The Waning Age

by S. E. Grove

  I have to admit that it changed how I looked at Troy. If I’d seen the house before calling him, I wouldn’t have called.

  Their voices drifted in and out as I moved from room to room, the women’s high laughter, Charlie’s occasional growl. I didn’t hear Troy at all. In one of the bedrooms that looked out over the patio, I paused for a moment and watched. The five of them were sitting in the scant shade of a lemon tree, beside the glinting waters of the lap pool. Mrs. Philbrick reclined in a lawn chair at the far edge, smiling and drinking. One of her friends in a floppy hat was laughingly fencing with Charlie; he leaned in to whisper something and she held up a jeweled hand, pushing him away by pressing a single finger to his lips. The other friend dangled over Troy’s chair like an eager marionette, all jerky pats and playful shoves. She was even thinner than the stepmother, with a platinum head of hair like Chandler’s Silver-Wig. Troy smiled tightly, not looking at her. He looked about as happy as a mouse in a glue trap.

  There was something wrong with the house, but I couldn’t figure out what. Something no amount of polished brass and blond wood could remedy. Something to do with flirtation and coercion, with a stepmother who made herself deliriously happy and a stepson who did not. Maybe I was trying too hard. Maybe it was just as simple as the unsubtle Charlie made it look: the predatory son of a predatory man who ran a predatory company. Predation of different sorts, sure, but predation nonetheless. They all had their various victims. And the people around them—Troy, Monica, Frances Peters—were merely accessories, some abler than others, to their habits of persecution.

  But maybe it was more complicated. What made the whole thing tick? What was the purpose? I didn’t get it.

  No answer ran into the bedroom to declare itself. Philbrick Senior didn’t appear, either. Suddenly all I wanted to do was get out of there so I could ponder the problem in peace. I ran a coriander-scented rag over some surfaces, scurried back downstairs to stack the supplies, and tried to make my way out of the house as discreetly as possible.

  Ed caught me on the way out. “Hey!” he said. He looked at me hopefully. “Will we see you again on Monday?”

  “No schedule yet from the boss, but I’m fine to come back,” I said. I didn’t explain that by Monday I would have found another solution. I had to.

  Ed seemed elated. It was probably the first time he’d gotten that answer. “That’s great. Thanks for everything.” He opened the door for me and waved cheerily as I stepped out. “Enjoy the weekend!”

  I shook my head as I started the car and watched the motorized gate rolling open. The place was seriously off-kilter.

  Driving down the hill toward Van Ness I began to feel a little better. By the time I parked the car in the underground garage, I was back in familiar territory. Van Ness was incurably, reliably seedy, and I relished the walk down to the bus stop. The air smelled of ocean, as it sometimes does in surprising pockets. Three crusty vagrants stood under an awning sharing a sandwich and looking for all the world like they’d stepped right out of Cannery Row. Their matted beards and bushy eyebrows disguised their faces entirely. I tipped my hat and one of the three Steinbecks decorously raised his own broken hat and swooped it downward with a gracious bow. “Bonjour, mademoiselle,” he said with a perfect accent. I grinned at him.

  I took a crosstown bus that left me at the far east end of Fisherman’s Wharf. Walking south, I came up to RealCorp ten minutes later. The place was even quieter on a Saturday. I called Glout from outside the building and he didn’t answer, so I dove into the lobby. Lucy and my friends from the previous visit were not on duty. Nevertheless, the weekend receptionists followed the same playbook. A smiling, twiggy thing with feathered bangs tried to sell me synaffs, and I fended off her advances. When I insisted she call Glout, she made a disappointed face and turned to the rotary phone. The conversation was short. She reported that Glout was in a meeting until three and could not be disturbed.

  It was difficult to leave empty-handed. I found my feet dragging as I headed back to the revolving door. I reviewed and discarded for the fiftieth time the crazy schemes I had considered during the last forty-eight hours. Threatening self-immolation would be dramatic, but most likely the ladies at the counter wouldn’t even flinch. Nuts, they’d probably smile and clap.

  No, my two best schemes were the ones I already had cooking: Philbrick and Hoffman.

  * * *

  —

  On the way to Marin, Cass told me that June had prepped all the legal paperwork and that it was sitting in a briefcase in the trunk. “She’s been working nonstop on it, Natalia,” Cass said.

  “I’m grateful,” I replied, looking out at the view of San Quentin. The state prison begins on the far side of the 580 bridge and sprawls northward, occupying thirty square miles. It’s like a city, only more so. The population is larger than San Francisco’s. The towers are just as high. They consume more food and utilities. And from what I hear they move just as much money around, too. It’s the largest prison in the area, but only because the real estate is so valuable. If you haven’t been to Nevada, you should go stand near the border and look at it with binoculars. It’s 90 percent prison land.

  “Did she say if it would work?” I asked.

  “It’s going to work,” Joey affirmed quietly from the seat beside me.

  Cass glanced at me in her rearview mirror. “She said that if Hoffman agrees to a paternity test and proves intent to take legal responsibility then we have an airtight approach.”

  “The trouble is proving intent,” I said.

  “Right,” Cass agreed.

