The Jekyll Revelation Page 23

  “Nope, not one of mine,” Rafe said. But it might just as well have been, and that was the problem. They were everywhere, on the prowl for a quick snack, or a handout from some homeowner who had no idea she was doing more harm than good. Once the animals got accustomed to freebies, they’d be back for more—and if a small dog or cat happened to cross their path, that would do just fine, too.

  “You want something to eat?” Evangelina said, as he finished tucking Lucy in and got ready to head out. “You look like you need a decent meal, hombre.”

  “No, I’m fine,” he said. And she replied, “Then why do you have blood on your sleeve?”

  He looked and saw that a drop or two of blood had seeped through the hastily applied cotton and bandage.

  “Just a routine blood test.”

  “I’ve got some turkey burgers in the fridge. You’ve got to put some meat on those bones.”

  He declined again, but by the time he was pulling his purple Land Rover out of the driveway, she’d appeared at the driver-side window with a paper plate wrapped in foil. “Cold or hot, they’re good. And I mixed in some chopped jalapeno peppers.”

  On the way back to Topanga, he plucked open the foil with one hand and broke off pieces of the burgers. All they needed was a cold beer. He was hungrier than he realized; as he often did, he’d forgotten to stop and eat anything all day. There was always something more important on his mind. And right now, it was what had happened to the jeep—sabotage or simple decay, he still couldn’t be sure—and what he had seen lurking by the lake. Was it the wolf whose tracks he’d seen?

  He was just relieved Ellen Latham had asked him no further questions about the drug activity in the canyon, or if he’d come across any evidence of it. As long as he didn’t have to utter a direct lie, he was okay with keeping mum. And if Axel could be believed—and this was one instance where he thought, out of the instinct for self-preservation alone, he might be—the lab was going to be dismantled forthwith, and whatever illegal activities the gang pursued next would be done far from the prying eyes of land management or park service employees. Rafe would check the place out himself, and make sure the lab was out of business. If it was closed down, then his work was done; if it wasn’t, then he’d have no choice but to call in the big guns. Either way, he would not be bringing Heidi along on any further reconnaissance missions.

  He was pretty sure she was going to respect her promise to keep quiet, and let him handle the whole issue. This was hardly the kind of mess that any trainee would want to get tangled up in; she just wanted credit for the necessary field hours and accreditation. And after this latest incident, he strongly doubted, in fact, that he would ever see her again. When they’d made it back to the main road and a highway patrol cruiser had picked them up, she’d jumped into the backseat and slammed the door so fast she nearly caught his fingers.

  The cop had looked at him appraisingly and said, “Guess you’re going to ride up front with me.”

  “Yeah, I think that would be best.” Even in the rearview mirror, he had not been able to catch her eye. She had stared out the window all the way to the station, and when they were parting ways and he had tried to apologize for everything that had happened, she had uttered not one word. Walking away, she hadn’t looked back.

  Although it might have been better all around that way, it wasn’t how he’d wanted it. In his heart, he’d felt that old, familiar dart of failure.

  Driving past La Raza, he saw a few of the Spiritz’ motorcycles outside. He wondered if they were debating their future in the canyon, wondering if it wasn’t maybe time to set up shop somewhere else, someplace they were a little less conspicuous than they were now. All Rafe wanted, wrung out as he was, was to hit the sack. The Cornucopia, to his surprise, still had its lights on, and Miranda’s old Subaru was parked in front, with the hatchback open. He pulled around to the side, parked the Land Rover—the Lakers fan who had owned it had even painted yellow flames around the door handles—and then walked back to the front porch of the store.

  Through the screen door, he saw Miranda, in jeans and with her blond hair tied up in a do-rag, dragging the old steamer trunk out from behind the counter. For a second, he just watched, taking it all in, then rapped his knuckles on the door frame.

  Miranda jumped. “Oh jeez, I didn’t hear you.”

  “You’re working late tonight,” he said, stepping inside. It was only then that he noticed the destruction. Several of her paintings had been wrenched from their frames or slashed. The top of a glass cabinet was cracked, and most of the little figurines inside were toppled over or smashed. The room smelled of Pine-Sol, and the floorboards were still damp from the mop standing in the bucket in the corner.

  “Don’t tell me,” he said. “Seth and Alfie.” He went to her, intending to just wrap a consoling arm around her shoulder, but she turned into him instead, laying her cheek against his chest and accepting a full embrace. “Are you okay?”

  He felt her nod.

  “They were mad about the trunk?”

  Now she shook her head, still not speaking. The top of the kerchief tying her hair brushed against his jaw. He had a dozen questions for her, but held off asking, letting her simply linger there in the harbor of his arms.

  “It wasn’t Seth and Alfie,” she finally murmured.

  “How do you know that?”

  “They’d have taken the damn trunk.”

  “Then who?”

  “Laszlo.”

  Although Rafe had never liked the guy one bit, and made no pretense of it, this still seemed out of character. “Why?”

  He felt her shoulders lift in bewilderment. “He hasn’t been the same since that thing was opened and he got into all that evil shit inside of it.”

