Aggie took an apple to the head. “I much preferred the other game we were playing,” she said, running into the next room.
Wilder ducked behind a sofa to choke down another section of the sandwich before Frumpley could get a lock on him. Sensing he was getting too close, he rewrapped what was left of the sandwich, and bolted into the long hall.
He took several apples to the head. “I forgot he was a sniper in his day!” Wilder, refusing to look a gift horse in the face, took a bite out of one of the apples fallen by his side, and kept running. “You have a hankering for apples, Aggie?”
“No, but I’ll take one of those oranges,” she shouted, still out of view.
“He’s saving them for last. Too soft,” Wilder bellowed back.
“Self-serving bastard,” Aggie yelled, catching the sandwich from Wilder as he entered the library.
“Here come the oranges. California Navel or Spanish Valencia?” Wilder asked.
“I’m rather partial to Valencias,” Aggie confessed. Wilder picked out the Valencia from the fallen oranges, and tossed it to her.
“Quick, let’s run back to the pantry so he can throw pies,” Wilder said. “This fruit will never suffice with my sweet tooth.”
Happy to comply, Aggie followed him back toward the kitchen area with its many support rooms, one of them being the pantry.
Frumpley, huffing and puffing more than before, wobbling, threatening a heart-attack, shouted hoarsely, and feebly, “I’ll get you for this.”
***
Frumpley cleared his throat to get Aart, Ernestina Chadwick’s footman, to notice him.
Aart stood stork-like, his signature move. He could hold his rigid postures for hours on end, and, when there were no eyes on him, sneak a swig off the top of the champagne bottle he was holding without anyone noticing, and return it to the tray with the same darting movement of a heron snatching up a fish. Frumpley had observed two such pulls in the short time he’d been standing directly behind him. He could hardly begrudge the man his small vices. He had many. Better that than one or two big ones. The big ones were left for the landed gentry, the kinds that kept everyone talking as opposed to the kinds of things that didn’t fuel as much gossip. Servants were only allowed forgettable quirks. Lady Harding seemed to live to prove otherwise, but Frumpley was old fashioned. Aart was closer to his ideal of a servant than most. He cleared his throat once again, louder this time, but he was croaking upwind.
Aart, poor chap, had his hands full. Ernestina Chadwick swayed on her rocking chair on the patio. All around her, giant toads and jumping lizards did their very best to get airborne enough to gulp one of her electronic fireflies. The frustrated creatures were jumping themselves to death. Periodically, Aart would sweep away the corpses of the fallen. He had to make sure none of them actually landed on Ernestina, which might cause her to panic, and hurt herself in a desperate effort to lunge out of the chair.
Finally, Frumpley seemed to coordinate his cooing just right with the sweeping away of the latest round of fatigued amphibians and reptiles and Aart’s latest sip from the champagne bottle. The man took more bracers than horses at the Kentucky derby took laps.
Aart sauntered over, and stood beside Frumpley, his eyes still on Ernestina. Say what you want about him, he took his job quite seriously, never slacked. “I’m collecting for Minerva’s birthday celebration.”
“Sorry, old man, I’m busted flat.”
“It does seem to be going around,” Frumpley said incredulous. “I’d hate to bring your drama with Toby in the garage to Lady Harding’s attention. She might make you enact it before crown and country at her next get together. And it is my responsibility to see that she doesn’t fall short of social expectations.”
Aart blanched as white as the sands of a Florida beach. “You can’t bleed a turnip, old man. Sorry.” He returned to his duties, and forgot about Frumpley as if he’d never been there.
Frumpley sighed. “You’re the first failed blackmailer in English history.”
FORTY-FIVE
Frumpley sat on the ornate Roth iron bench staring out at the pond, the bag of breadcrumbs between him and the ducks, squawking because he wasn’t throwing any of the treasure their way.
