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She couldn’t stop noticing howemptythe house felt with just her in it. Every sound felt amplified, making her feel small and frightened. Even the light felt wrong.
The metallic taste flooded her throat again with a vengeance. She gripped the wall, nearly knocking one of Marco’s ugly abstract impressionism paintings off its hooks. Fucking Jasper Johns. Just looking at those ugly smears of color made her feel hungover.
If she stayed home, she was just going to fret herself into a tizzy. Look at her, twitching like a jumpy meth addict. This was not normal behavior.
I shouldn’t go, she thought again.
But she already knew she would.
???????
A cold blast of wind slapped Rafe in the face as he stepped out the doors to the curb of the San Francisco Airport. The small drive was crammed with cars, many of which were parked illegally or loitering. Airport security had their hands full trying to move stubborn drivers along. Rafe hoisted up his suitcase and walked along the taxi stand until he found a car with its light on. He had to bend down to look into the window.
“Are you available?”
“Hop in,” the man said, his words lightly accented.
Rafe gave the driver the address of the car rental place. It was going to be an expensive fucking ride out to Napa, but money was no object.
“You here on business or pleasure?” the driver asked, apparently feeling chatty.
“Both,” Rafe said, in a tone that brooked no further conversation. The back seat was cramped and a little dirty. He had to angle himself sideways to keep from being crushed.
Shrugging, the driver turned on the radio, tuning it to some kind of sports game. Rafe preferred it that way. He’d never understood the point of asking questions nobody wanted to know the answers to in the first place. When people had asked him how his family was doing, nobody wanted to know that his mother was being institutionalized. It had annoyed him. Fakeness always did.
As the taxi driver piloted the car through traffic, Rafe scrolled through his phone. There were several missed calls from Nadine, his agent, and three texts.
He had informed her this morning that he would be going out of town and might be hard to reach. She had been unimpressed by this news. “I need those chapters, Rafe. You’re coming up on your deadline.”
“I’ve had a death in the family.” She sighed again and offered reluctant condolences.
“Get the chapters to me as soon as possible.”
“I will. By the way, remember that interview I did forHorror Magazine?”
“God, yes. It was great publicity. I’ve been told they still get calls from people claiming to be your mystery woman. Or offering to be. Why?”
“Well, I’ll be meeting the real one while I’m down here. For research. All the more reason for the chapters to wait.”
He’d hung up on Nadine’s disbelieving squawk. She’d messaged him,You better not be pulling my leg, Rafael. Or I’ll cut it off myself so I can beat you with it.
Oh, she’s real, Rafe wrote back.And she’s an actress.
OMFG.Another text bubble immediately appeared but Rafe closed out of the app.
That would give Nadine something to think about. Especially since they had just started talks about a screen adaptation ofMadison Hawthorneand vague ideas for the cast.
The ride took over an hour and ended up costing him about two hundred bucks with tip. Rafe handed over the cash and watched the driver speed away, before heading to the front desk. After flashing his ID and the requisite forms, he got the keys for his leased Prius from the front desk. The car was smaller than he liked but with the seat cranked back, there was just enough room for his legs.
Luckily, it was a short jaunt from Napa to Riachuelo. Thirty minutes, if that. It hadn’t changed much. Some of the businesses were different but the lay of the land was the same—lots of ranch houses built in the midcentury modern style, with a quaint little downtown packed so full of restaurants that it could prevent you from realizing there was nothing there to do. When he’d been really little, the town had been mostly open fields choked with mustard flowers and catchweed. Then the wineries had begun to prosper and it had started to get built out. Pretty soon people were moving out here because they wanted to, and not because they had to.
He drove past the public high school he’d never attended and a couple strip malls that looked new. The H&M was packed, he noticed, and so was the Sbarro. The Chinese restaurant he’d liked appeared to have closed; now it was some kind of upscale fondue bar. Rows of expensive-looking cars were lined up in front of the livelier looking joints. When he cut across Black Oak Boulevard, it amused him that the gravel quarry was still up and running. He could easily imagine the windshields of those expensive cars getting cracked from the gravel trucks that still paraded through the city streets. Nothing they could do about it, either. The quarries were owned by the county, not the city.
All that excavated land had unearthed the water table, and the man-made lake, Whytecliff, glowed like an unpolished star sapphire under the navy sky. He’d heard that the sand was made out of pulverized gravel, and trucked in every two years when the rains washed it away. Every summer, the townies who didn’t have pools would go out there for boating or to show off their tans. His father had forbidden him to go to—he said that the people who went to the fake beach were low rent—but that hadn’t stopped him from attending a few bonfires.
It looked eerie now, surrounded by cypress trees and peeling eucalyptus. The only reason to go out there now was to drink or fuck in secret. For a moment, he thought he saw a lone figure weaving their way through the trees, towards the shed. When he glanced away and then back, distracted by the headlights of a passing gravel truck, the figure had disappeared.
If there had even been a figure down there at all.
