Blood Test Page 23

  Maimon raised his eyebrows and stopped stroking the Lab. The dog stirred and growled until the stimulation resumed.

  “Suicide. Four or five years ago. She hung herself from an old oak on the property.”

  He recalled it matter of factly, as if the girl’s death hadn’t been surprising. I commented on it.

  “It was a tragedy,” he said, “but not one of those cases where one’s initial reaction is stunned disbelief. Marla’d always seemed a troubled child to me. Plain, overweight, excessively timid, no friends. Always had her nose buried in a book. Fairy tales, the times I noticed. I never saw her smile.”

  “How old was she when she died?”

  “Around fifteen.”

  Had she lived she’d be the same age as Nona Swope. The two girls had lived nearby. I asked Maimon if there’d been any contact between them.

  “I doubt it. As little girls they sometimes played together. But not after they got older. Maria kept to herself and Nona ran with the wild crowd. You couldn’t find two girls more dissimilar.”

  Maimon stopped stroking the dog. He rose, cleared the table, and began washing dishes.

  “Losing Maria changed Ray,” he said, turning off the water and picking up a dish towel. “And the town along with him. Before her death he’d been a hell-raiser. Liked to drink, arm-wrestle, tell off-color jokes. When they cut her body down from that tree he turned inward. Wouldn’t accept solace from anyone. At first people thought it was grief, that he’d come out of it. But he never did.” He wiped a bowl past the gleaming point. “Seems to me La Vista’s been a little more somber since then. Almost as if everyone’s waiting for Ray to give them permission to smile.”

  He’d just described mass anhedonia—the rejection of pleasure. I wondered if therein lay the key to Houten’s tolerance of the ostensibly self-denying Touch.

  Maimon finished drying and wiped his hands.

  I got up.

  “Thank you,” I said, “for your time, the tour, and the fruit. You’ve created great beauty here.” I held out my hand.

  He took it and smiled.

  “Someone else created it. I’ve simply displayed it. It’s been a pleasure talking to you, Doctor. You’re a good listener. Will you be going to Garland’s place now?”

  “Yes. Just to look around. Can you direct me?”

  “Proceed along the road the way we came. You’ll pass half a mile of avocado. Owned by a consortium of La Jolla doctors as a tax shelter. Then a covered bridge over a dry bed. Once off the bridge drive another quarter mile. The Swope place is to the left.”

  I thanked him again. He walked me to the door.

  “I passed by the place a couple of days ago,” he said. “There was a padlock on the gate.”

  “I’m a pretty good climber.”

  “I don’t doubt it. But remember what I told you about Garland’s being antisocial. There are coils of barbed wire on top of the fence.”

  “Any suggestions?”

  He pretended to look at the dog, and said with forced nonchalance: “There’s a toolshed next to my back porch. Odds and ends. Rummage around, see if you find anything helpful.”

  He walked away from me and I exited the house.

  The “odds and ends” were a collection of high quality hand tools, oiled and wrapped. I selected a heavy-duty bolt cutter and a crowbar and carried them to the Seville. I put them on the floor of the car along with a flashlight retrieved from the glove compartment, started up the engine, and rolled forward.

  I looked back at the brightly lit nursery. The taste of the cherimoya lingered on my tongue. As I drove off the property the lights went out.

  21

  I’D RECEIVED impressions of the Swopes from multiple sources but had yet to form a coherent image of the shattered family.

  Everyone had thought Garland unusual—emotionally inappropriate, secretive, hostile to outsiders. But for a hermit he’d been surprisingly outgoing—Beverly and Raoul had both described him as opinionated and talkative to the point of boorishness, anything but socially reticent.

  Emma had emerged as her husband’s cringing subordinate, almost a nonentity, except in Augie Valcroix’s view. The Canadian doctor had described her as a strong woman and hadn’t rejected the possibility that she’d instigated the disappearance.

  On the subject of Nona there seemed to be the most agreement. She was wild, hypersexual, and angry. And had been that way for a long time.

