A fine mist had been falling intermittently as Merlin arranged everything, but it ceased. He placed a small Bluetooth-enabled speaker in the grass a couple of feet away from the energy-reversal device. The decoy sled and wagon were stashed by the shelter. One minute prior to the event, Merlin flipped the switch of the VCR, and it whirred to life. Fifteen seconds before 11:33, Merlin stepped inside the ring of the particle accelerator. He hit “play” on a song he had cued up on his smart phone and the first ominous strains of Fortuna, Imperatrix Mundi from Carmina Burana began to play from the nearby speaker in the grass. With six seconds left, Merlin slipped the phone into his pocket and counted down in a whisper, “Five, four, three, two, one.”
The volume of the instruments and accompanying choir soared as he stretched his arms out on either side of him. He turned his hands skyward, and as the encircling electricity pulsed clockwise, he closed his eyes and began to rotate his massive person in counterpart, a slow clockwise gesture of commitment to the well-being of his hometown and a simultaneous devoir and sacrament honoring the city of his birth. His eyes remaining closed in a kind of ecstatic prayer, this unlikely tortoise-speed dervish raised his chin from his chest toward the heavens at the music’s crescendo. The fine mist began once again, filming the thick round lenses of his eyeglasses.
Merlin hadn’t noticed the coating of the extension cord attached to the VCR was worn all the way through to the wire. An electrical arc had formed between the bare worn wire and the metal ring of the Vortexan Cyclonic Reverser. The music was loud and Merlin had kept his eyes shut. He was completely unaware when the arc ignited one and then another and another of the rubber supports between the metal ring and its plywood base. Several of these pieces were now burning and Merlin was oblivious that his outstretched-arm spinning was happening inside a ring of fire. The priest of the par-three hole continued to spin and the opera played on.
Then, a voice. He heard a voice! And it was calling his name! Merlin closed his eyes even harder now as he discerned that it was the insistent voice of a woman.
“Merlin!”
The voice was closer now.
“Merlin!”
He ventured an answer to what he presumed was an auspicious visitation from a goddess.
“Yes! Is that you, Britomartis? Or do you prefer Britomart?”
“No!” the ever-closer voice responded.
“Are you Queen Boudica or Athena herself?”
“No! No! Merlin! It’s me!”
Merlin continued his query, racking his brain to remember the various female deities from ancient pantheons.
“Are you Hecate or perhaps Isis?”
“No! Merlin! It’s me! Lindley!”
“Lindley?”
“Yes! Your friend! Lindley!”
Merlin stopped spinning and faced the direction from which the voice emanated. The opera played but now the voice was all he heard.
“Lindley?”
“Yes! Merlin, open your eyes!”
He lowered his chin from its skyward angle and opened his eyes. He used his shirt to wipe his glasses and could barely make out the silhouette of Lindley Acheson trudging toward him from the thicket at the south bank of Buffalo Bayou. He stared downward at the flames licking toward his calves and gave Lindley a desperate look.
Then, a feeling descended upon him he had not expected. It was a cavernous emptiness borne of despair, a hollowness and terrible sense of futility with the sudden certain knowledge that, other than the rubber supports for the Vortexan Cyclonic Reverser catching fire, exactly nothing had happened or changed during what he was sure would have been a propitious and clearly discernible energy shift.
This terrible apprehension was a bolt as arresting as the one that had ignited the duck blind near Lumbeaux Jump but not remotely as exhilarating. Instead of an energy depositor, it was an energy thief. He knew the plug had been pulled on all his aspirations for reversing the negative gyre and resetting his city’s course. Merlin was defeated—a big overweight lumbering sweaty mass of post-delusional emptiness. And all he could do was stand motionless and hear Lindley calling to him as she emerged from the shadows, her Wellington boots trudging toward him with the same resolution that minutes earlier had animated Merlin’s own march across the links.
“Merlin!” Lindley continued. “This is bad!”
“It is?”
“Yes! This is bad! We have to go!”
“We do?”
“Yes! All this commotion and smoke is going to attract attention.”
“Oh!”
“I have a raft!”
“A raft?”
