Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money (27 page)

“The other factor is the boredom. Since
psychopaths are easily bored by many aspects of their lives, this
manifests itself in both the promiscuity but also in the way they
conduct their business. There must always be bigger and better
thrills. And the psychopath finds people valuable: but not as you
or I might. To him, it is always about: how can this person help
me, aid me, make my life better? And once that usefulness has been
extracted, it’s on to the next one. You see how many of these
things tie into each other?”

I nodded. I could see exactly. “What you’re
describing is a monster, capable of anything,” I said flatly.

Alex sighed. Nodded. “In many cases, I’m
afraid you’re right.”

Chapter Sixteen

Inexplicably, I dreamed of Arianna. She was
standing in a field, keeping something hidden from me. “You’ll
never find her,” she finally shouted. And I knew she was talking
about Jennifer. I woke up with a start and a shout and Tycho rushed
over to me to see what the problem was.

I’d forgotten he was there. “Don’t you have
a home?” I asked him. He just wagged his tail.

Thinking about Arianna reminded me of the
other paper she’d shown me. And Arrowheart. A name or word that was
completely unfamiliar, yet I felt as though it should twig
something.
I lay back in my little nest and toyed with the
word in my head. Arrow. Arrowroot. Heart of Arrow. Was it a name? A
company? A place? A product? A car? Finally I couldn’t stand it
anymore and, even though it was four am, I swung out of bed and
booted my computer.

And then I did a Google search: arrowheart.
Just like that: the single word.

There were
lots
of references. Inns
on the east coast, something about bridges in Madison County, there
was a very worthwhile sounding program that had to do with telling
stories to young offenders and people in prison. I scanned on,
occasionally following a link, until I came to one dealing with the
history of the Big Bear, California area. And there, on a badly
designed web page that looked as though it had been lost in
cyberspace since 1998, I found something that made sense. Amid
reams of text scattered with bad photos, it mentioned Camp
Arrowheart, built by the YMCA in the mid-nineteen-twenties about
fifty miles from Lake Arrowhead, where “thousands of Southern
California children came to learn about clean and healthy living
over the next seven decades.”

The camp had been abandoned in the 1990s,
and infrequent attempts to revive it in one form or another had
either failed financially or not gotten past whatever local
approval needed to be secured. It had been, at least according to
the tired-looking web page, unused since that time.

I pulled out the map of Southern California
that I keep in my desk to help me know where I am in relation to
anything people mention to me. And I could see that if I were to
plan a route between the spot in which I currently sat (which I had
circled when I first got the apartment, the desk and the map, in
order to keep track of myself) and Lake Arrowhead, it was about one
hundred miles southeast.

A plan was starting to form, and this time I
was fully on top of it.

Orange County was south, not east, but bits
of it were pretty close to the route someone would have to take if
they were driving to Lake Arrowhead. I left the map out and went
back to my computer, bringing up the Langton corporate information
once again. And, just as Steve had said, the LRG sales and
manufacturing office was based in Orange County: in Brea, not far
from La Habra. Back to the map.

From the looks of things, Brea was only
slightly south of the most direct route to Arrowhead. I thought
about this for a while. I knew that if I drove all the way down to
Camp Arrowheart, it was most likely I’d find exactly what the web
page had told me: a Y camp that had been abandoned for the better
part of a decade. But I had never been that far South before, and a
trip to the mountains sounded like more fun than staying here and
brooding. And if, as I suspected, Ernie had jotted down the word
“Arrowheart” because that’s where he was planning on holing up
during his kidnapping, then bonus: I’d have a fun daytrip
and
find out what the hell was going on.

It was true that, in his e-note to me, Ernie
had included a warning:
Alternatives could be unhealthy.
But
this
had
to be a bluff, didn’t it? I couldn’t imagine
corporate Ernie posing an actual threat to me, except for maybe
financial and how much worse could that get? And what was he going
to do? Sue me? I didn’t think so. Anyway, if I brought Tycho along,
the dog would get a day in the mountains while providing some
canine protection should I need it. Especially from lizards, but
he’d be company on the drive, if nothing else.

