by Ken Follett
Not that he thought anyone would come here looking for the truck. The Ricky Granger who had been hired as a juggie by Ritkin Seismex in the South Texas oilfield had no traceable connection with this remote vineyard in Sierra County, California. However, it did occasionally happen that a couple of backpackers would lose their way radically and wander onto the commune's land--as Melanie had--and they would sure as hell wonder why this large piece of expensive machinery was parked out here in the woods. So Priest and the Rice Eaters had slaved for two hours to conceal the truck. Priest was pretty sure it could not be seen even from the air.
He exposed a wheel and kicked the tire, just like the skeptical purchaser of a used car. He had killed a man for this vehicle. He thought briefly about Mario's pretty wife and kids and wondered whether they had realized yet that Mario was never coming home. Then he put the thought out of his mind.
He wanted to reassure himself that the truck would be ready to go tomorrow morning. Just looking at it made him edgy. He felt a powerful urge to get going right away, today, now, just to ease the tension. But he had announced a deadline, and timing would be important.
This waiting was unbearable. He thought of getting in and starting the truck, just to make sure everything was okay; but that would be foolish. He was suffering from dumb nerves. The truck would be fine. He would do better to stay away and leave it alone until tomorrow.
He parted another section of the covering and looked at the steel plate that hammered the earth. If Melanie's scheme worked, the vibration would unleash an earthquake. There was a pure kind of justice about the plan. They would be using the earth's stored-up energy as a threat to force the governor to take care of the environment. The earth was saving the earth. It felt right to Priest in a way that was almost holy.
Spirit gave a low bark, as if he had heard something. It was probably a rabbit, but Priest nervously replaced the branches he had moved, then headed back.
He made his way through the trees to the track and turned toward the village.
He stopped in the middle of the track and frowned, mystified. On the way here he had stepped over a fallen bough. Now it had been moved to the side. Spirit had not been barking at rabbits. Someone else was about. He had not heard anyone, but sounds were quickly muffled in the dense vegetation. Who was it? Had someone followed him? Had they seen him looking at the seismic vibrator?
As he headed home, Spirit became agitated. When they came within sight of the parking circle, Priest saw why.
There in the muddy clearing, parked beside his 'Cuda, was a police car.
Priest's heart stopped.
So soon! How could they have tracked him down so soon?
He stared at the cruiser.
It was a white Ford Crown Victoria with a green stripe along the side, a silver six-pointed sheriff's star on the door, four aerials, and a rack of blue, red, and orange lights on the roof.
Be calm. All things must pass.
The police might not be here for the vibrator. Idle curiosity might have brought a cop wandering down the track: it had never happened before, but it was possible. There were lots of other possible reasons. They could be searching for a tourist who had gone missing. A sheriff's deputy could be looking for a secret place to meet his neighbor's wife.
They might not even realize there was a commune here. Perhaps they need never find out. If Priest slipped back into the woods--
Too late. Just as the thought entered his head, a cop stepped around the trunk of a tree.
Spirit barked fiercely.
"Quiet," Priest said, and the dog fell silent.
The cop was wearing the gray-green uniform of a sheriff's deputy, with a star over the left breast of the short jacket, a cowboy hat, and a gun on his pants belt.
He saw Priest and waved.
Priest hesitated, then slowly raised his hand and waved back.
Then, reluctantly, he walked up to the car.
He hated cops. Most of them were thieves and bullies and psychopaths. They used their uniform and their position to conceal the fact that they were worse criminals than the people they arrested. But he would force himself to be polite, just as if he were some dumb suburban citizen who imagined the police were there to protect him.
He breathed evenly, relaxed the muscles of his face, smiled, and said: "Howdy."
The cop was alone. He was young, maybe twenty-five or thirty, with short light brown hair. His body in the uniform was already beefy: in ten years' time he would have a beer gut.
"Are there any residences near here?" the cop asked.
Priest was tempted to lie, but a moment's reflection told him it was too risky. The cop only had to walk a quarter of a mile in the right direction to stumble upon the houses, and his suspicions would be aroused if he found he had been lied to. So Priest told the truth. "You're not far from the Silver River Winery."
"I never heard of it before."
That was no accident. In the phone book, its address and number were Paul Beale's in Napa. None of the communards registered to vote. None of them paid taxes because none had any income. They had always been secretive. Star had a horror of publicity that dated from the time the hippie movement had been destroyed by overexposure in the media. But many of the communards had a reason to hide away. Some had debts, others were wanted by the police. Oaktree had been a deserter, Song had escaped from an uncle who sexually abused her, and Aneth's husband had beaten her up and swore that if she left him, he would seek her out wherever she might be.
The commune continued to act as a sanctuary, and some of the more recent arrivals were also on the run. The only way anyone could find out about the place was from people such as Paul Beale who had lived here for a while, then returned to the world outside, and they were very cautious about sharing the secret.
There had never been a cop here.
"How come I never heard of the place?" the cop said. "I been a deputy here ten years."
"It's pretty small," Priest said.
"You the owner?"
"No, just a worker."
"So what do you do here, make wine?"
