by John Case
‘Dammit,’ he said as his ball sliced into the rough off the fourteenth tee. ‘You guys mind if I take a mulligan?’
The question drew hoots. ‘One mulligan isn’t going to help you today, Obie,’ a man named Johnson joked. ‘You need a mulligan stew.’
By noon they were in the clubhouse eating lunch – his treat because of his lousy run on the back nine. By two he was home. The weather was holding. Barometer steady. Wind unchanged. An hour later he was in the hangar, checking over his gear for about the tenth time.
The fact that he had a private hangar made rigging up the plane a snap. Most crop-dusting equipment is simple enough, consisting of lengths of tubing attached to the following edges of the wings. Twenty spray nozzles had been fitted to the tubing, and it worked quite well. Indeed, he’d been able to buy everything he needed at Home Depot.
The canister itself was kind of large, but fit into the passenger seat behind him. It was a Swiss-made device that was apparently used for fogging against some kind of insect in the Bernese Oberland. Headquarters had come up with it, and they’d done good. Its dispersion rate was preset, and there was a built-in air compressor. All he had to do was charge it up, fill the thing with water, and introduce the material. Airborne, one flick of the switch, and a fine aerial spray would fan out behind the plane.
He waited until four-thirty. Like most small airports, Pine Creek had no instruments to control takeoffs and landings. For local trips, there was no need to file a flight plan. Some of the guys – especially the ones with vintage planes – liked to go up and do dipsy-doodles and barrel rolls. But there wasn’t anyone else up now, not that he could see. And there was no wait for the runway. (It was only on the weekends, really, that you ever had to line up for takeoff.)
He loaded the canister into the passenger seat and tossed his jacket on top of it. He went through his checklist, stood back and admired his handiwork. Really, the nozzles and tubing were barely visible, even at this distance.
Outside, the wind sock was slack, although every now and then a breath of air lifted it up. Up top, he didn’t see another plane in the sky except for a commuter heading south.
From the sky it was clear that this part of Florida was now almost fully developed. Off toward Orlando, a few farms hung on, their green patches bright with new grass. Apart from those, and some golf courses, and a narrow greenway along the creek, subdivisions and shopping centers stretched in every direction for as far as the eye could see. Which was good. They needed pretty good population density for the test.
The oceanfront was only four miles from Pine Creek, and within a matter of minutes he was flying over the north-south condos and hotels that crowded the shore. His plan was to execute ‘a line-source laydown’ – the technical term for spraying a small amount of material in a continuous line, relying on a favorable wind to carry the inoculant inland.
Not that there was any danger of missing the target.
Directly below, cars crawled along the blond beach, outnumbering the swimmers. The town had curtailed the hours a bit, but it hadn’t outlawed the practice – which stuck in his craw. Half the planet was paved, and these idiots had to drive on the beach!
It made him angry.
Dropping lower, he reached behind him and flicked the toggle switch on the air compressor. Incoming! he thought, as the plane cruised above the beach, the compressor thundering away, a fine mist spewing from the edges of the wings.
22
CAL TUTTLE SAT across the desk from Frank, with the flags of his office behind him. A doughy-faced man in his late forties, District Attorney Tuttle was not much of a talker.
Frank asked him how the torso had been found.
‘Campers’ dog.’
Was he surprised?
Tuttle cocked his head and looked at him. ‘To find a decapitated woman with her hands cut off, layin’ in the woods?’ He thought about it for a moment and shrugged. ‘Not really.’
When the body turned up, did he connect it to the Bergmans?
‘No.’
Why not?
‘Nothin’ to connect it with.’ He made a little snapping sound with his tongue and gums. ‘DNA tests take a while. Then we’ll know.’
Could you tell me the names of the campers?
‘No I don’t think they’d like that. Dog’s name was Taz.’
‘Thanks. But you’re in touch with Dutchess County on the case, right?’
‘If you say so.’
‘Well, it would be newsworthy if you weren’t,’ Frank replied, becoming irritated.
