Reilly 09 - Presumption of Death (18 page)

Looking around with a wicked grin, Britta said loudly, getting everyone’s attention, “I was looking for a match and your purse was handy. But looky what I found.” She held up a square black object.

“A tape recorder!” Britta crowed. “And it was rolling! She’s been taping us!”

“That’s not mine!”

“Oh, then I’ll just keep it and listen to it and tell everybody what’s on it tomorrow.”

“Look, Britta, just give it to me,” Elizabeth said. She seemed about to cry.

“Give it to her,” Ben said. Moving to Britta fast, he snatched the tape recorder out of her hand and gave it to Elizabeth. “And the purse.” He gave that back too.

“What’s that thing for?” George boomed.

Elizabeth didn’t answer. The fire seemed to answer in her place, surging up.

“Why are you spying on us?” George said. His voice held a new note of menace.

“I forgot about it. It wasn’t on,” Elizabeth said. “Anyway, I should go.”

“Don’t go,” Ben said, standing close by.

She looked at him and looked at Nina. “I guess I could stay for a bit.” She took his hand and walked away from the group staring at her and sat down on the steps leading back up to the deck.

“What’s going on?” Darryl asked them all. “Is she spying on us?”

Megan said, amused, “Outrageous. Who knew she cared.”

The dispassionate David Cowan looked rattled. “What exactly do you think she was trying to find out?”

Sam said, “She’s a little sneak.”

“Don’t you dare talk about her like that!” Debbie said.

“It was on,” Britta said. “Swear it was. Red light blinking.”

“I’m gonna find out why,” George said.

“George, leave it,” Jolene said. “We didn’t say a thing she shouldn’t hear a hundred times, if that’s what she wants.” Her husband leaned back. In the firelight he looked old and frightened.

The party went on. Inertia, brought on by heat and drink, captured them all. The pace of movement slowed, the talk sputtered. Only the children continued, exhausted but relentless, running and screaming.

Britta’s youngest, a three-year-old, had been crying intermittently for hours. He’d had an accident and his diapers were hanging over his little rubber boots. His parents didn’t seem to notice.

He and the other children gathered dead grass and twigs and leaned forward to toss them into the fire, while the grown-ups looked on with glazed, indulgent eyes. For one terrible moment, Nina thought the toddler would topple into the fire, but then he emerged like a dwarfish Vulcan from the smoke, black-faced but unscathed, and rushed back into the forest.

Ben and Elizabeth emerged from the house, fresh glasses in hand, and took seats by the fire near Nina. Darryl had tipped his chair back too far and now, amid general laughter, he fell backward to the soft ground.

The kids stripped sticks and some of them roasted marshmallows. Others just caught their sticks on fire and waved them around. A few feet behind the bonfire, a small group of children hunkered down. A moment later they sprang back. They had been making their own fire, outside the fire stones.

Preoccupied with their own affairs in the circle of chairs around the fire, the adults didn’t seem to notice. Nina saw Debbie at her kitchen window, rinsing dishes in a pool of light, but all around her was black sooty forest and the circle of flames.

Full dark had fallen around them. The birds no longer twittered and the stars shone indifferently through the oaks onto the pagan fire and its devotees. Nina had begun to feel hypnotized in these dark, smoky woods.

Britta, still conscious, although barely, had begun goading Sam, who had also drunk himself into mild stupefaction, with sexually pointed comments. She threw out this thunderbolt: “So do you still want me, Sammy?”

“Yes, Britta,” Sam replied, sounding weary and sardonic. He seemed to feel that further resistance would lead to gnashing of teeth, general bloodthirstiness, frightful consequences.

Britta had been gathering herself for something all evening. That time had arrived. They all knew it. She would not be denied. Nina imagined her naked, dancing on a corpse, her jeweled belt hung with skulls. What was going to happen?

Sitting a few feet from Sam, David Cowan slumped, seeming to have the strength only to lift his drink to his mouth one more time. The fire burned brighter, shooting up sparks that made George get up and move farther away, cursing. The added heat felt vivid, sharp, oppressive.

As the shower of sparks died down Nina saw through a veil of smoke that Britta, maddened by drink and boredom, had made her move; somehow she had slithered onto Sam Puglia’s lap.

