Death Sentence

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Naomi Vanderkloot knew people.

Hers was not an instinctual knowledge. She possessed no innate ability to read faces, voices, or personalities. In truth, she couldn't tell if a fellow human being were telling the truth three times out of ten, if her personal life was any barometer.

Naomi Vanderkloot knew people. She just didn't understand them. This was because everything Naomi Vanderkloot knew about people came from books.

As she turned in her chair to look out the bunkerlike window of her office, she wondered, for the first time in her thirty-three years on earth, if perhaps that was the problem.

Her thin eyebrows slowly drew together as she stared past the stark black-and-white geometry of the Kennedy Library to Boston harbor, believed by some voters to be radioactive. Today the harbor was slate gray. The sky above was the same uncertain near-blue of Naomi Vanderkloot's sad eyes.

They were the eyes that beheld the secret initiation rites of the Moomba tribe of the Philippines. They were the eyes of the first white person to behold, however briefly in the lightning-illuminated Matto Grosso, a member of the semilegendary Xitlis.

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