Magnificence A Novel

6


If you lived in a very beautiful house your life became the house, and like the house the life could acquire a quality of completion. It was something about order, she thought, order and its sufficiency. Before now, she had never seen how the mood of her life was defined by the spaces where she existed. Other people knew this—on one end of the spectrum architects and interior designers, on the other the guys who lived in appliance boxes in alleys—but it had never been so obvious to her.

When she left the house, three days a week on Mondays through Wednesdays, to drive to the office and do T.’s paperwork, she walked out the side door onto the driveway in a familiar path straight across the gravel. She parked the car in the same position every afternoon and so the path to it was always the same in the morning—behind her, as she emerged from the house, thick English ivy and Virginia creeper climbing the mansion wall, lilac bushes on either side of what had once been a service entrance.

To her left as she went out the door was the pool enclosure: the sounds of the fountain, a bird dipping over the water, a flicker at the edge of her eye. To her right was the driveway as it stretched out toward the wide front gate, the straight line of it with a branch curving off to the right, as you moved to the street, to round the front of the house in a semicircle. From where she stood it was mostly a line between grassy expanses, a simple gravel line in the grass. Beyond it rose the hedge that screened her from her neighbors; this was the closest point of contact with the other properties—the towering oleander that guarded them, rising easily eighteen feet, already thick with gaudy pink and red blooms.

Once she pulled through the gate—which was fixed now and glided open before her—and the lush gardens and shady trees were behind her, the gray buzz of the city replaced the oasis. There was the confusion of crowding, sometimes of ugliness: the concrete of overpasses and buildings, air thick with pollution, black and yellow digital signs with words unfurling constantly, velocity and noise, the haphazardness of garbage, the pall of commerce and everyday filth. There was bumper-to-bumper traffic on the freeway, exhaust fumes, the possibility of bad drivers, hostile passersby, sudden accidents, contagious illness, but more overwhelming still than these variables was the slightness and insecurity of her position in space—she could be anywhere, once she was out of the house.

She understood agoraphobics. As soon as she left the perfection of home her location, if not exactly arbitrary, was constantly and sometimes impulsively changing. Her being was subject to the many conditions of wherever she was, the trivial details of her momentary needs; outside the house the sequence of events was chaotic, could not express a clean design. This situation, she realized, was tolerated by most of the five billion people on earth. But more and more she had no idea how they did it—this normal state of mutability and flux, which she had always presumed and often preferred, was not only displeasing but almost unacceptable.

In her old life she’d gone out looking to make things happen because home was a resting place between these happenings; now home was more like a temple, inviting a routine of poise and deliberation. She could move peacefully between the walls as though she walked a neat path in history, as though her time and place were not the product of chance at all but of an ancient arrangement. She lived in the soft footprint of a ceremony. And the longer she lived there, the rarer were the thoughts of the knife. The winces as she expected the blade, awaiting the invisible cut, receded noticeably whereas out in the city she was anyone again. Anyone, to whom anything could happen; anyone, which she had once embraced.

Not anymore.

•

With students from the Art Center—art students whose names she’d found on a bulletin board—she began reorganizing the mounts. Before she had them rehung and restaged she had to encode a new system, and for that she went to a reference librarian who helped her order museum floor plans. She studied the organizing schemes.

There was geography, there was taxonomy, and there was the collection itself, the variety of animals she had and the spaces she needed to house them. She made her own plan according to those needs.

The main part of the ground floor would be given over to North American mammals, each order with its own section. The deer, the bison, the sheep and goats and pronghorns would occupy the great room, as she thought of it now, where previously foxes and wild dogs had slunk along the sideboards. The library would hold the big carnivores—the bears and the cats, the wolves and foxes—while the smaller meat-eaters, the weasels and raccoons, would spill over into a drawing room off the front hall. Rodents would live in the music room, rabbits and hares in the ballroom. Bats fit into an alcove once meant for a telephone and a lone armadillo fit into a display case in the hall, where once a forest of antlers had interrupted the air. She made a reptile room out of the old breakfast nook to house tortoises, alligators and snakes; birds of prey now had the rec room to themselves—the rec room where the lion had stood before it was rudely felled by Addison. Owls perched there, hawks, falcons, eagles and a lone vulture.

