No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks."
-Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Man
Chapter Seven
Approaching Emmaus
The empty drawing room was silent as Pacifica entered the room. The mocking images of the truth of her line together with the show paintings that were commissioned to make them look like honest self-made men and women and great contributors to charity. She stood there, utterly disgusted by the panoply of self-serving lies mixed with utter depravity arrayed before her. Next to a painting of the progenitor of her line, Nathaniel Northwest dealing fairly with a member of Oregon's Cayuse tribe, was the painting of what had actually happened, him cheating the land where Northwest Manor now stood out of them. Granted, that was pretty much par for the course at the time, but she never understood the need to paint one piece of self-serving propaganda and then paint one glorifying what actually happened.
She choked up as she stared at the large painting of her, her father, and her mother, tears forming behind her eyes. She remembered standing for that picture five years ago. They had just gotten back from their family vacation in Hawaii, where she'd had the most fun she'd ever had up to that point in her life. For a time, her parents seemed like real parents, and not just taskmasters deliberately trying to mold her into a tyrannical would-be dictator through a lifetime of violence.
The young blonde woman was seized with a sudden mood as what to do with the paintings revealed itself.
"I once told you," she said, glaring venomously at the painting of her and her family. Manic energy filled her, causing her to pace back and forth. "I intended to fix the name of our family," Pacifica said out loud before she could stop herself. "I had to see a lot of stuff, and a lot of people had to die, for me to realize that's impossible. It's like the name Hitler. That name is soiled forever due to the actions of one man. Your actions, the actions of all of you, have soiled our name. It cannot be fixed, and I'm not even going to try to anymore. I am a Pines, my children will be Pines," she said, giving in the urge to the dramatic. "I disavow any allegiance or loyalty to your name and your House. And your tradition of ruthless competition, deliberately encouraging your children to 'cull their weaker siblings' so only the 'strong' inherit the 'power and title,'" she shook her head, we're a republic for God's sake, "has worked against you. I have no cousins on my father's side of the family, no paternal uncles, and the last of the male line of Northwest was put to death two days ago.
"There was a belief among the Ancient Egyptians," Pacifica said in a rush of manic energy. "If one defaced the images that someone left in this world, you disfigured him in the afterlife. I don't know if it's true or not, but on the off-chance that it is."
She tore open the door to the room and ran down the hall. The trip between the drawing room and the bedroom she shared with Dipper was reduced to a blur.
In fact, everything was a blur. She was vaguely aware of Dipper calling her, but it was white noise as she ran back down the hall. In a subjective instant, she was back in the drawing room. A roaring sound in her ears as she swung her upraised axe, the very axe that had fallen out of the head of the lumberjack ghost, into the canvas of her family portrait, embedding herself in her father's head. She yanked it out of the painting to only slam it down again, and again, and again.
She was never quite sure exactly when, but at some point the world came back into focus. Where ten paintings, horrifying reality and self-serving lies, stood in all their arrogant glory, only chunks of wood and canvas remained. Her throat felt hoarse and she realized that the roaring sound that she had been hearing had been her.
"You feeling better?" a familiar male voice said from the doorway behind her.
Pacifica looked at the debris strewn drawing room. "Yeah," she said after a moment, turning to face Dipper. "Yeah, I am."
"It did seem rather cathartic," Dipper said, a smirk on his face, "Spazzy Paz."
Pacifica laughed before she could stop herself. "Spazzy Paz?" she smirked, the obvious retort coming to her lips. "That's funny, Dippy Doo."
Dipper sighed, erasing the joyous laugh that always made her ridiculously happy.
"What's wrong?" Pacifica asked, instantly concerned.
Dipper's face suddenly gained a haunted look. "I've discovered something going through the records."
"What?" Pacifica's heart sank like a stone.
It must've been about her father. Who else could've been? What else did her father leave her in his will? An incurable plague? Did he have a secret clone or something?
"Someone named 'Tomas Sanchez' bought the land where Briarwood sits directly from your father," he said, holding out a piece of paper that appeared to be a land sale contract.
Dipper's unexpected statement brought her up short. "'Tomas Sanchez?'" she said, taking the contract and looking it over. "That's got to be a pseudonym; unless this Mister Sanchez later sold the land to Salvatore at a later date."
"The way our luck's been going lately," Dipper pointed out. "I sincerely doubt that. But if we actually want to corroborate this, we're going to have to explore the records that came with these paintings, which you just reduced to wreckage in a fit of maniacal rage."
