Ripper by Isabel Allende
Overwhelmed by it all, Indiana reached across the table and put a finger on Alan’s lips.
“Are you sure, Alan?”
“I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life!”
“Well, I’m not. A month ago I would’ve said yes straight away, but now I’ve got serious doubts. Things have happened to me that—”
“Me too!” he interrupted. “Something’s opened up inside me, in my heart. Some huge, crazy force has taken over. It’s impossible to explain how I feel—I’m full of energy, I can overcome any obstacle. I’m going to start straight away, and come out of this strong. I feel more alive than ever! And I can’t go back now, Indi. This is the first day of my new life.”
“I can never tell when you’re being serious, Alan.”
“I couldn’t be more serious. For once I’m not being ironic, Indi: I might be talking like a cheap romance novel, but that’s how I feel. I adore you, did you know that? There’s no other love in my life. Geneviève means nothing to me, I swear to you.”
“This isn’t about her, it’s about us. What do we have in common, Alan?”
“Love, what else!”
“I’m going to need some time.”
“How much? I haven’t got a whole lot: I’m fifty-five. But if that’s what you want, I can wait. Will a day do it? Two days? Please, just give me another chance. You won’t regret it. We can go to Napa—it’s still mine, though not for much longer. Close your treatment room for a few days and come with me.”
“And what about my patients?”
“For God’s sake, Indi, nobody’s going to die for lack of a magnet or two and a bit of pollen!” he replied. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to insult you, I know your work’s very important. But can’t you even take a couple days’ vacation? I’m going to make you fall in love with me so hard, Indi, that you’re going to be begging me to marry you.” Alan smiled.
“Well, if we get that far, you can give this to me then,” Indiana said, handing him back the Bulgari box without opening it.
March
Friday, 2
Amanda sat waiting for her father in the little cubicle that belonged to his assistant. The walls were plastered with photos of Petra Horr in her white keikogi and black belt at martial arts tournaments. Petra was five feet tall and weighed 105 pounds, but she could lift and throw a man twice her size. This particular skill had not been of much use to her since she started working in homicide, but it had been essential for defending herself in the prison yard, where the fights were as violent as they were in the men’s jails. When she was twenty, after finishing the sentence handed to her by Rachel Rosen, she spent the next thirty months traveling the country on a motorcycle. It was on those interminable roads that she gave up trying to rescue some dream from her childhood of neglect and her adolescence spent running with gangs. The only consistent thing in her itinerant life was martial arts, which she used to protect herself and to earn her bread.
Whenever she arrived in a town, Petra would look for a bar—there would always be one, no matter how remote and run-down the place—and sit at the counter, nursing a single beer. Soon enough, men would approach her with only one thing on their minds, and—unless they were truly irresistible, which was rare—she would brush them off, telling them she was a lesbian, then challenge the biggest of them to a bare-knuckle fight. She was clear that there was only one rule: anything was permitted, except weapons of any kind. The guys would take bets, go out into a yard or some quiet alleyway, and form a circle; with the sound of their booming laughter in her ears, Petra would flex her little girl’s arms and legs and tell the man he could have the first punch. The man would smile and make a few friendly, harmless feints before realizing that Petra was slipping out of his grasp like a weasel at every turn, and making a fool of him. Then, goaded by the jeering of the crowd, he would go for her, ready to destroy her with a single punch. As Petra wanted to give a good, honest show and not let her audience down, she liked to play the toreador and taunt her opponent for a while, dodging his blows, wearing him down, until eventually, when she had him panting with rage, she would use the man’s weight and momentum to get him in one of her holds and pin him to the ground. To gasps of respectful admiration, she would collect her winnings, pull on her jacket and her helmet, and speed off on her motorcycle before her opponent could recover from the humiliation and decide to come after her. She could earn two or three hundred dollars from a single fight, enough to last her a few weeks.
