by Neil Mcmahon
Freeboot also acquired Motherlode, who had the extra qualification of being a wealthy heiress. Besides a hefty trust fund and other investments, she happened to own the property up in the wilderness north of Lake Pillsbury. He married her and set up a second camp there-the place where Monks had been held.
Shrinkwrap’s farm served as both a cover operation and a base, providing physical needs and a closer link to civilization. The mountain camp was for the elite-the training place for the few who were selected to be maquis and brides. Everything was kept scrupulously legal on the surface-taxes paid, no obvious drug use or welfare fraud, or any other reason for authorities to come around. As the logging truck driver had told Monks, people in the area knew that the group was there and didn’t much like it, but everybody left everybody else alone.
Days of careful searching through the camp’s wreckage had revealed little. The fire had destroyed almost everything. Computers found in an underground bunker had been stripped of their hard drives, and explosives had turned what was left into a chaos of junk. Police had done their best to track down the fugitives, but the fugitives had vanished. The identities of some were traced, but with no results-they were drifters, runaways, throwaways. Others, like Taxman, remained wild cards, their legal names still unknown.
It seemed that Freeboot’s boastful intentions about righting social injustices and changing history had gone up with the smoke. Now he was a fallen idol, an ex-con on the run, wanted for a host of crimes that would put him back in prison for life. But even here, he had provided for himself with alarming foresight. He had acquired power of attorney over Motherlode’s inheritance, dismissing the outraged trustees that her parents had put in charge. Investigators had discovered that roughly twelve million dollars of that money then had been siphoned off, apparently into numbered overseas bank accounts.
Now Motherlode was dead and Freeboot was rich.
Much as Monks had tried to write him off, he had not been able to. Freeboot’s level of organization, together with his personal power, were too disturbing. Now he seemed to be turning up in Monks’s imagination-getting into his head, as Freeboot’s devotees claimed he could. All of Monks’s scientific training scorned any such notion. But he recalled uneasily two separate instances when he could almost have sworn that people had made psychic contact with him. Both of them had been trying to kill him at the time.
The coffee water was boiling. He ground up a cup’s worth of French roast, dumped it into a filter, and poured the steaming water slowly through, in stages. The result was strong and bitter, the way he liked it.
He was starting to think about making breakfast when he heard a car door slam outside. There was no reason for anyone to be coming here at this hour.
He stepped to a window away from the kitchen light just in time to see the vehicle’s taillights as it pulled away, leaving a thin white plume of exhaust in the chilly night. It looked like an older-model van, the kind that were popular in the 1970s. Someone was walking toward the house, shouldering a backpack.
Monks got a dizzying lurch in his gut, like when flying and the airliner dropped suddenly in rough weather.
It was Lia.
Sara hadn’t said anything about her coming home. He was quite sure that Sara didn’t know-and that this was a violation of Lia’s probation. He unlocked the door and opened it.
“I knew somebody that was coming up here and I caught a ride,” she said, stepping past him and unslinging her pack onto the floor. “We drove all night.” She seemed neither glad to see him nor surprised. She knew from phone talks with her mother that he had been staying here sometimes, and his Bronco was parked in the driveway. Her movements were jittery and her pupils seemed dilated. He wondered if she had been using meth-another probation offense.
“Welcome home,” he said. “I’ll get your mom.”
Sara was already hurrying down the hall, tying the belt of her robe. She must have heard the car, too. She gave Monks a quick, distraught look, but then put on a big smile as she came into the living room.
The two women embraced, with Sara murmuring, “Oh, baby, it’s so good to see you.” She stepped back, clasping Lia’s shoulders, still smiling but looking perplexed.
“But you’re not supposed to be here,” Sara said.
Lia pulled away. “Don’t start, okay, Mom?” she said sharply. “There’s just no way I can live in that straight world.”
“What are you telling me?” Sara said. “You’re not going back?”
“No way,” Lia repeated emphatically.
Monks stayed in the background, silent. Lia hadn’t been happy about going to Phoenix; but, then, she hadn’t been happy about anything. He waited, expecting Sara to remind her of her probation terms. Leaving Phoenix was not her decision to make.
Instead, Sara said, “Okay, we’ll work it out. What about Joe and Ellie?” Those were the relatives that Lia had been staying with.
“What about them?” Lia retorted.
“Do they know about this?”
“What do you think, they’d have let me go? I told them I was going to spend the weekend at a girlfriend’s.”
Sara sighed. “I’d better call them.”
Monks was taken aback by her swift acquiescence. He told himself that it was none of his business, but that wasn’t true. When he had lobbied to get Lia the deal, he had implicitly staked his word that she would stick to it. And allowing her to stay here would constitute something like harboring a fugitive, even if in a very small way.
But now was not the time to bring it up.
“I was about to make breakfast,” Monks said. “How about it, Lia? You hungry?”
She swung around to face him, with her edgy, defiant gaze.
“Call me Marguerite,” she said. “You know that’s my real name.”