  We rode in silence. The prison loomed to our right, the high sand-colored walls like desert cliffs. Cass and Tabby’s car purred quietly. As we reached the winding roads closer to the coast, the motor shifted, expending rather than generating its store of friction. Cass slowed down. I always get queasy on curves but I was almost done explaining to Joey by way of De rerum what had happened at the Philbricks’. He shot me a quizzical glance when I described Troy as “solid.”

  For his circumstances, that is, I typed.

  Joey looked skeptical. You should have zapped older brother anyway, he wrote.

  Probably, I agreed. Any word from your army of spies outside RealCorp?

  . . . Nope. They’ve gone quiet.

  Meaning what? Not writing you back?

  All three are MIA.

  That was ominous. I refrained from pointing out to Joey that I’d told him so. Aren’t you worried? I asked.

  More worried about you, Joey typed. Fish bounty has climbed to 160.

  What a waste of money.

  And they have added + targets.

  What’s that.

  Dinging anyone in a quarter-mile radius also gets points.

  Dumb.

  Their way to deal with 100 Fish all converging in one place. Many prizes.

  How do they even prove radius?

  Time/location stamp on photo of kill shot.

  I shook my head silently. I can’t think about this right now, J.

  Okay, he relented.

  I put De rerum down and gave a long sigh. We’d reached the bluffs. The ocean glimmered with the promise of another kind of life—leisure and comfort and days unfolding slowly.

  We used to go to the Point Reyes seashore sometimes with Mom, and Cal always loved it, rain or shine. It was never the same place. Sometimes it was quiet and pastoral, with the cows bellowing in the sunlight and the mud hardening underfoot. Sometimes it was a landscape out of legend, with the elk running graceful parabolas between the grassy hilltops. Sometimes it was unearthly, with the patches of scorched grass left by the forest fires, the disfigured, carbonized trees like silent watchers. Once when we were hiking with Cal through the drizzle, he came upon the flattened and mostly desiccated carcass of a deer. The eye was missing, the fur was eaten away, but the antlers remained a perfect
, symmetrical crown. Cal crouched by the deer and stared and stared until the tears started running down his face. I wanted to console him, but I didn’t know what to say. The deer had a good life? Everything dies someday? The platitudes didn’t really touch the fact that something once living and vibrant was now rotted to pieces.

  Mom had a good response. She was often sort of awful with the little things but then came through with the big things. Death being big, rather. “What’s making you cry, Cal?” she asked, crouching down and wrapping her arm around his waist.

  “It was so beautiful,” Cal hiccuped.

  Mom nodded. “It was beautiful.”

  “It’s not right. It shouldn’t be out like this, for people to step on.”

  “What would be right, do you think?”

  Cal’s tears started drying up as he thought about what to do. He pondered for a time. “Can we move it into the woods? Then we can cover it with branches.”

  Mom gamely put Cal’s plan into action, and I did my part by clamping my jaw down and not saying a word about infectious diseases. We spent an hour sheltering Cal’s deer with branches and he gathered a clump of wildflowers, setting them reverently at the top of the pile.

  As they go, it was a gentle introduction to death.

  22

  CALVINO

  October 13

  Dear Nat,

  I think there is something really wrong. I did a test a little while ago. Sort of like what they did at school but with video clips. When we were done, Dr. Glout went offline for more than three hours. He never leaves for this long except for at night.

  But he wouldn’t tell me what was wrong with the test. He just kept saying that we would probably have to do the test again later because the results were unusual. But he would not explain how they were unusual. That really scared me. Then I kept asking and he didn’t answer. He just wrote, nothing. Nothing is wrong.

  What is wrong with me, Nat?? I really wish you had told me before this started. Maybe you didn’t know, but you are pretty good at figuring these things out before they happen. The things you told me that would happen this year pretty much happened just like you said. But I never thought this would happen. So what is this?

  Love,

  Cal

  23

  NATALIA

  OCTOBER 13—AFTERNOON

  We reached Mordecai’s Hill in the early afternoon. The sign was exactly as Steadfast had described: rickety plywood and spray paint. Maybe Cass would get some business out of this visit, I thought.

  The winding dirt road seemed to get drier and drier as we climbed. The almond trees gave way to cypresses, their leaning trunks long and wanting. A white gate with a padlock stood open half a mile in. The air carried scraps of something pungent—tangy and mineral.

  “Hot springs,” Joey said, looking out through his open window.

  “God, I hope they’re not nudists,” Cass commented.

  “They’re Puritans,” Tabby reminded her. “I think the two are not compatible.”

  “If there were to be a place for Puritan nudists,” I said, “this would be it.”

  Cass pushed the little coupe into the uphill. “Fingers crossed that it’s not.”

  As we crested the hill, the buildings came into view. The main house was a rambling late-Victorian structure that had never been flashy and had dwindled with time. The exterior was brown wood shingle. The spindled frieze around the wraparound porch looked chipped and broken in places. Sash windows on every wall were shuttered against the bright sun. Facing it across the dirt road stood a giant barn painted brick red and a long, low building of recent construction and uncertain purpose. On a high hill beyond all of these rose a church unlike any I’d ever seen: a Romanesque box made of thin, wooden slats. The slats were spaced evenly, so that narrow slices of blue sky appeared all through the walls and roof and steeple. It made you think of the church as a delicate wooden cage.

