When a figure as controversial as Preston Maddoc took a wife, the wedding should be news. Whether he’d drawn a marriage license in busy Manhattan or in a sleepy backwater in Kansas, the media would have learned of the event and would have reported it widely, even if the ceremony had been conducted and the bride had been kissed before journalists could fly to the scene with cameras. Yet. . . not a word.

Leilani had called it an amazing wedding, though it lacked a carved-ice swan. By now, Micky believed that no matter how outrageous the girl’s stories seemed, Leilani never lied. Somewhere, a wedding had been held, without either the carved-ice swan or the breathless attention of the media.

Understandably, when your bride was a woman like Sinsemilla, you might not want your publicist to seek a three-page spread in People or to arrange for the two of you to do a TV interview with Larry King in celebration of your nuptials.

Most likely, however, the reason for this singular degree of discretion had been the groom’s intention to kill his stepson and stepdaughter if his expectation of extraterrestrial healers wasn’t fulfilled. Fewer questions will be asked about your missing children if no one knows they existed in the first place.

Micky remembered Leilani saying that Maddoc didn’t use his own name at campgrounds when they traveled in their motor home and that he affected a different appearance these days. Judging by copyright dates, the most recent photos of him were at least four years old.

Staring at Dr. Doom’s blithe face on the computer, she suspected that his murderous intent toward Lukipela and Leilani wasn’t the only reason he kept his marriage secret. A mystery awaited revelation.

She logged off. The resources on the Internet were exhaustive, but Micky could learn nothing more of use from them. The real world always trumped the virtual, and it always would. The next step was to meet Preston Maddoc face-to-face and take his measure.

Leaving the library, she was no longer self-conscious about her too-short, too-tight skirt. If she hadn’t canceled, she could have gone to the job interview with confidence.

In the past couple hours, she’d changed in some fundamental way. She felt this difference profoundly, but she couldn’t yet define it.

Brooding about bioethics, Micky arrived at her Camaro without quite realizing that she’d crossed the parking lot, as though she had teleported from the library to the car in an instant.

Behind the wheel, she didn’t switch on the radio. She always drove by radio. Silences made her edgy, and music was a caulking that filled every jagged chink. But not today.

The real world trumped the virtual. . . .

Bioethicists were dangerous because they devised their rules and schemes not for the real world but for a virtual reality in which human beings have no heart, no capacity to love, and where everyone is as convinced of the meaninglessness of life as are the ethicists themselves, where everyone believes that humanity is just meat.

On her way home, the highways were as clogged as an aging sumo wrestler’s arteries. Usually she chafed at the stop-and-go traffic. But not today.

Maddoc and his fellow bioethicists ceased to be merely dangerous and became bloody tyrants when they obtained the power to try to make the world conform to their abstract model of it, a model that was in conflict with human nature and no more representative of reality than an idiot savant’s math tricks are representative of true genius.

Stop, go. Stop, go.

She remembered reading that California had halted freeway construction for eight years in the 1970s and ’80s. The governor back then believed automobiles would no longer be in wide use by 1995. Public transit would take over. Alternate technology. Miracles.

In all the years that she’d railed at bumper-to-bumper traffic, during so many frustrating two-hour drives that should have taken thirty minutes, she had never before connected that idiotic public policy to the current mess. Suddenly she felt that by her own choice she’d been living entirely in the current moment, in a bubble that separated her from the past and the future, from cause and effect.

Stop, go. Stop, go.

How many millions of gallons of gasoline were wasted in traffic like this, how much unnecessary pollution generated by the unintended consequence of that moratorium on highway construction? And yet the current governor had announced his own ban on freeway construction.

If she let Leilani die, how could she live with herself other than by embracing the we’re-just-meat philosophy of Maddoc’s crowd? In her own way, she’d been living by that empty faith for years—and look where it had gotten her.

One new thought led to another. Stop, go. Stop, go.

Micky felt as if she were waking from a twenty-eight-year dream.

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 br**sts 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.