The Summerland (5 page)

He was greeted with the boundless enthusiasm of his Australian shepherd, Boomer, and the plaintive meows of the three ‘barn’ cats demanding to be let into the house for the night. If he’d ever had a soft spot, it was for animals, and the menagerie he’d collected over the years made his ranch an animal shelter in all but name.

The ranch had been passed down to him by his grandfather, Pappy, upon his death at the ripe old age of ninety-three. Bill had never really known his parents; they had both perished in an automobile accident when he was just three. All he could remember were the comfort of his mother’s hands and the bass baritone of his father’s voice. Pappy and Nana, grieving over the loss of their only child, had raised him not as their grandson, but as another beloved son. The loving, totally functional household he’d grown up in had prepared him for his position as the last branch in the Ashton family tree. He took responsibility for living up to the family name and running the spread seriously.

In addition to what the family had always called the Homestead, a ten-acre lot consisting of the house, barns, paddocks, garages, bunkhouse and guesthouse, the Ashton holdings included outright ownership of ten thousand acres of prime grazing land and a perpetual lease on five thousand more. It made him, by default, one of the biggest ranchers in the area. That and his sterling family name had gotten him elected to his current position as Sheriff more than anything he’d done while wearing a badge in L.A. It had been that family name and the responsibility that went along with it in this county that had brought him home. And shockingly returned him to bachelor status.

Caitlin had been the center of his world, his one true compass. She had only visited Mariposa once, and from that date on emphatically refused to return to the hills he had called home.

That aversion to small-town life, even just visiting, seemed almost to be a phobia. Or so he had thought at the time. So he’d humored her, seeing his grandparents in short solo visits dissatisfying to everyone involved…but Caitlin.

Bill didn’t think of those wasted years often, but when he did it was with a saddened remorse totally unlike his usual good humor. He’d been so taken by her drive, her ambition to be something other than the small town girl she was that he’d missed the inherent streak of cruelty and selfishness running through her. Missed her need to control everything in her environment, and most of all, to control him. Oh sure, he knew she manipulated him with her sweet words and long, searching looks. He’d known it from day one. But he loved her, loved the idea of being married to an exciting, sexy woman.

When the time had come for him to come home, take up the mantle of tradition and family, to uphold and defend a ranching dynasty that stretched back almost a hundred and fifty years, his wife, the love of his life, had laughed.

If her laugh had held anything but derision for the path he’d chosen for their lives, he might have shrugged it off, found another way to approach her, warm her to the idea. But her laugh had not been kind or even sarcastic. It had been cruel, and the words she’d said after had finished their marriage with the speed and precision of a rusty chainsaw. No man liked being told that the city held more charms than he did. No man liked being valued less than an address.

At least the divorce hadn’t been too messy, he thought with an inward grimace. Pappy’s will stated that the ranch couldn’t be touched by anything other than blooded Ashton hands until the last in the family tree perished. Period.

Bill couldn’t really remember all of the legalese surrounding it, but apparently it had held up in court, and Caitlin had been left to stew and fret over the fact that she had no right to anything except half of their joint holdings. With the judge’s decision still echoing in the courtroom, Bill had retreated to the mountains he’d grown to both love and disdain throughout the turbulent years of his youth and young adulthood.

Like most teenagers, he’d gone through the stages of angst and rebellion that defined adolescence. He’d been contemptuous of his heritage, scoffed at the idea of staying in Mariposa, and been downright abusive to his grandparents. All part of being seventeen in America.

He’d left home two days after his eighteenth birthday, looking for that undeniable something that footloose teenagers seem to see with the clarity of a mystic. He had seen the football scholarship to San Jose State as a godsend, and it had cut his ties to the town that had made him what he was with the finality of a guillotine. It had certainly been a transition, he thought wryly, as he strolled through the lamp lit kitchen and claimed a longneck beer bottle from the icebox.

And it had propelled him into a direct orbit around one Caitlin Johnson.

College had been good to him, something he took to naturally, and even though he’d participated in his share of extracurricular activities, namely Caitlin, he’d graduated early, getting his bachelor’s in three years. He’d signed up with the San Jose Police Department right after graduation and been assigned to the street almost immediately. Those first few years of patrol work had been an education, even in a town as tame as San Jose was in those days. Working toward his master’s degree by day and riding shotgun at night, he’d become an ace at getting by on little or no sleep and a complete overload to the brain by the time he was twenty-three.

He’d headed to Los Angeles with a fresh master’s in hand, a wife looking for something she couldn’t or wouldn’t name, and a cocky attitude that the first day on the L.A.P.D. had shot right out of him.

Well, not the L.A.P.D., he corrected himself with a half-smile as he stood on the deep veranda, looking out over the Ashton holdings as they glimmered in the moonlight. It had actually been a gangsta by the name of Little Tommy who’d done the honors and nearly killed him in the process. But that was a remembrance for another day. Today he had too much gunplay on his mind, too many pictures of Kim Ross floating through his head, too many memories of days gone by, lived a lifetime ago. He needed to forget about all of it, if just for tonight.

He knew he’d be up and about before dawn broke anyway, and he always did his best thinking in the morning. He’d ponder death and destruction and young girls destroyed before their prime by the time the sun birthed a new day. But for right now, all he wanted to do was assume his other career, slide into the role of rancher. Lose himself in the soft low of cattle settling in for the night, the companionable stomp of a horse’s hoof in the paddock, the screech of a barn owl as it prowled the night in search of dinner. He wanted to immerse himself in grain prices, what beef was going for on the hoof, and whether or not his only live-in hand, Jimmy, had begun to restring the back fence line as instructed.

