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naturally."
    "Thank you."
    "You'll come?"
    "Yes."
    "Good. Hayden never came to the potlucks." Char ity glanced at the notes on her clipboard. "We still need hot dishes. Can you manage an entree?"
    "As long as no one minds if it doesn't contain meat."
    Charity laughed. "I was just about to tell you that a couple of us here on the pier are vegetarians. I think you're going to fit in nicely."
    "That would be a novel experience," Elias said.
    Charity decided not to ask him to elaborate. Some thing told her she would not like the answer. Her comment had only been a polite, offhand remark. She doubted that Elias made those kinds of comments. She had the feeling that everything he said was laced with several layers of cryptic meaning. She'd had the same sensation whenever she talked to Hayden Stone. It did not make for a lot of comfortable, casual conversation.
    Charity experienced a surge of relief as she walked quickly out of the dark confines of Charms & Virtue into the sunlight. She hurried down the wide corridor between the shops and entered the airy, well-lit premises of Whispers.
    Newlin Odell looked up from a bundle of weekly news magazines that he was placing on a rack. His thin features were pinched in the expression of some one who had just recently returned from a funeral. For Newlin, that was normal.
    He was a skinny young man of twenty-four. His narrow face was partially obscured by a scruffy goatee and a pair of wire-framed glasses. Charity was almost certain that he trimmed his lanky brown hair himself. It hung in uneven hunks around his ears.
    "How'd it go?" Newlin asked in his blunt, economical fashion.
    Charity paused in the doorway of her small office, aware of a familiar wave of sympathy for Newlin. She had hired him a month ago when he had shown up out of nowhere to ask for a job. He had come to Whispering Waters Cove to be near his girlfriend, a young woman named Arlene Fenton, who had joined the Voyagers. He spent the time that he was not work ing at Whispers trying to coax Arlene away from the influence of the cult.
    Having thus far failed in his mission to talk sense into Arlene, Newlin had stoically determined to wait out the situation. He hoped that on the fifteenth of August Arlene would finally understand that she had been taken in by a scam.
    Charity sincerely hoped that he was right. She found his devotion to Arlene heartwarming and quixotic in an old-fashioned, heroic sense. But she secretly worried about what would happen if Arlene did not come to her senses at midnight that night. Having nursed a depressed parrot for two months, she was not eager to deal with a stricken Newlin Odell.
    "You were right, Newlin," Charity said. "Elias Winters is kind of strange. He was a friend of Hayden Stone's, so I guess that explains it. But the good news is that he's willing to go along with the rest of the shopkeepers in order to negotiate the new leases."
    "You gonna call Far Seas?"
    "Right away. Cross your fingers."
    "It's gonna take more than luck to talk Far Seas into giving you a break on the leases if Pitt or the town council has already gotten to 'em and convinced 'em that the pier is valuable real estate."
    "Don't be so negative, Newlin. I'm banking on the fact that the town council doesn't yet know who owns Crazy Otis Landing. We only found out ourselves a couple of weeks ago. I told everyone on the pier to keep quiet."
    "I don't think anyone's blabbed."
    "I hope not." Charity pushed open the door of the back room and wound her way through stacks of boxes to her desk.
    She sat down and reached for the phone. Quickly she punched in the number for Far Seas, Inc., which had been included in the letter Hayden Stone's attorney had sent to the shopkeepers.
    There were some odd noises on the line, a click, and then the phone finally rang on the other end. Charity wondered if the call had been forwarded. She waited impatiently until the receiver was lifted.
    A newly familiar voice answered.
    "Charms & Virtues,"