Stormchild (11 page)

“You don’t have much faith in your vision, do you?”

“I have no faith in those who do not share my vision,” von Rellsteb said firmly. “And even though I am sure you are not hostile to it, you are still not one of us. Unless you’d like to join us?”

“No!”

He laughed, then stepped back. “I’ll give Nicole your letter. I know she’ll be pained about her mother.”

“I want to see her!”

“Maybe you can.” Von Rellsteb stepped back another pace. He was going into the darkness.

“What the hell does that mean?” I demanded.

“If she wants to see you, then you will see her.” He stepped further back.

I felt my chances of seeing Nicole slipping away with von Rellsteb’s retreat. “Tell her I love her!” I called to him.

“The world is love, Mr. Blackburn.” Lightning slashed at the sea, drowning the air with its sudden light, and in its slicing brilliance I caught a frozen glimpse of Caspar von Rellsteb’s face, and, in that instant, he seemed to be laughing at me with satanic glee. What earlier had seemed comforting and intelligent now looked evil, but, when my eyes adjusted to the dark again, von Rellsteb had vanished. He had come from the night, and seemed to have dissolved back into it.

“Von Rellsteb!” I shouted.

There was no answer. The sea sucked at the mangrove roots.

“Von Rellsteb!”

But there was only silence and darkness.

I turned away. I felt dizzy, almost drunk, as though I had been mesmerized by von Rellsteb’s voice, yet I could not shake the memory of that sudden satanic epiphany. Had he been laughing at me? Had his victory this night consisted of fooling a man whose wife he had killed and whose daughter he had seduced? I stopped and, despite the heat, I was shivering. I also realized that my encounter had yielded me nothing. I had achieved nothing, and I had learned nothing.

Then why, I suddenly wondered, had von Rellsteb agreed to meet me? What had been his purpose this night? To mock me? Then I thought of his denial that he might have used real bombs instead of stink bombs, and remembered the real bombs that had stranded the two Japanese whaling ships in their Korean dry docks. Fear surged inside me. Suppose Nicole was dead? Suppose that von Rellsteb had killed her, and Joanna, and now wanted to kill me? Fletcher had been right when he guessed that my father had left David and me comfortably provided for. We were not flamboyantly wealthy, but nor were we stretched for money, and inheritance has always been a motive for murder. And why else, it suddenly crashed on me, would von Rellsteb have raised the subject of Nicole being disinherited! Sweet God, I thought, that was how von Rellsteb made his money, by making heirs and heiresses of his cowed disciples!

God, he was clever! I remembered the uniformlike clothes Nicole had worn on the day she left with von Rellsteb; clothes which suggested a perverted subservience to von Rellsteb’s wishes. Did he have some kind of mesmeric hold over his women? And, once they were under his spell, did he manipulate their lives to enrich his own? Even Matthew had wondered where the Genesis community found its money, and now I knew. I knew.

But I had to carry my knowledge off Sun Kiss Key, and if von Rellsteb wanted me dead so that Nicole would inherit my wealth where better to kill me than on this empty Key in the middle of a thunder-ripped night? Fear swamped me. I ran to the car. I freed the revolver from its holster, slid into the driver’s seat, and fumbled for the keys. The engine banged reassuringly into life. I was panting. Sweat was streaming down my face as I let out the clutch and the car lurched forward.

Were they waiting for me? Had they thought to have a backup party guarding against just such an escape as this? I scrabbled Charles’s gun close to me, then shifted into second gear. I had left the headlights switched off. The car bounced sickeningly on the rough track. I shifted again, accelerating hard, spewing a plume of white dust behind me as the bright red car charged toward the highway. Moonlight was bright on the dirt track while lightning blazed to the north.

No one fired at me. No gun muzzle sparked and flamed in the night, yet still the irrational panic made me crouch low behind the leather-covered steering wheel as the little car bucked and banged and howled in the night. I could see the headlights of a great truck hammering down the highway, and I knew I should slow down and let the truck go past, but surely the best position for a Genesis ambush was where the track joined the main road? So I ignored good sense and put my foot down to the floor to try and race the truck.

