Thicker Than Blood

by Penny Rudolph

  “No.” Rachel jammed her hands into her pockets as if Irene might suddenly grab one and blurt out what she saw in the palm.

  “But I assure you it is quite simple and quite accurate. Just yesterday I read Herbert’s palm. He works in the butcher shop at the farmers market. His palm said he was going to come into a good deal of money. And do you know, that very afternoon, he won five hundred dollars from the lottery. I didn’t mean that I would charge, you know, although Herbert did give me twenty-five dollars from his windfall. For you it would be free, of course.”

  “Thank you, no. But I do have a money-making proposition for you.”

  The woman beamed. “Ah, yes?”

  “Could you baby-sit the garage for me a few hours here and there? Ten dollars an hour.”

  “Of course, dear girl. Anytime.”

  333

  Thursday morning Alexandra Miller woke with a monster headache. Stress always brought this awful hammering just above her left ear. She called her office and took the day off.

  This afternoon, she would fly. That would help. And she had invited that woman from the garage. The company would be nice.

  In the meantime she would finish the yard work, migraine or no. She could have hired someone to pull the weeds, but somehow that seemed like shirking. She should like gardening. Her grandmother had loved the digging and planting, and Alexandra was, after all, executive director of Protectors of the Earth. Rooting around in earth was supposed to soothe the soul.

  But today it seemed such grubby labor. Perhaps it was the headache.

  She stood to survey her progress. Her white shirt was little the worse for wear, but her khaki slacks had muddy ovals at the knees. Strands of dark hair had escaped the red bandana she had used to tie it back and perspiration was trickling down her neck.

  Irked, she wiped the back of her hand across her brow. Only one job left to do.

  Bending over the anemones, she uprooted the weeds that were encroaching on the White Queen. There would be no buds until autumn. When most of the flower world was preparing to die, the White Queen bloomed. And what wonderful blooms they would be: tall, stately, with yellow stamens, and stems clothed in vine-like leaves. They reminded Alexandra of her grandmother. And why she herself had become an environmentalist.

  At sixteen, Alexandra had discovered ecologist Aldo Leopold’s essays on the dire need for a land ethic.

  When her grandmother died, Alexandra spent a little of her huge inheritance on herself—a small but elegant house, an ARV Super 2 lightweight plane, a helicopter, and, finally, a hot-air balloon.

  With the rest of her grandparents’ legacy, she had founded Protectors of the Earth and dedicated herself to helping the people of farms and cities to live in harmony with each other and with nature.

  POE banners read “No privilege without obligation.” Alexandra believed the slogan.

  In the years since, she had learned a very great deal. For one thing, far too much privilege had been taken. Discovering that environmental concerns were a business, much like any other, she hardened into a shrewd businesswoman. And she learned to rule out nothing, to negotiate with anyone who could provide something she wanted.

  Plucking the last weeds from the bed of White Queens, she tossed her hair from her eyes and stood up, relieved to be finished, but above all, proud of her job.

  333

  The plane banked and smoothly turned east.

  Alexandra’s face lit with pure, sensual enjoyment. “Your first time?” she asked Rachel.

  “In a small plane, yes,” Rachel nodded nervously, willing herself to relax. The cockpit was compact, but not at all cramped, and her companion was clearly a skilled pilot.

  They quickly left the Burbank airport behind. The ocean of toy houses below seemed to stretch all the way to the horizon as they flew along the Angeles mountains.

  A persistent breeze had scoured the smog from the Los Angeles basin, and the sky was the color of violets—the sort of day that made Southern Californians smug.

  Rachel was eyeing the small bank of instruments feeling somehow cheated. She had supposed that a plane would require more dials than this to get off the ground and stay in the air.

  Alexandra swung her gaze toward the mountains and made a slight adjustment with the lever in her right hand. “No more thugs leaping at you while you’re jogging, I trust.”

  “Haven’t had much time to jog. Maybe that’s why I’m sort of stressed out.”

