by John Saul
“Aw, Mom—”
“They still have the king and queen of the prom, don’t they?” Ellen asked.
Blushing, Alex nodded his head, checked his pockets for his keys and wallet, and started for the door.
“And remember,” Ellen called after him. “Don’t stay out past one, and don’t get into any trouble.”
“You mean, don’t drink,” Alex corrected her. “I won’t. I promise. Okay?”
“Okay,” Marsh Lonsdale replied. He handed Alex a twenty-dollar bill. “Take some of the kids out and buy them a Coke after the dance.”
“Thanks, Dad.” Alex disappeared out the back door. A moment later Ellen and Marsh heard his car start. Marsh arched his brows. “I don’t believe he’s actually going to drive all the way next door,” he said, unable to suppress a smile, despite the fact that it was Alex’s car that he and Ellen had been arguing about all evening.
“Well, of course he is,” Ellen replied. “Do you really think he’s going to pick up Lisa, then walk her down our driveway? Not our Alex.”
“He could have walked her all the way to the prom,” Marsh suggested.
“No, he couldn’t,” Ellen said, her voice suddenly tired. “He needs a car, Marsh. After we move, I just can’t spend all my time ferrying him up and down the ravine. And besides, he’s a responsible boy—”
“I’m not saying he isn’t,” Marsh agreed. “All I’m saying is that I think he should have earned the car. And I’m not saying he should have earned the money, either. But couldn’t we have used the car as an incentive for him to pick up his grades?”
Ellen shrugged, and began clearing the dinner dishes off the table. “He’s doing just fine.”
“He’s not doing as well as he could be, and you know it as well as I do.”
“I know,” Ellen sighed. “But I just think it’s two separate issues, that’s all.” Suddenly she smiled. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we compromise? Let’s wait until his grades come out, and see what happens. If they get worse, I’ll agree that getting him the car was a mistake, and you can take it away from him. I’ll cope with the transportation problem some way. If they stay the same, or improve, he keeps the car. But either way, we stop fighting about it, all right?”
Marsh hesitated only a second, then grinned. “Deal,” he said. “Now, what say I help you with the dishes, and we try to put together something with the Cochrans?” He offered his wife a mischievous wink. “I’ll even drive over next door and pick them up.”
The last of the tension that had been vibrating between them all afternoon suddenly dissipated, and together Ellen and Marsh began clearing away the dinner dishes.
Alex carefully backed his shiny red Mustang down the driveway, then parked it by the curb in front of the Cochran’s house next door. He picked up Lisa’s corsage, crossed the lawn, and walked into the house without knocking. “Anybody here?” he called. Lisa’s six-year-old sister, Kim, hurtled down the stairs and threw herself onto Alex.
“Is that for me?” she demanded, grabbing for the corsage box.
“If Lisa isn’t ready, maybe I’ll take you to the dance,” Alex replied, peeling Kim loose as her father’s bulky frame appeared from the living room. “Hi, Mr. Cochran.”
Jim Cochran raised one eyebrow and surveyed Alex. “Ah, Prince Charming descends from the castle on the mountain to take Cinderella to the ball.”
Alex tried to cover his feelings of embarrassment with a grin. “Aw, come on. We’re not moving for two more weeks. And it’s not a castle anyway.”
“True, true,” Cochran agreed. “On the other hand, I haven’t noticed you asking if you can rent Kim’s room. We’ll happily throw her out.”
“You will not,” Kim yelled, aiming a punch at her father’s belly.
“Will too,” her father told her. “Want a Coke, Alex? Lisa’s still upstairs trying to make herself look human.” He dropped his booming voice only slightly, still leaving it loud enough to fill the house. “Actually, she’s been ready for an hour, but she doesn’t want you to think she’s too eager.”
“That’s a big lie!” Lisa said from the top of the stairs. “He always lies, Alex. Don’t believe a word he says.” Lisa, unlike Alex, had inherited all her looks from her mother. She was small, with short blond hair swept back from her face so that her green eyes became her dominant feature. And, being not only Lisa, but her father’s daughter as well, she had chosen a dress in brilliant emerald rather than the more subdued pastels the other girls would be wearing. Alex’s grin widened as she came down the stairs. “Hey, you look gorgeous.”
