“Do I hear fifty-five, fifty-five. Fifty-five,” Chuck Beasley ratta-tat-tatted in auctioneer cadence. “Fifty-five is peanuts for a magnificent house, are you clever people going to let this gentleman outsmart you and outbid you and take home a bargain? Give me fifty-five, fifty-five.”
Avalon raised her finger coolly.
“Lady in the shades bids fifty-five!” the auctioneer crowed. Every head whipped in her direction again. “Do I hear sixty thousand? Sixty thousand is pocket change for a Victorian palace, do I hear sixty thousand?”
Out of the corner of her eye, Avalon saw Handmade Loafers nod subtly.
“Sixty from the well-groomed gentleman!” Chuck Beasley bellowed with pleasure. “Do I hear sixty-five? Sixty-five thousand, you know you want it, you know you came to play, don’t be coy or it’ll get away. Who’ll give me sixty-five?”
“Sixty-five?” said Timid Guy in a little voice. Avalon was pretty sure that would be his first and last bid.
“We have sixty-five, and I know the rest of you can beat that. Do I hear seventy, seventy?”
“ONE HUNDRED,” shouted Button-down Shirt.
It caused a unanimous momentary blip of astonished silence.
“One fifty,” Avalon said coolly. Taking pains to sound bored. She glanced at her fingernails and frowned a little distractedly, as if dropping tens of thousands on property was something she did every day, so commonplace it was all she could do not to whip out her cell phone and start playing Words with Friends.
The auctioneer whistled low. “One fifty to our Lady in the Shades, who reveals herself to be hardcore. Now we got ourselves a horse race. Do I hear one fifty-five? One hundred fifty-five thousand for the house at Devil’s Leap?”
“One sixty,” Handmade Loafers said evenly. He had an English accent. That was interesting.
Avalon would love to beat out an Englishman.
She would love to beat any guy today.
“One seventy-five,” she all but drawled.
“Two hundred thousand,” he countered with great disinterest, before the auctioneer could even say a word.
Thus launched some swift-bidding ping-pong between the two of them.
Up the price went, up and up, with Chuck the auctioneer, who clearly could not believe his luck, merely shouting out their bids as they were made, until:
“Three hundred thousand dollars.”
Handmade Loafers laid those words down like crisp little bricks.
Overalls clutched his heart. Avalon hoped this was merely theatrics.
But sweet Jesus. She was tempted to do the same.
Three . . . hundred . . . thousand . . . dollars.
It sobered her into startled silence. The great weighty roundness of that number cut right through her buzz of defiance and determination. How had it come to this?
She did have the money.
And she’d have a little left. But it was everything she’d meticulously saved over the past two decades.
It was just definitely a lot higher than she thought she’d need to go. She and Corbin always kept money in reserve in case they needed to forego a paycheck, or cover an emergency contingency. Once or twice, early on, she’d dipped into her savings to help cover the GradYouAte payroll.
Clearly it was a lot higher than the auctioneer thought anyone would go, because it took him a good thirty seconds to recover his aplomb.
He cleared his throat.
“Do I hear three hundred five thousand dollars? Three five? Lady in the Shades, I know you don’t want to leave without this magnificent prize. Three hundred five thousand dollars is still a steal and I know you know it. Be the envy of all your friends, not to mention all these people standing around you. Be the enemy of this well-dressed gentleman. Are you going to let him get the better of you?”
Are you going to let him get the better of you? It was like the universe talking directly to her.
Her heart was slamming like bass in a disco.
“All right, then,” Chuck said matter-of-factly, rather sadly. “Three hundred thousand. Going . . .”
Avalon darted a glance at Handmade Loafers.
He was looking steadfastly straight ahead. His posture was indolent. But he had a tell: his face had gone white.
It might just be adrenaline. It might be tension. It might just be because he was English.
But Avalon definitively knew: he wasn’t going to bid higher than that.
Because he couldn’t.
“Going . . .”
Her fingers laced together. “Three ten.”
Had she really said that out loud?
Everyone was looking at her, so she must have.
There was a collective gasp, then someone coughed violently. It was safe to say a circling fly had been siphoned in.
Her words hung in the air, thrumming with insane bravado. Her will had hijacked her senses.
Handmade Loafers’s face was now as gray as his suit.
“Turns out we have three hundred ten thousand dollars.” The auctioneer sounded subdued yet gleeful. “Do I hear three fifteen?”
For a millisecond everything in the world seemed locked rigidly into place. Nothing moved. Not time. Not her lungs or her heart or her eyelids.
“Do I hear three fifteen?” Chuck Beasley coaxed, “Will the well-groomed gentleman sweep the prize away from the lady for three hundred fifteen thousand dollars, or will he suffer defeat today?”
Handmade Loafers was as motionless as the fountain. His lips were parted slightly. Avalon suspected he was struggling for breath.
“Going . . .”
Avalon’s own breath shuddered in and out, in and out. The blood rang in her ears.
“Going . . .”
She knotted her sweat-slick hands and pressed her lips together to prevent her silent, desperate prayers from escaping. She struggled not to close her eyes.
“SOLD! The House at Devil’s Leap sold to the Lady in the Shades!”
A great collective whoop went up.
Avalon had fainted once before in her life, and the moment preceding it had felt a lot like this one: the light-headedness, the black spots dancing before her eyes. So she didn’t trust herself to move just yet.
She did close her eyes briefly and indulged in an exhale so lengthy it ought to have deflated her two sizes.
“Congratulations on your exquisite taste and your triumph, my lady, and thank all of you for coming today. Why don’t we give her a hand? Come have a chat with me, if you would.” Chuck Beasley beckoned her forward.
