Mayfair (Girls of Spindrift 3)

The rationale behind the key cards was not that the students were incarcerated, even though it was easy to feel that way, but that they were heavily protected. The complex had a security guard at the main gate 24/7, and there was a ten-foot-high barbed-wire fence all around the property. Of course, there was CCTV around most of the building, with motion lights to spotlight an intruder.

The worst fear the board of governors for Spindrift had was that one of its prize students would be kidnapped by a foreign agent. After all, many of these students already had mastered nuclear energy and laser technology. The C

IA and NASA employed some of the graduates, and others were in brain trusts, secret brain trusts that dealt with military issues, too. Or they could be kidnapped simply for the ransom.

“Right,” Mayfair said. She went to her desk and got her key card. She held it up. “Shall we dance?”

They started down the hallway. Most of the other students were still in bed. The sun was just peeking over the tops of the trees. The shadows below in the lobby were reluctantly retreating as the light drifted in through the panel windows. It was as if the shadows were stuck to the floor, walls, and ceilings and were being ripped away. You could almost hear the sound of them being torn from the cocoa-colored tile floors and rich walnut walls.

But it was really only the work in the kitchen that interrupted the mansion’s still sleepy morning silence, that and the ticking of the early-twentieth-century grandfather clock that stood beside one of the small dark brown leather settees toward the rear. Above it was a large portrait of the billionaire whose foundation had created Spindrift: Dr. Norman Lazarus, one of the world’s most renowned biochemists.

Clocks weren’t a big thing at Spindrift. Matter of fact, there was only one other, a rather large, simple, round atomic clock in the cafeteria, a subtle suggestion not to waste time with idle chitchat. There were no specific classes as such. No bells rang for any other reason than a fire alarm test. A student here went from one subject area to another at his or her own pace, often not attending a class for weeks at a time or, if they liked, never. Each was, in fact, encouraged to become a specialist as soon as possible. After all, they all had already mastered most basic knowledge, undergraduate and graduate.

Mayfair, despite the lecture on the importance of the physical body that Dr. Morton had given them, did not expect to see any of the other drifters dressed and ready to do the Darwin Trail. There was a full fitness center and an indoor pool in a building added onto the large mansion. Some of the fifteen students did something physical for themselves there, albeit more as a token tossed at Dr. Morton and always reluctantly.

Of the three of them, only Corliss had been running the trail from the first week she had arrived. She was at Spindrift a good month before Donna and Mayfair were. On nights when they “spilled the beans” about themselves, they revealed the social reasons and the unpleasant personal events that had been the primary catalysts for their school’s guidance counselors to suggest and then find them a place at Spindrift.

It had always been difficult for each of them, indeed for everyone here at Spindrift, not to think of herself as abnormal. That was the way others their chronological ages at their former public schools thought of them. Every negative name in the book was thrown at them at one time or another. Those familiar with Star Trek called them Spocks. Others tritely referred to them as eggheads, which Merriam-Webster defined as a highly educated person who may not know much about real life, real life being a social life. Still others used meaner, crueler words.

Consequently, each of them was a loner before coming here. The social contacts they eventually had at their public schools had only led them to bigger problems.

Which students here had parents who were upset that they were no longer at home? None. After all, they had done the right thing, donating them to political, social, and scientific progress for the good of humanity. From this group of geniuses, surely there would come Nobel Prize winners. Trouble was, most of them really didn’t yet feel like winners, least of all Mayfair, who was still crawling up and out of a pit of depression and didn’t have any real ambitions for herself yet. Maybe she never would.

Lately, Corliss and Donna were competing for that unflattering honor, the honor of caring the least about her practical future or being recognized as someone special, someone important. This general lack of direction for themselves was another thing that helped them bond. They were truly “drifting” together.

The three quietly started down the circular stairway, with its polished mahogany banister and gray-carpeted steps. Spindrift was located in the Coachella Valley of Southern California, about a mile and a half outside the small city of Piñon Pine Grove, so named for the piñon pine trees that populated its borders. It was mid-April, and the lower desert was already experiencing temperatures in the mid-eighties with occasional high eighties and low nineties.

One of the problems some of the students at Spindrift worked on was the subject of climate change. Many places in the world were already experiencing unusually high temperatures, and the extended ocean warmth was creating longer and more vicious hurricanes and tornadoes. Peter Townsend, Spindrift’s current resident pessimist, whose father was a well-known weather expert at the University of Missouri, claimed the planet was already lost. Civilization was sliding toward oblivion at a rate impossible to stop.

“Why study if you can’t save it?” Mayfair asked him after he had made one of his dire comments in the science lab.

“I’m an observer. I diagnose.”

“You’re a walking microscope,” she told him. “When you look at other people, what you see is cells.”

He pulled in his face with such indignation she had to laugh. She was starting to enjoy this place, especially how she could get under the skin of some of the other drifters, who were never supposed to succumb to peer pressure.

The girls stepped out once Corliss unlocked the side door. Spindrift was located in the high desert, which fortunately provided for temperatures five to ten degrees lower than in the low desert. This morning, the Supremes would be jogging in the low sixties. There were some high clouds as well, but once they entered the heavy foliage of the surrounding forest, it would feel more like the mid-fifties.

The security guard on duty looked their way. He was a tall, lanky man with graying, thinning dark brown hair, spidery with his long arms and legs.

“I hope he’s a reader,” Donna said. “It has to be the most boring job. You can count the number of visitors, excluding teachers, on the fingers of one hand.”

“Every one of them is a retiree looking to supplement his income,” Corliss said. “My father, who, as you know, heads security at Ram Studios in Burbank, hires some for what he calls the ‘dead hours.’?”

“You have to wonder what’s left of the self-esteem of someone like that,” Mayfair said. “A recent survey of adults by the American Psychological Association determined that self-esteem is the most important factor in happiness and well-being.”

“No wonder we’re all so unhappy,” Corliss said. They all laughed.

The security guard was still staring at them.

“Creepy,” Donna said. Corliss and Mayfair looked at her and then back at him.

“Forget it,” Mayfair said. “Dr. Marlowe surely had his DNA checked back through his great-grandparents.”

“He probably just thinks we’re all weird,” Donna said. “Maybe even aliens.”

“Aren’t we?” Corliss asked, and started for the entrance to the Darwin Trail.