"V" is for Vengeance (19 page)

“I have some appointments this afternoon, but I should be back by five. As soon as you finish, why don't you take the rest of the day off. You've been working way too hard.”

“Thank you. I could use the time.”

“Just be sure to lock up. We'll see you tomorrow.”

Within minutes, she was heading south on the 101. She took pleasure in the drive because it gave her an opportunity to conduct an emotional self-examination. She needed to assess the situation with all the calm she could muster. She knew she was right about Thelma, but so far she had no proof. It didn't have to be evidence that would stand up in court. The situation would probably never come to that, but she wanted the satisfaction of knowing she was right. Poor substitute for having her marriage intact. Channing made a point of keeping his credit card statements at the office so there was no way to determine when he and Thelma had first hopped in the sack. Looking back, she could probably pinpoint the business trip where it all began.

Repeat encounters wouldn't have been conducted at the office because privacy there was in short supply. Half the partners worked late, showing up at all hours to finish business that couldn't be squeezed into the typical ten-hour day. Channing and his beloved Thelma, the whore, would have cavorted at the house in Malibu, thus saving the expense of a hotel room. Nora would have to boil the sheets before she slept in her own bed again.

She spotted a CHP black-and-white lurking at an overpass, invisible to northbound traffic. She glanced down at the speedometer needle, which wavered between eighty-seven and ninety miles an hour. She took her foot off the accelerator and put her racing thoughts in neutral. Maybe she was more stressed out about Thelma than she knew. In her mind, once she'd recovered from her initial humiliation, she'd felt curiously detached. The fact that her husband was involved with someone so
common
left her more insulted than devastated. From a practical standpoint, she could see how convenience and proximity made Thelma the logical choice. Channing's moral sensibilities were finely tuned. He would never screw around with another attorney in the firm and certainly not with one of his partners' wives. He was much too pragmatic to risk a breach of that magnitude. A violation of professional ethics could well blow up in his face. There were certainly countless Hollywood actresses, clients of his, who'd have jumped at the chance to seduce and be seduced, but that was another line he wouldn't cross. Thelma was a hireling, one down by definition. If the affair turned sour and he ended up firing her, she might sue for sexual harassment, but that was probably the worst she could do. Knowing Channing, he'd already set up safeguards against the day.

What puzzled her was that aside from her injured pride and innate snobbery where Thelma was concerned, she felt no sense of betrayal. There was no question Channing had deceived her. After the surprise wore off, she'd expected to feel outrage or anguish or loss,
some
fierce emotional response. In that first flash, she'd pictured a furious confrontation, accusations, recriminations, bitter tears, and remonstrances. Instead, the revelation simply allowed her to step away from her life and take another look. She had no doubt the affair would have an impact, but for the moment she couldn't anticipate the form it would take. She was operating on autopilot, going about her business as though nothing had changed.

An hour and a half later, she turned left off Pacific Coast Highway onto the steep, twisting road that led to their primary residence. Channing had purchased the last buildable half acre along the ridge. The lot was dominated by the sprawling glass-and-steel structure he'd commissioned. She experienced a strange form of agoraphobia each time she returned. There were no trees and therefore no shade. The views were stunning, but the air was dry and the sunlight was unrelenting. During the rainy season, the road would wash out and the occasional mud slide would make passage impossible. A brush fire of the most inconsequential sort could easily sweep up the hill, gaining momentum, sucking in fuel until it engulfed everything in its path.

Behind the house, mountains rose implacably, shaggy with chaparral and low-growing scrub. Paddle cactus had taken over the steep clay slopes, which were laced with old animal paths and fire roads. Most of the year, the surrounding hills were a dry brown, and the fire danger was constant. Channing's solution to the endless months without rain was to have a Japanese landscape architect create monochromatic gardens composed of gravel and stone. Boulders, chosen for their shape and size, were set in sand beds in asymmetrical arrangements that seemed studied and artificial. Lines were carefully raked from stone to stone, sometimes in straight rows, sometimes in circles meant to simulate water. Flat limestone slabs had been laid in the sand to serve as stepping stones, but they were too widely spaced for Nora's stride, which forced her to adopt a mincing gait, as though her feet had been bound.

