“A fucking child molester. And Daya knew. For five grand.”
Caitlin caught Promise Larsen’s eyes in the rearview. The quick glance away was all she needed to know that Magda was telling the truth.
Magda continued. “I knew then that Daya couldn’t be trusted, that she’d gone against everything the Daughters stood for. And if that was true, what else might she have done? Desmond looks to her as the Seer, the heir to Linda’s gifts—”
“Right. Didn’t Linda Sperry predict the world would end on February seventeenth, two thousand and sixteen? I don’t have my calendar on me, but I’m pretty sure her sight might not have been twenty-twenty.”
Magda took a breath. “I don’t expect you to understand. And now I see I shouldn’t expect you to drop your entire life to help me. If you’ll drive us to God’s Hill, you can leave and never look back. But I have to save the remaining Daughters, and to do that, I have to find the Five.”
Caitlin shook her head. “How? There’s an armed guard tower on the only entrance to the place.”
“There’s a northern gate that hasn’t been used since the ascension of the Five, when the road was lost in a landslide. It’s unguarded and safe. I came down that way with you.”
“Right, and why were you there, anyway?”
“To protect you. I’ve followed you since your arrival, but between evading the Larsens and taking care of Promise, I hadn’t been able to make contact. I tried once in Coos Bay outside a bar—”
The woman in the parking lot of the Lumberjack.
“—then again at your hotel—”
Before I checked out. The clerk said a woman came in asking about me.
“—but I couldn’t afford to linger around the casino. When I saw the Dayan car leave the parking lot, I returned to God’s Hill.”
“And let me get locked in a freaking cell?”
“Where I knew you’d be safe. With you in the containment room and everyone else at Ceremony Peak, I was able to look for proof that Daya also lied about—”
“The Five, right.” Caitlin remembered the woman backing into the hallway of the main house, holding a box of papers. “That was you.”
“I know what you do for a living,” Magda said. “You find the truth, help people in need. I thought it was a sign that you might help the Daughters.”
Caitlin stared at the woman, realizing that ever since she’d gotten the sheriff’s call, she’d secretly hoped for some magical reunion. An after-school special where her long-lost mother had been pining for her special daughter, but a witch or international law or a crazy mix-up at the hospital had meant the only obstacle to their shared happiness was a chance encounter at a drugstore. Except the woman sitting next to her didn’t want to make up for lost time or braid each other’s hair. She wanted to abuse her neglected familial relationship to solve some cult-based drama.
Caitlin shook her head. She wasn’t going to learn anything about her birth mother, dead or alive. “I don’t understand any of this shit and I don’t really care. Who is my real father?”
Magda looked out the passenger window, then glanced back at Promise, finally returning her gaze Caitlin’s way. “If you help us get back there, I’ll tell you everything you want to know, and you can go on with your life like I really was the dead body on the road.”
CHAPTER
41
EVEN IN THE metropolis of Los Angeles, Lakshmi’s GPS dropped in and out on the twisting hillside road. Luckily, the mansions on either side of Linda Sperry’s estate displayed ostentatious address plates, meaning the gate of faded red wood at the top of the hill had to be the only way in and out of the former Dayan compound. She parked on the narrow road’s shoulder, then inspected the entrance. Not only were there no obvious security features, but the hasp of the rusted padlock hadn’t even been closed. One slight touch and the door yawned open with the creak of ungreased hinges. She took a calming breath, then stepped onto the driveway.
The cell phone in her front pocket rang louder than a car alarm.
“Bugger,” she said, one hand over her now-pounding heart. She answered in a whisper. “Caitlin? Sorry I haven’t rung, but I have so much to tell you.”
“Lakshmi—” Caitlin started, but her voice cut out.
They played the who-has-a-worse-connection game for three volleys before Lakshmi took charge.
“Caitlin, I’ll ring you back in a few. If you can hear me, Beverly Bangs is alive.”
