by Susan Dunlap
The hiss of the kettle blew like a steam engine in this silent room. I jumped back, but Leo took the noise in stride, poured a small bit of cocoa in each cup, and added half a cup of water. He returned the kettle, found a spoon, stirred and handed me a cup. “Smells good, huh?” They were the first words he’d spoken since we’d left his cabin.
I looked from him to the cocoa. I understood this was a lesson. I didn’t want to be fooled. I wanted to understand. And yet, beyond whatever symbolic meaning it had, it did smell good. It smelled delicious. I thought of that first wonderful cup of cocoa I had gotten here, the one I’d taken outside Monday and sipped as if I were drinking in Heaven. I inhaled deeply and I smiled.
“Drink.”
I smiled and sipped. “Yuck! It’s awful. Worse than awful.” I plunked the cup down and picked up the cocoa packet. “It’s still half full. Roshi, you have to use the whole thing. Even then it can be weak. But this, this is terrible. I can make you a decent cup. We’ve got good cocoa here and the water’s still hot. There’s no need for us to drink this swill. It’ll only take—”
“Drink this,” he said, and sipped his own.
Frowning, I picked up my cup and prepared to down it in one big gulp. He caught my hand. It was the first time his hand had touched mine, and it seemed a very personal thing. His fingers and palm were calloused but they felt soft. Perhaps it was the way he cupped his hand, or maybe even his intent coming though the flesh. I remembered him—Leo—in the truck looking at me and me wondering if he was staring a mite longer than strictly necessary and thinking of the affairs nurtured in isolated places like this, like flower bulbs forced in tight vases.
“Drink,” he repeated. He released his hand. It may have lingered a moment, but more likely I was imagining that so I didn’t feel so foolish about the memory.
Whatever his intention, the result was I did drink the miserable cocoa slowly, tasting it, trying to treat it like instant coffee, as a brown liquid with no connection to its decent cousins. I didn’t get to like it, but I did drink it. I took the cups to wash, and when I turned back he was making two more cocoas, this time with Barry’s good cocoa, and in good-sized mugs. As he poured, I inhaled and smiled. He smiled back that wide kidlike grin. He turned off the overhead light, leaving the kitchen in the dim glow of the night-lights. Then he lifted the mugs, walked across the kitchen and up the stairs to the loft to Amber and Maureen, the aroma lingering behind him.
I stood in the half-dark, fuming. I’d understood his lesson and this was my reward! The aroma of the good cocoa teased me. I’d barely eaten all day, because I was taking care of Roshi then, taking care of Maureen, and now she got the good cocoa.
But, the water was still hot, and the good cocoa was in the cabinet. I strode over, feet rapping the floor, yanked out the good stuff and helped myself to a heaping spoonful. Righteously, I poured the hot water, stirred, and defiantly drank. The cocoa was good, very good. But when it was gone, I missed my pique.
The door opened behind me. I nearly dropped the mug. It was only when a whiff of cold air brushed my cheek that I realized the noise wasn’t Roshi coming back downstairs. I turned slowly, cup still in hand, expecting to see Rob heading deliberately for the kettle and a final cup of tea after a hard day of directing.
But the figure wasn’t moving deliberately, and it wasn’t Rob. It was Justin. I sank back into the shadows and watched Justin move furtively, almost soundlessly from the door to the stove, pause long enough that I wondered if he had sneaked in for tea. Getting an extra cup of tea wasn’t a hanging offense. Why didn’t he turn on the light and grab a cup?
I stood for a moment in the shadows. Justin moved on toward the stairs, placing each foot soundlessly. I was barely breathing. How far could I let him go? I couldn’t let him creep up the stairs and take Roshi by surprise. And yet I had to give him time to expose his intentions. Amber all but said Aeneas had stolen his college application essays. He’d have spent days, maybe weeks on each one. The opening was in March; the deadline for the essays must have been almost immediate. No way Justin could have reconstructed them in time. And he could hardly send in applications with notes saying: The dog ate my essay. Of course he’d chase after Aeneas. Of course he’d be enraged enough to shove him off the bridge.
