“Twenty-five,” Walker said urgently. He rocked harder.
Henry nodded. “We called ourselves the Seekers. We fell under the spell of a real asshole of a guru named Gordon Lasher. Don’t ask me why we thought he was so smart and so enlightened. To give the man his due, he was incredibly charismatic.”
“He was the perfect con man and we were young and dumb,” Vera said. “We fell for his pitch. Gave him every dime we had. A few of the Seekers had some real money. Trust funds and inheritances. He took it all.”
“Several people wised up or got bored and split after the first couple of months,” Henry added. “Lost a couple of others the hard way.”
“The hard way?” Isabella asked.
“Sam took his own life,” Vera said. Her eyes were shadowed. “Lucy got stoned and drove her car off the Point.”
Isabella took a sip of tea. “You were all members of a commune?”
Henry chuckled. “I believe the politically correct term is intentional community. What can I say? We were young and determined to find an enlightened path.”
“America has a long tradition of intentional communities,” Fallon said. “Goes all the way back to those folks who got off the boat in Plymouth.”
“True,” Henry agreed. “Well, here in the Cove we were into meditation, self-sufficient eco-living, serious philosophical inquiry and, oh, yeah, free love.”
Vera rolled her eyes. “In hindsight I think it is safe to say that as far as the Asshole and the other men were concerned, it was the free love that was the big attraction.”
“Which was probably what destroyed your community,” Fallon said.
Everyone except Walker stared at him as if he had just spoken in tongues.
He shrugged. “Sex is the most powerful force in any social group. It has to be controlled and regulated in some manner or else it tears the fabric of the community apart. It’s a fact that when a commune or intentional community disintegrates, it’s invariably because of the sexual dynamics.”
“Sure was fun while it lasted, though,” Henry said somewhat wistfully. He winked at Vera.
“But it only lasted about six months,” Vera said crisply. “The Seekers discovered what every other intentional community learns the hard way. Human emotions trump Utopian ideals every damn time.”
“‘Hearts full of passion, jealousy and hate,’”Isabella quoted softly.
“Yeah,” Henry said. “Fallon’s right. Turns out the free love thing is one of those interesting concepts that just doesn’t work out in the real world. Anyhow, six months into what we called the Grand Experiment, we met at the Scar and officially dissolved the community. Not that there was much left to dissolve by that time. The Asshole was already gone. One of the women went with him.”
Walker stiffened. “Rachel.”
Vera nodded. “That’s right, Walker. Rachel Stewart went with him.”
“Tell me about the vault,” Fallon said.
“Right,” Henry said. “The vault. Well, it’s all connected, you see. The black-ops people showed up about a month before Gordon Lasher and Rachel left. There were three of them. They weren’t interested in the Cove. All they wanted was this lodge. It was empty at the time.”
“What was it about the Sea Breeze that attracted them?” Isabella asked.
Walker rocked. “The vault.”
Henry put down his coffee mug. “Like Walker says, they wanted the vault. Come with me. I’ll show you.”
Fallon set his mug aside and got to his feet. Isabella rose, too. Together with Vera and Walker they followed Henry through the kitchen and out the back door into the yard.
Fallon sensed Isabella heightening her talent. She halted abruptly beside him. He heard her take a sharp breath.
“See anything?” he asked quietly.
“Oh, yes,” she said in low tones. “There is some serious fog out here. I’ve never noticed it before because I’ve never been behind the lodge.”
“We don’t bring a lot of people back here,” Henry explained.
“Why not?” Fallon asked
Henry pointed to a large, circular steel plate set into the ground. The steel had to be three inches thick, Fallon thought. It was secured with a heavy chain and a lock.
“What in the world?” Isabella asked. “It looks like a large manhole cover.”
“It’s the entrance to what we call the vault,” Vera said. “But it’s actually an old bomb shelter. It must have been constructed sometime back in the late nineteen-fifties or early sixties. In those days a lot of folks believed that a full-on atomic war between the U.S. and what used to be the U.S.S.R. was pretty much inevitable.”
“The real paranoids like the man who owned the lodge at the time built private bunkers underground in their backyards,” Henry explained. “Stocked ’em with enough supplies to last a year.”
Fallon studied the steel plate. “The hatch doesn’t look that old.”
“It isn’t,” Henry said. “The black-ops folks took out the old hatch and installed this one twenty-two years ago when they took over the lodge for a time. Guess they wanted something more substantial.”
Fallon gave that some thought. “Most of the people who built shelters kept quiet about it. When the bombs started falling, they didn’t want to have to fight off their friends and neighbors, who would all try to get into the shelter.”
“Right.” Henry squinted again. “You’re wondering how the black-ops people knew about this shelter in the first place, aren’t you?”
“The question does come to mind.”
“I don’t have an answer,” Henry said. “All we can tell you is that they must have known that the shelter was here. Moved right on in as if they owned the place.”
Isabella narrowed her eyes. “Sure sounds like someone set up a clandestine government lab here.”
“A secret lab, yes,” Fallon agreed. “But I doubt that it was connected to any of the standard issue intelligence agencies. They’ve got plenty of underground research facilities of their own. They wouldn’t need to buy an old motor lodge with a bomb shelter out back.”
Isabella beetled her brows. “I’m not so sure about that. Looks like a perfect cover to me. Just the kind of thing a black-ops project would use. And you said yourself this stretch of the coastline is a nexus. They probably knew that.”
He looked at her. “I’m supposed to be the conspiracy theorist in this agency.”
She smiled. “Learn from the best is my motto.”
He decided the only thing he could do with that was ignore it. “Whatever the hell was going on here, I’m ninety-eight-point-five percent certain it was not a secret government lab.”
“Hmm.” She considered that for a couple of beats. “A private research lab, maybe?”
“I think so, yes,” Fallon said.
“Under contract to one of the intelligence agencies?” she prompted hopefully.
“No.” He tried to quell her with a warning look. “Just some private researchers who somehow got their hands on one or more of Mrs. Bridewell’s curiosities.”
“Ah,” Isabella said. “So we’re talking mad scientists. What about the funding?”
He abandoned the attempt to introduce a degree of logic into the discussion. “What funding, damn it?”
“Who financed this small, private lab?” she asked with an air of sweet reason. “Labs take money. Lots of it.”
“I don’t know who financed the project,” he admitted. “But I doubt that it was the government.”
Isabella was disappointed, but this time she stayed silent.
Fallon turned back to Henry. “You said this lab was only in operation for about a month?”
Henry scratched his ear. “That’s all. Right, Walker?”
Walker nodded in his jerky fashion. “And then s-something real bad happened down there.”
“Tell me about that part,” Fallon said to Henry.
Henry heaved a massive shrug. “Who the hell knows? Whatever it was, it killed one of the three researchers. They hauled the body out of the shelter, threw it into the back of a van and drove off. Like I said, no one ever returned.”