Personally, I did not think it was good strategy to tell a pack of hungry carnivores that would-be diners without the proper attire would not be served.
Their hackles were raised. Their tails were tucked. Their ears were flat to their heads. Their bodies were tense, muscles tight.
These guys were up for a meal.
When she took another step toward them, I said nothing because I was concerned my voice would sound like that of Mickey Mouse, but I reached after her and put a hand on her arm.
Ignoring me, she said to the coyotes, “I am not yours. He is not yours. You will leave now.”
In some parts of the country, coyotes are called prairie wolves, which sounds much nicer, but even if you called them fur babies, they would not be cuddly bundles of joy.
“You will leave now,” she repeated.
Astonishingly, the predators seemed to lose their confidence. Their hackles smoothed down, and they stopped baring their teeth.
“Now,” she insisted.
No longer willing to meet her eyes, they pricked their ears and looked left, right, as though wondering how they had gotten here and why they had been so reckless as to expose themselves to a dangerous pregnant woman.
Tails in motion, ducking their heads, glancing back sheepishly, they retreated into the fog, as if they had previously been foiled by Little Red Riding Hood and now this, leaving them deeply unsure of their predatory skills.
Annamaria allowed me to take her arm once more, and we continued south along the greenbelt.
After some fruitless reflection on the meaning of what had just transpired, I said, “So, you talk to animals.”
“No. That’s just how it seemed.”
“You said they were not only what they appeared to be.”
“Well, who is?” she asked, quoting me, which will never be as enlightening as quoting Shakespeare.
“What were they…in addition to what they appeared to be?”
“You know.”
“That’s not really an answer.”
She said, “All things in their time.”
“That’s not an answer, either.”
“It is what it is.”
“Yes, I see.”
“Not yet. But you will.”
“I never saw the White Rabbit, but we’ve fallen out of the world into Wonderland.”
She squeezed my arm. “The World itself is a wonderland, young man, as you well know.”
Off to our right, visible only now and then as shadowy forms along the edge of Hecate’s Canyon, the coyotes skulked parallel to us, and I called them to her attention.
“Yes,” she said, “they will be persistent, but do they dare look toward us?”
As we proceeded, I watched them for a while, but not once did I glimpse the faintest flicker of a radiant yellow eye in the murk. They seemed to be focused strictly on the ground before them.
“If you can handle a coyote pack,” I said, “I’m not sure you really need me.”
“I have no influence over people,” she said. “If they wish to torture and murder me, and they are determined to shatter all my defenses, then I will suffer. But coyotes—even beasts like these—don’t concern me, and they shouldn’t worry you.”
“You seem to know what you’re talking about,” I said. “But I’m going to worry a little about the coyotes anyway.”
“‘Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful.’”
I said, “Shakespeare, huh?”
“Measure for Measure.”
“I don’t know that one.”
“Now you do.”
As much as I admired the Bard of Avon, it seemed to me that goodness needed to be fearful of those slouching shapes in the fog if goodness wanted to avoid being chewed up and swallowed.
NINETEEN
A FEW BLOCKS BEFORE WE ARRIVED AT THE Cottage of the Happy Monster, our skulking escorts faded away into the fallen clouds and did not return, although I suspected that we had not seen the last of them.
The house stood alone at the end of a narrow lane of cracked and runneled blacktop. Huge deodar cedars flanked the road, their drooping branches seeming to carry the fog as if it had the weight of snow.
With a thatched and dormered roof, cedar-shingle walls, trumpet vines espaliered along the roof line, and a bougainvillea-covered porte-cochere, the large cottage could have been copied from one of the romantic paintings of Thomas Kinkade.
Like curious spooks, pale shapes of curdled mist pressed to the casement windows, gazing in, as though deciding whether the rooms inside were conducive to haunting.
A dark amber glow of considerable appeal shone through those phantom spirits. As we drew closer, I saw that this cheerful light glimmered and twinkled along the beveled edges of the diamond-shaped panes of glass, as though a person of magical power resided within.