Lisa smiled appreciatively and gave him a mock-seductive wink. “You don’t look so bad yourself.” She stood waiting for a moment; then: “Aren’t you going to pin the corsage on?” Alex stared at the box in his hands, his face reddening as he handed it to Carol Cochran, who had appeared from the direction of the kitchen.
“M-maybe you’d better do it, Mrs. Cochran. I … I might slip or something.”
“You won’t slip, Alex,” Lisa told him. “Now, come on. Just pin it on, and let’s go. Otherwise we’ll be here all night while Mom takes pictures.”
Alex fumbled clumsily with the corsage for a moment, but finally succeeded in getting it fastened to Lisa’s dress. Then, true to Lisa’s words, Carol Cochran began herding them into the living room, camera in hand.
“Mom, we don’t have time—” Lisa pleaded, but Carol was adamant.
“You only go to your first prom once, and you only wear your first formal once. And I’m going to have pictures of it. Besides, you both look so—”
“Oh, God, Alex,” Lisa moaned. “She’s going to say it. Cover your ears.”
“Well, I don’t care,” Carol laughed as Alex and Lisa clapped their hands over their ears. “You do look cute!”
Twenty-four pictures later, Alex and Lisa were on their way to the prom.
“I don’t see why we have to stand in the receiving line,” Alex complained as he carefully slid the Mustang into a space between an Alfa Romeo and a Porsche. Before Lisa could answer, he was out of the car and opening the passenger door for her.
From a few yards away, a voice came out of the dusk. “Scratch that paint, and your ass is grass, Lonsdale.”
Alex grinned and waved to Bob Carey, who was holding hands with Kate Lewis, but paying more attention to his Porsche than his girlfriend. “You tore the side off it last month!” Alex taunted him.
“And my dad nearly tore the side off me,” Bob replied. “From now on, I have to pay for all the repairs myself.” He waited until Lisa was out of the car and Alex had closed the door, then relaxed. “See you inside.” He and Kate turned and started toward the gym, where the dance was being held.
“We have to stand in line because you’re going to be student-body president next year,” Lisa told Alex. “If you didn’t want to do that kind of thing, you shouldn’t have run.”
“No one told me I had to. I thought all I had to do was have my picture taken for the annual.”
“Come on, it won’t be that bad. You know everybody in school already. All you have to do is say hello to them.”
“And introduce them to you, which is stupid, because you know them all just as well as I do.”
Lisa giggled. “It’s all supposed to improve our social graces. Don’t you want your graces improved?”
“What if I forget someone’s name? I’ll die.”
“Stop worrying. You’ll be fine. And we’re late, so hurry up.”
They hurried up the steps into the foyer of the gym and took their places in the receiving line. The first couple to approach them were Bob Carey and Kate Lewis, and Alex was pleased to see that Bob seemed as nervous about moving down the line as Alex was about standing in it. The two of them stood for a moment, wondering what to say to each other. Finally it was Kate who spoke.
“Isn’t this wonderful?” she asked. “All year I’ve been looking forward to tonight, and I’m never going to forget a minute of it.�
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“None of us will,” Lisa assured her.
And none of them ever did. For none of their lives was ever quite the same again.
CHAPTER TWO
The last thundering rock chord was abruptly cut off, and Alex, gasping, glanced around the gym in search of Lisa. The last time he’d seen her—at least fifteen minutes ago—she’d been dancing with Bob Carey, and he’d been dancing with Kate Lewis. Since then, he’d danced with three other girls, and now Bob was standing near the wall shouting in Jennifer Lang’s ear. He started outside, certain that he’d find Lisa out on the lawn catching her breath. As he reached the door, a hand closed on his arm. He turned to see Carolyn Evans smiling at him.
