Bestiary

CHAPTER THIRTY

Either Carter was in an unusually amorous mood — breathing hard on her face and licking her hand — or it was Champ, anxious to go out.

Beth raised her head from the pillow — it felt heavier than normal — and glanced at the clock; it was later than normal, too. Nine forty-five in the morning.

Champ was standing beside the bed, his tail wagging back and forth as regularly as a metronome.

“Okay, I’m up.” For a second, Beth wondered why Carter hadn’t let him out, but then she glanced at Carter’s side of the bed and she could tell he’d hardly been in it. After they’d come home from the party last night, she’d gone straight up to bed and Carter had stayed downstairs. “Something I’ve got to work on,” he’d said before disappearing into the garage, where boxes of their books were still stacked against the walls.

Beth sat up, and she felt like something had just shifted inside her head. At al-Kalli’s party, she’d had more to drink than she customarily did. It had become so hard to keep track. Every time she took a sip from one of her wineglasses, or cordial glasses later on in the garden, some servant had stepped up and silently refilled it. And the array of wines and spirits had been wide.

“Carter?” she asked aloud, hoping for an answer. Her voice came out as more of a croak than common, even for first thing in the morning. And there was no answer.

She slipped her feet into her flip-flops, pulled on her robe, and went to check on Joey. Who was lying on his back, eyes open, smiling up at her. Was this the best baby ever? she thought. She’d heard so many horror stories about colic, and crying, and parents who hadn’t been able to get a decent night’s sleep in months. But she’d experienced none of that. If it was this easy, she’d definitely have a couple more.

After washing up, she took Joey and Champ downstairs. The living room looked like an all-nighter had been pulled, with books and papers still scattered all over the coffee table and floor. Most of the open books and loose papers had Post-it Notes slapped haphazardly all over them. But where she might have expected to find Carter passed out on the sofa with a book spread open on his chest — it wouldn’t have been the first time, not by a long shot — she found only the lamp still on and the sofa untenanted.

In the kitchen, she plopped Joey into his high chair, opened the back door to let Champ out — he was off like a shot to warn some squirrel or chipmunk off their property — and turned on the coffeemaker. Right next to it, where they usually left each other notes, was a yellow sheet from a legal pad, on which Carter had scrawled in his barely legible hand, Gone to the office. Call you later! Love.

As the coffee started to percolate through the filter, she thought, Sunday. It’s a Sunday. And he still has to go to work?

Of course she did understand the impulse. If it weren’t for the printed-out translations from the secret letter in The Beasts of Eden, translations which she took with her pretty much everywhere she went, she might have been tooling up to the Getty herself today. A fine pair, they were.

She was nearly done feeding Joey, and just starting to wonder what she wanted to fix for herself — a soft-boiled egg, whole wheat toast? — when she heard the sound of tires crunching in the driveway. With Carter home, maybe she’d make something fancy, like French toast or blueberry pancakes. Probably wouldn’t be the worst remedy for a mild hangover, either.

But then the doorbell rang — had he lost his keys? — and she went to the front window, pulled back the curtain to peer out, and saw a mud-spattered pickup truck, with those big tires, parked in the drive.

Which could mean only one thing.

“If you’re still in bed, Bones, get up!” Del shouted from the front portico.

Beth let the curtain fall back and went to open the door.

“Oops,” Del said, seeing that she was still in her robe. “Hope I didn’t wake you.”

“Not at all. Carter’s not here, but come on in.”

Del was dressed for the great outdoors, in camo pants and hiking boots and a red bandanna tied around his prematurely white mane. It was like inviting Willie Nelson into the house.

“Hey, boy,” Del said as Champ trotted up to bark a warning. He squatted down and extended the back of one hand. “Don’t you remember me?”

Champ eyed him warily, glanced up at Beth to make sure everything was okay, then allowed Del to rub him on the top of his head. “That scar’s healing up nicely,” Del said, standing up again.

“Would you like some coffee?” Beth said. “I was just making it.”

“Sure.” Del stopped to look around the living room as Beth went into the kitchen. “What happened here?” Del said. “Did the study group break up early?”

“Looks like it,” Beth called out as she poured a mug for Del. “How do you like your coffee?”

“Strong and black, just like my women.”

She brought him the mug, and found him poking through the books and papers scattered around the room. “Thanks,” he said, studying another one of the Post-its. “Looks like your hubby was working on some very odd theory here.”

