"I don't know."
He reached for her, hugged her, held her, and she began crying. He could feel her shaking, sobbing against his shirt, and though he wanted to be sympathetic and understanding, he could not help becoming aroused, and a powerful erection pressed outward against his jeans. She had to notice, but she didn't seem to mind, and he held her tighter, closer.
He thought of the man his mom had brought home, the man who'd been murdered, and the parallels were just too close for comfort. He thought of telling Penelope, but didn't want to worry her any further. He himself had dealt with the situation by ignoring it, not thinking about it, but Penelope was reacting in exactly the opposite way, and he tried to imagine what it must be like for her, living with people she suspected were murderers. He looked over her shoulder at the Greek-styled buildings at the top of the drive and shivered.
Too much was happening, there was too much going on. He didn't know what to do, didn't know what to say, didn't know how to react. This wasn't a simple situation where there was a problem and a solution, where there was someone he could talk to, someone he could turn to who would set things right. He couldn't just go to the police and say that he was having weird dreams and there seemed to be something creepy about Napa and, oh, by the way, Penelope thinks her mothers are murderers. He couldn't talk to his mom because ... well, because he had the feeling that she might be involved somehow. He could probably tell Kevin, but Kevin wasn't in any better position to do something about it than he was.
Do something about what?
That was the main problem. That was the most frustrating aspect of this whole business. Nothing had happened. Nothing concrete, at least. There were hints and feelings and hunches, but there was no one specific thing he could point to that would convince a rational outsider that his fears were justified.
Penelope was afraid too, though.
That counted for something.
She pulled away from him, dried her eyes, tried to smile. "Sorry," she said. "I think I got mascara on your shirt."
"Don't worry about it."
They were silent for a moment.
"So what do you want to do?" Dion asked.
"I want to look in the lab. I want to walk into the woods. I want you to go with me."
"What do you think you'll find?"
"Nothing probably. But I want to know why I've been kept away from them all these years. I thought about it yesterday, and I feel like I'm some type of Skinner experiment, like I've been conditioned and trained to act and feel certain ways. I mean, I've never even been curious about the lab. I've just accepted that I can't go in there. I've been curious about the woods, but I'm afraid of them, and I feel like those are the responses I've been conditioned to have." She looked into his eyes. "I
want to break my conditioning." He nodded slowly. "What if we do find something?"
"I don't know. We'll figure that out when we come to it."
Mother Felice was in the kitchen, baking bread, and Mother Sheila was out in the vineyard somewhere, but the rest of them had all gone into San Francisco for a meeting with their distributor.
"Perfect," Penelope said to Dion over glasses of grapej juice. t "What?" her mother asked.
"Nothing."
They had some fresh bread with the juice, then went upstairs for a moment, ostensibly to Penelope's room. She stationed Dion on guard at the top of the stairs and quickly ducked into Mother Sheila's bedroom, emerging a moment later, holding a key which she quickly pocketed.
They walked downstairs and outside, walking clockwise around the house from the front, coming at the main winery building from the side not visible from the kitchen window. Inside it was dark, only the security lights on, and Penelope did not turn on the rest of the lights as they went in. They walked past the pressing room in the dim halflight, and stopped in front of what looked like a small closet door. "Wait here,"
Penelope said, opening the door and walking in.
"What is it?"
"Security. I'm going to turn off the cameras." There was a click, a hum, and a beep, and Penelope walked back out, closing the door behind her.
"Come on."
He didn't remember exactly where the lab was. He thought it was somewhere far ahead, at the opposite end of the building, and he was surprised when Penelope stopped at the next door down.
She looked at him, tried to smile. "This is it," she said. She was scared. He could hear it in her voice, and he put a reassuring hand on her arm as she inserted the key in the lock.
She glanced around, double-checking, making sure that no one had followed them, that the security cameras were not on, then quickly pulled open the door and walked inside.
He followed.
He was not sure what he had expected, but it certainly wasn't mis.
Sensors had turned on overhead tights the second they had walked through the door, and they stood with their backs to the entrance looking at Nothing.
It was a lab in name only. There were no machines, no beakers or test tubes, no tables. There was no furniture at all. The walls were empty, the floor was spotless. There was only a circular hole surrounded by a low stone wall in what appeared to be the exact center of the room.
Dion wanted to leave. If before everything had been too vague, too nebulous, things were fast becoming far too concrete. The fact that Penelope's mothers had for years been spending time in here, telling her that they were working in a lab on stains of grape and varieties of wine when in reality there had been nothing in here but this well, scared the hell out of him. The seeming irrationality of it, the fact that he could make no sense of the situation, was what frightened him the most, and he was suddenly afraid for Penelope. He wondered if his mom would let her move in with them, if he could Penelope squeezed his hand, moved forward.
"No!" Dion said.
"What?"
"Don't go near it."
She smiled, but there was no humor in it. "You think a monster's going to pop up and grab me?"
That wasn't exactly what he thought, but it was close.
"I have to know," she said softly.
He held her hand tightly, and the two of them walked forward into the center of the room. They looked down into the well, expecting to see a black, bottomless pit, or an empty shaft with bones on the bottom. But instead they saw, a foot or so below the stone rim, their own reflections staring back at them from the deep, glassy burgundy surface of wine.
"What is this?" Penelope asked.
"I don't know," he said, but on some level, he thought, he did know. For the fear he'd felt before, the worry, was gone, replaced by calm. The feeling that things he didn't understand were spinning out of control was not mere anymore. This room, this well, this wine, all of it felt reassuring to him, comfortable, as though he was now ensconced in familiar surroundings. He breathed deeply. The smell of the wine reminded him of the counselor's office, of Mr. Barton drinking from the bottle in his desk, and he thought back to the fight with Paul. On one level he was horrified by what had happened, disgusted witi himself, but a deeper part of him approved, and as he re-.J played the fight in his mind, as he thought of the small ^ changes that would have resulted in Paul's death, hef smiled.
"What are you smiling at?" Penelope demanded.
He opened his eyes, looked at her, blinked. What had^ he been smiling at? The thought of killing Paul? He shook his head. "Nothing."
The two of them looked down at the well of wine.
"What now?" Dion asked.
"The woods," Penelope said.
"Are you sure?"
She nodded. "I knew I'd have to go there ever since I caught Mother Margeaux sneaking into the kitchen the other night. I tried to pretend otherwise, tried not to think about it, tried to tell myself that--that there was an explanation for it, but I knew there wasn't."