Coldheart Canyon

EPILOGUE. AND SO, LOVE

ONE

Although every medical expert who paraded by Tammy's bed in the next many weeks-bone-specialists and skull-specialists, gastroenterologists and just good old-fashioned nurses-invariably pronounced the opinion that she was a 'very lucky woman to be alive' there were many painful days and nights in that time of slow, slow recovery when she did not feel remotely lucky.

Quite the reverse. There were times, especially at night, when she thought she was as far from unmended as she'd been when Todd had first pulled her out of the car. Why else did she hurt so much? They gave her painkillers of course, in mind-befuddling amounts, but even when she'd just taken the pills or been given the injection, and the first rush of immunity from pain was upon her, she could still feel the agony pacing up and down just beyond the perimeter of her nerves' inured state, waiting for a crack to appear in the wall so that it could get back in and hurt her again.

She was in the Intensive Care Unit at Cedars-Sinai for the first seventy-two hours, but as soon as she was deemed fit to be removed from the ICU, her insurance company demanded she be taken to the LA County Hospital, where she could be looked after at fifty percent of the price. She was in no state to defend herself, of course, and would have undoubtedly been transferred had Maxine not stepped in and made her presence felt. Maxine was close friends with several of the Hospital Board, and made it clear that she would unleash all manner of legal demons if anyone even thought of moving Mrs. Lauper when she was in such a delicate state. The hospital authorities responded quickly. Tammy kept her bed, complete with a private room, at Cedars-Sinai. Maxine made it her business to be sure that the room was filled with fresh orchids every day, and that fresh three-layer chocolate cake from Lady Jane's on Melrose was brought in at three every afternoon.

"I want you well," she instructed Tammy during one of her first visits after Tammy had been released from ICU. "I have a list of dinner parties lined up for the two of us that will take every weekend for the next year at least. Shirley MacLaine called me; claimed she'd had a vision of Todd passing over, wearing a powder blue suit. I didn't like to spoil the poor old biddy's illusions so I told her that was exactly what he was wearing. Just as a matter of interest what was he wearing?"

"Jeans and a hard-on," Tammy replied. "He'd torn up his T-shirt for bandages." Her voice was still weak, but some of its old music was starting to come back, day by day.

"Well, I'll leave you to tell her that. And then there's all these friends of Todd's who want to meet you -- "

"Why?"

"Because I told them about what an extraordinary woman you are." Maxine said. "So you'd better start to get seriously well. As soon as you're ready to be moved I want you to come down and stay with me in Malibu."

"That'd be too much trouble for you."

"That's exactly what I need right now," Maxine replied, without irony. "Too much trouble. The moment I stop to think ... that's when things get out of hand."

Luckily, Tammy didn't have that problem. In addition to the heavy doses of painkillers she was still being given, she was getting some mild tranquilizers. Her thoughts were dreamy, most of the time; nothing seemed quite real.

"You're a very resilient woman," her doctor, an intense, prematurely-bald young fellow called Martin Zondel observed one morning, while scanning Tammy's chart. "It usually takes people twice as long as it's taking you to bounce back from these kinds of injuries."

"Am I bouncing? I don't feel like I'm bouncing."

"Well perhaps bouncing is too strong a word, but you're doing just fine!"

It was a period of firsts. The first trip out of bed, as far as the window. The first trip out of bed, as far as the door. The first trip out of bed as far as the en-suite bathroom. The first trip outside, even if it was just to look at the construction workers on the adjacent lot, putting up the new research block for the hospital. Maxine and Tammy ogled the men for a while.

"I should have married a blue-collar worker," Maxine said when they got back inside, "Hamburgers, beer and a good fuck on a Saturday night. I always overcomplicated things."

"Arnie's blue-collar. And he was a terrible lover."

"Oh yes, Arnie. It's time we talked about Arnie."

"What about him?"

"Well for one thing, he's a louse."

"Tell me something I don't know. What's he been up to?"

"Are you ready for this? He's been selling your life-story."

"Who to?"

"Everyone. You're hot news, right now. In fact I had a call from someone over at Fox wondering if I could sell you on the idea of having your life turned into a Movie of the Week."

"I hope you said no."

