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  “After that, it was very easy. When Beatrice finished cleaning—and she didn’t do a very good job—an opportunity presented itself and Beatrice handed the father a note. It told where he and his wife were to go the next day. She left the apartment as unnoticed as if she’d never been there.

  “The next day, as directed, the plane carrying the little boy’s parents landed on Beatrice’s private airstrip. The man was dispatched instantly, as he was of no use for anything, and the plane was taken apart, piece by piece, and buried or burned. But the woman, who was indeed pregnant, was kept in relative comfort—although she did not appreciate it, Beatrice thought—until after the child was born; then she, too, was sent to join her husband.

  “And, in the end, Beatrice was left with a pretty little female child whom she raised in luxury and comfort. And, true to the predictions, the child could see the visions in the mirror as clearly as though she were watching television.

  “And Beatrice knew that, if she could not read the mirror herself, she had the next best thing. The only flaw in her plan was that the brat of a boy child had escaped from the metal box where she had put him. Who would have thought that a child that young would be clever enough to be able to unfasten a catch that intricate and strong?

  “For months after the boy escaped, Beatrice followed in the newspapers and on television what she could about the child who had been found wandering in the Connecticut woods. He had been covered in deer ticks and running a fever and had been hospitalized for a while. But when Beatrice learned that the brat remembered nothing that had happened to him, she relaxed and turned her attention to the little girl who now belonged to her.

  “She soon found out that the little girl, whom she named Boadicea, after a warrior queen that Heather had written a paper about but that Beatrice had turned in as her own, was very intelligent. She thought of seeing things in the mirror that Beatrice had never tried to see. Gradually, Beatrice began to use the mirror, through Boadicea, as a way to gain power, not just as a way to make money. Beatrice began to control people and businesses.

  “And, most of all, she used the mirror to look for other magic items, because what Beatrice had decided that she wanted was immortality. If it could be had, she was going to get it.”

  That had been the story she told to the child, and all had gone well for many years. Beatrice had a sizable following of people who lived for nothing more than to do her bidding. She owned several important people, and she’d found a formula for immortality. Beatrice had collected six of the nine objects needed when the mirror showed a snippet of a girl, a skinny little thing with blonde hair and blue eyes and a left hand with nine moles on it, who was going to be the end of her.

  After that, Beatrice’s only goal in life was to get rid of that skinny little girl.

  1

  DARCI LOOKED OVER the job application again, checking that she’d been absolutely truthful on every line, with no “imagination” added. Her mother said that Darci’s “imagination” was like a family curse. “Must have come from your father’s side of the family,” Jerlene Monroe would say whenever her daughter did something she didn’t understand. “Whoever he may be,” Uncle Vern could be counted on to add under his breath—then there’d be a fight. When it got to the part where Uncle Vern was shouting that his niece wasn’t “full of imagination” but was just a plain ol’ garden variety blankety-blank liar, Darci would silently leave the room and open a book.

  But now Darci was in beautiful New York City, she had a fabulous college education under her belt, and she was applying for what had to be the best job that anyone had ever seen. And I’m going to get it! she said to herself, closing her eyes for a moment as she clutched the folded newspaper to her chest. I’ll apply my True Persuasion to this and I’ll be sure to get the job, she thought.

  “You okay?” asked the young woman in front of her in what Darci recognized as some type of Yankee accent.

  “Wonderful,” Darci said, smiling. “And you?”

  “Feeling like an idiot, actually. I mean, can you really believe this thing?” she asked, holding up the same newspaper that Darci was clutching. She was a tall young woman, much taller than Darci, and, compared to Darci, she was downright fat. But then people were always describing Darci as scrawny. “She’s ‘fashionably thin,’” her mother would say. “Jerlene!” her sister, Thelma, would snap, “you ain’t never fed that girl nothin’ but Jell-O and sugar cereal. She’s probably starvin’ to death.” This statement would produce a lot of anger from Darci’s mother, then a torrent of words about how hard it was to raise a daughter single-handedly. “You ain’t raised her; the neighbors has,” Uncle Vern would say; then the fight would escalate.

  Now Darci smiled at the woman in front of her. “I think it’s a miracle,” she said. Darci was pretty in a fragile sort of way, with wide-set blue eyes, a tiny nose, and a little rosebud mouth. She was only five-feet-two and weighed so little that her clothes always hung loosely on her. Right now, her little black skirt with the shiny seat was fastened at the waist with a big safety pin.

  “You don’t think you’re really going to get this job, do you?” the woman in front asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Darci said, taking a deep breath. “I believe in thinking positively. If you think it, you can achieve it, is what I truly believe.”

  The woman opened her mouth to say something; then she gave a sly smile. “Okay, so what do you think the job is, exactly? It can’t be sex because it pays too much money. I can’t imagine it’s for running drugs or that they need a hit man, because the announcement is too public, so what do you think they really want?”

  Darci blinked at the woman. Her aunt Thelma had washed Darci’s only suit in soap powder that she’d bought on sale, then had taken it out of the washer before the rinse cycle began. “Saves money that way,” Aunt Thelma had said. Maybe it was cheaper, but now the dried soap in the fabric was itching Darci’s bare arms inside the unlined sleeves of the suit, as her pink, ruffled blouse was sleeveless.

  “I think someone wants a personal assistant,” Darci said, not understanding the woman’s question.

  At that the woman laughed. “You really think that someone is willing to pay a hundred grand a year for a PA and that you are going to get the job because you....What? Because you believe you’re going to get it?”

  Before Darci could reply, the woman standing in line behind her said, “Give her a break, will you? And if you don’t think you’re going to get the job, then why the hell are you standing in line?”

  Darci didn’t approve of cursing, not in any way, and she meant to say something, but the woman three down in the line spoke up. “Does anybody here have any idea what this job is about? I’ve been waiting for four hours and I can’t find out anything.”

  “Four!” a woman several people ahead said loudly. “I’ve been here for six hours!”

  “I spent the night on the sidewalk,” a woman standing half a block ahead yelled.

  After that, all the women began to talk to each other, and since the line was nearly four blocks long, that made quite a noise.

  But Darci didn’t participate in speculating on what the job was really for, because she knew in her heart, in its deepest part, that the job was for her. It was the answer to her prayers. For the last four years, all through college, she’d prayed every night for God to help her with the situation she was in with Putnam. And last night, when she’d seen this ad, she’d known it was the answer to her prayers.

  “Sure has your qualifications,” Uncle Vern had said when Darci showed him the ad. His face was twisted into the little smirk Darci had come to know too well.

  “I’ll never understand why your mother let you choose that highfalutin fancy school,” Aunt Thelma said yet again. “You coulda gone to a secretarial school so you could get yourself a real job—not that you’ll need one after the weddin’.”

  “I . . .” Darci began, but then she’d trailed off. She’d long ago learned that trying to expla