And so he did just that, muting the constant scanning and replay in his brain that made him an outstanding cop and tuning into the rancher that had been bred bone deep and stayed true, no matter how hard he or his wife had tried to citify it out.

The Second Fold

Samantha Henning knew, without even opening her eyes that she was in deep shit. She had awoken in her share of strange places over the course of a lifetime and intuitively knew that something was just WRONG. She didn’t know where she was, and she had no idea how she’d come to be wherever ‘here’ was. She lay completely still, listening for something, anything, and got nothing.

She slowly opened her eyes, furtively glancing around the room without moving her head. Her first impression was green. The walls, the floor, the ceiling. She tilted her head slightly. The only relief from the overwhelming greenness was the spines of hundreds of books in the floor-to-ceiling library to her left.

She experimentally shifted her hands and feet, finding both free of any binding. With this relative illusion of freedom echoing through her thoughts, she sat up to survey the room that had become her prison.

Her head throbbed in dull counterpoint to her heartbeat as she scanned the room. Her eyes felt grainy, out of whack, and her muscles had a rubbery looseness she’d never felt before. She knew she should be panicking, racing around the room to look for an escape, or even for evidence of her captor, but she just couldn’t seem to summon the energy. Her mind churned listlessly, refusing to grasp or hold onto any solid thought. All she could do was look around the room; her gaze bouncing off one object before it rebounded and settled on another.

Even her own change in appearance didn’t make an impact on her. Her clothes had been stripped from her, and she wore a robe of virginal white. Her feet were bare and every piece of jewelry had been removed, including the clip that had held back her honey-blonde hair.

She shook her head, trying to clear the fuzziness, trying to summon a sense of urgency for what she knew was a dangerous, possibly deadly situation. She concentrated on the only thing that had mattered to her up to this point in her life, herself. As she ran down an internal checklist, she began to salvage the single-minded determination that defined her and made her the woman she had become. She had always been a survivor. She’d taken life’s punches as they were doled out and managed to turn most of them to her advantage in one way or the other. She lifted her head to scan the room, shaking off the initial lethargy and going into autopilot. So far she didn’t see how she could turn much in this room into an advantage.

There was no door or window she could discern, as her eyes darted, looking for any crack or crevice that would aid her escape. And she knew, without question, that she would need to escape from this place, from this one-room nightmare of forest green everything.

* * * *

Samantha slowly stood up, bracing her hand on the ornate bedpost. The wall of books called to her, beckoning in a voice she didn’t recognize. She’d never been a bookworm in any sense of the word, and thought, in fact, that those who read were bores, nerds with no other life. But it stood before her nonetheless, and she
never
ignored that inner voice, because it was invariably right.

The volumes before her ranged the gamut. Her eyes traveled over Raven Grimassi’s “The Wiccan Mysteries” to William Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” to the Koran. She put up a hand to brace herself on the built in bookcase, noticing as she did that most of the books were religious in nature, favoring the Wiccan religion above most others. Nonetheless, the hundreds of titles seemed to cover every religion known to man, most, of which she knew nothing about.

She glanced around the room, really realizing for the first time that the only real furniture in the room was the bed and a comfortable armchair. Off to one corner sat an elaborate decorative screen depicting, in graphic detail, a couple engaging in sex. Beneath the depiction was an arcane symbol, something she couldn’t really identify, but recognized deep in her bones. Behind the screen she could see a toilet and sink. She completed her survey of the room, looking down at herself and the white robe she wore. It was more ceremonial gown than robe, she thought aimlessly, experimentally tugging at the voluminous, silky sleeves.

She moved to the chair and tentatively sat on it, taking a deep breath as she did so. Her mind was really beginning to return from its previous Jell-O state, and she knew she had to do some hard thinking. She had never been a wailer or a screamer, and wasn’t about to begin now.

The possibilities of what might happen to her in the coming hours caromed through her brain like pinballs, bouncing off of each other, sometimes in outright horror. She knew what rape would be like; she had already survived it once. It was the rest of it that was beginning to scare the living shit out of her. Stranger rape took place in dark corners and alleys, rapists didn’t abduct you. Killers did, and this one had obviously been waiting for just the right moment in time before he struck. She didn’t know why she was so sure it was a he, she still couldn’t remember the circumstances surrounding her unwilling incarceration. Just as she was sure it was a he, she was sure that he planned for her life to end in this green room, dressed in her robes of white.

* * * *

Samantha jerked involuntarily, drawing into a protective ball as the man’s low voice came over the hidden PA system.

“
Greetings, Mother. I’ve been waiting a lifetime for you.” The silky voice purred. “I know you’re confused, even angry with me, but you must be educated in The Way before your rebirth as Diana. I will wait until you are ready, and then we will join and be reborn.” The PA clicked off and the relaxing sounds of Kitaro filled the room.

Samantha looked around the room wildly, vainly searching for the origin of the voice. She was imagining things. She knew she was. But she wasn’t imagining the music. Or the fact that she was enclosed in what appeared to be the library of a lunatic. She closed her eyes, picturing herself in her apartment in L.A., snorting a nice big line of blow. Her eyes snapped open, and she was still there. So much for the nightmare.

She braced herself and began. “Who are you? What do you want from me?” The mellow pipes of Kitaro met her queries. “Goddamnit, who are you, what the hell do you want from me?”

The smooth voice permeated the air again. “Do not take the Lord’s name in vain. Study the books, they will tell you all you need to know. Have no fear, I will not come to you until you have become educated in The Way and worthy of the consummation.”

Samantha looked to the ceiling and raved, “Well, I don’t want your fucking consummation and you and your books can go straight to hell.”

The elegant voice softly laughed. “I don’t believe in hell, and neither should you. You are the Goddess reborn. Do not bore me with hysterics. Study. Learn what you would be. Then I will come to you.”