Part 1: Demons in the Night

Cliched as it might sound, it *was* a dark and stormy night. A much anticipated Canadian cold front had pushed down into southeastern New England only to collide with the sweltering humidity of a July-Bermuda high. The resulting thunderstorm had been an awesome explosion of sound and light, and for a time, had distracted the woman seated in the elegantly furnished home office from her dark thoughts and even darker feelings.

Jane Thompson was an austerely handsome woman, not quite pretty, but her classic features were the type that did not change significantly with the passing years. When she admitted her age she was nearly fifty, but she looked at least fifteen years younger than that. This night, the still dark auburn hair that she ordinarily wore in a severe bun or a perfect chignon was unusually mussed and hanging down loose about her elegant face. The finely etched wrinkles lining her normally smooth forehead gave mute evidence of the steadily building headache behind the icy blue of her eyes.

The room suddenly seemed to close in about her, becoming stifling, almost airless. Jane stood and walked over to the door that opened onto her beloved English garden and flung it wide open. For several minutes, she simply stood behind the screen door, letting the still mist-dampened breezes cool her. "If only all my problems were so easily solved," Jane sighed aloud.

How many times, Jane reflected as she returned to her seat, had she found herself sitting up alone in the darkness like this? How often had she been the only person awake in her huge old Victorian mansion planning the next trial or excursion for one of her students? How many nights had she lain awake, unable to sleep because she had been worrying if she had pushed some boy too hard or too quickly, or if she had not pressed another one far enough? Probably at least a dozen times for each and every one of the nearly sixty young men she'd taken into this very house as her students.

Her students, Jane thought with a slight ghost of a smile, only *left* her home as "young men". With rare exception, they had all been little more than obstreperous boys when they'd arrived at her house as prospective students. Boys she'd subsequently forced into learning to behave like proper young ladies so that she could then help them learn to become fine young men.

*The Jane Thompson Winsome Girls Home for Wayward Boys,* she thought to herself, *the name Marie and I have jokingly given my little program over the almost twenty five years I've been doing this.* She remembered yet again that the big FIVE-OH was looming very large on her personal horizon - only a little more than two years in the future. *Where have the years gone?*

"Spent making money and building young character," she told herself. The financial games helped to assuage Jane Thompson's not insignificant competitive drives. Profit and loss statements were the score cards that clearly showed who won and who lost in that type of sport, and Jane *liked* winning - a *LOT*. In fact, Jane won quite regularly at the game of high finance - so much so that only the most reckless of the financial high rollers dared crossing entrepreneurial swords with her anymore.

However, those pleasures paled into insignificance when compared to her other avocation. She had become a teacher so that she could be close to and work with children. Eventually she had focused on a very specialized curriculum - petticoating wayward boys. Jane's unique program had a long history of success with her students, helping them to turn their lives around and to grow into productive, caring human beings - *men* in the finest sense of that overused and often misused word.

The truth was that her boys filled a basic, deeply seated need within the complex woman who was Jane Thompson - a need for family. Jane's be-skirted young men, along with Marie and a few carefully chosen and completely trusted co-conspirators, were Jane's family, and she had come to love each and every one of them. *Even if some of them never quite believe that I do until after they've left me.* she thought wryly.

Jane Thompson's love was often a very tough brand of love, but collectively, her little circle of friends and students filled a ragged bleeding hole that had been torn from Jane's life that day over twenty five years ago, when a viral infection had attacked her ovaries and fallopian tubes. The resulting fever had left Jane delirious for more than four days, and she had very nearly died. Jane had survived, thanks in large part to the heroic efforts of some superb doctors, but her dreams of ever holding in her arms a child of her body had not.

And Jane had come to view the words "sterile" and "barren" as being the foulest words in the English language.

She'd only lost two young men back to the system - spectacular failures to be sure - one to a life of violent crime as a drug runner and the other to a life of "legal crime" as an unscrupulous corporate robber baron.

Those failures haunted Jane, particularly on this dark, airless night, because tonight Jane had finally forced herself to confront the growing likelihood of a third failure. Carlton Everett Jeffries the Fourth, known for the past five months as Caitlyn, seemed no closer to "graduation" now than he had at the end of his first month in her program.

