The Euthanist (14 page)

The stillness helped slow down my brain. Redwood forests aren’t like regular woods. They’re tidier, because of how straight the trees grow. The forest floor had its share of needles, but no scrambling brush to scrape your shins. The soil odor was hearty, and a woodpecker jackhammered bark with a cathedral’s reverberation.

Stacy was old enough to control her strides, but Jess didn’t know what to do with her arms when she ran. Her limbs flopped around, and when she lost a relay, Jess complained that her older sister was cheating. I jogged behind them both so they could win. Sometimes I pretended I was chasing them, and they squealed. We hauled down a few hundred yards, caught our breaths, and scurried back down the decline. So long as we kept moving, they didn’t ask me questions.

After a few runs, Lisa Kim appeared between the trees. She’d thrown on a citrus yellow running outfit that probably cost as much as a business suit. Speaking to the children the way crazy cat people talk to their pets, she twittered, “Girls, could you go in the house?”

The kids clammed up immediately. As if magnetically repulsed by their father’s attorney, they stepped away from both the adults and walked back to the house with their heads down. Lisa waited until the front door latched, and we were alone in the woods. “The girls like to race up here. When you’re confined to a place in the middle of nowhere, you find ways to amuse yourself.” She braced a thick trunk and pulled one foot to her butt to stretch out the quad. “You all raced out?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“It’s either that or girl talk.” She wasn’t going to leave me alone. Weighing my options, I considered that the more effort I poured into physical exertion, the less tempted I might be to punch this woman.

So we ran. I bolted, then Lisa Kim charged after me.

What initially started as a race quickly began to feel like a chase. While we ran, she shouted questions and comments, just to remind me how close she was to my heels. “Jeffrey’s cabin is a good place to get some clarity. Not so many distractions out here. It helped me get a handle on your situation.”

I didn’t talk when I ran. It’s not like I was winded, but exercise was one of the few times when I could extinguish all my extraneous thoughts. So I said nothing, and without my responses to dam it up, her prattle flowed like the Yangtze.

“You know how bad it’s going to look if they bust us? It’s going to be bad. I mean,
national news
bad. They’ll call us a death cult. You’ll be our Squeaky Fromme.”

I sped up. With longer legs it shouldn’t have taken much effort to outpace her, but she was fast. She trotted alongside me like a hunting terrier. “How long do you think I’ve known Jeffrey?”

She gave me an open-ended question. I couldn’t just grunt an answer. “A long time.”

“Eleven years. A lot of us have been around longer. Much longer. Remind me, how long have you known Jeffrey?”

The faster pace was getting to me. Cold wind ran up my nose, and I had to gulp air to speak. “You know the answer.”

“Four years.”

Since I couldn’t outrun her, I tried to avoid her. I rounded a redwood trunk, but Lisa Kim found me on the other side. “You’d think that was a long time, but in the grand scheme of things, not so much. A ton of us are more vested in this organization.”

I was tempted to run off trail but didn’t want to get lost. I sped up, but Lisa picked up her pace too. Light on her feet, her legs a blur.

This time, when I turned to round another trunk, my foot caught on a root. I spilled hard, and rolled out in the dirt. The ground was soft, so I didn’t scrape up the way I would have on the pavement, but dried needles and blood freckled my palms. Because I braced the fall with my hands, my wrists stung beneath the bandages. My chest heaved harder once I stopped running.

Despite her size, when Lisa Kim towered over me she seemed formidable. Hands on her hips. Unlike me, she showed few signs of exertion. “You need to leave. I’m good at assessing risk, and it’s riskier having you here than not.”

I puffed. “How do you figure?”

“This guy’s going to find you. It’ll be better if he doesn’t find you here.”

She was right. I hated her for saying it without empathy, but my carelessness might have doomed the whole network. Coming here had only heightened the danger.

She turned and walked back toward the house. “I’ll give you the night.”

