That was a hard thought to consider. A child warped and crippled by those who had raised him? She didn't like to think about that.
Returning to the kitchen, she watched Dallas pull a box of shortbread cookies from her freezer. He had his uniform jacket off, his collar loosened, and had poured the coffee and set the sugar and cream on the table.
They sat comfortably together the way they had when she was little, when she'd had a problem at school or when she wanted to hear for the hundredth time the old family stories about her dead mother, the tales about Dallas and her mother growing up on the little family acreage in the wine country east of Napa.
They remained talking until after 1:00, discussing the boy, and Ryan describing the Jakeses' mountain cabin where she had added a new great room, turning the old living room into a master bedroom. They both knew the foothill area well, the rolling slopes that were green in winter until the snows came, green again in spring until the summer sun burned the hills to the golden brown of wild hay, broken by the dark green stands of pine. Scattered vacation homes were tucked among the hills along with pockets of older shacks down in the gullies where the drainage was poor and there was no sweeping view. There were a few large estates too, back away from the main roads, like that owned by Marianna and Sullivan Landeau, the couple whose weekend house she had recently finished, here in the village. The Landeaus' San Andreas estate was huge, the house overbearing with its excessive use of marble. Not at all like the simple Molena Point cottage that Ryan had designed for them.
"Must be nice to have that kind of money," Dallas said. "What, three houses-one in San Francisco?"
She nodded. "Nice, I guess. But they don't seem all that happy."
Dallas broke a cookie in half. "And the boy-you have no idea where he lived, where any of those kids lived?"
"They came up the drive, but you can't see the road from the house. I never did see which direction they came from." She named the other two boys but she didn't know their last names, she was certain she'd never heard them.
"The kids didn't talk about their families. They hung around the way kids do, showed up after school as if they were on their way home, and once or twice on the weekend. They seemed open enough, and friendly.
"Right in the beginning Curtis was sort of nosy, asking questions about where I was from, and did I do this kind of work for a living." She glanced wryly at Dallas. "He looked… when I told him where I lived he did a little double-take, then immediately covered it up. We were busy surveying and laying out the addition, I didn't dunk any more about it."
She looked at Dallas. "Right then, did he decide to hitch a ride, when he knew where I lived? Did he have it all planned, weeks ago?
"And what was he doing up there? How did he get there, in the first place? And did the old man hitch too? That would make me feel really stupid, if those two were both in the truck." Ryan shook her head. "Did I give them both a ride so they could set that bomb?"
"Soon as we get a lab report, likely we'll start checking stores in the San Andreas area-hardware, drugstores, feed and grocery. That might be where the meth supplies were coming from. We sure didn't turn up with big purchases here on the coast. That raid on the Farger shack netted us a hoard of antifreeze, iodine, starter fluid, fifty packs of cold tablets, just for starters. To say nothing of the mountain of empties buried in a pit. But no record-or no admission-of increased sales locally. Could be they got their bomb makings up there too."
She looked at him. "I wasn't carrying their bomb supplies! In the back of my truck!"
Dallas shrugged. "That could be hard to sort out. Ammonium sulfate, for instance. The bomb wouldn't have taken much, compared to what a farmer might use."
"That would be sick, Dallas. If I was hauling their bomb makings for them."
"What time did you leave San Andreas? Took you about four hours to get home?"
"About seven in the evening. Took me five hours. I stopped in town to load some stained-glass windows I'd bought from an antique dealer. He'd said he'd wait for me. Then halfway home I pulled into a fast-food place for a burger." She imagined the kid hunkered down under the tarp, cold in the wind and nearly drooling at the smell of greasy fries and burgers. "Why didn't I see him? How could I have loaded the windows without…" She stopped, and sat thinking, then looked up at Dallas.
"When I loaded the windows, the guy had given me some cardboard to buffer them, so I didn't need the tarp. I tossed it near the tailgate, still folded. There was no one in the truck, then."
"When you'd loaded the windows, what did you do?"
"I went back inside to give the shopkeeper a check."
"Was there any room left in the truck bed?"
"The windows were lined up in the front, riding on several sheets of foam insulation, and tied and padded. The back half of the truck bed was empty."
Dallas kept asking questions. Yawning, she went over every detail she could remember. The hitchhikers could easily have dropped off the back of the truck when she pulled into her drive. In the dark, she wouldn't have seen them.
"What other contacts did you have up there?"
"Lumber and building-supply people. Building inspectors. The furnace guy. A local realtor wanting me to do a remodel-a Larn Williams. Has his broker's license. Works independently."
"You take the job?"
"He wants to talk with his clients." She yawned. "I think I may skip that one. He seems interested in more than the work."
Dallas rose. "You're beat. I'll cut out of here."
She grinned up at him. "You never get tired, when you're on a case." She got up too, and hugged him, and saw him out the door. But the moment he pulled out of the drive and headed down the hill, she turned off the light and fell into bed, dropping immediately into sleep-she was definitely not a night person.
But others in the world loved the night, others found the small hours after midnight filled with excitement. While Dallas and Ryan sat in her studio trying to get a fix on Curtis Farger, Joe Grey woke from his nap in the double bed beside Clyde, woke hearing Dulcie and the kit at his cat door banging the plastic flap.
Leaping down and trotting out through the living room, he found the kit on the porch slapping at the flap, and Dulcie stretched out on the mat beside her enjoying the cool night breeze. Within moments they were racing through the village past the dimly lit shops, dodging around potted trees, streaking through sidewalk gardens. Ocean's wide median and one-way lanes were empty now and deserted, the wedding party vanished as if all the people and lights and tables of food had been sucked up by the sea wind. The cats didn't pause until they were high in the hills where the tall grass whipped in long waves-they ran chasing one another, clearing their heads of too many voices, too much laughter, too many human problems. Alone in the night racing blindly through the tangles caring nothing tonight for caution, they laughed softly and taunted one another.
"Gotcha." Then a hiss and a playful growl, humanlike voices no louder than a whisper. "Not me, you can't catch me." "Alley cat! You're an alley cat!" "Last one up the tree is dog meat!"
Dulcie scorched up the branches of a huge oak that stood on the crest of the hill, a venerable grandfather flinging its black twisted arms out across the stars. Racing and leaping within the great tree, riding its wind-tossed branches like sailors clinging to a rocking masthead, the cats looked down the hills that fell away below them. Ancient curves of land that, just here, were still totally wild, empty of human civilization. And out over the sea the new moon hung thin as a blade. The stars among which the moon swam were, Dulcie liked to imagine, the eyes of spirit cats who had passed from the world before them.
The wind died. The cats paused, listening.