"Why would a woman like you ever have to be alone?" he asked. He had seldom met someone so confident and graceful. Even now after the trek in the woods, she looked as collected and groomed as a woman shopping on Rodeo Drive. There was a thin little bracelet around her left wrist, a pearl chain, he believed they called it, and it gave her easy gestures an added glamour. He couldn,t quite tell why.
There were no trees to the west of them. The view was open for all the obvious reasons. But the wind was positively howling off the ocean now, and the gray mist was descending on the last sparkle of the sea. I,ll get the mood of all this, he thought. I,ll get this strange darkening moment. And a little shadow fell deliciously over his soul.
He wanted this place. Maybe it would have been better if they,d sent someone else to do this story, but they,d sent him. What remarkable luck.
"Good Lord, it,s getting colder by the second," she said as they hurried. "I forget the way the temperature drops on the coast here. I grew up with it, but I,m always taken by surprise." Yet she stopped once more and looked up at the towering fa?ade of the house as though she was searching for someone, and then she shaded her eyes and looked out into the advancing mist.
Yes, she may come to regret selling this place terribly, he thought. But then again, she may have to. And who was he to make her feel the pain of that if she didn,t want to address it herself?
For a moment, he was keenly ashamed that he himself had the money to buy the property and he felt he should make some disclaimer, but that would have been unspeakably rude. Nevertheless, he was calculating and dreaming.
The clouds were darkening, lowering. And the air was very damp. He followed her gaze again to the great shadowy fa?ade of the house, with those diamond-pane windows twinkling dimly, and at the masses of redwood trees that rose behind it and to the east, a monstrous soaring forest of coastal sequoia out of proportion with all else.
"Tell me," she said. "What are your thoughts right now?"
"Oh, nothing, really. I was thinking about the redwoods and the way they always make me feel. They,re so out of proportion to everything around them. It,s as if they,re always saying, ,We were here before your kind ever visited these shores, and we will be here when you and your houses are no more., "
There was something unmistakably tragic in her eyes as she smiled at him. "That,s so true. How my uncle Felix loved them," she said. "They,re protected, you know, those trees. They can,t be logged. Uncle Felix saw to that."
"Thank heavens," he whispered. "I shudder when I see all those old photographs of the loggers up here in the old days, chopping down redwoods that had been alive for a thousand years. Think of it, a thousand years."
"That,s precisely what Uncle Felix said once, damn near word for word."
"He wouldn,t want to see this house torn down, would he?" He was immediately ashamed. "I,m sorry. I shouldn,t have said that."
"Oh, but you,re absolutely right. He wouldn,t have wanted it, no, never. He loved this house. He was in the process of restoring it when he disappeared."
She looked off again, wistfully, longingly.
"And we,ll never know, I don,t suppose," she said, sighing.
"What is that, Marchent?"
"Oh, you know, how my great-uncle actually disappeared." She made a soft derisive sound. "We are all such superstitious creatures, really. Disappeared! Well, I suppose he is as dead in real life as he is legally. But it seems I,m giving up on him now in selling the old place, that I,m saying, ,Well, we will never know and he will never come through that door there again., "
"I understand," he whispered. The fact was he knew absolutely nothing about death. His mother and father and brother and girlfriend told him that in one way or another just about every day. His mother lived and breathed the Trauma Center at San Francisco General. His girlfriend knew absolutely the worst side of human nature from the cases she handled in the D.A.,s office every day. As for his father, he saw death in the falling leaves.
Reuben had written six articles and covered two murders in his time at the San Francisco Observer. And both the women in his life had