Lady Harding sat beside him. “I hear reports you’re losing it, Frumpley. I’ll have to hire someone else to manage the house. Not everyone can bring order to this much madness. Maybe I can find a direct descendent of Sir Isaac Newton; they say mathematicians are the best at dealing with chaos of such magnitude.”
“Sorry, mam.”
“Why aren’t you feeding the ducks?” Lady Harding sounded even more undone than the ducks by this quandary.
“I was going to, only, I fear this may end up being Minerva’s birthday gift, rather the best I can do.”
“You could have asked to borrow some money.”
“Never, mam! I’d rather die first.”
“I’m afraid Minerva would insist on it, this being her birthday and all.”
Frumpley simultaneously laughed and cried.
“Just as well. I’ve exhausted my allowance for this month and the next. Whenever I ask the sheikh for more money, he says the Mideast doesn’t have the oil it once had, as if he thinks it’ll take all they have to pay down my credit cards.”
Frumpley laughed.
“Should have gone with one of those Abu Dhabi sheikhs with the hotels that fly higher than airplanes.”
“Strange everyone being out of money at the same time,” Frumpley said, sensing a rat.
“You keep sniffing around, Frumpley, see what you come up with. Greater mysteries have yielded to your ironfisted management before.” She reassuringly patted him on the back of the hand, and returned to the castle.
“By jove, I don’t see why you can’t get to the bottom of this, Frumpley.”
After emptying the breadcrumbs for the ducks all at once, Frumpley shook out the bag, then footed it back to the castle.
En route to the servant’s entrance, he ran into Jaap negotiating a sale with Muriel. He hung back just outside of their peripheral vision.
The ragamuffin demonstrated his wood chipper for her by sliding a frozen cow’s leg down a ramp. Jaap and Muriel watched as the chipper spit out the chunks of meat on the other side no bigger than casino dice. Frumpley observed Muriel peeling money off her wad of bills until it was all gone. And he overheard Jaap say, “I’ll be back this time next month for the follow-up payment.”
And suddenly it dawned on Frumpley what had been going on. “I’ll be a beggar’s uncle.”
***
Aggie, reporting to work the next morning at the servants’ entrance to the Harding estate, saw Muriel take a nose dive into the chipper/shredder, only to be spit out on the other side as mulch.
She screamed like a banshee until she had chased all the demons out of hell.
Then, she took a deep breath, and donned her aquarium shades. “Getting better all the time, Aggie. Each day, better and better.” She resumed her promenade along the path to the kitchen.
***
Frumpley and Minerva stood on the upstairs library terrace and eyed Ermies’ urchins scurrying about the estate grounds.
“They’ve breached our defenses, Minerva. The outer perimeter, anyway.”
After a suitably reverential silence, she said, “So, it’s war then?”
“To put it mildly.”
***
Drew found Robin in their bedroom staring absently at a music box, watching the dancer twirl. “So how goes it with your superstars?”
Without looking up from the music box, she said, “They’re going dark on me; their incorrigible dispositions are catching up with them.”
He resisted the obvious comeback. More charitably, he said, “How do you sort the winners from the losers?”
She sighed. “Based on their response to my thought projections. Of course, as depleted as I am, hard to know if that’s a true sign or not anymore.”
“Looks like unt
il you contend with your own demons, you’re not going to be able to continue to reach out to them.”
She gazed up at him, not with eyes afire, as he expected, but with a pleading look.
Against his better instincts, he took pity on her. “You’re going to have to find yourself another source of power, if that overflying plane’s mind-bending ray, and the vortex the property is sighted on, are no longer enough.”
She snorted dismissively, then her expression changed. “You might be on to something.”
“All the same, if you continue to put your own spiritual growth on hold to help them, you can bet there will be a price to pay.”
When she met his eyes again, he saw the fear in them. But it wasn’t for herself. “Absent locating that new power source, I’m more concerned about just how out of hand things can get if the Renaissance types continue to spiral out of control.”