  “Ever notice that?” Alexandra pointed ahead. “When you enter the desert, the land changes from the green of money to the color of poverty.”

  Rachel peered out the window of the plane as the lush landscapes around homes gave way to desert scrub.

  “But that’s natural, isn’t it? I mean it isn’t poverty, it’s just the difference between where people water the landscape and where they don’t.”

  Alexandra’s laugh pealed through the small cabin. “The point is, where do they get that water? Most of our great state is desert—every square inch of the southern third certainly is.” Little spots of color had lit her cheeks. “Every morning, we get out of bed in a desert. Sixteen, seventeen million of us.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “Bit of a strain on the water resources, don’t you think?”

  “Guess I haven’t thought much about it.”

  “I think of nothing else.”

  Rachel considered the annoyed look on Alexandra’s face. Or was it anger? “Not likely to change, is it? I mean seventeen million people aren’t likely to get up one morning and decide to move to Pennsylvania.”

  “Pity Pennsylvania if they did,” Alexandra said. “You have no idea the devastation, the destruction of our birthright. Rivers once wild and free now shackled by dams, diverted into canals, and turned into sewers.”

  Alexandra leaned forward to look over the plane’s silvery wing. “The salmon are disappearing. Ducks, geese, herons won’t be far behind. If nothing is done, humanity will strangle on its own pollution.”

  Not one to get excited about abstract concepts, Rachel wondered at her companion’s fervor.

  “I don’t mean to argue, but didn’t there used to be too much water? I mean the Colorado jumped its banks every spring and drowned everything in its path. The delta was saltwater marshland. Nothing grew there but tules.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “My grandfather.” Rachel started to say her family had been delta farmers, but thought better of it. “I used to live up north.”

  Alexandra flicked a glance at her. “They grow rice up there. Sucks up more water than any crop in the world. And you know what they do with the stubble when they’ve slashed what they want from the plant?”

  “They burn it,” Rachel said, feeling somehow responsible.

  “And for days the smoke hangs like a filthy shroud over the water. What do you think that does to the birds, the fish?” Alexandra’s eyes were bitter.

  Rachel squirmed in her seat, relieved that her family hadn’t been rice growers.

  She recalled her grandfather, Bruno and even her father spending entire evenings bemoaning the onslaught of environmentalism. Rachel had never paid much attention to the other side.

  “I guess it’s a good thing we just have yards to water here,” she said weakly.

  Alexandra’s laugh was like the breaking of a branch. “The cities pay more for their water,” she said. “And city people care more, at least superficially. But agribusiness and the water developers—they’re like mountains. Protectors of the Earth, even the entire environmental movement, we’re like ants trying to move those mountains.”

  “I was under the impression that nobody even thinks of building dams these days.”

  “Oh, they think about it, all right. But they don’t try it. Not since we trussed up the water developers like Thanksgiving turkeys. The sad thing is, so much damage is already done.”

  “I thought a lot was being done to help the environment.”


  “You think San Francisco will give back Hetch Hetchy Valley? They say it was as beautiful as Yosemite before it was turned into a reservoir. You think the farmers will just clear out of the delta?”

  “Not real likely,” Rachel said uneasily.

  Alexandra’s mouth curved into a smile as enigmatic as an angel’s. “Actually, they just might.”

  Rachel gave her a puzzled look.

  “I have a plan,” Alexandra said with a soft chuckle. “I call it Operation Jack-and-the-Beanstalk. Jack accomplished quite a lot just by dropping a few pebbles on a couple of giants. My grandmother used to tell a similar story about a small boy and two huge brutes from a marauding tribe.”

  “I’d forgotten. Your grandmother was a Mojave, wasn’t she?”

  Alexandra nodded. “A shaman.”

  “A healer?”

  “Shamans are only part healer. They’re also part artist, part politician. They are the mediators between the profane and sacred worlds.”

  “And your grandfather. Was he a chief?”

