Tick Tock

lushly landscaped grounds.
    “I'm sorry we have to wake your mother at three-thirty in the morning,” Tommy said.
    “You're just so delightfully thoughtful and polite,” Del said, reaching over to pinch his cheek. “But don't worry yourself. Mom will be awake and busy.”
    “She's a night person, huh?”
    “She's an around-the-clock person. She never sleeps.”
    “Never?”
    “Well, not since Tonopah,” Del amended. “Tonopah, Nevada?”
    “Actually, outside Tonopah, close to Mud Lake.”
    “Mud Lake? What're you talking about?”
    “That was twenty-eight years ago.”
    “Twenty-eight years?”
    “Approximately. I'm twenty-seven.”
    “Your mother hasn't slept since before you were born?”
    “She was twenty-three then.”
    “Everyone has to sleep,” Tommy said.
    “Not everyone. You've been up all night. Are you sleepy?”
    “I was earlier, but—”
    “Here we are,” she said happily, turning a corner and driving into a cul-de-sac.
    At the end of the short street stood a grove of palm trees and behind them a stone estate wall illuminated by landscape lighting so subtle that Tommy couldn't always discern the source.
    Set in the wall was a tall bronze gate with two-inch square pickets. In an eighteen-inch-deep cast header across the top of the gate were what appeared to be hieroglyphics. The massive portal made the main gate to the community look, by comparison, like a tinfoil construction.
    Del stopped, put down her window, and pushed a call button on an intercom box set in a stone post.
    From the speaker came a solemn male voice with a British accent. “Who's calling, please?”
    “It's me, Mummingford.”
    “Good morning, Miss Payne,” said the voice on the intercom.
    The gate rolled open ponderously.
    “Mummingford?” Tommy asked.
    As she put up her window, Del said, “The butler.”
    “He's on duty at this hour?”
    “Someone's always on duty. Mummingford prefers the night shift, actually, because it's usually more interesting here,” Del explained as she drove forward through the gateway arch.
    “What're those hieroglyphics on the gate?”
    “It says, ‘Toto, we're not in Kansas any more.’”
    “I'm serious.”
    “So am I. Mom has a whimsical side.”
    Looking back at the gate as they passed through the wall, Tommy said, “What language is it written in?”
    “The Great Pile,” Del said.
    “That's a language?”
    “No, that's the name of the house. Look.”
    The Payne mansion, standing on perhaps three acres of grounds behind the estate wall was easily the largest in the neighbourhood. It was an enormous, sprawling, wildly romantic Mediterranean villa with deep loggias behind colonnades, arches upon arches, lattice panels dripping with the white blossoms of night-blooming jasmine, balustraded balconies shaded by trellises groaning under the weight of red-flowering bougainvillea, bell towers and cupolas, so many steeply pitched barrel-tile roofs hipping into one another that Tommy might have been looking down on an entire Italian village rather than at a single structure. The scene was so cunningly and romantically lit that it could well have been the most insanely ornate stage setting in the most maniacally extravagant Andrew Lloyd Webber musical that the singular British genius of Broadway kitsch had ever created.
    The driveway descended slightly into a spacious stone-paved motor court at the centre of which stood a four-tiered fountain featuring fifteen life-size marble maidens in togas, pouring water from vases.
    As she drove the Ferrari around the astonishing fountain to the front door, Del said, “Mom wanted to build a more modern place, but the community's architectural guidelines specified Mediterranean, and the architectural committee had a very narrow definition of the word. She became so frustrated with the approval process that she designed the most ridiculously exaggerated Mediterranean house the world had ever seen, thinking they'd be appalled and reconsider her previous plans—but they loved it. By then it seemed a good joke to her, so she built the place.”
    “She built all this as a joke?”
    “My mom's nothing if not cool. Anyway, some people in this neighbourhood have named their houses, so Mom called this place The Great Pile.”
    She parked in front of an arched portico supported by marble columns featuring carved vines and bunches of grapes.
    Warm amber and rose-coloured light seemed to glow behind every bevelled pane of every leaded-glass window in the house.
    “Is she having a party at this hour?”
    “Party? No, no.