by BETH KERY
“How is everything?” Valeria asked brightly, walking through the terrace doors holding a pitcher of ice water.
“I think we’ve hired the right person for the job, if this lunch is any indication,” Evan said, wiping his mouth with a napkin.
“It was just grilled cheese and salad. I’ll get fancier for your dinners,” Valeria said to me with a wink. “Would you guys like some coffee or dessert? Fruit, maybe?”
“No,” Evan said before I could get out a reply. He tossed his napkin on the table and scooted back his chair. I thought he was about to say that he needed to get back to work, given his familiar manner of purposeful determination. But instead, he stood and held out his hand to me.
“I’ve made plans for Anna and me to go to Sapphire Bay for a weekend spa getaway, and we should pack straightaway. We’ll be back Sunday afternoon by dinnertime,” he told Valeria.
“How nice. Sapphire Bay is supposed to be amazing,” Valeria said, grinning.
“But… I didn’t know anything about this.” Evan reached for my hand and I gave it to him.
“Of course you didn’t. It would haven’t been much of a surprise if you had,” he told me, his light eyes going warm.
That weekend away with Evan was like a perfectly distilled honeymoon.
The suite he’d reserved took up the entire top floor of the boutique hotel, giving us access to a large terrace overlooking Tahoe. The owner of the hotel herself came and served us our exquisitely prepared meals there. I loved taking in the breathtaking view, appreciating the differences in light and perspective afforded by switching my angle on the lake.
We took advantage of the spa, hiked, and even dived on Sunday morning. Evan hired someone from South Lake to take us out for my first official scuba dive at Tahoe… my first dive with him, in fact.
The scuba guide took us to Hurricane Bay, explaining on the boat trip there that this particular spot was famous for diving because of the crystalline water and a bonus: a twenty-five foot sunken sailboat.
At the mention of a sunken boat, I glanced uneasily at Evan. Would it make him think of Elizabeth? But he merely grasped my hand and asked the guide a question about dive site elevations. I remembered that Elizabeth’s boat had been found, undamaged.
The uncomfortable moment passed.
I had told Evan I considered myself an intermediate diver, but I think he wanted an expert on hand for our initial dive, just to make sure I hadn’t overestimated my abilities.
Afterward, he complimented me by saying he thought I’d actually downplayed my skill and knowledge.
“Have I done something to make you believe I’m a braggart?” I teased him as we removed our gear on the boat. It’d been a successful dive. We’d not only found the sunken sailboat, but also had swum past a huge, spooky submerged pine tree that had grown in some prehistoric drought, its trunk six feet in diameter, its branches coated in a white sediment that only added to its ghostly appearance.
Evan looked a little taken aback by my question. “Fair point. You’re always modest about your abilities. Maybe I just wanted to see your skill firsthand. Now, I don’t need to worry if you decide to dive while you’re at Les Jumeaux.”
“Good. You need to do less worrying, when it comes to me. And it’s not like I’d ever be alone diving. If you aren’t there, Valeria will be. And she’s a scuba instructor.”
He just nodded in an offhand way, but I wasn’t buying his nonchalance. I had the feeling that Valeria’s scuba diving credentials had factored into his decision to hire her.
I was so overwhelmed with love for him at that moment, even more so than usual because of the idyllic surprise weekend he’d given me. I found it easy to forget about his tendency to over-protect.
We couldn’t stop touching each other on the drive back to Les Jumeaux. I stared out of the car window onto the sparkling lake, holding Evan’s hand between mine and resting it in my lap. The usual feeling of being on a rollercoaster, given the twists and high elevations on the road, had vanished. I was secure and steady, not to mention ridiculously happy, with the sensation of his hand between mine.
My euphoria burst like a pricked bubble a minute after we passed the fork in the entrance road to Les Jumeaux. Evan braked abruptly. I was thrown against the restraint of the seat belt.
“What the—”
“I’m sorry,” Evan said as the world settled from the jarring halt. At the same moment he’d slammed on the brakes, he’d instinctively reached to brace his right hand against my left shoulder, holding me even more firmly in place in the seat.
I looked out the front window where he stared fixedly. Six to eight feet of soil, rock, and dislodged underbrush blocked the road directly in front of us. Evan’s quick reflexes had prevented us from driving directly into the wall of sediment, but only just.
“What happened?” I asked, shocked. “A landslide?”
Evan didn’t immediately respond, but removed his hand from my shoulder. He unfastened his seatbelt and opened the car door. I followed suit, still feeling rattled and disoriented by the near collision.
“Anna,” he called sharply. I paused in the action of stepping out of the car. “Stay inside. Please,” he added tersely. I sat back down in the seat, glancing anxiously up the slope of the ravine to my right. The trees, rocks, and underbrush seemed ordinary just next to me, but gravity had certainly pulled aggressively at the soil just feet away. Who knew how secure the earth really was? I closed my car door very carefully, afraid of sending off vibrations into loose soil. I had a brief, vivid vision of being buried beneath tons of earth, of blackness swallowing us whole. Evan was out there, without the benefit of the armor of the car to hold off the pile of dirt and rock. I bit my lip to stop myself from screaming at him to get back in the car.