  And then there was Woody, a sweet little boy. Any way you looked at it, an innocent victim. Was I deluding myself into believing he might still be alive? Engaging in the same kind of denial that had turned a brilliant physician into a public nuisance?

  I had an intuitive distrust of Matthias and the Touch but no evidence to back it up. Valcroix had visited them and I wondered if it had been only a single visit as claimed. Several times I’d watched him space out in a manner reminiscent of the meditation practiced by the Touch. Now he was dead. What was the connection, if any?

  Something else stuck in my mind. Matthias had said the cult purchased seeds from Garland Swope once or twice. But according to Ezra Maimon, Garland had nothing to sell. All there was behind his gates was an old house and acres of dust. A minor point? Perhaps. But why the need to fabricate?

  Lots of questions, none of them leading anywhere.

  It was like a jigsaw puzzle whose pieces had been improperly tooled. No matter how hard I worked, the end product was maddening off-kilter.

  I passed through the covered bridge and slowed down. The entrance to the Swope property was fronted by a sunken dirt driveway leading to rusty iron gates. The gates weren’t high—seven feet at most—but they wore a coiffure of barbed wire that stretched another yard, and were bound, as Maimon had said, by padlock and chain.

  I drove a hundred feet before finding space to pull over. Nosing the Seville as close as possible to a stand of eucalyptus, I parked, took the tools and flashlight, and backtracked on foot.

  The lock was brand new. Probably affixed by Houten. The chain was plastic-coated steel. It resisted the bolt cutters for a moment then split like overcooked sausage. I opened the gate, slipped through, closed it, and rearranged the severed links to conceal the surgery.

  The driveway was gravel and responded to my footsteps with breakfast cereal sounds. The flashlight revealed a two-story frame house, at first glance not unlike Maimon’s. But this structure seemed to sag on its foundation, the wood splintered and peeling. The roof was tar paper and bald in several places, the windows framed by warped casements. I placed my foot on the first porch step and felt the wood give under my weight. Dry rot.

  An owl hooted. I heard the rasping friction of wings, raised my beam to catch the big bird in flight. Then a broad swoop, the scurrying panic of prey, a thin squeak, and silence once again.

  The front door was locked. I considered various means of snapping the lock and stopped midthought, feeling furtive and vaguely criminal. Looking up at the ravaged mass of the decrepit house, I remembered the fate of its inhabitants. Inflicting further damage seemed a heedless act of vandalism. I decided to try the back door.

  I stumbled on a loose board, caught my balance, and walked around the side of the house. I hadn’t taken a dozen steps when I heard the sound. An incessant dripping, rhythmic and oddly melodic.

  There was a junction box in the same place as the one at Maimon’s. It was rusted shut and I had to use the crowbar to pry it open. I tried several switches and got no response. The fourth brought on the lights.

  There was a single greenhouse. I entered it.

  Long heavy wooden tables ran the length of the glass building. The bulbs I’d switched on were dim and bluish, casting a milky glaze over the creations that rested on the heavy planks. At the peak of the ceiling were winches and pulleys designed to open the roof.

  The source of the dripping sound became evident: a reptilian system of overhead irrigation operated by old-fashioned dialed timers and suspended from the crossbeam.


  Maimon had been wrong about there being nothing but dust behind the Swopes’ gates. The greenhouse contained a plethora of growing things. Not flowers. Not trees. Things.

  I’d thought of the Sephardic grower’s nursery as an Eden. What I saw now was a vision from Hell.

  Exquisite care had been taken to create a jungle of botanic monstrosities.

  There were hundreds of roses that would never fill a bouquet. Their blossoms were shriveled, stunted, colored a deathly gray. Each flower was ragged-edged, irregular, and covered with a layer of what looked like moist fur. Others boasted three inch thorns that turned stem and stalk into deadly weapons. I didn’t stoop to smell the flowers but the stench reached me anyway, pungently warm, aggressively rancid.