“Why do you say that?” Beth asked, as Del sauntered around the coffee table to take in another of the open volumes. There was a picture of a saichania skeleton, from the Late Cretaceous period, unearthed in the Gobi Desert. He took a sip from his mug. “Good coffee,” he said. The next picture, in a book beside it, was an illustration of a lycaenops, a mammal-like reptile from the Late Permian, Del’s own special area of study. He leaned down and flipped the pages to the next fluttering Post-it note. There was a black-and-white sketch, not bad really, of a homotherium, a scimitar-toothed cat that had hunted mammoth in Europe and North America before dying out, along with its favorite prey, at the end of the Pleistocene ice age. “Because he’s examining critters from all different epochs, and all different orders, from all over the globe.” Del couldn’t resist trying to put it all together — was there something that united the things he was looking at? Some thread Bones was following that he, for the life of him, could not see? He’d have to ask him, if he could ever find him.

“I left him a couple of messages on his cell,” Del said. “I thought we’d go hiking again, or even fishing.”

“Fishing?” Beth said, with a laugh. “Carter?”

“Don’t dismiss it,” Del said, “the boy needs some R&R. He works too hard. I told him that even when he was just a grad student.”

“I guess it didn’t take,” Beth said. “He left me a note saying he’s at the office.”

“Not when I called there,” Del blurted out, then instantly regretted it. Oh man, had he just blown Carter’s cover story? (But what the hell would he be covering up for?)

“You tried his office?” Beth said, trying to sound unconcerned.

“Well, maybe he’s in the lab, or down in the basement with our pal, the La Brea Man.”

That was probably it, Beth thought. “Say, I was just planning to make some breakfast. You like blueberry pancakes?”

“No, I don’t like them,” Del said. “I love them.”

While Del lingered over the books and papers, Beth popped upstairs to put on some shorts and a tank top; fixing breakfast for Del, in her robe and slippers, felt just a little too domestic. But that was interesting what he’d said about the bewildering nature of Carter’s research downstairs. Last night, when al-Kalli had escorted him back from wherever they’d been for the whole duration of the outdoor concert, he had looked altogether out of it. His eyes seemed focused on something that was no longer in front of him, but which he was seeing, nonetheless. And on the way home, when she’d asked what that had been all about, he’d just dismissed it by saying that al-Kalli had shown him some old bones from Saharan Africa that he’d wanted Carter’s take on.

“So, were they important?” Beth had asked.

And it was as though Carter hadn’t even heard her; he was just staring out the windshield of the car, driving as if on autopilot, already tuned back to some other frequency. The last time she’d seen him this consumed was back in New York, when the packet had arrived with the pictures of the fossil found in the cave from Lago d’Avernus. Like then, he had completely submerged himself in a world of interior theorizing and rumination. And much as she would have liked to continue to compare notes on the party while driving home, she knew enough not to take offense.

That was just Carter being Carter.

By the time she got back to the kitchen, Del had released Joey from his high chair and was down on the tile floor, playing with him. “His motor skills are exceptional,” Del said, in what she knew was meant as a warm and cuddly comment.

“How are yours?” Beth said, taking some eggs from the fridge. “Want to run the egg beater?”

“I think I could manage that.”

While the two of them prepared the pancakes and bacon — though Beth didn’t eat it, Carter did — Beth asked about how Del was liking L.A., how he liked living with his sister and her husband, and the answers were what she expected.

“No offense,” he said as the first pancakes were coming off the griddle and the bacon sizzled in the pan, “but I do not understand how anybody can actually live in a place like this. Way too many people, way too many cars, way too much noise. You can’t even hear yourself think.” He took the syrup and a plate of pancakes from Beth and put them on the table in the breakfast nook. “And the air’s so bad you can see it before you can breathe it.” He pulled out a chair and sat down. “But these look good enough to eat.”

“Go ahead and start,” she said, though, glancing over her shoulder, she saw that she needn’t have bothered. Del had already smothered a pile of pancakes in syrup and was digging in. He ate with the concentration and gusto of a man who customarily ate alone.

Idly, she wondered if she knew any eligible women who might be interested in Del. There were a few single women at the Getty, but they were far too sophisticated and polished. Even though he had a first-rate mind and a very kind disposition, they would never be able to see past the wild and woolly, Ted Nugent-style surface. They’d take one look and run for Beverly Hills.

“Carter tell you that we came across an abandoned cabin — well, more like a shack, really — on our last hike? I’m telling you, a few more nights on the balcony above Wilshire Boulevard, and I’ll be ready to move in.”

No, Beth wasn’t likely to find anyone for Del among her immediate acquaintances. She put the bacon on the table and sat down with him.

The obvious elephant in the room was Carter — or, more to the point, the missing Carter. They tried talking about other things — the drought, the latest police department fracas, the ongoing debate about providing illegal aliens with driver’s licenses — but they both knew they were just beating around the bush. So it was something of a relief when Del, swallowing the last strip of bacon and washing it down with his coffee, said, “What do you think? Should I try to track him down, or wait’ll he turns up on his own?”

