One Door From Heaven

wrong.
        The plastic hag was clear. Extracting it from beneath the mattress, she saw at once that it contained not the knife that she had hidden, not a knife at all, but the penguin figurine that had belonged to Tetsy, that Preston had brought home because it reminded him of Luki, and that Leilani had left in the care of Geneva Davis.

Chapter 58
        
        MIDNIGHT IN SACRAMENTO: Those three words would never be the title of a romance novel or a major Broadway musical.
        Like every place, this city had its special beauty and its share of charm. But to a worried and weary traveler, arriving at a dismal hour, seeking only cheap lodgings, the state capital appeared to huddle miserably under a mantle of gloom.
        A freeway ramp deposited Micky in an eerily deserted commercial zone: no one in sight, her Camaro the only car on the street. Acres of concrete, poured horizontal and vertical, oppressed her in spite of a brightness of garish electric signs. The hard lights honed sharp shadows, and the atmosphere was so oddly medieval that she mistook a cluster of brown leaves in a gutter for a pile of dead rats. She half expected to find that everyone here lay dead or dying of the plague.
        In spite of the lonely streets, her uneasiness had no external cause, but only an inner source. During the long drive north, she'd had too much time to think about all the ways she might fail Leilani.
        She located a motel within her budget, and the desk clerk was both alive and of this century. His T-shirt insisted LOVE is THE ANSWER! A small green heart formed the dot in the exclamation point.
        She carried her suitcase and the picnic cooler to her ground-floor unit. She'd eaten an apple while driving, but nothing more.
        The motel room was a flung palette of colors, a fashion seminar on the disorienting effects of clashing patterns, bleak in spite of its aggressive cheeriness. The place wasn't entirely filthy: maybe just clean enough to ensure that the cockroaches would be polite.
        She sat in bed with the cooler. The ice cubes in the Ziploc bags hadn't half melted. The cans of Coke were still cold.
        While she ate a chicken sandwich and a cookie, she watched TV, switching from one late-night talk show to another. The hosts were funny, but the cynicism that informed every joke soon depressed her, and under all the yuks, she perceived an unacknowledged despair.
        Increasingly since the 1960s, being hip in America had meant being nihilistic. How strange this would seem to the jazz musicians of the 1920s and '30s, who invented hip. Back then hipness had been a celebration of individual freedom; now it required surrendering to groupthink, and a belief in the meaninglessness of human life.
        Between the freeway and the motel, Micky had passed a packaged-liquor store. Closing her eyes, she could see in memory the ranks of gleaming bottles on the shelves glimpsed through the windows.
        She searched the cooler for the special treat that Geneva had mentioned. The one-pint Mason jar, with a green cast to the glass, was sealed airtight by a clamp and a rubber gasket.
        The treat was a roll of ten- and twenty-dollar bills wrapped with a rubber band. Aunt Gen had hidden the money at the bottom of the cooler and had mentioned the jar at the last minute, calculating that Micky wouldn't have accepted it if it had been offered directly.
        Four hundred thirty bucks. This was more than Gen could afford to contribute to the cause.
        After counting the cash, Micky rolled it tightly and sealed it in the Mason jar once more. She put the cooler on the dresser.
        This gift came as no surprise. Aunt Gen gave as reliably as she breathed.
        In the bathroom, washing her face, Micky thought of another gift that had come in the form of a riddle, when she'd been six: What will you find behind the door that is one door away from Heaven?
        The door to Hell, Micky had replied, but Aunt Gen had said that her response was incorrect. Although the answer seemed logical and right to young Micky, this was, after all, Gen's riddle.
        Death, that long-ago Micky had said. Death is behind the door because you have to die before you can to go heaven. Dead people… they're all cold and smell funny, so I leaven must be gross.
        Bodies don't go to Heaven, Geneva explained. Only souls go, and souls don't rot.
        After a few more wrong