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into the distance. “Anyway, Kate will probably behave herself around you. She is, after all, an intelligent and rational woman. She doesn’t normally wander around like the ancient mariner, grabbing total strangers and pouring her life story into their unwilling ears. She’s simply been using me as an echo chamber,” said Harriet firmly. “A therapeutic device.”
    â€œYou don’t sound very convinced. But it doesn’t matter. Kate and I probably have more in common than you realize. We’ll sit around boozing, exchanging horror stories, and showing each other our scars. By the way, is that blue thing that’s making the left turn ahead the bus we’re following?”
    Karen Johnson, the guide for the Archway Tours “Mysticism and Magic in Old New Mexico” special package, watched her clientele handing over their heavier pieces of luggage and heading toward their places. She exuded something less than the cheerful enthusiasm people on such an expensive holiday ought to be able to expect from the help. At the moment, she was staring with a perplexed frown at a note paper—clipped to the annotated passenger list. “Karen,” it said, “the kids are nonpaying passengers. Be nice, but don’t waste too much time on them. They won’t expect it.”
    What kids? She had eight passengers on her list. There were eight passengers and two male employees of the tour company on the ground outside. Inside the airport, as far as she could see, a family was gathering itself together—a man, his wife, and one child. In fact, the man seemed to have been on the flight with the rest of her passengers, but was definitely not part of her group. Maybe the note was supposed to go on someone else’s passenger list.
    Karen, twenty-three, nervous, and absolutely new at the job, felt she was guiding this tour under false pretenses. It was true that she was an embryonic archaeologist, and that was what Archway had advertised for at the student job center. Unfortunately, her field was underwater archaeology—not usually much in demand in the mountains—and she had left the rocky shores of Maine, many thousands of miles to the east, less than eight months ago. So far in her life, she had been on two wonderful diving expeditions off a tiny Greek island, but except for flying to Texas to begin graduate school, her out-of-state explorations in her native country had consisted of a few trips to Boston and one holiday in North Conway, New Hampshire. The result was someone who felt quite confident on the subject of Mediterranean classical pottery, but was ashamed at how poor her grasp was of the history, geography, or mystical sites of New Mexico. To her astonishment, however, the management of Archway Tours, Inc., seemed to feel that an underwater archaeology student was an archaeology student. Not only were all archaeologists interchangeable, but they were equally useful, except perhaps for minor differences in appearance and temperament.
    Karen was being paid five hundred dollars and her room and board to shepherd these eight passengers for the next ten days. Her job was to make sure that nothing—absolutely nothing—troubled their existences while she was in charge. And since she had just been thrown out of her miserable room over a matter of unpaid rent, and was facing a moneyless stretch until next September when her student grant came in, ten days’ room and board and five hundred bucks were not to be sneezed at. But she did have a distinct feeling that she didn’t know what she was supposed to be doing. And that nothing was happening the way she expected it to.
    First of all, the person heaving suitcases into the hold as though they were so many shovelfuls of dirt was not the driver of the bus. That shouldn’t have surprised her, she realized, since he was behaving more like a longshoreman than a bus driver. After telling him sharply—and to