Fire Sweeping: The California Ballot Killings Book II Read online

  “¡Sí. Claro que sí!” Dolores smiled. “You should have said. Happy birthday, Janet! We’d love to join you and meet your family and friends.”

  Dolores placed her glass of horchata on the side table, and she stood up and hugged me.

  “What kind of cake were you thinking of, Janet?” Miguel asked.

  I fidgeted about and stared at the paintings. I wanted to give the impression that I was an art connoisseur and that I knew, therefore, that these were the best reproductions I’d ever seen of the best paintings in the entire world. After all, people like it when you know and like what they do. It also makes them more likely to give you what you want.

  “Arrietta, you said?” I asked Dolores. “I just love his Mona Lisa, which is at the Grizzly Museum of Art, right here in San Diego.”

  “Arrietta is a great Mexican artist,” Dolores said. “And he might have painted the Mona Lisa—if his name was Leonardo da Vinci.”

  “But, of course, you didn’t come to speak of Arrietta, Arcimboldo, or Obregón,” Miguel said. “You came to talk about cakes, Janet. What kind of cake?”

  “Right. Um, so, three cakes, actually,” I said with some discomfort. “So, basically, um, Black Forest cake, red velvet cake, and fruit cake.”

  Dolores smiled.

  I could have ordered the cakes online or from ConfiPrice, the supermarket where my family did most of our shopping. Several local bakeries would gladly have taken the order as well.

  “Tell you what,” Miguel said, smiling. “I’ll make all three cakes for you, but you have to do something for us in return. Dolores and I own a couple of B&Bs in Hawaii. Problem is that guests have been leaving complaints online that their stuff is being stolen. We flew out a couple of weeks ago. The head office of the property management company is in the Bay Area, so we had to go there as well. They promised to take care of it. Situation’s gotten worse, and now we’re reading about maintenance issues and a whole lot of other stuff. If you put us in touch with a good lawyer, who’ll give us a free consultation, you’ll have three of the best cakes you’ve ever had—in two weeks.”

  I liked the idea, but I offered to pay.

  “You’ll pay by putting us in touch with a great lawyer,” Dolores responded. “That’s the payment. And it will give Miguel something to do, which doesn’t involve worrying about things we cannot control.”

  I nodded, and one of my fun thoughts came to mind: How about I give them a little legal advice about their B&Bs in Hawaii? I had worked at WS&X since it had opened about twelve years before, meaning that through the law school of osmosis, I’d absorbed more law than I probably knew. Sharing one’s professional expertise with others inspires confidence, which establishes trust.

  “So,” I said to Dolores and Miguel. “Why don’t I prepare you for your consultation with a lawyer? I know quite a bit of law, you know.” I sat up in my seat and straightened my back. I may have even cleared my throat. “It sounds like you have a contract with the management company. Did you pay consideration for the contract?” I was, of course, repeating words I’d heard thrown around at WS&X. “‘Consideration,’ you know, means there must be a bargain. It means you must exchange money with the management company for the contract to be valid. Was there offer and acceptance? Just make sure that it’s all there because it can create problems. Make sure, as well, that the parole evidence rule is at play.”

  I was so proud of myself.

  Who knew that I had absorbed as much contract law as that!

  I thought of what I might do going forward.

  I could open my own law firm: JW&V: Janet, Whitaker & Virdis. (My maiden name is Whitaker, and my married name is Virdis.)

  Maybe I’d practice law with Dad, who was an immigration lawyer. Then we’d be JWV&W.

  I would, of course, specialize in contracts, and Dad would continue to do immigration law. Maybe Dad and I would even become the first law firm ever practicing in the area of immigration contracts if such a thing existed.

