by Rex Burns
“If you want something else, just say the word.”
“No—it’s fine.”
We parked and I walked around to open her door. She hesitated, but there was no sense sitting in the car. Face blank, she finally slid off the seat. A brisk Chinese woman led us to a small table at the room’s far end. She handed us menus decorated with red tassels and pictures of a high-arched, ornate bridge.
“I’m going to have something light. Age and heavy lunches don’t go together. You order whatever you want.”
I don’t think she knew what she ordered. She seemed surprised when a plate of food was set in front of her. None of my banter about my daughters or trends in California cuisine made her relax. Questions about her job, her family, herself, were answered with a terse yes or no or just silence. Finally I pushed my empty plate aside. “You’re not eating much.”
“I’m not really too hungry.”
“And I suspect you wish I’d get to the point. All right, here it is: I want you to tell me why Jerry Hawley committed suicide.”
Her head shook before the words came out. “I don’t know.”
“You, Dori, Jerry, Steven, and Dwayne—and a few others. You ran around together. You saw a lot of each other. And you did some things that maybe you don’t want to think about now.”
“I don’t know what you mean!”
“Sure you do. Dwayne organized things, didn’t he? He led the rituals, didn’t he, Shelley?”
I spoke as if I knew all about it. She stared at me with eyes shocked wide enough to let me gaze into her very soul.
“Didn’t he, Shelley? The rituals. Were they incantations? Conjurations?”
Slowly and still staring, her head nodded once. I resisted the urge to lean forward.
“The conjuration of lust?” I smiled.
She nodded again, eyes staying on mine.
“Of destruction?”
“Yes.”
“What about compassion?”
“After.”
“After Jerry died?”
“Yes.”
“So that his soul would rest?”
“No. So his power would help us. Jerry’s a Prince of Satan now—he’s a god in the Kingdom of Darkness.”
She was using the present tense. I did, too. “And now his spirit is called on to help you?”
Her brown eyes looked back at me with an innocent, unsettling conviction. “He’s there.”
I completed the thought. “When you want to call him.”
“When the High Priest calls him. A High Priest or Priestess has to call him.”
“Dorcas was a member of your grotto at Occidental?”
“Kabbal—we call it a Kabbal. The others”—her hand moved in dismissal and I heard the first note of assertion in her voice—“the grottos, they’re just dabblers.”
“But Dorcas had joined before you did.”
Shelley nodded. “She quit for a while. She and Dwayne, I guess, did some workings in high school, but then Dori dropped out before coming to Occidental. But Dwayne said she should come back in, so after a while she did.” The girl’s dark eyes frowned slightly in awe. “Dwayne’s like that—he just gets people to do what he wants them to. It’s because he’s a Brother of the Inner Circle.”
“You joined because he wanted you to?”
“No. Because Jerry joined. Dori dated Jerry for a while our freshman year and then they broke up, so he asked me out. And Dwayne was always around—he knew Dori—so he and Jerry started going around together. I didn’t know anything about the Kabbal or Dori being in it before. I mean she didn’t say a thing to me, and we were best friends, you know? It really blew my mind when Jerry told me what Dwayne told him. I asked Dori and she didn’t want to talk about it at first—she was afraid, you know? But finally she did, and then Jerry and Dwayne … well, I joined and then after a while we brought Dori back in. Dwayne brought her back in.”
“And Steven?”
“I met him later. I dated him for a while and then we brought him in.”
“What about Tim Gifford?”
“Dwayne already knew him. He was in the Kabbal when I joined.”
“How did Jerry commit suicide?”
“He … he hanged himself.”
“Why, Shelley?”
She shook her head, staring at her plate.
“Was it a ritual suicide?”
“We didn’t … the Kabbal didn’t hold a ceremony. I didn’t know about it until it was all over.”
“But Dwayne knew about it.”
She nodded.
“Did he help Jerry do it?”