She faced him, legs wide apart, dress hiked up. Slowly, she began grinding her groin against his lap. All that could be seen of her was her round gelatinous rear revolving obscenely, her freckled arms firmly hugging Sam around his chest, and the pale skullcap of her hair. Her face was buried on his chest.

Sam’s arms were raised on both sides, his right hand still holding his drink. Above her nestled head, he smiled hideously, seeming to salute them with his drink and to beg them not to notice, distancing himself from the unseemly plowing taking place below.

In the woods, the children screamed and played. Britta moved implacably, rhythmically, upon Sam. Nina couldn’t turn her gaze away, but a veil had fallen over her eyes and the movement in the chair right over there turned blurry.

Anything could have happened in those moments. Cowan could have stood up and shot his wife. The devil could have appeared in a shower of sparks. The maintenance of the universe seemed to depend on not noticing.

They all held their breaths and pretended not to notice. George Hill held on to the arms of his chair to keep them attached.

Sam kept his arms held high like a catatonic, his smile a rictus. Britta made no sound, but worked away with a will.

A few moments later, using her strange magic, Britta rematerialized through the flickering fire onto her husband’s knee, her arms around him, whispering, wheedling, and jiving. Cowan’s pallid face yielded no clue to his reactions.

After what she probably considered a respectable period, Britta resumed talking to the others.

Relief filled the air. The rest of them, Nina included, looked at one another like tattered survivors of a terrifying natural event.

They had held it together in the face of chaos. The social fabric had not been torn, all was sort of as it was.

But Britta did not play her encore for long. She slipped away, alone. She was gone for good. Soon Jolene asked, “Where’s Britta?”

“Putting her kids to bed?” someone said. But, no, Nina saw that her boys were still making mischief out there in the shadows, their faces streaked with tears and carbon.

The adults rose clumsily together, moving toward the street, calling to their kids. David Cowan disappeared too and Megan rounded up the young Cowans. Ben offered to walk Elizabeth to her car. After a querying look at Nina, and a nod back, Elizabeth accepted his offer.

Sam continued to sit in his chair, drink in hand. He hadn’t moved since Britta had screwed him into it. He might have been unconscious, but no one wanted to look closely enough to find out.

The fire still blazed, but the party appeared to be over.

“So long, great party,” Nina heard a few voices call out to whoever might hear, and she and Ben joined the crowd stumbling along the road.

13

T OP DOWN ON PAUL’S MUSTANG, THEY whipped past the wineries and dry hillsides on Carmel Valley Road, which had just turned into G-16, on Sunday morning. Paul took the curves too fast, and Nina held on tight. This time they had decided to leave Hitchcock at home.

They were following Danny’s routines in order to find out who had tipped him off about the fires. Ben had told Nina he hardly went anywhere, except to a bar called Alma’s in the hamlet of Cachagua, deep in the Los Padres National Forest.

“So,” Paul said, negotiating a particularly harrowing bend in the road, “you ever been up this way before?”

“I used to come here to swim sometimes when I was a teenager,” she said. “There’s a place called the Bucket along the river here. Kids used to go naked in a deep pool in the Carmel River.”

“Where exactly is it?”

“Why exactly would you care?”

“Hot day,” Paul said. “Nice way to cool off on the way back.”

“Uh huh.”

“Who did you come with?”

“To the Bucket? That’s private,” she said. Paul’s sudden interest ballooned like a semi coming at her.

“I can just see it.”

“No, you can’t,” she said. “Banish whatever pictures you’re conjuring up.”

Paul wore his khakis and a polo shirt. Nina, in deference to where they were headed, had dressed in jeans and a tank top, her hair tucked under a baseball cap. A flock of wild turkeys burst out and skittered across a field, staying very low in the air. They had already passed Carmel Valley Village and lost the houses. The one-lane road, striped with light and shade, wound around the rock banks like a narrow asphalt river.

“Well, you promised to tell me about the Siesta Court Bunch party once we hit the road. When I mention it you get this expression-what is it, disbelief? Amusement? Disgust?”

“That was some party.” Nina shook her head. “Was it ever.”

“So? What do you think?”

Nina said slowly, “I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.”

Paul laughed. “That bad?”