Brea on my flight plan either on the way
down or on the way back tied the whole thing together: I’d stop at
Langton and somehow track Steve down and apologize and try to make
things up to him. That idea appealed to me more than I knew it
probably should have.

I slid on khaki shorts, a white v-necked T,
hiking boots and I brought a sweater: mountains, I knew, could be
cold. Tycho and I were underway in less than an hour. Heading down
PCH again, I felt truly happy for the first time in days. I felt
powerful and optimistic and, most of all, I felt like I was doing
something. In retrospect, I guess I also felt a little smug. Again.
Why didn’t I know better?

Chapter Seventeen

At Tyler’s party, between networking with
Emily and chatting quietly with Alex, I was talking to this guy.
Ned or Ted or Fred. Some kind of “ed” name, anyway. He was a
favored key grip or camera guy or some other behind-the-scenes
person. He was a rarity: a native Angeleno. He told me he’d been
born in Hancock Park — I remember that part — and that he now lived
in one of the beach communities, though which one slips my mind.
Obviously, he didn’t make a strong impression on me overall, but I
do remember one thing he told me. It was about his first trip to
the Redwood Forest, when he was thirteen. He said he’d never been
out of the city much before that, but driving through the forest in
the back of the family sedan he was completely struck with awe.
More importantly, he was suspicious. Suspicious of the forest. He
told me he’d thought that the huge, majestic trees that lined both
sides of the road were a facade. That if his father had stopped the
car and his family had piled out and walked into the forest, after
a few hundred feet the trees would thin and they’d be in a
neighborhood. That there would be paved streets and high schools
and strip malls.

“How could you think that?” I asked. A
recently transplanted New Yorker who, nonetheless, was born in
Seattle, the official home of gorgeous trees. I couldn’t understand
such a thought. And when he told me that, when the family had
stopped for afternoon coffee and cherry pie at a roadside diner,
he’d slipped alone into the trees and walked and walked and walked,
believing that, at any second, the trees would thin and he’d find
what he expected, I laughed aloud. But to him it was the
trees
that were unnatural. That and the peace and solitude
that forests engender. And, at the time he told me, this wasn’t
something I could get my mind around.

And when you live in Malibu and maybe shop
in Santa Monica, you’re not seeing LA. Both touch the ocean and
whatever place the ocean touches tends to have its own kind of
peace: a wilderness of water. Even my infrequent forays into other
parts of West LA and downtown didn’t give me a sense of what
Ned/Fred/Ted had told me. Maybe a taste, nothing more. But driving,
driving, driving anywhere — except north from Malibu — to get out
of LA, you begin to understand.

Looking at a map gives you a hint, but it
really is only a hint. Los Angeles, Commerce, Bell, Cudahy, Downey,
Norwalk, La Habra... you see them first as names on a map and — if
you’re from Washington State, or a lot of other places — you think
in terms of what you know: that between each place there’ll be some
type of physical relief. City followed by a thinning of humanity
when you reach the outskirts of the city followed by at least a
brief lull that includes some green and maybe even the occasional
cow.

In LA, things are different. You can’t
really go west, of course, because you’d end up in the Pacific. And
if you go north, you get clear pretty quickly because then you’re
in Ventura County and almost anyone will tell you that doesn’t
count. But in any other direction, you can drive for a long way and
never get the feeling that you’ve left something behind and have
started something new. The mileage boards will tell you so, and
you’ll see signs that say things like “Welcome to Bellflower,”
“Welcome to Alhambra,” whizz past, but nothing will give you the
visual respite that a Pacific Northwesterner needs to tell her
she’s left one city and started into another. It gets a little
eerie, after a while. Like something from
The Twilight
Zone.

So sitting on Tyler’s deck with a drink in
my hand, a breeze tickling the eucalyptus trees and the ocean
within visual range, I couldn’t begin to relate to Fred/Ted/Ned’s
story. But today, with Tycho panting happily in the back seat, I
got a good taste. You feel like it will go on forever, the desert
of asphalt, the sea of car lots, the forest of industrial
buildings, that you’ll never see another tree or lake or stream. I
began to feel as claustrophobic as Ned/Fred/Ted had probably felt
in the backseat of the family car, though in reverse.

