Eye of the Beholder (37 page)

Alexa considered that closely. Anyway you looked at it, “a friend” covered a lot of ground.

“What did you get on Lutton?” Trask asked.

Alexa realized that he was talking to the investigator he had mentioned, Phil Okuda. Very slowly she put down her cup. She watched Trask's face, conscious of the tension in her own stomach.

“Five years ago? You're sure?” Trask met Alexa's eyes. “No chance he was involved with the Institute before that?”

Her heart sank. He was not getting the answers he had wanted. So much for tying up the loose ends.

“I see. All right, that settles it,” he said much too evenly. “That's what I wanted to know. Yes, keep looking for Liz Guthrie. When you find her, have her give me a call. Right. I'll talk to you later.”

He hung up the phone and looked at Alexa with stony eyes. “You heard?”

“Stewart came to Avalon five years ago?”

“Yes.” He rubbed the back of his neck. After a moment he picked up his empty coffee mug and got to his feet. He went to the counter and grabbed the pot. “Lutton was living in the San Francisco Bay area when Dad went off Avalon Point. He was doing eighteen months on a drug conviction. There is no record of any connection to Dimensions until he moved to Avalon.”

“Drugs?”
Alexa was flabbergasted. “When I think of all the tea I bought from that man. He was a drug dealer?”

Trask said nothing.

Guilt assailed her. Stewart's former career was of little interest to him at the moment. He had other things on his mind.

She was not certain what to say. She stood and
walked across the room to put her arms around his waist from behind. She leaned her head against his strong, warm back. His muscles were rigid.

“I'm sorry, Trask.”

“I told myself that I could deal with the answer, even if it wasn't the one I wanted. But I was so damn sure that Dad's death hadn't been an accident.”

She tightened her arms around him. “You had no control over what happened.”

“Dad was so angry that night after we talked—”

“Stop it.” She dropped her arms, took hold of his shoulder, and turned him around so that he was forced to look at her. “Whatever you said that night, you did not cause your father to go off that cliff. He was a mature adult. If he was too angry and upset to drive safely, he should have known better than to get behind the wheel of a car.”

Trask just looked at her with an unblinking gaze.

“Look at it this way,” she said. “If you quarreled with your brother and then got into the Jeep and drove it into a ditch, who would you blame? Yourself or your brother?”

He scowled. “It would be my own fault if I ended up in the ditch.”

“Because you're an adult, and part of being an adult is taking responsibility for your own actions. Right?”

He hesitated. “Yeah. Look, I know where you're going here, but—”

“The least you can do is show enough respect for the memory of your father to give him credit for being an adult who made his own decisions. Right
or wrong, he made choices and they were his to make, not yours.”

Trask said nothing.

She cradled his hard face between her palms. “You came back to Avalon for answers. You've got them. Now the only healthy thing you can do is let go of the past.”

He pulled her into his arms, wrapped her close, and buried his face in her hair. For a long time he did not speak, but Alexa felt the tension gradually ebb from him.

She relaxed, too. It was going to be all right, she thought. Trask would deal with the answers he had gotten here in Avalon. He might not like them, but he could handle them.

The shoppers who sauntered along the shady paths of Avalon Plaza that morning were oblivious to the dark cloud of gloom that hung over it. But Alexa could feel the weight of the shock and horrified dismay that had descended on all of the tenants, herself included.

At the far end of the square Café Solstice brooded, its windows darkened, its doors locked. A bright yellow crime scene tape had been strung across the front door.

Dylan Fenn put his head inside Elegant Relic shortly after opening time. “You want any tea, Alexa? I'm making a pot in my back room.”

“Thanks, I've had enough this morning.” Alexa carried a fresh stack of illuminated manuscripts out of the stock room and began to arrange them on a display table. “I'm surprised any of us are even
interested in tea today, given the news about Stewart. You'd think we'd all convert to coffee.”

“You can say that again.” Dylan shook his head. “I still can't believe it. Incredible, isn't it? Lutton, of all people. A killer.”

“Goes to show you can't tell a psychopath when you see one.”

“Ain't that the truth.” Dylan glanced down the path toward the darkened café. “I was one of the first in line this morning to say those immortal words,
He seemed like such a nice guy.”

“Must have been crazy for years.” Alexa adjusted one of the brightly decorated manuscripts. “Apparently he saw himself as some sort of defender of the Institute. Remember what he said the other day about how Dimensions had changed his life?”

“I recall when he first came to town,” Dylan mused. “He was a loner who looked like he had reached the end of the line. Then he got involved in Dimensions, and it was like he'd found an anchor in a storm. He got his act together and opened Café Solstice. Never would have guessed he'd go off the deep end the way he did.”

“He must have become obsessed with Dimensions.”

Dylan shook his platinum blond head. “Webster was right when he said that the opposing vortices were out of synch here in Avalon. Maybe now that this is all over, they'll start resonating properly again.”

“I certainly hope so.” She glanced down at the vividly decorated reproduction of an ancient map in her hand. It featured a host of dragons and strange
beasts at the edge of the known world.
Monsters
. “I just hope Joanna will be all right.”

“Have you heard anything about her, yet?”

“No. The hospital says she still isn't seeing visitors. Not even Webster.”

Dylan looked alarmed. “You don't think there's a chance she'll be permanently—” He broke off to lower his voice. “You know, brain-damaged or something? I mean, gas and pills sounds like a pretty wicked combination.”

“Webster says she's expected to make a complete recovery, at least physically. I got the impression that her real problem now is a combination of depression and anxiety.”

“Poor Joanna. She kept saying that the past should stay buried.”

Alexa stared at the golden-eyed monster on the map. “But none of what happened here during the past few days had anything to do with the past.”

