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Andy Beale's twenty-acre estate in Rancho Santa Fe was in the tax rolls, but not in the lists of holdings that were being offered for sale, rental, or lease. It stood out in the tax payments list, not only because it was especially big and expensive, but because no notation indicated what it was. At first Jane thought it must be a parcel that was being subdivided. She had seen lots of these tracts in California—groups of little mansions, forty or fifty homes that looked like miniature Tuscan villas. Every street was a cul-de-sac, and the houses were all built from the same three or four sets of plans, so there was an illusion of variation. But then she happened to see an internal memo about a bid on a building site. It directed that a copy be sent to Andrew Beale at the Rancho Santa Fe address. It looked to her as though it must be company property, held ostensibly as an investment, but really an expensive residence for the company's owner.
She looked at road maps to determine exactly where the house was, and then after lunch she drove out to see it. The landscapes of California were oddly familiar, like places in dreams. Every film, every television series, every commercial was filmed in some part of Southern California. People from the east like Jane came for the first time and stepped into places that had already been established in their memories. Rancho Santa Fe looked like landscapes in old movies. The road from the freeway began on a two-lane new black asphalt trail that ran among stunted live oaks and native brush. She had already learned that California roads like this always led to places where rich people lived—Malibu, Montecito, Hope Ranch, Rancho Santa Fe. It took millions to have a big house anywhere in Southern California, but to keep broad margins of land untouched around the whole community required people with great fortunes who were determined to maintain their exclusivity and quiet.
She began to see large rectangles of grassy land with the high white wooden rail fences that were the sure sign of horses, and then the horses themselves, smooth chestnut and brown bodies far off in grassy paddocks. It was hard to see any of the houses. In most cases only the mouths of the long driveways that led to them were visible—really no more than a gap in the trees with an iron gate across it, or a place where a long, unchanging wall suddenly fell back a few feet.
When Jane came upon the central square of the community, it was a mild surprise. There was a rustic post office, a brick structure that might be another public building, a couple of restaurants of the sort that were too good to post their names or even concede that they were restaurants. They simply looked like elegant residences built with broad entrances and tables in their gardens. Jane followed her map away from the square and up a long road with tall hedges on the left side and more oak trees and dry grass on the right.
When she reached the house it seemed to be nothing but a mailbox, two gaps in the tall hedge—one the size of a door and the other wide enough for a car—and, as she passed the bigger opening, a glimpse of brick pavement, a six-car garage, and the high, dark shadow of a house looming to the left of it. All she could tell about the building was that the main part was three stories tall and there were two one-story wings. Then she was past it, and the hedge was opaque. Down the road the hedge ended, and there was a long expanse of wall that seemed to belong to the next estate, which looked even bigger. There were other driveways farther along, and long stretches between them.
About two miles farther on, she turned around and drove back. This time she came at a slow, steady pace, looking for practical features—places where a car could be driven off the road and left without attracting any attention, barriers that might prevent a person from walking from property to property. She kept her window open and listened for the barking of dogs, the distant sounds of mowers or tractors that might give her an idea of the sizes of the estates.
She had memorized the way here from the freeway, but she kept checking her mirror so she would see what each landmark would look like if she came this way again. That was one of the tricks her father had taught her when she was very little. They would wander in the big state parks to the southeast of Deganawida, and he would let her lead the way back. He taught her that finding her way out of the woods was more important than finding her way in. He said that some people got lost because they never turned around to see what things were going to look like the next time they saw them.
When Jane returned to the freeway she kept going until she was back in Encinitas, in Sharon Curtis's neighborhood. She went to a sporting goods store and bought a racing bicycle with very narrow tires, a black helmet, and a tire pump. At a hardware store she bought a can of black spray paint. She put her bicycle, still in the carton, into the back of her SUV, drove it to Sharon's house, and carried it into the garage.
She took it out of its carton and completed the assembly and adjustments so it fit her perfectly. Then she took it to the back yard, set it on its carton, and spray painted all of its shiny parts a dull black. When the paint dried she sprayed Teflon lubricant on all the moving parts, rode the bicycle around the block once, and loaded it into the back of the SUV.
Jane went into Sharon's house, made a sandwich and ate it, set the alarm clock for midnight, and slept until it woke her. She dressed in black jeans, a black pullover, a black nylon windbreaker and gloves. She drove back toward Rancho Santa Fe. At this hour, the traffic was fast and sparse, so she got on the freeway and didn't have to touch her brakes again until the exit for Solana Beach. She drove until she found her way to the North Coast Repertory Theatre on Lomas Santa Fe Drive, parked her vehicle behind it, and rode off on her bicycle. She got off the main road quickly, rode in darkness up County Road S8 for three miles, turned onto Paseo Delicias, then La Gracia, and then La Flecha. There were no streetlamps on her route, and the roads were nearly empty.
Now and then Jane would hear a car coming along the road far behind her, and she would pull off the road into the entrance of a driveway or behind the end of a fence, dismount, and stay low and motionless. The car's lights would appear, and then the car disappeared around a curve or over a hill. The people in the cars were all on their way home now, probably from restaurants or shows or parties. Somewhere ahead where she couldn't see them, they probably turned off into one or another of the nearly hidden driveways and closed their gates.
The trip was just over four miles. Jane rode at an average speed of around twenty miles an hour, working her way up the gears when she had a downgrade to pick up more speed. She couldn't read street signs well in the dark, but she had memorized the curves of the roads and the distinctive landmarks.
Then she was there, beside the two openings in the tall hedge. She rode to the end of the hedge where the next estate began, lifted her bicycle over the low wall, and leaned it against the inner side so she could reach over and get it again, then swung her legs over the wall, took off her helmet and left it with the bicycle. She walked away from the road into the trees. Jane had no doubt that there would be surveillance cameras somewhere inside the Beale property trained on the two gates set into the hedge, but the Beales wouldn't have anything like that aimed into the neighbor's yard.
She moved patiently, stopping beside tree trunks to look and listen, then moving to the next spot she had chosen before she stopped again. The sun would not be up until a bit after five, and if she was on the road by four-thirty, she would be virtually invisible. She had four hours.