26
Monks’s relationship with Gail, his ex-wife and Glenn’s mother, had become distant over the years, but it had intensified during the past three months-since their son had once again become a focus of their lives. In fact, they hadn’t had so much interaction since finalizing their divorce.
This afternoon, Monks had agreed to meet her for lunch. There was no news of Glenn, no aspect of the incident that they hadn’t already discussed dozens of times. But she needed to take her anxieties out on Monks, and while he usually received an emotional beating, in a twisted way he got some satisfaction, too. It was somewhat like giving blood.
Gail had a pleasant face and an athletic figure, a little on the big-boned side, like their daughter, Stephanie’s. Her hair was short and gingery, like Glenn’s. She kept herself trim by playing tennis and taking treks to remote places around the globe with her second husband, Sawyer, an environmental-sciences professor at UC Davis. She was intelligent, goodhearted, politically correct, and vaguely hostile to abstract thought.
“I think the police aren’t looking hard enough,” she said.
The fact was that Freeboot, with his illicit wealth, could be anywhere in the world. Monks answered with a noncommittal “Hmh,” chewing on a club sandwich. The restaurant was in Sonoma, at the corner of the old town square. It wasn’t the kind of place that he particularly cared for-it was small and cramped, with a sort of forced chichi ambience, and passers-by gaping into the big plate-glass windows made him feel like an animal in a zoo. But Gail had chosen it.
“Every time the phone rings, I jump,” she said. Her gaze was reproachful, as if he were to blame.
He nodded empathetically. Only since the fire had she confessed that before then, Glenn had been calling her regularly-and that she had frequently wired him money, to whatever bank he specified. She knew that he had moved from Seattle to northern California about two years ago, but he had refused to tell her exactly where. She kept sending money anyway. Monks had long since realized that the relationship between mother and son-especially an only son-was of a profundity beyond his grasp. And he suspected that Glenn’s emotional problems only made Gail’s attachment stronger.
> “You don’t think those sheriffs know something they’re not telling us, do you?”
“I don’t see what good that would do them,” Monks said. “But I suppose it’s possible.”
“That’s comforting.”
“There’s nothing we can do about it, Gail. Nothing but wait.”
She picked at her salad and watched him eat his sandwich with a hint of disdain, like a well-bred lady forced to share her table with an ill-mannered serf. When they were courting, Gail had been a fun-loving free spirit. But in the course of their marriage, she had became caught up in the role of a doctor’s wife. By the end, she seemed more interested in their social standing and the square footage of their house than in her sometimes contentious husband.
He accepted the lion’s share of the blame. She had wanted a smooth, stable, affluent life. He had felt the much less reasonable need to rattle cages. He supposed it was a common situation-both partners waking up one day, after a number of years, to find that they no longer recognized the person they were married to, while probably unaware how much they themselves had changed.
“I know you had to leave him there,” she said, suddenly laying down her fork. “But I still can’t believe it.”
He exhaled. This was one of the conversations they had had many times before, Gail always understanding and agreeing with his reasons-above all, the need to save Mandrake-but finally not accepting them. And every time, his own anguish crashed back down on him.
“I’ll take care of the check,” he said, standing.
He had expected her to stay at the table, but she waited for him at the restaurant’s door. She wasn’t yet done with him. Outside, the afternoon was warm with spring sunshine, but he could see the graying line of a fog bank beyond the coastal mountains to the west.
“How are you and your new friend getting along?” Gail asked.
“Just fine.”
“How many is this now, since we split?”
“For Christ’s sake,” he said wearily, “are you keeping a scorecard?” In a dozen years he’d had two semiserious affairs and a few flings. He still wasn’t sure which category Sara would turn out to be in.
“Just wondering if you’re getting into a second adolescence, like so many men. Trying to prove your virility.”
“Second?” Monks said. “You’re the one who spent years telling me I never grew out of my first one.”
Her lips twitched in a quick, grudging smile. “You’ll call me if you hear anything?”
“You know I will,” he said.
They exchanged a dry, formal kiss and walked their separate ways.
Monks climbed into his Bronco and drove north on Highway 12, passing through the small settlements of Boyes and Fetters Hot Springs, on his way to Sara’s. He had spent the last three days at his own house in Marin, taking care of necessities and trying to appease three cats that were pissed off by his absences. He was distracted and had to remind himself to keep his accelerator foot light through Sonoma ’s long stretch of its twenty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit.
The hardest thing about dealing with Gail was the inevitable aftermath of Glenn coming to the forefront of his mind again, along with all the ways that Monks feared having failed him.
He had talked extensively with law-enforcement authorities about what would happen if Glenn did turn up. The issue of his criminal culpability was murky. At Monks’s urging, the courts would probably overlook Glenn’s role in the kidnaping, along with his drug use if he agreed to enter rehab. There was the troublesome possibility that he had used his computer skills to help drain off Motherlode’s inheritance, but at least that was white-collar crime.
Whatever anger Monks had felt toward him was gone, especially as he’d come to realize the extent of Freeboot’s influence. Mostly, Monks nursed the tormenting hope that Glenn would get shaken enough to come home and start turning his life around. But as the weeks had turned to months, it seemed more likely that he was still in deep with Freeboot.
