Wolf in the Shadows - Marcia Muller [43]
Was it any wonder I’d chafed every moment my earthquake cottage was under renovation?
I was crossing the patio that stretched between the family room and the fence at the finger canyon’s edge when I stopped suddenly, alerted to something unfamiliar. I looked around, didn’t see anything at first. What …? Oh, no—Pa had filled in and paved over the swimming pool!
Of course, it had never functioned as a real pool, had been defective when Ma and Pa bought the house, and a sonic boom from a jet out of NAS Miramar had finished it. But for years it had made a splendid vegetable garden, well drained and full of rich earth we’d had trucked in to cover the rubble. Now—where once tomatoes, eggplants, corn, melons, and a riot of beans, peas, and zucchini had grown—there was nothing but concrete. I stood dumbfounded, my foot scuffing at the recently poured white surface.
What next? I thought.
I continued on to the garage and opened its side door with some trepidation. But there was nothing bizarre inside, just Pa’s covered cabinetmaking equipment and a full range of symptoms of McCone’s Syndrome, crammed from floor to rafters. John’s red Scout was nosed into the last empty space. I went over there and slipped inside, discovering the keys were in the ignition and the registration and insurance card in the glove compartment. In a plastic recycling bin bolted down in the rear carrying space were flares, a first-aid kit, Thomas Brothers guides, and a jug of drinking water. Three sleeping bags were wedged into the wheel wells. I checked the gas, oil, and battery and found them in good working order.
How unlike John, I thought. I knew that in recent years my big, brawling brother—who had seen the inside of as many jail cells as Hy—had undergone a startling metamorphosis into responsible business owner and part-time single father, but I never could think of him in his new form. To me he’d remained the incorrigible who’d begun his impious career by being expelled from Catholic school at age nine and more or less culminated it by blowing up his wife’s empty car the night she announced she was leaving him. Now, apparently, I would have to recast that image.
Back in the house, the kitchen clock showed three-ten. That couldn’t be! I checked my watch. Oh, yes, it could, and I wasn’t a bit sleepy. Also, I had another task to accomplish.
For as long as I could remember, Pa had kept his .45 Smith & Wesson revolver in a lockbox under a pile of old towels on the top shelf of the linen closet. I went there and dragged it down. Finding the key to the box was no problem; Pa thought he’d secreted it ingeniously, but he hadn’t counted on having a budding detective in the family. Since I was fifteen I’d known it was taped to the bottom of his nightstand drawer. I got it, took the gun out, checked its condition. Then, in yet a third hiding place under the kitchen sink, I found ammunition. I loaded the gun and placed it in my bag.
By now I was more awake than ever. Finally I went to the kitchen, found a bottle of wine in the fridge, and with glass in hand began to prowl through the house, checking doors and windows. Dust in the dining room. No furniture in the living room—that had gone to Rancho Bernardo with Ma. The bedrooms, even Pa’s, contained so few traces of their former occupants that they might as well have been motel rooms. Mine made me particularly sad, even though the things I cared about from my childhood were now stored in my garage in San Francisco. So sad, in fact, that I knew I couldn’t sleep there. I pulled the quilts and pillows off the bed, shut the door, and dragged them down the hall to the couch in the family room.
The family room was too tidy. No toys on the floor, no books and magazines scattered about, the TV set rolled back into one corner. I opened the sliding door