“No. Not exactly. He said he helped Jerry decide. They talked a long time, I guess, before Jerry did it. I don’t know, maybe all night. A day and a night, maybe. And he and Jerry finally decided it was the thing to do. Dwayne said he promised Jerry a conjuration of compassion and. …” She clamped her mouth shut.
“And what, Shelley?”
Lips tight, she shook her head.
I studied the suddenly closed face and wondered what additional admission could frighten the girl. “Was it a sacrifice? Did Dwayne tell Jerry he would get a soul to accompany him?”
She stared at me a long moment. “Slaves. He would send Jerry slave-souls.”
“Did he do it? Dwayne?”
“Not then. Later—one year after. I wasn’t there but I heard about it. I’ve never been to a High Sacrifice. Only people who are Prince or Princess, Priest or Priestess can go to the High Sacrifice. And members of the Inner Circle.”
“Do you know who the Chosen One was?”
“No. Only the High Priest knows that.”
“The sacrifice was a fetus, wasn’t it?”
“It was an innocent. A pure soul. That’s all they told me.”
“Where did they get it?”
“I don’t know!”
She answered too quickly. I tried to read the dark eyes. “Do you know where Dori is now, Shelley?”
She shook her head again. “She dropped out after Jerry crossed over. She left school for a long time and when she came back, I didn’t see anything of her. In fact, I didn’t even know she was back in school until Steven told me.”
“Dwayne didn’t like her leaving?”
“No. But he didn’t make a big thing of it. He says that’s what the Kabbal is all about—liberating people so they’re free to do what they want.”
“Do you feel free in the Kabbal, Shelley? Do you do what you want to?”
“I guess. Yes. It was my choice to join. Now it’s my choice to … obey. The Kabbal is freedom; my wishes are theirs and together we are free.”
The answer had the rhythm of incantation and not the slightest nuance of irony. What I was staring at across the tatters of egg roll and hot sauce was a True Believer. “Where’s Dwayne now?”
“In … some place in Colorado.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe the High Priest sent him.”
“Dwayne’s not the High Priest?”
“No—he’s a Brother of the Inner Circle. That’s just one step below High Priest.”
“Who’s the High Priest?”
The energy she had shown while telling me about the Kabbal began to withdraw. I saw the small woman almost shrink as caution and wariness pulled her away. Even her hands began to fold closer to her body.
“Shelley?”
I had asked more than I should have. Now she was afraid she had told me too much. “I want to go.”
“Something may have happened to Dori, Shelley. These things you’re telling me might help me find her.”
“I want to go.”
That was the last thing she said and all my urging was met with silence. On the ride back to her office, a worried frown pinched her dark eyebrows together. She gazed straight ahead into the midday traffic that glittered and swirled in the hot sunlight. I wasn’t new to people clamming up, but I’d never seen it so literally. A shell seemed to clamp down around her and in my
mind’s eye she almost curled into a fetal position. She answered none of my questions, refused to nod at any comment; she focused on something inside with a stillness that froze even the blink of her eyes. When she left the car it was without a glance backward. The building’s door closed off her small, silent figure.
At home, I telephoned Detective Betts of the Pasadena Police. When the division secretary said Betts was on the street, I left my name. Then I settled into a canvas chair in the shade of my cramped deck and opened a bottle of mineral water. It was the kind Tommy drank. A beer would have tasted better, but it couldn’t cut the thirst that came from the salty Chinese food. And which was intensified by the fidgety worry that had grown as I listened to Shelley. I watched a small ketch work its way out of a slip across the channel. Using only the jib in the light breeze that came from the ocean, it glided silently toward the open, sun-sparkled waters of the bay. There, the crew—a man and woman wearing matching hot-pink bikinis—hoisted the main. The boat heeled a bit and quickly disappeared behind a row of homes.