The landscape architect had spoken to them at length about simplicity and functionality, concepts that appealed to Channing, who was no doubt congratulating himself for the reduction in his water bill. For Nora, the carefully composed patterns generated an almost overpowering desire to scuffle her feet, making a proper mess out of everything. Nora was a Pisces, a water baby, and she complained to Channing about how out of her element she felt in the arid environment. He was gone all day, happily ensconced in his air-conditioned offices in Century City. The house was also air-conditioned, but the sun pounding on the wide expanses of glass left the interior smelling stuffy. She was the one stuck on a mountaintop where the house was totally exposed. His concession was the addition of a shallow reflecting pool at the front of the house. Nora took an absurd pleasure in the stillness of the surface, like a mirror on which the cloudless blue sky shimmered with the faintest breeze.

She turned into the drive and left her car on the parking pad beside the gardener's battered pickup truck. She glanced over at the wide gravel circle where the full-time Japanese gardener, Mr. Ishiguro, squatted on his heels, removing pine needles. He'd worked for the Vogelsangs since the gardens went in. He'd come highly recommended by the landscape architect, but Nora would have been hard-pressed to describe what he did all day, fussing about with his wheelbarrow and his bamboo rake. He had to be in his late seventies, wiry and energetic. He wore a gray tunic over baggy dark blue farmer pants. A wide canvas hat shielded his face from the sun.

The next-door neighbor had trucked in a row of knobcone pine trees that he'd planted on his side of the wall that divided the two properties. The pines were meant to serve as an additional windbreak. Channing had taken a dim view of the plan because the pines shed quantities of dead brown needles that blew onto their side. Mr. Ishiguro was perpetually exasperated at having to remove the debris, which he plucked up by hand. If he managed to catch her eye, he'd shake his head and mutter darkly as though she were to blame.

She unlocked the back door and entered the house by way of the kitchen. The alarm system was off. They'd both become careless about arming the house. To Nora, it was a blessing to enter the air-conditioned space, though she knew within minutes she'd feel like she was suffocating. She put her handbag on the counter and made a quick circuit of the downstairs rooms to assure herself she was alone. The house, built twenty years before, was Channing's when she married him. She'd never cared for the place. The scale of the rooms was out of proportion to the occupants. There were no window coverings, which created the illusion of living on a stage. He'd resisted her few suggestions about making the place more comfortable. Curiously, the style of the house looked dated though there was nothing she could pinpoint that contributed to the effect. This was one reason the house in Montebello was such a welcome relief. The ceilings there were twelve feet tall instead of twenty, and the views from the mullioned windows revealed trees and shrubs of a dense, lush green.

She heard a loud banging at the back door, so ferocious and unexpected that she jumped. She returned to the kitchen, where she saw Mr. Ishiguro's face pressed against the glass. She opened the door, awaiting an explanation. He was angry and his agitated English was gibberish to her. The more she shrugged and shook her head, the more infuriated he became. Finally he turned abruptly and motioned for her to follow. He set off down the path, walking so rapidly she had to trot to keep up with him. Turning a corner, she slipped and caught herself, but not before her foot skidded off the stepping stone and onto the countless parallel rake marks meant to quiet the mind. Nora laughed. She couldn't help herself. It always struck her as funny when other people fell. There was something comical about the complete loss of dignity, the flailing attempt to recover one's balance. Even animals suffered embarrassment when they slipped and fell. She'd seen cats and dogs stumble and then shoot a quick look around to see if anyone had noticed.

At the sound of her laughter, Mr. Ishiguro turned and lashed out at her, yelling and shaking a fist. She babbled an apology, trying to compose herself, but a part of her had disconnected again. Why should she put up with the incoherent ravings of a yard man, for god's sake, whose only purpose was to maintain a stone gray landscape created to prevent the house from burning down. Laughter bubbled up once more and she faked a coughing fit to cover the sound. If he caught her laughing again, there was no telling what he would do.

