Brain Child

CHAPTER TWO

The last thundering rock chord was abruptly cut off, and Alex, gasping, glanced around the gym in search of Lisa. The last time he’d seen her—at least fifteen minutes ago—she’d been dancing with Bob Carey, and he’d been dancing with Kate Lewis. Since then, he’d danced with three other girls, and now Bob was standing near the wall shouting in Jennifer Lang’s ear. He started outside, certain that he’d find Lisa out on the lawn catching her breath. As he reached the door, a hand closed on his arm. He turned to see Carolyn Evans smiling at him.
“Hey,” Carolyn said, “if you’re looking for Lisa, she’s in the rest room with Kate and Jenny.”
“Then I guess I’ll have a glass of punch, if there’s any left.”
“There’s loads left,” Carolyn told him in the slightly mocking voice Alex knew she always used when she was trying to seem more sophisticated than the rest of the kids. “Hardly anybody’s drinking it except you and Lisa. Come on out to my car—I’ve got some beer.”
Alex shook his head.
“Oh, come on,” Carolyn urged. “What’s one beer gonna do to you? I’ve had four, and I’m not drunk.”
“I’m driving. If I’m driving, I don’t drink.”
Carolyn’s head tipped back, and a throaty laugh that Alex was sure she practiced for hours emerged from her glistening lips. “You’re just too good to be true, aren’t you? Not even one little tiny beer? Come on, Alex—get human.”
“It’s not that,” Alex replied, forcing a grin. “It’s just that my dad’ll take my car away from me if I come home with beer on my breath.”
“Too bad for you,” Carolyn purred. “Then I guess you can’t come to my party.” When she saw a slight flicker of interest in Alex’s eyes, she decided to press her advantage. “Everybody’s going to be there—sort of a housewarming.”
Alex stared at Carolyn in disbelief. Was she really talking about the hacienda? But his mother told him the Evanses weren’t letting anyone see it for another month, until it was completely refurbished.
And everyone in La Paloma, no matter what he thought of the Evanses, wanted to see what Cynthia Evans had done with Bill Evans’s money.
At first, when the rumors began circulating that the Evanses had bought the enormous old mansion on top of Hacienda Drive, the assumption had been that they would tear it down. It had stood vacant for too many years, was far too big for a family to keep up without servants, and was far too decayed for anyone to seriously consider restoring it.
But then the project had begun.
First to be repaired was the outer wall. Much of it had long since collapsed; only a few yards of its southern expanse were still standing. But it had been rebuilt, its old wooden gates replaced by new ones whose designs had been copied from faded sketches of the hacienda as it had looked a hundred and fifty years earlier. Except that the new gates were wired with alarms and swung smoothly open on electrically controlled rollers. And then, after the wall was complete, Cynthia had begun the restoration of the mansion and the outbuildings.
Almost everybody in La Paloma had gone up to the top of Hacienda Drive once or twice, but the gates were always closed, and no one had succeeded in getting inside the walls. Alex, along with some of his friends, had climbed the hills a few times to peer down into the courtyard, but all they’d been able to see was the exterior work—the new plaster and the whitewashing, and the replacement of the red tiles on the roof.
What everyone was truly waiting for was a glimpse of the interior, and now Carolyn was saying her friends could see it that very night.
Alex eyed her skeptically. “I thought your mother wasn’t letting anyone in until next month.”
“Mom and Dad are in San Francisco for the weekend,” Carolyn said.
“I don’t know—” Alex began, remembering his promise not to go to any parties after the dance.
“Don’t know about what?” Lisa asked, slipping her arm through his.
“He doesn’t want to come to my party,” Carolyn replied before Alex could say anything.
Lisa’s eyes widened. “There’s a party? At the hacienda?”
Carolyn nodded with elaborate casualness. “Bob and Kate are coming, and Jenny Lang, and everybody.”
Lisa turned to Alex. “Well, let’s go!” Alex flushed and looked uncomfortable, but said nothing. The band struck up the last dance and Lisa led Alex onto the floor. “What’s wrong?” she asked a moment later. “Why can’t we go to Carolyn’s party?”
