Fire and Rain Read online

  Carmen had talked about him on the news. She hadn’t improved his image, nor Chris’s for having hired him. Jeff Cabrio was a loner, she reported, with no fixed address prior to his move to Valle Rosa. He was holed up in an abandoned warehouse on the rim of Cinnamon Canyon. There was one picture accompanying her report, a photograph obviously taken from a good distance away, of Jeff entering the warehouse.

  Mia had had no opportunity to sketch him again, and she was about to despair of ever getting the chance when he showed up at her door the sixth morning after his arrival. It was seven o’clock. She’d been working on Henry, and the sudden knock made her jump. She opened her door to find him standing there, the early morning gold of the sun lighting one half of his face and body.

  “Didn’t wake you, I hope,” he began and then suddenly grabbed her arm. “What the hell did you do?” he asked.

  For a moment, she was afraid. She pulled her arm away, holding it close to her chest. “What do you mean?”

  He took her hand again, straightening her arm out in front of her. “What…God, it’s paint!”

  Mia looked down at the reddish stains on the inside of her forearm. “No,” she said. “It’s clay.”

  “Clay. I thought it was blood. Thought I had a suicide attempt on my hands.” He shook his head, and she could see the relief in his face. “You know how it is, Mia. You try to keep a low profile, and you end up living on the property of a television journalist and a famous ex-ballplayer, and you innocently knock on your neighbor’s door, thinking, what could be safer, and you end up spending the rest of the day in an emergency room with everyone asking you questions about yourself.”

  He was a madman. She drew her arm to her chest again. “You have an overactive imagination,” she said.

  “Maybe.” He glanced toward the adobe, then back at her once more. “Could you do me a favor? Chris already left. He wanted me to stop by the office this morning, but I won’t be able to. Sometime in the middle of the night I realized I’m off base with a few of my equations, and I need to get to the warehouse to work on them. Would you let him know that, please?”

  “Sure.” She had gotten his nose entirely wrong in her sketches. It was longer. There was the barest hint of a flare to his nostrils.

  “Clay?” He peered behind her into the living room. “You’re working with clay at seven in the morning?”

  “Actually, I’ve been up since five.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “May I see?”

  She stepped back to let him in. He walked across the plastic-covered carpet and sank to his knees in front of the orange crate. Henry grinned up at him. “Holy shit,” he said softly, sitting back on his heels. “This is definitely not amateur hour.”

  “His name’s Henry,” she said.

  He looked up at her. “You work down here on the floor?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re going to destroy your back.” He touched Henry’s chin with tanned fingers. The hair on his arm was dark blond. “Terra cotta, right?”

  She nodded, surprised.

  “What did you use for an armature?”

  She pointed to the wire armature on the coffee table.

  Jeff ran his fingertips lightly over Henry’s hair, and she knew he was hunting for a seam. “How did you get it out?”

  She knelt on the floor next to him. “I cut him in two, right where you’re touching. Then I covered up my tracks.”

  He studied the top of Henry’s head. “Excellent job,” he said. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen something this realistic. It’s not the kind of work most sculptors do these days, is it?”

  “No. Figurative sculpting is not exactly ‘in,’ but I can’t imagine doing anything else. Right now, though, I’m only into heads.”

  He touched Henry’s rounded cheek. “You must have studied anatomy to be able to produce work like this.”

  “Yes.” She’d had more figure study classes than she liked to remember. “How do you know so much about sculpting?”

  He stood up again. “I know a little bit about a lot of things.”

  She pointed to the bulletin board covered with Henry’s pictures. “He was a homeless man in San Diego. I paid him to let me shoot the pictures.”

  “Are you aware of how good you are?”

  “Yes.” She smiled.

  “So why are you squirreled away out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “It’s where I want to be.”

  His eyes narrowed as if he didn’t believe her. “What will you work on next?”

  Mia laughed as she got to her feet. “I was thinking about sculpting you.”

