One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 42

WITH THE SWIFTNESS of a genie's spirit rising from the prison of his lamp, the sweet oily fragrance of vanilla magically spread through the humid air to every corner of Mrs. D's kitchen the moment that she opened the bottle.

"Mmmmm. That's the best smell in the world, don't you think?"

Putting ice cubes in the two tall glasses, Leilani drew a deep breath. "Wonderful. Unfortunately, it reminds me of old Sinsemilla's bath water."

"Good heavens. Your mother bathes in vanilla?"

As she watched Geneva dribble vanilla extract over the ice in the glasses, as she carried the glasses to the table, and as Geneva followed with cans of Coke, Leilani explained Sinsemilla's passion for purging toxins through reverse osmosis in hot baths.

"Then it must be a little like belling the cat," said Mrs. D, handing Leilani one of the Cokes.

"Mrs. D, you've lost me again. I'm afraid I'm hampered in conversation by a need to grasp how each comment springs logically from the one preceding it."

"How sad for you, dear. I meant you always know when your mom's coming because she's preceded by clouds of wonderful fragrances."

"Not so wonderful when she's had a bath seasoned with garlic, condensed cabbage juice, and stinkweed extract."

They sat at the table and sampled their vanilla Cokes.

"This is fabulous," Leilani enthused. "I can't believe you've never mixed one before."

"Well, we rarely have cola in the fridge. Old Sinsemilla says caffeine inhibits development of your natural telepathic ability."

"Then you must be a terrific little mind reader."

"Scarily good. Right now you're trying to remember the names of all the singers who've ever been in the group Destiny's Child, and you can only recall four."

"Uncanny, dear. What I'm actually thinking is how this vanilla Coke would go perfectly with a big fat sugar cookie."

"I like the way you think, Mrs. D, even if your mind is too complex to be read accurately."

"Leilani, would you like a big fat sugar cookie?"

"Yes, thank you."

"So would I. Very much. Unfortunately, we don't have any. Some nice crisp cinnamon cookies would be good, too. How about cinnamon cookies with vanilla Cokes?"

"You've talked me into it."

"We don't have any of those, either, I'm afraid." Geneva sipped her drink, pondered a moment. "Do you think chocolate-almond cookies would go with vanilla Cokes?"

"I'm reluctant to have an opinion, Mrs. D."

"Really? Why's that, dear?"

"It seems pointless somehow."

"Too bad. Not to brag, but my chocolate-almond cookies are quite wonderful."

"Do you have any?"

"Six dozen."

"More than enough, thank you." Geneva brought a plate of the treats to the table. Leilani sampled a cookie. "Phenomenal. And they go with vanilla Cokes just fine. But these aren't almonds. They're pecans."

"Yes, I know. I don't particularly care for almonds, so when I make chocolate-almond cookies, I use pecans instead."

"There's something I'm dying to ask, Mrs. D, but I don't want you to think I'm being disrespectful."

Geneva's eyes widened. "You couldn't be if you tried. You're an absolute, no-doubt-about-it. " Geneva frowned. "What is the term?"

"Absolute, no-doubt-about-it, fine young mutant."

"If you say so, dear."

"I ask this with great affection, Mrs. D, but do you work at being a charming screwball, or does it just come naturally?"

Delighted, Geneva said, "Am I a charming screwball?"

"In my estimation, yes."

"Why, you sweet child, I can't imagine anything better to be! As to your question… let me think. Well, if I am a charming screwball, I'm not sure whether I always was, or maybe only since being shot in the head. Either way, no, I don't work at it. I wouldn't know how."

Munching, Leilani said, "Dr. Doom is going to haul us to Idaho."

A quiver of alarm rang the smile off Geneva's face. "Idaho? When?"

"I don't know. When the mechanic's finished with the motor home. Next week sometime, I guess."

"Why Idaho? I mean, I'm sure they're nice people in Idaho, with all their potatoes, but that's an awful long way from here."

"Some guy lives near Nun's Lake, Idaho, claims he was taken aboard an alien spacecraft and healed."

"Healed of what?"

"Of the desire to live in Nun's Lake. That's my guess. The guy probably figures a really wild story will get him a book deal, a TV movie, and enough money to move to Malibu."

"We can't let you go to Idaho."

