by Casey Dorman
Lucas shook his head. “Bizarre. But what’s the coincidence?”
“Can I have another drink?” Ben asked.
“Sure,” Lucas said, draining his own glass for the second time. He got up and fixed them each another drink.
“The coincidence is that we got a tip about someone taking a large object out of the back seat of a car on the night Regina went missing, then we found a grave at that very spot, and it turned out to have your neighbor’s dog in it.” Ben studied the man’s face to see if he showed any reaction.
“But you said the dog was only missing for a week. Regina’s been gone for three weeks now.” Lucas looked confused.
“I can’t explain that. Probably just a coincidence is all.”
“Sounds as if you and the police are grasping at straws.” There was no hostility in Lucas’ voice.
“I’m as disappointed as you are that there are no leads yet, but even coincidences have to be followed up.”
“So the police are following up on my neighbor’s dog?” Lucas looked puzzled.
“They already did. That’s why they did the autopsy and found the poison. It’s not clear where they go from there. Probably nowhere.”
Lucas looked glum. “I’m glad it was a dog and not Regina. I want her to be alive.”
“Me too, Lucas, me too.”
Chapter 33
“Have you figured out whether Bonaventure’s dreams are real?” Susan Lin asked.
George felt a pang of regret that Susan had called him on the telephone, rather than requested another lunch meeting. “Some of them are real. Maybe all of them.” He was thinking about Lucas’ most recent dream of finding his wife buried with a tag tied to her mysterious penis. The dream fit psychoanalytic theory perfectly, but George was unaware of any report of such a dream in the literature, especially in any of Freud’s writings. It certainly wasn’t included in The Interpretation of Dreams. George had gotten out one of his copies of the text to make sure. “I haven’t asked him directly about his knowledge of psychoanalytic theory.”
“It sounds as if he’s had more dreams.”
“Everybody has dreams.”
“Don’t become evasive, doctor. I thought we were working together on this.” Her voice sounded more playful than irritated.
“We’re discussing my case because my client has signed a release. But you’re trying to catch a killer and I’m trying to cure my client’s neurosis.”
“And you still believe that Bonaventure has a neurosis?”
“Absolutely. I’m more convinced than ever.” Was he? Or was he just susceptible to Bonaventure’s suggestions because they mirrored his own neurotic tendencies? Every time he thought about it George became more confused.
“You’re more convinced because…?
“Because the material he’s brought up in therapy since our talk has convinced me of that. It fits with his particular neurosis and it’s not copied out of any book, at least not any that I’ve ever read. His dreams are too bizarre to have been made up.”
“Really?”
He had to control his defensiveness. He knew it was as related to him as it was to Lucas Bonaventure. “Listen, I’m keeping my mind open because I respect your opinion. I can be as wrong as anyone else, even when it comes to my professional judgment. That’s part of the beauty of psychoanalysis, it makes all of us aware that we can be subject to blunders, sometimes deliberate blunders because of our unconscious motivations.”
“Your own unconscious motivation might be leading you astray in Bonaventure’s case?”
Why had he suggested that to her? He felt a sense of panic. “I was talking generically, not specifically about myself.”
“Of course,” the psychologist replied. “Anyway, I just wanted to check in with you and see if you’d learned anything new. It sounds as if you haven’t. Or at least nothing new that would heighten our suspicion about Bonaventure. How about we do lunch again, maybe next week? Would Wednesday work? This one will be on me.”
He felt elated. He was amazed at how the thought of seeing the psychologist again wiped the fears from his mind. “Sounds great. You pick the place this time.”
“I’ll have to think about that. I’ll give you a call before Wednesday, OK?”
“Perfect.”
— — —
Lucas was still agitated. He went straight to the couch and lay down and began talking. “I’m still having dreams, disturbing dreams.”
“Tell me about them,” George said.
“Last night’s dream really bothered me. It woke me up, just like the last one I told you about.”
“What did you dream?’
“I was driving my car—I think it was along PCH, I’m not sure—anyway, I drove up this long hill, then down a small street until I came to this big field overlooking the ocean.”
George could sense his own anxiety rising. “Crystal Cove?”
“No, definitely not Crystal Cove. This was different. The ocean was off in the distance, but I could see it in the dark. There were lights below me. I could see a highway and then lots of houses and streets before the ocean. I walked into the field and there was this big flat surface of dirt with nothing growing on it, like it had recently been plowed, or the soil had been dumped on it. There was a ditch all around it, and I began walking along the ditch. At some point, the ditch widened out into a big hole. As soon as I saw the hole I began to have a feeling of dread. I was afraid to look inside of it.” He paused and rubbed both of his eyes with his hands, as if he were trying to stay awake. Then he lay silently.
“Are you alright?”
He nodded his head. “I still get nervous thinking about it.”
