which she could imagine some future use.
But when it came to the animals she was undecided. At first she had been determined to rid herself of their carcasses with all possible speed, but curiously the impulse was fading: the longer she lived with them the greater their hold. Some needed repair, were bald in patches with broken horns or ragged tails. At first, as she walked through the great room with its foxes and otters, this had made them ugly or pathetic; but more and more it made her feel protective.
Their arrangement added to her confusion. She understood the rooms on the second floor—their classification by geography, rough and general though it was. But the ground floor was a jumble. She did not know why the common raccoons of the great room kept company with the foxes, the possums, which were apparently marsupials, or the beavers, classified as semi-aquatic rodents. (She had to look this up.) The old man, she guessed, had not planned at all when he began to collect. At first the assemblages had been thrown together without forethought. A room of BEARS OF THE WORLD, he must have thought, hell yeah. A room of heads with racks. A room of brown mammals, why not.
As the collection grew he’d moved toward a better scheme—still rudimentary but at least organized—placing each mount in a more logical grouping. He’d been unable to help himself, and the more he acquired, the more he had to impose an order. She could see him, in her mind’s eye, being forced toward it. Because without order there could be no true collecting. Without order there was only acquisition.
When she’d been living in the house for six weeks Casey finally paid her a visit.
By then Ramon had moved on to another job—he turned out to be neither an illegal nor a student but the youngest son of a claims adjuster, with ambitions in auto detailing—and she’d started sleeping with Jim the lawyer. Jim was an intelligent and slightly petty man on the surface, but beneath it he was tender. She thought he might be the kind of person who, in the right circumstances, could kill someone. She wondered if this would be a bond between them.
The combination of circumstances required for Jim the lawyer to kill, she suspected, was so specific that it would likely never occur. That made him a would-be murderer at best, unlike her, and a fairly safe bet. Not that he was vicious or cruel—on the contrary, he was mild and gentle. Still she thought he might have a blind spot of rage, some hair trigger that would unleash a buried anger. Many men did; it was hardly unique.
Jim impressed her because most of the adulterers she’d known liked to lie naked and panting beside her and offer up a disquisition on their marriage. It was a common impulse. She herself had learned early on not to talk about Hal, that discussing her husband with others was off limits, but some men treated illicit sex as an entry to marital therapy. And surprisingly by her third time with Jim he had still not brought up his wife, other than to acknowledge he had one. She liked this disinclination to confess.
She was standing over the bathroom sink lazily after he left, gazing at the lines on her face in the mirror, when she heard gravel scrape on the circular drive. Cinching the belt on her bathrobe, she felt around on the floor for her shoes with an outstretched toe, then craned her neck to see out the window. Beyond the branches of an oak—Ramon had told her what each of the trees was in the garden, both the front and the back, and she had faithfully written them down on the landscape map to commit them to memory—she could make out the hood of Casey’s car.
When she invited Casey to come by anytime she’d been sure she’d have ample warning; her daughter didn’t do drop-bys often. She’d assumed the drive to Pasadena was unfamiliar enough that Casey would have to call for directions. Still, now that Casey was here Susan was excited to show her the place, and as she reached for her jeans she wondered if her daughter had seen the lawyer’s car leaving. It was a light-green BMW—unmistakable since Casey knew it from the office.
Also the two of them hadn’t talked about Casey’s livelihood since the airport but Susan knew they would have to discuss it sometime—it ached like a