“And your mum wasn’t approved.”
“She was once, but she lost the franchise because she wasn’t profitable.”
“Did I get her in trouble?”
“Yep,” said Troy matter-of-factly. “Some guy gave her a good talking to. Said they’d tell the boss, and there was a good chance she’d get sued. Took away all her books. They were the only thing that made money.”
“Why does Glenn care, though?”
“‘Glenn’—” he made inverted commas around Glenn with his fingers “—cares because Mom is taking potential clients from him when she’s not supposed to. But there’s something else you’ve got to understand, Viv.” Viv? No one called her Viv. She liked it. “These people really believe this shit. Glenn probably thinks Mom is some kind of false prophet who’s leading people off the purple path.”
“The Violet Path,” said Vivian.
“Right,” said Troy, and he rolled his eyes and looked at the replies on his phone.
“I’m sorry,” said Vivian.
“What for?”
“For getting your mum into trouble.”
He looked up, seemed to be formulating a reply, then said, “What happened to your head?”
Vivian touched the lump gingerly.
“I fell over.”
“You fell over?”
He sat back in his chair and folded his giant spider-arms and looked over her coat. It was smeared with mud, sap and pine needles clinging to the shoulders and elbows.
“You been up the mountain?”
She didn’t reply.
“Man, they got to you quick. You find enlightenment or what? Hmmm? What’s the secret?”
“I didn’t find anything. Well, nothing like that. I was following Judy. I thought she might lead me to my brother. Glenn said he’s somewhere up the mountain—”
“That’s no good.”
“—and she was with this other guy—”
“Shiv?”
“Yeah. You know him too?”
“He’s her husband.”
“What does he do?”
“Don’t know. Some kind of salesman.”
“Oh.”
“And?” said Troy.
“And what?”
“What happened?”
“I fell over. Like I said.”
“Did you meet your brother?”
“I met—” She thought of her vision of the violet man. She decided not to mention it. It was embarrassing. She could imagine Troy’s mockery, and she was too tired to tolerate it. “—this guy.”
“An Ascended Master!” cried Troy. Seemed she was going to get mocked anyway.
“No. A guy living in a kind of shed.” She looked over her shoulder at the lobby’s grimy sofas. “Has Mr Blucas been around here lately?”
“Blucas?”
“Yeah.”
“Not seen him for a couple of days.”
“Has he got a brother? He told me he did, but…”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But I try to avoid having conversations with him. Why?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
Troy frowned at her.
“I think you need a lie down,” he said. He sounded suddenly gentle. She felt like crying.
“So do I,” she said.
She stood and he sat and they said nothing for a moment.
“Well, I’ll see you later then,” said Vivian.
“Sure thing.”
“I’m sorry.”
“About what?”
“About the book thing. About your mum.”
“Forget it. It was going to happen at some point. And I should have told you. She should have told you.”
“Well… Sorry anyway.”
“You Brits love apologising.”
“Yeah. Sorry.”
She left the desk and crossed the lobby. A couple of paces from the side door, Troy yelled at her.
“Oh shit. Wait. Shit. Should have said. Your mom called.”
Vivian felt something like a premonition. A cold sensation at the base of her skull.
“She did?”
“Earlier this morning.”
“What did she say?”
“She wants you to call her back.”
“Right.”
“She didn’t sound great.”
“Right.”
“Just passing on the message.”
He put his earphones back in. Vivian turned and set off for her room with a whole new kind of headache.
Back in the room Vivian took off all of her layers and couldn’t believe the depth and complexity of the stench that had evolved underneath. She stood under a boiling shower for close to an hour, thinking. She was still no closer to knowing anything about Jesse’s whereabouts, other than he was somewhere up the mountain, in some subterranean alien civilisation, or in a state of bliss outside of time and space, or in prison, or dead in a ravine, like had almost happened to her. That led her to thinking about the vision of the violet man, and the other Mr Blucas. And now there was her mother to consider, too. There was just no way Vivian could ring home, not with so many things unresolved. But then she needed money from somewhere. That brought on a rush of guilt and she started sweating all over again, right there under the showerhead.
It seemed the Sanctuary was the best place to be, right now. She could ask after Jesse as much as she liked. The meals were free. She remembered the smell of the place with some fondness.
She got out of the bathroom and dressed herself. Both coats again. She tried to tune the TV while she was getting ready, thinking it might be good to remind herself of the outside world. She found a documentary about the Old West, just visible through the snowstorm. Someone was talking about smallpox and the picture came into focus just as they showed a photograph of a Sioux tribesman covered in sores and she decided to turn it off. What a country.
In a few minutes she was standing at the door to her room patting her pockets. She realised suddenly: Jesse’s notes. She hadn’t looked at them properly since she’d got back from the mountain. She turfed out all the scraps of paper he’d secreted inside and laid them out on the table at the foot of the bed.
