As they swung into Piñon, Jordan began to lean forward in his seat, dangling like a gymnast from his shoulder strap. He was dirty, dressed in the grass-stained shorts, T-shirt and Dodgers cap he'd been wearing when the alarm sounded, and he was wide-eyed from lack of sleep (it had been past midnight when they'd finally decided to get a room at the Holiday Inn in Woodland Hills, the last room available). All he'd been able to talk about was Dame Edith, the cat, who'd managed to vanish just as they were loading the cars yesterday afternoon. “You think she'll be all right, Delaney?” he said now for what must have been the hundredth time.
“Of course she will,” he responded automatically, and it had become a kind of mantra, “-she can take care of herself.” But even as he said it, he caught sight of the place where yesterday a grove of lemon-scented gum had stood arching and white against the flank of the hill and saw nothing there but a vacancy of ash.
Jordan bounded out of the car before it came to a stop, shouting, “Here, kitty, here, Dame Edith, here, kitty,” while Delaney sat there a moment to get his bearings. He'd been prepared for the worst, for blackened beams, melted plastic and twisted metal, for bathtubs hanging in the air and filing cabinets scorched like cookpans. These fires burned as hot as eighteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and they would sometimes suck up all the available oxygen in an area, superheating it far beyond the point of combustion until a breeze came up and the whole thing exploded as if a bomb had been dropped. Houses would burn from the inside out, even before the flames reached them, so intense were the temperatures. He'd expected annihilation, and here were the house, the yard, the neighborhood, and not a blade of grass disturbed.
Kyra had pulled in just ahead of him, and now her mother climbed out of the passenger's-side door, looking dazed. She'd spent the night on a cot at the foot of their bed in the Holiday Inn, and since they'd been up early to return to the roadblock and wait for the all-clear she hadn't had time to do her hair and make herself up with her usual attention to detail. She was showing her age, the tragedy of the night etched under her eyes and dug in deep round the corners of her mouth. Kyra, in contrast, had tied her hair back and forgone makeup, and even in her party dress she looked streamlined, girded for battle. Before Delaney could get out of the car she was in the house, striding from room to room like a field marshal, calling out the cat's name while punching numbers into the portable phone. Delaney, cradling a brown paper bag full of indispensable notebooks and essential nature guides, joined her a moment later.
He set the books down on the kitchen table and went to the oven, which still gave off a faint if unappetizing whiff of turkey. And there, inside, was the turkey itself, as tough and desiccated as a piece of camel hide. It had been a hell of a Thanksgiving, Delaney was thinking, the worst he'd ever had, when Kyra strode into the room, gave him a sour look, and reached into the refrigerator for the carton of orange juice. She pinched the phone between chin and shoulder while pouring herself a glass. “Uh, huh,” she said, speaking into the mouthpiece. “Uh, huh, yes. Uh, huh.”
She was concerned about her properties. As far as anybody knew to this point, the only homes lost had been eight redwood cabins just to the south of Arroyo Blanco in a little enclave of people living alternative lifestyles-hippies, bikers, palm readers, New Age enthusiasts and the like-but she was worried about a couple of far-flung listings, the Da Ros place in particular. She'd been on the verge of hysteria the previous afternoon when they'd had to leave the cat behind to what seemed a horrible and inescapable fate, but now that the fire had passed them by, Delaney could see that she'd automatically shifted her focus to her listings. The cat would be all right, she knew that. It was probably hiding under a bed somewhere, terrorized by the sirens. Or it was out back stalking all those dislocated mice. It would turn up.
“They didn't,” Kyra said into the mouthpiece. The juice went untasted from her hand to the counter, a clear orange tube of light. “Are you sure it was the Da Roses'?” And then, to Delaney: “Quick, flick on the TV, will you?” and they were heading in lockstep for the living room. “Channel Seven,” she breathed, and spoke into the phone again: “Thanks, Sally. Yes, yes, I'm watching it now.”
Full-color scenes of destruction blew by on the screen. The flattened remains of the redwood cabins held center stage a moment, burned-out cars and vans and toppling chimneys raising their skeletal fragments to the treeless horizon, and then the scene shifted to a reporter interviewing people outside Gitello's Market.
“That was Sally Lieberman,” Kyra said. “She says they showed the Da Ros place.” Her voice caught. “It's gone. She said it's gone.”
If this was the case, the reporters on Channel 7 failed to confirm it-at least in this segment-and their counterparts on Channels 2, 4, 5, 11 and 13 didn't report it either. They all showed the blackened rocks, the white ash, the corrugated air rising from the remaining hot spots and the sweaty exhausted firefighters plying their hoses, but already the fire was old news-there had been no deaths and precious little destruction of real property-and they turned to other matters, to the drive-by shootings, the fatal knifings, the traffic gore.
“Maybe not,” Delaney said. “Maybe she got it wrong.”
Kyra was wearing her frantic look. “I've got to go check.”
“What, now?” Delaney was incredulous. “It's dangerous. The thing isn't out yet, you know-it could flare up again. Besides, they've probably got the road blocked.”
He was right, and she knew it. She sank into the chair, volitionless, the phone clutched desperately in her hand. She was thinking of who to call next, how to get around the roadblocks, how to make things happen. “There's nothing you can do,” he said, “and we've got to get all this crap out of the cars before we do anything. You don't want people stealing it, do you?”
Kit appeared at that moment, still looking a bit disoriented but more herself now-she'd wrapped a turban round her head to conceal her frayed hair and reapplied her lipstick. Delaney saw that she was holding something awkwardly in her right hand, out away from her body, as if she'd found a bit of offal or a dead rat under the bed. But what was it-a belt? A Walkman? Or no, it was a black plastic box dangling from a neatly severed strap. The thing was wrong somehow in his mother-in-law's hand, anomalous, out of place, but powerfully evocative for all that.
“I found this in my purse,” Kit said, and her voice rose in surprise and puzzlement. “I can't imagine how it got there.”
But Delaney could. It came to him all at once, and he glanced at Kyra and saw that she understood too. “Dominick Flood” was all he could say.
“But why-?” Kyra began.
Epiphany came to Kit with a force all its own and her eyes sank back into her head in shame and hurt-Dominick Flood had been playing a very nasty game with her, stringing her along, waiting his chance. “I can't believe it,” she said.
Delaney pictured him, suave and unctuous, Kit clinging to his arm as they watched the spectacle of the fire from the safety of the police line, and the dawning realization coming over him that this was his opportunity. The monitoring device would still be sending out its signal from Arroyo Blanco, even if it wasn't from his own house, and the people at the Los Angeles County Electronic Monitoring Service would have known that he'd been evacuated overnight, that there'd been an emergency-it would probably take them days to sort it out. And Flood? A bank account in the Bahamas? A chalet in Switzerland, a beach house in the Seychelles? He would have had all the eventualities worked out.