The truck’s noise filled the night. Its chrome trim gleamed in the light of the small orange lamps that the driver had strung across his high cab. This beast of a truck was an eighteen wheeler, one of the behemoth super tankers of the highways, and it was thundering south with a tractor trailer attached and I was about to spin Charles’s small car under its juggernaut wheels.

Christ, but it was too late to stop now! I shifted down, making the Austin-Healey’s reconditioned engine scream in protest. Then I had the back wheels drifting because the main road was close, very close, and still no one fired at me, but it did not matter, for I was about to die anyway under the hammer blow of a Mack truck’s impact. The driver flicked his headlights to full beam as he hit the Klaxons, and the blinding night was suddenly filled with the violence of his giant horns. I kept going, and the truck driver stood on his brakes, so that the Mack’s rear end slewed across the road as I accelerated into its path. The Austin-Healey’s back wheels screamed and smoked on the blacktop, the steering wheel shuddered as the car’s right-hand wheels began to lift, and then the little vehicle skidded toward destruction under the truck’s massive tires. The big rig was threatening to jackknife, and its towering chrome radiator grille was filling the noisy night just inches from my rear fender. The Klaxons howled at the moon, tire smoke hazed the bitter air, then the Austin-Healey’s starboard wheels hit the road and the small car found its traction, and, suddenly, I was accelerating safely away, while behind me the truck driver went on hammering his horns in angry and impotent protest.

I drove a full mile before putting on my lights and slowing down. Sweat was pouring off me. I felt like a fool. I had not panicked like that in years, not since David had pulled me off a rock face in the Dolomites where I had frozen in absolute terror. That had been over twenty years ago, and then I had at least had real reason for the fear, while tonight the panic had been entirely self-induced. My imagination had worked on my fears, turning von Rellsteb’s sinister face into a devilish threat that had never existed. I was still shaking.

I slowed down, worried that the truck driver might have alerted the police with his CB radio, but no patrol car waited for me as I drove back to the warren of Key West’s streets, nor as I at last parked in the small driveway of Charles’s guest house. I turned off the engine, then sat in the car for a few seconds, feeling the jackhammer beat of my still frightened heart.

The revolver had fallen off the seat when I skidded onto the highway. I groped on the floor for the weapon then, wearily, I climbed out of the car. The guest house was dark, though I was sure Charles would be waiting up for me, even if only to reassure himself that I had not damaged his beautiful Austin-Healey. I closed the car door.

Then, from the deeply shadowed porch behind me, I heard the scrape of a footstep. I turned in a renewed and terrible panic, realizing that of course they would ambush me here, where else? If I died here it would be written off as just another street crime, and so I ripped the gun from its holster, then half fell against the car as I twisted desperately away from the threat of whoever had been waiting for me in the darkness. I used both hands to raise the Ruger and pointed dead center at the shadow, which now moved toward me from the porch.

“No!” It was a girl, who flinched away from the threat of the gun, and who screamed at me in a panic every bit as frantic as my own. “No! Please! No! No!”

It was the girl from the conference, the girl in the yellow skirt, the girl who had obscurely made me feel glad to be alive. And I had almost shot her.

“I
  hate guns!” The girl was gasping in her panic. “I hate guns!”

“It’s all right,” I said with an urgency equal to her terror, “it’s OK!”

“I hate them!” Her fear seemed out of proportion to its cause. She had twisted away so violently from the sight of the gun that she had dropped her huge, sacklike handbag, which had consequently spilled its contents across the path. “Have you put the gun away?” she asked in a stricken voice. She was still shaking like a sail loosed to a gale.

“It’s gone,” I said.

She dropped to her knees to retrieve the slew of notebooks, pens, tape cassettes, lipstick, chewing gum, and small change that had cascaded from her enormous bag. “Are you Tim Blackburn?” She turned her anxious face up to me.

“Yes”—I stooped to help her collect her scattered belongings—”and I’m sorry I frightened you.”

“You didn’t frighten me, the gun frightened me. I’ve never had a gun pointed at me before. I’ve been waiting for you.”

“Why didn’t you ring the doorbell and wait inside?”

“I telephoned,” she explained as she grabbed coins out of Charles’s flower beds, “and someone said you were out, but would be coming back later, so I came straight round here, but there were no lights on downstairs. I thought everyone must be in bed already and I didn’t want to disturb anyone. So I waited.”

