“Yeah,” Lowell said sarcastically. “That’ll be a big help.”
“What exactly are you worried about? That he’ll be picked on and bullied? That happens more in elementary than junior high school, and he’s doing fine.”
“Not that. It’s just . . .” He sighed. “There’s more social pressure. There’s going to be girls and dances and dating.”
“That’s three, four years away. By the time he’s in high school—”
“He’ll be just as shy and awkward as he is today.”
She put a hand on his arm. “You worry too much. Ryan’s a lot tougher than you think.”
“Maybe,” he said, pouring a cup of coffee. “Hopefully.”
“Butthead!” Curtis shouted from behind the closed door.
“I’m telling Mom!” Ryan announced.
The twins’ voices were suddenly lower, frantic, as they engaged in last-minute negotiations with their brother.
He met Rachel’s gaze. “Do you wonder sometimes if we’re good parents, if we’ve done right by those boys?”
She smiled. “Every day of my life.”
Lowell laughed. Rachel was right. He did worry too much. But it was hard not to. Especially with Ryan. The twins could take care of themselves. You could set them down anywhere and they’d come out fine. But Ryan was different, sensitive, more like himself in a lot of ways, and it made him overprotective to the extent that he sometimes underestimated his son’s resiliency.
As if on cue, Owen and Ryan emerged from their room. There was the sound of water from their bathroom, where Curtis was taking a shower. “So, are we really going to Tucson today?” Owen asked.
Lowell grabbed a blueberry muffin. “That’s the plan. There’s a planetarium there. And a Spanish mission. They have a desert museum, which is supposed to be like a zoo but you can go underground and see the bats in their caves and the snakes in their holes.”
“I’d rather stay here and swim.”
“Not me,” Ryan said, but his dissent was halfhearted. He probably wanted to stay, too, but the lure of a Burger King lunch was too strong.
“Get dressed and get ready,” Rachel suggested. “The sooner we leave, the sooner we can get back.”
Owen brightened. “Then we can swim?”
“Then you can swim.”
The boys returned to their room, and seconds later Lowell heard the sound of fists pounding on the bathroom door. “Stop beating off and hurry up in there! We have to take a shower, too!”
Forty minutes later, they were dressed and ready to go. Rachel had her purse and her camera, Lowell was carrying a small ice chest filled with bottled water, and the kids had books and MP3 players to entertain them on the long drive to the city. As they walked down the short steps from the door of their suite, a fat man in a bathing suit passed by, carrying a volleyball to what was obviously practice for this afternoon’s game. He wiped sweat from his oversized forehead and glanced at Lowell with an expression of disgust. “Pussied out, huh?”
“Excuse me?” Lowell said, a little too loudly.
The man kept walking.
“What did you say?”
A safe distance away, the fat man turned, walking backward. “The activities coordinator told us. You’re the only male guest who refused to play in the tournament. He said you pussied out.”
The activities coordinator.
Lowell’s jaw clenched with anger, but when the man turned back around and headed up the sidewalk toward the pool, he let him go.
“What was all that?” Rachel asked.
He told her about the visit this morning, how he declined to participate in their volleyball tournament.
“How did that jerk even know who you are?” She lowered her voice. “Do you think the activities director gave out our room number?”
“Yes I do. And it’s coordinator, not director.”
“Whatever. The point is, we’re busy, we have plans. So you can’t play in their little game. So what? That doesn’t mean he had the right to broadcast our room number to every loser on the planet and tell them to harass us.” It was strange to see her get angry and worked up the way she usually did and then see it all dissipate and fade away. Ordinarily, her tirade would have escalated as she strode straight to the lobby to give the resort’s management a piece of her mind, but now she simply shook her head. “I can’t believe this.”
Lowell smiled. “I guess now we’ll be ostracized by our fellow guests.”
“Hell with them,” Rachel said. “Let’s take a day trip back to the real world.”
“Yeah!” Ryan cheered.