She knew the second floor should follow the same principle, but she loved the dioramas. Also the foreign collections were small, with the exception of Africa—Africa, land of safaris, was a horn of plenty, and when the African cats migrated from the ground floor, the gazelles and the zebras along with them, it was clear that the horned beasts room could never fit them all. So she took herself out of it and reinstalled the buffalo and the wildebeest. Two of the art students were mural painters so the wide hallway, too, turned into Africa: out the walls of her former bedroom flowed the grasses and the great lonely flat-topped savannah trees, curling to the right and left as they emerged from the doorway. Long yellow grasses grew up from the hallway floor as they grew in horned beasts, and then, along the hall, ceded the way to wetter and greener terrain as the plain became a jungle. And on the Rainforest walls the art hangers put up a small colobus monkey, an antelope, a spiny lizard, and a gray parrot.

The birds seemed to demonstrate a lack of interest in her personal business, so she put her bed in Birds of the World, which once had been Russia. She had the squat, dun-colored horse and shaggy yak moved, and in the former Soviet Union students painted over Lenin and sketched the lines of treetops in a light sky, arching branches and tree hollows. She watched as the lines were filled in and dimensions came out. On a wooden platform a whooper swan raised its wings; against the wall that faced her bed stood a peacock with its shimmering tail open.

But in the other bedrooms the collections stayed where they were, in their quaint geographic compartments. She told herself that even the Natural History Museum in New York, even the British Museum in London, whose floor plans she had photocopied, displayed a less than symmetrical arrangement.

When the project was finished the house had a globe-like aspect in its sectioning off, its variety of scenes, its separation by palette. It was multicolored like a globe, and also like a globe it represented reality only partly, with the failure of all maps but also the same neatness, the same quiet satisfaction. The Himalayas and the Arctic were cold rooms, light-blue and gray-white; the tropics were emerald green, with the bright splashes of toucans and macaws, the savannahs yellow and gold, and in two of the rooms there were sunsets, pink and mauve.

She had loved austere institutions, as a child—old churches, universities, art galleries, museums. She’d cherished the high ceilings, the deep walls, the wide doorways. Now she thought she had also liked what she hadn’t recognized back then: an air of permanence and contentment, the happy captivity of precious things.




Jim the lawyer had an attitude of indulgence when it came to her interest in preservation. It was the kind of indulgence you would rarely find in a spouse, she thought—the benevolence of a third party with little stake in the matter, someone whose agreement was not required and therefore not contentious.

It wasn’t only the taxidermy; there were trees in the garden that were historic, which the state declared it was illegal to cut down. She learned the names of all these trees and tried to find out about them, and then the trees gave her an idea for the house, for how to keep it the way it was. It had never been put up for historic status but it could be, it might well qualify if she pursued that course . . . and she decided she would, in case the cousins won their suit, in case the place passed out of her hands. She’d try for state landmark status, Criterion 3: Embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, region or method of construction or represents the work of a master. She’d need to hire an architect to evaluate the place—she thought it would qualify as an example of California Mediterranean, like Pasadena City Hall—but first she needed the records.

So on a Thursday morning she drove down to the permit center to pull the old building plans. She filled in forms, waited in lines, paid fees for duplication and processing, and at the end of a dreary morning was handed some rolled-up plans. On her way across the parking lot she unrolled one of them: an architect’s drawings of additions to the main building made in 1928—outbuildings, a shed near the pool. There was a greenhouse, she saw, which sadly had since vanished. Sitting in her car with the curls of paper spilling off her lap, she found, to her annoyance, that there were no plans of the original construction in all of it. There was a drawing of a garage renovation done in 1950, a 1954 repair of the dome, and an old schematic she didn’t pretend to understand. But there was no drawing of the building in its entirety.

There was the name of an architecture firm on the 1928 drawings, though, a firm that had been absorbed by another one and moved from Pasadena to Westwood. She made an appointment to consult with an architect there.




Coming into the office one morning—the new, small office in Culver City to which T. had downsized—she found a message on the answering machine.

