One Door Away from Heaven

Geneva said, “Leilani, should I be calling the police?”

“Wouldn’t do ;my good. They pumped a huge dose of digitoxin into her, which caused a massive heart attack. Preston’s used this trick before. Digitoxin would show up in an autopsy, so they must have been sure there wouldn’t be one. Most likely, she’s already cremated.”

Geneva looked at the penguin. She looked at Leilani. She looked at her vanilla Coke. She said, “This is bizarre stuff.”

“Isn’t it? Anyway, Preston gave this penguin to me because he said it reminded him of Lukipela.”

Geneva’s voice bit with a venom that Leilani had not imagined she contained: “The rotten bastard.”

“It’s cute, Luki was cute. It leans to one side, same as Luki. But it doesn’t look like Luki because, of course, it’s a penguin.”

“I have a sister-in-law who lives out in Hemet.”

Although this seemed to have nothing to do with dead girls and penguins, Leilani leaned forward with interest. “So is this a real sister-in-law or possibly Gwyneth Paltrow?”

“Real. Her name’s Clarissa, and she’s a good person—as long as you have some tolerance for parrots.”

“I like parrots. Do hers talk?”

“Oh, constantly. She has over sixty.”

“I’m pretty much a one-parrot-at-a-time person.”

“I’m thinking, maybe when you disappear, the police would come looking here, but they wouldn’t know about Clarissa in Hemet.”

Leilani pretended to consider it. Then: “Out of sixty talking parrots, at least one will be a fink and turn us in.”

“She’d love your companionship, dear. And there’s always work to be done, filling seed trays and water cups.”

“Why does this feel like a Hitchcock movie? And I don’t just mean The Birds. I suspect somewhere in the situation, there’s a guy who dresses up like his mother and has an obsession with big knives. Anyway, if Clarissa went to jail for kidnapping, what would happen to the parrots?”

Geneva looked around as though assessing the accommodations. “I could take them in here, I suppose.”

“Holy smokes, we’d want twenty-four/seven video of that!”

“But they’d never send Clarissa to prison. She’s sixty-seven year old, weighs two hundred fifty pounds even though she’s just five feet three —and, of course, there’s the goiter.”

Leilani didn’t ask the obvious question.

Geneva answered it anyway. “Strictly speaking, it’s not really a goiter. It’s a tumor, and because it’s benign, she won’t have it removed. Clarissa doesn’t trust doctors, and given her history with them, who can blame her? But she just lets it hang there, getting bigger. Even if they could cope with her age and weight, prison officials would worry about that goiter scaring the other inmates.”

Leilani drained the last of the vanilla Coke from her glass. “Okay, so when the obituary appears, if you’d track down an address for Tetsy’s parents and mail the penguin back to them, that would be swell. I’d do it myself, but Preston doesn’t let me have money, not even enough for a few stamps. He buys me anything I want, but I think he figures that if I had an allowance, I’d ramp it up with shrewd investments until I had enough to afford a hit man.”

“You’ve still got half the Coke in the can, dear. Would you like me to add some fresh ice and vanilla to your glass?”

“Yes, thank you.”

After Geneva had built a second serving for each of them, she sat opposite Leilani once more. Worry drew connecting lines through her constellations of coppery freckles, and her green eyes clouded. “Micky will think of something we can do.”

“I’ll be okay, Aunt Gen.”

“Honey, you’re not going to Idaho.”

“Just how big is the goiter?”

“Can you come for dinner this evening?”

“Great! Dr. Doom is supposed to be out again, so he won’t know. .He’d stop me, but old Sinsemilla’s too self-involved to notice.”

“I’m sure Micky will have some strategy by then.”

“Is it, say, bigger than a plum?”

“I’ll turn on the air conditioning this evening, so we’ll be able to think clearly. You can bet the governor never does without.”

“Bigger than an orange?”

Chapter 43

RESPLENDENT in acrylic-heeled sandals and navel opals, these two Cinderellas have no need of a fairy godmother, for they are magical in their own right. Their laughter is musical, infectious, and Curtis can’t help but smile even though they’re laughing at his ridiculous and shakily expressed fear that they might be clones.

They are, of course, identical twins. The one he met outside is named Castoria. The one he encountered second is Polluxia.

