Magnificence A Novel - By Lydia Millet Page 0,57

had this—a punctilious, almost rigorous and pared-down sense of style, clothing with clean lines and expensive labels. Leigh showed no interest in the mounts, only the house itself—as though the animals were not there, as though she saw right through them.

Susan could tell she was less expert than the older guy but she seemed to know enough for the purpose. She rapped on walls and moved a small yellow stud finder over their surfaces, Susan watching as its green light flashed on and off again.

“Nothing there,” she said in the first room.

“Nope, nothing,” she said in the second.

“My guess would be crawl space,” she said in the third. “Not enough room for stairs.”

“Sorry, no,” she said in the last room.

Susan was disappointed.

Only then, resigned to a nonevent and walking the architect girl to the door, did she remember the slab.

“Wait,” she said excitedly, and stopped. “There’s this one place in the yard—it’s not that near the house, actually, it’s in the backyard, way back there in the fir grove—but when I first moved in, we were doing some garden work and we found it. It’s just a piece of concrete sunk into the ground. You don’t really notice it, normally. He said there might have been a root cellar under there once, something like that. I mean, it’s just a slab. Cement or whatever. With grass growing over the edges. But can you quickly take a look?”

Leigh followed Susan out the service entrance and around to the back, where they picked their way down the flagstone paths toward the copse at the rear of the property. The further they went the more discouraged she felt: it was too far from the house. It was unlikely to be connected.

A few steps into the fir trees they ducked under some boughs, crunched over a sparse litter of cones and then stood over the slab: overgrown, concrete, about three feet square.

Almost nothing.

“Enh,” said the architect girl, and shrugged. She poked at the slab with the smooth toe of her pump. “It doesn’t look like much to me.”

•

The intercom buzzed a little past midnight. She looked out the window of her new bedroom—it faced the crescent drive instead of the backyard—and saw a taxi waiting at the front gate.

She was hoping it was Casey, and she took the wide stairs quickly, lightly, two at a time. But when she pressed the button to talk to the driver he said, “I got a Angela here. Angela Stern.”

She almost said Oh no right then. But instead she sighed, buzzed open the gate and went out front to meet them.

“Does she know where you are?” she asked Angela, as soon as she stepped from the taxi.

It could mean Merced’s job, she was thinking.

“She fell asleep,” Angela said.

“We have to call. She’ll be worried sick by now.”

Angela walked slowly, peering down through the dark at her footing as the taxi’s headlights swept back. She was wearing a long winter coat, a coat she’d never have a use for in L.A., over a sheer lacy nightgown.

“So what went wrong?” asked Susan, a hand on her arm to steer. As they drew near the house again the motion sensors were triggered and the outside lights flicked on.

“It wasn’t safe. It was unsafe,” said Angela, and shook her head.

“Unsafe.”

“What if she stepped on you,” said Angela. “Those shoes—those shoes would be like daggers. They could stab me.”

“Uh-huh,” said Susan.

It took her a moment to register the words. And then she found Angela was standing there stricken. Her face looked white.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, exactly as a person might who wasn’t insane at all. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Don’t worry. It’s all right,” said Susan.

Inside she sat Angela down in the kitchen, gave her a glass of water and called the apartment, where Merced picked up the phone right away.

“She’ll stay with me,” Susan told her, resigned. “She’ll stay till Vera gets back. So have them call me as soon as that happens. Would you?”

She looked over at Angela, who was sitting very straight on her kitchen chair under a fish and holding her water glass carefully, with two hands. She put her to bed in North American Birds.

When the children returned, Angela was still there. They showed up at the big house one evening around dusk, while Susan and Jim and Angela were eating Thai on the patio beside the pool—though Angela was not eating. After the food arrived she’d decided she distrusted food of any “ethnicity” and had requested