  A look of surprise crossed his features before he, too, laughed. “I wondered why you’re always watching me. You look at me as though you’re trying to count the pores in my skin.”

  “Sorry.” Her cheeks flushed, but she wasn’t about to let this opportunity pass her by. “Would you consider it? Letting me sculpt you?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You wouldn’t need to pose,” she said quickly. “I could work from photographs, like I did with Henry.”

  He shook his head and began walking toward the door. “No, Mia. The thought of two dozen pictures of my face floating around is not too pleasant at the moment.”

  “They wouldn’t float around, Jeff. They’d stay right here.”

  “Why not your boss?” he asked. “Why not sculpt Chris?”

  “He’s not right.” Chris had boyish good looks and a roguish twinkle in his pale blue eyes, but he wasn’t a lure. “There isn’t anything in his face.”

  “Maybe you’re too young to remember this, Mia, but there were a lot of women who saw something in Chris Garrett’s face over the years.”

  She frowned, annoyed. “It hasnothing to do with being good-looking.”

  “Oh. Thanks.”

  “No, I mean, physical attractiveness is entirely beside the point. Have you ever really studied your face? They could use it to teach geometry. It’s all rectangles and triangles and planes. The way Henry is all circles. Get it?”

  Jeff dropped his gaze to Henry again, and she thought he actually did get it. He let out a sigh that seemed to drain him. “Are you sure you’re not a plant for the dragon lady?” He nodded in the direction of the adobe, and it took Mia a moment to understand what he meant.

  “I barely know Carmen,” she said.

  He opened the door and stepped onto her porch, turning back to face her. “This is against my better judgment, but you can take pictures of me in the warehouse if you like,” he said. “It has to be within the next week or so, because after that we’ll be using equipment that’s too hazardous for you to be around.” For a moment, he looked as though he might change his mind, and she plowed ahead.

  “That’s fine,” she said. “I’ll do it right away.”

  He hesitated again. “You’ll tell absolutely no one what you see in there,” he said, “and the pictures you take must never leave your hands. Understood?”

  SHE WASTED NO TIME. On her way to work, she bought film, and during her lunch hour, drove the few miles to the warehouse. The building was low and huge and flat-roofed, the outside walls painted a dreary beige. It was surrounded by a few other colorless buildings, all of which looked as though they’d outlived their usefulness. There were no cars parked on the narrow street other than hers and Jeff’s.

  Rick unlocked the front door for her.

  “Hey, Mia!” He was dressed only in baggy pink-and-yellow shorts. No shirt. No shoes. His skin was very dark in contrast to his blond-streaked hair. She had met him only once before, at Chris’s office, but even then he had treated her as if they were old friends. “How’s it going?” he asked.

  “Fine, thanks.” She stepped into the warehouse, her camera case over her shoulder and a peach in her hand. She followed Rick through a maze of bookcases and desks to the rear of the building. The warehouse was hot almost beyond endurance. It was a long shell of a building, made of met
al and wood, with high, small windows scattered near the ceiling. A few of the windows held fans, which only served to drive home the fact that the air outside was scalding.

  The warehouse was used for county storage, Rick explained as they walked. It was crammed full of file cabinets, desks, long tables, heavy wooden chairs, bookcases. There was nothing soft in the building, nothing to break the echo of her shoes clicking on the concrete floor or to absorb the low, constant hum of the fans.

  She was surprised to see a flatbed truck parked along one wall of the building.’

  “How did it get in?” she asked, and Rick pointed to a huge garage door in front of the truck.

  As they neared the rear of the warehouse, she saw that a space, perhaps thirty feet square, had been cleared of furniture, save one long table and two chairs. The table was littered with papers, and Jeff sat hunched over them, his back to Mia and Rick as they approached.

  “Photographer’s here,” Rick announced, and Jeff looked up from the table. He was shirtless, too. She hadn’t counted on that.

  “Hi, Mia.” He gave a faint nod in her direction before returning his attention to his work.

