Stormchild

  “Berenice,” Jackie said, as if that would explain everything, then, realizing that it explained nothing, she rushed into more detail. “She’s Molly’s eldest daughter, you see, and she went off with von Rellsteb about five years ago, and Molly thinks that Berenice was brainwashed by him, because she’s never even written her mother a letter, and they were really close! Berenice was my best friend, I mean, we told each other everything! Everything! Which is why I’ve been trying to find her. I know she wouldn’t just have just cut me dead, I mean, people don’t do that, do they?”

  “Perhaps she wanted some peace and quiet?” I suggested wickedly.

  She looked immediately contrite. “I talk too much,” she said miserably. “I know I do. My mother always says I do, and so does Molly, and so did Professor Falk, he was my Ethics of Journalism professor.”

  “There are ethics in journalism?” I asked.

  “Of course there are!” She offered me a reproving look, which, taking her gaze off the highway, made us wander dangerously across the center yellow line.

  I leaned over and steered the car back toward safety. “So Berenice just ran away?”

  “She went to a school in Virginia, where she met this guy, and in her senior year he took her to British Columbia for spring break, which I thought was kind of weird because she’d always gone to Florida before. That’s where she met the Genesis people. They weren’t called Genesis then, that came later. They were some kind of weird commune, know what I mean? And they just swallowed Berenice alive! No letters, no calls, nothing!”

  “And you’ve been trying to reach her ever since?”

  Jackie nodded. “I even visited British Columbia, but they threatened to call the police and have me arrested for trespassing! I couldn’t believe their nerve!” She frowned. “But at least they didn’t point guns at me.”

  I thought she was reproving me for my behavior of the previous night, and I offered yet another apology.

  “I don’t mean that,” she said hurriedly, “but Genesis is heavily into survivalism. Didn’t you know that?”

  “I don’t even know what survivalism is.”

  She bit her lower lip as she framed her definition. “It’s a kind of apocalyptic horror thing, know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Survivalists say that the nuclear holocaust is inevitable, but they’re determined to survive it, right? So they live in really remote places, and they have guns, so that if any other survivor tries to take their women or food stocks they can fight them off.”

  “Charming,” I said.

  “It’s kind of freaky,” Jackie agreed, then stopped talking as an eighteen-wheel truck, like the one that had nearly killed me the previous night, overtook us in a thunder of vibration and noise. Jackie was plainly terrified by the truck’s looming proximity and I wondered how she was ever going to endure the hundreds of miles between here and Kalamazoo.

  “Why did they leave British Columbia?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. Unless they just wanted to be somewhere more remote? Their island was pretty terrible, sort of cold-water standpipes and mud everywhere and real primitive, but a sympathizer let them use it for free, and it had a sheltered harbor for their boats. I guess boats are important to von Rellsteb. Do you know anything about boats?”

  “A bit,” I said, then changed the subject back. “Who was the sympathizer who gave them an island?”

  “She’s a rich widow who’s into New Age. You know, channellers and crystals and all that really weird stuff? I think she was charmed by von Rellsteb. I mean she was really cut up when he just left her without saying anything. He didn’t even tell her where they were going.” Jackie paused. “She must have given him money, and I guess he was screwing her.” She touchingly glanced at me to make certain I was not embarrassed by her allegation. “She thought that maybe he’d moved Genesis to Europe, because they disappeared soon after he came back from his European trip. But I don’t think she’s right. I think they’re still in the North Pacific.”

  “With my daughter,” I said grimly, and Jackie then wanted to know about Nicole, and so I spent a half hour telling my family’s story before we stopped for lunch at a waterfront cafe where Jackie ordered a salad of celery, lettuce, and a ghastly concoction called tofu, which she told me was made from soybeans, but looked to me like the foam insulation that my boatyard sometimes pumps into the space between a steel hull and the cabin paneling. “I assume you’re a vegetarian?” I asked her.

