Blood Relations

by Jonathan Moore

  “This place, the Creekside—it doesn’t have a website.”

  “Okay.”

  “And it’s not like she was just wandering past and saw it.”

  “So she was meeting someone,” I said. “Maybe she found Madame X.”

  “Look at this—a one-lane bridge. And the curves,” Madeleine said. We were following a creek through the woods. The road was a coiled ribbon, barely the width of the Beast’s wheelbase. “What do we have? Ten more miles?”

  “Twelve.”

  “If she was so desperate to die, why drive all the way back to the Tenderloin?” Madeleine asked. “It’d be hours. She would’ve had time to cool off. She could’ve called someone—she could’ve called me.”

  “I know.”

  “The whole idea that she jumped . . . it’s bullshit.”

  A fair point, but I didn’t answer. I drove. It was a road that took some concentration, and I gave it what it asked for.

  Our initial sighting of the Creekside wasn’t what I’d pictured. I’d imagined a ski lodge the size of a shopping mall, the kind of place that had gazelle on the menu and strung-out rock stars wandering in the lobby. But after we passed over another wooden trestle bridge and turned onto a gravel driveway, Madeleine’s phone announced that we’d arrived at our destination. That was it. There was nothing else that indicated we’d arrived anywhere. Just the gravel drive.

  I stopped the car in the middle of the road. As soon as we were still, the air around us filled with winged things. Mayflies, maybe, hatched from the creek. They thumped gently against the car. Soft bodies and cellophane wings.

  “What do you think?” I asked, looking up the driveway.

  Madeleine looked at her phone.

  “It’s up there. Or it doesn’t exist.”

  “Do you have cell reception, or is that offline?”

  “Offline.”

  Which meant we had a minimalist map and no possibility of a satellite view. We couldn’t see what we were getting into. We’d just have to drive up and see.

  I put the car in gear and took the turn. We rolled upward along a right-hand curve. Midway up, there was a small bronze sign on the left, mounted on a post so that it would be at eye level for a driver.

  MEMBERS ONLY

  That was more like it. Back in the trees, where the shadows were already long, I caught a flicker of red light from between the needles of a young redwood. I focused, and saw a telltale ring of LEDs. The kind of near-infrared lights that circled the lens of a night-vision-equipped closed-circuit camera. I pointed it out to Madeleine.

  “Nice little club,” I said. “All the precautions.”

  “They could’ve just put up a fence.”

  “Then everyone would know they were here.”

  After the sign, and the camera, the driveway changed. The muddy ruts disappeared. The gravel was raked, proceeding up the hill between two rows of well-tended rosebushes like a Zen garden. Pale yellow blossoms drew butterflies and bees. I saw three more cameras in the woods. I wasn’t sweating yet. This was Northern California. Squatters lived elbow to elbow with billionaires. A forest clearing could be a place to park an Airstream trailer, or a landing pad for a twin-turbine helicopter. So far as anyone watching the camera footage knew, we were just a couple of road-trippers who took a wrong turn.

  In a quarter of a mile, we came to a parking area made of crushed black slate. A low stone building sat at the far end, dwarfed by the old-growth redwoods that rose behind it. The trees were so tall, they were catching the sea breeze, drawing a cloak of fog to the ground.

  I eased the Beast between a Tesla and a Land Rover. There were half a dozen other cars parked around the side of the building, where a stone-lined path led into the woods. Someone had set oil lanterns at ten-foot intervals along the path’s wooden handrails. At night, they would give just enough of a glow to allow a person to walk comfortably down the path, but beyond that it would be pitch black, the woods full of mystery.

  “What is this place?” Madeleine asked.

  “No idea.”

  “Best guess, then.”

  “A spiritual retreat,” I said. “Yoga for rich ladies. Cooking classes and paint-by-numbers in the moonlight.”

  “And they get their chakras tuned. While they kick a stubborn pill habit.”

  “Was Claire into that kind of stuff?” I asked.

  “Not in the slightest. And she didn’t need rehab.”

  She opened her door and got out. I followed her across the parking lot, over the oak-planked porch, and through the front door. The inside of the Creekside looked like the tasting room at a Napa winery. Untreated wood floors, a stand-up bar, a few tables made of wine barrels. There was a big fireplace at one end—not big by Gravesend standards, but by mine—and a slim woman in an equally slim black dress waiting behind the bar.

  “Welcome,” she said.

  “Yeah. Hi.”

  She reached beneath the bar and brought out a pair of tall wineglasses. Maybe it really was a tasting room. The vineyard could be on the other side of the hill, assuming they’d cleared the forest.

  “And will you be staying with us?” she asked.

  “Staying? No.”

  She looked relieved.

  “I didn’t see any new names on tonight’s list,” she said. “I thought there’d been a mix-up.”

  “No mix-up.”

  “But you are members?”

  “Members?” Madeleine asked.

  “I’m sorry,” the woman said. “But this is a private club.”

