I had chanced upon them in the middle of a ceremony that no man was ever meant to see. I thought they were Wiccans, but they despised Wiccans almost as much as they despised reason. According to those three, mere witches were wimps.
Their ceremony was for the most part so dull that it wasn’t worth a ticket at any price, especially not at the cost of my life. The event was rather like a university women’s society meeting, with a reading of the minutes and a report from the treasurer, except that these three met in the nude, brewed magic-mushroom tea, and structured their get-together around the sacrifice of three plump doves. The poor birds never did anything to anyone but had the misfortune to be symbols of peace, and nothing infuriated those particular women more than the concept of peace.
They were a nasty trio. And their horses seemed to track me by scent, as if they were half Appaloosa, half bloodhound. The flaring nostrils, the black lips skinned back from big square teeth, the flashing eyes … Consequently, I find movies like Seabiscuit and even Black Beauty to be as disturbing as The Silence of the Lambs.
The groundskeeper’s building was a sizable two-story stone structure in a shallow, picturesque glen that was sunny in the center and ringed by lacy California pepper trees. The small leaves of the peppers shimmered in a soft breeze of hardly greater force than an infant’s breathing.
The ground-floor windows were larger than those at the guest tower, but they were barred. The man-size door was locked. Behind three garage doors were evidently vehicles used by the landscapers, wherever they might be. From Henry Lolam during one of my visits to the gatehouse, I had ascertained that Jam Diu occupied an apartment on the second floor, and that there were also rooms on that level for other live-in members of the landscaping staff, though Henry had never quite confirmed that said staff existed.
Although it might be dangerous to assume that Jam Diu would still be pottering around up near the house, searching for that one hateful dandelion that could destroy the perfection of Roseland, I made the assumption anyway. I boldly tried the front door, but it was locked. The garage bays had power roll-ups and offered no exterior handles for manual operation.
At the back of the building, I found two doors and a series of barred windows. Kicking in a door might be difficult if a deadbolt was engaged.
Besides, I was wearing rubber-soled Rockports. If you’re going to go around kicking down doors, you need to wear jackboots or the equivalent, so you don’t wind up lying on the ground with a fracture of the heel bone, sobbing like a baby.
Matt Damon and Tom Cruise and Liam Neeson and Bruce Willis and other men of their stature have kicked down numerous doors without sustaining the slightest injury to the calcaneus, which is the heel bone. Sometimes they have even done it barefoot. But I do not claim to be as tough as those gentlemen are, nor do I have access to the superlative health-care plan of the Screen Actors Guild.
On my way across the estate, I had thought hard about Wolflaw’s bewilderment as to why he had asked Annamaria to be his guest—and remembered Henry Lolam and Paulie Sempiterno being equally mystified. If these people harbored secrets that might destroy them, inviting strangers to stay in Roseland was self-destructive.
Annamaria might have charisma, in the truest sense of the word, and she might inspire in people a desire to assist her, but she was not a voodoo priestess casting spells that could bring her into any inner sanctum where she wished to go. She had told Wolflaw that he had a purpose in bringing her and me to Roseland, and she seemed to have at least some general idea of what that purpose might be, even if it was her curious nature not to share her insight, to be as enigmatic with me as with everyone else.
Having quietly worked on murder investigations in Pico Mundo with Chief Wyatt Porter, who was like a father to me, I knew that some habitual criminals, especially those who commit violent acts with a perverse edge, want to be caught. Not all of them. Perhaps not even most of them. But some of them. They don’t necessarily know they want to be caught, but they unconsciously follow signature behaviors that link their crimes, taunt the police, and take ever-bigger risks that sooner or later must inevitably bring them down.
Whatever bizarre business Wolflaw was up to, he might on some profound level be weary of it, feel trapped by it, and want to bring it to an end. But as with any deeply bad habit, stopping the madness could be difficult.
As I stood there considering whether I should try to break down one of the rear doors to the groundskeeper’s building, I suddenly wondered if Wolflaw, in his unconscious desire to be exposed and stopped, might have literally given me the key to get the job done.
I tried the guest-tower key, and it turned the deadbolt. The locks in both buildings were keyed alike.
On the bottom floor were the garages. Of the three bays, two contained vehicles. They were scaled-down, open-bed trucks of the kind landscapers used, but they appeared to be antiques, so old that they had polished-brass fittings, bug-eyed headlights, and fancy wire wheels that no company these days would include on such a utility vehicle. They were in mint condition.
