The morning was damp and cold. A thick fog lay along the freeway, staining the crowded neighborhoods the dirty gray-yellow of sour milk. David took the first shift, driving until Paso Robles where they meant to stop for a late breakfast. What worried him, as he pulled into the parking lot of the Paso Robles Inn, easing in between two tall trucks where the car wouldn’t be seen so easily from the highway, was that the killer might have followed them. That whoever had shot Martin might think that, despite the dark night, Maudie had glimpsed his face. That she’d seen, if not enough to make a positive identification, enough to give the police a clue. In the months before the shooting, Martin had, on three occasions, reported questionable airport personnel who later turned out to be security risks. Two of them were baggage workers, one the member of a maintenance crew, two with prison records, one with no green card and no passport. David worried that these men might be behind the shooting, and he thought about Martin’s ex-wife, as well. Pearl Toola had some questionable contacts, men David suspected she’d remained close to, from her earlier years working in the Las Vegas casinos. Martin and Pearl had married young, when Martin was perhaps wilder, before his responsibility as a pilot had settled him down. Pearl had been so beautiful, Martin hadn’t cared that she worked dealing blackjack and ran with a fast crowd.
After the shooting, when the L.A. police interviewed Maudie, she had made no identification, and as far as he knew, they still had no leads. The police told them there were no shell casings found and, on the hardtop road, the sheriff had picked up no tire marks. Maudie told the investigating detective that she had seen only the flashes of gunfire, that she hadn’t seen the shooter. When the L.A. detectives queried her about Martin’s ex-wife, Maudie told him that considering Pearl had had several affairs while they were still married, and had once asked for a divorce herself, it didn’t seem likely, when they did go their separate ways, she’d consider herself a wronged party in need of revenge. She said she thought Pearl was glad to be free of Martin and her little boy, that surely she wouldn’t be foolish enough to turn around and put herself in harm’s way for no reason. Maudie told the detective she was leaving L.A., and gave him her new address in Molena Point. She said she couldn’t continue living in L.A. with the memories of Martin’s childhood unavoidably all around her, that she didn’t want to live with those painful reminders.
Molena Point, too, was filled with memories, but of a different kind. This was the village of Maudie’s childhood, the one place she wanted to be, the one place she thought she and Benny could find peace and begin to heal, as much as they ever could heal. Among the woods and along the seacoast of the small village, she thought Benny’s hurt spirit might begin to mend. She wanted only to lose herself again in that perfect place, to return, as well as she could, to those long-ago childhood pleasures, to that early innocence before the world forced her to see life more clearly.
She had kept the two cottages all these years, since her own parents died. She and her husband, Allen, had leased out the larger house, keeping the little guest cottage, four doors up the block, for their vacations. After Allen died, she hadn’t had the heart to return to the village, and had rented out the smaller cottage, too. It was then that she had bought the tiny log house nearer to L.A., just north of San Bernardino, the cabin where they had been headed the night Martin and Caroline were killed.
Now she had sold the San Bernardino cabin, and sold the Molena Point cottage. She and Benny would live in her old home, in the two-bedroom Tudor which, with a little addition, would provide room for her quilting studio. She desperately needed that involvement again with color and cloth and stitching, needed to get outside herself. She couldn’t hope to heal Benny’s broken life without first healing her own—without embracing once more the work that eased her spirit and that she found meaningful.
It had been hard to sell the L.A. home where Martin and David grew up, hard to sell it just after Martin’s funeral. But that part of her life was over now. She had put the money from the sale of the house and of the San Bernardino cabin into an additional trust for Benny. When Martin left Pearl he had made sure all his holdings were in trust for the child where Pearl couldn’t get at them, and Maudie had done the same. Closing out her bank accounts of her day-to-day funds, she had packed the cashier’s checks safely in her luggage among her lingerie, for deposit in a Molena Point bank.
They’d arrived in Molena Point at one, in time for a lunch of hot soup and fresh-baked bread at a small restaurant run by a Persian couple who were among Maudie’s favorite people; then they’d headed up the hills to their new home, up the steep, wooded streets above the village. Approaching the dark-timbered Tudor that had been her childhood home, Maudie caught her breath. This was their home now, hers and Benny’s; they would settle in here, Benny would grow up here. And whatever the outcome of their move might be, maybe the final words of Martin’s and Caroline’s epitaphs had not yet been written. Maybe, Maudie thought with a cool certainty, the last episode of her son’s death was still to be revealed.
4
THE NOTION THAT Maudie’s fate and the fate of her small grandson might be guided by a cat would have greatly amused the older woman, the idea that she and Benny would become the subjects of a tomcat’s sharp and life-changing attention would have made her laugh. Yet even that first afternoon as Maudie supervised the moving in of her furniture and packing boxes, she was closely observed from the branches of an oak tree just above her, where Joe Grey crouched, his yellow eyes narrowed with interest. There was something about the soft little woman that made the gray tomcat tweak his whiskers and lick a paw reflectively.
She was just a bit pudgy, a pale, round woman with powdery skin, her smile warm, her voice, as she supervised the unloading, gentle even when she was annoyed at a worker’s carelessness. She was impeccably groomed, her blond-dyed hair—which was probably gray—styled in an expensive bob, her loose, smocklike jacket well cut, in subtle patterns, over silky, gathered trousers. Expensive, flat-heeled shoes. Tiny gold earrings and a gold choker. A timid-looking woman, well turned out as if to give herself confidence, and with a smile that should draw one to trust her. Yet there was an air about her, too, that didn’t seem to fit, a watchful expression that showed itself for only an instant and then was gone again, a look that puzzled the tomcat.
Over the next three days, Joe Grey watched Maudie. He watched her grown son David carry in a fresh Christmas tree, and imagined the three of them busily decorating it among their still unpacked moving boxes. He arrived early each morning with his housemate, Ryan Flannery, as she came to work on the cottage that she and Clyde had bought from Maudie. Ryan and Clyde Damen had been married only since last Valentine’s Day, the providential joining of a pair of avid collectors: Clyde of classic cars, which he restored and sold; Ryan, of antique mantels and moldings and stained-glass windows, which she used in the homes she built. Now, perhaps driven by an excess of matrimonial bliss, the couple had combined their creative fervor into restoring old houses.