  “Of course, Janet,” Miguel said. “You clearly know some law. And it’s great that you—”

  “That you work at a law firm that specializes in this area, Janet,” Dolores said. “We would never have thought of parole, but this is not a criminal matter. It has nothing to do with getting someone out on parole . We aren’t criminals—”

  “Oh, no,” I said as I apologized. “I’m not suggesting you or anyone you know is a criminal. It’s just a contract law rule that I heard at WS&X. Anyway, my bad, I’ll put you in touch with Hannah Wellspring. She’s a good friend, and she’s a fantastic attorney. She’ll do it for me as a personal favor.”

  3

  Fire Sweeping

  There were stories of goblins throwing stones at houses, setting huts on fire, and killing children and livestock. The goblins became invisible by drinking water and by transforming themselves into dwarves or baboons.

  There were stories of genius girls taking international exams. The girls were cursed by those who envied them, and the girls couldn’t remember a single thing on the exam, so they failed and became unhappy nannies.

  There were stories of women who offered mirrors as gifts to enemies, and through the mirrors, they looked into the lives of their enemies. If the women were disfigured in some way, their disfigurement was seen as proof of a pact with the devil.

  There were also stories of men being fed magical potions that ensured that they fell for one woman alone, and the men followed that particular woman’s every whim for the rest of their lives.

  These were the stories I’d heard from my mom and dad and from immigrants in the Southern African Federation, who lived in Upstate New York.

  Such stories influenced my worldview, and they imbued me with a sense of the otherworldly, of the extraordinary, and the inexplicable. They also made me pay attention to my dreams and try to find meaning and direction from them.

  When I was growing up, people discussed their dreams as freely as they discussed obituaries, births, and marriages. Dreams of the dead, especially, were discussed and feared, and there was the sense that the dead only came through when unhappy, and when they had a warning to provide.

  Those who repeatedly dreamed of the dead fell into one of two categories. They were either feared because they communicated with the dead in their sleep and delivered ominous messages they’d received the next morning. Or they were revered because they also bore good news from the other side.

  Beginning around early February 2039, I had the most vivid nightmares.

  Often, I woke up and looked up the meaning of my nightmares on the internet.

  The most destabilizing explanation I found was that I was the haunted house that recurred in my dreams, and I was, therefore, desperately in need of an exorcism.

  Looking up the meaning of my dreams was like diagnosing myself, which I had done quite a bit while a student at the University of the Finger Lakes, where the nurses in health services building announced as I entered the health services reception area, “Janet’s come to collect more frequent flier miles! Janet, what were you reading last night on the internet, and what do you think you have now?”

  I had a painful lump on the back of my neck at the time, so I’d typed “painful lump on neck” into the search engine as if it were the exact medical description of my symptoms, and the first result that popped up was “head and neck cancer.”

  “I’m not ready to die,” I confessed in tears to my favorite nurse, Wei. “I’m just too young.”

  “Janet,” Wei said, “you’re not dying. Well, not today.”

  “What do you mean ‘not today,’ Wei?’”

  “I’m pretty sure you don’t have head and neck cancer, Janet.”

  “How do you know? I felt something move about in that area last night. It’s probably the metastasis I was feeling.”

  “I bet,” Wei guessed correctly, “that your internet search also returned results for a sebaceous cyst, or a boil, which is what you have. You have a boil filled with
pus, Janet. I think you’re just stressed in general with the demands of college, and stress sometimes makes people worry about the smallest things, or it makes them blow things out of proportion. In your case, you do both.”

  “Honestly, Wei. I do feel something moving at the back of my neck right now. Oh, it’s spreading. The cancer—I can feel it spreading.”

  “What you’re probably feeling is the discomfort from the boil.” Wei shook his head. “We need to drain this boil.”

  My visits to the health services building taught me that my worst fears wouldn’t always come to pass, and when I thought I needed medical attention, I probably needed comforting instead, since stress and anxiety always made me expect the worst.

  My nightmares in 2039 were unrelenting in their assault.

  For weeks on end, I didn’t get a full night’s sleep, and my dreams got increasingly vivid, and they included my sons trapped in the same haunted house as I, locked in rooms on different floors from each other and me, and I could hear them screaming, calling out my name.