"Heck, Mrs. D, I've been to North Dakota."

"We'll keep you here, hide you in Micky's room."

"That's kidnapping."

"Not if you're agreeable to it."

"Yeah, even if I'm agreeable to it. That's the law."

"Then the law's silly."

"The silly-law defense never works in court, Mrs. D. You'll wind up sucking down all the free lethal gas you want, courtesy of the state of California. May I have a second cookie?"

"Of course, dear. But this Idaho thing is so distressing."

"Eat, eat," Leilani advised. "Your cookies are so good, they'd make prisoners tap dance in the torture chambers of Torquemada."

"Then I should bake up a batch and we'll send them some."

"Torquemada lived during the Spanish Inquisition, Mrs. D, back in the fourteen hundreds."

"I wasn't baking cookies then. But it's always given me so much pleasure that people enjoy my cooking. And even back when I had the restaurant, the baked goods drew the most compliments."

"You had a restaurant?"

"I was a waitress, then I owned my own restaurant, and in fact it developed into a prosperous little chain. Oh, and I met this lovely man, Zachary Scott. Success, passion. Everything would've been wonderful, except my own daughter began coming on to him."

"I didn't know you had a daughter, Mrs. D." Geneva nibbled thoughtfully at her cookie. "Actually, she was Joan Crawford's daughter."

"Joan Crawford's daughter came on to your boyfriend?"

"In fact, the restaurants belonged to Joan Crawford, too. I guess this stuff happened in Mildred Pierce, not in my life at all — but that doesn't change the fact that Zachary Scott was a lovely man."

"Maybe tomorrow I could come over, and we could bake a bunch of cookies for Torquemada's prisoners, after all."

Geneva laughed. "And I'll bet George Washington and the boys at Valley Forge would enjoy a batch, too. You're a peach, a pip, and a corker, Leilani. Can't wait to see what you'll be like all grown up."

"For one thing, I'll have boobs, one way or the other. Not that having them is the be-all and end-all of my existence."

"I particularly liked my breasts when I was Sophia Loren."

"You're pretty funny yourself, Mrs. D, and you're already all grown up. In my experience, not too many grown-up people are funny."

"Why don't you call me Aunt Gen, like Micky does."

This particular expression of affection almost undid Leilani. She tried to cover her inability to speak by quickly taking a swig of her vanilla Coke.

Geneva saw through the clever vanilla-Coke ruse, and her eyes misted. She seized a cookie as an instrument of distraction, but that didn't work because there wasn't any logical reason for her to hold a cookie in such a way as to block Leilani's view of her teary eyes.

From Leilani's perspective, the worst thing that could happen would be for the two of them to start sobbing at each other as if this were an episode of Oprah titled "Little Crippled Girls Marked for Murder and the Charming Screwball Shot-in-the-Head Surrogate Aunts Who Love Them." Just as the way of the Ninja was not the way of the Klonk, so the way of the weepy was not the way of the Klonk, either, at least not this Klonk.

Time for the penguin.

She fished it out of one pocket of her shorts and put it on the table, among the candleholders that were still arranged as they had been at dinner the previous night. "I was wondering if you could do me a favor and help get this back to the person who should have it."

"How cute!" Geneva put aside the cookie that she neither wanted to eat nor wanted to plaster over her eyes. She plucked the figurine off the table. "Why, it's adorable, isn't it?"

The two-inch-tall penguin — sculpted from clay, kiln-fired, and hand-painted — was indeed so adorable that Leilani would have kept it if not for its creepy provenance.

"It belonged to a girl who died last night."

Geneva's smile first froze and then melted away.

Leilani said, "Her name was Tetsy. I don't know her last name. But I think she's local, here in the county."

"What's this all about, sweetie?"

"If you'd buy a newspaper tomorrow and Saturday, an obituary should be published one day or the other. It'll have the last name."

"You're spooking me, dear."

"Sorry. I don't mean to. Tetsy collected penguins, and this was one of hers. Preston might have asked to have it, but he might have taken it without asking. Anyway, I don't want it."

They stared across the table at each other because Geneva's eyes were no longer misty and because Leilani was functioning unshakably in the way of the Klonk, no longer in danger of flushing the kitchen furniture out of the back door on a tide of tears.

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?"