“Maybe not directly, but you have to admit that it was Trask's return to Avalon that set things in motion. If he hadn't come back…”

“Trask had nothing to do with anything that happened.” Alexa whirled around, sudden rage welling up from an inner spring of emotion that she had not suspected she possessed. “Nothing at all. I don't want to hear any more talk about how Trask set a bunch of negative vortices in motion, do you hear me, Dylan?”

Dylan blinked a couple of times and took a hasty step back. “Uh, sure.”

“That's garbage. Absolute bull. Understand?”

“Right.” Dylan's head bobbed up and down. “Complete bullshit.”

Alexa knew from the wary look on his face that she was in the process of losing it. She took a deep, steadying breath. “Sorry,” she said gruffly. “I didn't mean to yell at you. But I really do not want to hear any more of those stupid theories about negative vortices.”

Dylan smiled weakly. “Got it. No more stupid theories.”

“So, when are you coming back to Seattle?” Nathan asked.

Trask gripped the phone and looked out the balcony window at the surreal landscape. “I'm not sure.”

“Damn it, JL, you just told me that it was finished. You said you were finally convinced that Dad's death was an accident. Why not come home?”

Trask studied the starkly sculpted red spires outside the window and wondered why the cool green-and-water world of Seattle did not beckon, why it no longer felt like home.

“I haven't finished my vacation,” he said.

“Finish it at one of the Hawaiian Avalons.”

“I like it here.” Saying the words out loud sent an unexpected spark of awareness through him. It was the truth, he thought. In spite of everything that had happened and the things that had not happened, he liked it here in Avalon.

“I distinctly recall hearing you say that Avalon, Arizona, was one weird place,” Nathan reminded him.

“Yeah, but weirdness has its charms.”

“What about all the loopy metaphysical types and the psychic nonsense?”

“You get used to them.”

“What about the fact that there's no water? No
lakes, no Puget Sound, no Elliott Bay?”

Trask thought about the afternoon he had sat with Alexa beside Harmony Spring. “There's water around. It just comes in different forms here in the desert.”
Nothing is so seductive…

“Okay, what about the lousy coffee?”

“I'm working on that problem.”

Nathan paused. “Are you feeling all right, JL?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure you're okay with the truth about Dad's accident? You were so damned obsessed by your theory that he was murdered…”

“I'm okay with the facts. This is Bottom Line Trask talking, remember?”

Nathan fell silent for a moment. When he spoke again there was a note of disbelief in his voice. “It's the Chambers woman, isn't it? Alexa? Is that her name?”

“Yeah,” Trask said. “That's her name.”

Nathan went quiet again for a while.

“Are you sleeping with her?” he asked eventually in an unnaturally neutral tone.

Trask said nothing.

“You
are
sleeping with her,” Nathan said.

Trask did not respond.

“I guess that's okay.” Nathan sounded cautious now. “Maybe an affair is what you need right now. Might be therapeutic.”

“I wasn't asking for your approval, and I'm not interested in therapy.”

“You're probably a little vulnerable right now,” Nathan said gently.

Trask considered hurling the phone off the balcony. “Vulnerable? Where did you pick up that kind of language? You sure as hell didn't learn it from me.”

Nathan chuckled ruefully. “Got it from Sarah. If you don't want her advice, remember your own.”

“What advice is that?”

“Don't get caught up in the fantasy.”

“Since when have you ever known me to get sucked into a fantasy?”

“Hey, I'm just spouting off words of wisdom from my esteemed elder brother.”

“Give my best to Sarah.” Very deliberately Trask disconnected the phone.

After a while he got up and went out onto the balcony. He sank down into one of the loungers and brooded over the spectacular scenery.

What the hell was the matter with him?

It took a while for the truth to surface. But when it did he knew he had a serious problem.

This time he wanted the fantasy to be real.

At four-thirty that afternoon Alexa sold the last gargoyle from the display, an engagingly ugly little creature with pointy ears and a lolling tongue.

She went into the stock room to fetch another supply. For some inexplicable reason, the little monsters had been selling like hotcakes all day.

She selected a box of small gargoyles that were each about the size of a man's fist and carried it back to the display table.

Opening the box, she began arranging the surprisingly heavy little statues in a whimsical design.

Little monsters
.

She paused, a gargoyle in hand, and glanced into the stock room.

After a moment she set down the gargoyle and walked slowly back into the cluttered room.

She came to a halt and stared at the boxes full of gargoyles stacked against the far wall. From out of nowhere fragments of a dream shimmered in her mind.

An eerie sensation crawled up the skin of her arms and stirred the hair on the nape of her neck.

She glanced through the doorway that connected the stock room to the front portion of the shop. There were no customers in sight.

Reluctantly she turned back to study the boxes of gargoyles. Joanna had tried to tell her something about monsters.

… It's with the monsters…

Impossible.

Ridiculous.

But what if Joanna had not been entirely out of her head that day when she had nearly died from the pills and gas. What if there had been some truth mixed with the hallucinations?

Talk about a fantasy
. It was a crazy notion, but there was no help for it. She would not be able to put the bizarre thought out of her mind until she
had satisfied herself that Joanna's strange words had had nothing to do with the little “monsters” in the boxes.

She waded through the ranks of winged lions, gothic dragons, and ancient Egyptian mummy masks to where the gargoyle boxes were heaped against the wall.

She reached up, took down the nearest carton, and unsealed the lid. She glanced inside. Cheerfully menacing little gargoyles gazed up at her out of their nest of plastic packing material.

She shut the lid and opened another box. This time lascivious gargoyles laughed at her, mouths open in rakish grins. She tried a third carton. Gargoyles with sly expressions winked at her.

A small sound from the outer room startled her. She nearly dropped the box of gargoyles.

“I'll be with you in a minute,” Alexa called loudly.

“There's no rush, dear.”