal whose heart stopped, but Roberta's. I knew that Moira was thinking that. When our eyes met I could see it, and she could see that I saw it. But she could not admit to it. Roberta was Josie's mother. Neal was hardly more than a name to her. And yet in her eyes I could see the face of Neal, whom I had never met, changing into the face of another unmet person: Roberta.

I took Moira down to the kitchen for danishes and coffee.

The two widows were in their room watching television. Top was in his study, which he had furnished with Oriental artifacts like his den in the Laramie house. At dinner he had suggested watching the Japanese version of 'The Ring.' He had a wide-screen plasma and Dolby surround-sound in his study. While brewing coffee I asked Moira if she wanted to see the movie. It would be the closest she would come to seeing a ghost that night, so she said yes.

After the movie I wanted to speak with Top in private, but Moira wouldn't go to our room by herself, not even into the living room. So we went to bed.

I opened the window, and getting into bed naked with Moira I sat up rolling a smoke while she chatted like her normal self. We kept away from the seance topic and didn't mention Josie or his mother. All of that was taboo. I got around to asking why she and Hadley Colt were at odds. Why were they so antagonistic toward each other? What had happened?

Without knowing it I had breached the taboo. Moira clammed up. It would be awhile before I learned that Hadley had dated Joe in high school. She had been very fond of him and still was. She blamed Moira for transforming him into Josie. The accusation had gestated in Hadley's head for some time before she vented it. Moira going off with Josie on their hitchhiking trip to Tennessee was what did it.

Moira dodged the subject by recounting why a redneck truck driver, with whom they had gotten a ride in Indianapolis, had stranded her and Josie in Kansas. He had wanted company on his haul to Witchita, and promised to take them on to Topeka where he was to pick up another load. All went well until he discovered that the girl Josie was not really what she made herself out to be. He pulled over on the 70 and told Joe to get the hell out of his truck. So they both got out; and now I knew why Moira had ignored my question about how they came to be under a tree in the middle of nowhere when I came by an hour after the truck driver had dumped them off.

Moira turned her back to me and pretended to go to sleep. But when my hands got friendly with her she rolled over on her back and smiled. Her eyes were bright, warm, sexual, and it was not until the passing of her orgasm that I saw again that seed of darkness.