Lucid, Page 3

  The SUV was glossy like after driven down the gravel road and parked behind the house it’d been washed and dried and waxed.

  Dad was still at work. And even though I’d just interacted with the two people from E!, and knew they were out there, I felt like I was by myself out at the house.

  We’d started locking our doors years before most people out in the countryside. Not long after Maddy became a movie star, someone had come into the house through the unlocked back door and gone through her room, made off with some of her clothes even. Before departing they’d masturbated onto her bed. The violation was a first lesson in some people’s need to get ultra-near their beloved celebrities. Dad bought a gun. I knew how to use it. I was wondering whether or not here was the instance where I’d have to put that knowledge to use.

  A tall, bald man exited the barn’s open doors. Following him was a shorter individual, a dark-skinned woman, her hair pulled back into a short ponytail. Both in black suits with blue shirt collars. I exhaled.

  If you watched E!, or any news footage of Jack, Maddy, or any celebrity who embraced Lucentology, somewhere nearby would be a grim face in a dark suit and blue collar.

  Most of the Lucentology media – books and books on CD and DVDs – featured the color blue. Lucentology’s Los Angeles headquarters featured a giant blue ‘L’ affixed to the building side facing Wilshire Boulevard.

  The big bald white guy I’d never seen. The woman had been at Jack and Maddy’s wedding, her eyes hidden the entire time behind a pair of curvy sunglasses that made me think of the sunglasses everyone sports in The Matrix movies.

  The woman nodded her chin toward the house and the tall bald guy followed the motion indicating someone inside was looking out at them.

  I drained the cup of water and momentarily froze up, wondering if I should call Dad, but the chance that he might fly off the handle and recklessly drive out here at light speed convinced me to just go through this, whatever it was, alone.

  Uncle Bob’s dog Mojo was a mix of Australian Cattle Dog and Border Collie. She had one gray eye and one bright blue like the color they use for oceans on globes.

  Mojo was smart. Soon as I got off the bus, she would’ve indicated someone was waiting behind the house. We didn’t have a Mojo. Dad didn’t care for dogs and he was allergic to cats. The pet options were a little limited.

  I opened the back door and walked out onto the back porch. I waved at the two intimidating figures.

  “Afternoon,” I said, trying to smile.

  The bald man hovered in the background while the woman walked towards the base of the porch steps.

  “Lucy McCall,” she said in a dry humorless tone. I half expected her to follow the pronunciation of my name with the announcement of charges the state had brought against me.

  “I’m Lucy, yes.”

  The woman stopped at the base of the steps. The sun gleamed off the dark blue ‘L’ pinned above her left breast pocket.

  “We’re with the organization. We’re running reconnaissance ahead of your sister’s arrival Thursday. We’d like to come inside the house and take a look around if that’s all right.”

  “Did my dad know you guys were coming? He didn’t say anything about it to me.”

  “Maddy’s assistant, Aster Cupps, was supposed to call ahead and arrange it.”

  I shrugged.

  It deflated the woman. Her shoulders slumped. I didn’t figure she’d show any sort of emotion, but she’d reacted like Sherman in every recent instance I’d reminded him his SharDi-kissing lips were still serving penance.

  She turned on her heel and called back to the tall bald man.

  “Trent. How long ago did she say it was set up? Aster?”

  He scratched at his shiny scalp. Shrugged.

  Turning back around, the woman said, “Last week,” to herself. She started rubbing a finger into her brow. Probably right where the headache was making itself most known.

  “I mean,” I said, “I know who you are. I recognize you from Maddy and Jack’s wedding. Dad probably just forgot to tell me. Between work and…I don’t know. He spaces things sometimes.”

  “You sure you don’t want to call your sister first? We have her number. Her personal number, not just Aster’s line.” She paused after the ‘just’ like she had to summon the will to say ‘Aster’ rather than whatever swear word might suffice in its place.

  I’d barely met Aster. She was thin and birdlike and very high strung. I could remember her having some near meltdown the day of the wedding because the caterers hadn’t brought the exact brand of caviar she’d assumed would be available for guests. Apparently there was a titanic difference between caviar packaged in New York versus that packaged in Boston. When she’d finished insulting the head caterer and steamrolled on out of the courtyard, the man looked after her, stunned that so much venom could be spent on something that would ultimately prove trivial given the momentousness of the occasion.

  The two security people roamed the house. The woman insisted I trail them, especially when they popped into my bedroom and looked down at the yard and the weeds and the gravel road and the E! news van beyond.

  I kept trying to think of the woman’s name. I’d told her I recognized her and now she probably thought that meant I remembered her name, too. I got so lost in trying to drum the name loose I didn’t quite notice they were done looking around in the room.

  I made myself thin as I could in the doorway as Trent stepped out the room ahead of the woman. I was the tallest girl in my class, but my head didn’t even crest his shoulder.

  When we started going downstairs I asked them what they were looking for.

  “Nothing in particular,” said the woman. “It’s more a matter of knowing what we’re going to be facing logistically.”

  Off the stairs she walked towards the front door and pointed out the window.