  Next to the roses was a collection of carnivorous plants. Venus’s-flytraps, pitcher plants, others I couldn’t identify. All were larger and more robust than any I’d seen. Green maws hung open. Sap oozed from tendrils. On the table was a rusty kitchen knife and a slab of beef cut into tiny pieces. Each cube teemed with maggots, many of them dead. One of the flesh-craving plants had managed to lower its mouth to the table and snare some of the white worms with it’s deadly-sweet exudate. Nearby were more goodies for the carnivores—a coffee can heaped to the brim with dried beetles and flies. The heap shuddered. Out crawled a live insect, a wasp-like creature with a pincer mouth and swollen abdomen. It stared at me and buzzed off. I followed its trajectory. When it had flown out the door, I ran over and slammed it shut. The glass panes vibrated.

  And all the while the steady drip-drip from the pipes overhead, keeping everything nice and healthy...

  Weak-kneed with nausea I walked on. There was a collection of bonsai oleanders, leaves ground to powder and stored in canisters. The granulate had apparently been tested on field mice for poison content. All that remained of the rodents were teeth and bones enshrouded in flesh tanned by rigor mortis. They’d been left to their terminal agonies, paws begging stiffly. The droppings had been used to fertilize trays of toadstools. Each tray was labeled: Amanita muscaria. Boletus miniato-olivaceus. Helvetia esculenta.

  The plants in the next section were fresh and pretty but equally deadly: hemlock. Foxglove. Black henbane. Deadly nightshade. An ivylike beauty identified quaintly as poisonwood.

  There were fruit trees as well. Acrid smelling oranges and lemons, pruned and twisted to nothingness. An apple tree laden with grotesquely misshapen tumors masquerading as fruit. A pomegranate bush slimy with mucoid jelly. Flesh-colored plums harboring colonies of gyrating worms. Mounds of fruit rotted on the ground.

  On and on it went, a stinking, repulsive nightmare factory. Then suddenly, something different:

  Against the far wall of the greenhouse was a single tree in a hand-painted clay pot. Well-shaped, healthy, and obtrusively normal. A hill had been formed from the dirt that floored the greenhouse and the potted tree rested on it, elevated, as if an object of worship.

  A lovely looking tree, with drooping elliptical leaves and fruit resembling leathery green pine cones.

  Once outside I gulped fresh air greedily. Behind the greenhouse was a stretch of barren land ending at a black wall of forest. A good place for hiding. Using the flashlight beam for guidance I made my way between the massive trunks of redwood and fir. The forest floor was a spongy mattress of humus. Small animals scampered in the wake of my intrusion. Twenty minutes of searching and prodding revealed no trace of human habitation.

  I walked back to the house and switched off the greenhouse lights. The padlock on the back door was fastened to a cheap hasp that yielded to a single twist of the crowbar.

  I entered the dark house through a service porch that connected to a large cold kitchen. Electricity and water had been shut off. The greenhouse must have run off a separate generator. I used the flashlight to guide me.

  The rooms downstairs were musty and stingily furnished, the walls devoid of paintings or photographs. An oval hooked rug covered the living room floor. Bordering it were a thrift shop sofa and two aluminum folding chairs. The dining room was storage space for cardboard cartons full of old newspapers and bound cords of firewood. Bedsheets had been used for curtains.

  Upstairs were three bedrooms, each containing crude, rickety furniture and cast-irons beds. The one that had been Woody’s bore a semblance of cheer—a toybox next to the bed, superhero posters on the walls, a Padres banner over the headboard.

  Nona’s dresser was blanketed with cut-glass perfume atomizers and bottles of lotion. The clothes in her closet were mostly jeans and skimpy tops. The exceptions were a short rabbit jacket of the type Hollywood streetwalkers used to favor and two frilly party dresses, one red, one white. Her drawers were crammed with nylons and lingerie and scented with a homemade sachet. But like the rooms below, her private space was emotionally blank, unmarked by personal touches. No yearbooks, diaries, love letters, or souvenirs. I found a crumpled scrap of lined notebook paper in the bottom drawer of the dresser. It was brown with age and covered, like some classroom punishment, with hundreds of repetitions of the same single sentence: FUCK MADRONAS.