As we had approached along the lane, I had prepared Annamaria for Blossom Rosedale, with whom she would be staying for an hour or two. Forty-five years ago, when Blossom had been six years old, her drunk and angry father dropped her headfirst into a barrel in which he had been burning trash primed with a little kerosene.
Fortunately, she had been wearing tightly fitted glasses, which spared her from blindness and saved her eyelids. Even at six, she’d had the presence of mind to hold her breath, which saved her lungs. She managed to topple the barrel and quickly crawl out, though by then aflame.
Surgeons saved one ear, rebuilt her nose—although not to the extent that it resembled a normal nose—and reconstructed her lips. Blossom never had hair thereafter. Her face remained forever seamed and puckered with keloid scars too terrible to be addressed by any surgical technique.
Out walking a week previously, I had encountered her as, with a flat tire, she pulled to the side of the road. Although she insisted that she could change the tire herself, I did the job because Blossom stood under five feet, had only a thumb and forefinger on her burned left hand, and had not been dressed for the rain that threatened.
With the spare tire in place, she had insisted that I come with her for coffee and a slice of her incomparable cinnamon-pecan cake. She called her home the Cottage of the Happy Monster, and though the place was a cottage and she was a deeply happy person, she was no more a monster than was Spielberg’s E.T., whom she somewhat resembled.
I had visited her once again in the week since we had met, for an evening of five-hundred rummy and conversation. Although she had won three games out of three, with stakes of a penny for every ten points of spread, she and I were on the way to becoming good friends. However, she did not know about the supernatural side of my life.
Now, when she opened the door in answer to my knock, Blossom said, “Ah! Come in, come in. God has sent me a sucker to fleece at cards. Another prayer answered. I’ll have my Mercedes yet.”
“You won fifty cents the last time. You’ll need to beat me every day for a thousand years.”
“And won’t that be fun!” Blossom closed the door and smiled at Annamaria. “You remind me of my cousin Melvina—the married Melvina, not the Cousin Melvina who’s an old maid. Of course, Cousin Melvina is crazy, and presumably you are not.”
I made introductions while Blossom helped Annamaria out of her coat and hung it on a wall peg.
“Cousin Melvina,” Blossom said, “has a problem with a time traveler. Dear, do you believe time travel is possible?”
Annamaria said, “Twenty-four hours ago, I was in yesterday.”
“And now here you are in today. I’ll have to tell my cousin about you.”
Taking Annamaria by the arm, Blossom walked her toward the back of the cottage.
“Cousin Melvina says a time traveler from 10,000 A.D. secretly visits her kitchen when she’s sleeping.”
As I followed them, Annamaria asked, “Why her kitchen?”
“She suspects they don’t have cake in the far future.”
The cottage was magically lit by Tiffany-inspired stained-glass lamps and sconces, the shades of which Blossom had crafted herself.
“Does Melvina have a lot of cake in her kitchen?”
“She’s a positive fanatic for cake.”
On a living-room wall hung a colorful and intricately detailed quilt of great beauty. Blossom’s quilts sold in art galleries; a few museums had acquired them.
“Perhaps her husband is having midnight snacks,” Annamaria said.
“No. Melvina lives in Florida, and her husband, Norman, he lives in a former Cold War missile silo in Nebraska.”
From a kitchen cabinet, Blossom took a container of coffee and a package of filters, and gave them to Annamaria.
As Annamaria began to prepare the brewer, she said, “Why would anyone want to live in an old missile silo?”
Opening a tin of cookies, Blossom said, “To avoid living with Melvina. She’d go anywhere with him, but not into a missile silo.”
“Why wouldn’t there be cake in the far future?” Annamaria asked.
With pastry tongs, Blossom transferred cookies from the tin to a plate. “Melvina says maybe they lost all the best recipes in a world war.”
“They had a war over cake?”
“Probably the war was for the usual reasons. Cake would have been collateral damage.”
“She does sound kind of crazy.”
“Oh, yes,” said Blossom, “but not in a bad way.”
Standing in the open door, I said, “Annamaria is in a little trouble—”
“Pregnancy isn’t trouble,” Blossom said, “it’s a blessing.”