At first, nothing. In her mind, Bea rolled around the idea that Allie might be so upset as to never speak to her again. Which meant her anticipated retirement would never come to be.
“Ten dollars,” Allie said after a time. Still she stared out the window as she spoke, her head turned to the right, away from Bea.
“That doesn’t seem like very much.”
“It was like twenty-five minutes’ worth of work. That’s more than twenty dollars an hour. That’s good.”
“Well, I suppose if you want to look at it that way.”
“And she threw in the fried chicken for free. I told her it was for my grandmother.”
“Just so long as you know I’m not really related to you and you don’t forget it.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. You’re not so much the grandmother type. Oh my gosh! Zebras!”
“What on earth are you babbling about?” Bea asked, not attempting to hide her irritation.
She looked in the direction the girl was pointing. On the right side of the highway—the non-ocean side—behind barbed wire fencing, cattle grazed in the fields of tan grasses. Among them Bea saw a dozen zebras grazing in the orangey light of the sunset.
Bea would have assumed her eyes were playing tricks on her if Allie hadn’t just called the animals out by name. Besides, there were three cars stopped, their occupants walking to the fence or leaning on fence posts, snapping pictures and staring.
She pulled the van over into the dirt and parked near the other cars.
Allie jumped out and jogged to the fence.
Bea sat in the driver’s seat, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. She could just put the van back into “Drive” and pull away. Maybe she should. The girl was talking to a couple of families. Bea wouldn’t be abandoning her. Well, not exactly. Well, yes, she’d be abandoning her, of course she would, but at least she’d be dumping her in a spot where someone else could give her a ride.
Let her be somebody else’s problem now, Bea thought. The last thing I need is someone looking over my shoulder and judging.
She reached her hand up to the gearshift, then dropped it again. If she left, she would never learn why there were zebras grazing in a field with the cattle. And now she felt quite curious about that.
A moment later Allie jogged back to the van and jumped in, and Bea shifted into “Drive” and pulled back out onto the highway. She vaguely recalled the highway north of San Simeon. The Big Sur coast. It was winding and narrow and full of tight hairpin turns, rising hundreds of feet above the ocean, with few guardrails. She felt a surge of fear at the mental image of driving it after dark.
“So what was the story with the zebras?” she asked the girl. “Were you able to find out?”
“Yeah, I did. All those people were tourists like us, but one family was just on a Hearst Castle tour today. The tour guide told them about it. William Randolph Hearst used to own all this property, and he had this big castle up high on a hill, and he had famous guests there, and he was really rich. This was like in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties. He had this private zoo. Most of the animals are gone now, but the zebras survived all this time and bred and lived with the cows like they belonged here. They’re leftovers from the Hearst zoo.”
“I see,” Bea said.
“You know who he was? I studied him in school.”
“Yes, I’m familiar.”
“See? There’s the castle right up there.”
Allie pointed up to a distant hilltop on their right. The castle was a cluster of white buildings, with turrets like bell towers on the big main structure, and palm trees all around.
“Oh my, yes. I can see it. I think I’ve seen pictures of it in books. Or maybe there was something about it on TV.”
They drove in silence for a moment or two.
“What will you do with the phone?” Allie asked.
Bea was startled by the change in conversational direction. It took her a moment to pull herself together to answer. Also to decide how much information to share with her new passenger.
“I took the first one to a pawnshop. But I think that last town was too small to have one. So I’ll try when we get to Monterey. If there’s nothing there, San Francisco for sure.”
A long silence.
“Pull over here,” Allie said.
“More zebras?”
Bea craned her neck to the right and pulled off onto the scant shoulder in the fading light. She saw no zebras.
Allie jumped out.
“What are you doing?” Bea asked.
“Leaving. Walking back to Cambria. I think I might be better off with the lady in the store.”
“That’s ridiculous. Get back in here right now. You’re out in the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing ahead of you for dozens of miles and it’s a couple of miles at least back to Cambria.”
“I’m not in the middle of nowhere. I’m a couple of miles north of Cambria. I can walk a couple of miles. I’ve done it before.”
“It’s getting dark.”
“I don’t care. It’s not that far.”
“Where will you sleep?”
“I’ll ask that nice lady at the store if I can stay with her. Besides. What do you care? I’m not your problem. Remember?”
That’s true, Bea thought. It came as a relief to shake this new set of troubles off her shoulders.
“Close the door,” Bea said. “Before you let the cat out.”
The resulting slam made her wince.
Bea pulled back into the northbound lane and continued her drive up the coast. She did not look back.
Chapter Twenty
Too Many Comments from the Cat
“It’s beautiful here, isn’t it?” Bea asked Phyllis.
The cat looked up from her plate of canned food. Looked right into Bea’s eyes. Bea could swear she saw some kind of feedback there—a slightly critical assessment.
It was the third time Bea had told the cat that their current location was beautiful. This was what Bea’s father had used to call whistling past the graveyard, because actually she found the place a bit spooky. Still, it was rude of the cat to point that out.
“Well, it is beautiful.”
Phyllis returned her attention to her dinner.
Bea stepped out of the van and walked around to the passenger door, where she removed the litter box from the floor. She reached under the seat and felt around until she found the scoop. Then she walked the box over to the trash can that sat in a corner of the dirt parking lot overlooking the ocean. As best she could figure she was somewhere between San Simeon and the Big Sur coast.