They’d gone away for a while, said T.’s calm voice. While they were gone, it would mean a lot if she could look in on Angela every so often.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” she said aloud in the empty, airless room. It was still full of unopened white boxes of files, stacked into crooked towers that stood around awkwardly. The venetian blinds were angled open slightly so that, standing beside the desk, her finger on the rewind button, she registered the dark masses of cars flicking past.

She wished Casey had told her.

The message didn’t say where they’d gone or when they planned to come back. T. had left a few jotted instructions about the business on a legal pad, but that was it.

“I can’t believe this,” she muttered.

The only people she saw for the rest of the day were a FedEx man, a guy selling copiers, and, when she went out to move her car around midday, a woman walking a dog.

•

Still, a few days later she did as they’d asked. She set it up so that Jim could come with her—made a late reservation for dinner on Abbot Kinney and scheduled the visit to Angela between that reservation and an early date at a bar. The trip would seem less dutiful then; they could stroll over from the bar half-drunk, in the moist sea air of early evening, and be garrulous the way drinks let you be. Angela wouldn’t mind. She wouldn’t know the difference.

She met them at the door in what appeared to be a kimono, orange and satiny with stylized white birds. They stepped over the threshold shaking hands and smiling. Behind the counter that divided the kitchen from the living room, setting crackers onto a tray, Susan saw the live-in helper, formerly of Bosnia-Herzegovina, whose name she always forgot.

“Vera,” said the woman, without being asked.

“Of course, of course,” said Susan to Vera, apologetic. “Hello. Susan. And this is Jim. He also works with T.”

“A criminal, like my son,” said Angela smoothly. She turned to a small wine rack with flourishes of grape leaves and began looking at bottles distractedly.

“I’m sorry?” said Jim.

“It’s one of those days,” said Vera, rolling her eyes.

Her English had improved, thought Susan, since she first started with Angela.

“Yes, my son is a criminal,” said Angela, with a measure of pride. “A criminal mastermind. Would you like white? Or red?”

“Oh, whatever you’re having,” said Susan quickly, and stole a sidelong glance at Jim. He was gazing at Angela and grinning faintly.

“Look,” said Angela, smiling delightedly, and lifted one of the bottles by the neck. “A Zinfandel. A Zinfandel is cheap and stinks like shit.”

“Oh!” said Susan. “Yes?”

“I never heard that said,” said Jim.

A look of sadness crossed Angela’s face and she shrugged regretfully. “I love it very much,” she said.

She turned her back, wine in hand. They followed her into the kitchen, where Vera handed them a tray with olives and pickles on it. Jim took a pickle.

“Often they blame it on the parents,” went on Angela, as she rummaged in a drawer. They stood back, spearing olives and biding their time. “The worst criminals are often caused by neglect. There was a television show . . .”

“Oh, but not in T.’s case,” said Susan.

“I’m sure, not with him,” agreed Jim.

“Really?” asked Angela. “But you’re a criminal too, aren’t you?”

“Some would say,” agreed Jim gravely, and inclined his head.

“I’ve heard of those,” mused Angela. “A criminal lawyer.”

They stood beside each other and watched as she struggled to open the bottle—“May I?” asked Jim—but Vera was already taking over.

“You would know better than I would,” said Angela, and turned from Vera to take a dish towel out of a drawer. It was cheerfully patterned with strawberries; she swabbed it up and down her arms as though cleaning or drying them. “So you tell me. Did they neglect you too? Was that why you did it?”

“I wouldn’t say they did,” said Jim. “No, I really can’t complain. My parents were pretty nice to me.”

“The Zinfandel,” said Angela, and proffered two glasses.

They sipped expectantly, waiting for the next remark. But instead she ceased to perform, and for the next half hour was gracious and comprehensible. She made tactful and sympathetic remarks about Hal’s death; she knew what T. was working on, discussed the mission statement for his new foundation; she understood that Jim was a lawyer for nonprofits and remembered that he had met T. at an alumni party for their college fraternity.

Frat boys, both of them, realized Susan with vague astonishment. In her youth she would never have gone near one.

They walked away slowly, afterward, in a mild daze.

“I like her,” said Jim.

