“Yeah, shaking him would have scared him. Maybe you could have slapped at him a little.” Shasta was clearly sarcastic.
“All I had were my words, and he didn’t listen. He said he was so close...”
“Close to what?”
“I don’t know. A bonus? An award? Some glittery belt he could strut around the stage in?”
“Did you ask him?”
“No. By then I didn’t care.”
“So he didn’t listen to you—and you didn’t listen to him.”
Zoey stopped, put her fists on her hips and faced Shasta. “Look! You’re my friend. You can’t take his side!”
“Sorry! Geez. Thought you’d want me to point out the obvious.”
“No.” And that was enough hashing over of her divorce. Foot traffic grumbled and flowed around them, making Zoey think of the small rainwater holding pond she’d created in Gothic, which gave her an idea. With a tug on the arm, she started them walking again. “Shasta, you would love Gothic.”
“I... What?” Shasta blinked at her.
“Gothic. Down the coast. It’s a great little town with seven hairpin turns. There’s a castle at the top of the hill...very picturesque...except now the tower’s being rebuilt and the scaffolding is kind of off-putting. Angelica Lindholm owns it. Do you know Angelica Lindholm?”
“I think so?” Shasta frowned in concentration. “My landlady watches her shows. Angelica cooks and gardens and cleans and... What has she got to do with Phantom?”
“Gothic,” Zoey corrected. “That’s her. We have some great restaurants and shops, and the graveyard is packed with celebrities—”
“Dead, I hope.” Shasta’s head whipped around and she pinned Zoey with her dark stare. “Isn’t that town called City of Lost Souls?”
“Yes!” Zoey beamed.
“There’s some legend about...”
Zoey recited, “On stormy nights, Gothic is said to disappear, and on its return it brings lost souls back from the dead.”
“That’s creepy. Why would you live there?”
“The legend’s not creepy. It’s romantic! Although on foggy nights, you can’t see your hand in front of your face and it can be, um... Well, a couple of years ago there were these murderers who were hunting down this couple and one of them got killed.”
“One of the couple?”
“No, one of the murderers. The other one is in prison.” Zoey waved a dismissive hand. “But living in Gothic is so... Zen.”
“Zen?” Shasta came to a screeching halt in the middle of the walkway. “Are you trying to talk me out of it?”
Zoey came to a stop with her. “I can always hear the sea, the waves, the seagulls, the storms blowing in and the silence of the fogs as they gather close... But listen, for you—Gothic is rife with artists. You could paint whatever you wanted. The cliffs, the waves, the dramatic clouds, the wind rippling through the grasses...”
“Flowers,” Shasta said bitterly.
Zoey smiled. “When you paint flowers, they’re alive. They almost tremble and grow.”
“I don’t want to spend my life painting flowers.”
“In Gothic, you don’t have to.”
“I live in fear that’s my fate.”
“It’s not your fate unless you deem it your fate. You’re Shasta. You hasta be Shasta,” Zoey teased.
“Shh!” Shasta put her hand over Zoey’s mouth. Shasta’s mother had told the tale of going into premature labor while hiking Mount Shasta, and Shasta had suffered teasing ever since. “No one knows that here. Don’t you dare start it!”
She pushed her friend’s hand away. “How is your mom?”
“She’s slowing down a little.”
“Not climbing every mountain anymore?”
“Not fording every stream.” Shasta smiled crookedly. “It’s the limp. She says it’s an old gunshot wound, but I take that with a grain of salt.”
“That does sound like one of her stories.” Zoey smiled as she remembered the tales Genesis would tell. Each was a gem of peril and adventure, and Zoey didn’t believe half of them. “I hate that she’s not getting around as well. Every time I met Genesis, she seemed like a force of nature, a real West Coast kind of person.”
“She is always charming.”
Shasta wore a tight smile; maybe Genesis didn’t approve of the basement in Sunnyvale. Which took Zoey back to her swiftly concocted scheme to bring Shasta to Gothic. “On my property, I have a shop where I breed flowers. There’s a cot and an outside shower—nice, really—and there’s no Superfund site anywhere near. If you like, you could help me. The Gothic Garden and Flower Show is coming up—it is such a big deal for the community—and someone has to handle my part of the tour.”
“Handle?” Shasta asked cautiously.
“Talk to the people. About flowers and vegetables and growing sustainably in fire-prone California. You know I hate that stuff. Public speaking is even worse than—” Zoey searched for a comparison.
“Your ex-mother-in-law?”
“Yes! Well, no. But yes.”
“I could do that,” Shasta acknowledged.
“You’d be great at it. Come and see if you like Gothic. When I wandered in, I knew I was in the right place. I could breathe again.” Zoey spoke to the despair she could see in Shasta. “I thought you might like to breathe.”
6
In the elevator of her mother’s condo building, Zoey cradled a bouquet in one arm, used her fob and pressed the button for the forty-second floor. As the elevator whisked up, she smiled at the wild assortment of blossoms that surrounded the sprays of forsythia. Not for her mother the well-organized, color-coordinated bouquets assembled by a florist; Morgayne Phoenix loved a wilderness of color, scents and shapes. Which seemed at odds with her personality: austere, straightforward, without a sentimental bone in her body.
The elevator opened into a sparsely decorated, elegant corridor, and Zoey took a left to one of the three condos that occupied this floor. Nobody needed that much space, certainly not a woman so determinedly single as her mother, but her mother liked the space, the view, the security and most of all, the knowledge that she’d created this kind of wealth for herself. Zoey didn’t know who her father was or what he’d done to engender this kind of hard-eyed ambition in Morgayne Phoenix, but he must have been a real bastard.