She didn’t know what she’d been expecting, but there were no more clues to go on. It was all nonsense, the usual noisy and impenetrable mental contortions. Numbers and symbols and algebraic functions that were so complex as to look almost alien, like the ideograms that Judy had added to the posters. There were words, too. Questions and theories with little or no punctuation. On the back of a receipt from a Mexican restaurant, from which it seemed he’d bought six identical bags of tortilla chips and nothing else, he’d written: lambda-CDM model of cosmology puts dark energy 68% of total energy in the observable universe mass/energy of dark matter and ord matter 27% and 5% other e.g. neutrinos photons negligible density of dark energy very low (~ 7 × 10−30 g/cm3) much less than the density of ordinary matter, so what if dark energy/telos energy/violet energy essentially cognate… It trailed off where the paper had been torn. A piece of legal pad folded in four asked, over and over: what is the thing what is the thing what is the thing WHAT IS THE THING. And, in among these, most lucid and miserable of all the notes, a page from a diary, 19 March, that just said: Where is Dad?
Even when their father had been alive, that had been a difficult question to answer. He had been “away on business” for most of their lives, coming back maybe once or twice a week to sit at the head of their enormous dinner table and do his beneficent paterfamilias thing. Neither she nor Jesse had ever really known what he did for a living. The closest they got to a job description was “consultant”, and that was second-hand from their mother. What the word actually meant, Vivian had no idea. He could have been a management consultant, or a consultant podiatric surgeon, for all she knew.
That was the day he’d died: 19 March. Their mother said he’d had a heart attack in the car, but what she hadn’t mentioned was that the car had been parked in the garage, and the garage door had
been closed, and the engine had been running for a good three quarters of an hour before someone phoned an ambulance. Vivian had heard it from her bedroom window.
Her stomach gurgled.
When she got up to leave, Vivian found another piece of paper on the carpet by the door. She assumed it had fallen from her pocket or blown from the table, but on closer inspection it wasn’t as grubby or dog-eared as any of Jesse’s notes. She picked it up and unfolded it. The paper was crisp and the writing was in neat, clear capitals. It said:
WING’S. 1900HRS. ALONE. J.
9
VIVIAN LOOKED out into the parking lot. There was nobody there. The message must have been delivered some time ago, while she was studying Jesse’s scribblings, or while she was in the shower, or watching TV. Jesse never called himself “J” to her knowledge, but it was just like him to say “1900” instead of “seven o’clock”. Then again, if it was him, how had he known she was here? And why not just knock on her door instead of doing all this spy stuff? What other “J”s did she know… Judy? John of Telos?
After a lot of frustrated screen-prodding, the alarm clock told her it was two minutes past seven. She was already late. The thought of missing her brother gave her a sudden nauseous spasm. She pictured Jesse sitting in the Chinese restaurant, small and alone, checking his watch, picking at the basket of free prawn crackers.
She ran down to the lobby, where Troy saw her over the top of his book.
“Something up?” he said.
“Did someone come through here?” she said, already on her way to the door.
“When?”
“I don’t know. Last few hours.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
He still had his music on full blast and probably wouldn’t have noticed any visitors unless they came right up to the desk. Besides, it was easy enough to get up to the motel’s rooms straight from the parking lot via the fire escape.
“Why?” he called after her, but she didn’t reply.
It was still raining half-heartedly outside, a warm mizzle that found its way through all her layers. She kept up her half-walk, half-run. The two bars in the centre of town were open, neon beer adverts reflected in the wet pavement. They were blaring country music at each other across the street, but from a quick look inside it seemed they didn’t have any customers.
Wing’s shutters were open for the first time. Vivian looked through the window. No Jesse. There was an elderly couple eating in one of the booths. The man was holding a pair of chopsticks in both hands like a knife and fork, and the woman was searching for a way to approach a mountain of plain-looking noodles. There was no one else.
She went to the restaurant door and saw two handwritten signs stuck to the inside of the glass. The top one said:
Dishwasher/waitress/chef/accountant wanted. Hardworking, experienced, “smiley”. Start immediately. No time-wasters.
The one below said:
We do NOT accept crystals, heart-stones, Telurian opals, etc. as payment!!
She made a mental note of the job advert. If there was no way of getting to her bank account – and she still refused to ask her mother for help – then some casual work might be useful. She wasn’t particularly “smiley” and she’d never had a job in a restaurant before. Had never had a job before, period, but maybe now was the time. (Her father’s legacy: twenty-five years old and not so much as a paper round to put on her CV.)
She took a seat on the opposite side of the restaurant to the old couple, facing the door. She opened a menu and flicked through its laminated pages without reading them, glancing up whenever someone passed in the street. There was music playing, though, a flutey dirge that she suspected had been composed by someone who had never been to China, and who perhaps hadn’t studied music at all. The restaurant was decked out in lanterns and Chinese characters and bright red good-luck knots. No pictures of Telurians or John of Telos.
A young man materialised at her shoulder. He was not much older than Troy, she thought. He seemed nervous.
“Good evening,” he said. He wiped his palms on his smart black trousers. “Can I get you started on some drinks, maybe?”
