There was no session scheduled for the fourth week, though by now Tim wasn’t so much presiding as participating and on any given day someone at the Homer Street house would likely be tripping, so Saturdays didn’t hold quite the significance they formerly had, at least not for the members of the inner circle. In this case, though, the Saturday party was upstaged because of Walter Pahnke’s Good Friday experiment, for which Fitz intended to live up to his promise to serve as a guide though Joanie had been unhappy about it when he’d first mentioned it to her and was just as unhappy now. There were two complicating factors. The first was that Joanie (who hadn’t, thankfully, found out about his post-meeting trip and the essential part Fanchon had played in it) was becoming increasingly possessive over the drug experience and resentful of anyone’s excluding her. The second was that the experiment, by design and of necessity, excluded her. It was science, he kept telling her, it was controlled, academic, a study, and she wasn’t a grad student and she wasn’t a prof and, as he’d told her from the beginning, this would involve males exclusively. Which, of course, only made the situation worse.

“What’ve you got against females?”

“Nothing.”

“Aren’t there any women in the seminary?”

“Apparently not.”

“All right. Great. Then you tell Walter—and whoever, Tim—that when they want to do a double-blind psilocybin experiment on librarians, I’m their girl. Or woman. I’m a woman, aren’t I?”

“Yes,” he said, “all woman, a hundred percent,” and he’d tried to take her in his arms but she pushed him away.

The day of the experiment—Good Friday—dawned clear, though a chance of rain was predicted for later in the day. It was balmy. It was spring. The air was dense with the scent of flowers, and the animal world, from pigeons to squirrels to house sparrows and the ducks and geese on the river, was busy processing hormonal urges in a flurry of wings and blurred paws. Which didn’t mean a whole lot to Fitz, who’d had to put up with Joanie’s silence at breakfast and actually left the house half an hour early just to get away from her incinerating gaze. He sniffed the air, registered springtime, slammed into the car and shot up the street, irritated by the fact that the muffler seemed to have developed another perforation and the gas tank was all but empty.