For a few seconds her father didn't answer. Since Daphne's mother had died two years ago, he had talked to Daphne as he would talk to an adult, and often she felt helplessly out of her depth; she hoped her last remark hadn't been stupid, or thoughtless. She had pretty much been talking about his mother, after all.
But, "That's pretty good, Daph," he said finally, and she could tell that he meant it.
"What's so weird about Grammar's coffee grinder?" she asked.
"Don't I get a turn? Who's the boy with the glasses and dark hair? I've been seeing him ever since we left Pasadena."
"I don't—" Daphne could feel her face heating up. "He's just a boy in school. What about the coffee grinder?"
Her father glanced sideways at her, and it was clear that he was considering not telling her. She didn't lower her eyebrows or look away.
"Okay," he said at last, returning his attention to the lane ahead. "Damn, that crazy bus has changed lanes too, look — maybe I could pass him now."
Daphne peered over the dashboard and the rust-specked white hood beyond the windshield. Though there were two cars between their truck and the bus, she thought she could see a face in the bus's tinted high back window — but the face seemed to have silver patches on its forehead, cheeks and chin.
She pushed herself back in the seat.
"Don't pass it, Dad," she said quickly. "Slow down, get off the freeway if you have to."
He might not have seen the face, but he slowed down. "No harm getting off at Haven," he said quietly. The Haven Avenue exit was almost upon them, and he swung the car through the lane on their right and directly onto the exit ramp, making the engine roar in first gear.
"Her coffee grinder," he said when they had got off the freeway and turned left onto Haven. It was empty country around here, and sprawling grapevines made still-orderly lines across the untended fields, leftovers from the days when this had all been wine country.
"Well, somebody's got part of the story confused," he went on. "See, when Grammar called me today — what was it, eleven-thirty?"
"About that, yeah."
"Well, when she called me she was using her coffee grinder. I ran it for a second in her kitchen back there, and the acoustics are unmistakable. She was still in her kitchen at — well, at the earliest! — eleven o'clock this morning."
"And the hospital at Mount Shasta called Aunt Moira when?"
"About twelve-thirty."
"How far away is Mount Shasta?"
"Five hundred miles, easy. Almost up at the Oregon border." He shook his head. "Moira must have misunderstood the time somehow. Or I guess Grammar could have raced to LAX right after she called me, got straight onto a plane, direct flight, no layover, and then died just as she got off the plane…"
Daphne simply understood that there was no way her great-grandmother could have got to Shasta, but that the old lady had done it anyway. And she was sure her father realized this too.
"Did she build the Kaleidoscope Shed?" Daphne asked.
"Hah. Yes. I don't think she even hired anybody to help. But her father drew the plans, she said. I never met him — she called him Prospero, but as a nickname."
"Prospero from The Tempest? What did he do? — like for a job?"
"I got the impression he was a violinist."
"What's the bit, in The Tempest? About the creepy music?"
Her father sighed. " 'Sitting on a bank,'" he recited, "'Weeping again the King my father's wrack, this music crept by me upon the waters.'"
Daphne knew she'd be scared tonight in her bed, but that would be then — right now, among familiar fields and roads, and the hour no later than 3:30, she was just tense, as if she'd had several fast Cokes in a row. "I said she was a witch."
"She was a good mother to us," he said. "But!" he added, holding up his hand to stop her reflexive apology, "it looks like she may have been something like a witch." He turned right onto Foothill, the highway that used to be Route 66, still dotted with 1950s-era motels; travel time was predictable on surface streets, and Daphne knew they should be home by 4:30 at the latest. Her father added, "I think Grammar killed herself too."
Daphne didn't answer; she knew he could tell she thought so too.
Another World War II-era bomber roared overhead. There must be fires in the mountains here as well.
Her father was teaching a summer school class in Twain to Modern at Cal State San Bernardino tomorrow, and he had a stack of papers to correct, so when he opened a beer and shuffled up the hall to his office, Daphne took a Coke from the refrigerator and walked into the living room. Two or three cats ran away in front of her, as usual acting as if they'd never seen her before.
The kitchen and living room were the oldest parts of the house, built in 1929, when San Bernardino had been mostly orange groves. The house was built on a slope, and the newer sections were uphill-two bedrooms and two bathrooms that had been added on in the '50s, and at the top end of the hall was a big second living room and her father's office, built in the '70s. The walls of the downhill end of the house were stone behind the drywall, and this living room by the kitchen was always the coolest part of the house.
She fitted the Pee-wee's Big Adventure cassette into the VCR slot and sat down on the couch across from the TV set. If her father wanted to watch the movie, she'd see it again with him, but usually he fretted till bedtime over his lecture notes.
Remembered circus music spun behind the credits on the TV screen, and then the movie opened with a view of the Eiffel Tower painted on a billboard. This was Pee-wee's dream, she recalled; he was about to be awakened by his alarm clock. In the dream a cluster of bicyclists streaked past the billboard, and Pee-wee was winning the Tour de France on his crazy red bike, yapping like a parrot in his too tight gray suit; then he had ridden past the finish line, breaking the yellow tape, and all the spectators lifted him off his bike and carried him to a bandstand in a green field — and after some woman had put a crown on his head, she and all the other people hurried away, leaving Pee-wee alone on the platform in the middle of the field—
—and then it was a different movie.
This was black and white, and it started abruptly, with no credits. There was jazzy atonal piano music, but shots of the ocean were accompanied by no surf sounds, and Daphne knew even before the first dialogue card appeared that this was a silent movie.
It was about two sisters, Joan and Magdalen, living in a house on the California coast. One of the sisters was engaged to a simple-minded fisherman named Peter, and the other wasn't; but the actresses seemed to switch roles from scene to scene, so that Daphne could only guess that the engaged sister was the one who met a glossy-haired "playboy novelist" and ran off with him to some glamorous big city, maybe San Francisco. Peter seemed upset by it, anyway. Everybody's facial expressions were exaggerated, even for a silent movie — grotesque, almost imbecilic — and they all seemed to walk awkwardly.
Daphne had never heard the sound-track music before, and it didn't have any recognizable melody, but she kept being jarred by the absence of certain notes that the music had seemed to call for, as if she had tried to step up onto a curb that wasn't there. She had no sooner wondered if the implied notes formed a concealed melody than she was sure that they did — she thought she could remember it and hum it, if she wanted to, but she didn't want to.
She was sweating, and she was glad she was sitting down. The couch, the whole living room, seemed to be spinning. Once when her mother and father had had a party, she had sneaked into the kitchen and poured a splash of each kind of liquor into an empty Skippy peanut butter jar — brandy, gin, bourbon, vodka — and taken it back to her room. When she had finished the "cocktail" and lain down on her bed, the bed had seemed to spin like this. Really, though, this was now more like teetering — as if the whole house were balanced on a pole over a pit without walls or a bottom.