“Yeah?” He dropped his gaze again and feigned abstraction as he leafed through his mail, flyers and periodicals and bills, from the looks of things, and he paused to frown at a manila envelope. “Have you now? In quantity? Good heavens, Avalon Harwood, what kind of company have you been keeping?”
He kept his face lower, but she didn’t miss his little smile.
“Well, you know how San Francisco is.”
He looked up at her then, and something about the shift in his stance told her he was about to deliver a coup de grace. “I happen to know there are no hippies left in San Francisco. They were priced out. They have to import the weirdos and eccentrics and free spirits now, and they go home to other cities during the day. Everyone’s a workaholic and no one thinks about sex. The Summer of Love it ain’t.”
Damn. So he did know how San Francisco was. Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead and all those guys wouldn’t recognize the place today.
“Which is why I’m sure your corporate millionaires and other geeks on retreat here in Hellcat Canyon would find an unpredictable parade of middle-aged nudists . . . refreshing,” he continued.
Mac met her eyes, kapow, the better to savor her reaction. “It might make them nostalgic, even, for that time of free love . . . and so forth.”
This was so brilliantly played she was arrested by admiration. She had every faith it would give way to anger in a second or two.
Because the moment he said “sex” that’s all she was thinking about, and yet she couldn’t quite remember the last time she’d had any of that, the same way she couldn’t remember the last time, say, she’d had a piece of toast, though surely it wasn’t that long ago.
She honestly couldn’t think of a single tech worker she knew who could say the word “hippies” without snorting. Or who would willingly whip off their hoodies to reveal their skinny bodies, untouched by the sun in eons thanks to San Francisco weather and all that work. Let alone whip off their undies in front of their coworkers. It would take an awful lot of alcohol or some truly splendid Burning Man–caliber drugs.
Rachel was pretty cool, but she was a businesswoman after all. She wasn’t going to want a property adjacent to a part-time nudist colony.
Avalon was going to have to keep her from coming out here today. She fidgeted with her phone, clutched in her fist.
Mac’s eyebrows went up, urging her to say something.
“You don’t know what you’re up against, Mac,” she said idly.
“Don’t I?” he said softly, sympathetically.
She didn’t like that. It reminded her of the times she’d been up against him. And how it clearly hadn’t meant much to him.
“How’s your head, Harwood?”
“Harder and cooler than ever,” she said tersely.
“You have a little bruise. Blue’s not a bad color for you, though.”
“Such a relief to hear I’m not an eyesore.”
It was like a thousand new suns were born in her chest when he smiled slowly at that.
She fought the feeling as if she was actually being sucked into an orbit. She realized that at no point had Corbin ever made her feel as though she could lose herself in him and not even notice. Her boundaries had never been compromised.
“I hear . . . do I hear chickens?” she said suddenly. That muffled, contented little bock bock sound was almost as good as a cat’s purr.
“Those would be my chickens.”
“You have chickens, too?”
“Yep.”
She was silent, and he studied her face as if she herself were the results of a Google search. “You want to pet them, don’t you? You want to pet them and give them names.”
“No,” she lied, swiftly.
This made the corner of his mouth dent.
Though she did wonder why they didn’t have names. Maybe because he ate them.
She was suffused with a million questions, but equally determined to continue proving she did not give a crap about him. But why had he joined the national guard? She was pretty sure that was at least an eight-year commitment, including active and reserve duty.
Her stomach reflexively contracted at the notion that someone might have shot at him, the same way she’d been panicked at the idea of someone taking away his P-29. She couldn’t help it.
“So how’s your brother? Is he a ‘farmer,’ too?” She air-quoted farmer.
It seemed safer to ask about somebody else first, to go at it obliquely. He might slip up and reveal more about himself. He and Ty had been so close.
“I don’t know,” he said shortly.
“What?” She hadn’t meant to sound surprised.
“I. Don’t. Know,” he repeated evenly, slowly, patiently.
But a chilliness had crept into the words.
“But . . .”
He waited.
He didn’t issue the usual “but what?” as a prompt.
She had a feeling they’d be standing here like this until California broke off into the sea if she didn’t speak. The man was nothing if not stubborn.
So she spoke.
“I’ll give you a hundred thousand for your Devil’s Leap land.”
His eyes flared in surprise. And then something very like bald admiration flickered and heated them. They locked gazes. His became a trifle lazy.
“Silly girl,” he said fondly, finally.
WOW.
It was the perfect response. Because it made her want to deck him, and he knew it.
And he knew she knew why he’d said it.
Which is why his smile got a shade more wicked. Daring her to react. Inviting a response he could parry.
Damn, but he was a competitor, in ways both subtle and overt. He always had been, of course. Perversely, it was as invigorating as walking into a blast of cold air whipping off the sea.
It made her doubly determined to win. I’m no hick from the sticks, Mac. I beat you before and I’ll do it again.
A little rustle made her turn toward the bushes. The brown-and-white cat emerged and sat down next to Mac like a spaniel called to heel.
It was all Avalon could do not to drop to her knees and coo at it. She yearned to pet it.