Pacifica's face heated. "I did kind of lose it for a bit there, didn't I?"
Dipper walked over and wrapped his powerful arms around her. Pacifica leaned into his touch.
"Yeah," he said, gently stroking her face, "but understandable."
Five hours later, Dipper flipped, desultorily, through a manila folder in the attic, which was crammed almost to the ceiling with box after box of documents, when a thought occurred to him. "What do you intend to do with those cars?"
Pacifica sighed. "To be honest, I'm keeping one of them, and the other two I will give to you and Mabel."
"They are nice cars," Dipper pointed out.
Pacifica gave a stilted laugh. "Yeah."
Dipper picked up on the tone of her laugh immediately. "You're worried about tomorrow." It wasn't a question.
Their current table of organization had Dipper as the commander, Wendy as his second, and Pacifica and Mabel as the leaders of their Alpha and Bravo squads. However, the gorilla in the room was that he and Pacifica were on call as servers tomorrow night, the night of the Epicurean Club dinner service. Meaning that he and Pacifica, unarmed and without support, were going to have to face Salvatore and his people. Wendy would be leading the return to Briarwood, with Mabel acting as her second, leaving Robbie and Tambry to lead the squads. Dipper didn't want to think about the things that could go horribly wrong.
"Yeah," Pacifica said. "I wish we could be there with them."
"Me too, but we can't. Someone has to actually confront Salvatore directly, and someone has to keep that plate from being served. Children were murdered to make them. And if we're going to be putting a stop to what they're doing, we have to put a stop to that, too."
"I know," Pacifica said, visibly swallowing and fiddling with her engagement ring. "It was a hell of a ride, wasn't it? Us."
Dipper smirked, despite the lump in his own throat. He knew what she was thinking. He had thought of it himself. "What do you mean?"
"Even if we win tomorrow, we're still committing multiple felonies, up to and including capital murder," Pacifica said, her bottom lip trembling. "They'll take us away, try us, almost certainly convict us, and send us to separate prisons for the rest of our natural lives. And while you, me, Mabel, Melanie, Vivian, and Genevieve, can't be sentenced to death, Wendy, Robbie, and the others can. I know we all agreed that if it saves those kids, it's worth it, but we'll never see each other again. I'll-I'll never touch you again. Never feel your arms around me again." Her beautiful blue eyes began glistening with tears.
Dipper reached out and took Pacifica in her arms. "I don't know what will happen tomorrow, but to quote a wise fictional bartender, 'if a man is convinced he's going to die tomorrow, he usually finds a way to make it happen.'" He kissed her softly. "We have to hope things will work out, or they won't."
Pacifica sighed. "I know."
Dipper cocked his head, leaning in to kiss her again, when he saw it, glinting in the afternoon sun filtering through the stained glass window beside Pacifica's head. The corner of a photograph.
He pulled back. "What's that?"
Pacifica, eyes closed and mouth open in anticipation, jerked, giving him a curious look. "What?"
"This," Dipper said, reaching behind her and grabbing a photograph. It was a group portrait photograph. In the picture, there was a group of well-dressed men and women, including Pacifica's thrice-damned parents, standing in the living room of the long-destroyed Northwest Manor, with the caption in elegant gold filigree, "Northwest Fest 2011".
He suppressed an irritated sigh, eyes glazing over. He'd forgone kissing Pacifica for this? He was about to throw it aside and see if Paz was still in the mood. However, a man to the right of Pacifica's mother Priscilla caught his attention. A tall, lanky man, with brown hair and eyes and an angular face, the face that had rubbed him seven kinds of wrong way the second he'd seen it. Thomas Salvatore.
"It's him," Dipper said softly. "He's right here."
"My Dad knew him?" Pacifica whispered. With a disgusted sigh, she grabbed the folder Dipper had. She pulled it out of and opened it up roughly.
"What is it?" Dipper asked after a moment of watching Pacifica's eyes scan the document over and over again.
"What is it?" He asked, louder this time.
"It's an excerpt from my father's journal," she said, handing it over to Dipper. "Take a look."
Dipper read it, the color draining from his face. "My God," Dipper said after only a few seconds, jamming his hand into his pants and yanking his phone out so hard that he almost dropped it.
Fifteen minutes later, Dipper watched as Wendy, Mabel, Robbie, and Tambry filed into the dining /conference room.