  She picked up the glasses and put them away. I glanced to my right. Madeleine wasn’t paying any attention to the woman. She was looking at the fireplace. Set into the wall above the mantel was a rectangular piece of black stone, bigger than a king-sized bed. Carved into it, in careful bas-relief, was a snake. Or maybe it was a dragon. It had what appeared to be wings. Legs sprouted from its scaled belly. It was bent into a circle, so that its long-fanged mouth could swallow its own tail. The building was relatively new, but the carving looked ancient. As though it had been chiseled free of its original site by Egyptian temple robbers.

  Madeleine reached back and touched one of the circular scars on her neck. Her skin had broken out into goose bumps.

  I turned back to the young woman.

  “We don’t want a drink,” I said. I showed her my investigator’s license, the kind of open-and-closed flash that every detective does on TV but none of the real ones ever use. “You don’t have to serve us, so it doesn’t matter if we’re members. I have a couple of questions about some credit card fraud. I’m sure it’s not a big deal, but we need to clear it up.”

  “Wait. Credit card fraud?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. “I’m investigating a charge that was claimed by this business. Four nights ago.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she said. “I was on vacation all last week. Look, you should really go.”

  “But that’s where it gets complicated,” I said. “Because I need to write a report. And right now, I can’t say that there wasn’t fraud. Or criminal activity. So there will be an escalation. Then you won’t be talking to me, but to the feds. So help me out.”

  “And you’ll go?”

  “You take credit cards here?”

  “Of course.”

  “And you’re open past midnight?” I asked.

  “Not usually.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It depends on the members. On what they want.”

  “But sometimes you’re open that late?”

  She nodded.

  “If someone asks.”

  “A member asked, four nights ago?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I wasn’t here.”

  “Is there a list?”

  “Of members?”

  “Members, what they request. All of that.”

  “I couldn’t show that to you.”

  “So you have it.”

  She backed up u
ntil her shoulder pressed against the door behind the bar.

  “I don’t know if we have it. I didn’t say we had one.”

  “But you couldn’t show it to us if you did.”

  “I don’t know anything about our members,” she said. “It’s a private club.”

  “A private club for what?” I asked.

  “For our members.”

  “Who come here to do what?”

  “Whatever they want.”

  “It sounds like a great club,” I said. “How do I join?”

  “You need an invitation.”

  “Can you invite me?”

  “I’m not a member. I just work here.”

  “Is Claire Gravesend a member?”

  “No.”

  “But you didn’t look at the list. So how do you know?”

  “I don’t recognize her name.”

  “You know all the members’ names? No exceptions? I thought you didn’t know anything about the members.”

  She looked at the front door. Maybe she was hoping I’d give up and leave.

  “Maybe there are one or two exceptions to the rules?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say that. I didn’t say anything. You’re putting words in my mouth.”

  I rested my fingers on the edge of the bar. The young woman glanced at the door behind her but held her ground.

  “Let’s make sure I’ve got this straight,” I said. “You’re not usually open late, but you might be if a member asked. You don’t know if anyone asked four nights ago, because you weren’t here last week. But you’re not ruling it out. And you take credit cards.”

  “Yes,” she said. “If we’re done, I think you should go.”

  “What can you buy here for twenty-six dollars?”

  “This is about a twenty-six-dollar charge?”

  “Fraud is fraud. And with a credit card, you’re looking at wire transmissions across state lines. Put that with a pattern of activity—”

  “A glass of Cabernet.”

  “That’s what you can get?”

  “Or two glasses of Chardonnay.”

  “You ring that up and it’d be what? Tax and everything.”

  “Twenty-six fifty-seven.”

  Which was the last amount charged on Claire’s card.

  “When can I come back to see the manager?”

  “You need more?”

  “I need to write a report. The people who read it will have certain questions. You want me to have the right answers.”

  “Tomorrow. He’ll be in tomorrow.”

  “This time tomorrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “So he’s not here now?”

  “There are a lot of people here now,” she said. Again, she glanced at the door behind her. “Just not him.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  I turned and walked out, and Madeleine came along beside me.

  The Beast didn’t idle quietly. She rumbled, and shook. I could feel the vibrations moving up my spine. We sat in the parking lot, facing the forest and the path that led away into the woods. Whatever secrets this club had were down there.

  “What was going on in there?” I asked Madeleine. “The minute we walked in you were staring at the fireplace.”

  “I’ve seen it before.”

  “The fireplace?”

  She shook her head.

  “The snake. That carving, or something like it. I can remember it.”

  “Where?” I asked. “When?”

  “I don’t know—of course I don’t know.” The look on her face was pure fear. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I put the car in gear and we started down the rose-lined driveway. I checked the rearview mirror just before the building was out of sight. The young woman had come outside. She was standing next to a man. Blond hair, cut close. His chest was the width of the Beast’s engine block. I guessed he wasn’t the cook. Then they were out of view, and I drove the rest of the way to the road.

  I waited until we’d crossed the second trestle bridge, and then I slowed and turned to Madeleine.

  “Tell me,” I said. “What happened just now, and what you remember.”

  “I don’t remember anything but what I told you. I think I’ve seen it before, but I don’t know when, or where.”

  I started driving again.