“Hey, cat,” Mac said nonchalantly to it. It was ridiculous, but in that moment it felt like he was actually rubbing in the fact that he had a pet, even if he couldn’t be bothered to give it a name.
“Well, guess I’ll see you around the grounds, neighbor.” Mac turned around.
The cat did, too.
“Oh . . . I meant to tell you. Whatever you do, don’t go up in the attic.”
And with that enigmatic little warning, he strolled off, whistling a little tune.
It sounded like the Jefferson Airplane’s “Somebody to Love.”
Hey Rach! Can we do a raincheck on lunch today? Sorry! Something came up.
She sent the text immediately. Then she took her laptop out onto the upper story deck to answer GradYouAte-related emails. They wanted her to approve the revised art for the cheerleader module—which was her idea in the first place, just like GradYouAte. She referred them to Corbin.
But all afternoon pale butts twinkled and flashed in her peripheral vision as bathers scaled Devil’s Leap and leaped merrily into the swimming hole, their peens and boobs cheerfully flapping as they sailed down. KERSPLASH! Laughter swelled and ebbed and echoed, voices cheerfully shouted to each other. All those naked people out there were having the time of their lives. Being who they were. Doing what they loved. Absolutely unashamed.
And here she sat, feeling so hollowed out with vague yearning and restlessness it was a wonder a wandering breeze didn’t coax a note from her, as if she were a didjeridoo.
Finally, she gave up, propped her hand on her chin and glumly watched the frolickers. She scratched beneath her bra strap.
All at once it felt like a little lace-and-wire jail.
She scrabbled underneath her T-shirt and unhooked it as if it were an octopus that had her in its dea
th grip. Then with a series of shrugs she wriggled from the straps and yanked it out of her shirt sleeve, no mean feat, and hurled it in a fit of pique across the deck.
Whereupon it disappeared over the side.
Surprise, surprise. She’d overshot the mark.
Chapter 9
She abandoned the email answering a few minutes later and, on the theory that a little exercise might burn off her restless mood, began washing the walls in preparation for painting them.
And then she saw them: the Bluetooth speakers she’d hauled in from her trunk, the ones she was supposed to give to Corbin. They were a dazzling bit of technology that could make your house sound like Coachella was trapped inside.
Or . . . outside.
She abandoned the wall washing.
And set to work with the cool-headed purpose of an assassin assembling a bomb.
She was just ahead of him, so close her hair flew out behind her and lashed his face. His lungs burned with the effort to keep up.
She scrambled up Devil’s Leap as nimbly as a mountain goat, and he was just about to reach out, to drag his fingertips along her shoulder blades in a tag, to make her turn around so he could pull her into his arms. Something seized him by both arms and yanked him back so hard his head snapped; he looked down upon the strong hands of his father, that old gold wedding ring, the hairy forearms, the tendons straining as they gripped him fast. And as he fought to free himself, Avalon stopped and looked at him then, her eyes radiating warmth. She stretched out her hand and uncurled her fingers; in her palm was the little stone heart he’d found for Trixie the Squirrel’s grave. Then she spun around and hurled it far, far out into the water. It sank below.
She leaped in after it. She sank. And didn’t come up.
“Avalon!” he screamed, his feet scrabbling in place like Fred Flintstone in his little car. And finally his father’s hands were gone. Instead, one of his favorite goats, Baaa Baaaa O’Riley, was standing up there with him.
“You win some, you lose some,” the goat said.
Which struck Mac as a pretty cavalier thing for a talking goat to say. “That’s not very nice,” he said, quite stung.
And then the goat opened its mouth and screamed and screamed and screamed.
Holy fucking—!
Mac jackknifed out of deep sleep into a sitting position, his heart pounding like a floor tom, his arms helicoptering around his head reflexively to ward off an attack.
He was panting as if he’d actually made that run all the way up to the rock.
That was it: no more pizza before bedtime.
His lungs were still heaving. Which was why it took him another millisecond to become aware that it wasn’t a goat scream that had terrified him out of sleep. Rather an actual, keening, tormented cry had sliced right through his dreams like an icy cutlass.
Gooseflesh raced over his body. All the hairs on his skin leaped erect.
What the fucking hell was that?
A . . . siren? An air raid?
No. No siren could sound so sort of . . . personally anguished.
The sound was definitely human.
In a single fluid motion he scrambled nudely up out of bed, seized his twelve-gage shotgun, shoved the window up, and cocked the gun.
The sound rose and fell. Dirgelike.
It was actually another second or two before his violated senses and assaulted nerves could reassemble and work together to draw a conclusion. And when he did he slammed the window shut again and stared at it blankly.
Oh, yeah. It was human, all right.
A very particular human: Melissa Manchester.
More specifically, it was the Melissa Manchester song “Don’t Cry Out Loud.”
From the sound of things, broadcast through speakers the size of boxcars.
Every wailed note and histrionic piano chord was delivered with pristine clarity.
He moved gingerly, slowly, pensively, locked his gun and hung it back up on the wall.
He tentatively opened the front door. He was tempted to hold his breath, as if he was plunging into noxious gas. He stepped outside.
Holy shit.
