Snowstorms in a Hot Climate

by Sarah Dunant

  Then, suddenly, she straightened herself and walked off the porch toward the road, her attention caught by something else. Or someone else. From the barn J.T. emerged, carrying a sack of what might have been grain. They saw each other, and communication flashed between them. I couldn’t read it, but there was something in the way her head rose up that spoke of belligerence or defiance. Then it was over, and she turned on her heel, shooting me one last glance before walking lazily back to the house. The screen door slammed behind her. Old flames after the heat had died down? None of my business.

  Back on the road, J.T. seemed preoccupied. Bad tempered again. “I don’t know how much you know,” he said at last, almost impatiently.

  “Enough.”

  “And how much is that?”

  “I know that you and Lenny used to work together, and I know what it is you did. And that you don’t do it anymore.” Pause. “I also know that you gave Elly help when she needed it.”

  We drove for a few moments in silence. “And where do you fit in?”

  “I’m here because she asked me to come.”

  He stretched slightly at the wheel, rubbing his back against the seat and wiping one hand on his thigh. I studied the legs reaching down to the pedals, slim, almost elegant, so mismatched with the rest of his body. His legs, my hair. Maybe he too would have been grateful for a way of homogenizing his image. Or would he?

  “You should get her out of it.” It was so quiet and mumbled that I almost missed it. But there it was, the one I had been waiting for.

  “Why?”

  He made a harsh clicking sound, another statement of frustration at my chronic obtuseness. “She doesn’t fit, that’s why. She never has. He told her lies and she believed them. But even she can’t be fooled forever. Things have changed. It’s not a game anymore.”

  Talking in tongues. “What does that mean?”

  He scowled. “You asked me what I thought, and I told you. What Lenny does is dangerous. Especially the way he does it. You should get her out while you can. His luck won’t last forever.”

  Ahead of us the red mailboxes appeared, standing sentry by the turnoff. The journey back had taken no time at all. He took the corner fast and had to brake as we hit the dust path. As the truck whined in protest, he muttered something. I thought I caught the words “… before it’s too late.”

  “What?”

  But he shook his head. Stubborn silence. I felt rushed. And bullied. What gave him the right? “If you think all this, why don’t you tell her yourself?”

  “Because she’s your friend, not mine,” he said curtly.

  “And what about Lenny? Whose friend is he?”

  This time he looked at me. A kind of fury. “Listen, Lenny and I worked together, right? That means we got certain obligations to each other. She isn’t one of them. Got it?”

  He made it clear this was the end of the conversation. I sat with my anger clasped tight between my hands. On the brow of the hill he stopped. It was my cue for an exit. I stayed put.

  “So, can I tell her what you’ve said? Or was it all ‘confidential’?”

  There was only a hint of mockery in my voice, but I have no doubt he heard it. “There’s nothing to tell,” he said, as if the whole subject suddenly bored him. “We just went for a ride, that’s all.”

  I got out of the car and slammed the door.

  “Here.” He called me back, holding out the star map through the open window. “Take it. You could learn a lot from looking at what’s already around you.” And letting it fall to the ground, he drove away.

  I stood watching the truck grow smaller in the distance. Then I picked up the map and began to walk. The exercise made me feel better, less churned up. And so I crossed the ridge back to the little wooden house on the edge of the world where Elly was sleeping peacefully.

  eight

  Except Elly wasn’t there. In the hollow of the cushion where she had been lying was a note, written in faint drawing pencil:

  A short walk in the canyon. Back by teatime or call out the huskies.

  It had no time on it. The kitchen clock read 3:40 P.M. I thought about trying to catch her up, but there was no way of knowing how long she’d been gone, and from our experience of canyon walks I knew the path was not easy to follow. If she strayed and I missed her, we would never find each other. Better to wait. I settled myself in a chair near the fireplace and started in on the meaning of life.

