The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (24 page)

“What are you going to do once you get them typed?” Zeta asks.

Lecha scoops two fat white pills off the night table and swallows them with white wine. It is difficult to know how sick Lecha really is. Zeta looks carefully at her skin color and her hair and then at Lecha’s eyes. Lecha has sunk back on the pillows. Her pills are taking effect now. “Those old almanacs don’t just tell you when to plant or harvest, they tell you about the days yet to come—drought or flood, plague, civil war or invasion.” Lecha seemed to be drifting off to sleep. “Once the notebooks are transcribed, I will figure out how to use the old almanac. Then we will foresee the months and years to come—everything.” Lecha’s eyes are closed now, but as Zeta is leaving, Lecha calls after her. “I should’ve started this years ago—then we’d already know what’s coming. But I was having too much fun—there was no time for old notebooks and scraps of paper.”

IT HAD DAWNED on Lecha—the way the darkness gradually bleeds away and the light gains momentum, much as water seeps into low places in the garden. The awareness pulsed through her day and night. When it had first broken through, she had tried little tricks, little exercises, attempting to cut off the channel. She had sat adding long columns of figures, and although she was able to concentrate on the numbers and do a more accurate job of adding them than she had ever done before, a part of her brain was still spinning a voice that mocked her: They are all dead. The only ones you can locate are the dead. Murder victims and suicides. You can’t locate the living. If you find them, they will be dead. Those who have lost loved ones only come to you to confirm their sorrow.

Old Yoeme would have laughed at her. Would have laughed as Lecha began to go over the past twenty years and assembled the evidence. The crazed old woman would have made jokes: Lecha is a special contact for the souls that still do not rest because their remains are lost; somewhere fragments of bone burnt to ash, or long strands of hair, move in the ocean wind as it shifts the sand across the dunes. Lecha could almost hear Yoeme’s voice. The crazy laugh and then, “Where do you suppose you got that ability, that gift?” Because Yoeme must have known all along that Lecha would be the one; she might have guessed it when they were still little girls.

The power Lecha had seemed to be as an intermediary, the way the snakes were messengers from the spirit beings in the other worlds below. She was just getting accustomed to this fact and her link with the dead when she had been called to San Diego.

Police in this case knew they would not find the missing boys alive because the killer had been apprehended. On the night of his arrest, with the same cunning he had used on his victims, he had managed to kill himself. In a security cell, wearing only a flimsy paper hospital gown calculated to tear if the inmate used it for a garrote, the serial killer had choked himself with a ham and cheese sandwich. He had deliberately swallowed a wad of cheese and ham that caught just over his windpipe. “No, the queer can’t tell us what he did with them. His mouth’s too full,” a young detective said loudly when Lecha had been brought in. “No, that queer won’t be doing any more sucking either. You think he did sucking? I would have said—” The older detective looked at Lecha and let the subject drop.

As her connection with the dead had begun to surface in her thoughts, Lecha had felt anxious; her nerves were raw, and her patience with grinning, backslapping police detectives in their polyester suits was running out. She had been ready to take a long vacation or maybe to go out of business for a while so that she could think about herself and her work with this power she had. It might be a dangerous power to work with. It might be the sort of power that should be locked away, ignored, no matter the wealth or fame it might bring her.

The police detectives had just been funded to set up a special team. They had been able to offer Lecha twice her normal fee. The situation they had was similar to the one Atlanta had had a few years before, except here the boys that were missing were white and had disappeared from wealthy neighborhoods in La Jolla. The department was feeling pressure from all sides. The computer and the psychologists had located the killer, but the case could not be closed until they found all his victims. Parents and family had to know for sure.

Lecha nods. This is her specialty. The detectives are anxious to talk about the work she’d done in Houston, and the case in South Dakota. But Lecha makes excuses. Flying and traveling tired her. She just wanted to get to the hotel. She had heard all she wanted from these two assholes in the car, driving from the airport. Just some hints, the younger detective had said. This weirdo really was into some kinky shit. He rented this garage apartment behind a house in the oak-hills section. We figure somewhere in the wooded areas beyond there. State fish-and-game range. But there’s way too much area. Dogs are no good after a certain point, if you know what I mean. The older detective is driving and has to get his observations in too. They’ve had search teams comb the area. But it is so big. They could be buried anywhere. Under all those leaves. The
creep was always wandering around in the forest, way back in the thick trees.