Inside, the kids watched TV in the living room. Jess was lost in her cartoons but Stacy waved. The dining table had been cleared for dinner except for the laptop Jeffrey had loaned me. A Post-it stuck to the screen. In bubbly cursive, Lisa Kim had written:
Cindy Coates. Victim
. I peeled it off and tucked it inside the envelope with my emergency money. I’d look this up later.

As I powered down the computer, Morton emerged from his bedroom laboratory, using the singsong voice of a carnival tarot reader. “Come with me and have all your questions answered.”

In the bedroom, Morton’s microscope, centrifuge, and computers sat across two folding tables. Soft lights cast the equipment in a vintage glow. All the adults clustered around the monitors, and Jeffrey looked disappointed that I was late. He said, “We’ve been waiting for you.” Behind him, Lisa Kim beamed at my expense.

Morton was so excited, his body jiggled. “It’s a drug. And I know what you’re thinking, but it’s not heroin, or any kind of heroin derivative.”

Jeffrey squinted at onscreen charts and tables. “Not a poison?”

“You could kill someone if you used enough of it, but it’s not a poison. It’s largely used recreationally.”

“You’re going to make us guess?” Lisa asked.

His cheeks flushed—he was too excited to hold it in. “There’s a drug used by shamans in the Amazon. It’s a very strong hallucinogen, stronger than LSD. They call it ayahuasca. They use it for,” he tried to find the right words, “spiritual journeys.”

Lisa had heard of it. “Rich white folks also use it to find themselves. You’re supposed to shit and puke your guts out. I hear it feels like dying.”

Jeffrey peered over his glasses at his attorney. “I’ve done it.”

I was pleased to see Lisa’s derision blow up in her face.

“Sorry, Jeffrey.”

“I was in the Amazon with a real shaman—and with a lot of other rich white folks. It felt like I died and I was reborn, several times.” He turned to Morton. “What I had was cooked. It’s organic. What’s this in the needle?”

Morton awed at the findings on his monitor. “A synthetic version. They call it pharmahuasca. What cocaine is to coca leaves. The experience is much more intense—so I’m told.”

“I can’t imagine something more intense than what I went through,” Jeffrey thought aloud.

I asked, “Why would Leland want to give this to Helena Mumm?”

Lisa added, “What would this do that poison wouldn’t?”

We all looked at Jeffrey.

“Torture.” He shrugged. “It would torture the patient. What I went through was administered during a ceremony, with someone who could guide you through the process. And it was still the most terrifying experience I’ve had in my life. The visions seemed as real as anything I’m touching now.” He prodded the centrifuge. “I saw myself crucified nine centuries ago. I saw my life begin and end across several lifetimes. The pain was agonizing. I’m trying to imagine what that would be like without a ceremony, when I wasn’t prepared for it. Honestly, I can’t imagine anything worse. It would make death seem easy.”

I didn’t talk much at dinner. The kids asked me questions, but that night I wasn’t as responsive. They ended up gravitating toward Morton, who made faces at Jess and joked with them. Lisa glared at me throughout the meal, until I excused myself and brought Jeffrey’s laptop into my bedroom. There I searched for more information on Helena Mumm, Walter Gretsch, and pharmahuasca until I finally fell asleep.

The next morning I ambled into the kitchen for water. I bent the blinds to look outside, and a soft beltway of mist lingered on the trees, tinged red from the first hint of sun over the valley.

A laptop glowed on the dining table, even though no one manned it. Maybe Lisa Kim beat me out there, set it up, and went for a jog in her hornet outfit. Another Post-it stuck to the screen, left for my benefit. It read, “Time to go.”

The onscreen browser had two open tabs. Lisa Kim had called up nuggets of information for me to look at before she sent me off. The first browser tab showed Cindy Coates’s home page. The woman had written a book about her captivity with Walter Gretsch and Helena Mumm, and customers could purchase it directly from the site. The home page footer contained an info@ e-mail address. I jotted down the URL.

