`I drank a glass of milk.'
`And a hamburger last night for dinner. No wonder you look pinched. Come on, I'll take you out for breakfast. It's the going thing.'
`All right. Thank you. But then what?'
`I drive you home.'
She turned and walked to the sliding glass doors that opened onto the patio, as far away in the room as she could get from me. A little wind was blowing, and I could hear it rustling in the fronds of a miniature palm. Stella turned back to me decisively, as if the wind and the sunlight had influenced her through the glass.
`I guess I have to go home. I can't go on scaring my mother.'
`Good girl. Now call her and tell her you're on your way.'
She considered my suggestion, standing in the sunlight with her head down, the white straight part of her hair bisecting her brown head. `I will if you won't listen.'
`How will I know you've done it?'
`I never lied to you yet,' she said with feeling. `That's because you don't tell lies to me. Not even for my own good.'
She produced her first smile of the morning.
I think I produced mine. It had been a bad morning.
I immured myself in a large elaborate bathroom with fuzzy blue carpeting and did some washing, ritual and otherwise. I found a safety razor among the cosmetics and sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet, and used it to shave with. I was planning an important interview, a series of them if I could set them up.
Stella's cheeks were flushed when I came out. `I called home. We better not stop for breakfast on the way.'
`Your mother's pretty excited, is she?'
`Dad was the one I talked to. He blames you. I'm sorry.'
`It was my bad judgment,' I said. `I should have taken you home last night. But I had something else to do.'
Get a man killed.
`It was my bad judgment,' she said. `I was punishing them for lying about Tommy and me and the car.'
`I'm glad you know that. How upset is your father?'
`Very upset. He even said something about Laguna Perdida School. He didn't really mean it, though.'
But a shadow crossed her face.
About an hour later, driving south with Stella toward El Rancho, I caught a distant glimpse of the school. The rising wind had blown away all trace of the overcast, but even in unobstructed sunlight its buildings had a desolate look about them. I found myself straining my eyes for the lonely blue heron. He wasn't on the water or in the sky.
On impulse, I turned off the highway and took the access road to Laguna Perdida. My car passed over the treadle. The automatic gates rose.
Stella said in a tiny voice: `You're not going to put me in here?'
`Of course not. I want to ask a certain person a question. I won't be long.'
`They better not try to put me in here,' she said. `I'll run away for good.'
`You've had more mature ideas.'
`What else can I do?' she said a little wildly.
`Stay inside the safety ropes, with your own kind of people. You're much too young to step outside, and I don't think your parents are so bad. They're probably better than average.'
`You don't know them.'
`I know you. You didn't just happen.'
The old guard came out of his kiosk and limped up to my side of the car. `Dr Sponti isn't here just now.'
`How about Mrs. Mallow?'
`Yeah. You'll find her down the line in East Hall.'
He pointed toward the building with the ungenerous windows.
Leaving Stella in the car, I knocked on the front door of East Hall. After what seemed a long time, Mrs. Mallow answered. She was wearing the same dark formal costume that she had been wearing on Monday, and the same rather informal smell of gin.
She smiled at me, at the same time flinching away from the daylight. `Mr. Archer, isn't it?'
`How are you, Mrs. Mallow?'
`Don't ever ask me that question in the morning. Or any other time, now that I come to think of it. I'm surviving.'
`Good.'