“ ’Cause I don’t want to.”
“You just don’t like Carolyn,” Lisa argued. “But you won’t even have to talk to her. Everybody else will be there too.”
“It isn’t that.”
“Then what is it?”
“I promised my folks we wouldn’t go to any parties. Dad gave me some money to take some of the kids out for a hamburger, and I promised we’d come home right after that.”
Lisa fell silent for a few seconds; then: “We don’t have to tell them where we were.”
“They’d find out.”
“But don’t you even want to see the place?”
“Sure, but—”
“Then let’s go. Besides, it’s not where we go that your mom and dad are worried about—they’re afraid you’ll drink. So we’ll go to the party, but we won’t even have a beer. And we won’t stay very long.”
“Come on, Lisa. I promised them I wouldn’t—”
But Lisa suddenly broke away from him and started pulling him off the dance floor. “Let’s find Kate and Bob. Maybe we can convince them to go up to Carolyn’s with us for just a few minutes, then the four of us can go out for hamburgers. That way we can see the place, and you won’t have to lie to your folks.”
As Lisa led him out of the gym, Alex knew he’d give in, even though he shouldn’t. With Lisa, it was hard not to give in—she always managed to make everything sound perfectly logical, even when Alex was sure it wasn’t.
The headlights of Alex’s Mustang picked up the open gates of the hacienda, and he braked the car to a stop. “Are we supposed to park out here, or go inside?”
Lisa shrugged. “Search me. Carolyn didn’t say.” Suddenly a horn sounded, and Bob Carey’s Porsche pulled up beside them, its window rolled down.
“Over there,” Bob called. He was pointing off to the left, where a small group of cars already stood parked in the shadow of the wall. Following Bob, Alex maneuvered the Mustang into a spot next to a Camaro, shut off the engine, then turned to Lisa.
“Maybe we oughta just go on home,” he suggested, but Lisa grinned and shook her head.
“I want to see it. Come on—just for a little while.” She got out of the car, and after a second’s hesitation, Alex joined her. A moment later Kate and Bob appeared out of the darkness, and the four of them started toward the lights flooding from the gateway.
“I don’t believe this,” Kate said a moment later. They were standing just inside the gate, trying to absorb the transformation that had come over what had been, only a year earlier, a crumbling ruin.
To the left, the old stables had been rebuilt into garages, and in the bright whiteness of the floodlights, the new plaster was indistinguishable from the old. The only change was that the stable roofs, originally thatched, were now of the same red tile as the house and the servants’ quarters.
“It’s weird,” Alex said. “It looks like it’s a couple of hundred years old.”
“Except for that,” Lisa breathed. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
Dominating the courtyard, which until recently had been nothing more than an overgrown weed patch, was a glistening swimming pool fed by a cascade of tumbling water that made its way down five intricately tiled tiers before finally splashing into the immense oval of the pool.
Bob Carey whistled softly. “How big do you s’pose it is?”
“Big enough,” Alex replied. Then his eyes wandered to what had once been the servants’ quarters. “Wanta bet that’s a pool house now?”
Before anyone could venture an answer, Carolyn Evans’s voice rang out over the rock music that was throbbing from the huge main house. “Hey! Come on in!”
Glancing at each other uneasily, the four of them slowly crossed the courtyard, then stepped up onto the broad loggia that ran the entire length of the house. Carolyn, grinning happily, waited for them at the elaborately carved oaken front door. “Isn’t it neat? Come on in—everybody’s already here.”
They went through the front door into a massive tile-floored entry hall that was dominated by a staircase curving up to the second floor. To the right there was a large dining room, and beyond it they could see through another room into the kitchen. “That’s a butler’s pantry between the dining room and kitchen,” Carolyn explained, then raised her voice as someone turned up the volume on the stereo. “Mom wasn’t really sure it was supposed to be there, but she put it in anyway.”
“You going to have a butler?” Kate Lewis asked.