  “What? Is he possessed?” Rafe said, half joking but half not. He glanced down at the deep green trunk, battered and corroded, squatting like an ogre on the damp floor, and wondered. He remembered dredging it out of the lake—the same lake his jeep was now sitting at the bottom of—and he had to admit, if not out loud, that a whole lot of bad had happened since its discovery. It was just as well that Miranda didn’t yet know the other things he was learning from reading the journal.

  “Did he say why?” Rafe asked.

  “He didn’t say anything. I didn’t actually catch him doing it. But trust me, I know. I left a message on his cell, telling him he doesn’t live here anymore.”

  Rafe felt an unexpected rise in his heart. “Okay,” he said, “but what are you going to do now?”

  “First, I’m going to get that thing out of the store and drive it to the dump.”

  “It’s closed until eight tomorrow morning.”

  “Then I’ll leave it at the gate.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, hoping not only to calm her down, but to forestall that plan altogether. Miranda had no idea of the significance these things might have. How could she? He was only beginning to grasp that himself. “Leave it till tomorrow.”

  “No—I’m doing it tonight. And then I’m going to take a long hot shower. So hot my skin scalds.”

  She separated herself from him, eyes downcast, and started dragging the trunk toward the door. If worse came to worst, Rafe thought, he’d get up at the crack of dawn and quietly retrieve it. For now, he recognized that Miranda was performing a necessary exorcism. He went to the other end and lifted it. Miranda then picked up her end, too, and backed toward the screen door, butting it open.

  “Watch it going down the steps,” Rafe said, and when they got close enough to the car, he wheeled his end around and shoved it inside. He was just making sure that it would clear the closing hatchback when he heard the unmistakable sputtering of Laszlo’s ancient Vespa coming down the road.

  Miranda paled, and Rafe instinctively moved closer. “You shouldn’t be here for this,” she said. “Seeing you here will only make him madder.”

  “Let it.”

  “No, really, he’ll think it’s about you.”

  S
ecretly, Rafe wished that it were.

  “Go,” she implored.

  And in what might prove to be their first quarrel, Rafe slammed the hatchback shut, brushed the dirt off his hands, and said, “No. I’m staying put.”

  26 September, 1888

  The killer has a name.

  Not a proper one, but a name nonetheless. Self-bestowed. And one that the public has been quick to adopt.

  In a taunting letter addressed to ‘The Boss’ at the Central News Agency in New Bridge Street, and since reprinted in both print and facsimile, he declares that ‘I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal . . . I love my work and want to start again. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn’t you . . . My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good Luck.’ The letter was signed, ‘Yours truly, Jack the Ripper.’

  Although the hysteria has affected the entire city, it is most notable, and logically so, in the East End, where the Ripper has struck. The local businessmen—pub owners, many of them—have seen their custom decline, and various vigilante groups have been formed to patrol the streets and, in one case, offer a reward for the arrest of the culprit. Especially subject to scrutiny are any men of a dark complexion (the Jews again), or who seem as if they might not belong there in the first place. It is in that latter net that my friend Symonds has already been snared once.

  ‘I was simply making a visit to a certain den of iniquity off Commercial Road when I was accosted by something called the Mile End Vigilance Committee,’ he told me over tea at the Athenaeum. ‘It was plain that everything about me, from my manner of speech to the leather portfolio I carried, was cause for suspicion. I was rather roughly manhandled,’ he said, before adding with a sly grin, ‘not that I objected to that in particular.’

  ‘How did you make your escape?’

  ‘I might not have done,’ he said. ‘They had a rope and had all but hanged me when a bobby happened by and was able to calm the waters. Even so, I was made to come to the Leman Street police station and explain myself to the captain of the watch.’

  ‘That cannot have been easy.’

  ‘No, it was not,’ he said, resting his cup back in its saucer. ‘Suffice it to say, I shall limit my vices to the West End until this whole affair blows over.’

  But it was showing no signs of doing so. All of London was waiting with bated breath for the next attack, and the press seemed positively hopeful—nothing sold more newspapers than a fresh rumour about the identity or whereabouts of Jack the Ripper. Fanny devoured them all, and even when I retreated to the garden to get away from her nattering on about it, what should I find but Lloyd, with a stack of writing paper on the table before him, and a copy of “Punch” in his hand.

  ‘Look at this, Louis,’ he said, showing me a cartoon that depicted a gaunt, spectral figure armed with a knife and haunting the streets of Whitechapel. ‘The Nemesis of Neglect’, it was entitled, as the magazine correlated the poverty and squalor of the East End with the atrocities now being committed there.

  ‘If you reduce people to savage circumstance,’ I said, ‘then savagery may indeed erupt.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ he replied, ‘or else the savagery is inborn.’

  ‘Well, haven’t we become the toff. Comes from hanging about with Randolph Desmond, no doubt.’

  ‘Oh, Desmond’s all right,’ he said, ‘but Constance and I sometimes tire of him.’

  He said it in the most off-handed manner, though he must have known full well that he was firing a cannonball my way. ‘Did I hear you correctly?’

  ‘You mean about Miss Wooldridge? I expect so. We have been keeping company for some time now.’

