Stormchild Page 8

  I found the dirt road leading off the highway. As I slowed and turned my headlamps flashed across a massive billboard which advertised “Sun Kiss Key, Your Home in the Sun! Waterfront Lots from Just $160,000!” Beyond the billboard the dirt road lay like a white ribbon through the low scrubland. To my left a few pilings had been driven into a cleared patch of land. The pilings were evidently supposed to form the stilts of the development’s show house, but work must have come to a standstill, for the pilings were now being used only as supports for a couple of ragged osprey nests. The water in the newly-cut canals was black and still.

  I looked in the mirror. No one was following me. Dust from the sport car’s tires plumed to drift onto the bushes. I passed another of the canals that was designed to provide boat docks for the planned houses. Behind me the headlight beams blazed and faded along the highway, but no vehicles turned to follow the Austin-Healey onto this lonely and bumpy road.

  I came to the end of the track, where I parked the Austin-Healey in a patch of inky shadow.

  With the engine switched off the night seemed very silent, then my ears tuned themselves to the noises of a myriad of insects and to the faraway drone of the traffic on the Overseas Highway behind me. I climbed out of the car. The night was warm and still. Far off to my left the sea sucked and splashed at the shallows that edged the keys, while beyond the reefs a motor-cruiser with brightly glowing navigation lights ran fast toward the southwest. To my right, beyond the highway, I could see the lights of the houses on the Atlantic side of the island. The half-moon hung above those houses, while to the north the clouds seemed thicker and blacker. Sheet lightning suddenly paled those dark clouds, hinting at rain over the Everglades. I walked to the water’s edge to see that it was a mangrove-edged channel leading to the open sea. Sun Kiss Key was a lonely place for egrets and bonefish, herons and ospreys, but a place doomed to be destroyed by bulldozers and pile drivers, by houses and carports, by powerboats and barbecues.

  Waves fretted on the offshore coral. More sheet lightning flickered silent to the north. Someone, I thought, was having a bellyful of bad weather, though the dark clouds did not seem to be spreading any further south. The thought of bad weather gave me a sudden and stunningly realistic image of hard ocean rain falling at sea; an image of clean, fresh water thrashing at a boat’s sails and drumming on her coach roof and sluicing down her scuppers, and I wondered just how many months it had been since I had last sailed a boat properly.

  It had been too long, I thought, much too long. Apart from the odd delivery job up-channel and shunting boats about the boatyard’s pontoons, I had not sailed properly since Joanna’s murder. I had not had the energy to provision a boat nor to face the problems of navigation, yet suddenly, in the humid night air of Sun Kiss Key, I missed the ocean. I wanted to feel the chill wind’s bite again. I wanted to go far from land into the blank emptiness of the charts where the only guide to life was a belief in God and the high, cold light of His stars. I thought of Tort-au-Citron, Stormchild as was, and I resented that she was rotting on a mooring when she and I could have been sailing the long winds of nowhere, and that sudden yearning made me feel that I was at last waking from a nightmare, and I vowed that when I got home I would rig a boat, any boat, and, late though the season was, I would cross the channel and sail round Ushant to where the Biscay rollers would shatter themselves white on my boat’s stem.

  I smiled at that thought, then looked at my watch. I still had two hours to wait. It had been stupid of me, I thought, to arrive so early, and even more stupid to bring the gun that was a hard lump in my pocket.

  “Good evening, Mr. Blackburn.”

  “Christ!” I jumped like a fearful thing, twisting round to face the sudden voice. I had recognized the voice immediately, for von Rellsteb’s German accented English had not changed since my last confrontation with him on the deck of Erebus. How the hell had he gotten so close without my hearing him? I could see him now; a dark shape just fifteen yards away. Had he come by boat? Was he alone?

  “I’m quite alone.” He chuckled as though taking pleasure in anticipating my question. He stepped closer, and I saw by the moonlight that his appearance, like his beguiling voice, had not changed. His face was as narrow and goatlike as I remembered it, and he still had a waist-length ponytail of white hair and a thin straggly beard. He also demonstrated a calm confidence as he reached out to shake my hand. “I rather hoped you would be early,” he said. “Midnight seems such a witching hour for a meeting, does it not? But alas, at the time I made the arrangement I did not think I could reach this place any sooner. Luckily things freed up for me. How are you?”

