Chapter 1: A Visit Home

High above central California
July 3, 1991

The 1982 Cessna 414A Chancellor cruised placidly along in level flight 17,500 feet above sea level, its twin Ram VII turboprop engines driving it through the thin air at 220 nautical miles per hour. Inside the aircraft the pilot and his passengers sat comfortably in a cabin pressurized to eight thousand feet of altitude. Outside the windows they enjoyed a panoramic view of the cloudless summer sky and the foothills and peaks of the Sierra Nevada mountains off to their right. To their left, the broad expanse of the Sacramento Valley stretched off to the west, framed by the low, rolling hills of the California coastal range. The city of Sacramento and its suburbs could be seen sprawling out beneath an ugly brown haze of summer smog. The aircraft flew more or less directly above the boundary between the valley floor and the foothills of the Sierras.

Jake Kingsley, former lead singer of the former rock band Intemperance, was sitting in the left-hand cockpit seat, his hands resting gently in his lap as the autopilot handled the mechanics of keeping the plane straight and level and on course. Jake had been a licensed private pilot for three years now. He carried an instrument rating, a multi-engine certification, and a pressurized aircraft operational certification. As of leaving the ground for this flight, his logbook showed 424 total hours of pilot time, including ninety-seven in the 414A Chancellor, which he had purchased two years before. If not for the months he had spent in self-imposed exile in New Zealand, he likely would have had another hundred hours or more in the log.

Jake was thirty-one years old on this day. His brown hair, which had been shoulder length, sometimes even longer, for his entire life past the age of thirteen, was now cut short, just barely falling over the tops of his ears. On his upper lip he now sported a carelessly trimmed mustache that extended just a tad beyond the corners of his mouth. Since his return to the western world from Oceania six months before, he had found that the short hair and mustache made for an almost foolproof camouflage. After all the years of trying to disguise who he was from adoring fans and committed haters by putting on hats and sunglasses and bulky clothing, the simple haircut and lack of shaving his upper lip had succeeded almost too well. Sometimes, these days, he had trouble convincing someone he really wanted to know he was Jake Kingsley that he was Jake Kingsley.

Jake’s body was looking a little better these days as well. Currently dressed in a simple pair of denim jeans and a button-up short-sleeved shirt, the blossoming beer belly he had recently sported was gone, replaced by the mostly flat and firm abdominal region that had marked much of his younger days. True, he was no longer skinny and gaunt as he had been back in his high school days, when his peer-assigned nickname had been “Bone Rack”, but he cut a respectable figure thanks to the morning runs he now habitually engaged in up in Griffith Park above his Los Angeles home, the thrice-weekly sessions on the weight machines in the downstairs of his home, and the relative reduction—though certainly not the elimination—of his alcoholic beverage intake.

Since the sky was clear with more than thirty miles of visibility, Jake was flying the plane under visual flight rules, or VFR, though he was only five hundred feet below the maximum altitude for such a thing. He did have his transponder squawking at Oakland Center for courtesy flight following, both so they would know that he existed and where he was if something went wrong, and so they would know where he was in relation to the commercial traffic flying above him. The plane passed a waypoint on the flight path—the VOR beacon located near Mather Air Force base outside of Sacramento—and turned gently to the right, settling on a new heading of 015 degrees—directly toward the small foothill town of Cypress, California thirty-six miles outside of the Heritage metropolitan region.

“We’re sixty miles out from Cypress muni now,” Jake told the woman in the copilot’s seat. She was not a licensed pilot, and was, in fact, never comfortable in the air at all, despite the fact that she had chosen both a profession and a marriage in which frequent air travel was pretty much mandatory.

“That means we start to descend now?” Celia Valdez, former lead singer of the former pop band La Diferencia asked, her white teeth nibbling a little on her lower lip. It was something she did when she was nervous, a habit Jake had learned to recognize over the past few months as they had spent an average of fifty hours a week together in a small, rented studio in Santa Clarita outside of Los Angeles.

“That’s right,” Jake said with a nod. He checked the frequency settings on his communications radio, confirming the primary channel was still set to the regional ATC frequency. It was. He keyed it up and spoke, his words picked up by the microphone on his headset. “Oakland Center, November-Tango Four-one-five.”