“
Lord of the Flies
bad.
Deliverance
bad.”

“Did you learn anything?”

“Well, I learned how to lap dance,” Nina said. She wet her lips and began describing the party, from Darryl’s mooning over Elizabeth to Tory walking out; the black-faced kids screeching through the woods; George’s tasteless jokes; Ted and Megan grinning beatifically from the sidelines; Elizabeth’s tape recorder. Paul burst into laughter here and there as she talked.

“Trust me, it wasn’t funny while it was happening,” Nina said. She finished with Britta and Sam on the plastic chair. Paul laughed long and hard at that one.

“Sam’s probably still sitting there in his plastic chair, holding his drink up with that look of horror,” Nina said.

“I can’t believe I let you two talk me out of going,” Paul said. “I wondered if there were any good parties left, and here I had the chance to go to the best one in ages.”

“But I’m not sure I learned anything about the arson. I didn’t look at one of the men and say, it’s him, like I thought I would. One of them, Darryl Eubanks, is a volunteer firefighter, which I suppose gives him an automatic place on the list.”

“What did you think of him?”

“A lunk.”

“I was looking for something more precise. More profound.”

“He’s dissatisfied, though he has everything-health, youth, a family, work, a home-he was hitting on one of the other women. He’s likable, though, and I kept watching him and reminding myself that a lot of my guilty criminal clients are likable.”

“Anybody else?”

“David Cowan is alienated. He has money. I suspect he’s obsessive, and these fires may be the product of an obsessive mind. He’s secretive, that’s what it is.”

“That’s interesting,” Paul said, “in an academic sort of way.”

“Well, George Hill is used to getting his own way, and he has a concrete grievance.” She told Paul how the Hills had lost their right to subdivide. “Danny worked for him a lot. If I had to pick, I’d say George, but then again, he’s got health problems and I can’t see him climbing a steep trail. I don’t know.”

“We’ll just keep gathering information, and you’ll be able to link up those impressions,” Paul said. “I think you learned a lot.”

“I think you better slow down.”

“Anything you know about this place we’re going? Cachagua?”

“Ca-sha-wa,” she corrected.

“But a hard
g
for
agua
?”

She shrugged. “It’s how we pronounce it here. Hmm, Cachagua. I always thought of it as this magical valley in the middle of the forest, timeless, quiet, the sun always shining. It’s sensationally beautiful and remote.”

“Can’t wait to see it, then.”

“But it’s probably not so quiet at the moment. Remember Ben mentioning the old dam up there? The San Clemente? The locals fish and hike there. The village, what there is of a village, is built right next to the dam. Well, there’s talk of putting in a bigger dam.

“Ah, you think the idea of a new dam has the locals worked up,” Paul said.

“Sure it does. The Salinas Valley growers are running out of water. The locals feel like the water’s being stolen from them.”

“We’re gonna wring the earth dry before we’re done,” Paul said. “The truth is we don’t think very well.”

“Hey, Paul. That last line is one of Ruthie’s Twelve Points.”

“So it is. They’re contagious.”

“Water is
the
big issue in the West. The South steals from the North. Las Vegas steals from the whole state and neighboring states too. Mono Lake is suffering. Salmon die in Oregon because the Feds divert water to the farms. There just isn’t enough fresh water to go around.”

“But it’s so hot and still here. I feel,” Paul said, giving the wheel a spin, “like someone heading into the waving fields of Iowa, one of those outposts where there should be miles of untouched neat rows of corn, American frontier, peace, and no issues.”

“Visit Iowa. I’m sure you’ll find they’ve got fights about pesticides, the end of small farming, whatever,” Nina said. “Meanwhile, California’s got its water fights.”

Stiff and impatient with the long drive, they arrived in Cachagua before noon. Even the spectacular views of forest, wineries, and horses along the way hadn’t diminished the feeling that they were riding into the Wild West, visitors to a place they did not belong. The village, a clearing in the woods with a couple of mom-and-pops and a dusty county park with a tot lot, had only one gathering place of note, the bar.

“Alma’s. I could use a drink,” Paul said.

She knew he meant a real drink, the kind that actually hydrated. They parked in full sun in the dirt lot, and Nina followed him through the door of the long, low brown shack.