And someone in the present. Someone who wanted to be alone with Hamilton Speke.
Her chest was tight. She trotted, her eyes searching, along the fence. Bell followed her, and she could sense his desire to argue with her. The trails were secret, impossible to find, and the heat was increasing, the pavement at their feet fluttering with heat waves that soared before their eyes. Sarah had sometimes wondered what it would be like to walk off into a distant mirage, into the place where the land melted and became mercury. Now she knew. The sunlight wavered before her, pebbled and fluid. Mirage began a stone’s throw away, just ahead of them, a smear of silver wings.
“It’s not really an emergency, is it?” Bell panted behind her. “As far as we know?”
She spun to face him, and her eyes gave him her answer.
“We can go to a farmhouse. Make a few phone calls—”
“I don’t want to wait. I want to be with Ham now.”
“We’ll have to tear our way through, then,” said Bell, sweating, squinting, hands on his hips. “Dig our way under the fence no matter how deep it is.”
This was the sort of decision her father would have made, after adding up the situation, making a list of the facts. When nothing works, you have no rational option but to resort to violence. It was the dark side of masculine intellect. When calm analysis failed, load the thirty-eight. She did not despise this reasoning. It had the heft of logic, after all.
She knew better. “Tearing through” would result in becoming lost. The creek beds and culverts of Live Oak would lead them nowhere. Tomorrow the two of them would both have poison oak, and might well still be lost somewhere between this road and the lake. And digging under the fence was not possible. The cable television company had spent an entire day drilling at the buried foundation of the fence with a jackhammer a few years ago. The salt-and-pepper granite buried in the ground wore out one air compressor, and three drill bits.
Bell sensed her disapproval, and dogged her steps, working himself, she could tell, into an argument in favor of leaping the fence, which would have been a painful ordeal of worming up the iron shafts to the black, iron points. And even if they made it over, there would be no way through. Perhaps he was on the verge of suggesting that they pile back into the car and drive to the sheriff’s office or back to San Francisco, or all the way back to Berkeley.
They hunted along the shoulder of the road for a quarter of a mile, and when the iron fence ended a stone wall began. The wall itself would have been easy enough to climb. But the woods there seethed with dense, virgin undergrowth. The brush was a tangle of branches, stiff, writhing fossil snakes, white looming limbs scarred with dead lichen, massive grandfather oaks centuries-old roped with lifeless moss, and in the undergrowth a mass of blackberries, like living barbed wire, and the scarlet, fluttering leaves of poison oak.
They paused again beside a brilliant, late-season poppy and a crowd of star thistle. The light was fragrant with herb scent. Bell frowned, like a man cheated into living in a world that made no sense. This was what happened to all such human beings, Sarah thought with compassion. The rational people are determined to understand, and what they learn baffles them. The trail is lost, the barroom dark, and the adversary who fells the hero is never a worthy enemy. The hero lies broken, and the victor scrambles away into the dark.
She was not as patient as she seemed. She was not patient at all. The huntress may seem calm, she knew, but she is not. There was something very wrong about this. Ham was trapped in there, somewhere, by something sinister. The sight of the chain still reverberated in her stomach, a cold, ringing knot of steel.
“Sarah, please talk to me for a second.”
“We’re looking for a trail.”
“A trail,” he echoed doubtfully.
“We’ll find it.”
“Of course we will,” he said skeptically. There was something very nervous about his voice. They were both dressed for a day in the City, but Bell had loosened his tie, and Sarah wore, she was pleased to reassure herself, what her mother would have described with some humor as “sensible shoes.”
“A deer trail,” she said.
His silence meant that she had scored a point.
She added, “There has to be one that reaches the road, because I’ve seen deer here, browsing on the shoulder.”
He even smiled. He was eager, now. He had a plan, he knew what to look for. Bell was the sort of man who required an agenda. Even so, there was an unsteadiness about him.