"DAMN!" Jane exploded. Everything about this boy should have been a perfect fit for her regimen. Deprived of parental attention. . . getting in with the wrong crowd . . acting out to fit in. Eventually, he'd gone too far, had found himself in Ruth's courtroom and under Jane's special tyranny shortly thereafter. She'd been almost gleeful at the thought of working and playing with this boy. But as Robert Burns said, the best laid plans of mice, men and petticoat disciplinarians oft times go a' glee. Or something like that. Suffice to say that things began to go awry.

Several unanticipated problems cropped up once Caitlyn had begun to settle into what passed for Jane's routine. The worst of these problems was Caitlyn's lack of coordination. Simply stated, the girl was an absolute *klutz*.

Putting the girl into high heels was an invitation to disaster. No amount of reluctance or recalcitrance could fake the badly swollen ankle that had laid Caitlyn up for over a week. *Twice!* Even Jane's trick of forcing a student study ballet to improve her grace and poise had been a complete flop. Jane did not even like *thinking* about her charge's performance at dance school.

For the first time in Jane's long experience, and despite her large and continuing financial contributions to the dance studio, the ballet instructor had actually asked Jane not to bring Caitlyn to class anymore.

"She tries hard, Ms. Thompson, really hard, but with our summer performance coming up, it just wouldn't be fair to the other girls. I promise all of my ladies that if they work for me, I will find a place for each of them on the stage, but . . ," she shrugged sadly at Jane.

The instructor had been right, of course. Even aside from the risk of additional injury to her charge, Jane couldn't have Caitlyn falling in the middle of performances the other girls had worked so hard to make beautiful. Unfortunately, Jane also saw Caitlyn's effort and wanted to see that continue, too. Ultimately, the two women had compromised. Caitlyn's recent ankle injuries were used as reasons to keep her out of the shows, but she would continue to take class with the dance mistress, working on her floor-work, basic positions and at the barre.

Then there was the not-so-small problem of make-up. If Caitlyn's gross physical coordination was abysmal, her fine motor skills were even *worse*. Her hands shook visibly whenever she tried to execute the delicate movements of brush and pad needed to apply cosmetics properly and subtly. When she attempted anything but the lightest, simplest "at-home" look, the girl came out looking like a circus clown at best and a five-dollar-an-hour street-walker at the worst.

Unfortunately, both problems were far more serious than they might sound at first blush. Jane's program required a certain degree of "near exposure" to work. Fear of being discovered as a boy in girl's clothing served as "incentive to succeed" for her students. Once that fear of discovery effectively diverted the boy's attention, the other, more important elements of Jane's program demolished his false, angry pride so that a sounder, more positive self-esteem could grow in its place. Only after they'd made that leap forward could they begin to see themselves and their surroundings in a new light.

For the first time in her memory, Jane couldn't take any pleasure in her excursions with one of her students. With the all the others before her, Jane's carefully orchestrated dances on the edge of exposure had terrified them but given Jane a delicious thrill of power. With Caitlyn, though, the risk of exposure was just too real. Her garish makeup (when Jane forced the issue of having the girl do her own) drew unwanted attention.

Worse yet, there was always the very real possibility that her clumsiness might cause her to fall and hurt herself badly enough to require treatment at an emergency room. Jane had gone to the hospital with an injured boy-girl once before and had just barely managed to get away without revealing her student's masquerade. Jane knew she could not count on being that fortunate again. The moment some orderly or nurse discovered the secret currently hidden in Caitlyn's delicate lace panties, all of Jane's previous students would be compromised as well.

Jane felt cornered by this decision. Caitlyn was obviously trying as diligently as than any student she'd very had in her program. Yet Jane knew she would shortly have no other legal option but to send her back to Ruth and a more traditional juvenile correction program, however ineffective that might be.

She snorted derisively to herself, *Yeah, like my program is any better. At least in this case.* It seemed . . . no, it WAS patently unfair, but Jane was caught up in a horrible moral and ethical dilemma - with serious legal overtones.

The court order required Jane to provide training that would rehabilitate Carlton into a polite, law-abiding citizen, but as yet she'd been unable to do that. Lord knew she'd tried, but so much of Jane's program had been stymied by Caitlyn's inability to master the skills of passing unread as a girl in public.

If she couldn't help the child to learn to behave properly, she was legally bound to return Carlton to state custody. Unfortunately, to date, Jane could provide no hard evidence of the sort of radical, extremely obvious transformation in attitudes her methods required. Jane had to be able to certify that the improvements were *real*, and that the student wasn't putting up a very convincing act during the relatively short time frame she had him under observation.

