One Door Away From Heaven (35 page)

Chapter 42

WITH THE SWIFTNESS of a genie’s spirit rising from the prison of his lamp, the sweet oily fragrance of vanilla magically spread through the humid air to every corner of Mrs. D’s kitchen the moment that she opened the bottle.

“Mmmmm. That’s the best smell in the world, don’t you think?”

Putting ice cubes in the two tall glasses, Leilani drew a deep breath. “Wonderful. Unfortunately, it reminds me of old Sinsemilla’s bath water.”

“Good heavens. Your mother bathes in vanilla?”

As she watched Geneva dribble vanilla extract over the ice in the glasses, as she carried the glasses to the table, and as Geneva followed with cans of Coke, Leilani explained Sinsemilla’s passion for purging toxins through reverse osmosis in hot baths.

“Then it must be a little like belling the cat,” said Mrs. D, handing Leilani one of the Cokes.

“Mrs. D, you’ve lost me again. I’m afraid I’m hampered in conversation by a need to grasp how each comment springs logically from the one preceding it.”

“How sad for you, dear. I meant you always know when your mom’s coming because she’s preceded by clouds of wonderful fragrances.”

“Not so wonderful when she’s had a bath seasoned with garlic, condensed cabbage juice, and stinkweed extract.”

They sat at the table and sampled their vanilla Cokes.

“This is fabulous,” Leilani enthused.

“I can’t believe you’ve never mixed one before.”

“Well, we rarely have cola in the fridge. Old Sinsemilla says caffeine inhibits development of your natural telepathic ability.”

“Then you must be a terrific little mind reader.”

“Scarily good. Right now you’re trying to remember the names of all the singers who’ve ever been in the group Destiny’s Child, and you can only recall four.”

“Uncanny, dear. What I’m actually thinking is how this vanilla Coke would go perfectly with a big fat sugar cookie.”

“I like the way you think, Mrs. D, even if your mind is too complex to be read accurately.”

“Leilani, would you like a big fat sugar cookie?”

“Yes, thank you.”

“So would I. Very much. Unfortunately, we don’t have any. Some nice crisp cinnamon cookies would be good, too. How about cinnamon cookies with vanilla Cokes?”

“You’ve talked me into it.”

“We don’t have any of those, either, I’m afraid.” Geneva sipped her drink, pondered a moment. “Do you think chocolate-almond cookies would go with vanilla Cokes?”

“I’m reluctant to have an opinion, Mrs. D.”

“Really? Why’s that, dear?”

“It seems pointless somehow.”

“Too bad. Not to brag, but my chocolate-almond cookies are quite wonderful.”

“Do you have any?”

“Six dozen.”

“More than enough, thank you.”

Geneva brought a plate of the treats to the table.

Leilani sampled a cookie. “Phenomenal. And they go with vanilla Cokes just fine. But these aren’t almonds. They’re pecans.”

“Yes, I know. I don’t particularly care for almonds, so when I make chocolate-almond cookies, I use pecans instead.”

“There’s something I’m dying to ask, Mrs. D, but I don’t want you to think I’m being disrespectful.”

Geneva’s eyes widened. “You couldn’t be if you tried. You’re an absolute, no-doubt-about-it…” Geneva frowned. “What is the term?”

“Absolute, no-doubt-about-it, fine young mutant.”

“If you say so, dear.”

“I ask this with great affection, Mrs. D, but do you
work
at being a charming screwball, or does it just come naturally?”

Delighted, Geneva said, “Am I a charming screwball?”

“In my estimation, yes.”

“Why, you sweet child, I can’t imagine anything better to be! As to your question…let me think. Well, if I
am
a charming screwball, I’m not sure whether I always was, or maybe only since being shot in the head. Either way, no, I don’t work at it. I wouldn’t know how.”

Munching, Leilani said, “Dr. Doom is going to haul us to Idaho.”

A quiver of alarm rang the smile off Geneva’s face. “Idaho? When?”

“I don’t know. When the mechanic’s finished with the motor home. Next week sometime, I guess.”

“Why Idaho? I mean, I’m sure they’re nice people in Idaho, with all their potatoes, but that’s an awful long way from here.”

“Some guy lives near Nun’s Lake, Idaho, claims he was taken aboard an alien spacecraft and healed.”