Open to the garage portion of the structure, a tool-storage area offered shovels and rakes and pickaxes and sickles hung on the wall. They seemed to be as clean as surgical tools.
In the middle of this space were racks of open shelving around which I walked. All were empty and dust-free.
Inlaid in the concrete floor were many of the copper rods with the elongated figure eight inscribed in the exposed end.
Nowhere could I find bags of fertilizer, cans of insecticide, bottles of fungicide, or other gardening supplies.
I went through the drawers of a storage cabinet, which mostly contained hand tools. I found a hacksaw, which I took, and a packet of spare blades, which I slipped into an inner jacket pocket.
I also took a screwdriver. It wasn’t as good as a knife, but it could do damage. The handle was wood instead of plastic.
Although the better Odd Thomas in me rebelled at the very thought of stabbing someone with a screwdriver or any other weapon, I knew from grim experience that, cornered and desperate, I could do to bad men what they wanted to do to me. And bad women. There is in me a darkness that, by darkness challenged, will rise up and have its way. I act in the defense of the innocent, but I sometimes must wonder if I will be innocent in my own heart, or even redeemable, at the end of my strange road.
The ground floor also contained Mr. Jam Diu’s office. The desk drawers were empty, as was the filing cabinet. In the concrete floor were more of the copper rods.
Because of the lack of an interior staircase, I used exterior stairs at the east end of the building to climb to the second floor. A hallway served five rooms and one bath in the first two-thirds of the building; although they might have been intended as quarters for live-in gardeners back in the day, they were unfurnished.
At the end of the hall, a door opened into Jam Diu’s efficiency apartment. These immaculate quarters were furnished and decorated almost as sparely as a Zen monk’s cell.
He had no television but a first-class music system. Although the world might prefer streaming music off the Internet, Jam Diu hung with his CDs. His collection seemed to consist entirely of classics, piano and orchestral, though I spotted one Slim Whitman album that must have been a gift from some misguided soul.
In the bedroom, as you would expect of any true music lover, a Beretta shotgun and an assault rifle were fixed to the wall with quick-release spring clips. They were loaded. On a set of open shelves were perhaps a hundred boxes of ammunition for the two visible firearms, but also for handguns.
Apparently Mr. Jam Diu worried about something more aggressive than aphids and bark beetles.
The pistols and revolvers were in the bottom two drawers of a highboy. So much for the screwdriver. I put it in the back of the lowest drawer and, from the selection of six handguns, I chose a Beretta Px4 Storm. Double-action 9 mm with a four-inch barrel. Seventeen-round magazine.
He had a spare magazine. I loaded both with copper-jacketed, low-recoil rounds. Through my mind’s eye ran the primate swine in the tall grass, and I dropped a box of twenty rounds in one sports-jacket pocket.
In the drawers were simple, premium-leather, double-thick, concealed-carry, belt-slider holsters custom to each of the handguns, with a built-in spare magazine carrier. My belt threaded easily through the eyelets, and in two minutes, the loaded 9 mm was on my hip, under my jacket.
And so it would soon begin. I hoped that I wouldn’t have to shoot anything but swine—and that the definition of swine would remain strictly biological.
Spare linens were kept in the bedroom closet. I took a bath towel and a pillowcase. I wrapped the hacksaw in the towel and put the towel in the pillowcase, which made a good sack.
I intended to do my best not to be seen as I went about the business at hand. But if I encountered someone, I could justify the sack somehow—perhaps by saying that I was going on a picnic in the meadow and that the sack contained my lunch—whereas explaining a hacksaw would be more difficult.
With luck, I wouldn’t run into anyone until I had thought of a better story than the stupid picnic.
In the living room, before leaving, I paused to scan the fifty or so volumes in a bookcase. They were mostly tomes of ponderous philosophy, though there were four thick books of photography too tall for the shelves and laid flat.
Every volume in that quartet was about Hong Kong. The photos presented the city as it had been in the late nineteenth century and on through every decade until the current day.
Jam Diu sounded Vietnamese to me. But I’m just an ignorant psychic fry cook who knows nothing more about Asian cultures than he knows about molecular biology.
Hong Kong had once been a British colony. Now it was a Chinese province. The groundskeeper spoke English without either an Asian or a British accent.
