A Darker Place (20 page)

Except that her audience had grown, and was no longer just a quiet five-year-old girl. Standing behind Dulcie was a dark, well-muscled, devastatingly good-looking young man with his hands in his jacket pockets and suspicion in his eyes.

“This is Jason,” Dulcie said proudly.

Ana felt simultaneously fourteen and eighty-four, clumsy, awkward, stupid, and ugly, and could only hope that none of it showed on her face. She picked up the screwdriver and tape and dropped them into the box, got to her feet, brushed off her trousers, removed her fingerless gloves and looked at the state of her hands before deciding that she ought not to inflict her grease on the young man. He looked nothing like Dulcie, except perhaps the eyes. His hair was as black as her tangled mop, but his lay slick against his head, gathered into a short ponytail at his neck, and his skin was a couple of shades lighter.

“Hello, Jason, I’m Ana. I heard that Dulcie had a brother. Did you have a good time down in Tucson?”

“It was okay,” he said, a typical teenager’s reaction, and although it was not accompanied by a shrug, something about the gesture made Ana wonder if he wasn’t younger than the eighteen or nineteen he appeared.

“You’re an artist, I think Carla told me.” In an instant, she could see it was the wrong thing to say: His face, already closed in, went completely blank. She hastened
to create a diversion by clearing up the tools and chattering. “I was in the shop in Sedona and bought a coffee mug, and Carla told me that Dulcie’s brother had sketched the bird on it. My favorite cup got broken when I had to slam on my brakes the week before—I got coffee all over the car and broke the handle off the cup, but I missed the deer.”

She pushed the tools down and snapped the top shut, flipped the manual closed, and put tools, book, gloves, and ground cloth into their place beneath Rocinante’s seldom-used passenger seat.

“I think I’d better go clean my fingernails before I offer to help with dinner. Good to meet you, Jason. See you later, Dulcie.”

“Good-bye, Ana. Bye, Rocinante,” said Dulcie. Her hand snuck out and surreptitiously stroked the bus’s faded paint, and then she and her protective, self-contained, aloof, unconsciously handsome and unbelievably sexy older brother walked away up the road to the main compound.

Ana let out a deep breath as she watched them go. He walked like a young athlete, or a street tough, with straight spine and a slight swagger to his hips. However, his head was ever so slightly bent to listen to the now-chattering Dulcie, and when the child’s hand came up to his, he allowed it to stay there.

Again, Ana wondered how old he was.

That night after dinner a basketball game was held in the dining hall. While the pans were being scrubbed and the smallest children put to bed, the tables and benches were pulled back to the walls and two men with a roll of masking tape measured off the sidelines and laid out two keys around the baskets that other men were bolting to the walls. It was a practiced exercise, finished before the
cleanup was, and when Ana came out of the kitchen, she stepped into a basketball court complete with a facsimile of bleachers and two teams of wildly mixed players warming up by doing passes and layup shots. One of the players was Jason.

Ana worked her way around the room to where Dulcie sat.

“Hey there, Sancho,” she said. “Why aren’t you out on the court?”

“Hi, Ana. They said I could stay up to watch my brother. Do you want to sit down?”

The woman at Dulcie’s side stared at Dulcie, stared harder at Ana, and turned to whisper to the woman next to her. Ana joined them and sat down.

“How is Rocinante, Ana?”

“My trusty steed? Ready to tilt at a hundred wind-mills, Dulcie. Hey, I forgot to tell you something. You know how I said that Don Quixote thought of himself as the perfect knight. Well, a knight has to have a lady to defend and to dedicate his victories to. And do you know what the name of Don Quixote’s lady was? Dulcinea. Dulcie.”

The child thought about it, and after a minute she ducked her head and said to Ana in a voice almost too low to hear, “My name isn’t really Dulcie.”

Ana answered in a near whisper out of the corner of her mouth, “That’s okay. Don Quixote wasn’t really a knight, either.”

Dulcie wriggled her body in a settling-in gesture and ended up leaning into Ana a bit more than she had been. After a minute, Ana placed her arm gingerly around the child’s shoulders and turned her attention to the players on the floor.

The game was a contest between the students wearing T-shirts in various shades of yellow and the men of the community in green. At first glance this division
seemed unfair, since the men were taller and heavily muscled, and presumably the pick of adult players came from a larger pool than that of the teenagers.

The kids were good, though, and fast. Of the five on the starting team, two were as tall as the biggest adult, four were unusually muscular for teenagers, and all of them looked like they wanted to win.

The two teams assumed their positions in the center of the court, the referee tossed the ball up, and the lanky blond boy rose up and tapped it into the waiting hands of the shortest member of his team, who immediately shot it over to Dulcie’s brother. Jason pivoted and began moving down the court in an odd hunched-over stance that looked clumsy but moved him along faster than anyone else on the court. A guard in green swooped up in front of him and without a break Jason switched hands, ducked under the man’s outstretched arms, and accelerated for the basket. Up he went in a sweet, easy layup shot seven seconds into the game, and the cafeteria erupted. Everyone in the hall was on his feet shouting, Ana no exception. Even the foiled guard grinned and slapped Jason’s shoulder as they jogged back up the court.