He walked the width of the road, inspecting the pile of earth. He stared up in the direction from where the earth had fallen, and then in the opposite side of the ravine, toward the creek.
I exhaled in relief when he finally returned to the car and sat in the driver’s seat.
“Do you… do we get a lot of landslides around here?” I asked him.
“We do in Tahoe occasionally, yes. But not at Les Jumeaux. Never before, anyway,” he said, his mouth set in a straight line. “Feeling up for a walk? We’re going to have to get to the house by foot. We’ll go down to the creek and hike past the slide. I’ll call someone to come out later and clean this up, and reinforce the sides of the ravine, if need be.”
So we hiked down the creek bed past the landslide, and then made our way back to the road. “What do you think caused it?” I asked, staring over my shoulder at the pile of earth, now from the opposite direction. I came to a halt on the road. “Could there have been an earthquake while we were away?”
“We would have heard about it if there had been a quake,” Evan said, his hand coasting up my spine, and pausing to rub between my shoulder blades. He always seemed to know instinctively where tension tightened my muscles. “I’d say human beings were responsible.”
“Human beings? Like… someone caused it on purpose?”
“I’m not saying that, no. It was probably hikers. People could have wandered over from the public beach and accidently kicked it off. It only takes one tumbling rock in the wrong location to start a debris avalanche. I don’t want you hiking around here until we get a geologist to come out and inspect the road and the land around it. We’ll get a professional opinion on what caused it, and then we’ll know for certain. Don’t worry, we’ll make things safe again.” He patted me gently. “Come on. Let’s get back to the house so I can make some phone calls.”
But I saw the trace of worry on his face. The recollection of that grim, tense expression he wore as he we walked back to Les Jumeaux stayed with me the rest of the evening.
I hadn’t dreamed during our idyllic getaway. But that night, I had the nightma
re again. And this time, I didn’t wake up when the ghost woman opened the sickening black void of her mouth. Through the thick waves of my terror, I thought I heard her gurgling voice.
After I’d awakened, wet with sweat, I realized that maybe I’d misunderstood what I’d heard. It’d been like listening to a crow underwater. It didn’t make sense, what I thought she’d said.
Light in the darkness.
Chapter Nine
The next few days passed peacefully. Evan contacted both the construction crew that had been working on the viewing room and Valeria, informing them not to come to Les Jumeaux until the ravine could be inspected and the road cleared of the landslide. We were stranded at the house, but happily so. Evan swam with me at the beach several afternoons. We took out the kayaks one evening, gliding along the coast during a glorious sunset.
My mom called one afternoon during our isolation, while Evan and I were exercising in the workout facility. She was full of questions about my new life at Les Jumeaux, all of which I answered with genuine cheerfulness and excitement. The tentacles of the nightmare couldn’t reach me during the daylight hours.
We talked about my latest series of paintings, and how I’d be showing them to Evan’s friend in South Lake very soon. Then she put Jessica on the phone.
I got off the treadmill for what was bound to be a more serious, involved, sisterly conversation. I sat down on a weight bench, losing myself talking to Jessica. She told me about the apartment she’d rented for her graduate school program, and complained about the process of interviewing potential roommates. I consoled her, knowing from experience what a crapshoot the roommate game was.
God, had I really been single and living through that very unpleasantness just months ago? It seemed impossible… like I taken on someone else’s identity. I felt deeply grateful to be living the life I was versus that of a typical young woman, struggling to make her way in the world.
When I finally hung up, I turned around to see Evan toweling off his neck after a grueling run, a small, very appealing smile shaping his mouth. It struck me, as it had before at our wedding, that he was fond of my relationship with my family. Observing our familiar, boring, yet unique domestic interactions pleased him in some way.
“Everyone doing well?” he asked.
“I wish Jessica could come and visit us sometime,” I told him impulsively.
He tossed aside his towel and came toward me.
“I’d like that. But not now,” he said gruffly, reaching for my chin and tilting up my face. His thumb pressed against my lower lip. “Right now, you’re still exclusively mine. And I’m not willing to give that up for a while yet.”
He leaned down. His kiss was warm. Possessive. It made me dizzy. A moment later, he straightened, giving me that blazing stare I recognized. He went over and locked the workout facility door, even though we were alone at Les Jumeaux. When he returned, I held out my arms. He grabbed my hands, drawing me up against him.
On Wednesday evening when we sat down to have dinner on the terrace, Evan told me that he’d received a report form the geologist he’d hired.
“Did she think the landslide was caused by hikers?” I asked.
“Most likely,” Evan said, looking down as he cut his steak. Since we hadn’t been able to get any groceries due to the landslide, I’d raided an icebox I’d noticed in the garage. I’d discovered it was packed with frozen meat, so we’d been especially carnivorous for the past few nights. “She recommended a crew to do some reinforcements in a few key areas. After that’s done, I’ll have someone come out to clear away the debris.”
“Evan,” I said quietly.
He glanced up, blinking at my serious tone.
“Are you even a little bit worried that Noah Madaster is somehow responsible for the landslide?”
He set down his steak knife with a clinking sound.
