Carter now understood why they were there and he, too, looked around at the rubble and ash at his feet. “Anything else I should be looking for?” he said.
“I had a propane stove, a few clothes, not much.” He kicked over one of the fallen timbers. “Can’t imagine anything else made it through the fire either.”
Carter helped to make a desultory search through the wreckage. Here and there he saw the glint of a twisted spoon, the metal buttons from a workshirt, a sliver of glass. He was just about to give up when a lizard skittered across the toe of his boot, and looking down, he saw the sunlight pick up a trace of something blue. He crouched down and cleared away some of the debris. Under it all, he saw a turquoise stone, and when he pried it from the earth, it came up on a tarnished silver chain. There were several more turquoise stones attached to it… making a necklace.
Carter held it up. “This yours?” he asked Del, brushing away some of the clinging dirt.
Del came closer. “Nope,” he said, turning it over in his fingers. “Never saw it before in my life.”
But Carter already knew he had seen it himself. He had seen it that terrible day in Pit 91, the day when Geronimo — a.k.a. William Blackhawk Smith — had jumped down and slashed him with the knife. The day Geronimo had died, swallowed alive in the tar pits.
He heard the cry of a bird overhead, and saw a hawk circling… just as he’d seen one the first time they’d come here.
And he knew at that moment whose home this had originally been.
“But it’s not an ancient artifact of any kind,” Del said, handing it back. “That chain is machine-made.”
He wandered off in search of any other remnants of his life, and once he was gone, Carter put the necklace back in the dirt, and covered it over. The hawk, perched on a limb of the sycamore now, cried again.
In the end, all Del was able to retrieve was a pair of army field binoculars, miraculously spared by the fire; they were still in their steel case, and under a bunch of bricks. “Not a total loss,” he said, stepping free of the burned boards and cinders, and climbing back toward the trail.
Carter turned to follow, but not before casting one more backward glance at the last remains of the cabin, and the hawk keeping watch from the blackened branch above it.
They continued on up the trail, toward the waterfall near the top, but it was all so different now; where the hillside had been dense and thickly overgrown, now it was spare and wide open. Most of the trees were down, but those that remained were just skeletal figures, black and bare of leaves. The scrub brush was just clumps of furze, affording almost no cover for the myriad creatures that would once have taken shelter below it.
At a turn in the trail, Carter stopped to catch his breath. Beth was right; he had to take it easy. He had been lying around for a couple of weeks, his body had taken a pretty bad beating, and the sweat was starting to trickle down into the cast on his arm. Del, who’d been pushing on, noticed and came back.
“You need a break?” he said, offering Carter his canteen.
Carter nodded, while showing Del that he had his own water bottle in his knapsack. He took a swig, and then another, while gazing out over the devastated canyon below.
“You don’t think you’re still going to see them, do you?” Del said, and Carter knew exactly what he was talking about. He and Del had discussed the creatures from the bestiary often — what precisely they were, what Carter had been able to learn about them in the brief time he’d had on al-Kalli’s estate, whether or not the fire had consumed them all, entirely. The beasts that had probably died on the grounds of the estate in Bel-Air — the basilisks, the griffin — would never be found, Carter was sure. Al-Kalli’s teenage son, Mehdi, and his attorneys had sealed off the place, and Mehdi would make sure that his family’s secret treasure — even if now it was only a pile of bones — would remain a secret forever.
As for the gorgon, Carter wasn’t so sure. But he hadn’t told Del — he hadn’t told anyone — about his encounter with the creature in Summit View. That was his own secret — his and Beth’s. One day, when he was back in shape, when the world had returned to some kind of normalcy, he would pursue the matter, he would try to find out what had happened. He would confess it all to Del, and together they could mount their own private expedition.
But not just yet.
“Here,” Del said, handing Carter the field binoculars. “I’m going to head up to the crest. Why don’t you take a breather?”
Carter hated to admit it, but Del was right. He should take a break.
“Thanks,” he said, sitting down in the dirt. “You might be right.”
“I’m always right, Bones.”
Del set off toward the waterfall, and Carter took a deep breath and looked out over the canyon; the Santa Monica Mountains rose up on the other side, their ravaged flanks showing the sweeping path of the flames. Beyond them, and just visible past their peaks, lay the tranquil blue of the Pacific, shining in the hot summer sun.
Carter kneaded his calves, where the skin was still tender, and flexed his ankles, still sore from their sprains. He stretched his long legs out in front of him. The sun felt good, like a hot pack. He wondered what Beth and Joey were up to. Had Beth dared to venture outside and run the risk of a gardening conversation? The Critchleys had made it clear that they could stay as long as they liked — in fact, Carter thought they rather liked having a Getty curator in their guesthouse — but Carter knew that he had to start looking for a new apartment soon. The housing on the west side was at a premium right now, with so many displaced Angelenos, but there were some buildings not all that far from the Page Museum and the La Brea Tar Pits that were still advertising summer specials.
He’d look into it when he went back to work on Monday.
For now, he would just enjoy the downtime.
Off in the distance, he could see a few spots on the mountainsides where the chapparal had not been burned off, and a couple of others where there were even signs of new growth; yellow flowers had popped up, in profusion, in one area to the northwest. Even from here, Del would know exactly what they were. He’d miss having Del around, he thought, but he knew that his friend’s university leave was running out, and he’d have to be heading back up to Tacoma soon.
A tiny spot of red, flickering like a flame, appeared among the distant yellow flowers.
Carter’s heart stopped.
His hand reached into his knapsack, fumbling for his cell phone.
Was it a hot spot? A place where the fire, even now, was still burning?
But then the red spot… moved.
He put the cell phone on the ground and picked up instead the field binoculars Del had left with him.
He kept his eyes on it while unsnapping the steel case, taking out the binoculars, unfolding them.
The red spot moved again, and this time he noticed that it seemed to move with some deliberation, traveling from one clump of the yellow flowers to another.
He put the binoculars to his eyes, quickly trying to focus them.
He found the scorched crest of the mountain, then moved down, and across, to find the yellow flowers.
He twisted the dial again, gently, to gain greater focus.
And there it was, the red spot — only now he could see that it was larger than he had thought, and that it could expand and contract.
When it moved again, he saw that it had a shape — the shape of a bird.
A huge bird.
And now his heart beat faster than ever.
He followed its path as it spread its wings, caught a sudden updraft, and drifted on the wind to another patch of flowers. He lost it for a moment, glanced over the top of the binoculars to get a fresh fix, and then found it again.