•

The architect came to the house a week later, a tall, thin man with glasses and a prominent nose—more or less an architect cliché, as far as Susan could tell. Together they toured the grounds. He studied the building from various angles and then accepted a cup of coffee and went inside with her to examine the interior features. He said he was hopeful the house would be granted state historic status and she felt a surge of confidence: now, even if Steven and Tommy somehow won their suit, she had an ace in the hole. Not that she had the money to pay them off without selling the house anyway, in the event that the decision went against her, but she would cross that bridge . . . she would rather lose all the money she had than sacrifice the house.

When she walked him out to his car he popped the trunk and brought out a long yellowing roll. “The 1924 drawings,” he said. “You can keep them. We’ve made a copy to put back in the archives. Technically we don’t need to keep even the copies this long, but since the file’s been reactivated . . .”

“Thank you,” she said, rolling the thin rubber bands up and down on the tube.

He got in his car, and she stepped back as he started it up. Then he put it into reverse and rolled the window down. “Hey, if I come out again you’ll have to show me the basement,” he said. “On the plan it has a surprisingly large footprint.”

“What basement?” she asked, but he had already backed up out of earshot with a light wave.

At the kitchen table, beneath a blackbelly rosefish, she spread out the drawings. There were several pages and she wasn’t good at correlating the lines on them to the real house, but soon she had glasses weighting the corners and could study the one marked BASEMENT & SUBCELLAR. She wondered if it had been filled in since—was that even possible? She’d never noticed a door to the basement, yet there it was on the plans. As far as she could tell it had been as large as the ground floor, had extended over the same area—maybe nine thousand square feet. The subcellar was smaller and seemed to have been designed for wine storage: there were built-in racks on the plan, if she was reading it right.

She called the architect, who had a phone in his car.

“Could it have been, I don’t know, filled in or something? I’ve never seen a basement here. I mean, I’ve lived in the house since December.”

“Tell you what,” he said. “My lunch meeting just canceled. Let’s look for it.”

He was back in half an hour.

“So you’ve never seen a door?” he said.

“Never,” she said firmly, and shook her head. “They’re not where the plan says they should be. See? Here?”

“The plans indicate there—there—two doors, two staircases,” and he tapped the flattened paper. “Let’s go look.”

He lifted the glasses off the drawings and took the plans with him. She followed him out of the kitchen, along the main hall to the raptor room with the sunken floor.

He looked around for a second and then consulted the drawing.

“Huh,” he said, and turned around a few times.

“What?”

“I don’t think this room was ever built as the plan stipulated. Either that, or it was gutted and rebuilt from the ground up. See? This should be a supporting wall. Nothing. Instead the support’s over there,” and he pointed.

“So what does that mean?”

“First we check where the other staircase was supposed to be,” he said, shaking his head, and this time she followed him to the music room.

“No,” he said, and shook his head again. “Hmm. Surprising.”

“Will it affect the application?” she asked abruptly, quickly worried that her curiosity had jeopardized the house’s future.

“Oh no. Shouldn’t be relevant,” he said vaguely, looking around and then back at the drawing.

“Oh good. Good.”

“OK. We’ll have to walk it. We can start from the east end,” he said finally.

“Wait. Are you hungry? I know you’re missing your lunch hour right now. Would you like me to make us some sandwiches first?”

“Thanks. Appreciate it.”

In a few minutes they were standing with their sandwiches in the parlor off the cavernous front hall—the drawing room, full of raccoons and ringtails and coati, weasels and otters and minks. “Procyonids and mustelids,” she told the architect, as he nodded and masticated his ham and cheese, casting his eyes to the molding and ceiling beams.

She liked knowing the nomenclature, even took pride in it. They were beautiful words, the terms from Greek and Latin: careful words to be kept and valued, along with the collection.

“All this furniture has been here? Since you took possession?”

“This room is unchanged, pretty much, except for the taxidermy. That’s all been moved around. But I don’t think it blocks anything.”

He walked along the one interior wall, rapping with one hand, sandwich in the other.

“Moving along,” he said, when the last bite of sandwich was gone.

He checked the hallway next, the wall behind the grand staircase; he went back and forth between rooms, measuring closet spaces and the depths of walls with his eyes. She was impressed by this, how he could know measurements without using a measuring tape. He knew the volume of hidden spaces without seeing both sides of them at the same time. But in room after room he shook his head, and finally—by this time she was impatient and the balls of her feet were hot and sore from standing—they had made it to the west end of the house without new information.