She hung up, set her ringer to silent, then stepped through the gate. Similar to the description in Maya Aronson’s diary, the driveway veered to the right through a grove of eucalyptus trees, opened up to a grass clearing, then continued until the corner of a house came into view. Peeling paint, dead grass, and a wheelless red limo on cinder blocks—the whole thing had a zombies-will-come-out-of-the-woods-any-second feel.
She checked her phone: 6:47 PM.
Maybe the zombies were at dinner.
The center of Linda’s former hillside home, a two-story A-frame with a sixties vibe, brought together two much-less aesthetically coordinated additions of single-story row housing. If not for a mountain of swollen trash bags lazily piled feet from the front entrance, the place would have seemed deserted.
Sunset wasn’t far off. If she was going to do something, she’d better get it done.
She broke into a sprint, crossing the hundred-foot distance to the closest side of the house in seconds. Back against the wall, she listened for movement but heard only her own rapid breaths. The remains of a vegetable garden filled the space between the house and the property fence, though any semblance of organization had lost to the combination of predatory weeds and neglect.
At the garden’s edge, a well-trod trail of hardened dirt led around a clump of bushes. Lakshmi tiptoed down the path and peeked. Both row house additions stood on solid ground, but the original A-frame and its deck jutted out almost thirty feet, cantilevered by massive support beams that met concrete foundations on the hillside below.
A stairway of natural stone led down the steep incline to a strip of land under the house’s massive deck. Beyond that, the hill continued uninhabited and wild for hundreds of feet before meeting other properties and a twisting road. If Linda’s flower garden was still down there, Lakshmi couldn’t see it from her current position.
She considered running around the other side of the house for another vantage point, but the rev of a car’s engine coming down the driveway made her heart rate spike again. Someone was home.
She went for the stairs. Halfway down, she saw the strip of land under the pilings, a rectangular patch of green surrounded by smooth stones. Unlike the garden above, this bed looked fertile and well kept, but no one was growing flowers. After the two last flights of stairs, she came out onto the plateau to face a ripe crop of marijuana.
“Well done, Linda,” she said, looking around. Under the deck, maybe two stories up, exposed pipes and ductwork ran the length of the house.
The slide of a glass door and a sudden flurry of steps on the deck above meant whoever’d been in the car now walked directly above her. She ran for the cover of the deck and wedged herself against the hillside, a mix of loose dirt and some sort of failing anti-erosion concrete. Sure anyone within the state of California could hear her chest heaving, she inhaled once and held it.
A male voice called out from above. “I can see you, and I’ve got a gun.”
So much for holding her breath.
“Come out into the clearing, nice and slow, and put your hands up and shit.”
Lakshmi raised her shaky hands and walked out, feeling dumber than she knew how to describe.
A man with long, gray hair and the effortless tan of a lifetime surfer looked down over the barrel of a shotgun. “Who are you, and why are you dicking with my garden?”
Lakshmi’s mouth went dry. A thousand responses came to mind, but all seemed ridiculous. The only one that stuck was a question: What would Caitlin do?
She l
et air fill her lungs, relaxed her shoulders, then smiled at the man with the gun. “Desmond sent me.”
He loosened his grip on the shotgun, using one hand to shield his eyes from the setting sun. “Why?”
Bullocks.
Lakshmi’s mind raced through the bits she remembered of Magda’s journal for something she could use. “To see the site of the miracle, of course.”
After a couple thousand seconds, the old surfer lowered the gun. “Well, shit. Come up the stairs.”
Turning back the way she’d come, Lakshmi tried to hide the release of tension from her body.
“Not those ones,” the man said, pointing directly below his feet. “The fire escape.”
She turned back to the underside of the deck. Previously hidden either by adrenaline during her first glances toward the house or by a shade of light-brown paint that blended with the dusty soil, a steel cat- walk ran the width of the A-frame. A door banged open, and a metal staircase unfolded in two segments, coming to rest along the hillside.
She brushed dirt off her pants, then climbed the aluminum stairway until she reached a metallic mesh wall. Turning right, she found another set of steps leading up into a room with a desk and a bunch of dusty books.