“Thinking about the dream makes you nervous. Can you continue telling me about it?”
He nodded again. “I wanted to look inside the hole, but, just like before, my legs became paralyzed. I don’t remember actually moving toward the hole, but suddenly I was standing over it. Regina was inside, naked again.”
“She was naked? With a penis again?”
“No, thank God. She was just staring up at me. I couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead. I looked around for help, but there was no one else there. There was some sort of construction equipment parked nearby, but it was almost black outside and there was no one there but me. Then I looked down again and Regina was gone. I became dizzy. I tried to back away from the hole, but my legs still wouldn’t move. I felt myself tipping forward like I was going to fall into the hole. Then I woke up.”
George felt a wave of relief that the dream had not gone any further. Something about the dream had made him intensely anxious. “And how did you feel when you woke up?”
“Still panicked. I felt my legs and they were OK, so I got out of bed and poured myself a drink. Just like before, I had to have a couple of Scotch’s before I was calm enough to go back to sleep.”
Lucas’ dream departed a little from his earlier ones, George thought. The paralysis was still there, suggesting the castration fear behind the dream, but there was no direct symbol of castration such as the workman’s saw in the first dream or the tag on the penis in the second. In this case, it seemed as if the fear of seeing his wife’s corpse was enough to trigger Lucas’ fear—and his paralysis—in the dream. “Do you think about your own death very often?” George asked.
“Almost never,” Lucas said, although his tone was tentative.
“You don’t sound completely sure.”
“When I wake up from one of these dreams and feel my heart pounding, then I’m afraid I’m going to die. My brother died of a heart attack. He was the same age I am now
.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Why is it interesting?”
“Freud thought that the fear of death was a displaced fear of castration. He believed that castration anxiety was the more primary fear. But there have been others, Ernest Becker being one, who thought it was just the opposite: that castration anxiety was a displacement of the fear of dying, and that the fear of dying was at the bottom of much of neurotic behavior.”
“So what does that mean?”
“It means we have a lot more work to do to figure out why these dreams frighten you so much and why you’re having them in the first place.”
“You can’t stop them?”
“As I said before, they are our roadmap as to what is bothering you. We don’t want to destroy our roadmap or we will become completely lost.”
“So next time I’m supposed to tell you about more of my dreams?” Lucas’ had apparently noticed that their time was up. He was sitting up on the couch.
“Or we continue to plumb the ones you’ve already told me about. We haven’t gotten to the bottom of them yet, have we?”
“I guess not.”
— — —
When Lucas had left, George sat back in his chair to think. There was something else about Lucas’ dream that George hadn’t divulged to his client. That something else was the source of George’s anxiety. The description of the field off of PCH and the newly excavated ground, with the ocean in the distance, fit one place that George was aware of: Banning Ranch. The land was in West Newport Beach, at the beginning of Balboa Peninsula, high on a bluff overlooking PCH, the peninsula and the ocean. George knew it very well.
He and Madeline had bought a homesite there.
Chapter 34
It was eating away at George that Lucas had envisioned his wife’s body in an open grave on what sounded as if it was where George and Madeline had bought land. The anxiety he had felt when Lucas had told him the dream had returned. He finished his gin and tonic and looked over at his wife. “Have you been by Banning Ranch lately to see how the homesite is coming along?”
“What do you mean, ‘coming along?’ ” Madeline had been sitting on the couch reading. Her face showed her irritation at George’s question.
“Progress. Have they made any new progress, like finished laying the sewer, or put up street lights, that sort of thing?”
She put her book face down on the couch next to her and looked over at him with her eyebrows raised. “Is that the kind of thing that interests me? You know me about as well as you know any of my literary friends, which is not much. When they’re done turning that hillside into streets and sidewalks and places where it might actually be possible to build a house, instead of the no man’s land that it is now, then I’ll take another look at it and decide if we really want to build there or sell it.”
“I thought you liked that location.” His wife’s negativity about the lot they’d purchased, surprised him.
“I love the view, I like the location, although it’s a bit farther from the university than we are now. But I want to see what it looks like when it’s not raw land. It’s hard to visualize how close the houses will be to each other, especially since the homes are going to be so big that their acreage will seem to have shrunk. And I’d like to know who else is going to live there.”
“They’ll be rich, whoever they are.”
“Everyone who lives around us now is rich. In Newport Beach being rich doesn’t mean being sophisticated. We’re surrounded by a bunch of millionaire Neanderthals. They’re nothing but land developers, dot-com entrepreneurs, get-rich-quick hedge fund managers or cooks who now own restaurant chains.”
“I’ve never heard you this negative about Newport Beach before. I always thought you enjoyed living here.”
