Hill was dominated by half a dozen grand residences, their roofs barely visible behind 
lush foliage. On the lower slopes of this Olympus were the Five Crescents, streets bowed 
upon themselves, which were-if you couldn't afford a house at the very top-the next most 
desirable places to live.
  By contrast, Deerdell. Built on flat ground, and flanked on two sides by undeveloped 
woodland, this quadrant of the Grove had rapidly gone downhill. Here the houses lacked 
pools and needed paint. For some, the locale was a hip retreat. There were, even in 1971, 
a few artists living in Deerdell; that community would steadily grow. But if there was 
anywhere in the Grove where people went in fear for their automobiles' paintwork, it was 
here.
  Between these two extremes, socially and geographically, lay Stillbrook and Laureltree, 
the latter thought marginally more upscale because several of its streets were built on 
the second flank of the Hill, their scale and their prices less modest with every bend 
the streets took as they climbed.
  None of the quartet were residents of Deerdell. Arleen lived on Emerson, the second 
highest of the Crescents, Joyce and Carolyn within a block of each other on Steeple Chase 
Drive in Stillbrook Village, and Trudi in Laureltree. So there was a certain adventure in 
treading the streets of the East Grove, where their parents had seldom, if ever, 
ventured. Even if they had strayed down here, they'd certainly never gone where the girls 
now went: into the woods.
  "It's no cooler," Arleen complained when they'd been wandering a few minutes. "In fact, 
it's worse."
  She was right. Though the foliage kept the stare of the sun off their heads, the heat 
still found its way between the branches. Trapped, it made the damp air steamy.
  "I haven't been here for years," Trudi said, whipping a switch of stripped twig back 
and forth through a cloud of gnats. "I used to come with my brother."
  "How is he?" Joyce enquired.
  "Still in the hospital. He's never going to come out. All the family knows that but 
nobody ever says it. Makes me sick."
  Sam Katz had been drafted and gone to Vietnam fit in mind and body. In the third month 
of his tour of duty all that had been undone by a land mine, which had killed two of his 
comrades and badly injured him. There'd been a squirmingly uneasy homecoming, the Grove's 
little mighty lined up to greet the crippled hero. What followed was much talk of heroism 
and sacrifice; much drinking; some hidden tears. Through it all Sam Katz had sat stony 
featured, not setting his face against the celebrations but detached from them, as though 
his mind were still rehearsing the moment when his youth had been blown to smithereens. A 
few weeks later he'd been taken back to the hospital. Though his mother had told 
enquirers it was for corrective surgery to his spine the months dragged on until they 
became years, and Sam didn't reappear.
  Everyone guessed the reason, though it went unadmitted. Sam's physical wounds had 
healed adequately well. But his mind had not proved so resilient. The detachment he'd 
evidenced at his homecoming party had deepened into catatonia.
  All the other girls had known Sam, though the age difference between Joyce and her 
brother had been sufficient for them to have looked upon him almost as another species. 
Not simply male, which was strange enough, but old, too. Once past puberty, however, the 
roller-coaster ride began to speed. They could see twenty-five up ahead: a little way 
yet, but visible. And the waste of Sam's life began to make sense to them the way it 
could never have made sense to an eleven-year-old. Fond, sad memories of him silenced 
them for a while. They walked on through the heat, their bodies side by side, arms 
occasionally brushing arms, their minds diverging. Trudi's thoughts were of those 
childhood games, played with Sam in these thickets. He'd been an indulgent older brother, 
allowing her to tag along when she was seven or eight, and he thirteen. A year later, 
when his juices started telling him girls and sisters weren't the same animal, the 
invitations to play war had ceased. She'd mourned the loss of him; a rehearsal for the 
mourning she'd felt more acutely later. She saw his face in her mind now, a weird melding 
of the boy he'd been and the man he was; of the life he'd had and the death he lived. It 
made her hurt.
  For Carolyn, there were few hurts, at least in her waking life. And today-barring her 
wishing she'd bought a second ice cream-none. Night was quite a different matter. She had 
bad dreams; of earthquakes. In them Palomo Grove would fold up like a canvas chair and 
disappear into the earth. That was the penalty for knowing too much, her father had told 
her. She'd inherited his fierce curiosity, and had applied it- from first hearing of the 
San Andreas Fault-to a study of the earth they walked upon. Its solidity could not be 
trusted. Beneath their feet, she knew, the ground was riddled with fissures, which might 
at any moment gape, as they would gape beneath Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, all the way 
up and down the West Coast, swallowing the lot. She kept her anxieties at bay with 
swallowings of her own: a sort of sympathetic magic. She was fat because the earth's 
crust was thin; an irrefutable excuse for gluttony.
  Arleen cast a glance over at the Fat Girl. It never hurt, her mother had once 
instructed her, to keep the company of the less attractive. Though no longer in the 
public eye, the sometime star Kate Farrell still surrounded herself with dowdy women, in 
whose company her looks were twice as compelling. But for Arleen, especially on days like 
today, it seemed too high a price. Though they flattered her looks she didn't really like 
her companions. Once she'd have counted them her dearest friends. Now they were reminders 
of a life from which she could not escape quickly enough. But how else was she going to 
spend the time till her parole came through? Even the joys of sitting in front of the 
mirror palled after a time. The sooner I'm out of here, she thought, the sooner I'm happy.
  Had she been able to read Arleen's mind Joyce would have applauded the urgency. But she 
was lost in thoughts of how best to arrange an accidental encounter with Randy. If she 
made a casual enquiry about his routines Arleen would guess her purpose, and she might be 
selfish enough to spike Joyce's chances even though she had no interest in the boy 
herself. Joyce was a fine reader of character, and knew it was quite within Arleen's 
capabilities to be so perverse. But then who was she to condemn perversity? She was 
pursuing a male who'd three times made his indifference to her perfectly plain. Why 
couldn't she just forget him and save herself the grief of rejection? Because love wasn't 
like that. It made you fly in the face of the evidence, however compelling.
  She sighed audibly.
  "Something wrong?" Carolyn wanted to know.
  "Just...hot," Joyce replied.
  "Anyone we know?" Trudi said. Before Joyce could muster an adequately disparaging reply 
she caught sight of something glittering through the trees ahead.
  "Water," she said.
  Carolyn had seen it too. Its brightness made her squint.
  "Lots of it," she said.
  "I didn't know there was a lake down here," Joyce remarked, turning to Trudi.
  "There wasn't," came the reply. "Not that I remember."
  "Well there is now," said Carolyn.
  She was already forging ahead through the foliage, not caring to take the less thronged 
route. Her blundering passage cleared a way for the others.
  "Looks like we're going to get cool after all," Trudi said, and went after her at a run.