"What happened?" Wendy asked immediately, as they took their places at the table.
"Our luck has been…interesting lately," Dipper said, leaning back into his chair at the head of the table. "First we get this place, and the funding, money, and material we need. And now, the government hand delivers us the final piece of information we need to stop Salvatore."
Wendy, his sister, and the others gave him quizzical looks.
"Apparently, Salvatore and Preston Northwest knew each other."
"Oh, sweet Jesus," Wendy exclaimed in a guttural voice as her head hit the table. "I thought we were done with that son of a bitch two days ago! What's next, is Gideon going to come ringing the doorbell?"
Silence descended on the room as everyone froze, ears straining for the sound of a ringing doorbell. More than a little fear trickled down Dipper's spine, images of Gideon's shears slashing as he tried to cut out his tongue. He glanced over to see Mabel's fingernails digging into the heavy oaken dinner table, eyes as wide as dinner plates.
After a moment, Dipper released the breath he didn't realize he'd been holding, along with everyone else in the room.
Wendy, her face flushing a deep red, said, "God, I'm sorry guys."
Dipper sighed. "It's okay, Wendy."
"Wendy," Mabel said, still shooting her a death glare. "I love you like a sister, but if you ever make a joke about Gideon again…"
"Point taken," a still mortified Wendy responded.
"Now that that's out of the way," Dipper said, "let us continue. Pacifica?"
Pacifica stood up from her seat, and circled the table, handing each of them a copy of the Preston Northwest's journal entry.
"Nearest as we can tell," Pacifica began. "My fa-I mean Preston," she corrected herself sharply. "Apparently, knew Thomas Salvatore when they were both in school. Salvatore attended the Culinary Institute of America's Hyde Park campus when Northwest was attending Columbia. They apparently met when he was out with some of his 'friends,' at a society party in Hyde Park. He apparently saw great things in him. Which is odd, particularly if you look at his transcripts on the last page."
Dipper looked down at them. He'd gotten the occasional A, but for the most part it was a run of straight Bs and Cs. Granted, they were Bs and Cs from a premier university, but they were still Bs and Cs.
He couldn't help but smirk in family pride. His mom attended the Culinary Institute of America's Hyde Park campus as well, while working two jobs, in addition to Pell Grants and loans and her work at the C.I.A.'s American Bounty Restaurant - and she never once gotten lower than a B+ on anything, graduating fourth in her class with a 3.9 GPA. She even got several job offers from the best restaurants in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.
But his mom's dream had to return home to the Bay Area and open a successful chain of family restaurants. That dream hadn't exactly been satisfied due to California's struggling economy. And more than once, they'd talked about pulling up stakes and moving to Austin, Texas with it's much better economy. But her one restaurant was still very successful, and neither he nor his sister had ever had to worry about going hungry.
It was why she'd been so happy to get into the Epicurean Club. The rich clientele coming in would make them vast amounts of money, so much so that she could finally open a second restaurant in the area, giving her mom's fading dream of a chain of restaurants a shot in the arm.
Their mom wasn't a saint. She had an ego, someone in her position, who achieved what she had achieved even in part, had to believe they were the greatest in the business in order to achieve anything. She liked the finer things in life, but she had a very powerful sense of morality and right and wrong. She paid her servers minimum wage in addition to their tips, even though the law specifically allowed servers to be paid two dollars and seventy-five cents an hour on the frequently erroneous assumption that they could make up the shortfall solely with tips. She served quality food and, unlike her great-uncle in law, did not "regularly commit massive tax fraud."
And she loved children, and not just her own. Every scrap of surplus food she could spare was given over to food banks. She bent over backward to assist Melanie's far less better off family with everything she could since Jessica's kidnapping. And if he allowed them to actually get away with serving human liver in her restaurant, she'd probably put a bullet in her own head.
That's why he couldn't lead the attack on Briarwood himself. He had to stop Salvatore from destroying his mother. It was the only way to prevent Thomas Salvatore from managing to slink away and do this again.
"More than that," Dipper said aloud. "It appears that Preston Northwest originated the Epicurean Club. It started out as a matter of fact, as an idea for a formal chain of restaurants. Unfortunately, his own start-up restaurants never seemed to quite get off the ground."
He looked down at the income figures, Epicurean Delight, Salvatore's first restaurant. According to the documents in the Northwest Files, it treaded water the first six months in operation, before finally going belly up, being forgotten in the intense restaurant market of the Bay Area in California. Same for The Alhambra, his second restaurant: it did okay for a few months, but it didn't stand out so it went out.
