Murder Alfresco #3 (29 page)

“So you’re the one who found my installation,” he said, shaking her, staring at her with a wet smile. Saliva had gathered at the corners of his mouth. “That was some of my best work. How did you like it? She looked beautiful, didn’t she? Admit it. You liked it. Otherwise you wouldn’t keep coming around.” Sunny stared into his eyes. She was curious now, with nothing to fear any longer, what the eyes of a killer revealed. He looked back at her with mud-colored eyes that said nothing. There was no passion, no anger, no fire. It was as if they were disconnected from his words, disconnected even from his thoughts.

“She was perfect,” he said, swallowing. “The perfect body, the perfect white skin. Most women are too fat. The flesh bulges out when you tie them. She was like a drawing.”

Every few seconds, he sucked back the saliva and swallowed. “I hope Bruce Knolls is crying like a baby. I wish I could have been there to see his face. Of course, you had to blunder in with the police and take all the drama out of it. He never even got to see his little whore strung up in front of his precious winery. You robbed us both of that pleasure.”

His words were distracting him and his grip loosened. Sunny let go of his wrist and skimmed her hand over the ground as far as she could reach in search of some kind of weapon.

“I’m glad he’s stuck with that bitch Kimberly,” he said. “He deserves her. The greedy bastard deserves an ungrateful whore like her.”

She stretched her fingers over the rocks, prying at them. Those that came away did so by crumbling into tiny, jagged
pieces. She wiggled over to gain new ground, causing him to squeeze her throat with renewed force. More than pain, what she felt was immobility. He had found the place where she was utterly vulnerable. She reached blindly for some rock or stick to use before her breath ran out. Her mind was already beginning to let go. She could feel her will to struggle waning as the last of the oxygen in her blood expired.

“We had all the time in the world,” he said coyly. “But you had to rush things. Now look what you’ve done. You’ve ruined everything, again. Now I’ll have to leave you here to rot. There will be no glory for you. Nothing left behind but a dirty corpse. You could have given yourself to art, but instead the buzzards and the maggots will have you.”

She pushed with her feet and wiggled another inch to the right, stretching out her arm. At first, when she felt the cold touch of glass on her fingertips, she almost forgot what it meant. She was slipping away from her circumstances and she registered the coolness without thinking anything beyond the sensation. It took a second for her mind to register
glass, bottle.
She gripped it with her fingers and felt the round open end with her thumb. Gathering the last of her strength, she seized it by the neck and slammed it with everything in her power into Ronald Fetcher’s temple.

He let go of her and leaned back, stunned. She rolled away and gasped for air. Her throat burned and she convulsed, gagging. Her head hung between her arms as she tried to breathe for what felt like minutes, hours. At last she could sit down and pull a ragged, painful breath into her chest. Across from her, Fetcher was kneeling, his eyes dazed and staring dully at her. A nasty abrasion oozed a thick stream of blood from his temple where it met his hairline. She turned and climbed up the bank,
clawing at the rock face as it slipped away under each attempt to move up it. She fought the burning in her chest and the urge to lie down and surrender to unconsciousness.

At the road, she staggered to her feet and ran for the truck, certain she could hear Fetcher behind her. The way the truck had come to rest, the passenger-side door was closest to her now. There was no time to get in, roll up the window, and lock the door. She flipped open her knife kit and pulled out the knife in the middle, her favorite, the seven-inch, forged steel fillet knife, the one sharp enough to slice through a chicken bone with the most tender of downward thrusts. He would be coming up the bank even now, and he would see the knife and know she was not afraid to use it. Her fingers closed firmly around the base and her mind hardened with resolve as she turned to face her attacker.

He had moved more quickly than she expected. When she turned, he was already lunging toward her. She did nothing but hold the blade steady and feel the soft flesh of the abdomen give way as Ronald Fetcher impaled himself upon it.