FORTY-SIX
“Are you getting a bead on this guy?” Cliff shook the snowflake dome, made it snow over the Chinese pagoda perched on a sky-bound promontory. The snow collected on the branches in the bonsai gardens terraced into the hillsides around the monastery. He set the globe down and picked up the picture of a happy family vacationing at the Grand Canyon. “He must be the most well-adjusted serial killer in the history of the world.”
“Technically, he’s a mass murderer,” Piper explained.
Piper yanked the tablecloth off the dining table, revealing the display case of guns recessed into the oval oak table for six.
“How did you know?”
“Do you see any other dangling cloth in this place? Not even curtains.” Piper opened the Chinese in-lay dowry case carved out of teak doubling as a coffee table big enough to stow a body, found there instead a collection of automatic rifles. “Nah, don’t have a clue about this guy.”
“What cued you about the Chinese box?”
“Who has a coffee table just big enough to hide their deepest darkest secrets?”
Cliff more closely surveyed the gun collections. “I wouldn’t put too much stock in those. My grandmother’s gun collection is bigger. Of course, she’s Republican. I’m getting a real Democratic vibe from this guy. He didn’t even splurge for a decent frame on the Leroy Neman. It’s a copy, no less.” Cliff ogled the poster on the wall, shook his head.
“Very funny.”
“No, I’m serious, my grandmother’s collection really is bigger. She has a gun fetish. Takes a different one out each night to fondle. She can’t actually fire any of the guns. I don’t think they’re even loaded.”
“When I want to get to know you better, I’ll break into your place, rifle through your things.” Piper passed his hand over seldom-disturbed surfaces, his fingers came away spotless each time.
“Sorry, just making conversation. Tracking mass murderers is turning out to be duller than I imagined. Want to order pizza?”
When Piper threw him an annoyed look, Cliff said defensively, “Unless you go in for that vegan shit he’s got in the fridge. He’s got tofu carved into the shape of a lobster, which is the only proof I’ve found so far that something pushed him over the edge.”
Piper restrained a smile. “You notice anything else?”
“Yeah, more bits and pieces that don’t fit together.”
“Our Mr. Brim—”
“I prefer the Barroom Butcher,” Cliff said. “I can’t stand vagueness.”
“Our Mr. Brimley, does he strike you as a clean freak?”
“Nah, this has professional maid service written all over it. No sign of the wife and kids, or any of the messiness of life. This place is more of a shrine.”
“Exactly,” Piper said.
“The wife left him two years ago, the daughter’s been in a cancer ward for the last three… If he was going to lose it over any of that, he had plenty of time before now.” Cliff had the display case open on the dining table, the glass lid propped up with a built in arm, the way the hood of a car is designed to give access to the engine. He pulled back the chamber on the SIG P228, smelled the barrel. “M-Pro 7 solvent.” He set it down, pointed to the pistol beside it. “See this?” he said. “It was a failed experiment. The Browning Hi-Power has two flaws. The standard trigger pull is heavy, especially for a single-action pistol.” He picked it up and handled it to demonstrate. “In addition, the pistol has a tendency to ‘bite’ the web of the shooter's hand, between the thumb and forefinger.” He depressed the trigger to illustrate the point, then licked the self-inflicted wound. “All of the above, suggests our guy’s been out a while. So I’m not sure I’d blame any of his current moodiness on discharge disorder, either. So why do you think he picked now to lose it?”
Piper shook his head. “It’s like a Kansas tornado. You know it’s coming, you just don’t know when.” He ran his eyes over the apartment for the big picture view, but nothing new suggested itself.
“Let’s talk it out. We’re not going to graduate to Orchid Guy if we don’t make it past these minor-league maniacs.”
“Orchid Guy? How do you know about him?” Piper said.
“Same way you do; your friendly neighborhood computer nerd. That, and hero worship, I guess. Everyone wants to be that smooth. That good at something, doesn’t really matter what it is.”
“Except to us. Is that where this is going?” Piper asked. “Preying on ever-bigger predators? Until we’re the biggest sharks in the sea? And we have no choice but to turn on one another?”
