A punishing breed, p.19
A Punishing Breed, page 19
Hedda attended grad night, at Disneyland, alone, surrounded by high school couples from all over Southern California. As she went on rides, surrounded by boys and girls necking in the dark, Hedda stared straight ahead, locked away her shame at being alone, circled the imaginary vault in her chest with her fingers, fist to her heart.
The summer after graduation, Hedda worked as a counselor at a summer camp. Her father, a reformed alcoholic, owned the local hardware store and was active in AA and the YMCA. He had secured her the job.
“It will be good for you,” he said. “Lots of activity. No time to dawdle. Toughen you up.”
Hedda said nothing. Why not? she thought. It would get her out of her house, away from her parents, who worried over her lack of any social life.
Her brother sniggered, “Fat camp.”
In June, eighteen-year-old Hedda shipped out to Bluff Lake in the San Bernardino Mountains. Each week she oversaw a new group of prepubescent girls. They traveled in packs; a constant cycle of fighting, giggling, or crying. Her campers needed a firm hand to propel them through homesickness, dining hall food, and endless physical activity. By the end of the first month, Hedy knew she excelled at her job. Plus, she had lost ten pounds and most of her baby fat.
Several of the older counselors were ex-military. They wrangled the rowdy teenage boys. One was a retired marine, Garth Stull, six foot four of muscle and grit, with a smile that could make a girl feel dizzy. The first time he touched her, they were sitting alone in one of the camp’s pickup trucks. He ran one finger down a rivulet of sweat that made its way from behind her knee and down her calf. She turned to look him in the eye.
“Wait,” Garth said. “How old are you?”
“Eighteen,” said Hedda, now a self-declared Hedy. Hedda had gone along with the baby fat.
“You sure?” he asked.
“I turned eighteen in May.”
“All right then.” He smiled. “Let the games commence.”
Garth had green eyes hooded by blond eyelashes, white even teeth, broad shoulders, and he smelled like the meadow. “Is this okay?” He asked every time his hand moved into new territory.
Oh yes, Hedy thought, Was it ever!
He was a break of sun in a cloudy life.
That summer was a revelation. Hedy had power, it emanated from the same body that had caused her so much humiliation in high school. By the end of August, Hedy had lost twenty pounds. She was lean, strong, unstoppable.
Garth was preparing a speech the night before the camp closed for the season. They had arranged to meet in the meadow where the whole thing started.
“You know how special you are to me . . . but . . .” Garth said.
Hedy smiled and shook her head. “No explanations, no regrets.”
Garth looked crestfallen. He wasn’t ready for a relationship, but was upset that Hedy, who had blossomed into a very hot babe, wasn’t interested in one either. “That’s it?” he asked.
“The games commenced and now they’re done,” Hedy said. She was losing her summer buzz. “I mean, right? We don’t live near each other. I’m eighteen. I need go to college. You’re twenty-seven and you need to . . .”
“To what?” he asked. “And I’m twenty-six.” He sounded upset.
“To travel, have adventures. I mean, I’m eight years behind you.”
“You think I’m too old for you. And what, not smart enough?”
A thought flickered through Hedy’s mind. She might be lacking some essential female component. During the summer, she realized all her lady parts were fully functioning, but she lacked any desire to be tied to a man.
“Is that what you’re saying?” Garth asked.
Hedy could see more hurt than anger in his face. She didn’t understand the intricacies of her female campers’ emotions, but men were easy. They liked to feel in control of the situation, whether it was true or not.
“Hey, baby,” Hedy said. She pushed her forehead to his. “If I thought I could hold on to you, I’d follow you anywhere. But I’m green. I still have too much to learn. But I can do this.” Her hand was unzipping his jeans. He was hard. She pushed her breasts into his chest. They had remained large and perky despite her weight loss. He unbuttoned her blouse, cupped each breast tenderly.
“I’m going to miss these,” he said. She went down on her knees. Started nice and slow like he’d taught her while her hand played with his balls and her finger went into his ass. “Is this okay?” Hedy asked.
