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I tried the number at the house, but the line was busy. I changed into my jeans and made myself some lunch.
By the time I got through to Ash, her mother was resting and couldn't be disturbed, but I was invited to tea at 4:00.
I decided to drive up the pass to the gun club and practice target shooting with the little.32 I keep locked in my top desk drawer in an old sock. I shoved the gun, clip, and a box of fifty cartridges into a small canvas duffel and tucked it in the trunk of my car. I stopped for gas and then headed north on 101 to the junction of 154, following the steep road that zigzags up the mountainside. The day was chilly. We'd had several days of unexpected rain and the vegetation was a dark green, blending in the distance to an intense navy blue. The clouds overhead were a cottony white with ragged underpi
At the summit, I turned left onto a secondary road barely two lanes wide, which angled upward, twisting half a mile into back country. Massive boulders, mantled in dark-green moss, lined the road, where the overhanging trees blocked out the sun. The trunks of the live oaks were frosted with fungus the color of a greened-out copper roof. I could smell heather and bay laurel and the frail scent of woodsmoke drifting from the cabins tucked in along the ridge. Where the roadside dropped away, the canyons were blank with fog. The wide gate to the gun club was open and I drove the last several hundred yards, pulling into the gravel parking lot, deserted except for a lone station wagon. Aside from the man in charge, I was the only person there.
I paid my four bucks and followed him down to the cinder-block shed that housed the restrooms. He opened the padlock to the storage room and extracted an oblong of cardboard mounted on a piece of lathing, with a target stapled to it.
"Visibility might be tough now in this fog," he warned.
"I'll chance it," I said.
He eyed me with misgivings, but finally handed over the target, a staple gun, and two additional targets.
I hadn't been up to the practice range for months, and it was nice to have the whole place to myself. The wind had picked up and mist was being blown across concrete bunkers like something in a horror movie. I set up the target at a range of twenty-five yards. I inserted soft plastic earplugs and then put on hearing protectors over that. All outside noises were damped down to a mild hush, my breathing audible in my own head as though I were swim-ming. I loaded eight cartridges into the clip of my.32 and began to fire. Each round sounded like a balloon popping somewhere close by, followed by the characteristic whiff of gunpowder I so love.
I moved up to the target and checked to see where I was hitting. High and left. I circled the first eight holes with a Magic Marker, went back to the bench rest and loaded the gun again. A sign just behind me read: "Guns as we use them here are a source of pleasure and entertain-ment, but one moment of carelessness or foolishness can bring it all to an end forever." Amen, I thought.
The hard-packed dirt just in front of me was as littered with shells as a battlefield. I saved my brass, collecting the casings after each firing, tucking them neatly back into the Styrofoam brick that cradled the live rounds.
By 3:15 I was cold, and most of my ammunition was gone. I can't claim that my little semiautomatic is wildly accurate at twenty-five yards, but at least I was feeling co
8
At 3:55, I was turning into the circular drive to the Wood family home, located on seven acres of land that sat on the bluffs overlooking the Pacific. Their fortunes on the rise, they'd moved since I'd last visited. This house was enor-mous, done in a French Baroque style-a two-story central structure flanked by two prominent tower wings. The stucco exterior was as smooth and white as frosting on a wedding cake, roofline and windows edged with plaster garlands, rosettes, and shell motifs that might have been piped out of a pastry tube. A brick walk led from the driveway around to the seaward-facing front of the house and up two steps to a wide uncovered brick porch. A series of arched French doors spa
"Mrs. Wood asked if you'd wait in the morning room," the maid said, without pausing for a reply. She departed on thick crepe soles that made no sound on the polished par-quet floors.
Oh, sure, I thought, that's where I usually hang out at my place… the morning room, where else?
The walls were apricot, the ceiling a high dome of white. Large Boston ferns were arranged on stands be-tween high curving windows through which light streamed. The furniture was French Provincial; round ta-ble, six chairs with cane backs. The circle of Persian carpet-ing was a pale blend of peach and green. I stood at one of the windows, looking out at the rolling sweep of the grounds (which is what rich people call their yards). The C-shape of the room cupped a view of the ocean in its lower curve and a view of the mountains in its hook so that the windows formed a cyclorama. Sky and sea, pines, a pie wedge of city, clouds spilling down the distant mountain-side… all of it was perfectly framed, wheeling gulls picked out in white against the dark hills to the north.
What I love about the rich is the silence they live in- the sheer magnitude of space. Money buys light and high ceilings, six windows where one might actually do. There was no dust, no streaks on the glass, no scuff marks on the slender bowed legs of the matching French Provincial chairs. I heard a whisper of sound, and the maid returned with a rolling serving cart, loaded with a silver tea service, a plate of assorted tea sandwiches, and pastries the cook had probably whipped up that day.
"Mrs. Wood will be right with you," she said to me.
"Thanks," I said. "Uh, is there a lavatory close by?" "Bathroom" seemed like too crude a term.
"Yes, ma'am. Turn left into the foyer. Then it's the first door on the left."
I tiptoed to the loo and locked myself in, staring at my reflection in the mirror with despair. Of course, I was dressed wrong. I never could guess right when it came to clothes. I'd gone to the Edgewater Hotel in my all-purpose dress to eat lunch with Ashley, who'd worn an outfit suit-able for bagging game. Now I had down-dressed to the point where I looked like a bum. I didn't know what I'd been thinking of. I knew the Woods had money. I'd just forgotten how much. The trouble with me is I have no class. I was raised in a two-bedroom stucco bungalow, maybe eight hundred and fifty square feet of space, if you counted the little screened-in utility porch. The yard was a tatty fringe of crabgrass surrounded by the kind of white picket fence you bought in sections and stuck in the ground where you would. My aunt's notion of "day-core" was a pink plastic flamingo standing on one foot, which I'd thought was pretty classy shit until I was twelve.
I blocked the bathroom out of my visual field, but not before I got a glimpse of marble, pale-blue porcelain, and gold-plated hardware. A shallow dish held six robin's-egg-sized ovals of soap that had never been touched before by human hands. I peed and then just ran my hands under the water and shook them off, not wanting to soil anything. The terry hand towels looked as though they'd just had the price tags removed from the rims. There were four guest towels laid out beside the basin like big decorative paper napkins, but I was way too smart to fall for that trick. Where would I put a used one afterward-in the trash? These people didn't make trash. I finished drying my hands on the backside of my jeans and returned to the morning room feeling damp around the rear. I didn't dare sit down.