It’s because of all of this, I think, that I
can be forgiven for writing my sighting and resighting of the
burgundy Honda Accord off as my own paranoia. And all of those
towns. All of that asphalt. The fact that I could have sworn I’d
seen that Accord several times between Santa Monica and Brea seemed
to me not even a matter for consideration. It’s not like seeing a
purple Bentley. And to get to Brea I followed the Santa Monica
Freeway — highway 10 — to the 60 East to the 57 South to the
Imperial Highway and finally to the 90. That’s a lot of traversing.
My last Honda sighting was on the Imperial Highway and then I was
ankle deep in negotiations for which Brea exit to take and I forgot
all about the burgundy car.

There was no hint to announce Brea — no
grass, no trees and certainly no happy cows. Just, suddenly, there
you were in a city named for tar that is now home to a lot of
corporations including the Langton sales office.

I didn’t feel nervous today. I had a plan
that I was conscious of. And I wasn’t trying to do any
infiltrating, only intercepting. I
could
have just called
Steve and asked him to meet me somewhere, but I knew it wouldn’t
have had the same impact. I could see how hurt he’d been by my
skulking out of his hotel room that morning in the marina. Plus
there’d been the whole potential kidnapper thing. Then I’d stood
him up in Brentwood. Since I’d been more or less going his way —
well, less, but now here I was — it just felt like the right thing
to do to try and surprise him. And now that I was thinking about
him, I realized I’d like to be able to make him smile — at me —
again.

I didn’t pull into the lot, just parked
Tycho in the next block in the shade of a couple of palms. I rolled
the windows down so the dog would have air, but not enough so he
could squeeze out if the thought occurred to him.

Not far from the loading dock, I found what
I was looking for: a picnic table with a metal bucket on it. Close
inspection revealed I was right on target. The bucket was filled
with sand and the sand was filled with butts.

I’d come prepared. I sat down at the picnic
table, pulled a book out of my bag and settled in to wait. I
figured that, since this was a sales office and a manufacturing
plant, a peaceable looking woman reading in the smoking area would
not cause any raised eyebrows. People from sales would think I
belonged in the plant somewhere. People from the plant would think
I was from sales and it was casual Friday or some damn thing. I’d
give it an hour. If Steve didn’t show, I’d go find a telephone and
get him out here the old fashioned way. If he wouldn’t see me,
well... at least I’d be able to say that I’d visited Brea.

I didn’t have long to wait. After about 20
minutes of reading, and just as the book was finally getting
interesting, I saw him see me. And I also saw him decide what to do
about it and I was pretty pleased with myself for thinking up this
surprise visit. I had stood him up. I’d eventually gotten to the
restaurant, but he had no way of knowing that. He’d already been
somewhat hurt about everything when I last saw him. I know if our
situations had been reversed and, after all of that, he’d called
me, I would probably have hung up. But a surprise visit that’s
extremely out of the other person’s way? That makes up for some
stuff. And I could tell by the look on his face — flattered yet
still slightly hanging on to injury — that he felt that way,
too.

“I just missed you,” I told him. I closed my
book, but continued sitting on the picnic table. “Yesterday. The
waitress told me. At the restaurant. I’m sorry.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Apologizing. I felt badly about missing
you. But I had no way of getting hold of you.”

“You want to go for a walk?” He said,
indicating approaching smokers. I was relieved. Walking would mean
talking and talking meant that, as I suspected, he wasn’t going to
stay mad.

I smiled at him. “I don’t know, Steve. Last
time we went for a walk, things got out of hand.”

He smiled back. “I’ll behave this time. I
have to get back to work pretty soon, you know.”

“OK. Walk me back to my car.”

And he did. And he thought Tycho was an
“extremely cool dog.” Tycho smiled at that (though he smiles at
everything). Steve and I didn’t talk about anything — he had
smoking and then working to do — except that he accepted my apology
and we swapped phone numbers. I told him I’d call him later and
then Tycho and I were back on the road.