  I ran from floor to floor and found each room was marked with the number “102322,” which meant nothing to me. I met Alexander, my best friend, Maria’s deceased husband, and I asked if he might help me. Alexander led me to an elevator that was supposed to take me to the floors on which Jon, Nate, and Nathaniel were, but the elevator moved in circular rings around the building before it released me on the roof of a building on the other side of town, where Alexander appeared again and asked why I was escaping the sweeping fire.

  What fire?

  Another dream followed, this one filled with sunlight, in which I was seated outside a sun-drenched Victorian manor nibbling chocolate (of all things).

  I felt myself smiling in my sleep, aware that I was enjoying my slumber. Near me sat two young men in CWP uniforms, who smiled and told me that I could never go any further than seven feet from the front door of the manor, or I’d experience “fire sweeping.”

  When I asked what they meant, they disappeared, and I now stood in a vast mangrove, surrounded by alligators and snakes.

  One of the snakes, which looked as large as a python, slithered across the surface of the water, raised its head above the surface of the water, and said, as it levitated in massive coils above the water’s surface, “We need your advice and help, Janet. Please join us.”

  I called out for Mauru, and the Victorian manor reappeared. I ran inside, and large metal bars descended behind me. My deceased maternal grandmother, who’d died when I was a child, appeared in a red kaftan and saffron slippers, holding a disintegrating apple, and she extended her left hand out to prevent me from proceeding any further in the manor. The building caught fire behind her, and I heard my sons calling my name.

  “Fire sweeping, Janet,” my grandmother said before she disappeared.

  I was now levitating and flying through the air, and I landed in a desert, coughing, with a single withered cactus in front of me. I prayed to the cactus, asked for answers, and it granted me seven answers.

  (I used to laugh at those who took their dreams seriously, and I’d get annoyed when books or movies dealt with people’s dreams at length, so I feel a little embarrassed repeating my dreams in my book, especially when mine involve praying to a withered cactus. These dreams, however, were so characteristic of that part of my life that to omit them would be to suppress a part of my experience that truly affected how I reacted in my waking life. Linda Maywrot, who helped me write my books, said to include my dreams.)

  “What does it all mean?” I asked the cactus.

  “You’re alive,” a voice hissed.

  “Should I be afraid?”

  “Your sons were alive, Janet.”

  “What I am doing here?”

  “Your husband was alive.”

  “What can I do to end these nightmares?”

  “Fire sweeping.”

  “Why am I having nightmares?”

  “You are the fire that is weeping.”

  “What does it all mean?”

  “Fires are weeping, Janet.”

  “Will my sons be OK?”

  “Only if you stop the fire sweeping.”

  I tired of telling Mauru of the play on words between “weeping” and “sweeping,” which was as impregnable as the meaning of the rest of the nightmares.

  Maybe the secret, after all, to dream interpretation was not to interpret one’s dreams at all but to let their incoherence be. The land of dreams, after all, was not real, and no amount of interpretation would make it so. There was, thus, nothing to fear; my mind was doing its own thing as I slept.

  Mauru, however, was not convinced.

  “I’m not joking, Jan,” Mauru said in response. “You’re going through something, and the only way to deal with it is to get help from a professional.”

  “People who get help,” I said, “find out that they always had the answer. Isn’t that the resolution to every great quest: the answer always lies within? Honestly, why should I see a shrink?”

  “For the same reason that you wouldn’t deliver a baby on your own, Jan. As the child of a psychologist, I’ll repeat my mom’s favorite analogy about her work. She sees herself as a midwife. When people come to her, they carry something inside that needs to come out. She didn’t put it in them, and it’s not hers to take care of once it comes into the world, but it is her job to ensure a safe delivery. She helps people safely give birth to their own answers. They deal with the rest.”

  “Whatever.”

