Yes, Cloud was sharp. If she’d been a real cloud, she would have been one of those brilliant crimson flares you saw sometimes above the buttes just after sunset, a cloud like flame and not a gentle rainbringer. Angelica gazed across the turquoise pool, caught the glint of Cloud’s golden eyes staring back at her, measuring, unafraid. She took another mouthful of wine, letting its sweetness fade, the faint tang of raspberries and smoke dissolving on her tongue.
Angelica had her own reasons for wanting her staff gone this evening. Her housekeeper, Sunday, came to work during the day, spending the night only when Angelica gave one of her rare parties. So she was never a problem. Cloud and Kendra and Martin usually had one free night a week together, when they drove Martin’s Jeep up to Flagstaff or Sedona. The three alternated their other days off, but once a month, at the dark of the moon, Angelica had to make up excuses to get them away from the compound. This had never been a problem at her place in Los Angeles, where so many clubs and bright lights beckoned, or in Santorini, where Martin had a legion of admirers among the sloe-eyed girls who worked as waitresses at the waterfront restaurants, and where Kendra and Cloud liked to go night-diving for octopus with Sabe, the old fisherman who cared for the Furiano estate when Angelica was away.
But when they were here in the desert, the girls and Martin didn’t like to leave Huitaca. Martin complained about the flaky old women in Sedona (Angelica laughed, most of the tourists were younger than she was), and Cloud thought the food in the local restaurants was disgusting. As for Kendra: well, Kendra was just plain lazy. Left to her own devices, Kendra would lie outside by the pool with her + 87 factor sunscreen and a pile of Sandman comics, and read and doze until she dried up into a little heap of brown dust and blew off into the Mazatzal Mountains.
Although really, Angelica couldn’t blame her for wanting to do just that. Huitaca was a glorious place. She had bought the land a year after Rinaldo died. She had just sold her first book—Into the Nysean Fields: Empowered Dreaming For Women Who Have Suffered Enough—for a modest five-figure advance. She’d visited Sedona on the tour promoting Nysean Fields, fallen in love with the buttes and vast lonely expanse of the desert, the blue sky like wet enamel paint and the wonderful midnight incense of piñon pine burning in fieldstone fireplaces. She’d found this place for sale and closed on it a month later, hired a brace of architects and contractors and carpenters. A year later she moved in.
She named the spot Huitaca for the Chibcha moon-goddess, a deity known for her love of indolence and intoxication; one of Her more easygoing incarnations. The compound was tucked between sandstone crags and a piñon-topped bluff where ravens and vultures nested. In the chaparral roadrunners and chachalacas rustled, hunting snakes and the little spiny lizards that hid among the stones. On spring mornings she could hear the chachalacas screaming raucously from the tops of huisache and scrubby pines. The cloudless air smelled of hot dust and pine resin; on summer evenings she could see prayers for rain rising like blue smoke from the distant belfry of the little church in Cottonwood.
Huicata was a few miles from Sedona, with its crystal wavers and wealthy pilgrims seeking enlightenment at overpriced restaurants that served blue corn chips and free range lamb fajitas. Every now and then a gaggle of tourists would find its way through the hills to Huitaca. Then Cloud and Kendra would get to do their stuff, politely but firmly directing the disappointed women back into their rented four-wheel-drive vehicles, watching until they jounced down the dusty gravel road, and out onto the main highway. Huitaca was an enchanted place, almost as beautiful as the Furiano villa on Santorini. Outsiders were only welcomed on special occasions.
The main house was dazzling, three thousand square feet of low-E glass and adobe and two-hundred-year-old beams salvaged from a deconsecrated church in Phoenix. The walls were hung with Navajo sand paintings and an entire steer’s skeleton had been reassembled above the massive fieldstone fireplace, its bleached bones threaded with beads and feathers and rattles made from the shells of tortoises. The floors were covered with hand-painted tiles imported from Tuscany, and small dried bundles of sage burned day and night in front of a tiny altar near Angelica’s bedroom.
But it was outside that Angelica did much of her work. The pool and its surrounding patio were set in a sort of natural amphitheater. On clear nights it afforded an unobstructed view of the eastern sky, with the violet-tinged buttes and hillsides erupting like frozen geysers of stone above the desert. On the patio, there were studiedly naturalistic plantings of native grasses and succulents: lecheguillas, the thorny leafless wands of ocotillo; rock nettles and prickly pear. Collared lizards slept upon the tiles; horned toads crept into the crevices where tiles had cracked, and laid their eggs among shards of terra-cotta. A colony of sidewinders visited there as well. Once Martin had tried to kill one, but Angelica stopped him—
“They only come here to drink,” she said. To his horror and amazement she stooped above a snake as long as Martin’s arm and thick around as his wrist, its head a raised fist, the dry husk of its rattle a blur.
“Here now,” murmured Angelica. Before the rattler could strike, she grabbed it behind its head. It dangled from her hand, writhing and twisting into improbable loops, its tail slapping her thigh hard enough to leave a red streak like the mark of a belt. Angelica held it at arm’s length and gently squeezed its jaws, so that Martin could watch the venom stream in milky strands from its hollow fangs onto the tiles. Then she let it go. Martin jumped onto a chair as the rattler made its crazy sideways flight across the patio and finally disappeared into a stand of prickly pear.
“Let them drink if they want to,” Angelica commanded. “And don’t you ever kill one.”
Martin had never threatened another snake, but he and the girls were much more careful about swimming after dark. That was fine with Angelica: she preferred swimming alone. The pool itself was a good twenty feet deep, designed to resemble a natural spring-fed mere. And it was small—three good strokes and Cloud was across it. Angelica had been concerned about its impact here in the desert, although not enough to forgo its construction, or to curtail the steady trickle of water that coursed from a hidden spigot into the narrow end of the pool. In its depths flecks of gold and silver glittered from a mosaic, done in the style of the women’s apody-terium in the Forum Baths at Herculaneum. It depicted the phases of the moon, with a triumphant female figure at center, the full moon held like an offering in her cupped hands.
Now, Angelica toyed with the idea of taking a swim. It was the twenty-ninth of June, and hot enough that your spit would sizzle on a rock. But Cloud was still there.
“I guess I’ll go on in,” Angelica said at last. She finished her wine, setting the empty goblet on the table beside her chaise. “Don’t miss your ride into town,” she called out, and went inside.
Cloud waited till she was gone, lying on her stomach and letting her hands trail through the blood-warm water. My ride, she thought. She flexed her hand, the hand with the three gold rings piercing it, feeling the water lap against the sensitive delta of flesh. Near her float, a beetle flailed against the surface of the pool, a small dun-colored atom of the desert. It had probably never seen this much water in its life. Cloud slid her hand beneath it, lifted it so that the beetle was marooned on one of her knuckles. For a moment it remained there; she watched as the film of water on its mottled carapace dried. Then its wings lifted and it flicked off into the heated air.