Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [42]
I turned my back to the window, leaning against the sink, shutting my eyes and listening. Traffic noises—had there been any at this hour—were muted here at the far end of the cul-de-sac, but even so, the house had never been so quiet. There was no laughter, no bickering, no shouts and taunts and sudden bursts of song. The voices of my parents, us five kids, our friends and relatives, even the most recent grandchildren, had been stilled. All that spoke to me were memories.
What was I doing here?
Well, for one thing, this house was the best refuge I knew from RKI’s surveillance. For many years Pa—now there was a true paranoid—had insisted on an unlisted phone number. Since the divorce, the property wasn’t even in his name on the tax rolls; in order to divide their community property with Ma, he’d been forced to sell, and he’d struck a bargain with the only family member who had any real money, my sister Charlene’s husband, country-music star Ricky Savage. A few years back when everybody else had given up on Ricky being anything but a backup musician in a second-rate band, Pa had loaned him the money to cut one final demo record. Ricky had hit it big with “Cobwebs in the Attic of My Mind,” and since then he’d looked for a suitable way to pay Pa back for his confidence in him. The divorce crisis was made to order: Ricky bought the house and signed an agreement saying Pa could live there as long as he wanted; the property was now listed in the name of a corporation Charlene and Ricky had formed for tax purposes.
Conceivably RKI could find me here, but it would take them longer than I intended to stay.
After catching the cab at Paoli’s Restaurant, I’d had the driver take me to the Westgate Hotel downtown. I entered by a side door, crossed the lobby, and at the main entrance hailed a second cab. That one took me to the Hilton at Mission Bay, where I waited half an hour, then took another cab here. Three different cab companies, three different pickup points, and none of the drivers had seen me catch my next ride.
Now that I was here, transportation would pose no problem. During my most recent conversation with my brother John, who lived in nearby Lemon Grove, he mentioned that he’d stored his four-wheel-drive International Scout in Pa’s garage. The problem of having too many vehicles and too much junk in one’s garage should be called McCone’s Syndrome, and John freely admitted to suffering from it. I was welcome, he told me, to use the Scout the next time I visited Pa. Again a tendency toward paranoia, which my big brother also freely admitted to having inherited from Pa, was working in my favor: should RKI go looking for any relatives of mine in the area, they wouldn’t find John; his home, telephone, and vehicles were all under the name of his house-painting company, Mr. Paint.
Now I pushed away from the sink, took the garage keys from the drawer where they were kept, and went outside. The garage stood at the far end of the property, beyond a bedroom wing that extended from the original house. The house, I reflected as I made my way through the dark backyard, had always possessed a peculiar chameleonlike quality. It had gone from being a small two-bedroom rancher on a large lot to a sprawling five-bedroom architectural horror that ate up the land on either side of the original structure. Baths had been added; the kitchen had been moved twice; a family room had been added, then turned into a bedroom, and a second family room had been built behind it. Rooms changed function and occupant so fast that you needed a chart to keep track of them, and in the end both the floor plan and the exterior only dimly resembled what the builder had intended.
The normal family would have been driven crazy by the constant upheaval, but since a state of good mental health hadn’t prevailed in the first place, the McCones blithely accepted chaos as the status quo. So what, Ma claimed, if you absentmindedly went