The bookshop has been open for about three months now. It isn't the best neighborhood in Reseda, and Reseda isn't the best city in the Valley, but it's got just the clientele [Jocasta] is trying to cultivate: a handful of serious collectors, academics, and researchers; well-meaning, guileless old ladies building their own versions of spiritualism; down-on-their-heels losers and dropouts trying to make sense of a world that left them behind; genuine dupes (and probably even a few authentic psychics, whose names she keeps in a locked steel box next to the cash drawer) who think they've figured it all out; and, of course, drug people looking for the sort of things drug people are always looking for. Her hair grown out even longer, draped head to toe in walking boots and post-hippie psychedelic-mom style, Jocasta is starting to enjoy running the place, as long as she has a cup of strong tea, powerful Chinese joss sticks, and a ready excuse to close the place down for days at a time when her other jobs demand her attention. Mary Smith's new hobby career is going pretty well.

Facilities

Jocasta leaves the counter to Miriam, the shop girl she hired about a month ago, and ushers Kate back to the office (the room she uses for paperwork and administration, not the Office -- the steel-doored 'storeroom' in the back that serves as a safe room and interrogation spot).

The Light of the Lodge is, in most respects, a perfectly ordinary bookstore in a commercial area of the Valley. It employs a small number of retail clerks, an accountant/office manager, a buyer, and a stocker. It caters to a small clientele that the owner cultivates of academics, researchers, occultists, counter-culturalists, and drug addicts. It sees occasional use, in its secure back area, as an interrogation site, storage area, or safe house for URIEL.

Timeline

• Late Winter 1974: Jocasta purchases the unit at 7019 Reseda Blvd.

• March 1974: The Light of the Lodge Bookplace opens for business.