“Uh, yeah,” Garth moaned.
Garth had not taught her this move into new territory, but he liked it just the same. Hedy had a whole big world to explore, and though Garth was sexy and sweet, she wanted more.
The next two years, Hedy blazed through junior college. It was easy for her; she was disciplined, focused. One day, bored by her surroundings, she found her way to a recruiting office. Missing the order of the prescribed life of camp, Hedy signed up for the army.
Eventually, she landed in the Military Police and found her calling. She worked crowd control, tracked AWOL soldiers, a few crime scenes. Hedy worked out as if training for the Olympics; she lifted weights, building muscle, and ran every day, practicing endurance.
“Who is that?” Hedy heard a young recruit say.
“Son, that’s DFW Scacht.”
“Who?”
“That’s Ms. Don’t Fuck With Scacht,” said a fellow soldier.
Hedy enjoyed the moniker. She casually dated, preferring Latino men who were respectful to their guera, their white girl, and talked fondly of their mothers. She kept her wits about her, left every party early and in control. For each new deployment, she packed up, took off for greener pastures. If she left a trail of broken hearts, they would heal. Her own was encased in elegant armor.
At age thirty, she left the military to test herself out in the world. Hedy tried private security—too political—and applied to the LAPD—way too political, and dominated by men who saw their control slipping away as women invaded their ranks.
One day, like a flash of lightning from a long-ago summer, she received a call.
“Hey, Hedy, Garth Stull here. You remember me?”
Of course she did. Garth was now the director of Campus Security at Chapman College.
“I need a second-in-command. I heard you recently retired from the military. You’d be perfect for the job.”
Hedy didn’t think twice on her way to the city of Orange and its pretty Mayberry circle at the center of town. She was home.
Garth was happily married with two little boys. He now carried an extra thirty pounds on his frame, his green eyes had deep wrinkles that bespoke humor and kindness. He loved his family, his job, and treated Hedy with an affectionate offhand friendliness.
The only thing he said that hearkened back to their past was this: “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I have to say it because you’re a single woman, and easy on the eyes. Don’t mess with anyone on campus. It would be an actionable offense.”
Hedy knew he was serious. She was both flattered and annoyed. “Yes, sir. Ten-four.” Message received.
Chapman College was like summer camp on steroids; young men and women free for the first time from parental oversight. Sex, drugs, alcohol; the unbridled hormones and hubris of youth coalesced in a murky stew of education and bad behavior. Hedy tried to decipher the ultra-liberal stance of tenured faculty against the conservative policies of the administration. It was exhilarating, stressful, exhausting. After a few years, Hedy began to drop her guard, she drank with colleagues, sometimes too much, dated a few men from her gym.
After all the personal diligence of her military days, her training, her tightly wound sense of order, she made one mistake, the one thing her boss had warned her about. She lowered her guard with a college employee who worked in another department.
She had been drinking with a group of colleagues at a bar and ran into the man. He was tall, muscular, and good-looking. But he looked as if this had been the worst day of his life.
“They are going to sack me,” he claimed. “Unfairly, I might add.”
He joined their table. She felt sorry for him; everyone knew Chapman’s administration sucked. She invited him to her apartment for a nightcap. She should have noticed how drunk he was, how much liquor he had put away. But she had also drank too much.
Hedy stood in her brightly lit living room, about to hand him a drink. She looked up and realized something was wrong. His face was red, he was sweating, his breaths short and hard as if he’d been running.
“This can’t happen to me,” he said. “Being fired. It’s fucking unfair.”
The man’s eyes were roaming around her apartment. What was he looking for? No, he wasn’t looking outward, but inward; he was staring into an abyss. His irises rolled around in their sockets, right then left, right then up, then down, unmoored from the reality of his surroundings.
“That bitch targeted me,” he said.
Hedy realized too late that the alcohol and his self-pity had fused into rage.
“I think you should go,” she said.
“Come over here!”
