Where Serpents Lie (Revised March 2013)

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “No use hogging all the good feelings,” said Melinda. “There’s enough of those to go around.”

  Penny let out that impatient exhale that kids save for the ignorant, then skipped onto the court.

  “She sure has gotten to be a smart-ass the last year,” Mel said.

  “Kinda has.”

  “She’s competitive and jealous.”

  “Maybe she’s going out of her way to make me feel welcome.”

  Melinda shook her head. “I don’t think so. It’s not that I don’t think she’s generous enough for that. Or duplicitous enough to fake it to get what she wants. She genuinely adores you.”

  I thought about that. Melinda ascribes levels of sophistication—as in sophistry—to Penny that I don’t see. I see a lack of guile. It’s another example of the difference in the way we see children in general, I suppose.

  “Do you really think she’d BS me?”

  “Oh, yes. I think it’s instinct for some people. Intuitive self-preservation. Smearing a little honey on things. She knows you like her, and that’s your weak spot. She’s not exploiting it yet, I don’t think.”

  “You make her sound like a Borgia.”

  “I think she has depths you don’t see. Well, do you feel welcome with us?”

  I thought about that for a moment. The last year had been full of good things for me and full of disappointments, too. “Yes, most of the time. I don’t forget that you two are the family and I’m kind of the third wheel, but … third wheels are good sometimes. Like on ATVs and trikes and—”

  “—No, really, do you feel welcome, or don’t you?”

  “I have. You’ve never made me feel like an outsider. And Penny hasn’t, either. I think she likes me.”

  Melinda turned her face to me and studied me hard. She had that interrogator’s expression, the placid one that bores in, gathers all and gives up nothing in return. “In fact, she’s playing us off against each other a lot more now than she used to. She’s using you to leverage her discontents with me.”

  “I see that. But I wonder where to draw the line.”

  “You shouldn’t cater to her, Terry.”

  “Do you really think I do?”

  “Of course you do. You’re a sucker for affection, just like we all are. I don’t blame you. I just don’t think it’s probably good for Penelope, in the long run, if you overdo that kind of thing.”

  I felt gut punched. I hated even the idea of getting between her and her daughter. I wanted harmony, not conflict. Clear lines, no clutter. Who doesn’t? Few things in life are more surprising than assuming your partner agrees with you, only to find out she or he vehemently does not. You wonder where you’re getting your ideas of who they are.

  “I really didn’t think I was. But I won’t. I’ll be real careful about that.”

  “Do what you mink’s right, Terry. It’s just a phase. It will be over soon.”

  Melinda turned away and watched the court. “But what I’m saying is, it’s a cheap-shit stunt to endear yourself to her if you’re not going to stick around.”

  Wham.

  She looked back at me with a cruel little smile. I’d seen a lot of that smile back around the time her father died and we were both in our separate worlds of torment Not so much, lately.

  “I’ll always do what’s best for her, Terry. Always.”

  “You should. And so far as my sticking around goes, I’m here. And I’m happy to be here. I adore both of you. You’re two of my favorite people in the whole world.”

  She nodded, still looking back at me. The smile was gone. “So you don’t think that I’m just a dried-up old bag who won’t give you a family of your own?”

  “Not going to answer, Mel. You know what the answer to that is.”

  And well she did, because this line of inquiry had come up before. So far as being dried up, Melinda has always been squeamish and uncertain about her own sexuality. Not prudish so much as afraid, slightly ashamed. With me, anyway. I have no idea what she was like with Jordan Ishmael. “Dried up” was a phrase she introduced herself, though she has been quite a bit less than dried up on several occasions with me. She’s often called herself my “old girl.” It’s been a term of self-endearment, as well as a way of getting me to acknowledge that her two years of seniority don’t bother me in the least. They don’t and never have.