Vivian still didn’t have a dollar to her name. She hadn’t been expecting to actually eat here – though, if “J” had offered to treat her she wouldn’t have turned it down.
“Uh,” she said. “Just tap water, please.”
The young man winced and said, “Alright, no problem.” He took two paces towards the kitchen, then came back. “You had any thoughts about food?”
She’d had a lot of thoughts about food.
“I’m still deciding,” she said, and tried to smile.
“Sure thing!” the man said, too loudly. “I’ll get you some crackers while you wait.”
He ducked away. Vivian felt the rising tide of anxiety. There was no escaping payment once the prawn crackers were in play.
She took out the secret note from her pocket and read it again and only felt more confounded. The lettering was neat, the message concise. Not like something Jesse or Judy would write, in appearance or tone. But then, after her meeting with Mr Blucas on the mountain, she was starting to learn that people weren’t necessarily who they seemed to be.
“Excuse me, miss?”
She crushed the paper in her hand and looked up. The old man from the couple in the booth was standing next to her, a little stooped, a tired but easy smile on his face. He wore a thick plaid shirt tucked into blue jeans. He looked like a cowboy, or at least an extra in a film about cowboys. Vivian thought about the Sioux tribe and their infected blankets. Behind him, his wife stuck a fork in her mountain of noodles and raised it and the whole thing, including the dish, lifted off the table.
Vivian looked back at the man and said, “Hi.” The message felt like it was dissolving from the sweat on her palm.
“My wife and I couldn’t help noticing you were eating alone over here, and we wondered if you’d like to join us.”
Vivian glanced at the door. The old man did too, and their eyes met again.
“That’s very kind,” she said. “I’m actually waiting for someone.”
“Well, that’s too bad,” the old man said. He scratched behind one of his large ears but didn’t leave. Vivian’s eyes burned a hole in the menu.
He fidgeted for a moment and then said, “Well, say, how about you join us for a drink, anyway? We can talk, and when your friend gets here y’all can go back to your table. Or he can join us too, if he likes. How about that?”
Vivian opened her mouth but didn’t say anything, trapped between the need to be alone and the need to be polite. Before she could reply, there was a clatter from the couple’s table and they both turned to see his wife’s dinner slopped over most of the tablecloth.
“Oh for goodness sake, Jerome!” she said. “Enough with the cloak and dagger nonsense, just get her over here and help me with this!”
“Jerome?” said Vivian.
He sighed and nodded.
“With a J?” She opened the fingers of the hand holding the note.
“Were you followed?” he said quietly.
She’d not really paid attention to that part of the message. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Why would anyone want to follow me?”
“Why don’t you come over and keep us old folks company, and maybe it’ll come up in conversation. That’s all this is. Just three folks, talking ’bout the weather.”
He went back to his booth rubbing the top of his head. Vivian followed him. He had a slight limp, and again she couldn’t help picturing him in a saloon, or leaning on a hitching post, chewing and spitting tobacco.
She slid into the booth opposite him, next to his wife.
“Hello, dear,” she said, and gave the same kindly smile as her husband, and went back to shovelling her dinner onto her plate. Vivian helped, and the old woman looked up in delight. “Well, you’re very nice,” she said.
Jerome tucked his napki
n into the top of his shirt like a bib and began to skewer bits of chicken with his chopsticks. No one said anything for a while. The waiter came over to Vivian’s empty table with a glass of water and the basket of crackers and looked mortified, before Jerome hollered, “She’s over here,” and the young man sagged with relief.
The waiter left. Vivian sipped her water. Jerome dabbed at his mouth.
“I’m sorry to bring you here,” he said. “But it’s a safe place.”
“Safe?”
“I mean, they don’t care about the mountain,” he said. “It’s just a restaurant. Period.”
“Oh.”
“We want to talk to you about… your problems.”
Vivian looked at them both.
“Who are you?” she said.
He extended a strong, long-fingered hand over the table.
“Sheriff Jerome Carter,” he said.
“Retired,” said his wife.
He looked at her, tutted, and then echoed, “Retired.” He paused. “My wife, Minnie.”
Minnie shook Vivian’s hand too.
“It’s a pleasure, miss,” she said. “You’re from England?”
Vivian nodded. “From London.”
“Well, I think that’s wonderful. How do you like California?”
“Uh,” said Vivian.
“I hope my husband didn’t scare you.”
“Come on, Minnie,” said Jerome. “There wasn’t another way I could have done it.”
“I’m not saying there was,” said Minnie.
“It’s fine,” said Vivian. “I wasn’t scared. I just thought the note might have been from Jesse.”
“That’s your brother, right?” said Jerome.
“Right.”
“Jesse Owens. Now there was an athlete.”
Vivian didn’t comment. Of course she knew about the other Jesse Owens, and she knew that her brother was as unlike his namesake as it was possible to be. It was something his teachers had pointed out all the way through school, incessantly and with great hilarity.
Jerome seemed to sense her discomfort. “He’s missing, isn’t he?” he said.
“How do you know all this?”
“You told the police in Lewiston.”
The Follower Page 7