He was almost to the stairs. At least, I thought, he didn’t grab a knife. He’s not planning on attacking. He was moving so slowly he paused on each foot, like he was walking in kinhin. No, wait! He was testing the floor, listening with each step. The envelope? Did he figure it was hidden in here? Did the kitchen have a trapdoor or some facsimile of loose floorboard? It doesn’t take much to hide an item none of the residents care about. But why would he bother about his college entrance essays all these years later? Nothing could be of less value to him now.
Unless there was something else in the envelope, something he was sufficiently loath to discuss, admit, focus attention on, that he had lied about to Amber.
I was speculating, but he was working on some thesis, and I wanted to let him follow it as far as he could. He moved around the far side of the melangeur and its great round red tub blocked him from view. I inched forward, faster than he had, but every bit as careful not to reveal myself. The boards under his feet may not have been squeaking enough, but to me those under my feet were screaming. I stopped, waited, but Justin didn’t turn.
Bent over, I moved forward.
I was beside the morgue-like metal table the beans had been on. Under its flat metal surface was two feet of empty space and then a bottom shelf. No protection from view. I peered through the opening just as Justin reached the bottom stair to the loft. He reached up, unhooked a foot-long rod from the wall. I couldn’t make out what it was.
No more time.
I sent the morgue table shooting across the room at him. He jumped onto the stairs. For a moment I thought he was going to do exactly what I was heading off—run upstairs—but the noise must have startled them up there and something banged overhead. Justin leapt off the stairs, sprinted across the kitchen, and out the door.
I raced after him out the chocolate kitchen door. In the few minutes I’d been inside, the fog had wrapped the kitchen. Now I couldn’t see anyone. Couldn’t even spot movement. The path forked below the sesshin kitchen door. Surely Justin had taken the left tine toward the zendo, not stayed straight to the parking lot. There was no reason for him to go there. I turned and hurried down alongside the kitchen, my feet slapping into the silence.
A hand grabbed my arm.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Before I realized what happened I was back in the kitchen, the sesshin-half this time, and staring at Roshi. The strength of his pull on my arm shocked me. His illness had lightened him physically but not emotionally, and this “save” came straight out of emotion.
“What was all that, Darcy?”
“Justin, creeping across the room. When he got to the stairs I shot that cart at him. I couldn’t have him wandering on up the stairs to find you and Amber and Maureen.”
I glanced toward the stairs expecting to find Amber headed down, but despite the racket she hadn’t come looking for the cause.
“Justin,” he mused. But he looked not as if he was thinking but something deeper was going on, as if he was sensing something within himself that had been there all along but he had avoided seeing.
I washed out the cups. The splat of the water resounded through the emptiness of the room. “Roshi, just who is Justin? Amber didn’t need him to drive her here this time. He didn’t come to study with you. So what’s he doing here now? He still thinks it was Aeneas who was the enlightened being; still acts like Aeneas went to Japan even when the truth is smacking him in the face.”
Roshi leaned against the counter.
“So he said.”
“But why would he say such bizarre things if they weren’t true?”
He shrugged.
“People do, Darcy. I know that’s not the answer you’re looking for right now.
You want something beyond a reasonable doubt. There’s a lot I don’t know about the students here. We are a small monastery, not like Zen centers with renowned teachers and waiting lists. We schedule our sesshins and we take who comes.”
“But how do you know what you’re getting?”
“We don’t,” he reiterated. “This is a monastery in the woods in a cold, rainy climate. We have no electricity; we are nine miles from the road. It’s not Puerta Vallarta here. If someone wants to come to spend two weeks in silence, facing the wall, with knee pain, back pain, shoulder pain, not to mention mental pain, I assume he is serious about his practice. I figure if he’s not; he’s in trouble. So far that’s been true.”
“But someone killed Aeneas.”
