Stormchild (12 page)

I told, leaving out only the details of my panicked flight from Sun Kiss Key, lest Charles should think I had been anything less than careful with his precious car. Not that there was much to tell, for my meeting with von Rellsteb had been remarkably unproductive. “I should have come with you,” Charles said.

“What good would that have done?” I asked.

“I would have pointed the gun at him, and then told him he had five seconds to tell me where the Genesis community lived. What is it?” This last, rather brusque, question was addressed to Jackie.

“The ice cubes.” She gestured at her club soda. “Are they made with tap water?”

“Of course.”

She blushed. “Do you mind?” She began fishing out the ice, which she dropped into an ashtray. Charles was amused, but pretended to be exasperated. Jackie Potten, once the offending ice was safely out of her drink, took a tentative sip, then searched through her capacious handbag for a notebook and pencil. “How did von Rellsteb travel tonight?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean by boat? Car?”

“I don’t know. He sort of appeared, then vanished.”

“By broomstick,” Charles said happily.

“Gee.” Jackie frowned at me. “I mean they had a boat the other night, so I guess they must have come to Florida by sea. I hired a motorboat to look for them, and I searched most places from here to Marathon Key, but I didn’t see them.”

“What were you looking for?” I asked her. “
Erebus?

“Erebus?”
She frowned. “Oh, the catamaran! They renamed her
Genesis One.
They’ve got two other boats we know of,
Genesis Two
and
Genesis Three.”

“How do you know?”

“Molly asked the State Department, and they gave us copies of complaints that Japanese fishing boats had made. It was nothing to do with the State Department really, because none of the Genesis boats are American, but the Japanese complained to them anyway. And sent some photographs.”

“And you looked for one of the boats here?”

She nodded. “But I didn’t see any of them. I wondered if von Rellsteb and the others flew here. Maybe I should try and find their records in the airline computers?”

She seemed to be asking my advice, but I knew nothing of such matters and had nothing useful to say, so I merely shrugged. I wished I could have been more helpful because I was finding her oddly attractive. I did not understand why, she was an unremarkable girl, but I was acutely aware of her presence. I decided her eyes were her best feature. They were large and a curious silvery green, though perhaps that was just the reflection of the sea-green lampshades Charles favored in the guest parlor. Otherwise Jackie’s face was very narrow in the chin and broad in the forehead. Her skin was chalky pale and she seemed, under the billowy clothes that had so offended Charles, to be painfully thin. Her fair hair was in disarray despite the pins and clips she had used to tame it. I put her age at mid- to late-twenties, but her innocence made her seem more like a fourteen-year-old waif; the orphan of some heartless storm.

“Would you mind telling me,” Charles asked in his silkiest voice, “just who you are, Miss Potten?”

“Oh, gee.” She was instantly flustered. “I’m here for the Genesis Parents’ Support Group.” She paused, as if expecting us to respond, and when neither of us spoke, she added a nervous explanation. “I’m Molly’s investigator,” she added in further reassurance.

“Investigator?” I sounded incredulous.

“I investigate Genesis,” Jackie said defensively.

“So you’re not a real journalist?” Charles made the question sound like a sneer.

“Oh, yes! I work for a paper in Kalamazoo”—she paused because Charles had sniggered, but then she decided not to make anything of his scorn—”and the editor isn’t really sure that the Genesis community is a proper story for our paper. I mean our only connection with Genesis is through Molly Tetterman, but the editor doesn’t like Molly very much. Not because she isn’t a good person, because she is, but because she can be very insistent, and she keeps on pestering Norman, he’s the editor, about the Genesis Parents’ Support Group.”

“Jackie,” I interrupted her very politely, but I was becoming aware that this orphan of the storm could talk the back legs off a herd of donkeys unless she was checked. “What were you doing at the conference?”

“Oh!” She was momentarily confused, as if trying to remember just what conference I was talking about. “I went there because I hoped to get an interview with Caspar von Rellsteb. Which I didn’t, of course.” She looked at me rather pathetically. “It’s been a wasted trip, really.”

“And mine,” I said as though it might make her feel better.

