What was he cooking?
Esther stormed over to the building.
She had barely raised her hand to knock before Kaspar called out for her to enter. It was as if he anticipated everything. Shrugging, she pushed the door inward.
There was a communal fire area in the center of all Truth Church disciple buildings, and in this one, Kaspar had started a modest blaze out of sagebrush and broken fir twigs.
Over the flames he had set up some kind of staggered scaffolding system out of heavy barbecue cooking grates. A long pan of water shivered on the lowest rack. The water boiled relentlessly, bubbling up against the heavy stone bottom of Kaspar's mysterious
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urn, which he had placed on a thick steel grate above the pan.
The lid was off the urn now. Esther caught a glimpse of a granular yellow substance just below the rim.
Kaspar's female companion sat on a simple wooden stool next to the fire, her frail arms stretching a blanket up over her head. The woolen blanket caught the noxious yellow fumes that poured freely from the ancient urn, and the girl inhaled greedily as if it were steam from a vaporizer.
The rotten-egg smell was stronger in here. As Esther studied the glazed look on the girl's face, she assumed that the yellow smoke was some kind of narcotic.
Kaspar was seated in a plain wooden chair, stoking the fire with a simple metal rod. He looked up wordlessly at Esther Clear-Seer, fixing her with his dead-serpentine regard.
Esther's smoldering anger was quenched by the unexpected strangeness of the scene within the building. She pointedly ignored the girl, who was gulping ecstatically at the smoke issuing from the pot, and focused her attention on Kaspar.
' 'Why did you buy that damn land?'' Esther asked.
"There are hot springs on the property," Kaspar explained.
"I already knew that," Esther told him. "That's why I didn't want it."
"The springs are crucial to our venture."
Esther hesitated. "How crucial?"
"They will make the difference between success and riches, and abysmal failure."
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"Well, okay," Esther said grudgingly. "Just check with me next time."
Kaspar nodded agreeably. "Of course," he said.
And that was that.
What could Esther say? The strange little man deferred to her nearly every time she challenged him, and even when he didn't—as in the real-estate matter—he didn't strike up a bold or defensive posture. He merely stated his position quietly, almost subserviently, and half the time Esther walked away thinking she had come to the same conclusion herself.
Besides, the money Kaspar brought in was nothing to sneeze at. To Esther Clear-Seer, any business partner who swelled the coffers of the Church of the Absolute and Incontrovertible Truth and asked for next to nothing in return was the business partner for her.
The property Kaspar purchased had once housed a modest crop-dusting and stunt-flying business back during the 1930s. Today the only visible sign of that long abandoned enterprise was a rusting corrugated tin hangar squatting at the far end of a sage-covered, crumbling concrete runway. Kaspar had gone to work, refurbishing the structure and altering the basic design of the vacant building into a sanctuary for special worship.
At first Esther resisted the idea of using Truth Church funds on such an outlandish project. But after Kaspar had made her an additional four hundred thousand investing in a Texas cable company, Yogi Mom found her resolve weakened. The man did have a way with money.
"Besides," Kaspar assured her, "fabulous wealth
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will begin rolling in just as soon as the temple is completed."
"How soon?"
"Very soon."
Esther was shocked at how soon.
It was the day after construction was completed, nearly two months after Kaspar's arrival. The night was hazy, and thanks to the nearby hot springs, humid for Wyoming in autumn. Esther fell sound asleep the moment her head touched her pillow. She dreamed of gold and greenbacks. A soft yet persistent tapping at her front door awakened her after midnight.
Esther was half-asleep when she answered. One of the female acolytes who was part of the compound's nightly patrol stood nervously on her front porch. She remembered the woman's name was Buffy something. An airhead, though she looked deceptively intelligent with her crystal blue eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses and her raven hair.
"What is it?" Esther asked. It was obvious by her tone that she didn't like being disturbed at such an ungodly hour.
"Zen and Gary are here!" Buffy Braindead whispered urgently.
Esther blinked sleep from her eyes. Beyond the young woman she could see a rickety old Volkswagen van parked in the washed-out light of the Ranch Rag-narok compound. It was stenciled with daisies.
"What are you talking about?" Esther demanded groggily.
"You know, the ice-cream moguls," Buffy whispered. She shot a dreamy glance at the van.
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Only then did Esther notice the two men standing near the rear of the vehicle.
One was thin and reedy, with a mottled gray beard, thick glasses and a green snap-brimmed golfer's cap. The other was about five feet tall, 250 pounds, with a balding pate fringed by about a yard's worth of stringy graying black hair. The sheen of sweat on his scalp twinkled in the moonlight.
She realized, with no small amount of surprise, that she had seen the pair of them an hour before. Their picture stared back at her from the side of a quart of almond-swirl ice cream in her kitchen freezer.
Wide-awake now, Esther pulled the acolyte aside. "So what do they want?" she hissed.
"They want to see him," Buffy answered, nodding toward the buildings where Kaspar had constructed his temple.
So it was that at 2:00 a.m. that October night, Esther Clear-Seer had found herself—in khaki pants, Army boots and silk pajama top—trudging through the fields between the Ragnarok compound and Kaspar's new rusted-tin-and-concrete eyesore, trailed by the nation's leading producers of specialty ice cream.
Neither man was in very good shape, and Esther found herself stopping every few yards to allow the wheezing, stumbling ice-cream gurus to catch up.
"What are you two dinosaurs doing here?" she asked after Gary—the fat one—caught his foot in a gopher hole and fell nose-first into a thorn bush.
"He told us it'd be finished today," the thin Zen answered.
In spite of the warm night, Esther felt a chill run down the gully of her back.
I
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"What would be finished?"
"The temple, man, the temple," Gary intoned from his reclining position in the Wyoming scrub. He plucked a thorn from his lowermost chin.
Esther furrowed her brow. No phones were allowed on ranch property except for the one locked away in her private ranch house. As far as she knew, Kaspar hadn't left the grounds since his arrival more than a month and a half before. How could he have known his temple would be completed today?
With a shrug she led the pair the rest of the way across the field, through the gap in the hurricane fence and onto the newly purchased Truth Church annex.
The partially collapsed hangar had been scraped and repainted by Esther's obedient acolytes. After the rubble had been cleared away, Kaspar had instructed the workers to create a new addition to the sixty-plus-year-old building. A two-story rounded cinder-block room bubbled from one end of the building and engulfed an area of the new property where jets of natural steam rose from fissures in the craggy black rock.
Sections of the new ceiling were designed to roll away, and Esther noticed as they approached the building that the skylights were wide-open. Bursts of phosphorescent yellow smoke puffed from the roof holes and hung ominously in the hazy black sky.
Kaspar met them at the main entrance.