"No. I just said I'd talk to you about it. Honestly, Tammy, there's a little window of opportunity in here when you could make some serious money."

"Selling my life-story? I don't think so. I don't have one to sell!"

"That's not what these dodos think. Look at these."

Maxine went into her bag and brought out a sheaf of magazines, laying them on the bed. The usual suspects: The National Enquirer and The Star plus a couple of more up-market magazines, People and US. Tammy was still too stiff to lean forward and pick them up, so Maxine went through them for her, flicking to the relevant articles. Some carried photographs of Todd at the height of his fame; the photographs often emblazoned with melodramatic questions: Was Fame too much for the World's Greatest Heart-throb? on one; and on another: His Secret Hideaway became a Canyon of Death. But these lines were positively restrained in contrast with some of the stuff in the pages of The Globe, which had dedicated an entire "Pull-out Special your family will treasure for generations," to the subject of Haunted Hollywood; or, in their hyperbolic language: "The Spooks, the Ghosts, the Satan-worshippers and the Fiends who have made Tinseltown the Devil's Fanciest Piece of Real Estate!

There were pictures accompanying all the articles, of course: mostly of Todd, occasionally of Maxine and Gary Eppstadt, and even-in the case of The Enquirer and The Globe, pictures of Tammy herself. In fact she was the subject of one of the articles which was led off by a very unflattering picture of her; the article claiming that "According to her husband Arnold, obsessive fan Tammy Jayne Lauper, probably knows more about the last hours of superstar Todd Pickett's life than anybody else alive-but she isn't telling! Why? Because Lauper (36) is the leader of a black magic cult, which involves thousands of the dead star's fans worldwide, who were attempting to psychically control their star, when their experiment went disastrously and tragically wrong."

"I was of two minds whether to show you all this," Maxine said. "At least yet. I realize it probably makes your blood boil."

"How can they write such things? They're just making it up ... "

"There were worse, believe me. Not about you. But there's a piece about me I've got my lawyers onto, and two pieces about Burrows -- "

"Oh, really?"

"One of them was a very long list of his ... how shall I put this? His 'less than successful' clients."

"So Todd wasn't the first?"

"Apparently not. Burrows was just very good at buying peoples' silence. I guess nobody really wants to talk about their unsuccessful ass-lifts, now do they?"

Maxine gathered all the magazines up and put them into the drawer of the bedside table. "That's actually put some colour back into your cheeks."

"It's indignation," Tammy said. "It's fine to read all that nonsense in the supermarket line. But when it's about you, it's different."

"So shall I not bring any more of them in?"

"No, you can bring 'em in. I want to see what people are saying about me. Where are the magazines getting my photographs from? That one of me looking like a three-hundred-pound beet -- "

Maxine laughed out loud. "You're being a little harsh on yourself. But, you're right, it's not flattering. I guess the photographer himself gave them the picture. And you know who that was?"

"Yes. It was Arnie. It was taken last summer."

"He's probably gone through all your family photographs. But look, don't get stirred up. He's no better or worse than a thousand others. Believe me, I've seen this happen over and over. When there's a little money to be made-a few hundred bucks even-people come up with all these excuses to justify what they're doing with other people's privacy. America deserves to be told the truth, and all that bullshit."

"That's not what Arnie thought," Tammy said. "He just said to himself: I deserve to make some money for putting up with that fat bitch of a wife all these years."

There was no laughter now; just bitterness, deep and bleak.

"I'm sorry," Maxine said. "I really shouldn't have brought them in."

"Yes, you should. And please, don't apologize. I'm not really all that surprised. What are they saying about you ... if you don't mind me asking?"

Maxine exhaled a ragged sigh: "She was exploitative, manipulative, never did anything for Todd except for her own profit. That kind of stuff."

"Do you care?"

"It's funny. It used not to hurt. In fact, I used to positively wallow in being people's worst nightmare. But that was when Todd was still alive ... " She let the thought go unfinished. "What's the use?" she said at last, getting up from beside the bed. "We can't control any of this stuff. They'll write whatever they want to write, and people will believe what they want to believe." She leaned in and kissed Tammy on the cheek. "You take care of yourself. Doctor Zondel-is that it, Zondel?"

"I think so."