  The question was, Should I tell Elly? Or, to be more precise, what was there to tell? Even now the conversation shimmered and slid in and out of my grasp like a fish in fast water, full of atmosphere but with little meaning. What exactly had been said? That J.T. thought she should leave Lenny. That came as no surprise. He had said as much before. What else? That she should do it soon, before it was too late. Because Lenny’s luck would not last forever. Those were the words that carried the chill. Were they just some strange prognostication gained from stargazing, or did J.T. know something? In which case, how did he know, and more important, why didn’t he tell Lenny?

  Consider J.T. What made him so incorruptible? He was as much an unknown as Lenny. More so. Elly had at least loved and lived with Lenny. She knew him. By her own admission, she knew nothing about the man who claimed to be his friend. A man who until a few years ago had earned his living by dissembling, fooling most of the people most of the time. The fact that I instinctively trusted him more than I did Lenny was based on a number of things. As Elly herself had put it, he shone less, and therefore seemed more real. His anger felt safer than Lenny’s charm. He was not the one who had hurt Elly, so he could not be blamed. Most of all, it appeared, he was on my side. But with what motive? For one of nature’s loners, he was getting very involved. Might it not be that he was jealous of Lenny? There were reasons enough. Lenny was fabulous. Lenny was charmed. Where J.T. had almost got busted, Lenny walked the tightrope with wit and with style. And he walked it with Elly. Where was J.T.’s comfort—a large garden and a single bed? Maybe he got his kicks from undermining others. Nothing he said could be backed up. He had even warned me against repeating it to Elly—a protection, no doubt, against it getting back to Lenny, who would surely see it as a betrayal. The more I thought about it, the more worms I could see squirming under the surface.

  If I told Elly the facts, they amounted to nothing. And if I interpreted the innuendo, wouldn’t she be obliged to warn Lenny? And mightn’t that, in some way, bring them closer together? No, malice or make-believe, there was nothing to tell. I felt better.

  I’m not sure when I realized that she had been away too long. There is a point during California afternoons when the heat is so close and so powerful that it brings everything to a temporary standstill. Time bears no relationship to the hands on the clock. Maybe it was this, or maybe I had simply dozed for a while without knowing it, tumbled into a kind of waking daydream. Whatever the reason, I didn’t at first realize how late it had become.

  In the kitchen I flicked on the radio while the kettle boiled. The FM station told me it was 6:08 P.M. Even assuming Elly had left the house the minute before I arrived, she had been away for two and a half hours. I went out on the deck to watch for her.

  The sun had started moving again, mixing the color palette with a little glitter, playing to the gallery now. In the canyon, a ghost of a wind was ruffling the heads of the trees. I kept thinking I had caught sight of her, or made out the sound of her feet on bracken near the house, but it was simply the breeze playing tricks, and she never appeared. If it hadn’t been for J.T.’s conversation, I doubt whether I would have thought twice about the delay. City girls always misjudge landscapes, and in my time I had been on more than one walk with Elly where a half-hour stroll turned into a minor marathon. As a child I had picked up my mother’s fear when my father was late home from work. He used to travel a lot in those early days, and one evening the radio had given news of a multiple pileup on a motorway he should have been driving along. He was two hours late that nigh
t due to the traffic jam caused. He called my mother from the nearest service station, but the damage was done, and ever after she suffered nightmares of oxyacetylene torches cutting through buckled car frames on even the simplest of journeys. Her anxieties were so great they even blocked my own, but as I grow older I find that I too have to quieten my imagination when people are late from car trips. Traditionally, though, the fear is limited to vehicles. When walking, people always come back to me.

  J.T.’s whispers left shadows in the sunshine. It was late. She should have been back. At 7:00 P.M. I decided to go and look for her. I was upstairs changing into walking shoes when the phone rang. Elly, stranded somewhere, needing a lift. I got down the stairs fast, but it stopped ringing just as I reached it. Still, if it was her, she would call again. I waited. Five minutes later it rang. This time my hand was over the receiver.