He jogged along behind her. Give him a schedule and he was all action. “You can pass them and not see them at all,” she called. “They run parallel to the road,” she panted. “Well into the estate, but we need one that—”
She stopped herself, and hurried back to gaze over the top of the chest high wall. A fly flicked off and on like a tiny electric light as it circled in and out of the shadow. There in the scribble of brush was a long wrinkle of bare earth.
The way in. They had both passed it in their hurry to find it. She called Bell to her side, and they scrambled over. Even so, iron points set into the stone wall caught her clothing, and there was a minute tear as the medieval-looking rampart caught and held her briefly.
“Stay on the path,” she whispered. She did not know why she spoke so softly. For some reason she was afraid of being overheard, as though the very ticks in the brush were spies.
“What happens if we lose our way? I mean, how lost can we get?” Bell tried to sound bouncy, ready for anything, but she could tell that somewhere within himself he was shaken. The imagery of this place confounded him, the black spearpoints, the shaggy trees. Bell was a man of information and flash-communication. As some people might be afraid of heights, or of confined places, she sensed that he was afraid of being lost.
We can become very lost, she wanted to say. We can lose our way entirely. It was the truth. Hikers had wandered on the estate for days, even struggling within sight of house and not casting eyes upon it, until they found themselves at last, torn and bone-tired, either on the surface of the highway or beside the lake.
This is a place that deceives, she wanted to say. This is a place of voices in the night, of shadows that spill where nothing casts them, and of light that pools from no source, not sun or moon, but the own, sole magic of this place. This is like the soul, the psyche. This is a place like no other, unmatched, unique, roped with power, and frail.
But she did not say this. Bell, with his gentleness and his strength, and his need for facts, would want to understand, but he would not. He would want to fumble for his notebook and write “magic place,” believing only that this was her own, impressive but irrational view. He would want to possess Live Oak by understanding it, and she knew that understanding was impossible, and was an effort that did nothing more than dilute such a place of its color.
Instead she pointed to a flourish of poison oak, and he nodded.
The trail lost them. It did not take long. She spied the two prongs of a deerprint, and then another, worked with the trail down the slope, and then they stumbled over a wash of round granite stones. The skeleton of a tree rasped against them, and the hum of wasps was the only other sound.
They hunted. The trail could not have vanished, completely. It was only a path, with no will at all, and it was crazy to think it might.
Then she realized that the deer, being practical creatures, would follow the creek bed for a while, before meandering off again on their own.
“We have to go back,” Bell panted. “This is crazy.”
“We’re lost,” she said, and to her it was a challenge she knew she could overcome.
“I’m going back.”
“You’ll never find your way.”
“Sarah—” he began, panting, sweating.
“Follow me.”
She ran, tottered on a rock and looked back.
He wavered, unsure.
She urged him downstream after her with a wave of her arm. She hurried forward, eager, bala
ncing over the scabs of old algae on the stones. A junco flashed its white tail feathers where a bay tree had let drop a scatter of blond leaves, and the air was delicious with the scent.
Here—where the trail resumed.
She was running fast, now, with the speed of a child, and with a child’s sure-footedness. She was amazed at how well she bounded over this rock, this fallen tree. Her hair streamed behind her, and the past-blossom lupine whispered at her feet.
There was a crash.
She froze.
Before her, startled, frozen to statues themselves, three deer stared at her, into her, looking hard. The sound had been the sudden leap to their feet from where they had been drowsing in the dry leaves. Bell panted behind her, and the two of them gazed upon the deer as though the animals were a trio of unearthly beings.
Black eyes, and black snouts, and ears as large as human hands. The deer drank in everything there was to know about Sarah and her companion. They did not even want to shift a single hoof for fear of making a deadly error.
Then the buck turned, both easy and cautious, and made an impossible leap, out of the culvert, and over the branch of a tree, which he barely ticked with an ebony hind hoof. The others followed, nearly silently, like a sound track that was out of synch with the picture, or badly dubbed. The deer were gone when the sound of their rustling was still in the air, and the branch swayed, slightly, where they had vanished.