  So far as not giving me a family, that’s a decision she made clear to me from the very moment we even considered moving closer to each other. Long before we decided to share a home. Marriage, maybe, she said: no children. She had been there and done that. I agreed wholeheartedly. I had had Matthew, and he was a perfect human and a perfect memory, and he was enough. I had no desire to bring another child into the world. None of them would ever be him. I believed that I had been blessed once and blessed almost completely. And I believed that only a fool would ask more of life than that.

  Melinda has told me a hundred times—the first few in all seriousness, the others as a kind of tossed-off joke—that I’d be better off with a young bimbo who would have my babies and still look good in a two-piece five years from now. But the fact that Melinda is the absolute opposite of a bimbo is exactly what made me love her to begin with. I took to her unadorned qualities like a trout released into a cold mountain brook.

  From the beginning there was no ditz or glitz in her; no mindless levity; no primping and preening; no consuming vanity, gyms, StairMasters or step aerobics; no low-calorie, nonfat, high-fiber diets; no weaves or perms or makeovers. In fact, until six months ago, she rarely wore makeup or did more with her hair than wash and comb it. Until six months ago I never saw her bring home clothes from anywhere but the discount warehouses. Until six months ago, when Mel began to pull out of that spiral that began with the death of her indifferent father, she rarely wore lipstick. Since that low point she’s shopped upscale two times and made regular attempts to prettify herself. She sometimes wears lipstick and makeup.

  I’m not sure what to make of it or how to react to it. If it was a sign of happiness or newfound confidence, I’d be happy, too. But in spite of her noticeable improvement since those dark days, I wouldn’t describe Melinda Vickers—she reclaimed her maiden name when she divorced Jordan—as a happy person. There’s a sadness in her that I cherished from the start. A sadness that seemed like a perfect mate for my own. And it’s still there inside her, just beneath the new outfit from Nordstrom and the occasional lipstick and the neatly trimmed hair. But her sadness is the one thing about Melinda that I loved in the beginning and have become impatient with. I think it’s time for her to move beyond it. It’s not necessary. But who am I to say what her heart should feel?

  I’ve been no help to her at all. I changed when I met Donna Mason. It actually seemed like something in the air I was breathing in that elevator, and maybe it did have to do with pheromones or some other biological mystery. I was instantly, subtly altered, my polarities tweaked, my point of view adjusted. I was lifted, turned and set down facing a slightly different direction. In that instant I saw myself with different eyes. I saw the world, and Melinda, too, with different eyes. It was like seeing clearly for the first time, or, more realistically, for the first time in a long time. Beginning then, with a four-floor elevator ride, I started to rethink a lot of what I thought I knew. That moment was a beginning and an ending. And since then I’ve been wondering how to accommodate the changed Terry Naughton with the old one. I’ve been as cautious as I can, as slow as I can, as self-examined as I can. I’ve put on the brakes, rationalized the circumstances, had a thousand long talks with myself. I’ve cursed the change, punished myself for undergoing it just when Melinda needed me most, loathed myself for stepping into that elevator, bludgeoned my own heart for its excitement. But after all of that, the fact remains, untarnished as a ball of solid gold: I am in love with Donna Mason and with the Terry Naughton I become when I think about her. I feel like many good things are possible with her, through her, around her. But I am dazed and su
ffocated by the Terry Naughton who lives his lying life with Melinda. I feel ready to shed away the old and make room for the new. Bottom line is I’ve made one gigantic mess of things, and I know this. There will be hell to pay.

  I didn’t answer her question about being an old bag who wouldn’t give me a son or daughter. I sensed the ocean of unsaid things welling up around us, splashing over the sides of our rickety little boat, the sea swells in the distance high and black and frothing at their tops, advancing. I yearned for tequila but I quit carrying the flask two months ago.

  After tennis we all went to a bluff-top café on Coast Highway where the food is good and cheap and you can sit on stools overlooking the Pacific. The ocean was flat and shiny as lacquer, but I still kept seeing those waves heaving up toward us.

  That night Melinda came to bed in a salmon-colored slip I’d never seen before with lipstick freshly applied and a bit of dizzyingly sensual perfume coming from her. She was assured and eager, even a little greedy.

