Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013)

by T. Jefferson Parker

  We went into the house. The living room was newly carpeted in light blue and had plump, oak-accented furniture that was heavy and graceless. The couch was beige. There was a tin vase on the coffee table with silk or paper daisies inside. There were brass-framed prints of flowers on the wall. The wall was papered in wide vertical bands of white with little flowers in it, separated by narrower stripes of dark blue. Homey and trite, cheaply cheerful.

  A sliding glass door opened to a backyard charged with sunlight. A woman with yellow hair and two men reclined on chaise longues with drinks in their hands. A low table beside the woman had bottles and an ice bucket on it. The pool glittered light blue and silver. A woman’s laugh, uncannily piercing, bounced off the water and through the screen door to us. The men chuckled. When Chet slid open the door, all three heads were already turned our way.

  Chet introduced us. Danny, an associate professor of mathematics at a local private college, was fifty and distinguished looking, slender from a diet of cigarettes and gin. He gave no sign of knowing me. Marlon was sad faced, big shouldered and slow. A bright green and yellow Hawaiian shirt with parrots on it hung over him. Late twenties. Beneath his lugubrious eyebrows, his blue eyes were fast and anxious. We didn’t shake hands: sex criminals generally don’t like to touch or be touched by strangers. Neither do I. Caryn was mid-thirties. Her yellow hair was cut big—blown and sprayed back from her face like the Cosmo models of some years ago. She had smooth skin and a receding chin made worse by big teeth. After she smiled she closed her mouth down pretty quick, like her teeth might get away. She was short legged and full in the chest, and all the hair made her look top-heavy. Her voice was a rasp, vaguely southern.

  “Well, nice to finally meet you, Art. Chet here’s been telling me all about you.” Her voice was friendly and open while her dark brown eyes narrowed to study me hard. “Whatcha drinkin’?”

  “Scotch and soda, if you have it.”

  “We can handle that.” She started making the drink. “Chet tells me you’re an investor?”

  “I do have a few investments. Conservative stuff, mostly just mutual funds. Some munis, so long as the Fed rates stay down. Some company stock.”

  “Like it strong?”

  “Please.”

  “She’s going to like you.”

  “I’m still a little—”

  She handed me a clear highball glass with a silhouette of the Manhattan skyline on it.

  “—Drink up, Art. It’s a good way to get yourself comfortable. Drink all you want, just so’s it doesn’t make you mean.”

  “Thanks, Caryn.”

  Her dark little eyes bore into me suddenly. “No rough stuff, Art. I mean none.”

  “Chet told me.”

  “Now I’m telling you again.”

  “That’s not me.”

  Her eyes stayed hard but her teeth escaped into a smile. “I’m not gonna win any mom-of-the-year award, but I keep a close eye on my girl.”

  “That’s the way it should be.”

  “That’s the way it is here.”

  Caryn’s hard gaze dissolved as she looked over at Danny. He nodded and lifted his drink.

  “You know, Art,” she said, “you’re going to have to give me some tips on investing. I want to make some good money. I got to thinking about starting an emu ranch. They’re worth a lot of money. You know, those big birds they got out now?”

  “Steer clear of that, Caryn. It’s more like a pyramid scheme. Plus, who the hell’s going to buy an emu from you?”

  “One egg feeds a family of five.”

  “Where you going to find a family that eats emu eggs?”

  “Internet, maybe? Beats me.”

  She crunched some ice from her drink. “I’ve been wanting to get into stocks my whole life. Something safe, but something with a good payback. My bank CDs are getting like, well I’m not sure, but those stocks I hear are going up 20 percent and all.”

  “Well, some of mem are, Caryn. The thing to remember is a lot of those stocks weren’t up at all last year. Stocks should be long term. If you want to play them short for a big return, well, that’s where you get burned. Still beat emus, though.”

  She seemed somehow burdened by this idea. “The little guys, like Chet and me, we ought to have some way of getting profits like the big boys. He works hard. I work hard. Get to the end of the year and what do you have? Same as you started the year off with. Lauren’s chippin’ about college already. I don’t even know if she’s smart enough. But it costs real bread.”