“It seems like a healthier outlet for our emotional neediness than this guy’s solution.”
“We’re supposed to become more human over the long haul, not less. I think that’s the point of life.”
“I put a premium on technical excellence over life itself,” Cliff confessed. He broke down the automatic rifle in his hands into more component pieces than Piper could imagine anyone bothering with when building the thing. He did the same with three other weapons, then mixed the parts from the different rifles to assemble a unique fireable amalgam all his own.
“The road to hell isn’t paved with good intentions. It’s paved with the quest for technical excellence.”
“So we go as far as hell’s gate, and then we turn back. The journey’s everything, right?” Cliff got a bead on Piper with his uniquely assembled rifle.
“You like to goad me.”
Cliff, finished centering the viewfinder, depressed the trigger. The hammer landed harmlessly with a click. He threw Piper the weapon.
Piper returned the favor, put Cliff square within the gun’s sights, and fired. “Probably,” he said, and threw the weapon back at him. Cliff smiled wickedly.
Piper canvassed the apartment again, picked up the globe Cliff had set down. “Like the rest of us, he has his allotment of things he does to keep himself in check. A little Eastern mysticism; meditation, perhaps.”
He set the globe down, picked up the family picture taken at the Grand Canyon. “Power vacations were probably the number two coping mechanism on the list.”
He passed his hands over the shelf which held the knickknacks. “I’m guessing the woodshop is in the garage.”
“He made the bookcase? Nice.” Cliff opened the kitchen door to the garage to confirm, saw the shop tools where a pair of cars should have been. “God, you’re good.” He closed the door, found his place at Piper’s side again.
They played a father-son role they enjoyed with one another, taking turns in the father and son roles. It didn’t take a genius to realize Cliff, like Piper, had been born to an absentee father, which meant they’d spend the rest of their lives filling that void, wondering why they could have been abandoned, wondering about the type of person that could do such a thing. And always, to get inside the head of “the other” better, they’d alternate between the father and the son’s perspectives. Even the gorgeous women in their lives were an effort to probe the psyche of the father figure, the “role model” for the ideal male, forcibly created in the absence of the father figure to do the role mode
ling. Thus, the idealization never held for long, too fragile, too hard to believe in any one version of it. The role model had to be torn down and rebuilt again and again; the position had to be earned from one minute to the next. An ongoing rehearsal, an audition without end, never actually casting the part. Piper knew what he was in for, even if Cliff didn’t. But the formula was well understood in criminal psychology for a reason: it had held up time and time again before all contenders. So why fight it?
“The point of divergence for our Mr…” Piper said.
“Barroom Butcher.”
“Mr. Butcher,” Piper said, “is that where most people just keep adding to the coping mechanisms as the stress level rises, to give them more tools in their carpenter’s box to fix any problem…” Piper eyed the elliptical machine aimed at the flat screen TV. “Our Mr. Butcher instead just kept adding straws to the camel’s back, to see when he’d break, exposing himself to new dangers.” He passed his hand over his Navy SEALs picture. A medal hung in the picture frame over the picture. “He kept pushing himself towards the inevitable, upset by the staying power of his stoicness, his ability to stuff his emotions, in order not to eat away at himself. But ultimately the military rigidity that held him together, the numbed emotions, the severed ties to all humanizing memories, proved a fragile defense.”
Piper eyed the archery target in the back yard, the other evidence of a military training ground; a booby-trapped obstacle course, acres of forest with God knew what surprises in store for them. “When we come up against him, we’ll want to taunt him with little digs about his past, expose the many regrets he surely must have over things left undone, or done improperly, until he breaks. He needs to build to that release. In the mad charge for us, he’ll be at his most vulnerable.”
“Though clearly no pushover,” Cliff said, “judging from the fourteen in the bar he gunned down, one shot each, despite hopeless angles and trajectories.”
Renaissance 2.0: The Entire Series (books 1 thru 5) Page 156