“Did you ask von Rellsteb where Genesis lived?” Jackie asked me.

I nodded. “But he wouldn’t tell me. He just fed me a whole lot of mystical nonsense about how Genesis needed its privacy.”

“I think it’s Alaska,” Jackie said suddenly.

“Alaska?” I asked.

“The Genesis group has always been based in the Pacific,” Jackie explained, “and when they left British Columbia they probably wanted to stay somewhere on that same coast, and von Rellsteb has always been intrigued by Alaska. No one would know if they were there, because parts of that coast are really inaccessible, so they wouldn’t need to bother with green cards or anything like that.”

“But why Alaska?” I insisted.

“Because I found the man he shared a prison cell with in Texas, and he said von Rellsteb was always talking about Alaska, and how it was the new frontier and a place where a man could.”

“Prison!” I interrupted.

Jackie nodded, but, for once, had nothing more to say.

“Why was he in prison?” I asked.

“It was attempted robbery,” Jackie said, “but I only found out about it last month, so I haven’t had time to write it up in Molly’s newsletter. It all happened ten years ago. He served two years of an eight-year sentence, and when he was released they sent him back to Canada because he should never have been living in Texas anyway. He tried to hold up an armored truck. You know, the kind that collects money from stores and banks? But it all went wrong and he didn’t steal a penny in the end. The whole thing was really kind of stupid, except he was carrying a gun, which didn’t help his defense in court. His lawyer tried to claim that von Rellsteb was alienated, and that he was only protesting against society.”

“Did he fire the gun?” Charles asked.

Jackie shook her head. “The police say it jammed, but for some reason the technical evidence about the gun was inadmissible.”

“But if the evidence had been admissible,” I said slowly, “von Rellsteb might have been arraigned on a charge of attempted murder?”

Jackie nodded slowly, as though she had not thought of that possibility before. “I guess so, yes.”

“Bloody hell,” I said.

Charles, plainly bored with the night’s lack of interesting news, yawned, and Jackie hurriedly said she had to be leaving. She was driving back north the next day and we agreed that she would give me a lift as far as Miami Airport. The hundred-and-fifty-mile journey would give us each a chance to pick the other’s brain for more news of Genesis. “Though of what use such a dull creature can possibly be is beyond me,” Charles said grandly after Jackie had left for her motel.

She returned at ten o’clock the next morning in a tiny imported Japanese car that was spattered with bumper stickers; so many stickers that they had spread off the fender onto the fading paint of the trunk. “Vegetarians Do It on a Bed of Lettuce,” one sticker proclaimed, while another warned “I Brake for the Physically Challenged,” which seemed to imply that the rest of us plowed indiscriminately into wheelchairs with merriment aforethought. “You car?” I asked Jackie.

“Sure. I worked out that it would be cheaper to drive than fly, so long as I stayed in really economical motels.” Jackie explained that her editor in Kalamazoo was not interested in Genesis, so she had attended the conference on her own time and on her own and Molly Tetterman’s money.

I put my seabag onto the car’s backseat, said farewell to Charles, then climbed into the cramped front passenger seat of Jackie’s car, where one dashboard sticker thanked me for not smoking and another enjoined me to buckle up.

We took four wrong turns in our mutual attempts to navigate out of town, but eventually Jackie steered the car safely onto the Overseas Highway where she gingerly accelerated to forty-five miles an hour. “Are you really going to drive all the way to Kalamazoo?” I asked in astonishment.

She evidently thought I was being critical of the car rather than of her nervous driving. “It sort of shakes if you go too fast.” She began to describe various other symptoms of the car and, while she spoke, I surreptitiously examined her and wondered just what it was that attracted me to her. She did not, after all, have the impact of beauty, and I did not know her nearly well enough to determine her character, yet still I felt an odd excitement in her company. It was, I finally decided, her very touching look of earnest innocence which made her seem so very fragile and which made me feel so very fatherly toward her. She was, after all, just about young enough to be my daughter.

When she had exhausted the problems of car ownership I asked what had first made her interested in Genesis.