Tuttle smiled, pleased to get his goat.
‘I’m told Harry Bergman is a suspect in his wife’s death,’ Frank said, watching Tuttle’s reaction. ‘Is that true?’
A regretful smile. ‘Well,’ Tuttle replied, ‘it’s a novel idea.’
‘Is it?’
‘Yeah,’ the D.A. said. ‘I hadn’t heard that one.’
Frank frowned. Unless Tuttle was a very good actor, he was telling the truth. ‘Well, maybe my source was misinformed.’
‘I think he may have been.’
Frank decided to switch tacks. ‘What about the Temple?’
‘What about it?’
‘I don’t know. What are they like?’
Tuttle shrugged. ‘They stick to themselves. We don’t see ’em that much.’
Frank sighed. He’d been trying to have a conversation with this man for almost half an hour, and the effort had worn him down. So he put his pen away and asked if Tuttle could direct him to the Temple’s headquarters.
Tuttle sketched a map on a piece of paper and pushed it across the desk. ‘Probably won’t let you in,’ he said, shaking Frank’s hand.
‘Why not?’
Tuttle shrugged. ‘Standoffish.’
And, in fact, they wouldn’t let him in – except to the Visitors Center.
This was a dog-and-pony show housed outside the compound in a white clapboard saltbox. A couple of hundred yards farther along the road, Frank could see a set of wrought-iron gates and a small stone guardhouse. The gates appeared closed, so he stopped at the Visitors Center, lifted the pineapple door knocker and let it fall. Once. Twice. Again.
A cheerful young woman appeared and welcomed him inside. He showed her his press pass and told her, ‘I was hoping to see the compound, but the gate’s closed.’
The woman apologized, explaining that the gate was always closed: no one was allowed inside the compound without an appointment.
‘So, who do I call for an appointment?’ Frank asked.
‘I’m afraid you’ll have to write ahead,’ she answered.
‘You mean, there’s no one I can call?’
‘Not really.’
‘What about him?’ Frank asked, nodding toward a photograph on the wall. The picture was of a man in his thirties, standing on a mountaintop, laughing at the camera. Behind, and below him, was the world.
‘That’s Solange,’ she said with a smile. ‘I don’t think he’s available. But since you’re with the press, you could call the Public Affairs office – only I don’t think they’re here today. I think they’re at a demonstration in Buffalo.’
‘But –’
‘We have a Web site – you could e-mail them, if you want. Just go to the site, then click on Public Affairs!’ She handed him a brochure printed on stiff, gray stock. ‘It’s all on here,’ she said, ‘the snail-mail address and the e-mail one.’
He thanked her for it,
‘And if you want to look around, the center has three sections: Inspiration, Information, and the Shoppe. But you’ll have to hurry,’ she said apologetically, ‘we close in half an hour.’
Frank agreed to hurry.
The first thing that hit him when he entered the ‘Inspiration’ room was the smell of incense and burning candles. Then he saw the striking black and white photograph that occupied the entire back wall.
It was a man’s figure – in fact, Solange’s – walking on a beach, just where the surf
met the sand, his pant legs rolled up, a dog beside him, the sky radiant and golden. Gulls wheeled overhead, and a calligraphic banner read, FOLLOW ME. WALK IN THE LIGHT.
As Frank approached the image, he noticed the music for the first time. A boy’s choir, singing a haunting melody in a language he couldn’t identify. Romanian. Bulgarian. Something like that. The pure voices washed over him, rippling the air. Helluva sound system, Frank thought.
Displayed along the walls of the room, which were covered in a soft gray fabric, was a series of smaller photographs, each about the size of a large poster. Like the larger picture, they were beautifully framed and artfully lighted. Frank looked at the images, and saw that each of them was different: a spiderweb spangled with dewdrops. A pine forest laced with shafts of sunlight. Children walking hand in hand toward the sunset.
What each of the pictures had in common, he realized, was light – brilliantly captured light. Frank moved from one to the next, walking through the waterfall of music. He felt . . . good. He actually felt kind of uplifted.
