She didn’t actually hang up on me. There was some kind of ruckus in the background, and I heard her say, “Oh, shit!” Then the line went dead.
I stared at the phone. This was bad. Worse than I’d thought. Had Hallie lied to me about everything? It was clear she’d played fast and loose, but what was the point? She’d conned me into doing the legwork in her efforts to locate an ex-con named Christian Satterfield, who might not be related to her at all. He was for real, a convicted bank robber out on parole. I’d seen the article about his crime spree and I’d seen the man himself (at least as far as I could tell in the dark and at a distance). I’d provided Hallie with contact information, neatly keeping her name out of it as requested, but the story about giving a child up for adoption now seemed questionable. I wasn’t even sure the name Hallie Bettancourt was real. Probably not, now that I thought about it.
There had to be a way to track her down. How could she appear and disappear without leaving a trace?
I picked up my leather bag by the strap and slung it over my shoulder, fishing in one of the outer pockets for my keys. I locked the office and trotted out to my car. I took the back road through town, skirting the city limits as I hit the 192 and headed east toward the Clipper estate. Now the route looked different, nearly disorienting with its surfeit of visual information. At night, many houses disappeared, fading into the surrounding darkness under the cover of trees. During the daylight hours, the trajectory of the east-west mountain range was brought into high relief.
Sunlight warmed the chaparral and the dry conditions intensified the volatile oils in the dense, low-growing vegetation. The still air was heavy with the woody smell of eucalyptus, black sage, and California lilac. Manzanitas and canyon live oaks, while drought tolerant, are also highly flammable—nature’s bottle rockets. Given current conditions, with the slightest miscalculation in human judgment, the landscape could ignite, turning into an ocean of fire that would take everything in its path.
I turned left onto Winding Canyon Road, following a series of switchbacks that angled ever upward. Houses were fewer here and farther between. There were no intervening side roads. An occasional driveway led off to some unseen habitat, but I saw no other motorists. I spotted the big sandstone boulder with the house number blasted into it and I turned in as I had the week before. When I reached the parking area below the house, I shut down my engine and got out. I stood for a moment, turning by degrees until I’d taken in the whole of the property, which Vera claimed had been on the market for years. Of course there was no For Sale sign. Montebello residents frown on anything so crass. I suspect in any economic decline, countless homes are listed on the quiet, with no suggestion to the outside world that owners are scrambling around trying to scare up quick cash.
I lifted my gaze to the house that towered over me. The expanses of exterior glass looked blank and lifeless. Before, believing someone was in residence, I’d seen signs of life, projecting the appropriate appearances. Now, if what Vera had told me was correct, I was seeing the structure as it really was: deserted and suffering neglect.
Scanning the foundation, I didn’t spot any cracks, but maybe they’d been puttied over and painted to match the rest of the poured concrete footing. I could certainly see where the termites were at work. A moldering cord of firewood had been stacked up against the house on the uphill side where it was cozied up next to an exposed beam. Some of the quartered logs looked fresh, and I was guessing that if a tree went down, the gardener assigned to maintain the property dutifully split and stacked the wood. Aside from that, there were no other indications that anyone had tended to the place in recent months. I climbed the rugged stone stairs, careful where I stepped.
When I reached the front door, I cupped my hands to the glass and peered in. The place was empty. No paintings, no furniture, no tarps, no glowing lamps. The floors were plain wood with no sign of the Oriental carpets I’d seen. I realized my perceptions on the prior occasion were colored by my expectations. Now the white walls were bare and looked slightly dingy. I tried the knob and found it locked.