“I could sense your trauma when you walked in the door.” He put a finger under Margaret’s chin and tilted her face up to his, as if he were a grandfather trying to comfort an upset child. She tried to hide her revulsion. “We can help rid you of it.”

He pulled her to her feet and embraced her. Margaret leaned into him, her arms at her side, her head bowed against his chest. She had to suppress every impulse to recoil.

“There, there,” he said. He squeezed her harder.

And then Hubbard suddenly convulsed, his shoulders spasming and his head thrust back.

Julius raced to him, crying out, “Are you all right? What’s wrong?”

Hubbard fell, and his body seized up; his legs kicked spastically, as if he were swimming.

Margaret grabbed Sheryl Ann’s hand and ran; the two women were out the door and onto the street by the time Julius realized Margaret had grabbed the tin cans from the E-Meter and shoved them under Hubbard’s arms after cranking up the electronic dial to jolt his body with a temporarily debilitating current.

Margaret and Sheryl Ann raced through the empty foyer, skidded down the snowy stairs, and almost tripped several times as they ran to their locked car. Two young men with crew cuts emerged from the house, shouting and coming at them like Olympic sprinters, followed by Julius, barking orders. Julius tripped in the slush and fell but the other two were fast; Margaret wasn’t sure they were going to be able to get away.

She looked to her left when she heard another car approaching. Amazed, she saw Charlotte Goode screech up in her blue Chevy Bel Air and open the passenger door. “Get in, get in!”

Margaret was stunned, but there was no time for questions. She scrambled into the Bel Air with Sheryl Ann right behind her, and Charlotte hit the gas.

Chapter Twelve

Los Angeles, California

January 1962

They raced down the street.

Charlotte attempted to speed her junky car through the snow but it was like her tires were inner tubes. The car kept skidding, dinging parked car after parked car, nearly mowing down pedestrians.

Margaret sat shotgun. In the back, Sheryl Ann looked through the rear window. The church thugs—Julius in his Hawaiian shirt and the two crew-cut young men—trailed a block behind them, also skidding all over the road, in a blue Ford Galaxie. An actual car chase. They had become a Hollywood cliché.

Margaret looked out the side window and saw pump jacks in the distance. An oil field. Could this be Inglewood? She had lost all sense of space and time.

Goode’s car hit an icy patch and they spun out, slid through an intersection, and careened into a telephone pole. The three women were jerked violently toward the pole, then back toward the front of the car.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Goode yelled.