"You can describe him?"
"Oh, sure. Big, but not fat. Big-boned. About forty, maybe a lithe less. Kind of a round face, with all his features sort of small and centered in the middle of all that face. Wispy blond hair cut quite short. No visible eyebrows or eyelashes. Lots and lots of pits and craters in his cheeks, from terrible acne when he was young. Little mouth, lithe pale eyes, girlish lithe nose. He was wearing a khaki jacket over a white turtleneck. He was holding onto the side of the passenger door because of the rough ride. His hands are very big and... well, brutallooking."
Meya said, ']t doesn't sound as if there could be two like that. But it's possible, of course. Maybe his change of expression was not recognition, but surprise at seeing somebody pop up like that."
"No. He knew me. Because I remembered two nights ago, in the middle of the night, where led seen him. As soon as I remembered, I knew it was the same man. Five years ago Billy's sister, my kid
The Green Ripper sister-in-law, Mitsy, disappeared. The family was frantic. She'd been in school up near San Francisco. She had just taken her things and gone away. Billy got time off from work and went up to San Francisco and nosed around and found out she had been hanging around with some kids who were connected with a religion called... damn! It will come to me."
"The Unification Church, the Moonies?" Meyer asked. She shook her head. "Hare Krishna? Scientology? Children of God? The Jesus People? The Church of Armageddon?"
She stopped him and said, '`That's close, that last one. It's like Apocalypse. Wait a minute. Apocry- pha! The Church of the Apocryphal"
"Very interesting!" Meyer said
'~Vhat's an apocrypha?" I asked.
"It's plural,": he said. "Fourteen books or chapters which are sort of an appendix to the Old Testament and are not acceptable to the establishment. Seldom printed. They are bloody, merciless, and, some say, divinely inspired. Authorship unsubstantiated. I suspect that a religion based upon them would be... severe indeed."
"A postcard finally came from Mitsy," Gretel said. "It was mailed from Ukiah, California. It was to her mother, father, her two brothers, and me. All it said was, 'Remember that I will always love you, but I will never see you again in this life.' You can imagine how that hit us ale Mitsy was such a... such a merrier little gal. Pretty and bouncy and popular. Your standard cheerleader type. No steady boyfriend. She wanted to be a social worker and work with handicapped children.
"Anyway, her father hired an investigator, and he located an encampment of the Church of the Apocrypha about twenty miles southwest of Ukiah, off in the woods. He had tried to get in to find out if Mitsy was there, but he couldn't learn a thing. Just about that time, her father my father-in- law had a stroke, a severe one. His right side was totally paralyzed, and he couldn't speak or understand what anyone said. He died of pneumonia about four months later. Billy's younger brother was working in Iran. So when we could, Billy and I drove up to the encampment, using the map the investigator had marked.
'4There were little winding roads, and finally we came to the private, no-trespassing signs he had told us about, and the wire gate across the road. A young boy came out of a lean-to. He wore a direr white smock and he was trying to grow a beard. We said we wanted to visit Miriam Howard, Mitsy Howard. He nodded and walked away up the curving road beyond the wire gate, and out of sight. We waited and waited and waited. Billy got very angry. I had to keep talking him out of going over the gate. It was over an hour before that man came down the road. That same marz. He was five years younger, of course. He wore a white tunic with a
The Green Ripper
Chinese collar, and white trousers tucked into shiny black boots. He came right to the high fence and looked us over very carefully. He completely ignored the angry questions Billy was shouting at him.
"Finally he spoke to us. There was so little movement of his lips it was as if he were a ventriloquist. He had a soft little voice. I am Brother Titus. I am an elder of the Church of the Apocryphal You are inquiring about someone we now know as Sister Aquila. She has asked me to tell you that she is quite happy here and she does not wish to see you or anyone from her previous life.'
"Billy demanded to see her. He swore at Titus. It had no effect. He said it wasn't possible, not now, not ever. She was happy in her new life, he said. Billy said he was going to see his sister Mitsy, and if it took a court order for a conservatorship, he would get it. He'd gotten that information from the investigator.