They walked down the sidewalk toward the lot where they’d parked. A short man with mismatched clothes had just slammed the trunk of his dusty Volvo. He pointed his key ring at the car, which emitted the familiar hiccuping chirrup of an activating alarm, then looked across the parking lot at Lowell. “Hey! Grocery boy!” the man shouted.
Grocery boy? Where the hell had that come from? No one here knew him and he hadn’t talked to anyone about his job. How could—
“I’d like to squeeze your wife’s melons!”
Lowell’s fists clenched involuntarily at his sides, and he felt his face redden in anger and in embarrassment at the fact that Rachel and the kids had been subjected to this harassment. “Come here and say that!”
Rachel put a restraining hand on his arm. “Lowell,” she warned.
“I bet your wife doesn’t even have any melons!” Curtis shouted.
“I bet you don’t even have a wife!” Owen called out.
The man did not respond but passed between two SUVs and started up one of the gravel paths, both middle fingers raised.
The twins looked sheepishly at Lowell, expecting a rebuke. “Sorry,” Owen mumbled. “Yeah,” Curtis said. Neither could bring themselves to face their mother.
Lowell had to smile. He knew it was his parental duty to be firm and strict and disapproving of such disrespectful behavior, but he could not help feeling a little proud of his boys and the way they’d stuck up for their parents. “Come on,” he said. “It’s getting late, it’s getting hot, let’s head to Tucson.”
Again, there was a little voice in the back of his mind telling him this was wrong, he should not be having shouting matches with other resort guests as though he were still in high school, but once more the warning was muted, rational rather than emotional, and carried no impact.
They piled into the car, kids and their things in the back, ice chest next to Rachel’s feet in the front seat, purse and camera on her lap.
And the engine would not start.
He turned the key in the ignition over and over again, but there was no noise, nothing, not even a click, and finally he stopped, realizing the futility of it. The car was clearly dead.
They’d been in their seats for only a few minutes and already they were sweating, the interior of the car smelling of body odor and failing deodorant. Lowell wiped his forehead to keep the perspiration from dripping into his eyes. “Everybody out!” he ordered.
The boys gratefully piled out the back doors, while Rachel opened her door and turned toward him. “What do you think it is?”
“The battery. I hope. If it’s anything major . . .” He trailed off, sighed. “It’s a long way to Tucson if we have to be towed.” He reached under the dashboard, popped the hood and got out, walking to the front of the car to check the engine. He wasn’t mechanically inclined, so unless something was glaringly obvious he’d have no clue if anything was wrong. Nevertheless, he inspected the battery posts and connections, examined the spark plug wires. He couldn’t see anything amiss, and he stepped back from the car, staring at the engine, stumped and annoyed.
Rachel fidgeted. “If this is going to be a while, I wouldn’t mind going on that gourmet garden tour. I think it starts in about ten minutes.”
Lowell looked at her. “Our friend the activities coordinator suggested that.”
“It’s an activity,” she pointed out.
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“I thought you had to sign up ahead of time.”
Rachel shrugged. “All they can do is kick me out.”
He chuckled. “And you’d throw such a fit about it and be so loud and obnoxious that they’d beg you to stay.”
She grinned. “That’s not inconceivable.”
“Go ahead,” he told her. “Even if it is just the battery, I wouldn’t trust dragging all of you across the desert until I’m certain that everything’s fine.”
“All right!” Curtis exclaimed. “Does that mean we can stay and swim?”
“I wanted to go to Burger King,” Ryan whined.
“We’ll go tomorrow,” Lowell promised. “And yes, you can swim. But not until we find out what’s wrong with this car so I can watch you.”
“Dad!” Curtis said.
“We do know how to swim,” Owen pointed out.
“Not unless your mom or I are there.”
“Mom let us go yesterday—”
“Well, I’m not Mom and this isn’t yesterday.”
“They’ll be fine,” Rachel said in a tone of voice that suggested You’re being overprotective again. “If you want, tell them they can hang around the pool but they can’t swim.”
“Mom!” Curtis cried, mortally betrayed.
