DEDICATION
For Chris and Teresa Arena
And with thanks to Assaf Asheri, Mike Baches, John Bierer, Jim Blaylock, Didi Chanoch, Russell Galen, Patricia Geary, Tom Gilchrist, Rani Graff, Julia Halperin, John Hertz, Jon Hodge, Varnum Honey, Pat Hough, Barry Levin, Brian and Cathy McCaleb, Karen Meisner, Denny Meyer, Eric Nylund, Aya Shacham, Dave Sandoval, Bill Schafer, Sunila Sen Gupta, David Silberstein, Kristine Sobrero, Ed Thomas, Vered Tochterman, Guy Wiener, Hagit Wiener, Naomi Wiener, Par Winzell, and Mike Yanovich.
PROLOGUE
Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the King my father’s wrack,
This music crept by me upon the waters.
—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST
The ambulance came bobbing out of the Mercy Medical Center parking lot and swung south on Pine Street, its blue and red lights just winking dots in the bright noon sunshine and the siren echoing away into the cloudless blue vault of the sky. At East Lake Street the ambulance turned left, avoiding most of the traffic farther south, where reports of a miraculous angel appearing on somebody’s TV set had attracted hundreds of the spiritual pilgrims who had come to town for this weekend.
At the Everett Memorial Highway the ambulance turned north, and accelerated; in five minutes it had left the city behind and was ascending the narrow blacktop strip through cool pine forests, and when the highway curved east the white peaks of Shasta and Shastina stood up high above the timberline.
Traffic was heavier as the highway switchbacked up the mountain slope—Volkswagen vans, campers, buses—and the shoulder was dotted with hitchhikers in jeans and robes and knapsacks.
The red-and-white ambulance weaved between the vehicles on the highway, and it was able to speed up again when the highway straightened out past the Bunny Flats campgrounds. Three miles farther on, the parking lot at Panther Meadows was clogged with cars and vans, but the hospital had radioed ahead and Forest Service officers had cleared a path to the north end of the lot, where trails led away among the trees.
In the clearings around the trailhead, people were strolling aimlessly or staring up into the sky or sitting in meditation circles, and the woods were noisy with ringing bells and the yells of children; two white-clad paramedics got out of the ambulance and carried a stretcher through a sea of beards and gray ponytails and pastel robes, with the tang of patchouli oil spicing the scent of Douglas fir on the chilly breeze—but they didn’t have to hike far, because six people had already made a stretcher of flannel shirts and cherry branches and had carried the limp body most of the way back from the high glades of Squaw Meadow; the body was wrapped in an old brown army blanket and wreathed with Shasta daisies and the white flowers of wild strawberry.
The paramedics lifted the old woman’s body onto their aluminum-and-nylon stretcher, and within minutes the ambulance was accelerating back down the mountain, but with no siren now.
Back in the clearing up on Squaw Meadow, the people who had not carried the stretcher were dismembering a swastika-shaped framework of gold wire, having to bend it repeatedly to break it, since none of them was carrying a pocketknife.
ACT ONE: I'll Drown My Book
I have done nothing but in care of thee,
Of thee my dear one, thee my daughter,
who Art ignorant of what thou art, not
knowing Of whence I am…
— WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST
One
"It doesn't look burned."
"No," said her father, squinting and shading his eyes with his hand. They had paused halfway across the weedy backyard.
"Are you sure she said 'shed'?"
"Yes — 'I've burned down the Kaleidoscope Shed,' she told me."
Daphne Marrity sat down on a patch of grass and straightened her skirt, peering at the crooked old gray structure that was visible now under the shadow of the shaggy avocado tree. It would probably burn up pretty fast, if anybody was to try to burn it.
The shingled roof was patchy, sagging in the middle, and the two dusty wood-framed windows on either side of the closed door seemed to be falling out of the clapboard wall; it probably leaked badly in the rain.
Daphne had heard that her father and aunt had sometimes sneaked out here to play in the shed when they were children, though they weren't allowed to. The door was so low that Daphne herself might have to stoop to get through, and she was not a particularly tall twelve-year-old.
It was probably when they were too young to go to school, she thought. Or else it's because I was born in 1975, and kids are taller now than they were back then.
"The tree would have burned up too," she noted.
"You're going to get red ants all over you. She might have dreamed it. I don't think it was a, a joke." Her father glanced around, frowning, clearly irritated. He was sweating, even with his jacket folded over his arm.
"Gold under the bricks," Daphne reminded him.
"And she dreamed that too. I wonder where she is." There had been no answer to his knock on the front door of the house, but when they had walked around the corner and pushed open the backyard gate they had seen that the old green Rambler station wagon was in the carport, in the yellow shade of the corrugated fiberglass roof.
Daphne crossed her legs on the grass and squinted up at him against the sun's glare. "Why did she call it the Kaleidosope Shed?"
"It—" He laughed. "We all called it that. I don't know."
He had stepped on what he'd been about to say. She sighed and looked toward the shed again. "Let's go in it and pull up some bricks. I can watch out for spiders," she added.
Her father shook his head. "I can see from here that it's padlocked. We shouldn't even be hanging around back here when Grammar's not home." Grammar was the family name for the old lady, and it had not made Daphne like her any better.
"We had to, to see if she really did burn it down like she said. Now we should see if" — she thought quickly — "if she passed out in there from gasoline fumes. Maybe she meant, 'I'm about to burn it down.'"
"How could she have padlocked it from the outside?"
"Maybe she's passed out behind the shed. She did call you about the shed, and she doesn't answer the door, and her car is here."
"Oh…" He squinted and began to shake his head, so she went on quickly.
"'Screw your courage to the sticking place,'" she said. "Maybe there really is gold under the bricks. Didn't she have a lot of money?"
He smiled distractedly. "'And we'll not fail.' She did get some money in '55, I've heard."
"How old was she then?" Daphne got to her feet, brushing down the back of her skirt.
"About fifty-five, I guess. She's probably about eighty-seven now. Any money she's got is in the bank."
"Not in the bank — she's a hippie, isn't she?" Even now, at twelve, Daphne was still somewhat afraid of her chain-smoking great-grandmother, with her white hair, her grinding German accent, and her wrinkly old cheeks always wet with the artificial tears she bought in little bottles at Thrifty. Daphne had never been allowed in the old woman's backyard, and this was the first time she'd ever been farther out than the back porch. "Or a witch," she added.
Daphne took her father's hand as a tentative prelude to starting toward the shed.
"She isn't a witch," he said, laughing. "And she isn't a hippie either. She's too old to have been a hippie."