"Sounds like a cheap white wine. Well, anyway, he thinks you're remarkable. And said to him: 'this we knew.'"

Tammy caught hold of her hand. "Thank you for everything."

"Nothing to thank me for," Maxine said. "We survivors have got to stick together. I'll see you tomorrow. And by the way, now that you're compos mentis-I warn you-there's a chance you're going to have nursing staff coming in to ask you questions. Then selling your answers. So say nothing. However nice people are to you, assume they're fakes."

Maxine came every day, often with more magazines to show. But on Wednesday-three weeks and a day after Tammy had returned to consciousness-she had something weightier to place on her bed.

"Remember our own Norman Mailer?"

"Detective Rooney?"

"Ex-Detective Martin Ray Rooney. The same. Behold, he did labour mightily and his gutter publishers saw that it was publishable and they did a mighty thing, and put it in print in less than three weeks."

"No!"

"Here it is. In all its shoddy glory."

It wasn't a big book-a mere two hundred and ninety-six pages-but what it lacked in length it made up for in sheer bravura. The copy described it as a story too horrific for Hollywood to tell. On the cover was a photograph of the house in Coldheart Canyon, with the image of a glowering demon superimposed on the clouds overhead.

"He says you, me and a woman called Katya Lupescu were in it together. Like the three witches in Macbeth."

"You mean you actually read it?"

"Well, I skimmed. It's not the worst thing I've read. He spells all our names right, most of the time, but the rest? Oh God in Heaven! I don't know where to begin. It's a big sticky mess of Hollywood myths and Manson references and completely asinine pieces of detective work. Basically, he's convinced everyone is in on this massive conspiracy -- "

"To do what?"

"Well ... that's the thing. He's not really sure. He claims Todd found out about it, so he was murdered. Same with Joe. Same with Gary Eppstadt, though of course everybody in Hollywood had a reason to murder Gary Eppstadt."

"I didn't know books could be published so fast."

"Well it's just hack-work. It'll be off the shelves in a month. But Rooney got a quarter of a million dollars advance for it. Can you believe that?"

Tammy picked the book up-which was called Hell's Canyon-and flicked through it.

"Did he interview Arnie?"

"Well I didn't read it that closely, but I didn't see his name."

"Oh, there's pictures," Tammy said, coming to the eight-page section in the middle of the book. To give him his due, Rooney-or somebody working on his behalf-had done a little research. He'd turned up two photographs from the archives of some silent movie enthusiast. One was a picture of Katya Lupi, dressed in a gown so sheer it looked as though it had been painted on, the other a much more informal photograph which showed Katya, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, Theda Bara, Ramon Navarro and a host of other luminaries at a picnic in the shadow of the dream palace in Coldheart Canyon. At the back of the crowd-separated from Katya by several rows of smiling, famous faces, was Willem Zeffer. Tammy closed the book.

"Don't want to see any more?"

"I don't think so. Not today."

"I've been thinking ... Doctor Zinfandel -- " Tammy laughed at Maxine's perfectly deliberate error " -- has told me you'll be out of here in a week, ten days at the most. I don't want you going back to Rio Linda, at least not yet. I want you to come and stay with me at the house in Malibu, if it doesn't have too many distressing memories."

Tammy had been worrying about how she'd cope when she was released from the hospital; the offer made her burst with tears of relief. "Oh Christ, I hadn't realized you hated the place that much!" Laughter appeared through the tears. "No, no, I'd love to come." "Good. Then I'm going to send Danielle-she's my new assistant-to Sacramento and have her pickup some of your things, if that's okay with you."

"That would be perfect."

Nine days later, Tammy moved out of Cedars-Sinai and Maxine ferried her down to the beach-house. It looked much smaller by day; and somehow more ordinary without the twinkle lights in the trees, and the cars driving up, full of the great and the good. Perhaps it was simply that she'd come to know Maxine so well in the past few weeks (and how strange was that?; to have become so fond of this woman she'd despised for years, and to have her sentiments so sweetly returned?), that the house didn't seem at all alien to her. It was very far from her taste of course (or more correctly, far from her pocketbook) but it was modestly stylish, and the objects on the shelves were elegant and pretty. Sitting on the patio on the second or third evening, sipping a Virgin Mary, the wind warm off the Pacific, she asked Maxine if she'd decorated the place herself, or had it done professionally.