He sounded bad. Curled in the ditch at the base of the embankment, his breath came in short gasps thick with saliva and blood. She stood over him. The light had come at last, in the form of diffused pastel pink and gold along both horizons. Blood seeped out from under Fetcher’s hand where he clutched at his side. His eyes met hers but he said nothing. Fat beads of sweat had broken out on his forehead. She watched him, deciding how seriously he was hurt. He didn’t seem capable of getting up, but she went over to the old Jaguar, leaned in, and removed the keys from the ignition, just in case.

Sunny set the knife on the floor of the truck and got in. The truck had slid partway around when she stopped, but it still took several tries to get it headed in the right direction on the narrow road. No cars had come since they’d stopped. She realized with surprise that their struggle had taken no more than a few minutes.

She drove slowly. Operating the steering wheel and the pedals felt like new, alien tasks she wasn’t quite sure how to perform. Her hands shook as she flipped open the cell phone. It found a signal at the top of the ridge.

Once the police were on their way, she left the truck and walked up the hill to where the view opened up facing the sea. Sitting in the truck, she kept imagining him in the window behind her, in the rearview mirror, crouching just out of sight beside the door. It was better to be outside. The grass was lush and scattered with early wildflowers. The first spray of California poppies, a scattering of lupin, a splash of tiny white daisies, and nearby, a lone buttercup. Songbirds announced the sunrise as if nothing had happened. As she stood there, she imagined a deeply reassuring peacefulness untouched by human aggression emanated from the mountain. It was people who where sick, she thought. People who destroyed things and caused each other pain. She studied the distant slopes with their patches of deep green forest and open meadow. Nature gives and grows, humans take and consume. Humanity has abandoned the pursuit of peace. It is no longer even a virtue. Now aggression and greed and power are what matter.

The coming light lifted her spirits even as bitter thoughts drove them downward. Ronald Fetcher’s face still loomed over her, her throat still ached with the crushing force of his fingers. She thought of him lying in the ditch by the side of the road,
enduring the pain of his injury. She hoped no cars would come. He might still be dangerous. She looked back toward the empty road. As she did so, a movement in the grass caught her eye and she turned with animal alertness. It was a large cat, not thirty feet away. She recognized it from pictures in the wildlife books she read as a kid, though she had never seen one in real life before. It was not a mountain lion, it was a bobcat, with the trademark spots, short tail, and flanged cheeks. It glanced at her, then went back to staring at a spot on the ground directly in front of it with the intensity of those responsible for their own sustenance. It crouched, pulled up on its toes as if about to pounce. Sunny watched for several minutes. The bobcat didn’t move. She turned back to staring at the open horizon of the sea.

Some tiny adjustment made her look again, just in time to see the bobcat pounce, coming up with a soft bundle in its mouth. There was no noise and no squirming. The tiny prey lay quietly in the bobcat’s jaws. The cat turned immediately and disappeared into the bushes.

Sunny felt a tickle and put a hand to her head. Her fingers came away wet with blood.

Wade Skord lifted the paellera
from the ground like a man lifting a pot of molten steel from the forge. Monty ducked in and fed the pit fire with dry lavender clippings and oak chips. Lavender-scented smoke rose up, filling the backyard with its ancient smell. Wade lowered the simmering paella back into the pit and backed away, shaking off the heat on his face. Rivka squatted next to the fire and edged the corner of a spatula under the thick stew, revealing a crusty golden-brown layer on the bottom of the pan. She looked up at Wade with obvious pride. “Nice. We’ve got a perfect layer of
socarrat.”

“That’s some kind of Mexican field hockey, right?”

“That would be the layer of rice that sticks to the bottom of the paellera. It’s the best part.”

Annabelle, Monty Lenstrom’s live-in girlfriend and new fiancée, edged closer to the fire and peered at the bubbling expanse of yellow rice and vegetables. “What is this we’re going to eat?”

“Paella,” said Rivka. “Vegetarian paella, to be precise. It’s kind of like Spanish risotto, but less creamy.”

“No meat?” said Andre, walking up to the group with a frown. He was wearing a white button-down shirt and had his
black hair pushed back in easy waves from his forehead. Sunny looked at him like she hadn’t seen him in a month, basking in the sight of him.

