A Date You Can't Refuse (19 page)

“What about bears?” I mumbled. Stasik, overhearing me, uttered a
short laugh. I couldn't tell if it was a nice, bonding sort of “I'm with you” laugh or a “you fool” laugh.

“Last thing.” Kimberly gestured to the window, where the workmen continued to work. “Out there, we carry the same packs, we drink the same water, we walk in the same boots under the same sky. But your hike is your own, determined by your self-talk. Your experience has nothing to do with circumstances, and everything to do with who you are.”

Who was I? A grump. So I was in for a grumpy hike. But was this fair, a philosophy that didn't allow for activity preferences?

“Happy trails, friends,” Kimberly said. “Last one to Eagle Nest is … the last one.”

After Kimberly's inspirational address, the march down the suburban driveway felt anticlimactic. But at the end of Tumbleweed Circle, we turned onto a trail that took us directly into the canyon. One minute, a gated community; the next, the hinterlands. We walked single file along a skinny path. Alik led the way and Kimberly brought up the rear to ensure that no one bailed and headed for home. Like me. Or Bronwen. We were clearly the weak links in the chain, placed at the end so as not to slow everyone down.

The day was hot. Within minutes I was sweating and panting and, half an hour later, as happy as a member of the Donner Party. Behind me, Bronwen moaned. Ahead, people kept up a good pace and animated conversation, even Zeffie showing more stamina than I'd expected.

“Wollie.” Yuri trotted up the hill toward me, with Olive Oyl at his side. He wore the red MediasRex baseball cap we all wore, and with his baldness covered and biceps exposed, he gave an impression of youth and virility. Olive Oyl, in her yellow fur, looked hot.

“Is Olive Oyl okay?” I asked. “Parashie said she wasn't well.”

“She's fine. She needs exercise.”

“Like me,” I panted.

“Transformation.” He clapped me on the backpack. “Never comfortable. So tell me your goals. We will place them on the mountain ahead of us and hike toward them.”

“Okay.”

He laughed. “But you have to say them aloud. Sound gives them substance.”

I considered that. Making up with Simon, that was a goal. Kissing Simon. Sex with Simon. Not what I cared to share with Yuri. “I'd like to know what happened to Chai,” I said.

“I'm happy to talk about Chai. But I want to focus on you first.”

“Is this part of the job, sharing my innermost desires?”

“Yes. What I ask of my trainees I ask of my trainers.” He took my arm. It might have seemed a chivalrous gesture, except for the fact that he was forcing me into a faster pace. “What is your purpose here, Wollie?”

“Purpose?” I flashed on Bennett Graham and felt a stab of paranoia. “In Calabasas?”

“On earth.”

“Oh, okay. Well. You'll probably say there are no right or wrong answers, but—”

“No. I won't say that.”

I took a deep breath. “I used to think that I was put on earth to keep my little brother out of trouble.”

He nodded. “What if you had had no little brother?”

I thought about my friends. And Uncle Theo. “There's always someone to worry about, isn't there? Someone who needs your help.”

“Yes, there is. Now widen the circle.”

“What circle?”

“The one that describes your life.” He looked at the sky. “You travel rarely—due to your brother. You belong to no groups, except Tree People and the Graphic Artists Guild.”

“And the Humane Society.” It no longer surprised me, the things he knew about me. “I may not travel much, but my greeting cards do. In a manner of speaking.”

“Exactly. Your work is seen in distant galaxies, by those who buy them and send them, in turn, to other galaxies.” He pointed to the canyon below, vast and stark. “This view makes you feel insignificant, yes? And you are. It is our ties to others that give us power.”

“Yuri, can we slow down?”

“No. If you slow, you give Bronwen permission to slow.” He glanced over his shoulder. “She wants to sing at the Met. She has the voice, but her reputation is shot. No relationship skills. No one will work with her. We are going to rehabilitate her.”

I looked back at the soprano, who was falling farther behind. Just ahead of us, Olive Oyl began barking at something on the side of the trail. Yuri let go of me to investigate.

“No, Olive Oyl,” he said, grabbing her collar and handing her to me. “Hold her.”

This was easier said than done and it took all my might to restrain the dog, now beside herself with excitement. What was it she'd discovered?

