Dominion

by Bentley Little

  When she did turn around a moment later and saw him, he pretended to be surprised. He cleared his throat. “Hi,” he said. “I didn’t recognize you.”

  She looked surprised too, but she smiled when she saw him. She had a nice smile, he thought. A friendly smile. A real smile.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “My name’s Dion. I’m in your Mythology class.” He knew it was stupid the moment he said it, but there was no way to take his sentence back.

  She laughed. Her laugh was warm, casual. “I know who you are. I

  corrected your paper, remember?”

  He reddened, unsure of what to say or how to respond, afraid he would say something even dumber.

  “I was really impressed by how well you did on the test,” she added.

  “Yeah, well, thanks.”

  “No, I mean it. You really know your stuff.”

  The line moved forward, and Dion realized with something like panic that it was his turn to say something, but he could think of nothing to say.

  There were at least six people between Penelope and the food. This was his one and only chance; he’d better think of something good, or they’d wait the rest of the time in silence and it would be all over. He glanced toward Kevin, who gave him a thumbs-up sign.

  What the hell was he supposed to say?

  It was Penelope’s friend who saved him.

  “I don’t remember seeing you here before,” she said, “Are you new?”

  He relaxed. Now he was home free. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m from Arizona. My mom and I just moved here a little over a week ago.”

  “It must be tough to come to a new school,” Penelope said.

  He looked at her. Was he imagining it, or was there more than just casual interest in her expression, in her tone of voice? She had spoken almost wistfully, as if she understood how he felt, as if she had been there herself.

  As if she cared.

  No, he was just reading nuances which were not there.

  “Yes,” he said. “It is tough. I don’t know anyone yet.”

  “You know us,” Penelope’s friend said, smiling.

  Dion smiled back. “That’s true.”

  “And you know that Kevin Harte,” Penelope said. There was something in the way she said “that Kevin Harte” which implied that she did not like his new friend.

  “Well, I just met him,” Dion said.

  And then they were through the line and at the food, their opportunity for conversation at an end. Penelope took a covered bowl of salad and a can of V8 from the buffet. Dion grabbed a hamburger, a small cup of fries, and two Cokes, one for him, one for Kevin.

  “I’ll see you Monday,” Penelope said, heading with her friend over to a cash register. She smiled that radiant smile. “It’s nice to meet you.”

  “Yeah,” her friend said.

  “Yeah,” Dion echoed. He wanted to say something else, wanted to invite the both of them to Kevin’s table, wanted to ask Penelope if she would like to study with him some time, wanted to ensure that they would talk again, but he did not know how. He paid the two dollars, watched the girls walk away.

  It was a start, and he should have felt good, but for some reason he felt disappointed, sort of let down. It made no sense. Things had gone well. It was the first week and they were already talking, but he still felt depressed about the encounter. He made his way through the crowd toward Kevin.

  “So,” his friend said, grinning, “how’d it go? She dive for your ding-dong?”

  “Asked for it by name,” Dion said, setting down the tray.

  Kevin laughed, almost spitting out the sip of Coke he’d taken. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Penelope?” he said, laughing.

  Dion smiled, chuckled, and then laughed himself. “Yeah,” he said.

  Already he felt better. He picked up his hamburger. “And her friend wants you.”

  “In her dreams,” Kevin said.

  Dion laughed. He thought of Penelope. Things had gone well, he told himself. Things might work out.

  He unwrapped his hamburger and settled down to eat.

  Lieutenant David Horton used the landlord’s key to open the heavy glass door and stepped inside Something Old. The antique shop was empty, its dead air silent save for the low drone of outside noise. He was followed inside immediately by the two uniforms. “Mr. Williams!” he called out.

  He waited a beat. “Anybody here?” His voice died flatly in the stillness.

  Horton nodded to the policemen behind him. “Check it out,” he said.

  The two officers spread out, taking both sides of the front desk, entering the back room in tandem. They emerged a moment later, shaking their heads.

  “Check the aisles,” the lieutenant said. He lit a cigarette, watching his men take parellel paths away from the center of the store.

  The antique shop had been closed for a week. No crime there. But it was highly unusual, noted by owners of several of the adjoining businesses.

  And when rent had come due a few days ago and the landlord received neither a check nor an excuse from the usually punctual antique dealer, he’d suspected something was up. He’d called Williams’ house, gotten no answer, called Williams’ sister in Salinas, learned that she hadn’t heard from him for over a week. Then he’d called the police.

  Disappearances were not that unusual in the Wine Country. Northern California’s reputation for fostering a laid-back lifestyle, combined with outsiders’ perceptions of what life in the valley was like, attracted to the area a lot of flakes and transients, drifters who saw the wine industry only in terms of its alcoholic output, not realizing that mundane work went into producing recreational beverages, that life here was not one long, constant party.

  But Victor Williams was not a transient. He was a local businessman with roots in the valley. And Horton had serious doubts that he’d just up and leave on a whim, telling no one, letting his store remain closed. It was out of character, it didn’t fit.

  Which meant, Horton thought to himself, that Vie Williams was probably dead.

  The lieutenant took a drag on his cigarette, sighed, exhaling smoke.