Oh, boy, an intellectual giant. "Yeah, that about sums it up." The cop did not pick up the irony. Priest went on: "What brings you to these parts so early in the morning? We haven't had a crime here since Charlie got drunk and voted for Jimmy Carter." He grinned. There was no Charlie: he was trying to make the kind of joke a cop might like.
But this one remained straight-faced. "I'm looking for the parents of a young girl who gives her name as Flower."
A terrible fear possessed Priest, and he suddenly felt as cold as the grave. "Oh, my God, what's happened?"
"She's under arrest."
"Is she okay?"
"She's not injured in any way, if that's what you mean."
"Thank God. I thought you were going to say she'd been in an accident." Priest's brain began to recover from the shock. "How can she be in jail? I thought she was here, asleep in her bed!"
"Obviously not. How are you connected with her?"
"I'm her father."
"Then you'll need to come to Silver City."
"Silver City? How long has she been there?"
"Just overnight. We didn't want to keep her that long, but for a while she refused to tell us her address. She broke down an hour or so ago."
Priest's heart lurched to think of his little girl in custody, trying to keep the secret of the commune until she broke down. Tears came to his eyes.
The cop went on: "Even so, you were god-awful hard to find. In the end I got directions from a bunch of damn gun-toting freaks about five miles down the valley from here."
Priest nodded. "Los Alamos."
"Yeah. Had a damn big sign up saying 'We do not recognize the jurisdiction of the United States government.' Assholes."
"I know them," Priest said. They were right-wing vigilantes who had taken over a big old farmhouse in a lonely spot and now guarded it with high-powered firearms and dreamed of fighting off a C
hinese invasion. Unfortunately they were the commune's nearest neighbors. "Why is Flower in custody? Did she do something wrong?"
"That is the usual reason," the cop said sarcastically.
"What did she do?"
"She was caught stealing from a store."
"From a store?" Why would a kid who had access to a free shop want to do that? "What did she steal?"
"A large-size color photograph of Leonardo DiCaprio."
*
Priest wanted to punch the cop in the face, but that would not have helped Flower, so instead he thanked the man for coming here and promised that he and Flower's mother would appear at the sheriff's office in Silver City within an hour to pick up their daughter. Satisfied, the cop drove away.
Priest went to Star's cabin. It doubled as the commune's clinic. Star had no medical training, but she had picked up a great deal of knowledge from her physician father and nurse mother. As a girl she had got used to medical emergencies and had even assisted at births. Her room was full of boxes of bandages, jars of ointment, aspirins, cough medicines, and contraceptives.
When Priest woke her and told her the bad news, she became hysterical. She hated the police almost as much as he did. In the sixties she had been beaten by cops with nightsticks on demonstrations, sold bad dope by undercover narcs, and, on one occasion, raped by detectives in a precinct house. She jumped out of bed, screaming, and started hitting him. He held her wrists and tried to calm her down.
"We have to go there now and get her out!" Star yelled.
"Right," he said. "Just get dressed first, okay?"
She stopped struggling. "Okay."
While she was pulling on her jeans he said: "You were busted at thirteen, you told me."
"Yeah, and a dirty old sergeant with a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth put his hands on my tits and said I was going to grow up into a beautiful lady."
"It won't help Flower if you go in there mad and get yourself arrested, too," he pointed out.
She got control of herself. "You're right, Priest. For her sake, we have to ingratiate ourselves with those motherfuckers." She combed her hair and glanced in a small mirror. "All right. I'm ready to eat shit."
Priest had always believed it was best to be conventionally dressed when dealing with the police. He woke Dale and got from him the old dark blue suit. It was communal property now, and Dale had worn it most recently, to go to court when the wife he had left twenty years ago finally decided to divorce him. Priest put the suit on over his workshirt and tied the twenty-five-year-old pink-and-green "kipper" tie. The shoes had long worn out, so he put his sandals back on. Then he and Star got in the 'Cuda.
When they reached the county road, Priest said: "How come neither of us noticed she wasn't at home last night?"
"I went to say good night to her, but Pearl told me she had gone to the privy."
"I got that story, too! Pearl must have known what happened and covered up for her!" Pearl, the daughter of Dale and Poem, was twelve years old and Flower's best friend.
"I went back later, but all the candles were out and the bunkhouse was in darkness, so I didn't want to wake them up. I never imagined...."
"Why would you? The darn kid has spent every night of her life in the same place--no reason to think she was anywhere else."
They drove into Silver City. The sheriff's office was next door to the courthouse. They entered a gloomy lobby decorated with yellowing news clippings of ancient murders. There was a reception desk behind a window with an intercom and a buzzer. A deputy in a khaki shirt and green tie said: "Help you?"
Star said: "My name is Stella Higgins, and you have my daughter here."
The deputy gave them a hard look. Priest figured he was appraising them, wondering what kind of parents they were. He said, "Just one moment, please," and disappeared.
Priest spoke to Star in a low voice. "I think we should be respectable, law-abiding citizens who are appalled that a child of theirs is in trouble with the police. We have nothing but profound respect for law enforcement personnel. We are sorry to have caused trouble to such hardworking folk."