There had been some shelves and cabinets and wardrobes they’d need to get out of the way, he said, if she wanted him to be sure—some walls he couldn’t get to without the furniture being moved, pieces that were too heavy for just the two of them to shift. He wrote down the list of rooms and the walls he needed to check if she wanted a definitive answer.

“I can send over a couple of burly guys who work for one of our contractors, if you don’t mind paying his fees,” he offered at the front door, consulting a sleek wristwatch. “Some cement guys or roofers or something.”

“Yes, please send them,” she said. “Or give me the number. Whatever’s quick.”

“The secretary will call it in to you.”

It hadn’t occurred to her to sleep with him, she thought, despite his competence and a passing attraction. She wondered at this, and when he was gone she put her feet up on the couch in the library and gazed into the face of a black bear.




“Vera’s gone,” said Angela.

Susan had picked up the phone at two in the morning, with Jim asleep beside her.

“What?”

“She’s gone. She had to go away.”

She sat up, discomfort growing.

“You mean—she’s coming right back, though?”

“She had to go because someone was sick. But now I’m all alone.”

She could hear thinness in the voice, a lost quality.

“She—Vera left in the middle of the night?”

“She left in the afternoon.”

“And she didn’t call for a substitute?”

“No substitute has come.”

“No one’s with you? No one?”

“I’m all alone.”

“I’m in Pasadena, you know. There’s really no one there with you?”

Silence.

“Angela. Why don’t you give me the agency’s number and go back to bed, and then I’ll call them for you first thing in the morning?”

“. . . I’m all alone,” said Angela again.

Susan sighed, sat for a minute in inertia and resentment, and then got out of bed.

“What?” asked Jim, as she flicked on the closet light and stood blinking at the clothes hanging.

“I have to go make sure she’s OK,” she said.

“She? Who? Casey?”

“Angela. Her attendant apparently left her. Unless she’s making it up, for some reason.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Have to drive over there,” she said.

“There? Where?”

“Santa Monica.”

“It’s the middle of the night. Why you?”

“There’s no one else.”

“But why . . .”

“There’s no one else,” she repeated, and reached into the hanging clothes to grasp the folds of anything.

•

The drive was faster than usual since the freeways were empty, but it still took almost forty minutes. When she got to the townhouse the lights were all out. After several minutes of her knocking and waiting, increasingly impatient, Angela appeared at the door in a lacy dressing gown and old-school hair curlers.

“Did you go back to sleep?” asked Susan. “After you called me?”

Angela shook her head firmly. But there was a waffle pattern printed on the side of her face.

Irritated that she’d driven across the whole city for what seemed to be nothing, Susan slipped past her and flicked on the overhead. Apparently Angela was fine with shuffling around in pitch black.

“OK, listen,” she said. “I told your son I would check in on you while he and Casey were gone. So I’ll sleep here tonight, until I can call Vera’s agency in the morning. I’ll just sleep on the couch, right here. And you need to go back to sleep too.”

“I’m sorry. T. will be back soon,” said Angela, lucid for a moment.

“Well, good,” said Susan. “I’m glad. And I have to say, I’m surprised at Vera. Even if she had to leave on an emergency, she still should have made sure you had someone.”

She plumped a pillow on the edge of the couch and slipped off her shoes.

“Back from the honeymoon,” said Angela, and nodded.

Susan stared at her.

“Pardon me?”

“Back from the honeymoon.”

“Vera went away on her honeymoon?” asked Susan, and studied Angela’s face, her pale blue eyes and carefully plucked brows. Maybe Vera did the plucking for her. Personally she wouldn’t trust Angela with a sharp pair of tweezers in the eyeball vicinity.

“Not Vera, T.,” said Angela.

Not lucid anymore.

She had to be inventing it—very likely she was. Still, Susan remembered what Angela had said about T., when he was missing in the jungle and she herself was convinced he was dead. Possibly the woman had some kind of savant deal going on.

“Let’s get you back to bed,” said Susan gently, and took her arm. “Here. I’ll walk with you to the room. Were you going around in the dark before I got here?”