  “Elly?”

  Nothing. Silence. Then a man’s voice. “Hi. How are you today?” in a flat, dead tone. A long pause. Then, “Have a nice evening. And see you soon, huh?” with the same dull death in the voice. Then the line disconnected.

  I looked down at the receiver and felt a chill inside me. I remembered again the other phone call, at dawn; I heard J.T.’s mumblings over the car engine—“Things have changed. It’s not a game anymore.” And suddenly I was frightened for Elly.

  From the deck I shouted her name over the canyon. My voice burst into the silence and seemed to carry halfway to the ocean, but I couldn’t be sure how far it would penetrate the undergrowth. I clambered down onto the path and started walking. For the first quarter mile it was familiar. We had been here twice before and had trampled down the top layer of summer growth. But we had never got that far. At night sometimes you could hear coyotes howling in the belly of the canyon, and we had been careful not to stray from the path. I reached what I thought was our limit. The track plunged downward. I followed. Fifty yards on I came to a small clearing, with two separate paths branching off from it. I shouted again. The sound returned empty. Which way? Above me the canyon had become a cliff. I could see nothing but trees, no sign of the house. What if she had arrived home and was standing out on the deck looking for me? Or had made it down as far as the road and was stranded with no way of getting back? Or maybe she really was lost in the canyon. In which case I was going to need help. J.T.? Who else was there to ask? I hesitated for a moment, then turned and forged my way back up toward the house.

  The light was already beginning to fade as I pulled myself onto the deck, soaked with sweat and a little the worse for wear. It was then I heard it, the sound of a car engine, the crunch of wheels on gravel. I ran to the top of the stairs in time to see a youngish man in Yuppie casuals getting out of the driver’s seat and walking round to the passenger door. Elly emerged, a hand on his arm. She saw me immediately and waved, but as she walked toward me I saw she was limping.

  She must have read some of the last few hours in my face, because when she reached me she grabbed hold of my hand and squeezed tightly.

  “Oh, God, Marla. I’m sorry. You were worried. I knew you would be. I got totally lost, completely fucked up my sense of direction. It took me hours to get out of the canyon. And when I got to the road I didn’t have any money. I had to hitch a lift back.”

  “What happened to your foot?”

  She made a face. “I slipped down a gopher hole. My fault—it’s these plastic shoes, not made for mountaineering. Can you believe it? Typical. I’m OK. But what about you? How did you get all those scratches?”

  I looked down at my arms. “I went looking for you.”

  “Oh, you didn’t.” She groaned and laughed. “Jesus, what a pair we are. I’m sorry.”

  Behind her, Sir Galahad hovered nervously. “What about him?” I said, gesturing with my eyes.

  “Oh shit, Frank. He gave me a lift from the road. Went miles out of his way. He’s really sweet. Can we give him a drink or something, just to say thank you?”

  I studied the rather awkward figure, smooth plump face, and clumsy half smile. Another lame dog. In the old days Elly had been in the habit of collecting them. It had been my habit to be rude to them. I avoided temptation by becoming the waitress.

  By the time I returned with bottle and glasses, Frank was halfway in love. It wasn’t her fault. I had seen it happen often enough before. For her, charm was just a way of getting on with the world, her social vocabulary for tricky situations. It was just that some people took it more seriously, saw in it what they were looking for rather than what was actually there. Poor Elly. The irony of her relationship with Lenny was that in some way she had been snared by her own trap. But not forever.

  I sat and watched her scattering stardust. And I even began to feel a little sorry for this hapless computer salesman from Portland, Oregon, on his way home after visiting his children and so obviously looking for a little romance after the breakup of his marriage. His life story came out without the asking, and when he finally took the hint from our empty glasses and allowed Elly to accompany him out to the car, I’ve no doubt that he asked whether he could see her again, and that she gently deflected the request and kissed him on the cheek to see him on his way. Funny. There are times now when I wonder what happened to him. Although I can’t say I really care.