“This is Oakland Center,” a female voice replied. “Go ahead, Four-one-five.”

“Four-one-five is beginning descent toward KCCA, maintaining present course, will cancel flight following at four thousand feet.”

The air traffic controller repeated back his words, her voice calm, cool, professional. Jake suspected her voice would remain at that same tone and inflection even if a fully loaded 747 was reporting a catastrophe and declaring an emergency. I copy you’ve collided with another aircraft, your roof has peeled away, and you’ve lost three engines, she would chirp. Can I give you a vector to the nearest airport?

Jake punched the altitude he wanted to descend to—3000 feet—and the rate of descent he wanted to maintain—1200 feet per minute—into the autopilot panel. Upon hitting the enter key, the plane immediately began to nose down. His avionics package did not include an auto-throttle, so he had to manually pull back the two levers, his eyes tracking on the airspeed indicators to keep them at or about 220 knots indicated. The engine noise wound down and the altimeter began to spin downward.

“See?” Jake said to Celia with a smile. “Nothing to it.”

“As long as nothing goes wrong,” she said, giving her lip another chew.

“As long as nothing goes wrong,” he agreed. “Remember the first rule of flying with me though.”

“As long as you don’t look worried, then I have nothing to worry about,” she dutifully recited.

“Exactly,” he said. “That’s the beauty of getting to sit in the cockpit.”

Celia gave him a weak smile, chewed her lip one more time, and then continued to grip the sides of her seat with her hands. She was just one of those people who was never going to be comfortable in the air.

Like Jake, Celia was looking a little better these days than she had in recent times. She too had had her entire musical career thrown into turmoil and uncertainty at about the same time as Jake and the rest of Intemperance had gone their separate ways. Type-cast as a teen pop singer despite one of the most beautiful contralto voices since Karen Carpenter, she had been unable to secure an acceptable contract for a solo album after Aristocrat Records refused to pick up La Diferencia for another album. Locked into depression and anxiety that was amplified by the problems her husband—actor Greg Oldfellow—was experiencing in his own career, she had put on thirty pounds and let herself go to some degree.

The challenge of going independent and producing her own solo album had had the same effect on Celia as it had on Jake. Hope and purpose were great healers. She had stopped the midnight snacking (and early afternoon snacking, and the late morning snacking) and had started hitting the gym once again. The effect was now apparent. As she sat in the right cockpit seat, dressed in a pair of tan slacks and a sleeveless cranberry colored blouse, she was back to her fighting weight of one hundred sixty-five pounds on her nearly six-foot tall, Amazonian frame. Her dark hair flowed majestically over her shoulders and her breasts pushed alluringly at the front of her blouse. Her hips and rear-end were back to their premium proportions—the curves of which made men ache with wanting when they saw them.

Sitting immediately behind the two vocalists in the cockpit, in seats that faced the rear of the plane to maximize the room, were Bill “Nerdly” Archer and his wife of almost two years, Sharon Archer (formerly Cohen). They were part owners of KVA Records (the “A” in KVA belonged to them), the limited liability company formed to produce both Jake’s and Celia’s upcoming solo albums. The Nerdlys (as they were called by pretty much everyone who knew them) were perhaps the most sought after audio engineering and mixing team in southern California. They could have named their own price at any of the major recording studios that produced more than ninety percent of the American music market. Instead, they worked for free with Celia and Jake in a tiny, three-room studio in an empty commercial complex in Santa Clarita. Actually, they worked for more than free. They had put up a million dollars of their own money for the privilege of having that A.

The Nerdlys were looking pretty much like they always looked. Bill was sporting a button-up black shirt with a pocket protector and four pens in it; a pair of khaki cargo shorts with multiple pockets, most of which were filled with a variety of objects like a Velcro wallet, a tape measure, extra pens, an asthma inhaler, and even a protractor (“you never know when you might need a protractor,” Nerdly always said); a pair of black socks; and an open-toed pair of Birkenstocks. Sharon had on a pair of baggy jeans; an even baggier T-shirt from her alma mater: UCLA, from which she held a Master’s Degree in Audio Engineering; and a pair of generic sneakers she had bought at a discount shoe store near their home. Both had headsets on that were plugged into the plane’s communication system.

