by Todd Borg
“No, and I don’t want to.”
“They look quite pretty in the woods at night, the shell colors illuminated from inside.” She held up the toothpick and its millipede remains. “The cousins of the girl who ate this guy from the inside out are the pink glowworms. They eat snails.”
“And I thought a snail’s shell was for protection,” I said. “Instead they’re just lamp shades so we don’t get blinded by the glowworms as they eat their dinner.”
Street beamed. “You could be an entomologist.”
“And if I were, what useful information would I deduce from such arcane knowledge?”
“I don’t know.” Street looked around. “Maybe just that this pickup truck has recently been down to lower elevations, because the California Phengodids don’t live up this high.
“Ah. Be a bummer if I didn’t know that.”
Street nodded with earnestness.
SIX
Street, Spot, and I went to Street’s condo. She got out of the Jeep and walked up to her door like a normal person. I struggled just to stand up straight. Street had her boots off and was already opening a bottle of wine by the time I got inside.
She poured a glass and handed it to me.
“Will a Seghesio Rockpile Zin work for loosening stiff muscles?” she said.
“We can always try,” I said, and sipped a delicious jammy wine with such an intense garnet color that it would shame any gemstone. “Tastes great. Full report in the morning.”
The sun was getting low in the sky, and the air coming through the screen was cold. While Street did food stuff in the kitchen, I sat on her big chair, feet up on the hassock, and drank my wine. Spot was already asleep in front of the cold fireplace. Some time later, Street came out to say something and woke me up.
“Dinner’s ready.”
She brought me a bowl of chili with crackers on the side, and set it on the arm of my chair. She set a tall glass of milk on the other arm. It was delicious. The only problem was that I yawned continuously as I ate.
“Maybe you’d better go home to bed,” she said.
“Good idea.” When I was done eating, I got up to go. I was kissing Street goodbye when my cell rang. I answered.
“Hello, Mr. McKenna? This is Ryan Lear. I’m up at the lake, now. You were going to come by this evening?”
After my big horse-riding debut, I’d forgotten. “Yeah. Of course. Tell me again where I’m going?”
He recited his address for me. South of Cave Rock about a mile, on the lake side of Highway 50. Spot and I were there ten minutes later.
I left Spot in the Jeep, sound asleep in back. I got out, feeling as stiff-legged as Belle had demonstrated early that morning. After my all-day ride on Paint, I tried to walk normally, but I couldn’t manage it.
Judging by the sizable lakeshore house, Ryan looked to be a typical bankbook baby living at mom and dad’s spread. The place was a large, semi-modern house on the water. It would have seemed quite out-sized but for comparison with a real mansion on the next lot to the north.
To the south of Ryan’s house, close enough to easily see in Ryan’s windows, was a log cabin. On the front porch of the cabin was a seat made from an old chairlift. On the seat sat an old man wearing a winter jacket to ward off the chill of the high altitude evening.
I waved and said, “How are you?”
He waved, but he didn’t say anything.
To the lake side of the cabin was a construction site. Long trenches for foundation, bundles of rebar, piles of crushed rock. All around the perimeter of the construction was the mandated, temporary, Day-Glo orange fencing and rolled straw mats to absorb and prevent construction runoff.
I walked past a kid-sized red bicycle leaning against a Lexus SUV, and headed for the front door. A little Douglas squirrel with a silver dollar-sized shock of white hair on its back sat on the mat by the door casually making a big mess out of a Jeffrey pine cone. He screamed at me, waited until I got close, then finally ran away carrying the large cone in his teeth, as I went up the broad front steps and pressed the doorbell. I heard the deadbolt being turned a few seconds later. The big oak door opened until it was restrained by a chain at eye level and another at knee level.
“Hello?” The young man was striking, with heavy arched eyebrows on a strong brow, projecting cheekbones, broad white teeth. But he came across like a skinny high-school kid who was afraid to look you in the eye. Even his baritone voice cracked with nerves.
“I’m Owen McKenna.”
“Hold on a sec.”
He shut the door, unhooked the chains and reopened the door. In full view, he looked more like he was in his mid-twenties, but with the ashen quality of someone who plays video games 18 hours a day and never sees the sun. He didn’t look at me, but instead stared past me to the left and then to the right, peering out to the road and the forest. His eyes seemed to flit back and forth in a head that nearly vibrated with nervousness. He reminded me of a twitchy chipmunk, constantly quivering, ready to bolt in an instant should a raptor swoop down out of the sky.
“Come in,” he said.
As soon as I was through the door he shut it, turned the lock and latched both of the chains.
He turned and reached out to shake my hand. His hand was soft and moist and clammy.
“You can sit if you like.” He pointed to the big great room ahead of me. “But first I should give you this.” He handed me a couple of photos of what I remembered would be his friends Eli Nathan and Jeanie Samples. He also handed me a hairbrush with lots of hair still in it.
“I hope that will work for scenting search dogs.”
“Perfect,” I said. I held it up to catch the light, and knew that a search would not be necessary. The hair was bright red.
SEVEN
Ryan waved his hand as if to push me toward the great room to sit down.