  “Not exactly,” Alexandra said. “He was a bootlegger during Prohibition. In the thirties, he bought up poor people’s housing. By the end of the Depression he owned a sizeable chunk of New Jersey.”

  Rachel almost squealed with surprise. “And he married a shaman?”

  “Don’t ask me how they did it, but apparently they were quite happy.”

  “How did they even meet?” Rachel asked.

  “He came to Southern California to acquire land for orange orchards. My grandmother was in Anaheim for some meeting. The hotel clerk assigned them both the same room.”

  “What a story!” Rachel said. “Did you see them often?”

  “I barely remember my grandfather. He died the same year my parents went down on a ferry that sank in the Mediterranean. I was only four. My grandmother took me and returned to her own people.”

  “So you were brought up as a Mojave?”

  “It was wonderful. The Mojave believe dreams are the source of all special powers. When I was twelve, another shaman had a dream about my future. He told my grandmother I would bring the people of a great region the harmony of the Mojave heritage.”

  Without warning, the plane lurched and seemed to Rachel to fall away beneath her. She grabbed for the handhold, knocking her handbag from her lap. “What was that?”

  “Just an air pocket. You get used to them.”

  Alexandra frowned at the odds and ends that had spewed from Rachel’s handbag across the cockpit floor. “Better get those picked up, they can take on a life of their own up here, leap right up and bite you in the face if you’re not careful.”

  Rachel brushed the hodgepodge of items together, scooped them back into her purse, and reached for the tie tack, which had landed near the fire wall.

  “That looks Native American,” Alexandra said, following Rachel’s gaze.

  “It may be,” Rachel said, straining, but still unable to reach it. She released her seat belt and swept up the tortoise.

  “My father gave it to me.” She smiled at Alexandra. “He used to say there was nothing so beautiful as the song of a tortoise.”

  “What a sweet story.” Alexandra squinted at it. “I’d like to take a closer look.”

  Rachel started to show it to her, but another air pocket jostled the plane and the tie tack fell into her purse. She rummaged through the contents, gave up, and refastened her seat belt. “It’s in there somewhere. One of these days, I’ve got to clean this out.”

  “What happened to the guy who worked for you?” Alexandra asked. “Mid-twenties, short, thin. He used to deliver packages.”

  A pair of lines appeared over Rachel’s nose. “Lonnie.”

  “Haven’t seen him lately.”

  “He…didn’t show up for work for a couple of days. He was found in his apartment. Dead.”

  “Good heavens! He was just a kid.”

  Rachel shrugged. Her arms were so tense the motion made them ache. She waited until she could get the words past the lump in her throat. “I’m afraid it may have been drugs. They’re doing an autopsy.”

  “So that’s what has been bothering you.”

  “It was a horrible shock.” Rachel examined the horizon.

  Alexandra expertly moved some levers and the plane began a graceful turn. As the right wing sank lower, she pointed over it. “There’s the reason for Southern California’s population overload.”

  Rachel watched the long straight streak in the desert as they flew along it. “Looks like a river, but it’s too straight.”

  “One of InterUrban’s rivers, not one of God’s. That aqueduct has more ugly power than you would ever imagine. It has killed fish, deprived Native Americans, robbed Mexicans. Even as we speak it is slowly destroying the Grand Canyon and helping us gorge ourselves.”

  Alexandra looked at Rachel. “I should pack up the soapbox. We came up here to relax. My work has been so tense lately that I have aches where I never knew I had nerves.”

  Alexandra’s smile was so plaintive and ingenuous that Rachel grinned back. “I know the feeling.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  The scene through the window of Charlotte Emerson’s ten-year-old Volvo was not a pretty one. Brush fires had left the Verdugo Hills charred and bare in spots, like mange on the coat of a once-handsome dog.

  The sign for Forest Lawn swung into view, and beyond it she steered the Volvo up the hill to a huge rock where she brought the car to a stop and got out.