Her first thought was that this guy had lost it.
He grabbed her arm.
“Stop it,” she said. “What the hell are you doing?”
He twisted one arm behind her back, pushed her off-balance, then down to her knees. Pulling her hair so hard her scalp burned, his face was inches above hers. “I’m in control,” he said. “I decide what happens in my life.”
“No!” she said. “Stop it!”
He had turned into someone, something else.
“Wait, you need to stop. I said no.”
It was no use. He was taller, heavier, stronger. He easily pinned her body on the floor.
“You don’t tell me no.” His knees straddled her; his eyes roiled in their sockets. “No piece of ass tells me no.”
Hedy thought if she yelled, pounded on the floor, someone, a neighbor, might hear and call the police. Her fists and feet struck the carpeted floor. She screamed, “Get off of me!”
His forearm crushed down on her windpipe. She struggled, using all her power to break free. He was cutting off her breath. She slapped at his face, fear replaced by dread. The more she fought, the harder his elbow pushed down on her throat. He pinned her arms above her head with his free hand. Hedy tasted his sweat dripping on her lips, felt the swell of his penis as he lowered himself on top of her. Trapped under his weight, she squirmed frantically, fighting for her life now. He let go of one of her hands as he unzipped his pants. Her arm scissored up and down as if she was drowning in the carpet. She remembered that long ago summer, that understanding of what men want, to feel in control, whether they are or not. This man had complete power over her. She stopped fighting, went still, then numb. The pressure on her windpipe let up.
He penetrated her.
Hedy stared at the ceiling. The building was old, cracks ran under the paint, a spiderweb of fault lines. He rutted like an animal, grunting like a pig. Maybe the roof would come down and bury them both. Pushing harder and deeper, he came inside of her.
He yelled out as if in pain, then fell, a dead weight on her body. She felt him shrivel inside of her, a spent carcass of rage.
Hedy didn’t cry out or move. Her body had betrayed her. All the years of strength training, lifting weights. As strong as she was, he had easily overpowered her. He rolled off, staggered up and away. Silently zipped his pants.
During all of it, the lamps still blazed. His hand flew to his face, his eyes hollow, as if he was lost in a brightly lit forest.
“I don’t know what happened,” he said. He began to cry. Not for Hedy, for himself. He paced back and forth beside her prone body, headed to the front door, then came back.
He stood over her.
“This didn’t happen,” he said. “You hear me? It didn’t happen.”
He fingered his car keys and left.
They called it date rape then, some people still did.
She shed no tears, circled her chest with her fingers, fist to heart.
Hedy had her daughter at age thirty-five. She named the baby after her mother.
CHAPTER 34
Other People’s Happiness
DJ sat in the conference room facing a wall of windows that stretched from floor to ceiling as the afternoon rain drizzled then stopped. Evidence snored in the corner.
Daniel Mendoza was expected in a few minutes, along with the pizza receipt he was supposed to have turned in that morning. Browning and Butter had reported he was a no-show. DJ had a tense phone conversation with Daniel.
“Sorry, Detective. Something came up, man. I can bring it over now.” Something always came up with ex-cons, or maybe there wasn’t a pizza receipt.
He thought back to what Hedy said about Serena Rigby. Maybe she never received a call from Campus Safety, maybe there wasn’t a blackout. The only other occupant of Sliming at that time, Will Bloom, could neither confirm nor deny her claim. Serena had the strength and heft to wield that sword. It could be the oldest story in the book: love unrequited, a woman scorned? But she had picked up her dinner at that Vietnamese restaurant, in business dress, at seven forty-five. That didn’t seem like enough time to kill Will Bloom and not break a sweat unless she was a cold-blooded killer. And had carefully planned out the whole thing.
Detective Talbot, along with four of LAPD’s finest, was now scouring the olive grove, broadening the search area. Officers had checked the grove on Friday, but now they were looking for something specific, Dolly Ruiz’s missing blanket.
