Page 49 of The Forest of Lost Souls

Good cheer and delight ... until there comes a valley of great suffering and sorrow ... then new heights of happiness ... dogs and one even better than dogs.

“No reason at all,” he says, and he puts out of his mind the predictions he paid for with the photographs of his father.

TWO

THE HUNT

39

PREPARATIONS

Whoever comes next to kill Vida is not going to arrive on this fair Sunday. She has enough time to make preparations.

Nash Deacon had his experience of monkshood soup early Friday evening and was interred with his Trans Am before dawn Saturday. As sheriff, he is expected to be available to his office in the event of a crisis, but in this case he surely ignored that obligation. He would not have wanted anyone to know where he intended to spend his weekend or to what wicked purpose. Although arrogant and confident, he nevertheless considered that Vida, having dealt with Belden Bead before him, might be not merely obstinate but restive, incapable of the submission he demanded. The advantage of his size might ensure he could overpower and rape her, but he couldn’t know that being brutally raped would break her spirit. Although he’d confiscated her guns, she might wound him or, failing that, might publicly accuse him of rape. If he couldn’t break her, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill her and use his power as sheriff to thwart an investigation or frame an innocent for the crime. He’d brought a disposable phone instead of the one at which his dispatcher could reach him, so whether or not to communicate with his underlings remained his choice. Even if Deacon expected to force her to submit as soon as Friday evening, he would have allowed himself the entire weekend touse, humiliate, and further psychologically shred her. No one is likely to be concerned about him until he fails to show up for work on Monday.

Even then, they won’t know where to start looking for him. But in a day or two, Damon Orbach—the only son of the county’s largest landowner, teenage druggie, and best friend of Morgan Slyke—might see a connection between the disappearances of the new sheriff and Belden Bead. He might remember the phantom Connie Cooper about whom he’d told Bead, and he might share his suspicion with whoever is his current supplier of dabs and other drugs. If not Damon, then Morgan Slyke, who’s out of school and working for Galen Vector, will think of Connie. Or someone of whom she’s unaware could know something damning. She assumes she has a few days to prepare for whatever’s coming, but it’s best to get it done today, before nightfall.

She makes a demanding trip into the forest, bearing the weapon and ammunition she’d bought in an adjacent state eight months ago and had hidden behind her supply of lumber and plywood. She brings as well one thing she is loath to be without if she cannot return—the drawing of her uncle that has hung in the library. She removes it from the frame, rolls it, and inserts it in a cardboard tube after stripping from the tube what Christmas wrapping paper remained on it. She travels three miles to the damaged twin-engine airplane. From what she’d read about the crash when it happened, she does not expect the vessel to be grounded at the end of a debris trail, as in the dream. It’s wedged in a pair of immense pines, twelve feet above the ground. Its speed had diminished when it shredded the uppermost branches of other evergreens. As it angled toward the massive and interlaced pines, it lacked sufficient velocity either to shatter through themor be fully deconstructed by the impact. Smaller branches were shorn away, but the larger limbs held fast to trunks and snared the aircraft. The tail assembly is mangled. Both wings are bent and broken but still attached to the fuselage. The nose wheel remains with its fairing, although the wing wheels are gone. Even as the tragic essence of the scene inspires pity, it’s such a compelling juxtaposition of thriving nature and failed technology that it seems as if it might be an installation by an artist.

No one seeing her in other circumstances would imagine she has the strength to haul forty pounds on her back, up steep slopes, across such distances, while also attending to demanding tasks at the plane, seldom resting more than two or three minutes at a time.

To most people, she appears to be nothing more than arm candy. She is often dismissed as being as shallow as the Hollywood beauties who lay claim to intellectual substance by embracing causes about which they know nothing more than what image consultants tell them. Vida makes no effort to win over those who make that judgment. Life is too short to spend any of it justifying herself to people who shape their opinions of others on first impressions and biases.

Often in her isolate and quiet life, she has paused to consider how fortunate she has been to be profoundly known and appreciated by at least two people. Her uncle saw the true and deepest Vida on his first encounter with her and always loved her for who she was in all her complexity of mind and heart. José likewise knew her soul; she believes he would have wished to marry her even if she had been plain of face and form. Although charismatic, he wasn’t classically handsome. Indeed, his round, pleasant face was like those of many comical sidekicks in numerous movies.But anyone wise enough to see past his appearance knew that intelligence, kindness, and compassion made him special. If Vida never knows another person the equal of those men, she’s known more love than many ever do in this often loveless world. She’ll be eternally grateful for the love she’s received and given, regardless of what is to come.

By five o’clock, she returns to her house, having made all the necessary preparations on the mountain. Never before has she taken guidance from a dream, but what strikes other people as bizarre or inadvisable makes sense to her. The world is strange beyond knowing, and life is a journey through wonders, toward mystery.

Following the death of Belden Bead, these past eight months have been frustrating because she’s dared not investigate José’s death aggressively. She’s had to be content with subtle inquiries, roundabout research, and theorizing from the barest facts, lest she raise suspicions among those who have the power to issue warrants and dig up what she has buried.

During that time, she’s known the moment would come when events beyond her ability to imagine would suddenly accelerate her along a path leading to justice for José Nochelobo and perhaps ensuring the success of the cause for which he died at the hand of an assassin. The late Nash Deacon is the agent of that acceleration. Vida faces the future with new excitement. But she suspects that she’ll unlock the truth and spare Kettleton from the intentions of Boschvark and his associates only at the cost of her life. She has seen signs and omens, more than just the wraithlike passage of Azrael while she dug the pit for Deacon and his car.