  “We need to find out more about this place,” I said.

  “What is it?” Madeleine asked. She was breathing deeply and slowly, and rubbing hard at her elbows. “A members-only hotel?”

  “It’s whatever the members want it to be.”

  “It’s what?”

  “She told us,” I said. “The members can do whatever they want. And back there, they have a lot of privacy.”

  She thought about that for a while. The pain in her joints didn’t seem to subside. We crossed the creek three more times, and then came into a clearing where a down-blast of wind had leveled the forest. Suddenly we were in sunshine. Around us were the rotting trunks of fallen trees. Trees that would have lived five thousand years but for one unfortunate night.

  “What now?” Madeleine asked.

  “There’s the bed-and-breakfast, in Mendocino. The last place she stayed the night.”

  “We’re going there?”

  “We’ll get a room,” I said. I heard myself say it, and I glanced at her. “A couple of rooms. We’ll wait until midnight, and then come back here.”

  “To do what?”

  “Find out what’s down that path, for starters.”

  “I don’t know how safe that is,” Madeleine said. “There’s something about that place that isn’t right.”

  “I know it.”

  “But you know Claire was there, don’t you?” she asked. “It’s not like someone stole her credit card and then drove out to a cult compound to buy two glasses of Chardonnay. She went there herself. There must have been something she wanted.”

  We drove the rest of the way to Mendocino without talking. It wasn’t dark and I wasn’t going easy on the gas pedal. But it took close to an hour. Which got me thinking again about Claire, and her last drive. In half an hour, when we arrived at the Discovery Cove Bed and Breakfast, we got some new information. It compounded the problem exponentially.

  Claire hadn’t gone straight from the Creekside to San Francisco. She’d made a stop. And her rental car had never made it out of Mendocino.

  21

  We were just north of Mendocino, at a rocky inlet marked on the map as Slaughterhouse Cove. Claire had meant to spend the night here, at a bed-and-breakfast that faced the ocean. The geographical nomenclature was clearly no good for business, and so the owner of Claire’s lodgings had invented a more inviting name. The Discovery Cove Bed and Breakfast. Which wasn’t bad for the place. The cove was beautiful—a broad finger of deep blue water dotted with rocks and islets, and surrounded on three sides by grass-topped cliffs. The grounds of the B&B were even better. There were cypress trees and Spanish dagger plants, and roses twined around stone birdbaths and white lattice archways—landscaping flourishes my ex-wife would have called bride magnets. She’d married me under such an arch near Point Reyes, so I suppose she knew what she was talking about.

  The main house was a Victorian gingerbread affair, with big porches and a lot of hand-painted scrollwork under the eaves. The rooms were all individual cottages, six or eight of them spread out on the parcel. According to the website, which I’d checked out after finding the credit hold, some of them came with their own porches, some of them with hot tubs or fireplaces. All of them had views of the ocean and the waves breaking on the cliffs up and down the difficult coast.

  I parked in the small lot and we got out. We walked side by side up the steps and past the rocking chairs that lined the porch. I opened the door for Madeleine and we walked over to the concierge desk at the far end of the room. There was a silver push-button call bell on the blotter. Behind the desk was a doorway with a velvet rope across it, and a sign that said STAFF ONLY.
/>   I gave the bell a double-tap, and then we waited. Above us, there was a creak of footsteps coming down a set of wooden stairs, and then a woman appeared in the doorway, lifting the rope from its hook so she could step through. She had silver-black hair tied up in a perfectly round bun at the top of her head, and she wore a neat floral print dress that seemed to reflect all of the colors in her yard.

  She looked at me, and opened her mouth to begin either a question or a note of welcome, but whatever she was about to say never came out, because she saw Madeleine. Her eyes widened, and she reached out and took hold of the doorjamb for balance. Then she turned and looked back the way she had come, and shouted so she could be heard from upstairs.

  “Larry! She’s back!”

  Next to me, Madeleine was backing up. I reached out and took her hand, to keep her from bolting. This was exactly what I’d wanted. The kind of break I’d been hoping for when I’d asked Madeleine to come along. I gave her fingers a quick squeeze. Play it cool, I was telling her. And she must have gotten the message, because she eased up. From upstairs, there was a muffled response. The voice of an old man who’d been roused from rest and wasn’t especially happy about it.

  “Larry!” the woman said, again. “She’s come back! Get her things!”

  There was another grunt from upstairs, this time a little louder. Then the woman turned to us. One lock of hair had come loose, falling across her forehead. She brushed it back.

  “I’m sorry,” she said to Madeleine. “You were only registered for that one night, and you didn’t come back. I had a wedding the next night—every cottage booked—and we didn’t know what to do. So we packed up your things in the morning, and made up the room. I haven’t run your card yet.”

  “I’m not—” I squeezed Madeleine’s hand again. A little harder this time. “I mean, I apologize.”

  I let go of her hand and she stepped forward.

  “Some things came up and I had to leave in a hurry.”

  “We saw you go with those people.”

  “It was a family emergency.”

  “Three in the morning, and peeling out of the lot. It must’ve been an emergency.”