“Healed of what?”

“Of the desire to live in Nun’s Lake. That’s my guess. The guy probably figures a really wild story will get him a book deal, a TV movie, and enough money to move to Malibu.”

“We can’t let you go to Idaho.”

“Heck, Mrs. D, I’ve been to North Dakota.”

“We’ll keep you here, hide you in Micky’s room.”

“That’s kidnapping.”

“Not if you’re agreeable to it.”

“Yeah, even if I’m agreeable to it. That’s the law.”

“Then the law’s silly.”

“The silly-law defense never works in court, Mrs. D. You’ll wind up sucking down all the free lethal gas you want, courtesy of the state of California. May I have a second cookie?”

“Of course, dear. But this Idaho thing is so distressing.”

“Eat, eat,” Leilani advised. “Your cookies are so good, they’d make prisoners tap dance in the torture chambers of Torquemada.”

“Then I should bake up a batch and we’ll send them some.”

“Torquemada lived during the Spanish Inquisition, Mrs. D, back in the fourteen hundreds.”

“I wasn’t baking cookies then. But it’s always given me so much pleasure that people enjoy my cooking. And even back when I had the restaurant, the baked goods drew the most compliments.”

“You had a restaurant?”

“I was a waitress, then I owned my own restaurant, and in fact it developed into a prosperous little chain. Oh, and I met this lovely man, Zachary Scott. Success, passion…Everything would’ve been wonderful, except my own daughter began coming on to him.”

“I didn’t know you had a daughter, Mrs. D.”

Geneva nibbled thoughtfully at her cookie. “Actually, she was Joan Crawford’s daughter.”

“Joan Crawford’s daughter came on to your boyfriend?”

“In fact, the restaurants belonged to Joan Crawford, too. I guess this stuff happened in
Mildred Pierce,
not in my life at all—but that doesn’t change the fact that Zachary Scott was a lovely man.”

“Maybe tomorrow I could come over, and we could bake a bunch of cookies for Torquemada’s prisoners, after all.”

Geneva laughed. “And I’ll bet George Washington and the boys at Valley Forge would enjoy a batch, too. You’re a peach, a pip, and a corker, Leilani. Can’t wait to see what you’ll be like all grown up.”

“For one thing, I’ll have boobs, one way or the other. Not that having them is the be-all and end-all of my existence.”

“I particularly liked my breasts when I was Sophia Loren.”

“You’re pretty funny yourself, Mrs. D, and you’re already all grown up. In my experience, not too many grown-up people are funny.”

“Why don’t you call me Aunt Gen, like Micky does.”

This particular expression of affection almost undid Leilani. She tried to cover her inability to speak by quickly taking a swig of her vanilla Coke.

Geneva saw through the clever vanilla-Coke ruse, and her eyes misted. She seized a cookie as an instrument of distraction, but that didn’t work because there wasn’t any logical reason for her to hold a cookie in such a way as to block Leilani’s view of her teary eyes.

From Leilani’s perspective, the worst thing that could happen would be for the two of them to start sobbing at each other as if this were an episode of
Oprah
titled “Little Crippled Girls Marked for Murder and the Charming Screwball Shot-in-the-Head Surrogate Aunts Who Love Them.” Just as the way of the Ninja was not the way of the Klonk, so the way of the weepy was not the way of the Klonk, either, at least not
this
Klonk.

Time for the penguin.

She fished it out of one pocket of her shorts and put it on the table, among the candleholders that were still arranged as they had been at dinner the previous night. “I was wondering if you could do me a favor and help get this back to the person who should have it.”

“How cute!” Geneva put aside the cookie that she neither wanted to eat nor wanted to plaster over her eyes. She plucked the figurine off the table. “Why, it’s adorable, isn’t it?”

The two-inch-tall penguin—sculpted from clay, kiln-fired, and hand-painted—was indeed so adorable that Leilani would have kept it if not for its creepy provenance.

“It belonged to a girl who died last night.”

Geneva’s smile first froze and then melted away.

Leilani said, “Her name was Tetsy. I don’t know her last name. But I think she’s local, here in the county.”

“What’s this all about, sweetie?”

“If you’d buy a newspaper tomorrow and Saturday, an obituary should be published one day or the other. It’ll have the last name.”