I hadn’t yet heard from Rebecca, which didn’t surprise me. A week for the first letter to get there, and chances were she had planned a trip over the long spring vacation. She mentioned visiting Portugal sometime soon. That could take another week. Then, if she wrote to the old Fairfax address, it would take additional time to be forwarded here. And where else would she have written? I hadn’t known my new address until less than ten days ago, when I’d bought this house, which the realtor told me had been on the market for what—four hours? I had the house because I had cash in the bank—the money from the Fairfax sale plus the investment and savings accounts that had been building for twenty years. The insurance settlement for Eleanor’s death had been dumped into a separate account and ignored. It made a nice emergency reserve in case the girls needed it. Or it would make a large addition to my own insurance when I died. As for me, with care and modest expenses, I could get by pretty well on my retirement.
There was even enough for a boat to ride against that empty dock. It was an extension of the narrow boardwalk that ran from the deck and across the patch of grass that was my new backyard. Its vacant water and empty cleats had been filled with an imaginary ketch from the moment I saw the home. The Eleanor out of Coronado, California … no, she wouldn’t want that; too lugubrious, she’d say. Or, laughing, how would my next woman feel sailing on a boat named after my first wife? Things we would joke about lying head by head on a single pillow. Serious jokes, of course—neither of us had wanted the other to be alone if one died. But neither of us was planning to die. It was all just talk.
A deep breath pushed all that to the back of my mind. In the four years since her death, the pain had gradually ebbed. But I still had a habit of talking things over with her. Personal things, things about the girls. Nothing about my work. Even while she was alive, the demands of security had kept me from talking with her about that, and I still heard her slightly bemused question, “I wonder how other women manage without talking to a husband about his work?” But we could talk about Eleanor’s work. And there were always family issues, things like the choice of wedding caterers for Karen, what college for Rebecca, the name of our long-dreamed-of boat. But why this resurgence of sadness and nostalgia now? This concern with death that came like a dark furrow in the soft blue California sky? Why the nagging vision of Shelley’s dark eyes staring at me with a mixture of terror and denial?
Maybe a name combining Karen and Rebecca. They’d like that and so would Eleanor. KaReb? Ren Reb? KaBec? The Ship Rek? I washed those names out of mind with another swallow—it might be harder to name the damned thing than to buy it.
But wouldn’t Karen and Chuck have fun sailing! Or how about me and Rebecca taking it down the Baja coast to Los Cabos? Hell, with enough provisions, a two-week sail to Hawaii and points beyond! Thirty, thirty-two feet. Seaworthy at that length and not too cramped for two people. Walk out my own back door, hoist sail, and be away on a clean and vacant sea that ran all the way to China.
I sipped again and tried to envision the nameless yawl or ketch tied up to the pier. Ample deck cabin amidships. A sturdy, squared-off hull designed for strength and comfort rather than speed. In my imagination I outfitted the boat and tinkered with the cabin layout, the rigging, the electronics, the auxiliary diesel. Tommy Jenkins had his contacts in the boat business. It could happen, and I tried to hold on to that bright possibility against the tug of Shelley Aguirre, Dwayne Vengley, Dorcas Wilcox. And two deaths so far—two deaths that I was certain of.
It didn’t work. The vision of the yacht faded and the insistent names and puzzles and relationships took its place. If the high sacrifice occurred one year after Jerry’s suicide, it would have been when Dorcas had just returned from working in the Sierras and Dwayne was about to graduate. She probably wasn’t a part of that. Shelley said she didn’t even know Dori was back in school. That meant she wasn’t involved with Dwayne’s group at that time. But Dwayne had kept in touch with her—the signature on the letter indicated that. And, once before, he had managed to pull her back after she left.
I drained the bottle and heaved out of the canvas deck chair to wander back inside. The soiled scrap of letter in its envelope of clear plastic, Dori’s fascination with the power of crystals, implied that the girl was still searching for whatever spiritual enlightenment she might find. And that Dwayne was still offering his version of an answer. A Dwayne who, according to Shelley, was still very active, even a leader, in the Kabbal. Shirley. “Shirley was all twisted up about it at first … but she’s into it now …” Did that refer to a ritual? To another Kabbal somewhere else? Was Dwayne looking for a sacrifice? Another unborn slave-soul to send to Jerry Hawley on another anniversary of his death? It didn’t sound like that—the Shirley mentioned seemed alive and participating in something ongoing.