"Which stands in stark contrast," Wendy responded, "with the statements in their brochures and website that Salvatore's restaurants were 'roaring successes' that proved his culinary mastery to the world."
"More than that," Dipper said, pointedly. "He apparently didn't take the failure of his restaurants well. It says here that Salvatore was apparently booked by the SFPD on disorderly conduct and assault charges when he attacked a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle for saying his food 'lacked originality.'
"Apparently," Pacifica pointed out, " Preston got annoyed with the repeated failures and brushes with the law, and refused to bankroll another one. There's a letter Preston sent him that states, 'either come up with something original or never darken my door again.'"
Dipper sighed. "At that point, Salvatore responds with a letter of his own stating that he intends to embark on a world tour to 'find inspiration.' There's not a complete itinerary, but at one point he receives a letter from Salvatore that I find particularly…chilling.
"Preston," he read aloud, "I've finally found inspiration! What I need to make a restaurant that can survive on its own. I learned in the Marquesas that the locals used to cook long pig. I was fascinated. I asked around, and discovered to my dismay that no one there cooked it anymore, but people in the Indonesian portion of New Guinea did. So I went to West Papua, among the Korowai people. Most people claim they stopped cooking it themselves, but I found the few clans, deep in the Indonesian jungle, who did. And let me tell you, it was succulent."
He could barely get through that sentence without vomiting. "Long pig" was a Polynesian term in historical records of European missionaries for humans who had been cooked and eaten in the manner of a pig. He didn't know what the Korowai called it, but it didn't matter.
Pacifica sensed him having difficulty controlling his gag reflex because she continued. "According to this, he begged Preston for money to buy up some rural farmland where he could work out 'recipes for using this new animal.' He agreed, and under a false name, sold him the land where Briarwood sits for pennies on the dollar, in the hopes that Salvatore's 'culinary research' would bear fruit.'" Pacifica gave a disgusted sigh. "Now, I haven't seen any conclusive proof either way that my Dad knew what 'long pig' was. However, later on, he said that he tried Salvatore's 'long piglet liver,' and agreed, to further underwrite it, resurrecting the dream of a new restaurant chain specializing in unique foods from exotic countries. And considering that he had plans to eat our butler in the panic room during the Lumberjack Ghost's rampage, I can't help but think he did. He'd apparently received ten million dollars to both further his 'research' and to get back into the restaurant business when his chief benefactor was suddenly and violently was thrown down a year later."
Wendy sighed, leaning back in his chair. "So basically, without Preston Northwest's logistical backing, Thomas Salvatore would have gone nowhere. While we've thought we were fighting a new problem, it turns out we're still solving the last problem. Great."
Dipper, now fairly sure that he wasn't going to vomit all over the table, rejoined the conversation. "The main Northwest line," he stared at his beautiful, physically athletic, fiancée with a look of unabashed adoration, "with one major exception, has been a blight on this country and Homo sapiens sapiens as a whole for the past century and a half. He was paid off by the U.S. government in a desperate attempt to erase Quentin Trembley from American history, not realizing that they gave that money to a suave sociopath with not only long-range plans for ultimate power, but with sadistic tendencies. This ensured that they launched whatever projects and plans they wanted, both to further their own goals for ultimate power and for, to put it bluntly, 'shits and giggles.' Simply executing one man isn't going to automatically undo the plots and schemes, and the damage from them, that man, his predecessors and allies put into place. That's a lifetime's work, maybe even a couple lifetimes. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Right now, we have to solve this problem. Now we've drawn up and finalized the attack plan against Briarwood itself. However, Paz and I have to be the ones to confront Salvatore publicly and expose him to his followers, most of whom outside his inner circle have been duped. Expose him, we destroy whatever social support base he has and alienate anyone with the resources to help him go to ground and try this again in a couple years under an assumed identity. Hell, they'll probably help us subdue him."
"Yes, but how?" Robbie asked. "Even if this attack is successful, it won't hit the twenty-four hour news cycle immediately. It'll be the word of kids a couple months shy of their seventeenth birthday against his, all he and his inner circle," he said, referring to the chefs he had working with him, several of whom worked for top restaurants and had cooking shows on the Deliciousness Channel. "All they have to do is pretend they didn't know anything, and all Salvatore has to do is storm off in a pretend huff before immediately making a run for it; and if that happens there's a good chance he might not be located for years, or never."