"Oh I'd love to say I chose every object in the house, but it was all done for me. Actually Jerry selected the paintings. He's got a good eye for art. It's a gay thing."

Tammy spluttered into her drink.

"He's flying back to California next weekend, to see a friend in the hospital. So I said he should call in. That's all right, yes? If you don't feel up to it, you don't have to see him."

"I'm fine, Maxine," Tammy said, "Believe me, I'm fine."

TWO

As it turned out, the following Saturday, when Jerry came to visit, Tammy was feeling anything but fine. Doctor Zondel had warned her that there would be some days when she felt weaker than others, and this was certainly one of those. She only had herself to blame. The previous day she had decided to take a walk along the beach and, as the day was so sunny, and the air so fresh, she'd completely lost track of time. What she'd planned as a twenty-minute stroll turned into an hour-and-a-quarter trek, which had not only exhausted her, but made her bones and muscles ache. She was consequently feeling frail and tender when Jerry came by the following day, and in no mood for intensive conversation. It didn't matter. Jerry had plenty to talk about without need of prompting: mainly his new and improved state of health.

"I'm trying not to be too much of a Pollyanna about it all in case something goes horribly wrong and the tumor comes back. But I don't think it's going to. I'm fine. And you, honey?"

"I have good days and bad days," Tammy said.

"Today's a bad day," Maxine said, chucking Tammy under the chin to get a smile.

"Look at you, Maxine. If I didn't know better I'd say you had a gay gene in you someplace."

Maxine gave him a supercilious smile. "Well if I did I certainly wouldn't tell you about it."

"Are you implying I gossip?"

"It was not an implication," Maxine dead-panned. "It is a fact of life."

"Well I'll keep my mouth closed about this, I promise," Jerry said, with a mischievous glint. "But were you not once a married lady, Tammy?"

"I'm not getting into this," Tammy said.

"All right, I will say no more on the subject. But I see what I see. And I think it's very charming. Men are such pigs anyway."

Maxine gave him a fierce look. And beneath her makeup, Tammy thought, she was blushing.

"You said you had pictures to show us?" Maxine said.

"I did? Oh yes, I did."

"Pictures of what?" Tammy said, her mind only a quarter committed to the subject at hand, distracted as she was by the exchange that had just taken place between Maxine and Jerry. She knew exactly what Jerry was implying, and although she couldn't remember thinking that she and Maxine had been nesting just like a couple of lesbians, she could see that his innuendo was not without plausibility, from the outside, at least.

And besides, men were pigs; or at least most of the men it had been her misfortune to become attracted to.

Jerry had brought out his pictures now, and passed them over to Maxine, who started to look through them.

"Oh my Lord ... " she said softly. Maxine handed the photographs over to Tammy one by one, as she'd looked at them.

"They were just taken by my old camera, so they're not very good. But I stayed all day, to watch the whole thing from beginning to end."

The thing Jerry had watched, and had photographed (rather better than his disclaimer suggested) was the Los Angeles Public Works' demolition of Katya Lupi's dream palace.

"I didn't even know they were going to knock it down," Maxine said.

"Well apparently there was a fierce lobby from your gang, Tammy -- "

"My gang?"

"The Appreciation Society."

"Oh."

" -- to keep the place as some kind of Todd Pickett shrine. You didn't hear about that?" Tammy shook her head. "My, my, you two have had your heads in the sand. Well, there was a petition, saying that the house should be left standing, but the authorities said no, it had to come down. Apparently, it was structurally unsafe. All the foundations had gone. Of course we know why but nobody else can figure it out. Anyway, they sent in the bulldozers. It was all over in six hours. The demolition part at least. Then it took another five or six hours to put the rubble in trucks and drive it away."

"Did anybody come to watch?" Tammy asked.

"Quite a few, coming and going. But not a crowd. Never more than twenty at any one time. And we were kept a long way back from the demolition which is why the pictures are so poor."

The women had been through all the pictures now. Tammy handed them back to Jerry, who said: "So that's another piece of Hollywood history that's bitten the dust. It makes me sick. This is all we've got faintly resembling a past in this city of ours, and we just take a hammer and knock it all down. How sensible is that?"