  “There’s a couple of education trusts that are—”

  “—Want to see her?”

  “Uh … yeah.”

  Caryn led me back into the living room and down a short hallway. We stood outside the door on our right. Caryn raised her fist and knocked as she pushed open the door. “Sweetie? Lauren? This here’s Art, one of our new friends?”

  Chet had said she was ten, and he wasn’t lying. Pedophiles usually round the age down. Lauren was cute in a plain, wholesome way, slender and rather tall. She stood there beside the bed at loose attention, her hands folded behind her back and her feet turned in, looking not quite at me and not quite away. She had her mother’s dark eyes and nice skin. Dad’s dark hair. Caryn had dressed her in a simple blue smock dress, white socks turned down and red canvas tennies with cartoon characters on them. Her hair was parted in the middle and tied off in two opposing pigtails that fell to her shoulders. The pigtails are a well-known deviant’s delight, and I was instantly furious at Lauren being turned out by this woman next to me, her mother. Lauren was the picture of innocence, and I wanted to run out of the house with her and take her someplace where her childhood could be removed like a bad part and replaced with a new, better one. One of my faults is that I feel children are precious. There was a TV going in the corner—music videos—and an open textbook on the bed. Dangling from the closet door were a couple of clothes hangers with a skirt and blouse on them, still packaged in clear plastic from the cleaners. In another corner stood a full-length mirror framed by those makeup lights you see backstage.

  “Oh. Hi.”

  Chet had told me he “started her” when she was two, taking pictures of her naked, getting her “used to things.” He gradually escalated the touching to include himself. He turned her to friends for profit when she was six—more pictures, more touching. She really took to it. Anything you wanted. Chet had ruined an entire life. In that moment, if he had been there with us, I would have had to restrain myself from pushing him into the hallway out of his daughter’s sight and killing him bare-handed. I knew there was no way that Lauren would ever have her childhood replaced with a better one. It would be her foundation forever, a nightmare from which she could never quite awaken, a painful haze through which she sleepwalked the daily thing called her life. Lauren had the resigned eyes and the aura of passive invincibility found in nearly all children who have escaped to the last place they can go—to the private, silent cave of their own selves.

  She looked at me very briefly, and I looked very briefly back, trying to tell her with my eyes that I was not what she thought I was. But I could tell by the way she looked away that she already knew who I was, and why I was here. There are few more heartbreaking expressions in the world than that of a child who has given up hope on you.

  “Your dad tells me you’re a good student,” I said.

  She shrugged, her gaze fell to the carpet and she mumbled, “Pretty good.”

  “What’s your favorite subject?”

  “Art.”

  “His name is Art, honey. Isn’t that nice?”

  “I know,” Lauren answered, with a slow glance at her mother and just a hint of impatience.

  “You like that,” I asked, “the drawing and painting?”

  “It’s all on computer. I made a picture.”

  “Show him,” said Caryn.

  Lauren stepped over to her dresser and took a piece of paper off the top. It was kind of a montage, like kids u
sed to make with construction paper and clips from magazines. There was an image of desert sand dunes at night, blue in the light of a full moon, one of those mood shots used to advertise perfume, or maybe a utility vehicle. I guess she’d scanned it in first. Then there were small smiling faces within the dunes—models and movie stars. At the bottom was a candle in a shiny gold candleholder, and the flame seemed to be reaching up into the desert and lighting the faces looking out of the sand.

  “That’s really something,” I said. I didn’t have to fake my admiration at all—I was truly befuddled that a ten-year-old could make such a sophisticated piece of work on a computer. I held the piece out and studied it. I told her I had a computer at home, but it was always giving me problems and flashing up options I didn’t call for and didn’t know what to do with.

  She looked at me with her calm, subdued eyes. “Click help.”

  “Help?”

  “On the toolbar. Help. Then do what it says.”

  “Well, thanks. I’ll remember that.”