  I had warily shaken his hand, but did not respond to his friendly question, preferring to ask one of my own. “Where’s Nicole?”

  “Ah, she’s well! And she’s safe!”

  “You got my letter for her?”

  “It was rather ruined by seawater. The telephone number was written in ballpoint, and decipherable, but the rest? I suspect it was washed away. I am sorry.” He shrugged apologetically.

  “I have another one for her.” I took the letter from my shirt pocket and held it out to von Rellsteb. I was feeling extraordinarily clumsy. Von Rellsteb, not I, had taken charge of this encounter.

  Von Rellsteb took the letter and pushed it into a pocket. “You told George that you had important news for Nicole? I assume that news is in the letter?”

  “I wanted to tell her that her mother is dead.”

  “Her mother is.” Von Rellsteb began to echo my words, then a look of awful pain shuddered across his face, and I thought of the police suspicion that the Genesis community had planted the bomb that killed Joanna, and I knew that if those suspicions were true, then this man was one of the greatest actors who had ever lived. Von Rellsteb momentarily closed his eyes. “My dear Mr. Blackburn,” he said at last, “I am so very sorry. Was it an illness?”

  “No.” I did not elaborate.

  “Poor Nicole!” Von Rellsteb said. “Poor Nicole! And you, too. How very sad. No wonder you are so eager to see her!” He had handled the news of my wife’s death with a superb assurance. Most of us, confronted with the mention of death, become tongue-tied and confused, but von Rellsteb’s comforting sympathy had been instant and seemingly heartfelt, and I, at last, began to understand how my daughter could have been attracted to this gaunt man. I remembered how Joanna had described him as attractive, and I could begin to see why; his long, thin face had the appeal of sensitivity and intelligence, which made him appear competent to handle the secret hurts of those he met. “You must understand, though,” von Rellsteb continued, “that your daughter is frightened.”

  “Nicole? Frightened?” I asked.

  “She thinks you will not forgive her.” Von Rellsteb paused to frown in thought. “Sometimes, you know, we do things, and then we find they are gone too far to be retrieved. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Not really,” I said.

  Von Rellsteb gave me a swift, apologetic smile. “I do not always express myself well in English. Nicole is frightened because she did not write or talk to you for so long that each new day makes it harder for her to risk facing the disappointment she knows you must feel.”

  “But I love her.”

  “Of course you do.” He smiled, complicit with my grief, then stirred the air with his hand as if, frustrated in his efforts to find the right words, he might conjure them from the night’s darkness. “I think Nicole knows you love her, but she fears you will be angry because of her absence. She even told me that, perhaps, you had disinherited her!” Von Rellsteb offered a small shrug, as if to share with me the ridiculousness of such a notion, and I did not think to notice that even the mention of disinheritance was an oddity in this admittedly odd rendezvous.

  “Disinherit her?” I said instead. “Of course not.”

  “Not that it matters,” von Rellsteb said loftily. “We should be above such mundane matters, yes?”

  “And I want to see her!�
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  “Naturally you do, naturally!” Von Rellsteb said with eager understanding. Behind me the lightning flickered eerily to blanch the rippling water in the mangrove channel. “But it’s difficult,” von Rellsteb murmured after a pause.

  “What is?” I sounded hostile.

  “I try to keep the Genesis community separate from the world.”

  “Why? I thought you wanted to save the world?”

  He smiled. “We are not apart from the world, but rather from the people who make the world unclean. The sins of the fathers, Mr. Blackburn, are being visited on their children, so we children must be pure if we are to redeem our fathers’ world.” His thin, expressive face was suddenly lit by another sheet of lightning which rampaged across the Everglades. “I am expressing myself badly,” von Rellsteb went on, “but what I am trying to say, is that we in Genesis have forsaken family, Mr. Blackburn. It is a measure of the seriousness of our purpose.”

  The pretensions of his words struck me as preposterous. “Seriousness?” I challenged him. “Stink bombs? Oil in a swimming pool?”