  Later, after food, showers, and liberal doses of witch hazel, we settled ourselves back out in the night to stargaze our way to sleep. Life was normal again, and my anxieties had evaporated, explained away by a series of coincidences. So J.T. nursed a nugget of envy against Lenny, and some nutter had plucked our phone number out of the air. There had been no return calls. Silly to have been so disturbed. In the life I came from, there was never this much drama. Hardly surprising then that I overreacted.

  It was half an hour later that Elly recounted her journey through the chasm, and the fear returned.

  “Actually, I have something to tell you. Something that happened this afternoon. A rather strange story. You’ll probably think it’s nothing.”

  “Try me.”

  “Well … I came across these two guys, halfway down the canyon. They were camping out.”

  “What’s so strange about that?”

  “Nothing. Only it was just a pretty crazy place to camp, that’s all. If you wanted to go trekking, there are a zillion more beautiful spots—all higher up than that—where the views are magnificent. You can’t see a thing from down there.”

  “Maybe they weren’t interested in views. Maybe they wanted to be near the ocean.”

  She shrugged. “Yeah, except this place was miles from the sea. And if they were beaching it, then it’s the wrong piece of coast altogether. It’s all rock down there.”

  “So, they were looking for privacy. Two consenting adults on holiday. I don’t understand what was so strange about them, Elly.”

  She chewed at the side of her cheek.

  “Well …,” I prompted.

  “OK. There was something else, but it’s probably nothing. They had a telescope with them.”

  I don’t know what I was expecting. But not this. “A telescope? What kind of telescope?”

  “I dunno. A regular long-distance telescope, I suppose. It was on a stand.”

  “Well, that answers your question, doesn’t it? If it was that big, they could hardly hump it up into the hills. They were obviously stargazers. That’s no doubt why J.T. picked this place. The greatest aurora borealis on the West Coast. It’s probably a regular Santa Cruz habit, the biggest thing since skateboarding.”

  “Yeah. Probably.”

  “Elly …?”

  She shook her head impatiently. “Marla, I know you’re going to find this stupid, but if they were stargazing, then all I can say is they had the telescope in totally the wrong direction. It wasn’t looking up at the sky. It was pointing directly at this house.”

  There it was, the tweezer nip in the soft flesh of my stomach. “Are you sure?”

  “No, of course I’m not sure. But there’s a point toward the
bottom of the canyon where there’s a clear break upward. It’s why at night sometimes we can spot car beams moving along the line of the coast road. Looking upward from there, you’d have a direct line to the house. With the naked eye it’s tiny, just a smudge against the hillside. But with a powerful telescope …”

  “Listen, I’m sure there’s a simple explanation to all this,” I heard myself say. “Of course they didn’t have the thing pointed at the sky. It’s daylight. What stars could they see? They were probably testing out its strength on the landscape.” Elly said nothing, and I went on. “At worst you just came across a couple of weirdos who like watching women sunbathe five miles away.”

  She smiled, but you could see she wasn’t convinced.

  “If you were so intrigued, why didn’t you just ask them what they were doing there? Were they so mysterious?”

  “That’s the bit I can’t explain. Maybe they just gave me a fright. I came upon them so suddenly. It was so silent and empty down there. When I heard their voices, I nearly jumped out of my skin. I spotted them, so I was the one who got the shock.”

  “Did they see you?”

  “No, though they heard me, made a big deal about scouting around in the undergrowth to check out the noise. But they misjudged the direction. By the time they got back to the camp, I had slipped down below them and could see without being seen.”

  “See what?”

  “Not a lot. One of them had his back to me—he was playing about with some piece of machinery. The other was smoking a cigarette and talking into some kind of walkie-talkie.”

  “There,” I said firmly. “What more do you want? They were a couple of tame scientists.”