Chapter One

It was earthquake weather and everyone knew it. As the temperature hovered near one hundred degrees the days melted together until it was no longer possible to tell the difference between a Thursday and a Friday. Coyotes in the canyons panicked; they followed the scent of chlorine into backyards, and some of them drowned in swimming pools edged with blue Italian tiles. In Hollywood the tap water bubbled as it came out of the faucets; ice cubes dissolved in the palm of your hand. It was a time when everything you once suspected might go wrong suddenly did. For miles in every direction people just snapped. Lovers quarreled in bedrooms and parking lots, money was stolen, knives were pulled, friendships that had lasted a lifetime were destroyed with one harsh word. Those few people who were able to sleep were haunted by nightmares; those with insomnia drank cups of coffee and swore they smelled something sweet burning, as if a torch had been put to a grove of lemon trees sometime in the night.

It wasn't uncommon to have hallucinations in weather like this, and Rae Perry, who had never had a vision in her life, began to see things on the empty sidewalk whenever she took the bus home from work: a high-heeled shoe left at a crosswalk, a wild dog on the corner of La Brea, a black garden snake winding its way through traffic. Hollywood Boulevard seemed to move in waves. And at home, the white stucco walls in Rae's apartment shifted as if they were made of sand. It wasn't just the heat that was affecting everyone, it was the strange quality of the air. Every breath you took seemed dangerous, as if it might be your last. Even in the air-conditioned office where she worked for an independent producer named Freddy Contina, Rae found she had to take several deep breaths before typing a letter or answering the phone. Toward the end of the day the light coming in through the windows was a sulky amber color that made you see double. It was the season for headaches, and rashes, and double-crosses, and more and more often Rae Perry put her head down on her desk at work and began to wonder why she had ever left Boston.

But after she'd gotten home, and had sat for half an hour or more in a bathtub of cool water, Rae knew exactly why she had run away two weeks before her eighteenth birthday. As soon as she heard the Oldsmobile pull up, she ran to get dressed and open the front door. Sometimes she swore she was under Jessup's spell. He didn't even have to snap his fingers to get her to jump. All he had to do was look at her. Even in this weather Jessup seemed different from everyone else, as if he were above the heat. He had the kind of blue eyes that were transparent, and so pale that his mother had thought they were bad luck. For several summers she had kept Jessup out of the sun entirely, for fear his eyes would be bleached even lighter. But as soon as you touched Jessup you knew how deceiving his appearance was. He might have looked cool, but his skin radiated heat, and it got so that Rae had begun to wait for him to fall asleep so that she could climb out of bed and sleep alone on the wooden floor.

Since the time they'd run away from Boston, Rae had been afraid that one day Jessup would change his mind and ask her to leave. And the truth was something had been happening to him ever since they came to California. He actually went so far as to get an application to the Business School at U.C.L.A., though he never filled out the forms. He continually grilled Rae about Freddy Contina and even had her steal one of Freddy's resumes — Rae found him studying it one night when he thought she was still in the shower. It was as if the ghost of some ambition had suddenly appeared to Jessup. He had begun to want things, and it just wasn't like him.