“Berenice,” Jackie said, as if that would explain everything, then, realizing that it explained nothing, she rushed into more detail. “She’s Molly’s eldest daughter, you see, and she went off with von Rellsteb about five years ago, and Molly thinks that Berenice was brainwashed by him, because she’s never even written her mother a letter, and they were really close! Berenice was my best friend, I mean, we told each other everything! Everything! Which is why I’ve been trying to find her. I know she wouldn’t just have just cut me dead, I mean, people don’t do that, do they?”

“Perhaps she wanted some peace and quiet?” I suggested wickedly.

She looked immediately contrite. “I talk too much,” she said miserably. “I know I do. My mother always says I do, and so does Molly, and so did Professor Falk, he was my Ethics of Journalism professor.”

“There are ethics in journalism?” I asked.

“Of course there are!” She offered me a reproving look, which, taking her gaze off the highway, made us wander dangerously across the center yellow line.

I leaned over and steered the car back toward safety. “So Berenice just ran away?”

“She went to a school in Virginia, where she met this guy, and in her senior year he took her to British Columbia for spring break, which I thought was kind of weird because she’d always gone to Florida before. That’s where she met the Genesis people. They weren’t called Genesis then, that came later. They were some kind of weird commune, know what I mean? And they just swallowed Berenice alive! No letters, no calls, nothing!”

“And you’ve been trying to reach her ever since?”

Jackie nodded. “I even visited British Columbia, but they threatened to call the police and have me arrested for trespassing! I couldn’t believe their nerve!” She frowned. “But at least they didn’t point guns at me.”

I thought she was reproving me for my behavior of the previous night, and I offered yet another apology.

“I don’t mean that,” she said hurriedly, “but Genesis is heavily into survivalism. Didn’t you know that?”

“I don’t even know what survivalism is.”

She bit her lower lip as she framed her definition. “It’s a kind of apocalyptic horror thing, know what I mean?”

“No.”

“Survivalists say that the nuclear holocaust is inevitable, but they’re determined to survive it, right? So they live in really remote places, and they have guns, so that if any other survivor tries to take their women or food stocks they can fight them off.”

“Charming,” I said.

“It’s kind of freaky,” Jackie agreed, then stopped talking as an eighteen-wheel truck, like the one that had nearly killed me the previous night, overtook us in a thunder of vibration and noise. Jackie was plainly terrified by the truck’s looming proximity and I wondered how she was ever going to endure the hundreds of miles between here and Kalamazoo.

“Why did they leave British Columbia?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Unless they just wanted to be somewhere more remote? Their island was pretty terrible, sort of cold-water standpipes and mud everywhere and real primitive, but a sympathizer let them use it for free, and it had a sheltered harbor for their boats. I guess boats are important to von Rellsteb. Do you know anything about boats?”

“A bit,” I said, then changed the subject back. “Who was the sympathizer who gave them an island?”

“She’s a rich widow who’s into New Age. You know, channellers and crystals and all that really weird stuff? I think she was charmed by von Rellsteb. I mean she was really cut up when he just left her without saying anything. He didn’t even tell her where they were going.” Jackie paused. “She must have given him money, and I guess he was screwing her.” She touchingly glanced at me to make certain I was not embarrassed by her allegation. “She thought that maybe he’d moved Genesis to Europe, because they disappeared soon after he came back from his European trip. But I don’t think she’s right. I think they’re still in the North Pacific.”

“With my daughter,” I said grimly, and Jackie then wanted to know about Nicole, and so I spent a half hour telling my family’s story before we stopped for lunch at a waterfront cafe where Jackie ordered a salad of celery, lettuce, and a ghastly concoction called tofu, which she told me was made from soybeans, but looked to me like the foam insulation that my boatyard sometimes pumps into the space between a steel hull and the cabin paneling. “I assume you’re a vegetarian?” I asked her.

“I haven’t eaten flesh since I was six,” she said enthusiastically. “Mom tried to make me eat chicken or turkey, and some fish as well, because she said I needed the protein to grow properly, but I couldn’t bear to think of all the suffering, and even at Thanksgiving I used to make my own fake turkey with vegetables and bread. I used to mix them and.”

“Jackie...!” I said warningly.