"Gotcha," Star said tightly.
A door opened and the deputy let them in. "Mr. and Mrs. Higgins," he said. Priest did not correct him. "Follow me, please." He led them to a conference room with a gray carpet and bland modern furniture.
Flower was waiting.
She was going to be formidable and voluptuous like her mother one day, but at thirteen she was still a lanky, awkward girl. Now she was sullen and tearful at the same time. But she seemed unharmed. Star hugged her silently, then Priest did the same.
Star said: "Honey, have you spent the night in jail?"
Flower shook her head. "At some house," she said.
The deputy explained. "California law is very strict. Juveniles can't be jailed under the same roof as adult criminals. So we have a couple of people in town who are willing to take charge of young offenders overnight. Flower stayed at the home of Miss Waterlow, a local schoolteacher who also happens to be the sheriff's sister."
Priest asked Flower: "Was it okay?"
The child nodded dumbly.
He began to feel better. Hell, worse things can happen to kids.
The deputy said: "Sit down, please, Mr. and Mrs. Higgins. I'm the probation officer, and it's part of my job to deal with juvenile offenders."
They sat down.
"Flower is charged with stealing a poster worth $9.99 from the Silver Disc Music Store."
Star turned to her daughter. "I can't understand this," she said. "Why would you steal a poster of a damn movie star?"
Flower was suddenly vocal. She yelled: "I just wanted it, okay? I just wanted it!" Then she burst into tears.
Priest addressed the deputy. "We'd like to take our daughter home as soon as possible. What do we need to do?"
"Mr. Higgins, I should point out to you that the maximum penalty for what Flower has done would be imprisonment until the age of twenty-one."
"Jesus Christ!" Priest exclaimed.
"However, I wouldn't expect such a harsh punishment for a first offense. Tell me, has Flower been in trouble before?"
"Never."
"Are you surprised by what she has done?"
"Yes."
"We're flabbergasted," said Star.
The deputy probed their home life, trying to establish whether Flower was well cared for. Priest answered most of the questions, giving the impression that they were simple agricultural workers. He said nothing of their communal life or their beliefs. The deputy asked where Flower attended school, and Priest explained that there was a school at the winery for the children of workers.
The deputy seemed satisfied with the answers. Flower had to sign a promise to appear in court in four weeks' time at ten A.M. The deputy asked for one of the parents to countersign, and Star obliged. They did not have to post bail. They were out of there in less than an hour.
Outside the sheriff's office, Priest said: "This doesn't make you a bad person, Flower. You did a dumb thing, but we love you as much as we always did. Just remember that. And we'll all talk about it when we get home."
They drove back to the winery. For a while Priest had been unable to think about anything except how his daughter was, but now that he had her back safe and well, he began to reflect on the wider implications of her arrest. The commune had never previously attracted the attention of the police. There was no theft, because they did not acknowledge private property. Sometimes there were fistfights, but the communards dealt with such situations themselves. No one had ever died here. They had no phone to call the police. They never broke any laws except the drug laws, and they were discreet about that.
But now the place was on the map.
It was the worst possible moment for this to happen.
There was nothing he could do about it other than to be extra cautious. He resolved not to blame Flower. At her age he had been a full-time professional thief, with an arrest record
that stretched back three years. If any parent could understand, he should.
He switched on the car radio. At the top of the hour there was a news bulletin. The last item referred to the earthquake threat. "Governor Mike Robson meets with FBI agents this morning to discuss the terrorist group the Hammer of Eden, who have threatened to cause an earthquake," said the newsreader. "A spokesman for the Bureau said that all threats are taken seriously but would not comment further ahead of the meeting."
The governor would make his announcement after he met with the FBI, Priest guessed. He wished the radio station had given the time of the meeting.
It was midmorning when they got home. Melanie's car was gone from the parking circle: she had taken Dusty to San Francisco to leave him with his father for the weekend.
There was a subdued air at the winery. Most of the group were weeding in the vineyard, working without the usual songs and laughter. Outside the cookhouse Holly, the mother of his sons Ringo and Smiler, grimly fried onions while Slow, who was always sensitive to atmosphere, looked frightened as he scrubbed early potatoes from the vegetable garden. Even Oaktree, the carpenter, seemed quiet as he bent over his workbench, sawing a plank.
When they saw Priest and Star returning with Flower, they all began to finish up the tasks they were doing and head for the temple. When there was a crisis they always met to discuss it. If it was a minor matter, it could wait until the end of the day, but this was too important to be postponed.
On their way to the temple, Priest and his family were intercepted by Dale and Poem with their daughter, Pearl.
Dale, a small man with neat, short hair, was the most conventional one in the group. He was a key person because he was an expert winemaker and he controlled the blend of each year's vintage. But Priest sometimes felt he treated the commune as if it were any other village. Dale and Poem had been the first couple to build a family cabin. Poem was a dark-skinned woman with a French accent. She had a wild streak--Priest knew, he had slept with her many times--but with Dale she had become kind of domesticated. Dale was one of the few who might conceivably make the readjustment to normal life if he had to leave. Most of them would not, Priest felt: they would end up in jail or institutionalized or dead.