“Then these men should be questioned.”
“I’m sure they will be.”
Under a walkway light, Matt shows Mahajad his sketches of Rene DeWalt, Williams, and Amon Binder. The big swami holds up the book to study the pictures point blank, and Matt realizes how bad his eyesight is.
“I do not know them. They would not be welcome here.”
Matt wonders how close Mahajad would have to get to a person in order to see them clearly. Wonders if, in his eyes, Jazz was too blurred for him to remember. Can you remember what you can’t really see?
With a heavy exhale, the swami closes the book and hands it back. “The Karma of this murdered girl brings a shadow over my heart. I will call the police immediately if I see those men.”
Matt gets out one of Jasmine’s missing person flyers. Hands it the swami, who studies it.
“I have a third question for you, swami.”
Om’s black wet eyes study Matt from within the tangles of his hair and brows. “Please ask it.”
“I’ve looked everywhere. I’ve walked every beach and gone to every bar and nightclub and restaurant, asked all of the people I deliver papers to. Remember when you told the Evolvers that now they could begin to see the world in a new way?”
“Yes, it is essential.”
“But can I? See differently? So Jazz comes into view?”
Matt stays abreast of Mahajad, who continues in silence with his short, quiet steps. The path goes downhill through a swale Matt remembers was once crowded with black mustard and kudzu and wild tobacco. Now it’s a grassy meadow with a stand of recently planted oaks in the middle, lit from below.
“Swami, please tell me how to see the world differently. She’s running out of time.”
They stop and the swami looks out at the young oaks basking in the floodlights. “It cannot be done instantly, Matt. You must begin with meditation. Meditation is simple and easy. Come here to the Vortex any day between two and five, or go to the Mystic Arts World store on Wednesdays or Fridays from seven to nine at night. Wear comfortable clothes but not leather. My Enlighteners are wonderful teachers. You only pay what you can afford. You will learn to see differently, which is only a way of thinking differently. Maybe it will help you find your sister. When you have passed my Evolution and Enlightenment ceremonies, I will personally oversee your training. Come.”
Back in the auditorium the women are waiting for their swami. The two sharp-eyed, white-suited security men are there, too, apparently flirting with them.
The men withdraw as Matt and Mahajad enter the lobby. Om pays no attention to any of them as he claims one of two foil-wrapped paper plates from one of the now empty food tables.
“Take this, Matt.”
“Thank you.”
“We who are always hungry must eat when we can.”
The swami collects a second foil-wrapped plate, lifts it to his nose for a whiff.
“Aren’t these both yours?” asks Matt.
“Let us call them loaves and fishes. You will find your sister, Matt.”
“I’m going to have to. The police don’t believe me and they have Bonnie and Johnny Grail to worry about. Here I am, the son of a cop who’s not here to help his own daughter. In a town where the police don’t give a shit. I’m pissed off. Sorry for the unholy words, swami.”
27
In the fragrant Dodge City “packing house,” Julie, wearing one of her mother’s homemade dresses and a matching bonnet, hands Matt a mason jar. Matt thinks that, for the first time in his life, she looks like the farm girl she once was. The dress is beige and the bonnet ties at her chin. She looks like the label of a dairy product.
This warm morning, the packing house is dense with the smells of tomatoes, garlic, and onions.
“I’ve been checking with Darnell by phone twice a day,” she says. “They haven’t learned anything. I’ve talked to all the neighbors about Tuesday night but nobody saw it happen. Ten thirty P.M. and nobody sees a thing! I’ve called all of Jazz’s friends’ families again, just hoping that something might click into place to help the cops find her. I taped up another fifty posters down in South Laguna and Dana Point. I had a long talk with an old friend who used to be a PI. I’ll be meeting with him tomorrow. I even meditated at Mystic Arts World with one of that swami’s so-called Enlighteners, hoping I could make that connection to Jazz you keep talking about, you know, like cosmically. I didn’t. But we’re going to find her, Matt. And I’m going to find my own strength, too.”
She looks serene, he thinks. Her skin is smooth, eyes bright, her dark ringlets bounce beneath the bonnet lid. Matt has prepared himself for a kimono-and-dragon-ball Dodge City Julie, not this. Is it all an act, possibly drug-enhanced?
“This is from Johnny,” she says, pressing some bills into his hand. The five bucks for the flyers, Matt thinks: just in time.
She takes a mason jar off the table and hands it to him. “Check out the cool label.”
The label shows on-the-vine tomatoes in hot blue, cinnamon, and yellow, with the words in loopy psychedelic tomato red:
“We grow them right here,” she says. “Sell them out at the roadside stand. We deliver and ship, too.”
The packing house is an old home on Woodland, gutted of most interior walls, with an exposed beam ceiling, skylights, and enormous windows. The windows have no glass, only screens, so the weather outside is the weather inside, which this morning is warm and humid. Looking up, Matt can see sunlight between the ceiling beams and bees clustered near the peak, buzzing lazily.
“So anyway, this is where I work. Me and Crazy Carol, who isn’t crazy at all. Basically, it’s one big kitchen, but with canning stations. Those are the water bath canners and jar racks. There’s all my jar wrenches and lifters and funnels. And those are ladles and bubble removers. Those boxes are all mason jars, the good ones with screw bands and commercial sealers. All new. Carol and I are supposed to work about eight hours a day, but they’re flexible. And we get as long a lunch as we want. She usually comes in later. So it’s working out for me here, Mattie. I’m keeping all the bad things away. Most of them.”
Matt sees the pasteboard boxes of Laguna Sunshine Farms canned stewed tomatoes stacked along one wall near the double doors. The boxes have enlargements of the mason jar labels stickered onto them. There’s a conveyor belt running from the cooling table to cut down lifting the heavy boxes. The prep tables are piled with spices, blenders, chopping blocks, and cleavers.
“Anyway,” she says, looking around inquisitively, as if she’s just arrived here. “We compost the skins. But I had the most terrifying dream last night. That my skin was being composted too. It was my responsibility to peel it off before bed, and throw the rolls into the compost heap.”
Matt sees that troubled fear coming back into her eyes. Senses her mood beginning to tremble, like a building at the beginning of an earthquake.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asks.
“Nothing, Mom.”
“I’m sorry. It’s Jazz. It’s what I said to her that last night, before she left. I said, bring the damned van back with a full tank or don’t come back at all. I can’t support you your whole life. That’s what I told my daughter.”
The words hit Matt hard and he knows they would have hit Jazz hard too.
“Sometimes you blow up like that, Mom. She knows you didn’t mean it.”
“Love the ones you love, Matt, because you never know what’s going to happen next.”
Suddenly, the Dodge City dogs are barking, and Matt sees two of them tearing off toward Laguna Canyon Road. Then two more. He hears popping sounds, like firecrackers, then bigger explosions, like the shotguns he used to shoot with Kyle and his dad. A fire alarm rings loudly, cutting through the popping and booming.