“Yes! A raft, down on the bayou! We have to go! Now!”
“Oh! Okay?” Merlin said with shocked uncertainty.
He looked at the flames encircling him and hopped over the fire to the damp grass surrounding the VCR.
Pointing to the VCR, Merlin asked, “What about this?” He now saw it as devalued scrap—an embarrassment and liability. Lindley saw it, whatever it was, as evidence that needed to disappear.
“We’ll drag it down the bank to the bayou,” Lindley offered.
Merlin then looked at the outline of the wagon and decoy sled leaning against the shelter.
“What about the sled? And the wagon? And the extension cords?”
“We’ll take them down there, too.”
“We will?”
“Yes! Merlin, we have to go!”
Merlin snapped to attention and went to work. He flipped over the VCR and stomped on it upside down, putting out the fire. Lindley unplugged the extension cord at the shelter, then pulled the wagon and dragged the sled toward the thicket at the top of the bank. Merlin pulled in the two extension cords and held them in the crook of his right arm as he dragged the VCR by one of its plywood edges toward the bayou. At the top of the bank Lindley put the wagon handle and the sled lead rope in his hand and said, “Take these down by the raft. I’ll take the thing that was just on fire and the extension cords.”
Merlin followed her instructions dutifully, almost numbly, and they scrambled down the steep bank with the gear. The black self-inflated raft was pulled all the way onto the dry part of the bank.
“What are we going to do with all this stuff?” Merlin asked.
“I don’t know. Throw it in the bayou?”
“We can’t litter!”
Sirens wailed in the distance.
“Merlin, we have to go!”
“I can put everything in the decoy sled. It’ll float. I can tie it to the back of the raft.”
Lindley was quite flustered now. “Okay, whatever, but we have to go! Now!”
Merlin put the Vortexan Cyclonic Reverser and extension cords on the sled and the Radio Flyer wagon upside down on top of everything. He cut the rope lead on the sled in half and retied it through a ring at the aft of the raft. Lindley had moved the raft halfway into the shallow water and was already aboard. Merlin flopped into the raft, loosening it from shore, and Lindley used a single oar to push off the rest of the way from the bank. She and Merlin lay prone, side by side at the fore of the craft, and Lindley covered them with a dark camouflage tarp that, at its front, she suspended from three short lengths of PVC pipe. The central length of PVC was a little longer, so the tarp made a short half tent at the front of the raft, providing them with a downstream view. There had been heavy thunderstorms west of town and the current was running at a fairly quick clip for a bayou.
Every once in a while, Merlin looked back to see if the decoy sled was still in tow. He asked Lindley where they were going, but she just told him not to worry about it. After a while they heard a police helicopter behind them, and they huddled more tightly under the tarp. Lindley hoped that from the air, the craft might just look like a piece of junk floating in the brown water along with the alligator gars.
They approached a kayak and canoe ramp near a restaurant overlooking the bayou alongside Allen Parkway, and Lindley used the oar to angle them toward the concrete incline. A man
wearing black was waiting for them at the water’s edge, and Lindley threw him a line. He began to pull the raft toward the ramp, and Lindley and Merlin stepped out onto the ramp’s cement surface. The man in black pulled the raft all the way out of the water onto the incline. Merlin looked back and saw that the decoy sled containing all of his gear had come untied and was floating down the bayou in the direction of downtown, the ship channel, Galveston Bay, and the Gulf of Mexico.
“Lindley! It’s loose!” he shouted. “It’s floating away!”
Lindley responded emphatically: “Merlin, you’re just going to have to let all of that stuff go! We have to go!”
Merlin watched his ill-conceived Vortexan Cyclonic Reverser and the red Radio Flyer wagon, a relic of his childhood, disappear around a bend in the bayou.
Lindley called him, and he heard an engine start and then another. Soaked with sweat and bayou water, he jogged up the ramp toward the waiting vehicles.
• Sixty-three
Detective Piet Penders had been awake all night at his place in Westerpark. He looked at the photos of Tite getting his treatment at the hands of the Syndics of the Rapers’ Guild. He then looked at a photo of Nico van Rompaey and at a shot of the scrap of paper with van Rompaey’s name and mobile telephone number written on it, which his mole in the Syndics had found in Tite Dûche’s wallet. They seemed like the spoils of war to him.