She finally arrived back in San Francisco with a brand-new, sweet-natured, handsome drug addict of a husband on the back of her motorbike. They moved into a seedy hostel, and Petra took whatever work she could find, while her husband spent her earnings and played guitar in the park. She was twenty-four when he left her, and twenty-five when she got a secretarial job in the police department by using the technique she’d perfected on the road.
At the Camelot, where guys from the department liked to relax over a couple of drinks after work, the regulars were so regular that a stranger was instantly the center of attention—especially a stranger like Petra Horr, who strode in as though she owned the place. The barman thought she was underage, and asked to see ID before serving her a beer. Petra took her drink and went to face Bob and the others, who were sizing her up. “What y’all lookin’ at? Have I got something you want to buy?” she said, and found herself challenging the strongest of them to a fight. By general consensus, that turned out to be Bob Martín. On this occasion she thought it best that the policemen not risk their badges by placing illegal bets, so she gave her little demonstration out of pure sporting spirit. Instead of resenting his defeat and the jeers of his colleagues, Bob got up off the ground, brushed himself off, straightened his hair, congratulated the girl with a sincere handshake, and offered her a job. And so began Petra Horr’s life in an office chair.
“Is Dad dating Ayani?” Amanda asked Petra.
“What do I know? Ask him.”
“He says no, but I’ve seen the way his eyes twinkle when he mentions her. I like Ayani a lot more than the Polish woman, though I don’t think she’d make much of a stepmother. Have you met her?”
“She came in once to give her first statement. She’s pretty, that’s for sure, but I don’t know what your dad would want with her. Ayani’s a complicated woman with expensive tastes. Your dad needs someone straightforward who loves him and doesn’t give him any trouble.”
“Like you?”
“Don’t be sassy. My relationship with the deputy chief is purely professional.”
“Well, that sucks! I wouldn’t mind having you as a stepmother, Petra. Anyway, did you talk to Ingrid Dunn yet?”
“Yeah, but no dice—your dad would kill her if she allowed you to watch an autopsy.”
“Who says he needs to find out?”
“Don’t drag me into this, girl. Why don’t you talk to Ingrid yourself?”
“Well, you could at least get me copies of the Ashton and Rosen autopsy reports.”
“Your grandpa’s already seen them.”
“He misses all the important stuff! I’d really rather look over them myself. Do you know if they’re going to run DNA tests?”
“Only on Ashton. If their kids can prove that Ayani offed her husband, they could claim the inheritance. As for Judge Rosen, turns out she had three hundred thousand dollars in savings, and she’s leaving it to the Guardian Angels, not her only son.”
“Seems pretty normal a judge would want to support a crime-prevention group,” Amanda mused.
“Maybe, but the son was pretty disappointed. Losing his inheritance has hit him harder than losing his mother. He’s got an alibi—we already checked it out—he spent the week away on a business trip.”
“Maybe he hired a hit man to get rid of her. They got on badly, right?”
“That kind of thing might happen in Italy, honey, but here in California people don’t put a hit on their mom just because they don’t get along. By the way, the blowtorc
“Which letters?”
“F and A. We still don’t know what they mean.”
“Well, it’s got to mean something, Petra. With every murder, the killer’s left some kind of sign or message. I said this to my dad like ten days ago, but he never listens to me: we’re dealing with a serial killer.”
“Oh, he listens to you, babe. Right now he’s got the whole department looking for anything to connect the crimes.”
Sunday, 4
On the first Sunday of every month—even if it was a weekend she was supposed to spend with her father—Amanda would spend an hour dealing with her mother’s crude accounting. Indiana’s laptop was six years old, and badly in need of being replaced, but she saw it as a talisman and intended to carry on using it until it died of natural causes—even though it had done some disturbing things lately. At random moments, images of violent sex —a lot of bare flesh, struggling, and pain—would suddenly flash up on her screen. Indiana would immediately close the disturbing images, but they reappeared so often that she ended up giving a name to the pervert that lived in her hard drive, or who crawled through the window and tampered with her computer. She called him the Marquis de Sade.