My words hung between us. I was thinking of Justin’s college entrance essays sitting invitingly in the car, despite Amber’s warnings. Was Justin the one she meant when she said it was only guests who became Aeneas’s victims because they didn’t protect their belongings? Next to original research documents, college entrance essays top the “can’t do without” category. If Justin spotted Aeneas with them, of course he’d chase after; of course he’d be furious enough to shove him.
“Did Justin say anything—”
“Darcy, no one said anything definite. Do you think I would have let this go on for years if they had?” His face went slack. He nodded, slow, minuscule movements. “It’s time to go.”
“Go where?”
“You, to bed.”
“And you?”
“That’s not . . . I don’t know.”
There had been a change in his voice during that pause; the last sentence seemed to surprise him as much as it did me. It scared me more than Justin had. He didn’t know where he was going because he didn’t know if he’d be coming back. He didn’t know if he would be killed.
My whole body quivered and I knew if I didn’t hold tight I would sob. I breathed in, staring at the counter next to him, feeling the cold of the air, forcing myself to concentrate on this moment and not the future without him.
I leaned on the counter next to him and said, “This is my first job as jisha. I’ve let you get poisoned. I’ve let you go all day without food. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you get yourself killed.”
A grin twitched on his face; he looked like he was about to wink, maybe to make some joke about his fork collection. Then, as quickly as it had come, Leo was replaced by Roshi, and it was Roshi who said coldly, “You are not jisha. You have ten minutes to get to bed before lights out.”
“Roshi—” I was desperate to ask him . . . something, anything. I didn’t know if it was to keep him or, failing that, to keep a part of him. He looked so fragile. I grabbed him by the arms. “You are my teacher.”
“Each moment is your teacher. Be alert.” He removed my hands. He may have given them a little squeeze; I can’t be sure if he did or if I so wanted it that I imagined I’d felt it. He opened the door, paused and said, “Check on Maureen before you go,” and stepped outside into the dark, leaving me more alone than I could ever remember feeling.
I stepped outside and watched him go. The fog fuzzed the light in the bathhouse and meshed the dark figures moving on the paths with the trees and buildings behind them. Almost immediately, I lost track of which one was him. I walked across the path toward the bathhouse, passing a tall man in a thick Peruvian sweater. The bathhouse looked like a temple on a foggy Japanese lake, ridiculously romantic with its rectangles of dim yellow throwing just enough light to outline the curlicued corners of the roof. I was ten feet from the building, on the path from the kitchen, when the door from the men’s side opened, backlighting a robed figure as it emerged into the night.
I recognized Roshi from his deliberate gait. But that wouldn’t have been necessary. He was carrying a lantern; it lit his face, throwing a grotesquely large shadow of his head onto the side of the building. Slowly he walked to the zendo, up the steps, and without removing his shoes opened the door and peered around inside. Then, satisfied in whatever his purpose, he closed the door, hoisted his lantern, and moved down the stairs, back along the path to the bathhouse, and turned right toward the parking area. He hadn’t looked around as he passed my path or at any other time in that walk. He hadn’t looked because he was not being alert to danger. He was a well-lit invitation to danger! The killer wouldn’t have to worry about finding him to attack. And in case the chances of his being saved were too great here, Roshi was moving down the path to the parking area and the road. And the woods. He was all but daring the killer to get him. In this fog anyone could come up behind him and he’d have no warning. If he wanted warning.
I flashed on that moment his face had gone slack and he had said, I don’t know. He hadn’t meant merely that he didn’t know what would happen in the next hour, he’d meant, I was sure, that he didn’t know anything, not the logic of his original plan, nor the safety of his student he had assumed he was protecting, nor whether his new, more dangerous plan would work. Was he on a suicide mission? Was he spurred by guilt about Aeneas? Or was this a last, desperate effort to protect the rest of us?
His slight figure grew smaller in the fog till I couldn’t distinguish him from the shadows beyond and could barely see his light.