“The thought crossed my mind,” he said after a pause.
“Is he really that awful?”
“To my mind, he’s one of the foulest men whom ever lived. Still, I have my doubts about him orchestrating a landslide. Even I have to admit that isn’t really his style.”
“His style?”
Evan nodded distractedly, picking up his knife again. “Madaster is subtle. He’s a snake, not a bull.” His stare briefly met mine. I felt a shiver pass through me. “He’s a poisonous snake, Anna. He’s dangerous. I don’t want you to forget that. I don’t want you to ever get within speaking distance with him. There’s no telling what damage he could do with that forked tongue of his.”
“Why do you say that? What did he do that’s so horrible?”
“You’ve never heard about why he was drummed out of the governor’s office?” Evan asked as he resumed cutting his steak. I wasn’t fooled by his even tone or calm manner. I sensed his usual tension churning just beneath the surface when it came to the topic of Noah Madaster.
I shook my head. “No. Like I said, I couldn’t find very much online about Madaster—or Elizabeth,” I added, more hesitant to say her name than I ever had been. “The only articles I did find were mostly political: stuff about his campaign and his inaugural ball, or bills he’d signed into law… stuff like that.”
“All glowing references, no doubt,” Evan muttered, and this time he couldn’t hide his bitterness or anger. “It’s amazing, how a man can rewrite history by paying enough money to a company to fix his online reputation. To create his own reality, in other words. Noah has had negative news about himself buried so deep, I’d imagine you need to go to page fifty or sixty to find some of the more controversial articles about him and his crimes. Some of his crimes, anyway. The most serious ones he committed never reached the light of day.”
He looked down at his meal distastefully, as if his food had suddenly made him ill. He pushed back his plate. I felt bad for ruining his dinner by bringing up the topic.
Still, that didn’t stop me from pressing it further.
“What did he do?”
For a moment, Evan didn’t respond. I saw a muscle working in his jaw.
“Are you really going to make me do a Google search to page sixty?”
He gave me a quick, cool glance, but then he sighed. I knew he was going to give me what I wanted.
“In looking up information on Noah, you may have found out he was a neurologist before he entered politics. By all accounts—including my own, I’ll admit—he’s a brilliant man. It’s what he’s done with that vast intelligence that’s infuriating. Horrifying,” he added quietly under his breath.
He paused. While I waited anxiously, he took a sip of water.
“What you have to understand about Noah Madaster is that he’s an absolute control freak. It’s why he went into politics. He couldn’t stand the idea of being on the sidelines, allowing other people to influence his financial and private affairs. He’d inherited an enormous estate from his parents, a fact which allowed him to go to medical school and specialize in neurology without ever once having to think about expensive tuitions or paying a single bill. Medical school and practice were all a lark to Noah.
“The Madaster lineage and wealth goes back a long way. I’ve never known anyone who is as much of an ancestry freak as Noah. It was like he thought Madaster genes were purer than everyone else’s… greater, somehow. It was just one of many facets of his narcissism,” Evan continued, his manner grim.
I thought of that ornate Madaster family tree I’d found in the great hall. Noah Madaster must have inherited his snobbishness and pride from a long line of Madasters.
“The American branch of the Madasters made their fortune in real estate, oil, mining… a lot of extortion, graft, and shady dealings, as well, but Noah never talked about those things. Every generation compounded the family fortune, feeding its children more and more wealth. More and more corruption.
“Noah became the ultimate gentl
eman physician, rich in knowledge and skill, but scarily short on empathy for other human beings. Most doctors enter the medical field, at least partially, because they want to help and heal people. But that was never what motivated Noah.
“Once he became a physician, he never really treated patients. Not for their benefit, anyway. Research became his forte. He was obsessed with the idea of control, more specifically, the goal of perfectly revealing human lies. He created a lie detector that read brain waves, as opposed to monitoring other physiological responses, like a polygraph does, for instance. He called his machine the Analyzer. He used to say he put people ‘to the test’ with it.”
Evan paused, staring down at the flickering candle I’d lit for our dinner.
“Noah Madaster would be cast perfectly as the head of the Spanish Inquisition or the Gestapo. A cult leader,” he said.
“Cult leader?”
“The man never wavers in his belief of his rightness. Time passed, and Madaster continued to perfect this piece of equipment—or at least that’s what he believed. He peddled it at doctor’s conventions and medical conferences, and for a while, his invention was hailed as an exciting new option for criminal investigation, a significant improvement over current polygraph tests.”
“I wonder if that’s where Madaster met Tommy,” I said, referring to our mutual friend from San Francisco. “Remember, I told you that Tommy said he met him at a medical conference?”
“Maybe it was where they met. I didn’t even realize they knew one another until you told me.”
“Tommy didn’t like him much. I think he didn’t mention knowing Madaster to you, out of respect for the fact that he was your father-in-law, and he didn’t know how you felt about him.”
“Tommy must have seen him for what he was. A few people saw through Noah’s facade, but most were completely taken in by him. He was the ultimate snake oil salesman. He had so much money, and so much polish, and so many friends in high places, it took time for a few people to finally see through his act. Most never did. They’re still fooled by him today.”