"Personally, I'm glad it's gone," Tammy piped up. Another wave of weakness had come over her as she looked at the pictures, and now she felt almost ready to pass out.

"You don't look too good," Maxine said.

"I don't feel too good. Would either of you mind if I went to lie down?"

"Not at all," Jerry said.

Tammy gave him a kiss and started towards her bedroom.

"Aren't you going to tuck her in, Maxine?" Tammy heard Jerry say.

"As it happens: yes." And so saying, she followed Tammy into the bedroom.

"You know, you mustn't let anything Jerry says bother you," Maxine said, once Tammy was lying down. She stroked the creases from the pillow beside Tammy's head.

"I know."

"He doesn't mean any harm."

"I know that too." She looked at Maxine, seeking out her grey eyes. "You know ... just for the record ... "

"No, Tammy. We don't have to have this conversation. You don't have a lesbian bone in your body."

"No, I don't."

"And if I do ... well, I haven't discovered it yet. But, as you raised the subject, I could quite happily take care of you for as long as you'd like. I like your company."

"And I like yours."

"Good. So let's have the world believe whatever it wants to believe."

"Fine by me."

Tammy made a weak little smile, mirrored on Maxine's face.

"Who'd have thought?" Maxine murmured.

She leaned forward and kissed Tammy very gently on the cheek. "Go to sleep, honey. I want you well."

When she'd gone, Tammy lay beneath the coverlet, listening to the reassuring rhythm of conversation between Maxine and Jerry from next door, and the draw and boom of the Pacific.

Of all the people to have found such comfort with: Maxine Frizelle. Her life had taken some very odd turns, no question about that.

But somehow it still seemed right. After the long journeys of late, the pursuits and the revelations, the terrors that could not speak, and those that spoke all too clearly, she felt as though Maxine was somehow her reward; her prize for staying the terrible course.

"Who'd have thought?" she said to herself.

And with Maxine's words on her lips, she fell asleep.

"I want to go back to Rio Linda," Tammy announced two days later. They were sitting on their favorite spot, out on the patio, and today there was a splash of the vodka mixed with tomato juice in Tammy's glass.

"You want to go home?" Maxine said.

Tammy took her hand. "No, no," she said. Then, more fiercely: "God, no. That's not my home any longer."

"So -- ?"

"Well, I had this huge collection of Todd Pickett memorabilia. And I want to get rid of it. Then I want to think about selling the house."

"Meaning you'll move in with me?"

"If it isn't too sudden?"

"At our age, nothing's too sudden," Maxine said. "But are you sure you want to go through all that stuff yourself? Can't you get one of the fans to do it?"

"I could, I suppose," Tammy said. "But I'd feel better doing it myself."

"Then we'll do it together."

"It'll be boring. There's so much stuff. And Arnie's been using the house on and off so it'll be a pig-sty."

"I don't care. When do you want to go?"

"As soon as possible. I just want to get it over and done with."

Tammy tried to find Arnie, first at the airport and then at his new girlfriend's house, just to warn him that they were coming into town, but she didn't get hold of him. Part of her was glad that Maxine was accompanying her, when there were so many variables she couldn't predict; but there was another part of her that felt a little uncomfortable at the prospect. Maxine lived in luxury. What would she think when she laid eyes on the scruffed, stuffed, little ranch-house where Tammy and Arnie had lived out the charmless farce of their marriage for fourteen-and-a-half years?

They got an early plane out of Los Angeles, and were in Sacramento by nine-thirty in the morning. Maxine had arranged for a chauffeured sedan to meet them at the airport. The chauffeur introduced himself as Gerald, and said that he was at their disposal. Did they want to go straight to the address he'd been given? Tammy gave Maxine a nearly panicked look: the moment was upon her, and suddenly she was anxious.

"Come on," Maxine said. "We'll face the horror together. Then we'll be out of here by the middle of the afternoon."

Arnie hadn't bothered to mow the front lawn, of course, or weed the ground around the two rose bushes that Tammy had attempted to nurture. The bushes were still alive, but only just. The weeds were almost as tall as the bushes.

"Of course he may have changed the lock," Tammy said, as they approached the front door.