Then I heard it, between Olive Oyl's barks and urgent whines. A rattle. It took longer to see it, the way the snake blended into the brown dirt. To my astonishment, Yuri stepped on it, behind its head, then reached down and grasped it in one hand. His arm wound up like a baseball pitcher's, and the rattlesnake went flying, launched in an arc far into the canyon.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” I said.

“You can let go of the dog. She's not terribly smart, but she won't follow it down there.” Indeed, Olive Oyl, when I released her, merely sniffed the ground around Yuri's feet. “A good trick, isn't it?” he asked. “Impresses the girls, especially when it's a big fellow like that one. It's the babies you have to watch. They don't have rattles, but they have venom, and they see threats where none exist. Much more aggressive than the adults.”

“Is it dead?”

“Let's say it's relocated. Can't let the dog get bit, or Kimberly would kill me. And Bronwen's not ready to encounter a rattler.”

“Me neither.”

“You just did.” We resumed hiking. “I'm a good judge of people, but I make mistakes. Chai was a mistake. World-class looks, and clever in the ways of the world, an interesting trait in one so young. It fascinated me. I saw her potential, and so I overlooked what I should have seen, what was clear to the rest of the team.”

“What was that?”

“She had no heart.”

He pronounced it like a medical fact. It unnerved me.

“So what happened to her?” I asked.

“I thought you knew. She had a car accident.”

“There was practically no mention of it in the media.”

“I can keep people out of the news as well as get them into it. It's my job.”

“Why would you?”

“Having a team member die is not good publicity.”

“I thought all publicity is good publicity” I said.

“Only if the goal is notoriety. Mere celebrity.” He gestured to the climbers higher up the path. “For us, the goal is influence. Each of them desires to reach a wider audience, to make a difference in the world with what talent they possess. Now you are part of that. Do you feel it? The connecting string, running through them, to you, back to Kimberly and Bronwen? Feel its vibration? You affect the course of human events.”

And with that, Yuri released my arm and continued up the trail at a run, easily, to catch up with Zeffie. Olive Oyl loped after him.

What was he talking about? Was I Joan of Arc? No, I was Wollie of L.A. I'd be lucky to make it up this hill, never mind affecting the course of human events.

And what about Yuri's own purpose? I thought of the note in my file, that I could be turned into an asset. Was this a recruiting technique? And what was I being recruited for? Arms running, or something higher-minded? It didn't matter. I wanted to save the planet as much as the next person, but I had enough on my plate, taking care of my brother in the face of mental illness and insufficient medical coverage. That was my real purpose here, the sole reason I was hiking and spying for my country.

The trail was really winding now, with frequent switchbacks, causing me to lose sight of Zeffie ahead of me, the only one I could see.

“Wollie, catch up to the others,” Kimberly yelled behind me. “I'll stay with Bronwen.”

Catch up? Kimberly overestimated me. And I'd underestimated her;
she'd achieved a first-name basis with Bronwen. I upped my pace, which was no fun at all. Yeah, the view was idyllic: pristine wilderness, no houses, and few power lines. But beauty's not everything.

I came to a fork at the foot of a hill, with one path going up and the other around. I chose the one that looked most traveled, but I chose wrong. After a time the trail grew weedy, then stopped. I looked behind me. No Kimberly No one ahead either. I was alone.

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end.

There was something fierce about all this. I was a child of the suburbs, I didn't belong here, didn't belong to this outfit, in this job. In spite of the heat, I shivered. Then I climbed higher, through the brambles to the top of the ridge, to get my bearings.

In the distance, I saw a person running. I squinted. It was one of our team—the red baseball cap was unmistakable. He or she was tearing through the canyon, off trail. Why? It was harsh going, as I'd just discovered, and with no clear destination …

And then I spotted another figure, farther away, the red cap just a spot moving through dense brush, in a different direction from the first hiker. With this one, too, there was speed and determination. These people weren't out gathering wildflowers.

A bark echoed through the canyon, a yowling, yapping, frenzied sound, the canine version of a shriek.

And then came its human equivalent, a scream, high-pitched and hysterical.

I
scrambled back down the trail faster than I'd come up, with no thought of poison oak or poison snakes, just following the voice that was still screaming in the canyon.

