“I’m Jake Kingsley,” he told her. “I just flew in from LA. The rental car company delivered a Land Cruiser here for me. I believe that is probably it outside in the parking lot.”
The name caught her interest a bit. Her eyes immediately locked onto his face, examining him carefully for a moment. She took in the short hair and the mustache and then gave a little shake of her head. No, not that Jake Kingsley, her disappointed expression said. The disguise had worked its magic yet again. She put her eyes back on her desk and pulled up a set of keys on a tab. “Right here, Mr. Kingsley,” she told him. “I’ll just need to see some ID first.”
“Absolutely,” he said, pulling out his wallet and opening it to reveal his driver’s license. He had recently had it updated with a new photo, one that showed him as he currently appeared.
She looked it over briefly, her eyes flitting from the photo to his face a few times. She either did not notice or did not realize the significance of the address and zip code listed. “That looks like you,” she said, handing him the keys. “It must be weird to go through life with Jake Kingsley being your name, huh?”
He smiled a little. “Why would that be weird?” he asked.
She looked up at him again. “Uh ... you know, because it’s the same as Jake Kingsley the singer.”
“There’s a singer named Jake Kingsley?” he asked, as if surprised.
“Uh ... yeah,” she said, as if talking to a retard. “From Intemperance? He’s only the most famous singer of the past ten years or so.”
Jake shrugged. “Never heard of him,” he told her. “I mostly listen to talk radio.”
“He’s the singer that snorted cocaine out of that girl’s butt crack that one time,” she said, somewhat exasperated.
“Wow,” Jake said, shaking his head a little. “Cocaine from a butt crack? That sounds kind of depraved ... not to mention unhygienic.”
“Yeah,” she said dreamily. “Some girls have all the fun.”
“I guess so,” Jake told her. “Anyway, I’d better get going. You have a nice day now.”
“You too,” she said. “And give Intemperance a listen sometime. You’ll love them.”
“Maybe I will,” he told her and then walked back out, singing the chorus for I Am Time, one of Intemperance’s most popular hits, softly under his breath. The girl stared at him, wide-eyed, as the door closed between she and Jake.
They loaded up everything into the back of the Land Cruiser and then piled in after it. Jake and Pauline sat up front. The Nerdlys and Celia crammed together in the back, sitting shoulder to shoulder with Sharon in the middle. Pauline directed Jake to drive out of the airport grounds and onto Highway 49, the main route through Cypress, until they reached State Route 38 in the center of town. There, Jake turned east and they began to climb higher into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Approximately fifteen miles later, after a twisting, turning, climbing drive along the badly maintained two-lane road, Pauling directed him to turn right onto an even narrower two-lane passage called Canyon Ridge Road. They wound through a forest of towering pine trees for about ten minutes and then came to a narrow, paved access road that was marked with a wooden sign on a post. The sign read: Paradise Homestead. Below it was a smaller sign that read: Private Property.
“This is the entrance,” Pauline said. “Just another quarter mile or so to the houses.”
Jake turned onto the road and drove about five hundred feet before coming to a closed steel gate, painted forest green, with a camera and an intercom box. Pauline directed him to stop at the box and push the button. He did so and was rewarded with his mother’s voice.
“You made it!” Mary Kingsley said excitedly. “Hold on a second while I open the gate.”
“You got it, Mom,” Jake said, feeling the first stirring of emotion. He had not seen his mother or father in person in nearly eighteen months now.
“Come right to our house,” Mary told him. “Stan and Cindy are already here. We have lunch ready for you.”
“On the way,” he said as, before him, the gate started to slowly swing open.
He drove down the access road, which rose steeply through the trees beyond the gate. At the top of the hill it turned forty-five degrees to the right and entered a large cleared area a little more than a quarter mile wide by five hundred yards deep. Two houses sat upon the land, one at either end, both tucked into the far corners. The area between the houses was mostly manicured lawn with a few isolated evergreen trees poking up. There was a tennis court almost equally between the two houses. There were two outbuildings that appeared to be garages, one near each of the houses. Beyond the land was a steep, rugged hillside that dropped down into the Heritage River Canyon. On the other side of the canyon—which was perhaps a half a mile wide at this point—were jagged, hillsides of rock and tree-lined plateaus that grew higher and more rugged. Rising beyond these were the granite mountains of the Sierras.
“It’s beautiful,” Jake said appreciably.
“Yeah,” Pauline said with a smile. “They picked their place well. Take the right fork of the road. Mom and Dad’s place is the one on the right.”
Jake nodded. He would have known that even had he not been told. The house on the right side of the property was a single story, spread out to take advantage of horizontal space and to avoid staircases. Jake had advised his parents on that design back when development of the property had still been in the planning stages. The house that belonged to Stan and Cindy—Nerdly’s parents—was a two story with a wrap-around balcony on the second level. The Nerdly parental units preferred to be a bit more pretentious with their domicile.
There was a circular driveway in front of Tom and Mary’s house, currently empty of any vehicles. Jake pulled in and brought the Land Cruiser to a halt. Before they even stepped out, the front door of the house burst open and two sets of parents came rushing out to meet their children.
Tom and Mary, Jake and Pauline’s parents, were both in their late fifties. Tom, the former lawyer for the ACLU, was tall, just an inch shorter than Jake’s six foot one inch, and had not the merest trace of the beer belly he had sported for much of his life. His hairline had receded slightly from his forehead over the past ten years, but, except for a few speckles of gray around the ears, maintained the dark brown color he had been born with. He was wearing a pair of khaki shorts and a pullover t-shirt with the logo of a local brewery printed on it. His legs were well-muscled and his eyes were free from the glasses that had adorned his face for as long as Jake could remember.
Mary also retained her natural dark blonde hair color, though she too was showing a few streaks of gray here and there. Her legs were short, her body thin and well proportioned. Her face was attractive, the resemblance to Pauline unmistakable, though Pauline’s hair was much darker. Once she had been capable of turning young men’s heads as she passed. Now, in her moderately late middle age, she was a distinguished and attractive woman who could still easily pass for early to mid forties. One of the most distinguishing things about her, however, was the asymmetry of her arms. There was nothing wrong with her left arm, but her right was quite noticeably larger in diameter, tighter, and significantly more toned and muscular through the bicep, triceps and forearm region. This was from a long career spent playing the violin professionally, mostly for the Heritage Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. The right arm was the one that had spent a lifetime moving a bow across the strings of her instrument.
Jake’s parents took a brief moment to take in the sight of their wayward son—they had not seen his hair so short since he had been in grammar school, they had never seen him with a mustache, and, undoubtedly, they had feared he would look haggard and strung out after the last year and a half he had put in during his journey through the life of a rock musician—and then both rushed up to him.