"Then we'll just get Gerald to shoulder it in," Maxine said, ever practical. "It's still your house, honey. We're not doing anything illegal."

In fact, the key fitted and turned without any problem; and it was immediately apparent from the general state of the place that Arnie hadn't after all been a very regular visitor here in a while. But the heating had been left turned up so it was stiflingly hot in all the rooms; a stale, sickly heat. In the kitchen there was some food left out and rotting: a half-eaten hamburger, a pile of fruit which had been corrupted into plush versions of the originals, two plates of pizza crusts. The stink was pretty offensive, but Tammy got to work quickly clearing up the kitchen, while Maxine went around the house opening the windows and turning down the heating. With the rotted food bagged and set outside, and bleach put down the sink to take away the stench, the place was a little more hospitable, but Tammy made it very clear that she wanted to stay here for as short a time as possible, so they set to work. Given the size of the collection it was obviously not going to be sorted through and disposed of in a day; all Tammy wanted to do was collect up all the stuff that was personal, and either burn it or take it away. The rest she would let members of the Appreciation Society come in and collect. They'd end up fighting over the choicest items no doubt; all the more reason not to be there when they came.

"I didn't realize you had so much stuff," Maxine said, when they'd looked through all the rooms.

"Oh I was a top-of-the-line obsessive. No question. And I was organized." She went over to one of the filing cabinets, opened it, and fingered through it till she found the file she wanted.

"What's this?" Maxine said.

"Letters from you to me. Usually Dictated but not read."

"I was a bitch, I know. I was just trying to protect him the only way I knew how."

"And it worked. I never really got near him. Nobody did."

"Maybe if I had been less paranoid, he'd have been less paranoid. Then we wouldn't have tried to hide him away, and none of this -- "

Tammy interrupted her. "Enough of that," she said. "Let's start a bonfire out in the back yard, and get this done."

"A bonfire? For what?"

"For things like these." She proffered the Maxine Frizelle file. "Things it's nobody's business to ever see or read."

"Is there much like that?"

"There's enough. You want to start a fire with these, and I'll bring some more stuff out?"

"Sure. Anywhere in particular?"

"Arnie built a barbecue pit to the right of the back door. Only he never finished it. We could use that."

"Done."

Maxine took the papers outside, leaving Tammy to go through the cabinets collecting up other files that for one reason or another she didn't want people to see. She wasn't proud of what her overbearing tendencies had led her to do or say on occasion; this was the perfect time to clean up her past a little. It wasn't so much the thought of posterity that drove her to do this (although she was aware that she had become a part of a footnote to Hollywood history), rather it was the desire to keep these unflattering missives and notes out of the hands of the members of the Appreciation Society who would come in here after they'd gone to cast dice and divide the lots.

When she took the first armful out to the back yard she found that Maxine had made quite a healthy fire with the copies of her own letters.

"Is that all?"

"No, no," Tammy said, studying the fire. "There's a lot more." She kept staring. "You know that's what I used to think ghosts were like?" she said. "Flames in the sun. Invisible, but there."

Maxine took the files from Tammy, and proceeded to feed them to the flames.

"Are we ever going to set the record straight?" Tammy wondered aloud.

"Like how?"

"Write our own book."

"Lauper and Frizelle's Guide to the Afterlife?"

"Something like that."

"It'd just be another opinion," Maxine said, poking at the fire with the stick she'd picked up. "People would go on believing their favourite versions."

"You think?"

"For sure. You can't change people's opinion about stuff like that. It's imbedded. They believe what they believe."

"I'll go get some more stuff."

"Historians of the future are going to curse us for this, you know that?"

"Probably," Tammy said, catching a thin, black smut that was spiraling up from the fire like some bizarre insect. It crumbled in her hand. She brushed her palms together briskly, to clean it off. Then she went back inside for some more fuel for the fire.

Three or four trips out into the backyard and she'd done all she needed to do. She stood in the front bedroom, where she'd always kept her special treasures, and assessed the contents. She could only imagine how many fights there would be over the contents of this room: how much bitching and bargaining. Her gaze went to the back of the room, where-hidden out of sight behind several boxes of film stills-was the holy of holies: the box of photographs of Todd that she and she alone owned. The idea that these would become bargaining material like all the other bits and pieces they were leaving was repugnant. It was fine for the fans to have their petty arguments over crew-jackets and scraps of costuming, but not her precious photographs.

