The Tortilla Curtain

passed by her again, jaunty on his bad leg, the space opened so wide it could have sucked in the whole universe. He was whistling, whistling under his breath.
    Later, after she'd shown the Monte Nido house to a crabbed old couple with penurious noses and swollen checkbooks who added up to a strong maybe, she went round shutting up her houses as briskly and efficiently as she could, hoping to be home by six. Everything was in order at the first four places, but as she punched in the code at the Da Roses' gate, something caught her eye in the brush along the gully on the right-hand side of the road, just inside the gate. Something shiny, throwing light back at the hard hot cauldron of the evening sun. She hit the command key, let the gate swing back, and walked up the road to investigate.
    It was a shopping cart, flung on its side in the ditch and all but buried in the vegetation. The red plastic flap on the baby seat bore the name of a local supermarket--Von's--but the nearest Von's was miles from here. For that matter, there wasn't a store of any kind within miles. Kyra bent to examine the thing, her skirt pulled tight against her haunches, heels sinking into the friable dirt, as if it would give a clue as to how it had gotten here. But there was no clue. The cart seemed new, bright in its coat of coruscating metal, barely used. She went back to the car, which she'd left running, to get a pen and her memo book so she could jot down the store's number and have someone come out and pick the thing up. After dragging it out of the ditch and wheeling it beyond the gate so they could get to it, she slid back into the car and wound her way up the road to the house, puzzled still, and suspicious, her eyes fastening on every detail.
    The house rose up before her, its windows solid with light, commanding the hilltop like a fortress looking out on the coast of Brittany instead of the deep blue pit of the Pacific. She pulled up in front of the big wooden doors of the garage and killed the engine. For a long moment she just sat there, windows down, breathing in the air and listening. Then she got out of the car and walked round the house twice, checking each door and window at ground level. At the same time she scanned the upper windows, looking for signs of entry or vandalism, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Finally, with a glance over her shoulder, she went inside.
    The interior was cool and quiet and it smelled faintly of almonds. That was a good smell for a house to have, a clean patrician smell, and Kyra realized it must have come from the furniture polish the maid used. Or could it have been an air freshener? She stood for a moment by the alarm panel, which she'd shut down this morning so Claudia Insty from Red House could show the place, and now she punched in the code to see if any of the twenty-three zones had been tampered with. They hadn't. The place was secure. She made a quick tour of the rooms, out of habit, all the while trying to imagine possible scenarios to explain away the shopping cart: the gardener had been using it and left it behind by mistake, teenagers had stolen it as a prank and flung it from their car, yes, sure, that had to be it. And yet how had it gotten inside the gate? Why would they go to the effort of lifting it to that height--why would anyone? Unless, of course, they'd gone round the gate through the scrub and valley oaks--but that didn't answer the why part of the question.
    She'd locked up and was standing at the door of the car, the air alive with birds and insects, when it hit her: transients used those carts. Bums. The homeless and displaced. Crazies. Mexicans. Winos. But no, that was a city problem, the sort of thing she'd expect to find out back of the 7-Eleven, in Canoga Park, Hollywood, downtown L.A. This was just too remote. Wasn't it?
    She'd swung open the door of the car, and now she shut it again. If someone was camping here, squatting, living out in the bushes... Delaney had told her they were camping in the canyon, miles from anything. If they could camp there, why not here? Suddenly the image of a village she'd seen on a tour of the Yucatán ruins came back to her in all its immediacy: naked children, pigs, cookfires, wattle huts--she couldn't have that. Not here. Not on the Da Ros property. How could you explain something like that to a prospective buyer?
    But maybe she was jumping to conclusions--all she'd seen was a shopping cart, and a new one at that, empty and