By the time they had dropped her off at the hotel, Lecha had a terrible headache. She went straight to the bathroom and prepared the syringe. The headaches had gotten worse lately, and tablets of codeine or Demerol did not touch the pain. This was going to be a rough job. These two cops had to be almost as weird as the killer, or maybe they were worse. Because the killer must have discovered his identity in much the way she was discovering her own identity as a psychic. The killer must not have known in the beginning where his fantasies and dreams would take him. The killer might not even have known the first time until after it had been done. Lecha was lying on her bed facing the sliding glass doors to the balcony. Below the balcony was the marina and beyond that the flat, blue bay, and from there to the horizon, the Pacific rising and falling to the rhythm of her own chest.

The Demerol was untying the fire knotted inside both temples. Her bones began to feel light; they floated, and then they had dissolved. She had hoped to sleep, but was accustomed to a middle ground the Demerol gave. It was a location where thought took on a more fluid quality, but unlike pure dreaming, remained more within conscious control. She kept hearing the voice of the younger detective. He reminded her of one of those tiny yappy Chinese dogs with bug eyes. “Trees! Trees!” He was certain the bodies were buried somewhere in a wooded area. She could not think about trees. The word had no meaning. She could hear the waves roll although she knew the hotel room was much too far from them. The ocean marked the motion of the moon. Up and down in the sky—higher or lower from the horizon, thin white curve of desert thorn swelled on consecutive nights to a fat white blossom. The disappearance and the returning. Over and over. The waves wash up the sand and fall back.

The dunes spread away in all directions. The white sand sinks under his boots like water. The sound is behind him. The ocean is the color of the sky. The eyes are gone. The sand fills the sockets. Now the boy has eyes the color of sand. Only the hair is lighter—the color of the sand in a wind that darkens the ocean, that darkens all.

He imagines the boys are trees that he must go tend from time to time. He uncovers them tenderly. To see how they are developing. They thrive best at the foot of the big dunes. Out in the flats they can’t take root. Rain washes them out. Exposes them where they might be found.

At first there will be an odor, but it is a sign they are growing. He remembers a baby brother long ago and the dirty diapers. But babies die. Other times the odor reminds him of fertilizer, which of course “the trees” provide for themselves.

He realizes they are trees while he is touching them. He fondles the boys between their legs, and a branch sprouts and pushes out. The tips are soft leaf-bud moist with sap. He never means to squeeze too hard or to crush. But they are tender, fragile. He plants carefully and prays for tall trees. He dreams of towering oaks and spruce that lean and sway but do not break in summer storms. He realizes his dreams are of the mountains, not the sea.

Lecha never tells how she does it, how she knows. They already mistrust the ability. One week they might hire her and the next arrest her for fraud. They like to think it is done with crystal balls and what is familiar to them from movies and TV. She is accustomed to dramatic announcements at press conferences. The high Indian cheekbones and light brown skin give her an exotic quality that television news desperately needs. But her contempt for the news media is too great to allow her to appear anymore flanking police detectives or bereaved families.

In the beginning it had been different, and Lecha had enjoyed the drama. The television talk shows were still her bread and butter. But when the detectives put the police chief on the line, she had politely declined. The beach had been closed for miles in either direction. Mounted police rode patrols to keep the curious and ghoulish out of the way of the search teams digging in the dunes. She told them she had urgent business elsewhere. She asked them to send a messenger with a check. But it was the young detective from the special squad who brought the check. She was trying to pack for an afternoon flight, she explained, but saw he would not go until he got to talk.

They always wanted to know how she knew. He said, “How did you figure the beach? His apartment was miles from the beach.” She held the doorknob. He had not stepped across the threshold because she would not move. “Congratulations, Detective Pearson, and please give my regards to Detective Connors. I’m glad I could help. Now I really have to catch a plane.” She refused a ride to the airport. He would have wanted to describe how they had found the remains of each victim. The jet circled over the ocean on takeoff, and as it banked and turned above the ocean, Lecha looked down. The waves glittered and flashed like fragments of a broken mirror. From the air the beach sand made a
narrow white stripe down the back of a giant animal, and the ocean waves glittered and flashed—eyes of mirrors as the sun dips closer to the mouth of the beast that swallows it.

She had the full answer now. She had suspected the concept of intermediary and messenger was too simple. Lecha knew exactly how grave her condition was. After she gave the instructions to the police, she had to take the Demerol again, not for any pain in her head, but for the pounding of her heart, and that voice inside shouting. She ordered scotch and milk to take the tablets. Tablets sometimes upset her stomach before they take effect. As she drifts back and forth, she thinks about old Yoeme and what she would say. But old Yoeme has got her mouth packed with sand. Lecha remembers the ragged bundles of cheap paper and the old notebooks. “Mouths” and “tongues” old Yoeme had jokingly called them. Now that she knew how the power worked, Lecha was not so sure anymore it could be called a gift. It was about time to go back home. She had made Yoeme a promise. She had to take care of the old notebooks.