She looked down, then looked up at him almost pleadingly.“I was afraid of Shamas. Because he controlled the money, and? that he might harm me. He was so? demanding. Autocratic. He would not tolerate being crossed.”
“Not an easy man to live with.”
“Not at all. So instead of leaving, I went off by myself for a few hours at a time-returned to care for the house and make the meals.”
Pedric shook his head.
“It helped to get away alone, take long walks and lick my wounds.”
“And now that he is dead?”
“Now I’m free,” she said softly.
Pedric nodded.
“With Shamas gone, slowly I am healing. The stress and anger are easing. One day, they will be gone.”
Lucinda sat up straighter.“I mean to take charge now, where I never did before. It may seem mercenary, Pedric, but I’m going to think, now, about my own survival.
“There’s more than enough money for my simple tastes. Money can’t make me young and pretty again, but it can bring me some small pleasures. I have retained a financial advisor. There’s so much I don’t know, records I haven’t found.”
Dulcie watched Lucinda, puzzled. She sounded as if she had planned for a long time what she would do if she outlived Shamas.
“The trust was the one thing Shamas did that? has been of benefit. He did it not for me, but simply to avoid probate taxes. Shamas hated any kind of taxes.”
Lucinda looked at Pedric intently.“The things I don’t know about how Shamas made the money-I really didn’t want to know. I could have snooped more efficiently, found out more. I? didn’t want to get involved in knowing, in deciding what to do if Shamas’s ventures were? illegal.
“Cowardice,” she said softly, and her face colored. “I just? I just wanted out.”
“You were married late in life,” Pedric said gently. “Shamas grew into certain ways long before you met him. Ways that were not always respectable.” A wariness crossed Pedric’s face. “Family ways,” he said, “that I cannot condone, that I have tried to remain free of, though I have lived all my life near the family. Tell me-what did you know about Shamas, when you married?”
“He let me know that he was well established in his Seattle enterprises, but he was vague about what they were. He said he wanted our time together to be filled with delight, not with mundane business affairs.”
“And you never questioned that.”
“Not in the beginning. The longer I waited to press him for answers, the more difficult that was. He took care of the banking and gave me a household allowance. He didn’t offer any information. That rankled. But I didn’t do anything about it.
“There was plenty of money for trips, for new cars every year-until I said I didn’t want a new car, that I liked the one I had.” She looked at Pedric. “I was afraid to ask him the important questions. I grew afraid of where the money came from. The longer we were married, the more secretivehe was. I knew he spent a lot on his own. At first on clothes, and on business lunches, he told me. Then, later, it was obvious that he was with other women.
“Yet as miserable as I was, I was too cowardly to change my life.”
“So you escaped into your long, lonely rambles.”
“They never seemed lonely-only soothing. From where we’re sitting you can’t see the village, not a single rooftop, and in the wind, you can’t hear the occasional car. I would sit up here imagining there was not another soul for hundreds of miles, that this little piece of the world was all my own.”
“Yes,” Pedric said, “I understand that.”
She looked at him quietly.“I have continued to come here for that kind of aloneness, so very different from being lonelywithsomeone.”
She smiled.“The hills are so green, the sea so wild. It is easy to imagine that I am in the old world, somewhere on the sea cliffs of Ireland.”
Pedric turned to look above them. From where Lucinda had chosen to sit that day, they could see the trailers lined up, each in its own little patio. The wind had overturned deck chairs and whipped the laundry on a clothesline. A trailer door, left on the latch, banged and slammed. Above the trailers and RVs, the eucalyptus trees that shaded the park crackled in the wind as loud as the snapping of bonfires.
Above the trailer park, Hellhag Hill rose another hundred feet, its bulk seeming to press the narrow shelf with its frail trailers, far too close to the edge.
“I seldom look up there,” Lucinda said. “Usually I sit where I can’t see any sign of civilization. From the first time I came here, the hill has put me in mind of the wild, empty hills in the old, old tales that Shamas told me.
She looked shyly at Pedric.“That was what first drew me to him. The stories. I loved his stories, and the caring and passion with which he told them.”
She sighed.“This hill gave me back that sense of magic. Gave me back that quality in Shamas that I found so appealing-and that he took away from me.”
Pedric gave her an odd look.“This is not the old country, Lucinda. Not the old world, where such tales are a dear part of one’s fife. In this modern world, magic-if such ever existed-most surely does not happen.”
She looked at him quietly.“That is not how you make me feel, when you tell your stories.”
He shook his head, looking around him.“The hill is delightfully wild, but it is only a hill, an ordinary California hillside-probably with poison oak growing beneath us, right where we’re sitting.”
Lucinda laughed. She looked up at the trailers and RVs.“Which of those is yours, Pedric?”
“The green trailer, there at the end.”
“Right at the edge,” she said softly. “So that, every morning when you wake, and every night before you sleep, you see not the other trailers, but the open hill dropping away below you.” She smiled. “Why did you park just there, where the view must be vast and empty? Don’t tell me you’re not touched by a sense ofothernessabout this place?”
He simply smiled.
After a moment, she said,“And why have all these frightened animals come to the hill so suddenly? The strange, wild cats that I feed, and those two thin, uncared-for puppies that Clyde Damen has taken in? Why did they appear all at once? No one abandons that many animals all at one time.” She watched him intently.
“I can tell you where the pups came from,” the old man said. “All very ordinary. But yon cats,” he said, falling into the old speech, “th’ cats be a band of strays that wandered here, that’s all.” He looked hard at her. “You are not imagining th’ cats are anything other than common, stray beasties? Why, th’ world be full of such, Lucinda.”
She laughed at him, and touched his hand.
“Not imagining th’ hill be full of burrows?” Pedric persisted. “Not imagining th’ bright eyes looking out?” He smiled and raised a shaggy eyebrow.
Pedric’s gentle teasing made such a notion seem silly even to Dulcie; though she was certain the hill was not ordinary.
And when Dulcie looked up, the little kit was hunched not a yard away from her, crouched deep in the bushes, peering out, her yellow eyes round and amazed, her fluffy tail twitching with curiosity.
“Maybe Iampicturing that old tale of the cats beneath the hillside,” Lucinda said to Pedric. “Who is to say what is possible?” She fixed an intense look on the old man. “Thereissomething strange about Hellhag Hill. You will not admit it, but I think you see it. And I am not the only one who has noticed.”
“So,” Pedric asked softly. “And what about th’ yon cat watching us? Th’ yon beastie half-hidden in the grass? Is there something strange about that little cat?” Looking into the tangles, he watched Dulcie with interest. He did not see the kit. “Wo’d that little beastie, who is spying on us, rise up and speak to thee as do th’ cats in the old tales? Wo’d this cat maybe bid thee good morning?”
He can’t see the kit,Dulcie thought.He means me. Why is he staring at me?