However it was accomplished—God knows they made teeny speakers these days that could produce just about the same amount of noise—the sound felt loud enough to crumble the walls of Jericho, or to be mistaken for the kind of fracking that could cause earthquakes three states away.
He was held motionless in a veritable net of sound. It was like the trees, the hills, the very ground and air were singing.
Singing the worst, the worst song in the whole world.
The execution of this fiendish plot had been diabolically skillful.
He stood, still naked, in that storm of sound, buffeted by a full dozen more emotions, which was about double the number that had even twinged him in the last few years.
But he was shocked by the impression he decided to nourish.
It was: she remembered.
Avalon remembered I hate that song.
He’d mentioned it to her maybe once in his entire life, and there was a very good reason why he’d never mentioned it again.
But she’d remembered.
He imagined a shrink would have a field day with the fact that, in the middle of his righteous and quite justified outrage, a perverse little pilot light of joy glowed.
Because if she’d remembered a stupid little thing like that, he had a hunch she remembered everything. Because that’s what you did when someone meant something to you. You hoarded every little detail you could.
How long had it been since he’d felt truly known? Something in him that he hadn’t known was tense shifted a little. Like he’d been given just a skosh more leg room on a flight.
He stood there until the song ended, as if to make sure an attacking army really was in retreat.
He sucked in a long, long breath, as if the air was finally clean again.
Well. Points to Avalon. It was a helluva way to wake up.
He turned and went back into the house, hefted a bag of kibble and poured some into The Cat’s bowl.
The Cat, unoffended by being jounced out of bed unceremoniously by Mac’s sudden leap out of it and who had in fact hopped back in and stolen his warm spot, jumped down, did a sort of nonchalant downward dog stretch and headed for his bowl. The Cat always rebounded swiftly from the many vicissitudes of humans, and never seemed to hold any grudges. In this way he and Mac were probably a little different.
Mac stepped outside again and stretched his arms luxuriously upward into the chilly morning. He’d been contemplating planting about a quarter acre with winter crops, and he needed to clean up the rest of the hydrangeas he’d trimmed behind the Devil’s Leap house and get as much work out of the way as possible during this warm spell, including trimming branches near the roof and cutting back the oleander.
He started the coffee, pulled on some clothes, and dozily communed with six deer moseying down the road, who all turned big limpid brown eyes on him, eyes which reminded him of the very person who was torturing him with Melissa Manchester.
The Cat came to sit next to him and wash his face. Mac always talked to The Cat. “Looks like it’s going to be a beautif—”
DUN dun DUN dun DUN dun . . .
He froze, blank with a sort of dark amazement as the sound hammered his nerves like they were piano strings.
The motherfucking song was starting all over again.
Well.
Now he knew how it would go down.
It was horrible. And original and impish and fiendish. Precisely the sort of thing he’d expect from the girl who’d once turned the top of Devil’s Leap into a tap dancing stage, who had once put acorns into an Easy-Bake Oven recipe and had then needed to go to the hospital for a stomach ache, who had suggested they all pretend to be mummies and walk off the edge with their arms outstretched. What if she did this every day?
Now the game really was on.
Later, when he stalked down to get his ma
il, Avalon was standing at the mailboxes, shuffling through hers like a Vegas gambler who knows she has the winning hand. He had a hunch she’d been waiting there for him to show up.
“Oh, hey, Mac.”
“Kicking out the jams today, are we, Avalon?”
She looked up, her velvety eyes innocent and questioning. “Don’t you like my taste in music?”
“IT’S NOT MUSIC AND IT’S NOT TASTE.”
Her eyes widened very slightly.
He took a subtle breath.
“Gosh, I didn’t mean to upset you, Mac,” she said very, very mildly. A little furrow crumpled the smooth tawny skin between her brows.
“I’m not upset,” he modulated, perhaps a little too much. Because now he sounded like an announcer on NPR. He’d tried to work with earplugs in. It hadn’t quite done the trick.
“Well, it’s just that you raised your voice just now,” she pointed out, reasonably, and still so, so sympathetically.
“Well, it’s just that I thought I needed to because I thought you might be losing your hearing in your old age. Given the volume of your chosen ‘music.’” He bent his fingers in air quotes around that last word.
“Ohhhhh, that. I just wanted to be able to hear it wherever I went in the house. And it’s a big house. As you know. Cavernous. So roomy and so comfortable and so very, very . . . mine.”
A bird oblivious to the gravity of their showdown trilled like it was Beverly Sills and this was La Traviata.
“Don’t you think the birds and the squirrels and deer mind the noise?” Mac suggested.
“Don’t they mind the music, you mean?” she corrected, her nose wrinkled fetchingly in faux confusion.
“I meant the noise,” he repeated evenly.
She shrugged indolently with one shoulder. “Animals often love music, Mac. I’m sure they’ll get used to it. It’s just that I sometimes get in the mood for an inspirational, motivational ballad. And I never know when the mood might strike. Sometimes it strikes very, very late at night. Sometimes it doesn’t ease up until morning.”
“Is that so, Avalon? Get lonely and bored late at night, do you, these days? Need to burn off a little angst?”
He detected a blip in her aplomb. A hesitation.
Dirty Dancing at Devil's Leap Page 9