resembled a troll that had crawled out from its lair beneath a bridge,
not content to wait for unsuspecting children to pass by, prepared to
forage for his grisly dinner.
Bobby reminded himself not to let his imagination run away with him. He
needed to keep an unbiased perspective on Fogarty, in order to determine
the truthfulness and value of what the old man had to tell them. Their
lives might depend on it.
“The house was built in the thirties by Deeter and Elizabeth Pollard.
He’d made some money in Hollywood, producing a bunch of cheap Westerns,
other junk. Not a fortune, but enough that he was fairly sure he could
give up films and Los Angeles, which he hated, move up here, get into
some small businesses, and do all right for the rest of his life. They
had two children. Yarnell was fifteen when they came here in 1938, and
Cynthia was only six years old. In forty-five, when Deeter and
Elizabeth were killed in a car crash-hit head-on by drunk driving a
truck full of cabbages down from the Saint Ynez valley, if you can
believe it-Yarnell became the head of the house at the age of
twenty-two, and the legal guard of his thirteen-year-old sister.” Julie
said,
“And… forced himself on her, you said?” Fogarty nodded.
“I’m sure of it. Because over the next year Cynthia became withdrawn,
weepy. People attributed it to death of her folks, but it was Yarnell
using her, I think.
just because he wanted the sex-though she was a pretty little thing, and
you could hardly fault his taste-but because being man of the house
appealed to him, he liked authority. And was the type who wasn’t happy
until his authority was absolute, his dominance complete.” Bobby was
horrified by the words
“You could hardly fault his taste” and what they implied about the depth
of the abyss in which Fogarty lived.
Oblivious of the disgust with which his visitors were regarding him,
Fogarty continued:
“Yarnell was strong-willed, re less, caused his folks a lot of heartache
before they died, kinds of heartache but mostly related to drugs. He
was an acid head before they had a name for it, before they even had LSD
Peyote, mescaline… all of the natural hallucinogens you can distill
from certain cactuses, mushrooms and other fun Wasn’t the drug culture
back then that we have now, but!” was around. He got into
hallucinogens through a relations he had with a character actor who
appeared in a lot of his father’s movies, got started when he was
fifteen, and I tellall this because my theory is it’s the key to
everything youneed to know.”
“The fact that Yarnell was an acidhead,” Julie said.
“That the key?”
“That and the fact he impregnated his own sister. The cheicals probably
did genetic damage, and a lot of it, by the time he was twenty-two. They
usually do. in his case somestrange genetic damage. Then, when you add
in the factthe gene pool was very limited, being as Cynthia was his
sister You might expect there’s a high chance the offspring will be a
freak of some kind.” Frank made a low sound, then sighed. They all
looked at him, but he was still detached. Thou his eyes blinked rapidly
for a moment, they did not come back into focus. Saliva still drooled
from the right corner of his mouth; a string of it hung from his chin.
Though Bobby felt that he should get some Kleenex and blot Frank’s face,
he restrained himself, largely because he was afraid of Julie’s
reaction.
“So about a year after their parents died, Yarnell and Cynthia came to
me, and she was pregnant,” Fogarty said.
“They had this story about some itinerant farmworker raping her, but it
didn’t ring true, and I pretty much figured out the real story just
watching how they were with each other. She’d tried to conceal the
pregnancy by wearing loose clothes and by staying in the house entirely
during her last few months, and I never could understand that behavior;
it was as if they thought the problem would just go away one day. By
the time they came to me, abortion was out of the question. Hell, she