After she’d left Angela in her room she tossed on the couch for a while beset by images of Casey with vanilla cake smeared around her mouth, Susan not there at all, Susan all alone and separate and completely forgotten. Casey in the middle of sunlight, sunlight and other people who knew her—flowers and dresses, pomp and circumstance, ceremony and dancing, white frills and hideous ruffles.

•

In the morning she waited till Vera’s replacement arrived, a pretty young Latina who walked expertly on black stiletto heels. Susan opened the door for her and right away Angela eyed her tight clothes with suspicion.

“My name is Merced,” said the woman, and smiled. “You must be Angela?”

“Mrs. Stern,” said Angela coldly.

“Of course: Mrs. Stern,” said Merced, not missing a beat.

Angela ignored the outstretched hand but Merced took that in stride too and patted her arm kindly.

“Don’t worry, Mrs. Stern,” she said. “We’ll do fine. I’ll take good care of you until Vera comes home again.”

She put down her purse on the counter.

“So what happened?” asked Susan, as Angela wandered out of the room.

“It was an unfortunate situation,” said Merced. “The receptionist was a temp, because the regular girl just went on maternity leave, and then this temp, who I guess, it turns out, is bipolar?—she just all of a sudden walked out on the job. So no one got Vera’s message. And then . . .”

“Something could have happened to her,” said Susan.

“They’re extremely concerned about the error,” said Merced, and nodded earnestly. “Are you the family?”

Susan was explaining when Angela came back in and began to rearrange items nervously on end tables and shelves.

“Excuse me, Susan? May I speak to you privately?” she asked after a minute.

Susan followed her into her bedroom, where she shut the door behind them.

“I don’t know that woman,” said Angela. “She’s a stranger.”

“It won’t be for long,” said Susan. “Probably just a few days.”

“I don’t know her at all. And she doesn’t know me.”

Angela had flipped open a jewelry box on her dresser and waggled her fingers in its miniature compartments until she found a sparkly rhinestone brooch in the shape of a bow.

“It’ll be fine. She’s a professional. Just like Vera. When Vera first came you didn’t know her either, but still you got along fine. Remember? This one’s good too. She knows what she’s doing.”

“But she doesn’t know anything about me,” said Angela.

“Is there anything you’d like me to discuss with her, before I go?” asked Susan.

Angela had opened the pin on the back of the brooch and was picking at her cuticles with the sharp point, agitated. They were already torn into ragged hangnails and soon they would be bleeding.

“I tell you what,” said Susan, reaching out and taking her hand to stop her. She pried the fingers gently off the brooch pin as she spoke. “You try to get along here for the day with just the two of you. All right? Because I have an appointment. I have some men coming to the house to move some heavy furniture for me. So I have to get back to Pasadena now. But if you still don’t feel comfortable with Merced by dinnertime you can call me. And I’ll come back again. Does that sound fair?”

Angela said nothing.

“I want you to relax,” said Susan. “She’ll take good care of you. She really will.”

“She’s low-class,” said Angela, and put out her bottom lip in a sulk. “She looks like a prostitute.”

Infantile, scattered, then distant and poised—but after all it must be par for the course. If Hal had lived, if both of them had lived together into their dotage they might have been like this. They might have ended as ancient children, half-gone, fumbling, and rarely if ever themselves.

“It’s the style,” said Susan. “She’s young. They all dress like that these days.”

As though she and Angela were already the same—old biddies far past sex and fashion.

“Prostitute shoes,” said Angela.

“Look, I like her,” said Susan, thinking that maybe a more personal testimony would help. “She’s nice. Give her a chance. I think she’ll grow on you.”

After a few more minutes of wheedling she was able to steer Angela back into the kitchen and persuade her to accept a glass of iced tea. Quiet in the background, she slipped out the door while the other two were talking—fled down the walk gratefully in her slept-in clothes, her teeth gritty and unbrushed.

•

Construction workers came and moved the large pieces of furniture from the walls marked by the architect. When they had gone, dark, massive old wardrobes stood anchorless in the center of rooms.

It bothered her. The investigation had to be finished quickly or she would grow restless at the disorder. But when she called his office the architect was busy with real work, he said testily. He pawned her off on a junior associate who could come by in his stead.

