“Peggy?”
“Yes.”
“I don't know if you remember me or not. It's Teri...” She had started to say, Teri Knight, but that hadn't been her name back then. It had been Teri Cutler in those days, sometimes even Teri Cutler-Knight, though that had come only after Michael had first proposed to her. She finished, “Cutler. Teri Cutler.”
The crack in the door widened slightly, and a smile of recognition seemed to grow on the face of the woman on the other side. “You're kidding? Teri? My God, how long has it been?”
“Too long,” Teri said. It had been some twenty-odd years since they had last seen each other. In fact, if she were called on it, she probably couldn't even remember exactly when their last time together had been. After she had married Michael and they had moved into a place of their own, they had seen less and less of the others. Over the years, Teri had come to believe that was the nature of most relationships. They came and they went. Some remembered, some forgotten.
“Well, come on in. Don't stand out there like a stranger.”
The front room was the parlor. Across from the picture window that looked out over the fields to Mount Lassen, stood a wicker sofa with bright, floral-print upholstery. There were huge potted plants on either side, standing nearly six feet high. Teri thought they might be paradise palms, but she wasn't sure. She had never had much of an interest in plants and shrubs.
“Can I get you anything?” Peggy asked.
“Oh, no thank you.”
“It's no trouble.”
“No, that's all right.”
Peggy sat on a wicker chair at the other side of the Shaker-look coffee table, covered with old copies of Mother Earth News. Her bare feet, dirty and scarred, stuck out from beneath the hem of her dress. It was a granny dress, similar to what she had worn all those years ago. A patch quilt pattern, empire style, with the tie just beneath her breasts.
She smiled, appearing genuinely pleased by Teri's presence. “This is so incredible. I saw Judy a couple of months ago, over at the Farmers Market. First her, and now you. Really incredible.”
“Judy's still in the area?”
Peggy nodded. “She married a cop. Can you believe that?”
“No,” Teri said uneasily. Going back was a strange and uneasy odyssey, she decided. As ridiculous as it sounded, because they had all undoubtedly changed over the years, she couldn't stop herself from thinking how much Peggy had changed. Not in her trappings, of course, because those hadn't changed at all. But the wallflower was gone now. Her smile was genuine and easy, and seemed more open than Teri remembered.
“They've got a three-year old girl,” Peggy said. “And they just bought a new house in the Henderson subdivision.”
“That's a nice area.”
“Yeah, they must be doing all right.”
“How about you?” Teri asked, trying to be tactful. “Are you doing all right?”
Peggy smiled. “Better than ever.”
“You live alone here?”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding. There wasn't the vaguest hint of regret or sorrow in her voice, and it occurred to Teri that her friend had learned something about herself since their last get-together. Peggy was no longer on the outside looking in. She had quit coveting those around her, and she had learned to be happy with herself. It was a lesson Teri wasn't sure that she, herself, had learned.
“It's my own little corner of paradise,” Peggy added.
“It is beautiful here.”
“I like it.”
“Especially the view.”
Peggy nodded. “So... how about you? You and Michael still together?”
“Separated,” Teri said.
“Oh, I'm sorry.”
“No need. It was the right thing at the time.” There was more to it than that, of course. But Teri wasn't in the mood for stirring it all up again. Once the sediment started rising, she was afraid she wouldn't be able to keep her emotions under check and her thoughts clear. So she sidestepped the issue as best she could and left Michael there for some other time, maybe some other occasion that wasn't quite as awkward. In his place, she asked Peggy about the house plants and the furniture and about what had been going on in her life all these years. They reminisced about the old times, about how naive they had all been, and how the world had turned out to be even scarier than anyone imagined, and how the good times seemed dimmer and more dreamlike than either of them cared to admit. There was still an aura, as Peggy put it, about those times, even though it had faded over the years. Some of the faces had faded, too, she admitted.
“Have you seen any of the others?” Teri asked.
“Not in years.”
“Me, neither. Funny how easily people drift apart, isn't it?”
“The cycle of life,” Peggy said, philosophically.
“Yeah, I suppose.”
They had come full circle now, and Teri had enjoyed the journey more than she had ever imagined she would. But it was drawing down to the end, and it was time she got to the reason she had come here in the first place. “Do you remember Dr. Childs?”
“From the clinic?”
“Yeah.”
“Sure, I remember him.”
“You ever see anymore of him?”
“Not since college,” Peggy said. She shook her head, a sly smile working its way into her expression. “Now there was an odd duck if ever there was one.”
“Odd duck?” Teri said. She had never heard anyone refer to Childs as an odd duck before. In fact, she couldn't recall having ever heard anyone speak ill of him at all. This was going to be interesting. “How so?”
“Oh, you know, him the good doctor and all.”
“I'm sorry. What am I missing?”
“Genesis?”
Times had been different back then. And they had been young. And what they had put in their bodies hadn't mattered much as long as it swept them away for awhile and eventually brought them back again. Some, like Mark Bascom, didn't even care if it brought them back. He died of a heroine overdose in '71, and Teri had always thought that his death had been the death of the group. Things had never seemed quite as carefree or spontaneous after that.