  There had been a time when he’d hated this job, when the novelty of wearing a badge and wielding a little power had worn off, when the fact that his work consisted of looking up society’s asshole day after day had really begun to get to him. He had almost quit then, had almost told the department to Johnny Paycheck it, but he’d realized that he was not qualified to do anything other than police work; he had no other skills and was too old to start over.

  Now he just tried not to think about it. He didn’t regret lost career opportunities, didn’t piss and moan that he’d never finished college, didn’t compare himself to other men of his age who were more successful.

  He simply put in his hours, did his job, and counted the days toward retirement.

  And he bought a lottery ticket twice a week.

  A man had to have something to hope for.

  “Lieutenant! Over here!”

  Horton turned around, taking the cigarette out of his mouth. He saw Deets, the youngest uniform, frantically beckoning him from down the end of an aisle. He dropped the cigarette, stubbed it out, and hurried toward the rookie. “What did you—?” Find, he was going to say, but there was no reason to ask. The floor in this section of the shop was stained brown with dried blood, forming a huge irregular amoeba pattern against the dusty faded slats of the hardwood finish. Small speckles of blood could be seen on the lower portion of a beveled mirror, though the droplets were smeared and it was clear that someone had tried to wipe them away.

  Bentley Little Protruding from underneath a piece of furniture was a small, ragged, fleshy segment of torn muscle.

  “Jesus,” Horton breathed. He glanced toward Me Comber, standing on the other side of Deets. “Call the lab,” he ordered. “Get some dusters and photogs over here now.”

  The younger cop nodded, frightened, and hurried down the aisl
e toward the front desk.

  “Don’t touch anything,” the lieutenant told Deets.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And stop that ‘sir’ crap. This isn’t the goddamn marines.”

  “Okay, sir, uh, Lieutenant.”

  Horton looked at the rookie, shook his head. He reached into his pocket for another cigarette, pulled out the package, but found that it was empty. He crumpled it up, put it back in his pocket, and looked wistfully up the aisle to where he’d dropped his other cigarette. It was going to be a long afternoon.

  After dinner, Penelope went out to the Garden. The air was warmer than it was inside the air-conditioned house, and more humid, but to her it felt wonderful. She sat on the edge of the fountain, bracing her arms against the rounded concrete, and leaned back, peering upward. The winery was far enough from town that the lights of the business district did not seep into then: air space, and the sky above was a deep purple, dotted with patterned clusters of millions of microscopic stars. Her eyes picked out the Big Dipper, the North Star at its corner, and her gaze swept across Orion’s belt and the Little Dipper to the dot of pinkish light that was Mars.

  She had always been fascinated by the stars, the moon, the planets, the movements of the heavens. It seemed amazing to her that the progress of celestial bodies had been noted and charted so long ago, the patterns of such an immense canvas identified and understood by peoples who had not even known the rudimentary rules of science grasped by today’s grade schoolers. She had taken an astronomy course last semester, hoping to learn more about the subject, but had been disappointed to discover that the class dealt more with the mathematics of trajectories than with the background stories of heavenly bodies and their earthbound discoverers.

  Which was one of the reasons she had signed up for, and really looked forward to, this Mythology class. Glancing through the book after the first meeting, she had seen that three full chapters were devoted to the constellations, and she had read those chapters immediately.

  This was what she’d wanted to learn.

  She had also met Dion in the class.

  She found herself thinking of him now, just as she’d thought about him at odd times during the week. She didn’t know Dion, didn’t know anything about him, but there was something about the way he looked, the way he talked, the way he acted, which interested her. He was obviously intelligent, but he also seemed very nice, very down-to-earth, although that was not a quality to which she would have expected to be attracted.

  Did he like her? She thought he might. Twice during the week she had caught him staring at her from the next seat over when he thought she wasn’t looking, and he had always looked immediately away, acting guilty, as though he had been caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to do.

  And then today at lunch he had actually spoken to her. Vella, afterward, had said that Dion was obviously interested, but Penelope was not sure she could read that much into the few words that they had spoken together. The suggestion had flattered her, though, and the rest of the day she had found herself tuning out her teachers, going over each sentence they had spoken, looking for clues that backed up Vella’s hypothesis.

  Penelope looked up into the sky. She smiled. Maybe it was fate. Maybe their signs had coincided, and that’s why they had met in this place at this time.

  She closed her eyes. Several times today she had tried to imagine what it would be like to go on a date with Dion, but the image just wouldn’t come. It was not that she wasn’t attracted to him, or at least interested, but she had never before gone on a date, and it was hard to imagine herself carrying on the sort of vacuous conversation favored by high school daters in movies.

  Movies.

  All of her perceptions of dates had been formed by film, books, or television.

  She heard a soft click and opened her eyes, sitting up. Mother Felice opened the sliding glass door and smiled at her. “Maybe we should bring your bed out here.”

  “And my dresser and TV.”

  “A refrigerator and microwave?”

