Odd Hours

answer, either.”
    “It is what it is.”
    “Yes, I see.”
    “Not yet. But you will.”
    “I never saw the White Rabbit, but we’ve fallen out of the world into Wonderland.”
    She squeezed my arm. “The World itself is a wonderland, young man, as you well know.”
    Off to our right, visible only now and then as shadowy forms along the edge of Hecate’s Canyon, the coyotes skulked parallel to us, and I called them to her attention.
    “Yes,” she said, “they will be persistent, but do they dare look toward us?”
    As we proceeded, I watched them for a while, but not once did I glimpse the faintest flicker of a radiant yellow eye in the murk. They seemed to be focused strictly on the ground before them.
    “If you can handle a coyote pack,” I said, “I’m not sure you really need me.”
    “I have no influence over people,” she said. “If they wish to torture and murder me, and they are determined to shatter all my defenses, then I will suffer. But coyotes—even beasts like these—don’t concern me, and they shouldn’t worry you.”
    “You seem to know what you’re talking about,” I said. “But I’m going to worry a little about the coyotes anyway.”
    “‘Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful.’”
    I said, “Shakespeare, huh?”
    “Measure for Measure.”
    “I don’t know that one.”
    “Now you do.”
    As much as I admired the Bard of Avon, it seemed to me that goodness needed to be fearful of those slouching shapes in the fog if goodness wanted to avoid being chewed up and swallowed.

 
    NINETEEN
    A FEW BLOCKS BEFORE WE ARRIVED AT THE Cottage of the Happy Monster, our skulking escorts faded away into the fallen clouds and did not return, although I suspected that we had not seen the last of them.
    The house stood alone at the end of a narrow lane of cracked and runneled blacktop. Huge deodar cedars flanked the road, their drooping branches seeming to carry the fog as if it had the weight of snow.
    With a thatched and dormered roof, cedar-shingle walls, trumpet vines espaliered along the roof line, and a bougainvillea-covered porte-cochere, the large cottage could have been copied from one of the romantic paintings of Thomas Kinkade.
    Like curious spooks, pale shapes of curdled mist pressed to the casement windows, gazing in, as though deciding whether the rooms inside were conducive to haunting.
    A dark amber glow of considerable appeal shone through those phantom spirits. As we drew closer, I saw that this cheerful light glimmered and twinkled along the beveled edges of the diamond-shaped panes of glass, as though a person of magical power resided within.
    As we had approached along the lane, I had prepared Annamaria for Blossom Rosedale, with whom she would be staying for an hour or two. Forty-five years ago, when Blossom had been six years old, her drunk and angry father dropped her headfirst into a barrel in which he had been burning trash primed with a little kerosene.
    Fortunately, she had been wearing tightly fitted glasses, which spared her from blindness and saved her eyelids. Even at six, she’d had the presence of mind to hold her breath, which saved her lungs. She managed to topple the barrel and quickly crawl out, though by then aflame.
    Surgeons saved one ear, rebuilt her nose—although not to the extent that it resembled a normal nose—and reconstructed her lips. Blossom never had hair thereafter. Her face remained forever seamed and puckered with keloid scars too terrible to be addressed by any surgical technique.
    Out walking a week previously, I had encountered her as, with a flat tire, she pulled to the side of the road. Although she insisted that she could change the tire herself, I did the job because Blossom stood under five feet, had only a thumb and forefinger on her burned left hand, and had not been dressed for the rain that threatened.
    With the spare tire in place, she had insisted that I come with her for coffee and a slice of her incomparable cinnamon-pecan cake. She called her home the Cottage of the Happy Monster, and though the place was a cottage and she was a deeply happy person, she was no more a monster than was Spielberg’s E.T., whom she somewhat resembled.
    I had visited her once again in the week since we had met, for an evening of five-hundred rummy and conversation. Although she had won three games out of three, with stakes of a penny for every ten points of spread, she and I were on the way to becoming good friends. However,