along half a dozen streets, lined with cherry trees now blossoming in a froth of pink and rose. The only really odd thing about it was the near-uniformity of style, and the fact that there were no boarded-up shops and not many for-sale signs. A civic center had a municipal pool and library and tennis courts; notices on the boards before the steps included those for a farmer’s market, the meeting of the local chapter of the SPCAI wonder if we get included? she wondered, then saw the fine print: Sponsored by Br?z? Enterprises. -and every other little bit of civic self-organization you’d expect, from the Lions and Elks through aromatherapy clubs. A biggish high school showed southward, a golf course, and after that a tangle of minor industrial stuff, fruit-packing plants and wineries, repair shops and a dairy that had a big All fresh! All organic! All local! sign, one of the few advertisements she could see.
To the east of town were rolling fields fading into the middle distance with the occasional farmhouse or crossroads hamlet sheltered in its trees. Vineyards marched in geometric rows and silvery-green olives flickered; there were low bare-branched brushy orchards of trees she couldn’t name, and flaming apple and almond and apricot in white and pink, interspersed with intensely green fields of grain. The higher pastures to the west, above the mansion, were green too with the winter rains; tongues of forest ran down the low points, growing denser on the high hills or modest mountains that separated this area from the sea.
The people were dead-on small-town California-normal; about half Anglo, more than a third Hispanic, the rest bits and pieces of everything with an accent on Asian and lots of mixing. They bustled in and out of shoe stores and bakeries-the buttery odor of fresh pastry made her mouth water-and stationers and the post office and electronics shops. Mothers wheeled babies, toddlers clutched hands, kids ran, elderly men sat sunning themselves and reading papers or watching the world go by. Teenagers Rollerbladed the brick sidewalks with immersive buttons in their ears, bopping to sounds only they could hear, or stood in groups at the corners.
No, there’s one thing odd. You’d expect at least one big Catholic church in a rural town this size, and a couple of others.
She wasn’t religious herself, but the thought made something clench a little inside. There was one building that looked like a church in the elaborately carved Churrigueresque style, but it had Sangre Community Theater on the front, with a banner announcing a Shakespeare revival.
And a little like selling your soul to the Devil, she remembered Theresa saying.
And that her parents and grandparents before her had made the same bargain. This was effectively a settlement of hereditary not-quite-Satanists.
I wonder when they tell their kids? What was that Theresa said about… initiation?
Suddenly she didn’t want to sightsee anymore, for all the charm that would have had a New Urbanist drooling.
“Excuse me,” she said to a middle-aged man sitting on a bench outside a caf?, eating ice cream from a cardboard cup with two teenagers similarly occupied. “I’m looking for Lucy Lane?”
He smiled at her, and she gritted her teeth. The kids were smiling too, and one nudged his slightly younger companion; it was more than the usual teenaged-male leer.
Oh, yeah, they know. They know.
“Just another block north up Br?z? Avenue; left on Armand. It turns into Lucy after the intersection with Auvergnat.”
“Thank you,” she said between clenched teeth.
Lucy Lane was a cul-de-sac curling around the hill the mansion rode, backing against the perimeter wall. The sidewalk was the same herringbone-pattern brick, and the houses were overshadowed by old plantings that included orange trees in fair-sized front gardens and little walled inner yards. She passed one man sitting on a bench with a set of weights nearby. He was black, tall and impressively built without being bulky, which she could see because he was stripped to exercise shorts, and he had a shaved head and narrow hook-nosed face.
“Hi!” she said brightly.
He looked at her impassively, then lay down on the bench again and began a series of vertical lifts.
Well, that wasn’t too successful.
Number Five had a newish Volt in the open garage, with the hood up and the charger cord extended and plugged into a pole-mounted outlet by the garage door.
“You Ms. Tarnowski?” a young Latino said around the open hood when she halted uncertainly.
He was about twenty, in jeans and cowboy boots and a white T-shirt that showed his taut-bodied build, an inch or so under six feet. He let the hood fall with a clunk and wiped his hands on a rag; when she shook she felt workingman’s calluses.
“Don’t mind Jamal,” he said, nodding towards the black man two houses up. “He doesn’t talk much. I’m Jose Villegas. I’m in Number Three. Just checking your car. Welcome to Lucy Lane!”
“I get a car?” she blurted.
He grinned, white teeth in a light brown face. “Sure, Ms. Tarnowski-”
“Ellen,” she said automatically.
“All the fixings, Ellen,” he said in perfect California English of a small-town, blue-collar variety. “Me, I’m a mechanic when I’m not… you know. So I was checking it for you. Looks good. You need anything done, though, just bop over. Come on in.”
The house had the feel of a place that had been cared for but vacant until recently; it was about two thousand square feet, with a living-room that gave on a rear court through sliding-glass doors and restrained furniture of the type that American Home Furnishings tried to imitate. A slender blond man a little below her height was finishing the connections on a wallscreen TV. He had a handsome triangular face and pale green eyes, and dusted off his hands before offering one.
“Hi!” he said. “Peter Boase, in Number Two. TV and display here, PC in the study, omnidirectional Bose speakers here, there and in the bedroom. All networked to the content library. You’ve got a high-capacity fiber-optic Internet connection. Hey, it’s the President’s plan, right?”
“Peter’s an egghead,” Jose said. “Forgets his own name sometimes. But he sure can make anything electronic dance and sing.”
The slender man shrugged. “PhD, physics, so I should be all thumbs and baffled by putting a CD in a player. But you need to be able to handle equipment the way grants are… were… these days. Come on in. Monica will-”
“Coming through!” a woman’s voice said.
She came through the front door with a baking tray in gloved hands. Ellen judged her to be the oldest person present, thirty or a hair either way, dressed in slacks and shirt and a checked bib apron. She had pleasantly pretty features that reminded Ellen vaguely of someone, and curling dark-brown hair held back by a barrette. She was very slightly shorter than Ellen’s five-six, and very slightly heavier; they might have been sisters as far as face and figure went, coloring aside.
“Hi! Monica Darton, in Number One,” she said. “Come on through to the kitchen. That’s where a house starts to turn into a home!”
“Monica’s our den mother,” Peter said. “She’s been here longest, eight years.”
Peter, Jose, Monica, Ellen thought; she had a good memory for names, and you needed one dealing with the public at the gallery. And Jamal is the black guy. With me that makes five, so that’s all five houses on Bloodbank Row… pardon me, Lucy Lane.
The kitchen was south-facing, with a glassed-in breakfast nook, and a small dining room separated from it by a pierced screen. Monica set the tray down on a counter. Then she took off the oven mitts and shook hands in turn.
“Do you want us all to clear out?” she said. “While you settle in peacefully?”
“Ah… no, no,” Ellen replied hastily.
So I could sit and look at the wall and try not to scream? Call Giselle and lie to her? Wonder where Adrian is? End up lying facedown on the floor drooling with an empty fifth of vodka in my hand? Seriously consider slitting my wrists? So…
“Please, stay for a while.”
“Good. I’ll make some coffee to christen your machine… unless you prefer decaf?”
“No, premium grade is fine.”
“… and these are the best homemade brownies in town! All local ingredients. Except for the chocolate and vanilla and sugar, of course, but the nuts and flour are, we have the most wonderful farmer’s market. I’ve stocked
