Page 34 of The Forest of Lost Souls

When Vida doesn’t make an appearance, Bead exits the muscle car with a manila envelope in one hand and stands at the foot of the porch steps and calls her name several times. In an imperious voice, producing almost as many decibels as the car horn, he declares that he knows she’s at home, that she knows who the hell he is, that they have an issue to discuss, an accommodation to reach, and that he needs to get back to town for a dinner engagement.

Since her conversation with Morgan Slyke, Vida has cautiously researched the great Bead. She knows what car he drives. Among other things, she knows he usually travels in the scowling company of two muscle-bound gunmen named Hanes and Rudy, whom some locals refer to as Jane and Judy, although never within their hearing. This time, Bead appears to have come alone, which might support his contention that his purpose is to negotiate with her rather than terminate her. In spite of his flamboyant attire, he is said to manage his empire from behind layered curtains of deniability, as prudently as befits the godfather of mountain crime. But it is rumored that, at times of intolerable frustration, he takes the chains off his Mr. Hyde and becomes a horror.

When at last Vida steps onto the front porch, she’s wearing a roomy gray sweatshirt and jeans tucked into cowboy boots, something of a contrast to Bead in his finery. “What do you want?”

“Peace,” he says.

“Then why did you start a war?”

His eyebrows seem to rise halfway to his hairline. “Terrence Boschvark and his company started the war, bombed us simple country folk with megatons of money. There’s no defense. I’m just determined to get my share instead of becoming a battlefield casualty.”

“And you’ll do anything to get that share.”

“Oh, I can think of things I wouldn’t do. I’m not as greedy as others I can name. Now, we can stand here talking at each other from different altitudes until we’re hoarse. Or if you’ll extend a little Kettleton County kindness, invite me to a rocking chair, sit with me long enough to hear me out, much misery can be avoided by everyone.”

“I can’t be bought.”

“I don’t want to buy anyone. I’m here to explain, persuade.”

“And if I’m not persuadable?”

“You’ve nothing to fear from me. What should scare the bejesus out of you is a four-hundred-billion-dollar corporation still guided by its self-adoring idealistic founder, with a mission statement so noble and poetic it makes stonehearted hedge-fund managers weep. An entity like that, run by a man like Terrence Boschvark, can grind a thousand Vidas to dust and get away with it. I am a messenger, not a hatchet man. If you’ll listen to what I’ve come to say and if you’re wise, you’ll accept what I propose and get on with your life here, as your uncle got on with life after he puthiswar behind him.”

Considering that Belden Bead arrived with much horn blowing and that he’s dressed as if he thinks a new disco era is at hand, Vida finds it hard to believe he’s just a well-meaning messenger or negotiator. Nevertheless, her investigation into José Nochelobo’s death has hardly begun; she has much to learn, and it’s possible that she will learn something true and useful even from a man as deceitful as Bead.

She invites him onto the porch and directs him to the chair she usually occupies. On this occasion, she finds it more advantageous to be positioned to the right of him rather than to his left.

After hanging his fedora on the finial that caps one of the stiles supporting the headrail of the chair, he sits with the nine-by-twelve envelope on his lap. He shoots one cuff of his rainbow-hued shirt and then the other, displaying an inch of fabric past each coat sleeve. He adjusts his collar and smooths his wheat-colored hair with both hands.

He is a good-looking man, with eyes the blue of robin eggs and as clear as if he just stepped out of Eden into this broken world, where he’s not yet seen wickedness. His face is open and smooth, but his mouth is soft and suggestive of decadence.

Bead says, “Terrence Boschvark isn’t an idealist. He’s one of those messianic freaks who go down in the history books for all the wrong reasons. You understand?”

“Nothing,” Vida replies, “is more dangerous than a man who has no humility, who sees himself as a savior but lacks mercy and pity, lacks any quality of the divine, let alone divinity itself.”

“Then you know what’ll happen to you if you try to thwart him.”

“Maybe I don’t care what he did.”

“Oh, you care. You’re the kind who can’t not care.”

“Did he direct you to enlist those boys to pelt José with bottles of water?”

“You have to understand my situation.”

“Willing accomplice?”

“I am not a man with scruples, but I am a survivor. Boschvark has saturated this county with private investigators. He knows all the power players, who has done what, by what levers all of us can be controlled. The man has a thousand ways short of violence—major financial tools, political connections—to persuade or destroy those who are straight arrows. When it comes to the rest of us, hehas the state attorney general in his pocket, also several key figures in the Department of Justice in Washington. If he says ‘sic him,’ then I’m done. Happily, he prefers to use me, and I have no choice but to be used.”

“So you enlisted those five boys.”

“The point was to humiliate Nochelobo, not to kill him.”

“Humiliate him? You think that makes sense?”

“No one could know he’d fall down those steps just wrong enough to break his neck.”

“He didn’t break his neck,” she says.

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