  Cass stopped the car by the side of the dirt road, since there seemed to be no designated place to park. We all climbed out of the coupe. I felt the waves of boiled-egg air coming up from the hot springs. A stream ran past the low building, and I was willing to bet the Puritan nudists had their baths in there.

  Or not nudists, as it turned out. We walked toward the main building and a woman came out to meet us wearing a version of the white dress and bonnet that Deliverance and Steadfast had been wearing at Ashael’s Cave.

  “Welcome,” she said, stopping in the road before us. “Bienvenidos to Mordecai’s Hill, New Puritan Church of God.”

  “Thank you,” Cass said. She introduced us all one by one.

  “I’m Cressens,” she said, giving a slight bow. She was an older woman, and she had a courtliness about her that I thought was less Puritanness and more agedness. Her eyes were pale blue and white-lashed, her nose long and purple-veined where the nostrils flared. She held her hands folded at her waist while she spoke. “Please come refresh yourselves out of the sun,” she said, gesturing toward the faded porch of the Victorian pile.

  We climbed after her and sat on a mismatched assortment of wooden furniture that had clearly been repaired many times. I sat on a rocking chair with one purple arm and new webbing. Hey, they were frugal. There was nothing wrong with that.

  Cass explained our visit to the New Puritan without mentioning Cal or paternity or anything potentially hair-raising. “We are trying to locate someone we knew in the past as Dylan Hoffman. We believe he now goes by Mordecai Hoffman—your minister. Is he the same person?”

  Cressens blinked at us. “I couldn’t say,” she replied slowly. “I didn’t know him before he was Reverend Hoffman.”

  “Could we ask him ourselves, perhaps?” Cass prompted.

  “He isn’t here at the moment. Reverend Hoffman and many from the community are doing their weekly educational outreach in Santa Rosa.”

  “Will he be back soon?”

  “It’s likely. They often return around three or four. Sometimes later.”

  Cass paused. “Could we wait here to speak with him? Or would it be better to return another time?”

  “You could wait.” She looked around the porch. “You’re very welcome to stay here. Or inside. Or you may enjoy the grounds—many daytime visitors use the trails on the property.”

  I couldn’t tell if she was being evasive on purpose or if she was innately vague in her thinking or if the bliss of Puritan life had made her a little weak-witted. Cass was having a hard time figuring it out, too. She glanced at us each in turn. I gave her a one-shouldered, one-inch shrug that said “Why not?”

  “Thank you,” she finally said to Cressens. “We’ll wait here.”

  “Very good. I’ll be indoors, and please make yourselves at home. Let me know if I can bring you anything.”

  Cressens disappeared through a screen door on a loose hinge. The four of us sat without speaking, listening to the silence.

  “I bet there are no decals besides ours in a mile radius,” Joey said in a low voice.

  “I saw solar panels on the way in,” Tabby offered.

  “Not enough for screens.”

  Tabby nodded agreement. “Probably just enough to run the electric kettle.”

  “They don’t use tech of any kind,” Joey said, dropping his voice further. “Not even kettles.”

  “Are you sure?” Tabby scrunched up her nose. “That seems impossible.”

  Cass and I watched this exchange in silence. “We can ask Cressens when she gets back,” Cass said.

  We waited a long time. In the silence we made, lulled by the heat and the bucolic surroundings, faint sounds reached us. Footsteps within the big house. A window closing. Splashing water. A hammer in steady bursts. We saw two more women leaving the barn carrying baskets and then, a while later, a man entering with a wheelbarrow. That was about it for forty minutes. I stood
up at the end of the hour. “I’m going to go check out the church on the hill.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Joey said.

  We walked down the steps and ambled along the dirt path. I had dressed for the country, with walking shoes and twill pants, but I hadn’t counted on the heat. My linen shirt was damp and crumpled. Though I had a canvas hat, I would have preferred a canvas tent. The sunlight was inescapable. Joey trudged along beside me without complaint, his polished shoes dusty at once. He had dressed for church, not for a hike: well-ironed pants and a checked shirt with matching socks. “I don’t think the Puritans will mind if you walk around their farm in a T-shirt,” I suggested.

  Joey shook his head. “First it’s the shirt, then the shoes. Next thing you know I’ll be wearing a bonnet and milking cows.”

  “Wow, I had no idea you were such a pushover. I would have tried to convert you ages ago.”

  “Never underestimate the Puritans,” Joey said darkly. “Look what they accomplished, despite all the starvation and self-loathing.”

  “These aren’t real Puritans,” I reminded him.

  “I’m not going to risk it. They might be descendants.”

  We had reached the base of the hill where the splintered church stood, and we climbed it slowly. Up close the structure was less poetic; it looked like scaffolding for a church, abandoned mid-project. But once we were inside, all the lyricism returned. The most impressive view was through the ceiling, which hung overhead like the rib cage of some ancient mammoth, delicate and perfectly proportioned. The blue sky lay in ribbons beyond it.