  It was one of those times when you make love without words because you understand that you are either continuing something or ending it, and you don’t want to know which.

  ELEVEN

  He took his third girl sometime that night or early morning, though we didn’t know it until 6:30 A.M.

  Her name was Brittany Elder and she was five. Irvine PD called me shortly after the girl’s mother had dialed 911. She had gone in to awaken her daughter and found the bed empty. Empty of her daughter, that is. One pane of the bedroom window glass had a hand-sized hole neatly cut in it; the other pane of the slider was open and the screen was down. I requested an all-points alert for any late-model red Chrysler-Plymouth-Dodge van and headed out.

  Johnny was the only other CAY deputy at work that early, and we hit the scene twenty minutes later.

  Abby Elder, the mother, was still in a blue terry bathrobe when she answered the door. Johnny walked in ahead of me and I saw him eyeing the front doorknob sadly—God knew how many times it had been touched by now. Abby’s eyes were red and puffed and her hair was still messed from sleep.

  Two Irvine PD officers stood in the bedroom. They looked at me, then down at the bed. I followed their eyes to the thrown-back sheet and covers and the long translucent snakeskin lying lengthwise down the bed. It was papery and wrinkled and its two jaws lay loose and open. It was probably five feet long and four inches wide. I looked at the hideous thing, then back at Abby Elder, who stood with her arms around herself and a big piece of her bottom lip locked under her teeth. Fat clear tears rolled down her cheeks.

  “What does he do to them?”

  “Nothing, Ms. Elder,” I said. “He dresses them and lets them go.”

  “He should be in prison.”

  “He will be.”

  “She’s my life. Brittany is my whole life.”

  “We’re going to do everything we can to get her back to you.”

  I told Johnny to start his crime scene work and took Abby into the living room. I wanted to hear every word she had to say. I told her to take it slowly, tell me the details as she remembered them.

  While she talked she looked at me with eyes begging me not to fault or blame her. Parents blame themselves for everything bad that happens to their children. I can vouch from experience. So I interrupted her several times to assure her that this was not her fault in any way, but other than that I kept silent, took notes and let her tell me about the night that was, she said, easily the worst of her life.

  “This is every worst nightmare I ever had,” she sobbed at one point.

  “People wake up from nightmares,” I said. “You’re going to. So is Brittany.”

  At the mention of her daughter’s name, a fresh river of tears poured down Abby Elder’s face. I said nothing.

  Instead, I looked at the pictures hanging on the living room wall. They were school portraits of Brittany—a pretty, dark-haired girl with brown eyes and a mischievous grin. There was a pink ribbon in her hair. In another photograph she was posed with her mother. They both looked happy and healthy, like they had nothing but good things to do that day. I wondered again at the courage and energy it must take for a mother to raise a child alone. Or a father. A single parent, I thought. Like Pamela’s mother. Like Courtney’s. I realized something then, but I couldn’t quite grasp what it was. So I listened.

  Her story was actually quite brief and clear: she had awakened at 6 A.M. as she always did on workdays, to her alarm. She liked waking up to a reggae station. She put on her robe, got a cup of coffee—the machine timer had it brewed up by five-thirty because she loved the smell of coffee in the morning. She poured in some milk and took the cup with her to peek in on Brittany. Usually, she said, Brittany would sleep until Abby was done with showering and dressing, around seven. But Abby always checked on her, first thing, or almost first thing, after she had that first cup of coffee going.

  “And,” she said, blinking and looking down at the carpet She took a deep breath but didn’t look at me. “And when I opened the door and looked … she wasn’t there. She just … wasn’t there. Instead, that … thing was in her bed. Where she was supposed to be.”

  The room was still fairly dark and it felt different, she said, so she turned on the light and overrode her shock a little, thinking that Brittany might be way under the covers, down by the foot of the bed, as she sometimes was. She wasn’t. Abby had pulled the bed away from the wall and looked under it. She’d flung open the closet, then run to the child’s bathroom. When she went back into the bedroom she felt the breeze and saw the window slid open and realized the screen was gone. She had screamed. Then she had raced to the kitchen and dialed 911.

