“Whoa,” she said, when we stopped, “I’ll go away more often.”
“Not necessary,” I said. “Sometimes there is gain without pain.”
She laughed and hugged me and put her arm around my waist. I held the door open as she got in the car. The man in the Hawaiian shirt had turned his back on us.
As I drove away she put her hand on my knee and looked over at the back seat. “Where’s the dog?”
“Guarding hearth and home. How was your talk?”
“Fine. Plus I may have sold that archtop guitar I did last summer-the one Joey Shah defaulted on. I met a jazz musician from Dublin who wants it.”
“Great,” I said. “You put a lot of time into that one.”
“Five hundred hours, but who’s counting.”
She stifled a yawn and put her head on my shoulder. I drove all the way to Sunset before she woke up, shaking her curls. “Boy. .. must have hit me all of a sudden.” Sitting up, she blinked at the streets of Bel Air.
“Home sweet home,” she said softly.
I waited until she’d roused herself before telling her the bad news.
She took it well.
“Okay,” she said, “I guess it goes with the territory. Maybe we should move out for a while and stay at the shop.”
“Move out?”
“At least till you know what’s going on.”
I thought of her studio, separated from the mean streets of Venice by a thin veneer of white windows and locks. Saws and drills and wood shavings on the ground floor. The sleeping loft in which we’d made love so many times. .
.
“Thanks,” I said, “but I can’t stay away indefinitely-the house needs maintenance. Not to mention the fish that’re left.”
That sounded trivial, but she said, “That poor fish. And you worked so hard to keep them alive.”
She touched my cheek.
“Welcome home,” I said glumly.
“Don’t worry about that, Alex. Let’s just figure out how to deal with this stupidity until it’s resolved.”
“I don’t want to put you in any danger. Maybe you should move to the shop-” “And leave you alone in the middle of this?”
“I just want to make sure you’re okay.”
“How okay do you think I’m going to be, worrying every minute about you? I mean, the fish are wonderful, Alex, but you can hire someone to feed them.
Hire someone to look after the whole house, for that matter.”
“Pack up the wagons and head out?”
“What’s wrong with being a little cautious, honey?”
“I don’t know. .. it just seems awfully drastic-all that’s really happened is malicious mischief.”
“So why were you so upset when you told me about it?”
“Sorry. I didn’t want to upset you.”
“Of course it upsets me,” she said. “Someone sending you weird tapes, sneaking in and She put her arm around my shoulder. The light changed to green and I turned left.
“Goes with the territory,” she repeated. “All those troubled people you’ve worked with over the years. All that misdirected passion. The surprising thing isn’t that it happened. It’s how long it took.”
“You never said it worried you.”
“It wasn’t a matter of worry-I didn’t obsess on it. just thought about it from time to time.”
“You never said anything.”
“What would have been the point? I didn’t want to upset YOU.”
I lifted her hand from my shoulder and kissed it.
“Okay,” she said, “so we protect each other, Curly. Ain’t that what true love’s all about?”
I pulled up in front of the house. No obvious signs of intrusion.
I said, “Just let me check around for a sec before you get out.”
“Oh, really,” she said. But she stayed in the car.
I gave the pond a quick inspection. The fish moved with nighttime languor, and none was missing.
I jogged up the stairs to the landing, checked the front door, peered in through the living room window. Something moved as the drapes parted. The dog’s face pressed against the glass, wetting it. I raised my hand in greeting. He pawed the window. I could hear the jazz through the redwood walls.
By the time I got back down, Robin was lifting her valise from the trunk.