pieces of flat metal, mostly washed and cut ten-gallon oilcans. They were all nailed tight and sealed at the seams with slathers of black caulk. The walls, the floor, the joists, everything was covered. The room was critter and bug proof.
And in that space was stored a lifetime’s worth of her grandfather’s writings. She spent hours scouring the journals with a fading flashlight. Some of them were stuffed with odd notes and clippings. They were stringtied with dates written on the covers in Magic Marker or pen or crayon or heavy lead pencil. June-September, 1984 and so on. The sheer density of it was impressive. It was an exhaustive codex of what? Stories, thoughts? Excuses?
Behind the pyramid of journals, like the square box of treasures often found behind the sarcophagi in Egyptian tombs, lay a peach crate. Its label read SARHOLE PEACH FARMS. She liked the label, a picture of orchards laid out in perfect order in happy colors, a brilliant yellow-orange morning sun shooting stripes of daylight way up into the sky.
In the crate was a battered valise, like a barrister’s case. A rude shoulder strap, festooned with bits of faded tie-dyed cloth, had been added to it long ago. In the valise was an odd assortment of documents that were wildly unlike her grandfather’s journals. These were obviously old, not by a few decades, but by scores of hundreds of years. They were written in an array of scripts and by many hands. A few words were annotated in English on one of the yellowed page margins—“Ara”, and “halfling” and the unintelligible “Myrcwudu”.
As she read through the scattered English in the documents, she sensed a rail spike being mauled into the frozen river of her indecision. From it fractures radiated out, the tiny fissures crackling underfoot as they spider- webbed in all directions. The Yukon-scale ice jam that had been her life this last year started to break up.
And that discovery also touched something deeper and more elusive. She felt a jangle, a twitch, something suggesting the body comes equipped with secret tools hidden in secret chests. Faculties masked by reasoning but still capable of lighting up unused nerve trackways. Instincts firing on receptors that understand before the conscious mind knows, that hear drums dim and distant. Cold sweat and heartbeat thuds foreshadowing the approach of rough beasts …
Something quivered against her thigh. She jumped. Her cell phone was on vibrate. She answered. It was Mr. Mel Chricter’s secretary calling to schedule an appointment.
Cadence listened for a second. “Monday? Yes. Yes! OK.”
A moving van downshifted and backfired on the road above the creek. The report was like a cannon crack, sending birds in the trees to flight.
She packed up her sketchpad and papers and thought about how she would get to the man’s office in Beverly Hills. Monday morning was only a day away and cab fare was out of the question.
On Monday at 7:30 a.m., Screamin’ Jay Hawkins was on KCAR 83.5. He was moaning raw lyrics at the two million cars stacked into the Los Angeles morning drive.
The green Jaguar, top down, looked smooth and feline as it cat-pawed the slick road. The rich canyon air mixed with wet seat-leather smells. A light drizzle misted over the windshield. The burl wood interior was aged like a fine pipe bowl.
The silver jaguar face snarled back at Cadence from the steering wheel center. A pleasant low engine roar worked its way up from under the hood. After she released it from its tarp, it had been hoarse and coughed for the first mile, but now it purred. Not too shabby for a ’65. Her grandfather, whoever he really was, clearly had a way with fine machines.
Cadence leaned the car into the steep decline and hard, sweeping slalom S-curves of Highway 92. The tires squealed with delight as she snaked down, toying with disaster, following the asphalt serpent down Topanga Canyon. Shooting a straight line through the curves pumped adrenaline into her veins. Her nose filled with an exuberance of smells deep and dank as she heard something, a pattern beneath the wind and engine roar. Almost like whispered fragments of strange and breathless language.
This morning the clouds had rolled in and poured down the first rain in four months. The road was treacherous where water mixed with the oily residue laid down by millions of cars, the slick sweat left by the city’s dumb, ongoing toil.
But up here, far from the metropolis below, her eyes drank in the secret beauty that is Topanga Canyon on a rainy day. Overnight, once-brown vegetation had transformed into every hue of green. It was like driving into another world. Waterfalls tumbling from clefts, high in the sandstone walls, might be showers for sprites, she fancied. The side canyons loomed as places of mystery that no man had ever ascended, their hidden caves fit dwellings for imaginary creatures. Up ahead, the stone cliffs sank into a swirling sea of gray mist.
The road beckoned to her this morning. She hoped to return from her meeting with Mr. Chricter, the for-real agent, somehow a different person. Leaning forward, the wind blowing back her hair, she imagined herself a figurehead on the bow of a ship, bound for discovery. With that questing image, she understood a small part of the faceless mystery that was her grandfather. She understood his sheer wanderlust.
But, of course, he was now her
In a moment, she descended into the subdued world of the clouds. She could feel the road approaching the bottom, where it merged into Highway One, the road to Santa Monica or Malibu. The sea that today would be a crashing gray washtub.
The clouds closed around her. They swirled and flowed, revealing roadside encroachments of thick brush. She looked at a tangle of brush and saw it. a long-nosed face was looking back at her. Their eyes locked and then it was gone. She heard a sharp, keening whistle. She peered hard into the rearview mirror.
Out of the mist suddenly loomed a giant dwarf. She stabbed the brakes and the Jag’s tires screeched in protest. The dwarf was plywood, a full-color figure of Disney’s “eighth dwarf,” a clutching, leering “Greedy.” The next sign objected to a proposed development in the canyon by Disney heirs. She took a deep breath and blew it out, settling her eyes on the road and both hands on the steering wheel.
The canyon remained an undeveloped gash in the Santa Monica Mountains, despite being at the shoulder blade of the great city. It had a few homegrown shops, a theater started decades ago by blacklisted Hollywood refugees, a nudist colony, and clutches of “creeker” cabins hovering streamside — at least, until the next fifty-year storm.
The triple threat of natural holocausts — fire, flood, and earthquake — still dominated the canyon’s existence.
Fire, of course, Cadence knew only too well. Mother Nature’s conspiracy of topography, fuel load, and wind, birthed horrific infernos. The names of the recurring beast’s incarnations made headlines: the Hume Fire of 1956, the Wright Fire of 1970, and the Pluma Fire of 1985. But the speed and fury of the Topanga Fire of 1993, slouching its molten hide through the ridgelines and canyon corridors on its way to the coast, was unparalleled in a hundred years.
Downshifting as she approached the ocean lurking ahead, she couldn’t help but see a few of that fire’s hateful scars: blackened, cracked trunks of older trees. These were surrounded by flurries of new growth.
She shuddered and tried for the millionth time to block the images of that night: her father grabbing the spare truck key and rushing out of the house as the red glow in the sky approached— the crackle and whoosh of a wind-driven firestorm — the cries and shouts — the mad scramble down the twisted hillside road as the air prepared to explode into an inferno.
And the insane roar of the unleashed monster.
That was the last time she saw her father.
“So, you see, it’s natural,” she remembered the musings in one of her grandfather’s journals. “Stories of family, of crisis, of achievement — all seek patterns of disaster.” One of many quaint chestnuts he left in his wake. Now the waters of his passing were still. It had been almost a year since that Halloween night when he