The associate was a young recent graduate named Leigh, her hair pulled back in a tight platinum-blond ponytail, wearing the same trendy horn-rimmed glasses favored by her colleague. Susan admired her self-possession and wondered if all architects had this—a punctilious, almost rigorous and pared-down sense of style, clothing with clean lines and expensive labels. Leigh showed no interest in the mounts, only the house itself—as though the animals were not there, as though she saw right through them.

Susan could tell she was less expert than the older guy but she seemed to know enough for the purpose. She rapped on walls and moved a small yellow stud finder over their surfaces, Susan watching as its green light flashed on and off again.

“Nothing there,” she said in the first room.

“Nope, nothing,” she said in the second.

“My guess would be crawl space,” she said in the third. “Not enough room for stairs.”

“Sorry, no,” she said in the last room.

Susan was disappointed.

Only then, resigned to a nonevent and walking the architect girl to the door, did she remember the slab.

“Wait,” she said excitedly, and stopped. “There’s this one place in the yard—it’s not that near the house, actually, it’s in the backyard, way back there in the fir grove—but when I first moved in, we were doing some garden work and we found it. It’s just a piece of concrete sunk into the ground. You don’t really notice it, normally. He said there might have been a root cellar under there once, something like that. I mean, it’s just a slab. Cement or whatever. With grass growing over the edges. But can you quickly take a look?”

Leigh followed Susan out the service entrance and around to the back, where they picked their way down the flagstone paths toward the copse at the rear of the property. The further they went the more discouraged she felt: it was too far from the house. It was unlikely to be connected.

A few steps into the fir trees they ducked under some boughs, crunched over a sparse litter of cones and then stood over the slab: overgrown, concrete, about three feet square.

Almost nothing.

“Enh,” said the architect girl, and shrugged. She poked at the slab with the smooth toe of her pump. “It doesn’t look like much to me.”

•

The intercom buzzed a little past midnight. She looked out the window of her new bedroom—it faced the crescent drive instead of the backyard—and saw a taxi waiting at the front gate.

She was hoping it was Casey, and she took the wide stairs quickly, lightly, two at a time. But when she pressed the button to talk to the driver he said, “I got a Angela here. Angela Stern.”

She almost said Oh no right then. But instead she sighed, buzzed open the gate and went out front to meet them.

“Does she know where you are?” she asked Angela, as soon as she stepped from the taxi.

It could mean Merced’s job, she was thinking.

“She fell asleep,” Angela said.

“We have to call. She’ll be worried sick by now.”

Angela walked slowly, peering down through the dark at her footing as the taxi’s headlights swept back. She was wearing a long winter coat, a coat she’d never have a use for in L.A., over a sheer lacy nightgown.

“So what went wrong?” asked Susan, a hand on her arm to steer. As they drew near the house again the motion sensors were triggered and the outside lights flicked on.

“It wasn’t safe. It was unsafe,” said Angela, and shook her head.

“Unsafe.”

“What if she stepped on you,” said Angela. “Those shoes—those shoes would be like daggers. They could stab me.”

“Uh-huh,” said Susan.

It took her a moment to register the words. And then she found Angela was standing there stricken. Her face looked white.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, exactly as a person might who wasn’t insane at all. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Don’t worry. It’s all right,” said Susan.

Inside she sat Angela down in the kitchen, gave her a glass of water and called the apartment, where Merced picked up the phone right away.

“She’ll stay with me,” Susan told her, resigned. “She’ll stay till Vera gets back. So have them call me as soon as that happens. Would you?”

She looked over at Angela, who was sitting very straight on her kitchen chair under a fish and holding her water glass carefully, with two hands. She put her to bed in North American Birds.




When the children returned, Angela was still there. They showed up at the big house one evening around dusk, while Susan and Jim and Angela were eating Thai on the patio beside the pool—though Angela was not eating. After the food arrived she’d decided she distrusted food of any “ethnicity” and had requested instead a Tom Collins.

Casey was brown from the sun and T. wore faded jeans. The three-legged dog loped along beside them.

“Oh, dears, dears!” called Angela joyfully. “How was the Mexican wedding?”

Susan rose as they approached the table, rose and put down her napkin.

“Good,” said T., and rested a hand lightly on Casey’s shoulder. “It was good.”