  Garland and Emma’s bedroom had a view of the greenhouse. I wondered if they’d woken in the morning, peered down at the chamber of mutations and been warmed by a self-congratulatory glow. There were two single beds with a nightstand between them. All available floorspace was given over to cardboard boxes. Some were filled with shoes, others with towels and linens. Still others held nothing but other cardboard boxes. I opened the closet. The parents’ wardrobes were meager, shapeless, decades out of style and biased toward grays and browns.

  There was a small hinged trapdoor cut into the ceiling of the closet. I found a stepstool hidden behind a mildewed winter coat, pulled it out, and stretched high enough to give the door a strong push. It opened with a slow pneumatic hiss, and a ship’s ladder slid down automatically through the aperture. I tested it, found it steady, and ascended.

  The attic covered the full area of the house, easily two thousand square feet. It had been transformed into a library, though not an elegant one.

  Plywood bookcases were propped against all four walls. A desk had been constructed of the same cheap wood. A metal folding chair sat before it. The floor was speckled with sawdust. I looked for another entry to the room and found none. The windows were small and slatted. Only one mode of construction was possible: planks had been slipped through the trapdoor and nailed together up here.

  I ran the flashlight over the volumes that lined the shelves. With the exception of thirty years’ worth of Reader’s Digest condensed books, and a case full of National Geographies, all were on biology, horticulture, and related topics. There were hundreds of pamphlets from the U.C. Riverside Agricultural Station and the Federal Government Printing Office. Stacks of mail-order seed catalogues. A set of oversized leather-bound Encyclopaedia of Fruit printed in England, dated 1879, and illustrated with hand-tipped color lithographs. Scores of college texts on plant pathology, soil biology, forestry management, genetic engineering. A hiker’s guide to the trees of California. Complete collections of Horticulture and Audubon. Copies of patents awarded to inventors of farm equipment.

  Four shelves of the case closest to the desk were crowded with blue-cloth looseleaf binders labeled with Roman numerals. I pulled out Volume I.

  The cover was dated 1965. Inside were eighty-three pages of handwritten text. The writer’s penmanship was hard to decipher—cramped, backslanted, and of uneven darkness. I held the flashlight with one hand, turned pages with the other, and finally got a perceptual fix on it.

  Chapter One was a summary of Garland Swope’s plan to be the Cherimoya King. He actually used that term, even doodling miniature crowns in the margins of the book. There was an outline of the fruit’s attributes and a reminder to check out its nutritional value. The section ended with a list of adjectives to be used when describing it to prospective buyers. Succulent. Juicy. Mouthwatering. Refreshing. Heavenly. Other-worldly.

  The rest
of the first volume and the nine that followed continued in this vein. Swope had authored eight hundred and twenty-seven pages of text lauding the cherimoya over a ten-year-period, recording the progress of each tree in his young grove and plotting his control of the market. (“Riches? Fame? Which is paramount? No matter, there will be both.”)

  Stapled in one of the books was an invoice from a printer and a sample brochure brimming with gushing prose and illustrated with color photographs. One picture showed Swope holding a bushel of the exotic fruit. As a young man he’d resembled Clark Gable, tall, husky, with dark wavy hair and a pencil mustache. The caption identified him as a world-renowed horticulturist and botanical researcher specializing in the propagation of rare food crops and dedicated to ending world hunger.

  I read on. There were detailed descriptions of crossbreeding experiments between the cherimoya and other members of annon-aceae. Swope was a compulsive reporter, painstakingly listing every possible climactic and biochemical variable. In the end that line of research had been abandoned with the notation that “No hybrid approaches the perfection that is a. cherimoya.”