“Now look what you’ve done.” June scrambled over to the child and put an arm around him.
“We are not discussing this, June. You and this kid are leaving with me. Right now. Grab some clothes. Grab whatever is the kid’s. I’ll find the cat. We need to leave.”
June turned to the little boy. “We are going to go with my friend Max in his car. It’s a nice car. It’s red and fast. Let’s get your Christmas presents from my room. We’ll leave Auntie Melanie a note. She will come to Max’s, too, okay?”
Nicky nodded, pacified, it seemed, at the thought of driving away in a fast red car.
June followed Nicky back to her bedroom and scooped his new toys into a fabric shopping bag. She wasn’t sure what to grab for herself. Wildfires in or near Malibu weren’t altogether uncommon. She knew that Malibu had been threatened by fire in the past—many times—and that on more than one occasion a blaze had waltzed in on a dry Santa Ana wind and destroyed whatever lay in its path. Elwood had once told her that in the last three decades more than thirty wildfires had broken out in the brush canyons near Malibu. Living in Southern California meant living with the threat of wildfires, and she’d lived all her life in Southern California.
June tossed into an overnight bag her jewelry box, Frank’s Purple Heart, and a few pieces of clothing, and also grabbed her purse and the emergency cash she kept in her lingerie drawer. On a notepad in the kitchen on which she usually wrote her grocery list she scribbled a hasty note for Melanie with Max’s address. On their way to the front door, she placed into her bag the framed photographs that Eva had days ago replaced on the hi-fi.
June taped the note to the front door with one hand and held on to the wriggling cat with the other.
Then she and Nicky and Algernon climbed into Max’s little MG—Nicky on her lap and a disgruntled Algernon on his.
“I stayed last night with a friend in Santa Monica but I’m getting us back to LA. As soon as you’re safe at my place, I’m going to drive out to the desert to see Elwood.” Max put the car into gear as the angry cat growled at him. “I don’t care if he asked for privacy. I need to discuss things with him and I’m tired of waiting.”
“All right,” June said slowly, picturing in her mind Max arriving at the bungalow in a few hours, knocking on the door, getting no answer, finding a way inside, discovering the note. Dashing back out to his car…
The Plan was unfolding far faster than she thought it would.
There was no going back now.
Although that had been true for three weeks, hadn’t it? Since the moment she dug a grave in the backyard and rolled the man she’d loved into it.
She wrapped her arms tight around Nicky and the cat as Max sped away into the smoky sunrise.
25
It didn’t take long to haul down to the car Eva’s boxes of belongings. When the last of her things had been tucked into the trunk of the car, they headed back inside so that Eva could leave a note for Yvonne with instructions not to give June’s address to those strange men.
She started to write a vague reason for the request but Melanie stopped her.
“Don’t give her any extra information. Trust me. Just ask her to say if they have a business card, they can leave one with her. And that the next time she sees you she will give it to you.”
There had been no sign of those men when they arrived, nor was there now as they got back in the car to return to Malibu.
The morning sky on the horizon was refusing to turn blue as Melanie pulled away from the curb, a ghostly coral tinge in its place instead. As the minutes and miles ticked as they approached the coast, the more smoke and the odor of ash hung on the air.
“There’s a fire somewhere.” Melanie turned on the radio and flipped through the stations until she found one reporting the news.
A fire had indeed broken out in the wee hours of the morning in Newton Canyon, eleven miles from Malibu.
But it was apparently a hungry fire and a generous one. It was now gobbling its way toward the coast, starting new fires along the way and in happy partnership with winds eager to play along. Worse, no roads led into Newton Canyon. Getting ahead of it was going to be no small feat for local and regional fire departments. Evacuations were likely if the winds didn’t die down and firefighters couldn’t reach the fire’s heart.
Melanie stepped on the gas.
“They’re okay, aren’t they?” Eva said. Surely June and Nicky were okay. Weren’t they?
“I think so. But I think we might need to hurry.”
“June doesn’t have her car.”
Melanie exhaled loudly. “I know she doesn’t. Stop talking about it. That won’t help me get us there.”
By the time they reached the Pacific Coast Highway, the air outside the car windows was a gritty, dismal gray. Few cars were rushing north toward Malibu as they were, but plenty were driving away from it, toward Santa Monica.
Eva counted down the fifteen coastal miles they needed to travel. She knew those miles. The second bus she took to work every day traveled them. Melanie was driving fast; Eva could feel it. But each time a pumper truck or fire engine came wailing up behind her, she had to pull over to let them pass, losing what seemed like precious minutes.