  He smiled at the accusation. “Of course stink bombs are a joke, but those people at the conference are so, what is the word? Complacent! They talk and talk and talk, and congratulate one another on the purity of their commitment, but while they talk the dolphins are dying and the world’s hardwoods are being cut down and oil is being spewed into the seaways. I think it will be the Genesis community, and groups like Genesis, who will cleanse the world, not these fashionable environmentalists with their shrill talk and soft hands. I wanted the journalists at that conference to be aware of the need for extreme measures if the world is to be saved, so I used stink bombs. Would you rather I had used real bombs?”

  “Could you have?” I asked him coldly.

  “No, Mr. Blackburn, no.” His voice was very gentle, as though he dealt with a fractious child.

  “Where is Nicole?” I asked him.

  “In the Pacific.”

  “Where, exactly?” I insisted.

  Von Rellsteb paused. “I won’t tell you.” He held up a placatory hand to still my protest, then, as though he needed to move if he was to think and express himself properly, he began pacing up and down the channel’s bank. “I have long dreamed of a community that could devote itself to oneness with the earth. A biocentric community, without distractions, living in a silence that might let us hear the echoes of creation and the music of life.” He gave me a sudden smile. “You, of all people, know what I mean! You’ve known the transforming wonder of sitting in a small boat in the center of an ocean in the middle of a night, and suddenly feeling that you steered a vessel among the stars. You could live forever at that moment. There’s no history, no anger, no pride, just you and creation and a terrifying, exhilarating mystery. If I am to pierce that mystery, and find its meaning, then I must live in the center of silence. That’s what we do.” He paused, seeking a further explanation that would satisfy me. “Perhaps we’re making the first eco-religion? Perhaps the new millennium will need such a faith? But to forge it, we must live without distraction, and so our first rule, our golden rule, is that we keep ourselves private. That, Mr. Blackburn, is why I will not tell you where we live.”

  He had almost seduced me with his gently beguiling voice, but some part of me, a robust part of me, would not be sucked into his vision. “You call lacing a swimming pool with oil living in the center of silence?”

  “Oh, dear.” Von Rellsteb seemed disappointed with me. He was quiet for a few heartbeats, then offered a further explanation. “We don’t want to be selfish. We don’t want to withdraw totally from the world. Most of the community does stay separate, but a few of us, like myself and Nicole, have to go into the world and deliver shocks to those people who would fill the planet with noise and disgust and dirt and rancor. One day, Mr. Blackburn, the whole world will live in harmony, and the Genesis community both anticipates that era and tries to bring it about. But if I told people where we lived, then I know visitors would come to us, and distract us, and maybe weaken us.”

  “You don’t have much faith in your vision, do you?”

  “I have no faith in those who do not share my vision,” von Rellsteb said firmly. “And even though I am sure you are not hostile to it, you are still not one of us. Unless you’d like to join us?”

  “No!”

  He laughed, then stepped back. “I’ll give Nicole your letter. I know she’ll be pained about her mother.”

  “I want to see her!”

  “Maybe you can.” Von Rellsteb stepped back another pace. He was going into the darkness.

  “What the hell does that mean?” I demanded.

  “If she wants to see you, then you will see her.” He stepped further back.

  I felt my chances of seeing Nicole slipping away with von Rellsteb’s retreat. “Tell her I love her!” I called to him.

  “The world is love, Mr. Blackburn.” Lightning slashed at the sea, drowning the air with its sudden light, and in its slicing brilliance I caught a frozen glimpse of Caspar von Rellsteb’s face, and, in that instant, he seemed to be laughing at me with satanic glee. What earlier had seemed comforting and intelligent now looked evil, but, when my eyes adjusted to the dark again, von Rellsteb had vanished. He had come from the night, and seemed to have dissolved back into it.

  “Von Rellsteb!” I shouted.

  There was no answer. The sea sucked at the mangrove roots.

  “Von Rellsteb!”

  But there was only silence and darkness.