She carefully negotiated her way through the piles of bric-a-brac (her legs, still mending, were beginning to ache) to where her treasure lay hidden. Then she slipped her hand down into the hiding-place, and pulled the box out into view.

The rest could go to the fire or the fans, but this, and this alone, she would keep, she decided. She put it under her arm and went outside to see how her fire-stoker was doing.

"Is that the last of it?" Maxine said, looking at the box under Tammy's arm.

"No, I'm keeping this."

"Oh? Okay."

"It's just pictures of Todd."

The fire was still burning strongly; waves of heat rose up out of the half-finished pit, making the air undulate. While she stared at the fire Tammy opened the box of photographs, and as she did so some instinct-a kind of repugnance for the woman who had obsessed so often on these pictures-made her toss the box lid aside, and with one unpremeditated movement, pluck the pictures and the little roll of negatives out of the box and toss them into the middle of the fire.

"Changed your mind, huh?" Maxine said.

"Yep."

The flames were already curling around the first of the series, but Maxine could see him clearly enough.

"He was younger then."

"Yeah. They were taken on Life Lessons."

"Are those the negatives you're burning?"

"Don't ask."

"That must have cost you a small fortune. But he surely was a good-looking man."

The first of the photographs had been consumed. Now the second and the third.

"Are these the last of it, then?"

"I think so," Tammy said. "They can argue over the rest."

"Only I'm parched. Watching fires is thirsty work."

"You want me to get you a coke or a beer?"

"No. I want us to get back in the car and go home."

"Home," Tammy said, still looking at the fire. The sixth, seventh and eighth pictures were being consumed. The roll of negatives had already curled up into a little black ball.

"Yes, home," Maxine said.

She took Tammy's hand, and kissed the back of it. "Where you belong."

The last of the photographs had come into view, preserved from the heat of the flames on which it sat by the bottom of the box. This was always the picture she'd stared at most often, and most intensely; the one in which she'd often willed Todd's gaze to shift, just a few degrees, so he would look out at her. The fire had caught it now. In a few seconds it would be ashes.

Suddenly, just as impetuously as she'd delivered the pictures into the fire, she now reached down and plucked this one out. She blew on the flames, which only encouraged them.

"Here," Maxine said, and snatching the photograph from Tammy's hand dropped it to the ground and quickly stamped out the flames.

"You left it a bit late for a change of mind."

Tammy picked the picture up, nipping out the last orange worms of fire that crawled around its charred edges. Three-quarters of the image had been consumed, and the remaining portion was browned by the heat and dirt of Maxine's stamping, but Todd's face, shoulder and chest had survived. And his eyes, of course, just one second from meeting the gaze of the camera. Imminent, but permanently averted.

"You really want to keep that?"

"Yes. If you don't mind. We'll frame it and we'll find a place in the house where we can say hello to him once in a while."

"Done." She headed back to the house. "I'm going to call the airport. Find out when the next plane back to Los Angeles is. Are you ready to go?"

"Just say the word."

Tammy looked down at the picture in her hand. Maxine was right; she had left it a little late to salvage it. But there might come a time when she and Maxine needed the comfort of this face; when they were no longer young, and the imminence of his gaze would carry with it the promise of a reunion in another, kinder place.

She glanced up, to be sure Maxine had gone inside, then she gave the bitter-smelling scrap of photograph a quick kiss. Having done so she smiled at the man in the picture, and at herself for all her years of vain adoration. Well, she'd made her peace with it, at least. She slipped the photograph into her pocket and went inside, leaving the fire to burn itself out in Arnie's half-finished handiwork.

THREE

It is night in Coldheart Canyon, and the wind is off the desert.

The Santa Anas they call these winds. They blow off the Mojave, bringing sickness, on occasion, and the threat of fire.

But tonight the Santa Anas are not blisteringly hot. Tonight they are balmy as they pass through the Canyon. Their only freight is the sweet fragrance of flowers.

They make the young palms that are growing wild on the flanks of the Canyon sway, and the banks of bougainvillea churn. They raise dust along the road that winds up the Canyon.