“Call me Cass.”

“And call me Polly.”

Polly puts down the big knife with which she was chopping vegetables. Dropping to her knees on the galley floor, with squeaky baby talk and vigorous ear scratching, she reduces Old Teller at once to licking, tail-lashing adulation.

Placing a hand gently on Curtis’s shoulder, Cass brings him out of the lounge and into the galley.

“In Greek mythology,” says Curtis, “Castor and Pollux were the sons of Leda, fathered by Jupiter disguised as a swan. They’re the patron deities of seamen and voyagers. They’re famous warriors, too.”

This knowledgeable recitation surprises the women. They regard him with evident curiosity.

Old Teller turns to stare at him as well, though accusingly, because Polly has stopped the baby talk and the ear scratching.

“They tell us half the kids graduating from high school can’t read,” says Cass, “but you’re mythology savvy in grade school?”

“My mother was big on organic brain augmentation and direct-to-brain megadata downloading,” he explains.

Their expressions cause Curtis to review what he has just said, and he’s chagrined to realize that he revealed more about his true nature and his origins than he ever intended to share with anyone. These two dazzle him, and as with Donella and Gabby, dazzlement seems to evoke in him either a looseness of the tongue or a tangling of the same potentially treacherous organ.

In a lame attempt to distract them from what he revealed, Curtis continues with a harmless lie: “Plus we had a Bible and a useless ‘cyclopedia sold to us by a mercantile porch-squatter.”

Cass plucks a newspaper from the table in the dining nook and hands it to Polly.

Polly’s sparkling eyes widen, and blue beams seem to flash at Curtis as she says, “I didn’t recognize you, sweetie.”

She turns the newspaper so Curtis can see three photos under the headline SAVAGE COLORADO MURDERS TIED TO FUGITIVE DRUG LORDS IN UTAH.

The photos are of the members of the Hammond family. Mr. and Mrs. Hammond, shown here, are surely the people who were asleep in their bed, in the quiet farmhouse, when the fugitive boy shamefully took twenty-four dollars from the wallet on the dresser.

The third picture is of Curtis Hammond.

“You’re not dead,” Cass says.

“No,” Curtis replies, which is true as far as it goes.

“You escaped.”

“Not quite yet.”

“Who’re you here with?”

“Nobody but my dog. We’ve pretty much hitched across Utah.”

Polly asks, “Whatever happened at your family’s farm in Colorado—is that all tied to this hullabaloo in Utah?”

He nods. “Yeah.”

Castoria and Polluxia make eye contact, and their connection is as precise as that between a surgical laser and the calculated terminus of its beam, so that Curtis can almost see the scintillant trace of thought passing from one to the other. They share their next question in a duologue that does nothing to diminish his dazzlement:

“It’s not just -“

“—a bunch of—“

“—crazy drug lords—“

“—behind all this—“

“—like the government says—“

“—is it, Curtis?”

His attention bounces from one to the other as he answers the question twice, “No. No.”

When these twins exchange a meaningful look, which they now do again, they seem not to convey just a quick single thought, but whole paragraphs of complex data and opinion. In the womb, fed by the same susurrus river of blood, soothed by the two-note lullaby of the same mother’s heart, gazing eye to eye in dreamy anticipation of the world to come, they had perfected the telemetric stare.

“Over there in Utah—“

“—is the government—“

“—trying to cover up—“

“—contact with—“

“—extraterrestrials ?”

“Yes,” Curtis says, because this is the answer they expect and the only one they will believe. If he lies and says that no aliens are involved, they will either know that he is dissembling or will think that he’s merely stupid and that he’s as bamboozled by the government spinmeisters as is everyone else. He’s drawn to Cass and Polly; he likes them partly because Old Yeller likes them, partly because the genes of Curtis Hammond ensure that he likes them, but also because there is a tenderness about them, quite apart from their beauty, that he finds appealing. He doesn’t want them to think that he is either stupid or disposed to lie. “Yes, aliens.”

Cass to Polly, Polly to Cass, blue lasers transmitting unspoken volumes. Then Polly says, “Where are your folks, really?”