The second tab was about me. An old article with crime scene photos. The images felt fresh, because I remembered them daily. Often they flickered in dreams. But I hadn’t looked at the photographs themselves in years.

The first showed a house on fire. Flames belched out the windows and rose from the roof like a wild surf of light and smoke. Helmeted men in the foreground fought in a blur to douse it.

The second in the series had been snapped twenty minutes later. Same scene, but the beams had collapsed and now firefighters were just watering down the ruins. One of the men had removed his helmet and was breaking the news to someone over a radio while mopping his head with a rag.

The third and final in the series showed paramedics in yellow lifting the sides of a stretcher like pallbearers. The woman’s hair had burned to the roots. Her scalp, and the skin visible around her oxygen mask, was either black or the color of raw salmon.

A toilet flushed, and Lisa Kim emerged in flannel pajamas decorated with pink toads. She froze when she saw me. Lisa had wanted me to find what she’d left on the monitor, but not at that precise moment. Possibly, she thought I’d wake up later or that I would see the computer and let myself out without disturbing anyone. I’d surprised her, and she flinched in a flutter of blinks, like someone coming out of a cave into noonday sun. With the rest of the house asleep, we were alone. I guess I could have resisted for Jeffrey’s sake. Instead, I walked slowly toward her so she wouldn’t run. When I got close enough, I hit her so hard in the cheek I knocked her off her feet. She bounced against the wall and dented the plaster.

That woke everyone up.

When Jeffrey assessed the situation, he let us both have it. I’d never heard him raise his voice, and now he ranted like a rush hour cabbie. “Jesus Christ, Lisa, show some discretion!” He thrust a finger at me. “And show some goddamned restraint!” To Stacy and Jess, who stood openmouthed at the kitchen door, he lowered his voice and said, “Pretend you didn’t hear that.”

I can’t say I regretted that punch, but it made this very uncomfortable retreat all the more awkward and reminded me that I had violated the generosity of my host. Lisa Kim might have been right on one account. Right now they were taking care of me, and I was being a difficult client. “I’ll pay for the wall.”

Jeffrey said, “You think?” Stacy and Jess had probably never seen a fight in their home. When I tried to look at them, their gazes danced away. The big muscly woman in their house had gone and socked the ice princess. Morton sat on the couch the whole time, eyes to the ceiling, possibly hoping a UFO tractor beam might come along and vacuum him up.

Lisa pressed a sandwich bag of ice to her face while she paced on the other side of the room. Sitting down would have been a show of weakness.

Jeffrey called to his daughters, “Stacy and Jess, could you leave us for a moment?”

“Why?” Jess asked.

“Because I want to say bad things to our guests, and I don’t want you to hear them.”

They disappeared.

Without his kids in the room, Jeffrey vented behind a scarlet face. “You know we’re trying to save your ass, right?”

I nodded.

He turned to Lisa. “You know why I brought you here, correct?”

She nodded.

“Do either of you realize how close we are to the precipice? I invited you into my home. Both of you. Our goal, and it’s sad I have to remind you both of this, is to protect our family. I have two. Those girls in the next room and this organization.”

Not one to be deterred by someone’s rage, Lisa Kim interjected, “Jeffrey, I am looking out for both. This woman is a liability. She can’t be here—she’ll ruin us.”

“So you antagonize her by throwing photos of her mother in her face? That’s how you’ve decided to help? We’ve discovered tiny bits of information. Instead of making sense of it, you’re both adding to the chaos by picking at each other like caged rats.”

“I wanted her to leave on her own, because I know you’re loyal to her.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing. I’m loyal to you too. Remember that the next time you think about being a sadist. That’s not who we are.”

Lisa’s shoulders rolled forward, an attempt to make herself seem smaller. Her voice lost a little of its confidence. “I apologize.”

“Goddamned right.” He addressed the only other beard in the room. “Morton, what do you think of all this?”

“I just want to get back to the lab, Dr. Holt.”

“Too bad, Morton. Like it or not, you’re a part of this too. Please come here. All of you.”