  “All you have out there right now is the one news van. Two days from now it could be a mob. It probably will be. In fact I tried to convince them not to come together. Maddy would be bad enough on her own, especially here, in her home town, but Jack, too?” She shook her head. “It’s going to be a headache.”

  Trent came to rest at the door. He stared at the woman, his arms loose, his hands crossed one over the other, the model of patience.

  “Truthfully,” said the woman, “we think we’ve got a handle on what might happen, but you never know. Isn’t that right, Big T?”

  The bald man’s mouth flexed in as close an approximation to smiling as he could get.

  “Whatever you say, Dina.”

  Silently I cried victory. Now at least I wouldn’t have to embarrass myself, asking for her name.

  I followed them outside, glancing towards the gravel road, trying to imagine a massive crowd of people all hoping for even a glance of a Hollywood star. I also wondered what they’d do face to face with one Ruth Arnett. If it ever got physical I couldn’t see things ending well for Ruth. Trent looked capable of chopping down trees with the side of one of those flapjack-wide hands.

  The side and back yard weren’t much. The grass just kind of coming to a halt along the dirt driveway that curved around the front yard and lead to the back.

  The SUV was parked with the front bumper already oriented towards heading out from around the back of the house.

  Trent got in the driver’s side of the vehicle and started the engine.

  Dina had already reached the front passenger door when she hesitated.

  “We saw the work inside the barn there. The sculpture. That you?”

  “My mom.”

  “It’s good,” she said. “She had talent. I’m sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you.”

  She nodded and got in the SUV.

  I watched the vehicle turn right onto East Jennings Road and accelerate, the afternoon sun glimmering off the rear windo
w and the black frame.

  When she talked, Dina seemed nice enough. Trent creeped me out a little. Even if he wasn’t big as a Sasquatch he still would’ve left that impression.

  I could swear that when he’d moved past me in the doorway he’d taken a deep inhale like there were flowers blossomed on the top of my head. Or maybe my room just stunk and he was drinking in the fresh air in the upstairs hallway. Either way, it wasn’t a sound I ever wanted to experience alone.

  Chapter 7

  Dad admitted he’d agreed to let Maddy stay with us before really thinking things through.

  But it was a favor his firstborn was asking for. She was in a time of need, although when you looked at the reasons, looked at them from the point of view of being an ordinary person living an ordinary life, Maddy’s labeling her career as being in crisis might’ve been a little hasty.

  Big Girls, the first movie with her name featured before the credits, her first starring role, grossed $80 million. Her next movie had been another romantic comedy, Just The Three of Us, and it’d made even more, topping out domestically at $115. Then she’d had a role in a military drama called For Love of Country, one of the very few Jack Ford movies that didn’t break the $100 million barrier. Jack had said he was satisfied with how the movie had been received, but most of all he was ecstatic about meeting his future wife while working on the film.

  Since then, Maddy had been in a horror movie, The Devil In the Details (earning $33 million and bad reviews), and Panda, a kid’s movie starring a CGI magical bear (earning $45 million and really bad reviews).

  Maddy had always considered herself a real actress and couldn’t quite stomach bubbly romantic comedies, yet her first two movies were of that genre and her new movie, Small Town Girl, was a return to the winning formula.

  The whole career-in-crisis thing that didn’t make sense to me was that even though her last couple of films had made less money than her first couple, her salary had kept going up. An on-line article detailed how Lucentologists with studio ties always made sure other members of the organization were well compensated even for participating in underperforming projects. Like most things on the Internet I knew I should take the information with a grain of salt. There was another story on TheBigScreenTattler.com detailing how Daniel Craig and Daniel Radcliffe were secretly lovers (“Harry Settles For a Double-Oh-Muggle!”).

  The last time I’d talked to Maddy on the phone she seemed a little depressed. She’d apologized for it. Blaming herself for letting her body negatives accumulate when it was so simple to purge them. She didn’t feel like purging them. She felt like eating a lot of ice cream in bed.

  That was part of the Lucentology thing. They had a lot of names for things like ‘body negatives’ and a lot of ways of dealing with those things.

  I thought that maybe what had convinced Dad that Maddy was being mind controlled was that during our LA stay he’d overheard her talking with another Lucentologist, talking the talk they used with one another, and it sounded like alien babble to him.

  He was convinced Maddy was in some sort of trouble. I don’t think he cared about her career, her opening weekend gross. More her soul. Add in the promise he’d made at Mom’s deathbed to always take care of us, and he was going to do all he could to free Maddy of her wrong-headedness.

  Soon as he knew the two security people had been in the house, Dad went from zero to furious in no time flat.

  Mom used to calm him down those times steam shot out his ears. Even once she took sick she had to remind him that her doctors were doing all they could to try and battle back the cancer. It served no purpose to threaten them. In fact that only drew upon reserves they needed when it came to focusing on her care.

  When she locked into her mode of calming Senate McCall it was like some forest maiden singing a song that slowed the hot blood of a vengeful demon whose twisted form eventually returned to that of a man.

  Dad slammed a fist into the dinner table.

  “What are they doing? In our house even!”

  He hit the table hard enough the ceramic bowl at table center had vibrated slightly.