“You’re spooking me, dear.”

“Sorry. I don’t mean to. Tetsy collected penguins, and this was one of hers. Preston might have asked to have it, but he might have taken it without asking. Anyway, I don’t want it.”

They stared across the table at each other because Geneva’s eyes were no longer misty and because Leilani was functioning unshakably in the way of the Klonk, no longer in danger of flushing the kitchen furniture out of the back door on a tide of tears.

Geneva said, “Leilani, should I be calling the police?”

“Wouldn’t do any good. They pumped a huge dose of digitoxin into her, which caused a massive heart attack. Preston’s used this trick before. Digitoxin would show up in an autopsy, so they must have been sure there wouldn’t be one. Most likely, she’s already cremated.”

Geneva looked at the penguin. She looked at Leilani. She looked at her vanilla Coke. She said, “This is bizarre stuff.”

“Isn’t it? Anyway, Preston gave this penguin to me because he said it reminded him of Lukipela.”

Geneva’s voice bit with a venom that Leilani had not imagined she contained:
“The rotten bastard.”

“It’s cute, Luki was cute. It leans to one side, same as Luki. But it doesn’t look like Luki because, of course, it’s a
penguin.
”

“I have a sister-in-law who lives out in Hemet.”

Although this seemed to have nothing to do with dead girls and penguins, Leilani leaned forward with interest. “So is this a real sister-in-law or possibly Gwyneth Paltrow?”

“Real. Her name’s Clarissa, and she’s a good person—as long as you have some tolerance for parrots.”

“I like parrots. Do hers talk?”

“Oh, constantly. She has over sixty.”

“I’m pretty much a one-parrot-at-a-time person.”

“I’m thinking, maybe when you disappear, the police would come looking here, but they wouldn’t know about Clarissa in Hemet.”

Leilani pretended to consider it. Then: “Out of sixty talking parrots, at least one will be a fink and turn us in.”

“She’d love your companionship, dear. And there’s always work to be done, filling seed trays and water cups.”

“Why does this feel like a Hitchcock movie? And I don’t just mean
The Birds.
I suspect somewhere in the situation, there’s a guy who dresses up like his mother and has an obsession with big knives. Anyway, if Clarissa went to jail for kidnapping, what would happen to the parrots?”

Geneva looked around as though assessing the accommodations. “I could take them in here, I suppose.”

“Holy smokes, we’d want twenty-four/seven video of
that
!”

“But they’d never send Clarissa to prison. She’s sixty-seven years old, weighs two hundred fifty pounds even though she’s just five feet three—and, of course, there’s the goiter.”

Leilani didn’t ask the obvious question.

Geneva answered it anyway. “Strictly speaking, it’s not really a goiter. It’s a tumor, and because it’s benign, she won’t have it removed. Clarissa doesn’t trust doctors, and given her history with them, who can blame her? But she just lets it hang there, getting bigger. Even if they could cope with her age and weight, prison officials would worry about that goiter scaring the other inmates.”

Leilani drained the last of the vanilla Coke from her glass. “Okay, so when the obituary appears, if you’d track down an address for Tetsy’s parents and mail the penguin back to them, that would be swell. I’d do it myself, but Preston doesn’t let me have money, not even enough for a few stamps. He buys me anything I want, but I think he figures that if I had an allowance, I’d ramp it up with shrewd investments until I had enough to afford a hit man.”

“You’ve still got half the Coke in the can, dear. Would you like me to add some fresh ice and vanilla to your glass?”

“Yes, thank you.”

After Geneva had built a second serving for each of them, she sat opposite Leilani once more. Worry drew connecting lines through her constellations of coppery freckles, and her green eyes clouded. “Micky will think of something we can do.”

“I’ll be okay, Aunt Gen.”

“Honey, you’re
not
going to Idaho.”

“Just how big is the goiter?”

“Can you come for dinner this evening?”

“Great! Dr. Doom is supposed to be out again, so he won’t know. He’d stop me, but old Sinsemilla’s too self-involved to notice.”

“I’m sure Micky will have some strategy by then.”

“Is it, say, bigger than a plum?”

“I’ll turn on the air conditioning this evening, so we’ll be able to think clearly. You can bet the
governor
never does without.”

“Bigger than an orange?”

