“Magi Rosencrantz, please forgive my companion’s outburst,” Lelani cut in. “Proust speaks very highly of your skills. We need help.”
“Well, I’ll do what I can, only… I’m not Rosencrantz. Name’s Benito Reyes. Friends call me Ben.”
“Can we see Rosencrantz?” Cal asked.
“You already have.”
The four of them looked at each other hoping someone knew what he meant.
“We have?” Seth said.
“Please don’t say he’s a skilyte,” Cat added.
“No. That’s Rosencrantz,” Ben said, pointing out the door.
The oak bristled in the wind.
“He lives in the tree?” Seth asked.
“No.” Ben pointed again.
“Rosencrantz is the tree?” Cat said.
“Boggles the mind, dun it?” Ben responded.
“Of course,” Lelani said. “I should have realized.”
“How do you talk to a tree?” Seth asked.
“It can be done, but I lack magical energies.”
“You can take your fill there,” Ben said pointing to a rusty spigot sticking out of the trailer. “It’s tapped into the lay line.”
Lelani smiled and went to the spigot.
“Are you the… what?… butler, gardener?” Seth asked.
“Same difference when your boss is a tree. Say, you folks must be pretty cold. Come in for a spell and warm up.”
“You go,” Lelani said. “I want to recharge my cache first.”
The trailer was filled top to bottom with periodicals, mostly yellowed with age: Life magazine, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, Time, Saturday Evening Post, Scientific America, Better Home and Gardens, Vogue, New Republic, New York Times, comic books, and countless trade publications from neurobiology to actuarial journals, going back to the turn of the twentieth century. They were stacked flat on the floor all the way to the ceiling, leaving just enough room for a single trail in the center. Seth spotted a copy of Action Comics number one, the first appearance of Superman. Each stack teetered and threatened the walkway.
Getting out of the wind was a good start, but Seth doubted any relaxing could be done in this mess. “Read a lot?” he asked.
“Actually I do,” Ben responded. “But these belong to him.”
“This is the tree’s library?” Cat asked.
“Yeah. It’s also a graveyard. All the pulp in here was made from Rosencrantz’s friends; other sentient trees like himself. Creepy, huh?”
“How depressing. And you live here?” Seth asked.
“Not exactly.”
Ben opened one of two doors in the back of the trailer. Sunlight and a warm breeze flowed through the doorway. They followed him in and found themselves in a spacious bright kitchen with terra-cotta floor tiles. The walls were cream-colored paper with pictures of bowls of fruit, sugar and flour bins, and other pleasant kitchen items, all rendered in lime green and lemon yellow. One photo stood apart, a black-and-white picture of a beautiful blonde in a one-piece bathing suit with a sash across her that read Miss Flushing, Queens. Open French doors revealed a patio with white wicker furniture overlooking a solitary beach and a beautiful sunset up on white crashing waves.
“Welcome to Puerto Rico,” Ben said.
“Holy cow!” Seth said.
“For once, I agree with you,” Cal added.
Seth stuck his arm back through the doorway and felt the cold sting of upstate New York. Once his mind accepted what had just occurred, he took off his jacket and claimed a padded lounge chair in the corner of the patio. “Finally, something good happens to me,” he said.
“May I use the bathroom?” Cat asked.
“It’s right in there, sweetie.” He handed her a crutch that lay in the corner. “My daughter sprained her ankle last year. You look like you could use it.”
“Thank you.”
“Ben, is that you?” came a voice from another room.
“Be with you in a minute, honey. That’s the missus,” he said with a smile. Ben poured them lemonade and made each one a plate of freshly made pasteles from a tray on the stove. “Just finished a batch before you came knocking,” he said. “Excuse me for a minute. Make yourselves at home.” He went into the bedroom.
Cal kept checking his watch and looking back at the trailer door.
“Take a breather, man,” Seth said. “Your brain’s still being edited. Relax.”
Cal considered him with a sour face.
It was in the forefront of Seth’s thoughts that the cop blamed him for the current situation. If everything they claimed were true, Seth would only have been thirteen at the time. How could a teenager be relevant to a covert mission? Seth turned from the cop’s scowl and studied the beach. A half-naked Puerto Rican girl, tanned and gorgeous, romped with her dog. Seth instinctively wanted to get his camera and pursue the opportunity. He watched-a neutered voyeur.
“We’ve got to go back,” Cal said.
“Let’s thaw out first,” Seth whined.
“Now.”
“Jeezus! I’m with the only guy in Puerto Rico who wants to work.”
“Can it. Let’s go.”
“You go.”
“You, too. You were there thirteen years ago. Might be important.” Cal hovered over Seth. He wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
Seth considered whacking the cop in the balls and running down the beach. He decided not to push his luck. “Well… so long as I’m important. What’s the plan?”
“We talk to the tree.”
“Of course. It’s so obvious. Do you speak Tree?”
“Lelani will figure it out.”
“Pretty convenient having your own living, breathing computerlike girl Friday. She’s like your Mr. Spock.”
“You’re only as good as the people who help you. Aandor, NYPD… doesn’t matter where.” Cal’s tone indicated Seth was the weak link on this team.
“What about Cat?” he sniped.
Cal’s expression changed, like a stick prodding a wound; Seth had struck a nerve. Cat was a liability to the mission. In Cal’s anal-retentive hierarchy, even Seth had more of a stake in this mission than Catherine.
“Quit stalling,” Cal said.
Ben came back from the bedroom and with him was a slip of a woman with a slight hump, in mismatched sweat clothes and slippers.
“Hey guys, I want you to meet my wife, Helen Flannery Reyes. Helen was Miss Queens, New York, 1966, you know. She gave those upstate girls a good run for their money in the Miss New York pageant, didn’t you, hon?”
Helen shuffled over to the men slowly and took Cal’s hands in hers. They were mottled and leathery, and she smelled of menthol. Seth was glad she chose to greet Cal.
“Don’t you pay Ben any mind,” she told them in a slightly slurred speech. Both men realized she was recovering from some sort of ailment, like a stroke. “He still sees me as that girl of seventeen, but you and I know there are a lot more miles on this ol’ bucket than he cares to admit.” She winked at them and smiled, mostly with the half of her mouth that was still mobile.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you Mrs. Reyes,” Cal said. “But if you could excuse us for a minute…”
“Are you leaving already?” Ben asked.