“No meat,” said Rivka. “We thought we’d give the beasts of the earth a break for the night. Except for the chickens. I had to do in one of our feathered friends for the stock. Vegetarian stock is a crime worse than poultricide.”

“What else is in it?” said Annabelle, holding the stem of her wineglass between pale fingers.

“Are you eating again?” asked Rivka, standing up. “Monty said you were on some crazy diet.”

“Of course I eat. I just eat less, and I fast more frequently. It’s not a diet, it’s a lifestyle change. Carrying around large quantities of food in your digestive system all the time is hard on your body. We’re not designed to digest constantly.”

Rivka studied the willowy Annabelle. “I feel springier when I’m thinner, that’s for sure.”

“Me too,” said Annabelle. “Besides, food tastes better when you’re really hungry. Is that a fiddlehead?”

Rivka looked at the paella. “It has fiddleheads, roasted red peppers, eggplant, fava beans from the garden, fresh morels, peas from the garden, rice, tomato, aioli, thyme and baby carrots from the garden, artichoke hearts, a ten-dollar pinch of saffron threads for color, and about a pound of garlic.”

“I hope you didn’t make it vegi on my account,” said Sunny. She took the bottle of Pinot that Monty had just opened. “Anyone?” She filled the empty glasses, then poured one for herself. “I’m over the meat hang-up. I mean, I don’t think I’ll ever like the smell of raw chicken, but I’m more or less back to normal.”

“Just when I was preparing to become a vegetarian cook,” said Andre.

“That would be a spectacular transformation.”

“I was going to open Napa Valley’s first vegetarian raw foods restaurant.”

“You laugh now,” said Annabelle, “but when we’re all eating raw foods and living to be a hundred you’ll have to apologize for making fun.”

“You guys enjoy it,” said Andre. “They can bury me with a duck leg in my hand and a greasy smile on my face.”

“Finding a dead body would put anybody off meat,” said Monty. “What I want to know is how skewering Ronald Fetcher like a pig on a spit brought you back into the carnivorous fold.”

“The great spirit sent me a vision,” said Sunny. “I was standing up there on the ridge waiting for the cops to arrive when I saw a bobcat catch a bunny. I saw the whole thing. There was no malice in the bobcat. He was just having his breakfast. I had been enjoying this fantasy that nature was peaceful and only humans were deadly. Then the bobcat put on his carnivore show for me and I remembered the obvious truth. Death is part of life.”

“That’s what I’ve always said,” said Wade. “These people who think being a vegetarian absolves them of violence haven’t taken a good look at a garden. Those carrots don’t want to die any more than anybody else, they just can’t say so. Look out there.” He gestured to the vineyard. “Bud break is like a high note that starts soft and builds. By summer it’s a gospel choir shaking the rafters. Those vines are as full of life as any living creature.”

“But there’s a difference, don’t you think?” said Sunny. “If I cut my arm it hurts, but cutting my hair doesn’t. Some things feel pain, some don’t.”

“Anything that strives feels pain when it’s thwarted,” said Wade. “The vines don’t mind being cut back in winter. They don’t mind giving up their grapes. But if you pull them up when they’re in full leaf, you hear about it.”

“By that logic, we should only eat what is willingly given,” said Annabelle, flicking her red hair over her shoulder. “That was actually a quite eloquent argument in favor of vegetarianism, from the last source I would ever have imagined could produce it.”

“It might be, if I believed life was meant to be or ever could be an entirely painless process, which I don’t,” said Wade. “We’ve insulated ourselves so well from the facts that we forget pain and loss are built into the system. Everything grows, peaks, gets old, and dies. Pain and loss are part of that process. And along the way, in order to survive, we have to eat, which is as inherently destructive as it is generative. I must consume another life, whether it’s part of a fern or part of a lamb, in order to sustain my own life.” He paused to sip his wine and give Sunny a long look. “Besides, if god didn’t want us to eat animals, he wouldn’t have made them out of meat.”