Page 33 of The Forest of Lost Souls

Playing to his expectations, she says, “I don’t want it.”

“I know you don’t, sweet thing. But if you won’t eat your nice little sandwiches, I’ll feed them to you. I won’t mind doin’ it, if you want. You need to keep your strength up for our next date.”

She engages in a brief staring contest but then picks up a pair of buttered crackers. She loathes him and can’t conceal it; however, his narcissism allows him to interpret loathing as fearand continue to believe that she can be made to submit to him and like it.

“Belden’s parents, Horace and Kathie Bead, are county royalty,” Deacon continues, “upstandin’ citizens. They can’t breach the wall between the family’s legit and dark-side businesses. So they bring in a man named Galen Vector to run Belden’s operation until they hear from their son, which they never do. The new boss is on the job for seven months before Damon Orbach rats out Morgan Slyke yet again, tellin’ Vector how Morgan, flyin’ high, told some girl about Bead payin’ them to prank José Nochelobo with water bottles and how a few weeks later Bead disappears. Galen comes to me. I hear a description of this Connie Cooper, I know she can’t be anyone but you. Those eyes that are as much green as blue, and all the other qualities that are put together so damn well in you. Even if Morgan Slyke hadn’t been high that day, he might’ve spilled his guts to you hopin’ you’d let him plant some seed. So I came sniffin’ around, eventually brought a good cadaver dog, found what I found, started runnin’ surveillance on you all by myself. And here we are, fallin’ in love in spite of I’m sixteen years older, our first date drawin’ to a successful close, finishin’ our wine before we kiss good night, dinner tomorrow already set, and more than dinner. Now, darlin’, be a good girl like I know you can be and eat the crackers I was so sweet to butter for you, and tell me what went down between you and Belden.”

Calculatedly, Vida eats the first pair of crackers with slow and exaggerated chewing, as might a mulish child who knows she has lost a contest of wills and wants to delay acknowledging the fact. She lingers over her wine before consuming the second saltine sandwich almost as slowly as she did the first.

If amusement lies behind his venomous smile, it’s the amusement of a cobra. His eyes bring to mind Poe’s raven, for they haveall the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming.

He says, “You mock me, so I’m supposed to think you’re a rebel and not scared in the least. Ah, missy, you’re such an innocent. All you just accomplished was make cracker eatin’ more arousin’ than any porn film. Now tell me about Belden—my dear departed cousin, who is so much missed.”

Vida grimaces and closes her eyes and massages her temples with her fingertips. “Tomorrow.”

“What about tomorrow.”

“I’ll tell you all of it when you return tomorrow.”

“The night is young, darlin’.”

“I drank too much wine too fast, on too little food. I have a vicious headache. I’m nauseous. I’m ... just ... very, very tired and confused. You came here with big news that changes things, so many things, you being the sheriff. I’ve got to think. Think it through. Right now I can’t. I can’t think clearly right now.”

He is silent for a minute or so, and then he says, “Before I leave, you unwrap what I brought you.”

As he slides the gift across the table, she opens her eyes. The small shiny-blue box is tied with red ribbon shaped into a lavish bow.

“I saw your hobby room,” he says, “whatever craft thing it is you’re doin’ there with all those colorful stones. You’ll look good in this. You’ll look just right.”

She slips the ribbon off the box and removes the lid. The item is wrapped in folds of pale-blue tissue paper. It spills into the palm of her left hand. The flexible silver-mesh necklace is an inch and a half wide. A polished black bead of what might be sphalerite isinset in the center of the woven silver. The piece is designed to fit snugly around the neck. A jeweler would call it a “choker.” Others might refer to it as a “dog collar.”

The necklace is lovely, but she will neither say so nor thank him for it. Such a premature surrender will sharpen his suspicion.

He gets up and comes around the table.

She rises to her feet, not sure what to expect, ready to put up a fierce struggle if it comes to that.

When he says, “I’ll put it on for you,” she considers throwing it on the floor, considers politely declining the gift, considers saying she’ll wear it tomorrow evening. However, intuition tells her to say nothing and allow him to put the necklace on her. She will resist if he tries to give her that good-night kiss he promised.

As he takes the choker from her hand, she doesn’t look at him. He stands behind her, gently pulls the mesh tight, and fixes it in place with the clasp. He doesn’t press himself against her, although he kisses the nape of her neck.

She startles at the kiss, but then he turns from her and steps away.

He retrieves his cowboy hat from the chair on which he left it. He looks at her, his expression as smug as she could have wished it would be. He believes the dog collar already has an invisible leash attached to it. Her head is partly bowed. She lifts her chin in defiance, but she presses her lips together as though biting back words that might anger him—conflicting responses that he is likely to read as evidence she’s come halfway toward the submission he desires.

“Clear your mind, girl, and think things through like you need to. I’m a patient man, though it would be purely stupid not to put an excellent dinner on the table tomorrow. Wear that whitedress of yours. With high heels.” He places his hat on his head, adjusts it, slides his pinched thumb and forefinger around the brim as though to say,Good evening, ma’am.He steps out of the kitchen, leaves the house, and closes the front door behind him.

Vida remains where he left her until the engine noise of the Trans Am recedes into silence.

Reaching behind her neck with both hands, she releases the clasp. She puts the dog collar on the table.

She knows what she has to do, and she knows what peril lies before her. Even if she’s fortunate, even if she’s able to dispose of Nash Deacon—who will come after her next?

32

THE VENERABLE BEAD

Eight months earlier, when Damon Orbach tells Belden Bead about the hot girl who came to the Slyke house under a false name, how she conned the drugged-out Morgan and drained him of certain knowledge as if she’d opened a petcock in his head, Bead reacts with all the caution, discretion, wisdom, and manners that might be expected of the son of one of the county’s most powerful families. Shaped and refined by the scholars and philosophers of Yale, he is an attorney who employs his knowledge of the law to avoid arrest and prosecution for acts that the great unwashed consider criminal but which are, in his more cultured view, merely the efficient servicing of the needs of those people who yearn for calm in a turbulent world. Or who are desperate for some stimulation to save them from the sea of boredom in which they are drowning. Or just want to exercise their God-given right to get wasted as often as they can afford. So after a week of scheming, wearing a white fedora, white pin-striped Givenchy suit with a brightly patterned shirt, dressy brown-and-white loafers, a Rolex watch, and two rings on each hand, he arrives in his black 1970 Plymouth Superbird Hemi. He parks in the yard and lays on the car horn for longer than a minute, waits, then pounds the Klaxon for perhaps half a minute more.

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