Beth had been thinking about it, too. And what she’d decided was that it was a perfect hot and sunny day, and nothing would feel better, or be more likely to help her clear her head, than a swim in the community pool. Most of the time, there was no one there, and even when there was, they tended to keep their heads down, absorbed in a paperback or zoned out on their headphones.

“I was thinking of taking Joey down to the pool for a swim.”

“You’ve got a pool?”

“We don’t, but Summit View has. It’s just down the street.”

She could see that his interest was piqued. “You could borrow one of Carter’s swimsuits.”

“Hell, no. I’ve got some Jams in the truck.” He wiped his mouth, grabbed his plate, and said, “What are we waiting for? Let’s boogie.”

In no time, they’d cleared the table, gotten Joey into his stroller and Del into his Jams, and were on their way to the pool. Champ trotted along beside them, head down to the short brown grass (the watering restrictions had gotten tighter all the time). At the gate to the pool, where no dogs were allowed, they had to maneuver things so that Champ was left just outside — he stared at them mournfully from a patch of shade, his leash looped around a gate post — as they set themselves up under a big yellow umbrella. Even on a blisteringly hot Sunday morning like this, almost no one was at the pool. A couple of teenage girls, coated with lotion, were cooking themselves to a turn, and a man with long white legs and bare feet, his head buried in an open newspaper, was all the way at the other end.

Del, like some kid who’d been cooped up too long, peeled off his T-shirt, threw it on the chaise, and did a cannonball into the deep end of the pool. When he came up again, shaking off the water from his long, white hair, he looked to Beth like Poseidon, rising from the ocean depths.

“Come on in,” he shouted, “the water’s great!”

“In a few minutes,” Beth said, resting her head against the back of the chaise and closing her eyes. “In a few minutes.” But lying back now, in only her one-piece suit, with a faint breeze blowing across her bare limbs, she thought she might never move again.

The only sounds were the rustling of the dry leaves and brush in the canyon behind her, and the occasional splash as Del paddled from one end of the pool to the other. She rested one hand on the handle of the stroller, adjusted her sunglasses with the other, and wondered just where Carter was right now. Something had really captured his imagination last night, and she knew that he was off in pursuit of it now. Just as she would be, she had to admit, if the secret letter from the scribe had required her to.

Fortunately, it did not — and the translation was nearly done. The story it told was an incredible one — a master craftsman, plying his trade all over Europe and the British Isles, joining the First Crusade (most probably to escape the consequences of a violent crime), and winding up as an honored guest, then prisoner, of an Arab sultan. There was enough fodder in this letter alone for Beth to write and research an entire book — and the thought had already crossed her mind. The letter had described the unparalleled splendors of the palace — the endless banquets served by a legion of slaves, the marble halls and mosaicked floors of the vast public rooms, the silken draperies and rich carpets that graced the bedrooms, the white stallions bred and raced in the arena, the perfumed gardens, the thermal baths, the elaborate maze, all designed for the amusement of the sultan and his favored guests — but none of that had interested her as much as the comments the artist had made about his craft.

Here he wrote, as no illuminator ever had, about his art — not only about the techniques he used to make and apply his paints and inks (she wished there had been more of that) — but about the decisions he made in the composition and the rendering of his illuminations. At times, he sounded surprisingly like a painter of a much later century, particularly when he declared — and the force of his handwriting emphasized it — that throughout The Beasts of Eden he had “imagined nothing, but had taken his inspiration from the miracles and terrors before his eyes.” He claimed to have painted only what he saw, which was both thrilling — for an artist of the eleventh century it was as bold as it was unprecedented — and at the same time absurd. You only had to look at the pictures themselves — mighty birds rising from flaming pyres, lions with wings, dragons breathing fire and smoke — to know that it was untrue.

But it was the brazenness of the claim, quite apart from its veracity, that had impressed her.

“Whew, that was good,” Del said, clambering out of the pool and shaking himself like a wet dog. Beth felt the droplets landing on her feet and legs. “You ought to try it.”

“Maybe I will.” She took off her sunglasses and laid them on the hot cement, under her chaise. Del was letting himself drip dry; he stood there in the hot sun, with brown arms and neck and legs, and a torso the color of whole milk. Off in the distance, she heard Champ bark, and she didn’t blame him.

“Watch Joey?” she said as she stepped to the side of the pool and put a toe in to test the water. The sunlight gleamed on the rippling surface. She had to say that much for Summit View — the pool and other amenities were kept in tiptop condition. She slipped on a pair of goggles to protect her eyes from the chlorine, then executed a quick dive into the invitingly cool water.