Once in a while somebody will still make their way up that winding road, usually to look for some evidence of scandal or horror. But nature, abhorring a vacuum, has blanketed with green vine the deep pit that marked the location of Katya Lupi's house. So the visitors, coming here in the hope of finding bloodstains or Satanic markings scrawled into the sandstone, dig around for a while in the hot sun and then give up. There's nothing here that gives them goose-flesh: just flowers and dragonflies. Grumbling to one another that this was all a waste of time, they get back in their rental cars, arguing as to who suggested this fool's errand in the first place, and drive away to find something that will give them something morbid to talk about once they get back in to Tulsa or New Jersey.

When people finally ask them whether they went up to that God-forsaken Canyon where all those Hollywood folks died, they say that yeah, they went and had a look, but it was a waste of gas and temper, because there was nothing to see. Not a thing.

And so, over the next few summers, as people come and look and go away disappointed, word slowly spreads that Coldheart Canyon is a sham, a fake; not worth the effort.

So people come less and less. And eventually the tourists don't come at all.

There's only one kind of visitor who will still make the effort to find the place where Katya Lupi built her dream palace, and for this sort of sightseer, the Canyon will still put on a show.

They come, always, in expensive vehicles, designed to be driven over rough, undomesticated land. They come with rolls of geological maps and surveyors' equipment, and talk proprietarily about how the Canyon would look if it had a five-star hotel, seven or eight stories high, built at the top end, with three swimming pools and a dozen five-grand-a-night bungalows, all arranged so that everybody has a little corner of the Canyon walled off for their private spa, the contours of the land altered so that it feels like a world within a world; an escape into paradise, just two minutes' drive from Sunset Boulevard.

The Canyon has heard all this idle nonsense before of course. And it has promised itself: never again.

Hearing these men talk about the money they're going to make once they've done their digging and their planting, the Canyon loses its temper, and starts to show its displeasure as only dirt and rock given something close to consciousness by the magic worked in its midst, can do.

At first it simply shakes the ground a little, just enough to send some stones skipping down the Canyon's flanks to shatter the windshields on every vehicle on the road. Very often, a tantrum like this is enough to make the developers turn tail. But not always. Once in a while, there's somebody who refuses to be so easily intimidated, and the Canyon must escalate its assault.

It shakes its flanks until it uncovers certain horrid forms: the mummified remains of the children of the ghosts and the animals who mated here in the dark days of the Canyon's shameful past.

The revelation is brief. Just enough to say: this is the least of it, my friend. Dig and you will regret what I will show you for the rest of your life.

The show works every time.

Pragmatic though these men are, they feel the cold presence of the uncanny all around them, and suddenly they want no more of this place. In their panic they don't even bother to clear the granulated glass off their leather seats. They just get into their cars and drive away in clammy haste, leaving their maps and artists' renderings to decay in the dirt, and their ambitions to rot beside them.

So the Canyon sits in the middle of the sprawling city, inviolate. Nobody will touch it now. All it has to do is wait; wait for a certain summons.

There's no telling when it will come.

Perhaps it's a hundred years away, this call. On the other hand, perhaps it will come tomorrow.

All the Canyon knows is this: that at some point in the future a whisper will pass through its cracks and its vaults, and with one almighty heave, the canyons and the hills and the flatlands as far as the shore will stand up on end, and all the towers and the dams and the dream palaces that were built here, along with their builders and their inheritors, will drop away into the deep, dark Pacific.

The land will shake for a year or so, as it lays itself down again. Tremors will continue to convulse it. But by degrees, things will return to the way they were in an earlier time. The Santa Anas will blow in their season, and they'll carry into the Canyon the seeds of the flowers whose scents they bear, dropping them carelessly in the newly-churned dirt.

After a few weeks of warm winter rain, the naked ground will be covered with grass and the shoots of young flowers; even the first spears of palm trees and bamboo. In the months to come they will flourish, transforming the land out of all recognition.

And in time it will be as though men had never come to this perfect corner of the world-never called it paradise on earth, never despoiled it with their dream factories; and in the golden hush of the afternoon all that will be heard will be the flittering of dragonflies, and the murmur of hummingbirds as they pass from bower to bower, looking for a place to sup sweetness.