The surf bum sat in a crusty faux-leather chair, his shotgun down at his side, his fingertips drumming on the edges of cracked fabric.
“Welcome,” he said, forcing a smile, then adding, “voyager.”
Lakshmi stepped up through the opening, a square trapdoor with a brass ring in the center. The room smelled like fast food, weed, and the gas of a man who lived alone.
“Brilliant,” she said, doing her best to summon Dayan enthusiasm. “A fire escape from the study to the hillside.”
“Yeah.” The surf bum cleared his throat. “Linda had the architect hide the whole thing, ’cause nature or whatever.”
He glanced sideways at a framed picture of Linda Sperry in her midfifties, then looked away, hopefully embarrassed. Someone had drawn ridiculous breasts and nipples over the photo with a red Sharpie.
Lakshmi looked around the room as if it were paradise, despite the stacks of magazines and newspapers covering the furniture. “And this was her study? It’s glorious.”
“You said Desmond sent you,” he said, nodding to the couch.
Again she tried to play confident, sitting back onto the one exposed section of sofa. “He did.”
The movement of the cushions began a newspaper avalanche her direction. She managed to stem the tide with her elbow, but a month’s worth of headlines ended up on the floor, cascading toward the edge of the trapdoor. The wooden square dropped to the floor with a bang, sealing the exit.
He didn’t seem bothered by the mess or the noise, but something was making him uncomfortable. “Why are you really here?”
Lakshmi hated how far she’d sunken into the old couch. Athletic as she was, getting up would take more than a second.
“Lakshmi,” she said, shifting her weight forward. “That’s my name. It means—”
“Why?” he repeated.
“As I said, Desmond wanted me to visit Linda’s room, so I could—”
“See the miracle.” He reached down to his side, near the shotgun. “Right.”
Lakshmi scrambled to her feet, ready to fight, but the man’s hand had picked up only a phone, a concept suddenly just as frightening as a gun.
He stood as well, bringing the phone with him. “I gotta hear it from Desmond.”
“Cool,” Lakshmi said, after a painful gulp. “Mind if I see—”
“Knock yourself out.” He took a step backward while dialing, then leaned down to grab the shotgun before moving into a hallway, his eyes watching her the whole time. “On your left.”
Lakshmi followed, grinning like an idiot, then turned toward a closed door.
She looked back, saw him nod again, still watching, then turned the knob enough to feel for a lock on the other side of the handle. It wouldn’t stop a shotgun blast, but a locked door might give her a few seconds to think of a way out. “Do you mind if I sit in here alone?”
He just waved at her. “Fucking hills,” he said, giving his phone a shake, then stepping further back into a great room. Apparently, Lakshmi wasn’t the only one with a spotty connection. He’d have to go outside to get a good signal.
She didn’t have much time. A paranoid man with a gun was about to figure out she wasn’t supposed to be in that house. She closed the door and locked herself inside Linda’s room: ten by ten, a full-sized bed in the corner, a tiny side table next to the wall, and dual-sliding windows looking out on the sunset.
Magda had said she’d looked under the bed the night of her miracle, so Lakshmi did the same. No sign of a trapdoor like the one in the study.
Bloody hell.
She reached for the side table, a three-foot oval draped with a red tablecloth, and raised the fabric.
Oh thank you, sweet Vanna White.
Just beyond the plus-shaped table base, a brass ring waited for the challenge.
She moved the table aside and revealed the secret of Linda Sperry’s ascension. Another set of emergency stairs led down to the catwalk and almost directly into a metallic mesh wall. She went down and pushed on the wall. The entire frame swung open with a creak and a cloud of dust, revealing the same fire escape she’d climbed into the study.
Neither Beverly nor Magda had ever known a second set of stairs led down to the garden, all because Linda Sperry’d had her homebuilder blend the fire escape into the natural surroundings.
Lakshmi stumbled down the hillside steps, her eyes on the decking above. The climb back to the road, uphill toward a man trying to get a better signal, would be risky. She knew another road existed downhill, hundreds of feet through scrub brush. She counted to three, then started running.