The great room projected out of the lake-side of the house, and it had windows on three sides. It was bigger than my log cabin and had an excess of furniture. I sat down on a leather chair and set the photos and hairbrush on an end table.
“Unless you don’t want to sit,” Ryan said, too late. “That’s okay. Whatever you want. Sorry, I don’t know much about real world stuff like being a host.”
“What world do you know?”
“Besides the world of computer games, I’m a biologist by training. A medical futurist by vocation. Some would call me a bio-geek. But before I tell you about what I think is happening to me, I need to explain something. Full disclosure and all that.”
His eyes darted around the room, stopped for an intense moment on me, took flight again. He rubbed his hands over each other repeatedly, as if washing them.
“You can sit, too, Ryan. Relax, and we’ll talk.”
“Oh. Right.” He sat in a facing chair, put one foot up over the other knee, held onto his lower leg with both hands, then put the foot back down on the floor. He radiated discomfort.
“Anyway,” he said, “I’ve been under a lot of personal stress. And for a long time I’ve had a little problem with obsessive compulsive behavior and paranoia.”
I didn’t expect that comment.
“We all have moments of thinking things are stacked against us,” I said.
He nodded with vigor. “In my case, it would be, um, more than what most people experience.”
“Maybe explain that?”
“The doctors usually refer to it as suffering from paranoid delusions. Like I’m crazy.”
“Are you crazy?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. I’m out at the end of the bell curve, I admit. My thoughts have been paranoid in the past. But it’s probably been three years since it was a problem.”
I nodded, unsure of how to respond to that. I decided to be straight. “Isn’t that what a paranoid person would say? ‘Not this time? This time my thoughts are real’?”
“Yeah. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what a paranoid person would say.”
“So wh
at makes you think this time is different?”
“The things that have happened.” By this time, he’d crossed and uncrossed his ankles three or four times.
“Which are,” I said.
“A note I got. Eli Nathan’s death at Cave Rock. Jeanie Sample’s disappearance, and when I was up for Eli’s funeral, a vision I had of a wild Mustang in the forest.”
“What do you mean, a vision of a wild Mustang?”
“Just that. A vision. I’d just come up to the lake, and I went for a walk down my street to get some fresh air. The sun was hot and I felt a little dizzy. I hadn’t eaten since I left the Bay Area. I stopped in the shade of the woods. I sensed movement in the forest. In the far distance, between the tree trunks came the shape of a horse’s head. It had a blaze in the shape of an inverted triangle. It was in a spot of sunlight. Then it vanished.”
“What made you think this horse was a wild Mustang and not just an ordinary horse?”
“I know horses a bit. This guy seemed wild.”
“Other people have seen the Mustang,” I said.
Ryan stared at me. “So I’m not the only one. At any rate, the horse was a bad sign for me. Wild Mustangs don’t live in Tahoe. He probably came from two mountain ranges east of here. So it is an upset of nature. It suggests something deeper and more important is amiss.”
Ryan was agitated, doing the hand-washing movement, blinking his eyes.
“What exactly do you think these various events mean?”
“I think they are all connected to this.” He walked over to a built-in bookcase and reached some papers off of the highest shelf. He handed them to me.
It was several layers of newspaper. I unfolded it to see the San Francisco Chronicle Obituary page. Stapled to it was a half-sheet of copy paper with computer printing on it. All caps. Times Roman.
“YOU’LL BE ON THIS PAGE SOON”
“Where did this come from?” I asked.
“My Sunday paper in the paper box at my house in Palo Alto.”
“Have you had any other specific threats?”
“No,” Ryan said.
“Why tell me about your delusions?”
“Because I did some research on you. I made some calls and got directed to a Sergeant O’Hara in Palo Alto. I guess he used to work with you in San Francisco. He told me that you are very thorough. So I realized that when you looked into my situation, you would discover my history of psychiatric problems. Then you would naturally think that this was just another case of delusions. But in telling you up front, I thought that would make me seem more forthright and believable.”
“Or,” I said, “it could be a sophisticated way of getting me to believe your delusions. But regardless of whether I thought they were legitimate, wouldn’t you assume I’d look into your concerns anyway, just to collect my fee?”
Ryan shook his head. “No. Because O’Hara told me that you are principled.”
“He said that? Principled?”
“Yes. But he did put a kind of unpleasant inflection on the word. So I got the message that you wouldn’t pursue something if you thought it was frivolous even if it meant a lot of money. That was what made me think I should call you.”
“If I knew about your past delusions, I might be better at believing your current thoughts.”
Ryan thought about it, his eyes flinching as if bats were flying around his head, and he was trying not to move.
“It started around puberty, in middle school. I was a skinny weakling then, just like I am now. There were one or two kids that were out to get me. They hit me, threw things at me. Later, there were more kids that picked on me. I stopped going to school because of my fears that I would be beaten up. My father made me see the school psychologist. She told me that my persecution was simple bullying. She explained that bullying was bad, but that it wasn’t anything more than that.