"Brother Titus thought for a little while and told us to wait. In twenty minutes a little crowd of them, about nine or ten, came down to the gate. We didn't see Brother Titus again. The people ranged in age from, I would guess, sixteen to twenty-five. Three or four girls, and the rest boys. At first we thought they had come without Mitsy, and then we recognized her. It was a shock. She had become such a worn, skinny, subdued little thing. She wore a dirty white smock and she had some kind of seri ous rash on her face and throat and arms. They looked badly chapped. The smock was too big for her. All of them had exactly the same look. It's hard to describe. Sort of bland and smug and glassy.
"They stood very close to her as she stood at the gate. She said, 'Hello, Billy. Hello, GreteL I don't know how you found me, but I'm sorry you did.' BiUy said, What have they done to you, Mitsy?' She said, 'My name is Sister Aquila now. They have made me very happy. I am full of peace and happiness and the love of God. Please don't ever try to find me again. Tell Mama and Papa Em happy here, happier than I've ever been before.' Billy said, Thou better come home. Pop has had a very bad stroke. Things are in terrible shape. We all need you.' She didn't turn a hair. She looked at him with that contented half smile and said, 'All of that is in my previous life. It has nothing to do with me now. My life is here. Go away, please. God bless you.' They all turned and went up the hid to" "ether, so close together they made each other stumble from time to time. They all had exactly that same look. It took the heart right out of Billy."
"Did you make another try?"Meyer ash
"Billy did. He went up there several weeks later, but they told him she was gong They said she had been 'called' to another place in the service of the Lord. If it wasn't for the stroke, maybe the family would have taken some kind of action through the
The Green Ripper courts, but money was scarce, and God knows Billy and I couldn't finance a court order and depro- gramming her and all that. The brother came back from Iran about six months before Billy ran out on me. Carl, his name is. He couldn't understand why we couldn't get her away from those people. He wasn't here. He couldn't know how it was. He lives in Houston now, at least he did the last I heard, and their mother lives with him and his wife."
"So you saw Brother Titus here, last week?" I said.
"Definitely. He was so... so out of context, it tools a while to remember where I'd seen him before. But I am positive. Tray, there's another thing that seems odd. After they went by me, they headed for the airstrip, and a little later the blue plane took off. I saw it take off and head west. When Mr. Ladwigg drove back home, he drove on the road. Why did he take Brother Titus on such a roundabout way? Was it because Titus didn't want to be seen by anybody?"
"Maybe he was showing him some land. Maybe the Church wants to set up an encampment here," I said.
"Where there isn't any available? That piece was sold months ago."
"To whom?" Meyer asked.
"To some kind of foreign syndicate, headquartered in Brussels. I was told they plan to put up a hotel-club where members can come for holidays in the States. They took twenty undeveloped acres over on our western boundary near the airstrip."
"For foreign members of the Church of the Apocrypha?"Meyer asked with a sweet smile.
"Oh, no!" Gretel looked horrified. "Mr. Ladwigg and Mr. Broffski and Mr. Slater would have fits. It can't be that, really. Could it, Travis? Could that creep..."
"Not at the price they're probably getting out there."
"Two hundred and twenty-five thousand. It was a special price because of no roads or water supply or sewer.''
"Maybe Brother Titus left the Church," I suggested. "Maybe he's into real estate. That has the status of a religion in south Florida"
She didn't laugh. She was scowling. 'I keep thinking of Mitsy. Her hands were grubby and her hair was caked with dirt. She had sores on her anHes. She looked exhausted. I am damn well god ing to find out exactly what that man is doing around there. And it can't be anything good."
"You two are well-matched," Meyer said. "You both have the same kind of compulsive curiosity. I will tell you what I tell Travis, my dear. Proceed with caution. The world is full of damp rocks, with some very strange creatures hiding under them."
"Herm Ladwigg is an old honey bear," she said. "He would not be involved in anything tricky or
The Green Ripper dirty. And if I can think of the right way to ask him, hell tell me what's going on."