  To say I was flabbergasted would be understating the case. Flashing before my eyes were the moments in Davos when a younger Lloyd had made himself a bit of a nuisance, kissing her inappropriately on the toboggan slope or stealing a piece of her lace (Fanny told me she’d found it in his shirt drawer) from the chambermaid’s basket. ‘And how does Desmond feel about all this?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter; don’t care,’ he said, nonchalantly turning a page of the magazine. ‘He treated her badly.’

  ‘Did he now?’ I was still incredulous.

  ‘Why do you think they were at the clinic?’

  ‘I never knew.’

  ‘He’d got her into trouble, shall we say. And given her a dose on top of that.’

  The revelations were beginning to come so thick and fast that I couldn’t dodge them all. But so much, too, was suddenly falling into place—the bills from the finest restaurants and shops in town. The late nights. The unexplained absences from home.

  ‘Does your mother know?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Another blow. ‘And she approves?’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

  It was fortunate that I was already sitting down. I could not have been more astonished if he had told me he’d actually written a novel and sold it to Longman’s.

  ‘Oh, and we went to the play the other night.’

  ‘What play?’

  ‘Yours, of course. I was sorry to have been in Paris on the night of the opening, but we finally got round to it. Mansfield, I must say, makes a great impression in the title role. Or roles,’ he said, in jest.

  I simply nodded in agreement. I had not yet absorbed all the more pertinent news.

  ‘But let me ask you,’ he said, slapping the magazine down onto the table as if signalling the end of idle talk. ‘When you start writing one of your novels, do you already know how it will end?’

  ‘Only in the most general sense.’

  ‘You let your famous Brownies lead you, then?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  Shaking his head like a man who has been wrestling long and hard with his craft, he said, ‘That sort of thing won’t work for me. I’ve tried it, to no avail.’

  An errant breeze blew several pages off the stack of papers on the table.

  ‘I work differently.’

  As Lloyd and I bent to retrieve the loose pages—many of them blank, some with just a few words and all of them scratched out—I wondered what method might work for him. This one plainly did not.

  TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA

  Present Day

  Laszlo wasted no time driving the sputtering Vespa up to the front of the store and scooting off it before it had even come to a full stop. It bumped up against the railing and teetered over. Trip raced outside to bark at all the racket.

  “What the fuck?” Laszlo was saying, over and over again, as he approached Miranda. “You leave me a message on my cell, telling me we’re done? That I’ve got to move out? On my cell? You don’t even talk to me face-to-face?” Taking a breath, he said, “And what’s he doing here?”

  “Rafe was just helping me clean up the store.”

  “I’ll bet he was.”

  “After you trashed it.”

  “Who says so?”

  Rafe noticed that he didn’t exactly deny it.

  “Really, Laz? After all the other crazy crap you’ve been pulling—like showing up in the bedroom in those old clothes from the trunk—and getting drunk—”

  “Like you don’t drink.”

  “And stoned out of your gourd—”

  “Oh, and you don’t smoke weed, either.”

  “And just basically acting like a piece of shit all the time, you think I don’t know you did this?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Why would you? How about because I refused to put out last night, or because I asked you to actually do some work around the place, or because our relationship has gone straight downhill ever since you found your new motorcycle buds.”

  “Can
he leave?” Laszlo said. “Why are we arguing about our store in front of this loser?”

  “First of all, it’s not our store.”

  “It’s Miranda’s,” Rafe said.

  “I can handle this,” Miranda said, placing a hand on Rafe’s elbow, as if to forestall anyone coming to blows. “Laz, I just want you to collect your stuff and get out.”

  “And take it away on what? My bike? I’ll need to borrow the Subaru.” He glanced into the rear and saw the trunk. “Oh no you don’t! You’re not selling off my stuff! That trunk, and everything in it, is mine!”

  “I’m not selling any of it. It’s going to the dump.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “You can go and get it there and take it wherever you decide you want to live from now on.”

  “Oh, don’t you worry about that, Miranda. I’ve got friends, plenty of ’em, and I’ve got a place to go.”

  “The Spiritz house?”

  Rafe knew they maintained some kind of compound, if it could be called that, at the end of one of the dirt roads off the main canyon—he’d seen the hand-lettered sign saying “No Trespassing or You WILL Be Shot, M*F”—and like anyone else with a whit of sense, he’d steered clear.

  Miranda took the car keys out of her jeans pocket and opened the driver-side door. “If you’re not gone when I get back, I’ll call in a domestic abuse charge.”

  “Bullshit you would.”

  But Rafe could hear a note of doubt in his voice.

  “Three strikes” was all she added, portentously, before closing the door. Rafe started to get in, too—she might need some help unloading the trunk—but Miranda said, “Would you mind watching the store for me until I’m back?” The expression on her face told him that what she was really asking was, Would you keep Laszlo from torching the place while I’m gone? He paused—just long enough for a whining Tripod to scramble up into the passenger seat—then closed the door again, and stood there while she pulled out and onto the main road.

  “That bitch,” Laszlo mumbled.

  “What’d you say?”