Genesis, though ... Teri had forgotten about that stuff. It was something they were into for about six months during her senior year. Like LSD, it came in a convenient little sugar cube and sent you out into new, uncharted territory every time you took it. She had tried it three, maybe four times altogether, and had quit after that because it always seemed to leave her with a headache that hung on longer than the trip itself.
“Yeah?” Teri said, still not making the connection.
“Where do you think it came from?”
“From you.”
“Where do you think I got it?”
“Childs?” Teri asked. It was almost too incredible to believe. They were talking about the man who had been her doctor for most of her adult life, the man who had given vaccinations to her son, who had set Michael's arm after he broke it playing racquetball, who had done the biopsy on the lump under her left breast and had assured her repeatedly that it was benign. Sweet Jesus, what was she hearing?
“I went by the clinic every Friday afternoon,” Peggy said flatly. Her smile was gone now, and her bright blue eyes seemed as if they had faded a bit. She stared past Teri, out the window into the countryside. “He'd give me enough to pass around for a week or so, no charge. Said he'd rather have us using something he knew was safe than something off the street.”
“You never told anyone?”
“It was the only reason you guys let me hang around,” Peggy said. “If I would have told you, you would have gone to him yourselves. You wouldn't have needed me then.”
It stung to hear that, though Teri knew it was true. They would have gone to Childs directly, and Peggy would have quietly faded into the woodwork, and no one would have missed her one way or the other. She would have become the remnant of a bad trip, a memory better forgotten.
Peggy
said something about how lucky they were to have made it through those times alive, but Teri didn't hear the words. She only heard the sound of Peggy's voice. It was a sound that she knew she'd probably never hear again, even as she was leaving and they were both saying how nice it had been to see each other and wouldn't it be nice to stay in touch from now on.
Teri thanked her again, and made her way down the walkway, through the white picket fence and out to her car. When she looked back, the front door had closed. Peggy had disappeared back inside, out of the sun and away from the past. It was a place that Teri thought she wouldn't mind being herself. Sometimes, maybe most times, the past was best left in the past.
[76]
The Garden Restaurant, which was a quaint, family-owned place, sat on the south side of town, just off the river. The cobblestoned patio, beneath a canopy of vines and flowers, overlooked a huge bend where the Sacramento River lazily flowed past, almost without making a sound. Sunlight seeped through the canopy, casting a warm, amiable blanket over the area.
D.C. folded back the front page of the Chronicle Sporting Green, and folded the paper again to make it more manageable. The Warriors had lost. Nothing new there. That had become one of the few things he knew he could count on these days. Everything else seemed to be playing against the odds.
He took a sip of water, and glanced across the river at a small, private boat dock where high water had drawn a line half-a-dozen steps above the surface. It wasn't unusual to find him here in the early afternoon, after the lunch crowd had thinned and the din of conversation had settled. Beyond the fact that Cecelia had been difficult this morning and he could hardly wait to get out of the house. The Garden provided one of his few respites when he was here in Northern California.
He had married Cecelia in 1972, when they had still been living in the Bay Area. She had been his first love, he supposed, though love was probably the wrong word. D.C. had never married for love. There were five wives in five different states, and he had never married any of them for love. Instead, he had married because it was part of the charade, another form of false identification, like a fake passport or a phony driver's license. Only these were his assumed families.
D.C. looked up from the newspaper and watched a familiar face cross the patio in his direction. The man's name was Jonathan Webster, and though D.C. had not been expecting him, he was not surprised to see him here. Washington had a way of keeping tabs on you even when you thought you had long been lost in the bureaucracy.
“And to what do I owe the pleasure?” D.C. asked, setting aside the newspaper.
The man pulled out a chair and sat across the table from him, his thoughts masked behind a pair of Eagle aviator sunglasses. “Just a friendly visit between associates.”
“Your visits are rarely friendly, Webster.”
The waiter arrived with lunch – a burger and fries, set in a bed of lettuce, parsley, and two dill pickle halves. D.C. rotated the plate, sat up, and reached for his napkin.
“May I get anything for you, sir?”
Webster shook his head and waved the man away. He had always been a man of few words. Tightly wound, with an undercurrent that rarely erupted, he had mellowed over the years, if one could believe that. In his mid-sixties, the years had been good to him. A little gray in the temple. Maybe four or five extra pounds, but no more. He had always been a presence, and the years hadn't changed that.
“Not hungry?” D.C. asked.
“I caught a late breakfast.”
“Eating on the run, that's not good for your system, you know.”
“I'll try to squeeze in some fries and a burger a little later.” The man glanced across the river at the distant horizon, searching for something more than the local sights. D.C. had dealt with him on two previous occasions, both under similar circumstances – because someone in Washington had suddenly grown uneasy.
“I hear things are getting a little sticky,” Webster said.
“Where'd you hear that?”
“Doesn't matter. I heard it.”
“Well, you heard wrong.”
