“Excited for my big undercover mission,” Margaret said quietly to her husband. Feeling guilty about leaving the kids again, she reminded herself that she needed to help Winston and, in a different way, Charlie.

“What undercover mission?” Charlie asked.

“Scientology,” she said. “Hubbard.”

“You’re not going on any mission in that weird church, Betsy,” Charlie said. “That’s crazy.”

“Ah, but the Lord will be with me,” she said.

“Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition,” Charlie said.

They argued—quietly, politely—for most of the flight. Ultimately, they agreed that she could go if she brought along a trusted friend. Street had flown back east, so that left Charlie’s former intern Sheryl Ann Gold.

Margaret kept her eyes on the snowy road. She remembered the first time she’d met Sheryl Ann Gold—well, Sheryl Ann Bernstein back then. It was January of 1954, and Margaret, three months pregnant and queasy, felt vaguely intimidated by the congressional intern’s vitality and youth. Witnessing the girl’s brainy, breathless charm and wholesome beauty, Margaret had worried Sheryl Ann was infatuated with Charlie, a newly minted congressman and a dashing academic with a bestseller under his belt. But she needn’t have been concerned. After the adventures of that winter, Sheryl Ann moved to Los Angeles, got married, and gave birth to a baby boy named Caleb. Her husband, a struggling screenwriter, reluctantly allowed her to do part-time secretarial work at a UCLA-affiliated think tank. Her academic ambitions had fallen by the wayside.

“It’s the worst of both worlds,” Sheryl Ann told Margaret with a resigned shrug. “Whenever I’m with Caleb, I wish I were at work, and whenever I’m at work, I worry that I’m a bad mom.”

“I sure know the lyrics to that song,” said Margaret.

A radio ad caught her attention:

Norman Vincent Peale, bestselling author of The Power of Positive Thinking and president of the American Foundation of Religion and Psychiatry, will be preaching at First Methodist on February eighteenth. His sermon—“The Tough-Minded Optimist”—is a must-listen. Come join us…

“Another flimflam man,” Sheryl Ann said, “just like our Mr. Hubbard.”

“People are seeking happiness,” Margaret said. “So some folks gotta sell it.”

“I guess the question is,” Sheryl Ann said, “were previous generations less happy or were they just more focused on the essentials, like food, shelter, and not getting the plague?”

“Post–atom bomb, there’s more existential dread,” Margaret said. “Hence Peale, Dale Carnegie, Dianetics…”

“You’re going to want to take a right onto Hoover in a few blocks,” Sheryl Ann said. “Hubbard bought the Casa de Rosas about a decade ago. You can’t miss it. It looks exactly like a place that would be called the Casa de Rosas.”