I got my work clothes, my shirt and jeans and shoes, out of the front seat and squirmed into them. The striped dress and red sandals were probably ruined. I mopped at my face with the droopy fabric of the skirt. The fire truck was still blocking the gate and I couldn’t drive out, so I walked around the back of it and down the lane in the dark. Maybe it was childish of me (as Aaron accused me later), but I felt cast out, as if I’d been pretending that I fit into any portion of Viridian’s world, and now I had been revealed as my true, stupid self. Not to mention the authorities, who might want to talk to a fire-starter.

I reached the end of the lane and the canyon road, and I hesitated, since it wasn’t the safest place to walk. People went tearing around the curves without expecting anyone to be there, and most of the time that was the case. Anyway I didn’t want to go far; as soon as the firemen left, I was hoping to sneak back in and start the truck and make my getaway. Just leave. That was as much as I’d thought through. I felt my shame as a weight, like a stone in my mouth.

Headlights came toward me on the road, and I stepped back. But the car stopped, and the window came down. “Excuse me,” a man said. “Is this still Fairfax?”

The passenger side window was down and he was talking to me across the passenger, a woman. I stepped closer. “Yes, this is Fairfax.”

“That’s good to know. The GPS on this thing is useless.” It was a big, dark Mercedes. The idling engine made almost no noise. If the car was cruising in water, it would have been a shark.

“The GPS is fine. You didn’t want to believe it,” the woman said. There was just enough light from the instrument panel for me to see that she was Asian, and extremely beautiful, with her hair pulled back into an elaborate topknot. She was wearing a dress with a halter-style top that left her shoulders bare. Her eyes and mouth were made up as precisely as an engraving.

“It’s a rental,” the man said. “Give me a break.” I couldn’t see him as clearly, but he was white, and older than the woman. “I don’t suppose you know where we could find Sixty-eight Meadow Way?”

“Right here.” I pointed up the lane behind me. Larry? It had to be. “But you can’t drive up there just yet, they had a fire.”

“A fire? Jesus.”

“Can we go now?” the woman asked. “I mean, if the place is all burned down.”

“What happened? Anybody hurt?”