The Jekyll Revelation Page 9

  “Too late. I’ve already called the drought police.”

  He handed her the check and she stuffed it in the back pocket of her jeans without looking at it. She wore her gray hair cropped close to the skull, and he was pretty sure she chopped it herself.

  “Lucy’s inside.”

  “How come?”

  “It’s a time-out. She got a sunburn yesterday and wouldn’t put on sunscreen today.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Fine. She got a new roommate,” Evangelina said, nodding toward a skinny girl rolling a bocce ball. “Always takes some getting used to. But they’re getting there.”

  The screen door to the kitchen was propped open, and Rafe wiped his feet carefully on the mat before going in. The linoleum floor was worn but spotless, the plates were piled neatly in the dish drainer. Lucy’s room was down a short hall, past a bathroom ripe with the smells of bleach and Lysol; towels and washcloths hung on a rack with name tags.

  “Luce?”

  Her door was closed, and he rapped on it gently. “Lucy?”

  “Rafe?”

  When he cracked the door open, she leaped off the top of the bunk bed and ran to hug him. Too hard. She was nineteen now, but she acted like she was the same spindly kid she’d been on that day at the rec center, when he’d forgotten to keep track of her and she’d lain at the bottom of the swimming pool—after being hit on the head by another kid’s kickboard—for one, maybe two minutes.

  That was all it took. A couple of minutes, and even after the lifeguard had resuscitated her, her oxygen-starved brain had been stopped in its tracks. She was, and forever would be, eleven years old.

  “Evangelina tells me you got a sunburn,” he said, gently extricating himself from the embrace.

  “Look,” she said, holding out one splotchy red arm to show him, but what he noticed most was that she’d gotten even heavier. She was on some meds that had that effect—she needed them to ward off the epileptic seizures, which often accompanied brain injuries like hers—but he also knew she needed more exercise. He’d mentioned it to Evangelina, but she’d told him that his sister was “as stubborn as a mule, and twice as fat.” Evangelina did not mince words. “The Lord helps those who help themselves.” She was big on tough love.

  “Does it hurt?” he asked, examining the sunburn.

  “Not if I don’t touch it.”

  “Why don’t we put some sunscreen on it, and go outside with everybody else. It’s beautiful out.”

  “I don’t like sunscreen. It makes me feel all goopy.”

  “Goopy is good.”

  Leading her by the hand, he found the sunscreen on the bathroom counter and lathered her up. “Close your eyes,” he said, as he swiped some on her cheeks and nose.

  Outside, she said, “That’s my new roommate over there.”

  “You like her?”

  Lucy shrugged. “She’s okay. I’d rather live with you.”

  It was a frequent refrain of hers, but it still made him feel guilty as hell. “My trailer is hardly big enough for me.”

  “I don’t care.”

  What he couldn’t say—wouldn’t say—was that she needed constant supervision, the kind he could never give her.

  “You wanna go bowl with the others?” he asked.

  He could see she was tempted.

  “You won’t leave if I do, will you?”

  “Nope. I can stick around awhile. Go—play.”

  He watched as she made her way across the scrubby yard, noting that her limp—another effect of the accident—was no better, but no worse.

  “You get the sunscreen on her?” Evangelina asked, her hands filled with pulled weeds.

  “Yep.” Lucy had just been given the red ball, and when she was sure he was watching, she rolled it down the lane.

  “Rafe,” Evangelina said, “she’s happy here. You’ve done the best anyone could ever do for her.”

  He must not have looked convinced.

  “So knock off the gloom,” she said, reverting to nun mode. “Life goes on. That means yours, too.” Her expression all but said Be fruitful and multiply.

  Yeah, right, he thought now, as he rolled off the cot in his trailer and lobbed the empty beer can—a perfect swish—into the trash. Life goes on.

  Rummaging around in the minifridge, he unearthed a burrito that was only one day past its sell-by date, and was just unwrapping it when he heard Miranda cry, “Mail call!” from the open door.

  She was holding out a stack of envelopes and catalogs. “You haven’t picked it up for like a week.”

