“And your bill will reflect today’s efforts, no doubt.”
“We do understand each other, Mr. Coltrane.”
Mac pressed the call to an end and stalked out to stand at the threshold of his cottage. He sucked in a long, cool, deep breath.
He’d stop by his mailbox to see if that promised envelope had appeared. His instincts told him he’d come up empty yet again.
Then he’d go burn off his frustration with a hike downstream from Devil’s Leap, take his fishing pole, maybe.
And work out a new plan.
One thing he’d learned over the years: a perverse elation often followed on the heels of a defeat. It was like discovering a little sliver of light indicating a window in a room you’d thought was airless. All defeat meant was another opportunity to prove himself yet again. And then again. Until he won.
One day, maybe, he’d be invincible.
He especially liked to win when the odds were stacked against him, especially if he had a worthy opponent. It was such a delicious feeling it was a wonder his father had bothered cheating.
Unless you counted that whole choir of cheerful birds singing their heads off in time to the wind soughing through pine boughs, not another soul in the world knew she was standing here right now, at ten thirty in the morning, in front of a house that looked like a giant pink birthday present. She was cleaved between a sort of exultant terror and a strange relief.
It felt like she’d just rescued something in the nick of time. Though she couldn’t quite say what or why.
Clean, hard lines—the slant of the roof, the long narrow front porch—met gentle bulges—the turret, the four sets of vast, multipaned bay windows that let in glorious amounts of sunlight, each of them trimmed in a rectangle of dazzling William Morris–esque stained glass across their tops. Two balconies and two wide decks—one above and one below. French windows led out onto the top deck, and she’d once imagined herself bursting through windows like those while she was wearing a gossamer nightgown, the wind whipping her hair out behind her, like a heroine in a Gothic romance. From that deck you could see Devil’s Leap, the namesake rock rucked up through the magic of tectonic plates eons ago. It rose twenty feet or so in the air, and in her mind, the smooth granite surface was the size of a Broadway stage.
She was as breathless as the first time she’d heardClair de Lune.
Also... kind of like someone had dropped an anvil on her chest.
The driveway was sandblasted smooth, spotlessly white, crack-free and swept clean of leaves and pinecones and the various animal droppings that tended to wind up anywhere you went in Hellcat Canyon. Her beautiful blue car looked right at home in it.
She finally ventured forward. Glossy, well-established azaleas and camellias hugged the walls of the house and the rails of the porch. A silvery cluster of venerable but still lissome birches arched up from the corner of a lawn which undulated moatlike around the house. It was lushly green and neatly barbered. Ancient oaks with huge heavy branches already naked of leaves for the season now mingled with a full dozen or more other trees, pines and a young redwood, liquidambars, and dogwoods, in a planned yet casual disarray.
She saw nothing that could be construed as superfluous flora, a miracle considering how opportunistic Scotch broom and Indian paintbrush and firethorn were in Hellcat Canyon. The Harwoods had once found a potato, a carrot, and a little rose growing out in their front lawn. It was always a surprise come spring to see what had gone wayward.
The groundskeeper under contract clearly took the job seriously.
Avalon became aware of a stabbing pain in her hand. She uncurled her fingers and found a perfect imprint in her palm of the house keys she’d been squeezing. They were all hot as little brands and damp with her own sweat.
“Here goes,” she breathed. She took a decisive step forward.
Something white darted in her peripheral vision. She spun about.
A white-and-brown tabby cat was staring at her in astonishment, frozen midstride, its front paw in the air. Clearly, he or she had been going about its usual rounds and Avalon was obviously unexpected.
“KITTY!” She realized she sounded for all the world like her niece, Annelise, when she’d first met their cat, Peace and Love, when she was three years old.
The cat turned around and trotted down the flagstone path that made its serpentine way across the lawn. It had a startled rather than a low-to-the-ground terrified gait. It glanced over its shoulder once. Almost as though itwantedher to follow it. Or so she told herself.
So she followed.
The flagstone path terminated some ten yards later, and she was now on a sort of paved red-dirt drive liberally sprinkled with gravel. It stretched on for about a hundred feet or so, ending in a barred metal gate about the length of her dad’s old blue pickup truck. The gate divided the drive from another long narrow road that led into Devil’s Leap from Old Canyon Road.
Thatwas the way her parents had driven them into Devil’s Leap during that summer.
Now she realized what a symbolic divide that barred gate was.
Disappointingly, the cat seemed to have vanished. Which was very catlike of it.
Outside of the gate a pair of mailboxes were mounted on wooden posts, which was a bit odd. Surely there was only one house on the property?
