A Curious Affair Read Online Free Page A

instead of humans?
    My eyes began to sting. I hate to admit that it was at least half self-pity that put the tears there.
    Again I thought, There but for the grace of God go I.

C HAPTER T HREE
    The city of cats and the city of men exist one inside the other, but they are not the same city .
    — Italo Calvino
    There were lights in town, but segments of the old streets near the sheriff’s department were still drenched in darkness that, for the first time to me, felt ominous. I spent a lot of that walk looking behind me for things that weren’t there. Perhaps I would have been braver if Atherton had come with me, but I was alone. Atherton had elected to stay at my place since it was wet and there was nothing he could tell the sheriff that he hadn’t told me. And bringing him along might seem downright weird. After all, it wasn’t like he was a dog who would want to go for a walk no matter what the weather.
    The sky’s normal nighttime black-and-white color scheme was distorted by more than winter clouds. Small fires, though mostly neutered and contained inside tidy houses where they devoured only small bits of trees, remembered enough of what it was to conspire together and become a forest fire. They vomited smoke together, painting the air above town with smoldering ash until the sky was as darkened by this as it would be by a more terrifying, summertime conflagration. The suspendedsoot in the air had turned the town into a place as dank and dark as an old miner’s lung. The rain tried, but it couldn’t clean the air fast enough to outpace the chimneys’ steady output. It was worst in the narrow streets where the wind never ventured. Eventually, the town was going to have to give in and pass an ordinance forcing the use of clean-burning stoves. I thought about this as I pushed open the door to the sheriff’s office, eyes stinging and nose protesting the smoky assault.
    The door had a cowbell that rang out like the knell on doomsday. Lucky me, the man himself was on duty. I had been hoping that maybe I would catch one of the deputies who had been friendly with Cal.
    I’m not stupid or masochistic. I had tried phoning the sheriff’s office before walking into town through the mud river that used to be the road. But I had been so cold and the connection so bad that the sheriff or whoever answered hadn’t been able to understand me. My choices were to forget Irv until morning, or slog down the hill to the station.
    So I’d slogged. And grumbled, though I knew whoever was on duty would grumble more going back up the hill. We are a small county and the sheriff, along with his two deputies and a secretary/dispatcher, was responsible for all of it. In an emergency like a forest fire, the sheriff could ask for help from other agencies like the highway patrol, but for little things like homicide, he was on his own. I knew he’d be thrilled to hear he’d need to take a midnight stroll.
    In the Central Valley, the farmland has been tamed and even trained to do man’s bidding. The foothills and the Sierras themselves are less biddable; it’s the geography. Once the mountains were whole, but in some long ago cataclysm, the Sierras had shrugged during one of the great earthquakes and clefts appeared. Water, ever the opportunist, had done the rest. The land was fissured.Sure, it’s beautiful here, but hard, and the land does not suffer fools. Killing heat in summer, murderous cold in winter, rock slides, flash floods, avalanches—both seasons lay traps for unwary hikers and skiers who come from more moderate climes. The poor fools don’t even know to be afraid.
    Part of the sheriff’s unofficial job is to see that visitors don’t blunder into danger, and if they do, that they are rescued right away. For this reason, I was given to understand, he had embraced the geological version of know-thy-enemy. Which is a long way of saying that he had already hiked some of Viper’s Hill and checked out some of the abandoned