The Tortilla Curtain

he was following a set of footprints up the muddy shoulder, very distinctive prints, unmistakable, cut in the rippled pattern of a tire tread.
    Kyra could barely see the road. The rain had come up suddenly, closing off her view like a curtain dropping at the end of a play, and she had no choice but to hit her emergency flasher and pull off onto the shoulder to wait it out. She took advantage of the delay to thumb through her _Thomas Guide__ and compare the map with the directions Delaney had scrawled on the notepad by the telephone. It was just past four and she'd taken the afternoon off to do some Christmas shopping--business was slow, dead in the water, actually, and for as long as she could remember she'd been meaning to start making a little more time for her family and for herself too--and she'd volunteered to pick up Jordan at his friend's house. She didn't know the boy--he was a friend from school--and since Delaney had dropped Jordan off, she didn't know the house either. Or the street, which she was having trouble finding.
    If she'd smoked, she would have lit a cigarette, but she didn't smoke, so she put in a relaxation tape and listened to the artificial waves soughing through the speakers while the rain, palpable and real, sizzled on the pavement and rapped like a medium's knuckles at the roof of the car. It gave her a cozy feeling, a feeling of being impervious to the elements, sealed in and secure, and she looked at the map and listened to her tape and realized that for the first time in as long as she could remember she was in no hurry to get anywhere. She'd been driving herself too hard for too long, and for what? Even before the Da Ros place went up she'd begun to have days when she just couldn't seem to muster the enthusiasm to stuff envelopes with potholders or write up ads with the same tired old stock adjectives and banal abbreviations--CHARMING Monte Nido Rustic Contemp., Las Virgenes Schools, 2 ac. horse prop., 6 BR/4.5 BA, fam. rm., pool, priced to sell--or even show Mr. and Mrs. Nobody through the eternal hallways of all the eternal houses they had neither the taste nor the money to buy and then arranging creative financing and holding their hands through a sixty-day escrow that was as likely as not to fall out. It was about as exciting as going to the toilet. The deal-making-slipping the needle in and pulling it out so quickly and painlessly they didn't even know they'd been pricked--that still got her pulse pounding, and so did beating everybody else out for a listing, especially a to-kill-for one like the Da Ros place, but the thrills were all too few and far between.
    Ah, there was the problem--she didn't know this part of Agoura as well as she should have, and she'd confused Foothill Place with Foothill Drive. She was on Foothill Drive now--and there, there it was, Comado Canyon Road, in the upper-left-hand corner of the map. She'd never heard of it before--it must be one of those new streets that jog up and down the grassy hills like roller coasters. Everything was new out here, a burgeoning, bustling, mini-mall-building testimonial to white flight, the megalopolis encroaching on the countryside. Ten years ago this was rural. Ten years before that you couldn't find it on the map. Kyra was sure there must be some really primo properties up here, older houses, estates, ranches the developers hadn't got to yet. The schools were good, property values holding their own, maybe even rising a bit--and it was just a hop, skip and jump from Woodland Hills, Malibu and Calabasas. She should look into it, she really should.
    The rain fell off as abruptly as it had begun, gray banks of drizzle bellying up to the hills like inverted clouds, and Kyra started up the engine, looked over her shoulder and wheeled out onto the blacktop road. She came to a T and bore left, past a tract of single-family homes and up into the undulating hills where the houses were farther apart--nothing special, but they had property, an acre or more, it looked like--and she saw half a dozen blond-haired children going up and down a long drive, and a flock of sheep patched into a greening hillside. The trees seemed to stand up a bit straighter here, their leaves washed clean of six months' accumulation of dust, particulates and hydrocarbons and whatever else the air held in suspension. It was pretty country--real estate--and it made her feel good.
    The road forked again and became narrower, a remnant of the cart path that must