High Bloods by John Farris Read Free Book Online Page A

off and went into the house.
    The washing machine was going in the laundry alcove off the kitchen. I found Beatrice in the courtyard wearing one of the dragon kimonos that were in most of the bedroom wardrobes, including mine. She was drinking coffee. The hand that held the cup still wasn’t all that steady. Other than the pewter coffee service there was nothing on the table but a shiny steel cleaver from the kitchen’s cutlery rack.
    She looked around at me with a troubled face. But she relaxed her grip on the cleaver.
    “Someone was here,” she said. “She scared me so bad I nearly freaked. I guess you didn’t have the time to tell me you had an ex-wife. Of course you didn’t. We’ve barely talked at all. But you would’ve told me sooner or later, wouldn’t you?”

4
    t had been more than a year since I had seen or spoken to our closest neighbor, Ida Grace. She had lived alone in the next house up the canyon road since her daughter Mallory had gone Lycan at age seventeen and earned her banishment from hearth and home and the unforgiving wolfless society of the Privilege.
    The loss of Mal and perhaps advancing age had turned Ida into a recluse whose household needs were met by a complement of service staff, particularly a houseman named Duke, who put on his chauffeur’s cap whenever Ida ventured outside the walls of her brick colonial house, usually for medical reasons. She occasionally visited the gallery on Canon Drive that exhibited her paintings or the vet who looked after her dogs. She owned a white Maltese and two Neapolitan mastiffs, the only breed I knew capable of taking on a werewolf with some prospect of survival.
    These days Ida’s social life seemed to be limited to a weekly visit from a Buddhist priest. But I was convinced that during the earliest hours of his morning there had been another visitor.
    Although it was still early, Ida had breakfasted and was at work on a painting in the orangerie/studio semidetached from the main house. I hadn’t expected Duke to receive permission tobring me around, accompanied by the mastiffs, although I had stressed that it was important and not a social call.
    Mal Scarlett had been the surprise offspring of Ida’s second marriage, when Ida was fifty-one years of age. Mal was born two weeks after my father died. Now at seventy-four Ida was spare of motion, finely eroded, but still erect. She had put down her sable brush just as I walked into the glass-walled orangerie. She stared at the canvas on her studio easel, ignoring me.
    I made myself at home on a two-piece wicker lounger and waited to be acknowledged. She was, as always, painting butterflies and hummingbirds and big splashy crimson flowers. The garden outside was filled with all three.
    “I thought maybe by now you would’ve taken a whack at abstract expressionism—like Jackson Pollock’s stuff,” I said, just to get the conversational ball rolling.
    “Those paintings are as ugly as bug guts on a windshield.”
    Ida turned then, slowly, with a certain arrogant tilt of her head, looking at me as if I were an afterthought. She had a butch haircut and a tough flat face, the ashen lack of expression that of a martyr who has long since squandered all of her passions but one. I thought she probably despised me, but that was nothing compared to how she felt about my mother.
    She had a smudge of blue oil paint next to one flared nostril. I helpfully pointed that out to her. Ida sniffed contemptuously and glared at me.
    “Well, then. Is she dead? Is that what you’ve come to tell me?”
    “Pym? No. I don’t think so. Although she’s been out of touch for a while.”
    “Still searching for the magic cure, is she?”
    “The secret of immunity she thinks is out there, just one more isolated, dawn-of-history tribe away.”
    “So if she
isn’t
dead, this is going to be something likely to spoil my day,” Ida said, with an understated smile of malice.
    “Ida, why don’t you let up on Pym? She didn’t