  “You two go ahead with what you were doing,” she said. “I’ll be quiet.” She set her peach on one of the desks.

  Whatever they were doing wasn’t what she’d expected. But then, what had she expected? Some sort of heavy labor, at the very least. How did you make it rain? At the edge of the cleared space stood six large rectangular boxes that looked like enormous stereo speakers. On the desk was a computer terminal which was absorbing Rick’s attention. That was it. And paper. There was paper everywhere. Piles of it on the boxes. Disorganized heaps of it on the table. Jeff had a few sheets on his lap. It seemed that most of their work was on paper at this point, and those sheets she glimpsed appeared to be covered with equations. When Rick and Jeff spoke to each other, it was in numbers. Kilometers and liters and grams. If anyone had asked her under the threat of torture exactly what it was they were doing in the warehouse, she honestly couldn’t have said.

  For the most part, they ignored her, which was fine. She took off her shoes so she could walk around quietly, and discovered that the floor was surprisingly cool beneath her feet. This would be difficult, though. It wasn’t like the other times she’d taken photographs of a model to use in her work. She’d posed those people, then circled them, snapping pictures, getting every angle of that particular pose. But Jeff was moving, fluid. It would take many more shots to get what she needed.

  She was near the large boxes when a cat slipped by her legs, startling her, making her gasp.

  “That’s Eureka,” Rick looked up. “My roommate. She hates staying home by herself.”

  Mia reached down to pet the cat, but Rick stopped her with a hand on her arm.

  “I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he said. “She’s got a nasty streak. Scratches everyone but me.”

  Mia watched Eureka slink over to the table and leap into Jeff’s lap. He kept his eyes on his work, but sank one hand into the cat’s long white fur and began to stroke her. She could hear Eureka purring.

  “Almost everyone,” Rick said.

  Mia used her zoom lens so she didn’t need to disturb Jeff by getting too close to him, although she wasn’t sure it would matter. He barely seemed aware of her presence. Her film was fast, yet the dim light of the warehouse demanded a slow shutter speed, and with every picture she took she was aware of the sluggish click-whoosh of the shutter.

  Occasionally Jeff passed a sheet of paper across the table to Rick, sometimes saying a few words to the younger man, who then typed figures into the computer. The limp breeze from the fans caught edges of the papers, lifted their corners, and Mia closed her eyes now and then to listen to the humming of the fans, the quiet flutter of paper, the occasional soft, echoing voice. Once she dropped her lens cap and the sound reverberated around the walls. Jeff and Rick turned in her direction for a few seconds before bending their heads once more over the littered table.

  The shirtlessness was a problem. She didn’t want or need that much of him in her pictures. She focused on his head, the structure of the bones, the detail of his ear, the lines on his skin. But her old training soon took over and her eyes were drawn downward to his deltoids, lats, pectorals. They were not the muscles of a man accustomed to hard physical labor, yet they were well-defined; he had little fat on his body. The lines of his torso were sharp and angular, like the lines of his face, and before she knew it, she had taken a half dozen shots of his chest with its light smattering of golden-brown hair.

  “So, how come that camera’s never pointed at me, huh?” Rick asked, and Mia jerked her camera away from Jeff’s body at the sound of his voice.

  Rick was grinning, leaning away from the computer terminal. “What’s he got that I don’t have?”

  “Maybe I’ll do you next,” she lied.

  Jeff looked up from his papers, and for a second, his gaze locked with hers. There was exhaustion in his eyes, and something else. Some sadness. She couldn’t turn away until he shut his eyes, taking his hand from Eureka to rub his left shoulder, rolling his head on his neck as if trying to ease some stiffness.

  “We’re going to have to turn these fans around,” he said to Rick. “They’ll do us more good blowing hot air out than in.” He stood up, letting the cat jump to the floor. He stepped around the table and leaned over Rick’s shoulder to study the terminal, his hands resting on the back of Rick’s chair. Mia walked slowly behind them, snapping three more pictures before her film ran out, all the while incorporating his chest, his back, his arms, and a few inches of his khaki shorts into her imagined sculpture of him.