  “Dina said they have to plan ahead. I think she was onto something. If both Maddy and Jack are going to be out here at the house, it might get a little weird out there on Jennings. There might be a lot of people.”

  He was still dressed in his post office work clothes. He mostly worked the desk in town, but sometimes drove a route if they were short. Over the years there’d been openings for the postmaster position, but he’d never applied. Too stressful a job, he’d said.

  After losing the income Mom brought in, Dad had started looking to buy cheap local properties and rent them out. So far there was just the one, the Winks place on West Jennings Road, past Uncle Bob’s and located just before you got back into town. Some couple was supposed to be moving in at the end of the week, right when Maddy arrived, complicating things just a little in case they needed Dad’s assistance with things.

  Dad wouldn’t take Maddy’s money. We were in agreement though that when I started college, I’d be the one taking a loan from my movie star sister, not Dad. It was one of the few times he’d quickly retreated from an issue. The stark reality of college tuition might’ve played more a part in his retreat than my insistence it was my life and therefore my call.

  “The guy was named Trent. I couldn’t remember that lady’s name at least at first. She’s Dina. She was at the wedding. She’s black, or, African American I guess I should say. She always wears sunglasses or I guess glasses with tinted lenses. You remember her?”

  Dad shook his head.

  “They just want Maddy to be safe,” I said. “You remember how creepy it was when someone broke into the house that one time and…You know, did what they did to her bed…She’s a movie star, Dad. And Jack’s going to be here, too. Crazy people are attracted to celebrities. Even sane people turn a little crazy if somebody like a movie star or something suddenly shows up in their midst.”

  Dad stared at the table. When he was still, reflecting on something, it added a bunch of years to his face.

  “Dina said she was concerned about getting in and out of here. She said if there isn’t much crowd control it could be a bottleneck. Like all those fans and whatnot will just be compacted right where we’re trying to get in and out of.”

  Dad sighed.

  “If anything,” I said, “at least it means I might not have to go to school.”

  I kept smiling until he looked at me. All he did was grunt.

  Chapter 8

  After dinner I enjoyed the silence. There was only a little bit of evening light remaining. The E! news van had disappeared and Ruth Arnett remained MIA.

  Digging around on the Internet I’d found her tribute site to her sister. Kip co-starred in a couple videos on Funny-or-Die.com. Ruth linked to them from her site. Watching the videos, the sisters were at least physically indistinguishable.

  I tried to find information out on the two people Ruth had mentioned. Griffin Sharp and Selkie Rosenfeld. Just trying to correctly spell Selkie’s name was an issue. They were barely mentioned on the Lucentology Wikipedia entry. Selkie an actress, Griffin a member of the movement’s executive board.

  The car pulling into the driveway and parking outside the house was an unmistakable sound in the silence that often enveloped the countryside.

  Heart racing, I got up from the kitchen table and the laptop and looked out the window.

  It was only lifelong Eaton resident Carla Griggs bearing a plate of baked goods.

  When I opened the door, she kind of thrust the plate at me, stating in her bright sunny way, “Brownies!” like Dad and I had just been discussing how to solve the world’s crises and were stumped on what would act as a big fix. Oh. Brownies. Of course. Thanks, Carla.

  After Mom died, Carla was a fixture in the house, for a brief interval
at least.

  Dad and Carla hadn’t dated, I don’t think you could call it that, it was too soon after Mom died, but Carla was the one who refused to allow her friend’s now widowed husband to sink into himself.

  She was a tall, almost always smiling brunette, older than Dad, all three of her kids fully grown. Carla shared the peculiarity of having an unwanted small-town spotlight aimed upon her.

  Her ex-husband had worked as the City Engineer for ages. When I was in 3rd grade one of our class field trips was to City Hall and Mr. Brunner was one of the employees who smiled and shook all our hands and answered our questions about what a City Engineer did and what would happen if there was an earthquake or a meteor strike, valid issues for a gathering of squirmy 9-year olds.

  When the Brunner kids were still in high school, the scandal broke.

  Another city employee borrowed Mr. Brunner’s computer, created a file and promptly lost it on the desktop. Searching for the newly created document, they found instead a file full of downloaded images of child pornography.

  When the cops got to the Brunner’s home computer, they found even more. Altogether it was somewhere around 1500 photos and videos.

  One of the Brunner girls turned ghost, hardly ever seen until she graduated, while Carla and her two youngest went on a mini-offensive, vouching that Daryl was a good dad and had never ever molested the kids or any kids, far as they knew.

  Her local church embraced her and her faith gave her the strength to weather the storm. Regardless, eventually there was a divorce and a return to her original last name.

  After Mom passed, Carla tried to steer Dad towards a stronger relationship with the Almighty, but he resisted. After a time she acknowledged his resistance, and they still saw one another now and again, but it was never a date. According to Dad, a little Carla went a long ways.

  “Supplies, Senate,” she said when he walked into the living room. The side of his mouth ticked up. He wasn’t delighted at her dropping in. His face would contract similarly when Mom would drop a joke about her chemo treatments.

  “Well, if they’re as good as your brownies usually are, they won’t last long,” said Dad. I set the plate on the kitchen table and then turned back towards the two.