A few of the photographs – those with Solange in them – had an audio feature. Frank picked up a set of earphones and pressed a button.
He was looking at a picture of Solange, standing in a wheat field. With the sun at his back, it seemed, almost, as if he had a halo. And the wheat, too, was sunstruck, the sparking off its tips making stars of light. When he pushed the button, the wheat seemed to move, to bend and sway, as if in the wind. Leaning closer, he could see that the image itself was steady but that behind it, some device made the light coruscate and shimmer. The effect was heightened by a background track of wind soughing through a field. And then a voice spoke, riding on the wind.
‘And the Lord said, let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself upon the earth: and it was so. And the earth brought forth grass, and herb yielding seed after his kind, and tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself, after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the third day.’
Frank passed a few more images and picked up the next set of headphones, standing now in front of a campfire scene, with Solange beside the fire and a sky strewn with stars. This time the audio track was the crackling fire – and like the wheat in the previous photograph, the fire seemed to sparkle and move. So, too, did the stars, which became even brighter as the voice-over rang in his ears:
‘And God made two great lights, the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night . . .’
Ah, Frank thought. Genesis. He made a brief circuit of the room, confirming this, and saw that the various images were meant to recapitulate the Creation story. Pretty slick, he thought.
He ducked into the ‘Shoppe.’ It seemed to sell vitamins, supplements, soaps, aromatherapy oils, candles, that kind of thing. One entire wall was devoted to inspirational books and tapes. Classical music played – Pachebel’s Canon, he thought. The brunette who’d met him at the front door stood behind the counter, wrapping up the purchases of a middle-aged woman with braided hair. ‘Do you want to buy anything?’ she called out. ‘We have to close, you know, in about’ – she glanced at her watch – ‘gee! Two minutes.’
He demurred and hurried into the Information room. He didn’t have time to do much more than take a quick, visual inventory. He saw a lot of graphs and charts and maps, more audio displays, with multiple sets of earphones tethered to a wooden counter. One display showed a map of the U.S. with tiny lights glowing in various sectors. On a central table, under a large banner that read WARMING, sat a fat globe with a thermometer stuck into it. Suspended from the ceiling was a ‘population clock’ shaped like a bomb. It ticked noisily away, its digital numbers whirling faster than the eye could see. On one wall the rain forest burned in Brazil. On the opposite wall a forest of pines appeared to have been mown to within an inch of the ground.
‘We’re closed now,’ the brunette said in her sweet, friendly voice. ‘But you could come back tomorrow. We open at nine.’
She gave him a small plastic bag with ‘some free samples. Try the mango-lavender shower gel,’ she said as she walked him to the door. ‘It’s fabulous.’ He grabbed a couple of brochures on the way out.
He’d hoped to drive straight back to Washington, but by nine o’clock, on the Jersey Turnpike, he found himself nodding off. A semi’s horn jolted him awake, and he decided to look for a motel.
He found one a few miles south of Cherry Hill. It was a Norman Bates kind of place with a bar off the lobby. The bar was reached through a thatched-hut entrance, flanked by signs trumpeting:
VINNIE & THE GEE-GNOMES!
ONLY AT THE LEAKY TIKI!
His room was an off-rust color: orange walls, drapes, bedspread, carpeting. Next to the bed someone had put his fist through the drywall. It was the kind of place where you hook a chair under the doorknob. He did that, and took a shower.
The mango shower gel was terrific.
Revived, he pulled out his laptop and wrote a couple of short memos to himself about his interviews with Kramer and Tuttle, and his half hour at the Visitors Center. Reading over what he’d written, he realized what a bust the trip had been.
If you believed Kramer, he was on a wild-goose chase. And why not believe Kramer? Kramer was closer to the story than anyone. He knew the Bergmans, knew the problems they had with their son – and he’d actually interviewed people on the ship. And according to him, there was nothing to any of it. His clients were as flaky as the people in the Temple – maybe more so.