She had known that the estate was large, and that it was, in a sense, prehistoric woodland, but with all her respect for the land here, she had not realized how Live Oak sprawled. They ran, splashed with heat, stroked by shadow. She could not run any farther. She would have to stop. Her feet were tingling, and her lungs burned. But she did not stop, although she left Bell far behind, his footsteps distant.
She ran until at last the peak of the roof and the tall green columns of the poplars were visible through the oaks. The last bushes whipped her as she hurried past, and she reached the clearing.
The lawn hissed under her feet. She should never have left him, and she would stay with him always, no matter what happened. Maria could do nothing to hurt Ham now. Sarah wrenched at the front door, fumbling, until she got it open.
The house was cool, and with the sound of her footsteps the walls seemed to inch outward, the cavern of the hallways taking her in.
She could not utter a word. She was breathing too heavily. She called for Ham, but her voice was broken by her panting, and was hardly a voice at all.
She called again, her voice clear, now, and insistent. Her response was no sound—silence, except the very distant gurgle of the aquarium. There was no response from the upstairs, or from the sunroom. She called for Clara, because she knew that Clara would answer at once.
There was only the hush of the great house around and above her. It was the quiet of old walls, old, horsehair plaster, and great redwood timbers. The place was empty of everything but its own stillness. It was both wonderful and chilling, like realizing that the earth will continue after one’s own death.
Her breath was steady now. Everyone must be gone somewhere, she felt, feeling like a child trying to piece together an explanation for a place that was, subtly, but undeniably, dangerous.
And then she told herself that she was being childish. It was too quiet, and yet for the moment she was so thankful to be here that she convinced herself she was untroubled. Surely everything would be fine, now that she was here at last. Her fears about Maria were fears, only. All would be well. If only she could see Ham, and know that he was safe.
So, she thought, I am alone. She had always thrived on solitude. Quiet had nourished her. But this was not the right kind of silence. This was a silence that soaked the color from the sky, the oxygen from the air.
The piranha flicked, a steel blade transformed into a fierce, supple life. Ham’s office, when she reached it, was empty. She tried to read some meaning into the clean desk, the chair kissed with the print of his head.
She touched the intercom, and heard the reverberating silence of the house for a few heartbeats before she realized that what she heard was the mere silence of a broken instrument. The hard, solid silence. As an experiment, a gesture in the interest of merest curiosity, and perhaps as a possible check to see if the entity that had provided the chain had provided even worse mischief, she picked up the phone.
She had guessed as much. She had not expected the phone to work. This was predictable, this dead instrument at her ear.
The French windows swung open at a touch, and there was the green lawn, the cheer of distant birds, and all was well. Ham must be off somewhere, hiking, or perhaps working on the play at last. And the chain and the dead telephone meant nothing at all. She hesitated, trying to lie to herself, and failing, and then she stepped into the heat.
There was no sign of Bell. He had been right to be afraid. He was lost, now, the poor man, and once a person is lost, she knew, it can be a long time before he sets foot again in a place of refuge.
When she first heard it, it was a pretty sound, much like the sound of celebration, discordant but merry music—the sound of something breaking. A sweet sound, surely a happy noise.
The tinkle of breaking glass.
She put a hand to her lips. Time hesitated. The Outer Office, she thought. It’s happening in the Outer Office.
She began to run down the slope of the lawn, toward the continuing sounds. Or were they sounds? The noises were so faint she could hardly make out what they were. Not breaking glass at all, she decided as she ran. Surely not. Sounds shifted here, a rattling leaf rasping like an ugly song, music resounding from nowhere. That had always been the way of Live Oak. The air whispered, the trees murmured, the very sky was alive.
She told herself that this was not the sound of breaking, of splintering, of violence beyond the trees.
