Elizabeth Zelvin - Bruce Kohler 04 - Death Will Save Your Life by Elizabeth Zelvin Read Free Book Online Page A

levitate,” he said.
    Was he pulling her leg? Using the wrong word? Or was he the real thing? The Farm abounded in flaky people, but she could believe this wonderful old man had genuine spiritual power.
    “Don’t need to see,” he said. “Not like jackrabbit with phony Buddha name.”
    Now how on earth had a word like jackrabbit entered his vocabulary? And who was he talking about? Oh!
    “Phony Buddha name—you mean the chef? The tall guy from the kitchen?”
    “Hmmph. Jackrabbit. Many more turns of the Wheel before he nip at the heels of Enlightenment. I get a few more lives myself for speaking bad about him. Not very nice. Sorry.”
    A noisy group of interns clattered and scuffed past them on the path, destroying the careful patterns the old man had made. They were wearing bathing suits and carrying towels. Barbara suddenly remembered that she had told Jimmy she would meet him at the room, so they could change and go for a swim while the heat of the day held.
    “You said Madhouse—the jackrabbit—goes up the hill to the Outlook at night? On the road? The dirt road, not the trail?”
    “E-leck-a-trick-ahh.” He spun an imaginary wheel.
    Electric car. Of course! The staff could use the carts.
    “But how does he see the way?”
    “Bin-ock-a-la. Red bin-ock-a-la.”
    “Binoculars. In the dark? Red? I don’t understand.” But suddenly she did. Madhouse must have a pair of nightscope binoculars. He couldn’t levitate like her new friend. But with the right technology, he could see in the dark.

    I dunked a red bandanna in the lake and tied it around my head, wondering what kind of bacteria you could get from swan poop. The sun beat down on bodies that covered the beach and spilled onto the grass. Heads bobbed as swimmers dabbled around a wooden raft. Farther out, canoes sliced through the water. Jojo came up beside me as I watched a tall, slim figure in a red canoe round the bend.
    “The ever impressive Annabel,” he said.
    A pair of swans with wings half unfolded like boats on Boston Common sailed across Annabel’s route, trailing five fluffy brown pint-sized babies. The red canoe stopped on a dime. The swans scooted to safety.
    “They’ve asked her to stay on here,” Jojo said. “Annabel’s hot now.”
    “And you represent her.”
    Jojo pursed his lips. In a phony French accent, he said, “But of course.”
    Clown. Jojo ambled away. Jimmy arrived, damp and slimy.
    “You smell like duckweed,” I said. “What have you been up to, and where’s Barbara?”
    “Barbara wanted to swim around the bend,” he said. “If you think I’m slimy now, you should have seen us right after we fell into the duckweed. We were picking it off each other when we heard someone crying on the other side of a huge bank of rushes. We peeked, and it was Feather, so Barbara told me to go away and went to see if she could help.”
    “A regular Mother Theresa, that girl,” I said.
    “Watch it, dude.”
    “Aw, c’mon, you know I love her. Look, the hammock’s free. I’ll go warm it up for you while you go jump in the lake and get the rest of that slime off. You’ll like the hammock. They don’t have them on the Upper West Side.”
    Jimmy liked the hammock, once he got used to it, and we were squabbling over whose turn it was like the pair of eight-year-olds we once had been when Barbara arrived.
    “So what was with the distraught damsel?” I asked.
    “Oh, poor Feather,” she said. “She had a huge fight with Madhouse about leaving the Farm. He’s counting on the money Melvin left her to get him to Katmandu, and she said maybe she didn’t want to go to Katmandu. She said Melvin left the money to her, not to him, because her brother wanted her to be happy. So then he said if she didn’t want enlightenment, what did she want, and she said she wanted to find her own way for a change and he didn’t have a monopoly on enlightenment.”
    “Go, Feather,” I said.
    “I bet he didn’t like that,” Jimmy