“Jake! Stay in there.” Evan met me with a quick, fierce one-armed hug and a cheek kiss. Same piercing stare; same wiry, dark good looks; same impact. “Cassie! You look wonderful.” Lean as a greyhound — through his raincoat I felt ribs, and the ropes of muscle along his back. If it weren’t for Jake, I could’ve been seriously attracted to Evan Calabresi.
He handed me the umbrella. “Go on inside. We’ve got to do some more sandbagging.”
I squelched across the terrace and into a broad entrance hall with a threadbare Persian carpet covered with several mud rugs. A hall tree hung with raincoats dripped into a nest of towels. Behind the left-hand door a mixer went in short bursts and a woman called out, “Just a minute — be right there.”
Through the door on my right lay a smallish sitting room, and farther along, a wide staircase slanting up sideways. The double doors straight ahead opened on a dining room with the table already set, dimly lit by a massive chandelier.
The kitchen door popped open and a pretty Latina about my age burst out swathed in a bunchy chef’s apron, her single thick braid coiled high and held with a big red clip, and her hand outstretched. “Hi! I’m Evan’s sort-of girlfriend, Sochi Alarcon; I’m in here doing his birthday cake. Not that he’ll eat any of it.”
“Cass, Cassandra Bailey. Sochi?”
“Short for Xochitl, from my daddy’s activist days. I was his little Aztlan princess.” A strand of blond threaded through the black braid. “Sochi’s hot,” Jake had said, and she was — high-cheekboned, vivid, sexy, strong. I can hold my own in a crowd, but Sochi’s the one everybody would see first.
She reached into the closet for a pair of gray slipper socks. “Come and put these on while we dry your shoes.”
The big kitchen took up the end of the house, its restaurant-sized range dominated by a slender brown man in an orange shirt and a white baker’s pillbox: Wilson Tang, the Filipino cook. “Call him Tang. Everybody does,” Sochi said. Tang looked maybe fifty, but was over seventy and had been with the family since Evan was born.
He squeezed my hand gently. “I am responsible for the conducting of the entire household. If you are in need of anything at all, you must contact me at once.”
The kitchen smelled wonderful. Wild mushrooms he’d gathered himself, Tang said, and Petaluma ducks he’d killed and dressed.
This was clearly Tang’s lair. In the back corner a roll-top desk overflowed with bills, catalogs, and sporting papers, a television tuned to basketball and a radio droning weather and traffic conditions.
Sochi asked about our trip up, and I told her about the drowned road. She was worried about getting back to town tomorrow to start the inventory at her business, which specialized in mineral and crystal specimens and carvings.
I heard Evan and Jake pass by in the hall, talking and laughing.
“Maybe he’ll sleep tonight.” Tang nodded toward the ceiling. “All night long I hear him up there, bum — bum — bum, running on his machine.”
Sochi volunteered to show me our room, stopping by the hall closet on our way. “I hope they still keep the heaters in here. I haven’t been up here for two months.” Uh-oh. She dug out two space heaters and handed me one. “This place is impossible to heat.”
“Who all are you expecting?” I asked as we started up the broad staircase.
She looked surprised. “Just us.” Evan’s mother, long remarried and living in Virginia, was cruising in the South Pacific. “Oh. Uncle Farley. He’s down in the library watching TV. No way would he pass up the chance for a good meal.”
“I didn’t know Evan had an uncle. Is he well?”
Sochi nodded; she seemed to understand exactly what I was asking. “Oh, quite.”
I seized the opportunity. “I never did hear exactly how Evan’s father died. Or his grandfather, either.” The staircase ended in the center of the upstairs hall, with a railing all around the opening; an odd arrangement. Music from two acoustic guitars came from the room at the end, above the kitchen, and Jake started singing. “In the shuffling madness... locomotive breath...”
Sochi lowered her voice. “Evan’s father killed himself,” she said. “My own father was vineyard manager here then. I used to love it up here. I was nine when Tom Calabresi walked up into the woods and blew out his brains.
“Not even a note. Horrible for the family. Forty-three years old. He’d been having headaches.” She scowled. Did she not believe it? “Of course he’d watched his own father, Tomase, go crazy. Turned violent, had to be tied down in his bed.” Sochi nodded toward the far end of the hall. “In a coma the last six months. He was forty-seven.”
“And they never found any cause?”
“You just know they tried everything. Clinics, experimental programs — now they’re talking stem cells. Evan’s been under the microscope his whole life, and he’s let himself be taken over by the dark side. Fatalistic; wicked. Helping it happen. So the less said about it, the better. Okay?” I could see that she really did love him, and she was totally frustrated.
Our room was at center back, opposite the stairwell. Sochi opened the door and a wall of cold, dank air flowed out. The room was mega-country, all maple and rag rugs. And — ugh! — twin beds with white chenille spreads, like a ’40s movie. I knew the sheets would be clammy.
“I’d start the heaters going now,” Sochi said. “You’ll have to share the bathroom.” She opened the bathroom door and set her heater down. “I’m on the other side.”
I started the other heater in the center of the room. As she left Sochi pointed out Farley’s door opposite, next to the glassed-in sunroom, and dropped her voice. “They say old Tomase never believed Farley was really his son. Anyway, Farley’s over sixty now and still charging, sharp tongue, big gut, and all.”
Sochi yipped as a smiling head appeared in the stairwell, the dark V of hair close-clipped, with a little Machiavelli goatee to match. “Well, hidy. And here you have me in the flesh! I wondered where you’d got to, Sochi.” Tweeded and groomed to a razor’s edge, Uncle Farley carried his years of good living quite well. Portly, that’s the word.
Sochi introduced us and Farley said, “Come on, Miss Sharp-Eyes,” with a knowing smile. “I need you to look at something for me.” Farley led the way through the glass-walled sunroom, dark now, and onto the balcony above the front entrance. The balcony was roofed, and the rain was slanting away.
“I’m worried about Noni’s Parcel,” Farley said. One of the fields was being undermined by the rising creek, and Farley went into a rant about ignorant county officials and the stupid and corrupt Corps of Engineers. “Sochi, look down toward the creek. Can you see anything like the shine of water?” He bent over the thigh-high iron railing, shading his eyes.
Obliging, Sochi leaned out. “Nope.” Nothing was visible but a steady curtain of rain against black. “Ask me again later, when the lanterns are turned off.”
Only when Farley discovered that the road in was submerged did he turn to me. “I was afraid of that,” he said. “Now I’m going to be stuck here overnight.”
When I finished unpacking I knocked on Evan’s door. Downstairs Sochi and Tang were discussing serving dishes and when to start the rice.
“Step into my playpen,” said Evan. The long room was jammed with a pool table, king-sized waterbed, giant television, several drums, his computer corner, and a grove of fierce-looking chromed workout machines. I felt as if I’d lost my hearing, and realized that the room was thickly carpeted and the walls hung with heavy draperies.
Evan handed me a bongo. “Make yourself useful.”
When Tang buzzed Evan for dinner I went downstairs first, aware that I should’ve volunteered to help.