  “The room felt different because the window was open?” I asked.

  “Yes. The wind coming through? I didn’t register it until I came back in.”

  “Did it feel different for any other reason?”

  She brought her red-laced eyes to me. “It felt like a room that something bad had happened in.”

  I made a note of that. Abby said she’d looked through Brittany’s room again after calling 911. Then she looked on the patio and in her own bathroom, and, for reasons not rational, under the big cream sofa in the living room. She looked in the garage. She looked in the washer and dryer. She said she was standing in the living room crying when the Irvine officers arrived, and when she answered the door she was too distraught to even speak. Her gaze shifted to the floor again and I knew that Abby Elder was punishing herself for what had happened. She shook her head and buried her face in her hands.

  I could see down the short hallway toward Brittany’s room where Johnny was photographing the bed with the shed skin in it. He’d already set his crime scene ribbon across the beginning of the hall, and stationed the Irvine cops on the other side of it. They stood there side by side, one looking back at Johnny and the other looking forward at me. They both looked spent: graveyard patrolmen on their last hour of the shift.

  “When was the last time you checked on her?” I asked.

  “Before I turned out my lights. It was eleven-twenty.”

  Abby Elder’s words sounded detached and dreamlike now, as if delivered on her behalf by someone next to her.

  I asked her if she had any relatives in the area.

  She said her mother, up in Fullerton, maybe half an hour away.

  “Why don’t you call her? See if she’ll come over and be here with you.”

  “I … I think that’s a really good idea. Now?”

  “Sure. We’re almost finished with this.”

  I asked for a cup of that coffee, both because I wanted it and because I wanted to get Abby focused away from herself a little. For the next twenty minutes we talked about her life, job, habits, haunts, friends, acquaintances, routines, activities. Her family, her ex, her neighborhood. I was trying to find the intersection with Pamela and Courtney. I saw little Pamela in Orange—which was north of here; and I saw little Courtney down in San Clemente—to the south. Brittany was
in the middle. None of their tangents crossed in any way that I could find. Until I looked at Brittany’s picture on the wall and began to understand what I’d almost understood just a few minutes ago. This was it: Pamela, Courtney and Brittany looked nothing alike. A blonde, a redhead and a brunette. Their mothers—Jennifer, Bridget and Abby—looked very much alike.

  He’s not picking the girls, I thought: he’s picking the mothers. That’s why we haven’t connected the girls. It’s not they who catch his eye. It’s Mommy. That’s where we’ll find the plane of intersection.

  “Abby,” I said. “Would you name for me, right off the top of your head, every group you’ve belonged to recently—church group, parents’ group, classes, workshops, seminars, social groups, clubs, unions, affiliations, anything? Everything? Please? Just take off and start naming.”

  I’d asked Jennifer Clark and Bridget Simenon the same question, and I had their answers carefully recorded in the case files of Pamela and Courtney. But I knew I had been focusing on affiliations where the girls would be present. Now I knew that the girls came second. The mothers came first, to his eyes. It was a small candle in our room of darkness, but its light was warm and promising.

  None of the three women were particularly active, either socially or professionally. They basically did their jobs and went home to take care of their daughters. Abby said she went to church occasionally, but usually not to the same one. It made her uncomfortable to be introduced as a guest, so she tended just to read her Bible sometimes for inspiration. She belonged to no professional associations except a credit union through work. She was an Automobile Club member, but she assumed that didn’t count. She took a junior college class in astronomy seven years ago, when her marriage was on the rocks, before Brittany was born. She said she didn’t belong to any of the “anonymous” programs because she didn’t have an addictive personality.

  “I … well … no, that wouldn’t—”

  “—Go ahead,” I said.

  “Well … I joined a singles club. A dating service? Just recently. Last week.”