“When did you ever ask? Irvine is a much more vibrant community. It’s not all White, for one thing. Do you know that Irvine has the highest proportion of Asians of any city in Orange County? Higher than Garden Grove or Westminster where all the Vietnamese live, even.”
“Yes, I knew that. So what?”
“So don’t you ever get tired of living in an all-White community, where everyone who went to college majored in business administration, if he or she went to college at all, and a place where everyone thinks that USC is a superior academic school to UCLA or Berkeley because it beats them in football.”
George peered inside his empty glass. “I hadn’t thought about it,” he said. “So I guess you haven’t been by the Banning Ranch property.”
She picked up her book. “No, George, I haven’t. And thank you for being so interested in my point of view.”
He got up and went to the kitchen and fixed himself another drink. His hand was shaking when he poured the gin.
After dinner, George had another drink. He couldn’t quell his agitation, wondering why Lucas Bonaventure had dreamt of a place where George and his wife had recently bought property. Could Bonaventure have buried his wife there? And if he had, was that just a coincidence, or did Bonaventure have another reason? But then perhaps Bonaventure’s dream hadn’t been about Banning Ranch at all. Perhaps that was just a projection on George’s part. But why? “I’m going out,” George announced.
“Out? Where?”
“I want to go look at our property. I want to see if they’ve made any improvements yet.”
“At this time of night? You won’t be able to see a thing.”
“Maybe they’ve put the street lights in.”
“They don’t even have paved streets yet, George. Why would they have street lights?”
“Anyway, I’m going. I’ll be back in about an hour.”
“I may go out myself.”
“Where are you going?”
“There’s a group of writers meeting at the Newport Beach Yacht Club tonight to discuss what they’re working on. I wasn’t going to go, but since you’re going out anyway, maybe I’ll drop in and see what everyone is doing.”
“Yacht club? And you were the one who said that you were tired of rich White people.”
“It’s just where they’re meeting. It doesn’t mean they subscribe to that lifestyle. One of the authors, Jack Kingsley, who happens to write thrillers—the kind I never read—likes to hang around with types who are more literary than he is, and he owns a boat and is a member of the yacht club. Besides, I’ve never been there. It might be interesting. Maybe I’ll learn something I can use in a future book.”
“Don’t drink too much and then drive. They stop people along PCH.”
“How many have you had tonight, George? I’d worry about myself if I were you.”
“Whatever,” he said. “I’ll see you later.”
— — —
Madeline had been right. George could see no streetlights ahead as he passed through the gate leading into Banning Ranch. As a property owner, he had a key to the otherwise inaccessible property. The road was graveled at least as far as the real estate office just to the left inside the gate, but leading up the hill to his homesite, which sat on the edge of the bluff, there was only a dirt road, heavily rutted from the construction equipment, which traversed it during the day. Nevertheless, his Lexus had no difficulty climbing the hill. He passed two leveled homesites before arriving at the one he and Madeline had purchased. It had been just grass and brush when they’d first seen it, but the view was spectacular. He pulled onto the lot and parked his car, then sat for a moment, gazing out at the panorama of lights below. Off in the distance, in the great void of the night ocean, were the sparkling pinpoints of the lights of Catalina Island. Up the coast, he could see two of the several offshore oil platforms, which dotte
d the coastline in front of Huntington Beach. He remembered that they had once belonged to Regina Bonaventure’s father. How had he known that? He began to feel anxious.
He got out of his car and looked around. There were no obvious holes in the ground. Of course, there wouldn’t be, he thought to himself. He was being ridiculous. If Regina Bonaventure had lain in an open grave for three weeks, one of the workmen on the site would have found her. There was a ditch running along the side of the road and George assumed that either sewage pipes or electrical conduits would occupy the ditch at some time in the future. There was a short offshoot of the ditch leading into his property from the main road. He followed it until it ended abruptly in a mound of loose earth. He stared at the mound, his heart beginning to race. Why was he feeling such panic? There was nothing special about the bump in the ground to distinguish it from several other areas of uneven surface, which he could see in the shadows surrounding him, yet he couldn’t take his eyes off of this particular pile of dirt. His head began to spin. He tried to walk toward the mound of earth, but his legs wouldn’t move.
— — —
He was on his knees, digging in the dirt with his hands. He had no idea how he had gotten there. The last thing that he remembered thinking was that he needed to move toward the mysterious mound of dirt, and now here he was, digging frantically, having removed almost a foot of soil already. He must have been digging for several minutes without even knowing it. His hand felt something soft and sticky. He drew it back as if he’d been stung. He could smell the putrid odor of rotting flesh. He stood up in horror.
Behind him, there were flashing red and blue lights coming up the hill. He knew he should move—return to his car—but his legs were frozen. Besides, if this was Bonaventure’s wife, and he was sure that it was, the police needed to know. He began waving his arms in the air.