Chapter Eight
“ Stop!” Gus shouted.
Tara stomped on the brakes, and the Mercedes left rubber along a hundred yards of narrow mountain road before it came to a screeching halt. Shawn felt his appendix sliced neatly in two by the seat belt.
“What is it?” Shawn said, clutching at the belt release.
Gus was already out of the car. He walked the few feet to the top of the mountain’s summit, then stopped, gazing down at the valley below him. It was like an enormous cereal bowl carved out of granite, deep, almost perfectly round, with enormous boulders protruding from the walls like stray Lucky Charms stranded after the milk was gone. A one-lane road spiraled around the bowl, taking three full revolutions before it finally reached the bottom of the valley and straightened out into the mansion’s long driveway.
And exactly in the center of the circle, Eagle’s View sprawled majestically, an artistic testament to attention-deficit disorder. Elias Adler was a man of great and sudden passions who could fall in love with an architectural style as quickly as a chorus girl, and dump it just as easily. When Adler first commissioned this house, he had just come back from a month in Italy, and the entrance was designed to look like a Roman villa’s. But before construction could be completed, Adler took a trip to Germany, where he fell in love with Ludwig’s Bavarian castle. So behind the villa’s atrium there rose three stone towers, each one topped with crenellated watchtowers. Apparently, however, Adler’s attention drifted away again during this construction, because the rearmost third of the house seemed to be modeled on a Japanese palace.
Even from half a mile away, the house was everything Gus had ever dreamed it would be. He was so totally engrossed in studying it, he didn’t notice Shawn come up behind him.
“That has got to be the ugliest house in the world,” Shawn said. “It’s like an aerial view of Disneyland, if each different land was a building and they were all crammed up against one another.”
“Spectacular, isn’t it?” Gus agreed.
“If you’re a lunatic.”
A car door slammed and Tara tottered up to them on her spike heels. She was about to say something when she saw the landscape spread out in front of them.
“What a beautiful house,” she cooed.
“There you go,” Shawn said.
To be fair, Tara hadn’t acted particularly crazy on the long trip. Even her driving was shockingly sane on the road’s tight turns, although Gus supposed she was still acting under Shawn’s earlier instruction to drive safely and obey almost all traffic laws.
Even that wasn’t enough to keep him from spending the first half hour of the ride ducking under the window every time they passed a police cruiser. A stolen car was a stolen car, no matter how considerately driven. Finally Gus decided he needed to tackle the question head-on. Or at least slightly to the left of head-on.
“Say, Shawn,” Gus said as insouciantly as he could with his head lying on the armrest, “how’s that other case going? You know, the one in Arcata?”
“I don’t know, Gus,” Shawn said. “Why don’t you tell me? After all, you’re the one who insists there’s a case in the first place.”
Gus studied Tara closely to see how she’d react to the mention of the scene of her crime. She didn’t seem to notice at all. At least, the small lock of her hair Gus could see poking around the headrest didn’t. From his position, he couldn’t see the rest of her. After a quick check for police vehicles, Gus sat up and tried again.
“You remember what I’m talking about, don’t you, Shawn? The Enid Blalock case?”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Gus realized he’d made a terrible mistake. If Tara was as crazy as he feared, what was there to stop her from driving them right off the edge of this twisty road, sending them all plummeting down to a fiery death? Gus didn’t know the odds against surviving two cliff plunges within a twenty-four-hour period, but he didn’t want to test them.
“I’m sorry, Gus. I couldn’t hear you over the all the subtlety flying around in the car,” Shawn said. “What was that name again?”
“Enid Blalock.”
“Not the Enid Blalock,” Shawn said.
“It’s hard to imagine there could be more than one,” Gus said.
“I wonder if Tara has an opinion on the subject,” Shawn said.
Gus realized he didn’t know what he was expecting from Tara. A stern denial, possibly, or a look of fake incomprehension. Or worse, a look of real incomprehension, which would suggest pretty strongly that she’d never learned the name of the woman whose car she had stolen. And of course, that long shot in the back of his mind: the terrifying plunge off the cliff after she deliberately missed a turn.
The one thing he definitely didn’t expect was what he saw-one tear running down her cheek.
“What’s wrong?” Shawn asked.
“That name,” Tara said. “It reminds me of my own aunt Enid.”
“Aunt Enid?” Shawn shot a chiding look back at Gus.
“She was so kind to me.” Tara sniffed. “When I needed a place to live, she helped me find an apartment, even though she specialized in houses.”
“So she’s a Realtor?” Shawn said, barely trying to hide the victory in his voice.
“She was,” Tara said. “She got her license after the divorce.”
“That is something new and different,” Shawn said. “Where is she now?”
“I hope she’s in Heaven,” Tara said. “I mean, I know they say gluttony is a sin, but do you really think someone would get sent to Hell just because she could polish off a pound of See’s Soft Centers for breakfast?”
“We try to leave those heavy theological questions for the experts,” Gus said. “Are you saying that Aunt Enid is dead?”
Tara sniffed back a tear. “I was with her until the very end. I think she was finally at peace.”
“I’m sure she’d be happy to know you were driving her car.” Shawn’s face was alight with triumph. “Almost as happy as Gus.”
“That’s very kind of you, Gus,” she said, sniffling. “She would have liked you a lot.”
Gus didn’t know what to say. Again, he was feeling that same guilt at having misjudged another person. And it wasn’t fair. There was every reason to believe Tara had stolen this car. Just like there was every reason to make fun of Bobby Fleckstein’s glasses-they were thick black horn-rims, and they had made him look like a ’tard. Just once, Gus wanted the freedom to think terrible thoughts about other people and not feel bad about it afterward. The woman had hit him with her car, after all. She was a dangerous, delusional psychotic. And even so, Gus was nearly overwhelmed with the urge to sit in the nearest corner.
Apart from the guilt, the revelation about Tara’s aunt freed Gus from his fear of riding in a stolen car driven by a remorseless psychopath, and as the road wound its way toward the top of the mountain, he began to enjoy the trip. He was finally going to see Eagle’s View. And for all of Shawn’s complaining, there was something particularly exciting about being summoned by one of America’s most brilliant investors. Maybe he’d give them some tips. Maybe he’d even give them some money. At the very least he was giving Gus something to think about besides the prospect of being arrested for murder.
Gus spent the rest of the ride to the summit happily switching between thoughts of Eagle’s View and dreams of actually being paid enough to cover all the bills. Until he saw the gates flanking the road ahead of them and ordered Tara to stop the car.
“It’s easy to call the house ugly,” Gus explained to Shawn and Tara as they looked down on the valley. “But that’s just the first, visceral reaction. Once you get past the initial impression, you can begin to appreciate just how momentous an architectural accomplishment it is.”
“So when I call it ugly now, that’s ignorance,” Shawn said. “But if I go to architecture school and spend years studying it-”
“You can call it ugly and really know what you’re talking about,” Gus said.