Amanda, who had been managing Indiana’s accounts with a bank manager’s precision since the age of twelve, was the first to realize that her mother’s income was scarcely enough to keep a nun. Helping and healing others was a slow process that drained Indiana’s energy and resources, but she would not change her job for the world. In fact, she saw it less as a job than as a sort of spiritual mission. Her focus was on the well-being of her patients, not her salary. She could live on very little; she’d never been materialistic. She measured happiness using a simple equation: one good day plus another good day equals a good life. Her daughter had given up telling her she should jack up her prices—an illegal immigrant picking oranges earned more per hour than she did—when she finally understood that her mother had received a divine mandate to heal the suffering of others and had to obey it. In practical terms, this meant she would always be poor—unless she found a benefactor or married someone rich, like Keller. Amanda preferred the idea of a life of poverty.
Although she did not believe in prayer as an effective solution to practical problems, Amanda had appealed to her grandmother Encarnación—who was in direct contact with Saint Jude—to get Keller out of her mother’s life. Saint Jude worked miracles for a reasonable price, payable in cash at the shrine on Bush Street or by a check in the mail. Scarcely had Doña Encarnación made the request when the magazine article that was to cause Indiana so much heartache appeared. Amanda thought she was rid of the man for good, that he would be replaced by Ryan Miller, but her hopes had been dashed; Indiana had gone off to Napa with her old lover. Her grandmother would have to restart negotiations with the saint.
To Doña Encarnación’s mind, divorce was a sin, and in the case of Indiana and her son Bob, an unnecessary one, since with a little goodwill they could live together as God intended. They must surely love each other deep down, since neither had remarried; she hoped they would soon accept this clear evidence and get back together. She did not like the fact that Bob had girlfriends of dubious virtue—men are imperfect creatures—but she would not tolerate Indiana risking her reputation, and her place in heaven, with extramarital affairs. For years Indiana had conspired to hide Alan Keller’s existence from Encarnación, until Amanda, in a fit of unwarranted honesty, told her all about it. Encarnación had sulked for several weeks, until finally her heart won out over her Catholic scruples and she welcomed Indiana back into the fold—as she pointed out, to err is human, to forgive divine. She was fond of her daughter-in-law, even though many areas of this young woman’s life showed room for improvement: not simply her manner of raising Amanda, her clothes, and her hairstyle, but also her work, which Encarnación considered little more than pagan ritual.
Even Indiana’s taste in interior decor was suspect. Instead of tasteful furniture, Indiana had filled her apartment with enormous tables, shelves, and cupboards lined with test tubes, weights, funnels, droppers, and hundreds of glass bottles of different sizes in which she kept all manner of strange substances, some from dangerous countries like Iran and China. Her home looked for all the world like one of those secret laboratories where they make drugs you see on television. On more than one occasion the police had come knocking on Indiana’s door, alarmed by the perfumed miasma that drifted from the apartment as though it were a shrine. Amanda asked the ever obliging Blake Jackson to put rails on all the shelves so that, in the event of an earthquake, the bottles of essential oils would not spill everywhere, poisoning her mother and probably several of the neighbors. The girl had just read a book of erotic stories in which a fifteenth-century Japanese courtesan poisoned an unfaithful lover using perfume. Doña Encarnación thought somebody should keep a closer eye on her granddaughter’s reading habits.
Amanda was thankful that the gift of healing was not hereditary. She had other plans for her future. She wanted to study nuclear physics, or something like that, to have a successful career, live a charmed life, and along the way fulfill her moral duty by taking care of her mother and grandfather, who, according to her calculations, would by then be a couple of geriatrics of forty and seventy.