She took a long, low, slow bow to acknowledge the applause. Her head swam on her way back up, another reminder that she’d slept maybe two hours last night. When she was upright she glanced around her as if she was seeing the world for the first time. Once again, everything had changed, and she’d done it. The sky seemed to have acquired a sort of rippling haze. She distantly knew this was because she was drunk on euphoria and bravado and fury and fatigue.
She moved, as though borne on a magic carpet, toward the beaming, beckoning auctioneer. She couldn’t feel her feet.
Handmade Loafers rotated slowly to watch. She was distantly aware that his expression suggested she might be a creature he’d never before seen, something cute but perhaps rabid. He was holding his cell phone a few inches from his ear, as if it was perhaps too hot to hold it closer. A peculiar high-pitched whine seemed to be emanating from it, as though it was picking up outer space signals, or an incoming fax, or perhaps preparing to explode.
And as she drew nearer to him, she nodded gently, and became aware that the whining sound was, in fact, a word: “Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo . . .”
Chapter 4
“WHAT THE FUCKING HELL HAPPENED? Who the hell was that woman? Where did she come from?”
Mac was in his cottage. Graybill was still on the courthouse steps.
“Mr. Coltrane, may I ask if you intend for me to attempt to answer these rhetorical questions, or are you venting?”
Oh, f
or God’s sake.
“Well, obviously the latter, Graybill,” he said through gritted teeth. “But if you can address the former, you’d have my utmost gratitude.” He mimicked Graybill’s clipped English.
“She went off with the auctioneer, Mr. Coltrane. If I’d known you’d wanted me to give pursuit I might have.”
Mac sucked in another breath, as if he hoped oxygen would behave like Ativan. His equilibrium remained thrown. “What did she look like?”
“She was about five feet five. A bit sweaty and disheveled. Frankly, she looked a bit as though she might have slept in her clothes. I at first took her for one of the homeless women who camp out here, or for someone late for a meeting with her parole officer. Then I realized she was wearing what I believe were lululemon yoga pants and Armani sunglasses.”
Mac was momentarily speechless. “What in the . . . how in the . . . lululemon? Are you kidding me with this, Graybill?”
“I wouldn’t presume to kid about this, Mr. Coltrane, given how important the matter is to you. You may thank my wife for my knowledge of lululemon.”
Mac rubbed his forehead with his hand. “Is that all you’ve got on her?”
“She had a very determined air. Hysteria channeled in a very goal-oriented way. Knew exactly what she came to do and wasn’t going to leave without accomplishing it.”
Mac was momentarily distracted by wondering about Graybill’s marriage, given the things he noticed about women.
“And she wasn’t unattractive, Mr. Coltrane. Her hair was a sort of dark red. Her form was pleasing. Her face was covered mostly with the aforementioned sunglasses. Though I thought I saw freckles. It of course might have been, er . . . dirt.”
The word “freckles” pinged somewhere in the vicinity of Mac’s heart, which he used these days strictly as an organ for pumping blood. Certainly no woman had seen the inside of it, to be euphemistic, in eons.
But the word was like a little pinprick puncture. Oddly, he felt the anger seep out of him.
And for a vertiginous millisecond, a slippage in time, he was that uncertain kid again. Hurt. Inwardly flailing, outwardly frozen.
For just a second, however. He might as well be made of rock these days.
“I do wish I could be of more assistance, Mr. Coltrane,” Graybill said into the silence. Graybill was starchy, but Mac believed him, because he was a decent guy.
“What a pity I’m not a police sketch artist, Graybill. Or a psychic. Or both.”
“All viable career alternatives, Mr. Coltrane, should you wish to abandon the agrarian life. A psychic works downtown in Hellcat Canyon, I’m given to understand.”
“Thank you, Graybill. I, too, have seen the giant palm over the New Age bookstore on Main Street. That was more humor on my part; please don’t bill me for it.”
They remained connected in a sort of commiserating silence.
“Mr. Coltrane, I would be happy to act as your agent should you wish to contact Tiberius in New York.”
That was about as delicately put as any human could put anything. Graybill knew exactly how Mac felt about the house. And about his brother, Ty. It was a testament to how well he knew how much this meant to Mac.
“No,” Mac said shortly. “Thank you,” he added a moment later, after a pointed delay, to punish Graybill a very little for even asking.
“Very well,” Graybill said evenly.
Mac cleared his throat. “That woman was attractive, huh? At least that gives me something to work with.”
“I’ve every confidence in your eventual success, Mr. Coltrane.” Admirable dryness, that.
“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 heard Clair 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 it wanted her 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.
That was 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?
She jiggled at the latch of the gate to free it, and then gave it a hearty shove, which made it groan and creak in protest, and walked its considerable weight almost to the far end of the road, until it was most of the way open.
There. That was better.
The freshness in the air hit her like a wine distilled from childhood and freedom. From here, she could probably find her way to the Devil’s Leap swimming hole with her eyes closed. She’d get there by texture: the scratch of the blueberry vines when you dove down the dirty path, the stones, some smooth, some coarse, arranged by nature, that formed a risky sort of staircase up to the top of the rock—
A text interrupted her reverie. It was Rachel:
The house looks gorgeous! I’ll be in Sac tomorrow—how about if I come by around two?
Avalon texted: Perfect!
A little rustle and a thud next to her feet made her jump.
“Well, there you are!”
The cat had long white legs and a brown tabby saddle and its homely face was the sort a child might draw—comprised of spheres and triangles. He was also missing about a third of his tail. But it had a certain rakish nonchalance that conferred presence. He reminded Avalon of Humphrey Bogart.
Dirty Dancing at Devil's Leap Page 4