Carolyn shrugged with elaborate unconcern. “I don’t know. I guess so. Mom says the house is too big for María to take care of by herself.”
“María Torres?” Bob Carey groaned. “That old witch can’t even take care of her own house. My mom fired her after the first day!”
“She’s okay—” Alex began, but was immediately drowned out by the others’ laughter. Even Lisa joined in.
“Come on, Alex, she’s a loony-bin case. Everybody knows that.” Then she glanced guiltily toward Carolyn. “She isn’t here, is she?”
Carolyn giggled maliciously. “If she is, she just got an earful.”
At the top of the stairs, María Torres faded back into the darkness of the second-floor hallway, her black dress making her nearly invisible.
She had been sitting quietly in the large bedroom at the end of the corridor—the bedroom that, by rights, should have been hers—when the first of the cars had arrived.
No one, she knew, should have come back to the hacienda for hours, and she should have had the house to herself and her ghosts from the past. But now her reverie was shattered, and the pounding din of the gringo music, and the children of the gringos she had spent her life hating, filled the ancient rooms.
She had been in the house since seven o’clock, having let herself in with her own key as soon as Carolyn had left. She had spent the last four hours drifting through the house, imagining that it was hers, that she was not the cleaning woman—no more than a peón—but the mistress of the hacienda: Do?a María Ruiz de Torres. And one day it would happen; one day, sometime in the vague future, it would happen. The gringos would be driven away, and finally the hacienda would be hers.
But for now she could only pretend, and be careful. The gringos were strict and never wanted her to be alone in their homes. She must leave the hacienda without being seen, and make her way back down the canyon to her little house behind the mission, and when she came back tomorrow, she must give no hint that she had been here at all tonight.
She glanced once more around the gloom of the bedroom that should have been hers, then slipped away, down the back stairs, the stairs that her ancestors never would have used, and out into the night. Then, as the gringo revelry went on—a desecration!—she kept watch, her ancient anger burning inside her.…
“Jeez,” Bob whispered. “Last time I saw this, it looked like the place had burned. Now look at it.”
The living room, across the entry hall from the dining room, was sixty feet long, and was dominated by an immense fireplace on the far wall.
The oak floor gleamed a polished brown that was nearly black, but the white walls picked up the light from sconces that had been wired into them at regular intervals to fill the room with an even brightness that made it seem even larger than it was. Twenty feet above, huge peeled logs supported a cathedral ceiling.
“This is incredible,” Lisa breathed.
“This is just the beginning,” Carolyn replied. “Just wander around anywhere, and make sure you don’t miss the basement. That’s Daddy’s part of the house, and Mom just hates it.” Then she was gone, disappearing into the mass of teenagers who were dancing to the rhythms of a reggae album.
It took them nearly an hour to go through the house, and even then they weren’t sure they’d seen it all. Upstairs there was a maze of rooms, and they’d counted seven bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, in addition to a library and a couple of small sitting rooms. All of it looked as if it had been built and furnished nearly two hundred years ago, then somehow frozen in time.
“Can you imagine living here?” Lisa asked as they finally started down toward the basement.
“It’s not like a house at all,” Alex replied. “It feels more like a museum. Hey,” he added, suddenly stopping halfway down the stairs. “I don’t remember this place ever having a basement.”
“It didn’t,” Kate told him. “Carolyn says her dad wanted his own space, but her mom wouldn’t let him have any of the old rooms. So he dug out a basement. Do you believe it?”
“Holy shit,” Bob Carey muttered. “Didn’t he think the house was big enough already?”
At the bottom of the stairs they found a laundry room to the left, and beyond that a big empty space that looked as though it was intended for storage.
Under the living room, occupying nearly the same amount of space as the room above, they found Mr. Evans’s private space. For a long time they stared at it in silence.
“Well, I think it’s tacky,” Lisa said when she’d taken it all in.
Bob Carey shrugged. “And I think you’re just jealous. I bet you wouldn’t think it was tacky if it was your house.”