  I turned away. I felt dizzy, almost drunk, as though I had been mesmerized by von Rellsteb’s voice, yet I could not shake the memory of that sudden satanic epiphany. Had he been laughing at me? Had his victory this night consisted of fooling a man whose wife he had killed and whose daughter he had seduced? I stopped and, despite the heat, I was shivering. I also realized that my encounter had yielded me nothing. I had achieved nothing, and I had learned nothing.

  Then why, I suddenly wondered, had von Rellsteb agreed to meet me? What had been his purpose this night? To mock me? Then I thought of his denial that he might have used real bombs instead of stink bombs, and remembered the real bombs that had stranded the two Japanese whaling ships in their Korean dry docks. Fear surged inside me. Suppose Nicole was dead? Suppose that von Rellsteb had killed her, and Joanna, and now wanted to kill me? Fletcher had been right when he guessed that my father had left David and me comfortably provided for. We were not flamboyantly wealthy, but nor were we stretched for money, and inheritance has always been a motive for murder. And why else, it suddenly crashed on me, would von Rellsteb have raised the subject of Nicole being disinherited! Sweet God, I thought, that was how von Rellsteb made his money, by making heirs and heiresses of his cowed disciples!

  God, he was clever! I remembered the uniformlike clothes Nicole had worn on the day she left with von Rellsteb; clothes which suggested a perverted subservience to von Rellsteb’s wishes. Did he have some kind of mesmeric hold over his women? And, once they were under his spell, did he manipulate their lives to enrich his own? Even Matthew had wondered where the Genesis community found its money, and now I knew. I knew.

  But I had to carry my knowledge off Sun Kiss Key, and if von Rellsteb wanted me dead so that Nicole would inherit my wealth where better to kill me than on this empty Key in the middle of a thunder-ripped night? Fear swamped me. I ran to the car. I freed the revolver from its holster, slid into the driver’s seat, and fumbled for the keys. The engine banged reassuringly into life. I was panting. Sweat was streaming down my face as I let out the clutch and the car lurched forward.

  Were they waiting for me? Had they thought to have a backup party guarding against just such an escape as this? I scrabbled Charles’s gun close to me, then shifted into second gear. I had left the headlights switched off. The car bounced sickeningly on the rough track. I shifted again, accelerating hard, spewing a plume of white dust behind me as the bright red car charged toward the highway. Moo
nlight was bright on the dirt track while lightning blazed to the north.

  No one fired at me. No gun muzzle sparked and flamed in the night, yet still the irrational panic made me crouch low behind the leather-covered steering wheel as the little car bucked and banged and howled in the night. I could see the headlights of a great truck hammering down the highway, and I knew I should slow down and let the truck go past, but surely the best position for a Genesis ambush was where the track joined the main road? So I ignored good sense and put my foot down to the floor to try and race the truck.

  The truck’s noise filled the night. Its chrome trim gleamed in the light of the small orange lamps that the driver had strung across his high cab. This beast of a truck was an eighteen wheeler, one of the behemoth super tankers of the highways, and it was thundering south with a tractor trailer attached and I was about to spin Charles’s small car under its juggernaut wheels.

  Christ, but it was too late to stop now! I shifted down, making the Austin-Healey’s reconditioned engine scream in protest. Then I had the back wheels drifting because the main road was close, very close, and still no one fired at me, but it did not matter, for I was about to die anyway under the hammer blow of a Mack truck’s impact. The driver flicked his headlights to full beam as he hit the Klaxons, and the blinding night was suddenly filled with the violence of his giant horns. I kept going, and the truck driver stood on his brakes, so that the Mack’s rear end slewed across the road as I accelerated into its path. The Austin-Healey’s back wheels screamed and smoked on the blacktop, the steering wheel shuddered as the car’s right-hand wheels began to lift, and then the little vehicle skidded toward destruction under the truck’s massive tires. The big rig was threatening to jackknife, and its towering chrome radiator grille was filling the noisy night just inches from my rear fender. The Klaxons howled at the moon, tire smoke hazed the bitter air, then the Austin-Healey’s starboard wheels hit the road and the small car found its traction, and, suddenly, I was accelerating safely away, while behind me the truck driver went on hammering his horns in angry and impotent protest.