Page 75 of The Bad Weather Friend

“She’s a billionaire,” Benny said. “So where’s the guarded gate, the palatial digs, the ocean view?”

“Maybe there’s a sixty-thousand-square-foot basement,” Harper said.

(Spike wishes it known he wasn’t surprised by Ms. Urnfield’s effort to conceal the truth of her enormous wealth behind humble architecture. Over the centuries, he has met many people who are so certain of their righteousness and their entitlement to power that they do not know the truth of themselves. They become convinced of their humility, although they possess none, and of their wisdom, though they have none. They believe passionately in their goodness, though they are evil; they believe they are motivated by a noble desire to make the world a better place, when in fact they merely insist on shaping it to suit their preferences, and to hell with everyone else. According to our resident craggle, they seriously scare him. If you’re in a reading group, consider a discussion of the issue.)

As Spike, Harper, and Benny got out of the Explorer, the front door of the cottage opened, but Llewellyn Urnfield didn’t appear—unless she was a gray-brindle whippet. The dog padded to the end of the lamplit flagstone entrance walk, stood looking up at them for a moment, then turned back toward the house. When they didn’t at once follow, the whippet halted and looked over its shoulder as if to say,What do you want, a written invitation?

As they followed the dog toward the open front door, Benny said, “I have a bad feeling about this.”

Harper tousled his already disarranged hair. “You have a bad feeling about everything, sweetie.”

“Not about you. Not yet. I don’t think I ever will. I hope.”

“My Romeo.”

APPROACHING THE HOME OF LLEWELLYN URNFIELD, BENNY REMEMBERS LEAVING BRIARBUSH WITH HIS MOTHER

Omar hulked in the driver’s seat of the superstretch limousine, perhaps regrowing the pointed tusks that had been surgically removed from his face. Benny and his mother sat side by side in a passenger compartment large enough to accommodate them plus everyone in their family who had been murdered over the years. The tinted windows that were almost opaque from outside were clear enough from the inside. The world beyond the car appeared to be coming apart as trees thrashed, debris flew, rain shattered through the day in blinding sheets, and the black underbellies of the clouds were ripped by stilettos of lightning.

“Jubal died in Cairo. Jubal, your stepfather,” Naomi clarified, as if Benny was known to suffer from short-term memory loss.

“What happened?” Benny asked.

“He was stabbed to death in an alley in a disreputable part of the city.”

“Who stabbed him?”

“We will never know. It is a country that offers no justice to foreigners, and often not to its own people.”

“What was he doing in a disreputable part of the city?”

“I am sorry to tell you that your stepfather was not the man I thought. Behind my back, he indulged in perverse practices.”

“What practices?”

“Every perverse practice you can imagine. I won’t corrupt your young mind by describing or even naming them. When he was brutally murdered, he was on his way to an assignition.”

“Ass ignition?”

“It means ‘a secret rendezvous for an erotic purpose.’”

“I think it means what some kids do when they gather in a dark dorm room to light their farts.”

Putting one hand to her breast as if to calm her shocked heart, Naomi said, “Whatever kind of sick school did Jubal send you to? Do they groom boys at Briarbush to be as perverse as he was?”

“Not really,” Benny said. “I never saw a fart-lighting party, but I heard about them. At Briarbush, they’re up to weirder stuff than that. Anyway, I think the right word is ‘assignation.’”

Naomi’s expression soured further. “Just three months in that hoity-toity boarding school, and you think you know more than your mother. I won’t tolerate being condescended to by my own child.”

“I’m sorry. I just thought—”

“It’s best that you don’t think. Thinking too much can get a boy in a lot of trouble.”

After a mutual silence, Benny said, “When is the funeral?”

“There was no funeral. Who organizes a funeral for a stinking pig? He was cremated in Cairo. I was so disgusted, so repulsed, by what I learned about his sick desires, on which he spentfortunes, that I emptied his ashes into a sewer drain and donated the empty memorial urn to a beggar boy for whatever use he might make of it to improve his life.”

“And now we’re broke?”

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