“We are the seeds, Mr. Charm,” Nesta/Ebony said. “Just seeds waiting for water in order to grow.”
“You mean, we aren’t the top ones in the animal world?” the old man asked. He seemed a little sad.
“No, Gramp,” she said softly. “We’re just empty husks, like, waiting for the light of life to enter us.”
“You are my little girl, aren’t you?”
“I love you,” she said. Then she bit hard into her bottom lip and kissed her mother’s father in a way that he had not been kissed in many years.
Fifteen
The view from the mountaintop was all that Gerin Reed ever wanted. Whenever his eyes chanced upon the deep blue Pacific or down the steep valley of pines, he stopped whatever he was doing, forgot where he was going to, and stared — sometimes for up to an hour. Many things distracted him. His children making up games based on how fast they could run or how well they could remember, the bottle of urine rotting and congealing on the back porch, the static between stations on the radio.
Karen had gone down with the children to Jason and Bridgette Sandler’s place. The Sandlers were their closest neighbors, two miles distant. Jason worked for a lumber company, and Bridgette took care of their kids. Gerin had seen his wife and Jason in the woods together. He knew that he couldn’t satisfy her needs and didn’t mind too much. All he wanted from her was her company and her laughter with the children. Sometimes he would wake up in the night and watch her sleeping. He once counted 3,700 of her breaths.
Aspiration, he thought while she slept, maybe dreaming of her lover down the hill.
Gerin had a slender paperback book in his pocket, The Prince by Machiavelli. The ideas didn’t mean much to him, but the words being read out loud made a kind of music that Gerin liked to set free in the forest.
He sang out in the woods, hoping for an echo. He wanted to hear something. Something that vibrated in his own heart and mind. He felt like a child in those woods, sure that there were other children laughing and playing there too. But they were hiding from him. It was a cruel game of hide-and-seek but Gerin never lost his hopeful heart. He knew that they would come out for him someday.
He could hear a car coming up the dirt road. Gerin worried that it might be Bridgette. Sometimes she came up to seduce him while Jason and Karen took care of the kids. She liked to go skinny-dipping, pretended that it was innocent enough, that she and her husband did it with people all the time. Gerin did what she asked but was continually distracted by cloud patterns wrapped in the ripples of the pond. He liked to look at Bridgette’s round belly and swirling pubic hair, but he was never aroused.
Karen never excited him either. It wasn’t that he didn’t want sex. He sometimes woke up having powerful orgasms, dreaming of a woman who, while they were in the act of lovemaking, would talk to him about her shopping that day, the smell of tomato leaves and the thunk of ripe melons.
The car came into sight. It wasn’t the Sandlers’ Jeep. It was a tan-colored Chevrolet. Three men in hats sat inside.
The sedan came right up to the front door of the log cabin that Gerin had bought with his life savings.
“Warden Reed?” the gaunt pipe smoker asked.
“Yes?”
The driver was shorter than the pipe smoker but looked bigger owing to his swollen muscles and big gut. The third man wore a wide-brimmed hat that hung down a little like a Mexican sombrero. But Gerin could still make out the red scars on the stranger’s face.
“I’m Inspector Bonhomme from the State Investigations Bureau, sir,” the pipe smoker said. “This is Sergeant Lonnie Briggs and Miles Barber, uh, our assistant.”
“Hello.”
“Your wife has already agreed to come with us, Warden Reed. She claims that you’ve been keeping her and the children against their will up here. The Sandlers contacted us for her.”
“I’m under arrest?”
“Yes, sir.”
“For what? I haven’t done anything.”
“That’s not what your wife says.”
“She could have left. I didn’t stop her from going down to Jason and Bridgette’s. She could have just kept on going.”
Lonnie Briggs shrugged his big shoulders even though the plea had been addressed to his superior.
“She says that you used psychological cruelty to keep her and the kids up here,” Bonhomme said. “She said that she was afraid of you coming after her and killing the whole family.”
Gerin Reed looked at the bluish smoke issuing from the agent’s lips. He wondered whether it was true. Was he crazy? Was he ready to kill Karen and little Jason and Anne-Marie? Was he insane?
He remembered Karen complaining that the money was running out. She’d asked him how they would survive if there was no money.
Was that crazy?
Gerry had thought that he could ask Jason about a job in the logging camp down in the valley. He’d been a cook in the Pacific Theater. He’d killed men in the war. He’d killed children too. But all that was before he’d been wounded and been made a cook.
At that moment Gerin saw Miles Barber assessing him. There was neither sympathy nor accusation in that one hard eye, simply the desire to know.
“Warden Reed?” Christian Bonhomme asked.
“Yes?”
“I’m going to have to ask you to come with us.”
“Are you taking me to prison?”
“No, sir, I’m not. But we need to have some questions answered and you’re a hard man to find.”
From all accounts Claudia prepared the sweet oils herself. She used store-bought extracts of cinnamon, almonds, rose petals, and vanilla to scent them. The oils, which came from cottonseed mainly, were heated to body temperature and placed around the room in wooden bowls. The walls and ceiling were draped with deep red cloths. Every corner housed a cluster of a hundred or more lit candles. In the center of the room was a pile of mattresses decorated with silken blankets, sheets, and pillows. Naked, Claudia Heart reclined in the middle of the mattresses and silk. Max the dog stalked the perimeter while her Special Chosen surrounded her. They were also naked and, to a man, erect. Each one had greased himself with the warm oils and now waited, listening to a song that had no words or sound. The music emanating from deep within their love goddess.
She leered with anticipation at their lust.
“Sing to me,” she said loudly. “Sing to me.”
Lonnie Briggs got that on his tape recorder. He and Miles Barber, backed up by eighteen state troopers, watched through an obscure window.
“We gotta wait until they do somethin’ illegal,” Briggs whispered to Barber. “Otherwise, the goddamned lawyers’ll get the arrest and everything we seize thrown outta court.”
But Barber thought that it was the spectacle of all that sexuality that had arrested the SIB sergeant’s attention. After all, the SIB usually went after less flamboyant suspects. The rare case of police corruption, construction scams against the state of California, or some bureaucrat using state resources illegally — these were Briggs and Bonhomme’s staples.
Barber also felt something from the naked woman. Whatever it was felt raspy and unpleasant on his sinuses and eye.
It was Barber who brought them to this abandoned mine. He used her husband’s name to do a tide search on desert properties. William Zimmerman had put a down payment of $175,000 on the played-out Jacobi mine in the eastern Mojave Desert.