  “I haven’t eaten flesh since I was six,” she said enthusiastically. “Mom tried to make me eat chicken or turkey, and some fish as well, because she said I needed the protein to grow properly, but I couldn’t bear to think of all the suffering, and even at Thanksgiving I used to make my own fake turkey with vegetables and bread. I used to mix them and.”

  “Jackie...!” I said warningly.

  “I know.” She was instantly contrite. “I’m talking too much.” She suppressed a shudder at the size of the steak on my plate, then reverted to the safer subject of the Genesis community. She told me how difficult it was to get even the smallest scraps of information. “We can’t even talk to people who used to belong because, so far as we know, not one member of Genesis has ever left the community since they moved out of British Columbia! Not one. A handful left before that, but none of them know where von Rellsteb might have gone.”

  It took me a few seconds to understand the implication of Jackie’s news. “You think he kills them if they try to escape?”

  Jackie was unwilling to endorse the implication of murder, but she thought it more than probable that some members of Genesis were being held against their will. “I never got beyond the pier when I visited British Columbia,” she said, “but I got this really bad feeling. I mean like von Rellsteb was into control? Like heavy discipline? I spoke to this professor at Berkeley, and he told me that a lot of Utopian groups finish up by substituting control systems for consensus because their leaders aren’t really into agreement and compromise, but have this blueprint which they insist will only work if it’s followed exactly, and they somehow manage to impose it on the group, then enforce it with rewards and punishments. Do you know what I mean?”

  I was nodding eagerly, because Jackie was reinforcing my own theory that von Rellsteb had some kind of sinister mastery over his followers, and Jackie’s revelation offered an explanation of my daughter’s silence. Nicole had ignored me because she had no choice. Nicole was not a convert, but a convict, and I told Jackie about the unsettling image of the three girls wearing von Rellsteb’s strange green uniform on the day Nicole had sailed away.

  “It’s not just uniforms,” Jackie said. “This guy at Berkeley says these groups make really weird hierarchies for themselves. Some groups degrade into slaves and owners, and in others the underlings have to work their way up the hierarchy by pleasing the guys at the top.”

  “It makes sense!” I spoke enthusiastically, for how else could my Nicole’s vivid spirit have been broken except by some brutal methodology? Nicole, I suddenly knew, was a prisoner, and my suspicion that von Rellsteb used his disciples to make himself wealthy seemed overwhelmingly confirmed by Jackie’s description of how Utopian ideals deteriorated into fascist regimes.

  Jackie suddenly looked very troubled. “Aren’t you going to eat your salad?”

  “Of course not. I’m not a rabbit.”

  “It’s good for you.” She waited to see if that encouragement would make me relent, then took the salad for herself when it was obvious I was not going to eat it.

  I watched as she picked at the lettuce. “Why doesn’t your editor want you to write about Genesis?” I asked her.

  “Because he doesn’t really believe Genesis is as bad as I say, and the paper can’t afford to send me all over the world to find out if I’m right, and I haven’t got enough proof or experience to persuade a bigger newspaper to let me do it. If I took the story to a Chicago paper they’d just put one of their
own staffers on it, which means I’d be passing up my best chance of a Pulitzer, so I’m chasing the story in my own time. And with Molly’s help, of course.”

  “So you can get a Pulitzer?”

  “Sure, why not?” She responded as though that achievement was well within her grasp, and I decided there was more to Ms. Jackie Potten than her unprepossessing exterior promised. “It depends on the story, of course,” she explained. “I mean if von Rellsteb really is holding people against their will, then it will be a Pulitzer story, but if he’s running just another survivalist commune, then it’s page thirty-two beneath the fold.”

  “It’s no story at all,” I said, “if you can’t find him.”

  “What I’d like to do is track down where he gets his money. Of course I’d like to find where they’re all living, but I guess that would be difficult because the coast of Alaska is really huge! And it’s got lots of inlets and islands. They could be anywhere, and maybe they’re not even in Alaska!” She sounded rather despairing at the difficulty of the task she had set herself, then she cheered up. “But there might be another way of finding them. The paper trail.”