“Do what I do when I ride in this contraption with Jake, Celia,” Nerdly said.

“What’s that, Bill?” she asked.

“I think about the mathematical calculations related to air travel.”

“You mean the odds?” Celia said.

Nerdly winced a little. “I’m not a fan of that term,” he said, “but, yes, that is what I’m referring to. Now, granted, flying in Jake’s plane is not as statistically safe as flying on a commercial airliner, but as long as he is a qualified pilot and the aircraft is maintained properly at the prescribed intervals—and I happen to know that Jake is quite fastidious about that—and, of course, you’re flying in good weather conditions, such as we are now, then you’re talking a likelihood of fatal accident that runs around one in twenty thousand or so. Compare this to a likelihood of one in five thousand for automobile travel.”

“That is a pretty good statistical analysis,” Celia had to admit.

“Indeed,” said Nerdly. “It’s all a matter of perspective.”

“If we do all crash and die, it can’t be right now,” said the fifth person in the plane—Pauline Kingsley, Jake’s older sister, the manager of both Jake and Celia, and part-owner of KVA Records. She was seated in the very rear of the cabin in a forward-facing chair. “If we have to go, it needs to be after we’ve put your albums out, or at least recorded them. That way, we’ll be able to cash in on the tragedy.”

“Well ... our next of kin will be able to, anyway,” Jake said.

“Yeah,” Pauline agreed. “The situation does have its drawbacks.”

“Can you imagine though?” piped up Sharon, in all seriousness. “Jake and Celia both dead in a plane crash and then the albums are released a few months later? We wouldn’t even have to promote them. We’d go platinum on both in the first week.”

“That would make Greg very happy,” Pauline said. “You know ... once he got over his wife dying and all that.”

“This conversation has taken a turn toward the morbid,” Celia said with a shake of her head.

“Hey, C,” Jake said. “We’re just talking industry realities here. Nothing stirs up album sales like a well-publicized death. We just need to pick the right time to cash in on it.”

“Madre de Dios,” she muttered, though she could not hide a slight chuckle of amusement.

When they passed below five thousand feet and were only ten miles out from Cypress Municipal airport, Jake declared a sterile cockpit condition. All of his passengers knew that meant they should not talk or otherwise distract him from his task of safely landing the plane. Despite their earlier conversation, all knew it was in their best interests to follow the rule, particularly when they were to land at an airport Jake was not familiar with.

Jake brought them down to thirty-five hundred feet and followed his navigation notes until the small airport was in sight. It was nestled onto a plateau just north of the historic gold rush town, its single runway a 7/25 that was thirty-two hundred feet in length. There was no wind to speak of, so he decided to bring them in from the southwest approach. There was a ridge about half a mile from the runway on the northeast approach—something he really did not want to deal with on his first landing at the field.

He circled around once in the pattern and then lined up with the runway for his final approach. The engines wound down, the flaps were incrementally deployed, slowing them to ninety knots of airspeed, the gear were lowered, and they touched down neatly on the centerline of runway 7 with barely a thump.

“Nice one,” Celia said appreciatively as they completed the rollout.

“Naturally,” Jake replied with a smile.

He parked the aircraft in one of the visitor spots near the airport office, pulling it in between a Cessna 172 and a Piper PA-24. The five of them exited the plane and spent a few minutes stretching their legs after the semi-cramped two hour and twenty minute flight. Jake spent a few minutes securing the plane to the two tie-down rings embedded in the concrete of the parking slot and then directed everyone to remove their baggage (one bag apiece, no more than thirty pounds) from the cargo boot in the nose of the plane. Once the bags were all removed and the doors all securely locked, they headed over to the airport office. Here, a 1990 Toyota Land Cruiser had been parked.

“Is that our ride?” asked Sharon as she looked it over.

“I’m thinking so,” Jake said, “since it’s exactly the model I requested and parked exactly where I told them to park it.”

“A Land Cruiser, Jake?” Pauline asked. “Really? You couldn’t have got us a Caddy or something comfortable?”