Her mother spent little, traveled everywhere by bicycle, cut her own hair twice a year with kitchen scissors, and wore secondhand clothes, because, as she said, nobody noticed what she wore, although that wasn’t true—Alan Keller noticed, and it mattered to him. Despite her thriftiness, Indiana struggled to make her money last the month, and often had to ask her father or her ex-husband to bail her out. Since they were family, Amanda considered this normal, but she was shocked to discover that Ryan Miller had also come to Indiana’s rescue a number of times. Miller, but never Keller: her mother said that a lover, however generous, would always end up calling in the debt with favors.
The only remotely profitable part of Indiana’s business was aromatherapy. She had made a name for herself with the essential oils, which she bought in bulk and poured out into small, lovingly labeled bottles to sell in California and elsewhere. Amanda helped her package them, and promoted them online. For Indiana, aromatherapy was a fine art that had to be practiced with care, studying the individual patient’s needs to determine the best combination of oils in each case; but Amanda had explained to her that, from an economic point of view, such attention to detail was unsustainable. It had been Amanda’s idea to make some money from the aromatherapy in hotels and luxury spas to help fund the expensive raw materials. Those establishments would buy the most popular oils and apply them at random, a drop here and a drop there, as though they were perfume, without taking the slightest precautions or reading the instructions, despite Indiana’s warnings that they could be harmful if used wrongly—if an epileptic were exposed to fennel and aniseed, for example, or a nymphomaniac to sandalwood and jasmine. Her daughter told her she had nothing to worry about: epileptics and nymphomaniacs made up a negligible percentage of the population.
Amanda could name all of her mother’s essential oils, but their properties didn’t interest her: aromatherapy was an esoteric art form, and she preferred an exact science. The way she saw it, there was no proof that patchouli stoked romantic feelings or that geranium oil sparked creativity—as certain ancient Oriental texts, of dubious authenticity, claimed. Neroli did not soothe her father’s anger, nor lavender oil enhance her mother’s common sense, as they were supposed to. Amanda had used lemon balm for her shyness, with no noticeable effect, and sage oil for her period pains, which was only effective in combination with painkillers from her grandfather’s pharmacy. Amanda liked to live in a structured world with clearly defined rules, and aromatherapy, like all her mother’s treatments, only made it more baffling and mysterious.
She had finished checking the accounts and was
“What kind of time do you call this, Mom!”
“I’m sorry, honey, I wanted to be here when you arrived, but we got held up in traffic. I was exhausted—I needed a couple days’ vacation. How are the accounts looking? I bet you’ve got bad news for me, as usual. . . . Let’s go to the kitchen and talk awhile—I’m going to make some tea. It’s still early—your grandpa won’t be taking you to school till five.”
She tried to kiss Amanda, but the girl dodged her and sat down on the floor to call her grandfather’s cell phone and tell him to hurry and come home. Indiana sat down beside her, waited for her to finish speaking, and took her face in both hands.
“Look at me, Amanda. You can’t go back to school angry with me—we need to talk. I called you on Wednesday to tell you that Alan and I had made up, and we were going to spend a few days in Napa. This didn’t come as a surprise to you.”
“If you’re going to marry Keller, I don’t wanna know about it!”
“We don’t know if we’re going to get married yet, but if I decide to do that, you’ll be the first to know—whether you want to or not. You’re the most important thing in my life, Amanda, I’m never going to abandon you.”
“I bet you didn’t tell Keller about Ryan! You think I don’t know you slept with him? You should be more careful with your e-mails, you know.”
“You read my private correspondence!”
“Nothing of yours is private—I can read whatever I want to on your laptop. That’s why I’ve got your password: Shakti. You gave it to me yourself, same as you gave it to Grandpa, to Dad, to half of California. I know what you did with Ryan, and I read your stupid love letters. You’re such a liar! You got his hopes up, and then you ran off with Keller. What kind of a person are you? You can’t be trusted! And don’t tell me I’m just a kid and I don’t know anything about anything—I know exactly what I’m talking about!”