  “Paper trail?” I asked in bemusement.

  “People can’t just disappear,” Jackie said with renewed enthusiasm. “There are always records! How does the Genesis community get their money? They must use a bank somewhere, and if they use a bank, then the Internal Revenue Service has to know about them, so maybe I should go that route.”

  “I know where they get their money,” I said with some satisfaction.

  “Where?” She was immediately interested.

  So I told Jackie about my suspicions that von Rellsteb was raising funds by forcing inheritances onto his cowed followers who, in turn, would pass the money to von Rellsteb. After all, if Joanna and I had both died in the English channel then Nicole would have inherited our expensive house that overlooked the sea, our investments, and our boatyard with its healthy cashflow, and if Nicole was indeed a brainwashed prisoner of the Genesis community, as I now believed her to be, then von Rellsteb would have become the effective owner of that plump legacy. And I had no doubt that von Rellsteb was still interested in that legacy. Why else, I asked, would he have raised the matter of Nicole’s inheritance?

  “He did what?”

  I told Jackie about von Rellsteb’s odd concern that perhaps Nicole might have been disinherited. “Isn’t it obvious why he raised the subject?” I asked her.

  “I don’t know.” Jackie was clearly unconvinced by my theory. “I haven’t heard of any other Genesis parents just disappearing, and why would von Rellsteb go all the way to Europe to find a victim? A lot of his followers come from Canada or the States, so why not pick on them?”

  “Because,” I suggested, “a murder in Europe is far less likely to be traced back to a commune in Alaska.”

  Jackie was still unconvinced. “It would be a messy way of making money. Think of all the other family members he’d have to deal with, let alone the lawyers. Mind you”—she was clearly worried that I might be upset by her abrupt dismissal of my theory, so she tried to soften it—”we know so little about what makes von Rellsteb tick. I still haven’t discovered why he went to Europe four years ago, and it was clearly important, because it was after that trip that the whole commune disappeared.”

  Jackie was referring to the journey during which he had met Nicole, and I suggested that perhaps von Rellsteb had been on a recruiting trip.

  “Maybe,” Jackie said, but without enthusiasm.

  “Perhaps he was going back to Germany,” I said. “He must have relatives there.”

  Jackie stared at me, then, very slowly, laid down her fork. “I bet that’s why he went to Europe!” she said in the tone of voice that betrayed the dawning of an idea.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, boy! Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “What?”

  “Jeez!” She was mad at herself. “Wow! I’ve been dumb! You know that? Really dumb! His father!”

  “Father?”

  “Only his mother emigrated to Canada. There’s no record of a father, but I’ll bet that’s it!” Then, being Jackie, she told me the story from its very beginning, from the time that Caspar von Rellsteb had been born in Hamburg in the very last months of the Second World War, which, I realized with a pang, made him almost my exact contemporary. Jackie confessed that she had discovered nothing about von Rellsteb’s real father, but had instead concentrated her research on his mother who had been a German national called Eva Fellnagel. In 1949 Eva Fellnagel had married a Canadian army sergeant called Skinner, and afterward had gone to live with him in Vancouver. Caspar, Eva’s son, had traveled with the couple, and, though the marriage to Sergeant Skinner had not lasted long, it had been sufficient to secure both Eva and her son Canadian citizenship. Jackie said she had always assumed Caspar’s aristocratic surname had been an affectation wished on him by his mother. “But perhaps there really was a von Rellsteb!” Jackie said excitedly, “and maybe that’s why Caspar went to Europe! To find his real father!”

  “And if we could find him, too?” I suggested.

  “Sure!” Jackie was excited, certain that by retracing von Rellsteb’s European footsteps she could track him all the way down to the present. Then her face fell. “There’s just one problem,” she said ruefully, “I’d have to go to Germany.”

  “Which you can’t afford to do?” I took a guess at the reason for her dubiety.

  “I haven’t got any money,” she confessed, “and Molly’s spent almost all her savings.”