The wheels this information had put in motion over the course of a couple of weeks or so continued to astound him as the higher-ups on both sides of the Atlantic closed in on the chief perpetrators of the ring. Being a part of the team that cracked this case would be a career maker. He finally fell asleep but awakened after a few hours and decided he needed to pull himself together for a trip to his favorite watering hole. Then, he hoped, a long afternoon nap would ensue.
• Sixty-four
At the top of the ramp, two vehicles were running and pointed toward a driveway that led to the street. Two men put the raft in the bed of a pickup truck and opened its air valve to begin the deflation process. The other vehicle was a black Suburban. After the man who had met Lindley and Merlin on the ramp opened the passenger doors, the muddy and disheveled rafters entered the vehicle. The black-clad man then drove them to a private aviation facility at Pastime Airport. On the drive to the airport, Merlin asked Lindley, “Is it going to be okay?” and Lindley nodded yes before dozing off into a brief nap.
When they arrived at Billion-Aire aviation, Lindley directed Merlin to the bathroom.
“They have a shower in there, and there are some fresh clothes for you. Leave what you have on in the bathroom. The driver will take care of it. Take your time. It’s okay now.”
Merlin nodded and trudged toward the restroom to the right while Lindley turned left and went to the women’s restroom to shower and change.
Although he was in a daze, Merlin was surprised by how much he enjoyed his shower. He even took time to shave the parts of his face and neck where he kept his beard at bay. He changed into new underwear, sweatpants, and a sweatshirt; he unboxed and stepped into a brand-new pair of water shoes. In the lobby, he met Lindley, also showered and in fresh clothes.
A man in a pilot’s uniform walked through the doorway from the tarmac. “We’re ready when you are, Miss Acheson,” he said.
Without looking at Merlin, she quickly responded. “Are the bags aboard?”
“Yes, ma’am!”
“We’re ready.”
Merlin, Lindley, and the pilot walked outside and boarded an electric golf cart–like vehicle driven by an employee of Billion-Aire. The cart took them to a small business jet with engines and lights on and ready for flight. The pilot helped Lindley and Merlin board, and they waved to his copilot, who was already seated in the cockpit and beginning the preflight check. The pilot who had escorted Lindley and Merlin to the plane turned left toward the cockpit after his passengers had settled into their seats. The plane roared skyward in the dark, quiet earliest hours of Saturday, August 14th, and after banking in a sharp right turn at takeoff, followed a direct flight vector just a couple of degrees west of due north. Lindley fell asleep again in her seat, and Merlin sprawled on a couch alongside the fuselage.
In a few hours, the jet landed on a runway beside a length of water that also looked like a runway. On landing and disembarking in the brisk morning air, Merlin and Lindley were met by another golf cart that took them and the bags that Lindley had delivered to Billion-Aire the previous afternoon toward the strip of water on which a seaplane floated by a short pier, its interior lights glowing. They waved goodbye to the jet pilot, and as they left in the cart, Merlin spotted a flag at the top of a pole near a hangar—a red maple leaf on a central white field flanked on either side by thick red bars. After Lindley and Merlin stepped up into the seaplane’s cabin and exchanged greetings with the pilot, the plane’s prop whirred to life.
With the sun cresting over the eastern horizon, Lindley and Merlin began the second leg of their trip. After half an hour or so, the plane made a flawless landing on the glassy surface of a pristine northern Saskatchewan lake. Its shore was forested and rock outcroppings jutted toward the water. The seaplane took them to a dock at the end of a pier that led to a small cabin up an incline near the edge of a forest. Merlin and Lindley thanked the pilot and headed toward the cabin.
The cabin was modest but very well appointed, with a fireplace, a full kitchen, and a cozy living room. It had only one bedroom, and in it a single king-size bed with an overstuffed mattress and high-thread-count sheets. The pillows were filled with pure Canadian goose down. A colorful Hudson Bay blanket was folded at its end. Dog tired, they stood at its foot, and Lindley shrugged at Merlin. They got under the covers and fell fast asleep, tucked into the northern forest blanketing the western reaches of the vast Canadian Shield.