Passing the crop of weed, she heard the clang of the study trapdoor popping open once again.
Faster, she willed herself, jumping down three feet of a ridge. The sun had nearly set and darkness was falling. Maybe she could hide.
The bangs of feet on metal steps made her maybe highly dubious.
“Stop it, kid. Right now,” the surf bum shouted, not far behind.
He was in his sixties, right? She was young and agile.
The distinct chk-chk sound of the shotgun being racked cut any age disparity in half. Still, if she could lower herself over the next—
Nope, that’s a twenty-foot drop.
She caught herself before tumbling over a ridge.
Only two choices now, both stupid: jump and risk horrible injury—or surrender.
“Tanner, stop,” someone called from above. Someone feminine, familiar.
Lakshmi turned back to see the surf bum, Tanner, staring uphill at a blonde in hot pink aiming a handgun in his direction.
“Jesus,” he said. “Is that you, Bevvie?”
“Drop the gun,” Beverly Chandler said. “Lakshmi’s with me.”
CHAPTER
42
JOHNNY FINISHED HIS beer and signaled for another. No one had seen shit for the last four hours. Gunner had dropped by after his shift at the mill but left for dinner with his girlfriend. Tom had bailed an hour later for his bouncer job at the Bachelor’s Inn, leaving Johnny alone in the Lumberjack on a low simmer.
Hazel twisted the cap off a Coors Lite and brought it over. “What’s got your panties in a bunch, John?”
Johnny shook his head. “Mind your own business, unless you’ve seen the bitch?”
Hazel put her hands up in surrender. “We don’t have many rules at the Lumberjack, but even we wouldn’t let a girl as young as Promise in here.”
Johnny took a good pull. “My daughter’s no bitch. You think I’d talk about Promise like that? What kind of man do you think I am?”
Hazel reached for a pair of dirty glasses and dunked them in her sink. “You say the word bitch so much, most people would guess you breed terriers.”
“Most people should keep t
heir mouths shut.” Johnny finished his beer. “Promise is an angel. It’s those Dogs that got to her. A bunch of freaks poisoning her mind against her own family.”
“Un-huh.” Hazel turned back his way. “So who’s this bitch then?”
Johnny gave her a nice long stare. Hazel didn’t look away. Not like his wife.
“That Jew reporter that was in here Saturday night.” He tossed his empty bottle into the trash can beneath the wait station. “Brunette in a sport coat, carries herself like a man.”
Hazel shook her head, reached into the cooler below the bar, and came back with a fresh beer. “Must have been after I left.”
“Right.”
Johnny walked his new bottle to the pool room. Hazel was full of shit, but he wouldn’t press her until his dinner was delivered.
Two regulars in their late sixties played the closest table, leaving two other tables wide open.
As he reached for a pool cue, a small growl escaped Johnny’s lips. Would have been nice if some strangers had the run of the room. He wanted to punch someone out. Instead, he racked a triangle of balls and broke, happy for the loud pop of that initial impact.
“So this is what you do on a sick day.”
He didn’t have to look away from the table to recognize the grating sound of his father’s voice. The five-ball dropped into the far-corner pocket.
“You gonna fire me, sir?”
Dressed in a Bandon Dunes polo, the shirt he wore whenever he wanted to remind people that he’d bought his way into every country club in the area, Anders shuffled over to the old-timers at the first table and handed them a twenty. “Why don’t you boys have a round of the good stuff on Larsen Timber?”
The pair took the hint well enough, leaving them the whole room. Maybe Johnny’d get to punch someone after all. He fixated on the red three, inches from the far bumper and the side pocket. “You gonna buy me a round of the good stuff too?”
He took the shot, but the three bounced shy.
Anders raised his voice. “Look at my eyes when you talk to me, boy.”
Johnny straightened up and turned toward his father, conscious of the solid feeling of the lightweight pool cue in his hand. One good swing would take the old man off his high horse, maybe out of the saddle altogether.
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