  “I’ve got money,” I said very simply, because suddenly life had become extremely simple. Nicole was being held prisoner by a man who was trying to forge his own insane Utopia. I would find that man’s hiding place and I would free my daughter. It would take money, but I had money, and I would do anything to get my daughter back.

  I was going hunting.

  “You’ve done what?” David asked me when I told him the results of my American visit.

  “I’ve hired an investigator.”

  “Oh, good God! You’ve hired someone! To do what?”

  “To find Nicole, of course.”

  “Good God!” At first I thought David was upset because of my profligacy, but then I realized he was frightened of my obsession with Nicole, expecting it to end in crippling disappointment. “Tell me, for God’s sake!”

  I told him about Jackie Potten, and the telling took all the way from Heathrow Airport to the coast where, before taking me home, David stopped for lunch at the Stave and Anchor. We sat at our usual table by the fire, where I took pleasure in a pint of decent-tasting beer and David took an equal pleasure in mocking me. “So! Let us celebrate your achievements, Tim. You have permitted some American girl to fleece you of sixteen hundred pounds. I do applaud you, Tim, I really do.”

  It was lunchtime, but a depression that had brought a gale of wind and rain up the channel had also fetched a mass of clouds that made the pub windows as dark as evening. The lights were on in the bar where a group of idle fisherman amused themselves by listening to our conversation. I tried to defend myself against David’s scorn. “Jackie Potten is a very enterprising reporter,” I insisted with as much dignity as my tiredness would allow. “That’s what I like about the Americans. They’re so full of enthusiasm! They’re not like us.”

  “You mean they don’t roam the world giving away their wealth to passing females?” David inquired robustly. “Good God, Tim, the trollop must have thought Christmas had arrived early! She must think you are the greatest fool in Christendom! You never did have any sense of financial responsibility.”

  “I am merely subsidizing Jackie’s investigations,” I insisted.

  “Oh, dear Lord,” my brother said in despair. He scratched a match on the stone of the hearth, then laboriously lit his pipe as he prepared his next broadside. “You remind me of Tuppy Hargreaves. Do you remember Tuppy? He had that very rich parish in Dorset, and a rather grand wife,
but he abandoned them both to run away with a girl young enough to be his granddaughter, and in no time at all the poor sod was wearing a wig and gobbling down vitamins and monkey-gland extract. He died of a heart attack in Bognor Regis, as I recall, and the floozie drove off with an Italian hairdresser in Tuppy’s Wolseley. I took the cremation service in some ghastly place near Southampton. They only paid me two pounds, I remember. Two measly pounds! No doubt a similar fate awaits you, Tim, with this Jackie creature.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

  “It is not me being ridiculous,” David said very grandly, then gave me a most suspicious glance. “Was this child beautiful? Did she bat false eyelashes at you, is that it?”

  “I am merely paying for Jackie to continue her investigation of Genesis.”

  “Her investigation of gullibility!” David pounced gleefully. “Good God, Tim, how gullible can a grown man be? This Miss Potten presents you with a few tattered assumptions about the Genesis community and you reward her with the balance of monies in your pocket, barely leaving yourself enough to buy a pint of ale! Do you really believe she’ll travel to Germany on your behalf?” David, despite his calling, had little faith in humankind. “Not that we can do much about the girl now,” he went on, “you’re home, the damage is done, so now you can do some proper work.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked suspiciously.

  “It means that your boatyard, now that you’ve had your fling, could profit from a firm managerial touch.” David usually kept an eye on the yard while I was away. “Not that Billy doesn’t do his best,” he added hastily, “because he does, but he hasn’t got the swiftest brain I’ve ever encountered in a parishioner, and he’s a hopeless salesman. And that’s what you need, Tim, a salesman! You must sell some of the yard’s inventory before you entirely run out of space! You won’t believe this, but Tort-au-Citron is back on the market. God knows what that lawyer thought he was playing at when he bought her, but you’ve got her back, and doubtless you’ll have to haul her out of the water and let her clutter up the yard again.”