“Did I?” Webster raised his eyebrows, knowing what they both knew – that he had heard things exactly the way they were, that things had become sticky. For awhile, maybe even dangerously sticky. “You've been with this one a long time, haven't you?”
“Let's not go down Memory Lane, all right, Web? What are you doing here?”
“You're making people nervous. When people get nervous, they call me.”
“There's nothing to be nervous about. It's under control.”
Webster grinned, part amusement, part warning. “Look, I don't want to quibble with you, my friend. I don't have the energy or the interest. Six months from now, they're going to throw a little dinner for me, tell me something stupid like how strange it'll be at the office on Monday when I'm not there, and set me free. Me and the misses, we're going to do a little traveling. Maybe Europe. Maybe the Caribbean. Wherever the muse sends us. The good life, you know? It's long overdue, and I don't want to jeopardize it. You understand me?”
“What are they nervous about?”
“What are they always nervous about? Exposure.”
D.C. took a bite of his hamburger, washed it down with some beer, then sat back in his chair and tried to look behind the sunglasses of the man sitting across from him. The operation, code named Karma, had been initiated in a joint effort between the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency during the late Sixties, early Seventies. Primarily a research project, things had grown considerably more complicated since then.
“The boy's aging,” D.C. said bluntly.
“When did this start?”
“Just recently.”
“How fast?”
“We aren't sure yet. Maybe ten or twenty times normal.”
Webster nodded, and looked past him, lost in a moment of consideration. “Not exactly what we had in mind is it?”
“Not exactly.”
“Maybe I better have a drink after all.” He ordered a beer and downed it in three or four tosses. It was the first time D.C. had seen the man take a drink and it left little doubt in his mind that alcohol was this man's beverage of choice. He dropped the mug to the table with a loud knock, and looked across at D.C. “So ... what now?”
D.C. stared back him a moment, then said, “Gee, I don't know. You think we oughta flip a coin? Heads we tank the whole thing so some ass-wipe in Washington can sleep a little better? Tails we hang in a little longer and see what happens?”
“It's not that cut and dry.”
“Never is.”
“I wish it were, but it's really not.”
“Hey, that's why you get the big bucks, Web. You understand all the nuances, all the ins-and-outs.” D.C. leaned forward, fighting the urge to grab the man by the lapels and shake him until his marbles finally fell into place. Didn't he get it? Didn't he grasp any of this? The boy was turning into an old man. “Look, all I need is—”
D.C.'s pager went off. It sent a vibration rippling across his side that very nearly brought him out of his seat. He would have thought he'd be used to it by now. He turned it off, checked the number, and pushed back his chair. “Got a call I better take.”
“Then by all means take it.”
“Give me a couple of minutes.”
“No rush. I've got all afternoon.”
On his way inside, he heard Webster call the waiter over and order another beer. Now, two beers for most drinking men didn't amount to much, but he hated to think what it might set loose in this one. It was something to keep an eye on, D.C. silently told himself. Maybe even what a man might refer to as a tell.
He took a bit of delight in that knowledge as he went out to the phones and back again. And as he sat down he immediately noted that except for some suds at the bottom of the mug, Webster's second beer was already history.
“Anything important?” Webster asked.
D.C. shook his head, and lied. The page had
come from Mitch. He had called to say that the Knight woman hadn't done much of anything the past day or two. She was still hanging around the ex-cop's place. He had wanted to know if he needed to continue watching her. To which D.C. had answered with an emphatic yes. “Just a friend wondering if we could get together tonight for dinner.”
Webster nodded lazily. “If I call back to Washington and convince them to continue to support this Karma thing a while longer, I'm going to need some assurances from you.”
“Like what?”
“For one, that you'll manage to keep a handle on this thing. The boy is back under our control, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And what about his mother?”
“She's staying with a friend.”
“She hasn't gone to the police?”
“No.”
“You keeping an eye on her?”
“Twenty-four hours a day.”
Absently, Webster spun the mug in one hand, stirring the suds at the bottom. “And how long until we have something concrete on this aging thing?”
“You know I can't give you anything definite on that.”
“Well, what are we talking about? A couple of weeks? A couple of months?”
“Months,” D.C. said. He spooned some ice cubes out of his water glass, popped them into his mouth, and began to chew. “Maybe longer.”
“I can tell you one thing right now – you don't have any longer than a couple of months. If I can't offer up something concrete by then, they aren't going to give a damn what you or I think about Karma's potential. They're going to shut it down and walk away and be grateful their backsides didn't get singed. That'll be the end of it. Right then and there. You got it?”
“Hard not to.”
[77]
Aaron was in a hurry. He came out of the building, both hands tucked into his pockets, and took the steps as if he were Gregory Hines in a Broadway musical. It was lunch hour, only he'd gotten himself caught up in a database search and now he had less than twenty-five minutes left.
“Aaron!”
He glanced over his shoulder, hoping it hadn't been his name he had heard. But no such luck. Walt was crossing the commons, hurrying to catch up with him. Aaron tried to wave him off. “Hey, man, not now. I've only got half a lunch hour.”
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