Allan Poe? What about Emily Dickinson?
Lisa cooked a huge dinner in the guesthouse, and Reuben tried to put on a brave face when he assured them they’d hear some good news from Jim soon. He went out into the night to call Grace, only to confirm there was nothing new. The police had confirmed Jim was on foot when he left the Fairmont Hotel. His apartment had been searched, and the little cashbox under the bed was empty.
“That means he probably has a couple of thousand with him,” said Grace over the phone, “and no need to touch his credit cards. Your brother always kept that much, just to be able to help people. If only he knew what was going on. The new rehab fund is up to two million! People are making donations in his name, Reuben! And this is Jim’s dream, this rehab shelter right by the church, where he can offer decent rooms to recovering addicts!”
“All right, Mom. I’m going back down to Carmel tomorrow morning, and I’m going to cover the entire area if I have to seek out every single little guesthouse or bed-and-breakfast in existence from Monterey to Carmel Valley.”
He texted the last four or five pictures he’d taken of Lorraine and the kids, being most careful not to include the robust and radiant Phil in any of them.
For a long time, he stood outside in the cold darkness looking through the multipaned windows of the guesthouse. Phil was sitting by the fire reading aloud to Jamie and Christine. Lorraine was lying, with a pillow under her head, on the carpet in front of the fire. He heard a footstep in the shadows behind him, and then he caught the scent of Laura, of Laura’s hair and Laura’s perfume.
“Whatever happens,” said Laura, “they’re going to be all right.”
“That part I know,” said Reuben in a thick voice. “They’re part of our family.” He turned and took her in his arms. “I wish we could be alone tonight in the forest,” he said. “I wish we could go off up there into the treetops, and just be us alone.”
“Soon,” she said. “Soon.”
Inside the warm cozy house, Lisa brought in steaming mugs on a tray. Reuben could smell the chocolate. He nuzzled his face into Laura’s warm neck.
“You’ve never told me,” she whispered.
“Told you what?”
“How did I do during the Twelfth Night Feast?”
He laughed. “Are you joking?” he said. “Your instincts were perfect.” He was thinking, remembering, and he could not bring his human attitudes now really to bear on what had happened. He could recall every second of it; but he could not feel what he’d felt when the Twelfth Night Feast had been in full swing.
She nodded.
“And how was it for you?” he asked. “The first taste of human flesh.”
“Natural,” she said. “Completely natural. I think I thought too much about it beforehand. And it was simple. That’s the word. No conflict involved at all.”
It was his turn to nod. He smiled. But it was a slow and sober smile.
The little gathering broke up about eight.
“We turn in early in the country,” Phil explained. Lorraine was obviously exhausted. But Jamie wanted to know if he could stay up to watch the eleven o’clock news.
They climbed the hill to the house, and found Felix in his robe and pajamas in the library. He gave Reuben a knowing glance. Phil would change sometime close to midnight. That was the way with new Morphenkinder. And Felix would not let Phil go out into the woods alone.
The next day, the house was in a pleasant little uproar. Felix unveiled his plans to build, with Reuben’s approval of course, “a great enclosed swimming pool” off the north side of the conservatory, stretching along the western wall of the house. The architectural plans had already been drawn up. Jamie obviously thought it was the most exciting thing ever, and he stood gazing down over the intricate drawings with wonder, asking if people had done these on a computer or by hand. Of course the enclosure would be a dramatic and harmonious extension of the existing conservatory with lots of white iron, gingerbread, and beautifully shaped windows. And more tropical plants. And Felix was looking into the matter of geothermal heat. Jamie knew about geothermal heat. He’d been reading about it online.
Margon was watching all this with amusement, and Sergei came in with Frank for breakfast and expressed his usual friendly but cynical dismissal of Felix, who was “always building something, always making plans, making plans.”
“And Sergei will be the first one,” said Berenice to Laura in a polite voice, “to swim the length of that swimming pool fifty times each morning, once it’s built.”
“Did I say I wouldn’t swim in the pool?” asked Sergei. “But what about a heliport out back or a jet runway? Or better yet a harbor down there where we can dock a hundred-foot yacht.”
“I never thought of that,” said Felix with genuine exuberance. “Reuben. What do you think? Imagine it, a harbor. We could dredge a small harbor, a slip for a yacht.”
“I think these are marvelous ideas,” said Reuben. “The luxury of an indoor pool, totally connected to the house, is something unimaginably wonderful. Yes, go ahead. Let me get my checkbook.”
“Nonsense, dear boy,” said Felix. “I’ll take care of it, of course. But this is the question. Do we make the northern end of this new enclosure connect with the old household office off the kitchen? Does that room go, so to speak, and do we replace it with a bright dining area at the northern end of the pool?”
A sword pierced Reuben. Marchent had been in that office, working, when her brothers, her murderers, had broken into the house. From there she’d run into the kitchen, where they had viciously and brutally stabbed her to death.
“Yes, let’s take that room away,” said Reuben. “I mean, let’s open that space up into the new enclosure.”
Hockan drifted in, distant, but smiling agreeably enough, and deeply polite to Lorraine and the children as he had been all along. He gazed at the blueprints with respectful awe, murmuring something under his breath like “Felix and his dreams.”
“We all need dreams,” Frank muttered. He had been on the fringes, drinking his coffee in silence.
Hockan and Sergei pulled Reuben aside at the first chance. “When do you want us to start looking for your brother?” Hockan asked with obvious sincerity. “Sergei, Frank, the rest of us. We have ways of finding people that others don’t have.”
“I know, but where do we look?” asked Reuben. “We could go back down to Carmel and start there.” But he had his doubts.
“Say the word,” said Sergei.
“If we haven’t heard anything by tomorrow, I’m going back down there, with anyone who’s willing to help.”
That night was Saturday night, and the house was filled with a celebratory atmosphere, with a huge dinner in the main dining room and plenty of extraordinary wines. Everyone was present, and the little Maitland family seemed dazzled by the candlelight, the display of china and silver, the rapid-fire conversation flying back and forth, and the soft piano music floating from the living room where Frank and Berenice traded off playing Mozart.
For the first time since his spectacular arrival, Hockan was genuinely talkative, chatting about beauties of the British Isles with Lorraine and Thibault. He was so attentive and so unfailingly polite that Reuben worried about it a little, that there was a note of sadness and humiliation in it. He couldn’t be sure.
Stuart was in awe of Hockan but he didn’t trust him. That Reuben could tell.
Hockan is trying very hard, Reuben thought, to be part of all this. For others it’s natural. Felix makes it all natural. And Hockan is truly trying to fit in. But he couldn’t help notice the suspicion in Berenice’s eyes when she studied Hockan. Lisa watched him rather coldly also. Who knew what stories these two had to tell?
Each and every one of the Distinguished Gentlemen and the Distinguished Ladies made it a point to engage the newcomers in conversation, to ask polite yet slightly unusual questions, and to invite them into enduring