Chapter 43

RESPLENDENT in acrylic-heeled sandals and navel opals, these two Cinderellas have no need of a fairy godmother, for they are magical in their own right. Their laughter is musical, infectious, and Curtis can’t help but smile even though they’re laughing at his ridiculous and shakily expressed fear that they might be clones.

They are, of course, identical twins. The one he met outside is named Castoria. The one he encountered second is Polluxia.

“Call me Cass.”

“And call me Polly.”

Polly puts down the big knife with which she was chopping vegetables. Dropping to her knees on the galley floor, with squeaky baby talk and vigorous ear scratching, she reduces Old Yeller at once to licking, tail-lashing adulation.

Placing a hand gently on Curtis’s shoulder, Cass brings him out of the lounge and into the galley.

“In Greek mythology,” says Curtis, “Castor and Pollux were the sons of Leda, fathered by Jupiter disguised as a swan. They’re the patron deities of seamen and voyagers. They’re famous warriors, too.”

This knowledgeable recitation surprises the women. They regard him with evident curiosity.

Old Yeller turns to stare at him as well, though accusingly, because Polly has stopped the baby talk and the ear scratching.

“They tell us half the kids graduating from high school can’t read,” says Cass, “but you’re mythology savvy in grade school?”

“My mother was big on organic brain augmentation and direct-to-brain megadata downloading,” he explains.

Their expressions cause Curtis to review what he has just said, and he’s chagrined to realize that he revealed more about his true nature and his origins than he ever intended to share with anyone. These two dazzle him, and as with Donella and Gabby, dazzlement seems to evoke in him either a looseness of the tongue or a tangling of the same potentially treacherous organ.

In a lame attempt to distract them from what he revealed, Curtis continues with a harmless lie: “Plus we had a Bible and a useless ’cyclopedia sold to us by a mercantile porch-squatter.”

Cass plucks a newspaper from the table in the dining nook and hands it to Polly.

Polly’s sparkling eyes widen, and blue beams seem to flash at Curtis as she says, “I didn’t recognize you, sweetie.”

She turns the newspaper so Curtis can see three photos under the headline
SAVAGE COLORADO MURDERS TIED TO FUGITIVE DRUG LORDS IN UTAH
.

The photos are of the members of the Hammond family. Mr. and Mrs. Hammond, shown here, are surely the people who were asleep in their bed, in the quiet farmhouse, when the fugitive boy shamefully took twenty-four dollars from the wallet on the dresser.

The third picture is of Curtis Hammond.

“You’re not dead,” Cass says.

“No,” Curtis replies, which is true as far as it goes.

“You escaped.”

“Not quite yet.”

“Who’re you here with?”

“Nobody but my dog. We’ve pretty much hitched across Utah.”

Polly asks, “Whatever happened at your family’s farm in Colorado—is that all tied to this hullabaloo in Utah?”

He nods. “Yeah.”

Castoria and Polluxia make eye contact, and their connection is as precise as that between a surgical laser and the calculated terminus of its beam, so that Curtis can almost see the scintillant trace of thought passing from one to the other. They share their next question in a duologue that does nothing to diminish his dazzlement:

“It’s not just—”

“—a bunch of—”

“—crazy drug lords—”

“—behind all this—”

“—like the government says—”

“—is it, Curtis?”

His attention bounces from one to the other as he answers the question twice, “No. No.”

When these twins exchange a meaningful look, which they now do again, they seem not to convey just a quick single thought, but whole paragraphs of complex data and opinion. In the womb, fed by the same susurrous river of blood, soothed by the two-note lullaby of the same mother’s heart, gazing eye to eye in dreamy anticipation of the world to come, they had perfected the telemetric stare.

“Over there in Utah—”

“—is the government—”

“—trying to cover up—”

“—contact with—”

“—extraterrestrials?”

“Yes,” Curtis says, because this is the answer they expect and the only one they will believe. If he lies and says that no aliens are involved, they will either know that he is dissembling or will think that he’s merely stupid and that he’s as bamboozled by the government spinmeisters as is everyone else. He’s drawn to Cass and Polly; he likes them partly because Old Yeller likes them, partly because the genes of Curtis Hammond ensure that he likes them, but also because there is a tenderness about them, quite apart from their beauty, that he finds appealing. He doesn’t want them to think that he is either stupid or disposed to lie. “Yes, aliens.”