Jam Diu might not be his real name. In fact, if Roseland was as much a nexus of deceptions and conspiracies as it appeared to be, his name was more likely to be Mickey Mouse than Jam Diu. Whatever his name, I thought perhaps he was sometimes homesick for Hong Kong.
I left the building, locking everything behind me, and returned to the cover of the trees and wild fields.
The temptation was to feel safer now that I was well-armed, but I didn’t allow myself to be tempted. Experience had taught me that overconfidence is an invitation to the Fates to bring onstage two or three muscle-bound guys in porkpie hats, who want to lock me in a walk-in freezer until I fully solidify or intend to toss me into the giant revolving drum of a concrete-mixer truck and pour me into the footing of a new sewage-treatment plant.
Guys who wear porkpie hats are always, in my experience, up to no good—and pleased about it. Whether that style of headwear turns previously benign men into sociopaths or whether men who are already sociopaths are drawn to that style is one of those mysteries that will never be solved, though the Department of Justice has probably funded a score of scientific studies of the issue.
As I headed east-southeast, the clouds coming in from the north loomed at my back. But the sky ahead was so blue and the land so sun-drenched that, under other circumstances, I might have wandered happily through the meadow while singing “The Sound of Music.”
Of course, one must always remember that although The Sound of Music is the most feel-good movie musical of all time, it is crammed full of Nazis.
Twenty-two
CARRYING THE HACKSAW DISGUISED AS A PICNIC LUNCH in a pillowcase sack, I approached the mausoleum from the south, first through weedy fields and then across forty or fifty feet of lawn as flawless and lush as that in an erotic dream about a golf course.
The forty-foot-square, windowless limestone megatomb boasted an elaborate cornice and carved panels depicting stylized sunrises and Edenesque landscapes. The entrance, a ribbed bronze door flanked by immense columns, wasn’t on the north side of the building, where it would have faced the house, but here on the south side.
According to Mrs. Tameed, superstition dictated the location of the entrance. The original owner had thought it would be bad luck to be able to look out of any window in the main house and see the door to this house of the dead.
The slab of bronze swung smoothly, soundlessly on ball-bearing hinges. As I eased the door shut behind me, I switched on the lights: three gold-leafed chandeliers and a series of wall sconces.
This enormous empty chamber would have been an ideal ballroom for a really cool Halloween party. Then I flashed on a mental image of people in harlequin masks waltzing with red-eyed primate swine, and I decided that I’d rather spend that holiday evening alone, with the doors locked and the shades drawn, biting my fingernails to the quick.
Inlaid in the walls were glass-tile murals that re-created famous paintings with spiritual themes. In the spaces between those works of art were niches waiting to receive urns of ashes.
Only three niches were filled. After the founder of Roseland, Constantine Cloyce, and his family died, subsequent owners felt no eternal attachment to the property and chose to have their mortal remains interred elsewhere.
The nameless boy had told me to come here. Before returning to the main house to free him, I thought it wise to heed his advice.
He had urged me to “press the shield that the guardian angel holds high” in one of the mausoleum mosaics. I hadn’t realized until now that all fourteen of those reproductions were of works that included a guardian angel.
No titles of the paintings were given, but inlaid at the bottom of each mosaic was the surname of the artist: Domenichino, Franchi, Bonomi, Berrettini, Zucchi.…
Fortunately, not all of the angels had shields. And only the one in the Franchi piece was held high, to protect a child not from demons but from divine reproach.
The shield was reddish-brown and contained a lot of tiny pieces of colored glass. With a little trepidation, I swept my hand back and forth across the entire shield. Exactly nothing happened.
I rapped my knuckles here and there on the shield, listening for a hollow spot. I didn’t hear one.
As I began to think I had chosen the wrong mosaic, I noticed that one of the larger glass tiles, about an inch square, was not grouted to those that surrounded it. I pressed only that tile, felt it give a little, pressed harder, harder still, and with a click it abruptly sank an inch into the wall.
Something hissed. And then with a low rumble, an entire section of limestone, seven feet high and four wide, containing the mural, rolled away from me. It retreated about three and a half feet before coming to a halt.
The main wall from which that section detached was eighteen inches thick, leaving a two-foot gap on each side, in which lights had come on automatically. A narrow flight of stairs led down both to the left and to the right.
I should have known that if I survived the challenges of my adventurous life long enough, one day I would have my Indiana Jones moment.