  “Anything important in there?”

  “I don’t read it, Rafe.”

  “Neither do I.”

  Seeing the petrified burrito, she said, “That’s what you’re eating for dinner?”

  He looked at it appraisingly.

  “I wouldn’t feed that to Trip,” she said. “Give me ten minutes, then come on over to my place.”

  After she left, he microwaved the burrito until it was good and soft, and, inspired by her comments, flipped it to Tripod, who was lying under the clothesline where Miranda had pinned some sheets to dry in the hot breeze. No doubt grateful for anything that wasn’t totally wholesome and gluten-free, the dog wolfed the burrito down, then looked longingly at the paper wrapper Rafe still held scrunched in his hand.

  Miranda was in the kitchen when he got there, expertly chopping vegetables and greens with a long knife, then tossing the ingredients into a salad bowl the size of a hubcap. He saw tomatoes, peppers, carrots, dried cranberries, sunflower seeds, and cucumber slices flying into the mix and tumbling through the cascade of dark green leaves. Kale, too, if he was not mistaken. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned iceberg lettuce—or even spinach, for that matter?

  “There’s beer in the fridge,” she said, “but just don’t drink the Coronas. Those are Laszlo’s fave.”

  “Where is the man of the house?”

  Miranda frowned and pushed a wisp of blond hair off her forehead with the back of her hand. “Off on his scooter, chasing the Spiritz.”

  Laszlo drove around on a little green Vespa that aspired to be a real motorcycle.

  “He won’t mind my being over?”

  “I wish you’d cut that out. This is my place. I own it.”

  “Sorry, just making a lame joke.”

  “Make some oil-and-vinegar dressing instead. The cruet’s on the counter.”

  While Rafe mixed the dressing and shook it up, Miranda put two vividly painted clay plates—“I made those myself,” she said, “when I was at Burning Man”—on the rickety round table carved from driftwood, next to a candle in a little red jar with netting around the outside.

  “You can light that,” she said, tossing him a book of matches.

  Killing the overhead light, she said “Cheers” and tapped her wineglass against his bottle of Bud. He sat opposite and let her dress the salad and ladle a generous heap of it onto his plate.

  She sat back, sipping her wine while he took the first few bites.

  “Aren’t you eating?”

  “Yes. I just wanted to get a buzz on first,” she said.

  “It’s good, even sober.”

  “Lots of antioxidants in it.”

  “Love those antioxidants.”

  She smiled, poured herself more wine, and with her bare feet propped on the chair between them, started picking at her salad.

  “Is that girl okay? The snakebite one?”

  “Apparently so, though I’m sure some official reprimand has been entered into my personnel file.”

  “Why? What’d you do, besides save her life?”

  Though that much was true, he still felt a great burden of guilt for not warning Heidi to stay clear of the shallows. He was also contending, just now, with all the strange sensations evoked by sitting in Miranda’s candlelit kitchen on a warm summer night. When he raised his eyes to look at her, he tried not to let his gaze drop toward the scooped neckline of her short-s
leeved top. But it wasn’t easy. From the first day he’d met her, while scoping out the canyon for the cheapest possible place to live, he’d felt this undeniable tug. When he’d seen the For Rent sign stuck on the parked trailer and pulled over to check it out, she’d drifted out of the store like some kind of wood nymph in a long skirt—like the one that draped around her ankles now—and after allowing him to inspect the interior of the camper, said, “How much can you pay?”

  “How much are you asking?” he’d replied.

  “How much can you pay?”

  “Depends on what you’re asking.”

  Giving up on that line of inquiry, she said, “What do you do?”

  He told her he worked in environmental science and would be doing some fieldwork in Topanga. “You’re not here to figure out how to cut a highway through the mountains, are you, or how to subdivide the land for developers?”

  “I’m here to protect the mountains and subdivide the developers.”

  That was what had sealed the deal. She quoted him a price a lot lower than he’d expected, and he moved his stuff in the next day—not that that was so hard. All of his stuff had fit into three boxes and a couple of duffel bags.

