LITMIR.BIZ

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by the rejection they sensed from every side the Katz family made plans to leave the Grove and return to Alan Katz’s home city, Chicago. They sold their home in late June to an out-of-towner who got a bargain, a fine property and a reputation in one fell swoop. The Katz family were gone two weeks later.

      It proved to be good timing. Had they delayed their departure by a few more days they would have been caught up in the last tragedy of the League’s story. On the evening of July 26th the Hotchkiss family went out for a short while, leaving Carolyn at home with baby Linda. They stayed out longer than they intended, and it was well after midnight, and therefore the 27th, when they got back. Carolyn had celebrated the anniversary of her swim by smothering her daughter and taking her own life. She had left a suicide note, which explained, with the same chilling detachment the girl had used to talk of the San Andreas Fault, that Arleen Farrell’s story had been true all along. They had gone swimming. They had been attacked. To this day she did not know what by, but she had sensed its presence in her, and in the child, ever since, and it was evil. That was why she had smothered Linda. That was why she was now going to slit her wrists. Don’t judge me too harshly, she asked. I never wanted to hurt anybody in my life.

      The letter was interpreted by the parents thus: that the girls had indeed been attacked and raped by somebody, and for reasons of their own had kept the identity of the culprit or culprits to themselves. With Carolyn dead, Arleen insane and Trudi gone to Chicago, it fell upon Joyce McGuire to tell the whole truth, without excision or addition, and to lay the story of the League of Virgins to rest.

      At first, she refused. She couldn’t remember anything about that day, she claimed. The trauma had wiped the memory from her mind. Neither Hotchkiss or Farrell were content with that, however. They kept applying the pressure, through Joyce’s father. Dick McGuire was not a strong man, either in spirit or body, and his Church was wholly unsupportive in the matter, siding with the non-Mormons against the girl. The truth had to be told.

      At last, to keep the brow-beaters from doing any more damage to her father than they already had, Joyce told. It made a strange scene. The six parents, plus Pastor John, who was the spiritual leader of the Mormon community in the Grove and its surrounds, were sitting in the McGuires’ dining room listening to the pale, thin girl whose hands went first to one cradle then to the other as she rocked her children to sleep telling, as she rocked, of their conception. First she warned her audience that they weren’t going to like what she was about to tell. Then she justified her warning with the telling. She gave them the whole story. The walk; the lake; the swim; the things that had fought over their bodies in the water; their escape; her passion for Randy Krentzman – whose family had been one of those to leave the Grove months before, presumably because he’d made a quiet confession of his own; the desire she’d shared with all the girls to get pregnant as efficiently as possible –

      ‘So Randy Krentzman was responsible for them all?’ Carolyn’s father said.

      ‘Him?’ she said. ‘He wasn’t capable.’

      ‘So who was?’

      ‘You promised to tell the whole story,’ the Pastor reminded her.

      ‘So I am,’ she replied. ‘As far as I know it. Randy Krentzman was my choice. We all know how Arleen went about it. I’m sure Carolyn found somebody different. And Trudi too. The fathers weren’t important, you see. They were just men.’

      ‘Are you saying the Devil is in you, child?’ the Pastor asked.

      ‘No.’

      ‘The children, then?’

      ‘No. No.’ She rocked both cradles now, one with each hand. ‘Jo-Beth and Tommy-Ray aren’t possessed. At least not the way you mean. They just aren’t Randy’s children. Maybe they’ve got some of his good looks …’ she allowed herself a tiny smile. ‘… I’d like that,’ she said. ‘Because he was so very handsome. But the spirit that made them is in the lake.’

      ‘There is no lake,’ Arleen’s father pointed out.

      ‘There was that day. And maybe there will be again, if it rains hard enough.’

      ‘Not if I can help it.’

      Whether he entirely believed Joyce’s story or not Farrell was as good as his word. He and Hotchkiss rapidly raised sufficient donations from around town to have the entrance to the caves sealed up. Most of the contributors signed a cheque simply to get Farrell off their doorstep. Since his princess had lost her mind he had all the conversational skill of a ticking bomb.

      In October, a few days short of fifteen months after the girls had first gone down to the water, the fissure was blocked with concrete. They would go there again, but not for many years.

      Until then, the children of Palomo Grove could play in peace.

PART THREE

       I

      Of the hundreds of erotic magazines and films which William Witt purchased as he grew to manhood over the next seventeen years, first by mail order then later taking trips into Los Angeles for that express purpose, his favourites were always those in which he was able to glimpse a life behind the camera. Sometimes the photographer – equipment and all – could be seen reflected in a mirror behind the performers. Sometimes the hand of a technician, or a fluffer – someone hired to keep the stars aroused between shots – would be caught on the edge of the frame, like the limb of a lover just exiled from the bed.

      Such obvious errors were relatively rare. More frequent – and to William’s mind far more telling – were subtler signs of the reality behind the scene he was witnessing. The times when a performer, offered a multitude of sins and not certain which hole to pleasure next, glanced off camera for instruction; or when a leg was speedily shifted because the power behind the lens had yelled that it obscured the field of action.

      At such times, when the fiction he was aroused by – which was not quite a fiction, because hard was hard, and could not be faked – William felt he understood Palomo Grove better. Something lived behind the life of the town, directing its daily processes with such selflessness no one but he knew it was there. And even he would forget. Months would go by, and he’d go about his business, which was real estate, forgetting the hidden hand. Then, like in the porno, he’d glimpse something. Maybe a look in the eye of one of the older residents, or a crack in the street, or water running down the Hill from an over-sprinkled lawn. Any of these were enough to make him remember the lake, and the League, and know that all the town seemed to be was a fiction (not quite a fiction, because flesh was flesh and could not be faked), and he was one of the performers in its strange story.

      That story had proceeded without a drama to equal that of the League in the years since the sealing of the caves. Marked town though it was, the Grove prospered, and Witt with it. As Los Angeles grew in size and affluence towns out in the Simi Valley, the Grove amongst them, became dormitories for the metropolis. The price of the town’s real estate rose steeply in the late seventies, just about the time when William entered the business. It rose again, particularly in Windbluff, when several minor stars elected to take houses on the Hill, conferring on the locale a chic it had hitherto lacked. The biggest of the houses, a palatial residence with a panoramic view of the town, and the valley beyond, was bought by the comedian Buddy Vance, who at the time had the highest-rated TV show on any of the networks. A little lower down the hill the cowboy actor Raymond Cobb demolished a house and built on the spot his own sprawling ranch, complete with a pool in the shape of a sheriff’s badge. Between Vance’s house and Cobb’s lay a house entirely concealed by trees occupied by the silent star Helena Davis, who in her day had been the most gossiped-about actress in Hollywood. Now in her late seventies she was a complete recluse, which only fuelled rumours in the Grove whenever a young man appeared in town – always six foot, always blond – and declared himself a friend of Miss Davis. Their presence earned the house its nickname:

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