On the other hand . . . Tuttle seemed genuinely surprised when asked about Harry Bergman and whether he was a suspect in his wife’s death. What had he said? That’s a novel idea, his voice heavy with sarcasm. And yet, if you believed Kramer, this was a big lead.
The operative words being, if you believed Kramer. Did he? Frank thought about it. Why would he lie? he wondered. And the answer suggested itself: nice car.
None of which meant anything, really. He was back where he started – stuck in a cheap motel with a lot of expenses and no real story. He might as well be in the Chernomorskaya.
Hunching over the computer, he typed the words: Temple of Light – Visitors Center. Then he pulled out the brochure and typed in the Temple’s specifics: address, fax, phone, Web site, e-mail. Anything else worth recording? Not really. Except that they obviously had a lot of money. A ‘flagship.’ And a helicopter. And a ‘compound.’
Where did the money come from? he wondered. The shower gel was great, but how much dough could you make from that? It wasn’t like they were selling the stuff at Wal-Mart.
Wondering what their Web site was like, he hooked up the laptop to the telephone and jacked into the Matrix (or at least AOL), thinking, Frank Daly, Cyber Sleuth.
It took about thirty seconds for the Web page to fill in, an image of the Earth – as shot from space. But instead of the random scarves of cloud that swirled over the familiar ‘blue marble,’ the artist had pulled the clouds together into a ghostly stylized image: a prancing white horse with a wild eye. Temple of Light pulsed on and off, changing colors. Below the banner were an array of smaller boxes, each of which contained an image. He clicked on the first one: Solange and the dog on the beach. It was the same one he’d seen in the Inspiration room at the Visitors Center.
Not much there. The text identified the Temple’s leader, Luc Solange, as ‘the reluctant guru of the ecology movement,’ and ‘an avatar of muscular environmentalism.’ The mission statement of the Temple was ‘to reestablish harmony between Mother Earth and Childe Man.’ Solange was said to be a frequent lecturer at the Temple’s ‘wellness centers’ in Big Sur, Taos, Cabo San Lucas, and other ‘vortices of spiritual convergence. There were options to click onto sites offering these lectures, and information about the wellness centers.
Subsequent pages offered options such as ‘Envirogeddon,’ and ‘Revelations Decoded,’ the latter Solange’s take
on the Seven Seals. He took a quick look and found it to be a dense, scholarly, footnoted work, sprinkled with references to numerology, the Qabbala, and more. He moved on to another page, ‘Dragon Tales,’ and watched the profile of a large ship crashing through heavy seas slowly materialize on his screen. He clicked on the ship, but got a 404 error message, indicating the page couldn’t be found. He went back.
A ‘Book of Days’ showed pictures of smiling Templars at work, at play, and en famille. There were order forms for the Temple’s ‘Eco-Vita’ product line (aromatherapy products and nutritional supplements) and its publications. Finally, there were links to other Web sites, including Earth First and PETA, and ‘A Letter from Luke,’ inviting readers to join the Temple in its fight to save the planet.
Frank looked at his watch and signed off. It was ten-thirty, and he wanted to call Annie before she went to sleep.
‘Heyyyy,’ she said, sounding happy to hear from him. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m in Jersey. My room is orange. I feel like I’m inside a pumpkin.’
She laughed, and made a joke about Cinderella. Then she turned serious. ‘So how did it go?’
He told her about Kramer and the Visitors Center, and added that he’d just logged off the Temple’s Web site. ‘You might want to look at it,’ he said ‘it’s kinda interesting – if you like that stuff’.
‘I’ll check it out,’ she replied. ‘It’s either that or sleep.’
They talked for a few minutes more about nothing in particular and then hung up, leaving Frank with a choice between going to bed or checking out the Gee-gnomes.
It was way past midnight, almost one when the phone rang, dragging him up from a deep, REM sleep. ‘Wha . . .?’
‘Frank, it’s Annie!’
‘Hullo,’ he mumbled, flicking on the light.
‘Wake up!’