Either that or he was dead.
27
Monks had been right about the incoming fog. It started to thicken when he turned off Highway 101 at Cloverdale and turned into dense gray gloom in the coastal mountains west of Booneville. Everything in sight was coated with a fine sheen of moisture-the trees, the road, the Bronco’s windshield. His sense was of driving through a rainstorm that was trembling on the edge of cracking wide open.
He arrived at Sara’s house a little before four P.M. Both of her vehicles were gone-the pickup truck that she drove to work, and the Nissan Altima that Marguerite had been using.
That reminded him unhappily of another situation that he wasn’t dealing with well. Marguerite had been home for almost two weeks now. He had talked to Sara privately about her probation issues. Sara had soothed him as usual, assuring him that she would work things out as soon as Marguerite calmed down. But that never happened, and it looked to Monks like Marguerite was settling in. She came and went as she pleased, apparently hanging out and partying with friends she had grown up with. Without doubt, she was drinking and using drugs. But no one else seemed concerned, so he had decided to let it ride. At the least, it was a major improvement over her being under Freeboot’s domination.
He poured himself a vodka in Sara’s kitchen, put on a jacket, and took the drink outside. Marguerite’s homecoming had deepened his sense of foreboding, and he had spent the past two weeks in a limbo of drifting from one inconsequential task to another, tense, irritable, and not getting much done.
The fog rolled in like a tide, advancing in swirling clouds and filling the deep ravines that converged down at the ocean. He liked watching it, liked this kind of weather; he supposed that it aroused something atavistic in his gloomy Celtic soul. He thought again about the canceled Ireland trip. Maybe that was what he needed to do-just get the hell out of here for a while and let people and events take care of themselves. Nothing he was doing was helping, that was for sure.
He was starting his second drink when he heard a vehicle pull into the driveway. He walked over to where he could see around the corner of the house. It was the Altima-Marguerite was home. He went back to his fog watching, a little uncomfortable with her presence.
She hadn’t done anything that troubled him directly. For the most part, she politely ignored him. But it was still a bizarre situation-sharing a house with a woman who had helped to abduct him, and sleeping with her mother. He was pretty sure that he wouldn’t have begun the affair if he had known that Marguerite would be around, and he didn’t know if he would be able to sustain it on those terms. That was another thing that he was on the fence about, waiting uneasily for a push one way or another.
The door to the kitchen opened and Marguerite stepped out onto the deck. Monks turned to her inquiringly, assuming that there was something she had to tell him. But then he saw that she was carrying a bottle of beer, one of his Kronenbourgs.
She raised it, as if saluting him. “You won’t turn me in for this, will you?” she said teasingly.
He was surprised. This was the first time that she had been anything like sociable.
“I don’t know,” he said with mock severity. “What’s the reward money up to now?”
She laughed and tipped the bottle up, taking a long drink. A little of the foamy liquid spilled from her lips. Then the bottle slipped from her fingers, bouncing on the deck and spraying beer.
“Shit,” she said. “Would you get me another one? I’ll clean this up.”
He hesitated, suspecting that she had already drunk quite a bit.
“Sure,” he said. “But how about only one more?”
She made a face, an exaggerated pout. That was unlike her, too.
He went into the kitchen and opened another one of the Kronenbourgs, not happy about his own judgment. But if he had refused, she would probably just go back out to the bars.
When he got outside again, she had disappeared. The beer bottle still lay where it had fallen. Then he saw that the
styrofoam lid of the hot tub was off. Marguerite’s jeans and blouse were lying beside it in a tangle on the deck. She was in the tub, leaning back, arms spread luxuriantly along the rim behind her, toes just peeping over in front.
“Why don’t you come on in?” she said. “It’s fucking freezing out there.”
Monks stopped walking and tried to think of an appropriate response. Nothing came.
“Hey, why be shy?” she said. “We’ve seen each other’s skin before.” She pushed away from the hot tub’s wall and slid toward him through the water.
“Marguerite, what’s going on? This is-silly.”
“I think you’re sexy,” she said mischievously.
Monks was quite sure that whatever was prompting her-an attempt to establish control over him, or assauge her guilt, or wound her mother, or even a reversion to her time with Freeboot, when she had held the exalted status of temple prostitute and been the object of men’s desire-it had nothing to do with his being sexy.
“That’s flattering, but I doubt it,” he said.
“You’d love to fuck me, admit it,” she taunted. “Doesn’t every guy have a fantasy about a mother-daughter team?”
“I’ve got my wrinkles, honey, but that’s not one of them. No offense.”
She stood up suddenly, a long, dewy sheen of smooth skin and wet hair. But her smile was glassy, her eyes wide with false innocence, or maybe just dope.
He turned away hastily. “Here’s your beer,” he said, setting the bottle on the deck and retreating.
“If you bring me that, I’ll tell you something you want to know,” she called after him.
“Put your clothes on,” Monks said, pulling the kitchen door open. “Then tell me.”