Kate Lewis raked Bob with what she hoped was a scathing glare. “My mother always says the Evanses have more money than taste, and she’s right. I mean, just look at it, Bob. It’s gross!”
It was a media room. The far wall was nearly covered by an immense screen, which could be used either for movies or projection television. Along one wall was a complex of electronic components that none of them could completely identify. They were, however, apparently the source of the rock music, and they could barely hear Carolyn demanding that it be turned down for fear the neighbors would call the police. Nobody, however, was paying any attention to her, and much of the party seemed to have gravitated downstairs.
What had elicited Lisa Cochran’s criticism, though, was not the electronics, but the bar opposite them. Not a typical home bar, with three stools and a rack for glasses, the Evanses’ bar ran the entire length of the wall. Behind the counter itself, the wall was covered with shelves of liquor and glasses, and each shelf was edged with a neon tube, which provided a rainbow effect that was reflected throughout the room by the mirrors that covered the wall behind the shelves and the bar itself. The bar, by now, was covered with bottles, and several of the kids were happily filling glasses with various kinds of liquor.
“Want something?” Bob asked, eyeing the array.
Kate hesitated, then shrugged. “Why not? Is there any gin?”
Bob poured them each a tumbler, added a little ginger ale, and handed one of the glasses to Kate, then turned to ask Alex and Lisa what they wanted. But while he’d been mixing the drinks, Alex and Lisa had disappeared. “Hey—where’d they go?”
Kate shrugged. “I don’t know. Come on, let’s dance.” She finished her drink and pulled Bob out onto the floor, but when the record ended, both she and Bob scanned the crowd, looking for Alex and Lisa.
“You think they got mad ’cause we had a drink?” Kate finally asked.
“Who cares? It’s not as if we need a ride home or anything. Forget about them.”
“No! Come on.”
They found Alex and Lisa in the courtyard, staring up at the stars. “Hey,” Bob yelled, holding up his glass, “aren’t you two gonna join the party?”
“We weren’t going to drink, remember?” Alex asked, staring at the glass. “We were going out for hamburgers.”
“Who wants hamburgers when you can drink?” Bob replied. He reached down and pulled a bottle of beer out of a tub of ice and thrust it into Alex’s hands. Alex looked at it for a moment, then glanced at Lisa, who frowned and shook her head. Alex hesitated, then defiantly twisted the cap loose and took a swig.
Lisa glared accusingly at him. “Alex!”
“I didn’t even want to come to this party,” Alex told her, his voice taking on a defensive edge. “But since we’re here, we might as well enjoy it.”
“But we said—”
“I know what we said. And I said I wasn’t going to any parties, either. But I’m here. Why shouldn’t I do what everybody else is doing?” Deliberately he tipped the beer bottle up and chugalugged it, then reached for another. Lisa’s eyes narrowed angrily, but before she could say anything else, Carolyn Evans’s voice suddenly rose over the din of the party as she came out of the front door with her arms full of towels.
“Who wants to go in the pool?”
There was a momentary silence, then someone replied that no one had suits. “Who needs suits?” Carolyn squealed. “Let’s go skinny-dipping!” Suddenly she reached behind her, pulled down the zipper of her dress, and let it drop to the patio. Stripping off her panties and strapless bra, she dived into the pool, swam underwater for a few strokes, then broke the surface. “Come on,” she yelled. “It’s great!”
There was a moment of hesitation, then two more kids stripped and plunged into the water. Three more followed, and suddenly the patio was filling up with discarded clothes and the pool with naked teenagers. Once more, Alex glanced at Lisa.
“No!” she said, reading his eyes. “We were only coming for a few minutes, and we weren’t going to drink. And we’re certainly not going into the pool.”
“Chicken,” Alex teased, shrugging out of his dinner jacket. Then he drained the second beer, put the bottle down, and began untying his shoelaces.
“Alex, don’t,” Lisa begged. “Please?”
“Aw, come on. What’s the big deal? Haven’t you ever skinny-dipped before?”
