Man With a Squirrel by Nicholas Kilmer Page A

guilty. Triply guilty, since you didn’t bring any for me.”
    Fred offered, laying his book down, “You want to go out for pizza?”
    Molly phoned an order in to Arlington’s nearest Pizza Haven, and while they were on the way to pick it up, Fred put the question again: “What were you up to this evening?”
    Molly drove her car through the rain—it hadn’t stopped raining all day—and Fred crouched in the suicide seat. Her car, an old red Colt, was too small for him. Molly pursed her lips and shook her head. “I’d hoped you wouldn’t ask again, Fred, because if I get started I don’t think I can stop.”
    â€œOK,” Fred said.
    Molly pulled up in front of Pizza Haven and Fred went in for the pie.
    *   *   *
    Fred called outside Terry’s room, “Yo, if I slide your pizza under the door the pepperonis will scrape off.”
    He waited until Terry, in her Red Sox pajamas, her wan face grinning, her mousy hair falling in fine wisps, opened the door and accepted the pizza, yelling, “Yah, Sam, I got pepperoni.”
    â€œIt’s not fair,” Fred heard from behind Sam’s door.
    *   *   *
    â€œThe thing is,” Molly said, sitting at her kitchen table with a Sam Adams and the lioness’s share of the pizza, “I got interested, with Ophelia hounding me and the damned woman after me on the telephone. So I went tonight and listened to Doctor Eunice Cover-Hoover perform. Fred, she is a pheenom. She is a reassuring snake of righteousness.”
    Molly took a bite from the leading edge of a slice of pizza and with a look questioned whether Fred wanted a bite, or a swig of her beer. He shook his head.
    â€œShe used to teach, but no more,” Molly said. “Says she’s too busy. Her position’s gone more to research and various committee and board activities here and there, and I gather Holmes College is getting grants through her also, though this year she’s on sabbatical. Her dog and pony show, her lecture, whatever that was I attended—she’s worse than I expected because she’s absolutely open, absolutely sincere, and she doesn’t come on like a crusader. The bulk of her argument is assumption and innuendo which need not be examined since they are postulated in her first book. But it turns out this gal Cover-Hoover’s really serious about the power of darkness thing.”
    Molly chewed and swallowed. She drank from Sam Adams’s neck and looked around the kitchen, shuddering. “Something walking on my grave,” she said. “She’s into it in a big way. Fred, after you make it past the graphs and footnotes in her talk, and all the political wisdom and quotations and statistics she pulls from the book, anybody can read the real story under the scholarly line. She’s talking witchcraft and Satanism, pure and simple.”
    â€œSatanism,” Fred said. “That would sell. But how is she, given her degrees and training, waving that banner? Can you, in any East Coast institution, get away with teaching supernatural forces in the sciences?”
    â€œDisregarding whether or not sociology is science—and I’d say a lot of it is yellow journalism in a suit—what Cover-Hoover claims she’s doing is deprogramming,” Molly said. “Her main argument is that this century and this country have seen the growth of organized forms of worship of the power of darkness—call it Satan if you want, she says, offhand—to which children and women—natural-born victims—are victim.
    â€œYou should see her, Fred. She’s white as a napkin, dresses like a banker, and is built.
    â€œIt was a public meeting at a Presbyterian church in Brookline, though she’s not tied to any church. Not many people there, maybe a couple dozen, but half of them claimed to be former victims of cults from all over the country. Or they