One Door From Heaven

finds this dining pace to be odd at first, but soon she recognizes the greater pleasure to be had from a meal when it isn't consumed in forty-six seconds flat. Even if she had been able to use silverware, hold a porcelain teacup in one paw with her dew claw raised like a pinkie, and converse in the flawless English of an heiress who had attended a first-rate finishing school, Old Yeller could not have conducted herself more like a lady than she did at this Chinese feast.
        Throughout dinner, the sisters prove to be vastly entertaining, recounting adventures they have had while skydiving, bronco-busting, hunting sharks with spear guns, skiing down the faces of seventy-degree cliffs, parachuting off high-rise buildings in several major cities, and defending their honor at chichi Hollywood parties attended by, in Polly's words, "rodent hordes of grasping, horny, drug-crazed, dimwitted, sleazebag movie stars and famous directors."
        "Some of them were nice," Cass says.
        Polly demurs: "With all respect and affection, Cassie, you would find someone to like even at a convention of cannibal Nazi kitten killers."
        To Curtis, Cass says, "After we left Hollywood, I performed an exhaustive analysis of our experiences and determined that six and one-half percent of people in the film business are both sane and good. I will admit that the rest of them are evil, even if another four and one half percent are sane. But it's not fair to condemn the entire community, even if the vast majority of them are mad swine."
        When they have all eaten to excess and then have eaten just a little more, the table is cleared, two fresh bottles of Tsingtao and one of nonalcoholic beer are opened, a dish of water is provided for Old Yeller, candles are lit, the electric lights are turned off, and after Cass has determined that the ambience is "deliciously spooky," the twins return to the dining nook, clasp their hands around their bottles of Tsingtao, lean over the table, and focus intently on their guests, both boy and dog. Cass says, "You're an alien, aren't you, Curtis?" Polly says, "You're an alien, too, aren't you, Old Yeller?" And they both say, "Dish us the dirt, ET."

Chapter 55
        
        WAITING FOR DR. DOOM to return with dinner, trying not to listen to her mother's headcase monologue in the lounge, Leilani sat in the co-pilot's seat, at the panoramic windshield, watching the sunset. Hawthorne was a true desert town established on a broad plain, rimmed by rugged mountains. The sun, as orange as a dragon's egg, cracked on the western peaks and spilled a crimson yolk. Against this fiery backlight, the mountains wore king's gold for a while, then gradually took off their shining crowns and drew royal-blue nightclothes up their slopes.
        Preston now knew that Leilani believed he'd murdered Lukipela. If he hadn't previously been planning to rid himself of her in Idaho or during a subsequent side trip to Montana, he had begun making such plans since lunch.
        The scarlet twilight drained into the west, washed away by the incoming tides of east-born darkness. Curtains of stored heat rose from the desert plain, causing the purple mountains to shimmer as might a landscape in one of dear Mater's hallucinatory fantasies.
        As dusk faded at the windows and the motor home fell into gloom relieved only by the glow of one lamp in the lounge, old Sinsemilla ceased muttering, stopped giggling, and began to whisper to the sun god or to other spirits not represented on the ceiling.
        The idea of bio-etching her daughter's hand had been planted in the fertile swamp of her mind. That seed would sprout, and the sprout would grow.
        Leilani worried that her mother, in possession of an extensive pharmacopoeia, would drug her milk or orange juice, slip her a Mickey Finn, a blackjack in a glass. She could imagine waking, groggy and disoriented, to discover that Sinsemilla had been busily carving.
        She shuddered as the last light died in the west. Although the desert night was warm, chill chased chill up and down the ladder of her spine.
        If the motherthing was in a sour mood, perhaps inspired by a bad mushroom or by an ill-conceived mix of chemicals, she might decide that prettifying Leilani's hand would fail to bring balance to her appearance, that it would be easier and more interesting and more creative to carve the normal parts of her to match the deformed hand, the