Jeffery Deaver - Ice Cold

As soon as Senator Stile’s presentation is over I wander out to the back patio, where the picnic table is loaded with chips and dips, beer, and soft drinks. When no one’s looking I stride to the side yard, march past the trashcans to the gate and let myself out to the driveway. Half a dozen gleaming police motorcycles are parked in formation on the front lawn, local law enforcement always welcome at our Birch Society meetings. The streetlights shine off their black-and-white paint, their chrome, and their civic emblems, but I hardly notice them. There’s a flagpole in the middle of the lawn, too, one of Dad’s and Mom’s patriotic projects. There’s a toilet float spray-painted gold bolted to the top of the pole. As a family, we hoist the flag in the mornings before school, and take it down at sunset. Humiliating.

A minute later I’m halfway down the block, and I can see the Lamm home, fortress-like and glowing at the end of it. As I trot toward it, I look to Adlyn’s large bedroom window for a vision of her. No vision, but the light is on. Her room is an upstairs corner on the west side of the house. I let myself through the side gate and stand under her balcony. Leaning my back to the high concrete sidewall, I see the railing and the beam ceiling, from which all kinds of glass-enclosed candles and potted plants dangle in macramé slings. It’s like a jungle. Suddenly she’s standing amid long tendrils of Wandering Jew and Creeping Charlie and Boston fern. She looks down at me and gathers two handfuls of greenery then holds them to her breasts.

“How you doing down there, little Romeo?”

“Groovin’, Adlyn. And you?”

“Oh, fine I guess.”

“Far out. I was pretty stoked when you called me.”

She looks at the plants in her hands with what appears to be mild wonder. “Mike, I’ve seen the way you look at me. Like in class and at the beach and at that party at the end of school. And I’ve made some difficult decisions. I want to tell you some things.”

“Uhhh…”

“Sorry I couldn’t go to the beach today.”

“I looked for you. It was blown out.”

“Larkin’s back for a whole week. So we had to do cultural stuff. Went to lunch in Pasadena, then the Huntington Gardens.”

“I’m glad you’re back now. Larkin’s over at our place for the chapter meeting.”

“He likes that kind of thing. He always has. Wherever we live.”

“Freaky.”

“That’s nothing!” She giggles, lets go the foliage, and leans over the railing. Her beautiful red hair drops forward into the light. She’s wearing a lacy white top that there isn’t much of. “Would you like to come in?”

“Bitchen, Adlyn. Fully boss.”

“Would you mind climbing up? The house has alarms on the doors and windows and I don’t know the code.”

“Alarms?”

“Silly. But Mom and Dad never quit trying to keep us safe and sane.”

The round columns supporting Adlyn’s balcony are concrete and ivy-covered, and I manage to bear-hug my way to the balcony floor, swing one knee onto it, then get my hands on the railing and pull myself over. I’ve got ivy juice on my favorite Hang Ten shirt and jeans, but Adlyn is smiling. I can smell her strawberry perfume. Under the white lacy top she wears a two-piece swimsuit, pink-and-orange swirls. Her legs are tan and smooth.

Her room is three times the size of mine and Max’s, with a tall ceiling. There are lights built up into it, not like in my room, where there’s only one ceiling lamp in the middle of the popcorn, with an opaque shade that collects dead moths. She slides a button on the faceplate and the lights dim and brighten. “It’s called a rheostat.”

“We don’t have those.”

“On our way home from Pasadena today, Ronnie Feurtag was on the news. They found her in a drainage ditch in Huntington Beach.”

“That’s good news.”

“Not for her it isn’t. She was dead. They think murdered.”

“Oh, Geez.” Ronnie had disappeared from the beach on the Fourth of July, and it was front page of the Register for a week and even made the L.A. TV news. She lived a few blocks away. First they thought she ran away to Knott’s Berry Farm or Disneyland, then police said it could be foul play. I didn’t know her but I’d seen her around, always roller skating down the block. Ten years old—same as Marie.

Adlyn takes my hand and leads me from her room down a wide hallway. We pass one closed door on the left, another on the right, then on the left another closed door that has steel bars across it. The bars run horizontally across the door, from top to bottom, spaced approximately six inches apart. They look like stainless steel, and I think at first this is some science-fictional design flair for advanced, sophisticated people like the Lamms. “Larkin’s room,” whispers Adlyn, stopping and running the backs of her fingers up the rungs. Sounds like steel alright. “You can only open it from outside and guess who has the key? Mom .”

She smiles, pecks me on the lips, and takes my hand again. Bitchen! I smell the strawberry perfume very strong on her. I spring one again and as we walk down the wide marble staircase I put my hands in my pockets and shove it up and to one side where it won’t show as bad. It always happens at the worst times, like catching some rays at the beach, like watching TV, like now. Somehow Dad seems to know, warns me about becoming “a bathroom idiot.”

We sit side-by-side on a black leather-and-steel sofa in their living room. The room is very large and high and it has more of the hidden lights up in the ceiling. The walls are plain white, and the carpet is white. There are paintings hung everywhere, huge things that don’t look like anything I’ve ever seen. No frames. I wonder if some of them are hung upside down then wonder: how would you know?

“Would you like to try a confession pill?” asked Adlyn.

“I don’t know what that is.”

“It makes you want to confess.”

“A pill does that?”

“Pills can make you do anything.”

“Hmmm. What’s it called?”

“Just X62-13. There’s no name for it yet because it isn’t approved. The X means experimental. The 62 means it was first formulated in nineteen-sixty-two, and 13 makes it the thirteenth drug created in that year. Nineteen sixty-two was a good year, so far as numbers go. The number of drugs created, that is.”

“So, drugs like pot or speed or downers?”

“Oh, no! X62-13 is not recreational. Although not-real-smart people might think so.”

“Your mom or dad work at a pharmaceutical place, then?”

“Well. Let me just take the pill first. Then I’ll tell you everything you need to know. Probably more!”

She runs across the carpet, up the stairs. Her legs are beautiful and the bottoms of her feet are white, like the carpet. I try to distract myself by making some sense of the paintings, but they make no sense. I look out the windows, but it’s dark and there are no streetlights nearby. The Lamms’ big, unreal house seems to sit in a nest of darkness. It’s on a slight rise. I go to one of the big windows and can see our tract below—Heritage Acres—huddled in orderly fashion, gridded off by the streetlights that lie in perpendicular rows and burn strong, none of them flickering, none of them out. There are orange groves surrounding Heritage Acres, though some of them are being cut down to build houses. Out there, beyond the streetlights, where the groves and partial groves are, it’s very dark. A new moon.

Behind me Adlyn clears her throat. When I turn she’s got a glass in one hand and a large white pill in the other, which she holds up to me like a treat for a dog. She’s wrapped a long, airy, green scarf around her neck. She smiles and sits primly back down on the big black sofa and I stride over, beginning to spring again. Damn. I sit near but not close to her, and cross my legs. She drops the big pill down into her mouth and swallows half the glass of what looks like water.