“Hey,” Carolyn said, “if you’re looking for Lisa, she’s in the rest room with Kate and Jenny.”
“Then I guess I’ll have a glass of punch, if there’s any left.”
“There’s loads left,” Carolyn told him in the slightly mocking voice Alex knew she always used when she was trying to seem more sophisticated than the rest of the kids. “Hardly anybody’s drinking it except you and Lisa. Come on out to my car—I’ve got some beer.”
Alex shook his head.
“Oh, come on,” Carolyn urged. “What’s one beer gonna do to you? I’ve had four, and I’m not drunk.”
“I’m driving. If I’m driving, I don’t drink.”
Carolyn’s head tipped back, and a throaty laugh that Alex was sure she practiced for hours emerged from her glistening lips. “You’re just too good to be true, aren’t you? Not even one little tiny beer? Come on, Alex—get human.”
“It’s not that,” Alex replied, forcing a grin. “It’s just that my dad’ll take my car away from me if I come home with beer on my breath.”
“Too bad for you,” Carolyn purred. “Then I guess you can’t come to my party.” When she saw a slight flicker of interest in Alex’s eyes, she decided to press her advantage. “Everybody’s going to be there—sort of a housewarming.”
Alex stared at Carolyn in disbelief. Was she really talking about the hacienda? But his mother told him the Evanses weren’t letting anyone see it for another month, until it was completely refurbished.
And everyone in La Paloma, no matter what he thought of the Evanses, wanted to see what Cynthia Evans had done with Bill Evans’s money.
At first, when the rumors began circulating that the Evanses had bought the enormous old mansion on top of Hacienda Drive, the assumption had been that they would tear it down. It had stood vacant for too many years, was far too big for a family to keep up without servants, and was far too decayed for anyone to seriously consider restoring it.
But then the project had begun.
First to be repaired was the outer wall. Much of it had long since collapsed; only a few yards of its southern expanse were still standing. But it had been rebuilt, its old wooden gates replaced by new ones whose designs had been copied from faded sketches of the hacienda as it had looked a hundred and fifty years earlier. Except that the new gates were wired with alarms and swung smoothly open on electrically controlled rollers. And then, after the wall was complete, Cynthia had begun the restoration of the mansion and the outbuildings.
Almost everybody in La Paloma had gone up to the top of Hacienda Drive once or twice, but the gates were always closed, and no one had succeeded in getting inside the walls. Alex, along with some of his friends, had climbed the hills a few times to peer down into the courtyard, but all they’d been able to see was the exterior work—the new plaster and the whitewashing, and the replacement of the red tiles on the roof.
What everyone was truly waiting for was a glimpse of the interior, and now Carolyn was saying her friends could see it that very night.
Alex eyed her skeptically. “I thought your mother wasn’t letting anyone in until next month.”
“Mom and Dad are in San Francisco for the weekend,” Carolyn said.
“I don’t know—” Alex began, remembering his promise not to go to any parties after the dance.
“Don’t know about what?” Lisa asked, slipping her arm through his.
“He doesn’t want to come to my party,” Carolyn replied before Alex could say anything.
Lisa’s eyes widened. “There’s a party? At the hacienda?”
Carolyn nodded with elaborate casualness. “Bob and Kate are coming, and Jenny Lang, and everybody.”
Lisa turned to Alex. “Well, let’s go!” Alex flushed and looked uncomfortable, but said nothing. The band struck up the last dance and Lisa led Alex onto the floor. “What’s wrong?” she asked a moment later. “Why can’t we go to Carolyn’s party?”
“ ’Cause I don’t want to.”
“You just don’t like Carolyn,” Lisa argued. “But you won’t even have to talk to her. Everybody else will be there too.”
“It isn’t that.”
“Then what is it?”
“I promised my folks we wouldn’t go to any parties. Dad gave me some money to take some of the kids out for a hamburger, and I promised we’d come home right after that.”
Lisa fell silent for a few seconds; then: “We don’t have to tell them where we were.”
“They’d find out.”
“But don’t you even want to see the place?”