“Well, Mom and Dad live up in the mountains now,” he said. “I thought the four-wheel drive might come in handy.”

“They only live two miles off the main road and their access is paved,” Pauline told him. “Not only that, it’s July, not the dead of freaking winter. Were you picturing some Donner Party shit or something?”

“Well ... I didn’t know what to expect,” he admitted. “I know they live on the edge of the canyon, so ... you know?”

Pauline shook her head. “They’re only at an elevation of thirty-two hundred feet. It only snows there once or twice a year, sometimes not at all.”

“Well, it’s better to be overprepared than underprepared, right?” Jake said.

“No,” Pauline said. “It’s better to ask someone who has freakin’ been there what vehicle would be appropriate.”

“I’m a man, sis,” Jake told her. “We don’t ask for advice.”

This earned him another shake of the head. He ignored it and went inside the airport office, where a young woman, moderately attractive, was working behind a counter. She looked up at him without interest or recognition when he entered.

“Help you?” she asked.

“I’m Jake Kingsley,” he told her. “I just flew in from LA. The rental car company delivered a Land Cruiser here for me. I believe that is probably it outside in the parking lot.”

The name caught her interest a bit. Her eyes immediately locked onto his face, examining him carefully for a moment. She took in the short hair and the mustache and then gave a little shake of her head. No, not that Jake Kingsley, her disappointed expression said. The disguise had worked its magic yet again. She put her eyes back on her desk and pulled up a set of keys on a tab. “Right here, Mr. Kingsley,” she told him. “I’ll just need to see some ID first.”

“Absolutely,” he said, pulling out his wallet and opening it to reveal his driver’s license. He had recently had it updated with a new photo, one that showed him as he currently appeared.

She looked it over briefly, her eyes flitting from the photo to his face a few times. She either did not notice or did not realize the significance of the address and zip code listed. “That looks like you,” she said, handing him the keys. “It must be weird to go through life with Jake Kingsley being your name, huh?”

He smiled a little. “Why would that be weird?” he asked.

She looked up at him again. “Uh ... you know, because it’s the same as Jake Kingsley the singer.”

“There’s a singer named Jake Kingsley?” he asked, as if surprised.

“Uh ... yeah,” she said, as if talking to a retard. “From Intemperance? He’s only the most famous singer of the past ten years or so.”

Jake shrugged. “Never heard of him,” he told her. “I mostly listen to talk radio.”

“He’s the singer that snorted cocaine out of that girl’s butt crack that one time,” she said, somewhat exasperated.

“Wow,” Jake said, shaking his head a little. “Cocaine from a butt crack? That sounds kind of depraved ... not to mention unhygienic.”

“Yeah,” she said dreamily. “Some girls have all the fun.”

“I guess so,” Jake told her. “Anyway, I’d better get going. You have a nice day now.”

“You too,” she said. “And give Intemperance a listen sometime. You’ll love them.”

“Maybe I will,” he told her and then walked back out, singing the chorus for I Am Time, one of Intemperance’s most popular hits, softly under his breath. The girl stared at him, wide-eyed, as the door closed between she and Jake.

They loaded up everything into the back of the Land Cruiser and then piled in after it. Jake and Pauline sat up front. The Nerdlys and Celia crammed together in the back, sitting shoulder to shoulder with Sharon in the middle. Pauline directed Jake to drive out of the airport grounds and onto Highway 49, the main route through Cypress, until they reached State Route 38 in the center of town. There, Jake turned east and they began to climb higher into the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Approximately fifteen miles later, after a twisting, turning, climbing drive along the badly maintained two-lane road, Pauling directed him to turn right onto an even narrower two-lane passage called Canyon Ridge Road. They wound through a forest of towering pine trees for about ten minutes and then came to a narrow, paved access road that was marked with a wooden sign on a post. The sign read: Paradise Homestead. Below it was a smaller sign that read: Private Property.

“This is the entrance,” Pauline said. “Just another quarter mile or so to the houses.”

Jake turned onto the road and drove about five hundred feet before coming to a closed steel gate, painted forest green, with a camera and an intercom box. Pauline directed him to stop at the box and push the button. He did so and was rewarded with his mother’s voice.