She stayed underwater as long as she could, gliding along with a few broad strokes of her arms. It felt so good she wanted to make her stay indefinite. When she did come up for air, she breaststroked her way to the far end of the pool, turned, and started on another slow lap. She wondered why she didn’t do this more often, and for the tenth time she resolved to leave work a little earlier, come home, and get some exercise in the pool on a daily basis.

Maybe she could even recruit Carter to do the same. On days when he’d worked in the pit, he always smelled faintly of tar, no matter how diligently he’d scrubbed himself off in the trailer at the site. Chlorine would be preferable.

It might be nice, in fact, to get some kind of regular routine going; she worried sometimes that she and Carter worked so hard, and at such erratic hours, that they didn’t have enough old-fashioned fun and relaxation together. In New York, it had been possible to see each other for lunch sometimes, or to attend some of the gallery openings together after work, or even go off to their friends Ben and Abbie’s country house on occasion (though their last excursion there remained vague and distinctly unpleasant in her mind). She shook off the memory by executing a flip turn off the end of the pool, and then freestyling her way back again.

Here in L.A., she thought, moving languidly through the water, their offices were much farther apart — you couldn’t just jump on a subway for fifteen minutes — and they hadn’t really had time to make many friends. She had a few people at the Getty, he had Del, but as a couple they weren’t exactly part of any social circuit. Maybe it just came with having a baby. As she flipped again, she noted a pair of feet in the shallow end.

And, God knows, there was no way to meet anybody at Summit View. When you drove up and down the streets of the development, all you saw was immaculately done homes, with closed garage doors and tinted windows. They had neighbors on only one side, and to this day Beth had no idea who they were. Once she’d seen a Porsche pull out of their garage and race off down the hillside, but that was about it. She guessed she could ask the man, a Getty trustee from whom they were renting, who lived next door, but she hated to bother him with anything; he was giving them such a deal in the first place, she didn’t want to even remind him that they were there.

She was starting to get winded — that party had really taken it out of her — and resolved to do just one more lap. At the far end of the pool, she put her hands up on the hot lip of the cement and rested for a while, just enjoying the hot sun on the back of her head and shoulders. Tanning, she knew perfectly well, was bad for you, but gosh, it was nice to have a little color.

She lazily turned herself over in the water and gazed down at the other end, where she could dimly make out the stroller, Del, and someone else. She knew it wasn’t Carter; this was a man in white tennis shorts. The guy who’d been reading the newspaper, she figured. She took off the goggles and looped them around her wrist.

Wouldn’t you know it, she thought. Just when she was thinking it was impossible to meet anyone at Summit View, Del was doing it.

Keeping her head above water, she kicked off and headed back. As she got closer, the man stepped out of the shade of the umbrella, and she could see that he was tall… and very blond. And she paused, watching.

She could barely hear, over the lapping of the water in the pool, their voices. The man was turning and walking toward the gate.

She kicked her legs underwater and, still watching, swam closer.

By the time she reached the ladder, she could hear the gate closing behind the man. Champ, who was leashed there, didn’t bark.

She climbed up out of the pool and said to Del, “Who was that?”

“Got me,” he said. “Sounded kind of foreign.”

“What did he want?”

“Just being friendly. Said hello to Joey.”

“By name?” she asked. “Did he know his name?”

“Huh,” Del said. “Now that you ask me, I don’t know for sure.”

“Stay right there,” she said, tossing her goggles on the chaise and grabbing her sarong.

She headed for the gate — the man’s wet footprints were perfectly imprinted on the shaded portion of the cement. At the gate, Champ jumped up to greet her. She looked up and down the street, but it was as empty as always. She looked down again at the footprints; they had grown fainter all the time, and here they were just barely an outline. But just a step or two from the gate, where the bushes grew high, they abruptly stopped, altogether. Not a trace, not a drop more.

She looked up and down the street again, searching for a departing, or even a parked, car. But there were none; in Summit View, you were required to leave your car in your own driveway or garage.

She glanced down again for the footprints, but now they had all evaporated. It was as if no one had ever been there.

Champ strained at his leash, anxious to go inside the pool enclosure.

“Everything okay?” Del called out.

Beth wasn’t sure how to answer that. The air smelled fresh, as if the sprinklers had just been on.

“Beth?”

“Yes,” she called out over her shoulder. “Everything’s okay.”

When she went back inside, the two teenage girls, coating themselves with lotion, followed her with blank expressions.

“If I’d known you wanted to meet him that bad, I’d have asked him for his card.”

“I just thought I recognized him for a second.”

“Not the kind of guy you’d forget,” Del replied, flopping back in the chair with a magazine on his lap. “But he could go a little easier on the aftershave.”