“Then what’s the point?” Owen asked.
“Or,” she said, “you can stay here in the parking lot and help your father with the car.”
Both sighed heavily.
“Go to the pool,” Lowell told them. “But no swimming. Wait for me.”
“How can we swim?” Curtis muttered. “We’re wearing Levi’s.”
“Then no skinny-dipping.” He gave Rachel a quick kiss. “Have fun at your garden tour.”
“Are you sure?”
“See you later.”
They split up, Rachel heading down to the lower end of the parking lot toward the section of the resort housing the cook’s garden, the twins running off in the opposite direction toward the pool.
Ryan remained where he was, and Lowell looked down at his son, surprised. “You don’t want to go with your brothers?”
“No. I’d rather stay with you, Dad.”
That made him smile. Feeling happy, he put an arm around Ryan’s shoulder, gave him a quick squeeze. “Good. Glad you’re here.” He looked at the dirty engine under the open hood. “Now let’s try to figure out what’s wrong with our car.”
Roland Acuna, The Reata’s head chef, was one of those hip and handsome young men so prized by televised cooking shows. Knowledgeable and telegenic, with a good speaking voice and a gift for making complicated procedures sound easy and doable, he made a grand entrance when he arrived in the garden, and for fifteen minutes that sped by like five, he regaled them with descriptions of how he came up with the menu each week at the Saguaro Room and how he utilized ingredients he grew in his gourmet garden.
Aside from Rachel, there were five women of various ages on the tour, as well as a middle-aged husband and wife, and two young, obviously gay men who appeared to be a couple.
“Mr. Acuna?” one of the women asked, an overweight elderly woman with the gypsy/bohemian air of an old hippie.
“Roland,” he said. “Call me Roland.”
“Roland. First of all, let me say that you have a beautiful garden here. But what I’d like to know is, is it organic or do you use pesticides and chemical fertilizers to get such a wonderful crop?”
He chuckled. “There’s one in every bunch. No, it’s all organic. No chemicals, no pesticides. We keep vermin away with various plants that are noxious or toxic to them, fight aphids with ladybugs and generally combat nature with nature. Does that mean that we sometimes have spots on our tomatoes or holes in our apples? Sure.” He grinned. “But that’s what a paring knife is for.”
The hippie woman nodded, satisfied.
“Let’s go this way.” He led them down a row lined with shoulder-high tomato plants bursting with clumps of yellow flowers and heavy green fruit just beginning to redden. “I’m sure you all recognize these. As you can see, it’s not quite the peak season yet, but we’re going to have a record crop, I think. We have Champion, Early Girl, Roma, a variety of yellow and cherry tomatoes. They seem to do very well in this climate, as do bell peppers and chilis.” He pointed to the left where a variety of peppers were growing in a row behind the tomatoes and glanced back at the hippie woman. “I’ve planted basil between the vegetables to ward off whitefly.”
From there, they went on to a wide open area across which spread a chaos of intertwining vines. “Zucchini, chayote, a whole host of squash,” he said, and proceeded to regale them with mouth-watering uses for each. Mixed in with the various squash were melons—watermelon, honeydew, cantaloupe—and for these, too, he had unusual and creative recipes. “In my kitchen,” he informed them, “melons are not just for dessert.”
Rachel was enjoying herself. She loved cooking, loved gardening, and it was a real treat to be able to learn about both from one of Arizona’s top chefs. His anecdotes were funny and fascinating, and he promised that after the garden tour he would invite them back to his kitchen for a hands-on demo. He’d brought a basket with him, and at each stop, he paused to pick a ripe fruit or vegetable to be used in recipes later.
The group continued past the squash and melons to a plot of wildly growing herbs. “Here we have teas and spices as well as some edible flowers native to the Sonoran Desert that I like to incorporate into many of my dishes.” Roland bent down, picked a handful of purple bell-shaped blossoms, broke off several branches covered with tiny water-conserving leaves. He grew visibly excited as they passed a patch of overgrown wildflowers. “Hemlock,” the chef said, pointing to one herb that resembled white dill. “Dumbcane, pokeweed, nightshade. This, as you can see, is our poison patch.”