  Her dress was a very dark pink with wide lapels that made her shoulders seem broad, her waist small. She smoothed the skirt and opened the back door of the sedan. On the back seat was a mound of amaryllis, their stamens long and curved, their long petal trumpets a vibrant pink much paler than her dress. There were three dozen flowers but not a single leaf.

  Carrying the flowers as one carries an infant, Charlotte made her way up the hill.

  The grave was very green. Most of the flowers from the funeral had already wilted and been removed. She stood for several minutes, her eyes fixed on the mound that covered the place where she had last seen the casket.

  Then she bent down to slip the amaryllis into one of the brass vases near the headstone. It was difficult to rise again, an irksome reminder of her age. A breeze fanned her cheeks.

  “We were never friends,” Charlotte nodded to the mound of earth behind the proud pink flowers, “but I have come to say goodbye.” She stopped.

  She could almost hear him laughing derisively at her as he had sometimes done, but only in private. He had brutalized others in public, but never her, not even when he could have gotten away with it. She had to give him that.

  “Twenty-two years ago, when you were a hot-shot attorney and I was running Riverside Water, and we both still had a sense of humor, you told me a dozen naked ladies would dance on your grave before you’d let me have my way. Well, here are three dozen. Not quite the sort you had in mind, I suppose. The florist says they’re also called Belladonna lilies, which seems rather appropriate. Belladonna is a deadly poison. ”

  Charlotte closed her eyes, as if in prayer. I admit I’m not sorry it turned out the way it did. Some things just have to be. And soon I am going to do something that would have vexed you even more, Jason. But I trust you are beyond that now. I am going to appoint a black man as your successor. And then I’m going to step down and retire. Without telling anyone about our little conflict.

  She opened her eyes and raised her chin. “You were my most worthy opponent, Jason, you were indeed.”

  333

  “Lovely flower,” Rachel said to Charlotte, nodding at the graceful amaryllis in a cobalt blue vase on Charlotte’s desk.

  “Yes, isn’t it. It’s called a naked lady,” Charlotte said in a conspiratorial tone, and they both laughed.

  Spread out on the gleaming desktop were the remains of hamburgers from Tommy’s. The two had met standing in the long, hot, noontime line for what many regarded as Los Angeles’ best bur
ger. Rachel had waved; the other woman had waited for her. They had strolled back along the sidewalk together until Charlotte had invited Rachel into her office to share the air conditioning.

  Now, Rachel leaned back in the chrome-legged, black-leather chair. She was pleased at the bonanza, the easy opportunity to ask her question. “How would I find out who was driving one of InterUrban’s cars on a certain day?”

  Charlotte’s eyes examined Rachel’s face. “Why would you need to know?”

  One of Rachel’s shoulders lifted a few inches and dropped. “I found something in the space where one of the cars was parked. A…watch with a broken band. I figure it must belong to whoever was driving that car that day and thought there must be some system for checking the cars out.”

  Charlotte was carefully folding the hamburger wrappers. “You know which car it was?”

  “License number E147G62.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.” Charlotte slid the folded wrappers neatly into the bag, picked it up, and placed it carefully in the wastebasket behind her desk.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Jolted from a sound sleep, Rachel jerked upright in the dark, adrenaline charging, unsure of what had wakened her. The bedroom windows were just beginning to brighten with dawn.

  Three sharp raps came at the door.

  But the garage was locked. No one could get to her apartment unless he had been in the parking lot when she locked up.

  Reaching under the bed, she brought out the telephone book and drew out the old thirty-eight.

  The raps came again, steady this time and loud.

  Heart hammering, she planted her feet just left of the door, lifted the gun and cocked it. The knocking ceased and in the silence that rushed in to take its place, her pulse drummed in her ears. “I have a gun pointed straight at you. It will easily penetrate that door.”

  “Rachel, for God’s sake!”

  She threw the latch and opened the door. Hank poked his head inside. She glared at him. “Are you crazy?”