“It’s not a big deal,” Lisa argued. “I just don’t think we ought to do it. I think we ought to go home.”
“Well, I think we ought to go swimming,” Alex crowed. He stripped off his pants and shirt. “I didn’t think we ought to come here, but I came, didn’t I? Well, now I think we ought to go skinny-dipping, and I think you ought to go along with it.” Peeling off his Jockey shorts, he plunged into the water. A moment later he came to the surface and turned around to grin at Lisa.
She was gone.
The effects of the two fast beers suddenly neutralized by the cold water, Alex scanned the crowd, sure that Lisa must be among the kids still on the pool deck. Then he was equally sure she was not. If she’d made up her mind not to come into the pool, she wouldn’t change it.
And Alex suddenly felt like a fool.
He hadn’t wanted to come to the party, he hadn’t really wanted the two beers he’d drunk, and he certainly didn’t want Lisa mad at him. He scrambled out of the water, grabbed a towel, then dried himself off and dressed as fast as he could. As he started into the house, he asked Bob Carey if he’d seen Lisa anywhere. Bob hadn’t.
Nor had anyone else.
Ten minutes later, Alex left the house, praying that his car wasn’t blocked in.
* * *

A quarter of a mile down Hacienda Drive, Lisa Cochran’s quick pace slowed, and she wondered if maybe she shouldn’t turn around and go back to the party. What, after all, was so horrible about skinny-dipping? And who was she to be so prissy about it? In a way, Alex was right—it had been her idea that they go to the party. He’d even argued with her, but she’d insisted. Still, he had drunk a couple of beers, and by now he might be working on a third. And if he was, she certainly didn’t want to drive home with him.
She stopped walking entirely, and wondered what to do. Perhaps she should walk all the way into the village and wait for Alex at home.
Except that her parents would be up and would want to know what had happened.
Maybe the best thing to do was go back to the party, find Alex, and convince him that it was time for them to go home. She would do the driving.
But that would be giving in, and she wouldn’t give in. She had been right, and Alex had been wrong, and it served him right that she’d walked out on him.
She made up her mind, and continued down the road.
Alex jockeyed the Mustang around Bob Carey’s Porsche, then put it in drive and gunned the engine. The rear wheels spun on the loose gravel for a moment, then caught, and the car shot forward, down the Evanses’ driveway and into Hacienda Drive.
Alex wasn’t sure how long Lisa had been walking—it seemed as though it had taken him forever to get dressed and search the house. She could be almost home by now.
He pressed the accelerator, and the car picked up speed. He hugged the wall of the ravine on the first curve, but the car fishtailed slightly, and he had to steer into the skid to regain control. Then he hit a straight stretch and pushed his speed up to seventy. Coming up fast was an S curve that was posted at thirty miles an hour, but he knew they always left a big margin for safety. He slowed to sixty as he started into the first turn.
And then he saw her.
She was standing on the side of the road, her green dress glowing brightly in his headlights, staring at him with terrified eyes.
Or did he just imagine that? Was he already that close to her?
Time suddenly slowed down, and he slammed his foot on the brake.
Too late. He was going to hit her.
It would have been all right if she’d been on the inside of the curve. He’d have swept around her, and she’d have been safe. But now he was skidding right toward her …
Turn into it. He had to turn into it!
Taking his foot off the brake, he steered to the right, and suddenly felt the tires grab the pavement.
Lisa was only a few yards away.
And beyond Lisa, almost lost in the darkness, something else.
A face, old and wrinkled, framed with white hair. And the eyes in the face were glaring at him with an intensity he could almost feel.
It was the face that finally made him lose all control of the car.
An ancient, weathered face, a face filled with an unspeakable loathing, looming in the darkness.
At the last possible moment, he wrenched the wheel to the left, and the Mustang responded, slewing around Lisa, charging across the pavement, heading for the ditch and the wall of the ravine beyond.
Straighten it out!
He spun the wheel the other way.
Too far.
The car burst through the guardrail and hurtled over the edge of the ravine.
“Lisaaaa …”