I was pretty sure it was Parashie, but hysteria messes with the voice-recognition factor. I kept hearing the word “dead,” but I told myself that Parashie would probably scream in Russian, in which case I wasn't really hearing “dead” at all but “dyed” or “nyet” or “da” or something. Maybe. I wanted it to be true, anyway.

Someone began to blow a whistle, the obnoxious kind favored by football coaches. It was a strange thing to hear in the wild, no doubt giving heart attacks to the little rabbits and fawns. I assumed it meant “Come! Fast!” and so I was coming, as fast as I could. I got to the fork in the trail and took the path I should've taken initially. Within minutes I saw them.

Bronwen and Kimberly were on the trail, both on cell phones, which apparently worked fine up on the mountaintop. Kimberly had the whistle. Twenty yards down the hillside were others, working their way up to the trail, carrying something. Someone.

I closed in, straining for a better look. Stasik had the guy's head, his back obscuring my view. Zbiggo had the torso, gripping the armpits, with Felix at the waist. Nadja had the legs. I couldn't tell who it was.

Following the body-bearers was Parashie, with Zeffie supporting her. Parashie was a wreck, her movements jerky and erratic, her face streaked with tears and dirt. She was quiet at that moment, but then she started in again. “Olive Oyl, stop! Stop the barking!” Her voice was raw, used up with screaming. “Olive Oyl, she is the one. She finds him. She is climbed down to him. His shoe. Is sticking up. Then the face. Dead. He's dead, isn't he? He's dead.”

I was close now, standing on the trail directly above the body-bearers. I realized that the body wasn't wearing camouflage gear. He wasn't one of us. He wasn't on the team.

My relief startled me. When had that happened, me feeling like part of the tribe, like what mattered most was that it wasn't one of our own?

Stasik changed his position and I got a glimpse of the man's face, and my relief withered.

His face was bruised. The area around his eyes was mottled, not black-and-blue but red, with dried blood all around his mouth and chin.

His eyes were wide open.

It was Crispin.

I
fought back an urge to scream. This became a need to vomit and I squatted, turning away from the group coming up the hill. My stomach heaved, but nothing came out. After some moments, I said a silent prayer to whatever Being might be presiding over this, and turned to face the nightmare.

They had Crispin up to the trail now. Yuri had just come upon the scene, appearing from around the bend, his face flushed. He said to put Crispin down and they did, lowering him carefully onto the dirt.

Except for Parashie, people seemed calm. Even Olive Oyl had stopped barking, confining herself to heavy panting, and the pallbearers, too, were collectively catching their breath. Kimberly was still on her cell phone, with a trail map in hand. She described landmarks, speaking with the matter-of-factness of a police dispatcher. Bronwen, talking on her phone in Norwegian, was intense but not hysterical.

But I could be hysterical. Panic was closing in on me, the realization that Crispin was dead, and by some unnatural cause. I'm no medical examiner, but I could see that this wasn't snakebite or a heart attack or even falling down the hillside in the dark. Something bad had happened to his face beyond coyotes chewing on him for breakfast. That image
made me turn away again, my stomach heaving, determined to lose its lunch. I had to keep it together, but I had no idea how.

Look up, Wollie
, a voice said.

I looked up. I saw trees. Grass. Clouds. Dirt. Wildflowers. Rocks. Details to ground me in the face of a world spinning out of control. Something glinted at me, catching a ray of sun and reflecting it back. A beer can, maybe. A prosaic image, stopping my brain from replaying the image of what lay behind me on the trail.

Think, Wollie
, the voice said.

I took a deep breath and began to think.

Crispin had left me in the middle of the night, gotten this far, and met whatever bad end he'd met. If it was murder—did it have to be murder? Could it be an accident? A misunderstanding between Crispin and Mother Nature?—if it was murder, then I shared some of the responsibility. Didn't I?

I did.

He'd been at the compound to see me. That's what he'd come there for. And he'd died going back home.

I turned once more to face the team. Parashie and Zeffie had reached the trail. Yuri moved to his daughter and folded her in an embrace, keeping her head buried in his shoulder, not letting her look at the body. Not that it mattered now. If she'd found Crispin, that vision was stamped on her brain. That shoe, sticking up. That face.