  They both laughed. Mother Felice crossed the gravel and sat down on the rim of the fountain next to Penelope. The two of them said nothing for a while, simply enjoying the quiet and each other’s company. They often sat this way. It would have driven Mother Margeaux mad to sit for so long without doing something actively productive, and Molher Margaret and Mother Sheila would have had to talk, get up, move around. She would not have wanted to be alone with Mother Janine. But Mother Felice enjoyed the quiet, was thankful for silence after spending all day in the hurricane of the household. She was like her daughter in that way, which only served to reinforce Penelope’s theory.

  Mother Felice leaned her head back, trying to reduce the tension in her neck, then sat up. She looked casually at her daughter. “Is anything wrong?” she asked.

  Penelope frowned, puzzled. “No. Why?”

  Her mother smiled. “Well, you seemed kind of distant today at dinner. I

  just … well, we sort of thought … I mean, we were wondering if maybe you’d met someone. You know, a boy.”

  Was it that obvious? She hadn’t thought she’d acted any differently than usual. She looked at her mother. She wanted to tell the truth, and probably would have if her mother hadn’t made mention of the rest of the family, but that “we” implied that the subject had been discussed, that Mother Felice had been sent out here deliberately. She had no doubt that Mother Felice had been the one to notice—she was always the most observant in emotional matters—but this obvious collusion, this attempt to invade her privacy, no matter how well intentioned, hardened her against revealing anything. “No,” she said.

  Mother Felice frowned. She looked confused, as though she hadn’t understood the answer. “Haven’t you even met someone who looks like he might be interesting?”

  Penelope shrugged. “It’s too early to tell.” She shook her head. “God, Mother, it’s only been a week. What do you expect?”

  “You’re right, you’re right.” Her mother’s voice was understandingly apologetic, her smile sympathetic, but there was still a slight look of mystification on her face.

  They were silent again, although the silence this time was not quite as comfortable. Penelope stared up at the recently risen moon, yellow and disproportionately large above the hills in the east.

  When she was little, around eight or nine, she had seen the movie A

  Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court with Bing Crosby. It had been light entertainment, a romantic musical comedy, but the thing that had made the biggest impression on her, that had stayed with her for years to come, had been the fact that Bing had been able to save his life by remembering the date of a solar eclipse, passing himself off as a powerful magician, pretending to the medieval men and women intending to burn him at the stake that he was able to make the sun disappear by simply making absurd hand gestures at the appropriate time. It had been a terrifying scene to her, and had been the cause of many a nightmare-filled sleep time. Throughout grammar school she had been obsessed with learning the dates for solar and lunar eclipses, past and present, just in case a similar situation ever happened to her.

  There was still some of that fear in her as she looked up at the moon now. Her rational mind told her that it was merely earth’s satellite, a dead, inanimate orb reflecting back the refracted light of the sun, but on a deeper, more visceral level she could not help feeling a little intimidated by it, as though, like the moon in a children’s book, it was sentient and possessed some sort of magic that could affect her life.

  The feeling was strange but not unpleasant, and she was grateful that even the cold facts of astronomy had not been able to completely dissolve for her the mystery of the night sky.

  Penelope looked over at her mother. “Do you like looking at the moon?”

  she asked. “Looking at stars?”

  Her mother smiled. “Sometimes.”

  Her father had liked to look at the stars.

  Or
so her mothers had told her.

  She found herself thinking of her father. She did not think of him often, and sometimes she felt guilty about that, but she had not really known him; to her he had been little more than a face in an old photograph. He’d been a handsome man, that she knew. Tall and broad-shouldered, with longish brown hair and a mustache, he looked in his picture as if he could be either a carpenter or a college professor.

  There was about him that appearance of both intelligence and physicality which suggested that he was equally at home with books and tools, adept at both mental and manual labor; a romantic assumption which was born out by the descriptions of her mothers.

  When she was younger, her mothers had talked about her father a lot, answering her myriad questions, invoking his perceived wishes in regard to discipline and learning, endeavoring to make his presence felt through affectionate stories and detailed reminiscences. But as she’d grown older, the talk had ceased, as if her father had been an imaginary entity like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, invented to aid a period of her development, as if the spectre of his life had performed its function and outlived its usefulness. By the time she’d hit her teens, the subject of her father seldom, if ever, came up in discussion, and her infrequent questions concerning him were often redirected elsewhere.

  It was all very confusing to her, and sensing the shift in attitude, she had stopped mentioning him at all. Gradually, the details of her father’s life began to blur and fade, blending in with the other secondhand stories of childhood.

  The details of his death, however, remained sharp and clear.

  Her father had been killed shortly after she’d beerf born, brutally murdered, torn apart in the wild woods beyond the fence by a stray band of rabid wolves. She knew the story by heart. It had been spring, late April, and her father had gone out for one of the evening strolls he enjoyed so much. Mother Felice and Mother Sheila had been preparing dinner in the kitchen, with Mother Janine watching television in the next room. Mother Margeaux had been in the office with Mother Margaret.

  All of them, even Mother Margeaux and Mother Margaret, had heard the screams, and all had come running out, only to see the gray-white blur of wolves savagely attacking a human figure on the dirt path which led between the tall trees. The screams had already stopped, but though it was night, they could clearly see in the distance the fall of her father’s upraised arm, the sleeve of his yellow shirt torn and streaked black with blood.