“Later, in college, it got worse. Not only were the other kids out to get me, but first one professor and then another went after me. I went to a shrink who explained that I was having paranoid delusions. He put me on medication. I was inconsistent in taking my pills, and it got worse. I began to think that the shrink was out to get me, too, so I went to another shrink. She concurred with the first. It was then that I believed that they were conspiring together. After a few months it got so bad that I couldn’t function. I never left my dorm room, and I pretty much stopped eating.
“My roommate was Eli Nathan. He saved me by tricking me into going out for a cup of coffee. He took me to a café where he’d assembled a group of people who knew me, along with two doctors I’d never met. They did a kind of intervention, eventually getting me to agree to sign myself into a hospital. After a lot of drugs and therapy, they got me stabilized. I’ve been in therapy and on medication ever since. I’m also on an exercise program. I started walking on a treadmill. I have one here and in the Bay Area. I believe that walking has helped more than the drugs.”
“Are these current thoughts you’re having similar to what you used to have?”
“That someone is out to get me? Yes. Very similar. The difference is that this time there is physical evidence. The first and main incident was the death of Eli. I believe it was a murder staged to look like an accident. Eli was my best, and longest friend.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. Ryan had lost not just one friend, but probably two friends in a short period of time. He would be dealing with a great deal of stress and pain and misery. But for him to think his friends’ deaths were the result of someone tormenting him was extreme.
“Look, Ryan,” I said, talking slowly, carefully. “When someone dies by accident, and another person believes it was a murder connected to them, that’s getting way off the charts into the land of delusions. I think you need to talk to a doctor, not an investigator.”
“But what if it’s true?” Ryan’s voice had risen to a near-shout.
I wanted to to change the subject for a few moments. I stood and looked out at the lake in the approaching twilight. A shiny wooden boat in a hoist at the large dock reflected the sunset afterglow over the mountains to the west of the lake.
“Good looking watercraft,” I said. “What is it? A Gar Wood? Chris-Craft?”
“It’s a Riva. It came with the house. But I’ve never used it.”
I couldn’t believe he’d never taken it out.
“What is the circular stone arrangement near the shore?”
“A custom fire pit.”
“Looks like a great spot to have a campfire and watch the setting sun across the lake.”
“I haven’t tried it. Actually, I’ve never had a campfire.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Just that. I’ve never done it.”
“You’ve never sat around a campfire? Roasted hotdogs? S’mores?”
He shook his head. “Anyway, fires are dangerous. Unless you live in a rainforest or something, you could burn something down.”
“From here it looks like the fire pit is surrounded by a large stone sitting area, and there is nothing combustible to speak of within forty or fifty feet. Even that closest Jeffrey pine is a good distance away, and its lowest branches are probably sixty feet off the ground. We’ve even had rain this summer. Just last week. They’ve never announced a burning ban.”
“There’s a lot of things I haven’t done,” Ryan said, his voice small and sad.
A sound came from another room. A young girl in the age range of someone just starting school came running in carrying an open notebook computer.
“Ryan! Ryan, look!” She saw me and stopped. She had eyes like in a Disney animated feature, large and round and so dark that you couldn’t see her pupils. Her hair was black as obsidian, long and coarse and shiny like a horse’s tail.
“Lily, this is Mr. McKenna.”
“Hi, Lily,” I said. “You can call me Owen. I’m glad to meet you.”
“Hello, Owen. And the pleasure is all mine.” Her eyes sparkled. She shifted the c
omputer under her left arm, and we shook, her tiny hand lost in mine.
“Where did you hear that phrase?” Ryan said to her, “‘The pleasure is all mine’?” He was visibly more relaxed now that Lily was in the room.
“That old movie you watched last night. Remember when Cary Grant met the woman pilot? She said that.”
“You have a good memory,” I said.
Lily nodded. “Yes, I do. And I have lots of good ideas, too.”
“I bet you do,” I said, already hoping she’d run for president some day. “What’s on your computer?”
“A game. I won. I got awarded the Silver Venus insignia and bonus points for my next game!” She showed the computer to me, then turned it toward Ryan.
“That’s great, Lily. Maybe you should play another game while Owen and I talk.”
“This time I’ll win the Gold!” As she turned, her eyes flashed up toward the windows, looked for a second, then looked away.
I turned to look at what she’d seen. The orange glow was now a sliver beneath the midnight blue of the sky above. Maybe she looked because of the pretty colors.
She left.
“Your daughter is a smart kid. How old is she?”
“Thank you. Lily is actually my sister. She’s six.” Ryan made a small smile, the first since I’d arrived.
Ryan’s personality had undergone a transformation. He’d stopped flinching for the moment, and he was much calmer. If I ended up working for him, I would want to have Lily around as much as possible.
“Ryan!” came Lily’s shout from around the corner.
“What?”
“Look out the window. There’s a big animal.”
“Sammy the squirrel?”
“No,” Lily said. “Sammy’s by the door. This is in a car. By the post light.”
“That’s my dog,” I said.
Lily came running into the room. “Can I go see him?”
“No,” Ryan said. “You shouldn’t approach strange dogs.”
“In this case, she should,” I said. “If I’m going to work for you, then you both need to meet Spot.”