The ring of the telephone interrupted my tangled thoughts; Detective Betts’s voice said he was returning my call.
“Do you remember what Jerry Hawley’s room was like?” I asked.
Betts thought a moment. “Like? You mean the location of windows and doors and all?”
“Not the floor plan, the decorations. Were there any candles around? Or graffiti?”
“You’re thinking ritual suicide? Occult crime?”
“I’ve found out he was involved with a group that practiced Satanism.” I gave the detective a short version of what Shelley had told me.
The man at the other end of the line grunted. “Well, now. That’s interesting. He did have a few posters—weird things, you know: Day-Glo pictures of hell and fiery towers, pictures of naked women being tortured, that sort of thing. I thought at the time he might be into occultism, but there was no reason to follow up the idea; he was dead and it was definitely a suicide.”
“Do you remember if he had any tattoos or ritual scars?”
“Not that I saw. And I don’t remember any being noted on the autopsy report.”
“Did you have any missing-persons reports come in one year after his death?”
“Why?”
I explained.
“A sacrifice? Jesus, no. I’ll check the records, but I don’t remember anything turning up like that. If it was a fetus, there probably wouldn’t be any record anyway.”
“Unless the mother died, too.”
“Yeah, there’s that. I’ll check.”
“Do you know of any Satanist groups in or around Occidental?”
“Not offhand. But I’d be surprised if there aren’t some. We can’t keep records on that kind of stuff—First Amendment restrictions. Devil worshipers find out we’re spying on them, they get the ACLU all over us.”
“Do you have an occult crimes section?”
“Person. But she’s called in only if there’s a crime. We have to be real careful about violating their civil rights, Mr. Steele. All police agencies do. That’s why a lot of departments don’t even want to hear about occult crime; and if something does go to court, the DA b
etter not breathe a word about ritual or ceremony, or it’s a First Amendment walk.”
“Just focus on the criminal act itself?”
“You better believe it. Forget motive, just present the evidence.”
I thanked the man. The detective said he’d give a call if a search of the missing-persons records showed anything happening on the anniversary of Hawley’s death.
A rattle at the mail chute came as a welcome interruption to my restless wandering. I thumbed through the envelopes. Three were form letters from Sacramento—replies to my inquiries about Dorcas. She had not gotten married in the state, no death certificate in her name, no traffic violations. The last, from the Motor Vehicles Division, also listed her insurance company and coverage. But a call to that number told me she hadn’t changed any address. In fact, the agent was a bit worried. “Do you think she moved out of state?”
“Not permanently. But she is missing.”
“Her policy’s paid up for the rest of the period. She made a lump-sum payment in April.”
“And you have no recent claims on the policy?”
“No, sir. But if you hear from her and she’s planning to move, would you ask her to drop us a line? Her payments might go down in a different state.”
Or, more likely, up. “Will do.”
A smaller envelope held a bill from Shell Oil which puzzled me until I reread the address: Dorcas Wilcox with my street address. It was from the check I’d sent a few days earlier. The company’s computer had quickly updated her address from the cabin to mine. They weren’t going to take a chance on a debtor moving beyond their reach. I spread out the small stack of receipts. Most were from Brown’s Full Service in Julian. But two others were different. The dim purple carbon named gas stations in St. George, Utah, and Grand Junction, Colorado. The dates were after she’d disappeared.
The winter rains fell steadily outside the window; the heavy gray of the late, overcast afternoon made the room colder and gloomier. She watched the rain, one of those endless, persistent California drizzles, drip off the long, sad curve of eucalyptus leaves and down to the soggy lawns of the quadrangle. A pair of students, huddled under the glistening black of an umbrella, walked quickly toward the white box of the library. Japanese, probably; they liked that kind of umbrella and they were always first in line when the library opened Sunday afternoons.