“You made it!” Mary Kingsley said excitedly. “Hold on a second while I open the gate.”

“You got it, Mom,” Jake said, feeling the first stirring of emotion. He had not seen his mother or father in person in nearly eighteen months now.

“Come right to our house,” Mary told him. “Stan and Cindy are already here. We have lunch ready for you.”

“On the way,” he said as, before him, the gate started to slowly swing open.

He drove down the access road, which rose steeply through the trees beyond the gate. At the top of the hill it turned forty-five degrees to the right and entered a large cleared area a little more than a quarter mile wide by five hundred yards deep. Two houses sat upon the land, one at either end, both tucked into the far corners. The area between the houses was mostly manicured lawn with a few isolated evergreen trees poking up. There was a tennis court almost equally between the two houses. There were two outbuildings that appeared to be garages, one near each of the houses. Beyond the land was a steep, rugged hillside that dropped down into the Heritage River Canyon. On the other side of the canyon—which was perhaps a half a mile wide at this point—were jagged, hillsides of rock and tree-lined plateaus that grew higher and more rugged. Rising beyond these were the granite mountains of the Sierras.

“It’s beautiful,” Jake said appreciably.

“Yeah,” Pauline said with a smile. “They picked their place well. Take the right fork of the road. Mom and Dad’s place is the one on the right.”

Jake nodded. He would have known that even had he not been told. The house on the right side of the property was a single story, spread out to take advantage of horizontal space and to avoid staircases. Jake had advised his parents on that design back when development of the property had still been in the planning stages. The house that belonged to Stan and Cindy—Nerdly’s parents—was a two story with a wrap-around balcony on the second level. The Nerdly parental units preferred to be a bit more pretentious with their domicile.

There was a circular driveway in front of Tom and Mary’s house, currently empty of any vehicles. Jake pulled in and brought the Land Cruiser to a halt. Before they even stepped out, the front door of the house burst open and two sets of parents came rushing out to meet their children.

Tom and Mary, Jake and Pauline’s parents, were both in their late fifties. Tom, the former lawyer for the ACLU, was tall, just an inch shorter than Jake’s six foot one inch, and had not the merest trace of the beer belly he had sported for much of his life. His hairline had receded slightly from his forehead over the past ten years, but, except for a few speckles of gray around the ears, maintained the dark brown color he had been born with. He was wearing a pair of khaki shorts and a pullover t-shirt with the logo of a local brewery printed on it. His legs were well-muscled and his eyes were free from the glasses that had adorned his face for as long as Jake could remember.

Mary also retained her natural dark blonde hair color, though she too was showing a few streaks of gray here and there. Her legs were short, her body thin and well proportioned. Her face was attractive, the resemblance to Pauline unmistakable, though Pauline’s hair was much darker. Once she had been capable of turning young men’s heads as she passed. Now, in her moderately late middle age, she was a distinguished and attractive woman who could still easily pass for early to mid forties. One of the most distinguishing things about her, however, was the asymmetry of her arms. There was nothing wrong with her left arm, but her right was quite noticeably larger in diameter, tighter, and significantly more toned and muscular through the bicep, triceps and forearm region. This was from a long career spent playing the violin professionally, mostly for the Heritage Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. The right arm was the one that had spent a lifetime moving a bow across the strings of her instrument.

Jake’s parents took a brief moment to take in the sight of their wayward son—they had not seen his hair so short since he had been in grammar school, they had never seen him with a mustache, and, undoubtedly, they had feared he would look haggard and strung out after the last year and a half he had put in during his journey through the life of a rock musician—and then both rushed up to him.

Tom reached him first. He did not bother with a handshake, he simply wrapped his only son up in a big bear hug that Jake returned heartily, feeling a small tear form in his left eye.

“Welcome, Jake,” Tom said when the embrace was broken. There was strong emotion in his voice and Jake saw him wiping at his own eyes. “It’s good to see you.”

“It’s good to see you too, Dad,” Jake told him. “Sorry I’ve been away so long.”