Outside the conference room window, bougainvillea bushes with magenta and ocher blooms receded into shadow, thick leafy shrubs glimmered in the dusk. The campus had an abandoned quality like a story-book kingdom whose residents had fled.
DJ contrasted Hesperia with his alma mater, Cal State LA, where serviceable brick and concrete buildings towered above a maze of sidewalks and asphalt. Scattered patches of grass fought for survival beneath the blazing California sun. As a student, DJ had circled numerous parking lots, praying for a space, while downtown Los Angeles glittered in brown haze like the Emerald City from Oz.
He saw movement at the corner of his eye. Fern Lake appeared out of nowhere. She ran down the stairs from Ramble Hall as if a devil chased her. What was she doing? Finally making their appointment? She stumbled down the last step of the stairway, falling to her knees.
What the hell, thought DJ. The girl was running as if someone was after her.
“Fuck,” said DJ. Was someone chasing her?
He pounded the windows with his fists and yelled.
“Fern! Fern Lake!”
The girl looked up with no sign of recognition.
“Wait there!” he yelled. “Don’t move!” Her body curled into a defensive crouch, frozen in place. DJ held up his index finger, a signal to hold on, he was coming. He raced out of the conference room, through the lobby, out the glass doors. Afraid that whoever was after her might get there first.
A gust of breeze hit DJ’s face, adrenaline, his heart. Turning the corner, he saw Fern fixed to the same spot, cowering close to the ground.
“What happened?” DJ reached for her. She flinched.
“He’s following me,” she whispered.
“Who?” DJ asked.
“He found me. He was outside my dorm. Watching me.”
DJ tried to help her up. Fern pulled away as he took her arm. The left knee of her sweatpants was torn. She walked on her own into Sliming’s lobby as he held the door.
Once inside the conference room, Fern sunk into DJ’s chair, a broken doll, arms limp, legs askew. One single light from above caught glimmers of gold in her long dark hair and in her eyes, now searching the corners of the room as if looking for monsters.
Wearing a peasant blouse and sweatpants, she appeared impossibly young and fragile. Evidence approached her, sniffed at her tennis shoes.
“Who followed you?” DJ asked.
She looked up as if she didn’t remember who he was.
“Was it the man from the other night? The one who attacked you?”
She shook her head. “Maybe not a man.”
“Not a man?”
She cocked her head as if listening for something.
“He doesn’t look human,” she whispered.
What kind of thing was that to say? The girl sat up, alert to a sound.
DJ turned. He heard the slow squeak of the lobby door open and close. Thump, thump, thump. Soles on marble. Up three stairs to the conference room. Despite himself, DJ was spooked. Who had entered the building? The thing that followed the girl? His hand went to his holstered gun. The dog growled.
The room was dark except for the one overhead light that now encompassed Fern Lake.
Someone knocked at the conference room door.
“Who is it?” DJ barked.
“It’s Danny. Daniel Mendoza. Detective Arias told me to come.”
“Goddamn it,” said DJ. “Bad timing.” He opened the door.
Daniel Mendoza stood framed against the doorway, backlit by the lobby lights. DJ felt the other man’s height and heft against his own slim five-footten frame. Danny was over six feet tall, wore a T-shirt and jeans that defined his muscles. Danny didn’t pay DJ any mind. He stared past DJ’s shoulder, at the girl.
A bittersweet smile bloomed across Fern Lake’s face. DJ looked from Danny to the girl. He felt crosscurrents of strong emotion; recognition, desire, regret?
“Wait, do you two know each other?”
“Danny Mendoza,” Fern said. DJ heard her whisper, “I know you.”
“What did you say?” DJ asked.
Danny teetered in the doorway, deciding whether to enter or run.
As DJ was about to tell him, “Go home, come back later,” Danny entered, pacing to one corner of the room then the other like a panther sizing up its cage. Fern watched him.
“Hello again,” Fern said.
“Hey,” said Danny, treading back and forth. “What are you doing here?”
DJ had lost control of the situation. The girl seemed to have forgotten him.