  The candle made the cramped kitchen feel like a cave lit by a campfire, and their voices instinctively fell into that lower range used to confide secrets in the dark. Sure, they had talked before, but only on the fly, or with Laszlo lurking nearby. Tonight she asked him question after question about growing up, and though he almost never talked about it with anyone, he found himself telling her about how his dad, a fiery young Salvadoran radical, had overstayed his visa and been deported, never to be seen again. All of this he’d gotten from his mother, an impressionable and unstable grad student in Latin American studies, whose own family had pretty much dispensed with her after she’d gotten involved with Jorge. It was all very confused. His memories of his dad were all mixed up with Che Guevara, whose poster hung over his mother’s bed. Did his dad wear a beret?

  “I can relate to that being-dispossessed stuff,” Miranda said, “even though I didn’t have all the trouble you had to deal with. When I didn’t fit in at the Marlborough School, where my mother and my grandmother and her grandmother went, my family didn’t know what to do with me. My dad passed away a long time ago, and I got a small trust fund. I call it an arts grant, since I use it to support my painting and this store. My mother recently married her third husband.”

  “Third time’s the charm, they say.”

  “Maybe. This guy’s named Bentley Wright—sounds like a comic book hero, right? And he seems pretty nice. A retired curator at the Huntington Library, which happens to be almost next door to my mother’s house. But I only see them at Christmas or Thanksgiving, or at a funeral if one of my aunts or uncles dies. Topanga might as well be a million miles from San Marino.”

  Two very different roads, he thought, but converging, in an odd way, here. While Miranda was rebelling and getting thrown out of every fancy school she attended, he’d been working like crazy to play the one good card he’d ever been dealt—his native intelligence—to make a life worth living for himself and his little sister. With some help from a couple of insightful public school mentors, and even a grudging hand, extended once, from his maternal grandparents, he’d managed to get a BS and a master’s from UCLA.

  For dessert, Miranda offered a carton of lemon sorbet, but instead of bothering with bowls, she simply stuck two spoons into it and they passed it back and forth. At one point, they got the spoons mixed up, and Miranda, laughing, said, “I don’t know which one is mine anymore.”

  “I’ll take my chances,” Rafe said, secretly hoping that he might get hers.

  As she scraped the last shavings from the cardboard bottom, they heard the crunching of tires on the gravel out in front of the Cornucopia, and a couple of car doors slamming.

  “That’s not Laszlo,” Miranda said, and a moment later they heard someone calling for him and banging on the front door.

  “What the hell?” she said. “At this hour?”

  “I’ll come with you,” Rafe said, already guessing whose voice he’d heard.

  After trooping down the stairs and through the dark store, he saw Seth peering in through the window while Alfie stood on the porch shouting for Laszlo to come out.

  “We’re closed,” Miranda said through the door, and Seth, stepping back, said, “We don’t want you. We want to talk to Laszlo.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “When’ll he be back?”

  Rafe interposed himself, opening the door, and said, “Why? What can’t wait?”

  Seth looked taken aback, and so did Alfie. They looked at each other like, Hey, what’s the story here? Rafe could already see that they were calculating how they might be able to turn his presence here to their immediate advantage, or at the very least cause some trouble with it.

  “Hey, Salazar,” Seth said. “Didn’t expect to find you here.”

  “What do you want?”

  “An opinion.”

  “Fine. I think you should go home.”

  “Not from you. From Laszlo.” His eyes sought out Miranda, standing behind Rafe. “We’ve got something we think Laszlo might be interested in.” He glanced back at their flatbed, where Rafe could see a big green steamer trunk. “We dug it up and want to know what it’s worth.”

  Rafe decided not to let on, just yet, that he already knew they were lying. How did they think the trunk had found its way onto the shore? A miracle? He felt like it had come back to him, even by this roundabout means, for a reason.

  “Bring it inside,” Rafe said, and when Miranda, surprised, started to object, he whispered to her, “Let them. I know what I’m doing.”