Poison patch?
She felt the first faint stirrings of suspicion within her. Not for the first time, reality seemed to have subtly slipped away, leaving her in an altered unfamiliar universe where sinister intent and motivations lurked behind the mundane façade of everyday events. “These are particularly toxic,” he continued, as though there was nothing unusual about growing herbs of death. “Don’t even brush against them.”
Rachel decided to speak up. “Why are you growing these plants?” she asked in a voice that she hoped sounded neutral but curious. “To keep away pests?”
“No,” he said shortly but did not offer any follow up. He kept walking. Stopped. “See this little plant with the pink flowers? Buckleroot. An aphrodisiac that I like to incorporate into my chef’s salad. How many of you women have husbands or boyfriends who can’t keep it up long enough for you to get yours? May I see a show of hands?” He smiled at the wife. “You’re excused.”
“Thanks,” the husband said.
“And us?” one of the gay men asked.
“You, too.”
Several of the women giggled embarrassedly.
“Viagra’s got nothing on this baby. Let me tell you. Ten minutes after consuming a pinch of this in, say, a nice salad of leafy greens with a piquant orzo vinaigrette, or a white bean and sweet potato soup with cranberry couilis, the penis will be at its peak and will remain gloriously erect for three full hours.”
“Does it have any effect on females?” the hippie woman asked.
“No. But this little miracle worker over here”—he gently touched a leafy branch on a tall thin bush—“can make you so orgasmic that the slightest touch to any part of your body, even your kneecap, will make you come so hard you won’t know what hit you.” He picked several leaves, dropping them into his basket.
Her vague misgivings blossomed into a full-fledged sense of dread that made her think of that horrible cloud face she’d seen in the storm. This wasn’t just a case of nebulous bad vibes but recognition that there was some sort of maleficent, perhaps cosmic, force influencing life here at The Reata. She made the determination then and there that they were going to leave this place immediately.
They’d sleep in their car by the side of the highway if they had to, but they were going to get out of here today. She didn’t know why they had waited this long. They should have left after that first night. But somehow the reality of the unreality here, the urgency of the potential danger, seemed to fade soon after it manifested itself. It was as though she suffered from short-term memory loss or some type of imposed ennui that kept her from acting on what she knew to be right, even kept her from communicating with Lowell about it.
But that wasn’t going to happen this time. She was focused now, she could see clearly, and she wasn’t going to let this place sap her resolve or trick her into staying.
This place.
She realized for the first time The Reata was haunted. She didn’t know why she hadn’t noticed before, but it was true. Although now that she thought about it, “haunted” seemed too weak a word for what was happening here, too limited and specific in its definition. This wasn’t a set of buildings plagued by ghosts but was a location suffused with a corrupting power that influenced everything in its general vicinity.
The woman next to her nudged Rachel’s arm. “He’s the reason we came here,” she confided. “I saw him on the Food Network and thought he was terrific. I even got some of his recipes off their Web site.”
Rachel nodded, smiling. What the hell was she thinking? Cosmic forces? She was letting her imagination run away with her. So there were poison herbs and aphrodisiacs growing in the chef’s garden. So what? Those things had been cultivated for centuries. The Native Americans who had once farmed in this place had probably made use of such plants as they did everything else that grew around them, and if Roland Acuna wanted to have an authentic Southwest garden incorporating as much indigenous vegetation as possible, naturally they would be part of his planting.
“His vegetarian meatloaf is out of this world,” the woman said.
“Let’s keep walking,” the chef announced.
This part of the garden was on a slight downward slope, and they passed single file over two split-log steps embedded in the dirt. To both sides grew some sort of deep green ground cover. “New Zealand spinach,” Roland said. “It’s a little rough if you eat it raw, so I don’t often use it for salads, but it’s delicious when steamed.”
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