“Sure, but—”
“Then let’s go. Besides, it’s not where we go that your mom and dad are worried about—they’re afraid you’ll drink. So we’ll go to the party, but we won’t even have a beer. And we won’t stay very long.”
“Come on, Lisa. I promised them I wouldn’t—”
But Lisa suddenly broke away from him and started pulling him off the dance floor. “Let’s find Kate and Bob. Maybe we can convince them to go up to Carolyn’s with us for just a few minutes, then the four of us can go out for hamburgers. That way we can see the place, and you won’t have to lie to your folks.”
As Lisa led him out of the gym, Alex knew he’d give in, even though he shouldn’t. With Lisa, it was hard not to give in—she always managed to make everything sound perfectly logical, even when Alex was sure it wasn’t.
The headlights of Alex’s Mustang picked up the open gates of the hacienda, and he braked the car to a stop. “Are we supposed to park out here, or go inside?”
Lisa shrugged. “Search me. Carolyn didn’t say.” Suddenly a horn sounded, and Bob Carey’s Porsche pulled up beside them, its window rolled down.
“Over there,” Bob called. He was pointing off to the left, where a small group of cars already stood parked in the shadow of the wall. Following Bob, Alex maneuvered the Mustang into a spot next to a Camaro, shut off the engine, then turned to Lisa.
“Maybe we oughta just go on home,” he suggested, but Lisa grinned and shook her head.
“I want to see it. Come on—just for a little while.” She got out of the car, and after a second’s hesitation, Alex joined her. A moment later Kate and Bob appeared out of the darkness, and the four of them started toward the lights flooding from the gateway.
“I don’t believe this,” Kate said a moment later. They were standing just inside the gate, trying to absorb the transformation that had come over what had been, only a year earlier, a crumbling ruin.
To the left, the old stables had been rebuilt into garages, and in the bright whiteness of the floodlights, the new plaster was indistinguishable from the old. The only change was that the stable roofs, originally thatched, were now of the same red tile as the house and the servants’ quarters.
“It’s weird,” Alex said. “It looks like it’s a couple of hundred years old.”
“Except for that,” Lisa breathed. “Have you ever seen anything like it?”
Dominating the courtyard, which until recently had been nothing more than an overgrown weed patch, was a glistening swimming pool fed by a cascade of tumbling water that made its way down five intricately tiled tiers before finally splashing into the immense oval of the pool.
Bob Carey whistled softly. “How big do you s’pose
it is?”
“Big enough,” Alex replied. Then his eyes wandered to what had once been the servants’ quarters. “Wanta bet that’s a pool house now?”
Before anyone could venture an answer, Carolyn Evans’s voice rang out over the rock music that was throbbing from the huge main house. “Hey! Come on in!”
Glancing at each other uneasily, the four of them slowly crossed the courtyard, then stepped up onto the broad loggia that ran the entire length of the house. Carolyn, grinning happily, waited for them at the elaborately carved oaken front door. “Isn’t it neat? Come on in—everybody’s already here.”
They went through the front door into a massive tile-floored entry hall that was dominated by a staircase curving up to the second floor. To the right there was a large dining room, and beyond it they could see through another room into the kitchen. “That’s a butler’s pantry between the dining room and kitchen,” Carolyn explained, then raised her voice as someone turned up the volume on the stereo. “Mom wasn’t really sure it was supposed to be there, but she put it in anyway.”
“You going to have a butler?” Kate Lewis asked.
Carolyn shrugged with elaborate unconcern. “I don’t know. I guess so. Mom says the house is too big for María to take care of by herself.”
“María Torres?” Bob Carey groaned. “That old witch can’t even take care of her own house. My mom fired her after the first day!”
“She’s okay—” Alex began, but was immediately drowned out by the others’ laughter. Even Lisa joined in.
“Come on, Alex, she’s a loony-bin case. Everybody knows that.” Then she glanced guiltily toward Carolyn. “She isn’t here, is she?”
Carolyn giggled maliciously. “If she is, she just got an earful.”