"Did you say 'we'?" Joana asked.
Dr. Hovde nodded slowly. "Believe me, it is not my habit to involve myself in other people's personal lives. For a doctor that would be disastrous. But this… this is different. It's too close to me to ignore. Besides, Joana, I feel I owe you."
"Owe me? I don't understand."'
"You came to me last week after your accident in the swimming pool. You had a bizarre story to tell, and you badly needed someone to listen to you. I listened, all right, but I didn't really hear you. The symptoms you described did not fit any known physical ailment, so I rejected them. Wrote them off as hallucinations. I sent you away with platitudes and a prescription for tranquilizers. That wasn't the kind of help you needed."
"What are you getting at, Doctor?" Glen said.
"In a moment," said Hovde. "Meantime, it would help if you both would call me Warren. Then I wouldn't feel so professorial."
They gave him brief smiles of assent.
"The first thing we should recognize," he continued, "is that Joana is in danger. Mortal danger."
"Even now?" Glen said.
"As far as we know. There have been two incidents already, and to be on the safe side we'd better assume there will be more."
"Excuse me," Glen said, "but I seem to be a couple of beats out of synch. What incidents?"
"The two attempts on Joana's life-Thursday afternoon, and again Sunday night."
"The woman in the car was no accident, was it?" Joana said.
"No. With what I've learned since then, I can assure you it was no accident."
"Explain that, Warren," Glen said.
"I will in a minute, but first consider the man who attacked Sunday night. There's no question that he was after Joana."
"No argument on that," Glen said. "He wasn't interested in me at all. All he wanted was to put me out of the way so he could get at Joana."
"Exactly. That makes two attempts on Joana's life in four days. Until we know exactly what we're up against, we've got to assume there will be more."
"Well, damn it, what are we supposed to do?" Glen demanded. "I already killed one man."
"No you didn't," Hovde said.
There was a long moment during which no one spoke. Laughter from outside on the tennis court filtered in with the cool June air.
"Warren, I killed that man Frankovich," Glen said. "I hit him with a poker as hard as I could maybe a dozen times. I saw his skull break. I could have killed him with any one of those blows."
"That's the point," Hovde said. "Any single blow like that might have killed a normal person. The autopsy report confirmed that."
Glen's forehead creased in a puzzled frown. "But then…"
"You were hitting a dead man," Hovde told him.
Glen stared. Joana sat quietly, waiting for the doctor to go on.
"The autopsy on Frankovich was done at my hospital. So was the one on Mrs. Carlson, the woman in the car last Thursday. In both cases the time of death was established as being many hours before witnesses saw them fall."
"Do the police know about this?" Glen asked.
"They don't want to know. I tried telling Sergeant Olivares. He's an intelligent, capable man, but first and foremost, he is a policeman. When I started talking about walking dead people, he tuned me out. And I can't honestly say I blame him. There is no procedure to follow in a case like that, and policemen have to be very careful about improvising these days."
"But…what does it mean?" Glen asked. "What the hell is going on?"
"I wish I knew," said Hovde. "All I can say for sure is that these… walkers were dead when they attacked Joana."
"It has something to do with what happened to me last week in the swimming pool, doesn't it?" Joana said. "The tunnel, the watchers along the walls, the voice that didn't want to let me come back."
"That I can't answer," Hovde said. "Nothing in my experience equips me for speculating on things outside the normal."
"It's crazy," Glen said. "It doesn't compute. But for the moment, let's say that is what's happening. Dead people, walkers, as you call them, are somehow, and for some reason, attacking Joana." He stopped and grinned without humor. "Jesus, it's even hard for me to say that aloud."
"That will give you an idea of the trouble we'd have convincing the police."
"I see what you mean. So the question now is where do we go from here? We can't just sit around and wait for another one of these zombies to make a move."
"No, we can't do that," Hovde agreed. "And I have a suggestion. That's why I asked both of you to come here tonight."
When he fell silent for a moment, Joana said, "What is it, Warren?"
Hovde grinned crookedly. "like Glen, I find it difficult to say this aloud. What it amounts to, there's someone I want you to meet. She's a nurse at the West Los Angeles Hospital."
"A nurse?" Glen said. "What good can a nurse do us?"
"Let him finish, Glen," Joana said quietly.
"She's an intelligent girl, and a truly dedicated nurse," Hovde continued, "but it's not in that capacity that she can help us."
"What, then?" Glen said impatiently.
"She has, well, I guess you could call it an occult connection."
"What is she, a witch?"
"It's not the girl herself, it's her grandmother. I've heard her talk about the old lady and some of the strange powers she has." He gave a little snort of laughter. "I always thought it was foolishness. But that was before."
Joana grew thoughtful, and the doctor looked at her questioningly.
"What is it?"
"Talking about the occult reminded me, Peter Landau never did show up Sunday night. On the telephone he sounded really excited. Said he had learned something important. Then, with everything that happened that night, I forgot all about him until just now. I wonder why I haven't heard from him."
"Never mind him," Glen said, "he probably found another party to go to. There's no way he could help us with his astrological parlor tricks."
"All the same, I wonder about him."
"So what about this old lady, Warren?" Glen said. "The one with the power?"
"I don't know any more than I've already told you," Hovde said. "If you'll agree, we can drive out and I'll introduce you to the nurse. Maybe she can put you in touch with her grandmother."
"It's worth a try," Joana said.
"What have we got to lose?" Glen added.
Joana frowned and Glen looked at her. "Is something wrong?"
"You just reminded me of something Peter said. I know he was kidding around at first, but I think he really wanted to help."
"I know," Glen said more gently. "If we haven't heard anything in the next couple of days, we'll look him up."
Joana smiled at him. Then to Dr. Hovde she said, "You say we can meet this nurse tonight?"
Hovde consulted his watch. "She'll be on her break at the hospital in twenty minutes. That would be the best time to talk to her."
"We can take my car," Glen said. "I'll go get the keys."
Glen went out, and they heard him jog off around the building toward his own apartment. Joana leaned forward on the sofa and searched the doctor with her eyes.
"Warren, will you tell me something honestly?"
"If I can."
"Did I really drown in that pool last week? Did I die?"
"What do you mean, Joana?"
"I mean, what if I really don't belong here? What if coming back was a mistake? If they, the walkers, have a real claim on me, maybe I'm just hurting other people by trying to stay where I shouldn't be. You, Glen, Peter, all of you are mixed up in something that could be deadly dangerous because of me."
"I don't know how to answer you, Joana. As for involving the rest of us, we're all acting of our own free will."
"That night of the party here, you saw my… my body. Just tell me, was I dead?"