Mary embraced him next, her hug softer, more motherly, longer in duration. She was freely crying as she held her son, her words choked with joy at holding him in her arms. “Welcome to our place, Jake,” she told him. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

“Me too, Mom,” he replied, kissing her on her wet cheek. He pulled from her hug and stood back a moment. “You two look great,” he observed. “Retirement is definitely agreeing with you.”

“It’s all the tennis we play,” Tom said. “And the hiking we do on the canyon trails.”

“We get a lot more exercise these days,” Mary said. “Not having to go to work every day frees up the time.”

“It shows,” Jake said. He turned to his father. “Where are your glasses, Dad? You look really different without them.”

“I had the RK surgery,” Tom told him. “I wrote you about it when you were living in New Zealand—several times I mentioned it, in fact.”

“Oh ... yeah,” Jake said guiltily. “It must have slipped my mind.” It had not slipped his mind. He had not opened any correspondence from home during his expatriate phase, which was why Pauline and Jill Yamashito, his accountant, had had to fly across the globe to finally track him down and pound a little sense into him. He still had not read any of those letters. In his haste to get back to California and start working on putting KVA Records together, he had left all of them unopened in a drawer in his home on the South Island.

“Yeah,” Tom said with a nod, “it sounds like you had a lot on your mind back then.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” Jake said.

“I kind of like your new look, hon,” Mary told him, reaching out to touch his mustache.

Jake shrugged. “It’s an almost perfect disguise,” he told her. “I can walk around in public now without people hounding me.”

“I almost didn’t recognize you,” Tom said. “My first thought in the first second was: ‘who the hell is that?’”

They had a chuckle over this and then the Kingsley parents finally acknowledged their other offspring, Pauline, who was standing just behind Jake. Hugs were exchanged, as were warm words of greeting, but the emotion of the moment was not quite as strong. Pauline, after all, kept in regular touch and flew down to visit every few months. She had helped them hire the contractors who had built the place and had helped her father clear all the legal obstacles that had cropped up along the way.

After greeting their daughter, Tom and Mary turned their attention to Celia, who was shyly hanging back near the rear door of the Land Cruiser. She had never met Jake’s parents before and they were a bit puzzled why she had come along for the visit. They knew who she was, of course, and that she and Jake were partners in the record company and both working on solo albums, but they also knew she was married to Greg Oldfellow and that there was not (or at least there shouldn’t be) any romantic involvement between her and their son. He was not bringing her home to introduce a girlfriend, so why would she be here?

Still, they were gracious when the introductions were made and they made her feel welcome.

“It’s very nice to meet you, Celia,” Mary told her. “I have one of the guest bedrooms all set up for you.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Kingsley,” Celia replied. “I’m looking forward to a tour of the house.”

“Oh, call me Mary, please,” she said. “I don’t even let my music students at the high school call me ‘Mrs. Kingsley’. It’s so formal.”

“And I’m Tom,” Tom said. “We don’t stand much on ceremony here.”

“Mary and Tom it is,” she said with a smile.

“Pauline said your husband can’t join us?” Mary asked.

“He wasn’t able to make this leg of the trip,” Celia replied, keeping the answer vague, implying that Greg was simply too busy with movie business to accompany her to meet Jake’s parents. In truth, there was no movie business for Greg Oldfellow these days. The abomination that was his last movie—The Northern Jungle—had all but destroyed his career. He had been offered no roles except for in slapstick parody movies as comic relief. No one was taking him seriously as a serious actor anymore. The real reason he had not accompanied her was he refused to fly in Jake’s plane, thinking it a cramped deathtrap flown by an inexperienced pilot. He had not wanted Celia to come along either and Celia’s insistence on making the trip had led to a long, still unresolved argument between the two of them.

“That’s too bad,” Tom said. “I would have enjoyed meeting him. I think he’s a wonderful actor and I own several of his films in my collection.”

“He’s going to meet us on the second leg of the trip in Oregon,” Celia said. “I’ll give him your praise.”

They beamed at the thought that a famous Hollywood actor—even one who was technically washed up at the moment—would be hearing their names.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the driveway, Stanley and Cynthia Archer had finished greeting their son and their daughter-in-law—it had been the better part of six months since they had last seen them in person—and wandered over to meet Jake, Pauline, and Celia.