Another ten feet along the path, Mr. Ishiguro stopped and pointed repeatedly, expressing his disapproval in a rapid series of what she took to be insults. On the ground there was a pile of animal feces. The compact deposit of excrement sat in the center of a composition of white pebbles he'd labored over the week before. It was coyote scat. She'd seen the pair for the past month, a big gray-and-yellow male with a smaller rust-colored female, picking their way along one of the trails, their bushy tails held down. They'd apparently established a den close by and regarded the neighborhood as one big cafeteria. The two coyotes were thin and wraithlike, and their posture suggested stealth and shame, though Nora thought they must be deeply satisfied with life. Coyotes weren't fussy about what they ate. Squirrels, rabbits, carrion, insects, even fruit in a pinch. A number of neighborhood cats had vanished, most noticeably on nights when the howling and yipping of the pair suggested a hunting free-for-all. The male wasn't above scaling the wall to drink from her reflecting pool, and Nora wished him well. Channing, on the other hand, had twice gone out with his handgun, shouting and waving his arms, threatening to shoot. The coyote, unimpressed, had loped across the patio, leaped the wall, and disappeared into the scrub. The female had been conspicuously absent for the past few weeks, and Nora suspected she had a litter of pups tucked away. Having watched Mr. Ishiguro obsess over the placement of every stone in the garden, she could see how a coyote taking an unceremonious dump on his path was the equivalent of an interspecies declaration of war.

“Get a hose and squirt it down,” she said when he paused for breath.

He couldn't have understood a word of this, but something in her irrepressibly jocular tone set him off again, and she was treated to yet another tirade. She held up a hand. “Would you
stop
?”

Mr. Ishiguro wasn't finished with his complaint, but before he launched in again, she cut him off. “HEY, you fuck! I wasn't the one who crapped on your fucking rocks so get out of my face.”

To her astonishment, he laughed, repeating the expletive several times as though committing it to memory.
“You fok, you fok . . .”

“Oh, forget it,” she said. She turned on her heel, went back into the house, and banged the door shut behind her. Within minutes her head was pounding. She hadn't driven ninety miles to take abuse. She climbed the stairs and went into her bathroom. She opened the medicine cabinet in search of Advil, which was sitting on the bottom shelf. She shook two into her palm and swallowed them with water. She studied herself in the mirror, marveling that recent revelations hadn't altered her outward appearance. She looked the same as she always did. Her gaze shifted to the wall behind her and she turned with a fleeting sense of disbelief. Thelma had left a monstrous brassiere hanging over the towel warmer just outside Nora's shower door. Good god, was Thelma staying here? She'd apparently hand-laundered the garment, which featured stiff, oversize lace cones sufficiently reinforced and buttressed to support the weight of two torpedoes. Nora was appalled at the casual appropriation of her space, though why she bothered to react at all was a question worth examining.

Carefully, she surveyed the room. There were signs of Thelma everywhere. If Nora had hoped for evidence, here it was. She looked down at the silver tray that rested on her countertop, feeling her lips purse as she picked up her hairbrush now threaded with Thelma's dye-coarsened red hair. She opened one drawer after another. Thelma had helped herself to a little bit of everything. Cold creams, Q-tips, cotton balls, expensive colognes. Nora made a point of keeping track of what she used in this house and what she needed to replace. She could have recited, item by item, the exact status and placement of her toiletries.

She checked the cabinet under the sink. Thelma must not have expected anyone else to examine the contents of the wastebasket, where she'd tossed the paper wrapper and lollipop stick from a tampon she'd inserted. Cheery news, that. At least the sow wasn't pregnant. The cleaning ladies came on Monday. Thelma must have intended to remove all traces of her stay by then.

Nora went straight to her walk-in closet and flung open the double doors. To the left, there was a climate-controlled closet-within-a-closet where she kept her cocktail dresses and her full-length gowns. The room was intended for fur coats, but since Nora owned none, she used the space for her wardrobe of designer creations, elegant classics by Jean Dessès, John Cavanagh, Givenchy, and Balenciaga. She'd put together her collection by patiently scouring estate sales and vintage clothing stores. The dresses had been bargains when she bought them, picked over and ignored in favor of what was trendy at the time. Now the interest in early Christian Dior and Coco Chanel had created a secondary market where prices were through the roof. A few of the gowns were too large for her now—the size 6's, 8's, and 10's she'd worn before the weight came off. She'd considered having them altered but felt that resizing would affect the integrity of the design.