"Ah," Dipper said, "but you're missing a key detail here. He doesn't take criticism well and is the type of person to fight his critics until hell freezes over. Paz and I intend to throw the accusations of cannibalism in his face and insult his food repeatedly until we get a reaction. Knowing him as we know him now, it'll probably be so disturbing that it'll turn the 'rank-and-file' Epicurean Club member against him. He won't be able to get out of the building, let alone make an escape down any ratlines he has set up to help him get out."
"That's the other thing I'm concerned about, Dipper," Wendy said, straightening in her chair. "There are a dozen restaurants in the Bay Area affiliated with the Epicurean Club movement. If we pull of this attack, and manage to get the children evacuated, they'll flood the Sacramento area hospitals. And when that happens, it won't take the media or law enforcement to put two and two together. And when that balloon goes up, the Bay Area is going to explode into a flurry of rioting, staring with angry mobs attacking every restaurant in the area that has an Epicurean Club sticker, including your own."
Dipper sighed, and leaned back into his chair. "I know. But it's a risk we have to take. Salvatore needs to be stopped on both fronts. It's going to get messy, it's going to get ugly before it's over. This is one of those situations where there will be no clear winners, but plenty of losers. With the possible exception of those kids, but it has to be done."
Silence filled the room. No one spoke. No one had too. They all knew he was right.
"Well," he said a moment later. "We have a busy day tomorrow, all of us. I suggest we all eat and turn in early. Dismissed."
With that, the meeting broke up, everyone filing out of the room, including Pacifica. Alone, he looked up at the ceiling, in the general direction of the drawing room Pacifica had trashed earlier in her rage, an idea occurring to him.
Pacifica sighed as she sat in the comfortable red armchair in the bedroom she shared with Dipper. She idly flipped through her copy of A Storm of Swords, but not really paying attention as images of her friends being mowed down like hay by a hidden machine gun nest played over and over in her mind. Followed by images of Dipper lying dead on the floor of his mother's restaurant, a meat cleaver buried into his skull.
She wanted to curl up in a ball and cry in bed. More than that, and she cried tears of burning shame at this. She struggled to hold back the urge to beg Dipper to let this whole situation go and run away with her.
Lord, Pacifica prayed, Let this work out. Please don't forsake us.
Her phone abruptly vibrated on her desk.
Hey, Dipper's short text said, Come see me at the bonfire pit. I have something I think might take your mind off tomorrow.
Pacifica, curiosity piqued, plopped her book down on the table, grabbing her phone and keys and walking out the door.
Pacifica crested the small hill and stopped dead in her tracks. To see Dipper, bathed in shadow from the sun setting in the west, standing in front of the large, shallow bonfire pit in the largest clearing of the estate's forest.
She stopped and smiled. The bonfire pit was filled up, and Dipper stood there with an unrolled sleeping bag and a picnic basket. She caught Dipper's meaning immediately, and lightness seemed to take her steps as she skipped down the hill.
"Hey, babe," she said, walking over him. "What's all this?" she tried to ask as casually as possible.
"I know what I said about having to believe we'll succeed tomorrow, otherwise we will fail. I wasn't wrong, but I'd be lying if I wasn't as scared as losing you tomorrow as you are of losing me. So if tonight truly is going to be the last night we will ever be allowed to be with each other, let it be a night to remember." He handed her a gas lighter and gestured with her head, to the bonfire pit. "Care to do the honors?"
Trembling in anticipation, not fear, Pacifica took the lighter and walked over to the pit. She stopped, breath dying in her throat. While there was dried sticks and grass for kindling, the bulk of the fuel for the fire was the same wood and canvas with oil paint she destroyed before. Indeed it seems that Dipper, and probably Mabel, had taken every scrap of those paintings they could out of the drawing room and put it out there.
The meaning could not be clearer. Whatever happened tomorrow and the days after they should face them together as Pines. It was time to consign the last links of her personal connection to the family she'd been born into to the flames and never look back.
Pacifica pulled the trigger on the lighter and touched the fire to the wood three times. The flames caught in the dried grass and wood as began to spread quickly.
She turned to face Dipper Pines, the love of his life and walked over to him. Dipper took the lighter from her hand and set it back into the box. He pulled her into a hard bruising kiss, pushing her gently but firmly in the direction of his sleeping bag…
Behind them, the pyre of Pacifica's past burned hot and fierce.