  She put her camera in its case and picked up the peach. The men were engrossed in something on the terminal screen.

  “Sorry to interrupt,” she said, “but may I come back with another roll of film tomorrow?”

  “Sure, Mia,” Jeff said absently, not even bothering to shift his eyes from the screen.

  But Rick lifted his head and grinned at her. “That’s the roll for me, right?”

  9

  IT FELT STRANGE TO give Chris a key to the adobe, and Carmen did it in an off-handed way, leaving it in an envelope with his mail on the steps of his cottage. She didn’t want to humiliate him, didn’t want to make a show of the fact that the house was hers and not his. Chris was suffering enough these days, although she’d once thought that all the suffering in the world was less than he deserved. Nevertheless, the way the media was tearing him apart distressed her. He’d asked for it, though, when he hired Cabrio. Perhaps now that she had regained her sanity, he was losing his.

  Her suggestion that he do some work in the adobe had been impulsive, and she regretted making it when he so readily accepted. She wasn’t certain how it would feel to allow him back into the house when she had so ferociously banished him from it. He loved that house. When they were first dating, he’d take her for long afternoon drives through the sprawling reaches of Valle Rosa, always going out of his way to pass Sugarbush and the run-down adobe at its core, always telling her his dream of owning it one day. He told her so often that the dream began to seem like her own. Now the property he had longed for was hers alone, but only in her weakest moments did she feel she had been cruel in keeping Sugarbush for herself.

  He had said he would work in the house when she wasn’t there, and so she didn’t realize he’d started until one morning when she was dressing for a doctor’s appointment and noticed the spackle on the walls of the bedroom. She walked around the house, and discovered he’d spackled the walls in the living room as well, and that the windows in the kitchen no longer protested when she tried to open them. The evidence of his presence warmed her one minute and gave her a chill the next, and she couldn’t stop thinking about it until she’d pulled into the parking lot of the medical building in La Jolla.

  There were two other women in the apricot-colored waiting room. They looked up from their magazines as Carmen wa
lked in, and she saw the light of recognition in their eyes and heard the slight intake of breath. They quickly lowered their faces back to their magazines, smiles spreading, as they thought about the calls they would make later that day to their friends: Guess who I saw at the plastic surgeon’s this morning?

  She knew it was the streak of silver in her hair that gave her away. It began at her left temple and carved a sleek path through the jet-black of her long hair. She’d had the streak since her teens, when it had been a novelty, and through her twenties and early thirties, when it became a symbol of caricature. Once a political cartoonist had drawn a sketch of her after her rigorous Sunrise interview of former governor Jerry Brown, and there was that streak in the cartoon, as distinctive as ever. She cursed it now. It seemed to have doubled its width, like a testimony to the wretchedness of the last few years. She had thought of dyeing it, but then people would talk even more.

  After signing in with the receptionist, Carmen took a seat on the opposite side of the room from the other women and pretended to lose herself in a magazine. She glanced at the women from time to time, trying to discern why they were there. One was small-breasted, although in any other setting she wouldn’t have noticed. Was that the reason for her visit, or was it the slight knob on the bridge of her nose or the sagging line of her jaw?

  God, was she really going to go through with this? She’d always looked at women who resorted to plastic surgery with disdain, thinking that she would graciously accept her own aging. She had been confident that her intelligence and skill would be enough to carry her through.

  Yesterday, Tom Forrest, a retired reporter and a man she had long considered her mentor, visited her on the set of News Nine. Tom had taken her under his wing many years earlier, when she was a twenty-four-year-old intern at the station. She was too sweet, he’d told her then. Too soft, and entirely too subjective. He’d taught her how to mask her softness with a tough facade, how to keep her emotional distance when a story threatened to pull her too deeply under its spell. She had mastered everything he’d taught her, and then some.