A Fox Inside Read Free Page A

from the surrounding marshes. It was a place that seemed somnolent and forgotten. It had the quiet of old age.
    As a township Bolinas was small, being a cluster of weathered wooden villas sprawled along two vacant streets. On the top of the bluff that protected the town from the sea mangy pines contended with the spray. On the land side grey eucalyptus trees rustled, swayed, and dripped with a steady precipitation of ocean fog that fell always on the same disintegrating, knife-shaped leaves, rotten in the heavy suffocation of damp eucalyptus oil. The red and yellow blossoms, like ragged sea anemones, lay wilted on the ground.
    An outsider named Shannon had built a summer house along the edge of the cliff, to the right of where the arroyo sloped down to the beach proper. He never bothered to speak to the townspeople, and since he had thrown a high brick wall round the town front of his property, there wasn’t much they could find out about him. He never gave parties and his house was always idle. Only the cold glow of the floodlights in his garden shone over the top of the wall. And those were out now, for it was late at night.
    That is what you would have seen if you were at a great height, but Maggie was not at a great height.
    *
    She was at Bolinas. She turned and went swiftly out into the yard. The gravel path cracked and exploded underfoot, and over that sound she could hear now the steady drip of water from the trees and the snarl of the surf as it lashed at the lagoon on the other side of thecliff. She did not know anything about Bolinas, and that made these noises ominous to her. She heard them all too well. She went down the drive, whose gravel hurt her bare feet, and stepped over the low chain that held the entrance driveway private.
    She did not look round, for she knew that the house lay low and quiet behind her. It seemed to sleep, like the rest of the town. Only on the beach the faint patterns cast by the dimly lighted windows trickled out across the sand. But she did not think that there would be anybody on the beach. Of course she should not have left the lights on, but she had no intention of forcing herself to go back to turn them off, either. She did not dare to push herself that far.
    Because the arroyo was narrow and she would have made too much noise backing the car, she had left it up the road a piece, parked in a clump of bushes under the trees. The street she had to walk up was banked by closed-up Victorian cottages, their wood blistered ash-grey by the corrosion of the ocean air. She went by them rapidly, having no way of knowing whether or not, from behind their windows, someone might be watching her. She hunched slightly forward, ducking her head, concentrating on getting to the car. By the time she reached the clump of bushes she was fighting down the panic to run. As it was she overshot the mark and had some difficulty in finding the car. It was an open convertible and even while she had been away a few of the scythe-shaped eucalyptus leaves had dwindled down into the front seat. Cautiously she threw them over the side, and then, closing the door softly, she leaned back in the driver’s seat and tried to pull herself together.
    At last she turned on the engine and eased the car out of the shrubs towards the highway. In the silence of the night the sound of the engine was frighteningly loud, but to her surprise nobody stopped her and the car was built for quiet speed. Speed was something that luxury could understand.
    She raced down the deserted road beside the lagoon, in a hurry to get safely past Stinson Beach. She need not have worried. The town was quiet now. Only one or two lights in a kitchen window shone out across the sand. Stinson Beach was a temporary town: anyone might come and go there, and yet not be observed.
    As she climbed the mountain she rattled over a cattle guard. At the top, before the last pull, the road reversed so that she could look down through the darkness far into the