Bitter Truth by William Lashner

“Would you like an extra dose of aroma therapy, Jackie?” A woman came out at the end of the meeting and sat on a high-backed regal chair, a beautiful woman in flowing white robes. Jacqueline was taken to sit directly at her feet. This woman was Oleanna, and as she sat on that chair she fell into a trance and strange noises emerged from her throat, noises which bent Jackie double with rapture. Grimes didn’t understand it, thought it part con, part insane, but he couldn’t help noticing how the members all buzzed about Jacqueline like bees about the queen. The next morning he hired an investigator to check her out discreetly.
    Three months later, in a private ceremony in her apartment, with the music and the fetishes and the candles, with a pile of crystals between their kneeling, naked bodies, he asked her to marry him and she said yes. By that time the investigator had told him who her great-grandfather was and the approximate amount of the fortune she was scheduled to inherit.
    “I’m not going to tell you what corporation they started or anything,” said Grimes.
    “Would I know it?” I asked.
    “Of course you would, everyone does. You’ve been eating its stuff forever. And her share of the fortune alone was over a hundred million. Do you know how many zeros that is? Eight zeros. That’s enough to buy a baseball team, that’s enough to buy the Eagles. And she said yes.”
    “Jesus, you hit the big time.”
    “Bigger than you’ll ever see, Mack, that’s for sure.”
    With their future settled, Jackie took him one afternoon to meet her family in the ancestral mansion deep in the Main Line, a place they called Veritas. The house was a strange gothic castle, high on a grassy hill, surrounded by acres of woods and strange, desolate gardens. Inside it was a dank mausoleum, cold and humid, decorated much like Jacqueline’s apartment only on a larger, more decrepit scale. One brother never rose from his chair, wearing a creepy smoking jacket, almost too drunk to talk. His wife flitted about him like a hyperactive moth, refreshing his drink, fluffing his pillow. Another brother, thin and nervous, was in a den glued to his computer screen, watching the prices of the family’s vast holdings rise and fall and rise again on the nation’s stock exchanges. The sister was a sarcastic little bitch in black leather who laughed in his face when he told her he was a dentist and who cut Grimes with a series of scathing comments. The mother was overseas somewhere, vacationing alone, and the father stayed in his private upstairs chamber, never stepping down to meet his daughter’s fiancé.
    “It felt like I was visiting the Munsters,” said Grimes. “And that was before Jacqueline took me to meet her Grammy, the daughter of the man who had founded the family fortune.”
    Grandmother Shaw was hunched over in a chair, her wrinkled face tilted as if one half were made of wax and had been pressed too close to a flame. Her hands were bony and long, the rasp of her breathing sliced the silence in the room. The eye on the melted half of her face was closed; from the other a pale, cataractal blue peered out. She stared at him like he was a disease as Jacqueline made the introductions. Then, with a withering smile, the grandmother insisted on taking Grimes for a little walk around the gardens.
    They were alone, the two of them, except for the old gardener who held onto her arm as she walked. It was the height of the summer now and the gardens were a riot of colors and scents. She showed him her rhododendron, her hyacinths, with spikes of red flowers, her blood-red chrysanthemums. Thick yellow bees burrowed for pollen, rubbing their setaceous bodies over the open blooms in a silent ecstasy. She led him through an arch cut into a high wall of spinous hedges. Here the hedgerows were trimmed into some sort of a maze, flowers fronting tall walls of barberry bristling with thorns, barberry hiding paths of primrose and blue lobelia that