The next time we looked at Meyer, we found he had fallen asleep in the chair. He would bitterly resent our leaving him like that, so we stirred him awake. He said he was too tired to eat, and over Gretelts protests that she could stir up something in a hurry, he went clumping on back to his stubby old cabin cruiser moored just down the pier from my slip, the John M~ryru~rd Reynes, sighing in consternation at the state of all the money in the world.
We buttoned up The Busted Flush. Gretel kicked on her shoes and hung herself around my neck and grinned into my face and said, "Well... will it be before or after the crab-meat feast I am going to fix usl"
I gave it judicious thought. "How about a little of both?"
YIow did I know you were going to say that?"
"Because I usually do."
"Shut up and deal," she whispered.
So the gusty winds of a Friday night in December came circling through the marina, grinding and tilting all the play boats and work boats around us, creaking the hulls against the fenders, clanking fit- tings against masts. While in the big bed in the master stateroom her narrowed eyes glinted in faint reflected light, my hands found the well-known slopes and lifts and hollows of her warmth and agility. We played the games of delay and anffcipaffon, of teasing and waiting, until we went past the boundaries of willed restraint and came in a mounting rush that seemed to seek an even greater closeness than the paired loins could provide. And then subsided, with the outdoor wind making breathing sounds against the superstructure of the old barge-type houseboat, and the faint swing and dip of the hull seemlug to echo, in a slower pace, the lovemaking just ended. With neither of us knowing or guessing that it was the very last night. With neither of us able to endure that knowledge had we been told.
28
2
Because Gretel had too many jobs at Bonnie Brae, she went back out Saturday morning to catch up on her desk work, driving off in the riffle Honda Civic I had helped her find and buy. It had belonged to a hairdresser at Pier 66 who had decided to marry her friend and go live in Saudi Arabia. It was pink, with a special muffler.
She planned to come in again early Saturday ever Ding and stay until Monday morning. It was a bright breezy day. My two best Finor reels were overdue for cleaning and oiling, and I had the first one all apart when Grets phoned me from work.
Her voice was hushed. "Darling, there is one hell of a mess out here. Herm is dead."
"Herm?"
"Ladwigg. Mr. Ladwigg. One of the owners."
"Heart attack?"
"They don't know yet. He's been bicycling early in the morning lately, for exercise, riding around the new roads they put in. And they found him in the middle of the road, face down, next to the bicycle. He either blacked out and the fall killed him... they just don't know yet. He was forty-six. What I wanted to say, don't expect me tonight, huh? Catherine Mrs. Ladwigg is in shock. They gave her a sedative. I'm here at the Ladwigg house trying to get in touch with their son and daughter. The son is a lawyer in Anchorage and the daughter works for the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki, and I haven't got through to either of them yet. When I do, I'm going to stay here until one or both of them get here. There's nobody else to do it. Stan Broffski's wife is a total loss in a situation like this."
'avant me to come out and help you wait around?"
"That's nice of you, but no, thanks."
"Let me know when you think you'll be free, when you have an idea of the time."
"Sure. Bye, dear."
So I went back to my fish reels. It was just ten o'clock, Saturday morning, December 8. They were having their weekend in Helsinki and in Anchorage. No telling how long it would take to find either
The Green Ripper of them. In the meanwhile, poor Hermhadsuccumbed to the age of the jock. The mystique of pushing yourself past your limits. The age of shin splints, sprung knees, and new hernias. An officesoftened body in its middle years needs a long, long time to come around. Until a man can walk seven miles in two hours without blowing like a porpoise, without sweating gallons, without bumping his heart past 120, it is asinine to start jogging. Except for a few dreadful lapses which have not really gone on too long, I have stayed in shape all my life. Being in shape means knowing your body, how it feels, how it responds to this and to that, and when to stop. You develop a sixth sense about when to stop. It is not mysticism. It is brute labor, boring and demanding. Violent exercise is for children and knowledgeable jocks. Not for insurance adjustors and sales managers. They do not need to be in the shape they want to be, and could not sustain it if they could get there. Walking briskly no less than six hours a week will do it for them. The McGee System for earnest office people. I can push myself considerably further because I sense when [m getting too close to the place where something is going to pop, rip, or split.