Until she heard it again.
38
What was it about the black cat, Asquith wondered, that had so aroused his desire to own it? And not only to own it, but to prize it, and hide it away where no one could see it and covet it in return.
Certainly its appearance had been remarkable enough. A cat carved, or chopped, out of black obsidian, it had been just the right size to carry without effort in the hands, even slippery hands, moist with the humidity of the jungle.
It had taken a long time to find the place, on a branch of land, a coral tumble the locals called “La Guadaña,” the scythe, an arc of land that sliced into the sea. The Yucatan had many such sights. It was an old, man-made hummock of rock yet unexcavated, tangled with the copper-scrub brush of jungle growth and the lairs of snakes, serpents that straightened underfoot and vanished, leaving the barest track. The place was a stew of lizards and the leaping punctuation of mosquito larvae in the foot-size pools between the chalky coral boulders.
Ham had not even wanted to struggle out there through the undergrowth. The two of them were having such a wonderful time, he argued, drinking and calling to the parrots that flung overhead. A few of the bright, metal-green birds were attracted to him. He had always understood animals, and they had always responded to his voice, his gifts of, in this case, bits of tortilla. From time to time the two travelers lurched into town to buy Lomotil at the Clinica Guadelupe, a place with green walls and green asphalt tiles and a green welcome mat with crisp new rubber stipples for the wiping of street mud from the shoes.
They found a man with a yellow-headed parrot that said, in English, “drop dead.” This man had worked for Americans in New Mexico, setting up microwave stations near Taos, and he was both amused by these two long-haired young men and eager to show them, for a price, “where the secrets are still lying for anyone to pick up.”
“If they’re so easy to find they would be found,” Speke had argued, cheerfully but with a certain lively force. “He’s tracking us off into the swamps of Quintana Roo to show us something made in Mexico City, or Korea.”
The beach life had been seductive. The village was b
oth trashy and prosperous, a broad concrete and mud avenue of Valvoline signs and a burro with what looked like white eyeliner browsing under a bridge. The police in their blue and white pickup trucks had been unsmiling but friendly, once the two Americans established the fact that the owner of the abandoned boat yard did not mind their campfires. The truth was, the retired owner of the yard had sold all of his boats long before, and kept the white sand raked so that his pet grackle was the first creature to make tracks across the white beach each morning. The black bird had been beautiful in his dark plumage, but the urraca was not as dark and beautiful as the obsidian cat Speke and Asquith were to find.
The owner of the grackle made a steady profit selling the two Americans, and a few other international wanderers, tequila and Oso Negro gin destilada seca, but one day he encouraged the two to take the advice of the man who had built communications systems in the desert. “You dig,” he said. “Who knows what you might find? It’s not easy.”
Being told it was a challenge was all it took to engage the interest of Hamilton Speke, and they had hacked their way with those machetes which seemed at a glance too rusty to slash the ropelike brush. The steel was keen, quiet. Once there, stumbling up the ruined pyramid, they tied a hammock overhead, and cleared a camp with the blades, snakes unknotting and vanishing at the touch of their shadows.
Speke had always maintained that the locals had left it there, as a gift, implying that it was both wondrous and a fake, but it was like him to think such a thought. He always assumed that strangers liked him and were planning ways to give him a pleasing surprise, while Asquith knew that the world was populated with men and women who knew his kind at a glance. They had lived, it seemed, on booze and Bimbo brand donas, the little packaged doughnuts, some powdered with white sugar, some coated with chocolate frosting. The air was heavy, creamy, sweet, and after a while the mosquitoes would not sting through the coating of perspiration. Insects whispered, scuttled, fled. Sometimes Speke would sear a white-fleshed fish over a fire, and they lived the time both searching and pretending to search, both avid and not caring, until one day Speke climbed out of the virtually Etruscan rubble of the rocks and dropped the moss green statue in Asquith’s lap.
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