Against All Enemies by Richard Herman Page B

Ross. Want to come along?”
    “What’s the story?”
    “About some group. They don’t have a name.”
    “Millenarians?” he asked.
    “What’s a millenarian?”
    “Someone who believes they’ll find salvation at the end of the millennium.”
    “We’ll find out when we get there.”
     
     
    Marcy talked as she drove along the coast road. “I love this drive.” Sutherland relaxed in the passenger’s seat, glad that he didn’t have to navigate. He hated driving and got lost anytime he ventured beyond the city limits. Because it was mid-April, the road was deserted and the vegetation lush with the promise of spring. “Maybe we can spend the night at Mendocino,” she said. He said it sounded good to him and gave her a lecherous leer. “I think this is the turn-off.” She turned into a narrow lane that led toward the ocean. They drove past well-tended fields and into a farmstead on the edge of the bluffs that overlooked the Pacific. “What a beautiful place,” she said, stopping to take some photos.
    Sutherland followed Marcy around as she toured the farmstead and interviewed the commune leader. He was a pleasant, ordinary-looking man in his early thirties who took a great deal of pride in his community. They walked past an expanse of lawn where a small group of children were clustered around their teacher listening to her read a story. “This reminds me of a kibbutz I visited in Israel,” Marcy said.
    The man smiled and said they were just themselves, getting on with life. “Would you like to join us for supper?” he asked. “We eat early so we can meditate at sunset. We let the diurnal movement of nature dictate our lives, not the arbitrary ticking of a clock.” He led them into the commune’s dining hall where they sat at long benches. Large tureens of soup were brought out of the kitchen with baskets of hot, freshly baked bread and pitchers of crystal clear water. The people joined hands and silently prayed. Then the room exploded into a symphony of laughter and happy voices as they ate.
    Afterward, Marcy and Sutherland followed them to a grove of eucalyptus trees nestled at the edge of the cliffs overlooking the ocean. Sutherland sat on a bench and studied the waves lapping against the rocks eighty feet below him. “This is pretty peaceful now,” he said. “But I bet it can get pretty wild during a storm.”
    “Shush,” Marcy commanded. All around them the people were gazing at the sunset in silence. He was amazed how quickly the sun sank below the horizon and assumed they would leave once it had disappeared. But the people sat there as the fading light painted the clouds and sky with shades of ever-changing yellow, gold, and red. It had never occurred to Sutherland that the most magnificent part of the sunset happened after the sun had set.
    Instinctively, he looked around, letting the evidence speak for itself. What he saw was a group of sixty-four people living a pleasant existence in an idyllic commune. There was no ideology or weirdness driving them and they didn’t dress funny or act strangely. It was too good to be true, which in a D.A.’s world was an alarm. I’m not in that business anymore , he thought. But he couldn’t stop thinking about it.
    Then it was dark. He and Marcy walked in silence back to the car. “Not much of a story here,” she complained. “A waste of time.”
    They got into the car and again, she drove. “I got a feeling they were searching for something, or maybe waiting,” he said.
    “Waiting for what?”
    He shrugged. “The end of the millennium? Someone to give them direction? Until then, they’re tending their garden.”
    “I like that,” she said. “Tending their garden. The Gardeners. Still not a story, though.”
    “There’s a story here, trust me. Keep asking yourself why? When you get an answer to the first why , probe deeper and ask why again. Keep at it until you get to the bottom line. It will surprise you.” He chattered on, wanting to