“A long time?”

She nodded. “Long enough.”

“I thought journalists didn’t care about waking people up?”

She blinked at me in gratifying astonishment. “How did you know I was a journalist?”

“I noticed you at the conference,” I confessed, “and saw you had a press badge.”

“Wow!” Her amazement seemed to stem from the fact that anyone might have noticed her. She retrieved a last pencil and straightened up. “My name’s Jackie Potten. Actually my name is Jacqueline-Lee Potten, but I don’t use the Lee because it was my father’s name, and he left my mom when I was kind of little, and Molly Tetterman says she’s sorry she wasn’t at home when you phoned, but she was away in Maine because her son is in college there and she was visiting him all week, and she only got home today, and I phoned her tonight and she told me about your messages on her answering machine, and she asked me to talk to you, which is why I wanted to see you, and I’m sorry it’s so late, but I’m leaving tomorrow.”

“Whoa!” I held up my hands to check the impetuous flow, found my key, and opened the guest-house door. “Come and have a drink,” I told Jackie. I did not yet know her connection with the Genesis Parents’ Support Group or exactly why she wanted to see me, but there was something in her disorganized volubility that I liked. Her presence was also good for me because her vulnerability forced me to control the panic that raced had my own heart and filled me with an inchoate fright.

“I don’t drink alcohol or coffee,” Jackie informed me in an anxious voice, as though I might be about to force those poisons down her throat.

“Come in anyway,” I said.

“Tim!” Charles, hearing his front door open, shouted from the private parlor upstairs. He was waiting up for me, as I had assumed he would, so I gave him the news he really wanted to hear, which was that his precious Austin-Healey was unscratched.

“I didn’t expect you back so soon.” Charles, who was splendidly dressed in a Chinese silk bathrobe, appeared at the top of the stairs. “What happened?”

“He was early,” I said, then placed the gun on the hall table. “I didn’t need it, but thank you anyway.”

“And who on earth are you?” Charles imperiously demanded of Jackie Potten who, faced with the ethereal creature on the stairway, shrank back into the doorway.

“My name’s Potten,” she said, “Jackie Potten.”

“I assume,” Charles said haughtily, “that you are the person who telephoned earlier. You may wait for Mr. Blackburn in the guest parlor, and he will help me make a pot of coffee.” Charles walked slowly downstairs. “Come, Tim.”

As soon as we were in the kitchen Charles dropped his absurdly pretentious manner. “So what happened? Tell me!”

“Not a lot. He was early, we spoke, he took the letter, and then vanished. I didn’t learn a thing.”

“Is that all?” Charles was disappointed.

“That’s all.” I sat on a stool and shook my head. “I don’t know, Charles. For a time there I actually liked the bastard, then at the end I thought he was laughing at me.” I had also thought that von Rellsteb had wanted me dead, so that Nicole could inherit, but there had been no ambush, so even that theory was wilting.

“You don’t need coffee”—Charles saw the weariness in my face—”you want something stronger. Your usual Irish?”

“Please.”

Charles pulled open a cupboard and sorted through the bottles. “What do you know about that creature?” He waved in the vague direction of the parlor where Jackie Potten waited.

“She’s a journalist,” I explained, “and I suspect she must be interested in the Genesis community because she said Molly Tetterman told her about me. You don’t mind her being here, do you?”

He offered me a dramatic shudder. “Of course I mind. She’s such a drab little thing.”

“Drab?” I sounded offended. “I don’t think she’s drab at all.”

“You don’t? That hair? And that awful blouse? And the skirt? That skirt wasn’t tailored, Tim, it was a remnant from a chain-saw massacre! Here!” He tossed me a bottle of Jamesons.

“I think she’s rather appealing,” I said stubbornly.

Charles raised his eyes to heaven, then poured himself a large vodka. “Would you like to find out what this ravishing creature of your dreams wants to drink?”

“She told me no coffee or alcohol.”

“A club soda and ice, then,” Charles decided. “I’m certainly not wasting designer water and a twist on such a creature.”

I carried the soda water back to the parlor, where Jackie was staring very solemnly at an alabaster reproduction of Michelangelo’s David. Charles followed me. “So tell us what happened,” he instructed me, as though we had not already spoken in the kitchen.