*God, what a coil* Jane fumed. *If only he wasn't one of the court order-referred cases. If he'd been sent here by his family, then I could just keep him with me until I found *something* that worked for him. Only he *is* a court case and soon I will have to answer to Ruth for his progress. What do I do then? Lie to her? DAMN!*

Tomorrow, she told herself. She'd look at the whole situation again tomorrow before she made any permanent decisions. "Playing Scarlet O'Hara now, are you, Ms. Jane?" she chided herself aloud, "And besides. It already *IS* tomorrow." In her heart, she knew she was only postponing the inevitable and that soon, all *too* soon, she would be legally required to start the process of making Caitlyn back over into Carlton so that she could then send Carlton back to Judge Ruth and the boys' home.

But not tonight. She wouldn't . . . couldn't do it tonight.

Jane's beloved antique grandfather clock chimed twice for two AM. Wearily, she pushed out of her chair to go to bed, not that she expected to sleep, but she had to try - no matter how badly she felt about failing Caitlyn.

"Face it, Jane Thompson, that boy is part of *your* *family* now - one of your boys to help and to protect - and you cannot stand facing that you have failed him," she told herself sternly.

Rationally, she knew the situation wasn't entirely her fault. There was more than enough fault to go around to all the key players, but knowing that did not do much to lighten Jane's own guilt and feelings of inadequacy. Jane *knew* that Carlton would not rehabilitate at that juvenile detention facility. Certainly her other two failures had not been improved by that experience, unless you believed in negative improvement. Still, she couldn't think of anything else she could do with the child at this point. She tried every sneaky trick and humiliating stratagem she'd accumulated in over twenty five years, but all to no real effect.

With a heavy heart, Jane made her way silently up the stairs to her room. Only force of long habit made her glance down the hall towards the student rooms. Instinct told her that there was something wrong an instant before she could put her finger on what that something was.

There was a faint halo of light arcing onto the hall rug from beneath Caitlyn's door. *Why is she up at this unholy hour?* Jane wondered before her icy fear clutched at her heart. *Is she planning to run away? Or maybe she already has run off, but left the light on?*

Jane turned and ran down the hall to her upstairs study. Inside, she slipped in behind her desk and turned on the surveillance monitors and selected Caitlyn's room. These new devices had seemed a prudent way of keeping watch over her students in their early days, especially after her experiences with Michael and Kendra. She could set tasks for her boys and then watch to see how they reacted in what they presumed was the privacy of their room or bath, so that she could intervene in time if something went seriously wrong.

The gray image coalesced into the color picture of a figure moving about in the intensely feminine room. For several long moments, Jane could only stare, unable to credit the evidence of her eyes. It was not possible. There was simply no way that figure on her monitor could be Caitlyn.

But it was. Amazingly - almost unbelievably - it was Caitlyn, but it was a Caitlyn Jane had never seen before.

Caitlyn was dancing. There, in her oppressively feminine room, in the middle of the night, Caitlyn was dancing.

Jane took a few moments to absorb the scene. Her student's appearance was like nothing Jane would have believed without seeing for herself. Caitlyn had outfitted herself in one of the dance leotards, completing her outfit with the classic ruffled skirt of the ballerina's tutu. Her hair was up in a perfect dancer's knot and her face, Jane thought in amazement, her face was beautiful. The student who could not seem to create anything but the most garish cosmetic presentation, even after months of makeup instruction, had achieved just the right effect for the role she was dancing.

Even without the music, Jane recognized the choreography - Caitlyn was practicing one of the lead dancer's solos from "Sleeping Beauty", the ballet that Caitlyn's dance school was currently planning for their spring performance later that month.

Only then did Jane realize that Caitlyn was not only dancing, she was dancing en pointe. *None* of her boy-girls had ever achieved that level of proficiency before - mostly because it wasn't necessary. Jane's purpose in having them practice dance had always been twofold. First, the exaggerated arm and hand movements, along with the steps improved her students feminine presentation and grace, and of course, her other reason for such a girlish activity was that it gave her plenty of opportunity to tease and humiliate the little darlings. *Still, I have never before had a student stay in dance class long enough to develop beyond that goal. Klutzy-Caitlyn,* she thought using Darla's disgusted nickname for her little sister, *has been in that dance class far longer than any of my other students.*

Perhaps it was Jane's fatigue-fogged mind, but it took several moments for her to realize precisely how well Caitlyn was dancing. Her steps and positions were precise, her spins balanced and flowing, her leaps powerful yet graceful. Moreover, she was obviously working to perfect her interpretation of the dance routine. Every once in a while, she would stop, go back and then repeat a sequence of movements over and over again until Jane saw her nod her satisfaction and then proceed to the next steps.