• Sixty-five
Mickey McNaughton negotiated the steep, narrow stairway from his apartment down to the building’s entry vestibule and emerged onto the street. He took a hard left and headed to a neighborhood place he knew would be open and serving cocktails. People were already there, arranged at tables on the restaurant’s terrace in the bright summer light.
Newspaper in hand, the sunglassed Mickey strolled right past them and took a seat at the bar inside. He ordered and folded the newspaper to reveal the crossword puzzle and set the paper on the bar counter. His pencil began to scratch a few letters into the newsprint grid when he heard someone call from down the bar.
“Hey, Houston!”
Mickey looked up from his puzzle and heard another call.
“Hey, McNaughton!”
He turned in the direction of the voice, and to his surprise, Piet Penders, the Dutch detective he had met at the restaurant bar, was once again seated down the way from him. Mickey put on his most jaunty prep school mode and said, “Hey, Detective! You’re not stalking me, are you?!”
This comment elicited the hint of a smile from the haggard official, who said, “I have an update for you.” He then motioned him his way as he pulled an iPad from his briefcase. As Mickey approached, Penders said, “Your friend in the Harris County District Attorney’s office has been very helpful. And I think some of our department’s research has been of use to him.”
Mickey sat at the barstool next to the detective, who was well into his cocktails. The waitress delivered Mickey his first drink of the day. Before Piet Penders opened a photo file on his iPad, he said, “Just to be clear, you never saw these images, and we never had this conversation, right?” Mickey’s mirth disappeared as he looked the detective in the eye and said, “Right.”
• Sixty-six
Late in the morning, Lindley and Merlin stirred from their sleep. Lindley put her hand on Merlin’s shoulder, and they turned to one another and he found her. At first, he wondered if this was another of his waking dreams about Wonder Woman or Athena, but no, this was real and that was the wonder of it. He embraced his rescuer, and she was more wonderful than he could have im
agined. Maybe for the first time in his life, Merlin felt as if he belonged, and then the more specific sense that he and Lindley somehow belonged to one another. He received Lindley, and she reciprocated. Their connecting was suffused with a warmth Merlin had never known until that moment. It was like some kind of case around his heart had opened and for the first time he knew its object was not an idea but a person. And that person was Lindley and she was fully with him. Somehow, he knew she was now his greatest advocate, and that together, they constituted a kind of bulwark of positive energy to counteract anything with which any sort of negative gyre might try to thwart them.
Lindley also felt a kind of belonging she had never known, and she and Merlin would talk about it during the ensuing days on their hikes in the forest and especially on their trips in the rowboat on the lake. They would look back on these conversations as pure magic—unguarded and exploratory and unlike anything either of them had ever experienced.
But Lindley felt even more than this. It was like an annoying little pebble at a corner of a chamber of her heart had melted away, or really, instantly dematerialized. She knew her mom had loved her during her lifetime and that her dad’s love for her was as solid and unwavering as he was, but for the first time, she felt beloved. There was no tinge of doubt, no bitter-edged second-guessing to this sense. It was like a thick beam of warm light, and in that moment, she knew that Merlin loved her and her love for him was confirmed.
• Sixty-seven
That afternoon Merlin rowed as Lindley faced him in the boat. He pulled the oar blades out of the water to drift, and they began to talk in the way neither of them had ever talked with another person. They talked together. Lindley related to Merlin that the name of the lake was Nemihaha and that her parents had often come to the same cabin when her mother was living and that her dad loved the fishing. On hearing this, Merlin’s eyes widened, and he asked, “Can we fish?!” Lindley smiled and began to laugh and replied, “Yes, all the fishing stuff is in that little shed behind the cabin.” He was ecstatic on hearing this news. Before Merlin began to row toward the shore, Lindley leaned toward him and Merlin held the oars to steady himself as he leaned in her direction. The sun glinted between their foreheads as they kissed in the fading light of the long northern summer evening.
Merlin of the Magnolias Page 25