Jason heard none of it. A glance at the man was his only acknowledgment of anyone outside his own skin, although he was quite obviously aware at any given moment just where his teammates and his opponents were on the court.

So it went for the whole game. Other players laughed, grimaced, raised a fist in a victory punch; Jason did his job, scored his points, and turned his focus onto what came next.

It was a high-school length game, four eight-minute quarters, and from the first play, Ana could not take her eyes off Jason.

He was a superb player, shambling along in that deceptive
way like an elongated chimpanzee and then suddenly shifting gears to streak through the crush near the basket, fast and slippery and untouchable, rising up free of the guards to nudge the ball in with his fingertips. Time and again he did this, and the men in green seemed unable to come up with a strategy to counteract him.

He was no team player. He hunted up and down the back of the court like a lone wolf until he either saw an opportunity to snatch the ball from a green player or until one of his teammates could get free to pass to him, then he was off. Only once did he voluntarily relinquish possession of the ball, when he was trapped in the corner and time was running out before the half was called. The pass he made, a single bounce beneath the flailing arms of the tallest man, was successful, but the boy he passed it to, the lanky blond kid who had jumped at the game’s opening, took three steps and had it snatched in mid-dribble. The only emotion Ana saw him show the whole game was right then: A twist of irritation passed over Jason’s face, more at himself, Ana thought, than at his teammate, and then he was back to his normal unruffled, ruthlessly focused self.

After halftime a pattern began to develop out on the court, or perhaps Ana was only now beginning to see it. The blond kid, whose name was Tony, had apparently had enough of Jason’s successes and decided to start keeping the ball to himself. Four times in the third quarter he ignored obvious opportunities to pass to Jason for an easy score. Twice his strategy succeeded. The third time an opposing player snatched the ball from midair and barreled down the court to score. The fourth time, with Jason, two other players, and most of the audience screaming “Pass it!” Tony chose for a long shot, with the same result. Most of the audience was watching the middle-aged English teacher take off down the court for
his two points, but Ana glanced over at Jason and saw the narrowed eyes of a pure, cold rage, so instantly wiped away that she had to wonder if she had actually seen it.

It was fascinating, Ana reflected, how much a person could discover by watching boys play a game of basketball.

She leaned over to ask the woman on the other side of Dulcie the question that had been puzzling her all afternoon. “Do you by any chance know how old the boy Jason is?”

“Fourteen,” she said promptly.

“Fourteen?
No.”

The woman shrugged and went back to her conversation with her neighbor. Dulcie took her eyes off the game long enough to tell Ana, “He had his birthday just before we came here.”

Good Lord.

Jason now had the ball and he was moving back and forth outside the key, watching and waiting for the opening he needed. He had taken the ball from Tony (whom Ana could easily imagine behind the wheels of a series of stolen cars, grinning in the pleasure of the joy-ride) and was waiting for the stocky kid to delay one of the guards and open the key. (That boy, on the other hand, had a mean streak, and used his elbows when the ref wasn’t watching. He would be the perpetrator of harsher crimes, and on his way to being a career criminal.) Jason would be too serious to joyride, too cautious to commit the obvious crimes.

Perhaps, she speculated, it would be that brief, white-hot rage that was Jason’s downfall, a sudden and disastrous loss of control resulting in a vicious and no doubt very efficient act of violence, instantly over, constantly guarded against. Would he regret it? Perhaps, perhaps not, but certainly he feared it. Clearly, too, Carla and the other women were a little bit intimidated by him, Carla
with her loud and uncomfortable laugh when Ana had suggested that Jason might be her son, the dryness in Dominique’s voice when she spoke of him. The only person Ana had met who did not seem slightly uncomfortable around the boy was Dulcie, and Dulcie, Ana felt sure, need never fear her brother’s anger.

Yes, a person could tell a lot about the players by watching a game.

Fourteen years old; the phrase kept running through Ana’s head as she left the impromptu gymnasium and walked through the cold night to her room. Fourteen years old, with the angular face of a man five or six years older and the ropy muscles of a laborer under his sweat-soaked yellow T-shirt, walking across the court with the wary self-confidence of a felon and the unconscious grace of a dancer. He moved through the community in a state of splendid isolation, shifting easily to avoid contact with others, always keeping a distance.

Except for Dulcie. Dulcie could touch him; for Dulcie he would bend his straight spine and dip his head to hear her childish rambles. For Dulcie he would walk through a hundred and more admirers, politely acknowledging their appreciative remarks after the game was won, until he was standing in front of Dulcie, looking down into her dancing, worshipful eyes with something very near a smile on his face.

God almighty, Ana mused. What the hell has that boy been through, to turn him into what he is now?

Excerpt from the transcription of a lecture by Dr. Anne Waverly to the Northern California Sheriffs’ Association, January 16, 1992

It had become clear that nothing could be done, no decisions made concerning Ana’s presence until Steven returned. She could be given no permanent position, not even a room in the central compound, until he had approved her sincerity. She wanted to work in the school, had come prepared for it, and knew there was a need for the skills Ana Wakefield brought, but she had to settle for drudgery in the kitchen and around the barn and buildings.