Cass to Polly, Polly to Cass, blue lasers transmitting unspoken volumes. Then Polly says, “Where are your folks, really?”

“They’re really dead.” His vision blurs with tears of guilt and remorse. Sooner or later, he’d have been forced to stop somewhere, if not at the Hammond farm, then at another, to find clothes and money and a suitable identity. But if he had realized just how close on his tail the hunters had been, he wouldn’t have chosen the Hammond place. “Dead. The newspaper’s right about that.”

To his tears the sisters fly as birds to a nest in a storm. In an instant he’s being hugged and kissed and comforted by Polly, then by Cass, by Polly, by Cass, caught in a spin cycle of sympathy and motherly affection.

In a swoon short of an outright faint, Curtis is conveyed, as if by spirit handlers, into the dining nook, and with what seems to him to be a miraculousness equal to the sun spinning off spangles in the sky over Fatima, a divine refreshment appears in front of him—a tall glass of cold root beer in which floats a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Not forgotten, Old Yeller is served a plate piled with the cubed white meat of chicken, and ice water in a bowl. After cleaning the chicken off the plate nearly as fast as it could have been sucked up by an industrial vacuum cleaner, the dog chews the ice with delight, grinning as she crunches it.

As though image and reflection exist magically side by side, Cass and Polly sit across the table from Curtis in the nook. Four silver earrings dangle, four silver-and-turquoise necklaces shine, four silver bracelets gleam—and four flushed breasts, as smooth as cream, swell with sympathy and concern.

Playing cards are fanned on the table, and Polly gathers them up as she says, “I don’t mean to salt your grief, sweetie, but if we’re going to help, we need to know the situation. Were your folks killed in a cover-up because they saw too much, something like that?”

“Yes, ma’am. Something like that.”

Slipping the deck of cards into a pack bearing the Bicycle logo and setting the pack aside, Polly says, “And evidently you also saw too much.”

“Yes, ma’am. Something like that, ma’am.”

“Please call me Polly, but
never
ask me if I want a cracker.”

“Okay, ma’—Okay, Polly. But I like crackers, so I’ll eat any you don’t want.”

As Curtis noisily sucks root beer and melting ice cream through a straw, Cass leans forward conspiratorially and whispers ominously,
“Did you see an alien spacecraft, Curtis?”

He licks his lips and whispers,
“More than one, ma’am.”

“Call me Cass,”
she whispers, and now their conversation is firmly established in this sotto-voce mode.
“Castoria sounds too much like a bowel medication.”

“I think it’s pretty, Cass.”

“Should I call you Curtis?”

“Sure. That’s who I’m being…who I am.”

“So you saw more than one alien ship. And did you see…honest-to-God aliens?”

“Lots of ’em. And some not so honest.”

Electrified by this revelation, she leans even farther over the table, and a greater urgency informs her whisper.
“You saw aliens, and so the government wants to kill you to keep you from talking.”

Curtis is utterly beguiled by her twinkly-eyed look of childlike excitement, and he doesn’t want to disappoint her. Leaning past his root beer, not quite nose-to-nose with Cass, but close enough to feel her exhilaration, he whispers,
“The government would probably lock me away to study me, which might be worse than killing.”

“Because you had contact with aliens?”

“Something like that.”

Polly, who has not leaned over the table and who does not speak in a whisper, looks worriedly at the nearby window. She reaches over her sister’s head, grabs the draw cord, and shuts the short drape as she says, “Curtis, did your parents have an alien encounter, too?”

Although he continues to lean toward Cass, when Curtis shifts his eyes toward Polly, he answers her in a normal tone of voice, as she has spoken to him: “Yes, they did.”

“Of the third kind?”
whispers Cass.

“Of the worst kind,”
he whispers.

Polly says, “Why didn’t the government want to study them, like they want to study you? Why were they killed?”

“Government didn’t kill them,” Curtis explains.

“Who did?”
whispers Cass.

“Alien assassins,”
Curtis hisses.
“Aliens killed everyone in the house.”

Cass’s eyes are bluer than robin’s eggs and seemingly as big as those in a hen’s nest. She’s briefly breathless. Then:
“So…they don’t come in peace to serve mankind.”