*This does not make sense,* Jane thought over and over again. *Kicked out of the upcoming performance - almost kicked out of the dance class entirely and NOW the girl was dancing like THAT!?!? How is this even possible?!?* Jane fumed as she watched the screen. *This is not the clumsy, stumble-prone child I see falling all over the dance floor three times a week at dance class. This is a talented, proficient young dancer. Maybe even a prodigy.*

Jane sat glued to her monitor, watching her student move confidently through the entire dance solo one last time. Just as she finished, her alarm clock buzzed. Caitlyn turned off the alarm and than sat down to undo her hair and clean off her makeup. *Does that efficiently and well, too.* Jane noted.

Caitlyn carefully gathered up the disposable items she'd used to clean up and hid them in the pocket of her bathrobe. She folded her leotard and slipped it into her dance bag along with the toe-shoes, then she shrugged into her nightgown and got back into bed.

Jane continued to sit and stare at the monitor long after the room had gone dark.

A student who still cannot put her hair up without tangling it or put on makeup or dress herself without looking like a clown. An ungainly, uncoordinated accident waiting to happen on the dance floor or on the sidewalk.

A lost cause.

A *Failure*!

That is what everyone had concluded about Caitlyn over the past few weeks, and yet, Jane had just seen how well her student had really absorbed her teachings.

A key question in all of this was why was she hiding her light under a bushel? A student who could make herself look as pretty as Caitlyn just had done, who could move as beautifully as Caitlyn had been dancing, had certainly mastered everything that Jane wanted her to learn about the masquerade. Surely, the girl knew that life around the Thompson household became much easier once Jane saw both effort *and* progress on the part of her girls. Darla had become so exasperated with her seeming intransigence that she'd come out and told the girl that, but to no apparent effect.

The other question that begged an answer was where and how had Caitlyn learned to dance like that. Jane was not an expert, but there was little doubt in her mind that what she had just witnessed far outstripped anything the current soloist was capable of doing in both skill and maturity of presentation. *Maybe her male ego is still so rigidly inflexible that it won't let her do something so femme as be even considered for the part of the prima donna dancer in a ballet.*

Perhaps that was what she was dealing with here. Was Caitlyn sufficiently motivated to passively resist Jane's program and, just as importantly, skilled enough as an actor to simulate effort to comply with the program? Well enough to fool even her, with all of her experience with boys pretending to get the message?

Then again, perhaps that was not the case with Caitlyn. Again the grim question assailed her - was Caitlyn intentionally tripping over her own feet just to defy her? Would even the most rigid, gender-phobic male ego be able to justify practically crippling herself with clumsy falls whenever she was made to wear heels?

She still did not have an answer. Perhaps, more honestly, she did not really want to *know* the answer.

Who was she really dealing with at this point? An implacable, bad actor in Carlton, or a very unusual Caitlyn? And if it was Carlton resisting her method so much more effectively than any student Jane had ever taught, why in god's name would he get out of bed at two o'clock in the morning to dress and make himself up so beautifully and then dance? Why would he chance his deception being discovered?

Ejecting the tape cassette from the recorder, Jane pondered her next course of action. *What to do, what to do? Should I go in there and confront her with the proof of this tape?* Shaking her head, she put the tape into her desk. *No, that might change her behavior if she knew about the hidden surveillance cameras. There is more to this than meets the eye. Obviously, there are things about Carlton Everett Jeffries IV that his parents have not told me.* Jane considered that line of thought for a moment. *Perhaps because they don't know themselves?* That made as much or more sense as anything she had just witnessed over the past hour.

Jane evaluated that theory for a moment and then pulled out her planner. She found the number she wanted and dialed it. The office was closed, of course, but Jane left a voice mail message asking for an immediate phone conference.

Once that was completed, Jane made her way back downstairs to her office. She had plans to make and she would not be able to sleep after that performance anyway. Her mind was too full to relax, so she might as well try to figure out what to do next.