In her wild, kitten days, she would have followed Kate there, down into the caverns of the earth, and she would have ignored the dangers. But now, all grown up, she had learned to be wary, she no longer had the nerve to race down into that mysterious land, overwhelmed by wonder. Now only her human friend was brave enough to breach that mythical world with a curiosity at least as powerful as Kit’s own.
It was just last June that Kate had phoned her Molena Point friends to say she had quit her job in Seattle and moved back to San Francisco. But then, after that one round of calls, no one heard from her again. Their messages had gone unanswered until two weeks ago when, in early September, she resurfaced and called them all, and this time her voice bubbled with excitement. She spoke of a strange journey but left the details unclear, she talked about a gift or legacy, a sudden fortune, but she left the particulars vague and enticing.
Now, Kit, safe in the backseat as Pedric negotiated the big Lincoln down the narrow cliff road, idly watched the white froth of waves far below glowing in the gathering night. She sniffed the wind’s rich scent of kelp and dead sea creatures and she thought about the wealth that Kate had brought back, treasures Kate insisted Lucinda and Pedric share—as if gold and jewels were as common as kitty treats or a box of chocolate creams to pass around among her friends.
Though Kate made sure the Greenlaws took some of that amazing fortune back with them to Molena Point, she had in fact already sold much of the jewelry, traveling from city to city—Seattle, Portland, Houston—taking care that she wasn’t followed, telling the dealers the most plausible of stories about her many European visits where, she said, she’d acquired the strange and exotic pieces. Though the gold coins she’d insisted on giving to the Greenlaws were common enough, she’d had them all melted down and recast into the tender of this world, they could be sold anywhere without question. “No one has followed me,” Kate said, “no one has a clue. If anyone did, don’t you think they’d have come after me by now? Someone would have broken into my apartment weeks ago, or intercepted me on my way to a bank or getting off a plane. And now,” she’d said with a little smile, “who would suspect a respectable couple like you of carrying a car full of jewels and Krugerrands?”
Kate and Pedric together had removed the Lincoln’s door panels, using special tools, one that looked like a fat, ivory-colored tongue depressor, and a long metal gadget that might pass for a nail puller or a bottle opener. They had tucked twenty small boxes into the empty spaces, taping them securely in place so they wouldn’t rattle or become entangled in the wires and mechanisms that ran through the inner workings of the car. Pedric was as skilled in these matters as any drug smuggler, though his lawless days were long past. Kate said the coins were theirs to use any way they chose, and Lucinda suggested the village’s cat rescue project, which the cats’ human friends had organized early in the year to care for the many pets that had been abandoned during the economic downturn, cats and dogs left behind when their families moved out of foreclosed homes. There was enough wealth hidden in the car to build a spacious animal shelter and still leave a nice buffer for the Greenlaws, too, against possible hard times to come.
“I’ve seen what can happen,” Kate said, her green eyes sad, “when a whole economy fails. That land, that was so rich and amazing . . . all the magic is gone, there’s nothing left but the ugliest side of their culture, all is fallen into chaos, the castles crumbled, the crops dead, the people starving. Everyone is drained of their will to live, not even the wealth I brought back was of use to them. What good is gold when there’s nothing to buy, no food, nothing to trade for? People wandering the villages scavenging for scraps of food, but with no desire to plant and grow new crops, no ambition to begin new herds or bring any kind of order to their ruined world. All their richly layered culture has collapsed, they are people without hope, without any life left in them. Without,” Kate said, “any sense of joy or of challenge. Only the dark has prevailed, and it feeds on their hopelessness.”
Now, as night drew down, fog began to gather out over the sea, fingering in toward the cliff as if soon it would swallow the road, too. As they rounded the next curve, Kit could see, far below, the lights of a few cars winding on down the mountain—but when she looked back, headlights were coming toward them fast, truck lights higher and wider than any car, racing down the narrow road. Then a second set of lights flashed past that heavy vehicle, growing huge in their rearview mirror, then the big truck gained on the pickup again, accelerating at downhill speed, the two vehicles moving too fast, coming right at them, their lights blazing in through the back window, blinding her. The truck swerved into the oncoming lane, passing the pickup, its lights illuminating the rocky cliff—then everything happened at once. The truck and pickup both tried to crowd past them in the left-hand lane, forcing them too near the edge. The truck skidded and swung around, forcing the pickup against the cliff, their lights careening up the jagged stone. At the same instant the cliff seemed to explode. Pedric fought the wheel as an avalanche of dirt surged down at them. Kit didn’t understand what was happening. Behind them great rocks came leaping down onto the truck and a skyful of flying stones skidded across their windshield. She thought the whole mountain was coming down, boulders bouncing off the pickup, too, and on down toward the sea. Pedric crashed through somehow, leaving the two vehicles behind them. The stones thundering against metal nearly deafened her, a roar that she knew was the last sound she’d ever hear in this life.
And then all was still; only the sound of the last pebbles falling, bouncing across their windshield and across their dented hood.
2
VICTOR AMSON’S OLD gray pickup raced too fast down the steep two-lane, its bare tires squealing around the curves, its headlights glancing off the stony cliff, following the taillights of a big produce truck, drawing close on its tail. The truck driver swerved onto a turnout at the sheer edge of the drop, impatient for him to go on past. As Vic swung into the oncoming lane, he could see the round-faced driver giving him the finger. Prickly bastard. Moving on around him, Vic smiled, grateful that nothing was coming up the hill; though the narrow, winding road didn’t bother him. Beside him, his passenger was hunched way over to the center, his eyes squeezed shut with fear. Didn’t take much to scare Birely.
Once Vic was free of the truck he sailed right on down the mountain, driving one-handed, his tall, wiry frame jammed in behind the wheel, his lined face catching light from the dash in a cobweb of wrinkles, a thin face, narrow nose, his pale brown eyes too close together. Worn jeans and ragged windbreaker, rough, callused hands. Long brown hair streaked with gray, hanging down, caught on the back of the seat, loosely tied with a leather band. He drove scowling, thinking about those three cops in their patrol cars watching him when he came out of that fence’s place.
The damn fuzz might not have been on his case at all but they sure as hell made him cranky, their marked units parked there in front of the Laundromat that the fence used as a front. That had made Birely fidget, too. Birely’d wanted to ditch the truck to get the cops off their trail, steal another car on some backstreet and then hit the freeway, he said they both should have had haircuts, that shaggy hair always set a cop off. Suspicious bastards, he said, and he was right about that.