She prepares a simple dinner of fresh fruits, cheeses, jams, and bread of her own making.

She fills the house with music. Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 2 in B-Flat Major, by Glenn Gould and the New York Philharmonic.

Soon, a vivid image arises in her mind’s eye—herself sprawled dead in a forest glade where blue wildflowers nod in a breeze.

Sometimes, great music excites her mind not only to an intense enchantment with the beauty of this world but also to a spiritual yearning for the mysterious and even greater beauty of some world beyond life. And sometimes stress conjures macabre images of no importance or meaning. This blue-flower death tableau seems not to arise from either the beauty of music or the bane of stress. This feels like a vision of inescapable fate.

Whether that is true or not, the thick fig jam on French bread is exquisite with the Gruyère, the sliced apple crisp is sweet and well married with the gouda, and everything else on the table is to her liking. She will resist death with all her might, but what will be will be. And what will be cannot be allowed to detract from what is, from the beauty of the music or the flavor of the food, because all she has is the moment; all anyone ever has is the moment, and moments, each in succession, are precious.

40

THE RIGHT HAND OF EVIL

Regis Duroc-Jersey is always affronted and angry when he has to meet with Galen Vector, the unsavory operator who has been installed in Belden Bead’s position by Horace and Katherine Bead following their son’s sudden disappearance eight months earlier. Vector’s management of illegal drug sales, human trafficking, loan-sharking, massive fraud perpetrated against the state disability fund, and murder for hire cannot be faulted for inefficiency. The man knows what he’s doing. However, his affectation of sunglasses at all times, even at night, his pencil-line mustache, and a broad gap between his upper incisors for which he has sought no periodontal fix render him too absurd to be even a rural crime boss. He has a fondness for plaid slacks and brightly colored polo shirts, and on the rare occasion when he wears a suit, it’s a cheap off-the-rack garment accompanied not by a proper necktie but by a bolo with a turquoise clasp. His degree is in money laundering or something, acquired from a state university with fewer ennobling traditions than any McDonald’s franchise. Galen Vector is manifestlynotof Regis’s class, and Regis feels diminished every time he meets with the man. Regis Duroc-Jersey III is New World Technology’s junior vice president of community relations and Terrence Boschvark’s right-hand man, facilitator for the Kettleton project, an important position for which he has been schooled byMontessori, Pencey Prep, Harvard, and a family whose expectations are so high that Regis has suffered nosebleeds most of his life.

On this occasion, he and Vector, each having disabled the GPS in his SUV, arrive at the abandoned sawmill an hour after nightfall, Regis by way of the compacted-gravelstone lane that once served the enterprise, the crime boss by a forest-service road. As always, they park at opposite ends of the long-decaying mill.

Regis steps out of his company Lexus and locks it and stands listening to the wilderness. He is at least a mile from the nearest residence, six miles from town.

Affronted and angry, he is also deeply uneasy. The moon has not yet risen, and starlight fails to define either the buildings or the surrounding forest that lump together in a glob of imminent threat. The primeval darkness disturbs him less than the silence that seems as perfect as in the vacuum between the stars. This hush suggests the forest is a dead realm, but of course it teems with life even at night, perhaps especially at night. Therefore, the uncanny quiet feels conspiratorial, as if legions of sharp-toothed predators know he has arrived, wish to deceive him into thinking they don’t exist, and will pounce on him the moment he lets his guard down.

City-born and city-shaped, Regis isn’t just out of his element in Kettleton County; he’s deeplyoffendedby the place. Instead of manicured parks and botanical gardens, there are meadows that have never been mowed and unkempt forests. Animals of infinite variety shit wherever they want, and no one ventures into the woods or fields to pick up the crap in plastic bags for proper disposal. Instead of a Starbucks, there are establishments like the hole-in-the-wall called Java Joe’s that also sells doughnuts andmuffins with no respect for those who have problems with gluten. The only restaurant in town offering duck is Hazel’s Homestyle, where the menu trumpets “Quacker a la Orange”; instead of tablecloths, paper placemats feature a grotesque cartoon of Hazel in an apron and chef’s hat.

The people are the worst of it. Because they can grow their own food and hunt game for their meat and fix anything that breaks down, they think they know what life is about. However, they would have no idea how to conduct themselves in a private jet or how to get a good table in New York’s finest restaurant. They are stubborn people who don’t know what’s good for them, and most of them refuse to learn. They need to be put through a rigorous reeducation process to better program their minds, but because most of them are gun fanatics, that is not currently a viable resolution to the problem they pose.

Even when Regis Duroc-Jersey isn’t in an infuriating backwater like Kettleton County, he suffers constant anxiety. Because he is so perfectly put together and conscious of appearances, no one suspects his inner life is in turmoil. He lives with the constant fear that he’ll be a failure, that he mightalreadybe a failure. He is thirty years old and has not yet either founded a business grossing at least half a billion dollars per annum or become the CEO of a multibillion-dollar company. He makes a salary of nine hundred thousand dollars a year, with a long list of benefits, has four million of investments and six million in stock options, buthe’s thirty years old. In a mere five years, he will potentially be seen as over the hill by the cruel standards of Silicon Valley or by the criteria of whatever pitiless engine of change comes after Silicon Valley. If by then he fails to accumulate at least three hundred million, he will be deemed out of sync with the times, old, elderly, anembarrassment to anyone seen with him.He has to gain momentum sooner than yesterday!America is being reshaped from democracy to oligarchy. Regis absolutely must be one of those oligarchs giving the orders, because he has spent his life taking orders, and he’s sick to death of it.

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