Dark Rivers of the Heart

long. There was much yet to do and not a lot of time in which to do it. Nevertheless, he wanted to spend a few minutes of quality time with Mrs. Bettonfield.
        While the Beatles sang "And I Love Her" and "Tell Me y," Roy Miro tenderly held his late friend's hand and took a moment to appreciate the exquisite furniture, the paintings, the art objects, the warm color scheme, and the array of fabrics in different but wonderfully complementary patterns and textures.
        "It's so very unfair that you had to close your shop," he told Penelope.
        "You were a fine interior designer. You really were, dear lady.
        You really were."
        The Beatles sang.
        Rain beat upon the windows.
        Roy's heart swelled with emotion.
        Rocky RECOGNIZED the route home. Periodically, as they passed one landmark or another, he chuffed softly with pleasure.
        Spencer lived in a part of Malibu that was without glamour but that had its own wild beauty.
        All the forty-room Mediterranean and French mansions, the ultramodern cliff-side dwellings of tinted glass and redwood and steel, the Cape Cod cottages as large as ocean liners, the twenty-thousand-squarefoot Southwest adobes with authentic lodgepole ceilings and authentic twenty-seat personal screening rooms with THX sound, were on the beaches, on the bluffs above the beaches-and inland of the Pacific Coast Highway, on hills with a view of the sea.
        Spencer's place was east of any home that Architectural Digest would choose to photograph, halfway up an unfashionable and sparsely populated canyon. The two-lane blacktop was textured by patches atop patches and by numerous cracks courtesy of the earthquakes that regularly quivered through the entire coast. A pipe-and-chain-link gate, between a pair of mammoth eucalyptuses, marked the entrance to his two-hundred-yardlong gravel driveway.
        Wired to the gate was a rusted sign with fading red letters: DANGER ATTACK DOG. He had fixed it there when he first purchased the place, long before Rocky had come to live with him. There had been no dog then, let alone one trained to kill. The sign was an empty threat, but effective.
        No one ever bothered him in his retreat.
        The gate was not electrically operated. He had to get out in the rain to unlock it and to relock it after he'd driven through.
        With only one bedroom, a living room, and a large kitchen, the structure at the end of the driveway was not a house, really, but a cabin. 'The cedar-clad exterior, perched on a stone foundation to foil termites, weathered to a lustrous silver gray, might have appeared shabby to an unappreciative eye; to Spencer it was beautiful and full of character in the wash of the Explorer's headlights.
        The cabin was sheltered-surrounded, shrouded, encased-by an eligant grove. 'The trees were red gums safe from the Australian beetles that had been devouring California blue gums for more than a decade.
        They had not been topped since Spencer had bought the place.
        Beyond the grove, brush and scrub oak covered the canyon floor and the steep slopes to the ridges. Summer through autumn, leeched of moisture by dry Santa Ana winds, the hills and the ravines became tinder.
        Twice in eight years, firefighters had ordered Spencer to evacuate, when blazes in neighboring canyons might have swept down on him as mercilessly as judgment day. Wind-driven flames could move at express-train speeds. One night they might overwhelm him in his sleep.
        But the beauty and privacy of the canyon justified the risk.
        At various times in his life, he had fought hard to stay alive, but he was not afraid to die. Sometimes he even embraced the thought of going to sleep and never waking. When fears of fire troubled him, he worried not about himself but about Rocky.
        That Wednesday night in February, the burning season was months away.
        Every tree and bush and blade of wild grass dripped rain and seemed as if it would be forever impervious to fire.
        The house was cold. It could be heated by a big river-rock fireplace in the living room, but each room also had its own in-wall electric heater.
        Spencer preferred the dancing light, the crackle, and the smell of a log fire, but he switched on the heaters because he was in a hurry.
        After changing from his damp clothes into a comfortable gray jogging suit and athletic socks, he