“Some do. But not these scalawags.”

“And they’re still after you, aren’t they?” Polly asks.

“From Colorado and clear across Utah,” Curtis admits. “Both them and the FBI. But I’m getting harder to detect all the time.”

“You poor kid,”
Cass whispers.
“All alone, on the run.”

“I’ve got my dog.”

Getting up from the booth, Polly says, “Now you’ve got us, too. Come on, Cass, let’s pull stakes and hit the road.”

“We haven’t heard his whole story yet,” Cass protests. “There’s aliens and all sorts of spooky stuff.” Still leaning toward Curtis, she drops her voice to a whisper:
“All sorts of spooky stuff, right?”

“Spooky stuff,”
he confirms, thrilled to see the delight that he has given her with this confirmation.

Polly is adamant. “They’re hunting for him right across the state line. They’re sure to come nosing around here soon. We’ve got to get moving.”

“She’s the alpha twin,”
Cass whispers solemnly.
“We’ve got to listen to her, or there’ll be hell to pay.”

“I’m not the alpha twin,” Polly disagrees. “I’m just practical. Curtis, while we get the rig ready to roll, you take a shower. You’re just a little too fragrant. We’ll throw your clothes in the washer.”

He’s reluctant to endanger these sisters, but he accepts their hospitality for three reasons. First, motion is commotion, which makes it harder for his enemies to detect him. Second, but for the big windshield, the motor home is more enclosed than most vehicles; the other windows are small, and the metal shell largely screens his special biological-energy signature from the electronic devices that can detect it. Third, he has been Curtis Hammond for approximately two days, and the longer that he settles into this new life, the harder he is to find, so he probably poses little danger to them.

“My dog could use a bath, too.”

“We’ll give her a good scrubbing later,” Polly promises.

Past the galley, a door stands open to a water closet on the right, which is separate from the rest of the bathroom. On the left, a vertically stacked washer-dryer combination.

Directly ahead is the bathroom door, and beyond it lies the last eighteen feet or so of the motor home. The sole bedroom is accessed through the bath.

Old Yeller stays behind with Polly, and Cass shows Curtis how to work the shower controls. She unwraps a fresh cake of soap and lays out spare towels. “After you’ve undressed, just toss your clothes out the bathroom door, and I’ll wash them.”

“This is very nice of you, ma’am. I mean Cass.”

“Sweetie, don’t be silly. You’ve brought us just what we’ve been needing. We’re girls who like adventure, and you’ve seen
aliens.
”

How her eyes sparkle on the word
adventure,
only to sparkle even more bewitchingly on the word
aliens.
Her face glows with excitement. She all but quivers with expectation, and her body strains against her clothes just as the powerful body of Wonder Woman forever strains against every stitch of her superhero costume.

Alone, Curtis removes his small treasury from his pockets and puts the cash aside on the vanity. He slides open the bathroom door just far enough to toss his clothes out in front of the washer, then slides it firmly shut again.

He is Curtis Hammond enough to blush at being naked here in the sisters’ bathroom. At first this seems to indicate that he’s well settled in his new identity, already more Curtis than he is himself, and becoming more Curtis all the time.

Peering in the mirror, however, he watches his face darken to a shade of scarlet that he’s never noticed in other people, suddenly causing him to question whether he’s fully in control of himself. A blush this fierce is surely beyond the range of human physiological response. He seems to be as red as a lobster cooking in a pot, and he’s convinced that anyone, seeing him like this, would suspect that he’s not who he pretends to be. Furthermore, he looks so sheepish that his expression alone would fill any policeman with suspicion and predispose any jury to convict.

Heart beating fast and hard, counseling himself to remain calm, he steps into the shower before turning on the water, which Cass advised him
not
to do. It’s immediately so hot that he cries out in pain, stifles the cry, mistakenly cranks the water hotter still, but then overcompensates, and stands in a freezing spray. He’s lobster-bright from top to bottom, and his teeth chatter so hard he could crack walnuts, if he had walnuts, and it’s just as well he doesn’t have walnuts, because the shells would make a mess, and then he’d have
that
to clean up. Listening to himself babble to himself about walnuts, he’s amazed that he has survived this long. Once more he tells himself to be calm—not that it did much good the last time.