  Seth and Alfie stalled, unsure of their next move, but since they were not the kind of men gifted with patience and foresight, they picked up the trunk, and while Miranda turned on the lights and Rafe cleared a space for it on the counter, they carted it in and plunked it down, wiping their hands on their dirty jeans.

  Seeing it inside, under the lights, covered with grime and rust, it had an altogether different aspect. At the lake, it had looked like flotsam. Here, it assumed the appearance of some ancient relic. Rafe fingered the padlock, which would never have yielded to a key anymore; it would have to be knocked off with a hammer.

  “What now?” Rafe said. “What do you want to know?”

  “We want to know,” Seth said slowly, as if speaking to a child, “what’s inside it.”

  “And what it’s worth,” Alfie added.

  “Why bring it to me?” Miranda asked.

  “In case you forgot, we didn’t bring it to you,” Seth replied. “We brought it to Laz. But since he’s not around, maybe you and Salazar here can tell us.”

  Rafe was torn. Ever since spotting it sticking up out of the lake, he’d wondered what was in it himself. Who dumps a trunk in the middle of a lake in a desolate canyon? And when had they done it? How many years had passed before the level of the lake had fallen enough to reveal it?

  “You got a chisel or something?” Seth asked.

  Miranda shook her head.

  “I’ve got some tools in my trailer,” Rafe said, reluctant to leave Miranda alone with them for even a minute or two, until Trip showed up to guard her.

  After fishing his metal toolbox out of the storage bin in his trailer and coming back, he found Alfie smoking a joint on the front porch and Seth leering at a painting of a nubile maiden petting a unicorn.

  “You do these yourself?” he was asking Miranda. “Maybe I’ll buy one of ’em someday.”

  Probably with the riches he was expecting to find inside the trunk, Rafe thought. Pulling the trunk to one side of the counter so that he could land a clean blow on the padlock, he could still make out the faintest impression of travel stickers—scraps of color and the outline of illegible letters—imprinted on its top. He had the impression that this trunk had seen the world in its day.

  It took jus
t two strikes with the hammer for the padlock to explode into a cloud of red dust, and one more for the remnants to drop to the floor. As Rafe brushed the dust off his hands and pants, Seth, unable to wait any longer, grabbed the lid and pried it up.

  Even before looking inside, Rafe had to wonder what they had just cracked open. Was it, as Heidi had suggested, a treasure chest . . . or was it something more dire? Not a treasure trove, but a coffin?

  9 December, 1881

  And so began what I have come to regard as the period of the Great Experimentation.

  I was, at once, its chief beneficiary and its most tortured subject.

  I lived a divided life, half the time in the subterranean labyrinth that comprised the doctor’s treatment rooms and laboratories, and half the time above ground, in my own suite, recovering from whatever the latest ministrations had entailed. My blood was let, and anaemia diagnosed, which required that I consume slabs of calf’s liver nearly raw and submit myself to cold showers meant to force the constitution into rallying its forces; these were quickly followed by steaming saunas designed to leach the tubercle bacillus from the body through the natural perspiration. I was reminded of an American sweat lodge in a place called Laramie, where I had joined the Lakota Indians under a suffocating tent of buffalo hides. I had done so with an eye towards including the episode in one of the letters for which the London and Edinburgh newspapers paid me negligible sums, but I had in the end needed to be ignominiously carried out, insensible, by the tribal elders.

  I could tell Dr Rüedi was no more satisfied with my progress than I was. Even the glittering of the lenses in his pince-nez seemed to radiate a sense of impatience, as if it were I, and not the disease, that was obstinately refusing to yield. Surely, I thought, he must be accustomed to such results—the midnight toboggan runs still occurred with dismal regularity, and the quaint cemetery, not half a league up the mountain slope in Davos-Dorf, was well-populated with the graves of those who had elected to rest forever in the region where they had last entertained some hope of recovery. Although I did not like to admit to such a vanity, it did cross my mind that in my particular case he was most determined to effect a cure because of my public reputation. He had already saved my life once, during the wolf attack, but were I to resume my place, untroubled by disease, in the literary world, I would provide an indisputable advertisement of his medical services to all and sundry.