Then I dug my hands into my pockets and hurried after him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
Roshi’s walk had the quality of meditation, a slow, steady, deliberate moving of the weight onto one foot and then the other so that the progress was steady, unbroken, ineffable.
Coastal fog in California is different than the gray, downy comforters that smother the Atlantic coastline. It blows in from the Pacific at night and is cranked back in morning like an old awning. There are small tears in its canvas through which the moon blinks and is gone. The moon blinked on Roshi as he crossed the bridge. He slowed and for the first time his gait was shaky, the uncertain steps of a sick man. At the middle of the bridge he stopped.
I moved closer, trying not to crackle twigs underfoot. His face was drawn and the moonlight bleached out any color, leaving it garishly white. He made a small bow toward the stone wall railing, lifted the hem of his robe, stepped up on it and gazed down over the edge to the water and the rocks.
I broke into a run.
I don’t know if he heard me or if he had intended all along to climb back down, but he stepped back onto the bridge, walked on across to the Japanese maple, and paused before it as he had on the bridge wall. I could see him bowing as the fog sealed up the tear and he faded under it.
He turned onto the path beside the stream. My stomach lurched. You’ve been in the woods twice today, once going, once coming back, I reassured myself. But the first time I had been all but blindfolded as Amber led me along, and coming back I’d had my hands on Maureen’s shoulders most of the way. Neither time had been in the same thick fog that coated woods of my childhood. Not for a moment had I been alone. Now, my body felt light with fear, as if any gust would blow me off. I swallowed hard and forced myself to keep moving. Roshi’s lantern was growing dimmer in the distance.
At the Japanese maple I paused, as Roshi had. The rain had washed off its leaves and just the skeleton remained. Surprising myself, I bowed, walked around it, and stepped onto the path, into the woods.
My feet went numb; I could barely feel the ground. My breath stopped at my throat. My mouth turned sour with bile. I thought I would faint, or slip into the stream, or die. I couldn’t move, couldn’t go forward.
Just pretend you’re in Central Park, Gabe would have said.
“Central Park,” I murmured. “The boathouse. This is just a path to the boathouse.”
The bile welled. I was going to retch and keep retching till I chucked all my guts into the stream. This wasn’t Central Park; it was here. The fog swirled in, around me. Roshi’s light was almost invisible.
I was going to pass out.
Roshi was walking to his death alone.
His light was a speck far o
nto the path.
I grabbed onto it with my eyes and followed, looking neither right nor left, feet shuffling along the ground for balance. On my left the stream sputtered and sloshed; below, leaves and twigs crackled; above, leaves swished against other leaves. It all blended to one sound not as loud as the draw of my breaths. Ahead, the tiny lantern light flickered and was gone. I broke into a run. Then it reappeared, as if Roshi had swung the lantern in front of himself and back.
He moved ahead steadily, but ever more slowly, and I was afraid his own gait would falter. He only needed to lose his balance once to tumble down the embankment onto the rocks, into the river. Yesterday he had been too weak to sit up without help; this burst of strength couldn’t last. It was all I could do not to grab him and drag him back to his cabin. But he’d just have set out again when I wasn’t looking.
My brief run brought the feeling back to my feet and I walked more steadily, my gaze toggling from the light to the ground and back with every step. Condensed fog dripped off leaves and tapped on my forehead, and made a pungent potpourri of pine and damp earth. I may have walked for half an hour, or maybe it was five minutes. I was so intent on not losing Roshi and on staying on the path I didn’t think about anything else, didn’t see leaves, or trees, only the dot of light in the darkness.
The light went out again. Roshi was about thirty yards ahead. I walked on, feeling a great draft of aloneness, waiting for the comfort of the light to return. It did not flicker back on. Something banged, wood on wood. A gruff groan sawed through the still air.
“Roshi,” I yelled. “Leo, are you all right?”
There was another bang—wood on wood—louder, sharper.
“Leo!” I ran, batting branches out of my way. My boot caught against a root or something. I lunged, grabbed a branch and twisted, landing on one knee.