“Delusional.”
“Okay, gotcha. Joel is a bit of a character, it’s true,” Harper conceded. “But none of this explains what you were doing at the Perles Mansion.”
“It was just, I mean, how often do you get invited to a séance in a haunted house?” said Jenny.
“Who invited you?”
Jenny and Blanca exchanged a long look.
Finally, Jenny said: “Okay, it’s just some students. We always go to the Perles graves to decorate them for Day of the Dead. This friend of ours has been studying occult stuff andhunts for ghosts and stuff, and she leads the group. Her father ran for city council once, and he’s super opposed to this sort of thing, so…”
“…so it makes her even more interested,” Blanca finished. “We thought it would be fun to include on the podcast. They don’t hurt anything. Usually.”
“It was a pretty stupid thing to do, I guess,” said Jenny.
“It certainly was.”
Harper watched as Naomi clacked out of the café.
“Are you going to tell?” Jenny asked again.
“Still deciding. Tell me more about these body parts.”
Why have we mere mortals lost our way?
Nature holds the truth, the secrets to health, to happiness. Just as an artist dabs pigments upon a white canvas, transforming a clean slate into a new world, so the seeds and leaves can open their souls to us. To cure us.
Nineteen
As she drove to Sigrid’s address in Salinas, Harper streamed Jenny and Blanca’s podcast about the grave-robbing Soren Perles. It was surprisingly well researched and professionally presented. Jenny described the history of Harvard Medical School and the tradition of medical students having to dig up bodies for their research; they were distinct from the so-called resurrectionists who found and sold bodies, some even resorting to murder in order to fill the demand for anatomical studies and experiments. She then referred to the current manager of the Harvard Medical School having been accused of selling body parts online.
Blanca highlighted a couple who spent their time and money trying to recoup some of those bodies and even searching for their families. Showing respect to the physical bits and pieces of life that remain on earth once we humans had shaken off the mortal coil.
Wow. The fear of being buried alive at least made some kind of logical sense. This was just crass commercialism.
Salinas was about half an hour inland from Monterey via highway 68, which wound its way past Laguna Seca raceway and skirted the former Fort Ord. The drive gave Harper a better sense of just how vast the military base had been back in the day. Here and there were small housing developments, but most of the land had been established as a national monument area, so it was left wild, crisscrossed with hiking trails.
Once she crossed the Salinas River, the low hills gave way to a long, flat valley. Harper passed vast expanses of farms and wineries, their crops laid out in long, regimented lines. In the distance she saw groups of farmworkers bent over, doing the punishing work of handpicking produce in the hot sun.
The highway turned into Main Street as she approached town, and she passed a large center dedicated to Salinas’s renowned native son, John Steinbeck. Steinbeck did not appear to have returned the town’s esteem, famously writing that Salinas was “never a pretty town” and that he felt woefully out of step with most of his neighbors. Harper had read accounts ofThe Grapes of Wrathbeing banned or burned because, in highlighting the plight of migrant workers from Oklahoma, the book cast the area’s prosperous farmers and landowners in a negative light.
But in hindsight, through the prism of the intervening years, the townsfolk appeared to have forgiven Steinbeck. History had a way of transforming reputations.
A big arched sign announced her arrival to the old-fashioned downtown. A historic Fox Theater promised an elaborate art deco interior and indicated that Salinas was once prosperous enough to support the ornate theater. Old posters on signposts flapped in the wind, advertising a rodeo, long since passed. Colorful Day of the Dead and Halloween decorations were displayed in shop windows. A woman had ababy strapped to her back with a rebozo while tending a corner stand selling plastic cups full of cut-up fresh fruit. Groups of young people loitered in front of bodegas and botanical shops, signs in Spanish hawking everything from liquor to herbs to burritos.
Harper made a mental note to herself: She needed to learn Spanish if she really was going to call California home. Latin, which she had learned for the sake of her historical research, wasn’t nearly as useful these days.
Following the directions on her phone, Harper found Sigrid’s address, pulled up to the curb, and parked. Before she could get out of the car, Sigrid had already come out to greet her. Today the kitchen witch was wearing a gauzy orange tunic printed with rune signs, her long dreads tied back with a matching satin ribbon.
Sigrid lived in a modest ranch-style tract house. When Sigrid had spoken of her extensive garden, Harper assumed she lived out in the country, not in this 1960s-era housing development. But when Sigrid led her around the side of the house and through a gate, she understood.
“This is amazing,” Harper said, taking in the large double lot with its carefully tended, lush garden plots. Plants of all shapes and varieties were thriving, some in the ground, some in pots, some climbing trellises, some in raised beds. “I wasn’t expecting this.”
Sigrid smiled. “My neighbors aren’t into gardening, so they allowed me to take down the fence and combine our two yards. In return, I share my produce with them. The climate here is perfect for growing: hot summers, with lots of daily sunshine and damp evening fog. You know what they say about Salinas: We’re the Salad Bowl of the World.”
“I didn’t know that. I heard Gilroy calls itself the garlic capital.”
“It’s an ongoing feud. Salinas and Gilroy are both agricultural towns, though frankly Gilroy seems to be winning. Not Salinas’s fault, it’s just that not a lot of people get excited about lettuce. Garlic ice cream is much more titillating, I suppose. Still, this area provides a significant amount of produce for markets all over California, and beyond.”
