"Is that the last of it?" Maxine said, looking at the box under Tammy's arm.
"No, I'm keeping this."
"Oh? Okay."
"It's just pictures of Todd."
The fire was still burning strongly; waves of heat rose up out of the half-finished pit, making the air undulate. While she stared at the fire Tammy opened the box of photographs, and as she did so some instinct—a kind of repugnance for the woman who had obsessed so often on these pictures—made her toss the box lid aside, and with one unpremeditated movement, pluck the pictures and the little roll of negatives out of the box and toss them into the middle of the fire.
"Changed your mind, huh?" Maxine said.
"Yep."
The flames were already curling around the first of the series, but Maxine could see him clearly enough.
"He was younger then."
"Yeah. They were taken on Life Lessons."
"Are those the negatives you're burning?"
"Don't ask."
"That must have cost you a small fortune. But he surely was a good-looking man."
The first of the photographs had been consumed. Now the second and the third.
"Are these the last of it, then?"
"I think so," Tammy said. "They can argue over the rest."
"Only I'm parched. Watching fires is thirsty work."
"You want me to get you a Coke or a beer?"
"No. I want us to get back in the car and go home."
"Home," Tammy said, still looking at the fire. The sixth, seventh and eighth pictures were being consumed. The roll of negatives had already curled up into a little black ball.
"Yes, home," Maxine said.
She took Tammy's hand, and kissed the back of it. "Where you belong."
The last of the photographs had come into view, preserved from the heat of the flames on which it sat by the bottom of the box. This was always the picture she'd stared at most often, and most intensely; the one in which she'd often willed Todd's gaze to shift, just a few degrees, so he would look out at her. The fire had caught it now. In a few seconds it would be ashes.
Suddenly, just as impetuously as she'd delivered the pictures into the fire, she now reached down and plucked this one out. She blew on the flames, which only encouraged them.
"Here," Maxine said and, snatching the photograph from Tammy's hand, dropped it to the ground and quickly stamped out the flames.
"You left it a bit late for a change of mind."
Tammy picked the picture up, nipping out the last orange worms of fire that crawled around its charred edges. Three-quarters of the image had been consumed, and the remaining portion was browned by the heat and dirt of Maxine's stamping, but Todd's face, shoulder and chest had survived. And his eyes, of course, just one second from meeting the gaze of the camera. Imminent, but permanently averted.
"You really want to keep that?"
"Yes. If you don't mind. We'll frame it and we'll find a place in the house where we can say hello to him once in a while."
"Done." She headed back to the house. "I'm going to call the airport. Find out when the next plane back to Los Angeles is. Are you ready to go?"
"Just say the word."
Tammy looked down at the picture in her hand. Maxine was right; she had left it a little late to salvage it. But there might come a time when she and Maxine needed the comfort of this face; when they were no longer young, and the imminence of his gaze would carry with it the promise of a reunion in another, kinder place.
She glanced up, to be sure Maxine had gone inside, then she gave the bitter-smelling scrap of photograph a quick kiss. Having done so, she smiled at the man in the picture, and at herself for all her years of vain adoration. Well, she'd made her peace with it, at least. She slipped the photograph into her pocket and went inside, leaving the fire to burn itself out in Arnie's half-finished handiwork.
THREE
It is night in Coldheart Canyon, and the wind is off the desert.
The Santa Anas they call these winds. They blow off the Mojave, bringing sickness, on occasion, and the threat of fire.
But tonight the Santa Anas are not blisteringly hot. Tonight they are balmy as they pass through the Canyon. Their only freight is the sweet fragrance of flowers.
They make the young palms that are growing wild on the flanks of the Canyon sway, and the banks of bougainvillea churn. They raise dust along the road that winds up the Canyon.
Once in a while people will still make their way up that winding road, usually to look for some evidence of scandal or horror. But nature, abhorring a vacuum, has blanketed with green vine the deep pit that marked the location of Katya Lupi's house. So the visitors, coming here in the hope of finding bloodstains or Satanic markings scrawled into the sandstone, dig around for a while in the hot sun and then give up. There's nothing here that gives them gooseflesh: just flowers and dragonflies. Grumbling to one another that this was all a waste of time, they get back in their rental cars, arguing as to who suggested this fool's errand in the first place, and drive away to find something that will give them something morbid to talk about once they get back to Tulsa or New Jersey.
When people finally ask them whether they went up to that Godforsaken Canyon where all those Hollywood folks died, they say that yeah, they went and had a look, but it was a waste of gas and temper, because there was nothing to see. Not a thing.
And so, over the next few summers, as people come and look and go away disappointed, word slowly spreads that Coldheart Canyon is a sham, a fake; not worth the effort.
So people come less and less. And eventually the tourists don't come at all.
There's only one kind of visitor who will still make the effort to find the place where Katya Lupi built her dream palace, and for this sort of sightseer, the Canyon will still put on a show.
They come, always, in expensive vehicles, designed to be driven over rough, undomesticated land. They come with rolls of geological maps and surveyors' equipment, and talk proprietarily about how the Canyon would look if it had a five-star hotel, seven or eight stories high, built at the top end, with three swimming pools and a dozen five-grand-a-night bungalows, all arranged so that everybody has a little corner of the Canyon walled off for their private spa, the contours of the land altered so that it feels like a world within a world; an escape into paradise, just two minutes' drive from Sunset Boulevard.
The Canyon has heard all this idle nonsense before, of course. And it has promised itself: never again.
Hearing these men talk about the money they're going to make once they've done their digging and their planting, the Canyon loses its temper, and starts to show its displeasure as only dirt and rock given something close to consciousness by the magic worked in its midst can do.
At first it simply shakes the ground a little, just enough to send some stones skipping down the Canyon's flanks to shatter the windshields on every vehicle on the road. Very often, a tantrum like this is enough to make the developers turn tail. But not always. Once in a while, there's somebody who refuses to be so easily intimidated, and the Canyon must escalate its assault.
It shakes its flanks until it uncovers certain horrid forms: the mummified remains of the children of the ghosts and the animals who mated here in the dark days of the Canyon's shameful past.
The revelation is brief. Just enough to say: this is the least of it, my friend. Dig and you will regret what I will show you for the rest of your life.
The show works every time.
Pragmatic though these men are, they feel the cold presence of the uncanny all around them, and suddenly they want no more of this place. In their panic they don't even bother to clear the granulated glass off their leather seats. They just get into their cars and drive away in clammy haste, leaving their maps and artists' renderings to decay in the dirt, and their ambitions to rot beside them.