  She took back the sheet and set it on top of the dresser. Then she hiked herself onto the bed and looked at me, then at her mother. “I’ve got the stomachache,” she said.

  “Ah, honey, I’ll get you something for it. Don’tcha worry about a thing. Come on, Art, let’s go make up something good for Lauren’s tummy. See you in a while, sweetie. Say good-bye to Art for now.”

  “ ’Bye, Art.”

  “Good-bye, Lauren.”

  In the kitchen, Caryn mixed up Lauren’s medicine: a big mug of whole milk, with a shot of chocolate liqueur, a shot of cheap bourbon and some cinnamon sprinkled on top. She put it in the microwave to warm it up.

  “Settles her stomach,” said Caryn. “She … really likes it.”

  Not even Caryn could look at me as she said this. I watched her quick little smile come and go, and she opened the microwave and handed me the cup. “Take it to her, and don’t touch.”

  I knocked on her door and waited for her to say something. I heard the book shut, then the rustling of fabric on fabric. She opened the door and looked up at me. I held out the mug to her and tried again, with my eyes, to tell her I was not who she thought I was. She took the cup in both hands and sipped some, her eyes focused down at the liquid like a kid will do. Then she looked up at me again and smiled just a little. A smile of invitation. She cocked her head and closed her eyes slowly, then opened them again about halfway in a sleepy, bedroom look—a gesture so startling I wanted, again, to just grab her and make a run for it. Daylight. Freedom.

  “Hang in there,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m asking you to.”

  I had to wonder what my team, picking up every word that was said in here, made of this statement.

  “You have to talk to Mom.”

  “I will. Believe me.”

  “I do what she says. And Dad says.”

  “It’s going to be all right.”

  She looked at me with her dark dead eyes and shut the door.

  An hour later the men were drunk and eating hamburgers and store-bought potato salad. I drank right along with them, but I can hold a lot of booze and not show it. The evening had turned cool so everyone had on light coats or sweaters. The sun was still a half an hour from setting and I pictured Johnny and Frances sitting in their car, just beyond the cinder-block wall that ended the backyard. I pictured Louis in the black antmobile, dressed in his exterminator’s costume with his automatic in the big radio holster. I pictured Lauren sitting on her bed, watching videos, drinking milk and bourbon to dull her nerves against the things to come.

  Marlon drained his fifth or sixth highball. He finished grilling me about stock market ideas and asked if the Brandywine Fund is really all it’s cracked up to be. He paused, then laughed overloud when I told him it was a good fund, but too much of it could impair his ability to drive or operate machinery. His face was covered in a light brown beard that matched his hair, and the whole thing kind of crinkled in on itself when he laughed. His eyes were nervous again when he stopped.

  “What do you do, Marlon?”

  “Caryn, can I build another one of these?”

  She looked at him and told him to build away, and another one for her, too—rum and Coke, mostly rum. I watched him lumber to the drink table. When he reached out for a bottle I saw his shirt catch on something at his hip.

  “I’m a supervisor at the school district,” he said. “Got about thirty janitors under me.”

  “Sounds like good work.”

  “Pays the bills.”

  This talk is nearly all lies, and we all know it, but that is how things are done. The names are false, the occupations invented, the interests faked. It’s partly for security—in case any one of them is popped or propositioned by law enforcement; it’s partly the logical stance from men who, on one level, are deeply ashamed of what they do. Occasionally, you’ll find a deviant who feels no shame at all, no remorse for his acts. Danny, whom we flipped quite easily, is not one of those. My guess is that Marlon is not, either, and that the handgun under his shirt is just another compensation for his profound and thorough inadequacies. I didn’t make him for the kind of guy who would have the nuts to use it, but I’ve been wrong before. Chet is the real catch here, the sociopath, the only one cold enough inside to turn a profit on perversion, with his daughter as the product. Caryn is driven by greed, low intelligence and by hatred of the girl her husband prefers over her. Like most people who do this kind of thing, both Chet and Caryn were probably used sexually as youngsters themselves, came from measurably terrible childhoods that they will never outgrow. They’re passing down the legacy to Lauren now, and, in the spirit of free enterprise, making it pay.