  “My wife knows everything,” Mauru said, exasperated.

  I grunted. Mauru shook his head and checked on Nathalie, who was crying.

  I called Mom and Dad, recounted my nightmares, and Mom said I should always pray before sleeping.

  “Prayer takes care of everything, Janet,” Mom said. “Sometimes, the answer is immediate. Sometimes it takes a little longer, but there’s always an answer. Learn to see God in everything, and you will see that God goes before you in all things. I’m praying for glib Pastor Jim to be evicted from Living Heavens Church, and I feel that my prayer will be answered soon.”

  Pastor Jim (also referred to as “President Jim” by Mom) was the young preacher who talked of global warming and similar topics in his sermons at Living Heavens Church, and Mom detested him, and she called him “glib.”

  I sighed in response to Mom’s suggestion that the answer was simply prayer, and I found myself wishing that there was a drug that gave you sweet dreams with absolutely no side effects.

  “Practice saying, ‘I see you, God,’” Mom continued, “whenever you notice the parts of your life that are already peaceful and that bring you joy. Whenever something works out in your life, it means that God is already there, and acknowledging His hand will only expand his presence in your dreams.”

  Prayer didn’t help, at least not in any discernible way when it came to my nightmares, and Mom suggested that I call her “glib” sister, Aunt Mary, who was “gifted when it comes to these things. Mary also has the gift of sight, but take everything she says with a bucket of salt,” Mom warned me. “Mary’s also a liar.”

  Though five years Mom’s senior, Aunt Mary looked more youthful than Mom. Aunt Lucy, Mom’s other sister, had convinced Aunt Mary to “monetize her gift” among the members of the Southern African community in Upstate New York, where Aunt Mary charged “two hundred dollars per hour before taxes for my gifted sessions, Janet.”

  When she heard what my video call was about, Aunt Mary pulled out a timer.

  “Time is nothing but money, Janet,” Aunt Mary declared. “And family members never pay up. So, you have fifteen minutes to tell me your dreams and another fifteen minutes of free interpretation. Everything after that must be, well . . .”

  When a word or idea didn’t come to mind when summoned, Aunt Mary just abandoned that word or idea. She often left the completion of her sentences to those around her. Often, Aunt Mary uttered incomprehensible fragments, which were entertaining in their
own right.

  I recounted my dreams to Aunt Mary.

  “Your husband is a philanderer,” Aunt Mary declared, and I grunted. “There’s another woman, Janet. There are also two children, two boys. My late mother came to visit you in your dreams because the dead see all, they know all, and they exhaust themselves in trying to communicate, um . . . Your marriage is the prison in your nightmares, and the talk of fire is all about your husband’s infidelity. Well . . .” Aunt Mary muttered things to herself. “Of course,” Aunt Mary continued as she rolled her eyes, “this always happens in the vale of tears.”

  “Thank you so much for the insightful reading, Aunt Mary,” I said. “But what about the cactus? There was a cactus in my dream. What might that mean?”

  “It’s a parable,” Aunt Mary said, “You have a cactus in your home. Anyway, your mother, my sister, is slowly going mad in San Diego, talking to her plants. Your mother’s also the stingiest woman in the history of Africa and America combined, which is why, um . . . In all the world, you will never find anyone as greedy as your mother. She’s honestly the stingiest woman in all of North America, South America, Latin America, Central America, Meso-America, Mesopotamia, Mediterranea, and the Caribbean.” Aunt Mary looked away and whispered more things to herself. “As I was saying,” she said as she looked at me, “tigers in India have lost their spotted skins in these times.”

  Aunt Mary waited for me to stop laughing like she was waiting for a child who walked at a decidedly slower pace.

  “I had a wart on my backside, Janet,” Aunt Mary divulged, “a wart—can you even believe it!—caused by too much sitting in economy class on international flights to the Federation, and I called your mother and asked for her to pay for business class because I couldn’t sit without the itching, and, um . . .”