“They’re really dead.” His vision blurs with tears of guilt and remorse. Sooner or later, he’d have been forced to stop somewhere, if not at the Hammond farm, then at another, to find clothes and money and a suitable identity. But if he had realized just how close on his tail the hunters had been, he wouldn’t have chosen the Hammond place. “Dead. The newspaper’s right about that.”

To his tears the sisters fly as birds to a nest in a storm. In an instant he’s being hugged and kissed and comforted by Polly, then by Cass, by Polly, by Cass, caught in a spin cycle of sympathy and motherly affection.

In a swoon short of an outright faint, Curtis is conveyed, as if by spirit handlers, into the dining nook, and with what seems to him to be a miraculousness equal to the sun spinning off spangles in the sky over Fatima, a divine refreshment appears in front of him—a tall glass of cold root beer in which floats a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

Not forgotten, Old Yeller is served a plate piled with the cubed white meat of chicken, and ice water in a bowl. After cleaning the chicken off the plate nearly as fast as it could have been sucked up by an industrial vacuum cleaner, the dog chews the ice with delight, grinning as she crunches it.

As though image and reflection exist magically side by side, Cass and Polly sit across the table from Curtis in the nook. Four silver earrings dangle, four silver-and-turquoise necklaces shine, four silver bracelets gleam—and four flushed breasts, as smooth as cream, swell with sympathy and concern.

Playing cards are fanned on the table, and Polly gathers them up as she says, “I don’t mean to salt your grief, sweetie, but if we’re going to help, we need to know the situation. Were your folks killed in a cover-up because they saw too much, something like that?”

“Yes, ma’am. Something like that.”

Slipping the deck of cards into a pack bearing the Bicycle logo and setting the pack aside, Polly says, “And evidently you also saw too much.”

“Yes, ma’am. Something like that, ma’am.”

“Please call me Polly, but never ask me if I want a cracker.”

“Okay, ma’— Okay, Polly. But I like crackers, so I’ll eat any you don’t want.”

As Curtis noisily sucks root beer and melting ice cream through a straw, Cass leans forward conspiratorially and whispers ominously, “Did you see an alien spacecraft, Curtis?”

He licks his lips and whispers, “More than one, ma’am.”

“Call me Cass,” she whispers, and now their conversation is firmly established in this sotto-voce mode. “Castoria sounds too much like a bowel medication.”

“I think it’s pretty, Cass.”

“Should I call you Curtis?”

“Sure. That’s who I’m being. . . who I am.”

“So you saw more than one alien ship. And did you see . . . honest-to-God aliens?”

“Lots of ‘em. And some not so honest.”

Electrified by this revelation, she leans even farther over the table, and a greater urgency informs her whisper. “You saw aliens, and so the government wants to kill you to keep you from talking.”

Curtis is utterly beguiled by her twinkly-eyed look of childlike excitement, and he doesn’t want to disappoint her. Leaning past his root beer, not quite nose-to-nose with Cass, but close enough to feel her exhilaration, he whispers, “The government would probably lock me away to study me, which might be worse than killing.”

“Because you had contact with aliens?”

“Something like that.”

Polly, who has not leaned over the table and who does not speak in a whisper, looks worriedly at the nearby window. She reaches over her sister’s head, grabs the draw cord, and shuts the short drape as she says, “Curtis, did your parents have an alien encounter, too?”

Although he continues to lean toward Cass, when Curtis shifts his eyes toward Polly, he answers her in a normal tone of voice, as she has spoken to him: “Yes, they did.”

“Of the third kind?” whispers Cass.

“Of the worst kind,” he whispers.

Polly says, “Why didn’t the government want to study them, like they want to study you? Why were they killed?”

“Government didn’t kill them,” Curtis explains.

“Who did?” whispers Cass.

“Alien assassins,” Curtis hisses. “Aliens killed everyone in the house.”

Cass’s eyes are bluer than robin’s eggs and seemingly as big as those in a hen’s nest. She’s briefly breathless. Then: “So . . . they don’t come in peace to serve mankind.”

“Some do. But not these scalawags.”

“And they’re still after you, aren’t they?” Polly asks.

“From Colorado and clear across Utah,” Curtis admits. “Both them and the FBI. But I’m getting harder to detect all the time.”