  Danny kept to himself and no one said much to him. He seemed to feel superior to us all, but from the non-reaction of the others I gathered it was his usual way. My little Judas, counting down the minutes, guzzling down the gin. I had assured him that if he failed me even in some small way, his leniency deal would be shot and I’d personally see to it that they threw the book at him and plastered his picture all over the newspapers and TV. This guy’s got a wife and two grown kids, and a tenured position. I’d never dealt with a more agreeable subject. All he had to do now was wait. He looked distressed, though. Maybe he just wanted to be in Lauren’s room one more time in his life.

  Chet reclined, gulped his drink and watched us. He smiled slyly at me a couple of times, a can-you-believe-this smile, trying to welcome me to the club. Caryn waited on him, bringing him his dinner on a real plate—the rest of us had paper and plastic. She moved mechanically, like her responsibilities could quickly overwhelm her if she didn’t stay in control. I tried to guess how many times they’d done this. And I sensed it was time to make my move.

  I rose and slid my chaise next to Chet’s. He gave me a not-in-the-program look. I wanted to get the heart of this transaction for the tape for the DA. I sat on the edge and leaned toward him confidentially.

  “I’m afraid Lauren won’t like me,” I said.

  Chet’s eyes narrowed as he vetted my intentions. “She likes who I tell her to like.”

  “But, well, are you sure she’ll like me?”

  “What’s wrong with you, Art?”

  “I just told you.”

  “Look, if it’s you you’re worried about, just let her do her thing. She knows what to do.”

  “I’m thinking that fifteen hundred is going to seem pretty expensive if she’s scared or not turned on.”

  “Art, we covered this already. If you’re scared then I’ll take you home right now. But this is a professional operation here, so I’m going to keep that money of yours either way. You need to have this kinda shit settled before you come over.”

  I nodded and looked down at the patio. “I’m all right.”

  “You’re all right, Art.”

  “Just … you know … first-time jitters.”

  “Make yourself another drink, man. Relax. We’re a
dults doing adult things. Nobody’s doing anything they don’t want to. Fuckin’ relax, man, you’re making me nervous.”

  “Got it.”

  I stood up and dragged the chaise longue back where it was, regarded the pool for a moment, then started making another drink. Chet was looking at me and I didn’t like the silence around it.

  Caryn was eyeing me, too.

  And then Marlon.

  Danny was trying hard not to.

  “Hey, babe,” Chet said to Caryn.

  “Yeah, babe?”

  She had just sat down with her paper plate of food. He nodded his head toward the house and she got back up, setting her plate on the drink table.

  He grinned at me. I grinned back.

  Caryn walked toward the house with an air of self-conscious drama. It was her gait, I think, that suggested the importance of what she was doing—deliberate and measured but not slow, like she was walking between walls of flames, like this was a mission only she could accomplish, like the world really needed her now.

  She went inside for about twenty minutes, and when she came back, Lauren was with her.

  They’d dressed her in a short black skirt and red heels. Her face was made up and her lips painted, and perhaps most revolting of all, they’d left her little pigtails alone and they stuck out from her whore’s paint job as a monument to her childishness. No, what was most revolting was the change in her personality now, the way she changed like any girl trying on her mother’s clothes, playacting her vision of womanhood, performing her concept of how a woman acted and how a woman walked and how she looked at you. And I could see that Linda Elizabeth Sharpe, age ten, had been trained to believe that a woman was an object to arouse men. A painted, alluring item. A fuck in red heels.

  She walked past me. I could smell perfume and a trace of booze on her. She stopped at the drink table, sloshed a little bourbon into a plastic cup, twirled and drank it.

  “Wooh!” Marlon yelped quietly. “Hot stuff!”

  Lauren smiled and set down the cup. She walked over to Chet and pecked him on the cheek.

  Danny stood up then. He swayed a little, but he had a matter-of-fact expression on his face. I should have seen it coming, but I hadn’t.